Been quite a while since I did anything with this, and I’ve been keenly aware of that fact. Oddly enough, a bunch of stuff has happened since I left wrote an entry, and I wasn’t completely sure how I wanted to approach writing about it. So let’s just jump into everything.
While driving into work on Tuesday, January 27th, I slowly began to realize that I couldn’t see. Fortunately, I was almost at work by the time I figured out what was happening. It wasn’t that I was going blind – my eyes basically just stopped working together. My right pupil was larger than my left, it was basically impossible to focus on anything that wasn’t directly in front of me, and if I moved my head (hence having to focus on something ELSE right in front of me), it’d take probably 5 seconds to get that new focus.
As I said, I didn’t really figure out that this was happening until quite a bit later. I just knew that it was getting more and more difficult to really see anything. That may help explain how it is that I got myself to work, told my boss something was going on, looked up directions to the hospital, and drove myself there. I told the woman at the front desk that I thought I might be having a stroke, and she lost no time in getting me through the doors and sitting me in front of a doctor.
And another doctor. And some nurses. And some other people. They squeezed and shone lights on me and gave me a couple of CT scans and plugged about 500 wires into me and asked a bunch of inane questions (true story – I told them I was having double vision and they asked, “In which eye?”), and about three hours later told me that I had high blood pressure but no signs of a stroke. The also said that they wanted to admit me and give me an MRI, but I’d already promised Jenny (she was in the Galapagos at the time) that I’d take care of her cats – and I didn’t know what this was costing me – so I declined and somehow drove myself home.
It was during the drive home (white-knuckled) and while sitting there the rest of the afternoon that I actually figured out what my eyes were doing (as described above). Needless to say, I was kind of freaking out for most of the day, but I managed to let my boss and co-workers know that I wasn’t dead and went to bed pretty early.
Wednesday morning, my eyes were back to normal. I took the day off and picked up a couple of prescriptions that the hospital had given me for hypertension and made an appointment with a GP for a follow-up.
Do you remember when I said, near the end of my last post, that I really needed to cut down on my smoking? Yeah – I went ahead and quit that. Coming up on two months now. I’m also walking (rather quickly) a bit over 5 miles every morning and taking drugs for hypertension and cholesterol. I’m also not eating anything that tastes remotely good (no sugar, no salt, no cholesterol, no fat, no carbs, blah, blah, blah).
The GP wants me to go see a cardiologist about carotid stenosis (blockage in my carotids), but I’m not ready for that yet. The worst part of things now is that one of the BP meds occasionally gives me vertigo – and every time it happens, I start to wonder if the whole thing is starting up again.
That can’t be good for my blood pressure.
In other news…THE APOCALYPSE IS HERE! Yes. Coronavirus. COVID-19. The big one. Or not. Who knows? All I know is that everything in Atlanta (and much of the world) has been canceled, and we went from talking about maybe working from home a bit to EVERYBODY WORK AT HOME ALL THE TIME – over the course of 3 days. So that’s what we’re doing. I straightened out my office, brought home a standing desk and my laptop, and made sure that all of my people brought home whatever they needed to be efficient from home. Just like that, all of us are remote for the foreseeable future.
The remote working isn’t really a big deal – I’ve been doing it a couple of days per week anyway – but the fact that I’m at home all the time now is going to get really boring really fast. I’ve got a project, which I’m calling “Campmachine 3.0,” to keep me occupied for a while. Not sure how long it will last. I’m basically building a bed and some cabinets in the back of my car in anticipation of going car camping sometime after tax season. At this point, what I’ve built is perfectly functional (helps a great deal when I’m bringing home groceries!), but it doesn’t look “finished,” so I might just consider what I’ve got to be a prototype and built the whole thing again better. That’s assuming that the Home Depot stays open long enough for me to get the material that I need.
I bought a Dremel tool a few weeks ago. Now THAT’S a good time! I’m still very green with it. Not sure of all the cool things that it can do, but I know it can do more than cut the ends off of screws that go all the way through a piece of wood (which is all I’ve used it for). I have a feeling that I’ll be doing more with it as I get more bored.
I’ve also been watching a couple of woodworking channels on YouTube, and I’m definitely going to build a Joiner’s table to replace the aging worktable that I put in my garage 15 or so years ago. I’ve got the plans and everything. I’m really looking forward to building that. I probably should do that before I do any other projects, to be honest.
One last bit of news is that this blog may be moving yet again. Or it may not. I’m definitely doing something with it, but haven’t decided exactly what. I’ve started a new domain called TomsBrain.com, both because I don’t want my personal blog so closely associated with the football site and also because I wanted a non-gmail address that was more “me” than my hotmail address, but not all-the-way “professional” like my Outlook address is. For those of you who didn’t know I had multiple addresses, you haven’t been paying attention – and I have others that are basically “stealth” addresses that you’ll probably never know about.
Anyway, I liked the idea of “tom@tomsbrain.com,” so I got that setup. The new domain is indeed built on a WordPress structure; in theory, I could just move this whole thing there and call it good. I thought about that. And then I thought, “What if I use the TomsBrain.com address to apply for a job? Do I want complete strangers who might be looking to hire me to see a personal blog?”
And I’m not sure that I do. But I might want them to see a less personal blog. Not necessarily professional, but maybe more structured, with more formal writing. Maybe articles about brass banding or thoughts on various technical issues or even just day-to-day nonsense, but written for a larger, general, audience (as this is most certainly not). That’s a decent idea…but what do I do with the last 15 years’ worth of stuff that’s already here?
Don’t know. I might move it (truth be told, I already HAVE copied it) to the new site, but set it up in a more protected way, allowing access only to a select few. Or I might just archive it, allowing access to nobody other than me – no one wants to go back and read my old stuff anyway, right?
Anyway, it’s all still up in the air. I’m working on the design for TomsBrain.com now, and I’ll decide what it’s going to be – and where this blog will fit in – after I’ve got that taken care of. For now, this is still the only place to see all this literary nonsense.