Buzzards in Waiting

Looking out the window one morning I noticed some visitors.  I am not sure what, or who, they are waiting for but I found it a little ominous.  If they were waiting for me they were disappointed, I'm still alive so far and not quite ready for the dung heap.  After several hours they left and I dared go outside again. I guess they found some other prospect a little more ready to be eaten. 

                                                                    Buzzards in line on the fence, looking for an easy meal?

Make Asphalt Great Again

We finally got asphalt on our road.  We have been fighting the dust and mud now for almost 14 years.  I have wanted to asphalt our road for quite some time now but Elma Lynne has been dragging her feet, thinking that we could probably put the money to better use elsewhere, but she finally relented and we got the job done.

Last year when Garth was having the main road seal-coated I talked to one of the workers there about giving me a bid to do my road.  He gave me a bid of $33,000 and  said it would be be good through next summer, giving me the winter to getting Elma Lynne to agree to the project.

They started the project on June 2nd and only took a couple of days to complete it.  It turned out really nice and I am very pleased.  They put down and compacted three inches of road base and then about three inches of asphalt about twelve feet wide.

They came back in September and put on a sealcoat so now it should be ready for winter.  In fact several winters, I am hoping for five or more before it needs to be sealed again.

2020, a year from where?

2020, What a year this has been!

In January Elma Lynne was diagnosed with Pancreatic Cancer, adenocarcinoma, the bad kind.  Fortunately it was caught quickly.  They discovered a tumor the size of a marble in the head of the pancreas.  Usually Pancreatic Cancer doesn't have many recognizable symptoms until it is well progressed.  Fortunately this cancer grew right next to the bile duct and closed it off, causing very light colored, nearly white, stools, which was a cause for concern.  A CT Scan revealed the bile duct blockage and small growth. A procedure opened the bile duct with a stent, then a biopsy confirmed the tumor was cancer.

Surgery was scheduled in Salt Lake at the IHC Murray Campus for the end of February.  Doctor Mark J. Ott was the surgeon and he is fabulous.  Surgery went well and Dr. Ott was confident he had removed all the cancer and also removed a bunch of nearby lymph nodes and biopsy showed the cancer had not spread there.  He visited every day for the entire length of the stay in the hospital, often twice a day.

Recovery was a long slow process,  I stayed right at the hospital, crashing every night on the couch in the room which made into a small bed.  The hospital staff was wonderful but after a while it got very tiresome.  Elma Lynne's digestive system had a hard time getting re-started and it was hard seeing her go through all the procedures and tests over and over again. 

About mid March the Covid 19 pandemic started to be a real concern at the hospital.  I didn't leave the hospital much but when I did I had to take precautions and they threatened to make me find other accommodations but decided since I had been there all along and it was almost release time they let me stay.    Just a few days before release we were walking the halls of the tenth floor where our room was when an earthquake hit.  It really shook the building and we could feel it swaying for quite a while after. Finally after 21 days Elma Lynne was released to go home.

Of course there was much more recovery once home. Things went along pretty well for a few weeks and then chemotherapy started. The first round went well until time for the third infusion and Elma Lynne was so sick there was no way .  She had diarrhea so bad that everything was going right through her.  They finally sent a home health nurse to take a blood sample which revealed her potassium was dangerously low so she spent four more days in the hospital, this time in Saint George.  We learned a lot about how to control the diarrhea and they cut the chemo treatments by 20% and after that things went much better.

Chemo lasted for six months with the last treatment being November 11th. It was great to see her ring the bell at the chemo lab, and great to get the results of the latest scan showing no cancer.  She was officially in remission. Dr. Gilbert will continue to monitor her condition about every three months for the next while to make sure the cancer doesn't return.

                                                  Elma Lynne ringing the bell at the end of Chemo

Through all this the pandemic was ravaging the world and the presidential race and a movement called Black Lives Matter (BLM) among other things were causing a lot of ugly contention and division in the nation.  There were race riots in many large cities, including Salt Lake, supposedly triggered by the death of a black man while being arrested by white police somewhere in the Midwest. As in many protests, things turn violent and many just use the excuse to vent their anger and loot and burn. Things seemed pretty grim for a while but after the election things calmed down and things seem to be at a simmering truce for now.

Because of the pandemic and our "high risk" status we haven't seen much of the family this year.  We did attend Ashlyn's wedding in Rexburg in July, and Jillyn's family came during the summer for a few days and then again at Thanksgiving.  They have all had the Covid-19 virus so we figured they probably wouldn't spread it to us once they were over it.  Joel came for the deer hunt and we enjoyed a few days chasing around in the hills without ever chambering a round. We did see some bucks we could have taken but we were looking for that monster trophy and he wasn't around this year.

                   Ashlynn & Mason's Wedding                                                       Caden mastering the lawnmower

In addition I got a bit of a scare when my doctor did my wellness check in September he sent me for lab work and diagnosed dome irregularities in my blood.  When I looked it up I found out that I had symptoms that could indicate Multiple Myeloma, a rare cancer of the blood.  I saw the same oncologist that Elma Lynne was seeing, Dr. Heather Gilbert, and after more tests she determined that I have a condition called MGUS, which stands for Monoclonal Gammopathy of Undetermined Significance. It is considered to not be serious and very rarely leads to MM, so that was a relief to get past that.

As we approach the Christmas season we are sick and tired of the isolation, mask-wearing and restrictions brought on by the pandemic, but are dutifully doing our best to keep from contacting the virus and staying as healthy as possible.  A few weeks ago President Russell M. Nelson encouraged everyone to show our gratitude which I think was an inspired message in the mist of all the turmoil. We are truly grateful to our God and our Savior for all the blessings we have seen, and continue to see, while going through the trials and problems of this crazy year.

I become a Ham

At 71 years old I have taken up the hobby of HAM radio!  A while ago I was called to the position of Assistant Emergency Preparedness Coordinator for our ward with the specific responsibility of communications.  I was given a dozen handy-talkie radios and told to distribute them to our districts and to train people on how to use them. The radios have a wide range of capabilities including public service channels, emergency channels, and Ham Radio channels.  I decided that if I was to be training on these radios I needed to have a Ham license, even though those in our districts without a license would not be using those frequencies.

I learned that the local amateur radio club was having training on getting the license so I joined the club and started attending.  The training was really boring and after just one session I decided to study on my own.  There are several websites available with practice tests which have the exact same questions as the FCC exam so I studied that way. I took the basic test and passed and so was able to take the general test the same night and I passed it as well.  I few days later I got my Ham License in the mail.

I bought a 50 watt mobile radio and a hi-gain antenna for the roof and started communicating with club members , mostly on the daily nets.  The Nets are in the 2-Meter band which is in the VHF(very high frequency) range, and is primarily used for point-to-point local communications, though through a system of repeaters you can communicate throughout the intermountain region. The Breakfast Net meets on the Iron Mountain repeater (146.760 MHz) every day but Sunday at 7:00am and the Friendship Net meets daily at 9:00pm on the same repeater.

I got with Don Blanchard, whom I consider the father of Ham Radio in Southern Utah, and who was also my electronics instructor in college back in the 60's, and we worked with the BLM to get a repeater installed on Harmony Mountain which gives us coverage for the entire Harmony Valley and over the mountain to a majority of Iron County.

 

Harmony Mountain Repeater site                                  My new HF radio, an ICOM 7300

I got into HF (High Frequency) communications when I purchased some used gear from Katherine Pons whose husband had been a HAM operator but died a while back.  The HF radio was really old and hard to use but I did make a few contacts across the country.  More recently I purchased a newer radio that is a lot easier to use and have started making more contacts.  My HF antenna is a parallel dipole wire antenna about 60 feet long strung between trees in the back yard.  I would like to find a used antenna tower, somewhere in the 40 foot range so that I can get my antenna up higher in the air and get better signals.

I am not a rebid radio fan but am enjoying the technical aspects of the hobby as well as making contacts far and wide. I think it is a hobby that I can continue to enjoy even when I am too old to do much else. 

Crushed like a Bug

I write this blog not to draw attention to my own stupidity, which is usually way to easily done without trying, but hopefully to help someone else avoid making a similar mistake.

Sometimes we get so complacent in the things we do everyday that we get careless.  I recently purchased a set of palate forks for my skid steer.  I tried to move a piece of steel pipe about 8" in diameter and 12' long.  I pushed one of the forks into the end and lifted, observing immediately that it was heavier than expected.  Evidently the pipe was full of dirt.  Things were going well until I hit a bump, which caused the pipe to bounce.  The increased weight put extra strain on the fork and bent the back plate which connects it to the skid steer.

I tried bending the back plate to its proper position by pushing the fork in the opposite direction against solid objects, like a large tree, but it didn't work. The plate is quarter inch steel and pretty rigid.  I tried a few other things that didn't work and finally decided that the best option was to put a wedge between the back plate and the place it connects to the skid steer and use the unit's hydraulics to squeeze it back into place. 

In order to do this I had to cheat the unit's safety system, something that I really know is kind of stupid.  They put such systems in place to protect stupid people from damaging themselves.  I did it anyway.  The seat switch that turns the machine off if you get up off the seat went bad a long time ago so I had by-passed it.  I started the machine and raised the safety bar and got out with the engine running.  I lowered the safety bar and pushed the button that activates the hydraulics so I could operate them from outside the cab.  Safety system effectively by-passed.

So, outside the machine I put a block of wood between the bent back plate and the plate it connects to.  Holding the block in place with my right hand I proceeded to reach inside the machine and operate the hydraulics with my left hand, which is the opposite hand normally used for that purpose.  As you can see I was build a recipe for disaster.  I activated the hydraulics a couple of times, not having the desired effect to bend the plate back into shape, but somehow the block of wood slipped. Because I was operating the controls left handed my reaction time was slow and my right hand got squeezed between the plates where the block of wood had been.

I'm sure I have not experienced a lot of pain in my life, but I don't remember ever experiencing pain like I felt having my hand crushed between those two steel plates.  There are a lot of nerve endings in the hands and fingers, and everyone of them was screaming in my right hand.  I think I almost passed out from the initial wave of pain, but maintained enough presence to reverse the hydraulics and release my hand from the machine's death grip.  For a few moments I thought every bone in my hand was broken.  The intense pain throbbed mercilessly for a few minutes, then slowly subsided to the point I could cuss. Amazingly, I didn't use any bad words, and mostly berated myself for doing something so obviously dangerous.

Luckily, it was a chilly day and I was wearing a winter glove with heavy lining which I believe, along with divine intervention, helped prevent more serious injury.  After letting the pain subsided to a manageable level, with my hand hanging at my side I put the skid steer away and went to the house.
When I removed the glove I discovered that the skin had not been broken and there was no external bleeding, but the hand was becoming scarlet and swollen. Within a few hours my hand looked like it belonged to Mickey Mouse.

Wrapping this up, I had an x-ray taken a few days later and the PA that treated me said I was really lucky because there were no broken bones.  That was hard to believe, but steeling myself against the pain I could move all my fingers and all the joints worked. It took about six weeks before I had much use of the hand, and I got fairly good at doing things with my left.  It has now been about four months and it is mostly recovered.  There is still some pain in the joints of my fingers, especially first thing in the morning, and some in my wrist when I bend it in certain positions.  My little finger still won't bend all the way, but hopefully with time and therapy it will return to normal.  I also don't have full strength in my grip or in the use of the wrist, but that is slowly improving.

So, in summary, I made a stupid mistake and I paid for it.  I have always thought of myself as one who can foresee trouble and accidents and therefore avoid them, but even so by getting a little too comfortable and complacent I failed to prevent this one.  Obviously even obsessive-compulsive behavior can't prevent all accidents, and I wouldn't want to go through life keeping myself in a protective bubble, but I have made a promise to myself to be more careful and to try to avoid getting so comfortable in every day activities that caution flees.