This morning I ran my knee into the corner of the coffee table. Ouch, no biggie. Then this afternoon after my walk with Dad, it began to hurt a lot. I'm now noticibly limping. I blame age.

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Last night I drove to Owego, so I could get up rather early this morning and drop Mom off at the airport for her flight to Baton Rouge.

Today it was quite nice at 0500, only a light dusting of snow on the car. So we went in my Cavalier instead of her Forester, because my car warms up faster, and no four-wheeling seemed indicated. Boy was I wrong, because as we headed east to Binghamton Airport, things got nasty in a hurry. Plenty of wet snow on the roads, very slippery. Still, we got here there in time, I drove back to Owego, and went back to bed. That last was to cat Katie's great disappointment; when I walked back in at 0630, she was convinced that it was playtime, and I had to eject her my from bedroom to get any rest at all.

Before she left, I gave technophobe Mom a rundown on basic operation of her new cell phone. I wonder how much of it she'll retain? And she left it turned off in the morning, which is not exactly a good sign about her "getting" how a cell phone works.

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This morning I was enjoying a nice big bowl of oatmeal. Then I mused that it would be entertaining to travel back in time twenty years and tell Young Me that as an adult I had the financial wherewithal to eat Lucky Charms every morning, yet I chose to eat oatmeal of my own free will.

Young Me would be disappointed, in that it was clear that some effect sucked all the fun out of adults, but he'd hoped to avoid it himself.

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What with the steady snow all day, we decided Dad needed to walk somewhere indoors. To the mall! Bright an early! Why, we were there at five! Um, five PM, that is. No reason to rush into these things.

We did a full circuit, which is a decent distance, less than a mile but more than a half-mile at a guess. We did have to sit down for three breaks, but it wasn't shortness of breath, it was leg fatigue. Prolonged bed rest and multiple hospitalizations have done bad things to his muscles.

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Dad was scheduled to be discharged from the hospital this morning. I was irrationally optimistic and came in with just a book to read. I should have brought my laptop, as we didn't get out until just after four PM.

He's doing fairly well, the steroids seem to be helping. While half of his diaphragm remains paralyzed, he's managing to breath well enough with the other half. His inhalation volume is up to about 90% of where it was before the latest hospitalization, which is better than it was when he was sent home following the operation. So we just need to exercise to keep both lungs inflating fully, and hope that the diaphragm will recover on it's own.

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Via the Economist's Daily Chart feature, the breakdown of US Presidents via signs of the Chinese zodiac.

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Dad's at Corning Hospital, which is part of the same Guthrie network as Robert Packard, where he had the bypass done. So I assumed that the heart surgeon had been brought into the discussions of Dad's case. I was wrong, as my BIL discovered when he called the surgeon this morning.

Anyway, the surgeon thinks that it's not as serious as the pulmonary specialists do, that it's just a temporary post-surgical inflammation that will go away in a couple of weeks. While he certainly is expected to assume the best outcome of the work he does, it makes me happy to know that there's at least one doctor who thinks this is no big deal.

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I went for a run this morning, in the beautiful falling snow. I wore a sweatsuit, figuring that would be enough, as running would provide plenty of body heat.

I was only out for eleven minutes, because it's been many years since I've been running in below-freezing temperatures. And while my running certainly kept my core temperature at a good level, my ears and fingers went numb in a hurry. After five minutes, I decided frostbite would be a bad thing, so I turned around and headed home. I didn't even make a mile and a half distance. Not exactly a shining moment in athleticism.

Tomorrow I'll be wearing gloves and either earmuffs or a hat.

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Still working on the diaphragm issue. We hope it's temporary, but there's a possibility it may be permanant. In which case he'd have to use a positive-pressure breathing device at night, and possibly oxygen during the day, for the rest of his life. It'd also make him prone to lung infections. Lung excercises will reduce the chance of infection or other problems, so he's going to continue doing breathing excercises for the forseable future, unless his lungs suddenly recover.

He could also continue to degrade, and if that happens or he gets a serious infection, he'd no longer be able to breathe on his own. In that case he'd have to go on a full-time medical ventilator.

Still, it might be temporary, although the docs say that they would have hoped to see some improvement in it so far. He's starting on steroids, because a possible cause of temporary paralysis of the diaphragm is swelling pinching the nerves. They're going to keep him in the hospital until Tuesday to see if there is any improvement with the 'roids.

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So, some of you may recall that I dropped my laptop in the hospital. I didn't have a Vista disk to reinstall the OS, because HP is too cheap to include a DVD with a several-hundred-dollar purchase. I'd have to pay them $20 additional bucks to get a restore disk. Plus, I'd have had to order a replacement hard drive and wait for it to arrive. So I dropped off my laptop at the local computer place that built my first computer, back in 1994. I liked the owner, and they'd done well by me.

Except now it's got a new name and a new owner and a different customer service philosophy. If I could summarize, I'd say that (a) they took longer than the clerk told me: they had a replacement HD on the shelf, but it still took them more than a week; (b) they charged a lot more money than I thought was fair, especially because (c) they did a lousy job anyway, as I had to go online myself and download the necessary drivers to make the system work.

So attention google: please index the terms "Southern Tier PC" and "Sucks" to help future consumers.

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