Roadkill Raccoon

No, Carol didn't hit me!

My old droopy eye lids were sagging down over my eyes so much that my peripheral vision was just about nonexistent. (Gravity seems to be the enemy of getting old.)
The eye doctor had suggested that I get a Blepharoplasty ( Easy for him to say!) over a year ago, but I kept putting it off. Finally, a couple of weeks ago I gave up and made an appointment for the surgery.

He explained that he'd cut away the excess skin that was drooping over my eyes and after some healing I'd be like new again, and look years younger! “As long as I don't look like the runaway bride!” I told him.

I remained semi awake through most of the surgery, floating happily along on the anesthesia. The swallowing problems I have because of Parkinson's caused me to start coughing and gagging at one point, but it passed and he didn't cut off my nose or anything, so I guess it wasn't a big problem.

At home after the surgery, I faithfully applied ice packs for 20 minutes every hour for the first day to keep down the swelling, and slept with my head elevated. The next morning when I looked in the bathroom mirror, a strange black and blue and yellow image peered out at me. It looked like a raccoon that had been in an accident... a roadkill raccoon!

Carol and I are going to our great-grandson Aiden's fourth birthday party today and I think I'd better keep my sunglasses on, or great grandpa might just scare the heck out of him!

Hero

Carol retired from driving the ambulance last month.

She's been on call five days a week or more since May of 2001, sometimes answering as many as four or five calls in one day, sometimes none. She has logged well over 2,000 runs since she started and she's received countless compliments and thanks from patients for her kindness while helping the paramedics.

Tony Mooney, the head paramedic and assistant fire chief, credits her with being "the smoothest driver he's ever ridden with." (Contrary to popular opinion, speed isn't the most important thing in driving an ambulance.)

The days when Carol was impatiently waiting, and her radio stayed silent were the most difficult, but when the Waldport "tone" sounded she would grab the radio, her fire department jacket, give me a running kiss and be out the door. One time she got in the car with the TV remote control instead of the radio but I caught her in time. Taz even learned to recognize the Waldport tone and when it sounded he would start barking, adding to the excitement.

It's nice knowing that whatever we're doing, like eating lunch or her giving me a haircut won't be interrupted any more, but I know she misses it dearly.

Noodling

The other day I watched a TV show about "Noodling," which is essentially sticking your hand into a big catfish's mouth and wrestling him out of the water. It brought back the memory of a hot summer day on the Verde River in Cottonwood, Arizona.

Carol was sitting on a half submerged lawn chair in the middle of the river, drinking pop and lazily fishing, while Rick, our youngest son and I were swimming and goofing off downstream. We splashed our way around a bend in the river, when Rick yelled, "Hey dad! A big catfish just swam under the bank over here!"

I dog paddled over, but even though the water was fairly clear I couldn't see anything.
"He's right under there!" Rick said.
We had heard about noodling from some of the old-timers, but I never thought that I'd want to try it.
"See if you can catch him, dad!"

I summoned up some courage and carefully reached down under the bank. My fingers brushed up against the slippery side of a big fish and I immediately yanked them back .
"Yep, he's there all right!" I said shakily.

"I heard that if you tickle their belly, it hypnotizes them, then you can stick your hand in their mouth and just pull them out!"
Rick was trying to make it sound easy, but I didn't see him sticking his hand down any giant fish's mouth. In fact he had backed a safe distance away. I reached down again and tentatively slid my hand under the fish's belly. I was just barely able to keep my mouth above the water while I attempted to do my best fish belly tickle.
"Boy, he is big!" I gurgled.
"Is he hypnotized yet, dad?"
"It's kind of hard to tell, Rick. He sure seems to enjoy being tickled, though."

Tiring of all the foreplay, I took a deep breath, slid my fingers up to his gaping mouth and grabbed his lower lip. The fight was on!

"I don't think I hypnotized him enough!" I yelled, as the big fish started thrashing back and forth. I thought he was going to yank my arm off, and I gladly would have let go, but he had clamped his mouth shut on my hand and it was a toss up as to who was catching who.

"Don't let go of him, dad!" Rick yelled from the bank, where he had found a safer place to watch the fight.
My arm felt like it was about a foot longer than it used to be, and I was sure my hand was missing some fingers. Gathering what was left of my strength, I made a mighty heave and flopped the struggling catfish up onto the bank beside a wide eyed Rick, who quickly jumped back into the river.

If you've ever caught a catfish, you know that they are hard to kill, and this one was no exception. I picked up a rock with my left hand and smashed it down on top of his head, which resulted in squashing my fingers, still in his mouth, even more. Finally he opened his mouth to gasp for water and I yanked my hand free. I laid beside the still flopping fish, rubbing my throbbing arm and counting my fingers.
“Are you OK, dad?”
“Oh yeah, that was easy!” I said, trying to keep the quaver out of my voice, “Let's go show mom!”

As we rounded the bend in the river, I held the big fish behind my back, hiding it from Carol's view. When she saw us she grinned and held up a stringer with several ten inch catfish to show us. When we got closer I showed her the big fish, and Rick proudly yelled, “ Look what dad and I caught!”

Family?

Recently I joined a group of Parkinson's patients to have my DNA sequenced. Normally this costs $299.00, but thanks to funding from the co-founder of Google, Sergei Brin, we were only charged $25.00. The purpose is to find if there are any common genetic markers in Parkinson's sufferers.
I received what they delicately labeled a "spit kit" in the mail, drooled into it and sent it off by Fed Express to" 23 and Me," a genetics lab. About a month later my results came back.

I found that my genes show that my Parkinson's wasn't inherited, so I probably acquired it by inhaling bug spray or laquer thinner or God knows what else over the last 70 years. Along with scads of data, there was a section on maternal and paternal chromosomes and family prehistory. It seems that mom's side of my DNA shows a pretty common group of Europeans originating in Scandinavia. However, when I looked at the paternal, Y Chromosome side I found this:

Haplogroup R1b1c9

Your Y chromosome DNA determines your paternal haplogroup.

Today R1b1c9 is found mostly on the fringes of the North Sea in England, Germany and the Netherlands, where it reaches levels of one-third. That distribution suggests that some of the first men to bear the haplogroup in their Y-chromosomes were residents of Doggerland, a real-life Atlantis that was swallowed up by rising seas in the millennia following the Ice Age.

Doggerland was a low-lying region of forests and wetlands that must have been rich in game; today, fishing trawlers in the North Sea occasionally dredge up the bones and tusks of the Mastodons that roamed there. Doggerland had its heyday between about 12,000 years ago, when the Ice Age climate began to ameliorate, and 9,000 years ago, when the meltwaters of the gradually retreating glaciers caused sea levels to rise, drowning the hunter's paradise. Doggerland's inhabitants retreated to the higher ground that is now the North Sea coast.

Dogger what? The lost continent of Doglantis? Truly, I could never have dreamed up a weirder family history.

JC's Awning

After our first Three Stooges attempt at installing an RV awning on the side of JC's mobile home, we sat back, sipped a little wine and slowly came up with several new plans of attack.
Then lo and behold one day when I walked up for my daily visit, there it was in all its glory!
JC had won the battle single handed!
Since then we've spent many enjoyable hours sitting on his deck protected from the rain and sometimes even the sun!

New project

I may have bitten off more than I can chew this time.

We've been keeping an eye on our ex-boss and friend's river front house while they spend the winter in warmer and less rainy places. Joanne moved to Hawaii and then when the volcano fumes got too strong, she came back for a short time, and then went to her brother's home south of San Diego. Laura, her daughter, went to their home in southern France.

Around the first of the year she called and asked if we would oversee the crew that was going to tear down their old dilapidated boat dock. We agreed, and told her that we would take pictures as the work progressed.

When the foreman told us that the wood would be taken to the dump to be disposed of, I asked if they could dump it off at our house instead, so I could saw it up for firewood. They happily agreed and a few days later the first trailer load showed up.

The old Cedar and Fir, rough-sawed timbers and dimensional lumber had been torn apart, loaded on a barge and floated a couple of miles down river to the boat ramp where it was winched on to a 26 foot flat bed trailer and then hauled by truck to our front yard. It was difficult backing the trailer into our driveway, but by stopping traffic on the highway and a lot of back and forthing they managed it.

After I helped throw off the first trailer load the foreman asked me, "There should be at least two more loads like this, are you sure you want it all?"
I looked at the huge pile of soggy, barnacle encrusted, nail infested lumber, swallowed, and said, "Sure, I'll take it!"

Now my work's cut out for me!

Medical Marijuana Test #2

3/11/2009

4:05 am:
Taz growled me awake, I got dressed, put the coffee on and we went outside for our morning pee.

4:15 am:
I got a fire going in the fireplace, poured a cup of coffee and sat down in front of the computer. While it was booting up I realized that it would be a good time to try one of the medical marijuana cookies I'd been given, to see if they would help with my Parkinson's tremors. The marijuana cigarette experiment a few weeks earlier had mostly been a failure.

4:30 am:
I washed the weird tasting chocolate chip cookie down with hot coffee while I was surfing my usual morning web sites.

4:40 am:
Right in the middle of reading the Drudge Report my eyes went out of focus.

4:45 am:
I realized that I'd been staring at the same out of focus article for about five minutes, and that I'd better go lie down. I tried to close down the browser and go off line but I couldn't remember how. I squinted my eyes really hard, concentrated, and managed to find the red X to shut down Firefox. I tried to stand up and almost fell, so I crawled on my hands and knees into the living room and up onto the couch where I started flying through the air. Unfortunately it wasn't that good kind of flying like Superman, it was more like uncontrollable tumbling.

4:47am:
Taz jumped up on my chest and licked my face. My vision cleared enough that I could see the digital clock in the TV stand. I closed my eyes and I was upside down going through bright bands of color, still rolling and tumbling. I didn't want to fight the weird sensations so I tried to relax, but the tremors in my hands increased and some new jerks and tics in my neck and legs started. About fifteen minutes went by before I opened my eyes and looked at the clock.

4:47 am:
How could that be? Now I was floating among the colors, lost in space somewhere. Taz began licking my hand, which usually drives me nuts because it tickles. I tried to move it but I couldn't move anything. I was paralyzed, and I was starting to get sick to my stomach. I concentrated on trying to move and all of a sudden the paralysis was gone, and I was back on my trip. In a little while I opened my eyes again.

4:47 am:
Either the clock had stopped or marijuana has the property of stopping time. Now I was really getting sick, so I struggled to get Taz off of me and stand up. I weaved around and staggered a step or two before I fell to my knees and crawled into the bathroom. I barely made it in time, and although I hadn't eaten anything since lunch the day before, I barfed up a Technicolor nightmare. I remember thinking, I never ate anything like that! I staggered to my feet and wobbled over to the washbasin to wash my face and rinse out my mouth, but before I could start I began retching, and had to kneel before the throne again.

5:00 am:
Using the support of the bathroom fixtures, walls, and furniture I got back to the couch, and shivering, I covered myself with a nearby afghan. The fire was dying down, but I didn't trust myself to mess with it. Taz hopped up to help keep me warm and I sank into a deep sleep.

7:00am:
I was supposed to wake Carol up at 6:00 am, but I was totally zonked out. I remember hearing her stoking the fire and I know she put her hand on my forehead, but when I woke up she was gone on an ambulance run. I alternated between sleeping and throwing up stuff I hadn't eaten the rest of the day.

I think medical marijuana test #2 was also a failure. For the next test, a small piece of cookie?

Late Snow

After a cautious first few steps outside this morning, Taz decided that the white stuff all over everything was fun. First we wrote our names in the snow, and then after I watched him running in circles, jumping in the air and sliding around, I joined him and we ran around the back yard like a couple of little kids for what seemed like a long time to me. (At least it got my heart rate going pretty good.)
It sure is late in the year for snow here. I guess it's because of that damn global warming.

The Old Deer Head

Early the other morning, watching CNN with Taz stretched out upside down beside me on our favorite overstuffed chair, a piece of firewood fell from the stack beside the fireplace. Taz jerked awake, growled, looked around and started barking at the deer head hanging above the fireplace.

It took 5 minutes of petting and shushing to quiet him down. He just knew that damn deer had knocked over the piece of firewood, and he wasn't about to let it get away with it. He's been suspicious of it ever since he was a puppy, when he first noticed it up on the wall looking down at him.

For quite a while after the firewood incident, any strange noise would result in Taz instantly looking up at the deer head first to make sure it wasn't responsible. That's when I started thinking about how long that old deer head has been with us.

I shot the deer in October of 1958 just a few miles from our ranch in the Colorado foothills. It was on a steep, rocky hillside and when I tried to turn the big buck over to dress it out, the deer, my rifle and I slid, tumbled and rolled down the hill in a cloud of dust and rocks. When I untangled myself at the bottom I discovered that one of it's antlers had poked an inch-deep hole in the inside of my thigh. I was going to the Colorado School of Trades at the time to learn gunsmithing, and I had entered a big buck contest at the start of deer season. All of the entrants were officially measured using Boone and Crockett rules and my buck had a high enough score to make the record book and win the $50.00 first prize. Dad and I took it to Jonas Brothers in Denver to get it mounted.

The next time I saw it was in 1960 after I had moved to Las Vegas and opened a gunsmith shop with Cecil Fredi. Mom and Dad came to Vegas to visit and brought the deer head with them. We hung it on the gun shop wall where it gathered compliments from celebrities like Red Skelton and Brook Benton, and former Cleveland mobster turned Desert Inn owner, Moe Dalitz.

After Carol and I met in Vegas and then moved back to Colorado to get married, the deer head was with us, overlooking our family in a house in Golden and then back to the ranch where it had started from. When we sold the ranch house in 1973 and bought a campground in Cottonwood, Arizona, it hung on the office wall watching over us.

We sold the campground several years later, and the deer head was back in Las Vegas again, hanging in my brother's living room while we took a three year vacation traveling around the country in our travel trailer.

When we finally settled down again on the Oregon coast, our youngest son, Rick and I drove down to Vegas to get some things we had left with my brother including the deer head. On the way back my brother was driving when a Nevada highway patrol car pulled us over. Instead of asking, “Can I see your driver's license?” the officer asked for my brother's hunting license!

For a while there was total confusion until we realized that the tarp had blown back on the rental trailer we were towing and the deer head was exposed. After a few thumps on the deer's hollow head we were allowed to go. “He didn't even check your driver's license!” I told my brother.

“That's good, because I don't have one!” he answered.

For fifty years the old deer head has been a part of our family, getting petted by little kids, (visitors and family,) festooned with silly decorations and hats, but stoically watching over happy times and sad times, birthdays and holidays, births and deaths.

The great experiment

I made up my mind some time ago that if the occasion arose, I'd do a small experiment and see if marijuana would have any effect on my Parkinson's symptoms. A few days ago I got the chance to share a “joint” at our barbecue. It was the first marijuana I'd smoked in over 20 years and I wasn't quite sure what to expect.

Much to the amusement of JC, after deeply inhaling I started coughing and hacking. My eyes were watering, and I coughed some more until finally I stopped long enough to take another drag. The whole coughing and crying thing started all over again and I waved off the offer of another puff.

I didn't know if two puffs were enough to have much effect, but I carefully watched the tremors in my left hand as the high began.

I definitely had inhaled enough to get high, but the tremors remained. I tried stamping my left foot in a steady rhythm, but there was no improvement; still just as spastic as before. About an hour later, disappointed and still coughing, when asked if I'd like to try it again, I answered “No thanks, I'm trying to quit!”

I thought the experiment was over and a failure, until the next morning when I said “Good morning!” to my dependable, 4:am, alarm clock dog, Taz. The loudness and tone of my voice startled us both. My voice lately sounds more like a whisper than anything else, so something had definitely changed for the better. Was it all of the coughing I'd done, the marijuana, or both? Over the next day I gradually resumed talking in my Muhammad Ali voice again, but I think that the results call for another experiment, maybe something with less smoke like... cookies?