Thursday, June 11, 2009

A hopeless jumble of topics.

I went to the doc today and was given more medication on top of the old medication and I'm having a pain flareup and blah blah and poop and if you guys hang in for another day or two you're gonna be getting some freaky-ass blog posts. (Hey. Maybe the freaky-ass blog posts start today!)

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The hopefully last word on radiation is thus:

The husbeast is getting ready to retire and doing health checks and crap. For entertainment (knowing I'd been writing about radiation), he asked what his total radiation exposure is. See, whenever he's down a hole on a submarine or whatever, he wears a little pencil-shaped sensor called a TLD (stands for Thermo-Luminescent Doohicky, I think) that monitors his level of radiation exposure. So he got the total for all the radiation he's been exposed to while working on ships for the entire twenty years he has been in the Navy. Know how much? It's less than he got in a month of riding around in jet boats in Pearl Harbor when he was at his last command. (He rode around in jet boats for four years, meaning he was exposed to about, um, forty-eight times more radiation fooling around outside in normal conditions than he was in submarines.)

Yes. You read that right: Twenty years of radiation exposure from working on nuclear submarines is LESS than a month of sunny days in the tropics.

Believe me now when I say it's all relative? And to quit the sunbathing already?

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Have been spinning way too much, and my finger - the finger that the fiber goes over - has gotten raw. I'm not sure if it's really raw (no blood or anything), or if it's just some lovely symptom of this dumbass pain flareup (I get super-sensitive to pain; a papercut last night felt like I'd severed the tip of my finger). So I'm just gonna keep spinning until I see blood. Fuck the pain.

Ditto on the knitting; I'm working with cotton right now.

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The Goober is still big into her Little People animals and yesterday I got to shout the fun statement, "HEY! Get this horse out of the dining room!"

The neighbors think we are either insane, or have small children. Or both. (I think it's both.)

Today she got out her alphabet of animals and told me what letters each one was. She knew about half. Not bad.

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Thanks to everyone helping out with moving suggestions. The military will pay for one thousand pounds of stuff (packing and moving), and store it for one year. Anything OVER the thousand pounds, we pay for. They allow for 10% over, so 1100 pounds. When we moved out of Hawaii, I think the weight was 1107; they were nice and didn't charge for the seven pounds. But we are definitely maxed out.

Since then, I've gotten rid of about half my books, but we've acquired a washer, dryer, and refrigerator. We intend to rent a U Haul and take the husbeast's tool and spare part collection with us to NE Ohio (we obviously couldn't do that from Hawaii), as well as taking a few boxes of my books, the spinning wheel, knitting gear, and stash. With luck, that will take care of the weight. If not, well, I guess we pay.

I'm probably going to be ditching some furniture. Haha.

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The husbeast put the engine he's been rebuilding into the truck yesterday. There was much rejoicing. I watched him sweating buckets in ninety degree heat (uh... 45 C? thereabouts?) with eighty percent humidity, and thought "You call this a hobby?" But it takes all kinds, so I kept my mouth shut. I'll stick to knitting in the air conditioning, though.

15 comments:

Unknown said...

Of course its both, you'd have to be at least mildly insane to have small children. ^_^

amy said...

I think it's the small children that drive us insane, actually. There's definitely a causal thing there.

Amy Lane said...

I'm with Jake-- it's BOTH. The small children make us crazy, and the craziness often leads to more children. Or is that only me?

Okay--knitting in the A/C at least gets you less radiation exposure, right?

Emily said...

Oh, small children & insanity definitely go hand in hand. Add in some pain & there you are. The ideal would be to drug oneself into painlessness, but you can't be on duty with a child and be loopy like that. I guess the not-screaming builds character or something. I hope, anyway.

roxie said...

I envy you. Wish I had a chance to tell someone to get the horse out of the dining room!

Good luck with the new meds. And thanks for the last word on radiation. Really interesting!

Leonie said...

Children lead to insanity, unless you have already done a Higher Degree in which case you are already insane!
The move sounds like it will be interesting in many aspects not the least of which would be managing the side effects of your meds and changing doctors again....
Oh and according to Google 90F=32.2C (body temp being 37C~98.5F), thought 45 sounded a bit high! Although with the humidity....
(Googled "90 fahrenheit in centigrade" first hit is the answer, you can convert all sorts of things like pounds and ounces to kilos, inches to cm, etc)

NeedleTart said...

When we moved (12 years ago, The Husband worked for the FAA) they paid for 10,000 pound. We had 20,000. Wish we had thought of getting rid of books....

ellen in indy said...

you might want to check whether it's cheaper to mail books than to move them.

as for getting rid of books? i just gave our public library 25 boxes of books/mags/tapes/etc. that left me w/18 or 19 printer-paper-size boxes of books. now all my books fit on the shelves again, with room to spare. at times it was tough triage, but the combo of a good cause and a tax deduction was a winner. (just keep a good tally sheet, get a receipt and a list of what the recipient library charges when it sells your stuff,

great verification word: thydrat

hmmm -- i'll use that when next i look at my swollen limbs.

Galad said...

Hope the new drugs have some benefit and not too many side effects. Eventually maybe they'll hit on the right combination.

It's been quite a while since I had small children so it is all a pleasant blur at this point. Selective memory is a marvelous thing!

Anonymous said...

I'll second the mailing things to the new place. I've done that a lot.

Pam

Donna Lee said...

So Peter kevin tells me it's a Dosimeter. I was telling him about the exposure and he said "yea, you wear a tld". He spent a few years on a nuclear powered aircraft carrier in the
80's. It always amazes me the things he keeps in his brain.

Emily said...

Just to let you know: I sent on your articles on radiation to a lot of people I knew would be interested. One replied, "Whoa! This is from a knitting blog? Fascinating reading, though."

I think your blog should be syndicated....

Robin said...

You're moving to NE Ohio and I may be moving to SW Ohio. The packing and cleaning ..... UGH!

baby nuke said...

Dosimeter. measures dose, like a thermometer measures therm.

Ginger_nut said...

thought you might like to know this for future referencc - quick way of converting temperature that i learnt while I was in the US

(x) degrees F minus 30 and halved (divided by 2) = (y) degrees C

ie - 90F -30 =60 / 2 = approx 30C

viceversa

45C x 2 = 90 + 30 = 120F (bloody hot - even for an austalian!)

of course, being such a big geek you may get a kick of knowing that the correct formula is
(x)F - 32 / 1.8 = (y)C hence
(y)C * 1.8 + 32 = (x)F

if it weren't 0130 here i could prove the formula for you* ;) but for the moment be content that the 32 (30) comes from the fact that that is where water freezes at F instead of a 0C, and after that the relationship between
degrees F and degrees C is approx double (1.8)


*actually - about 10 years ago i was doing engineering with a pure maths unit and could have proved it but now I wouldn't have a clue...