As if life is not hectic enough, since I last posted here, my cancer came back twice and I have had two surgeries as a result. Both of the tumors were in my skull, top left of my forehead. So now a good piece of my forehead is titanium mesh, Jing, a super nice and cool woman I work with, gave me the superhero name of “mesh head”

Most recent surgery was in Feb last year. And even though radiation and chemo aren’t really effective for RCC, they gave me targeted radiotherapy to try and prevent it from coming back again there. Well end of last year I was having crazy symptoms, I was going to Doctors and could not get a straight answer as to what was going on.

And of course a couple weeks before Christmas I felt a new lump growing on my forehead. First an MRI, and results were not definitive. Then a bone scan, still not 100% sure what it is. Now we are going to do a biopsy. Maybe it’s just me, but a new bump, inches away from where tumors appeared twice previously, seems to be a no brainer, it’s a metastatic RCC lesion again.  But, we will know for sure pretty soon. I’ll keep you posted, I must know a few people who check this site once a year or so!

OK, I’m gonna share a dirty little secret. Being a linux and formerly unix sysadmin for about a decade now, it’s a little embarrassing… For the last 18 years my primary desktop has always run Windows. Yes, there it is, I said it!
But a few weeks ago, I threw a new system drive in my computer, swapped my data drive, and installed Pinguy OS and I’m not looking back. I’ve been using Pinguy 10.10 on my work laptop since February and it’s proven rock solid. But 11.04 on a fast desktop is incredible.

I installed about 50 extra apps I can’t live without, transferred 500 GB of data from my old drive to a data drive, and have been playing with it non stop. It’s not lightweight, but it’s still snappy. CPU’s are fast and memory is cheap, so I see no need to run a light desktop shell. I’m generally not a big Ubuntu fan, preferring rpm based distro’s, but I can really say this is the nicest linux distro I’ve ever run. The other upside is I actually spend more time on my work laptop than my personal computer, so it’s nice to have everything the same. I already have to work in six different *nix’s at work, so simplifying the GUI OS’s I deal with is a welcome change.

Lots of eye candy if you want, intuitive apps, tight integration, and stable. Keep in mind my favorite window manager has always been enlightenment, so I expect a lot from my desktop environment. I have a dual boot set up, small windows partition, as there is one app I need that doesn’t run in wine and there’s no linux equivalent. So once a week I’ll boot into Win 7 and enter my new comics into the database, it’s a time consuming process anyway, so an extra 5 minutes rebooting a couple times isn’t that bad.

And a note on hard drives. I have been using Hitachi drives for about 7 years now in a few computers and they are great drives. All I buy now. Fast and reliable, don’t run too hot, and they last. A little noisy but that  doesn’t bother me. OK kids, there you have it, my fave distro of 2011, give it a try, I highly recommend it!

So even though I stayed up waaaay too late in Friday night, and late last night, I woke up at 6 this morning. Then, without ANY coffee in my system (I was running late as usual) drove up to Montgomery, NY to see my son Danny in his first MTB Race. Funny it was right up the road from where I worked at Stewart Airport, near Johnnies Pizza if you know the place. Danny has been into every sport, his last organized one was Lacrosse, but he’s been a bike nut for years now, I guess a passion for two wheelers runs in the family. I’m glad one of the kids is athletic, myself and Sam were definitely not into sports. I played a little frisbee and hacky sack in my day, and was a pretty good skateboarder, but that’s about it in that department.

It was a 40 mile race of two laps, and he was riding the first lap, his teammate taking the final one. Each lap was 8 miles on fire roads and 12 in the woods on trails. Danny did really well and came in a little under two hours. His team ended up finishing fourth!!  Congratulations to the team.  Here he is coming up to the finish line. So it was a nice morning and a good way to end off a quiet weekend.

And I know, I haven’t posted in over a year. Haven’t had anything to say I guess

And a better day, got the results of my x-ray and ultrasound.

No New Cancer!

Now I need to be even more strict with my diet and, barring any symptom, I can breath a little easier to the next round of tests in November. It’s relieving to know I can enjoy this summer without the hell a metastasis would bring to my world.
K, haven’t written in ages, because it has not been pouring out, I have to think to write now, when that changes again, I’ll write regular, pinky promise…

If there is supposed to be some sort of lesson here, am I a student or a teacher? Methinks probably both, and that too is always in flux. It does feel like as one lives longer and sees more and learns more, the mind is like a database, and you’re cache takes a lifetime to build, so the fuller it is, the more efficiently you can access data. And recent studies of the brain’s capacity as you age see to bear this out as well, but I digress, enough for now. More to come.

Well, so much has happened in a little less than a year. My oldest son who lived with me turned 21 and my child support went up $1200 dollars a month. And then my tenant moved out and the cottage needed repairs, new flooring, carpets, and a paint job. I was in trouble. At precisely this time wall street got a little too crazy in their asset backed securities and derivatives money grab, so the market was crashing and real estate prices plummeting. I had just started a new job 5 or 6 months prior, back in the Sys Admin saddle again. Working in a small shop with CentOS on intel boxes with some heavy Xen virtualization going on. Glad to be in an office again but a small shop where you do everything and have no backup is no fun. You’re on call 24/7 365 basically.

Problem is with a less than stable employment history and a couple 90 days in my credit history, I couldn’t re-fi to get enough money to stay a few more years until a couple more kids turned 21. I also looked into cashing out an investment and was told it wasn’t an option. So, since the main house needed so much repair it was in essence a knock down, we just stopped paying the mortgage and started waiting for the axe to fall. After not paying for a year, I received a foreclosure complaint in June of ’09 and answered it myself at the supreme court. We started looking at apartments a few months prior and were dismayed at the shit-holes that were in our price range. The problem is we have Sid, and although some  places take dogs, they often have a weight limit, they want small dogs, not 80 pound high drive GSD’s as tenants.

Well we found a great old pre-war building a guy I work with recommended, he has lived there for like 5 years or so. We got approved and saved up our deposit and first months rent along with extra for moving, etc. I had a doctor’s appointment mid August to get an ultrasound of my liver to make sure it looked OK. The tech said she saw a “little something” on my kidney. That little something was a 9 cm. tumor that I was told was almost definitely cancer and I would have to have my right kidney removed. Friggin’ CANCER, I forgot to mention we also had a motorcycle crash down around Chinatown and couldn’t afford to fix the bike, so we are definitely not having a good year so far. I went down to Sloan Kettering and met with Dr. Paul Russo, who is on of the best surgeons in the world when it comes to renal cancers. We scheduled an appointment for surgery the next week, on August 26th.

I went through the surgery, stayed in the hospital two more days (loved the morphine pump the first two days) and went home to recuperate.  Knowing we were moving in 3 weeks and I hadn’t packed half of the stuff up I’d accumulated in 18 years of not throwing anything out was a disconcerting thought. Luckily I had moved my shed next door to my Mom’s property, so I had plenty of room for metro shelving and storing stuff we couldn’t bring but I couldn’t part with. I packed a little here and there without bending over, and we hired 3 guys and rented a truck and made the big move, from Mahopac, where I’d lived in the same house the kids were raised in for 18 years, to Sleepy Hollow.  The move went pretty smooth, the poor guys carried 37 boxes of books up 6 flights of stairs to the 4th floor!

Here are a few pics of the building  and the neighborhood. OK, that’s enough shocking news for one update and I’m glad I got this post in to keep it just under a year since my last post. I could be the once a year blogger… Although I’m sure many others would want to share that title. I’ll try and update again and tell you what else is new.

In case you couldn’t tell I was a big Mopar fan for years.

If you had a last meal and it could be any food from any place you’ve ever had, what would the meal consist of ?

Mine is easy-

Soup- The Lobster Bisque from Arno’s on Nantucket.

Bread- Sourdough assortment from Boudin’s in San Francisco

Salad- A spring mix with a round of warmed goat cheese in the center, slivered almonds, and a nice raspberry vinaigrette.

Main Course- Broiled NY Strip Steak served with 6 jumbo shrimp, brushed with a compound butter then grilled over cherry wood coals.

Vegetables- Baked Potato with butter, chives, sour cream, salt
and also- broccoli spears sauteed with olive oil and garlic, sprinkled with a few drops of lemon juice

Desert- A Double chocolate ice cream soda – either from “The Hippies Place” that was on City Island, Bronx, NY in the 70’s or from “Huntley Farms” in Eastchester, NY also in the 70’s. Home made ice creams, fresh whip cream, it was great !

And if I’m not full maybe a slice of Juniors Cheesecake from Brooklyn

Beverages- Iced water while eating, Coffee would be a yemen mocha brewed in a vacuum pot, with raw sugar and cream, and then maybe a bit of a nice vintage port to end the perfect meal

Or maybe just 10 really fresh and juicy white castle cheeseburgers with one onion ring each placed under the bun top and a chocolate shake, depending on my mood !

I’m always saying- “such and such” is one of my desert island albums…

Well, I’ve finally taken 5 minutes and written down the ten albums I’d take if I was going to be stranded on a desert isle. Yes, just ten albums to listen to for years on end. I guess The Professor and Gilligan are taking care of the electricity and the sound system!

Anyway, here’s the list-

1- Charlie Parker (still not sure what album yet)

2- Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers RVG recording – Live At Birdland

3- The Rolling Stones- Sticky Fingers

4- The Beatles- The Beatles (White Album)

5- The Clash- London Calling

6- Bob Marley and The Wailers- Confrontation

7- Lucinda Williams- Car Wheels On A Gravel Road

8- Red Hot Chili Peppers- Blood Sugar Sex Magic

9- Patti Smith- Radio Ethiopia

10- The Allman Brothers Band- The Allman Brothers Band