The family comes to see our new home.....and re-live old memories

Kids and grandkids came.  Jules, Sean and Emily had been to Leisure World many times in the past, especially Emily and Jules who started visiting here in 1988 when their grandparents bought a home here.

And now thirty years later in 2018 their children get to visit us, their grandparents, in Leisure World.  The tradition continues....

Hiked Pass Mountain: 

Soren and Sebastian planting a cactus with Grandma:

 Then Jules, Ian and Adam arrived.  We hiked to Wind Cave.

We went to the Organ Organ Grinder, a favorite of their grandparents.  We also went out to Serranos and the Diner, other places we have gone out to eat at many times over the past 30 years.



Emily had lots of time to catch up on her “fun” reading.

 We went to the zoo:

And rode the camels:

Grandma rode with Sebastian:

Sebastian making breakfast for everyone with Grandma:

 Watching the Seahawks:

Grandpa and Grandma and all of our boys swam together in the pool.  This may never happen again. 

We pass 3000 cycling miles for the year.....and are we ever happy!

Here we are at the point where we crossed the 3000 mile mark. 

Here is a very boring (to everyone else but us) video of us getting to this goal and getting our photo taken by a very fun man who was doing plumbing work on one of the manors. 

12 weeks out of open heart surgery (and 20,000 cycling miles in 10 years)

Ten years ago this January (2009) I got it in my head to do the STP (the Seattle to Portland 200 mile bike ride).  I had been doing a little bit of cycling around Whidbey Island in the previous year and a half, and had somehow heard about this ride.  I had no idea what I was doing.  I had never done an organized bike ride, or something of this scope.  All I had at the time was a (very) used, heavy, Specialized mountain bike.

So in February I bought a "new " bike--a $400, heavy, steel Jamis--probably the heaviest bike any of the 10,000 riders used that year on the STP.    I started riding longer and longer rides, to prepare for it.

I crossed that finish line in that July a different person.  I have said this before, but next to all of the important aspects of my life that involved people I love, crossing that finish line, by myself, was the most life-defining moment I have ever experienced.

Since that January, I have had multiple surgeries (3 shoulder surgeries, 3 foot surgeries, open heart surgery).   I have probably had to sit out a year, in total, for these surgeries, so my actual window for accomplishing this goal was probably closer to 9 years than 10.  In addition, Vicky and I have spent 2 1/2 years of that time in our camper, mostly in the desert southwest, during the winter, doing no cycling but hiking instead (over 3400 miles).

In 2011, while training for my second STP. a real life-defining moment happened--I met Vicky.

And we started riding.  Since then we have done the STP in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018.  All with Jules.  And one with Sean.  How many men get to do this with their wife, son and son-in-law?  I am blessed.

By doing this with Jules and Vicky, I was able, through all of the lay-offs because of surgeries, keep my motivation for, and enjoyment of, cycling.

Today I passed the 20,000 mile mark.  20,000 miles in slightly less than 10 years.

20,000 miles.  A feat I could never have imagined when I retired 11 1/2 years ago.  Miles with Vicky, and with Jules, and with Sean.

The photo above is when I achieved this milestone.  I planned it so I would be on the street across from where my parents lived for 20 years in Leisure World.  I knew they would be happy for me, and I wanted to share the moment with them.

There is something kind of wacky about doing this wearing what we call our old lady gardening hats.  But they work--they keep the sun off of our faces and neck and provide terrific visibility to drivers.  We are in our late 60s/early 70s.  We have no pride left, so what the heck?  We get tons of compliments on them.....although to be honest, only from other people in their late 60s and early 70s.  There is something fun about accomplishing this milestone while riding our tandem, Daisy. 

11 weeks out from open heart surgery...connecting with my inner child(hood)

My heartburn surgery still seems to be holding, which means that if it continues to hold for another three weeks I will be free from Warfarin.  Then I will be all done, and everything will be a success.  We are holding our collective breath (breaths?).

We read that a common after-effect of open heart surgery was depression.

I can understand that.  But I don't think it is depression.  There was a definite feeling state associated with the experience, an aversive one, but it wasn't depression.  It's one I can't put into words because there probably isn't a word for it.

Vicky and I have talked about this.  The best we can come up with is that having your heart stopped for several hours, and having your blood circulation and breathing be by machine for a few hours, and having powerful anesthesia for a few hours, and then powerful painkillers for a few days after that simply does something to the body that we don't fully understand.  Did my brain get enough oxygen?  Did the rest of my body get enough oxygen?    

One indication of my body just simply not firing on all cylinders was obvious when I was in intensive care.  I was hooked up to numerous machines and had several tubes in me that were oozing fluid.  I don't remember much about it, except that the nurse assigned to me was like a guardian angel.  Even in my haze I could feel her taking care of me.  Vicky said she was adjusting those machines like I was a video game, competent and confident.  She's the only person from that hospital stay whose name I remember.  After I am completely healed I am going to send her a card thanking her.  She got me from being a total wreck to being semi-functional.  This is a lot of trauma for a body to experience, and it is no wonder my systems went haywire.   How long does it take for the body to "unhaywire?"  That's the best I can do to explain the feeling I had for a few weeks after surgery.

Fortunately I can't remember the actual feeling.  All I can remember is having it.

I'm glad I'm past it.

When I was at home I needed something to do.  I didn't feel like watching television or up to reading the bad news all of the time, so I pulled out an old, unassembled model car kit that I had kept from my days as a vintage toy dealer.

It was a welcome relief.  However, the model was the most difficult one I have ever put together, and in my childhood I did them all of the time.  This one had a ton of tiny pieces.

The model was an Entex brand Bugatti.  Entex built models until the 1980s, often in 1/16 scale, so they were much larger and more detailed than were the standard 1/24 scale models of my youth.

I didn't get it finished while I was recovering on Whidbey Island, so carefully packed it and shipped it to Nuestra Casa.  I finished it about a week ago.  It was not my finest effort, because I had not assembled a model since my childhood, except with Ian, our grandson.  Also, I had never assembled an Entex model, and that's a completely new ballgame.  And why these kits are so sought after.

But it means something to me, even with it's imperfections.  Just like I mean something to me even with my imperfections.  It was something to help me get through those painful and awful feelings and give me the feeling that I was "doing something" instead of just sitting and looking out the window.

Vicky knitted during those times I was working on it--meaning, the times when she wasn't making meals for me, hauling firewood for me, driving for me, doing laundry for me, doing XXXXX for me, doing YYYYY for me, doing ZZZZZ for me, etc. 

As I mentioned, as a child in Oklahoma one of my main hobbies was assembling models.  It was nice because it made it easy for people to get me gifts---just get me a model kit.  I assembled dozens and dozens.

One type I assembled was airplanes and jets.  My father had built a room for me off of the living room, on the "second story." It had originally been a storage area above the garage.  The entire room was done in plywood.  I loved it.

Because it had plywood ceilings I came up with the idea of hanging my airplanes from it.  So I had 10-15 at any one time, all zooming around.  I put up little cotton balls to represent flak.  In the early morning light all I could see was the planes, not the threads holding them up.  So I would look at them and imagine myself flying around in one of them.  What a memory.

Then, when I got tired of one or the other and wanted to replace it I would give it a hero's death.  I would fly it into the ground, just like I saw in the movies.  My version of that was to sail it out my window onto the small concrete slab below my room.

Remember I was a kid, and a boy, and those are a lethal combination, and sort of weird much of the time.

Here is my window of my childhood home, and the slab:

So doing this Bugatti model was also calming in that it connected me with my childhood and with memories of my childhood and parents..  I'm now no longer a child and a boy, but am an old person and a boy.  Still a lethal combination I guess. 

It's kind of cool--doors open, steering works, glove boxes open, very detailed engine.  

I don't intend to give it a hero's death by ramming it into a rock or anything. 

10 weeks out from open heart surgery: Heartburn!

The surgery was successful, but it left me with an irregular heartbeat and a rapid heartbeat.  This can happen. But these conditions also mean I need to continue to take Warfarin, a blood thinner.  While on Warfarin I bleed easily, which means that many of our activities (some of our cycling and almost all of our hiking) isn't possible because I could bleed excessively if there was an accident, and help would be too far away.

The first thing I tried was called Cardioversion.   It consisted of administering an electrical shock to my heart--sort of punishing it for misbehaving.  That was effective, in the short term (like all punishment), but the Atrial Flutter and rapid heartbeat returned in five days.  So it has to be classified as a good try but a failure.  It was disappointing.

So, a month later I had was is called Ablation.  The Cardiologist inserted some tubes (BIG tubes) into my leg and threaded them up to my heart.  Then he punctured my heart with one of them and entered one of the upper chambers.

There he could "see" the electrical impulses and where they were going awry.  What he did was use an instrument to destroy part of my heart to create scar tissue.  Then, the impulses needed to go a different direction, and that direction was the healthy one.

Then he did whatever he could to try to make my heart beat irregularly so that he could test whether he had finished the job.

It was a success, although 5% of the time the condition returns.  Wish me luck.

All of this still makes my head spin.  Parts from a cow, a plastic tube in my artery, shocking my heart to make it behave, and then entering my heart and killing parts of it.

What a miracle.

I have every reason to believe that if I die within the next few years it will not be from heart problems.  I will need to take my chances with everything else, like all people my age do, but I am no more likely to die from heart problems than anyone else who did not have defective parts.

Vicky has been here through all of this, every step of the way, taking care of the things that I am too incapacitated to take care of, suffering through the fear and the distress of watching me in pain.   I am determined to make this pay off for her.

A miracle. 

9 weeks out from open heart surgery: Losing my noodle

I'm back to normal.  How do I know?  Answer:   I keep losing my noodle.

I don't understand why I have such difficulty with my noodle.  When Adam was here visiting I lost two of them.  Two.  Who loses two noodles?  Who loses one?  Who even uses one?  Who even HAS one?  Who has THREE?

Fortunately, we do have three.

But the third one led to a lot of ridicule from my wife.  She said it looked like I was carrying around a dryer vent hose. 

We have been swimming and cycling every day, about two hours total.  Some days, when we have appointments, we do a lot of walking too.  We enjoy it, but most importantly these days it is also part of my rehab.

At first I used the noddle the entire hour when swimming.  Now I am down to using it for 20 minutes of every hour and "swimming" for 40 minutes.  My "swimming" is kind of a joke, as I am a terrible swimmer.  So I do a combination of treading water, doing the backstroke with my head out of the water, and the dog paddle.  The advantage of being a crappy swimmer is that I get more exercise--nothing I do is efficient.

I get stronger all of the time.  Exercise is the key.  And the critical exercise didn't occur after my open heart surgery.  Instead it was the exercise that we did before it.  We knew about three years ago that I would need this surgery, so prepared for it the same way an athlete might prepare for a marathon.  We looked at it as being 'in training" for my heart surgery.

Why not?  You train for a marathon or for any other endurance activity, so why not look at open heart surgery the same way:  It is an endurance activity, so train for it.

And it has paid off.  I am not back to where I was before surgery, but if my upcoming ablation procedure pays off, I should be back to my pre-surgery levels by the first of the year.

And I am also quickly getting back to being forgetful as well, which is why I keep losing my noddle.

Here I am with what Vicky calls my dryer vent.  Fortunately, I didn't need to use it because there, in the locker room on this day, were BOTH of the noddles I had forgotten and accidentally left there.

In my defense, I've never used a noodle so never had to remember one.  Is that a good defense?  Works for me.

Before and after photos of the front and rear patios

First photo in each group was taken shortly after we purchased the home.  The second photo in each group is after our cactus and desert plant garden was installed and the front patio and pavers were installed.

 With new gravel and removal of lava rocks and borders, in order to give it a more desert appearance:

Back patio:

Back patio has a lot of cast iron and other metals, low walls, and openness to outside.

Surface of patio was gravel and concrete when the home was purchased.  A stump of a tree was in the graveled area outside the bedroom, and a full-grown tree was in gravel right outside the dining room window, completely blocking the view and making it impossible to walk out of.

Here are photos of the rear patio when we purchased it:

Now it has the same Scabos pavers as there are in the front.  The huge overgrown tree at the far end was removed, and now we can see the outside from all three rooms on this side of the house (all have sliders, and two of them also have a door).  The theme is openness. 

View of the outside from the living room slider:

View from the front door through the house through the living room slider to the outside.  One can stand on the Scabos pavers outside the front door and at the same time look through front door and see the same pavers on the rear patio.  The house is that open.