Emergency Room Visit

Two weeks ago I had surgery to replace my worn out hip joint. Wednesday morning I was supposed to visit the doctor for a routine follow up visit, see if everything is progressing okay. At 4:30 AM Wednesday morning I felt a muscle spasm around my new hip joint and a clunk-a-bunk sound and all of a sudden I couldn't move. Well, I could move my hands and feet but that right leg wasn't going anywhere. What do I do? I could holler for my wife, but she's sleeping, she's had a rough couple of days with her own problems, and I am loathe to disturb her. I can scoot down the bed until my lower legs are hanging over the edge, but that's as far as I can get.

About 5:30 AM I hear rustling noises so I know the boss is awake and I start hollering. Eventually I get her attention and we start figuring out what to go. I call the clinic and talk to the on-call doc and he advises me to call 911 and get an ambulance ride to the hospital, so we put that in motion.

Ambulance and fire truck arrive about 6:30 AM. I always wondered why they always seem to send a fire truck along with an ambulance, now I know. It's for the man power. For the ambulance crew to be able to deal with the patient, first they need to extricate them from wherever they are. In my case you wouldn't think it would be too bad, but they still had to get 240 pound dead weight out of bed and down the stairs. The six of them carried me in some kind of blanket. It was a bit snug going down the stairs, but we all got down without incident.

The ride to the hospital was uneventful though a bit bumpy. I always thought ambulances would have a soft, cushy ride, but they don't. They must have rocks for springs. I felt every bump in the road. It wasn't painful, just annoying. The ride on the stretcher into the Emergency Room wasn't much better. I think the hospital must get the wheels for their gurneys at the scratch and dent sale. Bump, bump, bump, bump all the way down the all. It would all be tolerable except that all the floors in the hospital are glass smooth. You'd think with all the pristine floor they could spend an extra quarter on getting some ROUND wheels.

Once they got me ensconced in the ER they hooked me up with an IV (Intra-Venous line) and gave me a dose of dilaudid, also know as hydromorphone. That gave the whole ER thing a warm, fuzzy glow.

Clay from the clinic came by and introduced himself. He was there to assist Dr. Wang with getting my hip joint back together. That was the last I saw of him. A bit later I'm wondering when they are going to get going and the nurse tells me they're getting ready to take another X-ray to make sure the joint was back together, and I'm like what? When did they do that? While I was knocked out, apparently.

My wife drove me home. We stopped and picked up a couple of cheeseburgers on the way and were home by 2:30 PM.

My surgeon was a bit distraught over this turn of events, but evidently thinks she has identified the problem, so I will be going in for surgery again tomorrow (Friday) afternoon.

Hip joints becoming dislocated is a rare but not unknown event, but usually when these rare events happen, the ball part of the joint goes backwards. In my case it went forwards which makes it double rare. My wife wants to know why. I tell her it's because I'm a Martian and we're just weird.

P. S. I hoped to include a video of me being carried down the stairs, but it hasn't been dropped into my grubby little hands yet, so you'll just have to use your imagination.

Cougar Dream

Ashland Cougar

I have just arrived at an old house. There are two or three other people there already. The place is a little scruffy, but habitable, kind of like a house rented out to students near a college campus. It's getting late so I go to bed. I sleep for a couple of hours but now I need to use the bathroom. (That much is realistic.) One of the other people is wearing a bathrobe and is slumped across a desk. Seems everyone is asleep. All the lights are on in the kitchen so I set about turning them off. If I turn them all off, it will be completely dark, but there is one that is blocked from shining directly into the other rooms, so I turn it on. It's like a candle lamp with a vertical glass tube about a foot tall and two inches in diameter. But it's not a candle. There are two pull chains hanging from the side of the tube, one near the bottom and another about halfway up. I pull the first one and something in the tube starts rising from the bottom. When it gets about halfway up I pull the second chain and it continues stopping a couple inches short of the top. The light is now on.

I head to the bathroom. I have to go through another room to get there. When I get there, there is what looks like a body wrapped up in a blanket propped up on the toilet. It's not a body, it's a dude who is feeling poorly. He offers to move, but I tell him not to bother. He looks miserable and I am not going to contribute to his misery. Back in the previous room I notice there is a young woman wrapped in a blanket and curled up in an overstuffed armchair. I realize this must be the couple that we were expecting. She too offers to make the toilet available, but I decline, I tell her I'll go water the shrubbery in the backyard.

I head out the backdoor. It's light enough to see, it's either a full moon or street lights, in any case nothing like my real pitch-black backyard. There isn't as much shrubbery as I expected, and the neighboring houses are maybe a couple dozen yards away, so I start walking across the yard. The house in back of ours is adjacent to an empty lot. I start walking across the lot. The lot fronts on a road and there is a slight embankment there. There is a tree by the road. I walk up to the tree and look across the road and that's when I see three cougars (mountain lions) prowling the hillside on the other side of the road. One of them notices me and starts walking in my direction. He's about as far from me as I am from my back door. I look for something I could use as a weapon and find a couple of rocks about the size of a billiard ball. Do I scream? Call 911? Throw a rock? Run? Instead of making a decision I wake up.

Note about the picture. In my dream, the cougars were in black and white. Ask Google for photos of cougars at night' and all the pics are either in full color or have glowing devil eyes.

Nick Goes Fishing

My nephew somewhere between Anchorage and Seattle

Chain Ferry

Plan for the French chain boat, La Vill de Sens (1850)
Click image to embiggenate
Note driving wheels in the center and the path of the chain over the deck.
From the looks of things, it may have a two speed transmission.

In season 3, episode 4, of The Witcher, our band of heroes catches a ride on a chain ferry. That's a new one on me. I've ridden the Canby cable ferry and I've heard of big chains being stretched across rivers or harbor entrances to keep enemy ships out, but I haven't come across a chain ferry. There undoubtabedly were some in the bad old days, but the ones that are still around have all been converted to using steel cables and nobody seems to have preserved any of the old stuff. I did find one drawing of a chain boat (above) which was used for traveling up and down rivers, not just across them. They followed a chain that lay on the river bed. They picked up the chain at the bow, passed it down the length of the boat and dropping it off the back end. In the middle of the boat they had a couple of wheels driven by a steam engine that engaged the chain and propelled the boat along.

The ferry in the show crosses the north sea, a pretty fair distance since you can't see the far shore. You might think, like me, that this is unlikely, but the ancients dig all kinds of amazing things. It might not have been a good idea, but there isn't any reason it couldn't have been done, especially since this is a fairy tale. Oh, and there's no sign of an engine and there isn't much in the way of payload, but you know, maybe it's the off season. All in all an impressive prop for such a brief appearance.

Screen shots from the show on Netflix:

The ferry at the dock. No sign of the far side.

A closer view of the ferry at the dock

A view down the length of the boat. You can see the big idler wheel in the center with Ciri sitting dangerously close by.

The drive and idler wheels and the chain. Ciri and Geralt in the background.

A close up view of the ferry.

A close up of the monster's tail that has just been severed by the chain wheel. Monster bleeds green blood.

Ed Teaches The Team Old Tricks! Bombi Build

Matt of Matt's Offroad Recovery is rebuilding his snow cat pretty much from the ground up. After stripping it down to the bare chassis, one of the first things they want to do is mount some new idler wheels. The brand new tires need to be mounted on the brand new wheels. There are eight of them, so they decide to hold a competition to see who can spoon a tire onto a rim the fastest. They are doing this by hand using just a couple of tire irons, no fancy tire mounting machine. It's kind of like a lumberjack competition where they chop down a tree using an ax. The competition starts at 12:27.

Bluetooth

TaNix Bluetooth Audio Adapter for Home Stereo

I'm expanding my Bluetooth horizons. I bought two gadgets from Amazon so I can get tunes more places. They cost about $20 each, are very small and don't require any batteries. The TaNix does require power, just another cable to add to the home stereo snarl.

IMDEN Bluetooth 5.0 FM Transmitter for Car

We moved our antique home stereo to the basement in preparation for the big kitchen remodeling project, so I use it when I'm riding the Peloton. Using my smartphone with the Bluetooth gadget lets me control the volume and change the tune without having to get off the bike. I put the IMDEN unit in my wife's car. Looking for empty space on the FM radio dial, I was surprised how full it is.

Getting connected, 'paired' in Bluetooth parlance, sometimes requires some fiddling, but I think I've worked out a protocol. So now I've got five Bluetooth receivers that I can use: these two plus the my office speaker, the built in one in my truck, and a pair of fancy headphones. Six if you count the one in my daughter's Mazda. I've got enough playlists built up on YouTube Music to keep me pretty well entertained.

The only problem with IMDEN is that the CONNECTING announcement is rather loud.

Maxby Phone Holder

I also bought a bracket to hold my smartphone on the Peloton handlebars, also less than $20. The clamp that holds it to the handlebar is tough enough, but the clamp that holds the phone is weak, adequate, but weak. I'd get something tougher next time.

The Swingsationals - Sing Sing Sing

The Swingsationals - Sing Sing Sing
Swingin' in the Rennes

Dancing girls, upbeat music, just my speed.

At the end they mention the Hôtel Barrière L'Hermitage La Baule, presumably it's where they shot the video. It's on the west coast of France, just downstream from St. Nazaire, the site of the greatest command raid of WW2.