A lot of people here have commented on how brave the Mrs. is for posting her pictures and story here of her cancer. I think the initial cleavage pictures were very brave, but the support she's gotten here has really helped her along and made it much easier on her. Thank you one and all. Interestingly, while initially she didn't want anyone to know (I literally had to get clearance on a person by person basis), now she's finding posting the story here very empowering.

About the only part she didn't/couldn't tell was what I was doing during the surgery. The hospital has a lot of senior citizen volunteers. One woman, Ruth, was very wonderful to me, helping me figure out all the things I needed to do and know. My mind was definitely not with it that day, and it was very nice having someone to point me in the right direction. I happened to eat lunch with the nuclear tech, Julie, who helped with Mrs. FT's technetium-99 injection. As Mrs. FT mentioned in her diary, I spoke to Julie about the confusion at the imaging center, and she said she was a good friend of the director and so would let her know. Ruth let me know when Mrs. FT's surgery got pushed back an extra half-hour, though she didn't mention it was because the surgeon had his privileges suspended. In all fairness, I'm far more concerned about how a surgeon performs in the operating room than if he's up to date on dictating charts, and this surgeon has come highly recommended from several people.

We had been told that the surgeon, while excellent, was a no-nonsense guy who didn't laugh much. If that is true, I scored a coup by getting him to laugh. When the surgeon mentioned the possibility of physical therapy for Mrs. FT, I mentioned that not only was it a good thing that Mrs. FT was now working for an occupational therapist, but that her boss was used to working with children so Mrs. FT should be no problem for her. The surgeon and P.A. both got a good laugh out of that.

I hesitate mentioning it here, but Mrs. FT encouraged me to do so. I am somewhat conflicted because one of the things I'm worried about is how all this will affect our sex life. Mrs. FT has had to go off her estrogen patch as a result of the cancer and will likely not be able to go back on it, as chances are the cancer was estrogen receptive. So that's kinda left both of us wondering what will happen. I feel guilty about even thinking about it, what's important is that she's healthy, and I really don't have the right to worry about such things at a time like this. We're going to see her gynecologist in May and we're going to discuss it with him.

At some point, we rented Escape from L.A. What. A. Stinker. Made Escape from New York look like a decent movie. Poor special effects, wooden “acting”, recycled plot, worse script, complete and total disregard for stuff like basic physics, and glaring continuity errors. Also, note to Kurt Russell: You don't take the 5 from the Queen Mary to Disneyland, you would take the 405 to the 22.

Or rather, maps, if you take a wide view of the word “map”. I have instrument approach plates for everything west of the Mississippi even though I've never flown IFR outside of the state of California. The subscription is expensive for all those charts yet I renew it every year. I have VFR charts for most of the U.S., though I only keep the “local” VFR charts (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Las Vegas, and Phoenix) current. I like maps. I like looking at them. I like picturing the flight to someplace based on the maps. I don't know why I like the IFR charts so much though. They're very bland, not very colorful, and have a lot of technical data on them. Likely, it's the technical data. I'm such a nerd.

Aren't intermittent problems fun? The shop called to say the RNAV worked fine for them. So I flew out there and managed to talk to the tech. I told him that it would act up after about 20 minutes or so. Apparently that bit of information didn't get passed to him when I gave it to the shop for repair in the first place. So he's going to let it run under a blanket for an hour or so to get it warm and see if it's a heat thing. I also found out that while they don't repair the old Narco NAV-12 self-contained VOR head, they do have a harness to at least plug it in and test it. So I can find out if the one my mechanic had lying around works or not. I hope it does, I'd like to have a second Nav receiver.

We flew up to FIL's Easter morning. Got beat up descending into Kelso valley. At 8,500', the air suddenly got very turbulent with a hard roll to the right that almost required full left aileron to counteract. We were okay above 8,500, but we couldn't descend. So we flew further toward the airport until we got over Lake Isabella, then descended in a modified holding pattern over the lake where the air was a little better. We had a good dinner there, FIL's g/f is a great cook, and we had fun hanging out with FIL. The only down part was FIL's horse. The poor horse is on his last legs, and I think FIL will be forced to make the decision to put the horse down soon. Going back was only moderately better. We had to pick our way between coulds, and there were some bumps, but not near as bad as the trip up.

Oh yeah, a question for those of you who've read this far. I'm getting a lot of bounced messages that are spam sent out with some random username at our domain. Am I correct that it's not at all likely that someone's broken into our hosting providers email server, that it's just spammers forging the email headers? How likely am I to end up on someone's shit list because of this?