Talk about antiquated: daylight savings time should be abolished. Governments need to let us leave our clocks set on standard or DST and then leave us be. In the 21st Century there is no need to be changing our clocks every spring and fall.

I am really worn out after cleaning the house, washing the rugs, pruning the fruit trees, adding a rounded edge to Laurie’s study desk, doing 3 weeks of French homework (I’m still 3 weeks behind), and buying ingredients to make a pot of my NM gumbo. Losing an hour of sleep tonight will not help me recover.

The sky was overcast all day, which was nice for pruning trees, but it made the light flat for photographs. Thus I used HDR for the photos today. HDR is high dynamic range imaging where you take at least 3 exposures (under exposed, properly exposed and over exposed) and merge the images to create a more dynamic range in the image.

The orchids that surround my computer are in various states of being. One has almost completely faded with one dried flower hanging on. The flowers have all turned yellow and brown on another one, while the other three orchids are still in full bloom. The cut flowers we got about three weeks ago are slowly fading, but still looking good enough to come out nicely in B&W.

 

Stretch knows what to do on a cold, windy day — curl up on a shelf with math books.  The forecast was for snow today, and tomorrow. I didn’t see any snow today, but there was plenty of wind . We’ll see what tomorrow brings.

As the moon rose over the mountains while we were on our way home tonight, we noticed the details were almost completely obscured by dust that fills the air from the strong winds that blew all day. A woman who checked my receipt on our way out of Costco asked if I had gotten any good pictures today. I thought for a second and told her I hadn’t done any photos yet today.  After we got home, and unloaded everything from the car, I went out and photographed the moon as a cloud was blowing by. There was still a lot of dust in the air creating a nice glow around the moon.

I was awakened by the glow from the pending sunrise, and ran out and got it before it faded.  I had my 3 month check up today, which included blood work and my monthly port flush. A new nurse was learning how to access ports, and I allowed her to do the port draw and flush on me as part of her training. She is the 5th trainee to work on me so far; however, she was the first to miss one of my ports and skewer me.  Laurie said I can’t really complain, however, since I have poked a needle through Stretch’s skin and run solution all over Stretch and the counter.

All my blood work was normal, and the doctor couldn’t feel any lumps or other abnormalities, but since I still have a lot of fatigue, have lost a lot of strength, etc., she decided to check my thyroid and testosterone since chemo tends to wipe out both; therefore, I had to have more blood drawn — I had them draw it from my arm, because I didn’t want my port poked again.

We scheduled a PET scan for June 21st, which will be 2 years since I became one of Dr Marshall’s patients. I look forward to celebrating solstice with a good PET scan. Dr. Marshall said after two years, the chance of the cancer recurring goes way down.

 

This has been a “Garfield Monday”  — new hard drives didn’t work, new clothes didn’t fit, missing glasses, spilled coffee, no c-cell batteries, noise on a recording, and so on — everything seemed to be against us today.

 

 

Texas police patrolling US 84 between Muleshoe and Lubbock are weird.  On the way to SLAM on Saturday morning, Janet and Laurie were discussing the speed limit, and noting that Janet was driving 65 MPH, the posted speed limit, when a Texas State Trooper, heading the other direction, makes a U, crossing the median, and pulls us over.  Janet asked him why he pulled her over, since she was doing the speed limit, and he said “No ma’am! You were speeding!” He told her. Laurie asked him how fast he clocked us, and he replied “6 MPH over the speed limit!” At that point Janet, Laurie, Tayler and Praise said in unison “No Way! We all saw the speedometer at 65 MPH!” The officer stood his ground, but said he was only going to give Janet a warning this time. After we took off again, and within a mile of where we were stopped a speed limit sign read 70, but Janet stayed at 65. A few minutes later another cop going the other way made a U-turn across the medium, and Janet said something like “Give me a break!”, and the cop sped past and stop a truck with a load of hay that was ahead of us.

On the way home this afternoon, some miles outside of Muleshoe, a big tour bus with a school-like logo on it passed us and the next thing we knew there was a police car in the left lane in front of it with its lights on with an SUV driving beside the cop car. There was another SUV behind the bus followed by two police cars with their lights on behind the SUV. The bus did not pull over and we decided the police must be escorting the bus. Several miles later, the police car in front and the last police car, turned off their lights, crossed the median and headed back towards Lubbock. One cop, lights still flashing, still followed the bus.  All of a sudden, out of nowhere, there was a fire engine and another cop car in front of the bus and an EMT/Rescue vehicle from Sudan followed, driving at 40 MPH with all their lights flashing. Janet pulled off to get gas, and when we got back on US 85, the whole parade had disappeared. The whole episode was beyond strange.

The SLAM math conference was great. I missed one lecture yesterday while I walked around the Texas Tech Campus with Rick and Laurie’s cousin Teri, photographing sculptures and buildings. Then the last lecture on Saturday got cut short by a fire in the new Chemistry Building that is attached to the old building we were in. When the fire alarm went off, we all just sat there and the speaker continued, but when the alarm persisted, one of the organizers went out to check, and seeing police outside the building, came back in and told us we had to evacuate. Several minutes after we left the building, fire trucks showed up.

The conference organizers asked me to do a group photo of the speakers and participants, so we got everyone out on the steps of the Science Building during the break before the last lecture this morning. They were a cooperative group, and, amazingly enough, you can see everyone’s face. I counted 52 in the photo.

 

I’m in Lubbock, TX tonight. Laurie has a poster of her thesis in the Southwest Local Algebra Meeting (SLAM) held this year at Texas Tech University. We drove down with Professor Vassilev and 3 other graduate students from UNM this morning, and will drive back tomorrow afternoon.  We got back fairly late from a reception tonight, so I’m only posting photos from one of the lectures and of a blackbird that was digging around in the grass with its beak.

 

 

 

We are having to waterboard Stretch everyday now. He seems to be perkier and eating a little more, but he’s still pretty thin. The clouds over the Transportation Center where nice this afternoon, and there was enough dust in the air to make the color look like Kodachrome.

 

 

The winds blew hard today, leaving lots of dust in the air this evening.  Our white orchid is bowing its head as it prepares to shed its last bloom. Davie Jones and Andrew Breitbart both passed on unexpectedly and the ages of 66 and 43 respectively. A solemn reminder of how fickle life can be.