Dan's Sh*tty Website

I was just reading one of Wil Wheaton's blog postings (You may ask yourself, "well, how did I get here?"), and I realized something. Wil, along with most or all of the people whom I am fans of have a deep sense of gratitude. There are many famous actors and writers that I couldn't care less about. People who I will happily watch their movies or read their books, but I won't follow on Twitter or stand in line to shake their hand.

Ruth took this while we were on a drive over the Beartooth Highway with our friend MJ. Sometimes its hard to tell if Sophia is 2, 12 or 32. For some reason her expression just seems so grown-up to me.

FaceBook has gotten big lately. I mean really, really big. So big, that it strains credulity that there might be people who choose not to connect with all their friends, loved ones, friends of loved ones, enemies, frenemies, and that one person you met on vacation and friended but don't really know but are too nice to unfriend. How can people not want to join this amazing thing?

As I write this is is roughly a week and a half since I had my adrenalectomy to remove a tumor. The surgery was mostly a success, in that it accomplished the task of removing my adrenal gland. However, it turns out that there was nothing wrong with it and the tumor was only adjacent to it rather than growing out of it, but a person can live a normal life with only one gland, so it's okay that it's gone. The tumor itself was significantly more complex and slightly larger than appeared on the Contrast CT. It also grew along the vena cava to below the vein that feeds the kidney.

Just a quick post to say that I have surgery tomorrow to remove my adrenal tumor. It isn't a particularly dangerous surgery, and it seems pretty unlikely that the tumor is cancerous. There is a fair chance that it's what's known as a Conn's Tumor, and if so it will explain all of the strange symptoms I've had for some years now, but had been attributing to asthma (and the meds to treat it). I should just be in the hospital overnight, though it sounds like there will be a fair amount of accompanying pain. I'm sure I'm macho enough to handle that no problem.

Ruth and Sophia were looking at a train on the railroad, half a mile away and a few hundred feet above us.

Although this image has no real bearing upon the subject of the poem, when I first looked at it on the computer I though of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Wild Dreams of a New Beginning. Here are a few lines that seems most fitting:

"...
Eyes smell flowers and become them
...
the washed land awakes again to wilderness
the only sound a vast thrumming of crickets"

and here is the full text for those with the inclination to read the entire poem:

Wild Dreams of a New Beginning

Poor Eliza. She suffers so much at the paws of Romi.

This is one of the biggest, brightest reasons that I love living in the country. There are thousands more in the night sky

It is always a little uncomfortable for me when I talk to someone and they say that they read my blog. I'm not too comfortable with people praising my work, though fortunately, that is seldom an issue. Instead it is that all of my worthwhile stories and anecdotes end up either here or on Twitter (http://twitter.com/aristeos). What little wit I can muster I pour into my posts (yes folks, this is the best I can do), so I'm forced to try to come up with some new and interesting topic that I haven't blogged yet.

This is a girl who loves her rides. She's so confident on them, she didn't even want Ruth touching her.