Random tidbits

I stayed home from work today with a suddenly-appearing cold.  Felt fine at mid-afternoon yesterday, a bit dried-out and scratchy on the bus after work, headache-y and stuffy at bedtime.  By 3am or so, I was completely stuffed up and unable to sleep.  This one is a bit odd, in that my throat is still scratchy while my nose is full ... usually those are consecutive rather than coincident.

At least, I hope it’s just a cold.  With the rapidly-intensifying, and justified IMHO, concern about the new inflenza H1N1 strain, one has to be hypervigilant.  I do wonder whether age 58 is still in the “healthy adult” range or considered “elderly” in pandemic flu circles.

One reason for my (even more extended than usual) blog-absence is that I’ve been working feverishly on wrangling the research presentations for this summer’s SABR39.  We had appreciably more submissions than in any of the previous years I’ve been in charge of evaluating and scheduling the research abstracts for the convention.  I’ve recruited another volunteer to participate in the coordination processes, which will lighten the load in the future but has necessitated extra time for training and instruction this time around.

This year’s SABR convention will be held in our nation’s capital, at a hotel that’s just a line drive away from Sasha and Malia’s new digs.  I can’t begin to express the pleasure of the vast majority of the expected attendees that we’ll be near their house rather than another of John and Cindy McCain’s mansions.  Also, this meeting will mark a personal milestone ... my 20th consecutive convention.  Yep, every year since the first one I went to, 1990 in Cleveland.  Which also means that I will have attended over half of the total number of annual SABR conventions.

Oh, and it will be my last convention as a member of the Board of Directors.  My term on the Board officially ends after the Annual Business Meeting, on July 30.

You may be wondering about my shoulder injury.  I last wrote about it two months ago, when I’d completed a month of physical therapy.  There’s been a lot of progress since then.  After another four or five weeks of weekly PT, the therapist and I agreed that I was doing well enough to continue on my own.  At that point, my range-of-motion in most axes was within about five degrees of my other (dominant) arm.  I’m not quite pain-free—in fact, it’s been a bit achier in the last week or so than it had been for the previous several weeks.  I’m continuing to do exercises on my own, but of course I’m not as diligent as I should be.  I suspect it’ll remain a bit weaker than I’d like, and a bit more likely to ache than I’d like.  On the other hand, I can do pretty much everything I could do before I hurt it, without giving much thought to potential consequences.  The ER and PT bills are starting to come in, but my insurance coverage is quite good.

When the discussion at a staff meeting of my workplace revolves around the issue of annual raises (there won’t be any this year) rather than layoffs, that’s a positive thing.  I still worry about it, due to the nature of the bureaucratic control over my particular program, but so far we seem to be doing OK.

It’ll be even better when we can put together some tangible outcome data from the big project I’m involved with.  It involves record-matching between two large databases, to be followed by a GIS analysis of patterns of injury locations and transportation to the region’s trauma centers.  I’ve run into a few hitches in the project, culminating with the demise of my workstation due to a malware infestation.  My replacement computer now holds all the data from the old one, but rebuilding the analytic files to reflect its data and file structures will take a while.

Seattle and King County politics are at a bit of an impasse right now.  The state legislative session was typical inside-baseball politicking at a time when innovative leadership toward new solutions is desperately needed.  I don’t see much in the upcoming races for County Executive, Seattle Mayor, and City Council that draws me in.  Oh, there are plenty of competent aspirants, but we need excellence and new directions now.  Doing the same old stuff better or more effectively just ain’t gonna hack it right now.

For the most part, ditto national politics.  I keep saying that the calls for investigation and correction of the pathologies perpetrated for the last three decades under the influence of far-right antigovernment zealots are intended to obtain justice or accountability, not retribution.  Our nathion ethos is deeply in need of cleansing, deeply in need of focus on our better nature, deeply in need to reorientation toward supporting the common good instead of the greed is good ideology that rides rough-shod in the dangerous, failed “free market” model.

Comments

It’s been nearly 3 weeks. Can we assume you don’t have swine flu—or are perhaps fully recovered by now?

I don’t think I’ll be at SABR because of poor timing. My family has commitments to be in the DC area July 18 to 26 and I’ve got to attend a student-related event in Louisville on the 29th.

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Not swine flu.  Or, better stated, not seen by a healthcare professional, so no samples drawn.  Just a standard-issue lasts-too-long cold.

Boy, Rodger, that’s really bad timing ... being in the same city, but just a few days too early.  FWIW, I plan to arrive in the area while you’re still there (on the 25th, I think) to do some sightseeing before the convention.  Hmmmmm…

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