A Rude Intrusion :: Day 11

This is my blog for day 11 of cancer treatment, Thursday, 20 Jul 2017.

Slept well last night, even through the rainstorms. Too bad about the rain, especially for those waiting for the river to go down!

I have a question for everyone: is there anything that tastes better than a nice, cold glass of milk? Had one first thing this morning, and it was goooooood!

Have to work again today, but am still scheduled to be on short-term disability starting Monday. I'm not sure if I'll like that, or not. May still get on to work once in a while to stretch out the C# skills, but, ya know, ya never know. I do have a lot of books to read! (I just don't want to come back to thousands of unread e-Mail messages.)

So far so good today re: calorie count. Just at 800 for the morning. Now to try to get to 2200-2400 by the end of the day. It could be tough. Just sayin'.

Hey - got weighed at the hospital today. They say I gained a pound after losing ten the first week. Whaddya know? I know how to put on weight! Woo hoo!

Had spaghetti for dinner tonight. In what might be a "taste of things to come," so to speak, the sauce tasted "funny". Not like it should have. And that is a potential side-effect of the radiation treatments. While I haven't really noticed this in other foods (the milk this morning was especially good, as I noted earlier), it's a sign of things to come.

Nancy and I met our son Tim and his wife Kate at the Culver's in Crystal Lake for a birthday dessert. We all had sundaes, each different, and all were completely and thoroughly enjoyed. Thanks, guys!

And it's the 48th anniversary of the landing on the moon (20 Jul 1969). I was in Gerber, California at my grandma's house, watching on a small, rabbit-eared black-and-white set, enamored with what was happening. The Space Race was a really big deal to all of us of a certain age. I would have been in 8th grade at the time, at St Raymond's school. We considered the astronauts heroes, and I don't think there's a better word to describe them. They flew in machines that consisted of millions of parts (built by the lowest bidder, as was pointed out in one movie or another), using technologies that were new, lifted, as it were, through and into the heavens on massive chemical engines that required so much of their mass to be consumed that the remaining vehicle was a fraction of its original weight of 6,540,000 pounds (yes, that's over 6 million pounds!). The Saturn V was launched thirteen times - it never failed. It is still, "the tallest, heaviest, and most powerful (highest total impulse) rocket ever brought to operational status, and holds records for the heaviest payload launched and largest payload capacity to low Earth orbit." See Wikipedia, here.

In short, the men and women of NASA, the technologies, the missions, the vision; still, all never fail to amaze me!

For today's YouTube selection, we're going back to one of the good old good ones - Standing at the Crossroads by Elmore James (here) and Crossroad Blues by Eric Clapton and Cream (here). Same song, of course, originally by Robert Johnson (here). The influence of Johnson and James on Eric Clapton is well known, and I thought they deserved some recognition, too, as Clapton does.


For convenience sake, here a running list of all of the links I've posted to YouTube in the past few days:

According to Plan, Carolyn Arends - Link

Because We've Ended As Lovers, Larry Carlton & Steve Lukather - Link
Cross Road Blues, Robert Johnson Link
Crossroads, Eric Clapton and Cream Link
Groucho Movie Clips - Link
Lookin' At The World Through A Windshield, Bill Kirchen - Link

My Funny Valentine, Kristin Chenoweth - Link

My Funny Valentine, Miles Davis - Link
Route 66, Asleep at The Wheel - Link
Shim, Sham, Shimmy (dance) to Tain't What You Do, Jimmy Lunceford - Link
St Louis Blues, Stephanie Trick & Paolo Alderighi - Link
Standing at the Crossroads, Elmore James - Link 
Starts and Stripes Forever, United States Marine Band - Link
Sweet Georgia Brown, Wynton Marsalis/Mark O'Connor - Link
That's Jazz, Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong & The All Stars - Link
Time to Blow, From That Thing You Do - Link