OUCH!

If there is one thing I can say about my wife.. she doesn't like to do things halfway. If she is going to do something.. by golly, she is going to do it right. And this last weekend, she proved it.. the poor girl.

Friday morning, I casually (and sleepily) walked onto an airplane in Minneapolis, to take a long flight to Portland. While I was somewhere over Montana, my wife was just getting ready for the day. Having taken Little Calvin to school earlier, she was showering prior to picking him up and heading to the airport to pick me up. She stepped out of the shower to dry off, took a step onto the bathroom linoleum floor, and for some reason, felt both of her legs slipping out from under her on the wet floor. Down she went.. backwards. Instinct took over and she threw her left arm behind her to brace her fall. As she fell backwards, she looked down at her bracing hand, just in time to see her wrist snap and break as she hit the floor. Immediately she knew she had just broken her wrist.. and needed help.

Now, nothing against my wife, but when things don't go her way, she can get angry. And in this case, that sense of anger is what really helped her. She was angry that she could tell she just sustained a major injury, and as spring break was just beginning with lots of family plans coming up, as well as work demands, this was NOT the time for a major injury! But her anger helped her work her way out of the bathroom, to get dressed and call a friend to help get her to a doctors office, all while having her left hand lying uselessly on the bed. It was this drive that kept her mind thinking clearly, to use her first aid skills (she teaches first aid classes) to teach her friend how to make a splint out of magazines (while carefully sorting out the ones that she thought I may still be reading), and bandage herself up to get some medical attention.

By the time I got off the plane, my cell phone was ringing to tell me what was going on, that she wouldn't be picking me up at the airport, and that I need to get to the hospital ASAP. She had already been to the doctors, taken X-rays, and was then immediately sent to the ER for treatment. Every doctor that looked at her wrist, could immediately tell it was broken, as it was disfigured significantly. Luckily, the bone was not coming out, but it was tweaked enough to give people the shivers.

Soon after landing in Eugene, I got my car, and headed to the hospital. By the time I got there, the doctors had just finished setting the bone. She was (luckily) out cold, with her hand hanging from a raised hook, with her fingers stuck in some medieval looking torture device. With her fingers locked in place, the doctor could pull down on her arm to pop everything back where it should be. According to the Dr. it took all his strength to pull it all out, but as seen in the x-rays, he did a perfect job. While I was glad to be a the hospital with her, part of me wasn't upset that I missed that procedure.

After more x-rays, a cat scan, and a LOT of morphine (for her)... we finally left the hospital. And for the rest of the weekend she got to deal with a large cast almost up to her shoulder, being unable to move much, and in a great deal of pain.

Fast forward to today (Tuesday). Right now she is finishing up in surgery. The doctor just handed me the groovy X-ray of the plate that now supports her wrist bone, nicely screwed in place on the operating table with 8 screws (Click image below for larger view).

Her full arm cast will be replaced with a half arm brace that she will wear for the next few weeks. Sure, the next few days will have some painful recovery for her, but she soon should be back to normal. And who knows.. with that kind of hardware in her arm, she could become all powerful on the volleyball court next year. I am struggling to remove Star Wars references from my head ("She more machine now than.." wait.. never mind). But so far so good in the recovery process.

But, everyone who sees the original x-rays and her original injury can all agree.. she did a REAL good job in breaking this bone!! My dad would be proud.. There was no "Half-Assing" here!

My Psychic iPod

It started out a little weird... now it is just plain creepy. I swear, my iPod is psychic.

I must admit, the iPod in general is the greatest invention of the last 10 years. Forget the Walkman, capable of playing a cassette tape of 90 minutes of music, with its warping tapes that a small child (or dog) could pull out and ruin in .3 seconds. I remember being so excited when I got my first one.. "Wow! I can take my music with me!". And thus began the days of carrying the walkman with me, along with a large box of cassette tapes to hold my music. One backpack and I could take it all with me, where ever I went (assuming I had a good supply of batteries, unless I wanted to hear really sloooooow tunes).

Then came the portable CD player. I can also remember the first time I listened to a song on a CD, standing at the electronics counter of Best, listening to "Time After Time" by Cyndi Lauper. Suddenly, I had to have one of these little gadgets with such high sound quality! And forget the box of tapes... now all I needed was a CD wallet and again, I could take my music with me.

But now, iPods rule the world. Beginning as a player that could hold an astonishing 1,000 songs (Like we'd ever take THAT many songs on the road with us at once), iPods continue to get larger and larger. Nowadays, they can store, what.. 25,000 songs, your entire lifetime worth of photos, plus an entire living room's worth of DVD movies, and tv shows.. and entire entertainment center, that fits right in your pocket. I never leave home without mine.

Gone are the days of waiting in boredom in lines or in doctors offices, when at any point, I can pull out "Lost" or "The Office" and catch my favorite episode. I could even tell when kind of shift was taking place this week, as I spent the week traveling to Indiana for my job. During an entire days worth of flying, I never once pulled my laptop out of my bag (where as it typically never leaves my hands). This trip, it was my iPod that kept me entertained, as I watched 2 episodes of the "Office", an episode of "Lost" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark" en-route to Cincinnati.

But what is really weird is, as I said, my iPod tends to be psychic. Somehow it "Knows" what is going on in my life and can play the appropriate music for almost any occasion.. without me doing anything.

During the work day, my iPod sits on my desk, attached to a speaker allowing me to have music playing quietly in my office as I work. Usually, when listening to music, I select "Songs" (which selects from all the tunes in my collection) and then it randomly pulls songs to play. It has thousands of songs to choose from, but what it chooses.. gets eerie.

Last year, I blogged about this phenomenon as I was intrigued that my iPod happened to pick Bill Cosby's "The Dentist" while sitting in the dentists chair. But lately, it has gotten way more than just coincidental in its "random" music picks, it must be psychic. Let me give you some examples:

• While helping a friend with some graphic design for his thesis, the iPod, happened to play 3 songs from an Album by Big Wreck, the same album that he and I used to listen to repeatedly while college room mates. It hasn't picked songs by that artist in years, or since. But it did right then.. and 3 of them. Weird.

• While talking to a friend about his upcoming trip to Disneyland, it began to play songs from my Disneyland Soundtrack.

• While boarding a plane, the iPod JUST HAPPENS to pick "Jet Airliner" by the Steve Miller Band.

• Upon reading that the new Harry Potter book will be out this summer, in the background, the Harry Potter theme begins to play.

• Even this week, while traveling for some meetings with my boss in Indiana, the iPod dipped into the Motown collection playing:

"Going Back to Indiana" by the Jackson 5

"Jimmy Mac" by Martha Reeves (that's my bosses name, by the way)

or even "Gary, Indiana" from the Music Man Soundtrack.

It's almost like my life is a movie, only the soundtrack plays out loud, the iPod queueing up the perfect tune for the situation, or the things that I am thinking about.. Guess I better watch my thoughts! It does provide for plenty of those slow looks, as my head turns sideways, the look of shock and surprise when the tune perfectly fits the situation. And there it sits, smiling back at me in its little iPod cradle on the desk.

I just must be careful... And if I start hearing "Fired" by Ben Folds or "Burn, Baby Burn (Disco Inferno) by the Trammps, I'm running for it!

Goodbye Mr. Incredible Car

It's gone... all gone.. goodbye Mr Incredible car! Most people may not understand this reference. It was invented by my friend Zak as he watched me drive my car down the street. Being that I am an.. eh... bigger guy, and I drive a smaller little sedan, I was told I looked like Mr Incredible driving down the street, me all hunched over at the wheel trying to maneuver the thing.

That thing was my 1998 Mitsubishi Mirage... the car I have owned for the last 7 years. Purchased with only 20,000 miles on it, I have obviously spent a lot of time in this little car over the years as I suddenly found it nearing 200,000 miles. My wife and I had talked for the last 6 months about the fact that a change needed to happen before the car would need some serious maintenance, the older it got and the more miles I racked up. But financing a new car, and making a whole new car payment, after having spent several years owning it free and clear, was just not appealing to us. And what kind of car could we afford to buy free and clear from the get-go? Well, probably a car with 200,000 miles. So what was the point of looking at options. There simply were none, but wait for the little beast to die.

Suddenly, an answer to our quandary came out of nowhere, hitting us like an unexpected brick to the head. My wife heard through someone at her work, of a car for sale. This one was just as old as our current car, a 1998 model year vehicle. But amazingly enough, it only had 48,000 miles on it. The car had one previous owner.. an elderly couple whose husband had been a mechanic. It didn't have a single scratch (something I certainly couldn't say for my Mirage that I had driven into the ground), not one flaw in the paint, as it had spent so much time in the garage. The interior was immaculate. And it's owners had done every bit of preventative maintenance you could imagine. When I went to look at the car, I was presented with a large file folder, filled with every receipt for every oil change, and every expense ever put into the car.

My only hesitation was really about pride. The car was an Oldsmobile.. a brand that I had always associated with elderly people. Me? An Oldsmobile driver? I don't think so.. No old lady car for me! After all, my next vehicle was supposed to be my big honkin S.U.V. or something fun.. certainly not an Oldsmobile...

But as I drove the car.. something happened. I discovered.. this was a nice, COMFORTABLE car!! My old Mirage... was a very base model car. No frills, no comforts. This car had leather seats, actual power windows and locks, a V6 engine. Things I certainly was not used to!! So while my Mirage was a baseline unit of 1998, this was a 1998 luxury car, filled with lots of driving perks that I had never had before. Suddenly the brand name didn't seem to be a very big deal. Driving down the road in comfort and a big, powerful engine under the hood, rather than my gutless 4 cylinder engine.. suddenly that was important.. desired.

And so I began to explore the potential.. of owning an "old lady car". And it didn't seem so bad. The biggest problem.. in order to be able to buy the car outright, I had to sell the Mirage.. something that I thought would be virtually impossible. Who would want a old, beat up, gutless, basic, boring car? My wife suddenly had a thought and called me at the office 5 minutes later with the news.. "I just sold your car." WHAT?!

As absolute fate would have it, she thought to call a friend. That friend had a daughter just finishing high school. A daughter who had just pulled money out of her bank account THAT DAY to go car shopping THAT AFTERNOON, as she need a car to take to college. As soon as she heard that our car was for sale, and that we'd sell it for a good deal, she bit. And it would be a perfectly fine car for a college student!

And so, in 2 days time, I went from not even looking for a car, to selling "the Mr. Incredible Car", to buying an "old lady car". It's amazing how things can change so quickly.

Now, we thought the story had ended there, but it turns out, it continued. 10 days after the "Mr Incredible Car" was purchased, the car turned out to be more incredible than we ever imagined it to be. It's new owner, all proud of owning her first car, and still a bit inexperienced behind the wheel, pulled into traffic not seeing a speeding car roaring down the inside lane of a 4 lane highway. She was side-swiped, being hit just behind the driver side door with enough force that the driver's seat was shoved into the passenger seat. The car was totaled.. the Mr. Incredible car now truly gone.

But what we found incredible was that the car, for as sick of driving it as I was, for as much as I couldn't wait to get rid of it, thinking of it as a piece of junk.. that car saved her life. According to authorities, had it been almost any other kind of car, she would have been killed in the accident. Instead, she walked away with a broken collar bone and some minor bruises. Yes, she had to be cut out of the car, but she made it. And the car is getting a lot of credit. When we heard of the accident.. that it was my old car destroyed on the highway, we feared the reaction that may come from her parents. But with tears in their eyes, they actually thanked us for selling her that car, as it has done what it needed to do. It had saved a life as it met its end. Had she been driving any of their other cars, she would no longer be with us.

Sure, it's weird seeing photos of the car that I spend so much time and put so many miles on, as nothing more than twisted metal. But it was a good car. And it wasn't until the end that I really appreciated it. Sounds silly, I know. It's a car. But it was a good car. I just have to hope that the new car can keep me just as safe if necessary. But it has too.. heck.. it's designed for old ladies!