Tuesday I had surgery for a detached retina. Totally unexpected, unplanned.

Had some fuzziness in my right eye on Monday, went right to my optician after work. She spotted the problem immediately and made arrangements for me to be seen by a specialist that night. She insisted on my going then and there - well done! I would have waited till morning normally or gone to the local hospital which is next door to where we live. But she was insistent on my doing it right. Of course, that was the one night Alan wasn't coming straight home from work. He was over in east London sorting out some computer problem for a friend. I phoned him to let him know but being London, he was over 90 min minimum mass transit trip home - I would have to go on my own if I intended to see the doctor before closing time. So I managed to carefully drive home and park, call a taxi and wisk off to St George's Hospital.

The ophthalmologist at St George's confirmed a detached retina and arranged an appointment for me for 8am the next morning at Moorfield Eye Hospital for surgical evaluation. The trick with a detached retina is that it all happens fast so you need surgery immediately to halt further damage and hopefully repair what is already damaged.

Tuesday morning at 7:30 am Alan & I were at Moorfield at the emergency vitroretinal surgery clinic. By 8am a specialist Opthalmologist was confirming I needed immediate laser surgery and scheduling me for the first appointment that afternoon. Three hours later I had the surgery - under local anaesthetic - and by 3pm I was phoning Alan to let him know I was ready to go home. The actual surgery took less than 45 minutes.

So such is my merry week. My right eye will have distorted vision while it slowly heals. It sort of looks like seeing underwater. The itching drives me nuts at times. The 5 different kinds of eye drops used 4 times a day drives me nuts. The head positioning I need to keep in mind and conform to drives me crazy. Etc. But all worth it if I can come out of this with vision restored to normal.

Life's a bitch. And there's no viable alternative. Soldier on, there's nothing to see here, those aren't the droids you're looking for.

Everybody Hates Being Outvictimized

(Native American cop is arresting a black man)
Black man: Fuckin' discrimination, man! Leave me the fuck alone! I ain't done nothin wrong!
Native American Cop: Fuck you! We were oppressed first!
Black man: Apache motherfucker!

(Overheard in New York ---82nd St, Queens)

I passed the "Life in the UK" test today.

Yes, ladies and gents, that is a real, official UK gov't required test you must pass to get a resident visa/citizenship here.

They made me swear to secrecy about the questions. really. ( To protect the guilty, I suppose - I could have played Vegas with these questions and had them rolling in the aisles)

Conductor: This is 81st street. Get off here for the big museum of dead stuff.

--Uptown C Train

Just got an email that an old friend of Alan's has died. Funeral next week. We'll go to the memorial afterwards at the pub to toast her memory. I remember her as a rather nice, funny old woman. She was a local Councillor and stood for the environment in a very practical and sensible manner. She was a smoker, a fellow exile. (No she didn't die from smoking!)

Update on the burn. I've never had a burn like this before. Usually the skin gets a bit red or at worst, I get blisters, which usually break) and then it gets scabby and starts to heal. This time, no visible blisters. The skin is a dark reddish brown and swollen where it was burned and I suspect the blisters are deep below. It hurts. It hurts a hell of a lot.

So, deciding to take advantage of the much lauded NHS "free" medical care which I pay vast amounts of my tax money into, I stopped at the A&E walk in clinic. The so-called medical person who looked at my hand advised me, "that's burned innit?". No shit, Sherlock. So what did he propose to do about it? A nice perscription burn cream to take away the sting and pain? Oh no, he suggested "don't do anything rough with it" and "let nature take its course". And that I should take some paracetomol is the pain kept me from sleeping. Nothing else, not even some sensible advice like wash gently to keep it clean.

Waste of my time. This is a serious burn. The NHS can be good at times but sadly, most of the time they are little better than the witchdoctor.

It took over 5 hours of iced wraps and painkiller tablets to bring the burn pain down to function level. It's 9:30 pm now and the hand still hurts and is stiff. There aren't blisters yet but the skin is swollen in the pattern of the boiling water inpact.

damn, damn, damn! I burned my right hand this morning making coffee. Splashed boiling water all over the top of my hand.

I stayed calm and grabbed for the "cooling burn spray" we keep handy on the kitchen counter. What garbage! Useless and didn't work. I turned on the cold water and stuck my hand under the running water as fast as I could. Now that is relief. I don't know why the spray didn't work but it didn't. So here I am an hour later, after soaking the hand in bowls of ice and water to cool down the skin and prevent further damage. And it still hurts like hell.

And so tomorrow my little "vacation" comes to an end. Wednesday morning at 9am will find me at my new job. That's the good news. The bad news is that my agency has a monthly pay schedule. I know that a monthly pay cycle is the general rule in the UK, especially for higher level jobs, but I've been lucky in that, up till now my jobs paid on a weekly basis. The money is obviously exactly the same either way. The only difference is that I have to wait a l-o-n-g time for my first paycheck and have to budget a bit more carefully.

In other news, the time has come for me to make a decision on my name. Do I switch over to my married name completely or do I keep using my former name which most people know and use? If I intend to switch, I need to call the US Embassy tomorrow, sort out the details, and overnight my passport to them to replace. Then at the end of July, I will be able to renew my visa in my married name - the UK authorities will only issue a visa in the name on my passport.

Whatever I decide, July is going to be a very tight financial month and August only a little less so. In August I'll have the pleasure of paying the UK gov't £1000 (yes, one thousand pounds sterling) to issue me my new visa. All so that I can continue working and paying that same UK government my obscene taxes for which they provide amazingly little in return. (Other than the opportunity to loathe Gorden Brown.)

Despite Alan's ambitious plans for spending my salary, I plan to pay off my credit cards as fast as I can and do some serious saving to create a reasonable safety cushion. I've already made a mark in the sand on IBgames. I'm not putting a single penny of my money into it. I know the annual company taxes/business license/whatever it is will soon be due. Last year, we paid half the cost because the claim was made that the company's income was only barely enough to cover its expenses and no funds were being used to pay the CEO a salary. This is bullshit. She is actually withdrawing a small but tidy amount every month. (An interesting point to me since ALL income in excess of the data center monthly charge were supposed to be divided evenly between the CEO, Alan, and me but I've never seen 1 penny out of it.) So I've informed Alan that when the bill arrives from the Isle of Man for the annual company accounts, the CEO will have to fund the £2-3,000 it runs. If she can't, then the company will have to dissolve or find some other source of funds.

Anyway, I had a lovely day in Calais with Asti on Saturday. We had lunch in a restaurant that I would happily recommend to anyone - La Sole Meuniere in Calais, old town near the yacht basin.

I start a new job on Wednesday as a project manager in Disaster Recovery at GlaxoSmithKline. The offices are a 5 minute drive from my house - astounding!

The night too quickly passes

And we are growing old,

So let us fill our glasses

And toast the Days of Gold;

When finds of wondrous treasure

Set all the South ablaze,

And you and I were faithful mates all through the Roaring Days.

Henry Lawson, "The Roaring Days"

How can they not have cottage cheese?

So here I am trying to move to a healthier diet. More fruit and vegetables, less bread and pasta, you know the drill. So I was shopping at Tesco's and for crying out loud, they don't sell plain cottage cheese.

They sell disgusting low-fat cottage cheese with it's plastic texture and taste. They sell plain low fat cottage cheese, low-fat cottage cheese with cheddar, with pineapple (and lots of pineapple juice to make it a soggy goo), with alien vegetable combos, and with corn and tuna and sweet chili - I can't even begin to describe how revolting that sounds to me. And yes, they do sell one variety of regular cottage cheese - with added creme fraiche - which makes it a loose, liquidy, creamy strangeness, tasting like you are eating lumpy cream, forget the cotage cheese.

Ugh! All I wanted was some plain regular cottage cheese to provide protein for my lunches.

But no, not in 3rd world Britain.

You can't even trust your familiar old brands to be safe here - they "localise" the recipes. Thus Cheerios that are sweet from the box, 7UP that is tooth achingly sweet, Heinz ketchup and Hellman's mayonaise that have strong distinct vinegar tangs.

It's not that I am being jingoistic about American products. It's quite a different story on the other side of the channel in France and Belguim ( not to mention Switzerland). Asti & I routinely do day trips over the Channel and shop in the French Hypermarts or the Bruges farmers market and their food is gorgeous.

I've heard a lot of talk about the "New British Cooking" all full of self-praising accolates. It's rubbish. Whatever they make might manage to look pretty but by and large it tastes pretty mediocre or gross. (We won't even start with the cost of food here because that itself is enough to sicken you!)

Not to say you can't go to some restaurants and find fantastic food. You can. We do. I just had dim sum at Yauatcha in Broadwick Street, Soho, London. Oh my god it's fantastic. Must orders: baked venison puffs, almond prawns - and the beef ho fun is to die for!

But sometimes all you want is some cottage cheese for a simple lunch with sliced fresh fruit on top. And fuggeddaboudit, it ain't happening here.

Went to see Cabaret at the Lyric theatre with Asti today. Awesome, awesome, awesome production. The actress playing Sally Bowes was no Liza Minella, not in her dreams; she was adequate and passably good in a few bits. The rest of the cast was ok. The orchestra was great. And the MC, ah the MC...the MC -was- the show and he was fabulous. From the moment he peeked his head out of the dilated iris in the wooden front "curtain" and said Wilkommen! he drew in the audience and had us eating out of his hands - and replying to his demands. No way to describe it, but he was sensationally good. Wow! I am so impressed. And the ending of this version of Cabaret was stunning - they slowly drop their clothes and walk naked into the showers as the clouds of zyklon B swirl. Wow!

In the middle of the night on Thursday (Friday morning at 3:30am) I woke up with terrible chest pain. It was as if someone wrapped a belt around my upper chest and was pulling it tight, along with that I had difficulty breathing. I felt clammy and slightly nauseous and light headed. So of course I thought to myself - is this angina/am I having a heart attack? I also considered, was it just a bad reaction to the aspirin I'd taken about an hour before at 2:30 am? Should I wake up Alan and have him drive me to the hospital just to be safe or should I risk dying rather than feel like a fool with a false alarm. Then the pain got bad enough I didn't care about feeling like a fool. I poked Alan awake and told him I was having chest pain and take me to West Middlesex Hospital (which is basically next door to our estate). Alan was dressed in a flash, and in moments I was in West Mid's A&E where a jobsworth behind the counter nevertheless took my details, slowly found them in the database, printed them out and alerted a passing doctor that I was having chest pain and trouble breathing. (Hold onto your seats, ladies and gentlemen) Within literally 2 minutes I was in a spotless emergency room being hooked up to a EKG machine and other state of the art kit we Americans take for granted but the NHS seems to regard as indulgent and optional. Technicians were taking blood, Emergency room technicians/nurses were getting details and prepping for the doctor who arrived in short order. And - they were all serious, listened to details I had to say, gentle, careful, thorough. The doctor on call that morning was a young woman with fantastic bedside skills who listened and explained lucidly. I'll skip to the end now..it turns out I was not having a heart attack. After 3 hours of intensive checking, testing, 4 sets of blood tests, x-ray, etc they could finid nothing wrong although it was clear to them I had been in extreme pain and brathing distress. The doctor referred me for further testing with a specialty group. However, she explained in detail they could find nothing wrong except that I was anemic as I had told her.
So false alarm? Not really, the pain was absolutely genuine.
Not the way I like to spend my nights. I was exhausted when I got home about 7am and slept most of the day on and off. Of course Alan stayed home - his night was also disrupted. I am unkind enough to have wished he went to work anyway since I just wanted to be alone and quiet.
Anyway that was how I spent my night. I was very impressed with West Mid's A&E staff.

And after all that, it might well have been the aspirin.

Andrew - graduation day

Wow, long time since last posting. So much has happened. Adam and his partner Geri were here for a long Easter weekend visit. They managed to catch the most miserable weather of the year here - sleet, freezing cold, snow. Hopefully they enjoyed the holiday trip anyway.

Then Andrew came over at end of April for a week or so during spring break. We had a ball - he lucked out with generally warm and sunny weather. The last full day of his visit was gloriously warm and sunny and Asti, Andrew, and I left at 6am for a day trip to Bruges. Fast drive down to Dover, the P&O ferry across the English Channel, then another quick drive and we were sitting back, basking in the sunshine, drinking excellent crisp pilsner at a street cafe by the T'zant plaza in Bruges. Lovely little place where we had grilled steaks with Bearnaise sauce and sizzling fites.

It was a really excellent day. We dragged Andrew to our favorite chocolate shop and loaded him down with some goodies to take back to NYC.

At work, I finally completed the dread London Disaster Recovery Test. Nightmare! Four weeks+ for what should have been simply an intense 5 days. That's what happens when you neglect your DR environment for over a year, possibly close to 18 months. I ended up expanding an EVA into a 2ndary cabinet, reconfiguring another EVA, building our first DR ESX system (a descent into IT hell!), and building 14 replacement servers for ones that could not be repaired with simple parts replacements. Ugggh! I just finished the Gantt tiimeline chart and the Issues matrix on Friday and handed them in just before the bell at 4pm.

On a lighter note - I found this website sweet - http://colorwar2008.com/submissions/youngnow?page=1

In 9 days we fly to New York for Andrew's graduation from CCNY. He's getting a Research Honours BA in Chemistry and even won a prize. He's been accepted into the Chemistry PhD program at CUNY so school resumes in the fall. We'll all be at Capsuoto Freres Friday night celebrating after the commencement.

I'm looking for a new contract this week. My contract with A&O finished a month ago and was extended but it was only covering a secondment of the regular DR guy so now it's finished. Such is life for the IT contract worker.

Ringing changes at Bishops Square, Spitalfields

Going off to Oxford tonight after work to meet Alan at the annual ACCU conference. Tonight's the "Speakers Dinner". As usual the food will be utterly horrible and generally inedible and offend meat-eaters sensibilities with their uncanny ability to turn protein into reinforced cardboard with extra carbon on top. And to add insult to injury its £50. Ouch.

Tube to work

Amazing, a gentleman on the Tube offered me his seat this morning. An
almost unknown custom in the UK these days.

I'm so sick of gray skies and winter. I need sun!