To continue the transplant donor process, my sister needed to send in the image CD she received from her CT scan. Wanting to keep a copy in case the original was misplaced, she asked me to burn a copy. CD-R’s were super popular a decade ago but today, not so much. If you wanted to store a lot of data offline, a DVD-R holds 4.7 GB vs. about 700 MB for a CD-R. For music, hardly anyone buys CD’s anymore; most music is from a streaming service like Spotify or Apple Music.
I have a few of these 100 pack spindles at home
I only had about 5 blank CD-R’s left from before but was able to make a copy of the image CD easily. There is a tool called Ashampoo Burning Studio that’s free and easy to use. Many years ago, when hard drive capacity was in the 1 GB range, I burned a lot of my video downloads to DVD-R to free up hard drive space. Now that I have a 6 TB drive on a network-attached storage (NAS) device, I’m copying files back from DVD’s back to the server for faster access. Maybe it’s all going on the cloud next.
I just bought a $400 document scanner from Amazon and I’m in the process of scanning years of paper receipts, statements, and whatever into PDF documents. Hopefully I can remove some of the clutter on my desks.
In going through the many piles of paper, I found some old travel receipts, including stuff from a trip to Singapore/Hong Kong/Taipei during the summer of 2005. Fifteen years ago! I was taking vacation to go to Hong Kong and Taipei with then ex-wife and family so my boss at work said to stop by the Singapore office and they company will pay for my business class flight. It was my first long-distance business class flight and it was awesome. Originally I booked the flight on Singapore Airlines but our corporate travel office screwed up payment and my flights were cancelled a week before departure. I scrambled and managed to get Transpacific flights with EVA Air and Cathay Pacific which were pretty nice as well.
This was when I was still married and it was our last big trip. Later that year, my ex-wife filed for divorce and it was finalized during the summer of 2006. I hate finding things from the past since I always look at the date and wish I was still back at that time and wondering what if. This was when there was no hint of kidney disease and just the beginning of diabetes so I could have done a lot to save myself from the situation I’m in now. Or not since I was a lazy idiot and would have done exactly the same.
I’m gong to shred all this old stuff and not even scan it!
I’m usually up early on Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday for dialysis. However, I have not noticed the comet in the sky at 5:00 am. So this morning, I went outside to look for it specifically.
I have an iPhone app (Night Sky) that showed me where the comet should appear in the sky but there were houses and trees in the way. In addition, we have very bright street lamps which basically ruins your night vision. I didn’t see anything, which is typical for living in the Los Angeles basin. I probably have to drive pretty far to have a dark sky overhead.
Ugh. Since I still can’t sleep well at night, I’ve been binge watching more yacht videos. I made a previous post about expedition yachts but doing the math, it will take a lot of money and time to make ocean crossings. For example, for a Nordhavn 60, it can do 6,000 nautical miles at 5.6 knots with a mileage of 2.67 nmpg. It’s about 3,000 nautical miles from New York to Southampton (England) so the trip will take 22 days non-stop and use up 1,124 gallons of diesel. If we use $2.50/gallon for marine diesel, the fuel cost for the trip is ~$2,800. For something like a 70 foot sports cruiser, cruising at 17 knots will only give you 0.2 nmpg, making every trip expensive. Also, the yachts that I can afford look very uncomfortable to live in full-time. Maybe I just need to downsize a lot.
Another option is a solar yacht. There is a company called Silent Yacht that makes solar powered catamarans. They have 55, 60, or 80 foot models starting around $1.5M. The good thing about a catamaran is the amount of living space onboard. There is room for a several salons, galley (kitchen) and 3-4 bedrooms. One of their older models did an Atlantic crossing and all of it on solar power. Like expedition yachts however, cruising speed on solar is 4-6 knots so any long distance trip will also take forever, especially if the sky is cloudy.
Silent Yacht 55
The main problem with catamarans is that it takes a double berth at a marina so if I wanted to dock this thing and live in it, it would cost a lot more. Another option would be a hybrid powered yacht by Greenline. Their boats are mainly diesel powered but also have solar panels and electric motors to drive the boat short distances. Kinda feels like a plug-in hybrid of the sea. Problem here is the maximum range for smaller boats seems to be only 1,000 miles which is likely not enough for cross ocean travel. Maybe I’ll just go on a cruise ship.
Greenline 39
All this is wishful thinking at this time. Without a kidney transplant, I’m not going anywhere.
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I actually spent a few hours looking at real estate along the ocean in SoCal. It doesn’t look good. There are only a few places that have houses with docks: Belmont Shores, Naples, Huntington Beach, and Newport Beach. Basically everything is over $2M if you want a private dock.
There is a female dialysis patient that I’ve seen a few times before. When most of the patients are old and in wheelchairs, a young girl in her 20’s is really noticeable. Not sure how long she’s been here at the clinic but she seems to know all the nurses and technicians.
Anyway, recently she has been coming in on a stretcher. It seems she is unable to walk on her own. I don’t know if it’s temporary or permanent. Also, why a stretcher and not a wheelchair/scooter? I hope it’s just temporary.
Sigh… fistula didn’t work again today. It did work well last Saturday however they were able to run at 350 mL/min through two needles. I think the nurse really wants me to talk to the vascular surgeon again but he did say that he wasn’t sure the fistula will work when he operated the first time. I’m just tired of all the surgeries.
I wonder what they would do if I didn’t have a chest catheter.
I can’t get a break. The first night that my heartbeat has been “normal” in several weeks and my neuropathy pain starts acting up. I now have a stabbing pain in my left big toe that just started. I took two Tylenol but probably won’t help. I thought I would be able to get some sleep but with the sharp pain and super sore/dry throat from intubation, I think it will be another long sleepless night.
I just want to be symptom free for one night.
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Every time I have neuropathy pain, my mom would tell me her leg hurts and show me her swollen ankle. Every. Single. Time. I think she has arthritis joint issues so she rubs all sorts of ointments on it and it seems to help. That means each time I have excruciating pain in my feet, she want to rub her ointment on it. I’ve told her it doesn’t help but it seems to go in one ear and out the other. Last night, she rubbed some cannabis based ointment on my left toe and the pain was gone/minimized for about four hours but now it’s back with a vengeance. It’s hurting much more than before and I’ve rubbed ointment all over the area four times. Not helping.
When I left to go to dialysis this morning, the tiny street in front of my house was packed with cars parked on both sides of the road. I live pretty close to Peters Canyon, which is still closed. The parking lot entrance is blocked off. However, people are here anyway. When the lot was open, we get some stray cars parking on my street because cheapskates did not want to pay $3 to park. Now everyone is parking on the street, to the point that some residents want the city to issue resident parking permits.
Also, no one getting out of their cars were wearing a mask. Stay home, you idiots!
In the four weeks that I’ve been stuck at home, I haven’t learned anything new. Even old stuff I’ve abandoned; I put both of my guitars and my bass back in their cases and haven’t touched them in months. This week, I decided that since my job has to do with software systems, I may as well learn something new while stuck at home. I purchased a Raspberry Pi 4 kit from Amazon for $99. I got the kit with 4GB of RAM.
Complete Raspberry Pi 4 kit
Here is the actual computer board. It’s smaller than I thought it would be.
It took me about 15 minutes to put together. There were three tiny heat sinks to stick on a few of the IC’s. That took the longest time. I have it connected to an old Visio 720p TV via HDMI. Let see if I can get it to work.
Mainly I want to learn Python, plus maybe build a few hardware projects. My staff analyst took Python in school and has written a few cool tools. Me, I learned BASIC and Pascal in high school, and LISP and C++ in college. Need to learn a more modern language.
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System has been installed from the included SD card and the computer is connected to my router. It’s now updating the system. I think I’m going to do a keyboard/mouse swap with another computer so I can have wireless input devices on the Raspberry Pi computer. It looks weird with my huge Corsair gaming keyboard attached to it.
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System updated and everything is running. This website on Chromium on Raspberry Pi.
WordPress tells me this is post #500 for this blog. When I started posting back in June of 2019, I was planning to do weekly posts, documenting the struggles I was having with peritoneal dialysis. However, with the heart bypass surgery in November and subsequent three months of recovery at home, I had lots of time to write and lots of stuff to complain about. I guess I got into the habit of communicating way too much online since there’s no one to talk to. Now it’s even worse with the COVID-19 quarantine. Previously, I was at least spending three days at work work co-workers and a few events weekly at church. Now I’m stuck at home and the only people I talk to are my parents and dialysis clinic staff.
Now that it’s been three weeks since we were ordered to stay home, life is not that different for me. When I was on peritoneal dialysis, I had to be hooked up to the cycler for 10 hours each night. Since it took about an hour to connect and disconnect, and about an hour for the midday manual exchange, about half my time was spent on dialysis. Since I was working full-time and commuting, that took the other 12 hours. I wouldn’t have time for much else. Even when I on hemodialysis previously, I was tired all the time so I slept whenever I had free time.
With the current social distancing, it’s not so different. I just got my Google location summary for March and I only visited three places: home, work, and dialysis clinic. For April, it’s going to be just home and dialysis. Again, that’s not so different from my sad life prior to COVID-19. I read that even though dialysis keeps you alive, it’s not great. Your blood is still pretty toxic which means your body is not operating at 100%. Almost everything I read about kidney transplants is that patients fell much better right away. I hope I can get a transplant while I still have a life to enjoy.
YouTube video by 3Blue1Brown that simulates how various quarantine measures affect the infection curve.
He has several key takeaways but most importantly, we need to keep the measures in place until the virus is eradicated, otherwise we’ll just have a second wave of infections. I don’t like staying home but I’m more worried about getting sick at the dialysis clinic.
Here’s where I believe President Trump is an asshole. I didn’t vote for either him or Hillary during the 2016 elections. He’s so worried about his re-election that he is willing to tell lies about the pandemic in order to prop up stock prices. Basically trading lives for votes. More people are going to die if we go back to business as usual while the pandemic is ongoing. He should just shut the hell up and let Dr. Fauci talk.
I haven’t seen thechaplain intern for two weeks now. I’m guessing he’s not considered essential staff think he could be useful during these stressful times but infection riskmis still in retty high.
I wonder what he’s doing now since churches are closed too. I guess everyone’s life is on hold. I’m still thinking about the question he asked me a few weeks ago about Lazarus. I wonder if we’ll ever meet again to discuss.
I read on Reddit that people have been experiencing slower Internet speeds now that everyone is stuck at home. For me though, it appears my Internet speed has gone way up. I used to average about 30 Mbps for the longest time. I even bought a new cable modem last year since according to Cox, I’m supposed to be getting ~100 Mbps for my $80/month. I’ve just been too lazy to call them. I just ran Speedtest, and got this result:
Fast!
It’s not just only this test. Running the Google speedtest gave me 162.2 Mbps download and Speakeasy speedtest shows 180.3 Mbps. I’m still paying the same monthly fee for the past several years so it must be something on the Internet provider’s side. I did notice a slow down several days ago. I think the Internet is slower in the evenings; I guess that’s when everyone is streaming video from Netflix or other services. I think I was only getting ~5 Mbps at that time.
When we moved into this house 10 years ago, I was hoping to get a fiber connection. At that time, the only fiber option was Verizon fios and they did not offer the service in my neighborhood. I then called Time Warner and they said they would have to dig up my front lawn. The only connection already in place was with Cox so I didn’t have a choice. I’ve been watching Google Fiber but they have not expanded here either. Cox is offering Gigablast for an additional $27/month which will increase my speed to 940 Mbps. I’ll need to check if my current cable modem and Wifi router can handle that. Despite what Trump says, looks like we’re going to be stuck at home for several more weeks or months.
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Just found out that I have Internet Preferred so I’m supposed to get 150 Mbps. I guess I’ve been shortchanged all this time. It also says it’s ideal for 7 devices. Ha ha! I have about 50 devices connected. Just counting TV and tablets, we have four Samsung smart TVs and five iPads. There is another service level called Internet Ultimate which gives you 300 Mbps. However, it’s the same price as Gigablast at 940 Mbps so I don’t know why it’s available. Probably Cox will raise the price of Gigablast later.
Just got an email from another employee witness that the hearing was postponed to May 6th, 2020. I’m glad I didn’t take the risk of going to the courtroom in person. Hopefully we can leave the house by early May.
Of course the District Attorney’s office has not called or email me back.
Since everyone is stuck at home, other than sleeping, I need to find something to pass the time. I’ve watched a lot of streaming videos and stuff I download. Last week, I watched the entire four seasons of Food Wars, a Japanese anime series about a cooking school. Also watched a lot of YouTube videos.
Stay home. Play games.
I’ave also been playing computer games. I bought Borderlands 3 recently, which was 72 GB and took over two days to download. It’s a FPS (first person shooter) and I’ve purchased all the titles in the series. Last night, after playing for about ah hours, I suddenly felt very nauseous. I would occasionally get dizzy when playing FPS but this was a lot worse. I ended vomiting up a bunch of stomach acid with bits of vegetables from dinner. Not sure if it was an one time thing or just something to get used to from now on.
My sister asked us over to her house to play Mahjong in this time of social distancing. We originally got the time confused and showed up to her house last night, only to come back 15 minutes later. This morning, my parents reconsidered and decided to stay home. I think they were worried that my nieces could pick up the virus (they’re 13 and 10), not show any symptoms, then pass it to them and me. All of us are at high-risk due to age or medical conditions.
So for an tire week, I only left the house to go to dialysis plus the short visit to my sister’s house in error. This week looks about the same. Sad.
With the stay-at-home orders by the state and county, Tesla Superchargers are pretty empty. I usually get out of church service around this time (11:00 am Sunday) and local Superchargers are typically full. Here’s the status from my phone app:
Empty Superchargers
I’ve been keeping my car charged to 90% overnight in case there’s an emergency and the power gets cut. Otherwise I’d be down in Main Place Mall charging my car for free.
Another sleepless night. It almost 6:00 am and I’ve been unable to fall asleep. In addition to the physical issues, I can’t seem to shut my mind off to sleep. I keep thinking about and regretting the past.
There are so many thoughts swirling in my head that I can’t write coherently. I’ll have to continue this later…
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I just got hooked up for dialysis. For some reason, they’re way behind today. I had to wait about 30 minutes to get connected. They also decided to wait until Saturday to try out the fistula since today is lab day.
Back to the post. Yeah, a lot of regrets…
Divorce: I still have dreams about ex-wife all the time. I should have done more to be a better person and maybe she wouldn’t have left me. Kidney failure and dialysis would probably be easier with a support partner.
Health: For several years after the divorce, I basically ignored my health. The thought was whatever happened, it would be karma for being a bad husband. Looking back, that’s really stupid.
Dialysis: I put off a lot of decisions because I did not want an ugly fistula. That was why I switched to peritoneal dialysis, which probably made my health worse and I ended up with a fistula anyway.
Work: I was just talking to the social worker intern and realized that throughout my work career, I’ve probably worked 50-60 hours a week. Would I be in a better place if I took less stressful jobs? Also, I’m a bit lost with my new responsibilities. The fact that I only go three times a week is not helping me catch up.
Children: What would happen if my ex-wife and I had kids? Would we still be together? Would I be more motivated to take care of my health?
People sometimes ask hypothetically if you could go back in time, is there anything you would change? I have a huge list of changes I want to make and that is depressing.
Life with chronic diseases 