Okay, so yeah. The broken wrist thing.

The morning of my doctor’s appointment arrived, two weeks to the day after the Turkey Bowl, and I still had a significant amount of pain in my wrist. I decided to go in and make sure it wasn’t broken.

The office was busy and although I arrived right on time, I spent a considerable amount of time, first in the waiting room, and then sitting in my own little disinfected compartment. Eventually Dr. Schwarting had the time to see me.

He had me take off the brace and began poking and prodding, looking for tender areas. With one exception, I didn’t feel much of anything at all; the swelling had long since disappeared. It wasn’t until he started in on the twisting and bending that I made the pain face.

After just a couple minutes, he decided that more X-rays were a good idea. Just like when I hurt my knee, I got the impression that he was asking me for permission – not everyone feels good about spending money to irradiate their body. I do. Or at least I felt that the merits of knowing for sure whether or not I had another broken bone outweighed the risks.

He left me alone again for a bit and I went back to reading my National Geographic. Before long, one of his assistants showed up and ushered me into the room with all the bulky machinery. She took four X-rays of my wrist in various positions and only one was excruciating (palm and forearm flat on the table, with the wrist bent about 45 degrees clockwise). While the images of my bones were developing, I was back in my room reading again about places in the world I’d rather be.

Before long, Dr. Schwarting came back in with the X-rays and popped them up onto the lighted wall panel. It seemed as though we were both looking at them for the first time. My eyes sought out the scaphoid bone, looking for the telltale signs of a hairline fracture. I couldn’t see anything, but that didn’t mean the guy with all the experience wouldn’t.
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When I first read about “flashbulb memories” in Psych 101, I immediately understood the metaphor. Sometimes an event occurs that is so perfectly captured by the mind that, in retrospect, time seemed to have slowed down and the tiniest detail can be recalled…

I sprinted off the line as soon as the ball was snapped. It was fourth-and-long and the cornerback, as usual, was giving me plenty of cushion. Without cleats, I didn’t bother to offer a fake. Eyes on the quarterback, he let me pass unhindered. The gusting wind was incredibly strong that Thanksgiving Day (benefiting our team that half) but the accompanying rain cast any throw in doubt. The defender must have decided that I was outrunning the quarterback’s arm.

With the gap between us widening with each step, our QB launched the ball into the air. It arced too high, giving the defenders time make a play, but at least it had some semblance of a spiral. Still, it wouldn’t reach me.

I reversed direction as quickly as I could, the rubber soles of my court shoes almost skidding out from under me on the hard-packed dirt. Now advancing on the backpedaling cornerback, I could tell that he could have a chance a intercepting the descending ball. I ran farther back than I needed to, consciously making the decision to block him out with my body’s position. But now the ball was sailing over my head.

I barely had enough time to think that I had made a mistake; this would be one of those difficult directly-over-the-head catches…

In one motion, I jumped and twisted my body around, losing sight of the defender. I saw my arms out in front of me, coming together from odd angles, and then football was between them.

There was a fleeting moment of surprise, and then the cornerback’s arm was wrapping around my waist. But his center of gravity diverging from my own, and as I spun away, his hand failed to find a purchase on my muddy sweatshirt. The end zone loomed in front of me; I ran.

We were evenly matched in speed, but I knew that his cleats would give him and edge in both acceleration and cutting. It was a footrace, plane and simple, and I put everything I had into stretching my legs for the orange cone that marked the goal. I crossed the line barely a stride or two in front of him, scoring the winning touchdown.

Without fanfare or celebration, I looked back down the field to see almost every other player near the line of scrimmage, some 60 yards back. I hadn’t realized it, but it was to be the last play of the game.

As vivid as that play is in my memory – illuminated as though a “flashbulb” went off, freezing each motion and thought in place – it’s an earlier play, one in which I may have broken my wrist, that I keep going over in my mind.
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A continuation of this journal.

You’d think that, 38 months after our wedding, we would be all through with the expenses. Not true, when you marry an alien.

Oksana has been keeping an eye on the calendar and, back in February, it was time for her to submit another INS form. Her temporary green card (i.e., her permission to work in the U.S.) was about to expire and she needed to apply for the permanent extension. We fired up the internet, sussed out the appropriate I-551 form, and started to compile the appropriate paperwork. We wrote a check for the form submission fee ($200!) and packaged it up in an envelope with 20 pages of supporting documents. It was mailed off to Anchorage on February 3rd ($4.30).

A couple months later, we received notification that our paperwork was in process – that was a good thing, because Oksana’s temporary green card would have expired in May.

In late August we received another letter from the Anchorage INS office informing us that her petition for a permanent green card (for the INS, permanent apparently means “ten years”) had been approved and that she only need to do a couple things to make it official.

Step One: Provide three passport-sized photos.
Step Two: Submit the photos. In person… at the Anchorage office.
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Early November and another Halloween has come to pass. This year was remarkably similar to the last – video editing to get me in the mood through the weeks before, an enjoyable social evening spent carving pumpkins, and a surprisingly taxing half-day of videotaping my department’s at-work shenanigans.

This year, our department decided on a Willy Wonka theme. I must say, despite procrastinating until the last weekend, our crew turned out some great costumes. Orange-faced, green-haired Oompa Loompas paraded around a purple-suited Wonka, a tuxedoed Slugworth, and four college-age adaptations of the lucky golden-ticket-wielding children. During our tour around campus, everyone handed out Wonka Bucks that were intended to be exchanged later for treats at our “Candy Store.”

Unfortunately, our lack of planning came back to haunt us when the student judges selected two other departments for the coveted campus Halloween awards. Not that the competition wasn’t deserving. We were handily beaten by the same strategy our department had created years before – the Presentation. That’s right; capital P.

We didn’t go home empty handed, though. One of our student assistants took home the best individual costume for Violet Beauregarde’s blueberry. I would never have guessed that an oversized blue jumpsuit, filled with balloons, would beat out all the other impressive costumes!

Back at home, Oksana spearheaded our pumpkin carving. She went corporate this year by selecting a Dodge Ram log while giving me the difficult task of carving a design whose difficulty was listed as “moderate” in our book. After punching maybe a thousand holes into the pumpkin through the cheat sheet, using a tiny jack-o-lantern saw to carve out tiny, intricate bats and a swooping ghost’s cape, I wondered what horrors lay in wait for those that chose to tackle a “challenging” design.

No Halloween would be complete (at least, not for me) without the mad rush to finish editing the previous year’s Halloween music video. 2005 was no exception. I finished the “SPAM!” video with just five days to go, but a little push from the campus PR department ensured that it got played around campus and helped to build excitement.

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Back in September, I ran across a website that had a tutorial for making Post-it note mosaics. I didn’t even read it, just skimmed it long enough to realize that they used Photoshop for their pre-process trickery. I knew I could do what they had done; I wanted to do what they had done. But where? And more importantly, why? National Boss Day! I work in a lively office and I knew that something like this would go over well. I looked up National Boss Day (a Hallmark holiday if ever there was one) on the internet and discovered that it wasn’t until October 16th (ironically, a Sunday). I placed a little squiggly mark on my calendar; something to remind me. The week before the 16th rolled around, I called a coworker to see if they’d be interested in spending Sunday night arranging thousands of Post-its on a wall in our boss’s office. I asked him because he had a key. Although he thought the idea was great, he mentioned a small problem: On Saturday night, both he and the boss were getting on a plane bound for Orlando. They’d be spending the entire week at the EDUCAUSE conference. What to do, what to do. Why, take advantage of the boss’s absence and bring the whole department into it, of course! That week, I set myself to work. There was much to do. Continue Reading »

Warning: Depending on your tolerance level, this post could contain minor spoilers for The Island, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Flightplan, Terminator 2, Red Eye, The Sixth Sense, The Matrix, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and, uh, possibly World of Warcraft… and somebody’s car, I guess. Seemed only fair to warn you.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about spoilers. For hours at a time. Really.

A few weeks months ago [I’m late in posting this entry], the Sci-Fi channel made the purchase of my HTPC completely worthwhile with just three blocks of programming. They aired the entire first season of Battlestar Galactica, the entire first season of Stargate Atlantis, and the entire eighth season of Stargate SG-1. Three days in a row, 7am to 2am, the little PVR in my media PC wrote episode after episode to its hard drive.

When all was said and done, I had literally hundreds of Gigabytes of new sci-fi programming. But there was a problem. I couldn’t leave it all on the HTPC because the software would automatically start removing programs to make way for newer shows. I thought about watching them on at my computer desk, but it didn’t have the most comfortable seating arrangement. The obvious answer was to burn them all off to DVDs – especially since they were already encoded as a decent-quality MPEGII stream.

If I was going to archive them to disc, I wanted to make sure that the quality remained high. Granted, there was nothing I could do to get rid of the Sci-Fi logo imprinted over each episode or, more annoyingly, all the little promo bugs they threw up (“You’re watching the SG-1 Marathon!”), but I could at least edit out the commercials. Next step: Find a program that would allow me to do that without a multi-hour recompression of each episode.
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Despite going to bed relatively late after the night dive, our next day in Hawaii started very early. We didn’t realize it at the time, but it was to be the longest, most tiring day of our vacation.

I wanted to spend some time in the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, but didn’t know what to expect. Would the park be crowded? Would it take more than one day to see it all? Would the active steam vents – as our guidebook said – lose their grandeur as the day warmed up?

We were staying in Kona and the points of interest were on the other side of the island, a three-hour drive away. We left at 5:30am, hoping to pull into the park early enough to see the steam while the air was still cool.

The drive from Kona to Kilauea was nice, if rather long. The traffic was sparse and the road alternated between long, straight stretches and Hana-like curves that slowed us to a crawl. We drove through arid, almost desert-like regions, soggy hillsides thick with vegetation, barren black lava fields along the jagged southern coastline, and finally into the rolling hills of the park.

We paid a $10 fee at the gate and drove straight to the visitor’s center. A park ranger had just opened the doors and was going about the business of posting the daily activity reports. We had a quick look around, asked a few questions, and drove off on a road called Crater Rim Drive, which encircles the mostly-dormant craters of Kilauea.

We skipped the first point-of-interest, Sulfur Rocks, for the steam vents that were just a quarter-mile down the road. There was only one other car in the parking lot – getting up early had paid off for us. I dug out our cameras as Oksana changed into warmer clothes; it was windy and the early morning mountain air was still cold.
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