101

I love shopping, and I love shopping for bargains even more. Back in California once, my college friend Alex commented on how nice my suit looked. I told him I found it for only $200. Elvi reproached me about talking cost rather than gracefully accepting the compliment. Had I learned my lesson, I wouldn’t have written that just now.

Groupon has found itself in the news over the past year, mostly due to its failures. I still don’t think it has much of a business model, but great googly moogly, the deals are fantastic.

I was initially lured in by the offer of four 60-minute massages at a reputable spa for a mere $100. Talk about happy endings! After that, I couldn’t turn down a comprehensive auto-detailing package for $85. Nothing polishes off winter like detailing.

I realized I had a problem when I found myself considering a diode-laser hair remover for $200. That’s 80% off retail. No, I let that deal pass.

What I didn’t let pass, at one-tenth the cost ($19 after delivery – there I go again) and 1,000 times the fun of laser hair removal was a VooMote One. Former FCC chairman Michael Powell once called the TiVo “God’s machine“. The VooMote is God’s remote control.

The VooMote One is an infrared device that when couple with an iPhone or iPod Touch turns the latter into a universal remote. It is amazing.

Granted, I could have bought a universal remote but that doesn’t solve my problem, which is that the everyone in my house loses or breaks remotes. This way, I have my VooMote at my desk and I can slip it on when needed.

You can program the VooMote by brand of equipment and a quick test sequence or by teaching it with your remote. It works as advertised, and have I said it is amazing yet?

Not all is perfect, however. I have three issues. Firstly, the app had to attempt the VooMote firmware upgrade three times before it was successful. That happens occasionally, and the company advises you to stop the process and try again if it happens – although the app itself tells you you can ruin the equipment if you do that. Mine is fine.

Secondly, the matte-black plastic case holds onto fingerprints. Mine already looks grubby. It’s not a deal-breaker for me.

The final problem is not the fault of the VooMote. We have an old Sanyo CRT television that the VooMote does not recognize – and I can’t teach the VooMote from the TV remote since the kids have lost it.

Bonus poll:

Buoyed by the success of Nibbler’s teeth, I am considering further customization. I’m thinking of ordering magnetic vinyl decals for the front fenders. On one side would be Nibbler and on the other would be a 101 Squadron badge. Here are the images and a mock-up of what each side would look like. Ignore the positions of the decals for now. We can discuss that later. (I had no side photos with the teeth installed.)

Late last night, after everyone else was asleep, I was leaning back in my chair when I heard a resounding crack and all the lights went out. More worrisome, I smelled smoke.

My biggest fear was that the iPhone had blown up due to a power surge, but I had not connected it to its USB cable. It was working fine. Using the trusty Flashlight app on my iPhone, I investigated all major electronics and outlets in the vicinity: iMac, router, modem, external hard disk, printer, throttle, joystick, and rudder pedals. I found nothing wrong or warm.

I went downstairs and discovered that the downstairs was not affected. Only one circuit breaker had tripped. I flipped it on and went back upstairs. There, I noticed a grey patch on the white extension cord that leads to the printer. The cord was sliced down to the copper wire inside.

I examined my $16 folding Home Depot chair. The plastic foot is missing from one of the legs. (I should explain that I hate chairs on wheels. They distract me and are no good for flight simming.)

I conclude that the leg of the chair was on the extension cord and when I leaned back, it cut into the insulation and shorted out the circuit. The insulation melted or burned a bit, but the voltage passed harmlessly through the chair’s metal leg.

I suppose I was in no real danger, but would have read this lame excuse of a blog post if I hadn’t sensationalized the title? Are you even reading it now?

What do you get when you take this…

…then add some sheet metal and paint it with this?

If you know me well, this answer is not much of a mystery. It’s happening, slowly, in Arizona.

The big mystery is why anyone would dare to take it for a spin.

Not long after I cracked my own tooth, Nibbler suffered his own damage. (Nibbler is my Mazda 3, remember?)

Wife One took Nibbler out of the driveway so she could take the minivan. She parked him across the street. What she didn’t see was the large ice boulder on top of which she parked. You can see the imprint of Nibbler’s fron left tire on it.

This method of parking not only served to keep Nibbler from rolling forward, it cracked his poor plastic jaw.

Like any anyone with a broken jaw, Nibbler suffered some swelling in his cheek.

Nibbler is a trooper and still drivable, but I can’t stand him suffering so. I plan to get him a new jaw soon. It should be $600-$800.

Speaking of cars, even if we do tend to anthropomorphize, there’s news in the lummox category. Our 1999 Grand Voyager finally choked and died. It had been running with a crack and drip in the transmission case, forcing us – OK, Wife One – to keep it topped up with transmission fluid. The key would often refuse to turn until whacked on end with a hammer. Still, it soldiered on. Something has gone wrong with the electrical system, forcing us – yes, really both of us – to boost it every time it had to start.

A week and a half of research into Toyota Siennas and Honda Odysseys let us to a 2006 Odyssey EX-L with a scant 96,000 kilometres on the odometer and a tip-to-tail warranty to 160,000 kilometres. We’re quite happy with the purchase, which also came with summer tires on alloy wheels, although it did not come with the cute Honda hat on the roof rack.

Yes, those are leather, heated seats.

Wife One has no plans to name the van.

I’m sitting here with a mouthful of aches. About two hours ago, I got up from the dentist’s chair after a root canal. There’s still some anaesthetic in my mouth and what aches the most are my TMJs (jaw joints). It’s hard to keep your mouth open for 90 minutes.

Why did I need a root canal? Child Two (whom you see at right) is quite the baker, and she decided to make homemade snack bars. I guess you could call them granola bars, but they were mostly dried fruit and hazelnuts (that’s the other photo, left). I had a hunk and the stuff pulled out a filling on my rearmost top right molar. My tooth cracked and part of it went with the filling. The inside of my tooth had been infected, to the surprise of me and my dentist, so I need to have the root canal.

Despite the name, a root canal is the removal of all pulp from within the tooth and the root canals. The dentist uses these diode-like files to pull out all the living tissue.

The procedure was painless, after the needles in my palate. The right side of my face was frozen from eyelid to neck. The freezing is wearing off as I write this, and it’s starting to ache a bit. The dentist told me to take Advil for any subsequent pain, and I hope that’s sufficient. If not, I have my migraine stash to raid.

I have two weeks to wait before the broken molar gets a permanent fix.

No new footwear lately.

Back on October 3, I took Child Three to an interview at a high school he’s interested in attending last year. When we returned to my parked car, we discovered that a navy blue Volkswagen Golf had snuggled under my car’s rear bumper.

I didn’t have a camera and as I was puzzling out what to do, a woman who lives in the house in front of which I parked came home. I showed her the situation ad asked of she could take a photo for me. She did.I recorded the license plate of the offending Golf and left a note on its windshield. I returned Child Three to his current school and ran errands.

When I got home, I had a phone message from the driver of the Golf. She was apologetic and couldn’t understand how it happened. I called her back and told her I would send her the photos as well as photos of the damage, which, as you can see, was minor: some abrasions on and under the bumper lip. But the car was barely six months old!

I still hadn’t received the photos of the cars so I went back to the house and spoke to the woman’s husband. They couldn’t figure out how to download or send the photos on the cell phone. A few days later, I got this, which seems to be a photo of the cell phone screen. It arrived as a 314 dpi image of 2.3 MB:

I sent the photos. I wasn’t expecting to have to go through the insurance companies.

The last communication the driver sent me was an e-mail that in its entirety read: “Please be advised that I am totally unaware of how your car was damaged and deny any responsibility for said damage.”

Well. I think she took some bad advice from friends or family.

The next call I made was to my insurance company. I had the offending parker’s license plate number, e-mail address, and phone number. I also had the witness who took the photos for me. The agent told me to go ahead and get the car fixed, so I did, at the cost of a $500 deductible I was sure to get back when this was settled.

The agent handling my case got in touch with me again on November 11. The offender refused to provide my insurers with the name or contact info of her own. My insurance agent said that I should go to the police to file a report for a hit and run. The police would get in touch with the other driver/parker and ask her for her insurance info.

The police were not cooperative, but the officer who dealt with me was extremely helpful. She told me that my insurance company was taking the easy way out instead of hiring their own researcher. They wanted the police to do the work for them. Further, the officer called the Golf driver and explained the situation, strongly advising her to cooperate with my insurance company. The officer spoke with her for a good ten minutes. The call ended and she told me that the offender had promised to call my insurers.

I was hopeful, but it never happened. By the end of the month, my insurance company went to find the parker’s info.

I heard nothing for two months. I sent an e-mail to my agent on January 11 and heard back that while the company was in touch with the parker’s insurance company, said parker stilled denied the incident. Given the photos and the witness, that didn’t seem to me to be a prudent course of action.

Last week, I got word: my insurance company had prevailed and I would be reimbursed in full. In one way, it’s a shame, as I was all set to launch Operation Public Humiliation, but now that the issue is settled, I can leave the parker anonymous.

Very late in the year, I bought myself a present.

Speaking of segues, I got two of these for my birthday:

Technically, I got one of those and its enantiomer, as we used to say in organic chemistry.

What did I buy myself? A cell phone number! Yes, I who am interviewed by folks writing articles on high tech and social media (really!) can finally text. I’m learning how to do it.

Not long after I learned my number, I received a series of texts from a Marc I do not know. He was asking me how the new job was. I tried convincing Marc that I wasn’t who he thought he was sending messages to, but Marc expressed only appreciation at my attempt to put one over on him.

A week later, Marc texted me again. This time, I asked him who he thought he was writing to. I guess I convinced him, and Mark explained that he was using Yahoo Messenger to chat with Imre Glaser. Given his name, I quickly tracked down Imre. He used to have my Montreal cell phone number but had recently moved to Ontario and gave it up. Rogers recycled it to me. – but Imre had forgotten that he had set Yahoo Messenger to forward IMs to his (my) cell phone. Not many people know where their phone number came from, but I do. I should form a club.

By the way, Imre, I got call for you tonight from the Ottawa region. You should text me your number so I can send these people your way. You know my number, I assume. You can text it to me because I know how to text now.

Now, if I could only get FaceTime to connect….

Bonus apology:

I thought I would receive mail when a comment was held for moderation, but apparently I hadn’t set that correctly. A few comments have been held up because of that. Also, the story of my car’s unsafe liaison with another is still in progress, so I’m going to hold back on that for a bit. It’s nothing major unless you count gall, and then not mine.

I had a restful holiday. The five of us spent a week and a half in Houston. I spent a lot of that time sleeping. I also bought new shoes. They look like this:

I wrote a long and detailed account of how I solved problems with my Chrome browser intermittently pooping out “Aw, Snap” and “Missing Plug-in” notifications, only to have an “Aw, Snap” page obliterate my advice. At least now I don’t have to admit I was wrong.

I’m going to revert to using Safari until this is fixed.

While on the subject of tech, let me introduce one of the products my brother sells. By name, it’s the GelPoint Path Transanal Access Platform. Below, you can see an animation of it in action. I recommend you expand the video to full-screen.

The GelPoint Path Transanal Access Platform may or may not be abbreviated to the GelPoint Path TAP, and surgeons may or may not refer to the procedure as “TAP that ass”. The company did not answer my e-mail inquiry.

Before you get all huffy about my disrespect for a potentially life-saving device, allow me to state that I see the unquestionable value of having one’s ass TAPed. So bugger off.

Bonus blog preview:

Coming up soon… a story of how my car got rear-ended.

The fourth from last line in my last post was “In the meantime, my dad has stabilized and appears to be out of the woods for now.”

Not so much, it turns out. He died Monday, December 5 at 6:05 a.m.

Marion, my dad’s wife, transferred him to the hospital. He was placed in isolation in the emergency ward, but the folks there didn’t mind allowing as many visitors as wanted to go in.

I showed up to relieve Marion around 9 p.m. Sunday night. My dad had double pneumonia and kidney failure. The doctor wasn’t sure my dad would make it through the night.

I offered to stay overnight. Everyone else left to get some much needed sleep. I stretched out on three plastic chairs and drifted off for about a half hour. My dad’s heart rate was about 125 bpm, his breathing rate about 25 per minute, and his blood pressure was too low to be recorded. Metabolically, his blood potassium was high – his kidneys weren’t clearing it.

Now, I wrote “my dad” and I’ll continue to do so, but since I’d left him Thursday afternoon, he was only a body that gasped rattly breaths while being fed 100% oxygen.

The night shift doctor came to visit around 2:30 a.m. He was careful in introducing the subject of morphine, which my dad might not handle well, he explained. I told him that if it had been up to me, I would have stopped my dad’s feeding 13 months ago. The doctor quickly pointed out that he wasn’t advocating euthanasia; he was only hoping to make my dad more comfortable. I was pretty sure my dad wasn’t feeling anything, but the morphine couldn’t hurt, so I approved it. Shortly thereafter, Marion responded by phone and approved it, too. It was legally her decision. So sue me.

At 3:20, my dad’s heart rate took a tumble. It fluctuated between 28 and 70 bpm. Whenever it dropped below 33 bpm, the monitor alarm would beep loudly. The nurses came in to turn it off – apparently it has no volume control – and told me to use the call button if I needed anything.

I no longer had the monitor to calculate for me, but I could tell my dad’s breathing rate was slowing.

The nurses administered a second dose of morphine and a dose of something else that was meant to relax his breathing. I was in the middle of a wicked game of iBubble Shooter when I realized I was no longer hearing breathing. My dad’s face had turned… – what’s that colour? Pallor? I checked the clock and it said 6:06, so I pulled my estimate of his time of death back a minute to compensate for my inattention.

I pressed the call button twice but no one came. I stepped into the hallway and spotted the kind doctor at the main desk he looked up at me and I did that signal for “cut”, swing my hand in front of my neck. he understood and came to confirm that my father had died. He said he was glad my dad had gone on his watch and in comfort.

We had the funeral on Wednesday. The day went perfectly, even with my brothers cracking into laughter at the cemetery, first at my sister’s attempts to shovel dirt and then at my dad’s friend Allen’s near tumble into the grave.

I have a few things I want to blog about, but this had priority. I hope I remember what they are. Regardless, I have a pile of grading and freelance to get through now.

I made a quick Facebook status update that I was spending too much time in hospitals and here’s my explanation.

Child Two has been suffering repeated bouts of cold-like illness over the last three weeks so Monday I took her to the clinic. The resident thought he heard some slight crackle in her lungs, so we crossed the street for an X-ray, then returned to the clinic to await the results.

There was some sort of technical-communications glitch that left us waiting for a while. Finally, the doctor who was waiting for the results told us to go home and he’d call if there were any signs of pneumonia.

I had been planning to get a follow-up on my broken finger. I’ve discarded the splint and there’s no pain, but it remains swollen and stiff and it tingles a bit. I was a bit paranoid I had compartment syndrome because the original doctor had told me my finger would heal in four weeks. Monday was four weeks and one day.

I had wanted to visit my GP but the hospital had not forwarded the records regarding my broken to his office, so that meant revisiting Emergency to get either a follow-up or the records which I could then relay to my GP with whom I could book an appointment in January. I Was at the hospital already with Child Two so I popped in to check on my options. The triage nurse told me that there wouldn’t be a long wait so I decided to stay.

Two hours later, I had to leave to do carpool for Child Three.

The staff told me to come back and they’d see me right away. Child Two was testy that she’d had to wait with me and now would have to tag along for carpool. Ingrate.

I returned to Emergency after carpool and, sure enough, a resident saw me right away. He suspected an infection, but there was no sign of one other than the swelling. The physician in charge explained to both of us that my finger was swollen because my body was resorbing the many fragments of pulverized bone. Once that was gone, the swelling and stiffness would decrease. So that’s where my finger is.

My next visit to a hospital was Thursday. OK, it’s not really a hospital but the long-term-care center that is hosting my father. Thursday is his physiotherapy day and I went to encourage him. Upon arriving, I learned that he had thrown up in the morning so the staff decided to keep him in bed.

He looked sick. He had facial twitches and a wet cough. He was on supplemental oxygen. He would open his eyes every once in a while but there was no indication he was looking at anything. He certainly didn’t acknowledge me. I stayed 90 minutes then left to do carpool again.

Elvi and I returned that night. My dad was feverish and diagnosed with a lung infection and a urinary tract infection. He seemed worse. Around 11:00 p.m., Child Two called us because she was in great pain around her eye. We left my dad and headed home.

What Child Two described sounded to me to be a migraine. I gave her one of my Maxalt – that would cure a migraine but not another sort of head pain. It helped her a bit and she was able to get to sleep. The next morning, yesterday, she had more pain. This time a Maxalt did not help. Neither was the acetaminophen or ibuprofen. I pulled out the heavy artillery and gave her one of my 1-mg Dilaudids, that got rid of her pain and knocked her out for the afternoon. Victory – or so I thought.

Elvi reached my toward the end of a hockey practice last night. She was taking Child Two to the emergency room at Montreal Children’s Hospital. I dropped Child Three off at his friend’s for a sleep-over then went to join them.

I was almost there when Elvi called to tell me that she had forgotten Child Two’s health insurance card, so I drove home, changed clothes, and picked up the card. I got to the hospital at 8:30 p.m. At 2:30 a.m., we got the diagnosis: Child Two probably has a sinus infection. We picked up anti-biotics at an all-night pharmacy and came home.

In the meantime, my dad has stabilized and appears to be out of the woods for now.

So, yeah – too much time in hospitals.

Bonus peace and quiet:

At least the dog has stopped his barking/moaning sessions.