Post-Surgery Recovery

Doorways

The last couple of months have been pretty busy. The highlight for September was that I bought a new car. I knew that I wanted to shop for a car this Fall, and that October would be pretty much disrupted between travel and eye surgery. And I wanted to get rid of the old car before the inspection came due in November. So we had a day in early September when Linda had the day off, and we had nothing planned, so we bought a car.

I knew what I wanted - another Subaru Forester - but Linda bought one earlier this year in the color that I had picked out. So I told the dealer what I wanted, and specified that either the red or blue would be fine. That was a Thursday - we picked up the blue car on Saturday. Mine is essentially the same as Linda's except that I wanted a few additional features (such as the six-CD changer) that pushed me into a leather interior. Very luxurious! Drives very nicely (as I would expect for a Subaru).

Houston turned out to be OK - for Houston. I mean, really, that town is such a miserable place. But I arrived on Saturday night, and left Wednesday morning, and never left the hotel, so I really didn't notice. The portion of the conference that I was involved in went well. I especially enjoyed transitioning the Magazine to Lanny - and I think he got a kick out of the 'red pen'. And the ExBoard asked me to continue on as Administrator of the ScholarOne Manuscripts site and will fund my participation in both the S1M user group meeting at POE and the annual meeting.

Linda and I had a really nice day in New York the weekend after Houston. We walked around in SoHo, did some photography, had lunch at Spring Street Natural, saw a couple of gallery shows, and then went uptown to a fabulous FREE chamber music concert at Lincoln Center, followed by dinner at Osteria al Doge.

But then there was the downside. I had an appointment with Dr. Schiff in New York on 10/19, and then the oil removal surgery at the Harkness Eye Center on 10/20. This operation only lasted about 90 minutes, and wasn't nearly as bad as the operation last December. Had a followup the next morning - Dr. Schiff reported that the eye looked good, the retina was flat, but obviously the outcome remains to be determined. An additional followup with Dr. Mayron on Monday reported about the same observations.

So it's now been a week, and I'm starting to be up and about a bit. Probably try to get out shopping this weekend, perhaps some driving.

I will be so glad when this election is over. Those who are crying that "Washington in broken" or "Albany is broken" are only partly right - the entire political system is broken. Politicians don't want to do anything - they only want to win. Our society is facing enormous problems that politicians don't want to solve - because solving them would require that they first admit that they exist, and they can't acknowledge that problems exist since that would be an admission that they have done nothing to prevent those problems from developing. And the idea that all our problems will go away overnight simply because one party gets into power rather than the other is ludicrous - problems are complicated, and it takes time, effort, and yes, money, to solve them. So the result is that the electorate is inundated with a constant barrage of obnoxious TV adds in which contenders lie about their opponents, harassing telephone calls, and all those ugly signs.

And at the end of the day, the candidates who are most outspoken, and getting the most attention, are coming at the election from a perspective of anger. They are agenda-driven, which means that in their mind the political process an all-or-nothing game - 'winners and losers'. They don't understand the need for compromise, they believe that they are absolutely 'right' and therefore its OK for them to dictate how everyone else lives, and their opponents are absolutely 'wrong' and don't deserve to have their own choices, and the bottom line is that they are simply incapable of actually governing. The fact that they also tend to be religious nuts and hate-mongers only adds to their 'charm'.

The image this time is from our morning at Fort Point in July 2009. I really liked this scene, and took a long time to make the negative. Of course, this was one of those situations where people kept wandering through the scene, so I had to stop and restart the exposure several times. In retrospect, I wish I had used my 210mm lens instead of the 90mm - it works as an 8x10, but the the image portion of the negative is too small to make a larger print.