Flash of memory

To-day is August 27, 2016, 4 years and 4 months, give or take, since my last post. I had lost all my login information, plus the library where I was using the computer said this was a social networking site and blocked it. Today while washing dishes (yes, some of us still stand at the sink and wash the dishes) I had a flash of memory, so I dried my hands and rushed over to the desktop computer and - voilà! - I am able to log in for the first time in over four years. Much has changed since the last login. I will review what I wrote to see what needs to be updated. 
I will say that I have mostly worked out my uncertainties and am leading a boring, normal, predictable life, as normal and predictable as one can live with multiple sclerosis and its flareups and remissions. 
I will come back later to begin updating. In the meantime, here is a current dog picture:

Friday the 13th, April 2012

Today is Friday, April 13, 2012. My last post was nearly a year ago, give or take a week or so. I've been distracted by life. But that's good, you know. That way I don't have too much time to think of all the philosophical things.

I woke up really depressed this morning, but not as depressed as earlier in the week. That day it was so awful that I couldn't stay in the house to drink my coffee. I had to quickly get dressed and go to the gas station and buy coffee there so I'd be out of my private environment. Three hours later I felt better and went home.

Later that day I found out that one of my dogs has metastatic cancer to her lungs. On March 3 she had her rear left leg removed because of cancer. The X-rays at that time showed no metastasis. But about 6 days ago now she began coughing, and I suspected. Yet I was hoping it was allergies like I have. The X-rays showed otherwise, bad news, and a downhill spiral.

I am wondering, did God give me the severe depression that morning so that I would get it over with and be able to deal with the eventual bad news and be able to take care of my dog? Regardless, it worked out that way.

Yesterday I took her to the university veterinary hospital for further examination and possibly a biopsy. She had the luck to draw an oncologist for the day. The doctor said that 99.9999999999...% it is metastasized bone cancer. There is the infinitesimally remote possibility that it is a fungal infection, but even I am not holding on tight to that hope. Rather than do an invasive biopsy, the doc took a urine specimen to send off for fungal culture.

What was suggested that might help in palliation, and should not be considered curative, is administration of a drug called "Palladia". This stops the tumors from growing blood vessels and makes them die. If this works, at least my doggie won't suffocate maybe. I still am not holding out for a cure, because the blood work showed she was in mild organ failure, kidneys to be specific. Miracles do happen, though. I just hope I don't make her last days sick and miserable by giving this medication. If this appears to be the case I will stop it.

Doggie feels good right now. She is short of breath and she coughs, but she still has interest in going out into the countryside and swimming in the creek and the ponds.

I don't feel too happy or motivated this morning, either. I took my temperature and it is slightly elevated. The weather is stormy, with lots of rain, thunder, and lightning. There has been hail in the area. None of the dogs wanted to go outside to relieve themselves, but there was a break in the rain and I managed to get them to go out. Right now sick doggie is guarding her dog bone on the sofa, and one of the others is hiding out in the bathtub. I think the other is hiding behind the sofa.

I'm in a mood for purging things in the house, just going through and throwing out stuff if I haven't used it in a reasonable amount of time. I don't have too much left, though, and I might be throwing out stuff I will eventually want. I have purged so much that I'm sort of down to the things I need.

The purging is calling loudly. I sat down here to look up the meaning of something but now I can't remember what it is I wanted to know. I took apart the TV table and washed it, and now to keep myself busy I'll go clean something else.

First I had to change the title of this post. I had called it "Nearly a year later" but after being confused by it, I discovered that the post immediately previous to this had been named the same! Now I'm done here.

Nearly a year later

I have been recovering from my father's death, from a stray cat bite and rabies shots, and MS getting worse, and lately a speeding ticket that I am certain I didn't deserve. International disasters have happened since I last posted -

• oil gushing into the water from a broken oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico;
• earthquakes in Haiti;
  
• earthquakes in Chile;
  
• earthquakes in Indonesia with a tsunami;
  
• even a 3.9 earthquake in New York City;
  
• "eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull in April created a giant ash cloud, which at one point covered most of Europe. The spread of the ash in the atmosphere created fiery red sunsets and brought international aviation to a temporary standstill, resulting in travel chaos for tens of thousands. The plume was so electrically charged that it made its own lightning" (quote from http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40831566/ns/technology_and_science-science/, Brett Israel);
  
• volcano in Indonesia;
  
• tornado in New York City;
  
• a winter blizzard in the midwest and northeast and snow over most of the country;
  
• so far in 2011 dead fish and birds everywhere (people claim they are disasters);
  
• shift of Earth's magnetic pole;
  
• flood in Queensland, Australia;
  
• earthquakes in New Zealand;
  
• earthquakes and tsunami in Japan, wrecking nuclear power plants; with the tsunami damaging much of the United States' west coast;
  
• and lately the tornadoes that ripped through the South a few days ago, mostly North Carolina, and killed people from Oklahoma to the East Coast.
• 33 miners in Chile survived for two months underground and their rescue captivated the world.
  

A lot has been going on all over the planet. I think a lot has always been going on, it's just that now with international communications being as light-speed and public as they are, we just know about more of it sooner. Some think it is the sign of the end times, with the imminent return of Jesus. Maybe so, I won't discount that, but the fact is if people didn't live in the places where these things happened, they wouldn't be considered disasters.

Back on the 'Net again

Finally got Internet connection via satellite at the house this week. Have not been connected at home since 2007, and lots of stuff on my computer is too old, or so say all the requests for downloading updates. Downloaded all the updates, then my computer wouldn't run!!! Deleted lots of them, started using Firefox, and here I am. But I should be back more often from now on. I live in DBF Missouri, and there isn't even any cable for TV here nor do I have a landline phone. With some of the money from my father's estate, I paid off my truck loan, so now I can afford the monthly Internet bill. Maybe I'll be able to start selling on eBay again and that way earn the Internet payment. It is 1:44 a.m., so I am going to go to bed and sleep for a while. I have been spending more time getting this Internet thing to work than doing what needs to be done around the house and yard.

Let me say that the original purpose for this blog is and has been pretty much satisfied. I have figured a lot of things out for myself. One thing that is peculiar, after my mother died, the intense wondering about what happens when we die has gone down in volume, and I rarely think about it any longer. I am certain that writing things out here has helped, but I also believe, to a degree, that I was thinking my mother's desperate thoughts, and when she died, they were no longer ethereally being transmitted to me.

No matter how nuts she was, if there is a Heaven, she is there. Her main goal was always to be like she thought Jesus wanted her to be, no matter how misled and screwed up that she really was.

I do feel a bit like a fish out of water. Everyone I wanted to share this part of my life with is dead. So now what?

Daddy died

The library system where I have Internet access has decided that "social networking" sites are verboten. So that means out in Missouri I can't access my own blog! Tonight/this morning, 1:46 a.m. on January 4, 2010, I am at a Comfort Inn in Newport News, Virginia. My father died New Year's Eve, so I traveled from DBF, Missouri, to be here for the one funeral I never wanted to attend. I had plans to spend time with him, y'know? I was going to buy him a new truck. I talked to him maybe 2 weeks ago now, and he felt just fine, was very happy, and it was the best conversation we have ever had. My brother-in-law called me Jan. 2 to tell me; I suppose it took everyone that long to find my telephone number since not too many people had it, and my father was probably the only one, so they had to look through his cell phone or something, I am sure. Anyway, I was told he had a sore throat that got worse and worse, and it was really blood backing up instead of being a sore throat, which they discovered in the hospital where he died. It sounds like congestive heart failure to me. He was only 79 years old; would have been 80 this coming February. I need to get a nap; the funeral is at 11 a.m. and I have to figure out a way to get to the place. I hope to blog more tomorrow. If I don't get to, please know that this blog is NOT defunct, I just don't have many opportunities to update.

Had a heart attack

On Feb. 10, 2009, I was taken to a hospital in severe pain and vomiting from my kidney stone. Long story short, on Feb. 11 they put in a right ureteral double-J stent. This released infection but also forced it into my blood, I went into septic shock, lost my blood pressure, had a heart attack, and spent a week in the ICU (I lived, by the way, surprisingly!!). I nearly got to experience all this stuff I have been wondering about.

In March I had lithotripsy. In April I had a tiny remaining piece of the stone lasered out and the stent removed and replaced. In May I had the new stent pulled out, and the kidney episode seems to be OVER, all infection, stone, and pain gone. Now I have to deal with the heart damage. I have an appointment tomorrow with a cardiologist.

Let there be light - and there was

I was thinking about the Genesis story of creation, that God spoke the universe into being out of nothing. You know, without form, and void, and darkness on the face of the deep. This is not an advertisement for the Judaeo-Christian-Muslim views on or beliefs in creation. Nor is it an attempt to include any explanation of inconsistencies in these creation stories, it is merely a statement of thought -

I wonder why it so difficult for people to believe that the universe was brought into being out of nothing, when we ourselves were brought into being out of nothing. I am not speaking of the conception of our bodies, creations that were brought into existence after the union of two other previously existing biologic particles that carried the life with them at their union and had it before their union. After all, the sperm and the ovum came alive from other living creatures; the life "created" at their joining to become a zygote was not an actual creation, but a continuance of the lives that came before.

What I am speaking of (well, writing) here is the "us" that came into existence out of nothing. The "me" and "you". Even upon fertilization, there is no guarantee that the zygote will become a human. It could merely keep dividing and not differentiating and turn into a hydatidiform mole, a cancer resulting from conception. It is alive, certainly, but alive as a tumor is alive and not as an individual. And even if the zygote does become human, there is no guarantee that the fetus or infant will have an intellect sufficient to become a discrete person.

Yet for most of us, somewhere in this process of fertilization, dividing, and differentiation, an individual with intellect and personality begins. At what point does this happen? Which two cells form an electric connection that allows this to begin? And from where does this nascent personality come? At what point does the fetus become charged with the ability to become someone?

I mean, even before there is a brain, there is a heartbeat; certain cells differentiate into cells that will become a heart, and they begin to beat as a heart will. THERE IS A FIRST HEARTBEAT. What makes this heartbeat want to occur? Is there an energy of anticipation before the first spasm of the cells? The heartbeat was not there before that point, and then suddenly it is there. It wasn't anywhere before, and then it exists. Out of nothing.

Similarly, there is a first spark of personality, a first spark of intellect, a first enabling of the differentiated cells to become someone different from all others on the planet. This person was not there before. Yet one day, out of nothing, a person exists, a person who has never been any other and who will never be any other. Out of nothing.

This is the way of humanity. This is the way of all life. So why is is so difficult to believe that God can call up the universe out of nothing?

Genesis 1: 1-5 (King James Bible)

1. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
4. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
5. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

What about the Big Bang and a belief or a desire to believe in creation without a creator? From http://www.comereason.org/sci_bible/sci040.asp I got this:

What exactly was it that "banged" to cause the universe to come into existence? If matter, space and time are all a part of our universe, then what was before that? Out of nothing, nothing comes is the logical dictum, so there must have been something out there, but that something must not be material, it must not be spatial and it must not be time-constrained. Well, God fits these criteria. He is spirit, not matter and as spirit He transcends space. Also God is defined as eternal; therefore He can be outside of time.

There is a lot more to this article that is good, thoughtful reading.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, applies only to the corporeal. "We" are the mysterious creation made from nothing, just like the universe.

Fiat lux.