When I had my MRI in November, other than the arthritis, the results turned up something odd about my thyroid. After a discussion with my primary doctor in December, I scheduled a thyroid ultrasound, which confirmed that I have “nodules” on and around my thyroid. This resulted in a specialist visit to see an otolaryngologist, also known as an ENT (Ears Nose Throat).
After an initial meet & greet – which I question the need for when the ultrasound results recommended an “FNA” – Fine Needle Aspiration – I scheduled the FNA, or thyroid biopsy, to pull some tissue from the nodules. Alas, our medical system is weighed down by bureaucracy.
Bureaucracy aside, the doctor’s bedside manner was good, talking me through the process before starting and throughout. I was warned that the local numbing agent would burn going in – it did. After that, I only felt pressure as each needle went in, and then got poked around a few times. I’m not sure the poking around part was really mentioned, though I suppose it still just counts as pressure. It reminded me a little of a root canal, when the dentist is poking into the tooth repeatedly to make sure they got all of the root and you only feel the pressure of the poking.
I was warned that the results could take up to 7 business days; they took 5, and I am relieved to say my thyroid nodules are benign.
What are Side Quests, you ask? Well, I used to refer to them as Goals, but really, “Quest” is more fun as a concept, at least for us gamers. I don’t accomplish every quest I give myself, and sometimes I add quests during the year based on circumstances. For example, the year I got laid off, getting a new job became my highest priority quest.
For the most part, I try to spread my quests across various categories that I’ve deemed important, such as Garden, Fitness, and Finance (among others). Obviously, these will vary by person… one of my categories is “Garden,” which may be entirely irrelevant to you. An important factor is always making sure these quests are SMART – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-based. The SMART aspects helps in planning for achievable goals rather than setting your sights on something that may not be feasible in the time period you’re looking at. To use martial arts as an example, a white belt working towards a black belt in an achievable quest, but setting a deadline of a single year is not likely to be attainable.
I find that tracking my quests is also useful, so at the beginning of the year, I set up a document on my Google Drive listing them. Over the course of the year, I pop back into the document to make notes and mark when I complete items. Then at the end of the year, I copy that document for the layout as my base for the next year’s quests. In some cases, quests that I didn’t get to may be carried over to the next year, like some of the sorting and furniture rearranging that I didn’t get to in 2025. I’m kind of in a house organizing phase at the moment, so if I keep it up, I may complete that quest early this year.
What do you want to accomplish in 2026 and how do you track it?
In college, I spent a year abroad at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, which was a fabulous experience is so many ways, including my first Live Action Role-Playing (LARP) adventures. That’s not what comes to mind this time of year though. As the dorms closed over break, I went with the guy I was dating to his parents’ home near Edinburgh for most of the month we had off (with a fun-filled week in Paris for New Year’s). His parents were amazingly welcoming to this strange American he dragged home, including me in the family Christmas traditions.
On Christmas morning, I woke to find a stocking lying at the foot of my bed – rather than hung by a fireplace (not that we did that in Miami either) – and was amazed to find that every gift inside that stocking was individually wrapped! I recall being delighted as I unwrapped each gift, many of which were small Lego sets. (Oddly, I owned no Lego at all until that year. I certainly made up for it over the next few years.)
This year, in the midst of dealing with the delightful homeownership issues that I mentioned, I decided to do the same for my daughter… wrapping all of the stocking stuffers, that is, not the Lego sets part. (Don’t worry, we have plenty of Lego in the house.) I’ve thought about it in the past and never got around to it. After wrapping all of them, I realized that she’s the same age I was when I woke up to a stocking full of wrapped gifts, so I guess this was the perfect year to do it.
Almost two weeks ago now, it snowed – again – bringing our accumulated snow to a whopping 11 inches early in the season. It was warm enough that the snow was melting on the roof even as it was falling, causing an annoying drip drip drip outside my bedroom window, which I unfortunately noticed in the middle of the night. I suspect the persistent dripping off the edge of the gutters is partially due to the smaller width of the gutters after the siding and gutter work early last year; this was not a problem we had encountered before. A few hours later, I was sitting in the living room sorting embroidery thread and realized I could open the curtains for better lighting, as it was a sunny day and reasonably warm (for winter).
I was definitely not prepared for what I found! There was a puddle on the bay window bench and water damage on the window’s ceiling. I scrambled to clean it up, then move everything we had near the window out of the way, discarding a couple cardboard boxes after relocating their (fortunately undamaged) contents. It was a while before I returned to sorting my embroidery thread, followed by waves of cleaning, and as the snow continued melting, the realization that the afternoon heat (I use the term loosely, it was in the mid-30s) was causing a steady drip of snow melt and I wanted more than just a pair of towels in the window to mop it up.
Monday morning found me on the phone to the window company, who installed the window back in 2018, followed by reaching out to the company who redid our roof, siding, and gutters last year. The consensus is that nothing can be done until after the snow melts (did I mention 11 inches of accumulation?), my towel/bucket approach was the necessary approach for now, and the cause of the leak (likely the gutter work) needs to be fixed before the window can be. As the weather shifted back to cold (and colder… last Saturday’s high was 8 degrees), the drip temporarily abated, though it did return this afternoon in a sudden burst of warm weather (high of 48!). Hopefully enough has melted to clear the gutters of ice, though we’re not keeping the warm weather for long, so I’m not sure of the repair timing.
Another disaster struck Friday morning, at least for someone who works from home… our internet connection vanished mid-morning! Our neighbors use the same service, so I was able to verify that it was isolated to our house, and now know that the wire bringing fiber into our house can freeze at the box if water gets into the wrong spot, pushing the wires apart and breaking the connection. On the plus side, they were able to send a technician out that evening, though the poor guys were working in the dark by the time they got here.
As the title says, homeownership is not for the faint of heart. On the plus side, there’s chocolate. On the downside, I wonder if that’s why my glucose count was higher than usual on my annual blood test last week?
A couple years ago, I posted about my first MRI experience, which was for my hip. While I found the sound variance fascinating with a headset, this week, I experienced an MRI without one, and it was definitely annoyingly loud at various stages, even with the earplugs they provided. When it wasn’t too jarring, I was – as I was concerned about in my previous experience – bored.
I understand why I didn’t have a headset this time. Technically, I had two MRIs back-to-back: one of my spine and one of my brain. It’s safe to assume that they don’t want a headset showing up while scanning your head.
Good news! No concerns at all about my brain. Well, at least not on an MRI.
Bad news! We’re back to arthritis in my neck being the likely cause of the tingling in my fingertips that I have been experiencing since May. The EKG I mentioned back in July that was checking for nerve damage/carpal tunnel showed nothing significant, which led to me seeing my Primary Care Physician (PCP), who then referred me to Neurology.
On the plus side, the neurologist is amazing – attentive, taking notes, looking up possibilities while we were talking about my symptoms and eliminating options based on symptoms that I don’t have. She called me within a couple hours of the MRI results hitting the system to discuss what I should try next. I’ll schedule a follow up with her in a month or so to discuss the effectiveness of the latest possible solution.
Near the end of May, I visited the Orthopedics department at my medical group to assess a new problem in my right hand – my fingertips were intermittently numb. A couple days earlier, I had been discussing that problem with a pair of people who had similar symptoms dealt with, and in each case, it was related to carpal tunnel. I received a carpal tunnel diagnosis years ago, so it made sense that these new symptoms could be related.
And yet, when I saw the doctor and mentioned my carpal tunnel, instead of being sent for an EKG – apparently the only accurate way to diagnose carpal tunnel and determine the severity – I was sent to a month of Physical Therapy (PT) on the possibility that the arthritis in my neck was causing the numbness. Here I am, eight PT sessions later – with out of pocket expenses and eight gardening mornings lost – scheduled for an EKG a couple weeks from now.
I’m not clear on the decision making process here, though I suspect the bureaucracy of insurance is part of it, opting for the presumably cheaper PT instead of another test. (I’ll know for sure which is cheaper once I see the billing.) I am disappointed in the process, having to wait more than two months from my initial appointment to possibly discover the cause, and having lost so much gardening time.
It’s been a weirdly busy week, including a physical therapy appointment this morning, and I suddenly realized it’s Thursday evening and I haven’t written a blog post yet. I did make art, a couple versions, over the last couple days, but I’m not ready to share them. Zuko left a scratch on my leg Monday when he launched himself at Arwen, Arwen fell off the bed Wednesday morning and hooked into my left elbow to catch herself, and I appear to have encountered poison ivy last weekend, at least according to my right wrist.
That’s the long-winded way of saying I’m taking this week off.
Last weekend, Peter David, a writer of “stuff” – comic books, TV shows, novels, and such – passed away. He was only 68, which in the United States is around retirement age (unless you’re in Congress). Since I saw the news, I’ve been reflecting on the unusual impact Peter David had on my fandom. Picture a geeky butterfly flapping its wings somewhere.
In grad school, a friend and I decided to drive up to Orlando for MegaCon, which was primarily a comic book convention at the time. He wanted to hear Peter David speak; being a Babylon 5 (B5) fan, I wanted to hear J. Michael Straczynski. They were scheduled back-to-back, so we sat down for both. I came out of Peter David’s talk with an awareness that he had written some B5 episodes, a book called Howling Mad, and some funny “But I Digress” columns about Star Wars. I was working in Interlibrary Loan on campus at the time and set some challenges for my co-worker when I asked her to find those for me. (I have since acquired my own copy of Howling Mad.) I followed with my own research into Peter David and discovered that he was listed as a guest at DragonCon that summer.
If you recall my past discussion of DragonCon, it was my first exposure to Out of the Box Publishing and John Kovalic’s work (actually the 2nd year I attended). A few years later, that familiarity with both John and Out of the Box Publishing saw me hanging out at their GenCon booth playing Shipwrecked with a couple who were involved in the now-defunct Chicago Gamers Conclave, a Thanksgiving weekend gaming convention. Attending that convention brought Capricon to my attention, along with a reintroduction to some gamers I had met at Wizard World over a year before, and an invitation to a tabletop role-playing group, where I met my ex-husband.
The ripple effects of that geeky butterfly include exposure to John Kovalic’s work and as a result, my subsequent involvement in Dorkstock; meeting the father of my favorite human child (don’t worry, she knows she ranks above the cats too); and my introduction to Chicago’s fan-run conventions (one of which I co-chaired this year). That’s a pretty big impact for listening to a guy talk about Skippy, the Jedi droid; the “Bear”bylon 5 incident, and a wolf that got bitten by a werewolf.
There was, alas, a casualty from the power outage I mentioned last week. The following Monday, we realized that the large freezer in the garage, which came with the house, was clearing experiencing a meltdown. Not a minor one of the “oops, I left the door cracked open” variety which causes a build-up of ice… the previous build up (from one of those incidents) was clearly melting over the entire contents of the freezer.
At a pause in the mad scramble to squish the contents of a larger freezer into a smaller – and not empty – one, I paused to Google the freezer model, on the off chance that it might be reparable. I haven’t located the serial number, so I don’t know the exact age… according to the search results, the Sears Coldspot freezer model was replaced by Kenmore in 1976.
Needless to say, I was flabbergasted, and have progressed from wondering at its sudden demise to appreciating the quality and extended lifespan of this freezer. We will certainly miss it.
I realize, even in the United States, this is a privilege. But even this privilege has quirks.
You may recall that we had solar panels installed last summer, including a backup battery. (I did incorrectly say we weren’t pushing power back into the grid.) On Saturday morning, as I lay in bed cuddling the cats and scrolling my social media feed, I heard the power go out, and immediately kick back in. As is customary when our power flickers noticeably, our 2.4 GHz network dropped, sending a notification from our thermostat app that it couldn’t communicate with the thermostat. (The thermostat and printer only work on the 2.4 GHz network; almost everything else runs on the 5 GHz.) When I eventually got up, I knew I’d need to reset it through the admin portal.
When I did get up, my first responsibility was to feed the cats. This is where I noticed things being weird – one of the lights in the kitchen weren’t working, others were fainter than usual, and on one, two of the three bulbs weren’t lit. I wondered what sort of power outage would knock out some – but not all – of the light bulbs. This was before caffeine and it didn’t click yet that the power was still out.
While taking my morning shower, the water pressure dropped. That worried me – the well circuit was supposed to be on the battery, so why hadn’t it come back on? (Noting that the circuits were supposed to be accurately labeled shortly after I bought the house; now I’m fairly sure the “well” circuit is actually the water softener’s outlet.) After my shower, I scrambled to check the circuit breaker and the reset by the well. You may recall I gained some experience with our water pressure about a year and a half ago, when a pipe rusted through on Christmas Day. All I was sure of at that point was that the water pressure was really low, and it was way too early to call anyone to help troubleshoot it.
Eventually, I looked at our solar battery and realized that the blue icon I was seeing was not its normal display. Annoyingly, I couldn’t find anything online explaining what the different icons are. That display combined with having to manually light the gas stove are what made me realize that our power was still out and the solar battery was working as designed.
I made myself a micro breakfast to minimize water usage – I had water in the kettle from Friday and grabbed a snack bar. About twenty minutes after I finished, the power kicked back on with all the normal beeps and clicks that come with a power flicker. Including the need to reset the 2.4 GHz network again.
