Good news

Hi all,

I know I'd talked to a number of you about this, but I know I didn't talk to
everyone becuase my mom herself wasn't until recently being public about it
outside of a small group of friends and family. Before you get worried I'll
tell the end first and say she is home safely.

About 2 months ago my mom went in to see a doctor about chest pains. During a
routine x-ray, they saw a suspicious lump in her chest. Further tests revealed
good and bad, it was indeed a tumor (about the size of an egg) but it was on
her rib, and not on her lung as they had feared most. Other evidence such as
calcification, seemed to lead the doctors to believe it was benign, but they
still didn't want to take a chance of leaving it in. She was scheduled for
surgery to remove the entire upermost left rib, and part of her breastbone.
Apparently becuase that rib is partial under the collar bone you can function
just fine without it. Although the surgeon did point out her rugby career was
over. The only complication is that the area of the chest they were working in
was quite delicate as many importand nerves and arteries went through there.

She went through surgery on tuesday. Neil and Rachel came up from Berkeley, as
well as my mother's friend Helen and I to spend pretty much the whole day in
the hospital. The had her scheduled for 1 o'clock, but she wasn't awake enough
to say goodbye to until about 10 that night.

In the end she recoved amazingly well, and the 3 to 5 days they estimated that
she would need to recover in the hospital turned into 2 days, which is great.
I brought her home today and she will still require 2 weeks or so of physical
recovery, which means I'm pretty much staying in davis for the next two weeks
to help her out.

They are going to do tests on the removed lump now that it is out (doing a
biopsy ealier would have been practically as hard as removing it considering
it's location.) At this point, it may just be accademic whether or not it's
cancerous, but I guess knowing may affect future treatment.

Anyway, this email was mostly a lazy way of letting you guys all know at once
that she is doing good if you were worrying about her, but since I had forgoten
who I'd talked to about it previously, ironically this email may just serve to
worry you. Sorry about that.

Hope you are all doing well, and I hope to see you soon!

-a

Hotel for Rachel's wedding

Hey kids! (er... those invited to my sister's wedding)

Just wanted to let you know I'll be getting a room at the Courtyard Marriott in
Emeryville, the one mentioned on the invite that all the out of town guests are
going to stay at. You may have already gotten a room yourself or live close
enough that you will just go home after, but I wanted to let you know that as a
backup plan (or as your only plan) you can of course crash in my room. They'll
be lots of people going from the reception to the Hotel, so if you end up
drinking too much and can't make it home you'll know this is always an option.

Plus... it's where the cool kids are having the after party, cause they are
kicking us out of the hall in Piedmont at 11.

Yay weddings!

-a

P.s. if more than a couple people actually take me up on this i can't offer
anything better then
slumber-party-style-blankets-on-floor-space-or-bed-craming. but if you think
you're too old for that then that is just sad. plus less than ideal sleeping
conditions is always better than drinking and driving.

Pictures!

Hi kids!

I just wanted to let you know that I've been using flickr (www.flicker.com) to
upload pictures from my camera phone here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/71207411@N00/

In the past I've found camera phones to be, well, the dumbest thing ever. I
always got phones that had them, but the novelty quickly wore off because the
quality was poor, and it was difficult to get the pictures off. Especially
with sprint service. I just discovered that using flickr is a non-crappy way
to display pictures from my phone. When you sign up (free!) you can set up and
email address that you allows you to email pictures from you phone. And now
that my new phone can take pictures just over a megapixel, they aren't nearly
as bad as they used to be.

Anyway, I'm letting you know this for 2 reasons. First, of course I love to be
the center of attention and love people to check out my pictures and leave
comments or whatever, but also, I wanted to let you all know how cool flickr is
and if you have a camera phone and haven't really figured out what to do with
the pictures, you should really give it a try.

There aren't a huge number of pictures up yet, but I've found myself actually
uploading a picture or so most days, so check back every once and a while. If
you are technically inclined and like that sort of thing, you can also get the
rss feed of my photos here:

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=71207411@N00&format=rss_200

Also, If you do end up setting up and account, or if you already use flickr,
please let me know because I'd love to see your pictures as well.

-a

New Blog

So I got a little tired of Wordpress, not because it is bad software, but because I really didn't want to put in the investment of constantly updating it, uploading patches, and constant customization. Call me lazy, but there it is. Also, the commenting was getting out of control, I had over 3000 spam comments and didn't want to go through deleting them. The idea of moderating comments is lame. I much prefer the captcha method, but it didn't seem to be available in Wordpress, so I switched to blogger for that (and the above reasons).

A note on the transfer of old posts. There was no export/import option, so I did it all manually copy/paste style, which presented a couple problems. Firstly, because I had a bunch of lame posts on my old blog that were mostly just camera phone pictures, a system I am now using flickr for, I just deleted a bunch of them. Secondly, although I was able to back-date the posts, the comments were not so manageable, and now all the old comments appear to have been posted today, May 2nd. Whatever.

Hope you enjoy the new blog, let me know if you think anything is missing.