well, at least not for the next few weeks while the garlic harvest dries.
Tag Archives: car
haulin’ straw with the galaxie.
i can say with some authority that nothing brings out the smiles and waves quite like when your tooling around the country roads of a farming community hauling a load of straw in an old ford.
farmers like their old fords and i’ve discovered that they have a peculiar amount of respect for one with an original 289 under the hood.
scenes from the galaxie: going to gladstone the long way.
i’m pondering an occasional series called “scenes from the galaxie”. if anything it’ll prompt me to fix up the interior sooner rather than later.
lots and lots of hay on the backroads in wisconsin. lots.
if i were a better photographer, i would have done a much better job capturing just how menacingly dark the sky was behind me.
eventually my lucky streak of of just missing torrential downpours ended just west of escanaba.
don’t let anyone fool you, the galaxie windshield wipers are not going to win any awards for efficient removal of water.
i hereby declare that the trunk of a galaxie 500 is a legal unit of measure.
forget cubic yards or other boring measures, i think the world should immediately adopt the Galaxie Trunk (GT) as their standard unit for measuring volume. maybe even somebody at nist would be more than happy to fund me to convert everything into GTs.
for example, two sets of golf clubs is equal to about 0.20 GTs. i wonder if the morgue would let me see how many dead bodies equals 1 GT?
in any case, i’m off to the upper peninsula which always has the potential to be a unintended adventure. so wish me safe travels 🙂
honestly i didn’t think too much of driving the galaxie alone without a cell phone through rural wisconsin and michigan. that is, until somebody looked at me as if i gone absolutely mad when i casually mentioned the plan. i guess one person’s fit of insanity is another person’s relaxing ride through the countryside.
unless it involves walking 20 miles to a service station.
the eric update – day 96: welcome home, odin!
psssst. i’ve updated the post – please scroll down.
he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home! he’s home!
( more later, lots to do )
time passes.
we’re home. after 96 days in the nicu i still can’t quite believe that we’re actually home. and despite my slight anxiety that i’d be paralyzed by fear at not having a nicu nurse at close hand, i think we’re doing pretty well. actually, little odin is making things quite easy for us. he’s mostly just been sleeping the day away in the arms of family members that have come to visit. his monitor has gone off a few times, but they’ve all been false alarms. and while there was some concern that moving home might wipe out his “reserve capacity” and bring on another round of refluxing and alarms, he has only spit up a very little bit of food since getting home. so he seems to be handling the transition very well!
regular readers might wonder how we were released so quickly without having any of the various surgeries that he may or may not need. in an amusing last minute twist the doctors changed the original plan that we discussed with them which involved eric coming home early next week after having surgery for his inguinal hernia. but it appears that scheduling for surgery is quite complicated and they couldn’t get a slot for him in a timely manner and they decided that they didn’t want to have him hanging out in the nicu waiting for surgery; they came back to us a couple of hours later and told us that we could bring him home today. as you can imagine we were, er, quite surprised. in a good way. mostly. so, due to the vagaries of surgical scheduling, we got to bring him home and wait for october 19th to arrive which is when he’ll have his inguinal hernia repaired. with each passing day that his reflux continues to remain under control they are increasingly confident that he won’t need any of the more invasive measure to stop the spitting ( woohoo! no gut tube! ).
a large number of people have asked if i’m going to continue the postings now that we’re out of the nicu. i think the short answer is that i probably won’t stop posting any time soon. so if you’ve been following along, keep following along.
as a taste of what’s to come, some of you may remember that we bought a house for the snowdeal show ® with our sister-in-law and her partner and they are expecting their second child very soon. diane’s due date was within days of little odin’s original due day, october 16th, so things should even more exciting than ever, all the more so because she’s having a home birth, which long time readers might remember is what we originally planned as well.
it’s odd to think that within the next couple of days, odin – who just celebrated his third gregorian monthly birthday – will meet a cousin who is the same age, but not. or something like that.
But now, we sleep at home together for the first time! the Beginning of Many More Adventures to Come.
here are a few sights from The Very Exciting Day ( some dupes from above but with more description ).
the whole discharge process took about 3 hours, which is two bottles in bottle time.
sweet ease is sugar water and it’s given to preemies in the nicu to calm them down. if a kid is screaming or uncomfortable, you’ll often hear a nurse say “just give ’em some ‘sweet ease'”. eric never fussed too much, so he never had much of the stuff ( some of the kids were sweet ease addicts ), which is nice because we never were too comfortable with training him to be comforted by sugar water.
but today it appears that they gave him some sweet ease while they were administering his vaccines, which needed to be done before he could leave.
you can’t go home without smelling fresh and clean now can you?
despite being caffeine free, eric is going to go home with a monitor, so we can make sure that he doesn’t react adversely to the change in environments by slowing his heartrate and respiration.
we had to go to a “class” to learn how it worked as part of the discharge process, which was a little silly because we’re pretty familiar with monitors after 3 months in the nicu.
he’s sleepy after the bath, a feeding an diaper change, but we decide to show off his very cute duds that he’s sporting for the ride home.
the sensors for the home monitor are held in place on his chest with a cloth “belt”, which a much nicer alternative to the “sticky” leads. they’re cutting the cloth belt down to a proper size as they transfer him from the nicu monitor to the home monitor.
he’s has his pulse oximeter sensor on almost continuously from the the very beginning, so it’s a little odd to be taking it off for the very last time. what will i do with my time if i can’t stare at his blood oxygen saturation levels for hours on end?
woohoo! normally they like to test kids out in the car seat, but we’re leaving on such short notice that we just cross our fingers that he’ll enjoy being in the seat.
indeed, he liked it a lot and didn’t make a peep during the entire process.
that’s right! he’s in the car! he hasn’t melted in the rain!
auntie gina greets odin when we arrive at the house. mauja hangs back for a bit and then decides that he really, really wants to get a closer look. it’s hard to tell, but if gina hadn’t stopped him, he would have had his front legs on the table and would likely have commenced with licking, which is probably not a good idea.
mauja loves babies and i think he’s going to have a hard time understanding why he can’t plant a wet sloppy tongue on odin whenever he pleases.
gradma and grandpa snowdeal came along to help us with the transition from the nicu to home. they held eric for a long time which was nice because we had lots to get done. odin slept comfortably the entire day.
cousin ruby lives in the house that we bought for the the snowdeal show ®, so she’s sort-of like a big sister. she’s been anxiously waiting to meet odin for 3 months. ruby was very thoughtful and brought a balloon along for a gift.
ruby is having a grand time talking to baby odin.
we won’t be going anywhere without the home monitor and i’ve found that it’s a little tough to remember to not just pick him up and walk away without grabbing the monitor.
the antiseptic hand wash is going to be a very important fact of life for quite some time. anyone who touches eric must wash their hands before picking him up.
we have to fill out the apnea journal anytime the alarm goes off to give the doctors contextual information such as whether or not he changed colors and what we were doing at the time – e.g. feeding. so far, we’ve only have “loose lead” alarms which aren’t very important.
hey, it’s a sneek peak at his nursery! it’s sort-of a green-silver-blue with artwork theme. more pictures later.
eric gets his nightly meds for reflux.
auntie gina also lives with us in the house we bought for the the snowdeal show ®, so you might be seeing many more pictures of her, if she doesn’t mind.
they were watching the presidential debate which obviously wasn’t doing much to help keep ruby awake.
it’s time for sleepy time in the arms reach Co-Sleeper®. the only problem is that he’s not so sleepy.
auntie diane is super duper pregnant and her due date is within days off odin’s original due date, so she’ll be having the baby very, very, very soon.
auntie diane was on the short list of visitors at the old nicu so odin is quite familiar with her belly. whenever auntie diane holds odin, her baby starts to stir, so maybe there’s some sort of baby-to-baby communication going on.
as proof that the road is not the map and the blog is not the man, i offer up exhibit ‘a’. a shiny 1965
galaxie 500
that i purchased back in august.
i think there may be only a handful of friends and family that know that i bought the classic muscle car, and i’m not quiet sure how it failed to make it into my online life.
perhaps it’s because i originally intended to “flip” the car for some easy money and didn’t think i was going to invest that much mental energy in it. i figuratively “stole” the car from a co-worker whose family had owned the car since it was purchased in ’65. when he said he wanted to get rid of the car, which was sitting risking neglect on their napa valley property, i was smart enough to say i’d pay to ship it back to michigan. i was pretty sure i could sell it for more than what i was paying, so i jumped on the opportunity.
now, despite the fact that i spent 13 years in maine the grandson of a grandfather who owned a car dealership and helped-out behind the parts counter when i was barely out of diapers and despite the fact that i went to high-school “just outside” of flint, michigan and despite the fact that the pops is an engineering manager for
gm
– i’ve never considered myself a “car person”. much to the chagrin of my dad, i’m all about automobile pragmatism which usually means buying foreign – mazdas, toyotas and vws have all been parked in my driveway. and after years of owning a toyota camry, i was completely unprepared for experience of driving the galaxie.
well, the very first experience was trying to get used to the “three on the tree” set-up where the the manual transmission is shifted on the steering column. but five minutes later, as i pulled into my driveway, i had what would end up being a commonplace experience – someone freaking-out over the car. in this case it was a couple of construction workers that tripped over themselves to get a closer look.
little did i know that there’s a whole different world out there. a world of people who will yell out their minivan window, while you’re driving down the highway that their first car was a galaxie. people with large, black muttonchops and blue coveralls that will bolt across the parking lot with their girlfiend in tow, just to get you to open the hood. people that will ask you if they can buy your car while you’re idling at a light. people that stop the flow of traffic to jump out of their idling car to ask you when you’re exiting a conveniece store where you get parts because it just so happens that they bought a ’66 but it doesn’t have a seat and “no shit” that’s the original seat, i’ve never seen a ’65 galaxie seat in such great condition.
of course, i can’t just get rid of the car now. there’s a whole winter’s worth of work to done on her. maybe a new gearbox. maybe i’ll put in “doolies” [ duel exhaust for the unitiated ].
who knows, but i hear this is how it starts. it’s a disease that strikes the unsuspecting and if i don’t keep it in check in ten years i’ll have cars in various states of reconditioning up on blocks in the front yard.