This past Sunday, Joe, my father-in-law, passed away. Joe lived very long and full life — in his 85 years he marched through southern France as an infantry man in WWII, graduated from RIT when it was downtown, participated in the atomic bomb tests in the southwest though the U of R, and been loved greatly by friends and family. As an amputee, he’s managed to live independently up until he went into the hospital two weeks ago. While its terribly difficult to say goodbye to him, he was facing a lifetime of pain and future amputations that would have taken from him the independence he held so dear.

I have more to write, but right now we’re planning for the funeral. It will be Friday at 10.00am at St. Joseph’s in Penfield. Here’s his obituary from the D&C. The online “guest book” can be found here.

LJC organized “Mexican Museum Night” in honor of an exhibit of Mexican Wrestling Photography that just opened at the Eastman House and a show of Latin American and Latino art at the Memorial Art Gallery.

Dre and I agreed that, of the two shows, the MAG’s TRANSactions: Contemporary Latin American and Latino Art, is the one to see. While I loved the Mexican Wrestling photos, that exhibit was marred by some of the worst signage I’ve ever seen. Not only were the notes written in incomprehensible academic speak (and I’ve read many of the works they were referencing), but they were full of typos and mispellings (enough that I even I noticed). It was pretty embarrassing all things considered.

TRANSactions, on the other hand, was uniformly excellent. The art was really challenging (its one of the more “gutsy” shows I’ve seen at the MAG) and the presentation was excellent.

After the museums, we headed across the street to Selena’s. Aaron’s new friend Domo came along for the ride. Unforunately, when Aaron’s back was turned, Domo got a little frisky with Jenny. I’ve been told that Domo has chalked up this unfortunate incident to the booze.

Things have been really crazy. RIT has been taking more time than ever. And I’ve just not been able to find the time to write. I expect that should change in the next few days.

In the meantime, I need help with some .htaccess redirects to synch up my RSS feeds. Anyone out there feel helpful?

I’m back from vacation, and sitting in my office trying to get used to my new Mac laptop. Our short vacation was great. And Dre and I have passed the one-year marriage milestone with no frying pans being embedded into my skull. Good times!

Here are some photos from today at RIT:

Tomorrow I’m at Cornell to start classes there.

I am finding that I need to learn to retype again. The left middle finger has no feeling in its tip (actually in the entire highlighted area) and my left hand isn’t letting it play in the typing games. That’s causing me to get cramps from the weird contortions that the hand is making to work around the finger.

So this four fingered typing isn’t a viable long term solution. I’m working on getting the hand to “trust” the finger again. It’s tremendously slowing down my WPM. I’m basically having to relearn how to touch type with one finger that doesn’t give a lot of feedback about it’s relative positioning.

It’s really strange to have to struggle at typing after so long. And it’s a lesson about how much we sub-consciously rely on senses, like touch, to orient us in the word. This is such a little injury but its taking me a while to adjust to. I can’t imagine what its like for people who suffer major trauma.

For those interested, there are more healing pictures of the finger after the jump. It’s not gory this time. I promise.

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Last Friday 13 sutures came out of my finger and thankfully everything remained attached — I had been haunted by a cartoon image of the top of my finger flipping open as soon as the stitches came out.The healing has progressed really well; better in fact than my surgeon expected (how’s that for confidence in your patients). Due to the loss of tissue, the finger will most likely have an uneven look, but all and all he thinks everything should be o.k.

What has been a bit strange is the “hard candy shell” (comprised of dead skin) that’s formed over the tip of the finger. I’m told that it will peel off one of these days (the shell, not the finger). For the moment though, I can’t feel anything through it, which leads me to wonder how much of my sense of touch that I’ll have.

Still, I feel really lucky.

Especially since I’m forced to keep my middle finger splinted and held up high. Which is strangely therapeutic:

Oh, and in response to LadyGoat’s comment from a few days ago, I did a hell of a job on the bushes before the accident! Check out this artistry:

Ok, so now onto the nc-17 part of this post, if you dare, you can see pictures of the finger carnage. For everyone’s sake, they’re after the jump…
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Thanks for all the well wishes!

Thankfully I took my last pain med on Monday. Vicodin made me nauseous. Percoset gave me headaches and caused really weird dreams. True story: Sunday night, I dreamt that something (either a lizard or a piranha) had latched itself on to my bad finger — and I was desperate to pull it off. Unfortunately that led me to forcibly pulling off my finger splint in the middle of the night and shifting the pressure bandage over the wound — Verily I say to thee the test of true love is changing your drug addled spouse’s finger dressing at 2.30 in the morning. I married a good woman.

Any pain from the finger was worth getting my head back together.

Anyway, I’m feeling so much better now.

healing continues
vicodin causes some nausea
only one hand types

That’s about it. I’m down to one pain pill ever few hours. I’m looking forward to none. The finger looks prettly gnarley, but it’s got color other than purplish-green) so thats a great thing.

BTW, if you haven’t seen Shake Hands With Danger, where the previous title came from, check it out here.

As the few of you who check this blog have noticed, things have ground to a halt. That’s been driven by a few things.

Summer research, at the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle and within the local citizen journalism community, has been taking a lot of my time. The rest has been going to RIT and publishing related research there.

Perhaps the bigger problem are mySQL/database issues that I’ve run into since migrating all of the old blog content to the Wordpress platform. Basically, I need to bite the bullet and upgrade my database.

Finally, I’m planning on a major site update (ironcially moving the blog directory location one last time).

Long and short, over the next few days I’m planning on backfilling some entires into the blog, but up to date content is still a bit aways.  See you all in July.