Day 61

Vlad's as good as he can be. We're still very thankful.

Most of the home repairs are over. The guys come back tomorrow to do a lot of cleanup work, and the gutters. And then there's the sheetrock inside where it leaked.

DirecTV guy came to recalibrate the dish, but he didn't have a big enough ladder. On Sundays they don't carry the 40-foot ladder. He said it like it's against their religion. WHATever. Another night of no Olympics.

But we have 8 of the 10 Oscar-nominated films to watch. Up in the Air was awesome. But last night we watched Couples' Retreat (NOT a contender), which was nowhere near as funny as I expected. But it was OK.

There's nothing extraordinary in Vlad's schedule this week. We're hoping things calm down a bit.

Day 57

Vlad is fighting a minor infection. If it's not from his line I would be very surprised. It bleeds more than any line he's ever had. You can't completely clean it because you have to limit your cleaning window to keep things as sterile as possible. I suppose infusion nurses could do a thorough cleaning, but no one at the hospital seems bothered by all the dried blood in there.

He is pretty tired and kind of weak. His eyebrow hair is finally falling out, four months after his last chemo.

He was at the hospital all day yesterday. His sugar is doing weird things. He remains on the antibiotic infusions. I think just dealing with the 3 infusions a day tires him out. Last month I wistfully thought about a weekend in Galveston this month, and going to Fort Worth to see the family. And we were invited to Beaumont this weekend. But it's just not possible. It's tricky staying on top of all the meds and infusions. Adding travel to the mix would be asking for trouble.

As it turns out, I'm working the homepage on Sunday. We've lost two homepage people in the past month. I saw this coming a week ago when my coworker Will said he had taken a job with Memorial Hermann's web site. He's a great guy and will be a huge loss. But I hope they get the news side sorted out soon. I don't need this.

Anyway, there's a lot going on with the siding job that's turning into a roof job. This crew has been so wonderful. Ricky and his guys are from Honduras. My front patio was a shambles after the siding install, but they power-washed everything and it almost looks better than when they started. I mean, the freeze killed the plants or it might have been much worse. But all in all, great.

When Ricky got the sagging roof off he garage he found a huge problem: a bad frame job. It had been repaired long before we moved in. Another few hundred dollars to rebuild the frame. We're also getting a horizontal vent on the roof, replacing the rotating turbans (my term) we replaced after Ike. The turbans blew off during Ike and water gushed in. And they had been installed incorrectly before we moved in, we found out. The folks who lived here before us were not very careful with their repairs.

Anyway, just saw this morning that Capt. Phil Harris of the crab boat Cornelia Marie on the show "Deadliest Catch" died. That's one of Vlad's favorite shows. We watched a lot of it in the hospital. We used to shake our heads at Capt. Phil, chain-smoking and drinking coffee and not eating anything and working 20 hours straight. Sorry to see he died; he was a really cool guy.

Day 52 - update

Vlad's been at the hospital since this morning. It's taking longer than normal; Fridays are always a zoo at M.D. Anderson, rivaled only by Mondays. His blood tests showed some bacteria, but apparently it's treatable with antibiotics. I need to change his dressing tonight.

A neighborhood spy reported our siding job to the authorities. We were said to be using salvage Hardieplank, which we aren't. Upon investigation, our crew was using siding over the garage that was leftover from another area on our house, which is a no-no. It's been rectified. I hope. But it was a very anxious afternoon.

We're meeting with said spy, board member Mark McDonald, who lives two doors down this evening. He called the association rather than knocking on our door. Great guy.

UPDATE: Vlad met with Mark. It was very friendly and Mark said the association misunderstood his statement; he was only trying to save us from the headache of a redo. We're being grownups about it. On the outside.

Day 50

Left the house at noon today for work. Ricky and the crew were heating up their lunch in a microwave on the flatbed plugged into the portable generator. I told my coworker Kathy about it and she said the crew working on her house today were doing the same thing! Trend in construction crew culture? We still don't know where they pee. Sorry, but we're wondering.

Day 49

Vlad was at hospital most of the day with infusions and whatnot. It's routine now.

I had to work at home because we're getting new siding on the front of the house. Four workers banging on the house all day. And they had to turn the water off for awhile. I'm glad the freeze killed most of my plants because I don't think they would survive this. It looks like a war zone out there. I've never seen so much scaffolding in such a small area.

And they're all day screaming at each other in Spanish. It sounds like they're arguing. I. Hate. Arguing. Just like Russian. The Russian spoken at dinner parties always makes me nervous. It sounds like they're saying, "Shutup! You're a stupid cow! Why don't you just do us all a favor and leave!" And what they're actually saying is more like, "Pass the mashed potatoes! I am crazy for them!"

At one point the garbage truck came. The folks across the street are moving out and they're begging the trash guys to take the couch and the La-Z-Boy and the coffee tables. And these trash guys are crushing them up. (They took our old water heater a few years ago, much to my surprise. It sounded like a large animal dying when they crushed it.)

Anyhoo, here's our guys with this huge Crew Cab pickup and a very long t-neck flatbed trailer. They're blocking 3 driveways, and trash. Between them and the garbage truck, there is no access or egress for anyone else. My cat's wandering around, children riding bikes in and around the mess.

And our crew leader Ricky's trying to get the trash guys to take the construction trash. Ha! They wouldn't. Ricky says it's cool; he'll take it. I'm thinking, yea, you will, it's in the contract. They all pile in the pickup and I open the gate for them. Then the trash foreman Martin comes over to apologize about not taking the 4-foot-by-6-foot plywood sheets and the wood siding. He introduces himself and gives me his elbow to "shake," apparently this being the etiquette for garbage workers. So I shook elbows with the lead trash dude today.

It was the most remarkable trash day ever, if you don't count water-heater day.

Vlad got home just as this surreal cloud of characters from a Fellini film was floating off beyond the gates. Then he grabbed some sour clementines to return to Kroger, where a day earlier they overcharged him by $2.60 for 2 avocadoes and he had to wait in line to get his money back.

"It took me five minutes to shop and 30 minutes to wait to pay and then get a refund," he said, annoyed.

Then he went to HEB to get more clementines. For now he can eat fruit only with a thick skin. Bananas, clementines and avocadoes. So he's pretty serious about it.

He went to bed early. He was pretty tired. That's the biggest thing. Everything else is just amazing.