2941

Jason – your NYT illustrations are fabulous, as usual. Congrats!

2942

Yeah, some of those do look familiar and I remember seeing the Champlin name attached to some of the info cards about where the planes came from. And actually, the high rate of reproductions was one of my few complaints. I don’t mind it as much with the WWI planes, but seeing reproduction WW2 planes seems weird. Not that I would have been able to tell the difference if they hadn’t said they were reproductions.

The other weird thing was the lack of Boeing built stuff given that the museum incorporates Boeings original factory building. None of the WW2 Boeing built bombers were present, for example.

The Yak-9 (Soviet WW2 fighter) was probably the highlight for me. You don’t see many Soviet WW2 planes around in the US. The near highlight was a model collection of all the planes of WW2 as far as the major powers went. There was probably a thousand or more of them, all built by a single guy. :-0

2943

Thanks, Sparks!

2944

Jason: Wowzers. Was reading the Krugman piece and saw the illustration name…And I thought to myself…Is this the same guy as the Dominons mapmaker? What a genius. Congrats and kudos.

saw on your blog you featured the old album games. I used to have Apache/french foreing legion. Legion was quite fun. Apache was ehhhhh… But legion had the “we’re all gonna die” and you got attached to the fighters…or as much as you can too tiny cardpaper cutouts representing berbers and the Foreign legion.

2945

Actually I don’t know that they’re paying yet. I have to get the inspector’s report, send it off, request the repairs, wait for the response, etc…

But we do have an estimate which says that the house is worth more or less exactly what we’re paying and we’re hoping that this, coupled with the fact that it’s been vacant and on sale for 2 years, is enough to convince him to do the work. He apparently got another, higher offer on the house right after he’d signed the contract, so we can’t be too aggressive with what we ask for from the inspection, but I think working hot water and electricity is pretty damn reasonable.

As for your water heater, I think the bank’s thinking is that they’re taking something like 80% on the dollar or less, so it’s reasonable for you to make up the difference. In my case we’re buying at the appraised value. If he wants to sell it for 80% of its current appraised value I will happily pony up a couple thousand to fix these few things. ;)

2946

I showed the illustrations to one of our layouters, who also happens to be a childhood friend and the guy who introduced me to stuff like Watchmen. I did it for two reasons, I thought they were great and wanted to share, and I wanted to say “we can totally afford to hire this guy!”

To my surprise he allready owned Berlin. So you’re like really famous and cool and stuff. And published in NYT.

2947

Now if only we could get Jason to illustrate a Tom Chick article in the New Yorker…

Can you guys get on that?

2948

Warning If the symptoms and results of intestinal diseases gross you out, or if you have a habit of responding poorly to hearing about other people’s medical problems, then please skip this post.

Warning - Warning - Warning

Despite discouraging results of my first non-google information attempt (Thanks Tom!), and the fact that the situation was not getting any better throughout Monday, I went to Student Health to speak to a doctor about what may be wrong (Tuesday). She asked me several questions, and she said it was probably something relatively non-trivial, such as hemorrhoids, and that I shouldn’t be too worried unless it is pro-longed. Then I said that my grandfather has a history of intestinal disease. In which, her attitude changed and she thought I should go to the hospital at the medical campus right away, just in case it’s something more serious.

She calls the hospital and get’s in contact with the proctology department to see if they can take me in, and they have time for me that afternoon. I go to the hospital, get seen by a regular(?) doctor first who asks all the same questions as the Student Health doctor. Then he leaves and a young proctologist comes in with a couple of med students (yay college hospitals). He asks me more questions. I’ve been sleeping for upwards to 12-15 hours a day for the past 3 weeks, but I attributed that to depression (though it was uncharacteristic of me, even when I’m depressed.) Also, a week or two of “average” intestinal pain + bathroom grossness, but that was not unusual for me because I’m Lactose Intolerant. No serious abdominal pain, fever, swelling, or weight loss. Due to some of the above symptoms, the bleeding while going to the bathroom, and family history, they wanted to take a stool sample(gross), a blood sample, and go ahead and take a CT scan, to see what they could see.

Okay, I go take a CT scan. They don’t see much, but they find what they were looking for. The proctologist said that my lower intestines have appeared to start narrowing in my lower GI tract near by colon. Also, there are abnormalities(?) in the same general area which may be the beginning of ulcers/abscesses. Great, so, the doctor says that he 95% sure that I am in the beginning stages of some gastro-intestinal disease. One student recommended that we do some sort of barium enema (eek) to see the extent of the damage, but the doctor said that it likely wouldn’t be good enough, we should go straight for a colonoscopy (which doesn’t sound exciting either, but I think I would rather have this than a barium enema). See if they can get a sample, and wait for results on the other samples they’ve taken.

So! An exciting colonoscopy scheduled Thursday.

P.S. I typed this up while sitting on the toilet, because I drank all that shit they gave me to prepare for the test, and I feel like I’m going to kill myself.

2949

Man, you sure showed Tom.

I hope everything works out okay for you.

2950

Kaiser keeps calling me to do a colonoscopy and I just refuse. I don’t have your symptoms though.

2951

Apparantly they drug you up nice for it. Plus, my morbid curiosity of getting to see my innards is piqued.

2952

After I had a recent CT scan, I asked the technician if I could see the results. She gave me a look, and then said okay. But she couldn’t tell me what things were. Weird stuff. I was more curious about the workstation and software, though.

2953

Good luck with that. My dad had a couple of those years back (turned out to be nothing serious). He said that while it was clearly uncomfortable, it wasn’t too bad, and he’s a complete pussy that whines about the smallest things, so you should be OK.

2954

Yeah they’re not allowed to do that, that’s for the doctors to do. They can get in trouble if they tell you stuff, especially if what they tell you turns out to be wrong.

They’ll tell you if it’s clear that you know what’s wrong anyway. I went in for an ultrasound of my ovaries and as soon as I told the guy I knew he was looking for cysts, he turned the screen around and said “IF you had cysts, which I’m not saying you do, they’d be here and look exactly like what you see on the screen.” And then he pointed to the very obvious cysts :P

While I’m here, WISDOM TEETH UPDATE! I got dry sockets and they felt like death in my mouth. Percocet and Vicodin did nothing and after a day or so of extreme non-stop pain, I went back to the oral surgeon and he filled the sockets with something that is clearly made of magic. Magic and clove oil. The clove oil, while doing wonders for the pain, leaves an unfortunate odor and taste, not unlike that of clove cigarettes. I smell like I’ve been eating goth kids and not brushing after.

2955

Brilliant.

2956

Yeah I’ve had both a colonoscopy and a gastroscopy and the gastroscopy was the worst due to constant gagging. None of them were what I’d call painful, just unpleasant. The examination will probably go just fine, they do wonderful things with drugs these days!

2957

Yeah, I had to have a colonoscopy about 15 years ago, without drugs of any kind, and it had me screaming in agony. For the follow-up repeat about two years ago they drugged me up and it was AWESOME (er, relatively speaking). I love that magical time jump between when the anesthesiologist says, “Start counting backwards from 15” and “We’re all done here, Mr. Lutes.”

The, um, cool part about the first one was that I was conscious, so I could watch the whole thing via the magic of fiber optics.

2958

I don’t want to do the prep, that’s the thing. My mom got really sick from a barium enema and the whole thing just gives me the shudders.

2959

We moved.

My legs are killing me. I went up and down steps a thousand times yesterday.

The house is now full of boxes and all of our stuff is in the boxes. Finding anything is a crapshoot.

Computer is set up and my office is much bigger, but I can’t finish setting it up until I finish painting the baseboards.

Cable guy arrived at 8am this morning and said he couldn’t put the cable anywhere upstairs-- that we’d need to hire an electrician to install cable outlets throughout the house. He knew a guy who could do this for us… Does that should like a scam to you guys?

2960

Depends. Most cable companies will only add an outlet to an outside wall. They drill through your outside wall to make a hole for the cable, cut a square in the drywall opposite, and install an outlet.

To do that on an upstairs wall would require someone with a ladder. Perhaps your cable company doesn’t provide this service because of safety or insurance concerns. You should call and ask them to confirm what the technician told you.