Where the Sidewalk Begins ...

State of the Union

I went for a while where it was all politics all the time. That tapered off in the last year because George Bush makes my head hurt. A lot. And sometimes his policies or ideas make me cry. A lot.
Anyway, I won't be watching the State of the Union address tonite, primarily because I can neither watch nor listen to him talk without lots of shuddering and wincing. Aside from what he is saying, his delivery - both visually and audibly - are generally cringe-worthy. I will most likely read the speech, or whatever the New York Times prints - tomorrow. I will probably not blog on it because it will all just upset me as I pray for 2008 and hope the Democrats can manage to get their act together beyond Hilary.
So that's all I have to say about politics for now. Woudn't want to cry, you know.

Never Doubt Your Cheerleaders

As many of you may know, I'm a Steelers fan. It started in college (it's a long story as to why) and continues to this day. It doesn't make me overly popular here in Cincinnati though. ;-)
I'm not a rabid football fan. When I was a cheerleader (yeah, most of my life, through college), I knew a lot more about the game than I do know. Every cheer squad I was ever a part of had to take written tests on the intricacies of both football and basketball to be able to cheer. Do not doubt the cheerleaders - there's a reason they know when to scream "Defense!"
However, I've forgotten most of what I've learned. (If you don't use knowledge, it leaves so that other stuff can fill up your brain.) Despite my lack of knowledge, I've stood by my Steelers. When I remember, I try to wander around the house in a Steelers sweatshirt on a Sunday. Needless to say, I'm thrilled beyond words that my guys - esp the Bus - are heading back to the Superbowl. Last time I remember they were in the SuperBowl, I was recently out of college (probably it was 1995) and hadn't yet moved to Maryland. The SuperBowl was on NBC and there was a super-sized episode of Friends on directly after the game: an episode which featured Jean-Claude Van Damme going on a date with Rachel. I had also gotten my only tattoo (on my shoulder) the day before. 

San FranJello

Found this via Boing Boing:

An artist has created the city of San Francisco out of Jello. The art has a limited shelf life (obviously) and survives via photographs and video. Apparently it's launching a new exhibit at the always wonderful Exploratorium.

Pens

I've decided I need to invest in a decent pen for correspondence. I'm still really good about sending real paper cards and thank you notes and such to people (as opposed to only the electronic versions of such). I'm always scrabbling for a pen that looks okay on the nice paper I'm using and coming up short. It also needs to be a pen that won't smear, as I'm left-handed and tend to drag my hand over previously written material as I write.  While I want to invest in a nice pen, I also don't want to drop an insane amount of money. Past experience tells me I'll lose the pen (and find it again) three or four times within a year.

That said, any suggestions? I know nothing about pens ...

Apple Whine

I want to whine about something. Less than a year ago I purchased my iBook, along with tons of software, including iWork '05 and I also have a copy of iLife '05.  The '06 versions of both packages have been released. As far as I can tell, there is no "upgrade package," which is why I'm whining. Why should I have to pay $80 just to get the new features of iWork as well as the parts of iLife that I want (the new features of iPhoto, and the new iWeb)? Shouldn't they have an upgrade package for those of us who have '05? It's just frustrating.

In other news, today I learned that my arm is not yet ready to a) move a vacuum cleaner up a flight of stairs, b) use a vacuum cleaner, c) move a chair up a flight of stairs, and d) make minor rearrangements to my office furniture/rugs.
Live and learn! Ouch!

Me & Reality TV

I've always tried to avoid reality TV. The first time Joe Millionaire was on, Kevin & I watched it out of curiousity. The first season of The Apprentice we watched in case Trump imparted any actual business wisdom. But that was it - the extent of our reality-TV watching.

Then last summer we stumbled onto the WB's Beauty & the Geek, which is currently running its second season, and got hooked. Beauty & the Geek is not a love-match reality show, which is refreshing. It's also not "let's do some stupid challenge with no point." Instead, the beauties are charged with teaching the geeks a little about pop culture and a lot about how to feel comfy around a beautiful woman. The geeks are charged with teaching the beauties how to do things like change a tire or fix a computer. They're paired into teams - one beauty and one geek per team. Of course, one team will get booted off at the end of each episode. It's a nifty social experiment with a sense of humour. The geeks this season are so much geekier than last season -

Stupid Girls

As a rule, the music I listen to is slightly off the beaten path and is sandwiched between NPR hourly reports on the local college station. It's good stuff, but not what your average teenager is listening to either. I'm "out of touch" with popular music, but that's not a new thing for me. Because of my um, eclectic taste, I couldn't tell you the first thing about Pink as a recording artist. However, I came across a new song/video of hers this morning and it's awesome. She pokes so much fun at Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Ashlee & Jessica Simpson, plastic surgery, and just the shallow "stupid girl" culture in general. It's great - the point of the video? To convince girls that it's better to just be yourself, and okay to be smart, than to aim to be Paris Hilton. Anyway, it's funny and has a message and is definitely worth a look. See the video here.

Gadgets!

Just a post with a "gadget" update:

Virtual Pets: Let's start with the fun one. Since Kevin is allergic to furry animals and I'm an animal lover, I go without. People are finding ways to rectify the situation. For Christmas I received an iDog, a rather needy, cute, and opinionated speaker for my iPod. He barks, whines, needs petting, and "eats" music. He lights up and is very expressive.
For my birthday I received a Perfect Petzzz Siamese kitten. This cat sleeps near my desk in its pet bed and looks pretty damned real. She actually breathes and sort of even purrs. If you just glance, it looks like a real sleeping kitty. According to the owner's manual, she does things like play, eat, and bathe while I'm sleeping and then she sleeps while I'm awake. Clever, eh? Apparently she'll also never die. If her batteries go, then she slips into a coma, but never dies. As you walk by her, you can't help but pet her. I named her Tiki. I haven't yet named the iDog.

iTalk for iPod: When I first got my iPod, I wanted an iTalk to take to business meetings and record the proceedings. I was told by several people that I'd never use it. Last year, I saw someone using it at a conference and I ran right out to buy one. It's come in handy twice now - first at my conference last November. I recorded the keynote speakers (like Malcolm Gladwell) and was able to upload and share the MP3 with others from the conference. When we got back from the cruise, I had a big meeting and knew that my note-taking skills wouldn't be too great because of my hand. I recorded the meeting. I just went through the recording and found all sorts of things I missed. Plus, now I have a record of everything that was said. iTalk picks up sound really well - I'm very impressed. There's also not too much background messy noise. I've read bad reviews of it but I haven't had any problem - either with battery drainage (on my iPod Photo) or with iPod freezing.

OneNote & TabletPC: OneNote is an amazing piece of software for notetaking. I always thought I needed a tablet PC for it, but today I just typed right into it. I'm very impressed. Within my "notebook" I have a folder for each client. Inside each folder I have sections for specific areas. You can record audio direct from OneNote (handy during a lecture) or associate audio files with your notes. I also have a Personal folder with various sections. Last night I wanted to record some things about how I decorated the house for the holidays, because I liked the end result this year. I whipped out my tablet pen and wrote several pages, all filed under my Holiday Decorating 2005 section.

OneNote allows you to print to the software, meaning I can grab a web page (or a snippet of a web page), a pdf, a word doc, and so on, and print it to One Note, where I can mark it up. If your professor gives you a handout you can download it (from Blackboard, etc) or scan in the hard copy and drop it into your OneNote Notebook section for that class. You can write notes on it. You can send your Notes to Outlook as text and share your notes with your classmates and vice versa.

You're not constrained by the page, as you are in word. Typing or writing, you can put text anywhere you want and add empty space in the middle of a page just as easily. Whether typing or writing, I really appreciate OneNote and am definitely looking forward to the new release this fall (I think) which will be mobile-connected and provide the abillity to have more than one Notebook.

The Tablet PC and OneNote are a very powerful combination for students - especially college students. But with the notetaking abilities in OneNote, all students should be using it to electronically organize their notes.

Doin' the Loop-d-loop

Via Guy Kawasaki's blog, I've discovered a nifty little tool called Film Loop. Sort of Flickr-ish, sort of not. I'm intrigued by it. I do wish it didn't involve a quick little software installation, but such is life. Check it out here.

Welcome to FilmLoop™. Free software to broadcast, find, and share photos. Share photo Loops with all your friends. Link a Loop on your Blog or Web site. Drag and drop photos directly to the desktops of your entire social network in a live, continually updating Loop.     

There are a lot of potential uses for this, in both everyday internet life and in education. I need to play with it a little more, but it may make my photo albums much more streamlined in the future. We'll see.

Dining Room Table

Yesterday I used my various birthday dollars to purchase a "new" dining room table! Our current table is fairly serviceable - it's rickety, but Kevin had plans for fixing that. However, the top is sort of a laminate on top of the wood, and it's rather ugly. I always had to keep a tablecloth on top of it to make it look pretty and I tried to use oversized table cloths to cover the legs as well. Yesterday we ran out to the Legacies warehouse sale. The best way to describe Legacies is that all the wealthy folks in the Hyde Park area donate their furniture. Legacies then appraises the furniture and prices accordingly. The prices then drop on a weekly basis (At the warehouse sale, prices are static). It's a gamble whether you want to pay the higher price or wait for the price to drop and hope the item is still there. Money spent at Legacies benefits a charity.

We went yesterday just to look around - I had no intention of buying, just looking around for ideas and prices. Then there was the vintage drop-leaf dining table with gatelegs and two "insert" leaves as well. I bought it, for $195 (a real steal!). I could have gotten 6 chairs as well, for the combined price (table and chairs) for $350. I didn't like the chairs at all though. We have gorgeous dark wood mission style chairs. None of my wood pieces/floors match and my styles are sort of a hodge podge of clean modern and old woodworking. It sounds chaotic, but seems to work well so far because all the pieces are interesting in themselves. (The photo isn't of our table, but the closest I could find.)

We pick up the table on Wednesday. It sits two people with the drop leaves down, which is perfect for our small dining area. I also will only need table runners, not table cloths, which I don't like because I have to wash and iron them after every meal. We can extend one drop leaf to sit up to 4, two drop leaves to sit 6, and insert one or two of the insert leaves to sit up to 12. Yep - at full leaves and extensions, this table will extend out into the living room and be perfect for dinner parties, wine tastings, etc. It's also really unusual.

Most importantly, we picked it out. It's our table - not a hand me down. In the last year we've really started acquiring our own furniture and it's really cool. Kevin will fix the old table and we're giving it to my little sister who is getting married later this year. We figure they'll need it.

The Slow RoboGoodbye

My anger at Macromedia/Adobe is slow but steady. RoboHelp is quirky, but it accomplishes a lot. The most recent release (about 2003 I think) had a million and one upgrades that made Help authoring much less cumbersome and available in many formats. Generating a layout of a word document, flash help, web help, or HTML help was easy all from the same content. That is a big time-saver for your average tech writer like me.

I'd been slightly worried about RoboHelp's future, and was unable to get information out of a contact of mine at Macromedia back in October. However, from reading a few articles today, I have learned two things:
1) RoboHelp has been may have been unofficially "sunset" by Macromedia/Adobe
and
2) The previous RoboHelp/Blue Sky/eHelp team (RoboHelp has had many incarnations in the last 13 years) has formed a new company, MadCap Software, which is very possibly the future in help authoring.
I know, this is boring to you all. But it's important for my job security. I've signed up for the last beta test of Madcap's Flare software, as well as a sneak peak that gets me a $350 discount (the initial offering will be priced at $850). After I play with it, I'll post more, but as of right now, I think it's got a lot of potential.
The Future of RoboHelp
Is RoboHelp Going Away?
Dear Help Authoring Professionals ...
Madcap Software

Hypnotize Your Bunny

I had to post this - it's a combination of adorable, strange, and hilarious. I think it freaked Kevin out a little and it reminded me that I would love to have a bunny (oh, but for the 10,000 cords in this house).
How to Put Your Bunny in a Trance

Steve Jobs Movie Posters

A contest was held where people put Steve Jobs into movie posters. The winner received an iPod. Some are stupid, some are brilliant, but they are all pretty funny. Examples include iTrip (Road Trip), Enemy of Bill Gates (Enemy at the Gates), The iPodFather (the Godfather), and The Big Woznowski. You have to go take a look!

Contest Entries

Winners

RoboFrustration

I am beyond frustrated with RoboHelp. My clients all request it - it's the industry standard. And there is very little competition out there for it. I need a legitimate copy of it and Macromedia/Adobe charges no less than $999.99! I could purchase the academic copy, at which point I pay $899.99.
I have yet to come across a piece of software, ever, that is worth a thousand dollars. Certainly not RoboHelp which is, to be kind, extra quirky on its best days. On eBay, you can only buy old (therefore useless thanks to Windows) versions, or purchase the current version (academic) for $500.00. While that is better than full price, it's still a large amount to pay for software.
I've searched for alternatives. But an alternative needs to create not just Windows help files, but HTML and Flash-based help files. (This enables the end-result Help to be run on any system.) Of course, there's also the "client requesting" thing. Anyway, it's all very frustrating, and expensive, and I'm holding off on the purchase a little while longer.

Wicked Lines

Kevin works for 5/3 Bank, which sponsors the Broadway series in Cincinnati. This means we can buy tickets in that in-between time - between when the subscribers buy their subscriptions and when the subscribers buy their spare tickets. After all that, then the general public gets to buy tickets. We like this method because we generally don't want to buy tickets to all the shows (for instance, we have no interest in Little Women this spring). Wicked is coming in April. Tickets went on sale for us for 2 weeks back in August. This was unusual. Usually we can get tickets for 4-6 weeks and usually they are at a 10% or more discount. Not Wicked tickets! I was up at 5 am that day (when they went on sale on-line for us) to get tickets for Kevin & I and Kate & Ben. Mom is a subscriber and Marianne decided not to buy the tickets at the point because they were most definitely pricey. I'm used to paying $55/ticket and these were around $79 - for a Thursday!
Anyway, we have our tickets, unlike the poor people standing in line. Yep - people lined up at 9:30 pm last night for Broadway Series tickets to Wicked that went on sale this morning to the General Public. There were, I guess, only 3,000 tickets left that us 5/3 folks and subscribers didn't already buy up. Cincinnati tickets on eBay have a Buy It Now price of $350 (and people are buying). Kevin is giving serious thoughts to selling ours on eBay for a large amount and going to see it in Chicago with Ana Gasteyer as Elphaeba.
We'll see!

Old Computer Books

I know I should go rest my arm, but first a question.
Over the years I've purchased countless computer books from MicroCenter, Amazon and B&N. They run the gamut from Crystal Reports, Java, and Perl to Photoshop, Illustrator, Quicken, and the old Mac operating system.
Yesterday I pulled many of those books out, including books on Photoshop 3.0 and 4.0, Sad Macs, Bombs, and other Disasters for OS 8.0, Dreamweaver 4, Illustrator 5, and Intro to HTML 1.0. Old stuff. Not relevant any more as all of those programs have either changed substantially and/or I have new books.
What on earth do I do with all these books & CD-ROMS? Donate to my local library? Half-Price Books? Will these places even want these books? They are hopelessly out of date ...
Suggestions welcome.

Elbow Evolution

Because some of you are sadists, and some of you are just curious, I've started a Typepad Photo Album of my elbow healing. It's icky. Don't feel compelled to look.
I've posted it because 1) the elbow really is healing nicely and 2)there's no information on this out there.
When I tried to find out how I would feel AFTER the surgery, there was no information. Ulnar nerve transposition surgery is fairly irregular, and the information is limited. I wanted to know how my bandage would look, what my scar might look like, and how I would feel. There was nothing. So now, on the off chance there's someone else looking for that stuff, there's a little something that I hope is informative as well as icky. I did caption the photos, you know.
As the elbow continues to heal, I'll continue posting photos. The photos aren't the greatest since it's not only hard to take a photo of the inside of your elbow, it was hard to do it with my right hand.
Oh- how do I feel? Well, I definitely have good days and bad days. My guess is that I've been typing too much the last few days because I'm in a lot of pain today. A lot. But I'm really done with just sitting around the house too ... We'll just chalk today up to a bad day and I'll go rest.

Technorati Tags: ulnar nerve, elbow surgery, cubital tunnel

Cruise Photos Posted

Not the prettiest layout, but the cruise photos are posted. Click here to go directly to the album.

The interior room ...

The Evangelist Way

Guy Kawasaki is knee-deep in attempting to blog, which is pretty damned cool. For those of you who don't know, Guy Kawasaki was the first Mac Evangelist (that was his job title at Apple). In 1989 he published a great book on product evangelism and business models at Apple called The Macintosh Way. I have an autographed copy of it somewhere. Anyway, it's pretty cool that he's blogging and for the moment, he seems pretty tuned in to his readers.

From his first post back in December:

Welcome to my first attempt at blogging. Admittedly, I’m three years behind the bleeding edge, but I had to get over the inherent arrogance of blogging: that people would give a shitake about what I have to say.

A book every two or three years is one thing, but a daily blog? (Not that I’m committing to daily blog.) However, many people pounded on me, so here goes. Not that you can hold me to this, but I’ll write about entrepreneurship, venture capital, innovation, public speaking, Macintosh, and hockey.

From time to time, I will also discuss things that I do not “know,” but I’ve never let ignorance get in the way of expressing an opinion—and clearly, very few bloggers do! So let the good times roll…

A rose is still a rose ...

(Cross-posted to Write Tech blog)

Via Boing Boing, I found a great article over at AdAge.com, positing that a blogger is just a writer with cooler software. The creative force is the same - the medium is just changing. Therefore there's no such thing as a blogger. Much to my surprise, I found myself agreeing.

So why does the idea of the blogger as The Other continue to persist? Because many bloggers, of course, like the idea of being all alterna; it’s a point of pride, a tenet of the “blog community” (whatever that is), that bloggers are superior to the musty, lumbering, out-of-touch traditional media. And for traditional-media types, blog/blogging/bloggers are variants of a sort of linguistic armor -- labels that allow old-school-ists to convince themselves that they are the true professionals, and they needn’t radically alter the way they work (i.e., work way faster, interact constantly with readers, be vastly more voracious, etc.) to compete with the amateurs, the arrivistes.

In case you want more, you can read the whole article after the jump.

Slight Redesign

Taking a nod from Kara, who always has awesome banners and is currently sporting Kermit (and who gave me the Fraggles), I grabbed a shot of one of my favorite Muppets. I call the theme "Rowlf Sings the Blues." ;-)  It's an experiment, so we'll see how long it lasts.

Perfect Birthday Weekend

I had this great post composed and then something went wonky, and I lost it. Since my hand now hurts, I'm just going to sum it up -
The Art Institute of Chicago is incredible. I love Toulose-Lautrec and some of his work is there. Among others, we also saw this, this, this, and this, all of which are just incredible.
We shopped in the museum store and Kevin purchased for me (part of the birthday) a small replica of Degas' The Little Dancer. I used to have a replica of the sculpture, and then it shattered, and hadn't ever been replaced. Now it has been and lives in our living room. He picked up a pretty cool Toulouse-Lautrec tie for himself and we even bought some Christmas cards for next year.
We checked in at the Palmer House Hilton where they gave us a gorgeous corner room on the Hhonors floor (plus double points and miles!) and sent up a mocchachino, chocolates, and champagne for my birthday. (Always join those hotel membership programs ...).
We had dinner at Bin 36, at the House of Blues Hotel. We had three flights (yep, flights) of wine, 1 flight of cheese, 1/2 a gourmet pizza each, chocolate fondue for 2 (with homemade marshmallows) and Merryvale Antigua for our dessert wine. Dinner was amazing. We joined the Bin 36 club, which gives us a discount whenever we return. We ate in the Tavern (not the uber-fancy Cellar, although we had access to the menu) and had a leisurely 3-hour dinner with no rush. I highly recommend the place for both the wine & cheese selection and for the fun attitude (Live well. Drink wine. Have fun.). We purchased some wine and some Wine Knowledge flash cards in their shop.
Sunday we spent all day exploring the sales at Marshall-Field's. (My birthday falls on the best weekend of the year for sales!) We finally got back home at 10:30 last night, where I found a package from Kara containing the Fraggle Rock DVDs. YAY!!!
It really was a perfect birthday weekend!

Adult Child of Divorce

I was in my mid-20s when my parents got divorced. It was awful for me and I ran off to Maryland in part to get away from them both. Their separation and subsequent divorce took years and was very messy. As an adult, they both told me all about it and occasionally asked me to speak as their mouthpiece for the other.
I've always said that had I been 2 or 10, the divorce would have been easier. I would have grown up with it and I certainly wouldn't have been so oddly placed in the middle. More of the issues would have been hidden from me. Instead, they made me incredibly angry, shared everything with me, and drove me as far away as I could get.
Last night, Mom called and they are at it again. They've been separated slightly over 10 years and still, STILL, things come up. This time, older and wiser, I've decided to not talk to either one of them about the current issues. They can work it out themselves. I'm playing dumb. I am not going to be put in the middle again. ARGH! They definitely put a damper on an otherwise perfect weekend.

Typepad Template

Bleh - I can't find any Typepad templates that strike my fancy. If anyone is bored and would like to design a banner for my two-column Typepad blog, I'd appreciate it. I don't quite yet have the finger dexterity to start playing around in Photoshop just yet.

I Can Write on My PC!

I bought a convertible tablet PC. Er ... my company bought me a convertible tablet PC. (Same difference, when I am the company.) I've been excited about this particular PC ever since we took Kevin's brother to visit Morehead. This is the PC they offer to their students. I have to say that as far as education goes, the tablet PC certainly rocks. There are so many things you could do with it, from both the learner and the instructional sides. In fact, I'm so intrigued, I'm giving thought to attending an academic workshop at Purdue in April. I am an instructional designer/technologist, so this is really up my alley.

As for my tablet, it's a Gateway CX2610 and so far I love it. We uninstalled all the various CRAP that comes on new PCs (Earthlink, MSN, AOL, Norton, etc, etc, ) and popped on all the stuff we like, such as AVG, Firefox, and so on. And I started in on installing software. (BTW, I seem to have completely misplaced my copy of Lectora 2005. On the off chance anyone has a copy, I think I still have my own registration key. Argh! I have 2006, but my clients need 2005.)

The Gateway had all the extras that I really wanted. Not only is it convertible (it will be excellent when I teach training classes!), but it has a CD and DVD burner and a 5-in-1 memory stick reader, as well as a Firewire port and 802.11g. I couldn't be happier. I just wish my arm would hurry up and heal so that I can really start writing on the thing. Right now, I couldn't tell you how well the tablet works because my arm doesn't really work! ;-)

I've played around with Windows Journal, which I don't like, and OneNote, which I do. Or rather, I think OneNote has enormous potential in both an office and a classroom environment. I'm intrigued by what I've read about OneNote 12, to be released when they release the next version of Office.

I also like a lot of little tools (or toys) available for free from Microsoft for the tablet PC. MS seems to be 100% behind tablet PCs. There is a flash card maker, equation writer, dictionary, calculator - all tools that let you write on your PC. I also downloaded some awesome extensions for Firefox, including GeckoTIP, which integrates ink and tablet into Firefox as well. I also found a Clip to OneNote extension for Firefox that lets me send web site clippings directly into OneNote.

I started exploring what can only be called the Tablet PC community. It reminds me of the Mac community before Apple went mainstream. These are diehard folks who own 1 or more tablets and would never own anything else. They are chock full of useful and interesting information (except where in the world I can get a replacement pen for when I inevitably lose mine - Gateway seems to be permanently out of stock ).

So that's my new toy. Still working, slowly, on customizing the machine just the way i like it and transferring files (all hail USB sticks!).

I'm done for the day, as my fingers now ache. I miss blogging!

UPDATE 01/17: We upgraded the 512 MB of memory to 1 GB last night. Woohoo! This machine now officially rocks.

Cool Office Wizard

I bought a new PC (more on that in the next post) and have been banging my head against the wall trying to customize Outlook and Word. On my previous laptop, I had both of those programs scarily customized and cannot figure out how I did it. Today, I discovered this little blog post quite by accident.

Warner Crocker is a theatre guy in Virginia who also happens to be a tablet PC enthusiast and a Microsoft MVP. He mentioned the Office Save Your Settings Wizard:

The wizard can be found in Start/Microsoft Office/Microsoft Office Tools and saves your settings to a file that can then be used to restore them. This can come in really handy during a reinstallation/ flattening/paving a machine.

So, keep this in mind when you're transferring machines or restoring. I haven't finished using it yet, but I have high hopes it will will remove my Outlook headaches.

Birthday

Today is Friday the 13th. Tomorrow I turn 30 (again). For those of you who don't know, I'm 30 until Kevin catches up with me. (I think I have 2 more years of being 30).
Tonite we head to Chicago for my birthday. Last year we went to a couple of museums for my birthday and this year I requested the Art Institute. Should be fun!

Elbow Health

As far as my elbow goes, I'm a lot better. I'd put me at about 65-70%. That's probably about right, considering that I've got about 2 more weeks before the wound is officially healed.

I'm typing better, but I also can only type for short periods of time, or my ring finger gets shooting pain. The pinkie is better and even felt normal for about 2 minutes the other day.

I can almost eat with my left hand again, can almost fasten various female accoutrements all by myself, and can now use both hands to shampoo my hair.

All is looking up.

Technorati: elbow, ulnar, ulnar nerve, elbow surgery, cubital tunnel

back home again

hi there!
well, we got home from the trip on sunday. as you can see, my left pinky finger still isn't up to par and that left shift key seems miles away ... my arm did improve on the trip though. i can get a fork to my mouth, with my left arm, once or twice before i have to give up. that's actually a big improvement. needless to say, it's slow going, and occasionally really painful. i was hoping to progress further by my birthday, but since that's on saturday, it doesn't look like it. relaxing really helps though!

the cruise was interesting. we enjoyed it, but we learned things to look for if we ever decide to buy a cruise ourselves.