Just Do It.

Cross-posted from The Weekend Scrub

This is a bit of a rant.

I work weekends. I have to be able to do just about any case that comes along. I understand that the wimps fine scrubs who work during the week are stuck in their specialties and don't have a lot of exposure to other specialties. I don't care though. There are certain cases spread through all of the specialties that every scrub working in a large hospital must be able to do. (I may make a list of these someday.) If you can't do them, go work out an outpatient surgery center, or L &D, or specialty hospital and let your position be filled by a competent scrub. Even if you don't see them every day, you gotta be able to day a crani for subdural, a thoracoscopy, an ORIF and other procedures in the "scary" specialties of ortho, CV and neuro, even if you a GYN, or Plastics or General scrub. You just have to be able to do them, or get the hell out of here.

There, I feel better.

Modern man.

Here is the definition of badass.

We are wimps. Every damn one of us.

Bad scrub.

Cross posted from The Weekend Scrub.

So I've been following this story and giving it some thought.

Short synopsis: A hep C positive scrub in Denver was caught exchanging her dirty syringes filled with saline for fentanyl syringes, which she then shot up with. Thousands of people may have been exposed. After being fired from the Denver hospital she went to work at a one day surgery center where she worked until she was arrested. Hundreds of more potential exposures.

Some interesting tidbits: the hospital knew she was Hepatitis C positive, it showed up on her blood work when she was hired. They counseled her on a ways to avoid avoid exposing patients. A few news stories have made statements that she did not have patient contact. That can't be true, if she was in fact working as a scrub, unless reaching into a patient's abdomen and holding their intestines doesn't count as patient contact.

Also the news stories say that she was caught after being found in an OR which she was not assigned to. This is interesting, as, at every hospital I have worked at, people go into other rooms all the time to steal supplies or say hello to friends. The hospital must have had serious suspicions about her, or she was found messing with the anesthesia stuff. Some of the articles mention a previous drug test which came back negative, so the hospital was probably suspicious.

The fact that she was going into other ORs explains those high numbers of potential exposures. She only worked at the hospital for about six months, so that's about 130 working days. She would have had to have been stealing dozens of syringes a day to actually expose thousands of people. In fact the hospital is testing every one who had surgery at the hospital when she was at work. Of those "only" a hundred or so will be at serious risk of exposure. Pretty horrific, but not quite as scary as the headlines.

I'm still flabbergasted at the substitution of her dirty syringes. Why? Stealing drugs I can understand, that's what addicts do. But exposing people? Surgery departments are awash with syringes. Finding sterile syringes would be quick and easy. Sterile saline is likewise easy to find. I can think of only three reasons why she reuse her dirty syringes: She was paranoid that the extra syringes would be missed; second, she didn't have access to the proper labels for the syringes, or the original labels could not be removed from the original syringe. Not having a proper label on her replacement syringe would expose her quickly. Finally she may have been an evil bitch who wanted to infect other people.

My final thought is that, without taking away any of her responsibility, there are others who have seriously screwed up here. There is no way that she should have been able to go get Fentanyl syringes. Narcotics are suppose to be strictly controlled. Ideally, an anesthesia provider should never draw up a narcotic until he or she is ready to give it. What was obviously happening was that anesthesia was pulling up drugs, setting them down, and leaving the room. Stupid. Especially, as seems likely, there was a staff person about whom the hospital had suspicions of drug abuse.

General badness all around.

Farrah Fawcett, R.I.P.

I am going duplicate a thousand of blog posts across the internets today. Farrah Fawcett lost her battle with cancer today. She was 62. Although her one season stint on Charlie's Angels is what made her famous, she, of course, was most famous for the poster. As does every other male of a certain age, I have fond memories of that poster.

An interesting, to me at least, side note when I was at school in Austin, my wife worked at the Umfaulf Sculpture Garden. The Garden showcases the work of Charles Umlauf, who taught sculpture in the art school at UT. In the seventies one of his models was Farrah. He made several busts of her. Here's the most recognizable, it has the hair.



And of course the poster.

Old Books are cool.

I used to sell books a little. I'd go to estate sales and the like and buy books cheap and put them on ebay or amazon and wait. If you know what you're doing, and have a little luck, it can be fairly lucrative I had several books that I paid under $3 for that sold for over $50 and a couple that went over $100. I also had a lot of books that I paid a dollar for that will eventually be donated to goodwill. Knowledge, of course, is the key, and kmowledge is often hard won.

Sometimes luck will do though. When he was 16 Capt. Nathan Harlan of the Indiana National Guard, picked up an old leather bound copy of the Federalist Papers for $7. He bought it, in part, because he was studying the Federalist Papers in school. It tTurned out to be Volume I of the two volume first edition. Facing his second tour in Iraq, he decided to cash it in, thinking he might get $500 for it. He got $80,000. As nice final touch, the auction house, Heritage Auction Galleries is waving its 20% fee in recognition of Capt Harlan's service in Iraq.

Hat tip to Ace of Spades HQ.

Random music: Philmont Hymn

Crossposted from Dafydd's Random Music.

The internet is a strange place. The elder daughter is expressing an interest in Girl Scouts. I had been holding out until she was 14, so she could join Venture Scouts, the co-ed program run by the BSA. I have an ulterior motive. Venture Scout crews can go to Philmont. I went thrice as a Boy Scout, and want to go back, badly. If she goes, I can go. To entice the elder daughter I told her, again, about Philmont. To drive the point home I searched youtube for Philmont videos. It wasn't hard to find nice videos with slide shows of the scenery. I may have hooked her. Of course I ran across some videos that use the Philmont Hymn as a soundtrack. I like the Philmont Hymn, and a spent the better part of the evening singing it. (The younger daughter now hates it.) After my evening shower I had a brain fart on the lyrics, and looked them up via Google. A little bit if searching turned up an astonishing coincidence. The Philmont Hymn was written by a 16 year old Philmont Ranger in 1947, John Westfall. Mr. Westfall died this month after a good life aged 81. It turns out that he lived in town I now live in. His funeral was at the Episcopal Church down the street from my house, the church my family occasionally attends. His obituary describes as active in scouts and in his community throughout his life. He was a past member of the board of directors for the ballet company my daughter is in. I never met him, but throughout my life his song has meant a great deal to me. I never met him, but I miss him.

So far as I know, the Philmont Hymn has only bee professionally recorded once, by the US Air Force Academy choir. I used to own this version as a single.

A birding trip

Yesterday the family and I piled into the car and wet on quick birding trip. We've been doing this fairly regularly for the past several months. Usually we don't see much out of the ordinary, but yesterday was different.

We just took a run up to Lake Copan, in part to see how high the water has gotten in the lake. We took the usual route, up what I call "Buffalo Road" and then skirting Dewey to the west and finally coming out on Highway 75 a couple of miles north of Dewey.

Last week we went up Buffalo Road and found a flock of Bobolinks, which were a life bird for all of us. Yesterday, the flock was still there. They may have settled in for the season which would be cool. Buffalo road is prime flycatcher habitat, and both Scissortails and Eastern Kingbirds were out in force. No Western Kingbirds though. The Dickcissels were also out in force. Add in a couple of Meadowlarks and Grackles and you had almost everything you could want from the Prairie.

While running up the road west of Dewey I spotted a couple of Great Egrets in a field. What Egrets were doing in a field, I'll never know. Well, I do know, they were hunting, as I saw one of them catch something a couple of times, but what they were hunting I can only guess. Perhaps there was a small pond that was hidden from view by the grass, or perhaps they were hunting mice or frogs. I dunno.

A bit later on, a red bird flew across the road in front of the car and landed on the fence. My wife called, out "Cardinal!". Something about the bird pulled me up short, though. It didn't look right. I stopped and took a look. Summer Tanager. Right then, an Eastern Bluebird flew from the section of the fence where the tanager had landed. I noticed a second bird on the fence that I at first registered as another bluebird. I quickly saw a blue head and red breast, the the bird turned a bit and I saw the green back. Painted Bunting! Summer Tanagers and Painted Buntings were two of my nemesis birds. I had neither seen either one, and here I had them both in the same binocular view. We hung out admiring the birds until a passing car flushed the birds.

We didn't see anything unexpected at Copan, although I have never seen the water that high. If it keeps raining, and they don't get a chance to lower the lake levels, Bartlesville is in for another flood. I also didn't find any Orioles at Washington Cove, which is usually a dead certainty. Maybe it's too early for them.

Here's the bird list for the day:

Double-crested Cormorant
Great Egret
Canada Goose
Turkey Vulture
Mourning Dove
Rock Pigeon
Eastern Kingbird
Scissortail Flycatcher
Blue Jay
American Crow
Barn Swallow
Cliff Swallow
Carolina Chickadee (heard)
Eastern Bluebird
American Robin
Northern Mockingbird
European Starling
Summer Tanager
Dickcissel
Painted Bunting
Meadowlark
Bobolink
Red-winged Blackbird
Common Grackle
American Goldfinch

Twenty five species. Not bad for 1 1/2 hour trip.

Manuscripts on the web: The British Library

Cross posted from Monstrous Beauty.

So, I like to go looking around the web for pretty pictures. One type of pretty picture I look for is illuminated manuscript images. One thing that I've found is that several institutions have done a great job digitizing images and making them available. Here are some of the places I've found.

Let's start with the big one. The British Library. The British Library, of course, has one of the best collections in the world. The Bibliotheque Nationale and the Vatican Library are the only close contenders I can think of.

The British Library is fairly generous, there are three ways they make manuscripts available. The big one is their Catalogue of Illuminated manuscripts. Thousands of manuscripts are cataloged here. (Over 1500 from the Harley collection alone.) Each manuscript has a upwards to twenty or so images available. The down side is that they are going methodically through the collections, and they haven't included the Cotton or Additional Manuscript collections yet, and that is where a lot of the really good stuff is.

Equally impressive is their Online Gallery of illuminated manuscripts. This used to be part of their Collect Britain site, and focused on manuscripts made in Britain. Each page is treated as separate work, but you can search by shelfmark. There are plenty of images of little known manuscripts. There are also illuminated manuscript images scattered through some of the other galleries. The Online Galleries also has a Virtual Books section with in depth looks at several important books including a late 17th cent Ethiopian Bible, the "Golf Book, the Luttrell Psalter, the Golden Haggadah, a 15th Century Hebrew Bible from Lisbon, the Sforza Hours, the Sherborne Missal, and the Lindisfarne Gospels. I can't make this feature work due to limitations of my computer and my lack of Geek skills.

A final place to look for images is the Images Online. This is primarily intended as a site to sell high quality images, but their previews are good enough quality for casual browsing. You can find images from many manuscripts not found at the other Brirish Library sites.

Finally for the British Library if you are looking for information on manuscripts, but not images, there is the Manuscript Catalogue. The entries in the catalog range from fairly complete articles, with bibliography to a few words in Latin.

Codex Manesse

Cross-posted from Monstrous Beauty

The Codex Manesse (Heidelberg, University Library, Cod. Pal. germ. 848) is a German manuscript, which was produced in Zürich between 1304 and 1340. It is an important literary manuscript, as it is the single most comprehensive source of Middle High German love songs, the songs of the minnesängers. There are 140 poets represented, who range in social status from the Emperor Henry VI to commoners. As important as the manuscript is for literary history, it is best known for its illuminations. There are 137 portraits of poets, many of them shown in full armor with heraldic devices. These illuminations have been widely reproduced, so much so that are almost the stereotype of High Medieval art. The last I was at Barnes and Noble I noticed at three books with cover art drawn from the Codex Manesse. The illustrations have also been widely used as decorative motifs. I have some wooden plaques with reproductions of some of these pages on my walls right now. Here are some of the images.


Emperor Henry VI, Fol. 6r.



Conradin, Duke of Swabia, King of Jerusalem, King of Sicily, Fol 7r.



Henry I, Count of Anhalt (The manuscript calls him Duke in error), Fol 17r.

And, since this is a manuscript of songs, here is recreation of one of the songs.

When worlds collide.

I haven't mentioned it here before, but I have spent some time over the last couple of months doing volunteer work at the special collections department of a local university library. I have been considering a change of career and going to library school. Before I jumped off that bridge, though, I thought I should have some idea of what doing library work was actually like. I also thought that it would be a great way to find people to write letters of recommendation for me.

My first project has been to inventory the library's World War I collection. They started the collection years ago, based, in part, on the fact that almost the entire male student body enlisted en masse and became part of the Rainbow Division. The donations of several alumni of their war memorabilia made a nice start and the library has, over the years, actively collected things since. They have a lot photograph and letter collections, a German code book, various logs, and lots of ephemera and other things that old men have saved from their youthful adventures. One of the collections they acquired along the was of a army surgeon named William Jason Mixter.

One of the standard instruments used in surgery is the mixter right angle clamp, seen here. Much of the instrumentation for modern surgery was developed in the first half of the 20th century, and most instruments are named after the person who developed them. Since Mixter is an unusual name, I was intrigued. A quick Google search confirmed that William Jason Mixter was almost certainly the inventor of the mixter right angle. What's more, he was a major figure in the history of neurosurgery. He was the first head of Neurosurgery at Massachusetts General, and a pioneer in back surgery. He was the first to realize that herniated discs could pain by compressing nerve roots and the spinal cord, and along with Joseph Barr, did the first successful discectomy.

The library did not buy the Mixter collection because of Mixter's importance in the history of neurosurgery, indeed they were unaware of it. They bought it because contained some interesting items that fit well with rest of the World War I collection. Nevertheless, they did end up with some stuff that was much cooler than they realized. And I got an unexpected collision of two of the different worlds in which I live.


William Jason Mixter

The day the music died

Fifty years ago today, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P Richardson "The Big Bopper" boarded a small plane and flew into legend.

The intellectual rigor of ABBA

Last month I read The Dumbest Generation by Mark Bauerlein. His thesis is that today's under-thirty crowd is the least intellectually developed generation in recent history. He blames this, in part, on the nature of the digital communications that generation uses; video games, text messaging, myspace, cell phones, etc. He argues that kids burn so much time with these forms of communication, that there is no time left for anything else. Another, more important, part of his argument, is that one reason kids burn their time away is because the previous generation allowed them to, or more accurately the guardians of our cultural heritage, teachers, scholars, writers, artists and the like, never convinced the current generation that there was anything of value in the World's cultural heritage worth pursuing.

I've also read a couple of blog posts recently by academics lamenting the unprepared minds they are expected to reach. One professor discusses in length the number of students who don't seem to understand that 800 BC came before 450 BC. There has been much talk about how even the best students view coursework and classes as mere obstacles to be overcome with the least amount of work.

All of which leads me to ABBA. Yes, the 70s Swedish pop group. I was discussing these ideas with my wife, and commented on the fact that in many universities, general history courses are often no longer required. Students don't have to know who Napoleon was in order to get degrees. I dramatized by say that one can go all the way through one's high school and college career without even hearing the word "Waterloo".

Now I challenge anyone over the age of 40. Can you hear the word Waterloo without the hearing somewhere in the back of your mind ABBA singing? Even if you are or were a die hard rocker or country fan, ABBA still seeped in and stayed there, because that's watch catchy song hooks do.

The interesting thing about this is that the ABBA song is not about the battle, but about a girl falling in love. But to get the song, you have to know the phrase "to meet one's Waterloo" meaning to come to a permanent, decisive surrender. The girl has surrendered to love, she has met her Waterloo. Of course the phrase is meaningless if you know nothing about Napoleon and the Napoleonic wars. The phrase itself has slowly slid from the language over the last thirty years as fewer and fewer people understood the referent. Today it unlikely that any band would write a song that assumed that the listened would know what happened to Napoleon at Waterloo.

So this is where we are. We live in a culture in which ABBA songs are to intellectually rigorous for the mass market. God help us.

And since we are talking about music, here's a video. Don't hit play unless you want ABBA to be stuck in your head all day.

How in the hell?

Cross-posted from The Weekend Scrub.

Working in surgery can lead to interesting questions.

Today's question is: How in the hell is it possible that someone can shoot themself in the leg with a bow and arrow?

HIPAA and me

Cross posted from The Weekend Scrub.

So there is this law that says that we medical folk can't divulge patient's medical information without a good reason. We also can't act on it for any reason other than to treat or aid the treatment of the patient. The rules are so strict that if I saw my mother's name on the surgery schedule, I couldn't go and see her after surgery unless I also got the information from a non-hospital source. HIPAA can cause some problems for bloggers, as the best stories involve patient information. I feel that on this blog I am abiding by these rules in the following ways.

I, of course, never use patient names. I don't use my name or the name of my hospital. I don't even explicitly name the city where my hospital is located, although it probably isn't difficult to figure out. However given my other interests, as seen on my other blogs, anyone who knows me would recognize me here. I am the only scrub in my town, who works the weekend shift, with my set of interests. I have a limited set of patients, so it theoretically may be possible to figure out which patient I am talking about. I doubt anyone will actually go to the trouble to figure out which town I work in, then who I am, and therefore which hospital I work at, and then connect my patients with a blog post. It could be done, but only by someone who has access to my hospital's records, and who knows me. Still I protect myself further by lying. When I say "this weekend", I mean, "sometime in the last 19 years". I can and will change the nature of a patient's injuries, disease or treatment in ways that don't change the core of the story. If I can, I might even change the patient's gender. In other words, this isn't the patient you're looking for. Go away.

Surgical cases that suck

Cross posted from The Weekend Scrub.


I made passing reference to the something that made a case suck over here, but I thought that the causes of surgery sucking could be further expanded upon. Note that some of this list is subjective. It is also viewed from the scrub staff's point of view, rather than the surgeon's, patient's, anesthesia's or circulator's point of view. I suppose that ophthalmologists actually like eye surgery. Some circulators like long cases because they get to sit. Anesthesia has a completely different set of priorities from the rest of us. They seem to think that just because the patient’s blood pressure stays in the 50s it is a bad case. There are even some scrubs who might some theses cases.

First and foremost, harvests suck. Nothing sucks worse.

Second, eyes suck, but not as much as harvests. Retina and vitreous surgery sucks more than other eyes.

Third, any case with certain doctors suck, because the doctor is an asshat. Luckily, this is actually a small set of surgeons.

Any case involving more that one surgical specialty sucks. The suck factor goes up exponentially. A case with two specialties sucks 4 times as much as a similar case with 1. Three specialties sucks 27 times as much. Four specialties sucks 256 times as much. If we get to five specialties, just put a central line in me and hook it to wall suction.

Any case which departs from its script sucks. Some departures suck more than others. This includes, for example, the unscheduled opening of an endoscopic case. Note that just because we don’t know what we are doing going in doesn’t mean that there isn’t a script. For example, an exploratory laparotomy for bowel obstruction has departed from the script if we find a huge diaphragmatic hernia. It hasn’t if we find a tumor or adhesions.

Dead bowel sucks. Smells too. That’s why it sucks.

Any case scheduled to last more that 150% of what a normal version of that case would last sucks. First it's going to last twice as long as it's scheduled for, and second the surgeon knows something, and it's not good.

Any case scheduled for longer than two hours sucks. (Corollary, heart scrubs are crazy.)

Any case that requires re-draping sucks.

Any case with broken bones in more than one limb sucks.

Any case in which the circulator has to leave the room for anesthesia more than twice sucks. The circulator is there to get me things, not them.

Aneurisms suck. All of them.

Holding retractors on vaginal cases sucks.

Interesting cases suck. After 19 years, if I haven’t seen it, I probably don’t won’t to. OK there’s one exception. Years ago, when I was a baby scrub, a case down the hall was a removal of a cyst. When the surgeon cut into the area an insect stuck its head out of the wound. The patient had been in the tropics recently. I didn’t see that case, but I’ve always wanted to see another one. Otherwise interesting is out.

So there it is, an incomplete list of ways that cases can suck. I leave out that there are certain case and doctor combinations that suck and that certain staff have people that they can't get along with, which sucks. I, of course, can get along with anyone.

The Day from Heck

I've never had a day like yesterday before. It certainly wasn't the worst day of my life, but it was far from the best. It was mainly a long series of weird, mostly minor frustrations.

The day started when I rolled over, looked at my alarm clock and noticed it was 7:15. My shift starts at 6:45. I live an hour from work. This math doesn't work well. I jump up, run through the house, grab the phone to call work. No dial tone. I get my phone service, along with my internet, from the cable company, so I pull up my browser and connect to Google. I have internet, but not phone. I find the antique, princess phone that we keep for power outages, and hook it up. No dial tone. So I quickly get dressed, and start to work. planning on stopping at a convenience store to phone work. I don't see a phone at the first store on my way. The competition doesn't have one either, and it's the last store before I leave town. I turn around to got to QuikTrip, which I know has a phone. As I pass the first store, I notice a pay phone I overlooked before and pull in. No dial tone on the pay phone. I go into the store, and ask if there is a general failure of the phone system. They have dial tone in the store, and I make my call.

An hour later I pull into the hospital. As soon as I hit the front desk, my boss tells me "Call your mother." Never a good sign. I call her. There is a minor family crisis embedded within a major crisis. I can't do anything about the major crisis, but I can fix the minor crisis. What's more I'm the only one who can do anything, and it needs to be solved immediately. I check my OR, and see that another scrub is opening and is going to be running the mayo. I'm only there to hold retractors, so I ditch my room, find a phone and solve the minor crisis with a few phone calls. I also call the cable company and get them to send a tech to my house to fix the phone. My wife will be surprised.

My first case is a big complicated case with two surgeons, each in a different specialty. One of my rules is that the suckiness of a case increases exponentially with the number of specialties in the case. Two types of surgeons means the case sucks four times as much as a comparable case with one type of surgeon. This is a long case, so the suck factor is way high. Add on that the scrub running the mayo is in over his head, and I had an unpleasant couple of hours. (On a side note, if a surgeon asks for an instrument by name, get that instrument and no other. It really will make your life easier.) The rest of the day wasn't too bad, and the evening charge nurse took pity on me and let me leave early.

As I pull into my driveway, I notice what appears to be a small dog lying in the yard, next to the drive way. It doesn't move as I pull in. I walk over to it, and it is a small dog, with a lot of Jack Russell terrier in it. I nudge it with my foot. The whole body moves in one piece. Dead. I thought dogs crawled under bushes to die. When I go in, I find out that we have to go to Wally world, and the dog must be disposed of before we leave, so as to not disturb the sensibilities of the children. My wife doesn't volunteer. While I try to wrestle the dog into a trash bag without actually touching it, a long expected cold front arrived and dropped the temperature by about fifteen degrees in five minutes. Nice touch that.

After the trip to Wally world, I notice Lord Ratbane's litter box. There is cat stool with blood in it in the box. Although the cat seems to be acting fine, there is a vet trip in his near future.

I gave up and went to bed.

Today was a nice day.

Adventures in bibliography

So, as if I don't have enough projects up in the air, I decided to tackle something that has been hovering in the back of my head for about a decade, which is to create a bibliography of medieval texts which have been translated into modern English. I have no idea how a professional bibliographer goes about creating such a bibliography (although I will, I hope, learn in the next few years.) But this is how I started.

First I needed a list of medieval authors. I started at the obvious place: Wikipedia. I entered the first medieval author that came to mind, Bede. I noted that the article is in several categories that will be fruitful to explore later, but see that in the "See also" section there is an article "English historians in the Middle Ages." It contains several lists, which I swipe. That article points to a second article, "List of English chronicles", which I also swipe. After collating the lists together and alphabetizing, I have a list about 100 medieval authors and texts, more than enough to start with.

First up on the list is Adam of Usk, a late 14th and early 15th century cleric, who spent some time around important people. He wrote a chronicle about the stuff he saw. I never heard of him or his chronicle before today. After reading his Wikipedia article, I'm off to find out what I can about English translations. A quick Google search finds me this blog entry, from which I find out that there was a nineteenth century translation and a late twentieth century translation. Next stop, the Library of Congress. Their catalog reveals 4 editions dated 1904, 1980, 1990 and 1997. The middle two are reprints of the 1904 edition, which I discover is the second edition. The 1997 is a new translation. I grab the pertinent information and move on. Swinging back by Google I find that Googlebooks has a preview of the 1997 edition. The preview includes the discussion of the manuscript tradition. It seems that Adam's chronicle survives in a single manuscript. The bulk of the manuscript is in the British Library (Add MS 10104), but at some point the final quire became separated from the manuscript. It wasn't rediscovered until 1885, after the first translation was published. The second edition included the text and translation of the lost quire. This explains why the reprints are of the second edition. Next stop is Worldcat, where I find the publication information for the first edition. I don't find any other English editions. I do find an Italian edition, though, which I ignore. For good measure, I check Bookfinder, but don't find any other editions. I am done with Adam. Repeat 10-20 times a day for ten years, and I might finish this project.

Adam of Usk, fl. 1400. English chronicler.
Thompson, Edward Maunde, Sir, ed. and trans.; Chronicon Adæ de Usk: A.D. 1377-1421 (London: J. Murray, 1876) (N.B. Adam's Chronicle survives in a single copy. The final quire of that copy became separated from the main manuscript at some point. It was not rediscovered until 1885. Thompson's second edition includes this fragment. The second edition, or the Given-Wilson edition are preferred over this edition.)

Thompson, Edward Maunde, Sir, ed. and trans.; Chronicon Adæ de Usk, A. D. 1377-1421, 2nd ed. (London: H. Frowde, 1904) Reprinted: Chronicon Adae de Usk, A.D. 1377-1421 (New York: AMS Press, [1980]): and The Chronicle of Adam of Usk, A.D. 1377-1421 (Felinfach, Lampeter, Dyfed: Llanerch Enterprises, 1990) (with abridged introduction).

Given-Wilson, Chris., ed. and trans.; The Chronicle of Adam Usk, 1377-1421 (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)

New household member

Yesterday we welcomed a new member to our household: Lord Ratbane, Baron von Shasta, otherwise known as Shasta, or Mr. Kitty.

His Lordship is spending his period of adjustment to his new surroundings by hiding under and behind things. It took some physical persuading, but he will no longer be hiding behind the dishwasher. That way is closed.

The daughters had been making noise for several months about wanting a cat. The wife wanted a Maine Coon, mainly because she wanted a big cat. Well, we got a big cat. This cat is only three and half months old and is as large as some of the adult cats in our neignborhood. He is going to be monster. It is good thing for the neighborhood cats that he is going to be an indoor cat, because in 5 months he will be able to eat the current top cat for breakfast. (The current top cat is a mid-sized grey persian.)

Important safety note, BTW, if you hhave a low grade allergy to cats, it is best to not let the cat use its very sharp kitten claws to inject you in multiple places with its dander. Thank God (and McNeil Healthcare) for Benadryl.

Happy New Year

Well, Happy New Year. I followed my annual tradition and got to bed before midnight. Didn't get to sleep though, as I got caught up in a book. I don't do New Years Eve. Don't see the point. Stay up late, drink, scream at arbitrary point in time. Yeah! I'm all for making February 17 at 3:47 PM a similar holiday.

2008 was not a bad year for me. We ended the year in our best financial condition in a while, which is kind of strange to say, given the times. But the reality is, if you haven't been an idiot with your mortgage, and you feel some security in your job, the times are not that bad. Prices went up a bit, but the bursting of the oil bubble has helped there. Since I'm in a recession proof industry, I feel pretty good about my job. Meanwhile I'm nearly a decade into paying my mortgage, which means that my pay has risen, but my housing costs haven't. We don't do credit cards, and whenever possible we pay cash for our cars. (We buy used.) I got caught flatfooted when my previous car died, which meant I had to take out a loan on the current car. That got paid off this year. If the current car lasts another year, I won't get caught flatfooted again. All in all, I could not care less what the credit markets are doing.

I've also developed a plan to get me out of my safe industry. I'm, quite frankly, tired of scrubbing. My plan involves going back to school and entering a fairly competitive job market, and may involve a future relocation, but also would move me into a field where the pay tops out at about double the realistic top-out in my current job.

In politics, my guy didn't win, but then my guy didn't materialize at all. The guy I disliked the least thought he could sit on the front porch and run for president. The guy I held my nose and voted for anyway lost. Oh well. Hopefully this is 1976.

I didn't loose any weight, in fact I gained some. I might actually have to make New Year's resolution about this one. Or not.

I don't do resolutions, per se. But some goals for the new year are:

1. Read more American history.
2. Read more "period" literature.
3. Fill some of the gaps in my reading of the Western Canon.
4. Redevelop some of my lost language skills. (Latin, French)
5. Develop some new language skills (Old English)
6. Write more.
7. Play a musical instrument regularly.
8. Walk more
9. Do more birding and other nature study.
10. Get into the library science program.
11. See and hear more music.
12. Develop a better understanding of architectural history in general and the architectural history of Oklahoma in particular.
13. Continue reading in art history, especially medieval art,
14. Visit more museums and other cultural/historic sites.
15. Widen my reading into new areas.
16. Create world peace.
17. Cure cancer.

All this while continuing my current interests and responsibilities. There is not enough time, to do it all, but I can try.