Wednesday, 12 July 2023

Autoglass

I am sitting outside, at a picnic table, while my windshield is being replaced at Safelite Autoglass. It turns out that replacing a windshield is no longer a simple thing. Windshields no longer just protect you from the elements, they also contain sensors, which must be recalibrated.

Discovering that this would take a while, I choose the company who would replace it — it is all entirely paid for by insurance — by its proximity to the Surly Brewing company. I used to stop by fairly frequently three or four years ago when I was taking classes at the University. It was convenient to the bikeway that led to the U, and so it was a nice place to stop for a beer and a nibble and to do a bit of homework on the way home from classes. Unfortunately, I did not check its hours. In the post-pandemic employee-constrained world, it now does not open until 3:00pm, well after the time when I expect my car to be finished.

But at least the day is pleasant: the clouds from a storm passing by to our south are dissipating, the sun is shining, and the temperatures are cool — in the seventies. That said, with another one and a half hours to go, I see that my shade is disappearing and that I will soon want to find another spot.

Jury

Since I last wrote in May, not a lot has happened that was unexpected. The most significant event is that I served on a jury in a criminal case. The process was interesting, and I was heartened by the behavior of other jurors and the gravity with which they approached the task; the operation of the courtroom, and the rules of evidence, was also interesting. The content of the case — sexual assault of a minor was disturbing, to say the least. Perhaps I will write more about it later, but I’ll pass for now.

Travel

As I expected in May, both Yosemite trips were canceled due to record snowfall. Tioga pass is still not open – yesterday was the date of the High Sierra Loop trip would have begun – and in any event not long after I last wrote the NPS announced they would not be opening the high country infrastructure at all this year. They suspected there would be damage to repair — but could not get access to inspect the camps, etc,. — and I imagine that whenever that becomes possible adding on time for repair and opening will leave a season so short that it will be difficult to recruit seasonal staff. Since my geology field camp was based in White Wolf, which is also closed, that trip is out as well. I did manage to book five nights in Yosemite starting August 20th, so that will probably be my Yosemite fix for this summer. I do have reservations for October, but I suspect that Katie and I will be traveling in Europe….

Reading

Reading is going well. CT and I have declared a “summer of Sacks,” and we are reading a number of his books, most not the medical case history accounts for which he is best known. We are just finishing Oaxaca Journal, and will move on to the River of Consciousness; after that we have his autobiography, On the Move. That will probably get us through the summer.

CT and I have finished Ends of the World, a book on mass extinctions and their causes, and are now reading Assembling California, by John McPhee. (I also, on my own, making my way through Tabula Rasa, Volume 1, a book of McPhee’s essays, most of which appear to discussions of books that he considered writing but never did.) In any case, Assembling California is really interesting, in that it discusses what has always appeared to me to be the rather chaotic geology I drive through when approaching and departing Yosemite. It turns out that the apparent chaos is actual chaos, and not a symptom (as I feared) of my deep ignorance. The continent that is now North America used to end far to the east of California — both the continent and continental shelf. But over the last couple of hundred million years, a series of islands arcs have collided with the western coast and gotten sutured to it. What seems to happen is that tectonic plates move east and subduct beneath North America until a continental portion of the plate approaches, jams the subduction trench, and gets “sutured” to North America. The subduction portion of the process generates an accretionary wedge — a wedge of sediment scraped from the oceanic lithosphere — and the part of plate that subjects melts and leads to volcanism and uplift; when the continental terrane collides with North America, it causes compression and associated melting, as well as metamorphosing a lot of existing rocks. So basically, the western portion of North America is the result of a series of collision of island arcs, and associated accretion of sediment, compression, metamorphism, uplift, volcanism, and accretion of terranes, so it’s not surprising the rocks are so chaotic.

In other reading, KC and I are reading essays by Loren Eisley; we are currently making out way through his collection, The Immense Journey. We also dipped into some E. B. White. And finally, RB and I are reading The Immense World, about the variety of sensory systems — and their resulting umweldts. I think the most interesting part, so far, is how diverse the methods for seeing are. The only thing that most eyes have in common is opsins — the proteins that produced an electrical signal when they are struck by photons. Everything else about eyes is variable: number; location; relative position (binocular or panoramic); visual fields and blind spots; their acuity; their sensitivity of response to light (color, UV, polarity); whether they can detect direction or just presence; whether the eyes are fix or movable, and if movable to they move in unison or independently. Even relatively similar animals may have very different visual capacities depending on their lifestyles.

Wellness

I am running at least a couple times a week, though not as much as I’d hoped. I am still doing physical therapy intended to stabilize my left legs. I think I’m making progress, although jury duty disrupted my routine and I got out of the habit of doing it. More generally, the combination of heat and, especially, smokey air as during some periods curtailed my running.

I’ve had my next PSA test, and it went from 0.2 ng/mL to 0.3 ng/mL over three months. It is too soon to tell, but my physician’s best guess is that I am on the path that indicates a local recurrence (if that is the case the increase will be relatively linear); a much more rapid increase (typically defined as a doubling time less than 3 months) is a sign of systemic spread; it is also possible that the PSA level will oscillate, which would be good news as it would indicated benign cancer in the ductile cells associated with the prostate. I had a PET scan, but it did not show anything, which they had told me in advance was quite likely at my current levels. So the path forward is to test PSA every three months, and re-scan if or when it more than doubles. If I am on the linear path, I believe the hope is that they will be able to detect it with a scan and do some kind of targeted therapy.

The week after next I will head down to the Mayo Clinic for my peripheral neuropathy workup. I can’t recall if I wrote about this earlier, but his is my ‘second opinion.’ I had assumed that at the most they would do a second EMG, but they appear to do a full workup, so I am currently scheduled for 5 appointments on three days, and was told to be prepared for more (though that may be what they tell all first time neurology patients.

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