Chatter #41 - September 10, 2001

12/14/2001 — I started the Chatter section on July 27, 2000 when I noticed that the rest of my site was sometimes getting cluttered with lots of text. I'm a talkative guy, after all! So now I talk about my life here, instead of all over the place. Originally this was one huge section, but in December of 2001 it simply became too large to remain as one page, and I broke it into dated sections, as you can see. —>PM

The Night Before

It's 9:30 PM. Tomorrow morning at 5:30 AM we start out for the hospital in Peabody. I check in at 7:45 AM, and the surgery is scheduled to begin at 8:45 AM. I'm told it takes about an hour.

After that there's an hour or two of post-operative recovery; I guess they watch me to make sure that I'm not in shock, and that all systems are functioning. Barring any disasters, we should be on our way home by noon.

I'm nervous, of course, but I know I'll have to just bear down and live through it. It's pretty minor surgery, my doctor is the best, and I'm fairly healthy, so there shouldn't be any trouble. It's only fear, and I've lived with that for a long time, so I really should be used to it by now. And to tell the truth, I think I am coping with it better now than I used to. Maybe it's something to do with being a father soon. I don't know.

Thanks to everyone for reading all this stuff so far. I'm looking forward to doing lots more in the future.

After the Aftermath

No, of course the car didn't work out—not that it didn't pass inspection. It didn't even get that far. Here's the story:

I checked the lights on Saturday morning, and found that one of the rear turn signals was burned out. Fortunately I had a spare—the last time I'd had a bulb burn out I'd bought a two-pack. It was no problem to replace the bulb.

Took the car for an oil change, and then took it to the gas station for inspection. After a minute the mechanic came back: "Sorry, pal, I can't inspect this car. Your registration expired last week. I can't even enter it into the computer."

Shit! It was almost noon on Saturday, and how the hell was I going to renew my registration? And how come I hadn't received anything in the mail? Had I received something in the mail? I didn't remember. I went home, looked online, and found that Rhode Island had a single DMV office open on Saturday: a DMV Express office on the other side of the state.

Fortunately if you're going to have to cross a state in a hurry, Rhode Island is the best one cross. I got down, found the office in an obscure mall, and got in line. 45 minutes later and $60 poorer I had my new registration. But it was too late to get inspected.

Oh well. I'll do it as soon as I can, after I've recovered a bit from the surgery...

Speaking of which, I'll try to write something about the surgery here as soon as possible afterwords. Here's hoping it's a very boring story.

Take care, all!