Moh's Surgery Done!

I had an interesting procedure done to me the other day. A few weeks ago, I noticed a red spot on my skin that would not go away or diminish with the usual assortment of oils & creams. I went to the dermatologist who diagnosed it as Squamous Cell Carcinoma. It was not a surprise considering that my Mom had various bouts with skin cancer during her life. But hearing the Big "C" associated with you is nonetheless startling.

At any rate, the biopsy confirmed it and they froze it which got the top layer off. The surgeon said that they still needed to cut it out and that the Moh's procedure was the best. It was kind of interesting to say the least. They first numbed the area then took a layer off and put it under the microscope. It took about an hour to confirm yea or nay if they got all the cancer. If they did find. If not you went in for another slice taken, and so on. I was lucky, the got all mine on the first try. I have to go back to remove the stitches and do a six month check up. If everything is fine, I have to do an annual check up. She (the surgeon) said it was caused by exposure to the sun. That's odd to me since I hate the sun and stay away from it as often as possible, not to mention the fact that I've had an office job for the last 33 years. The most sun exposure I ever had was during my time in the Coast Guard when I worked outdoors all the time. But that was almost 50 years ago.

Well now I will look devilishly hansome with a 2 inch scar on my left cheek. Will just need an eye patch to complete the look. :-)

Mother's Day

We celebrated Mother's Day a day early this year. My oldest and youngest kids chipped in to purchase tickets to watch an acrobatic/dance/comedy team called Galumpha up at SUNY New Paltz where my daughter lives. It was really a lot of fun and the campus at New Paltz looked very nice. Galumpha reminded me a lot of the old show on Broadway, Mummenchantz. If you ever see them slated for an area near you, I highly recommend them.

Before the show, we went to a restaurant in New Paltz called La Stazion. It was an Italian restaurant that was housed in an old rail road station depot. Nice decor and great food. Definitely a repeat adventure when we need to celebrate something else. Especially because due to time restraints we couldn't hold one of our 3 hour marathon gabby feasts which we have been known to do on many occasions.

Mom is anxiously awaiting her Mother's Day present from the West Coast Doherty's. Its going to be a drawing for her from Liam our grandchild. She'll probably have a 300.00 frame constructed for a crayon drawing :-)

On a side note, I like the area enough to consider retiring there.

Washington Redskins

My favorite sports team of all time is the Washington Redskins. My affection for the team was a gradual affair. As a college student in Virginia, they were the only local pro team so if you watched football, they were “THE” team. The more I watched them compete, the more I liked them. This was the “future is now era” with George Allen. He traded away a ton of first round draft choices to get some veterans who knew how to win and play hard on the field. The names that I recall are now legendary there was Ron McDole, Chris Hanberger, Sonny Jurgenson, Bill Brundige, Billy Kilmer, Kenny Houston Charlie Taylor, Larry Brown and on and on. What a team. Even if they lost, they fought like furies til the bitter end. You couldn’t help but love these guys.

Then of course there was the rivalries that grew out of the NFC Eastern Division. All the team seemed to play harder when they played amongst their own division and great rivalries developed. There pretty much was the Redskins vs. everyone else. But within that, you had the Redskins vs. the Giants, Giants vs. Philly, Giants Vs. Dallas, Dallas vs. the Redskins. The Cardinals never had a smash mouth rival in the NFC East which may explain why they are now on the west coast.

As the years went by, the rivalries stayed much the same, but the ‘Skins got a new coach in 81 by the name of Joe Gibbs who made the Redskins a house hold word. He won the Super Bowl three times with three separate quarterbacks; Joe Theisman, Doug Williams and Mark Rypien. Those were great years; then Joe Gibbs retired and the team tanked for quite a while. They continued to try hard, but they had issues with several head coaching changes then a new owner who is not exactly Mr. Popularity.

I particularly didn’t like the way he handled the quarterback situation this off season. Jason Campbell has been the starter for 4 years. Last year the new coach installed the West Coast offense and Jason was getting used to it and did well the first half of the season. Trouble is that the offensive line did not protect him very well and the long and short of it was that they lost 4 out of their last 5 games. In the off season the owner decided to pursue The Denver quarterback and when that didn’t pan out he went after the number one draft pick in this year’s draft. That didn’t work either so Campbell is still the starter. Personally, if I was Campbell, I’d be really p.o.ed but he has shown composure. He’s working harder so maybe this year things will get better?? Maybe because the ‘Skins didn’t do anything this off season to improve their offensive line.

Over the years, my kids also became Redskin's fans and occasionally when I was able to scarf up some tickets to Giants Stadium years ago, I would bring one of them to the game. Usually, it was a night game and cold as heck, but they were the Redskins and we got to see them play in person so it was worth it to me.

But one of the big reasons why, I will never ever stop being a Redskin’s fan is because rooting for them is quite literally the last tenuous connection I have with the Commonwealth of Virginia. I really loved it there and miss it a lot. Still rooting for the Redskins keeps a little bit of that Virginia soul within me.

IT'S THE ECONOMY STUPID!!!

.......or so I'd like to think. I have my own opinion but let's just say things are getting very depressing around work. We are losing dozens of employees every day being laid off by the vagaries of the Economy or Bush or Obama, choose your Devil! I ride the cross town bus every morning with a half dozen or so fellow employees. Every day we do a quick survey to see if anyone got let go the previous day. So far our little bunch is intact.

I'll bet none of the idiots that caused this crisis in the first place feel this kind of angst. They probably all got golden parachutes and are lazing about. The rest of us wonder each day what's coming around the bend.

I wanted to retire early. Now it looks like I'll have to wait a couple more years and hope I make some money back that I lost. One day at a time...

In the Electric Mist Film based on a book by James Lee Burke

Well finally at long last the movie was released and I caught it at Blockbusters. I don't know how it will do. But what I'm thinking is that he is such a great writer that the average JLB fan would be seriously miffed if they cut out too much of the book for a film. Therefore his work would translate better to a miniseries. James Lee Burke fans are a fierce lot and don't like their characters messed with. On the other hand the way the movie was edited, there were a couple of gaps that if you hadn't read the book would have been hard to follow.

Tommy Lee Jones did a great job as Dave Robicheaux. The bait shop, Alafair, Tripod, Batiste everybody was there except Clete who wasn't in the book anyway.

For my part I loved the movie. My favorite scenes were when Dave spoke to the ghost of John Bell Hood. They did use some of JLB's prose as an overlay, but they should have used more in my opinion. That would have really set the mood.

P.S. One thing I find amusing is that I purchased a Dave Robicheaux Bait Shop baseball cap which I wear fairly regularly. You can get one at http://www.jamesleeburke.com/ I can tell that there are a fair number of James Lee Burke readers out there by the chuckles and smiles I get as people approach me and read what is embroidered on the cap.

I HATE COMPUTERS @$%^^&*^#%^

Of course it it doesn't help that mine is almost 10 years old. I can't wait til we scrounge up enough money for a new one. A simple normal act this weekend turned my wife into not a nice person. Everything I did was wrong because, god forbid, I got a note that my firewall protection expired. I use CA products. They've been good to me for the last couple of versions. So I downloaded it again. Almost immediately I had problems. I went nuts trouble shooting both our Optimum on line account and connection. Did the pings and the pings were returned. I called them up to make sure I did everything right. They assured me I did.

They also told me to hang on and they would connect me to CA. Good service here I will add. I spoke to CA, we went through a bunch of scenarios. We finally decided to uninstall it. The wife in the mean time was frothing at the mouth because she couldn't get her blogging fix satiated. She didn't even think that I was also inconvenienced mightily because I couldn't get my Zuni Newsletter out with no internet service.

At any rate the CA folks were very helpful. They told me to go back to Optimum because they have a free downloadable version of CA virus scanning firewall etc. I did get it downloaded and finally got everything up and running with CA's help. Now the youngest son won't have to come over and try his magic. He told me he probably couldn't help but would see what he could do and bring the PC to a computer nerd friend of his. Long story short, everything is back to normal until the next time we have connectivity problems..... then of course it will be my fault again!!! sheesh!!

Chugging right along...............

It appears that our project to restore the USS Zuni is picking up steam. We've had several inquiries since we had a presentation in Virginia and 4 more people have joined the message board. Right now, she's docked at Little Creek. We picked up a webmaster which we sorely needed to freshen up the site.

Within the last several days, we have received 4 more memberships at the Yahoo Message Board and one fellow will be sending me photos from the 80's to scan to our Photobucket site.

Perhaps the best news is that we finally arrived at a decision about selling adoption certificates for the old girl. That should help bring some money in for maintenance.

I've collected over 200 photos of the ship for our photobucket site spanning 6 decades. A lot of interesting photos are there. check out http:/photobucket.com/zunitam.

Bill