It was just five minutes, but I cannot begin to tell you how good it felt.
(Warning. Gross anatomical details ahead. Click through if you care.)
The procedure that was done on my knee is called microfractures. The knee repairman did it because when he got inside with the arthroscope, he could see that the top surface of the outside of my right tibia was completely screwed up. It's the result of a break 20 years ago playing basketball (I was fouled.) and it for all practical purposes means I'll be coping with a problematic knee for the rest of my life.
What's odd is the way I've lived my life not realizing the slow inexorable damage going on. I've always assumed the surgery 20 years ago left me with a good-as-new knee. I stopped running in the late '90s, switched to the bike, because of ankle problems. Had I not, this likely would have happened earlier.
Microfracturing involves poking little holes (six in my case) in the bone, allowing gunk to ooze out and form a protectitve surface. That takes a while to heal, which is why I'm going to be non-weight bearing on it for at least another five or six weeks. (I have pictures, but I'll spare you....) They're also going to fit me with an "unloader brace," a contraption that shifts my weight away from the fucked up outside (lateral) to the healthy inside (medial) part of the joint.
Physical therapy for the next several weeks involves keeping the muscles strong and taking various steps to keep swelling and scar tissue down. I'm also working on getting range of motion back. Surprisingly, when I was at physical therapy Friday, I was able to get past the magic 110 degrees, so my therapist, Peter, put me on a recumbent stationary bike for five minutes. Peter's a cyclist. He understands.
It was tough. My muscles are weak, and I had to left-leg it all - no pushing with the right, just strap it into the toe clip and let it spin. But the windows looked out east, to the whole panorama of the Sandia and Manzano Mountains. My mountains. Before I went in for surgery, I had worked out in my mind a goal - Sandia Crest before the snow falls. It's clear now that is unrealistic. Not until next spring, perhaps.
When we first moved to Albuquerque 15 years ago, we lived in an apartment in the northeast heights right behind a Wal-Mart. On the south end of the Wal-Mart parking lot was a depression dug into the ground and lined with river rocks. A couple of trees - I think Russian olive - were growing in it.
Over time, I noticed similar constructions at other shopping centers and developments, and assumed their purpose was to catch runoff from summer storms, adding bits of capacity here and there to the flood control system of this paved metropolis, with no bare earth left any more for water to soak in. These little hollows are gross, the rocks stained with the black crud - motor oil, ground-up lead from wheel weights and the like - that builds up in our urban environment. There's no chance of groundwater recharge here. The aquifer is far too deep for that to happen. It's just an ugly mess.
That came to mind this afternoon when I ran across a discussion[1] of the way the Maya handled this:
The Maya paved plazas and courtyards and canted these catchment surfaces toward the elevated reservoirs where water was collected and held for extended periods. In short, the city planners designed their cities to be watersheds.... (T)he plazas and other catchment zones are always free of trash middens containing food or human waste, as for example, the whole of the Central Acropolis at Tikal. It would appear that any waste that was produced in the catchment areas was carefully collected so that it did not enter the water system and foul the water.
We're not quite so careful here.
[1] The Great Maya Droughts, Richardson Gill, University of New Mexico Press, 2000, P. 263-264
I think there can no longer be any doubt of a great scientific conspiracy to cover up the connection between increasing global temperatures and the well-documented drop in pirates. Venganza has the goods:
For your interest, I have included a graph of the approximate number of pirates versus the average global temperature over the last 200 years. As you can see, there is a statistically significant inverse relationship between pirates and global temperature.
(Hat tip Luis.)
The latest CLIMAS soouthwest drought conditions report is out.
They've got the New Mexico Drought Working Group's current map, which shows most of the state out of short-term drought (a couple of hotspots in Los Alamos and Lincoln notwithstanding).
Longer-term drought - "hydrologic drought" in the lingo, meaning conditions based on long-term rain and snow - is still a mixed bag. That's reflected in reservoir levels, which suck less than they did a year ago. But they still suck.
Johnny_Mango got up close enough to see that the baby cottonwoods I was all excited about are really toddlers.
Top five search strings for June:
- eat a peach
- hollyhocks
- old bike
- tendonitis
- calutrons
Oh, man. What a week to be out of the office. Apparently real celebrities are in the building! (Well, at least one. I've never heard of that other guy, what's his name?)
Thanks for all the kind notes. It's odd how this blog thing has created an extended community of folks I've never met face to face.
The knee is still swollen, but it's moving a lot better now, and I've got a lot more energy. The question is now to use it, what with only one functioning leg and all. Books, I guess. FInished Daniel Coyle's new Lance Armstrong book, which is a ripping good read. My buddy Paul yesterday brought over Jane Leavy's Koufax book, which shows great promise, a trip back to my youth in LA.
The knee bender contraption is up to 60 degrees flexion. Doc says I need 70 as quickly as possibly. PT says 110 to ride the bike.
So I survived yesterday's knee surgery with no nausea from the anasthetic, and almost no pain. That's the good news. The bad news is when the knee repairman finally popped the hood to look inside, things were substantially more messed up that we had hoped. He had to do some bone work, not just cartilege. I'm going to be laid up much longer than I thought.
Back on the plus side, I've got one of those cool CPM devices, idly popping my knee up and down while I'm parked on the couch watching Dr. Strangelove.
On the U.S. nuclear weapons program:
The United States' current approach to maintaining its nuclear arsenal "looks increasingly unsustainable," according to an internal report by senior officials at the nation's three nuclear weapons labs.The nuclear weapons program's future costs exceed the available budget, and the effort to maintain aging warheads is forcing the nation to retain a larger nuclear arsenal than would otherwise be needed, the report concludes.
Completed last month, the report's findings mirror in some respects those of a key House of Representatives subcommittee.
The House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee issued a report last month calling for a sweeping reorganization of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex as part of its proposed 2006 Department of Energy budget.
We're not entirely clear on how we first got hollyhocks in the garden. Our best recollection is that we got an old stalk from our neighbor Alison across the street and shook it over the garden to scatter seeds. Or maybe we bought some. Whatever. They just volunteer now, wandering the yard looking for a cozy spot to do their stuff. This year, thanks to the prolifically wet spring, they're putting on a show:
I assume the varieties of color we see are the result of hybrization, because I sure don't remember ever having salmon pink (not shown) before.
The show's going on all over the 'hood, with an especially striking one up the street that's a sort of lemonade yellow with just a hint of green. Double blossoms. Magnificent. Must see if I can score some of the seeds when it's done blooming.
(See Sim Yard for last year's disquisition.)
The "islands" in the middle Rio Grande through Albuquerque are really nothing more than sandbars that have stabilized because the river hasn't flooded in years. But with this spring's high flows they're turning into an interesting little ecosystem experiment.
Back in the day, before dams and levies channelized the rio, it meandered a wide sandy flood plain, scouring things every few springs when things were wet. That hasn't really happened for probably five decades. The winter of 1940-41 was a hugely wet year, causing major flooding, and the folks who lived here over the next several decades built a system to protect their homes and farmland. It was an understandable response, but the result is a human-mediated ecosystem that bears little resemblance to the old river.
The cottonwoods are a case in point. Along both sides of the river, the last cohort of cottonwoods is all roughly the same size and age - fifty years or more. Babies, which used to sprout following the spring scouring, are rare. But this year, on those phony islands in the river's midst, scoured by a slightly larger-than-normal floodiing, baby cottonwoods can be seen.
I spotted some yesterday morning on the islands in the middle of the old Alameda bridge at the north end of town. I took mom and dad back yesterday evening for a look. They're lovely, and it'll be interesting to see how they do over time.
Update 6/23/05 Johnny_Mango got a closer look and thinks you can see previous years' growth on the cottonwoods I thought were babies. I really need to track down a cottonwood subject matter expert and get more info.
Godwin's law: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."
Over on Quark Soup, a thread in which we hit the mark on the very first post.
M.J. Wilde at the Albuquerque Tribune is a treasure. How she manages to be funny in the midst of all that is a wonder:
Even sleeping with a tube down her throat, she held her chin high, dignity intact. We were all waiting to talk to the doctor. And, like chili cheese fries, they're never around when you really, really want them.
It takes strength to be snarky at a time like that.
My buddy Al Zelicoff's new book is out: Microbe: Are We Ready For The Next Plague?
You should go to Amazon and buy this book, because Richard Preston says it is "beautifully researched and sharply intelligent." I haven't read it yet, but I do know that Al's a little homely, but sharply intelligent.
From the LA Times:
The unpredictability Fleck wields gives his work power. He is all spectacle, dangerously close to an edge, both dramatic and personal, and he doesn’t let his viewers merely watch. He drags them with him to the sweaty, teetering reality of the brink.
Added to my planet: James Annan. Found via Stoat. James is another climate scientist who blogs, and has been involved in a marvelous exercise involving trying to find takers on a bet: if climate change skeptics are so confident in dismissing the mainstream science, will they put money on the table?
Brief, but to the point: State officials Thursday launched an effort to reduce New Mexico's emissions of greenhouse gases."
This is my 1,000th post on this blog, which I'm using as a cheap excuse for navel-gazing. I've actually had the ideas herein kicking around for a while, so when I saw the odometer about to tick over, I figured it was as good an excuse as any.
The question I've been sorting out in my own head is this. Why blog? I've got a schtick going here that is almost by design guaranteed to drive away most of my audience. Here's the problem: I've got kind of a short attention span. And I'm fascinated by a lot of things that don't really have much at all in common. Sorry 'bout that.
When I started the first incarnation of this, blogging didn't really exist. I wrote some simple perl code as a front end to a MySQL database and wrote a few vaguely disjointed entries. It was a short-lived exercise, in part because the software used to run it was not exactly, uh, friendly. Those of my free software friends who have actually seen my code will no doubt understand this point.
The second incarnation was in March 2001 on Advogato, the free software community site. I lived there for a couple of years, but increasingly I found myself writing about stuff that wasn't related to free software. By that time I had a blog at work, and my boringly specialized Nuke Beat blog (which, amazingly, gets like 100 visits a day - what's up with that? I think it's all bots.). But I decided I needed a blog that was just me. I had Inkstain, so it seemed appropriate to set up shop here. I argued thus:
I have too many blogs already - Advogato, the Nuke Beat, my ABQJournal musings. Starting another seems a bit of overkill. They all have their roots elsewhere - a pre-existing publisher in the case of the Journal and Advogato, which provides a built-in audience. There's comfort in that. The Nuke Beat's just a hare-brained experiment, which may or may not work. But they all have something in common, which is me. There are times when, writing for one or another, I feel uncomfortable. Too much free software ranting is prolly a bad idea on the Journal blog, and I've never been entirely comfortable bragging about my incredibly smart and talented daughter on Advogato.That's why I decided to consolidate things here. By no longer hiding behind the skirts of an existing publisher, I lose built-in audiences, but that seems fine. I'll still do the other blogs when my whim suits their audience (and in the case of ABQJournal, I get paid for that, which still amazes me). But if Tim Berners-Lee's original idea of the web as a medium for both reading and writing has any meaning at all, this is it, so my Inkstain web site must reflect that.
It seems sort of quaintly naive, but ultimately accurate - "But they all have something in common, which is me."
I have this problem - happens to me all the time - where I'll sit down to write a post and have to Google myself to see if I've already written it. (Lissa suffers the same fate, except there's no Google. I'll start sharing some wild idea, and then I'll have to stop and ask her if I've already told her.) I have this constant conversation going in my head, and y'all are one of the audiences I'm working it out for. And I'm never sure if I've just thought about writing the post, or rehearsed the telling of the story to Lissa, or whether I've actually done it.
The conversation is about a lot of different subjects, which is part of the audience problem I have. Free software has long been a passion - I was heavily involved in the GNOME project for a long time, and I still stay connected with a lot of my friends from those days through Planet GNOME, where this blog is still syndicated. (Poor Jeff, who runs it, has faced some amount of abuse over the last couple of years: "That guy never writes about GNOME!")
I blather on a lot about climate, which is a fascination of mine, so you'll see folks gravitating my way via RealClimate. But that seems more than a little odd to me at times, imagining folks coming from that august and serious site to find my latest post about baseball and gay rock bands.
I've picked up a bunch of Albuquerque readers lately, because I've been writing more about the community I live in and love. I sure can't imagine them caring a whole lot about my climate ramblings. Or baseball and gay rock bands.
Luckily Mom reads this, and she loves it all. Thanks, Mom.
The Planet GNOME criticism used to bug me, and I admit I felt a little weird when the RealClimate people put up a link on their blog. As a writer, it's ingrained in me to think about my audience, try to reach them, to address their needs. What is it they need to know? What is it they will enjoy?
But with this blog, I've realized that ultimately, the audience is me. I admit to the blogger's ego of checking my hit counts, and feeling all pumped up when they spike. But the great joy for me is the simple pleasure of reading my own stuff. I hope this does not sound egotistical. I think it's just that, at the gentle middle age in which I find myself, I'm basically comfortable in my own skin. I enjoy my own company, and the blog is a favorite place to share it.
It's not that there's literature here, or good journalism. It's more like a writer's equivalent of garage band riffing - getting together with some friends (that's you, gentle readers) to play stuff you like.
I have favorites, things I'll go back and read again and again: Armstrong and cancer, Don't Bogart that Joint, Ebert's Peak.
The last, if I may be immodest, I think is fucking genius, perhaps the only truly funny thing I have ever written. Unfortunately, no one else seems to get the joke. But that's OK. Because the whole point is to amuse myself.
Bryan Curtis had a great observation a few months back about "baseball's homoerotic rituals—the butt-slapping, the excessive man-hugs."
I was thinking about that recently when my friend Josh and I were sitting at the ballpark while they played YMCA on the house sound system. That and foot-stomp-clap introduction of Queen's "We Will Rock" you have become ballpark staples, in the midst of the mainstream middle American splendor of the ballpark, where brauts are brauts and beer is beer and men are men (of a particular kind, you understand).
When I was a teenager, Queen was the rock band that I saw more than any other. I liked them, but was not a huge fan. No, the reason I went again and again was a succession of girlfriends who loved them. They thought Freddie Mercury was hot. Which he was, though the observation is not without irony.
OK, now Marston's talking about the issues that affect the city we love. So's Coco (actually Coco has for a while).
Coco's also got a link to a piece by Zia Mian at Princeton about our nuclear weapons culture. (Zia's particularly thoughtful about the role nuclear weapons institutions play in all this.) Coco's got a lot of nuke news.
It's clear that if you're interested in stoat, there's only one place to be.
A great architect. A greater artist. A supreme rascal.
Frank Lloyd Wright day on Google.
If anyone needed an explanation of why blogs matter:
There were reporters that Todd and John Horne trusted to take a shot at the story, but when they found out about the blog and realized that the story could be posted in their own words without worry of information being misconstrued by a reporter, it was clear that they should post it here. The blog also provided moral support and it helped all of us, even the kids, to know that there were people on our side and that people really did care. I can honestly say that this blog and all the people posting positive comments gave Todd the drive he needed to continue fighting, and made his last days hopeful ones.
This, like, totally happens at my office, which can be a pretty frenetic place:
From classical to electronica, rock 'n' roll to world music and country, workers across corporate America are plugging into their own portable music players and tuning out loud co-workers, office boredom and other workplace distractions. With the portability and popularity of iPods and other personal music devices, anecdotal evidence suggests more American workers are bringing their music to work.
Lissa and I took a wander south this afternoon through the Rio Grande Valley south of Albuquerque.
Our bosque - the riverside woods - is usually dry, but the river has crested its banks and spread into the cottonwoods. I've never seen this before in the 15 years I've lived here, and it's been fascinating. (Tania Soussan has a good story about all this in today's Journal (sub. req.)
(click through for more)
For those of you who live in the Albuquerque area, I recommend the drive south to Los Lunas to see it. The pictures above were taken at the park on the south side of the river where the main Los Lunas bridge crosses.
In Albuquerque itself, the river is largely staying within its banks. That is because the river channel is deeper in the northern reaches of the middle Rio Grande Valley. It's a result of the hydrologic changes in the system created by Cochiti Dam. As the clear water leaves the dam, it tends to downcut the upper reaches of this stretch of the river, depositing its silt further south. So up north it's downcutting, and farther south it's aggrading, deposit its silt and shallowing the channel. So as you get farther south, there's more tendency to spill over the old banks and into the bosque.
The risk of flooding here is pretty much zero right now, because they can control the output from Cochiti. They've been releasing 6,000 to 6,500 cubic feet per second lately, and you can see on the downstream river gauges that the flow through Albuquerque and points south pretty much mirrors the amount they release from Cochiti.
A reader had trouble finding the Barnett climate paper I mentioned earlier in the week. It is here.
Marston's back, this time with a vastly entertaining romp through the E. Shirley Baca saga. The whole Baca-King cat fight is fun and all, but as I mentioned before, Marston's not taking this the next step and explaining how the outcome of all this entertainment will actually influence what the PRC does. C'mon, show me how this is more relevant to my life than the outcome of the Yankees-KC series.
(Warning - tedious Albuquerque government stuff ahead.)
Isabel Sanchez has a good overview in this morning's paper of what's at stake in next week's Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District election. MRGCD has sometimes been called a "stealth agency" because it's (pardon the cliche) not up on very many people's radar. But it is pretty important.
As Isabel explains, it's a subdivision of government not unlike a city or county, with the power to collect taxes. Essentially every property owner who lives in the valley pays (check the map to see where you fit). The beneficiaries are, generally speaking, the agricultural irrigators:
The district, created by the Legislature in the 1920s, maintains ditches, canals and levees from Cochiti to Bosque del Apache and releases water to farmers and irrigators in Bernalillo, Sandoval, Valencia and Socorro counties.Residential property owners within district boundaries pay 4.98 mills, or $166 a year on a $100,000 home. The district lowered that amount to 4.62 mills effective July 1 and plans to pay for it with $2.5 million from the reserve fund.
The district can raise or lower taxes without voter approval. It's a political subdivision of the state, like a city or county, and can act as independent provided it doesn't violate state law. It holds its own elections, and can issue tax-backed bonds without asking voters' permission.
So what's at stake here, in policy terms, is the extent to which MRGCD's policies and practices in collecting taxes and distributing water benefit the various interest groups that live down there and other interests - irrigators, recreationalists, the environment. It involves how much in taxes property owners pay, how much irrigators pay for their water, and how much water and MRGCD land is dedicated to other uses.
Check out the map. If it looks like you live in the district, read Isabel's stuff and go vote.
In which I move into phase two of my secret plan to become the Journal's cycling writer:
Todd Bauer is one crafty bike racer, and all Ben Delaney could do was smile and admit he'd been outfoxed. It was a hot Tuesday evening in Albuquerque and Delaney, Bauer and 20 or so of their friends were tearing around a Northeast Heights business park at a sometimes alarming rate of speed.Heading into the race's final two corners, Delaney thought he was in perfect position until Bauer somehow pulled a rabbit out of his bike helmet.
The Tuesday Night Crits is bike racing's version of "shirts and skins" hoops pickup for the town's best riders.
If you're in Albuquerque, these races are great fun to watch.
This is not my normal schtick, but the Journal sent me out to the New Mexico Veterans Memorial Monday for Memorial Day Ceremony, and I was privileged to see something special:
There was a 21-gun salute, an F-16 flyover and a haunting bugler's taps Monday morning at the New Mexico Veterans Memorial.But the most poignant symbol at the 2005 Memorial Day Ceremony was something no one planned.
Early in the solemn event, shortly after the color guard had posted the colors, the American flag almost fell over.
An unnamed veteran, near the front taking pictures, grabbed it to keep it from touching the ground. After fiddling with the base of the flagpole for a moment, he simply stood and held it.
For the rest of the ceremony, veterans materialized from the crowd, one after another, saluting sharply and taking over the sacred duty of holding the flag.
They wore full dress uniforms, street clothes, tattered demim and bikers' leather vests. One used a walker. But their aging bodies all stood, for those moments holding the flag, ramrod straight.
"You can't let it touch the ground," explained 55-year-old former Marine Jay "Doc" Schmitt, a veteran of Vietnam.
I already blogged this at work, but Mark Justice Hinton's candy bar tale bears repeating:
The old bars were 6 ounces; these bars are only 5 ounces. Funny, they don't say "now much smaller!" on the package. This is, in effect, a hidden 20 percent price increase.
Funny bit of business in Arthur Demarest's(1) description of the mid-19th century burst of fascination with Mayan archaeology. The early Spanish who first saw the spectacular Mayan ruins seem to have understood them to have been the product of an indigenous society, but by the time of the great "travel writers" of the 19th century, such roots were gone:
Le Plongeon, James Churchward, and many others attributed the origins and achievements of the Maya and other New World civilizations to lost tribes from the Old World or from sunken continents. Unfortunately, such fantastic speculations are very effective in capturing public interest. Just as this epoch of popular antiquarian writings had launched modern scientific archaeology, it also seeded the development of the lunatic fringe of Maya archaeology (who even today besiege archaeologists with letters and emails on extraterrestrial influences, Atlantis, and the lost Semitic tribes!).
1. Demarest, A. (2004) Ancient Maya: The Rise and Fall of a Rainforest Civilization (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK).
I awoke this morning to a plate of seven plump, lovely, freshly baked biscuits on the kitchen counter - a visit from the Biscuit Fairy? I almost plopped a couple in my lunch, but then thought better of it. What if the Biscuit Fairy was planning on having friends over for lunch? Or, worse, what if the Biscuit Fairy was a Vengeful God, and left the plate out on the counter to test me, like Lot or Job or one of them guys in the Bible?