Palo Alto Animal Services cat adoption

As I've mentioned, I'm volunteering a few days a week at Palo Alto Animal Services on the front desk and with the cats.

I've now set up a blog and I will have cat of the week to try and help find homes for some of the longer term cats at the Animal Shelter. So please point any friend and family in the Silicon Valley area to the website to help get the word out!

First cats off the block are Ricky and Lucy who've been there since August.

Book 1 of 2006 - Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell will be my first book of 2006. My aunt Glenda bought it for me for my birthday at the end of 2004, and I never got around to reading it. I did start, but the book is nearly 800 pages long, and the last thing I felt like doing in a gorgeous summer was sitting down and read a really long book! So I read a few chapters, put it down and never read it again.

It's by Susanna Clarke, and is her first book. It's won many awards, and is highly recommended and was even named Time magazines number 1 book for 2004. The book has been coined as an adult Harry Potter (as in aimed at adults, rather than a Harry and Hermione Mills and Boon....).

Glenda did say it takes a little while to get into, but once you do it's excellent. I remember last time starting it I was quite bored with it, but I'm now up to page 64 and enjoying it much more than last time! It helps that the last week or so has been very windy and rainy, and today I finally got a chance to curl up under the doona with a cup of tea and read, which is my favourite rainy day activity! It puts me in a much better frame of mind for reading!

I'll give a review when I'm done.

New Years Resolution

Ok, so I never bother with New Years resolutions because if you want to do something, just do it, why should you wait until a new year to decide to do it??

I even said just last night that I thought new year resolutions were crap. But I was just thinking this morning that I need to read more, particularly of other genres. Andrew will argue that I'm quite a bookworm, but I really only stick to a few author's I quite like that are usually "nice" stories, plus the odd bestseller that's being raved about.

I think I might try a bit harder to just go and buy random books I wouldn't normally buy, and maybe see if there's a local bookclub I can join. Now's a good time as I'm not working so have a little more free time to sit down and read (I'll hopefully have more time soon once we've fully unpacked anyway!).

If anyone has any recommendations, please let me know!

Bringing the new year in with style!

We got invited to a new years party that one of Andrew's workmates was having. It was nice and low key, and we saw the clock tick over to 2006 while sitting in the hot tub. Mmmm it's a tough life :-)

Photos from the US

We've finally got ADSL which means I've finally been able to upload my photos!

So you can now go to Sarah and Andrew's adventures in the US (aka our photo website...) to see what we've been up to.

Dag-nammit

Walls here seem to not be smooth, they're all stucco type non-smooth walls. Because of this it makes our favourite wall hanging method Command Adhesive kind of non efficient.

We've hung 8 things up using Command Adhesive and only 3 are still hanging. In the US you seem to be able to make as many holes in walls as you like when renting, I guess this is because it's the only way you can hang things!!

So we're going to have to resort to putting lots of holes in walls to hang things. That's a shame!

Heart update

I had a cardiac MRI just before I left Australia which is supposed to be the most comprehensive heart scan that can be done, showing the most detail.

I finally got the report from it back a little under 2 weeks ago now I guess, and from the way it reads, it looks more likely that I may have the same thing that killed my dad and aunt. I haven't seen a cardiologist yet over here as you need health insurance, which we can't get until Andrew's social security number comes through (that's a whole other drama..). So I haven't had it all properly analysed, but if nothing's wrong when one of these things, the final report bit says "Nothing noted" or something along those lines.

This report basically said parts of my heart were enlarged. This had me worried so I rang my cardiologist back in Australia, who said it was nothing to worry about and I was in no danger. I don't believe he actually had the report at that time though. The initial scans done said that at the sinuses of valsalva, the measurement was 39mm which was at the upper limits of normal. The latest report says that same measurement is 41mm. I know 2mm doesn't sound like much, and there is a slight margin for error but it means either 2 things. Either the first test which isn't as accurate was a bit out and the measurement was actually a bit bigger than reported, or it has gotten a bit bigger since the first scan. And if it has grown 2mm in size in 6 months then that is a bit worrying I think.

Anyway, so at the University of Texas, through research they've been doing, they've identified a gene that causes aortic aneurysms and dissections. I contacted then a little while ago, and they said I was welcome to be part of the trial if I wished. So I contacted them again a couple of days ago and said I was now in the US, I am interesting in being part of the trial, and attached the report from the cardiac MRI they could get an idea of my situation, and decide for themselves if they thought it was nothing.

Her response was "This increase in your aortic size suggests that you may be a carrier for the same gene which predisposed your father and aunt to aortic aneurysm/dissections."

So now I'm not sure what to think. She's an expert in aortic aneurysms, and my cardiologist has never said that the heart measurements are still in the normal range, he's always answered my question asking if that's "normal" in saying that I'm in no danger at the moment, but to keep taking my pills and not to do any strenuous exercise. For the moment though, she's sending me a saliva collection kit, so I can send some saliva which they can do DNA testing on, and see if I have this same gene that they've already identified as being a cause. It's unlikely that they'll be the same apparently, but that's what research is all about - lots of testing! I won't take the researchers comment as the final word though give that she does not have my full history.

I certainly do believe I'm in no immediate danger of having a heart problem as such, and it has to grow a fair bit more to be in the category of needing surgery, but my fear is more that it's looking more and more likely that it's going to turn into an aneurysm, and not being able to do anything about it. Once it is at the size that it is considered an aneurysm, there's still nothing you can do until it reaches an operable size which frustrates the hell out of me. I don't like the thought of just sitting back and monitoring it until it reaches this magical size, and not being able to do any sort of strenuous activity because it might cause it to dissect split.

For the moment though, it just means a lot more monitoring to figure out if it is growing in size, or if it's just big for some strange reason.