Stacerella

Sorry I’ve been quiet lately. My nephew is in the hospital recovering from an emergency - and hopefully temporary - colostomy bag surgery.

 I should explain a bit for those of you who don’t know much about him because I try to keep his condition private and to respect his body and mental state. My nephew was diagnosed with Crohns at the tender age of 9. He’s now 23, and he’s fought long and hard over the years to avoid this very operation.

Now, I know I joke a lot about my food intolerance and my gassy ways, but by far I got the good family digestion genes, whereas he got the absolute worst of the lot. I would trade places with him in a heart beat if I could, but that wasn’t to be my lot in life as it turns out. I have my own problems to deal with.

Anyway, he’s a stronger man than I am. He’s taking pain meds, but has yet to allow doctos to give him meds for the Crohns. He has refused for years, and yet he’s managed to go this long without the bag. I am humbled. He has my uptmost respect and admiration. His doctor, on the other hand, I could strangle with my bare hands for employing a wait and see attitude with my nephew that lead to all of this.

When I say this is the very last thing my nephew wanted in the whole world, I’m not exaggerating. No one would want this. So imagine his reaction when he passed out in the emergency bay only to wake up the next day with a new hip friend. Yeah… so… I’m pissed right now, but in equal measure to how impressed I am with how well my nephew has dealt with it. I’m told he’s not complaining about any of it at the moment, not even having to lay in the most unnatural and uncomfortable postition after the surgery. The grace and strength he’s shown since this last flare up started shows me the true grit he’s made of. I’m in awe, really.

Smashed pins inside a set of USB ports where metal is now touching metal:

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Smashed in LCD lid resulting in a lovely spider effect from the point of inpact outwards. Good times, kids, good times.

Years ago, a lot of bloggers did this thing where they would take a screen capture of their current desktop and drop it into their sidebar for whatever reason. Mostly it was a mini meme, other times it was to showcase where their heads were at - as if to say their desktop landscape was another extention of their creative soul… or something like that.

I did these little desktop updates for a short time, but I always forgot to change the backgroud, and after awhile the sidebar content of my various blogs became just as stale as the actual blog posts. Yikes, I know!

Not that this post is about sidebar widgets showcasing my creative expression through my desktop or anything, but rather it’s a post about how I hate my monitor sitting in the landscape format, so I had Joe help me with changing it to a portrait format. This required Joe swapping out the base to one that allows tilt, pan and swivel action, a new-ish video card that was laying around at work he happily went there on our one day off a week to grab and bring back, installing it and tweaking the settings. All that hard work just to make me happy. Aww. *swooning*

And happy I am with the final result! Check it out. This is what my desktop looks like in the portrait format and how I view all web pages now. I love this format. I don’t know why I didn’t have him do this for me years ago. *smacks forehead*