WalkerPad

Ah, what can I say about this past year? It’s almost over? We survived? This past year has been a lesson in patience. We have taken a few punches and rolled with them all. I remember this time last year, looking forward to the end of the year. I was finally done with my arm and wrist surgery. It looked like I was going to return to work and everything was going our way. 2006 was going to be my year.

I made it to January 5! That is when I got the news about the swollen optic nerve and my eye doctor gave me a prescription for an MRI. I didn’t even make it a week before they had found the brain tumor. Griffon and I spent two weeks wondering if the tumor would be operable, and if it wasn’t, how long I would have before the tumor caused major (if not mortal) damage. I remember asking my doctor if I would make it to Christmas, and she said she couldn’t say. My first thought was, I better get my Christmas shopping done early!

This February 8 will be the one year anniversary of my operation. So far all of my follow-up MRI’s (and there have been many) have all been clear and my recovery has been “above average.” Yes, I have always been an over-achiever. I was also very fortunate to have my mother come and stay with me for almost three months. She was the reason I was able to rehabilitate at home and did not have to go to a care facility. And let’s face it, no one takes care of you like your mom.

I am now back at work two days a week. I am team-teaching second grade at my school and am still in my classroom. The staff has been warm and welcoming and reaffirms everyday how lucky I am to work with them. I have been able to gain about 85% of my speech and can walk without a cane. I still go to physical therapy twice a week to work on balance and strength. My vision has improved with prisms on my glasses and I can drive myself- yeah! It is exhausting to do so much, but I see improvements all the time.
The future looks good. My brain has completely healed from the surgery and I have a groovy scar down my neck. We will continue to have scans every 3-4 months to watch for tumor regrowth ( a real potential, unfortunately) and decide what to do when, and if, that happens. For now, we cherish everyday together and I lavish attention and love on Kaily- just in case she needs a little more.

I am quite sure that 2007 is going to be my year!

So it’s official I quit Cisco the other day (last day is the 29th) and accepted a pretty good offer from a startup that has a lot of very talented people and leadership and a product that I dig on. The company is Socialtext, I’ll be starting there some time in January.

Oops, Charise just pointed out that I better find out how to get some bridge insurance to cover the gap. I hadn’t even thought of that, dammit lots of little complications.

Anyway that’s the cliff notes versions so if anyone wonders why I seemed freaked out over the normally laid back holidays, that’s why. Crazy days indeed.

Ok I ground my way through them and the pictures are up in the gallery. I don’t think I did the party justice though, I was a bit sick and not really taking many pictures once things got rolling.

* WPG2 CANNOT LOCATE GALLERY2 ITEM ID 6712 ** WPG2 CANNOT LOCATE GALLERY2 ITEM ID 6704 ** WPG2 CANNOT LOCATE GALLERY2 ITEM ID 6756 *

Also I have bunch of new artsy shots up on Zooomer as edgshot 

Enjoy and sorry it took so long (see lower post, *grumble*)

I was hoping to add dads but he couldn’t figure out Amazon wish lists, or something with his accounts. Looks like there UI could use a little work at least for the non technical… So anyway here is ours, and if anyone else wants to one or email me I’ll add it to the list for general family reference. Or you could all just hope you don’t get fruit cake and nitted socks =).

Kaily
Charise
Griffon
Yeah ok it *is* a wish list so don’t *tsk* me for rdiculously exspensive camera lenses and what not, I buy that stuff for myself (or well not these days :p ), but I use my list as a memory bank for such things .

To make a long story short I bought a Netgear SC101 SAN, added two seagate 300gig drives to it and and told to mirror them for redundancy. I should have done more research this being a SAN rather then a more convention NAS dose not allow UNC connections and requires some proprietary software, you also can’t just mount drive should you have problems.

I have had some problems. It ate a ton o my data, including the thanks giving pictures. Poof, gone. You try to do the right thing and have a backup system but when your back redundant data protection system is the source of the failure… well it’s little disappointing. I have been working with Netgear tech support, they keep giving me things to try (VERY SLOWLY I MIGHT ADD ) and they keep not working. No root cause analysis or explanation of multiple solution scenarios of course. They might be right to say most people just wouldn’t care but I want to know if this is a fundamental problem with the device and if I should fire the dam thing and just suck it up and get something new.

 Anyway, I since the Netgear solutions are not getting my pictures back I was at least able to go back to the compactflash card that I used for thanks giving and run a regular disk recovery program against it to get some, if not all, of the pictures back. I have to clean things up a bit and then they really will be up in a day or so.

Hole thing has been a total drag, it’s my own fault I should have backed out when I understood what the box really was. I am just simple not a fan of SAN technology at work either. I tend to think of net apps and other NAS type devices as just being so much easier to deal with in case exactly this type of problem.