"There is nothing -- absolutely nothing -- half so much worth doing..."


"... as simply messing about in boats."

So omegabeth and I rode from Boston to Provincetown on Saturday, on a tandem bike borrowed from moominmolly and dilletante.

What happened?

• Tandems are way cool. Everyone we rode with seemed to be cheered up just having a tandem on the road. We became known to the rest of the riders, and later, by apparently random people in Provincetown, as "those crazy tandem people."
• omegabeth did not keel over and die from biking on her broken ankle.
• omegabeth actually finished in way better shape than I did.  By the end of the ride, she was doing the bulk of the hard cranking.
• omegabeth is clearly a mutant who has supernormal healing powers and possibly an adamantium endoskeleton.
• Good bike fit is really important.  Really really important. Like, as important as you thought it was, and then more important than that.  I did an okay job of sizing the tandem to me, but "okay" is not good enough, especially for a trip like this.  I finished the ride with severe numbness in the ring and little fingers of both hands, and profoundly diminished gripping strength.  Right now I can barely turn a key in a lock, put on my socks, or write my name.  Calling the doctor first thing in the morning.
• As important as it is to wear sunscreen, for the love of god remember not to wear it on your face. Because then when you start sweating, it melts and trickles down your forehead into your eyes, and it stings and you can't see and THAT WILL MAKE YOU DIE.

I have many many heroes today, but especially keyne and kids for their love and ongoing support of my madness, moominmolly and dilletante for the loan of their contraption and for invaluable technical advice, soong and sandhawke for sharing their homes (sometimes unexpectedly), bubblebabble and bitty for sharing their home and for gamely going along with our insane plans, inseriatim for repaying the favor and registering me when I started acting lame, and omegabeth for being such an amazing, untiring, perpetually upbeat and inspiring ride partner.  This life is sometimes an amazing place to be.

As of this morning, unchi.org appears to be registered to some domain squatter in Canada.  I was pretty sure I had reregistered it for 10 years, so I'm not sure what's going on, but I'm investigating.  If mail to unchi.org is bouncing, this is why. 

Edit: Resolved.   Billing dispute.  Very embarrassing.

My dear friend docorion, an ER doctor, recently posted this extraordinary essay on death and his relationship to it.

I tried to write a better introduction, but he has left me tongue-tied.  So all I can say is: You should go read it.  Now.

When Morgan went to Nature's Classroom in September, he took his point-and-shoot camera and extra memory cards I packed with him.  He came back with about 800 pictures.

A lot of them were of things like his dinner and mashed-potato sculptures and his classmates doing goofy things.  There were probably 100 pictures of the bonfire at the end of the week, taken valiantly in total darkness and coming out impossibly blurry.

But a lot of them came out well.  And some of them really stunned me.

I think I could work with this guy.

So I had this birthday.  And a really, really lovely birthday it was, with highlights including:

• Surprise visit and magnificent birthday cake from omegabeth in the morning
• Surprise visit and gifts from chaiya in the morning
• Long lunch and great conversation with ectophylla 
• Surprise birthday dinner and magnificent birthday cake from keyne, Mom, Dad and the kids
• Lots of post-dinner visits from the neighbors to help polish off as much of the cake as possible.
  

The funniest part:

The magnificent birthday cake from omegabeth was a chocolate layer cake with peanut butter frosting.

The magnificent birthday cake from keyne and npierce was.... a chocolate layer cake with peanut butter frosting and chocolate glaze.

I think I may be getting predictable.

But enough of that.  Here's what matters.  All day long, I ran into people at every turn who were conspiring to make sure I had a good day.  And wow, apparently I needed that more than anything.

Thanks and love to you all.  You are my rockstars.

More first responder training tonight.  We finally got our books!  That will be awesome -- I have been taking copious notes, and when questions come up, Mike has provided good and clear answers, but I'm certain I've been missing some stuff.  Tonight's class was all about vital signs, recognizing different classes of shock, and how to treat different classes of wounds.

But here's the snag: we can't administer an Epi-Pen.

First responders are trained to provide a very specific level of emergency aid.  We can dress wounds, splint fractures, administer CPR, that sort of thing.  We cannot go beyond our scope of training.  That makes sense -- they don't want a bunch of kids who have gotten 30 hours of classroom instruction to go swaggering out in the world thinking they can perform emergency tracheotomies.

Among the things first responders are not allowed to do is administer medication.  Which includes the Epi-Pen.

Now, our neighbors include one young boy with a very severe peanut allergy.  We all got instruction from them on how to use the Epi-Pen, in case he were to go into shock when his parents aren't around.  My spouse has an allergy to bee stings severe enough to keep an Epi-Pen in her purse.

As a regular joe, I would be covered under the Good Samaritan law if I were to administer the Epi-Pen to someone in good faith.  But for trained first responders, the Good Samaritan law only covers you as long as you stay within your scope of training.

My reading of this is that, until I get my first responder certification, I can legally use the Epi-Pen on someone who's going into shock.  After that, doing so could expose me to liability if anything were to go wrong.

It all reminds me of Michael Pollan's discovery of the bizarre legal rabbit-hole around the poppy: that if you wish to grow opium poppies, you can do so provided you do not know what they are -- that once you realize that fact, you can be held liable for drug trafficking.  It's kinda loopy.  But there we are.

27. Get CPR certified.

I started First Responder training last week.  "CPR training" has been on my to-do list for a long time anyway.  This is a lot more intensive than that, so of course I jumped at the chance when I learned they had classes in our area.

The instructor is a gregarious and rambly local EMT and firefighter.  He's a nice guy but it remains to be seen how effective the instruction is -- several times the class has gone off on a long digression to cover another hysterical story about a greenstick fracture or meth overdose he covered once.  Which I don't mind hearing about, as long as I feel like it prepares me to take care of a terrified car wreck victim some day, which I'm not sure it will.  But hey, we'll see.

Possibly the most disturbing thing I've learned tonight is that paramedics consider rotten.com a great source of photographs for teaching aids.  (Not entirely surprising, but disturbing nonetheless.  And I'm deliberately not giving you a link there -- if you don't know what it is, then you probably don't want to see it.)

Just about every cohousing community is built around a "common house" -- sort of a clubhouse for grownups.  Typical common houses include a "great room" large enough for a few dozen people to eat together, a kids' rec room, a mail room, a living room -- that sort of thing.  Ours also has a music room, a laundry room, an exercise area, a commercial-grade kitchen and more.

The common house is the backbone of a cohousing group.  The community is organized in a way that encourages people to gather at the common house during the course of the day.  Everyone's mail gets delivered there.  Many of us do laundry in the common house.  Two to four times a week we hold a community-wide meal.  We designed and built the community with the expectation that we would often spend as much time hanging out at the common house as at our own houses.

There was one hitch in this plan.  Our common house wasn't ready.

When we started moving in, the general contractor was still finishing some of the units.  The construction schedule meant that most of the units would get finished before the common house.  That's good, because the individual family houses had to be finished before people could move into them!  But very very frustrating for us.

So we have been picking up our mail at the town post office every day or two.  Those of us who don't have our own laundry machines have been sharing with those who do, or going to a laundromat.  We've been having common meals a couple of times a week in the dining room of one of the unsold units.  Living here is great, but it wasn't exactly what we were expecting.

( Until now. )

It's a "temporary" certificate of occupancy because there are still a few things to be negotiated with this inspector and that official and this other guy, and so on, but nothing likely to be show-stopping at this point.  With no likely overwhelming roadblocks at this point, we are legally allowed to use the building.

So what's it like?

( Let me show you what it's like. )