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Category Archives: General
Early present
Leah will get an early present this year. She’s going to have surgery on the Monday before Christmas.
She has been having leg pain for several months because of pressure on a nerve in her spine, and she is experiencing some weakness in her leg. She has fallen a few times lately, once in the shower and once in the garage. She has avoided serious injury only through luck. It has reached the point that surgery of some sort is necessary.
The surgeon gave her two choices, fusion of the L4 and L5 vertebrae, or a laminectomy, in which the doctor removes some of the tissue that is pressing on the nerve. As usual, the choice was not clear. The laminectomy would almost certainly eliminate the problem, but it’s possible that the vertebrae might have too much motion as a result, and a fusion would have to be performed anyway. Fusion seemed a surer bet, but fusing vertebrae results in reduced motion, which often leads to back problems in other locations.
The laminectomy is a less complicated surgery that requires less time to recover — weeks instead of months. We asked the doctor the probability of needing fusion after a laminectomy. He said maybe 10 to 15 percent. Then we asked which he would do if he were in Leah’s shoes. He said a laminectomy. So that’s what Leah is going to get.
The surgery will be first thing Monday morning. And I mean first thing. We have to be at the hospital at 5:30 that morning. That’s bad enough, but Leah is supposed to drink a special carbohydrate supplement two hours before she arrives, plus take a shower with an antibiotic soap. And it takes about a half an hour to get to the hospital from our house. So we’ll be up shortly after we go to bed.
Leah is not looking forward to the surgery. She’s worried about a lot of things, some of which are even possible. Her father had surgery at about 81, and suffered permanent cognitive decline as a result of anesthesia (Post Operative Cognitive Dysfunction. Here’s the wikipedia article; if you search for POCD you will find lots of other articles, some pretty scary. See in particular the first sentence of the abstract at that link.). He also had back surgery many years ago, and that surgery left him with a weak leg.
And then there’s the fact that when we asked the doctor which surgery he would do, he said he would really not like to have any surgery. But, as I said, there really is no choice at this point.
Power!
I’m a little late posting this. We got our power back around 5:30 pm Monday, almost exactly four and a half days after we lost it. We were among the last to get power restored, not only in our area, but in the entire state.
We used about three gallons of purified water from the grocery store and probably three five-gallon buckets of less pure water every day that the power was out. We lost almost everything we had in our freezer. Since I couldn’t connect the refrigerator to our generator, it didn’t occur to me right away that I could connect the freezer.
I suppose it’s good that we don’t keep much in the freezer.
Just a note: ice cream is not good after it has been thawed for a few days and then refrozen.
It was quite a relief when the power came on. It was nice to have lights actually come on when I flipped a light switch. It was especially nice to have water come out of the faucet when I turned the handle. I was happy to take a hot shower that night.
This has made it clear that we need to be better prepared for the next power outage. The biggest problem was, of course, no water, since we’re on a well. My plan is to have an electrician wire a circuit breaker lockout and a fixture where we can plug in a generator. Without a big generator we will be able to power only part of the house, but that will be OK. If we can power the refrigerator and freezer, a few light circuits, and some outlets in the living room, we will be fine. Oh, and, of course, the well pump.
Smells like Christmas
Tropical Storm Zeta dropped by here early Thursday morning. It was not a good visitor. It didn’t stay long, and it tore the place up.
We woke up around 3 am to wind and rain. Leah got up around 5:30 and went into the kitchen. I heard her say, “Oh, great!” That’s when the power went off.
Zeta was predicted to bring pretty strong winds, and it did. Rome reported a peak gust of 55 mph. That was bad enough, but we had had about three inches of rain the day before, and along with the rain Zeta brought, it was enough to make the ground soggy and soft. Especially soft. Soft enough that trees fell all over North Georgia. Falling trees means, among other things, fallen power lines. Georgia Power said the storm damage was the worst in about 60 years. I checked the Georgia Power outage map for our area. It was busy.
Each icon indicates a power outage in a given area. The icon just left of center, with 15 in it, is our area. Clicking on the icon brings up information on how many customers were without power. Our little mountaintop community showed 12 customers, which means every single one of us. The numbers in the icons don’t show the number of customers without power. Other icons closer to town represented up into the hundreds of customers. The total in the Georgia Power service area was around a million.
The worst power outage we have had in our 15 years up here is less than a day. Georgia Power’s estimate for restoring power is 11 pm Sunday. For us, a very long power outage is more than an inconvenience. We have a decent generator, which means we can string extension cords through the house and get some lights, the TV, and the freezer running. Unfortunately, our refrigerator is a press fit into the cabinets, so we can’t get to the power cord for it. So now we have lights and TV, but since we are on a well, we have no water. That’s a problem. So I decided to drive down to town to get some water. That’s when we ran into the next problem. Downed trees blocked Fouche Gap Road down to Huffaker Road, which is the way we get into town.
I walked the dogs down to check it out. There was a second blockage a little further down.
The dogs and I edged past the trees, which were hanging on power lines, something I wouldn’t have done if the power lines were live. Further down the road we ran into more downed trees, but also a county road crew that was clearing the road.
Unfortunately for us, they wouldn’t touch trees that fell on power lines.
All the broken pines smelled like a Christmas tree farm.
There is a detour that leads down the far side of the mountain into Texas Valley, west along the northern edge of the mountain, and then to Huffaker a few miles further out. That adds at least 10 miles to our trip. Unfortunately (a lot of things were unfortunate), Big Texas Valley Road was blocked by trees. There is another way out of the valley that leads to Rome’s major north-south highway, US 27. The road narrows to one lane for some distance. It also had downed power lines, but they were dangling so that we could thread our way through. We got into town, but that detour is more than 20 miles, because it ends up on the wrong end of town for us.
Friday morning I saw our neighbor John, who has a grading company. He met a friend and they cut a narrow tunnel through the first downed tree on Fouche Gap. They expected to clear both places. On Friday Leah and I decided to drive into town, so we headed down Fouche Gap to Huffaker, expecting to find both blockages cleared. The second downed tree was not cleared. I said S*%T, and not for the last time. So we turned around and decided to take a chance on the 10-mile detour instead of the 20-mile detour. It was passable, but only because residents had taken their own chainsaws to the trees and cleared just enough to get by.
We stocked up on gallon jugs of filtered water for drinking and washing (hands and dishes, not entire bodies). We have a little wet-weather spring next to our driveway that provided water for toilet flushing. By Saturday it was running fairly low. Just about the time I was finding that out a neighbor came by and said we could get water at his house. He has a generator big enough to power his well pump and most of his house. I took him up on that offer, so as of late Saturday we have almost six gallons of drinking water and five five-gallon buckets filled with toilet-flushing water.
Another neighbor got a generator that automatically shuts off the company power lead and sends power into the house. Her generator is big enough to power everything in her house. That would be nice, but that kind of setup starts at around $4000 just for a smallish generator without installation. It’s hard to justify spending that kind of money for something that happens so infrequently. On the other hand, another neighbor and her husband use EPAP machines, so they have to have power. They ended up at a hotel.
Saturday morning a power company crew cleared the two trees that were blocking out way off the town side of the mountain. That allowed me to get to a fast food place and back in a reasonable time.
So, as of now, we have some water. We have some lights. It’s going to get cool tonight and cold tomorrow night. If the power company is right, we ought to have heat in time for the coldest part of the night. And how shower. That will be nice.
Fall shots
It’s fall here. The trees are just starting to turn, but last week, something other than a tree rushed to show its color.
This is a Virginia creeper. It’s a common vine on the mountain. In fact, it’s a common vine in about half of North America. Its range covers the entire eastern seaboard, as far west as Colorado, as far south as Texas (at least), and all the eastern Canadian provinces.
One of the most notable features of the Virginia creeper is that it is among the first plants to show fall color. I was driving down Fouche Gap Road last week and saw this brilliant red streak running up the side of a tree. When I took the dogs for a walk down that way, I took this photo. The red had faded by the time I took it, and the vine was bare about a week later.
Another vine is also showing some color.
Poison ivy. Not all that pretty. I have seen some poison ivy turning red as well.
The maples and sweetgums are beginning to turn, but the oaks haven’t really started yet.
Another sign of fall is dead deer dumped on the side of the road. I noticed a plastic garbage bag lying beside the road a couple of weeks ago. I thought it had fallen from the back of a pickup truck on its way to the county garbage transfer station; that happens sometimes. But when I nudged it with my shoe, I realized it was too heavy for garbage. I figured it was almost certainly something dead. I did not investigate further because I didn’t really want to know. I hope it’s only a deer.
The plastic protected whatever it was for longer than I expected, but by Wednesday, the sharp senses of the vultures had led them to it. They had torn the bag open, and the smell was not pleasant.
Zoe went crazy when she saw the vultures. In her opinion, they were not supposed to be there. The birds flew up into the trees. They are hard to see in this shot.
Here is a closer view of the birds.
They waited till we passed, then returned to their business. I was hoping they would find whatever is in the bag, because that’s the only way it was going to be cleaned up.