Foggy morning, smoggy sunrise, photos by S. Doug Studdert

Let’s see… where to start….

Greyfox had medical and dental appointments at the clinic up the valley, so he has known for a couple of weeks that he would be passing through here today.  He made his usual heroic offer to bring us supplies, and started making a shopping list.  I kept adding items to the list as they came to mind up until last night.

For perhaps four or five days, Greyfox has fallen into another pattern that is usual for him in such cases.  He started getting stressed out and testy, tired of trying to find places to stow the stuff he had accumulated for us, sick of tripping over some of it, regretting ever having offered to do it… the usual.  Yesterday, I got a plaintive message on CallWave:  He had been limping and gimping around a supermarket for twenty minutes, trying to find the enchilada sauce.  He wanted to know if I knew where to find it.

I called back and told him where it had been the last time that I had been in that store, but that was no help to him.  Finally, he went to the customer service desk and was told that all the salsa and such had been moved into a new “Hispanic foods” department.  He found that, but they were out of hot enchilada sauce of any kind, so he ended up at a different store, where he finally scored my sauce.  My hero!

I had decided that I was going to rest as much as possible, in the interest of self-preservation.  I resisted getting caught up in Greyfox’s stress as much as I could, and when he suggested that I bake one of the pizzas he was bringing for us to eat while he was here, I delegated that job to Doug.  Doug knew that his help would be needed for unloading our supplies, so instead of going to bed early this morning, he stayed up.  That meant I was relieved of the fire watch and being the cats’ door opener and closer.  It helped, especially since I wasn’t breathing too well in the smoggy air before the morning fog burned off.

I had been running low on things to read and this morning I started on a book one of us had picked up from the library discard rack, a Time-Life Mysteries of the Unknown volume, Search for the Soul.  I was well into the story of James Kidd, an eccentric Arizona copper miner who left hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and stocks to be donated to “research or some scientific proof of a
soul of the human body which leaves at death,” when I discovered that someone had cut a bunch of pictures out of the book, taking with them the text that had been on the opposite sides of the pages. 

That distracted me, and I flipped through the book looking at the captions for the missing pictures.  Apparently, each one included some Christian symbolism, leaving me wondering if the miscreant had been a Christian scrapbooker or decoupager gathering crafts material; a Christian purist who objected to the symbols’ being in such close proximity to pagan symbols and text involving reincarnation, transmigration, etc.; or if it was someone who found the Xian symbols offensive.  I may never know, just as I may never know all of James Kidd’s story.

I remained in bed while Doug and Greyfox unloaded our supplies.  My bed is in the living room, close to the wood stove, since I’m the most likely member of the family to notice a decrease of warmth and get up to stoke the fire.  I had told Greyfox I was running out of stuff to read, and asked him to check the discard racks and the unlimited checkout paperbacks, and bring me things that looked good.  During the past week or so, I’ve gotten several calls from him, in which he listed what was available and I told him yea or nay.  As the kitchen filled up with bags of groceries this morning, my bed filled with bags of books, a few DVDs, and the selected sections of Sunday papers (funnies and Earthweek, mostly) that he habitually saves for us.

After Greyfox left for his clinic appointments, Doug helped me dig out from under the books on my bed.  I moved over to the couch and we watched a western movie.  The Old Fart blew through on his way home, stopping long enough to pick up the DVD we had been watching while he was up at the clinic.  Now, the sun is going down (we are down to less than nine hours of sun a day now), Greyfox is already back at his place in Wasilla, Doug has gone to bed after having been up for about 24 hours, and I’m back to having to decide how long to put up with the draft from the half-closed door each time a cat goes through it, before I get up and shut it.

It is very quiet here.  I like it that way.
  

“Pain is part of life; suffering is optional.”
  –The Buddha

I have the intellectual resources and psychological skills to accept whatever comes along in my life, without suffering or feeling like a victim.  Having those resources makes life much easier and more pleasant than it would be otherwise, more pleasant than it was before I learned those skills.

Even though I have not recovered from all the symptoms, I can tell that the pneumonia crisis has passed.  I guess that I slowed my recovery by going out on three separate occasions when reason and medical advice would have had me resting in bed.  Because adrenaline gave me the strength to function, I did, and I have paid for my imprudent acts with prolonged and increased symptoms.  Mea culpa.  That was my doing, my unwise choices, my refusal to accept that I’m sick when I feel strong enough to get up and go and get things done.

Now I have resolved to take it easy, as much as I can.  Taking it easy is not always easy.  Rest and lots of fluids is not an easy prescription to follow.  The fluids keep me going to the outhouse, but in my estimation that is still preferable to being in a hospital bed, condemned to using a bedpan.  I don’t run.  I take it slow and easy.  I had Doug spread ashes from the woodstove on the icy path to prevent slips.  If that’s not taking it easy enough, then I’ll just have to take the consequences.

Doug’s sleep schedule is somewhere between night and day now.  He goes to bed between midnight and dawn and gets up sometime in the middle of the day.  When he is down, I must keep the fire going, let the dog in and out as needed, and likewise with the cats.  If a cat lets itself in or out, I have the option of gettng up to close the door, or just letting it swing closed and accepting the minor flow of fresh cold air that comes through the crack.  When Doug is up, I have the option of calling on him to do things, leaving them undone, or doing them myself.  Sometimes that choice is not an easy one to make.

I wrote recently about my occasional giddiness from hypoxia, and some other emotional ups and downs.  I have known in some vague way that the difficulty I have breathing when I lie flat, and my inability to sleep for more than a few hours at a time, have been affecting my moods as well as my ability to heal.  After reading this article at SFgate.com, it seems to me that I’m caught in a nasty little feedback loop here, as the effects of sleep deprivation lead me to, “overreact to emotional challenges,” and to make, “irrational choices.”

Doug has gotten himself into an emotional bind over my illness.  Caring for me is burdensome, and to top it off he’s trying to take on a burden of guilt over my death if I don’t survive this crap.  This gives me more motivation to live, anyway, even as it complicates my choices when it comes down to asking for his help or doing for myself.

I need sleep.  That is undeniable.  The night before last, when I lay down to sleep around ten thirty at night, I coughed until half past midnight before sitting up and turning on a light to read.  The rest of the night, I nodded off over my book a few times for half an hour or so.  My diaphragm still burns from that episode, and the connective tissue between my ribs keeps reminding me that with M.E., any body part that gets used gets sore. 

Last night, I was able to lie down and sleep for an hour or two at a time, three or four times.  I’m not sure.  One of the times, I started to get up, thinking it was after six, but Doug told me it was only about three.  I could have sworn I’d looked at the clock and it said six something.  That must have been a dream.  I see and hear strange things, too, in the hypnogogic periods as I’m falling asleep.

I’m okay, even with these challenges.  The body-mind is getting by, and the spirit still soars.  I just want to make that clear
in case anybody is worried about me.   I do not need worries, not yours
or mine.  I need to go check the fire now.  I fed the stove when I awoke today, and that was hours ago.  Letting the fire go out would only make more work trying to get it going again.  
 

Anyone who has followed my blog even sporadically will know that it is all over the place:  memoirs from half a century or more ago, commentary on the news, silly quizzes, photos of subarctic suburban life, myth and folklore, and more, including the obligatory journals about my chronic illness and the occasional acute health crisis.  I call them “obligatory,” because my instincts when I am sick urge me to withdraw from human contact and communication.  I would never post anything like yesterday’s entry if I didn’t feel that I need to, and for more compelling reasons than simply a need to vent. 

My commitment to disclosure conflicts with cultural programming to pretend that I am “okay,” and the factor that always tilts the scale toward revelation is my solidarity with others whose health might be even shakier than my own.  Footprints reveal hits referred from the blogrings, Living with Chronic Illness and Pain and Fibroland, and others show me that people find my site through web searches for myalgic encephalomyelitis and chronic fatigue.  If anyone finds a useful fact or gets a helpful lift when morale is low, then my purpose is fulfilled.

The immediate feedback I get from these entries, in the form of comments, can be both comforting and disturbing, all at the same time.  I keep reminding myself that it is the thought that counts, that people care about me who might not quite know how to express that.  Their wishes for me to “get well” or “feel better,” I tell myself, are not meant to pressure me into better performance when I am healing as well as I know how and as fast as I can already.

Once in a while, one of those “get well” comments includes something more than just good wishes.  Yesterday, HomerTheBrave sent me a link to maybelogic.blogspot and a video of Alan Moore’s poetic tribute to Robert Anton Wilson, “And How Are You Tonight, Mr. Wilson?”  I was moved to tears and laughter, both of which have incredible healing powers.  It’s so wonderful to have such wise and generous friends.  Keep those comments coming.

Mind over matter appears to be something I can handle as long as the matter is functioning within acceptable parameters.  That’s counterintuitive, isn’t it?  If it’s mind over matter, the mind should be able to rise above the matter’s malfunctions.

Mind is not in the brain, they say, but internal evidence suggests to me that my mind is at least of the brain and the brain can’t get out of the body.

Greyfox quoted me something recently, from George Carlin, something like, the sicker you are the more likely you are to forget to take your medicine.  I’m that sick, and then some.

I have been experiencing random waves of rogue brain chemistry:  unaccountable sensations of wellbeing followed by suffocating waves of malaise and dysphoria that make my hair hurt.  During one of those waves of phantom wellness a day or two ago, I got up and tried to cook something to eat.  It was just a simple meal.  I was too shaky to even attempt much, but as soon as the vapor started rising from the pan, it choked the breath out of me.  I sat on the kitchen stool until I could walk again, and Doug finished cooking whatever it was.  I don’t remember… don’t remember eating it, either, but I suppose I did.

I know I took my vitamins after breakfast today.  I remember it clearly because swallowing the pills almost made me puke.  I hope they were the right pills.

It snowed again.  I have that perennial seasonal urge to go south, but dammit I’m too sick to travel even if I had the fare.

Ignore me.  I’ll get over it, one way or the other.

People are just following age-old patterns of behavior without thinking about the reasons or the results.  It is a large scale manifestation of the same psycho-social factors that cause people to be interested in and talk about their neighbors.  Some people care a lot more about celebrities than others do, and I suspect that those are the same people who care the most about what their next door neighbor does.  

Many factors, such as snobbery, curiosity, or narcissism, can influence how much interest a person takes in other people and about which other people one tends to care.  In a small village, high status individuals are more likely to be talked about than those of lower status, largely because the higher status people are better known to everyone.  It is more enjoyable talking about someone when everyone in the conversation knows the person under discussion.

The more notoriety or status a person has, the more people will be interested in his or her activities.    Anything which brings notoriety, such as a singer with a popular song, an actor with a role in a successful movie, or a politician who gets arrested, arouses interest and discussion.  People also have valid reasons for wanting to know about the ones whose political status, wealth, or social position might give them power and influence over any aspect of one’s life.  Media response to the demand for information creates even greater demand by increasing the celebrity’s notoriety.

The psycho-social programming behind that phenomenon is certainly older than civilization.  Biologists studying apes and elephants, for example, have noted that their social groups tend to keep track of both the leaders and the young, and to communicate about them.  The effect of a global culture and electronic communication has been to magnify this to an absurd degree.

I just answered this Featured Question, you can answer it too!

I wrote recently about my will to live, in connection with pneumonia and the difficulty I have been having breathing.  I used the word, “anoxia,” when what I really meant was, “hypoxia,” low oxygen to the brain, not no oxygen to the brain.  That is a distinction I should know.  In my right mind, I do know it, but I have been subject to a mild dementia lately, due to the hypoxia of pneumonia.

I like using words like hypoxia, ataxia, aphasia, etc., because they take fewer keystrokes and less space on the page than their definitions do.  Sometimes I forget, or ignore the fact, that some readers don’t know what I mean.  Occasionally, I get comments telling me that someone had to look up a word.  That tells me that I’m expanding someone’s vocabulary.

In my current condition, it might be wiser to stick to standard words, or even monosyllables.  That’s not effing likely, so I’ll just have to accept the risk of sounding stupid as I type from my stream of consciousness with my oxygen starved brain.(at first, I typed, “not bloody likely,” but recently I learned that
effing is the new bloody and I didn’t want to misrepresent myself as a
bloody Brit, anyway)

Last night while we had Greyfox on the speaker phone, Doug was in the kitchen making me a cup of tea.  He said, “Are you the one who has been putting the torn Splenda® packets back in the basket?  It sure wasn’t me!”

I answered him, something to the effect that I wasn’t aware of having done that but wouldn’t be surprised to learn that I had, since I have been stumbling around here (ataxia) with an oxygen starved brain.  At least that is what I was trying to say, but the words didn’t come out right (aphasia), so I had to say it again… and again, before both Doug and Greyfox understood what I was trying to say.

Greyfox’s response was, “I sure hope you haven’t lost any important brain cells from that.”  Though admittedly imperfect, my wetware is functioning better than my input/output systems, so I started wondering just which of my brain cells might be important, or might seem important to my husband, in contrast to those that were (relatively, I hope) unimportant to him.  I love each of those little cells equally, you see.  They all are important to me.

I had been thinking about brain cells even before Greyfox brought up the subject.  I had noticed behavioral changes in myself and wondered if they were fever related and temporary or possibly more permanent and due to brain changes.  I had observed, in addition to weakness and decreased muscle control, my emotions were more labile than usual and I tended to be more jocular, boisterous (in a conversational way, not physically), and what I’ll have to call “silly” for want of a better word.

Today, I did some web research on the effects of hypoxia.  It was reassuring.  I learned that mild to moderate hypoxia usually has no lasting effects beyond the hypoxic episode.  Severe hypoxia or anoxia, however, can have some pretty awful and permanent effects, including coma and death.  I’m glad I haven’t gone that far.  Since I haven’t completely lost consciousness, my hypoxia hasn’t gone past moderate.

This is where the healthy instincts come in.  It might be a misnomer to call them instincts, actually.  There has been some conditioning involved, through over four decades of experience with asthma attacks and hypoxia associated with the dyspnea of M.E.   I don’t know when I learned, or if I always knew, to stop when I got short of breath, bend over so my head was lower than my heart, and push the old air out and pull new air in with all my might.

I do recall that this time, even before I’d learned that I have pneumonia, when I was starting up the ladder to work on the roof and darkness began closing in on the edges of my vision, my legs started shaking and my heart racing, I paused on the rung I was on until the blackness receded, backed slowly down the ladder, bent over and rested my hands on my knees to keep from pitching over on my head… and just breathed for a while.  Then I apologized to Doug, who was already on the roof, and told him he’d have to finish fixing the roof without me.

Since then, I haven’t attempted to climb any ladders, but I’ve had to stop and drop my head more than a few times while trying to get from place to place.  I have also given priority to the function of my diaphragm as necessary, focusing on it and ignoring everything else when that was what I needed to do to avoid blacking out.  Such techniques have kept me from losing consciousness, and presumably (if my sources are correct) have kept me from losing important brain cells.  That’s reassuring.

I was thirty-five when I found my elder daughter, after having been separated from her for over sixteen years.  I have written about her birth and our parting, and links to other episodes during the intervening three years that she lived with me can be found in the memoir module on my main page.  In 2009, I posted another entry about her, Whatever happened to little Marie?

My mother had maintained contact with my daughter’s adoptive family.  Occasionally, she would send me a recent photo, but she would not relay messages from me to Marie/Dorrie, nor would she reveal the other’s location to either of us.  The little bits of contact went only one way.  My daughter was never given any news or photos of me.  I learned from her that she had asked my mother about me many times, and received only evasion, even after she was an adult and married.

When my first grandchild was about six months old, my mother decided to let me know I had become a grandmother.  She sent one of the first photos taken of my grandson.  It was the “official first photo” birth announcement, professionally done in the hospital nursery, enclosed in a decorative paper folder with matching envelope.  He looked like a generic Caucasian neonate, squinty and purplish.  I was captivated by him and frustrated by my mother’s obstinacy in keeping my daughter and me apart after all those years.

On an impulse, I tore the glue loose and removed the photo from the folder.  On the back of the photo, I found a rubber stamp impression with the name of the hospital, and a handwritten surname.  I was familiar with a hospital by that name in Wichita, Kansas, where my first son had been born.  Directory assistance in Wichita said there were two listings for that surname.  I got both numbers, and my daughter answered on my first try.  I said, “Dorrie…?” and that was the start of our mother and child reunion.

It took a few months to accumulate the money and make travel plans, but that autumn I went to Wichita to see her and to meet my son-in-law and my grandson.  I kept a journal on that trip.  It has always been easier for me to keep journals in extraordinary times than in times of mundane routine.  That autumn, that trip, and the journal, came immediately to mind when I saw the current Featured_Grownups topic, Tales from the Autumns of our lives.  I knew where that journal was.  I thought it would make it easy for me to write about that trip to Kansas for the reunion.

I was wrong about that.  After reading the journal, I see that the diary itself must be the centerpiece of this essay.  It reminds me that the value of a journal is less the record of events than the insight it can later provide us into our earlier selves.  I began on November 14, 1979, aboard flight 730 from Anchorage to Seattle, in more stilted language than is usual for me, expressing the uncertainty, anticipation, and anxiety I felt over the upcoming reunion with my mother and my daughter. 

Therapy had let me work through most of my own issues, and had taught me the importance of confronting family issues.  There were my daughter’s feelings about my letting her go that had to be dealt with.  There were also a complex set of issues between my mother and me.  I wrote:

I got no sleep on the plane.  To save money, I flew only as far as Seattle and took a bus from there, and continued without sleep through Idaho.  The diary reminds me, with all my reporting about what I was eating and how I felt physically, that at that time I had only recently begun to abstain from refined carbohydrates.  It also shows how, with the zeal of the new convert, I attempted to educate the whole family about nutrition, and to clean up their diets.

When I got there, my baby grandson greeted me with enthusiasm and affection.  His mother was more reserved for a few days until we’d had a chance to talk out our feelings and share some of each other’s histories.  Both of my daughters had been abused in the foster home where they were placed first, and after Dorrie left with the woman who eventually adopted her, she was exploited, harassed, and belittled by her adoptive family.  She was told lies about the circumstances of her adoption.

Reading the diary entries about my son-in-law, I can only conclude that at the beginning I was censoring myself because I feared that he might read the journal.  I remember that he struck me as overly polite, with an excessive and transparently phony show of deference toward me and affection toward his wife and son.  I made an effort to like him, but I never succeeded.

After a few days in Wichita, I went home with my mother to the farm where she lived with her current husband.  She had married a widower and took up a position in his family that no real live person could fill.  It was obvious from the interactions I observed that she wasn’t liked and wasn’t welcome there.  It seemed that she’d become the scapegoat for the whole family, and I had a hard time figuring out how much of it she had brought on herself with her manipulation and mind games.  Her unhappiness was palpable, and she was completely unresponsive to my efforts to draw her out and confront the issues.

To get away from that miserable place and those miserable people, I spent a few days in Halstead with “Little Granny,” my mother’s sister Alice.  We shared some enjoyable conversation, I mined her memories for family history and genealogy, and I took several long walks around that little town I had known so well and of which I had so many conflicted feelings along with the memories.

I was invited to Thanksgiving dinner with my daughter’s inlaws.  I was pressured to deviate from my diet and “try” this or that dish loaded with sugar.  I was as polite as could be in refusing on grounds of health, but it was obvious that my hosts were offended.  Dorrie’s father-in-law ladled gravy onto my plate against my protests, and I did my best to pick out a little uncontaminated turkey, but still had a huge blood sugar spike and opted to walk back to Dorrie’s house to work off the drowsiness.  When I made my excuses, explaining that it was either get out and walk or fall asleep, my host indicated that I should just take a nap.  “That’s what I’m gonna do,” he said in a superior tone.  Later, thinking over the interactions of that dysfunctional family, I wrote:

My grandson needed to wear leg braces to correct a congenital orthopedic problem.  One day, my son-in-law’s parents came to pick the baby up for a visit to his great grandmother:

My mother expressed nothing but admiration for Dorrie’s inlaws.  I commented in my journal on my own reticence to express how I felt about the family my daughter had married into.  I rationalized it on grounds of not wanting to make trouble for Dorrie.  I had no such problems regarding her adopted family.  Everyone there was badmouthing them.  Dorrie had run away from home as a teen to escape her role in the household as maid and babysitter.  I learned that following a divorce, her adoptive mother had run an “escort service” for her living.  Dorrie had some ugly stories about drugs and frightening encounters with her mother’s customers.

By the end of my stay, my initial opinions of Dorrie’s husband’s phony courtesy had been borne out.  He never had the temerity to say anything rude to me, but I heard several instances of his browbeating and berating my daughter, screaming at the baby to shut up, and speaking scathingly of other people toward whom I had seen him behave with the same sort of polite hypocritical mealymouthed bullshit he laid on me.  I was more than ready to return home when the time came.

This journey occurred about halfway through my ten year cohabitation, then marriage, with Charley, Doug’s father.  I remarked several times in the journal on how much I missed him, and how uncomfortable I was with the idea of being so emotionally dependent on him.  I can even find in the journal some indications of his controlling behavior and possessive attitudes that contributed to our eventual separation.  But that would come later. 

As soon as I got home from my visit with my grandson, I told Charley I wanted to have a baby.  Until then, I had felt as if “losing” three children (four when I include the one who was stillborn) was enough grief for one lifetime.  I had even refused for some years to have a pet because losing them hurt too much.  But after holding my grandson and getting to know him, I just couldn’t not risk giving my heart to another child, no matter what the outcome.  The outcome of that decision has been plenty of challenges, with more rewards than I ever could have imagined.  No regrets.

A few days ago, in response to a little anecdote involving some laughter shared between Doug and me that I had written in an entry about my ups and downs with pneumonia, ZashiaQSharr wrote:

I know.  I understand this more deeply than I am able to express.  One of the sweetest things about our relationship is that he appreciates me about as much as I appreciate him.  We lean on each other.  We love each other and bring laughter, insight, discovery, and more, into each other’s lives.  We sometimes grate on each other’s nerves, too, get in each other’s way, eat the other’s ice cream, fuss over which of us gets to use the computer or the PS2. . . . This is a well-rounded relationship, and I never expected it to be as rich and full as it is.  I certainly didn’t think he’d hang around as an adult and take care of me, nor had I expected to need so much help.

I have another magical relationship, too, with my Old Fart, Greyfox.  It is just as “well-rounded” as my relationship with my son, full of challenges and frustrations along with the joys and laughter.   It amazes and delights me to see the ways in which we meet each other’s needs, all three of us.  There is very little of a strictly conventional nature in our family life, but we’re a more functional unit than many more conventional families are.  We are seldom all in the same place at one time, and the nightly 3-way speaker phone conversations are often the high point of everyone’s day.

If I could bottle the magic formula for what we have and share it with the world, I would do so and know that the world would be happier, more peaceful, and more interesting as a result.  It is not that easy, however.  This family has endured some tough times that might have destroyed one or more of us and the relationships we share.  We held together, not entirely willingly sometimes, and it paid off in the long run not just because we held together but because we did it with love and honesty.  If I ever find a way to bottle love and honesty, I’ll give it away to everyone.  Meanwhile, that little secret is what I have to give, and I can only hope that everyone is wise enough to understand and practice it.

My health is much improved today.  I slept well last night and have been breathing without assistance today.  My husband the witch doctor has ordered me to take it easy, “no tramping around in the cold taking pictures,” no housecleaning, etc.  But he was a little late with the admonition about the picture taking.  I captured the images below this morning before Greyfox called me.

Yesterday’s snow is all gone except in a few shady areas.

Some surfaces, such as the lid of the garbage can, are glazed with frost.

Frost highlights edges and tips of some grasses and moss.

I may have been mistaken last week when I said we would not get any “practice snow” this year, the kind that melts away within hours or days.  When I said that, the ground had been frozen and days and nights were staying below freezing.  Then we had two warmer days, with nighttime temps in the 40s F.  Last night, it rained.  Then it snowed.  Then it was rain and snow mixed for a while around dawn.  What it does next is anyone’s guess.

I only had to take a few steps out my door to get the image above.  That’s as far as I plan to go today, and the nearest I expect to get to actual productive work.  Much of my energy is going into coughing.  At least it’s a productive cough. 

In a reflective ( and probably anoxic ) moment recently, while I considered the sensitivities of some of my readers — the ones who wince at my descriptions of pain and malfunction, or who scroll quickly past the pictures I post of cuts, abrasions, burns and scars, I created a new Xanga account:  oversharing.  If you possess a curiosity that’s stronger than any squeamishness you may have, maybe you’d want to sub or friend or something. 

If I feel energetic enough later today, I’ll post something over there about what my cough has been producing.   Or maybe I’ll post it here.  It’s not as if I haven’t already done a lot of oversharing here already.  I joked one time that my nic should have been, “oversharing.”  Now it is.

I’m on my way back to bed, very soon. 

I’m focused on rest and recuperation today.  I just got off the phone with Greyfox, who is gearing up for a busy weekend of sales as he celebrates his 60th birthday, or as he said in his blog today, (quoting George Carlin) “16 Celsius.”

If inspiration strikes later on, I may be back.