Debbie update...

Debbie update...  We just heard back from her orthopedist after he had a chance to review her knee MRI.  There's a clear diagnosis: a posterior horn medial meniscus tear.  The orthopedist unequivocally recommended surgery for her tear (they vary quite a bit).  We're in the process of getting that set up right now.

This is actually a bit of a relief for us.  The meniscus tear, in the grand scheme of things, is far from the worst sorts of injury that can happen to a knee.  Debbie's already experienced one of the worst: a tibial plateau fracture, and a bad one at that.  Generally surgery to repair meniscus tears is arthroscopic, low risk, and fast recovery.  We're hoping that hers will fall into that category. 

Also, there's quite likely a bit of a bonus for Debbie in this surgery.  When she had her tibial plateau fracture surgery (two and a half years ago), the surgeon “installed” a significant quantity of very expensive hardware – a fancy plate and a half dozen or so titanium screws.  She could never bring herself to schedule a surgery just to remove that hardware, so she's been clanking around with it (well, it doesn't really clank) ever since.  We're going to see if it can be removed at the same time the meniscus repair is done.

Phone just rang, and she has an appointment with a knee specialist next Thursday...

Precipitation in Paradise...

Precipitation in Paradise...  We had a surprise thunderstorm last night.  The forecast was for overcast, but we got a bit more than that – four tenths of an inch more, to be precise!  Our backyard is now once again a mud bowl, and it will take a few days to dry out.  Meanwhile, we have more rain actually forecast for this afternoon.

A couple of months ago, the locals with long experience here were worried about a drought.  Now they're worried about their hay rotting in the sopping fields.  Crop dusters (both fixed wing and helicopter) are having a boom time here, as many fields are too wet for a tractor spraying rig to traverse them.  I also saw a fantastical machine the other day (too far away to get a photo): a spraying machine with around a 100' wide spray boom, all running on the sort of giant balloon tires you see on dune buggies, but scaled way up.  Those tires spread the weight of the rig over quite a large ground area, and he wasn't sinking into the muck at all.  The photo at right will give you the general idea, but the one I saw was much larger...

Visual perspectives...

Visual perspectives...  Via my pistol-packing mama...

There's something similar that I hope to do in my retirement: capture natural sounds that we cannot hear because they are too low or too high in frequency, or their modulation is too low or too high in frequency.  I'd also like to develop a phase-array microphone that will let me accurately point a camera at the source of a sound (especially for birds).  Way back in the early '80s I briefly played around with these notions, but the compute power available then made it impractical.  Today the compute power in my iPhone is more than adequate!  Digital audio capture and electronic phase delay has also gotten much easier and cheaper than it used to be.  I think the most challenging aspect of these projects today will be the digital signal processing (software), not the hardware...