June 11, 2024 – Finished both antibiotics yesterday. Returned the continuous infusion pump to the medicine provider and had my ports removed by the home health nurse. Nothing extra left on me or in me except a big bandage where the ports penetrated my arm, and that comes off tomorrow. I feel almost human again! […]
Done with treatment Read More »
May 4, 2024 – I just returned from six days in the hospital recovering from a UTI that had blossomed into a nasty sepsis infection. The hospital stay ran through my birthday–not my best birthday, but my lovely wife did bring me a small piece of my birthday cake each day. I never really felt
Sepsis hospital stay Read More »
February 19, 2024 – Not really news from your point of view, but it’s what I’ve been up to lately. Another security plugin showed me that unauthorized people (well, probably unauthorized bots) were trying to gain access to my administrator account several times a day. I get the impression this is pretty common, but it
More website security Read More »
2/5/24 – I had to update my bulk email plugin to its new version. And repair the settings on my SMTP mail plugin. And I cleaned up my other plugins and themes, including starting up a new security plugin. And I learned more about backing up and restoring a site with my current tools (just
Website maintenance Read More »
10/31/23 – I recently finished the arduous task of changing my website and email hosts. Well, that was more of a pain than I’d anticipated! But, with any luck, I’m done, and all of you out there won’t notice any difference. This should cure the problem I was having of some of my outgoing emails
Change to website and email hosts Read More »
October 28, 2023 – I appeared at the 1942 Tacos and Tequila restaurant near Ligonier, PA at an event by the Ligonier Valley Writers group (https://www.lvwonline.org/) honoring the winners of their flash fiction contest. No, I wasn’t a winner—I didn’t even enter—but I gave a talk on writing flash fiction and read my flash story
Reading WANT GOLD for Ligonier Valley Writers Read More »
August 7, 2023 – I went to the Friday evening session of Confluence, the convention by Parsec (https://parsec-sff.org/), Pittsburgh’s science fiction club, on July 21. A good time as always, highly recommended for all science fiction and fantasy readers and writers. I particularly enjoyed the session on hopepunk and solarpunk. They’re sort of the opposite
April 16, 2023 – I’ve added a giveaway of my story “What Matters” to my email list signup! It’s all there on the home page. While adding this, I found that my email list signup had broken at some point, probably when I updated my email security settings some time ago, and I hadn’t noticed.
Email list and story giveaway Read More »
April 14, 2023 – I was just about to start cardiac rehab from the heart surgery, when COVID suddenly came roaring through the household and hit us all. It wasn’t too bad for three of us–all that vaxing and boosting apparently paid off–but my oldest son got slammed–he always gets everything worse than anyone else,
February 1, 2023 – I just had surgery to replace my heart’s aortic valve. I’d known for a couple of years it had aortic stenosis (inability to pass enough flow) caused by a combination of a birth defect and aging, but only recently did the condition suddenly jump into the “severe” category and require surgery