Well, I was getting ready to post something else instead, but I see that Photobucket is no longer allowing me to hot link photos to Badrabbit. I could, but the subscription would be $400 a year, which is ridiculous. I’m in the process of setting up an alternative host for images, but until then I guess I’ll just have to use text.

One of the things the new post was going to talk about was how I’m revamping my personal website for optimal viewing on a cellphone. Sections are already this way but it’s a large site, thousands of files, well over 500 html pages, and revamping includes rescaling almost all of the many, many images on the site. Since the site goes back to 2000 finding the originals can be a challenge. The section I’m working on is about 200 pages and that’s being entirely rewritten and reorganized.

I’ll be a little slow on displaying images on existing pages, but actually the alternative host will be a lot easier for me to use so maybe more pictures in the future.

A couple of days later — I’ve started changing the image urls but it’s going to take a while. The most recent posts with images have been done.

This is a photo I took about a month ago from a road in our woods toward the garden, looking west. This is a different road than that in last October’s post.

I never thought, until today, that our home which enjoys the many benefits of electricity from the sun was a political statement. For us solar power just made sense.

We live in a third world enclave in a first world country. Infrastructure is challenged to say it nicely, not like neighboring states like Ohio or Virginia. Our state road in the hollow to our home is slowly reverting back to dirt. Phone and electrical service come with periodic outages. Everyone remembers when a leaking chemical tank contaminated the river which was the source of drinking water for 300,000. We’ve had two major natural gas pipeline explosions within miles of our home since 2000.

Of course living in a third world enclave lets us see politics at its crudest. Now everyone in this first world country gets to see what we see all the time, only this is national politics. A president who can’t use the words climate change has taken our country out of the Paris Climate Accord for reasons, because he can’t say climate change, that don’t make much sense. Of course when politics becomes crude, leaves the realm of compromise, then finding anything that makes sense is nearly impossible. In this country we now have the party which is always right, and the opposition, the always wrong. Our president, the impresario of gilt schlock, is incapable of telling the truth about anything. And that’s being kind.

Are we happy with solar power? Yes. When our unfortunate neighbors’ power is out for one reason or another, our refrigerator still runs and we have lights. And now we get to make a political statement, too.

I’ve been going through hundreds of old drilling documents, well records and plugging affidavits for oil and gas wells, and I stumbled upon some records with neat handwriting. These are on Lincoln county, West Virginia, well records from the early 1940s, though the writing strikes me as older, say around 1910. Actually there are some 1909 and later records in the same handwriting but I think these are copies made in the 1940s. The script on the earlier records is fancier. By the 1940s many records were typewritten and are actually harder to read, at least the copies of copies that I’m seeing.

What I’m am doing with selected records is attempting to determine if wells drilled in the early part of the 20th century are a hazard to drinking water in certain situations. In West Virginia the legislature didn’t require fully cemented surface casing to protect fresh water until the late 1960s. Operators did this as a matter of course earlier, but the practice didn’t become usual until the 1960s. I’ve seen a completion report for a well drilled in Kanawha county the 1940s where there is no cement at all behind any casing to protect the producing formation, the original purpose of cement, or groundwater.

Drillers didn’t begin to use cement until the early twentieth century. A well drilled in West Virginia around 1910 most likely has no cement. West Virginia was one of the first states to required plugging of wells, but this was to conserve mineral resources, not to protect groundwater. In the early twentieth century drillers here were using just a wood plug, or plugs, in casing and red clay. Cement plugs, usually on top of wood plugs, start to appear affidavits in the 1930s, again with lots of red clay to fill the hole. The open annulus behind uncemented casing remains a pathway for contaminants to groundwater. It wasn’t until the mid-1950s that plugging started to begin to meet modern standards with removal of uncemented casing and thicker cement plugs separated by gel.

When these early wells were drilled a final step in the completion process was setting off an explosion deep underground. These are variously called nitro or glycerin(e) treatments where quarts of the explosive, plus a little dynamite, were used. In the 1960s several wells were fractured using atom bombs, not in this state, thank goodness. This maybe gives an idea of the forces unleashed underground today with hydraulic fracturing. The well report from which the bit of handwriting is shown here has 90 quarts used.

I love doughnuts, at least the first bite or two and then they become sort of boring. I’ll labor through the whole box or bag in a perverse form of dedication. Even though I love doughnuts I try to eat a doughnut or two only several times a year. Just because I love doughnuts doesn’t mean they’re good for me.

In 2015 I started to have some health issues. I was putting off doing anything about them because they would either go away or I was going to see the doctor anyway in a week. Things came to a head that weekend when I realized I had an enlarged lymph node – it felt huge. That and the periodic fevers and other stuff caused my partner to put down her foot and say we’re going to the doctor Monday morning.

The doctor’s office squeezed me in for an appointment and I was feeling like an idiot for making a big fuss. The doctor examined me, discovered other enlarged lymph nodes, got this look on his face, and left the examination room. We could see him across the hall talking to people in the lab. I looked to my partner and she looked to me and I thought that’s strange.

He came back, sat in a chair and said, “We’re going to be aggressive about this, I promise you.”

I said, “What’s this?”

“Lymphoma.”

He started me on some antibiotics in case this was an infection and scheduled me for an ultrasound of the largest node.

It was definitely time for some doughnuts. They tasted good, especially after doing some research at the library about lymphoma.

Two weeks later he had the ultrasound results and the antibiotics weren’t having a noticeable effect so he sent me off for a second opinion. That opinion was also lymphoma and I was scheduled for surgery to remove a node for pathology.

I love doing research and I did a ton of research. At this stage of diagnosis about 38% of the time the pathology report will not show cancer but some other issue. That was the number that stuck in my head until the night before surgery when I realized that meant about two thirds of the time pathology will show lymphoma.

The surgeon told my partner while I was in recovery that he thought everything would be okay. Since we were in town anyway we went shopping. I think I got my streak of optimism from my mother.

In the end, it was an infection of unknown source.

The sad thing is that my doctor died last year, unexpectedly, and I miss him. He was one of those people where you can see the child they were. Bright eyed, imaginative and inquisitive, a bundle of energy. He emigrated from the Middle East when he was sixteen, was someone who gave so much to his adopted country. I miss him and doughnuts won’t help.

This is what I posted on FetLife a few weeks ago. When these events were happening in 2015 one of Kelsey’s family members called it “a hard time for family dads.” Her brother’s father was in ICU in Colorado, our daughter’s birth father was in ICU in Miami on life support. The daughter was down there faced with the decision of whether or not to pull the plug. He lived alone, had a massive stroke, and wasn’t found until several days afterward. His doctors didn’t expect him to live and if he did live wouldn’t have much brain function. She decided not to pull the plug.

She was really pissed when we told her after the fact what had been going on with us but accepted our reasoning that she already had more than enough to deal with.

The father in Colorado is okay, I’m okay, and the daughter’s father in Miami survived. He’s able to talk but not able to live on his own — he’s in an assisted care facility where the nurses love him. There have been rumors of a romance.

One of the reasons for the FetLife post was to remind myself that I didn’t need to go off the deep end. After a physical in early January my new doctor brought up the c-word in a new context and sent me off to a specialist. The specialist called me Tuesday with the pathology report from the biopsy and it was good news. Again.