COMPUTER, COLORECTAL AND CATARACTS, AND ONLINE ART COURSE
What an extremely busy time it’s been recently. So much so that I’ve fallen behind a bit on the online art course, but it doesn’t really matter, as the course is designed for us to work at our own pace. Obviously it’s good to keep up so that you keep the momentum going and build continuously on what you are learning, but it’s important not to get stressed out about it if Life gets in the way at times!
Computer
I’ve mentioned before about my new laptop, and how when it arrived, the “E” key wasn’t working. Our local computer repair shop were able to get HP to collect it from them, and they replaced the keyboard under guarantee. This all took several weeks, but eventually I got it back, and was able to continue to install everything and get it up and running as I wanted.
I have been running two large external hard drives, of 5 TB each, as identical backups. In the early years I lost a lot of stuff through not being vigilant about backing up, and since then (highly stressful time!) I have become paranoid about this. The trouble is, hard drives don’t last forever and the more you use them, and connect and disconnect them from the computer, and move stuff around on them, the faster they will deteriorate.
Both of them were purchased at the same time and had equal amounts of use, as I backed up every file I created, onto each drive. They started to run very slowly, and I got a free app (EaseUS Partition Manager) which enables you to manage all your drives, both the main hard drive of the computer and any external ones that happen to be connected, and I was getting warnings of problems with both external drives. Running various tests, it appeared that there were loads of bad sectors. Definitely time to do something about this, so I purchased two new drives of the same capacity, and proceeded to transfer the material onto the first of these.
I have so much material now that it is impossible to store it all on the internal hard drive of the laptop. This is another reason why I have been running two identical external drives; one acts as the backup of the other. Before I discovered the imminent failure problem, I had found out that it could be advantageous to change the file system of the drive to NTFS if I was working exclusively with Windows, so I used the Partition Manager to achieve this on one of the drives. It involved formatting the drive and losing all the data on it. I began copying stuff over from the other one, and it was then that the alarm bells started ringing, and I was terrified that the drive that still contained all my data might fail before I could save it all! I stopped what I was doing, and immediately ordered the two new drives, and was on tenterhooks until everything was safely transferred onto the first of these.
I felt that it was unnecessary to run both backup drives all the time, and there didn’t seem to be much point in having backups of both laptops on both drives. (The other laptop is an old one that I use in the office and it doesn’t have much on it apart from the accounts etc.) It is highly unlikely that both the internal hard drive of the laptop and the backup external drive would fail simultaneously. I am therefore keeping the second one just as a backup for all my media stuff – tons of videos, all my photos, and a huge folder titled “Art” which contains an eclectic mix of tutorials in document and video format, images and other stuff. This drive is not connected to the computer all the time. I have created a folder on my desktop into which I put copies of anything that has already been put on the main backup drive, and about once a week I shall copy these over onto the second drive.
The added advantage to this is that the second drive is going to get a lot less use than the first, and if failure does happen, it is more likely to occur with the first one, giving me the chance to keep all the data intact.
NOTE: This may all seem very tedious and boring to read about, but it’s mainly for my benefit, as a record of what I have done, am doing, and why.
Health update
Things have suddenly started moving forward apace on all fronts.
Colorectal
When I saw the consultant in Exeter recently, regarding my parastomal hernia (see this blog post), he told me he was not prepared to go ahead with any operation until he had got all the information he wanted. It is now so long ago that I had my previous CT scan that he needed me to have another, and I had a letter with the appointment for this, in which was the instruction to go to the GP surgery and have bloods taken for kidney function in advance of the scan. I duly did this, and the CT scan took place last Monday.
He also told me he wanted me to have a sigmoidoscopy to check my rectal stump for any evidence of cancer or pre-cancer, and that this appointment might take a little longer. I have now received a date for this, on 28th March, and it appears that the consultant himself will perform this procedure. The week before (i.e. this coming Wednesday) I have a telephone appointment with the nurse to discuss the details of the procedure, and whether I shall need sedation or not.
After the sigmoidoscopy, I will be called back for another outpatient appointment with the consultant when we will discuss the best way forward.
Cataracts
I have now had my second cataract done. This took place on Thursday, so we are back on the drops three times a day regimen, and my hubby is doing this for me. He gets the drops in my eye, but I get them all over my face… We have to do this for three weeks.
After the first one was done, I had a follow-up appointment only four weeks later, but this time it has to be six weeks, to be sure that everything has settled down sufficiently for the optician to be able to prescribe new glasses for me.
It is strange that one’s two eyes should be so different! After the first operation I had very little discomfort. One of the two eye drops stung like crazy. After the second operation, all the way home in the car, my eye was very weepy and felt terribly gritty and uncomfortable, and I needed to take some paracetamol when I got home. When I was able to remove the eye shield the following morning, I needed to clean the eye which was pretty gunky and my eyelids were partially stuck together. After I had bathed it it looked and felt a lot better, but I have ended up with two floaters – one quite large “C” shaped one that scoots away to the side every time I try and look at it, and another tiny one that makes me think there’s a fruit fly in my face! One of the nurses from the clinic phoned that morning to check that everything was OK, and she said that floaters were quite frequent after surgery and that they should go away in time. As for the drops, the one that made my left eye sting so much, simply doesn’t sting at all in the right eye! Very odd. At the clinic, when I was having my cup of coffee after the operation, the nurse was chatting with me and she said that for many people, that particular one doesn’t sting, but the other one does!
Once the eye shield was off (I have to wear it at night for a week), I was blown away by the improvement in my vision. After the first one had been done, things were very unbalanced. In my glasses I had one lens only, for the right eye, and without glasses I was seeing double. The left one’s distance vision was fine but no reading correction, and of course no astigmatic correction either, but the right eye remained pretty awful with the cataract still in place. Now that both have been removed, I am not wearing my varifocal glasses at all and even with the astigmatism, my distance vision is incredible, not to mention how bright and clean all the colours look, and how sharp everything is. I have a pair of dedicated reading glasses and until I get my new varifocals, I have these on a cord round my neck which makes me feel distinctly grannified, but at least I’ve always got them with me. I certainly wouldn’t want to be in this “on and off” position permanently, though.
I am absolutely delighted with the result so far, and very grateful for all the excellent care at the clinic and also from the optician. Everyone has been so kind and so friendly, and the clinic itself, a private eye surgery clinic which takes NHS patients, was a beautiful place; very bright and clean. One thing I noticed on my various visits was that the towel dispenser in the disabled loo was fixed too high on the wall. I am able to stand so it wasn’t really a problem for me, but for anyone completely dependent on a wheelchair, it would have been impossible to reach.
When I arrived for my operation on Thursday I went to the loo as soon as we got there, and decided to mention this to the lady on the desk. When I was leaving after my operation, she said that the engineers had already been contacted about this and the job was in hand! How’s that for efficiency? She said she was very grateful for my having reported this as they had not thought about it, and although I wouldn’t be returning and would not experience the benefit myself, it would be so helpful for others.
At my pre-op appointment I had taken in the poster about Dad and the tigers, and I was told that this was now up on the wall in the staff room, and everyone was fascinated by it. They all loved hearing the story about Mum’s handbag, and the unusual experience my Dad had, operating on two tiger cubs with congenital cataracts back in the mid 1950s! As we were leaving, I said to my hubby how special it was that a little memory of Dad was being kept alive in a place where his work would be appreciated – I told them at the desk how absolutely thrilled I was with having my cataracts done and how lovely they had all been, and I said my dad would have been so proud of them all, and they were so pleased. I said to my hubby on the way out that as a result of all this, they probably wouldn’t forget us in a hurry! They run a kind of production line there, doing cataracts every day, and it must be hard to remember everybody, but once in a while something special comes along, like the story of my wonderful dad, and this will be remembered and talked about – something to lift them out of the doldrums of day to day routine!
Online art course
This afternoon my hubby and I sat down to continue work on the old car drawing. We’d done the outline first in pencil and then with the ink pens, and then the watercolour, and this step was to add further ink work to bring out some of the detail. Originally I wasn’t too keen to add much to what I’d already done, but decided to follow Phil, the teacher – after all, this is part of the course and a good exercise, and in the end I was quite pleased with the result. My hubby struggled with it and felt he’d overworked his, but when I looked at it, it looked more underworked. Not having taken part in the course from the beginning, he has missed out on all Phil’s continuing emphasis on the importance of values, and he is like I was at the beginning – a bit afraid of the very dark shadows! His whole drawing is rather bland and grey, but it was certainly improved after I suggested the areas that could be completely darkened. Apart from that, his drawing is very good and I liked the way he drew the grass in front of the car, and the background too, where there is another old wreck of a car.
I have decided to leave out this background as I want my car to stand alone without the distraction. The final lesson in this project will be to deal with the background. We will certainly be doing work on the grass in the foreground, and I may add a suggestion of some foliage in the background. This finishing touch is not nearly so important as the main subject, so I don’t think I shall be departing from the brief too much.
Anyway, here is my old car, firstly at the watercolour stage for comparison, followed by the drawing with the addition of the ink work.
It certainly looks more beat-up and rusty now! There is some additional detail and further darkening of the shadow areas.
When it is all done, I shall post all the photos in order, to show the progression of the work. This is a really fun project to do!
