Daybook

Descriptions of what I did recently; what most people think of when they imagine a “diary entry.”

Dreams of a Gum Surgery Fiend

This is getting old. No, scratch that—it was old before it started. It is now real old. This morning, while I was still blearily sipping coffee and waiting for the microwave to cook my oatmeal, Carol looked at me across the table and said, “You're turning black and blue.” And it was true: The damage I had previously been able to conceal by just keeping my mouth shut is now leaking through my cheeks somehow, and I have blotches. Not many, not big, but sheesh, this was gum surgery. I didn't have a limb stitched back on. I didn't have my gallbladder removed. I wasn't in a brawl.

Carol, at least, tells me that the swelling isn't any worse than it was yesterday. Yay wow halluluia. It is, however, increasingly asymmetrical, as the left side appears to be going down a little faster than the right—or maybe the right side is still swelling and the left side finally stopped. The pain drugs keep me a safe distance from suicidal, but there are…side effects.

My dreams are changing. They are moving from otherworldly to thisworldly, and I'm not sure that's entirely a good thing. I've had my very personally specific brand of dreams for 55 years, and a guy should go with what works. Magnetic monsters that rise from my tool cabinet and look like walking globs of stuck-together screwdrivers and ratchet sets, well, fine. I can deal with tools. Rotating horned skyscrapers, sure. I used to live in Chicago and I like innovative architecture. Freeze-dried dinosaurs stacked up like cordwood out on the parkway, no sweat. I have a fireplace. Talking doughnuts—hey, I knew guys in college who not only talked to their doughnuts but argued with them. If that sounds weird to you, well, you don't remember the 70s.

I wish I was artist enough to do CGI. I would show you some things, man…

But no. Last night I woke up at 5 ayem from a new kind of dream. I am not making this up; you can ask Carol yourself. There was nothing freaky in the dream at all. There was nothing in the dream that does not already exist in this world, and that's a first for me. It was disturbing in the extreme: I was wandering around Hilary Clinton's red-brick condo in Park Ridge (outside of Chicago, where she grew up and near where I grew up) looking at her record collection while Hilary was talking strategy with two of the senior guys from her campaign team. She had a lot of Steely Dan. Ms. Clinton was charming, pleasant, and every so often came over to me to see if I wanted more nachos or another soda. I looked at my watch and remembered that I had volunteered to give them all a lift downtown in a few minutes, and decided I didn't want any more Diet Mountain Dew.

She was good with that. So I took my toolbag and went out to look for my car. It was gone. I had parked it in a no-parking zone, and the old guy on the second floor leaned out the window and told me he had reported me and they towed it. Dayam.

The nachos had nothing to say. There were no talking doughnuts. Where were the weird creatures? The space habitats? The mutant Frank Lloyd Wright bungalows floating on antigravity cushions? The fiendish intelligences breaking through from the eleventh dimension to steal our souls? No. Nothing at all. I dug for my car keys and pulled a spool of corotron wire out of my pocket, and woke up in a cold sweat.

Last night I dreamed I was Hilary Clinton's copier repairman. You couldn't beat that for weirdness by tossing in a Maidenform bra. I want off these drugs. Dear Lord, please let it be soon. Please.

And On the Third Day, He…Ached

Jan 17th, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

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Figgered I'd surface for a few words; I'm between pain pills and can think a little bit. However, my face is badly swollen and I've lost three pounds in as many days, largely because eating requires the detailed use of your mouth.

Before the surgery, the medical office handed me pages of fine print about the procedure and its aftermath, which I skimmed, as it was depressing. However, it was true in an interesting respect: The worst doesn't come until three days after the procedure itself. In truth, I was so sedated that I no longer remember much about being in the chair and getting worked on. And the first and second days weren't too bad. But this morning, mon dieu…

And there it was, in the fine print: Swelling peaks on the third or fourth day post-surgery. Now, I'm no Hugh Grant and don't care that much how I look, short-term. But swelling hurts.

So I'm reading, daydreaming, and lying on my back in bed being bored. I'll report more when I can think clearly enough to report on something.

Rocketing on New Year’s Eve

Dec 31st, 2007

by Jeff Duntemann.

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Shortly before driving out here, Pete got in touch with the Colorado Springs Rocket Society (COSROCS) and we got an invitation to an impromptu lauch this morning out at the club’s launch range waythehelloutthere beyond Peyton, Colorado. The photo above gives a good impression of the area. Is it just me, or does the image suggest an alien planet on the edge of some star’s habitable zone? (If the sun were at the horizon it would look like the twilight band of Longshadow, the tidally locked world in the Zeta Tucanae system on which some of the action of The Cunning Blood takes place.)

It was 22 degrees when we got there about 9:30 AM, with a good stiff wind and some powder snow in the hollows. The club was testing some newly built launch gear, so it was a small gathering, with Pete and myself and just three other club members plus the owners of the ranch on which the club’s launches are held. Pete brought along his newly completed (as of the night before) Estes Interceptor E rocket, a 39" beauty into which he had poured many hours over the past week or so. (I have one underway too, but we knew we didn’t have time to finish both of them before the launch this morning.)

Pete had a couple of other rockets with him, and we fired them all without losing any of them. His 15-year-old Phoenix model cracked the glue joint on one fin as it touched down a little awkwardly, but it’s nothing that a little 90-second epoxy won’t cure.

The photo above shows the Interceptor E on the launch rod ready to go. We got some terrific video of the launch and recovery, but the .mov file is 53 MB huge and I don’t have the server bandwidth to make it a download. (We may post it on YouTube after Pete does some video editing on it.)

The wind was intermittent, but when it was blowing it was blowing hard enough to be a hazard. One of the other club members put an E-class engine in his rocket and may have hit 1,000 feet, after which the wind took the vehicle a long, long way. He jumped in his truck for the chase, and through binoculars we watched him scour a field across the road more than half a mile off.

We got about a dozen launches in before pausing for some hot chocolate and homemade cookies with Tom and Eileen Preble, our very gracious hosts. Tom is that kind of guy you’d like to have behind the same tree as you; in addition to being an amateur astronomer and a private pilot, he built his passive solar house with his own hands. It was a toasty 72 degrees inside even though the nightly lows had been touching zero and they hadn’t had the heat on in three days.

Pete and I drove back to Colorado Springs marveling at how well it had all gone. I realized once I got out of the car again that after being fired, model rockets carry the unnmistakable whiff of black powder. (I myself hadn’t fired a model rocket in thirty years and had completely forgotten…) The car is in the garage with the windows open, and I’m considering a gasket case for toting future vehicles to and from the launch range. You live and learn.