74 today. Data from my family tree indicates that I\u2019m doing all right by still breathing: I\u2019ve lived longer than any man in my paternal line going back to one Johann Andreas Duntemann 1729-1808. He made it to 78. If I can log five more years, I\u2019ll be the oldest guy in my paternal line going back as far as I can see, which (for now) is a man born in 1687, who died at 51. I\u2019ve seen the names and lifespans of other, older Duntemann men here and there, but I can\u2019t connect any of them to my own line.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s one way to look at a year that wasn\u2019t\u2026exactly<\/em>\u2026the best. I was diagnosed with prostate cancer last fall, had radiation treatment in January, and have recently been told by my oncologist that the radiation worked and my PSA is now 0.86. That was a big<\/em> drop, let\u2019s say. We need to keep an eye on it, but that\u2019s part of what getting older entails: keeping an eye on all your various \u201chealth numbers\u201d as I call them, to be sure nothing is severely out of line. In a blood panel some months back I found that my vitamin B-6 levels were literally off the chart on the high end. Doc told me to quit the B-50 supplements we\u2019ve been taking for years and years. I did. Last Tuesday I gave them some more blood, and learned that my B-6 levels now are dead-center in the normal range.<\/p>\n Whew. (I think.) I\u2019ve never heard of anyone overdosing on B vitamins, but a little research shows that it can happen<\/a>. I have a mild neuropathy in my right foot, and I have to wonder if excess B6 (pyridoxine) had anything to do with it.<\/p>\n About a month ago we had to send poor little Dash back to his Creator. He was 17 and developing multiple serious symptoms all at once. He lived longer than any of the other six dogs we\u2019ve had as a couple. So the Pack are all now in God\u2019s green fields. We cried, sure. Who wouldn\u2019t? We spent a lot of time with the Pack, and Dash retired from the show ring as an AKC Grand Champion. So he did very well, and we will always imagine him at his best.<\/p>\n There\u2019s nothing like a cancer diagnosis to scramble your creative faculties, and I\u2019m only just recently generating some new ideas and plot arcs for my (stalled) novel, The Molten Flesh<\/em>. I did publish a new and significantly rewritten version of my 1971 short story \u201cWhale Meat\u201d<\/a> and later on a new short story, \u201cMorning Man,\u201d<\/a> about an AI disk jockey at a small-town AM radio station. Both are available for 99c on Amazon. The two stories were platforms to try using generative AI to create covers for short ebook fiction. Not great, not terrible, and I learned a few things in the process.<\/p>\n That\u2019s all the bad stuff. Carol and I have never been closer. We bought a spectacular new car: a Subaru Crosstrek. I got a new mini-split AC installed in my garage\/workshop\/shack so it\u2019s not always an oven in there. I found a bunch of ancient manuscripts at the bottom of an old box that I thought were gone forever, including parts of a story I wrote when I was 10, on the ancient typewriter my grandmother Sade gave me that year. I\u2019ve made peace with Windows 11. We\u2019re still doing strength training and enjoying it as much as ever.<\/p>\n Nonetheless, I now say 73 to 73. Forgive me if I don\u2019t add ET CUL\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 74 today. Data from my family tree indicates that I\u2019m doing all right by still breathing: I\u2019ve lived longer than any man in my paternal line going back to one Johann Andreas Duntemann 1729-1808. He made it to 78. If I can log five more years, I\u2019ll be the oldest guy in my paternal line […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-noneoftheabove"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5664"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5664\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5665,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5664\/revisions\/5665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}