TTK Ciar's Journal: Remicade, NASA, and the Passing of Needles

Remicade, NASA, and the Passing of Needles

Man, things have been busy lately! And it's been a month since my last journal entry .. scowl. So I'd better write something, eh?

Remicade

My wife's condition has been getting nothing but worse for a few months now, and the steroids she's been taking to control her internal ulcerations have had a little effect, but also many negative side effects (weakness, tiredness, sleeping 14+ hours a day, loss of balance .. icky things). After much discussion with doctors (one GP and two specialists!) and our insurance company, we finally got the go-ahead to put her on Remicade. Her first infusion was a little over a week ago, and it usually takes two or three weeks for it to show effects. We're crossing our fingers real hard for this, because if the Remicade doesn't work there are only a couple of options left open to us, all of which are scary and unpleasant.

I'm looking forward to her being well enough that she can come with me to a Houseness BBQ party and meet some of my new SF geek friends. They're great people, and I think cobalt would get along with them well. Also, some of my friends who have never met cobalt may be starting to think she's my imaginary friend :-) There is a reason people invite all of their friends and relatives to their wedding -- there's something to be said about showing a relationship, and demonstrating the wonderfulness of one's life partner. It will also do cobalt some good to get out of the house and meet new people.

NASA

I was determined -- determined! -- to leave The Archive for a less dysfunctional company. I was interviewing places and even got a couple of highly generous (perhaps even overly generous) offers from some cool companies, but then something really wonderful happened. The Director of Data Collections at The Archive offered me an extremely desirable role in his newly founded NASA Archive project. We are going to be digitizing, categorizing, archiving, and making available online a huge volume of NASA-produced content, and as soon as we hire someone to take over my old role as catch-all Data Collections engineer, it will be my full-time job to help make the NASA Archive happen. If I'm being a little vague on the details of what that entails, well, unfortunately there's a reason for it. All I can say is that this opportunity is like a dream come true for me. I will own several problems which intensely interest me, will be archiving vast volumes of hard scientific content (and pretty pictures, too!), and will do it while working with people I know and like. For the past few weeks I have been splitting my hours between general Data Collections tasks and NASA Archive tasks, and not really getting enough done on either, despite working even longer hours than usual.

So, please, if anyone out there knows a good software engineer who works well independently (by which I mean "submerged in utter chaos") and is excited at the notion of archiving hundreds of terabytes of new content, point them at this job description and encourage them to drop us their resume. It can be a wonderful company if you have the temperament for it, and I would work closely with my replacement for a couple of months before shifting entirely to NASA Archive tasks. The skills requirements isn't too much -- candidates need some PHP experience (preferably PHP5), experience with XML (parsing it, generating it, and using it in PHP5), and practical knowledge of using linux remotely (connecting to remote machines via ssh, using "df" to see if disks are full, looking at process lists to see what programs are misbehaving, simple stuff). Knowledge of another language well-suited to file manipulation (especially perl or python) is a plus, but not totally necessary as long as the candidate is willing to learn some perl (there is some legacy software written in perl that the Archive Engineer will need to maintain -- or totally rewrite in a different language, if they want). About half of the day-to-day work involves writing software that translates third party metadata (which might be XML, Excel, text files, or whatever) into Archive-compliant XML metadata. The other half tends to be more interesting, comprised of many things which we can talk about in person.

Farewell, Needles

Needleclaws, my beloved cat, had been struggling with her body for a long time (dementia, respiratory problems, arthritis, blindness, and other issues brought on by old age). On August 2nd of 2007, she gave up the struggle and passed away.

When I got home about 9:30pm she was panting and intermittently gasping for air, and would not sit or stand. She was barely responsive to cobalt and me touching her. Cobalt got a towel as I held my cat, and we wrapped her loosely to keep her warm and to contain the "nature" which would surely flow. I held her in my arms, talking to her, touching her face and head and neck.

Soon her pants faded to bare whispers of breath, and her gasps became more violent but less frequent. A corner of my mind couldn't help but count the clock ticks between her gasps. Ten seconds for a while, then twelve, then sixteen, twenty-four, thirty-two for a while .. then sixty-two, once, and she stopped breathing altogether. I still held her for a long while, with cobalt next to me. We wept, and talked about her life, and sometimes what we said made us laugh. She was a goofy cat.

She had been blind for about four years. She was a bulldog of a cat, my "battleaxe cat". She was insane in a way that made the other cats give her room when she wanted her turn at the food or water. One of her signs of affection was to rub her cheek and jowl against your hand, such that her overhanging fang would scrape lightly against your flesh. Cobalt loved it, called it "tusking". I took cobalt's hand and ran it lightly over my dead cat's tusk. Surprised, she laughed, and then cried.

Cobalt looked for something "more dignified" to wrap Needles in, while I went outside to finish the casket I had mostly built for this eventuality. I had wanted to go to the hardware store to find two more pieces of wood which were not warped and were the same length for the bottom of the casket, but there was no more time. I picked the two flattest pieces of wood which were more or less the same length, and finished building the casket bottom. Meanwhile, cobalt had laid Needles down on the t-shirt I had donated to the burial shroud (my old black "Codewarrior '96" shirts; it seemed appropriate) and snipped tufts of hair from my cat's body. It's a tradition she invented two decades ago, to make keepsakes of her dead pets' hair tufts. She would cut a tuft, lay it on the sticky side of a segment of clear packing tape, then fold the other end of the tape over the top, sealing the hair tuft in. Homespun lamination. She made three for me, two for herself.

I was very sad, but wanted to make something with my hands for her. A casket seemed just perfect. Apologies to the neighbors for the four nails I had to hammer that night. The following day I put the bottom on, put my cat inside, and nailed down the lid. It wasn't until the following day that cobalt and I were up and active at the same time, and we had a dignified but informal burial. I looped two lengths of rope under the casket, and left them in place when I buried it. The other end of the loops are showing above ground, and they will help me find the thing later and help me raise it up when we move to a different house. I want Needles to be buried on our own property. Where she is now is only temporary, like too much in our life right now.

Cobalt wrote up her own entry for this sad but inevitable passing.

I was very, very sad until I dug a four foot deep hole big enough to hold Needles' overly-large casket. The process burned away much of my grief and unhappiness. I still miss her, but not as harshly as I did before digging that hole. I surmise from this that people who hire a funeral parlor to bury their loved ones for them are doing themselves a disservice. Those who loved their deceased might find a lot of therapy in burying them themselves (or at least digging as much of the hole as they are physically able, and letting family and friends take over if necessary).

-- TTK