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around 3am this morning i was trying to get to sleep and i keep hearing these muffled yelps coming from somewhere. i thought it was cats that sometimes fight outside but i kept hearing it. after a few more it started sounding like “help”. there’s an old lady who lives in the unit underneath mine and im like, ugh, im sleepy. but i dont want this lady to die below me. so i go lie down on the floor and put my ear to the ground for a few minutes so i could make sure.

and sure enough, another “HAAALP!” comes from underneath, so i start yelling into the carpet. im like, “hello?”

“HAAALP!!”

“are you ok? do you need help?”

“im on the floor!”

“do you want me to call an ambulance?”

“i cant understand you!”

so im like, ok fine, it’s on now. i get up and go outside and walk downstairs and try to talk to her thru the window. she’s like way past 80 years old and her son who lives with her usually leaves for work around 1:30am, so i know she’s all alone. some neighbors are woken up by the commotion and we kinda talk thru the window. we cant see cuz of the blinds but in general it seems like she’s not deathly hurt, just not totally coherent and in need of some assistance.

“are you ok?”

*no answer*

*knock on window* “hello?”

“come on in!”

“i can’t, your door is locked. do you have someone we can call?”

*no answer*

“are you hurt? do you need help?”

“the light is on!”

so i’m like, fine. i call 911 and tell them whats up and call my apt manager (who never answers, this is no exception) and leave a message in case he can come by with a key.

911 sends police, ambulance and fire truck and the police dude takes it from there. he talks to the lady a little and then he takes the screen off the window to climb in. the window is a good 5 feet off the ground with an opening that’s pretty small. the police dude is like 6′3″ 250 so me and the neighbors are amused watching him try to squirm in.

apparently the lady fell trying to get to the bathroom and couldnt get up. the paramedics did their thing and decided to take her to the hospital as a precaution. i watched them wheel her into the back of the ambulance from my steps and i waved and she waved back and went “bye!” in her shrill old lady voice. it was kinda sweet. now i get to try to go back to sleep at 4:30am, secure in the knowledge that there will be no incapacitated old ladies trapped underneath my bedroom tonite. not on my watch.

I did it. It is done. After 4+ years of servitude, on July 11, 2008, I replaced my old cell phone for an iPhone 3G .

Back in the early 2000s I was still a bit of a cell phone snob. I didn’t believe people actually needed cell phones. People who used cell phones were just bad planners, I thought. I was a good planner. I was still waiting for the perfect device, one with voice, camera, mp3 playback, internet, memory for media and a color screen so I wouldn’t have to carry all those devices separately. The Handspring Visor Prism came close, but it was too clunky and so big it almost bordered on sidetalking.

The Toshiba VM4050 was one of the best phones out there in early 2004. It had a sturdy build, a decent camera, a colorful, high-quality screen, access to the web, and a clean and customizable interface. I got mine and I convinced several friends to get the same. Over the years I took over 3500 pictures with the onboard camera (50% up girl’s skirts), used the phone all over the country (including Hawaii and Puerto Rico), tethered it to my laptop on trips for desperate mobile internets and twirled, threw and abused it like dog’s favorite bone.

All the years and abuse were not kind. The charging port stopped working over a year ago. I took it to a Sprint store and they declared it unrepairable. I wasn’t ready to give up on it though. Having so many friends with the same phone paid off, as one accidentally broke the hinge and had to get a new phone. So he gave me his broken shell of a phone and I’ve been using it to charge the battery for my phone, swapping the batteries in and out every couple nights. When I went on trips, I would take both phones with me because I needed one to charge the other. It was ridiculous(ly cool).

Other things went wrong, I got water on the phone and the ringer volume buttons stopped working. That made for an embarrassing moment in a quiet theatre at Sundance. Specks of plastic were coming off the inside of the camera lens housing, depositing big black splotches in my pictures. And yet the phone soldiered on. I willed it to continue living. I was in control of the DNR papers and I said suscitate.

But now it’s finally time to say goodbye. It was strange, even after buying the iPhone, I was still preferring to use the old phone (I have a bit of overlapping carrier contract). But that balance has pretty much shifted 180 now. The iPhone still isn’t the perfect convergence device I’ve been waiting for, but it’s getting there. I’ll post my impressions of the iPhone 3G on here soon. In the meantime, it’s about time to pull the plug on the trusty VM4050. Or rather, since the charge plug doesn’t work, stop swapping those stupid batteries.

A couple months ago I fractured 3 ribs while snowboarding in Tahoe. I’m not a breaky-bone type of person and not a beginner snowboarder, so this was new and exciting. It was my third run of the day and second run through the terrain park. I was hitting a jump and for whatever reason totally bailed in mid-air and came down with my board sideways to the mountain. Having your board sideways to the mountain is normally okay, except when you are travelling 15-20 mph and falling from an 8 ft height, then it is less okay.

I landed and the momentum carried all my weight forward, smashing my torso into the landing pack. I remember two or three hard bounces and then coming to a stop unable to catch my breath at all. I couldn’t inhale normally and was gasping for air like a goldfish on a snowy mountain. It was pretty cool but unfortunately wasn’t caught on tape, what a waste. I knew something was wrong, I was just hoping it wasn’t too bad like a punctured lung or something, because then I would have to cut down on my smokes. (I dont actually smoke)

Ski patrol slid me down the mountain on a stretcher, about an hour later in the clinic I still couldn’t catch my breath, an ambulance came to take me to the hospital and my blood pressure crashed on the way there and they had to stick an IV in each arm. There was some blood in my urine so they did a CT scan to check for any injured organs leaking out precious life force.

Luckily everything was fine except for the 3 jaggedy ribs, it could have been much worse. And I got a cool CD with pictures of my insides! Truly this is some witchcraft.

Now that I’m pretty much healed up and have gone through the whole process, I have advice to give fellow rib breakers who may follow in my rib steps.

DO:

• Cough - It will definitely hurt, and don’t do it too often, but maybe 2-5 times a day, cough lightly. This will help keep your lungs clear of fluid and mucus. If you don’t cough, you’ll be susceptible to pneumonia, and you don’t want that.
• Light shoulder exercises - the side of your body with broken ribs is going to be weak, rolling your shoulders and doing arm circles will help.
• Breath deeply - my dad is all about these Chinese breathing exercises, and this one he told me to do seemed to help. Inhale, hold and exhale in a 1:4:3 ratio. That is, for every 1 second of inhaling, hold it in for 4 times that number, and exhale for 3 times that. Start with what you can do and work your way up. I started at 2, 8, 6 until I was back to normal. This will also help keep your lungs clear in conjunction with coughing. Do this as many times a day as you can.
• Have friends bring food - your friends and family will take pity on you and offer to bring food to your house in order to keep you alive. You should graciously accept. Having food delivered to your lap is a wonderful thing.
• Drink milk - the calcium will be good for your calcifying riblets.
• Take the recovery slowly - I did almost nothing exerting for the first 5 weeks and took weeks 6-9 very cautiously. I think the later weeks in the recovery period are the most dangerous because mentally you think you are ready for the big kick boxing match when actually your ribs are still gluing themselves together.

DO NOT:

• Laugh or sneeze - Laughter is the best medicine, except when it jiggles your dangling rib bones. Stay away from your funny friends and funny movies for the first few weeks. I learned this the hard way. Sneezing will also be horrible for you. When you feel a sneeze coming on, tilt your head down and try to suppress it. If you must sneeze or cough, hold a pillow on your stomach and use it as a splint.
• Use a rib belt - your doctor may give you a rib belt and it may seem helpful at first, kind of holding everything in place, but really all it’s doing is constricting your already labored breathing. I stopped using mine after the first night.
• Go driving - depending on how many of your ribs have become useless, you should avoid driving. I tried to drive a couple times and it wasn’t very safe, as I couldn’t turn my body to check blind spots or merge onto the highway. Get your nice, sympathetic friends to take you places.
• Sneeze in bed - I learned this the hard way and this isn’t on WebMD or someplace. Sneezing while laying horizontally still brought shooting pains in week 6, long after the normal pains diminished.
• Go insane - the world needs you.

Good luck! Hopefully this will help some of you looking for treatment. I’m not a doctor but I play one on the Internet.

Hello Earth! Here’s my shiny new blog. I’d like for this place to serve as my little information deposit to the internets, to repay all those times when I searched for something, and another human had published something that was useful to me. Hu-mans: don’t count us out!

Having instant information at your fingertips is pretty amazing. I remember back in the early 90s when I would write down a list of things I wanted to learn about and then tediously look them up in reference books and periodicals during weekly trips to the library. And I walked to school in the rain, gas cost a nickel, and Teddy Roosevelt took the Panama Canal! In my day I tell you what…