Oh! And, BTW - Yes, We Both Feel MUCH Better Now!

It worked.

Walter'd filled the car with fuel around mid-week. He'd already told me he wanted to take us out on a jaunt as soon as we could go. We don't know when he may be suddenly ordered back to work; he's still getting tests done and waiting for time to heal his injury.

The checks are coming steadily now, which is a huge relief. But after such a long period of low to no pay - two months, I think?!, I don't want to know for sure, really - we have a lot of financial catching up to do. That's just ordinary budgeted expenses, outside of the debt we're still working off.

So Mr. Budget did not look upon excursions with a kind eye. Filling the tank on the Isuzu cost $66. I have never paid that much for one tank of automobile fuel in my entire life.

Walter filled 'er up after carefully listening to my accounts of where we stood, knowing that at least we weren't secretly overdrawn or about to have the internet shut off. Walter knew that if the tank was full, it would be a lot harder for me to say, again, --No, we can't afford it yet, maybe next weekend...

He also knew how very much it would mean to me to go out, especially where we went.

Can you tell how much I love that man?

Picture us staggering around allergic Sunday morning, fighting to stay awake, doing better or worse as our allergy meds freshened or wore off, or new waves of pollen came through like they do. Carefully parceling out our necessary belongings, putting them by the front door, not daring to open it until the last minute. Open the door and pollen comes in...

Earlier in the morning, Walter was a little better off than I was. He cleaned out two air machines; then he went down, and I perked up a bit. Good. I fed him. He was getting so fatigued he was about to pass out, and surely would be in no condition to drive. Lunch woke him up a little.

Meantime, at long last, I packed the car as quick as I could. I turned the key in the ignition and ran the HEPA and ionizer machines in there for a while.

It was already early afternoon by then. You see how pokey we get? Both of us are seriously experienced travelers. Despite this being an unusual type of trip, it shouldn't have taken more than an hour or so to get going. I wanted to bring some odd items as a sort of practice run for camping out in the Isuzu. So maybe two hours packing, maximum.

Not five.

Here's one of those times I think, --This is why they call it *disabled...*

I came back in and told Walter, --Ride shotgun, I can drive. Just getting into a small space with both air machines going will help us.--

Between the cleaned air and trading environments with the Everglades, we're both doing much better today. Me, I slept until late afternoon, and felt pretty vigorous when I woke up. Walter's eyes are almost normal, not all black and purple and swollen shut. He's been able to stay awake all day. He got up to get his chest CAT scanned this morning (hooray!).

I got up at the same time to take my AM meds, then fell asleep in the office chair. When he came home around 11 AM, I thought it was 8:30 and he was just leaving for his test. Nope. It was time to wake up, take my noon meds, and go back to bed.

I woke up refreshed. Been awhile since I did.

We have no idea how long the good effects will last. But we'll be sure to enjoy the hell out of them while they do.
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This Place of Unearthly Beauty

We went to my all-time favorite place in the Everglades, off US 41. I had a need to go a-swamping, and so we did. The trees you'll be seeing are mostly cypress (bald and pond cypress). But what I love just as much as cypress are the plants that live upon them. Here, it's forests of bromeliads. And orchids, lichens, ferns, all sorts of beautiful plants.


It's one of the only places I've ever been where a swamp looks like the *Swamp* scenes from the movies.


The water is like a mirror. It's so reflective it's hard to tell where the surface is sometimes.


Those bushy looking plants growing up the trunk of the cypress tree are bromeliads. Many are way bigger than your head.


Plants that live on other plants are called epiphytes. They don't hurt the host plant. Here, it's not just bromeliads and orchids that live on the trunks of these trees. The ferns and lichens and such do too.
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We Were Entertained By All Sorts of Critters...

Well, hello!


heh! Everybody knows alligators can't read.


I have to look this one up. Maybe a Painted Lady?


Zebra longwing. Perfectly common down here, but I never ever get tired of them.
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This Campsite is Taken. Hey!

The deer are slightly skittish, but not enough to leave. They're really almost tame.


Which, as the rangers tell us, is not a good idea. This preserve contains about half the state's population of panthers. Those are very big cats, folks. The sign explains how you shouldn't jog alone here, or let your toddlers or dogs run around untethered.


nom nom nom! Oh - the reason it's not a good idea for the deer to be so tame is because deer are the panthers' favorite dinner, along with feral hogs. If dinner's tame, it'll hang around humans, and the huge cats will follow. So please don't feed the deer and hogs. Thank you.


There are giant grasshoppers here too, lubbers and such. Probably you can feed them all you want. But the signs don't say.


This bird, and his wife, were vastly entertaining. More about them later...
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Hoooo-EEE!!!

We are both incredibly allergic here. The pollen counts are skyrocketing and Walter is getting the extreme symptoms I used to live with daily. Back before the high-dose steroids, that was.

Most people wouldn't understand these are symptoms of extreme allergies. I'm watching him and it's like looking into a mirror. I've talked with other superallergics, but almost never seen one in the middle of a bout.

We were walking through the house to the laundry room. He suddenly wavered, recovered his balance, tried to take another step, and his foot went way off to the side instead of in front of him. Like someone who's had too much Happy Hour.

I told him, --Put your hand on the wall. Something solid. Stand up as straight as you can: line up your bones. If you touch anything at all it'll help you balance.

Around his eyes, he's so swollen and purple it looks like he was in a bar fight after that too much Happy Hour.

He's sleeping constantly. Gets up for an hour or two, can't do anything, can't stay upright, goes back to bed. Taking Zyrtec helps some, for a while. It makes his nose leak like crazy.

Fatigue. Dizziness. Loss of balance. Extreme sleep. Weakness. I ask him a question and his mind goes blank.

Walter was always allergic. He gets these reactions to food, like eggs, where his skin makes huge patches of hives, nearly covering his back and thighs. But this? This is new.

Long ago I wondered if some obscure virus may play a role in this superallergic condition. If so? He caught it from me.

He's been getting more and more like me in his allergic reactions the past few years. I'm far more protected now than I was seventeen years ago. There's a reason I take all these pills. It's not for recreation, believe me.

He doesn't take those allergy meds, and most of them are barred to him because of his heart condition and the meds he takes for that.

Bear with me. I'm here. I'm sleeping too, most of the time, just not as much as Walter.

Right now we're contemplating running off for a nice recreational drive. If we pack the Isuzu with HEPA air machines, a drive will probably do us both a lot of good. Just going to another area, not even far away, can help calm down these reactions. Walter says whenever he leaves Florida he's normal again. I know this is a factor in his desire to go back to work.

Meanwhile...I've been hearing from some of you, too, about exceptional allergic reactions, hay fever, like that. Your dizziness and fatigue are part of it, yes.

And I've got a stack of unanswered comments and emails about other stuff. I'll get back to you as soon as I can.

I'm okay. I'm used to this. Just slow, for now. I'll get there though.

I always do.
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Happy Birthday Dad! Oh. Happy Father's Day Too!

My father was a Texan, although you'd never know it to speak to him. A Californian as well. He moved all over the country in his childhood and youth. Granddad was a college tennis coach, then became a civil engineer. A Navy lieutenant during WWII. After the war, when Granddad moved up into high-level defense construction as a civilian, they did some more moving around.

But when Dad was a little boy, they stayed put long enough in Texas that he kept a pet spider for quite some time. It wasn't in a container; it was free. It had spun a web between his bed's headboard and the wall. He feels this was very effective for keeping his mother out of his room. Hey. Kids need their privacy.

That spider was a black widow. Now you know one reason I've loved black widows all my life.

Dad's mother, my Helen, was an artist. Oh, she was a pistol, Grandma was. Outspoken and funny, intelligent and flirtatious, intimidating as all get out. She could charm the eyes off a snake, and had a pilot's license too. A true Texas woman. Besides all their family dogs, she tolerated Dad's many personal pets, his scorpions and spiders and I don't know what-all. Well, she better; she kept pet rats as a girl, herself.

One day the movers came, packing the family up for yet another relocation, and they went by a little box Dad had put on the dining room table. The lid of the box opened up. Out came his collection of pet tarantulas, crawling over the dining room table, escapees.

That was one of their more interesting household moving experiences.

A lover of science and medicine and biology all his life, Dad went on to medical school, became a doctor, helped deliver his own kids, then went into pure microbiological research - his lifelong dream. It's been an interesting ride ever since.

It's perfectly common now to see extraordinary things; we take them for granted, watching the Discovery Channel or National Geographic. But when I was small, viewing any microbial life was an unusual privilege for adults, not to mention kids.

Dad the Scientist had access to one of those rarities called an electron microscope in the early 1960's. Looking through those eyepieces, seeing things so small that almost nobody in the world had even dreamed of them - that fascination has never left me. They were black and white images, not color. But for the first time in history, with an electron microscope you could see certain internal structures in very small microbes. Particles of minuscule life that had only been theorized until then were actually being viewed. And as a small child I got to see some of those first-ever sights.

Our parents used to take us up to Mt. Baldy when we were kids. We'd get pond samples and bring them home to look at all the pond life through the microscope. Oh, it was beautiful! Diatoms and paramecia and amoebas and protozoa and I don't know what all, swimming around doing their bit. You could watch them move, propelling themselves about with their little flagella or whatever their usual means, eating, engulfing fellow denizens in great maws. They blithely went about their business of life in the tiny universe they dwelled in - a partial drop of water on a slide.

Dad's done a lot of tissue culture, meaning he grows tissue cells, human, mice, rat, whatever the need. The containers the tissue cells live in are kept in an incubator at just the right temperature, and fed just the right medium to grow and reproduce as fast and healthy as they can.

They need some TLC from time to time. For example, the containers may need periodic rotating to bathe all the cells in the medium. These days that's automated, using roller bottles. You can see how well they're doing by simply counting a sample, to see how their numbers increase over time. Perhaps adjustments in temperature or food are called for. So the ritual of counting cells by putting a sample, or the whole bottle, under the microscope is a familiar one. A nurturing activity, checking the little ones to see how they do.

So is mixing medium. Like most foods, it's a lot cheaper and better if you make it yourself. Dad gets the ingredients and mixes up big batches, often in a 5-gallon water jug. Different foods have different mixing procedures. Generally, though, they take several steps that include putting a big bottle of stuff on an electromagnet plate. Inside the bottle is a piece of steel. Turn on the electromagnet, and the steel inside the bottle rotates fast, mixing the medium.

Add some more stuff and mix again. That step may involve a more gentle mixing procedure: rolling the big bottle across the floor. I've had the pleasure of helping in that one. Dad stands across the room, puts the big bottle on the ground, shoves it over to me with his foot, and I send it rolling back to him. Ah, fun! We roll it back and forth until he deems it Mixed Enough.

The incubator temperature can be tricky. No matter how much care is taken with the incubator room, with its thermostat, its HVAC system, it can still be just a tiny bit off. That tiny bit can mean days of delay in cell reproduction, and thus in production of whatever he's after. Sometimes the solution is a wonderfully simple one: add a light bulb. The tiny increase in heat by turning on, say, a 40-watt bulb can keep the temperature exactly right.

Dad has accomplished great things in his life. If I gave you his name to google, you'd find some of them. Part of why he was able to do these things is because he's always been a person to think *outside the box,* as they say. He took great care, raising us kids, to teach us to follow this approach as well. To think for ourselves, no matter what others say. To be truly independent, and true to ourselves. It's why he mixes his own medium. Why he rolls the bottle across the floor. Why he added a light bulb in the incubator. Why he had a pet black widow spider.

This is creativity, invention, independence, individualism. I feel all this when I walk into his home turf - his lab.

I want you readers to have some idea of what that home turf looks like. To see, perhaps, some of why I love the place, and love to see my father in it, doing his work. So I'm publishing some pix from the very many I took when I visited the lab last year.

I really don't know what would have happened to me without my father's teachings. Did we butt heads? Oh, you bet. At times, very badly. But the older I get, the more I realize how much both my parents gave us kids, gave me. And how difficult I must have been to raise. There are no parents in the world who can raise children without ever making a single mistake, without ever doing their kids some wrong, large or small. If we had it to do over again, I'd do certain things very differently, and I've no doubt my parents would too.

It takes a special father to raise a *gifted* child. Dad...In those long ago days, lashing out in anger, I told you plenty about the negative parts. I think, I'm pretty sure, I left out thanking you for the good things you gave me, for the strength to deal with the unusual brain and heart I was born with. And for the wonderful times not just out in the world but also in your lab, that place of peace. I want to thank you for all of that now, and to tell you how sorry I am for how very long it took me to say so.

Today is Father's Day. My father was, and is, an unusual dad. Lucky for me, an unusual dad is exactly the kind I need. I would not exist without him, of course. But you know I mean that in more ways than just me being born - with Doctor Dad helping.

His own birthday is very close to Father's Day. This tends to confuse me. Dad, once again this errant daughter, despite carefully watching the calendar, neglected to call you on the Actual Day. Probably, in fact, slept right through it. So I hope you'll accept this as a Double Happy Day, and forgive me my transgression there.

I love you, Dad. Happy Father's Day to you. And happy birthday, too.

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Welcome! Come Into the Laboratory.

NOTE: I'm publishing these *backwards,* with the first in the series at the top of the scroll, not the bottom. There are 6 separate picture posts in this series, with four pix in each post. (This is because I'm too lazy to figure out how to do more than four pix in Blogger once again.)

We're going to take a walk through the lab, and see some of the special things it holds. The vast majority are things I can't begin to identify, sry! But some I can. Enough, I hope, to take you on a reasonable tour.

Click away, embiggen to your heart's content. Some of these pix are more blurry than I like, and the subjects are visually complex. Embiggening is good for you!

And just in case you wondered: Dad knows exactly what, and where, everything in here is.


This is the view that greeted me as I walked into Dad's lab last year. I hadn't been in this one before. They never look the same to me, but I always like them all.


There's always some Wonderful Mysterious Glassware.


All KINDS of glassware. Some look exactly like you'd expect them to.


And there's usually a fridge holding bottles of mystery substances.

Many Mysterious Bottles of Substances, Actually.

Some come labeled by Official Scientific Companies.


Some make you think you're at the pharmacy.


Some are hand-labeled concoctions that only a father might know for sure.


Some are perfectly sensible to the regular visitor: *Antibodies.* I like antibodies. Well, most of them, anyway. The good ones, I want more of.

...And Some Perfectly Recognizable Ones.

One day, Dad required some pure alcohol, as scientists often do. He had a choice. He could fill out a huge wad of requisition forms for the government project he was working on at the time, then spend scientific market price for it.

Or, he could run down to the liquor store and get some Everclear, cheap and fast.

Works that way with distilled water, too.


Slides! How's that for Regular Lab Stuff?


And other Important Ingredients and Glassware. Tea and mugs. Not for the microbes. For the microbiologist. And any human guests who might wander in.


*urp!*

Lord above. Those little bitty cells sure consume a lot of Everclear. You'd never think it to look at them. Hollow legs.

One Takes One's Ingredients, Measuring Means, and Implements...

Ummm...I dunno what. Scary looking though, huh? heh!


A beautiful classic Laboratory Scale.


More heavenly Special Glassware, tiny this time; a perfectly recognizable syringe, and, oh, other stuff.


I love the names of some of these products. Labquake! Doesn't that instill a strong sense of confidence, that this thing can do its quaking Exactly Right?

Just because it's a highly scientific product doesn't mean they know nothing about marketing.