Easier Said than Done

If you’ve read recent posts here, you know I have AFib and am getting ready for cardiac ablation, so I’ll skip the history and spill the latest.

The hospital called to schedule my cardiac ablation procedure, offering three dates. Predictable, reactionary me chose the most distant one … I’m a morning person and of the three it had the earliest show time: an 0530 check-in for an 0730 procedure.

Now that I’ve had a moment to think, the date I chose, May 23rd, is almost six weeks away; moreover, it’s also Donna’s birthday. A rational person would have chosen the earliest available date. I’m on borrowed time with this AFib; the cardioversion they performed on me last week is a temporary fix and it’s possible the irregular heartbeat will return before I can get in for the ablation, a more permanent fix (although with AFib, nothing is really permanent).

Naturally I thought all this through Friday evening; the scheduling office was closed by then and won’t open again until Monday morning. I called and left a message and will call again first thing tomorrow, hoping those earlier dates are still available. There’s nothing like self-induced medical anxiety to make a weekend drag by.

Donna says don’t stress. Easier said than done, babe!

This is the street in front of our house, freshly resealed. The work took two days, Thursday and Friday.

Four years ago, when I was president of our HOA, I helped convince a voting majority of homeowners to suck up a hefty dues increase, specifically to pay for future street maintenance (by some agreement dating back to the 1980s, when our subdivision was built, we maintain our own streets, not the county).

I hope we got our money’s worth with the resealing: if you click on the image to see it larger on Flickr, down at the bottom you can see a piece of tar has already popped out of the crack it was filling. Waste Management garbage trucks come through on Tuesday and I wonder how the rest of the patches and fills under the sealant will hold up to them. Glad I’m not on the HOA board these days!

Still getting settled in with the new Apple device. I downloaded the latest update and now have a huge selection of watch faces to choose from, but so far I’m happiest with this one: a simple analog face with day & date, Zulu time at top left, moon phase top right, heart rate down below.

I’ve tried, off and on, wearing watches on both wrists: smartwatch on the right, one of my mechanical or quartz watches on the left. There are a lot of watch collectors like me; ladies and gentlemen of a certain age who love to wear “real” watches but who also need to wear smartwatches to track heart rate or blood oxygen or whatever, and I read somewhere that two-wristing it is a popular choice among the afflicted. Maybe, but it seems dorky.

I belong to an online watch group where members post daily “wristcheck” photos of whatever watch they’re wearing. It looks like I’ll be wearing the smartwatch every day, but I don’t want to post photo after photo of it. What I’m doing instead is putting on one of my real watches every morning while the smartwatch is on its charger, and posting a photo of that. Which also seems dorky.

If the upcoming ablation procedure is a success, maybe I can go back to wearing regular watches during the day, and wearing the smartwatch overnight. I hope so, because there’s a Seiko Alpinist I’m lusting after … if I can afford it, perhaps for my birthday this year … and not just to have, but to wear.

That’s the news for now. Stay fresh, cheese bags!