It’s Easter Sunday, and I don’t expect to get a lot of hits or reads today. After a morning if Easter baskets and eggs with my granddaughter, and a video chat with my other granddaughter in Texas, I’m watching the Mets vs. the Diamondbacks and the Mets look like they’re going to win this one. The currently have the lead, 5-0, in the top of the 8th. The one thing I miss about living in New York is having the local feed of the games. I pay for an MLBTV subscription, but I don’t get the pre- or post-game shows that air on SNY. I was thrilled a couple weeks ago when I saw SNY has an app and that FUBO was considered a carrier so I could see it. Unfortunately, all of the live coverage and shows are blocked, though.

HOW I’M DOING

Well, I still have the wound vacuum on from the complications following an appendectomy. The wound has decreased in depth from 5 cm. to a little less than 2 cm. It’s also now less than 10 cm. long. I have been having problems with a rash around the wound area. Last weekend, they left the wound vacuum off and just packed it with wet/dry bandages. I was scared to death to do much of anything because I was afraid it would just open up again. The nurses come tomorrow, and we will see how it looks then. I also have an appointment with the second surgeon’s physician’s assistant on Wednesday.

With the vacuum on, there’s a canister that holds the discharge that it pulls out of the wound. From March 11 until about 10 days ago, I didn’t notice any problem with it. However, recently I’ve noticed an odor. It’s not a horrible, noxious odor like the one when the wound first burst back in March, but it’s not pleasant. At first, I thought it was just due to the discharge sitting in the canister. However, the nurse who changed my bandages last week said the wound had that smell as well. It doesn’t make sense that it’s from sitting because in the beginning I had the same canister on the vacuum for almost a week and no smell, and now it’s usually by that night after a new canister is on that I can smell it. I don’t have much pain except when I try to bend a lot, which is good. It’s something we’ll talk about this week at my appointment.

GEOCACHING

That has put a bit of a crimp in my geocaching, particularly working on the towns of New England. I’ve managed to get out a couple of times, but I’ve also had to hold back a bit because I’m afraid of ripping this all open again. I didn’t go last weekend when I didn’t have the vacuum on. I did manage to get out Tuesday and work on some of the towns in Vermont.

I found lots of covered bridges in 7 towns that I found geocaches in. I try to look for easy caches near the road since I’m not supposed to do any climbing or descending and walk mostly flat, level surfaces. That led me to the covered bridges which was fine.

I

When I geocache, I used to make sure I had all of my waypoints in a hand-help GPS and augmented it using my phone. Lately, I’ve found that I can use my phone exclusively as they have improved the GPS technology in the cell phones. I just have to remember to download the geocaches for off-line use since I end up in a lot of places where there is no cell signal. That happened to me Tuesday. I entered the coordinates in the GPS I have in my vehicle and when I arrived, I found I didn’t have cell service. The GPS in the car said it was 80 feet from where I was near a creek bank, so I decided to try and find it since it was a regular-sized geocache. In this case, a metal ammo can.

I walked across the street and down the creek bank (I know, bad me) and searched and soon found a very rusty ammo can in the rocks, all with no GPS. As I was signing the log and replacing it where I found it, a “muggle” approached from the other side of the bank. The term “muggle” is what we geocachers use to refer to people who don’t geocache, whom we try to avoid revealing the location of the geocache to. I could barely hear him over the water, but I was pretty sure he was asking if I was looking for the geocache.

When I walked back up to the road he came over and introduced himself. He owned the house on the other side of the bank a short ways away. He said he’d seen people looking here before but he’d never seen someone find it. I told him the problem was there was no cell service in the area so people tried to do what I did and find it without using a GPS. He told me that in Hurricane Irene the geocache got washed downstream from this location and someone actually walked down and found it in a clump of debris and brought it back. That would explain why it looked so rusted!

Back in the fall, I decided to book the week the kids are off from school here at a timeshare in western Massachusetts. This would give me a base of operations to work on the towns in Western Massachusetts, northern Connecticut, and Southern Vermont.

Of course, that was before my appendectomy and ensuing complications. I had planned out what geocaches I was going to try to find in January. and just last week I tossed that list. I had to go back and make sure all of the geocaches I’m going to try to find are all easier roadside caches or in parks with a fairly level walk that’s not too far (if the physician’s assistant says it’s still okay to go). So while I didn’t get to go geocaching this weekend because of the weather and it being Easter, I should be able to more than make up for it starting on Friday the 22nd.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN SHOULD?

Well, yeah, there’s one other factor besides the lovely gaping hole in my belly. My daughter will be 37 weeks pregnant on Tuesday. Last year I took the great road trip to Kansas to find the oldest geocache in the world. I didn’t want to go too far just in case. She’s had to make a few trips to the hospital as her blood pressure is giving her issues in these last few weeks of her pregnancy. We almost thought they would schedule a c-section for this coming Tuesday. She has to go twice a week and have things checked, so we’ll see what happens. If they do decide to do the c-section while I’m gone, I’m only a few hours to home.

DIAMOND PAINTING

Being stuck at home like this and unable to do much around the house, I’ve been pretty bored. I’m watching television, but I really don’t like just sitting here in my chair just watching it. Sure, it’s now baseball season, which is a blessing for me, but it’s not enough.

I’d written about this hobby of mine back during the early days of the COVID pandemic. I was working on this very large Star Wars mural. I was about 2/3 of the way done with it when we went on vacation in January of 2021. I had rolled it up to try to keep all of our critters from destroying it. Somehow, while we were gone, something heavy got put on it. I came up with a contrived way to hang it and be able to lower it onto my workspace, hoping that hanging it up would help it straighten out. The “diamonds” were falling off in clumps from various places. For over a year I just looked at it. I was too depressed to even try to fix it.

Being stuck here and unable to do anything, I decided to try to fix it. Well, I’d replace five diamonds and 20 more would fall off as I was working. It was going to be impossible to fix, but I really wanted to continue with it. I found this again online in the very large size that I’d ordered and re-ordered it. The problem was that it was coming from China. I waited, and waited, and waited. Almost every day I checked, and it was still in China.

This weekend, with the terrible weather and being terribly bored, I had it and went to find another kit to do until that one comes in.

My son loves the Marvel characters and I’d bought two kits a few years back to make pictures for him. I found the kit for Thor. My only disappointment is that these have round beads (drills, diamonds – there are a few different names for them) rather than the square ones. I prefer the square because they fill in the entire canvas while the round ones have space between then and the color of the canvas underneath comes through. I don’t know if this was my error or an error where I ordered these from. In any case, my son is thrilled. It will look something like the picture on the right when it’s done. Right now, you can just make out the top of his head.

And, of course, the night I started working on this I checked where the new Star Wars one was that I ordered and it should be here on Monday.

At least, this one probably won’t take me too long and I can start working on the Star Wars one right after I finish it.