In the Loop

I don’t want to share a hot tub with these people.

“A man” and his “friend or relative” have been found with ricin in a Las Vegas motel room with several animals including a dead dog. Oh, but there’s no connection to terrorism, and the dog died because of lack of food and water. And this all went on two weeks ago. So what are their names?

From AP:

LAS VEGAS (AP) – Vials found in the motel room of a man hospitalized in critical condition tested positive for the deadly toxin ricin, authorities said Friday. There was no indication of any link to terrorist activity, Las Vegas police Deputy Chief Kathy Suey said at a press conference.

The man was admitted to Spring Valley Hospital in Las Vegas in critical condition on Feb. 14, hospital spokeswoman Naomi Jones said. Suey said he had made an emergency call for help because of breathing problems. His name was not made public.

The investigation of the apparent ricin didn’t begin until Thursday, police said, after someone Suey identified as “a friend or relative” went to the sick man’s hotel room to retrieve his belongings and found “several” vials of a powder and brought it to the motel manager. Police were ultimately called to the Extended Stay America Motel several blocks west of the Las Vegas Strip.

Interesting that this story surfaces more than two weeks after the fact, on a Friday afternoon. This also happens to be the Friday afternoon before the March 4 primaries in Texas and Ohio, which will draw almost all of the news coverage.

Names. I want names.

So how’d things turn out? Pretty well so far…

We are in the delivery room and the nurses have readied the room. It’s almost time to push. Sam-Sam is on his way!

Last night I felt like I’d done one of my regular full-on Saturday workouts. Other than being tired, I’m fine today. I rested and am ready to resume my rehab training tomorrow. It’s going to be really tempting to do more, but I’m going to keep my heart rate in the 65-70% range.

Groundhog Day. This is the perfect day to say hello again after a long absence. Let’s take a little inventory:

In the last seven months…

1. I’ve learned I’m going to be a father to a son.
2. I earned my MBA.
3. My daughter turned 1.
4. I got pneumonia.

Son

Samuel Martin will be here very soon. He’s going to be big like his sister before him, so we’re not going to let things go on more than another two weeks.

MBA

I finished with all A’s, excepting the blight of an A- in Crypto a couple of years ago. I’m the most proud of our Capstone project. I graduated with honors in November. There has been a withdrawal of sorts. I do miss the week to week, term to term grind, but my family does not. I have promised my wife that there will be no more graduate school or certifications for at least a year.

One

Brooke turned 1 just before Christmas and she is the delight of my life. Watching her grow from first sitting up last summer, to crawling, standing, cruising, walking and now running has been the most amazing experience of my life. She’s going to make an awesome big sister.

Pneumonia

I’ve had a sinus infection since roughly Thanksgiving. It has come and gone, but I haven’t knocked it out. I went to an urgent care clinic on New Years Eve and got a flu test, which was negative. They wrote me a script for Cipro, which knocked it back, but unfortunately did not knock it out. A couple of weeks ago, I started getting tension headaches in the afternoon. I woke up one morning with a fever over 104, but no other serious symptoms. I trudged back to the urgent care clinic, was given another flu test, which was negative, and sent home to treat the symptoms. I slept all day and felt better that night.

I felt well enough the next day to workout, and felt better still the next morning. Then the relapse came. I had fever back up over 104 on a Sunday afternoon, so my wife ordered me to go to the ER. The ER gave me a flu test, which was (again) negative, diagnosed me with “fever” and sent me home to treat the symptoms. The respiratory distress from the pneumonia flared during the night and I thought I was going to be done for. Thankfully, I survived until I could see my regular doctor the following afternoon.

If you go to urgent care or the ER for very high fever, or any kind of relapse of fever — other symptoms or not — don’t let them give you a flu test and send you on your way: get a chest x-ray.

I’m almost finished with my course of Levaquin and Medrol. I’ve been cooped up at home all week and I’m champing at the bit to get out of the house and to resume my training regimen. I think today is that day. I’m going to start back very slowly with a treadmill walk. I’ll work up to a 65-70% BPM level on the cross-country machine this week and then stay at that level at least through the week before I start adding the high intensity stuff.

So that’s where I am now. I need to do a ton of updates to the site, and those will get rolling sometime soon.

Stay tuned…

The nice default theme is displaying because my hosting provider has been hounding me about upgrading my version of WordPress. Of course upgrading hoses me, so this is going to work for now until I have time to hack through the errors. Hey, at least I have a post in the month of June.

This is only a test.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

This was only a test.

:mavs:

The Mavericks have three games left to win three games. Golden State is a number 8 seed that most thought would be easily dispatched by a 67-win team. However, former Mavs coach Don Nelson has the Warriors playing very well and they seem to match up well enough against Dallas to give them fits. A 3-1 series lead is evidence of that. Here’s hoping the Mavericks can turn things around, win three straight and advance in the playoffs.

:cowboys:

There once was a time when I could go about four rounds deep in the draft before there was a player drafted that I didn’t know anything about. Nowadays, there are some first and second-overalls that I have to read up on. That said, I don’t know very much about the Cowboys two first-day draftees. They selected Purdue DE Anthony Spencer and Boston College OT James Marten. I like both of these picks for a couple of reasons. First, it’s April and almost anything above the most blatantly boneheaded of picks looks good in April. Second, I like the moves Jerry Jones made to get these two picks.

Whether these two guys turn out to be great remains to be seen. Jones has been roundly criticized for the bad draft picks in the post-Jimmy Johnson era, but Saturday brought some good things because we have two number ones next year and were able to move out and back into the first round without scavenging the rest of this year’s draft, the current roster, or a future draft. I also like how Brady Quinn ended up with the Browns even though he fell all the way to 22. I don’t think the Browns were unwise to pass on him with the third overall, but had they not wanted him they would not have made the deal with Dallas to move back into the first round to get him. For Quinn’s part, he’s a first rounder getting a chance to play with the team he wished to play for. Not a bad gig, if you ask me. I think this is a trade that works out for both sides.

The Cowboys were able to leverage the second round in deals with the Browns and Philly to effectively drop four spots in the first round to take Spencer and while securing what might be a top 15 pick next year. In a second deal with the Browns, they were able to send the Browns their original second round spot to take the Browns third rounder and add depth with another pick in the fourth and the Browns pick in the sixth (effectively moving up 17 spots). Not a bad first day. I’m eager to see what they add in the later rounds and what happens going into camp this summer.