Sunday, November 19, 2006

Lasic Surgery Success!

I have new eyes! Well rather new and improved vision! This past Wednesday (11/15) I finally had Lasik surgery and all I can say is wow! This is truly amazing, my vision is already 20/20 and I feel so much better not having to use contacts or glasses. I've had a lot of people ask me about the procedure so I will give a somewhat detailed report and how it went.

Kirsten and I first arrived at Restore Vision Center at 9:30am for my 10:20am appointment. Once checked in we read some People magazines while I nervously fidgeted. We did this for about an hour and 1/2 as I didn't get called in until 11am. We were both allowed in for the first part of the appointment, the Post Operation Instructions. The nurse informed us of all the different types of drops I needed to put into my eyes and specially what to do the first day home. The main theme was rest the first day, as I could not read, watch tv or play on the computer.

After the post op care was given Kirsten had to return to the waiting room while I was escorted to the surgery waiting room. The room was filled with chairs for people pre and post surgery. When I first arrived there were two other patients waiting to have the surgery. We chatting about our nervousness for a few minutes until one of them was called in to have the surgery. Once the patient was done I was called to get my eyes examined by the surgeon before the surgery. It was a quick eye test to make sure my vision was the same as my pre-exam a few weeks back. At the end of the exam he gave me one Valium. I asked for two but he said one is fine. I then returned to the waiting room to be called for the surgery. After waiting about 20 minutes I was called in, hoping my Valium kicked in (and yes it did).

Once in the surgical room you lay on a table and the nurses give you a stuffed animal to squeeze if you are nervous, I squeeze relentlessly. After about a minute the surgeon comes in and puts some numbing drops in both eyes and then tapes my left eye closed and puts a patch over it. He continues with my right eye walking me through the procedure as he is doing it. The surgeon puts more drops in my eye to numb it and then tapes my eye lower and upper eye lashes out of the way. Following the tape he puts this speculum type device into my eye to spread the eye open, this amazingly doesn't hurt one bit. Once the eye is wide open he puts some more drops in and starts to put the Microkeratome on my eye to cut the cornea flab. Now I have to say this is the hardest part (but not that hard). Once the Microkeratome is on the eye it sucks all the air out of in front of the eye so that it can cut the cornea flap without any blood. This suction is slightly uncomfortable. During the suction you lose your vision for a few seconds while it is cutting the cornea flap. The Microkeratome is then removed and the surgeon take a thin metal tool and pulls back the cornia flab for the laser to have direct access to the rear cornea. He then does some more irrigation and aligns the laser to your eye.

After everything is aligned he starts the laser. You cannot feel or see the laser at all. You can hear a clicking sound of the laser as while as slight burning smell. Luckily for me it was only 30 seconds on my right eye and 38 on the left. After the laser is complete he puts the cornea flap back on and smoothes it out with a brush. He finishes the eye by having me close it and keep it closed for a few seconds then it's all complete for that eye. The left eye was exactly the same except it was a little more uncomfortable when cutting the cornea flap but nothing I couldn't handle.

Overall I was pretty worked up for nothing as the surgery wasn't painful at all and actually quite surreal as your eyes are numb during the procedure. When returning the waiting room I could already see an improvement in my vision. Ten minutes later (around 1pm) Kirsten drove me home where I kept my eyes closed for most of the day, calling as many people possible to talk since that was one of the few things I could do with my eyes closed. The next day I returned to Restore Vision Center for my first post op appointment where I was cleared to drive again. My vision in my left eye was 20/20 and my right eye almost 20/20. I expect my vision to be 20/15 once all said and done which will be great since that is where my vision was with my contacts.

Sunday, November 12, 2006

Lasik Surgery

Well I have finally threw away my fears and decided to have Lasik surgery. Several times the past three years I've wanted to have the surgery to then back away from it after learning about the procedure. The problem has always been the cutting of the cornea flap, that just freaks me out.

The first time I was interested in the surgery I didn't know they cut your eye open and once I found out I completely stalled and decided to not have the surgery. And then every year I get interested in the surgery again and think can I handle this and the answer is usually no. Until this year.

This past summer Kirsten and I went to The Bite of Seattle to watch a buddy play a concert. After the show we walked around the various booths and ran into a Restore Vision Centers booth. This is the place I've always looked at to do the procedure, but this time the guy said something that made me think twice about doing the surgery. He said, "Don't worry they give you Valium." After him telling me that the Valium helps with the anxiety and seriously thought about having the surgery. It also helped that I would get a $400 discount if I signed up with him to at least get the pre-exam. A few weeks after The Bite I got a call from Restore Vision Center to schedule my pre-exam. Then for the next few months I waited and postponed the pre-exam a couple of times due to baseball and our Hawaiian vacation. Then in October I finally had my pre-exam and decided to have the surgery. So on Wednesday (11/15) I will be getting some new eyes.

Monday, August 14, 2006

The NINE's first Win

Tonight our team, Redmond Nine, won its first career baseball game against Cobra Kia Dojo 7-4. That breaks our 18 game winless streak and The Curse of the Rockies at the same time. It was the best played game I've seen us play.

We were led by a stellar pitching performance by Adam. He pitched a complete game with giving up only 2 earned runs with 7 strike outs. A great defense led by shortstop Scott, center fielder Cameron and left fielder Chris that nullified every started rally by the Cobra Kai. And to top it all off we had some hitting led by Adrian.

It was a great game and now we have a big game against the Rebels who have a couple of players from our old Rockies team. If we win this one, we will have our first win streak! Wish us luck!

Tuesday, August 8, 2006

The Curse of Rockies

Earlier this week we finally diagnosed why we (Redmond Nine) haven't won a game yet in the past two seasons. Last year we managed to tie one game, but that is beside the point. We now believe the root cause of all our baseball problems is The Curse of the Rockies.

The Curse of the Rockies refers to the original Rockies coach (our first Redmond Men's Baseball team), who was an awful coach that didn't know the first thing about baseball and to make it worse thought he did. So when he left for a 3 week vacation right before the season Adam and I began to run practices. Everyone was happy again to finally have some structure to practice and not wasting time. So when the season started and when Mr. Coach returned we formed a coup and told him he is no longer the coach. He wasn't too happy about it but we had the backing of the entire team so there wasn't much he could do. The season went pretty smoothly for a first year team. We ended the season 2-8.

And to empower the curse even more, the following year Adam and I decided to form our own new team called the Redmond Nine. We invited a majority of the players from the Rockies but left off the former manager. Needless to say he wasn't happy about us taking his coaching status the first season then taking most of his players the second. And there is the story behind The Curse of the Rockies.

Now that we have identified the curse, hopefully we can break it. Wish us luck!

Sunday, July 30, 2006

Busy August

August is going to be a busy month for Kirsten and I, specifically me. I have 14 baseball games scheduled this month, the most of any month. Along with all the baseball the second weekend of the month Kirsten and I will be heading over to Spokane for her Aunt Tilly's 98th birthday. Kirsten got us a really nice hotel room in downtown Spokane. I can't wait; it should be a nice drive over. At the end of the month we have my 10 year High School Reunion in Montesano, WA followed by a Tool concert at the Gorge (George, Washington) the next day. That will be a lot of driving, luckily we took Monday off to recover.

I'm sure this month will fly by, but hopefully not too fast. Once the month is over we will start visiting family that we haven't gotten to see all summer.

Friday, July 21, 2006

Redmond Men's Baseball League

Yesterday was the start of my Redmond Nine baseball season. The Redmond Nine are a 23 and older men's hardball team I manage with Adam. We are in the Redmond Wood Bat League in Redmond, WA. It is a great league for a couple of reason, one it is right down the road for Kirsten and I. And two, it is a wood bat league. There is nothing better than playing baseball with wood bats.

Our first game was against Milt's BBQ Express. This was the team I played for 3 years ago when I first got back into playing hardball. They are a pretty decent team. We ended up losing 0-9 but pretty well considering we didn't hit at all. This is the first year we actually have good pitching so I look forward to playing the rest of the season. Our goal this year is to make the playoffs. Wish us luck!

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Playballstats.com V1 is complete

I have finally finished version 1 of my Playball Stats website. I currently have 3 teams using it in my Redmond Wood Bat League to keep track of stats. It has been a fun project that I very much enjoyed for the past 4 months. I have to give a special thanks to Kirsten for allowing me to sit in front of the computer for several hours at a time during week nights and weekends. If it wasn't for her support I would have been done next year :-). Also I also like to thank Adam for all the help he provided when I was stuck.

Now on to version 2. Luckily I don't have to rush on this one, so I will be taking some time off and working on small chucks as time allows.

Wednesday, June 7, 2006

Nose Surgery is done

For those of you that didn't know I had surgery last week to fix my deviated septum and adenoids removal. It has been a week and I'm finally starting to feel better. Yesterday was my last day on pain meds so I have a much clearer mind now and can drive. I can already feel a difference in my sleep with my nasal passages opened up. I should have more improvement during the next 3-4 weeks.

Friday, June 2, 2006

Playball Stats

For the past two months I have been working on a new baseball stats program. The beginnings of this project started way back in my junior year (2000) at CWU in User Interface Design class. I have always loved baseball and found no good stats programs out there. So in class I wrote a program call Playball Stats that was a Windows based baseball stats program for teams.

The original program was pretty limited due to the fact it was designed for a single season of stats, thus no database was used. Throughout the years I've updated the program to add more stats but never changed the back end to a DB. It wasn't until I started playing hardball again (see Nine Baseball) that I found I really needed to re-write the program to allow for multiple season and career stats.

So a few months ago I decided to get started on the new version. At that time I also decided to make it a web based app so that I could make changes very easily and nobody would have to upgrade there product. I first started with all the end user pages. These pages are what display all the team and player info, including roster, schedule, offensive and pitching stats.

Well I've finally completed the first phase of development which you can see at http://www.playballstats.com/. I'm now working on the admin section of the site which will include all the pages necessary to add teams, players and stats.

Please take a look at the site and let me know what you think.

Sunday, May 7, 2006

Allergy Test

This past Friday I had an allergy test. I decided to do this since I'm having surgery to fix my deviated septum soon. I don't want my allergies to increase once I can finally breath out my nose.

They start the test by plucking both forearms with 24 different items such as tree, mold, dust mites, cat, dog, etc... Once the nurse plucked all 24 items she informed me to not scratch and she will be back in 15 minutes for the results. Oh boy, as soon as she left the room and wanted to itch. I looked down my right arm and saw a big red rash start to form. I wanted to scratch it so bad, but couldn't. So I started text messaging Kirsten to distract me. It was the longest 15 minutes I can remember. Once the nurse came back she said I was allergic to dust mites and cats.

The nurse then went and spoke with the doctor and came back with a bunch of syringes. She told me we needed to do another set of test to make sure I wasn't allergic to anything else. This time she shot my upper arm with needles of about 10 different things and left for 15 minutes. This one wasn't too bad, only one thing turned red this time. Unfortunately I found it was dog, I was so sad to hear that. Luckily the doctor said my allergy to dogs was pretty minor so that made me happy. Once I get my surgery done I will start on shots that should suppress all my allergies.

Monday, May 1, 2006

Nose surgery, w00t!

On May 24th, I'm having Septoplasty and Turbinate surgery. This will allow me to breath and in turn sleep much better. I found out about a month ago that I have a deviated septum. That is the bone in your nose that divides to two halves. My septum doesn't divide my nose 50/50, it is more like 70/30 which causes congestion. I will be taking 3 days off work and will be put under during the operation. It is pretty quick surgery and I should be back to playing baseball in about 3 weeks. For more information check out this: Septoplasty and Turninates Surgery.

Tuesday, April 4, 2006

Gotta love cell phone companies...

A little over a year ago I left Verizon to go to Cingular due to them having better candy bar style phones. Well I'm now back to Verizon. I really liked Cingular and it's service, however Verizon is where all my family along with Kirsten are. So now we can be on the same plan and save some money. I got the Verizon 6700 which is a very nice PDA phone. I tried the Cingular 8125, which is pretty much the same thing and didn't like the slower processor. So now that I'm back with Verizon and all my calls to my family are free! I'm finally back "In".

Saturday, April 1, 2006

PSSBL here I come...

For the past few weeks a few of my buddies and I have been trying out for the Puget Sound Senior Baseball League (PSSBL). It is a 21 and older league with several different divisions. We all tried out for the 21+ recreation weekend only league. This will allow us to play more baseball without interfering with Nine Baseball in late summer.

The league consists of 16 regular season games with a tournament at the end to crown the league champion. The coolest thing about this league is we play in the best parks in the area. Some of the parks we play in are Cheney Stadium, Husky Stadium, Everett Aqua Sox Stadium and sever all community college parks. I'm looking forward to getting to play a little more baseball this year instead of that big ole softball.

Sunday, March 19, 2006

Moving into the Apartment still...

Today we had the second phase of our move. I rented a U-Haul truck this time to save on trips. We got some help from my good buddies Adam, Tad, Brian, Mike and Kirsten's Dad Mark. The loading of everything into the truck went pretty quick and easy. It didn't get hard until we had to unload and climb up 3 flights of stairs. We were all tired as hell once done. I think everyone bitched why we live on the top floor, now I completely understand. It took a little over 2 hours in total. Kirsten got sandwiches and beer for everyone to enjoy afterwards.

Lesson learned: Hire movers next time!

Monday, March 13, 2006

Moving into the Apartment

This weekend Kirsten and I starting moving into our new two bedroom two bathroom apartment. It started off small Friday by just moving over my new TV so that cable could be hooked up. Then on Saturday we decided to move the recliners over so that we can watch a movie while waiting for the cable guy. Then after the cable guy came over we decided to get Kirsten's couch to fill out the living room. Sunday we moved over both beds and one bed frame along with all of our computer equipment. Those that know me know I have a lot of computer stuff. Needless to say that took a while. Sunday night (around 12am) we finally were all done with Phase I of our move. My legs were very tire after endlessly walking up and down three flights of stairs. Luckily we will have some friends help us out with the rest of the move.

Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Ski Trip to Stevens Pass

Today was our annual ski trip for work. We went to Stevens Pass. This was my first trip due to last years being canceled. The bus left at 8:30am and we arrived a little after 10am. About 10 miles out the NW rain turned into snow. By the time we got to the summit it was snowing pretty hard. I then walked to the rental office and stood in line for about an hour and got my snowboard and shoes. I waited until after lunch and took a lesson which I only last about 1/2 way through it before my knees started to hurt. I then met up with a buddy and went tubing for the last hour. Tubing was the best part of the trip since it was easy and fun. After the tubing I jumped back onto the bus and got back home around 6pm. Overall the whole trip was a total blast. I can’t wait till next year, maybe then I will do some more boarding.

Tuesday, February 21, 2006