Antarctica Starts Here.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I'd had some emergency dental surgery that involved some reconstructive work. And I was in the hospital a few weeks after that (which I haven't written about but might later) for something unrelated. Another thing I didn't write about was what happened after I got out of the hospital. But let's take those in order.

For starters, a few days ago as I write this I went back in for x-rays to see how my jaw is healing. The bone graft the surgeon did looks pretty good but it's not fully consolidated. The parts of my left mandible that are still in place and more or less in one piece ¹ but they're not really capable of healing rapidly anymore. So, we're giving it another month or so before seeing if the bone is solid enough to take an implant. At least as things stand right now it's looking significantly better on the x-rays.

As for my stay in the hospital in April, when I got out and got back to work I found out that, for various reasons ² I was being put on night shift for a couple of months. There is a project going on which requires 24x7 support, and they needed somebody who was not only comfortable with working nights but very experienced with systems engineering (which I am) and can dive in to figure out weird-ass problems (instead of the usual IT problems). I found out about this maybe two hours after logging back in. I spent the next couple of weeks in training meetings and studying because I'm pretty much flying things solo every night. So, if folks are wondering where I've been lately my life and sleep cycle have been flipped upside down.

The thing is, this is closer to my preferred waking cycle ³ so aside from pushing my schedule forward about half a day it hasn't been difficult to adjust. If anything, the only adjustment I've had to make was being careful not to make too much noise and wake people up in the house. Also, and this is probably idiosyncratic to me, somehow I find that I have more perceived time during the afternoons before I start work. In some ways it feels like a late Saturday afternoon every day; I've been cleaning up my office a little at a time (and by that, I mean taking stuff off the shelves and wet cleaning them instead of just dusting them), straightening up my bookshelves, and inventorying my books to see which ones didn't make it into my card catalogue. Much to my surprise, I've found about 80 books that had to be added and some duplicates that I'm going to pass on the next time I haul stuff to Goodwill. I haven't been working on any projects lately, though, because it seems like more hassle than it's worth right now to, say, haul a breadboard and my inventory of parts out to build something. I think that's going to wait until after I go back on day shift.