My wife has been gone for six months now. Conscious magical thinking has turned into internalized magical thinking. Early on, it was as if she was just in the other room, or was on vacation and would walk back into the house at any time. I knew this was not correct, of course, but the feelings were… Continue reading I Still Have Her Meds
[Ed. Note: I wrote this while on a flight home from Milwaukee five years ago today, back when I returned to consulting for a living. Business consulting means you must travel to clients since they will not come to you. Clients want you to come to them, but generally will not foot the bill for anything… Continue reading A Rant on Airline Travel
My wife's kidneys failed when she was a teenager, and therefore she was getting hemodialysis for a good part of her life. The kidneys filter the blood to remove excess fluid and a wide variety of toxins. Hemodialysis replicates some of the kidney's function when a person's kidneys fail. In hemodialysis, your blood is cycled… Continue reading Dialysis Blood
Recently, the NPR show Planet Money had an episode about Edward Thorp, the man who invented blackjack card counting. Thorp is a mathematician, and he saw blackjack as an interesting problem to analyze as opposed to a way to get rich quick. At the time he discovered card counting, the established idea was that there… Continue reading Denied!
When I was a teenager, we had a neighbor next door who lived in the same house since the mid-1930s. She had a sister who was a pack rat, and subscribed to magazines and news papers, and never threw them away. Rather, she put them in the garage. After fifty years of this, the garage was full. Since… Continue reading We See Dead People
The first snow in Central Oregon was December 5th. I live in Sisters, near Bend, and we are in the high desert. The dry, cold air makes for nice powdery snow. The snow was beautiful! I was prepared: I bought a new set of snow tires for my four-wheel-drive F150. The truck even with regular… Continue reading Beautiful Disaster
What a day. I woke up once again wondering how the hell Donald Trump could have been elected to the presidency. It still seems unreal to me that enough people in enough places voted for this guy, enough to edge out a flawed, but much more qualified candidate. Unlike some of the liberal persuasion, I don't… Continue reading Cautiously Optimistic
It is important to know that my wife was a dialysis patient, and that she was never really healthy in all the years we were together. When we first got together, I used to count the number of days she was not in the hospital. She lived as long as she did because of her… Continue reading PTSD and Me
I am the son of gambling professional Jerry L. Patterson. For thirty years, my father took money from casinos, wrote books on gaming, had a casino gaming news letter, and held clinics on gaming techniques and systems for Black Jack, Craps, and Roulette. He predates the MIT kids who won all that money playing Black… Continue reading Casino Royale Pain
My son wanted to watch a movie with lots of guns. Oh, where to start? A friend of mine suggested "Saving Private Ryan," especially the beginning, which to my mind is one of the best battle scenes ever made. But I couldn't find the DVD. I did, however, find "The Matrix," with the wonderful line: "Guns.… Continue reading There is no Spoon
Indelible Mark 