Nothing like dexamethasone for late night meditations. I found myself reflecting on a friend’s inspiring metaphor of my myeloma course as a race between advancing disease and emerging new therapies, and couldn’t help but think of myself as Xeno’s tortoise with Death Achilles chasing me. If I can just live myself inside smaller and smaller slices of time, he’ll never catch me. Roman Catholicism teaches that God and Heaven exist outside of time, so maybe that’s my secret approach to eternity. Those of you not in my reference frame will just have to deal with something more linear.

That does mean, as he said, trying to extract all I can out of each infinitesimal. The girls are coming here for Thanksgiving after all, because my new chemo (three-drug, pretty tolerable) schedule hits on every Friday and weekend travel might not be so good. Christmas was already decided for here due to Chris’ schedule. Good thing we haven’t sold the house yet.

It was 31 days ago that the motherboard in my main machine gave up the ghost. As of yesterday I finally have everything back together again. No data loss (recovery just difficult enough to force some improvements in my backup regimen), fortunately had a quite functional laptop to bridge the gap, but my what a pita it has been troubleshooting the Z690 chipset. It took three weeks just to get a POST, and who knows how long it will take for AMI to get out a BIOS flash that will recognize attached disks when RAID is enabled (kinda defeats the purpose, no?). Sure is nice to be back with a couple of big screens, and my good keyboard and trackball, though.

So, life goes on…