It’s another Sunday, which means I’m back on the radio, which is better than you can possibly imagine (unless you’ve done this before). I know that the future is far from clear where an every-day return to this is concerned, but I am well-satisfied for the present.  It is enough for me to be able to be in the studio and get to do the thing I love to do best.

Be sure you’re listening today, or else you might miss something good–it’s streaming right now on the 93Q website. And you should check out my Facebook fan site so you don’t miss anything else good.  Meanwhie, I’ll be here, just doing that thing I do.  You’re welcome.

It’s taken a pretty long time for me to get back here and say something about something, mostly because it’s taken me a pretty long time to feel like it. I guess it took a while to get used to the idea that the thing I had loved doing the most–being on the air–was not happening, and maybe not happening ever again. That’s a tough one to try and overcome, but I think I’m there. Which is pretty ironic, since the “not happening ever again” part turns out to not be true.

The fact is that I will be returning to 93Q very soon–maybe as soon as Sunday, if the corporate powers-that-be can sign off on the necessary paperwork to make me an employee again. I’ll be back part-time only, working Sundays from 10AM-3PM, but it’s a start and it sounds pretty good to me. I’ll probably do some vacation fill-in work as well, so I will hopefully have a little more active summer than I imagined.

Whether this part-time start leads to more, I don’t know and can’t waste time worrying about it. The lesson I’ve learned from what’s happened to me the last few months is that NOTHING lasts forever, so make the most of what you are doing right now. For me, that’s been focusing on my health after a very successful gastric bypass surgery. Here’s a little illustration for you (these pictures and captions will make more sense if you click on the post link at the top and view it full-screen):

Here I am from last summer...Balloonfest 2008...left to right: Rick Roberts from 93Q, artist Matt Kearney, me, and Tom Mitchell from 93Q...

Here I am at Friday's 93Q Summer Jam On The Island...from left: 93Q's Joshua, Mike Cauchon, me, Ted Long, Rick Roberts, Brandon C, Tom Mitchell, and Amy Robbins

The “after” picture is from farther away, but I think you can still see the difference. Getting to “after” has been much of what my life’s been about since my surgery December 1, and I am OK with that. Going forward, it will have to be as big a part of my life as I can make it, so the new stuff–working Sundays included–will have to fit in accordingly. I’m pretty excited to see how it will all work.

I’ll keep you posted–literally and figuratively–right here as to what’s happening. This blog will very likely develop into more of what I’m doing on the air and what’s happening with my life. I will also be launching a fan page on Facebook just as soon as my start date on-air is confirmed. I’ll be sure to post the link here and look forward to you finding it. It was time to return, and I guarantee that it won’t take 6 months for me to have something more to say.

Now that I seem to have an awful lot of spare time on my hands, it seems that I should try and share more about what is going on with me–other than that I’m unemployed and just had an operation.  The fact that these two events have been responsible for my excess spare time shall not consume me at the moment.  For now, I’ll just take a moment to marvel at the season at hand.

In Central New York, winter is far more than just a season.  The old saying about there being just two seasons–snow and road construction–is a reality here.  Snow will regularly fall here pretty much from November to April, with occasional surprises on either side of those months.  The official start of winter Sunday saw our area in the midst of a long-weekend snow storm that’s dumped in the neighborhood of two and a half feet.  I realize that the whole nation has been in the grips of much the same thing.  Even in my native Pacific Northwest, I see that they are getting their decade’s allocation of the white stuff all at once–not a pleasant thing for an area that usually suffers when the temperature just goes below freezing.

But snow in my home for the past 16 years is pretty commonplace and fairly typical now, but no less awesome and beautiful.  To be honest, I don’t usually find myself overcome with emotion during the actual snowfall, unless you count frustration and misery.  But once the blowing, drifting, horizontal downpour and impossibly treacherous travel have all abated, the magnificence of winter’s landscape never seems to bring a smile to my face.  Nature takes a terrible toll on so much of our nation and world at various times between hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes and forest fires, but snow rarely competes with those natural disasters.  Most of the time, it’s just something that requires coping, but I think those parts of the world who’s only adverse weather is snow are fortunate indeed.  Because there are times, like today when I snapped a few shots of the our recent storm to send to friends in Tasmania who rarely if ever see such things, that the spectacle of this season was a beauty in and of itself.

I wonder that I am waxing romantic about winter simply because I have nothing more compelling to do right now, but I don’t believe that.  As much as the snow can be a major pain in many ways–shoveling, scraping, soaking, freezing and often frightening–it is a part of life here, a life that I have come to grow to love.  That is, just as long as I can still pay the tab for the plow guy to keep my driveway clear.

My apologies to you for the slowness of my postings recently.  Since what I was typically writing about related so closely to my work, and I am now without work, it’s seemed like there was just less to say.  Plus, while my recovery process from surgery has been going excellent, the attention I must now give to how and when I eat and drink has almost consumed my life.  I can tell you that at least on that count, I will be making an even greater effort to exert a bit more control so that I can not feel as though I’m a slave to my daily schedule.  Let’s face it–that’s a tough enough thing when you have a job that swallows up most of your day.  When you’re unemployed, it’s downright embarrassing.

Tonight my newly-separated employer is holding their annual Christmas party, for which I was specifically invited to attend.  Since that invitation came the day following my dismissal, it at first seemed a bit bizarre–no sooner am I sent packing than I’m being included in a company social event.  Then I realized that this truly was a heartfelt effort to include me, as someone who had been a part of the daily life of that place.  It is certainly consistent with the feeling I got that no one at my workplace participated in the decision to let me go, nor was happy about the outcome.  It’s a surreal thing to have to cope with the reality of not being able to do the thing you love to do everyday while realizing that everyone else that’s there likely feels the same way.  It’s the same kind of feeling I have about going to the party.

I’m anxious about going–both in the sense of being excited about seeing all of my friends, and in the sense of feeling a bit nervous about going.  I’m pretty sure that I will get more than my fair share of attention from everyone under the circumstances, which alone contributes to my ambivalent feelings.  While all of their kind words and concern for me will probably do my ego a world of good, I’m not all that at ease in that situation.  And I’m more than a bit concerned about how I might feel afterwards–will it be an uplifting reinforcement of the part I have played in my co-workers’ daily lives, or will I feel even more than now that I am on the outside looking in?  Of all of the career options I must consider at this point, the one at the top of the list is to return to where I have been the past 16 years and continue the work I have so loved to do there.  Should that give me hope to believe it will happen sooner than later, or am I causing unnecessary heartache by holding out for something that will probably never happen?  Perhaps the answer, or at least part of the answer, will come from tonight’s events.  I’m just hoping they’ll have something on the menu that I can actually eat.  When your diet consists of yogurt, cottage cheese, scrambled eggs and tuna, it’s not a small hope.

Hello from the other side of the hospital (and the operating room!) I seem to have come through the entire ordeal of the surgical process with nothing more than a few small bruised scars on my stomach and a healthy fear of the word "Foley" (that euphemistic alternative to the more direct term that basically means ‘tube put in the last possible place you’d ever imagine it going’).

The truth is that I feel like the whole thing went just about as well as it possible could have. The operation itself went without a hitch, and the expected post-op pain management drill seemed mostly unnecessary. It wasn’t that I tolerated the pain to avoid a possible morphine addiction from my PCA (Patient Controlled Analgesic)–I just didn’t seem to hurt that much. By early Tuesday, I was reporting "no pain" to the nurses’ constant queries, and my handy-dandy "pain button" was removed by noontime. Too bad–it was my one shot at being a completely legal opiate addict.

I was discharged on schedule Wednesday morning, grateful that I had escaped possibly one of the most uncomfortable beds I’ve ever had to pretend to sleep on.  The hospital experience is an odd one–a large staff of people who seem genuinely devoted to helping you in any way they can–other than permitting you to actually sleep more than an hour or two at a time.  I was treated pretty wonderfully though–mad props to the Upstate Medical Center nursing staff on 5A for making me feel just about as good as I was going to feel under the circumstances.

I’m at home with my recuperation/eating transition underway, a process that allows my digestive system to heal from all of the work done to it.  That means spending the first 5 days consuming nothing but powdered whey protein mixed with milk to make a drink that is called a "shake" mostly because that’s what you do to mix it up.  Actually they’re pretty tasty and an extremely healthy thing to consume–almost no fat, very little sugar, and lots of protein–what the body needs to heal and what muscles need to be muscles.  I’m downing about 24 oz. of the shake-like beverage every day, along with as much water as I can get in.  The goal is 64 oz., and I’ve been able to satisfy that–no small feat when you consider that due to the small size of my new stomach and the much smaller openings it has at either end, it would be unwise to take more than a moderate sip at a time.  Any more and you’re likely to have it behave as if it just splashed against a wall (ewwwww!)

 My next step is Monday, when I begin to introduce small amounts of more typical foods into the diet–in almost experimentally small amounts.  The goal is to not give the newly-shrunk stomach neither too much, or something it can’t well tolerate.  The foods for now will all be proteins, like yogurt, tuna, and chicken or turkey.  An added challenge will require that I stop drinking fluids from a half-hour before each meal until about 45 minutes afterward.  Drinking before, during and after meals adds too much volume to the stomach, making it difficult to digest the food you’re trying to cram in.  I’ve developed a better tolerance to no-drink meals lately, so I don’t expect it to foul me up.

The most interesting part to this whole process thus far is how good I actually feel.  I have my surgical scars (since it was done laproscopically, they consist of 7 small cuts) of which maybe two are a bit swollen and bruised, making them a bit tender.  Other than that, I seem to be doing quite well–hunger is kind of an absent sensation now.  I’ve been told it could easily be like this permanently, as long as I continue to be careful about not eating more than my freshly-shrunken stomach can comfortably hold.  The only challenge is coping with others eating around me–the food seems to be appealing, but I know that having any of it, at least right now, puts me at risk of severely upsetting everything that was done Monday.  That’s enough for me to happily refrain, longing only for a steak-flavored shake…