Nature

 Henry is fascinated by it. He doesn’t care about the television when we’re watching it.  It makes no difference if we’re watching Football, Survivor Island, or Cops.  He doesn’t care unless we turn to a Nature program.  Then he is engaged. A year ago we took this video of him watching the bird migration.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnCChNGKOJw This week, we watched a program about radioactive wolves.  A team revisited Chernobyl 30 years after the entire area was evacuated.  Wildlife abounds now in the abandoned overgrown cities even though there is still a severe radiation hazard for humans.  It looks like a futuristic apocalyptic movie set.  Hundreds of wolves run wild through the forest that is reclaiming the city streets.  When the wolves come onscreen, Henry gets agitated.  He talks with them when they howl. He got more engaged when we watched a program on mountain lions.  Talking, growling, and barking.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn2JMfXjP_c Every time a big cat came on screen, he just couldn’t help himself.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdr76f9aIqQ We couldn’t hear the narrative.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZnL3apyskM Finally, we had to make him leave the room so we could finish the program.  

Saturday

 Perhaps we were suffering a sleep-deficit. Woke up at 7:30 this morning, having gotten 9 hours of sleep.  Felt good about that.  Nothing on the agenda for today.  Let the dogs out.  Got them up on the bed and when they settled down we all fell back to sleep……….for another 4 hours!  The first person we saw outside today we had to say Good *Afternoon* to.  Meanwhile, Grandson Alex had his 2nd gymnastics meet.  This time he got blue ribbons in every event and placed second overall in his age group.  He wants to go to the Olympics.  

Drone

 We have a drone on the ground in Iran?  We have drones that are so sophisticated they’re a generation ahead of everybody else?  They’re so advanced that we can’t afford for them to fall into the wrong hands or we’ll lose our technology edge?  The mission of these drones is to fly over the people whose hands we don’t want them to fall into, and there is not a button we can push to blow one up if things go wrong?  There is not a failsafe to protect the technology if we lose control, like making it so the drone will blow up or melt down if we *don’t* push a button? They thought of that on Mission Impossible 40 years ago!  

Skin graft update

 They cut a roughly round hole of skin out of my nose to remove the skin cancer; the basal cell carcinoma.  Then, for the skin graft, they cut a slice of skin from just in front of my ear, cut a roughly round plug of skin out of that, and used it to fill the hole they made in my nose. As the hole in my nose healed, the skin graft didn’t “take”.  The new skin didn’t connect with the old skin and become part of my face.  What the skin graft did do, is function as a scaffold, holding everything in place while new skin grew up from underneath.
I skipped sending the gruesome intermediate photos and descriptions, but overall, it did seem like a big deal.  There is still some healing going on inside, but the external result: some scars and stitch marks, but a face essentially still intact.
 Same process for Judy.  Same result.