speedblogness

This is the "If you ever wondered what these procedures can do for your life" part of my blog.

So I thought I’d throw out my thoughts on a couple of medical procedures I've gone through in the past few years.

Lasik Eye Surgery: Awesome. I had the surgery in mid 2002 and it has changed my life. I wore glasses most of my life and now that I no longer have to deal with that, I have to consider it the number two thing that has changed my life for the better. When you are in and out of a helmet as often as I am, you begin to realize how this surgery changes your life. To no longer have to deal with putting glasses on and taking them off constantly is like nothing you can imagine. I highly recommend it!

Please note: I suggest that anyone who is considering this surgery takes the time to investigate and find a lasik eye surgeon that they are comfortable with and who can produce information on previous customers and surgery's. I would also peruse the internet and find as much information as you can so that you are able to answer any questions thatyou may have regarding this surgery. There are a few specific issues that you may deal with after the surgery, such as dry eyes (solved with eye drops) and some halo issues (noticable more at night with traffic lights and outdoor lighting in general). Mine went away after about a year and they did not keep me from doing everything as I normally would.

Sedation dentistry: Another cool procedure that rocks if you hate going to the dentist.

Since I was around 10 years old I have had nothing but grief with my teeth. And I have seen my share of dentists. Some good, some even great, but many, to many to remember that were hacks.

Between a few of the hacks and the military (U.S Army) they were screwed up pretty permanently. After many root canals and a few surgeries, and a slew of caps, I finally had them completely redone between November 2006 and May of 2007. It was an expensive undertaking (around 25K) and it was a five month process.

Despite my misgivings about getting the work done, I spent some time and visited a few dentists whom were recommended before I found one I liked.

Because of the long hours I spent in the chair the sedation end of the deal made the whole process a breeze. The end result was awesome, I now have front teeth that are straight and correct in length and my bite is much better. I am very pleased with my new smile.

If you don’t like going to the dentist, sedation dentistry is the way to go. I highly recommend it!

Please Note: As with Lasik I highly recommend that you spend some time and do a little research on whom you choose to perform this work. Any sedation has possible drawbacks and there were adjustments to the amount I was given during my various visits. I can attest that I did not feel any pain, in fact I recall very little of the time I spent having the work done. It is an all day process and you can expect to spend most of the day once you've returned home sleeping.

Thought I'd take a minute to write about my mom who I find to be such an incredible person. Maybe you to have a mom who has been there for you, has endured pain, who has stepped up and who has loved you through all of your trials and tribulations. Mine certainly has.

My mother is a combination of everything you'd ever want in a mom. First and foremost she is just a really good person as all of my friends would attest. In my youth she was the "everyones mom" of the subdivison I lived in. My father passed away rather suddenly in 1998 and she has been alone ever since. She turned 72 this year and Karoline and I have tried to ensure that she has a good life. I think she knows that I would be there for her at a moments notice if she needs me. I figure that I owe her that much after all that she has done for me.

Today she lives what I would call a cozy life in down south where she enjoys the ocean and the year around warmth.

She is the one person in my life who does not judge me. And I've made some mistakes to be sure along my journey. I have been married twice and she has never judged the women I have chosen to be with. She gave as much and probably more to my first marriage than it deserved and paid the price by being lied to and hurt good by my ex. Like any mom the end of that marriage was very difficult on her. But she did not hesitate to let go off the past and move on. When I married my second wife some twelve years later, she was even more elated because Karoline is the real deal, a no BS, kick ass wife. She is more than my partner in life. She is rock strong and as smart as they come. It took me forty years but I think I finally have given my mom someone who she can enjoy a close trusting relationship of love and respect, More than I can say for the fiasco my first marriage brought her. For that I am greatful.

Today she volunteers at a local hospital helping cancer patients who are dying to enjoy as best they can their last months, weeks or days in this world. How she endures the constant suffering, and death I can't begin to understand. I can only say from my experience with my fathers death that dying of cancer is a lonely internal demise that effects everyone in a different way. As much as my dads death took from her she strives to know every patient by name and shows them the same kindness she gave to my father as he suffered through cancer and eventually passed away. She has a story for each person that seems to live with her long after they are gone. I just don't know if I could do the same if I were in her shoes and it says volumes about her as a person.

As a grandmother she has done everything possible to guide my niece who despite divorced parents, growing up in a less than ideal environment, has managed a 4.0 grade average, is an honor student and thankfully will get some nice grants for a college education. I thank my mom for working hard at keeping her on the right track and we all expect that she will be a stellar nurse or doctor, the field she has chosen.

She was my biggest supporter when I started racing and did what ever she could to help me during those years. I can't tell you the many times she took me to a race when my father could not or just didn't want to go.

She was always giving you the thumbs up, the you can still win it, you can do anything you put your mind to. And I have to say that at 50 I am pretty happy with my life and a lot of that has to do with her. She always instilled success in us and she never let you get down.

My mom is the most non judgmental person I have met. She just likes to be part of whatever we are doing and has followed my brother (whom I stopped speaking to many years ago) and I to a variety of racetracks (all of the country) during our dirt bike racing years. ANd during the past few years as Mark and I have ran our perspective trackday ventures. Not to mention how un-believably kind she has been to my sister.

I've had two mother in laws. Thus I have gotten a chance to see what other moms that connect to you through the virtue of marriage can be like to their kids. For me one was just not nice at all, being around her was like being tortured, constantly trying to control her daughter and who did everything possible to ruin my marriage. The other is somewhat like my mom and who allows her daughter to be everything she can be without meddling in our marriage. I have learned one thing that you should do before you chance marriage, and that is to find out whether or not your potential spouses parents suck. Trust me on this. It was something I did not do well enough the first time around. I am super lucky that my current in-laws are awesome people that I enjoy being. Live and learn!

I have achieved so much more than I dreamed in my life. Twenty years ago when I was left for dead by my ex and her family after up rooting and leaving Michigan to move back to Seattle so the ex could be by her family and and after my divorce I came back to Michigan to run my fathers company and with my mom by my side we turned that into a very good time in our lives. Nothing is more challenging than working with your family and still maintaining a fun and loving relationship while making money. But we did it and it rocked. I enjoyed every minute, there was pain, there were little victories and big victories, shit days, sometimes shit weeks and through it all, up until my fathers death we stayed a team and a family.

I can honestly say that 20 or so years ago I was the last person on earth you would have envisioned working in the computer industry. I am truly more of a mechanical person having worked on helicopters and as a welder, it was my mom who really gave me the inner strength to forge through the early days of computing and the pain in the ass that it was. I am grateful and thankful for every word of inspiration she gave me while I struggled through code, through hardware failures, through Microsoft's horrible first GUI and today it has given me an awesome life and allowed me to make some awesome money.

She also had a belief in her kids throughout our lives that helped my brother and I to win some championships on bikes as well as my ventures in karting. And although there were a lot more loses than wins getting to the championship days and she just kept on believeing and inspiring us. Another thing that makes her a cool mom.

When I left Sportbike Tracktime and started my own trackday company, Trackoholics shewas the first person to encourage me to leave them and to forge ahead with my own deal. And I am glad that I did. As it turned out we had a lot of fun and made some money running our trackday company and it gave Karoline and a I something that we could work on together.

So now as we mom and I grow older and as time goes by we realize that we are nearing the end of what has been a fantastic journey. I do my best to fly down a few times a year to her place and help her out, jazz up her computer, replace sinks, plumbing, electric, you know the usual home crap that drives you crazy, always stuff that makes life a little easier. It gives me a chance to give back to her all she has sacrificed for me and to hang out with her.

I know that I can never give back all that she has given to me, but I figure that if there is a time to try, now is it!

Ironically Karoline's parents live on the opposite side of the state in Naples and it makes it hard for both of us to see each others parents at the same time. But we plan on making bringing everyone together in 2008.

This year mom and I watched the space shuttle launch from the beach, her favorite place to hang out! Man it was an awesome sight to be sure and it was cool because I can recall the first space launch when I was a kid and President Kennedy on TV telling the country about space and how it would change the world, and it did. It has given us so many technical breakthrough’s that have allowed so many things (without listing them all, I know firsthand the cool stuff in motorcycling) to be possible today. The kids of today with all of their high tech gadgets can thank that first mission for making those toys possible.

At any rate it was a great day to stand with my mom and watch the shuttle fireball disappear into the sky and know that we had both lived through these cool experiences.

I love her and hope your mom has left as lasting an impression on you that she has on me.

I thought I'd share a story about my furnace with you. Something I'm sure others have had happen to them, and that is that when it fails, it always fails at the worst time.

So it is January and it was -5 degrees and our furnace which had been acting up finally quit during the night. We woke up to fifty degrees and getting out of bed was not pleasant.

Of course you can't get around your daily life and so Karoline headed off to work and I headed off to school. When I returned home I called Consumers Power as we have an appliance contract with them. I figured they would come out and repair it.

From that point on things got interesting.

Far be it for any employee of the power company whom sold you the supposed appliance agreement, the same people who are supposed to be the experts in getting your furnace working to be able to do that without turning it into a major ordeal. The reality is that they want to do as little as possible. And so he immediately claimed our furnace was to old to fix (20 years) and proceeded to pull out his new fangled video tool with a light to snake the heat exchanger to show me why.

Cracks in the heat exchanger can cause deadly carbon monoxide to travel throughout the house, being odorless it basically kills you and you don't even know it. He seems to think he is telling me something I don't know. At the same time I'm thinking that unless you were born under a rock and don't know this fact that you just stupid and maybe dying will convince you to learn something about those things that are dangerous within your house.

I am also thinking about the six carbon monoxide detectors I have throughout the house and I have yet to hear one go off. Besides that, it was impossible to make out anything, especially a crack or cracks with his new fangled tool. It's to damm blurry. At any rate, he kept screwing around and deems the furnace un-repairable.

He proceeds to tell me that today is my lucky day and that because he works for Consumers Power he is going to do something only someone from the company can do and how lucky I am that they did not send a contractor out for the repair because they can't do the same. He claims he does this deal all the time on old furnaces.

He then proceeds to contact his boss at Consumers Power and conjure up a deal w to give us a $400.00 credit if we bagged any repairs to the furnace and buy a new furnace from anyone we chose. Another words, replace ours with a new one. And that he would put it all in writing. Of course there was a catch. If we were to go that route he could not do any repairs. The credit came from the cost saved from him not repairing it. NICE EH!

It's like -5 degrees with a massive wind and the house is sitting around 49 degrees, it's Friday and the house is getting colder and this guy leaves me with a paper deal to replace the furnace. More on the deal later.

Of course my main concern was that the pipes might freeze and burst. I was a little ruffled to say the least.

Knowing that the furnace was 20 years old and taking into account the multiple carbon monoxide detectors I have around the house, which again have never gone off lead me to believe we had no current issues with the heat exchanger, but that the furnace was old and should be replaced. I agreed to the deal to buy a new furnace and suffer for a few days if need be.

Naturally finding anyone on a Friday afternoon to either buy one or fix the current one was next to impossible. So I decided to have a look at the problem myself. I knew before he came out that the controller box that controls everything that happens to make your furnace work had a short of some sort based on what was happening. So I shut down the power to the furnace and removed the controller box. I figured twenty years of heating and cooling on the printed circuit board might be part of the problem. I grabbed my soldering Iron and re-soldered all of the connections, re-assembled the box, re-installed it and what do you know HEAT!

Now I'm not telling you to repair your own stuff. My point is that I needed to buy some time, get some heat and I can't tell you how great full, how thankful I am for what my father passed on to me in his lifetime. He learned from his dad, who learned from his dad and so on down the generations. They almost always made an attempt to repair things before they discarded them. The problem today at least here in America is that we are so "Instant Gratification". Throw it away, get a new one that todays kids wouldn't think twice about a problem like this, let alone understand anything about what caused it. There are a lot of kids today who don't seem to be getting the kind of learning experience I got from my parent, from their parents, instead parents think playing soccer, or video games or sitting on a computer all day is ok. The sad reality of progress I suppose.

I accomplished the whole repair by thinking outside the box a little. By taking the time to think out the problem and then a reasonable solution, I was able to solve my dilemma. I know some folks just don't have the capacity to do their own work so if you fit that type of person I'm not writing this for you.

First off I'll admit that I was a little frustrated and that the cold had a direct bearing on my motivation. There is so much information out there that I just had to see for myself if this problem was something I could solve. The Internet and Google got me a head start in finding a skematic of the controller box. Now I'll admit that the reality is that anyone can write anything on the web. That being the case, I suggest that anything you might read on the web needs to be double checked, if you are not 100% positive that what you have read is going to solve your problem without destroying something.

Long of the short is that we had heat and that bought me a few days to get several estimates, to study up on what we needed so that I could make a decision based on the best deal and not the fact or the pressure that we had no heat. We ended up purchasing a combo deal from Randazzo's Heating and Cooling and I have to say that they were TOP NOTCH! I am totally satisfied with the work and the awesome price we got on a new Lennox Furnace and Air Conditioning unit. The air conditioner was the same age as the furnace and the pricing for both was so good that we decided to have them both done at the same time.

Getting back to the repair issue. Any thoughts of doing a repair like this assumes that you have some mechanical skills, that maybe your dad gave you something more than a soccer ball to learn from. If not, this kind of thing is not for you and you could get your self into serious trouble. Remember that you are dealing with a device that produces, well heat of course, but death as well. Better to freeze your ass off for a few days that to be dead, forever.

I am also a firm NON believer in service contracts. We has it based on Karoline's job at the Energy company. The fine print negates ever considering one of these contracts. And at the moment Consumers is denying that they owe us the $400.00 from the deal their technician made with me while here. That surprises me since we have the whole deal in writing. I can see a court case and lawyers sorting this matter out already.The are useless! for most anyone under 50. It has been canceled.

PLEASE NOTE that if you are elderly, disabled or otherwise unable to deal with something of this sort, as is the case with my 70+ year old mother who lives out of state and has no one to help her, a full replacement service contract is the only way to go. And yes full replacement contracts are more expensive. They do however cover repairing, up to replacing the item in question at no charge. Remember the words "FULL REPLACEMENT" which is very different than a standard service agreement.

Anyways, I'm enjoying the heat.