Joe Haldeman's Blog

Turns out that pancreatitis is a gift that keeps on giving. A culture of the gunk being extracted from the site (pancreatic fluid and little bits of pancreas) came back crawling with pseudomonas. So it's back on the IV for me, some antibiotic.

Picked it up in the hospital. (And everybody was singing, "All I want for Christmas is an opportunistic infection.")

Fortunately, since I don't yet show any symptoms, I can delay the IV drip till I get down to Florida. The surgeon here is calling my G...

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Niece Lore has come to my rescue on the Sopranos. She wants to see them again, too, so we'll make it a Family thing.

Mitch, I don't dare get Netflix. I'd never read or write again.

My own library needs culling, Dave, by about 20-25%, to get the stacks of books lying around everywhere up on shelves. Have to be ruthless and get rid of books that I'll never open again; those that don't have any esthetic or associational value. It's not a good time of year to cart books to the used book stores....

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Thanks for the laugh, Dave. Unfortunately, my Superman tights don't work so well with the tubes and bags hanging from the super-torso. Maybe six months from now.

Watched a couple more Sopranos last night. Utterly fascinating. The lead actor, James Gandalfini, does everyday evil so well . . . all in a day's work; get off my case. It's delicious, malicious fun to watch his two lives mixing it up. The family man who's also a Family man.

We'll have to find someone down in Gainesville who can ...

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Thanks for the good wishes, all. Gay and I are both still adjusting to the idea -- I guess out of self-preservation we haven't let ourselves be too optimistic.

It was undramatic enough. The doc looked at my tubes and wounds and said, well, you could go home now if you want. Do you feel okay to fly?

In fact, I'm not sure I would need a plane.

Just have to get in touch with my primary care doctor at the VA in Gainesville, who will hook me up with a couple of specialists -- a gastrointestinal su...

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We're headed home! The surgeon released me, and Gay's been on the phone arranging things. Be back home in Gainesville about 1700 Wednesday.

Have a doctor appointment down there on Friday, so that aspect of life will continue uninterrupted. Still a couple of surgeries to go, but at least I'll be able to recuperate in the sunshine. And I'll recover much faster, surrounded by my telescopes and art stuff.

Joe

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An old friend who has been through the mill with cancer wrote and asked me how I felt during and immediately after surgery . . . .

my earliest recollections after I went under were a series of ghastly dream images, where I was involved (as a third-person character) in painful and disgusting ways. But for some reason I think that those were only in the first hours after surgery. When I slowly came out of it I was of course drugged to the gills, but my memories are mostly pleasant, a successio...

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Jeff Carver took over my sf class, Keith, and I couldn't have made a better choice. (Not that I personally made the choice -- I was still unconscious.) The Longer Fiction was picked up by a writer I don't know, a friend of Junot Diaz.

I don't know whether I will get to Florida quicker than if I were still teaching at MIT . . . I'd be leaving Cambridge on 18 December. Guess I'll find out tomorrow, whether we'll beat that. Hope we will.

Dave, if I opt for cryonics I don't think I'll use a Den...

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Dave, when I was in high school in Bethesda, Maryland, there was a place across the Potomac called "Ye Olde Hunter," which was the retail outlet for Interarmco, an international weapons dealer. They had thousands of old rifles from WWI and the Spanish-American War for less than twenty bucks (I googled, and the basic Krag carbine now goes for $600-$1600.) A buddy of mine got a British Enfield jungle carbine there (without ammo) and I was so jealous.

I was totally impressed by their WWII anti-...

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How could I have missed _Blazing Saddles_ and _Butch Cassidy_? I've never seen the bowdlerized version of B.S., for which I'm grateful.

Interesting coincidence -- or probably just an example of subliminal recall -- hours after I wrote down that list of Westerns, I looked at the TV listings and saw that the Turner channel was showing _The Treasure of Sierra Madre_, included on the list in spite of its modern elements. So we watched it after dinner and much enjoyed Bogart chewing up the scener...

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(Response from sff.net -- )

I was happy about the Heinlein award, of course, when they told me about it. Decided before I got sick, glad to know, so it's not a sympathy thing.

Dave, I like the specialized use of the word "valid" in symbolic logic. An argument is valid if (so to speak) both sides of the truth-value equation balance. But that has nothing to do with actual truth. If any of the elements of the argument are false, the validity of the algorithm has nothing to do with "truth."

Go...

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