Category: Miscellaneous babble

I’ve been a pretty regular blood donor since I was 18, with the exception of the three years I spent in Detroit.

Today I made my first donation of plasma and platelets.

It’s a pretty simple process, although a little more involved than a whole blood donation. The initial screening process is the same as for a regular blood donation. After that you go settle into one of their nice comfy chairs and get ready to relax for about 90 minutes.

During that time you can relax, nap or watch a movie. Don’t bother bringing a book because you won’t be able to read it. Today, there were 3 pheresis machines, but only two had TVs set up. Guess which one I got. Fortunately my brain is pretty good at entertaining itself.

Next to you is the machine that takes your blood, spins out the platelets and plasma and returns the rest to you. It’s big with lots of tubing and a little on the noisy side but not too bad. It’s like being next to a car.

Plasma/platelet apheresis is a two needle process with one removing blood from one arm and the other returning red cells/saline to the other arm. Since you can’t move your arms, it’s pretty hard to read anything.

For me the process took just under 90 minutes. Aside from getting stuck by two needles, there wasn’t really any discomfort at all. I ended up spending most of the time napping, so the donation felt like it went pretty quickly. The staff checks up on you periodically to make sure everything is going smoothly. I thought it was pretty cool watching the machine work and seeing the plasma bag fill up.

Once the machine goes through the equivalent of your entire blood volume (about 5 liters), you’re all done, one needle comes out and then you just have to wait a couple more minutes for the machine to finish putting the red cells back in. The second needle comes out and you have two bandage wrapped arms. The bag containing the platelets comes out of the pheresis machine partly filled with yellowish clumpy looking stuff. Some of the plasma is used to dilute the platelets and they’re transferred into another bag. Then off you go to have a drink and some snacks and make sure you’re not feeling any ill effects from the donation.

If you’re looking for a good excuse to get away for a couple hours and have to sit and do nothing, think about doing a plasma and/or platelet donation!

The last couple of months my Cliq has actually been behaving pretty reasonably and is almost tolerable to use. Still spontaneously reboots itself every now and then, but not nearly as much as it did before.

I still have the problem with calls where nobody can hear me unless I switch to speaker phone, but my Bluetooth handset takes care of that problem (and also doubles as a conversation starter). It also helps that I hardly ever get any calls.

I’ve given my cell phone number out enough times that I only have to think a little bit to remember the number without looking it up.

The EA Mobile version of Bejeweled for Android sucks balls on the Cliq. None of the other software I have on my Cliq runs or plays as slow as Bejeweled. I think the EA Mobile team needs to go back and do some more work on it. This is not a game that should require a GHz processor to play smoothly.

I was giving some serious consideration to dumping the Cliq for maybe a Nexus S, but I think I’ll wait a bit. After what I did to the car, it’ll be a while before I can splurge on anything new anyway.

A cheque arrived from the insurance company so now I can mostly pay to get the car fixed up. Waiting on parts now so they can put it back together. Hopefully I’ll have it back by the end of the week.

After a year or so of relative peace, the spam bots are back hammering the comment script again. Almost all of them use IP addresses assigned to networks in China.

None of the comment spam is getting posted but it’s still a PITA. Maybe I should set up my own Great Firewall of Not-China.

bah

The new turkey at in the Mountain Forest exhibit at the Aquarium just about scared the wits out of me today. Walking around the exhibit setting out the food pans as usual, and then there’s this giant black blob flying toward me!

It’s been a couple of months since my last volunteer shift, so the turkey is a new addition. Seems pretty friendly, and followed me around the exhibit.

The barn owl chick that hatched last month has gotten pretty big. Shouldn’t be too long before it’s either transported to a new facility or released into the wild.