Mike and Arroxane

We’re now accepting reservations from those who plan to attend our wedding. Please email rsvp @ mikeandarroxane . com with the following information:

Name
Address
Number attending
Number and ages of children
Any assistance required for accommodations or transportation

If you have questions or suggestions, use the same email address to reach us.

We look forward to seeing you there!

With the silver and gold celestial theme for the wedding, finding shoes to fit in shouldn’t be hard, but here’s an ebay seller suggestion:

http://tinyurl.com/3ppl8z

If that link no longer works, try this one:

http://tinyurl.com/3wdfs9

At 5 am my nasty 102 degree fever finally broke.

Then here came the tests… Chest Xray (digital even), Ultrasound of my legs looking for a DVT.

At 11am They had me drink this whole white bottle of white thick gue.

Barium is some of the nastiest stuff you will ever drink, and it gave me massive intestinal distress.

At 1 pm I finally get my CT scan of my Sinuses, Chest and abdomen.

So after being in gastronomical distress and not having anything to meaningful to eat since Thursday morning, I finally get some food at 5 pm.

So at 8 pm they took me off the O2 and my pulse ox continued to do well.

About that time Arroxane and Tim dropped in to check on me.

They stayed until the ICU staff kicked them out, I took some pain meds for my foot and went to sleep.

So as you can probably figure out Baylor Grapevine has WiFi.

But with one twist.

All ports are blocked in NAT except for port 80 and port 443

This basically prevents me from running my office VPN connection,  using my VoIP phone, playing World of Warcraft, Instant Messenger or doing any other “online” activity except for just browsing web pages.

This is really more of an annoyance than a problem for me, but it still complicates things further than they really need to be.

What to do…..

It just so happens that my brother Jonathan and I are very tech savvy people. whouda guessed?

My brother Jonathan has a FreeBSD server that is CoLocated at Savvis where his server speaks a protocol called SSH.

Jonathan has configured his SSH Deamon to listen to requests on port 443 instead of its usual port 22.

By doing this the Baylor NAT Firewall thinks that I am talking to a webserver through the HTTPS protocol when I am really talking to Jonathan’s SSH Deamon.

I have a program called PuTTY on my computer. PuTTY is an SSH client for Windows.

SSH normally lets someone connect to a remote server and issue dos like commands and receive the responses.

But the clever PuTTY programmers have added the ability to create an SSH Tunnel and this lets me almost bypass the NAT Firewall entireley.

Here is a good writeup on what we have have covered so far: How to make a tunnel from PuTTY

Now I need to tell my laptop running Vista to send all my Internet traffic down the Tunnel made from PuTTY.

There is a little $30 program called ProxyCAP that happens to work with Vista. I was sold the moment I saw it.

How they describe it:

ProxyCap enables you to tunnel Internet applications through HTTP, SOCKS v4, and SOCKS v5 Proxy Servers. You can tell ProxyCap which applications will connect to the Internet through a proxy and under what circumstances. This is done through a user friendly interface, without the need to reconfigure any of your Internet clients. ProxyCap provides flexible rule system and allows you to define your own “tunneling” rules. You can add a new rule with just a few mouse clicks.

And moments later I was up and Playing WoW….

This is still an annoyance but is livable.

So a public “THANK YOU JONATHAN, YOUR A LIFESAVER!” goes out to my younger brother Jonathan for letting me toss some extra bits his servers direction.

-Mike

Thursday, April 10th

I got up at around 8 am took more drugs, and had noticed I had sweated a lot and had a much higher temp. I also began to notice a bruise on my left foot that looked like I had hit something when I got up to go to the restroom. I showed Arroxane and she thought I did the same thing.

So back into the couch to rest some more. By around 2 pm I was getting worried about my pulse being so rapid and began to ask Arroxane if she had a BP Cuff for me use. She said Tim had an old one and to contact him, so I did. It turns out his was old and not reliable. So the Awesome guy Tim is, ran out for me and got me one to use.

He came over around 3:30pm and set it all up and we tested me.. 90/50 pulse 150.

Tim said no that can’t be right so he tested himself and came up as usual. So we retested and it was about the same.

He looked at me and said “You need to go back to the Dr”.

So I called Care Now again and they got me right in, Tim drove me over. I got there around 4pm the Dr said that I was septic and that I must go to the ER now, she called Baylor Grapevine and notified of them of my pending arrival.

So I called Tim back up, at about 5 pm and we got me to the truck and crawled through what seemed like 15 miles of bumper to bumper traffic, but it was just normal rush hour 121 to 114 traffic. We got of on 26 and followed the blue “H” signs and found our way to Baylor Grapevine. It took us about 45 min I think to get there. Then I waited for about 15min for “Jeff” the triage nurse the Dr had spoken to.

I finally got into an ER room about 6:30 pm and had to wait for an ICU bed, Tim stayed with me.

In the mean time the Nurse hooked me up to O2 and the monitoring machines then began two 20 awg IV’s in my right arm, first trying unsuccessfully in my left arm.

They began to pump me full of Sodium Chloride, I used 3 1000ml bags while I was in the ER room. In the other IV they filled me with antibiotics Vancomycin, Levaquin and a new one called Zosyn.

Some time later, Arroxane found me and was just “There” and that all I wanted.

I  didn’t know it or realize it at the time but my BP crashed to 48 / 35 while I was in the ER room with my pulse still 150 bpm.

To everyones amazement (now even my own) I was still somehow alert and conscious. I’m not sure just how close I was but, damn it scares me now. If I had chosen to just go to sleep like I wanted to on the couch, who knows.

I finally got an ICU bed at 9:30pm.

Tim and Arroxane both left a little after I got my room.

So now in my ICU room the first order of business was to get me a PICC line. This is essentially an IV directly into your heart. Mine was to be a “Double Lumen” meaning that it has 2 bidirectional connections for both receveing fluids and drawing blood from.

It wasn’t painful at all, they have it down to a science. All I felt was the subcutaneous numbing agent they injected before sticking me with the threading-needle and threading the wires and tube down my artery to my heart using ultrasound.

They then suture a clip to hold the whole thing in place. All in all it took about 10 min for everything.

Now that I had a PICC, that no more needle sticks at all!

They used one line for what is called a “CVP” it is used to measure my central venous pressure as opposed to external blood pressure, it read out on the monitor along with all my other vitals.

The other line was used to put Blood Pressure inducing drugs Levophed “Norepinephrine” (is particularly nasty) and Dobutrex “Dobutamine” in me that they couldn’t with regular veins, too harsh.

So to sum up:
O2 in my nose
EKG everywhere
On my right arm 2 IV’s going Saline /w cocktail of Antibiotics, and Saline /w IV Steroids
Pulse Ox bandage on my right index finger.
BP Cuff on my right wrist
On my left arm PICC line, the Blood Pressure Drugs, and the “CVP” thingy
An array of tags on my left wrist
Any my very own drainage system

Today I got up and had a massive sinus headache and ear infection and went straight to Care Now to get more drugs.

I have a fever of 100.9.

I saw the Doc, she confirmed my sinus and ear problems and I got a script for some Amoxil and a $2 off coupon for some Mucinex-D.

I just got home from drugstore, I got my drugs, and I am headed for the couch.

-Mike

We finally found some affordable, printable invitations. It’s really shocking to think that some folks actually spend $10 or more PER CARD for invitations. Not to mention many send “save the date” cards, then invites, and then reminders–and that doesn’t include the thank-you cards. I understand these are considered family history and keepsakes and all that kind of stuff, but really, c’mon!

We’re still waiting on the ‘rents to get us their lists of family and friends to invite. After we combine those we’ll add in our friends that aren’t on those lists already.

In addition, we found a phrase from a poem by Rumi that really sums up the wedding theme. No, don’t have it here, but I’ll post it eventually. I’ve been reading through dozens of wedding planning, ceremony, and vows books. Anything good I pass on to Mike and then we talk it over to come to an agreement.

Between my research, his tech skills, and our combined brainstorming this really is going to be a unique, interesting, special event.

Stay tuned for more on our planning!

Although we aren’t going to force everyone to buy specific outfits that don’t suite them, I would like to recommend a style and place where you can buy affordable, attractive, comfortable clothes for the wedding. The store has everything from S to 5X–so don’t say they don’t have your size! Also, the styles are varied, but similar and offer enough options for any body-type.

The wedding colors are silver and gold, so here are the links to the outfits they sell in gray/white/silver and tan/beige/gold:
http://tinyurl.com/24rz48
http://tinyurl.com/2z37an

Make sure to look closely, some of those outfits don’t look so hot in the mini pic, but are very classy up-close. I’m just trying to keep anyone from over-dressing. No tuxedos or formal-wear, puh-leeze!

You’ve got plenty of time before the wedding to figure out what to wear and get a hold of it. This style of clothing is also sold at many boutiques and fairs, so if you don’t feel like ordering from eBay you can get something similar locally.

Location is everything. So we’ve been holding off releasing any more info on the wedding until the spot was set in stone. Well, it’s set in paper at this point. LOL We’re waiting to hear the quote, but today we stopped by and reviewed the venue. As we suspected, will be perfect. Presuming we can find an easily-robbed bank.  :P  OK, I don’t expect it to be cheap, but at least we will be getting the place at a major discount since Mike knows the staff there. He’s contracted for them a number of times and will be doing so again soon–so it sounds. We asked questions like about tea-lights and balloons. Details. All details. But ALL important.

So, hopefully in the  next few weeks we’ll have more to tell about the location. Keep tuned!

Arroxane and I will share events and thoughts related to our upcoming wedding. Keep checking back to stay informed.