Geiger trumps GlobalEntry

photo by pennuja (http://www.flickr.com/photos/pennuja/)

Last October, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. After considering all the options, I elected to go through a procedure called Brachytherapy. This involves volumetric measurement of one's prostate, and the subsequent insertion of around 100 rice-grain-sized "seeds" made of titanium and filled with Iodine 125, a radioactive isotope. The seeds are permanent, the idea being a long-term, highly-localized dose of radiation to kill off the cancer. The half-life of I125 is about six months. At the end of the procedure, I was issued a wallet card identifying me, the procedure and the isotope: the seeds can be detectable when crossing international boundaries.

On a recent flight to Mumbai, there were TSA agents in the jetway at Seatac, checking passports. As I approached one of them, a little box on his belt began to buzz. He actually looked a bit scared for a moment, like "uh oh, this is the big one" and asked "is there anything you want to tell me?" Ah. I showed him my "I'm radioactive - but it's okay" card and he waived me on. No big deal.

I travel quite a bit, much of it internationally, and for reasons unexplained I tend to get pulled into secondary screening every time I enter back into the U.S. I decided to go through the effort to get a GlobalEntry ID in the hopes it would streamline my travel experience. On my return from Mumbai, Seatac Immigration was jam-packed, so I was glad to be able to walk past the crowds to a bank of 4 GlobalEntry kiosks, nobody using any of them. I placed my hand in the scanner, posed for a photo, tapped a few things on the touch screen and was on my merry in about 30 seconds. Awesome.

I thought I was home free - until, as I handed my Customs Declaration to the CBP officer, one of those same little boxes buzzed. My radiation card didn't much impress the officer - other officers separated me from my luggage and led me to a waiting area where they brought out a shoebox-sided device with a handle on the top that started ticking when it got near me. The agent explained "this is a very expensive instrument that looks for radiation." I said "um, yeah, it's a Geiger counter." He was surprised and responded "oh, you must be a scientist." Said Geiger counter recorded my pattern but couldn't match it against some database of "okay" forms, and so the sample had to be emailed to "a scientist on the Internet" (FEMA?) for verification. I ended up sitting for 30 minutes before I was cleared.

I'd like to think that in the age where we have TSA, CPB, PreCheck, GlobalEntry and the concept of a trusted traveler, the systems might somehow be connected in a productive way. Once I'd been identified with a specific isotope, and determined to have a proper explanation, it would be great to have that included as part of my trusted traveler profile. I posed that as a suggestion on the CPB website and received a call from a rather surly CPB agent who basically said "can't do it, not now, not never. Tough luck."

Ah, the pairing of government with technology...

A rose by any other name...

Over the last several weeks, I've received a number of confounding emails from people who ran the gamut from befuddled to annoyed to outright pissed off. They've accused me of loading software on their systems that took over all of their browsers.

This confused me. "Imminent", or "imminent.com", my Imminent, is this blog. Period. Nobody else gets to use this domain in any way.

Regardless of my attempts to clarify, or defend, or sympathize, most of these people writing me would not accept clarification, would not accept my defense, didn't care about my sympathy. They wanted what I can only describe as their righteous pound of flesh.

During this little odyssey, I confess that I didn't much care about anything except that these folks had the wrong guy, and frankly most of their descriptions of the problem were so close to incoherent that I assumed it was some noob who'd got their system infected and was looking for someone to blame. In one case, it appears that it may have been someone's executive assistant who infected her boss' machine and was desperately looking for someone to toss under the bus.

Finally, some enlightenment:

Imminent, in addition to my blog, turns out to be the name of some new virus running around. Shit. People download it, get infected, and go looking for the bug's owner. The virus' creators seem to use a different spelling: iminent. But nobody seems to notice that before they send their ire my way.

Folks, it isn't me.

The battle for Spike

Spike is a stuffed animal. My mother used to nestle him in the crook of her arm for comfort when she slept. Because of this, Spike earned a place of honor in my mom's coffin when she passed away a year ago, along with a photo of her family and a small bottle of Gilbey's gin. This is my first time dealing with formal death rituals like this. The family, being my sister and myself with our spouses, comprises the "family": It was our job to approve of the way mom looked lying in state ("Her hair just isn't right. Can you get her jacket to lie properly?") and add what accoutrements we thought appropriate for her body's next journey. I nestled Spike up against her arm (I couldn't put it under her arm because her hands wouldn't curl properly around him. The dead: go figure).

Enter The Housekeeper. Someone who's been caring for mom off and on for 27 years, who's taken to calling mom "mom", much to mom's offense. Who walked up to the coffin and started rearranging things to her liking while the actual family looked on incredulously. We'll call her "Flo".

At some point, I decided a line had been crossed, that Flo's presumptuousness could not go unchecked, and that line was where Flo decided to rearrange Spike. Stepping in, I stated quietly "I prefer Spike nestled like this" and replaced him in his original position. Much to everyone's amazement, Flo decided she couldn't accept that, and a literal tug-of-war ensued, me keeping Spike in place and saying things like "Flo, I want things to stay this way" and Flo, with a monomaniac focus on that stuffed animal, determined to change things to suit herself. To my amazement, I had to stop Flo no less than three times. For a long moment, the husband and I locked eyes. Her husband started to pull her away from the coffin - even then, she remained focused on Spike, reaching for that dog, determined to have her way. For myself, I'd never felt such a powerful combination of a feeling of righteous, outright rage at what I perceived was a deeply inconsiderate behavior toward My Family and My Mom, and an irony that we would be, quite literally, in combat over a stuffed animal, over my mother's body.

This conjures up all sorts of cultural imagery. The competing lovers jumping into a grave of a lost one; the Egyptian ritual of placing an entire entourage into the pyramid. We manipulate our dead to make ourselves, the living, feel more comfortable about their passing.

Spike ultimately stayed where I and my sister thought he should. I made sure of it.

Fall winery operations

It's been a  busy month. All of the 2010 reds are now bottled (Cabernet Sauvignon, Malbec, and Port), the 2011 whites are now bottled (Semillon, Chardonnay, Viognier, and a blend of the three). The 2012 grapes arrived, and there have been a number of very busy crush days. 200 pounds of the new Semillon is past primary and in MLF. I reserved a couple of gallons to try my hand at a white port this year. I also have 200 pounds of Cabernet Sauvignon mixed with 40 pounds of Petit Verdot. Part of that will go toward port as well.

Now we need to start drinking the stuff...

Bee Resetting...

Well, we seem to have failed in our first beekeeping attempt. The hive is deserted with quite a number of dead bees in the bottom super. We don't know if this is a result of our replacing the top super with a new one on the bottom last month, new materials for the new super, stress on the bees during the switch, or what. As the bees can't be replaced until the spring, we have some time to research this and ponder. A sad day.