Dad Visit Photos

We had a blast last month when Dad came to visit: spent most of our time eating and drinking our way through Portland.  He got some pretty great photos while he was here, and I thought I would share a couple of my favorites, for those of you who haven't had the chance to see them.

Triple selfie in the park, on one of the warm beautiful days we were lucky enough to get during Dad's visit

Below: a comical but great series of Sarah and I out at one of our favorite Indian eateries.

Winter Dress

This December Ashley requested a nice "Christmas Dress" for her trip back home.  In the past I've made patterns for her in the traditional way: by drafting one side and then doubling it for a symmetrical garment.  But Ashley had pretty bad scoliosis as a teenager (as you can maybe see in the first photo) and as a result one hip sits about an inch higher than the other.  This time I build a full pattern for each side of her body that can function as a base pattern for any future bodice she might want, and it fits like a glove!  She was really excited about the fit, and so am I.  We finally got around to photographing it just the other week.  I'm working on another couple of projects for her right now, as well as refining my underwear patterns, so more project posts should be coming up soon.

 

A few weeks ago we also drove Lenny down to San Francisco to start a new tall ship gig, and I have a handful of photos from that trip that I'll hopefully find time to pick through and narrate soon.  This week Seth's mom, sister, and brother in law are visiting, and got a condo in Newport (at the beach/bay), so we're all hanging out enjoying the (intermittent) sun and sand.  Hopefully our relaxing beach week will provide some more blogging time!

Spring Flowers

A quick look at what I've been up to: the newest version of my base pattern.  Also, happy spring!

Lace and Snowflakes

I was able to steamroll the momentum from our class directly into lingerie production in anticipation of a sales party planned for the following weekend (the weekend before Valentine's).  Nature, it seems, did not approve of my plans and sent a three day snow storm that effectively shut down the whole city. Everyone made the right choice and didn't drive over that day, so instead of a party I had a trickle of clients stop by throughout the week once we returned to the reign of rain and all of the snow had melted away.  I'm extremely happy with how my underwear making is progressing:  I have four sizes and several different styles patterned and tested, and I've had moderate luck sourcing materials at a reasonable price for the kind of small scale production I'm doing.  More than anything, this is the first sewing venture I've undertaken where I'm able to pay myself a living hourly wage and price items at a level that I could/would buy them.  Here's a little sampling of what I whipped up this week:

The last few days of our class, which I never got around to blogging about, were as enjoyable and educational as the beginning portion had been.  We learned how to give an muscular injection (Seth and I were each other's guinea pigs for this one), how to identify a hernia, and how to rotate a twisted testicle back into position (no guinea pigs here, just a theoretical explanation).  Our class ended on a Thursday, and on Friday we had those folks who didn't have to skip town right away over for snacking, drinks, and a fire in the living room.  I know I've said it already, but I can say enough about what a great social experience this class was and what an interesting and diverse group of people we met and became friends with: a Blackhawk helicopter pilot, a Shakespearean actor, a beekeeper, a yoga instructor, a professional poker player...  And despite the differences in lifestyle, we all had in common a love of the backcountry and a desire to be prepared to help ourselves and others while enjoying it.

Connecting on this shared interest lit a fire under me and Seth to do some summer planning, and last week we bought train tickets to (finally) visit Glacier National Park this July.  We'll be there for about 10 days in the middle/latter part of the month; I'm extremely excited to take a backpacking/camping trip without use of a vehicle.  The Amtrak (the same train line that we've taken cross-country) stops directly in the National Park, and then Glacier runs a shuttle (free with your Park Pass) along the main park road and to the major campgrounds and trailheads.  We hope to spend several days doing a backpacking trip and the remainder of the time camping and going on day hikes, perhaps with one night in the lodge to clean ourselves up before we board the train back home.

I'm also excited to announce that for the first time in many years we'll be home for Thanksgiving.  I thought that perhaps if we bought our tickets now that they would be comparable in price to a "normal" time of the year, and I was right, so we did.  I'm really looking forward to having Thanksgiving dinner with family, to Grandma's pie (I'm putting in a pecan request now), and to some kind of blackened fish concoction of Dad's!

In the meantime...

I don't have a wrap up post on our class yet, but I stumbled across the Halloween photos from this year.  We had a super hero themed party:  I'm Wonder Woman (obviously), Sarah's Hawkgirl, and Seth is the Green Arrow.  Also featured: Supergirl, Aquaman, and both a male and female Batman!

Stuff I learned today: I'm really really tired

I am sacked, and tomorrow is a full day for us: 8 hours of class, quick dinner break, and then a nighttime mock rescue during which we're supposed to get the first rain we've had since our class began.  On Saturday we learned about altitude sickness, how to identify its different stages and the best treatment approach for each (the short answer: go down).  Bites and stings, including how to deal with poisonous critters.  (more myth busting: pretty much anything you've seen in a movie is outdated and no longer recommended.  You can't suck the poison out of bite, nor should to put a tourniquet on to isolate the poison. you just have to monitor and evacuate.)  We also covered lightning and submersion.   There's a guy in Canada doing really interesting studies on hypothermia and cold water accidents, and this was the most interesting tidbit from the day.  According to his findings (gathered from making himself and his willing students/participants intentionally hypothermic) there's a fairly universal rule for the timeline of cold water submersion, which they call the 1:10:1 rule.  If you fall into freezing water it generally takes 60 seconds for your body to recover from cold shock.  The best thing you can do is to just focus on getting control of your breathing during this time.  After that, you have about 10 minutes of "meaningful" movement before the cold begins to immobilize your muscles, regardless of how cold that water you fall into is.  And after this, you have about 1 hour during which you can stay conscious.  If, say, you fall through some ice, and you've used your 10 minutes of movement with no success, the best thing you can do is to try to get your arms to freeze to the surface so that if you lose consciousness your airway will remain above water and someone can still find and rescue you.  We also learned that if you do drown, your chances of survival are much higher if you drown in cold water, because it slows down your body, which slows down your dying.  We read an article by a girl who was trapped underwater in a snowy stream for 66 minutes as a child and was successfully resuscitated.

Yesterday was our day off, and after napping all afternoon I get myself together to grab a drink with some folks from our class.  Most people don't live in Portland, and it's been fun to show some of them around a little bit and recommend places for them to check out.  One day of brain recovery time wasn't really enough, and I'm glad today was some easy to digest information.  Today we did cardiovascular and respiratory medical issues, as well as CPR training.  We spent a lot of time with the CPR... although it's conceptually quite simple we spent a lot of time practicing to develop the muscle memory and rhythm of it.  There are some well known songs with a tempo of 100 beats per minute, which is the rate of chest compressions for CPR.  One of them is "Stayin' Alive" and another "Another One Bites the Dust".... like I said they have a good sense of lightness in this class.  Also learned how to use a defibrillator (modern ones are placed everywhere, and the machine literally talks you through the process.)  I was interested to learn that King County (Seattle) has a roughly 50% success rate in CPR, whereas the national average is somewhere between 10-15%.  Apparently it's a combination of having a population that is better educated in CPR, and having the money to have more defibrillators placed around and faster EMS response.  As heart disease is the leading cause of death our country, it makes you wonder what a populace better educated in how to handle a heart attack might be able to do for our national life expectancy.

Oh, and I learned how to remove a fish hook if someone gets it caught in their skin.

Don't think I'll make it onto the blog tomorrow, as I've been told our mock rescue could run as late as midnight.  I'll catch up in a couple of day... wish me luck and calm!

Frostbite and Fake Blood

After the long day yesterday today felt like a breeze, especially because the material we covered was a little more strait forward, at least for me.  Today we covered wound management, which included some pretty gnarly stuff, like how to control an impaled object that you can't remove from your patient, and how to treat an amputation.  We're lucky to have really awesome instructors for our course, who have the ability to inject some comic relief into our interactions without losing the weight of the situations we're talking about.  Case and point, Lisa referred to the fake finger that popped off of her patient's hand as "little patient."  As in, "we want to take care of big patient, but I can't forget about little patient over here either."  Unlike many things, this was pretty in line with my media experiences.  Clean that little patient and place it in some sterile, damp gauze in a ziplock baggie and keep it cool.

After wounds and lunch (what a combination for one's morning) we got on to environmental issues: heat exhaustion/stroke, dehydration, hyponatremia (low sodium, usually caused by over hydration), hypothermia, frostbite, and non-freezing cold injury (also known as trench-foot).  This section was also fairly familiar to me, although we did some interesting myth busting.  Getting into a sleeping bag naked with a hypothermic patient won't do any harm, and might help them feel more comfortable, but isn't going to be especially helpful in raising their core temperature.  Waiting to pee doesn't make you colder, and you don't lose more heat from your head than from an equivalent sized surface elsewhere on your body. With environmental risks, the focus is definitely on prevention, although treatment is obviously thoroughly covered as well.

I can't tell you how unexpectedly fun this class has been.  Pretending to be a patient (which I did twice today) is a blast, and I finally get to utilize the skills from that acting class I took in college.  Today I suffered a head wound, broke my wrist, and had some internal bleeding!  Even more amusing is watching the reactions to the regular folks walking their dogs through the park, wondering what 10 of us are doing splayed out in the grass with fake blood on our heads while the other 20 crouch over us.

Tomorrow is the last day before our one day weekend, so maybe on Sunday I'll have time to say more about the experience, rather than just the curriculum, of this class.  For now, suffice to say these have been some of the most interesting, affirming, and fun days in recent memory.