Category Archives: Personal

…is whether the metal valve in my aorta sets off airport metal detectors.

Yes, the family is leaving early in the day for a quiet (two teenage boys, cough cough) week's holiday to a house in a location which if not in the absolute middle of nowhere is at least on the edge of it. But only, promises the rental ad, about 30 minutes from somewhere. Even if it is, we later discover, some 75 feet from the road to the house.

To get there from here will involve a short flight as I didn't feel up to the very long drive we might otherwise have taken. Then we will still have a car ride of some length. The house is well suited, allegedly, for lounging about — something I'm getting quite practiced at. There are supposed to be great views. And if I want exercise, well, the house is on a mountain side.

There's supposed to be broadband, so we may be on the information highway even if we're just on the edge of the paved grid. Or there may not be broadband, in which case there will be very little posting for a week, but that doesn't mean I've had a relapse. Or, there may be broadband and I still may not be posting much.

(As regards the metal detectors, I have this card I'm supposed to give anyone who wants to point a magnetic field at me about the metal inside me. It tells them the safety parameters beyond which the fields can hurt me. It looks terribly easy to counterfeit, so I wonder if the TSA will accept it if I do set off the alarms, or if I'm headed for the back room to show them my scars.)

All this is due to the fact that I'm feeling considerably better than I was, say, two months ago. There is no question that I am recovering, slowly but generally surely. That said, I still have some way to go before reaching normal strength and especially stamina. I can do most of what I used to do — but not nearly as much of it in a day. And a cold really really knocks me out. And I'm not up to doing much work yet.

The docs said it would take six to twelve months to feel 100% and it has been about five (or four if you count from my hospital discharge) so far, so I suppose I'm on track. Teaching starts in a few weeks, and I'm confident I'll be ready to handle the one class I'm scheduled for. Whether I'll be up to much of anything else remains to be seen.

In a couple of weeks, my house is going to be covered with a thing like a circus tent.

Before that happens, I have to take out all the food, medicines, houseplants, and anything else that could end up in a mouth, as that tent is going to be pumped full of noxious toxic gas.

Yes, we have drywood termites. The flying kind. Indeed, judging from the number of tents sprouting in the neighborhood, every other house is infested.

We went through all this about ten years ago, and it seemed amazingly hard, a once-in-a-lifetime mess. A wiser colleague warned me that tenting every ten years or so was just an incident of life in south Florida. I didn't believe him, but he was prophetic. And after hurricanes, teenagers, and the odd medical crisis, it doesn't seem so bad.

That gurgling noise was the water pump leaking.

I've just been appointed this coming year's Laurie Silvers & Mitchell Rubenstein Distinguished Professor of Law. It's a one-year, rotating, appointment, and I'm the second person to have it, following in the large footsteps of my colleague Bruce Winick. Needless to say, I'm floored.

UM is unusual in that we don't have many chairs — at present only two us have permanent chairs. The rotating chair idea is also something new for us.

Here is the Dean's message to the faculty:

I am delighted to announce that during the 2010-11 [academic year] Michael Froomkin will be the Laurie Silvers & Mitchell Rubenstein Distinguished Professor of Law. As you know, Bruce Winick was the first recipient of this award and, given his great body of widely-praised work, set the bar quite high for subsequent recipients. Michael's projects, repeatedly exploring problems of internet governance, widely recognized not only nationally but internationally, plainly meet the standard. When we work out the details, we will invite all faculty to join us and other members of the larger university community in celebrating this award and, of course, the generosity of Laurie Silvers and Mitchell Rubenstein.

Among their other claims to fame, Silvers and Rubenstein are founders of the Sci Fi Channel, although the cable channel is now controlled by others (who changed the name to SyFy so they could trademark it). This should make watching Stargate Universe even more fun.

Admittedly, there's something slightly ironic about being so honored in the midst of the (involuntarily) fallowest period in my career, but I guess this is one more incentive to get well quickly and attempt to prove I deserve it.

According to Walk Jog Run my current figure-eight walk around my block and the one north of me totals 0.87 miles, which seems significantly more than I would have guessed. Anyway on a good day I do that route in about 30 minutes, which given my condition would be very good for .87 miles, and isn't bad for the .6 or so I thought it really was.

Is Walk Jog Run (which is based on Google Maps) reliable for short distances? I could imagine an evil business model based on making runners feel good by making them think they were going farther then they really were….

I went into the law school today, mostly to sit in the quad (“the bricks”) and enjoy the sunshine. I saw a number of friends and colleagues, and they said I'm looking great. Apparently reading my earlier updates on this blog convinced them I would be looking like death warmed over.

Part of that may just be continuing progress. In addition to reportedly not looking so bad — and having lost 20 pounds or so the hard way — I can walk longer distances this week. I'm going twice around the block on each walk on good days, and not collapsing in a total heap when I'm done. I start outpatient rehab later this week, and am hoping it will add to my still limited strength and stamina. My hands are not normal yet, but they are distinctly improved.

So things are better. I'm still a convalescent, and likely to be working on mending for some weeks/months to come. But the trend, however slow, is good.