State of Affairs

Yes, I know I owe you guys a blog post.  Good gravy, I haven't written one since mid-February.  Of course, not a lot has changed since then.  There's a pandemic, we're working from home, we're both still employed and the cats are still happy.  I heard someplace that people are losing touch with their friends because they're getting tired of having the same conversation over and over:  "What's new?"  "Not much, what's new with you?" "Not much."  

Well, there are a few new things.  One of them is that Joan and I have now been vaccinated against COVID-19, at least theoretically.  And that was an adventure.  The county of Dallas sent me a text message the night before the day I could get my shot to let me know.  The same county of Dallas sent the same text message to Joan, telling her that her first shot could be had the day after my shot.  Now, Joan can't drive, so I would be driving her to her appointment.  So it would make sense, would it not, to have them both on the same day?  Well, there was no convincing the county of Dallas of that.  And I tried.  I worked my way up through levels of bureaucracy as only a former Federal Government employee can.  But I got nowhere.  I was actually a bit depressed about this, because I'm good at cutting through layers of bureaucracy.  However, when the smoke cleared and the dust settled, I was having my shot one day and Joan was having her shot the next day and that was all there was to it.  So I got to drive down to the big mass vaccination site twice, thus missing two afternoons of work instead of the mere one.  Thanks, county of Dallas.  

  

Still, we got our shots.  Last week we had the second round, and by Tuesday, I should be as fully immune as science can reasonably make me, which is to say, if I do get it, I won't get very sick.  (There are no absolute truths where any of this is concerned.  We hope it works. That is all.)  Dallas County's case numbers have dropped back down to about 270 new cases a day, and stayed fairly stable around that number, so there's some indications that the vaccines are making a difference.  They've also opened up vaccinations to anybody over 18, which is a good sign that they think they have a grip on this thing.  The troublesome part is, nobody seems to know how long the COVID vaccine will last.  A year?  Six months?  Until the current strain mutates again?  Will we have to get it every year like the flu? Nobody knows.  It may be years until we know the answers to those questions.  

However, one thing is sure.  With two shots in my system, I can go back to the pool. 

Not back to my swim team, because my swim team is no more.  I will have to content myself with making up my own workouts and swimming at the gym.  (Or joining the Tom Landry Fitness Center, which has a coached swim practice, which is sort of the same thing, kind of, minus the four swim meets a year.  That might be an option.)  During the summer, I was swimming at Lake Lavon and in a friend's outdoor pool, which was great.  When it got cold, I started swimming at the gym, but then the COVID numbers went off the charts and Joan and I sort of mutually decided that going to the gym, in any capacity, wasn't safe anymore.  So, considering that swimming has long been an important pillar in keeping me generally stable. this is really good news.  And don't think I'm forsaking the treadmill; I'll still plod along for a mile or so on the days I'm not swimming.  

Mind you, there are precautions to have in place about this thing.  I'll have to wear a mask while walking through the gym to the pool, and back out again.  I don't wanna shower there or otherwise put myself into contact with folks unnecessarily.  It has to be one person to a lane.  But other than that, I can go back to the pool.  I'm doing that this morning, in fact, as soon as I finish this blog post.  

The other news is that our governor, Greg Abbott (and Lou Costello) opened Texas "100%." Which means all the bars and restaurants are open, business are supposed to reopen and the Lone Star State is supposed to go charging back into the world economy, puffing and snorting and leaving big hoofprints.  Now, not all of us are buying this.  Those of us in Dallas County are still wearing masks, for the most part, and avoiding large gatherings.  But things do seem to be opening up, and if the vaccines really are making a difference, we can maybe dodge a fourth wave of this thing.  Maybe.  

 But maybe even more important than that, we can have dinner with Tammy and Tracy again.  It has literally been a year since we've seen them.  They've had their shots, too, and if we can find a restaurant that's suitably open-air, we can maybe get together.  This used to be a weekly thing, or almost a weekly thing.  And I miss them.  And I'm sure they miss us.  

And is my law firm opening up again?  Well, maybe.  We were supposed to open on April 5 but that's been pushed back again.  (By "open," I mean, "we allow non-employees into the building".  Regular staff have been working, both at home and in the office, for some time now.)  I was supposed to return to the office on Monday but that's been pushed back too, which is Just Fine.  (I like working from home, though there are some drawbacks.)  The libraries are still not open.  You can still get any book you want through their curbside service option, and the reopening plans are in progress, though no date has been announced.  So Joan is still working from home too, and in her case we hope it will be  permanent.  More on that situation as it develops.  

I guess the most important thing is that we're all still here.  Some people in our family and circle of friends got sick with COVID, but they didn't get a really bad case of it and recovered quickly.  Nobody died.  Nobody even went to the hospital, as far as I know.  We've all been very lucky.  And I can go back to the pool.  So the news is all good.  

I hope your news is good too. Cheers!

Winter Cometh, And That Right Early

I'm feeding a stray cat on the back porch (because of course I am).  She's a small cat with black and grey stripes and I think she may actually have a home, but she must not be getting her share of the kibble because when she comes over, she's always hungry.  I am constitutionally incapable of turning down a hungry cat, so she's getting the same food as my two, which is to say, The Good Stuff.   I call her Little Cat, because, well, she's not very big.  (And I'm not very creative about cat names.  The last stray I was feeding on the porch was called Orange Guy.) 

Grayson the Cat, who is a big boy, has been fascinated by Little Cat since she started showing up.  We open our back door in the morning, when it's cool, and there's a big security screen door between Grayson and Little Cat.  Still, he watches her very carefully when she's on the porch.  

Well, the other day, Grayson somehow managed to sneak out of the house while I was taking food out to Little Cat.  I'm still not sure how he did it.  He got away with it, though, because there's another gray cat in the neighborhood that looks shockingly like him.  So when I saw a gray cat outside with Little Cat, I thought, "Oh, it must be that grey guy."  I even watched the grey guy chase Little Cat around the yard.  It wasn't until later, when Grayson couldn't be found anywhere in the house, that I realized the grey cat outside might have been our grey guy.

So I went out back looking for Grayson.  I called, I shook a container full of treats.  I shone a flashlight around (it wasn't dark yet but it was getting that way).  I looked out front.  I looked around on the side.  And then I went back out back, where, after a few minutes, I heard somebody meowing.  I went further out and saw Grayson.

He was stuck between two fences.

At some point our neighbors, who thought this would be easier, I guess, put in another fence just outside of our fence.  So there are two fences running down our property line.  They can't be more than about six inches apart, but Grayson - who is just about six inches wide - was in between them.  The space was so narrow he couldn't even turn around, and apparently he couldn't go any further forward, either.  I went over to the fence and rather quickly figured out that if he climbed up the chain-link side, he'd be grabbable.  So I held some treats over his head to encourage him to climb.  

(Wouldn't this make a great Buddhist story?  A man gets stuck in a cave, can't go backward or forward, but suddenly realizes he can climb out if he looks a direction he never looked before?  Which just goes to show something or other?  I think it would make a great Buddhist story.)

So anyway, Grayson climbed up the fence until he was grabbable, and then I grabbed him and took him back into the house.  Mind you, I still wasn't sure I had the right grey cat.  They really do look a lot alike.  But when Artemis, our other cat, didn't immediately dive at him and try to kill him, I figured I must have the right cat.  Artemis is more territorial than Grayson, if that's possible.  And Grayson, who'd just had who knows what adventures, just stretched out on the coffee table and looked at us.  Not perturbed at all.  Also not perturbed at all was Little Cat, who showed back up the next morning for breakfast like nothing had happened.  And who knows?  Maybe nothing did.

Proof of cat.

Well, a cold front came through town, and temperatures dropped into the 70s.  Which is great when it's been in the 100s, but not so great if you've been doing all your swimming outdoors.  Which I have.  I've been swimming in a friend's pool during the week and going to Mallard Park at Lavon Lake on the weekends.  I got into the water at Mallard Park yesterday and it was noticeably colder.  Last time I got into a body of water and it was noticeably colder, it was the Pacific Ocean and the water temperature

had dropped from 70 to 55 overnight.  This wasn't that cold, but still, colder.  It's an ominous warning that winter is coming and that those of us who swim need to find a place inside, and as soon as possible.

Mallard Park. 

  

I am on a swim team, which has access to several great indoor pools around town, but we've been shut down since March.  My gym, which has reopened since Gov. Abbott (and Lou Costello) says that the coronavirus epidemic is over and everything is just peachy keen fine, has a pool, but I'm not sure how safe it is.  You know what I mean--lots of people in a small space, panting for breath, air circulating relentlessly--just because you can do it doesn't mean you should.  

By far the best choice would be the SMU pool.  I don't know if you've ever seen it, but the new indoor pool is the shining jewel in the crown of Dallas area indoor pools.  This pool is fifty meters long by fifty yards wide, there's a diving tower so you know the roof has to be thirty or forty feet above the pool, and, anyway, it's this huge indoor space.  Probably a lot safer than my gym pool.  The problem is, I don't know if it's open to people like me (nonstudent nonathletes), or even at all.  There's conflicting information on the Web and I haven't been able to get a human being on the phone. 

I mean, yes, we do have a treadmill, and yes, I make copious use of it, but it's still a treadmill and not a pool.  And swimming is one of the things that keeps me sane.  I know that sounds like an exaggeration but I promise it isn't.   

(It occurs to me I could take a class at SMU.  That might get me in the door.  Hm, so all I'll need is $2,355 per credit hour.  I'd pay it if I had it, though.)

So anyway, y'all, pray for hot temperatures in North Texas.  Or that I find a pool that's reasonably safe. Quick.  Thanks.  Cheers!

And The Quarantine Rolls On

Tomorrow is Joan's birthday and we've been celebrating all weekend.  Well, of course we've been celebrating all weekend.  The older you get the longer your birthday should last, and when it comes  to one of those big "zero" or "five" birthdays, the party should never end--at least until everyone's either passed out or gone home, the lead guitarist in the band has broken a string, the margarita machine is out of tequila and there's maybe only one bowl of chips left. This isn't a "zero" or a "five," but it's still a birthday, so of course there were presents and cake and a longish session of D&D.  (Yes, I've finally started playing D&D.  It only took me 50 years.  What's more, I've started looking online at nifty sets of dice I might like to own, which is a sure sign that you're hooked.)

Anyway, we didn't really have anybody over because quarantine.  We play D&D via Skype which, unlike Zoom, doesn't kick everybody off after 40 minutes.  That's good because our D&D sessions can last upward of five hours.  They'd go on later still if my circadian rhythm isn't still set for early morning, despite almost seven weeks now of not being able to go to the pool.  Yes, my chlorine content is at critical lows, but there's nothing I can do about it.  Even if we started swimming again tomorrow I couldn't go.  I can't be in a 2 1/2 meter wide lane with three or four other people all panting for breath from swimming 4 IMs in a row and expect to remain uninfected.  Seriously, I have asthma and Joan has underlying conditions, too, and if one of us brings this thing home, both of us are going to get very sick.  That. Can't. Happen.  I won't try to re-establish anything like a normal routine around here until the new case count is not only down, but dropping steadily for at least 2 weeks.  Right now it's doing the opposite, at least in Dallas County. And so the quarantine rolls on, no matter what Gov. Abbott has to say.

Fortunately, both of us are still employed, and more fortunately, neither of our bosses has said anything about either of us moving back to the office.  My boss is being pretty reasonable, and even if he wanted everybody back at the office tomorrow, I think I could present a fairly compelling case for continuing to work from home.  The Dallas Public Library, on the other hand, just furloughed slightly less than half of the total employees. (Not Joan, though.) The furlough lasts until August 1, but when the library reopens is up to the City Council, and that august body hasn't been terribly forthcoming with information.

It's been a lot like that movie Groundhog Day.  We wake up every morning at roughly the same time and do certain things in a certain order. By about 8:30 we're both sitting in the kitchen in front of our respective laptops.  Then it's law firm this and law firm that for the next nine or so hours, followed by the making of dinner and the cleaning of kitchen and maybe some programs on the All Paranormal, Tedious Reality and UFOs Channel, formerly known as the Travel Channel.  Or I come back here to my laptop and maybe write something.  Once in a while we leave the house to get groceries or prescription meds.  That's about it, though.  (I am extremely annoyed that the price of gas is so low and I haven't been able to buy gas because there's too much in the tank already.)  I have a temporary crown that's been needing its permanent coronation since mid-March. According to Joan, I also need my hearing checked. (Let's be honest here; does anyone out there who's actually had their hearing checked ever do it for any other reason than that their spouse insisted? If so, write to me.  I'm taking a poll.) I don't think I can get my hearing checked until this is all over.  And I don't know when this is going to be all over, and I don't think anyone else does, either.

One thing I'm reasonably sure is going to happen: The number of coronavirus cases is going to start shooting up again, and maybe get a lot higher than it is right now, because a lot of states, like Texas, are "reopening" way before it's safe to do so.  If enough people get sick and emergency rooms and ICUs start running close to capacity, we're all likely to be ordered right back into "sheltering in place", only for a longer period of time this time.  Figure another sixteen weeks or so, just based on how long it typically takes an epidemic to peter out. And there won't be a vaccine for another year yet, and they don't know who's going to be able to get it once there is one.  And let's just add to the pile of uncertainty by stating that there's no evidence that getting the coronavirus means you're immune from getting it again.  There are multiple strains of it now, and it's possible you can get strain A even if you've already had strain B.  Kind of like the common cold or plain old flu.

Se we may be here, with our respective laptops, for quite a while.  This is the first time I've had office mates that purr.  The commute is awesome, except that one part of the hallway where the traffic always piles up.  And I don't get in trouble for calling my wife during work hours because she's, uh, sitting right here. I don't have to be anyplace after work.  I don't have to color my hair or style it.  I don't have to wear makeup or sunscreen.  I don't have to get up at four dark thirty to go to the pool, though it's such an ingrained habit I usually wake up then anyway. And I'm quarantined with people I like, including two that have fur.  So silver lining, sort of.  We have been incredibly lucky.  There are so many ways that this could be worse.

Which brings me back to something Buddha said; "Your problem is that you think you have time."  A little while before this all happened, it occurred to me that I was sort of treating my days like they came one by one out of an inexhaustible well.  That everything would continue rolling along just like it had and nothing would change.  But everything changes.  Things change.  People change. Haircuts change.  So accept and embrace what is, and let it go when it's time to move on, or something like that.  Probably Buddha said it better.

A Buddhist Takes On Bigfoot

I don't know about you guys. but our household is as prepared for the Coronavirus as one can hope to get without getting into fights with strangers over 24-packs of Charmin.  We created a Plague Box (actually, it's two boxes) filled with canned goods, most of which we already had, and pasta, oatmeal, chocolate and other essentials (chocolate is, of course, an essential).  We've ordered an extra bag of cat food and litter, extra laundry soap and extra other essential cleaning products.  We're not going full-on survivalist about this, though.  I'm shunning water purifiers, firearms and other things that take up space and wouldn't really help anyway.  We have books galore, Netflix and of course a treadmill. And we're both working from home.  So we should emerge from quarantine rested, well-read and possibly even buff. Except for prescription drugs, which is a problem.

Nearly every CDC bulletin has been letting us know that we should have two extra weeks of prescription drugs in our arsenal.  That's nice, but the insurance companies only let you pick up a new prescription when the old one runs out, give or take about three days.  In my case, I couldn't get extra refills even if the insurance companies wanted to help, seeing as I have Controlled Substances in my pill box.  So unless both the insurance companies and the DEA are willing to play ball, I will spend my two weeks in quarantine going bananas.  I can't imagine that would be safe for my three housemates (one with two feet and two with four feet, for a total of ten feet) but that's where we are.  Oh, and because they're made in China, I may run out of them even if we don't get quarantined. There simply May Not Be Any, which has actually happened before. Ask me about calling 4-5 pharmacies before I found one that had extra stock. That was fun.  I can hardly wait to do it again.

So because there's nothing I can do about any of that, and things that you have no control over have people fighting with strangers over 24-packs of Charmin (sorry, but it's a really compelling little video), let's talk about something else.

Let's talk about Bigfoot.

Yes, I'm talking Sasquatch, or Yeti, or Yowie, or anyway, the guy who scares hell out of Boy Scouts and makes grown men with trail cams look like fools.  I don't know about you, but I've become way too fond of the Travel Channel lately.  Especially on Saturday night, when we have back to back These Woods Are Haunted, Haunted Hospitals, the Dead Files and Ghost Loop.  Which have very little to do with travel, by the way, and I'm wondering if the Travel Channel should just rename itself the Supernatural and Gruesome Reality Show Exploitation Channel and get it overwith.

By far my favorite of these supernatural themed shows is Supernatural Caught on Camera, where people send their alleged ghost videos, their UFO sightings and their blurry, grainy cell phone shots of Bigfoot to be examined by experts and commented on by supposed supernatural Experts who get interviewed in front of a nice blue screen that usually has geometric shapes portrayed behind them, for reasons I'm unclear on.  And some of this stuff is actually pretty convincing. The office chairs captured rolling around by themselves by the after hours security camera, for example.  The gurneys traveling around in the hospital video.  And of course who could forget the Saudi Arabian guy in the abandoned beach house, scaring hell out of himself while looking for djinn (and possibly finding one).

And then there are the Bigfoot videos.  Usually these are accidental; a couple is riding upriver on a pair of ATVs and filming themselves, and they happen to film a big hairy thing crossing the river in front of them.  T'aint a bear. T'aint a wolf walkin' upright.  T'aint a human being and it sure t'aint a guy in an ape suit because they don't make them ape suits that big.  Surely this is proof that Bigfoot is real, right? Surely 9,000 trail cams can't be wrong?

Well, I'm of two minds about this, actually.  For one thing, if there really are hairy woods apes that have managed to evade detection by modern humans for all this time, their days are numbered. Homo Sapiens have managed to reach almost every part of the planet now, and in our wake is mass extinction through disease, habitat destruction and, well, greed.  The hairy woods apes don't stand a chance.  Sooner or later some trigger-happy Second Amendment rights activist is going to shoot one, and then we'll know.  Or maybe the same trigger-happy Second Amendment rights activist will disappear, prompting a massive manhunt that finally ends when the local sheriffs find the activist and a Bigfoot in the honeyoon suite of a local Holiday Inn.   Seriously, I would give Bigfoot about ten more years, if he's real.  And we should find out one way or another before they go extinct, but there are no guarantees.

However, if he's not real, I think I may have an explanation for the recurrent sightings, and it starts long, long ago, when we had just become homo sapiens.  For a long time there, we shared the planet with Neanderthals and homo synovius and homo florensis and a couple of other animals that were like us, but were not us.  At the time, we had no civilization, no crops, no writing, no sense of how big the world was. We were just bands of hunter-gatherers, probably never more than 30 or so individuals. We ran into other bands from time to time, and we probably ran into those-who-were-like-us-but-were-not-us from time to time, too, but for the most part, it was Just Us and our 30 or so friends and family members.

We didn't have written language then and maybe not much of a spoken one either, but scientists are pretty sure we did communicate, even if just through gesture, because we obviously hunted and ate pretty big animals that would have been impossible for one guy to take down acting alone.  We had to be able to organize and break ourselves up into groups in order to do this big-game hunting thing (I mean hell, we didn't even have rifles; just spears and primitive bows and arrows.)  If we communicated, that means we also told stories around the campfire at night.  The stories we told then were probably not much different than the stories we tell now; good guy, bad guy, both fighting over something each wants, the good guy winning in the end (but not without some cost, like a bad injury or something), and the bad guy vowing to come back and fight another day.  I mean, we're creative, and we've come up with at least two or three more plots since then, but our stories tend to follow the same patterns.  And what had to be the hottest tale told around the campfire in those days was The Time I Was In The Woods And I Ran Into Some Others Who Were Like Us But Were Not Us.

In those days, we were pretty small guys.  The average male was maybe 5'4 and the average female proportionally smaller.  The average Neanderthal, on the other hand, was huge. Easily six feet or taller, very broad through the chest and shoulders, and hairy.  Much hairier than homo sapiens.  A big scary hairy guy with a spear (yes, Neanderthals also had spears) in the woods was not something you wanted to run into when you were a little homo sapiens.  It made for a great campfire story, though, if you happened to survive it.

Now, let's think about this for a second.  Big hairy scary guys in the woods. Is that sounding at all like something we see blurry, grainy photos of now? Something like us that is not us? I propose, and I could be wrong, that when we see something in the woods and we don't know what it is (or a picture of something that we don't know what is), our brains go back in time to the stories around the campfire.  We still tell the same stories today about strange creatures in the woods, though we call them fairy tales and think they're for children.  (Thanks, Brothers Grimm.)

And so we see Bigfoot.  Or maybe we remember him, through some kind of collective unconscious memory.

That is, if he's not real.

(Incidentally, homo florensis, were only about three feet tall.  You know those stories about fairies and pixies and elves? Well, there really were little people at one point.  And we modern humans probably encountered them, at least occasionally.  There are stories on Sumatran islands about these little guys stealing food and animals and, in at least one instance, a human baby, and the elders who were questioned by scientists about these things said they happened "so many lives of men ago," which translated into roughly the 1700s. So Captain Cook feasibly could have seen or even met a homo florensis.  Imagine.) 

Anyway, stay safe, everybody, and if you encounter a Bigfoot, try to get decent video.  Thanks!

The Coronavirus Flu

Hello all.  Sorry for the long pause between nifty guest post and actual content. There was a lot going on, including but not limited to the thing that's being called the "novel coronavirus."  Novel means new, of course, but there's really nothing new about coronaviruses; they've been around forever.  The only thing new is that they can apparently jump the species barrier now, which is fine if you're a bat or a sloth or something and have been dealing with coronaviruses since the dawn of recorded time, but deucedly inconvenient if you're a human being.   And in between actual good ideas (quarantining people for 14 days, restricting the movement of possible infected persons), there are plenty of really bad ideas being deployed in the spread of this thing. 

Like quarantining people on a cruise ship, for example.  Bad idea.  The internal air system on a cruise ship is designed to move everything around, as opposed to an isolation ward in an actual hospital that sucks air from outside under a negative pressure containment system, so you have lots of people potentially infecting each other all over the ship.  (Check out the film "Outbreak" if you want to see how this works.)  Plus, they gave the crew members nothing by way of protective equipment, which meant they were getting exposed to this virus every time  they knocked on someone's cabin door.  Which they did a lot, apparently. 

So, okay, that was a bad idea.  Another bad idea:  Treating everybody Asian as though they might potentially have the coronavirus.  People, please check your big ugly xenophobia at the door on this one, okay?  Your Asian next-door neighbor who was born in Milwaukee and grew up in Detroit and has never left the country is a lot less  likely to have the coronavirus than your white across-the-street neighbor who just got back from a business trip in South Korea.  And the racist element of this thing gets even uglier when you consider that there's been an outbreak in Italy, and nowhere are people avoiding Italian restaurants or treating  white people with Roman noses like they have the plague.  And nobody's said anything about canceling all flights to Italy, though, she says with a reluctant sigh, it's probably on somebody's agenda.

Besides, it turns out that the coronavirus is actually not all that dangerous.  Oh, you don't want it, but your odds of dying of it really aren't that good. Most people who get it feel like they have a bad cold for a few days.  You can die of it, but most of the people who die of it are the people who typically die during an epidemic.  The very old, the very young, people with compromised immune systems.   How do they treat it? Rest, lots of fluids, cough syrup.  Since this thing is getting around (it's ridiculously easy to spread a virus anymore, and with this one it turns out you can be asymptomatic for possibly a couple of weeks before you get sick, which means you don't trip fever detectors in airports), we might want to all invest in an extra bottle or two of Robitussin. But that's it.  That's all I'm doing.  That and keeping an eye on the headlines. 

Speaking of dangerous viruses, Joan caught a cold a couple of weeks ago and stayed home from work.  I went to work as usual, and by the time I came home, Joan was feverish and having trouble breathing.  We called the nurse-on-call provided by her health insurance company.  She asked us a bunch of questions, and after getting our answers, told me to take Joan to urgent care, pronto.

So I packed her up and took her to urgent care. This was not easy, because she was in her jammies and didn't want to go out.  But, I talked her into a coat and some shoes and we headed for the only urgent care around that was open at 8:00 on a Friday night.  They poked and prodded and asked questions and took a chest X-ray.  When the chest X-ray came back, the nurse in charge told Joan they weren't equipped to handle her at urgent care and I'd need to take her to the ER. 

So off to the ER we went.  The ER was mobbed with people hacking and coughing and sneezing (really, is there any place better than an ER waiting room to get some horrible disease?).  But they took Joan back right away.  We got a little room in the corner someplace, and watched some Godawful sitcoms for about the next five hours.  This handsome young guy in a white coat came in a couple of times and made various pronouncements, the last of which was, "I'm going to admit you."  And at something like 2:30 in the morning, they wheeled her into a room on a long ward on the fourth floor.  I got to go home at that point, and deal with a massive craving for breakfast cereal. Why breakfast cereal? I have no idea, but I was hungry and that seemed like the food to get.  Maybe it's the human equivalent of cat kibble in that it requires no imagination whatsoever to prepare. 

So Joan was in the hospital for five days.  She got better. She got worse.  She got better.  She got worse.  Some specialist in infectious disease came in to see her.  Some Regular Doc came in to see her too. They told her at least three times that they were going to discharge her today before her fever suddenly spiked again and deep-sixed that idea. An occupational therapist took her for a walk.  (I'd have been jealous, but she said he didn't actually hold her hand.)

While all that was going on, I was going to work and going to the hospital and then going home very late at night.  Every time I went into her room, I had to put on one of those cute little masks like you see in coronavirus videos.  There was a little box of them attached to her door.  And get this.  When you looked up and down this long ward that she was on, every single door had a little box of masks attached to it.  I mean, it was Upper Respiratory Infection Central around there. 

The hospital finally sent Joan home after five days.  That's a long time to be in the hospital if you're not too sick to care.  She missed a week of work.  Recovery has been slow but steady.  And what caused all this havoc? The flu.  The common, ordinary, comes-around-every-winter flu.  So if you're worried about getting the coronavirus, GET YOUR FLU SHOT.   And if you're not worried about getting the coronavirus, GET YOUR FLU SHOT ANYWAY.  Any chance you have to avoid being in the hospital for a week is a good  chance to take. As it happened, Joan had her flu shot, but she got it anyway, which is just Bad Luck as far as the docs were concerned. But seriously. Get your flu shot.  Wash your hands a lot. Stay home if you don't feel well.  And don't get all panicky if somebody accidentally sneezes on you.  There's a statistically significant likelihood that you're going to be fine. 

Merry Christmas, Everybody!

We got up. We opened presents. The living room is a wreck.

The cats got new toys. They are happy.

Grayson with his new scratching toy.

Artemis with her new brush and catnip mousie.

Time for the humans to kick back and read some new books.

Cheers and Happy New Year!

How Not To Have A Sore Back at 6 AM

Well, in case you missed it, I bought a mattress.  In retrospect, it wasn't quite the huge cavalcade of ridiculousness that it seemed at the time. It was only a small tsunami of ridiculousness.  But it was still pretty ridiculous.  I think buying a used car was actually easier, and that's not even taking into account the fact that I have incredible luck with buying used cars.  ( Take, for example, the '79 Datsun; purchased at 150k miles, drove it for 100k more, no major repairs apart from replacing the clutch, though the ceiling eventually fell on me.) You might check out Consumer Reports and read a few articles and check a few Web sites to buy a used car.  You can fricking read BOOKS about how to buy mattresses.  And even then, you still don't know everything you need to know, such as how not to end up paying almost twice as much as you set out to do.

See, I wanted a Purple mattress.  If you go to Purple's Web site, you'll find it's nice and informative and explains everything you need to know.  Also, Purple's mattresses are purple.  Purple is my favorite color.  So it would have been totally and completely awesome to have a Purple mattress.  It would have even come with free purple sheets.

But here was the problem, as well as the problem with online mattress purchases generally.  Purple is not a "traditional" mattress.  It's not designed to be placed on a box springs.  It's designed to be placed on a single hard surface, like a flat bed with no box springs.  The kind you get at Ikea.  So in order to get a new mattress, I would have had to get an entirely new bed.

Now, I wasn't really down on that concept.  The current bed I've had for a very long time.  I won it in the divorce, actually, and the divorce was one of those things that happened in the Time Before Joan (TM).  Seeing as Joan and I just celebrated our 20th anniversary, you do the math. I've had this bed for a very long time.  Besides, Ikea beds aren't very expensive.  You can get one delivered and set up for about $400.00.  But this is where the logistics began to get difficult.

See, in order to get a new bed, I would have to get rid of the old bed.  So someone would have to come help me take it apart, carry the pieces outside, and put it out for the bulky trash guys.  Which meant it could only be done during one week of the month, in case nobody adopted it and it was actually still there by the time the bulky trash guys showed up.  (Not likely in our neighborhood; everything even slightly valuable or practical disappears almost as soon as you put it out there, except for that fucking combination printer/scanner/fax that we had for a while, and I can only assume that our neighbors heard me yelling at it.  Hell, they heard me yelling at it in Indonesia.)

Okay, so let's say we got the bed successfully out of the house.  Now, the removal of the bed from the house had to be timed just so, so that the bed from Ikea showed up on the same day or at the very latest, the next day.  And then the guys who were going to put it together would need to show up, and they would have to have no problems whatsoever with their cute little Allen wrenches and the many parts.  If there was a delay of a day or two, I would have to find somewhere else to sleep.  And then, even when all that was done, there was the question of when the new mattress would be delivered.  If it showed up a few days early, where would we put it?  If it showed up a few days late, would I be sleeping on the couch?

Seriously, this was starting to give me a headache.  In desperation I wrote to our friend Suzy, who is much better about logistics than I am.  And true to form, she laid out an exacting, six or seven point plan about how to get the new bed and mattress into the house without having to sleep on the couch and suchlike and so forth.  (Thanks, Suzy!)  The only problem was, I kept putting off the actual doing of the steps.

I think it was Joan who finally suggested maybe I was having trouble letting go of the old bed (it is a nice bed), and that maybe I should consider just getting a traditional mattress and box springs set and just have them delivered and forget about it, already.  And that's what I finally did.  I drove out to Nebraska Furniture Mart (which is a lot like Ikea, only without the Allen wrenches) and picked one of the mattresses that I'd deemed a suitable substitute for the Purple mattress.  It happened to be on sale.  I had it delivered.  The nice folks at NFM hauled away the old mattress and box springs, and suddenly I had a new mattress.

I woke up the next morning at 6 A.M. and lo and behold, my back didn't hurt.  That's the first time that's happened in, oh, about two years.

So I have a new mattress.  I'm not used to it yet.  Oh, it's fine to sleep on, but I sit down on the bed very tentatively so as not to disturb it.  It's a hybrid mattress, part springs and part supportive foam, so I kind of sink down into it, which is actually really nice.  But I'm like almost afraid to put weight on it.  What if it starts to sag?  Oh, it has a nice ten year warranty and all that, but still, you never know...

Organizational What?

One of the problems with writing a weekly blog post is trying to come up with something to write about.  That almost requires something to actually happen, and as you know, nothing ever happens around here.  I mean, except for weird ear infections and things that cats do and the kitchen flooding and the refrigerator needing to be fixed and now the dryer's on the fritz and I'm afraid Joan is going to run out of pants before it's fixed and my former boss leaving me weird messages and this old guy turning up on our doorstep, three times on three different days, pounding on the door and demanding to be let in.

What's more, I actually have to come up with two things, because that's how blog posts work.  I'll bet you didn't know there's a pattern to this, did you? Well, there is.  First you spout off for two or three paragraphs about something that's not really important, just to warm up a little.  It can be about anything; politics, a joke you heard yesterday, the religious leanings of grasshoppers or even a monologue about dwarf bowling.  Then you say, "Speaking of androgynous left-handed bullriders who speak Mandarin Chinese, here's something that happened..."  and you go off on another topic.

I don't know how blog posts evolved to follow this format.  They just do.  I don't see any reason to break the pattern, either.  So speaking of slithery touch typists with gout who wear SAS shoes, here's what's new around here: Professional Reading.

Yes, I know. Professional Reading should not be new.  Anybody who has a job, much less a career, ought to be trying to get better at it one way or another, whether that's by taking a class or volunteering for extra projects or, yes, Professional Reading.  But it is new.  Or at least, it's new that I have any desire whatsoever to do it.  For that I blame Joan and these things called podcasts.

I'm pretty sure I posted about this a while back, around the time I figured out that I had heard most of the songs that ever came on the radio at least 9,185 times apiece since the early 1980s.  Joan installed a "podcast app" on my phone, which talks to my car and plays itself over my car speakers, and lo and behold, I could actually learn something while driving all over creation, or all over Dallas, anyway.  What a concept.  My current favorite is this one on neuroscience called "The Hidden Brain."  It's the only podcast on neuroscience I've come across where I can actually understand about 90% of it. I'm also a fan of The 12-Step Buddhist, The Podcast of Doom (failure analysis on a large scale) and Witness, a history podcast from BBC America. 

And just when I realized I was hitting the "refresh" button on my phone a little too often, something new happened. Audiobooks. Audiobooks about business.  What's more, audiobooks about business that are perfectly free.

Yup.  The Dallas Library has this app called Libby that gives you access to audiobooks. With nothing more than a common ordinary library card, you can check them out---again, for free--and download them on your phone and play them over your speakers just like a podcast.  In fact, your phone automatically kicks on when you start your car and goes right back to the place you left off.  I'm currently reading, or rather, listening to "Delivering Happiness" by Tony Hseih, the guy who founded Zappos and then sold it to Amazon for $1.2 billion.  You wouldn't think it, but the life story of an industry titan is actually pretty hilarious.  Especially the part where he declares that his life partner is Red Bull, but you'd probably have to hear that for yourself.

Anyway, the Dallas Library has a pretty good selection of business audio books.  A lot of them have waiting lists, but that's okay; it takes me a couple of weeks to get through each one, anyway, and by the time I'm done, there's another one waiting for me.  I'm not sure why I'm suddenly interested in stuff like management and leadership and organizational psychology.  It may have something to do with my new boss, who is the PR guy at the law firm. (Most law firms are set up like this. One partner is the PR guy, one is the money guy and one is the Brilliant Legal Mind who keeps the others in line.)  My office is right next to his so I get to listen to him on the phone all day, and believe me, he really is on the phone all day.  What's more, he has to be nice to all those people he's talking to, even if they're cranky back.  And he does it.  It's pretty amazing.

So I figure it can't possibly hurt to know how one does that sort of thing, and more stuff about how people work together generally.  I'm supervising two people that are much younger than me and one who's the same age but who comes from a totally different background.  I have to talk and interact with them all the time, and it can't possibly hurt to learn how.  For whatever reason, I've always felt like an anthropologist in this thing called human society, tentatively approaching with a notepad and a pen and hoping not to interrupt the village ceremony.  Who knows; maybe if I learn enough about How People Talk To Each Other At Work and What That All Means, I can at least be a better mimic.  Even if I never start a company and sell it to Amazon for $1.2 billion.

You Can't Do That On Television

I hope it's okay to get your shit together the day before you die, because I think it's going to take me about that long.  There's all this stuff I'm supposed to be doing every day that I'm not doing.  Reading from the Big Book (that's Alcoholics Anonymous, not the Bible, in case you were wondering).  Writing stuff in my journal. Working on The Book (still not the Bible; just the book I'm working on).  Meditating.  Household chores.  Cat cuddling/paper ball tossing/feather toy flinging.  Honestly, adulthood is like a to-do list just never ends.  I get to the meditating most days, but the rest of it doesn't seem to happen very often.  Most days, when I walk in the door, I'm all up for sitting down to dinner, looking at my cell phone for a bit, then going the hell to bed. (Well, I get up at 4:30, so…)  

Apart from baseball, I'm trying to think when I last even sat down and watched a TV show.  Unless you count "The Dead Files," the haunted house show that Joan is crazy about and that puts me right to sleep.  See above re: I get up at 4:30. 

And it's too bad, too, because suddenly there are a LOT of good TV shows out there.  Once Netflix and Hulu started cranking out their own content, the gloves suddenly came off and everybody was making good shows. We got shows about music producers and we got shows about hair stylists.  We got "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" (again) and we got shows about what happens after you die (that aren't documentaries).  For a second there we even had a show about Van Helsing, but I think we can write that one off without too many regrets.

And in the middle of all this, we got "The Handmaid's Tale," and honey, this show is doing for television what "The Hunger Games" did for YA fiction.  If you thought it couldn't be done on television, "The Handmaid's Tale" has done it.  And I'm not just talking about sex and violence (yawn, how too too passe, dear).  I'm talking about subject matter that you couldn't get on TV before now.  This show is way beyond cutting edge. It's maybe 20 years ahead of where we are now.  (Maybe even in real life.)  Oh, and it also won a pile of Emmys, including a Best Actress nod for Elisabeth Moss. 

So why aren't I watching it, you ask.

Well.  That's kind of hard to explain. 

I watched the first season.  For the most part I watched it 20 minutes at a time, before bed, while falling asleep, but watch it I did.   Joan didn't like it so it never really graced the screen of the TV in the living room, but it looked just fine on a tablet.  (If you ever watch this show, keep an eye on the colors.  They mean different things. There's a lot of red in this show.  Lots of deep green, too.  Interesting.)  And it was riveting television. I mean it was edge-of-your-seat, nail-bitingly tense watching.  Even if you've read the book and you know what happened, you don't know what happened, because a TV show is a whole different universe and Just Because It Ended That Way In The Book Doesn't Mean It'll End That Way On TV. 

In case you've been hiding under a rock and you don't know jack about "The Handmaid's Tale," the story takes place in the near future.  There's been a war, the United States no longer exists, and most of the northern East Coast has been turned into something called the Republic of Gilead.  The birth rate is dropping precipitously all over the world; only one in every five pregnancies results in a live birth, and that's even assuming you can get pregnant in the first place.  There's no birth control, no abortion, no morning after pill, nothing like that--and the population rate is still dropping.  So the government of Gilead is hunting down all the women who have proven that they're fertile (previous pregnancies, an actual kid, etc.)  and turning them into handmaids--women who have babies for the elite households.  Doesn't matter if you had a job, husband, kids, family beforehand; if you're fertile, you're now a handmaid and your job is now to have babies.  Oh, and your children are taken away and raised by other people.  Gilead comes up with a religious explanation for how this is all okay, but they don't really need one; they're doing it because they can.  And because they're desperate. Something or other about the danger of the human race going extinct trumping individual rights.

And it's good.  As I mentioned, it's riveting.  But the whole second season is out and I haven't watched any of it. And I'm probably not going to, at least not for a while.

I blame Donald Trump.  

In all seriousness, I'm not supposed to be watching the news. The doctor even told me not to watch the news. He didn't specifically say anything about not going to news web sites, so I still do that sometimes, but without watching the news, I'm in a much better frame of mind. Because, frankly, all the news is bad.  And there's so much more of it than there used to be. Well, of course there is; something had to fill up all the news channels and Web sites and magazines that have been proliferating at a ridiculous rate since, oh, the advent of cable TV.  

I dunno about you, but I kind of like being in a better frame of mind.  It beats the heck out of the way I feel after I watch the news.  And the way I feel after watching "The Handmaid's Tale," as good as it is, is about the same, unfortunately.  It's a very hard show to watch.

This must be why parents don't want their children to watch horror movies.  (Though, personally, I think a lot of parents don't want their children to watch horror movies because they don't want to have a lot of conversations about man's inhumanity to man and what happens to us after we die with a nine-year-old. But I digress.)  In short, I'm trying to be an adult about this. And a Buddhist.  Precept Five is all about not consuming intoxicants, which includes certain TV programs and Web sites in addition to drugs and alcohol. (And gambling. In fact gambling is specifically mentioned.)

And, really, why would you want to consume something that's bad for you? You know, like heroin or cocaine or maybe lots of sugar. But people do. Fortunately for me,  it is just a TV show,  and I can stop consuming it by not going to a particular Web site. So that's easy.

NOBODY TELL ME WHAT HAPPENS. I still have this fond hope I can get back to it someday. And hopefully it won't jump the shark in the meantime, like "The X Files" did in season 4. Cheers!

It Begins WIth A Cat.

As things often do in this life. Not just any cat, though; Uhura the Cat, a sleek, coal black female with bright green eyes.  I don't have a picture of her. (This is a stock photo.  It's pretty close though.) I wish I did; actually I have lots but they are all actual photos on paper, and if I have to try to get that scanner to come online even one more time I will probably pitch it out the window and leave it for the Jawas But anyway, she was a beautiful and very smart cat.  She lived with Joan, who had had her since she was a tiny kitten, and then, roughly about 1996, I came along.

Here's the thing.  I had just broken up with somebody, and in the breakup, the somebody stole my cat.  I was so thoroughly undone by the breakup and everything else that I not only swore off dating for life, I swore off cats. I would never have another cat. Forget it. I did not need that level of heartbreak and aggravation.

Then Joan moved in next door, and, well, we know how that ends.  And Joan came with Uhura the Cat.  And if Uhura the Cat hadn't liked me, well then, Joan wouldn't have had anything to do with me.  But Uhura did like me, and darn it, I liked her too.  It was hard not to like her. This was a cat where, if you picked her up and she decided she wanted down, she beeped you on the nose with her paw. I'm not kidding.  Sometimes she beeped you emphatically, as if to say, I want down now.  Other times she'd hover around your face with her paw.  Maybe I want down and maybe I don't.  Hm, I have to think about it.  Again, a very smart cat. With a sense of humor, no less.

Shortly after we bought our first house, the condo in San Diego, Uhura got sick with fibrosarcoma, a common cancer.  She had surgery and some chemotherapy (it doesn't make cats sick the way it does people).  It didn't cure her, since fibrosarcoma generally can't be cured, but it did buy her about six more months, during which she didn't know she was sick. Two days after she had the tumor removed, she tried to tear through the screen door to get at the orange cat that liked to lounge on our patio. Not until she quit eating and started coughing a lot in the last few days of her life did it become obvious she was really going to leave us. We had her put to sleep in December of 2000.

It wasn't the next day, but it was probably not very many days after that we woke up one morning and the house was too quiet.  Any house without a cat is too quiet.  We went out that afternoon and adopted Caesar and Chloe, a brother and sister pair, from a cat rescue service.  They were inseparable at first; then, once they realized they lived in a safe house with nice people, they decided they really didn't like each other all that much and spent much of their time at other ends of the house from each other.  Well, that was okay.  They were great cats.  They survived a flooring installation, an attic remodel, a move to Texas and (in Caesar's case) cancer at the age of five. And if you've ever been over here you probably met at least one of them, or maybe both of them.

One of our neighbors gave us a kitten (gee, thanks), with an eye problem. Eventually the eye had to be removed.  This was Sparrow the Cat, named after the infamous one-eyed "CaptainJack" Sparrow. Only, as it turned out in the second movie, he actually had two eyes; the eye patch was a prop.  So we'd named our cat after a bird for nothing.  Well, that was okay. Sparrow didn't know she was named after a bird.  She did fine without the eye, the only problem being that she'd sometimes jump for the feather toy and miss.  (Depth perception and all that.)

Caesar, our cancer survivor, came down with another case of it, as sometimes happens, and died at the mighty age of sixteen.  Not long after that, Joan found a kitten outside under a truck during a rainstorm.  She took the kitten to the vet, and the vet told her he could put her in with a litter of feral cats in the back but was Joan sure she didn't want to keep her? She was very sweet.  And so we met Artemis.  Boy, was Chloe less than happy.  She was sixteen herself by then, and not impressed with the pipsqueak.  But Sparrow liked her, and put up with having her tail pounced on and her ears chewed on and, once in a while, being the victim of a flying leap from the other side of the room.

Sparrow developed a neurological problem and lost the use of her  back legs.  Being unable to walk is a deal breaker for a cat, so we had her put to sleep at the age of twelve. Then it was just Chloe and Artemis, at least until last week when Chloe slipped out of the world at the super-advanced age of eighteen.  And a few mornings later, Joan and I woke up (with Artemis; Artemis is fine) and realized it was still way too quiet in the house.

Meet Grayson, our new handsome boy.

It all comes back to Uhura the Cat. Without Uhura, there wouldn't have been Chloe and Caesar, and without them, we wouldn't have met any of the other fine felines we've been so lucky to have. I don't know if I'll make it to the age of eighteen in cat years (around ninety-five, we think), but even if I do, I will still have a cat.  Can't live without a cat. Can't write without a cat, for one thing; if you don't have a cat, you don't have anybody to curl up on a fresh pile of pages from the printer, so how do you know if they are any good?

The Epic Flood

My sister was here last weekend and she reminded me that I hadn't told y'all about the epic flood.  (And she said lots of other things, too, and we went to the zoo and the Dallas World Aquarium, and had dinner with some friends and stuff, but anyway):  It all started, as these things often do, at two o'clock in the morning.  I woke up to hear a tremendous crash, which Joan apparently slept right through.  And as it goes when one has cats that are primarily nocturnal, I lay there listening for another crash before deciding on whether or not to get up.  No subsequent crashes followed, so I went back to sleep.  I mean, I figured somebody had just knocked some precious knickknack off a shelf and broken it or something, and if that was the case there'd be a mess to clean up, and I always deal with messes better after a decent night's sleep.  I don't know about y'all. 

Anyway, the next morning I got up (and two innocent-looking cats, lying at the foot of the bed, also got up).  I headed into the kitchen and put my stockinged foot down in an enormous puddle of water.  Lights, please. Ah, there we are.  Yes, it appeared that the entire kitchen was flooded to a depth of about an inch, which, in our kitchen anyway, is a lot of water.  No idea where it was coming from or such, but it did appear to have stopped. Which was good.  If it had gone on it might have filled up the entire house. 

So Joan got up and brought many towels.  This was an eight-towel job, including wringing some of them out and going back for more.  I mean it was really a mess.  And the tremendous crash I'd heard?  Well, that was the younger cat apparently trying to climb a chair in the middle of the night to get away from the floodwaters and bringing it and herself down on the floor and right into the cat food bowls. Which spilled everywhere,  making cat food soup.  And in the midst of the cat food soup were the three bras which had been hanging on the chair drying.  They, uh, weren't dry anymore.  They were soaked in cat food soup.  And kind of weren't wearable, at least not before serious washing went on.

At this point, the only thing more important than determining the source of the water became the quest for a decent day's lingerie.  I was going to wear one of those bras to work, thank you very much.  I have only one other and it was missing a hook.  So while I was hunting all over the kitchen for suspicious wet things to blame for the cat food soup, Joan was executing an emergency lingerie repair so I'd have something to wear to work. 

At about 7:30, our normal time of departure, Joan finished the emergency lingerie repair right about the same time I discovered the source of the leak.  The dishwasher. Aha, now we could call a plumber.  The plumber couldn't come until the next day.  So, the wet towels went into the washing machine and the cat food bowls got refilled and I got dressed and then we headed off to work, only like 15 or 20 minutes late. Yay, go us.  But don't think we're superheroes or anything. We totally stopped at McDonalds for breakfast and coffee.

Anyway, the dishwasher guy told us to have funeral services for it, and so we no longer have a dishwasher. Well, we have a dishwasher but it can't be used because of its potential to cause epic floods.  (Hey, on the plus side that was soapy water all over the floor. So at least the floor got washed.) We're doing the dishes by hand.  Kind of like in the old days when your cell phone screen was lit by candlelight and the Internet was all in pencil.  There's some possibility that we can catch a post-Memorial Day sale and still get one at a decent price.  Otherwise we're stuck with the rubber gloves for a while.  (And I have to wear rubber gloves, even though they make me clumsy, because otherwise my hands break out from the dish soap.).  Number of glasses broken so far: 3.  (Hand washing is rough on glasses.)

So that's the story of the epic flood and the cat food soup.  I mean, I guess it could have been worse.  We could have had wet cats.  Cheers!

Random Ramblings

Item:  Getting a state ID card is just as hard, and in this case more so, than getting a driver's license.  The state of Texas is a little confused that you'd give up a license in favor of getting an ID card instead, so they made it super complex.  At least, I think that is the reason. Next...

Item:  I am now the sole driver in the family.  Insurance rates have gone down appreciably, though not as much as you might think. Next...

Item: It's Joan's birthday.  Happy birthday, Joan!!  Next...

Item: This means it will soon be my birthday too.  Joan and I have birthdays exactly one month, one day and one decade apart.  Next...

Item:  We settled the Big Case at my office, finally.  So no Big Trial and there will be some money.  So I asked for a raise and was told "not sure where our cash flow is at this point...want to do something for my people but I don't know what...I'll think about it."  Which was more or less exactly what I thought they'd say.  At least they didn't say, "No, because we don't like you," which is what I always think they're going to say.  Next...

Item: Having more or less successfully painted this here iris, I'm now painting a pic of our kitten, Artemis, looking out the back door.  Wish me luck, this painting involves actual geometry and, you know, math.  Next...

Item:  You can look up how to contact your senator here.  Since the Senate will be debating a bill that will be stripping affordable health insurance away from anyone who has ever sneezed and can't get insurance from an employer, you might want to say a word or two to that person.  Next...

Item:  I have once again figured out that it is a mistake to keep ice cream in the house.  I don't know why I have to find this out over and over again, but I do.  Next...

Item:  I fired our process server, or rather, I'm not sending our process server any more work, which is the same thing as firing him.  Getting permission to fire him, on the other hand, took four months of screw-ups and noncommunication, as well as several meetings and court hearings, and it was like pulling teeth the whole time.  He still owes me two affidavits that I'm probably never going to see. Cautionary advice: DO NOT HIRE FRIENDS TO DO THINGS FOR YOUR BUSINESS.  It makes it hard to fire them if they do a bad job and it drives. your. paralegal. crazy. Next...

Item:  The Alarm is on tour this summer and will be coming to Dallas, Austin and Houston.  I'm very, very tempted to repeat the Epic Big Country Road Trip of 2013 but I probably won't, that was pretty exhausting and I'm driving to Kansas City to see the eclipse a few weeks after that anyway.  Still, it was a lot of fun, and you can check the Alarm tour dates here.  Next...

Item: By the way, there's a total eclipse of the sun on August 21.  If you've never seen such a thing, I suggest you get yourself into the path of totality forthwith.  I have never seen such a thing, but I understand it's pretty awesome and you kind of get why more primitive men thought the moon might be devouring the sun.

And that's how things are going, for the most part.  Updates to follow. Cheers!

Work In Progress

I have this bad habit of starting blog posts and then not finishing them.  Last week I got into full-on rant mode about a letter to Dear Carolyn, where this lady’s husband was disabled (as in, on disability/SSI and unable to work) and her family not only didn’t believe he was disabled, but kept asking him when he was going to get off his lazy ass and get a job.  I mean, excuse me?  They don’t just put you on disability if you walk with a limp, you know.  You have to apply (often more than once) and there are hearings and doctors are called in to testify and, you know, it’s kind of a big deal.

Mind you, the closest I’ve ever come to that situation is where I had sprained my ankle really bad and was limping around on crutches, and I went with my family to dinner and the bartender (really no idea what prompted this) suddenly yelled, “Faker!  She’s faking!” for the whole restaurant to hear.  He’s lucky I didn’t sail a crutch right into his wall of nicely decorated bottles.  I can’t imagine having to deal with that kind of cr@p every DAY.  Much less from family members.  So I got all into a rant about it, but I fizzled out two paragraphs in. I kind of Didn’t Know Where To Go With That. So that was it for that blog post.

Another time I started a blog post about the Buddhist Five Precepts and how they did and didn’t relate to the Ten Commandments and Thich Nhat Hanh’s Five Mindfulness Trainings, but that was just a tiny bit esoteric and it was so boring it put my teeth to sleep.  So that one didn’t get published either.  I don’t think this sort of thing is unique to me; I’ll bet Stephen King has lots of stuff he started writing and then bailed on when he realized he was never going to be able to hook the monster up with the protagonist without a lot of mental gymnastics and an apologetic phone call to Bram Stoker.  (Incidentally, did Bram Stoker answer the phone? Because THAT would make a really good Stephen King story.)

Let’s take painting, for example.  I was just at an art museum a few days ago, and whenever I go to an art museum I invariably want to go home and paint.  I’m working on a picture of an iris (the flower, not the eyeball) and it’s not going to be great; it’s still kind of a work in progress but I can tell that nobody’s ever gonna pay $1.4 million for it at a Sotheby’s auction.  That’s okay, though.  I like painting, it’s fun and I’ve done lots worse.  Once I was taking a class and we had a nude model come in and pose for us.  I was so embarrassed that there was a naked woman in the room that I couldn’t do much more than peek at her every ten minutes or so, and what I painted ended up looking kind of like a gargoyle with a bad case of mange. You can bet that one got gessoed over really fast.  Years from now, after I die, they’ll X-ray my copy of The Beheading of St. John the Baptist by Rubens and find this really bad nude underneath it and wonder what I was thinking. I was probably thinking about how much I wished the model was wearing a dress.  (And speaking of John the Baptist’s head, I did Salome’s nose so many times trying to get it right that she looked like Michael Jackson.  My instructor had to come over and fix it for me.  Imagine, getting a nose job from a painting instructor.)  

The thing about failed first attempts at anything is, you tried it, right?  Lots of people don't bother trying anything (and criticize those who do, for reasons I'm a little unclear on.)  If your first knitted square looks like something the cat threw up, or your first silver white cake collapses in the middle, or your first painting looks like, well, a gargoyle with mange, there's no need to freak out or even show it to anybody.  (Sometimes failed first attempts are good for getting a laugh, though.)  The point is, you did it.  Maybe the next attempt will come out better.  Maybe there won't be a next attempt, because you figured out you never really wanted to learn how to knit in the first place.  But you won't know that unless you give it a try.  I didn't want to write a blog post tonight, for example, but darned if I haven't done one anyway.  Which is a good thing.  And now I'm going back to my painting.  Cheers, all.  

So This Happened:

So this happened:  On our way home from a craft thing at a friend's house, Joan and I stopped at an Indian restaurant in Richardson to have an early Valentine's dinner.  As often happens, about six more parties followed us in (we draw crowds wherever we go, what can I say).  One of the parties was seated right behind us; a couple, evidently from around town, and some friends from out of town (they didn't have Texas accents; if I had to guess I'd say South Africa).  Anyway, we'd just put in our order when the guy of the couple started opining, loud and long, about transgender people and "men using the women's room".  I distinctly heard him say, "I feel like a woman today, I think I'll use the ladies' room."  Among other things, using some words I haven't heard in better than 20 years. Meanwhile, we got increasingly uncomfortable.  No, neither one of us is transgender (though I wouldn't tell you if I was, so munch on that), but we know people that are and, well, I'm just not happy about people dissing other people in public.  In general.  And in particular.  Are you?

Anyway, Joan leaned across the table and said, "Let's go."  And I said, "We just put in our order."  So she flagged down the waiter and asked him if he could box up our order to go.  And then Mr. Opinionated said something else--I actually didn't hear it, or didn't understand what I did hear, and Joan said, "Let's go. Now."  And we did.

We left a nice note for the manager, letting him know it wasn't his fault, and some money for the appetizer that had already come.  And on our way out the door, Joan leaned over and announced to the table, "Thank you for ruining our dinner."

Lemmee back up and say that again.  Joan leaned over and announced to the table, "Thank you for ruining our dinner."  

I mean.  I just.  Wow.  Those of you who don't know Joan, she is a quiet and nonconfrontational type of person.  She has a temper (who doesn't?) but it doesn't come out very often.  So she must have been pretty pissed.  I was just really uncomfortable and wanting to leave because I was listening to a person who plainly understands nothing of what he speaks and has to say it loudly, but it wouldn't have occurred to me to actually confront the table.  I mean that was ballsy.  Oops, I just referred to Joan with the wrong genitalia.  My bad.  You see how complicated this sort of thing can get?

A couple of minutes later, as we were getting into the car and driving away, I said, "I've never walked out on a check before.  Are we going to jail?"  Joan said, "Relax.  I left some money."  So I relaxed.  A little.  But if you guys hear anything about the Richardson police looking for two fat ladies who walked out of a restaurant Sunday night, I'd appreciate it if you'd pretend you don't know us.

This ends happily, sort of.  We drove over to Afrah, my favorite restaurant, which not only serves great Lebanese food, but is really warm and friendly and welcomes everybody.  We got a great meal and if anybody was talking loudly about transgender persons, they were doing it in Arabic so I didn't understand them.  (I can say a few things in Arabic.  Hello, how are you, he'll be out in a minute.  I thought I was going to get a job with the Holy Land Foundation Defense Fund there for a while, so I learned a little Arabic just in case.  I've forgotten most of it, though.)

So I guess the moral of this story is, you never know who might be seated next to you in a restaurant. So don't spew your prejudices about, loudly, to a room where you don't know who might be hearing them.  Or that people will be assholes sometimes.  But I think the real moral is, don't ever, ever piss off Joan.  She can be fierce when roused.  I'm going to take her a nice iced coffee now.  Cheers.

Exodus

Aaaand she's late again.  Well, that's okay.  What are they going to do, cut my salary?  Besides, I have an excellent excuse.  I found out Friday that we're going to be kicked out of our house for a week.

Yeah.  Seems that a few years ago, when we had that broken pipe which led to the catastrophic flood under the house, some of the floorboards in our bathroom were damaged.  They're now very weak and starting to give way.  In short, the entire bathroom floor is due to collapse.  Which, you have to admit, would be a rotten thing to happen while you were sitting on the throne, if you know what I mean.  And guess where all the weak spots are?  Right around the throne.  So you see the problem.

We had a contractor come over and give us an estimate.  It's a scary estimate, but it's doable.  He's pulling out all the bathroom hardware, totally replacing the shower stall with a disabled-friendly walk in shower (thank God for small favors), repaneling the floor, laying tile, and painting.  In short, we're going to get a whole new bathroom, and it's going to be a nice shade of teal.  The only thing that really sucks is the whole having to move out of the house for a week part.

See, we only have one bathroom.  That's the one thing I've never liked about our house.  All houses should have two bathrooms, in case of emergencies.  But in 1958, when our house was built, it was sort of inconceivable that anybody could possibly need more than one bathroom.  (Clearly, 1958-era contractors never tried living with two women at once.)  I asked a contractor once how much it would cost to add another bathroom to our house and he told us that A. because of where the sewer pipe is located, the only way to go is up, ie, we'd need to add a second story to the house and B. that would start around $20,000.00 and go up from there.  So we never did it.  Besides, Joan can't do stairs.

So we spent a goodly portion of Saturday trying to find a place to stay for a week.  Surprisingly, there aren't a lot of hotels which are A. affordable and B. are just fine with you bringing your three cats. Imagine.  Anyway, we ended up cruising vacation rental places and finally found a condo near downtown. The guy who owns it is an attorney, and it probably didn't hurt that I said we were a paralegal and a librarian.  And yes, I told him about the three cats.  He rented the place to us anyway.  Beginning this Saturday, we'll be living in a tony one-bedroom in a luxury complex that has a fitness center and even (gasp!) a swimming pool.  Not that anybody's doing much swimming when it's 38 degrees outside, but I guess you could.

Moving day is next Saturday.  We will probably each be taking a few days off work so that the cats won't be alone in a strange place.  Luckily, both of us can work from home to a greater or lesser extent. If I can manage it, I'll send pictures.  Wish us luck.

It could be worse, you know.  It could be Dallas in the winter.  Oh wait...

Update - And The News Is...

...not that good, I'm afraid.  Joan saw the neuro-ophthalmologist  (who is quite the character -and the character I'd use is "officious prick", but no one asked me), and his conclusion is that the same thing happened to Joan's right eye that long ago happened to her left eye. That is, she had what was in effect a small stroke behind her optic nerve, which caused her optic nerve to swell up.  I don't know why your optic nerve would swell up if you lost blood, but then, I'm not a neuro-opthalmologist. Nor an officious prick.  Anyway, the swelling of the nerve is causing the loss of the visual field, and if they can get the swelling down, they might restore some sight. Maybe.  So Joan is taking huge doses of steroids to get the swelling down. Thank you and come back in three weeks.

But what caused all this, you are no doubt asking. How does a fifty-something person end up with a condition that normally only affects very elderly diabetics?  Well: It turns out there are a number of prerequisites for getting this, and Joan has every one of them.  The biggest and most important, though, is sleep apnea.

If you don't know what that is, relax. I'm going to tell you. Sleep apnea is where you stop breathing in your sleep.  You can stop for anywhere from a few seconds to almost a minute before your brain realizes it's not getting any oxygen and forces you to gasp for breath. This may wake you up, or not. The most common symptom is snoring, especially loud snoring. Another symptom is dreaming that you can't breathe, or startling awake breathing hard.  A lot of people have it and don't know it.  Older white males (50+) and black men under the age of 35 are the most likely to have it, especially if they're overweight, have a thick neck, smoke or have allergies/chronic nasal congestion.  Besides possibly causing you to go blind, sleep apnea can cause or make worse high blood pressure, heart disease, weight gain, diabetes, asthma and--get this--car accidents.  (That falling asleep at the wheel thing.)  So if your sweetie tells you you snore like a buzz saw, or if you wake up gasping for breath on a regular basis and there isn't a cat on your chest when this happens, please talk to your doc.  You may not have sleep apnea, but then again you might.

So Joan still can't see very well, and I'm still driving her around.  And we're still taking it day by day. I'm managing to get to the pool on a regular basis, mainly by taking Joan with me (she sits in the lobby and does cross stitch).  We're working on that whole public transportation thing, if only so she doesn't have to get up with me at five in the morning. And I guess that life is going on, mostly.

Therefore, it's time for me to say something about The Election.  Yes, I know: A couple of blog posts ago, I said I wasn't going to talk about The Election.  Further, I actively avoid news coverage of just basically anything, on the advice of my doc; it doesn't help my anxiety level, and generally it only takes about ninety seconds to find something that pisses me off.  However, because of recent events, I sort of have to say something.  I heard about these recent events on Twitter (where, if you want, you can follow me around @jenstrikesagain).  And look.  I don't care what sex you are, what species, what color or how long your ear tufts are: Donald Trump has said a ridiculously large number of things, both recently and ten years ago, that have revealed his true character and ruled him out of contention as someone who's fit to be President.

Now, I know some of you are Republicans.  (There's therapy for that now.  Just saying.)  And I'm not saying everybody should vote for Hillary, although I will be.  If I were a Republican (and I would be, if the Republicans of the Lincoln era or even the Theodore Roosevelt era were still around), I'd be freaking out right about now.  I'd be trying to decide if I should be voting for nobody (always an option), or writing in Lindsay Graham because, let's face it, it can't possibly hurt. I'd also be consoling myself that Trump was never really a Republican to begin with; like most cowards, he chose the gang he thought was deluded enough to let him in, and then he fought every person in it until he was the leader.  And I'd be apoplectic that my party was falling apart, but then I'd remember that political parties have split up many times throughout history, and the results were always new parties that were stronger and better than the original.  In fact, this might be an opportunity for the real Republicans to form their own gang, while the Christofascist do-what-we-tell-you-and-not-what-we're-doing demagogues get together in another sandbox and plot their own takeover of the free airwaves, the Supreme Court, the stock exchange and women's bodies.  But one thing I would definitely not be doing is voting for Trump.  I don't care if he's the nominee (our bad, for not nominating somebody like, say, Lindsay Graham again.  Or Colin Powell.  Or heck, even Janet Napolitano.)  When you're talking about the leader of the free world, you don't put someone in the job who lies compulsively, hires white supremacists as his advisers, is obviously utterly confused by this Constitution thing and advocates waterboarding.

Having said all that, I will finally get to my point.  Which is:  If you're still going to vote for Donald Trump, as is your right, I'd greatly appreciate it if you just didn't tell me.  Heck, I like you.  And I don't want to lose all the respect I have for you.

New and Exciting Medical Saga!

And here I thought this post would be about how I sent all the contributions to Heifer and they sent a nice letter back and named the water buffalo "Jim" and sent him to Southeast Asia.  Well, that's still going to happen (this week, I swear) but in the interim, Joan's having a new and exciting medical saga.  For anybody who doesn't know what's going on, Joan woke up about a week ago mostly unable to see out of her "good" eye.  She has a "bad" eye, too, where the visual field is limited, so to have the "good" eye poop out on her like this is not a good thing.  Obviously this is causing all kinds of problems, like you would expect if you were suddenly struck about half blind.  We've spent days in doctors' waiting rooms and testing facilities, and while we were at it, we hit Joan's out of pocket maximum. So at least everything's free from here.  

At this point there is no news, except that things are not getting better.  Nobody seems to be able to tell us if the eyesight will come back once they figure out what's causing the problem and start treating it.  Oh, and what could be the problem ranges from papilloedema, a condition caused by diabetes but usually on a much older person (don't Google it, it's scary) to a brain tumor, which is--well, I'm not gonna say anything more about that.  And all of that is incredibly sucky, but what I'm having the most trouble with now is just the sheer logistics of this thing.  

By that I mean, how to cope with the world when you can't see most of it.  I dunno if you've ever thought of that before, but it's a lot.  I mean, for example I've had to go through the house, and will have to do it again on a regular basis because we have a kitten, looking for trip hazards and things below radar that Joan could get hung up on. (And our house is an OSHA nightmare in that respect.  We're working on it, though.) There are some chores I've more or less taken over because I just don't think she can do them.  And of course there's driving.  When you can't see, you can't drive.  So now, instead of just driving myself around, I actually need to think about it, sit down and make a schedule; where Joan has to be when, when I need to pick her up, how long it'll take to get to here from there, and therefore, what time I can expect to, say, arrive at work.  Bonus, though; We're spending a lot of time together.  Kristen was right; that part is actually pretty cool.

(And just incidentally, my work has been great about all this.  No complaints about my lateitude or about my being gone on a semi-regular basis to take Joan someplace or other.  Essentially, they don't have to pay me while I'm not here, but that aside, they've been really nice.  And this may be coincidental, but one of the Downstairs Guys came upstairs to tell me he was running low on work and did I have anything for him.  Oh, honey.  Do I ever.)

And me? you ask.  Has my head exploded from the stress yet?  Well, actually no.  This is very Buddhist-y of me, but I've just been taking it one day at a time.  Say today is Thursday.  What time do we both need to be at work?  Any doctor's appointments? What time do I need to be at the library to pick Joan up?  What's for dinner?  And that's all I can really think about.  I don't deal with the long term possibilities because they're just flat-out beyond me. We'll have news when we have news.  It'll get better if it's going to get better.

(Of course, I can say that, right?  It's not like it's my eyes, after all.)  

But, seriously, this is a marriage.  And in a marriage, things change all the time.  You might not notice it, but if you take a look at yourself you'll realize you aren't the person you were ten years ago.  Everything's different now.  You're different now.  If you're married, you're in a different marriage than you were in ten years ago, even if you're still married to the same person.  You've plainly found a way, and many people don't, to navigate those changes with your partner.  Now, this is a particularly sucky change, and it's a big ugly nasty one, but still, it's a change.  The only way to handle change is to handle it together.

That's all I've got for now.  Sorry, but I've been really tired. Those of you that are in good with any particular deity, if you  wouldn't mind dropping him or her a line about Joan's eyes getting better, that would be great. And the checks go to Heifer tomorrow.  All I need is an envelope.  And a really good picture of a water buffalo.