Arthroscopic Knee Surgery (TM)

 It will be 2022 in just under 90 minutes, so I better type this fast or it won't count for 2021 and I have a rather pathetic number of blog posts for 2021.  I hope next year will be better.  Somehow I've gotten out of the habit of getting on the computer when I get home from work and actually writing some stuff.  I need to get back in that habit.  There's stuff that needs writing, after all, and it's not like anyone else is gonna do it for me.  

So, I had Arthroscopic Knee Surgery (TM) and it didn't go well.  Well, the surgery itself went well, but everything leading up to the surgery really didn't.  I was doing this thing solo because Joan can't drive, and although I'd arranged transport to and from the surgery center, I sort of didn't think I could ask any of my two intrepid drivers to actually go through this with me.  In retrospect, I certainly could have, but anyway, lesson learned and all that.  

A couple of days before the surgery I had to go down there for a Covid test.  Which is fine, I get the whole Covid thing, but there were no instructions about where one should go to get the Covid test.  I hobbled into the building with my cane, and there in the lobby, which is empty, is a sign that says, "Check in downstairs for outpatient surgery."  So downstairs I went, only to be sent back upstairs to the lobby and down the hall.  After I checked in there, they sent me back to the lobby for a third time and then up in the elevator to the third floor, where I finally got the damn test.  And I'm like, people, I'm hobbling around on a very unhappy leg, you know?  This is not a scenario that works very well for disabled folks, even temporarily disabled ones like me. I sent an email to the administrators. They never answered.  So things were off to a flying start.

On the day of the actual surgery, I got called in from the waiting room and the first thing they said was that they needed a urine test.  Now, this is particularly stupid because at this point, I don't have any urine. They told me not to eat or drink anything after midnight, and although I happen to know that you can drink clear liquids up to 2 hours before the procedure, I didn't want to argue about it so I just did what they said.  This meant I was dehydrated by 10:30 the following morning.  But anyway, I tried to produce said urine sample and ended up dropping the cup into the commode. 

They were not very happy about this.  They asked me if I could do it again.  I told them, uh, basically no.  I asked if they could do a blood test instead, since they had to run an IV for me anyway.  There was some whispered discussion among nurses and the verdict was, they would Find Out.  Then I asked why in hell they needed a urine test, anyway, and they said to make sure I wasn't pregnant.  

I am not pregnant.  I have never, at least as far as medical science knows, been pregnant.  In order for me to be pregnant, I would need to have been pregnant since 1992.  The Summer Olympics.  The vaulting finals. I told them this.  They did not care.  They said they tested eleven-year-olds and sixty-year-olds. If you got a period at all, they had to check for pregnancy. Hospital policy.  (TEXAS HEALTH PRESBYTERIAN HOSPITAL DALLAS, DALLAS, TEXAS.)  And I thought, who in the hell is still getting her period at sixty and how can I keep that from happening to me?  

Okay.  I get that it's hospital policy, even if it's an idiotic policy that assumes everyone with a womb is just that, a womb with legs.  I bet they don't test transgender men for pregnancy, even though some transgender men have uteruses.  I bet they don't cancel your surgery if you turn out to be pregnant, either, though I don't know; maybe they do.  But I don't take well to being treated like a womb with legs.  So next time I'm just going to lie.  "Nope, haven't had a period in years."  Seriously, do you want a relationship with a medical professional that starts out with being called a liar?  If they're going to call you a liar, you might as well actually be one.  

So, as I said, things were not going well.  I hadn't had my meds that morning, either, since they told me nothing to eat or drink after midnight.  Then I got to the pre-op area and they had left a gown out for me that was about five sizes too small.  People, my height and weight is in my medical records; you might not be able to extrapolate my exact size from that information, but is a plus size gown really out of the question?  So I had to call the nurse and send her back out to get a plus size gown, and while that was going on  I called Joan and told her I was ready to cancel the whole thing and just leave now and should I get an Uber or should I call Kellum, who was picking me up, or what.  

Joan, naturally, talked me down.  Something about the doctor probably didn't have a choice of what hospital surgery center he was allowed to operate at.  So even if I did reschedule, I'd have to do this all over again with the same gang of idiots. By this time the nurse was back with a gown that actually fit, so I began to think things might actually be okay.  Then the nurse tried to start my IV and stuck me five different times.  

(Eye roll)

Well, again, I was dehydrated. There's nothing to get veins to collapse like not having enough in them.  Fortunately, somebody somewhere had a moment of clarity and got me another nurse.  The second nurse was obviously trained in how to talk down a surgery patient who was about ready to climb out a window and disappear, because she spoke in very soothing tones and generally wasn't an idiot.  She also got my IV going on the first try.  Imagine that.  (Incidentally, it's a month later and I still have a huge yellow bruise from one of the first lady's needle sticks.) 

Once the IV got started, things got a lot better.  Drugs may have had something to do with that.  The next thing I knew, it was over and Kellum was there to pick me up.  The doc said everything had gone very well, except for my meniscus, which was totally shredded to the point where they had to basically remove the whole thing.  He wanted to know if I'd been in a car accident, or a bad fall, or something else that might have caused that kind of damage.  My answer was, basically, no.  I still have no idea how I came by this injury.  My best and only guess is uneven pavement, and that exists all over Dallas.  So, I may do fine with no meniscus.  Or I may really be in trouble.  We don't really know and won't for some weeks yet.  If I'm still in pain after everything heals up, the next step is a knee replacement.  Let's hope that doesn't happen any time soon because with the pandemic filling all the hospital rooms, I won't be able to get one for quite a while anyway.

I was packed off home and spent the next four days recovering.  I'm in physical therapy now and we get to play with lots of cool toys.  And I'm sore a lot, but it's easier to get on and off the couch without help.  Which is good.  I'm still hobbling around with a cane, but maybe by February I won't need it anymore.

So that's the story of my knee surgery.  Now it's almost 2022 and people are lighting fireworks and firing off guns and just all manner of strange things, so I'm going into the kitchen, like I do every year, and hide under the table until about five minutes after midnight.  Y'all be safe now.  If you're going out, mask up and drive sober, but have a wonderful time and a happy, peaceful 2022.  I'd say you've earned it.  Wouldn't you?  

Mini-Post: Surgery, After All

 When last we left this sordid saga, I had arthritis and couldn't have knee replacement surgery because of Covid.  Well, that's still true, but we have a new development.  The injection of cortisone didn't work, and my doc got concerned because it should have worked.  Cortisone shots nearly always work.  But this one didn't, and so I got stuck in an MRI to find out why it didn't work.

MRIs, by the way, are quite a thing.  They're this long tube, surrounded by a big machine, into which human beings go to get scanned.  While you're in there it sounds kind of like being on a train, or driving across a bridge.  Whoop whoop whoop whoop whoop.  Only louder.  So loud they put you in protective headphones and ask you what kind of music you like so you won't get upset while you're stuffed into this tube.  I told them I liked New Age music and they piped in Tracy Chapman, 10,000 Maniacs and Madonna.  Not exactly New Age music but it did make the whoop whoop whoop a little more tolerable.  I was in there for something like 45 minutes.  Every now and then someone interrupted Tracy Chapman to advise that this would take four minutes, or three minutes, or five minutes and fifty seconds.  Whoop whoop whoop.  Then a pause, then more Tracy Chapman, then another four minutes.  It was very surreal.  When it was over, it took two grown men to help me back to my feet.  

A few days later the results came back.  The doc came in and asked me how things were going.  Could I live with my knee the way it was, or was the pain interfering with my life?  After I stopped laughing I told him that, yes, unbelievable as it might sound, level 6 pain at all times except when suitably dosed with Tramadol was, as he put it, interfering with my life.  He said that besides the arthritis, I had a torn meniscus.  I pumped a fist at the ceiling and said, "Yes!  I knew it!"  Which, he said, was not the reaction he was expecting.  I said, "Look, I've been a paralegal for 20 years and I've seen a lot of torn meniscuses (menisci?) and I know they can be fixed."  Well, said the doc, not exactly fixed.  More like ameliorated.  They don't sew the meniscus back together or anything.  They just cut away the torn part, and the pain signals stop.  Or should stop.  Or stop most of the time. 

The meniscus, incidentally, is a tendon that connects the two long leg bones to each other beneath the patella.  I had a nifty drawing all ready to go here but it turned out to be copyrighted, so, never mind.  

Anyway, so, after some three months of limping around with a cane, I find out that I can have surgery after all.  I can get my knee fixed, or at least partially fixed.  Or at least the part that is causing me the most trouble at this exact moment can get fixed.  It's not even a particularly scary procedure.  My insurance covers it, it takes like 15 minutes and I don't have to stay overnight at the hospital, which means it's possible to do.  This is all great, right?  

Well, it is great, but of course I had to do research about all this.  (I am a paralegal, after all.)  And--well.  It seems that having meniscus surgery makes arthritis worse, faster.  Of course, some clinicians say that not fixing a torn meniscus also makes arthritis worse, faster.  Or maybe both are true.  It sort of depends on what article you read.  And some minor percentage of people who have the surgery don't feel any better afterward, and of course this tiny percentage drop dead from an allergic reaction to the anesthetic, and and and.  

Joan says I shouldn't worry.  She had a torn meniscus, got it fixed, and she was fine.  And her arthritis did get worse, but then she also got ten years older.  And getting it fixed was certainly preferable to not being able to walk, which was where we were.  Which is where I am.  And of course, if I keep limping around for another god knows how many months, I'll eventually hurt the left knee.  Tear that meniscus, too.  So there's really nothing to do but to have the surgery.  

In nineteen days, six hours and thirty minutes.  

Osteophytes, Cortisone and Untested Furniture Upholstery Gel

Some of you who have been hanging around these parts for a while are probably wondering why I haven't gone off in a long rant about the new Texas abortion law.  Well, there's a reason for that--actually two reasons.  The first reason is that I already said what I had to say, way back when the law was actually passed but before it went into effect.  The second reason is that, pretty much, people have done it for me.  The collective journalistic zeitgeist are losing their minds over this law, and to be honest, it's a little refreshing. If I wasn't so concerned about women dying and going to jail, I might even say hell-o!  Wake up call!    

I know some of y'all thought I was Chicken Little, talking about the sky falling, because I kept saying over and over again that access to abortion was going to disappear.  Well, I'm accepting lavish apologies at this site (see below).  As long as we had a fairly normal Supreme Court, I could sort of forgive you for thinking these laws would not stand, but people, we have not had a fairly normal Supreme Court for quite a while now and won't for many years to come.  This means the laws your legislatures pass matter, because some of them, however ridiculous, are going to get upheld.  This also means your state and local elections matter.  So you need to register and then vote, and you need to vote in all the elections, folks.  Not just the flashy ones every four years but the small ones, too, for City Council and school board and stuff like that. Read up on the issues, and then vote.  Not voting is no longer a luxury we can afford if we want to continue to have a democracy.  And those of you who think I'm tossing around hyperbole, that's also what you thought when I was talking about disappearing abortion access.  QED. Again, lavish apologies are being accepted below. 

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, yours truly woke up with a very sore knee about, oh, say, four weeks ago now.  Before the sore knee, there was about a month of this weird instability, where I felt like I was going to fall down at any moment.  I did not, in fact, ever actually fall down.  However, it didn't occur to me that this was anything out of the ordinary because I take a truckload of medication, people, and about half of them have as a side effect "causes dizziness."  This sense of instability wasn't really the same thing as dizziness, but hey, what do I know.  Maybe dizziness and instability are the same thing.

So I had a sore knee and it was hard to walk around, not to mention impossible to get on the treadmill.  Hell, even getting up and down the three stairs to my laundry room was difficult.  I let this go on for about a month, during which I developed a sore heel on the other foot and this weird nerve thing where it feels like somebody's stabbing me in the ring finger on my left hand.  The weird nerve thing remains unexplained, except to the effect that it's probably some weird nerve thing.  But I did finally go see my Regular Doc about this sore knee business.  

My Regular Doc is okay.  She's fine if you have a sore throat or a sinus infection or high blood pressure or whatever sorts of medical issues normal people have (I wouldn't know).  And as a starting point, again, she's fine.  She took a look at my leg and told me it was one of two things; costochondritis (an inflammation of the tissue behind the kneecap) or a torn meniscus (which usually requires surgery).  She suggested I get a brace with a nice big hole for the kneecap, the kind that prevents any lateral movement of the knee joint, and see if I felt better in two weeks.  So I left planning to do that, and then overnight the pain in my knee joint went from a 4 to about an 8. (More than you ever wanted to know about the one to ten pain scale can be found here.)  And I'm not a very patient person anyway, so I started calling around to orthopedic surgeons.  

I got lucky and got in for an appointment in less than a week.  This Ortho Doc is the doc of a friend of mine and also the colleague of the guy who saw Joan about knee surgery and told her he would do it whenever she was ready.  (She isn't ready yet.)  So I hobbled into the office, went for a bunch of X rays, and then spent what seemed like an inordinately long time waiting in one of those little exam rooms for the Ortho Doc to show up.  Which he did, finally.  He said:  "Well, this is no mystery. You have severe arthritis on your knee, probably on both of them, and it's causing the irritation which is causing you pain."  I was kind of surprised--not about the arthritis part; an X ray tech who shot my chest for possible pneumonia told me five years ago that I had arthritis in my shoulders, so I figure it's pretty much everywhere at this point.  No, I was surprised that the Ortho Doc didn't think anything was torn or otherwise out of place.  Honestly, it feels like somebody's operating a blowtorch under my knee.  How it could feel that way without something seriously torn is a mystery.  

So the Ortho Doc gave me a cortisone shot in my kneecap (ow) and said that it should help.  (It did; it brought the pain back down from an 8 to again about a 4.)  The next step, unfortunately, is a knee replacement.  What he hopes will happen is that the cortisone calms everything down for a while and I can maybe skate another year or so before I have to have my knee replaced.  That would be good, because it can't be done right now.  Why?  Well, because all the hospitals are filled up with people who have COVID (in fact, as of this morning, there were no ICU beds available anywhere in the entire state of Texas, or Oklahoma either).  A knee replacement requires an overnight hospital stay and that Just Can't Be Done at this time.  

I've heard a couple of horror stories about this.  There was a man here in Texas who died of a gallstone, of all the stupid things, because there wasn't a surgery team available anywhere to take it out and his gallbladder became infected and then necrotic while he waited.  Another man who was shot six times waited a week for surgery.  Parents whose kids need an ICU bed are basically being told that they're waiting for someone else's child to die.  And shrieking headlines announce in thirty-point type that our medical system is on the verge of collapse. 

Um.  No.  No, I would say that if we have so little care available that people are dying of gallstones,  our medical system has already collapsed.  

I mean, will I live?  Of course I will.  I can get by on cortisone shots for a while, and if that can't happen for whatever reason (sometimes they quit working) there's always the option of having my knee joint filled with untested furniture upholstery gel.  A friend of mine actually just had this done and we're all sort of waiting to see if she turns into an ottoman.  But look, this was entirely preventable.  All we needed was about 70% of the population to get the COVID vaccine back when it first became available.  That's it.  That's all.  Once you have that many people immunized, the virus drops way off because it doesn't have enough hosts to keep propagating.  Also, things like the Delta variant don't happen for the same reason.  So if you're one of the people who didn't get the shot yet, GO GET THE SHOT.  (Yes, I  know some people can't get the shot for various reasons.  I'm not talking to those people.)  If you're not going to do it for your sorry self, do it for the wife and kids of that guy who died of a gallstone.  And if you're not going to get the shot because Joe Biden told you to or because you want to own the libs or something, fuck you.  Very hard.  

Of Antimatter and Cell Phones

So in case you were wondering if this blog had gone the way of M. Night Shyamalan's last several movies, let me hasten to assure you it's not so.   Firstly, you probably missed this controversial post.  Secondly, I started a new job in June, and it's been quite the adjustment. It's hard to explain what I actually do, but I can tell you what it's like.  It's like being the navigator on the Starship Enterprise.  The captain tells me where we're going, and I calculate the heading to get us there so that we don't go right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova, because that would end our little trip real quick, wouldn't it?  Then I run down to Engineering and make sure the engines are pointed the correct direction, and I talk to the cook to make sure we have enough provisions, and I see the fuel guy to make sure we have enough fuel, and I talk to the guys who line up the, I dunno, space fins, to make sure the space fins are lined up properly, and then I go back and tell the captain we're ready and then he or she says, "Engage."  Yeah.  That's what it's like.  So there have been some extra hours and there have been lots of meetings and for the most part when I come home from work, I fall asleep on the sofa in front of the re-imagined "Perry Mason." Don't ask me what's going on.  I have no idea.

In my spare moments, though, I've been thinking about the concept of duality. The guys down at the CERN high speed supercollider have apparently created antimatter, at least for a few nanoseconds.  Turns out if you have a particle, you can also have an anti-particle, which is like the polar opposite of a particle. No, I don't know what the polar opposite of a particle would look like, but it's pretty cool, no?  If the particle and the anti-particle run into each other, they either explode, releasing energy, or cease to exist, which should be impossible.  (Matter is neither created nor destroyed and all that.)  And while the implications for physics are positively mind-boggling, the implications for philosophy are even greater.  For example, is there an anti-Elvis?  (Yes.  Michael J. Fox is the anti-Elvis.)  Is there an anti-Trump? (Yes. Beto O'Rourke is the anti-Trump.)  How about an antiChrist?  Well, that one's been kicked around a lot over the millenia, but I'm of the opinion that if there's a God, the physical manifestation of all things good, there must also be a Devil, the physical manifestation of all things bad.  Good thing I don't believe in either one, because that'd be pretty scary.

All of this leads to a question much dearer to my heart.  Is there such a thing as an anti-Buddha?

Yes.

People, the cell phone is the anti-Buddha.

Yes, your cell phone.  My cell phone.  Every cell phone.  Do you know our cell phones are more powerful than all the computers that steered Apollo 11 combined?  They do amazing things that even Star Trek didn't imagine (though it did imagine a communicator that you could activate by hitting yourself in the chest--I guess that's pretty cool.) And cell phones are the anti-Buddha.  Seriously, it's hard to imagine anything less Buddhist-y than a cell phone.  

Think about what Buddhists do.  We meditate, we practice mindfulness, we cultivate certain states of mind like happiness and compassion and selflessness.  Cell phones basically unwind all that.  They're bright and shiny and full of nifty graphics.  They're an endless distraction.  Even when you're not looking at them, they chime at you wanting your attention:  Look at me!  Look at me!  They present an endless parade of news, mostly bad, and invite you not only to comment on it but to get into public spats with other commentors.  Spend half an hour on a cell phone and you're practically guaranteed to be less happy, distracted, anxious and wanting to hide under a rock until the world ends, which it's obviously going to do any second. 

Yes, you can also use your cell phone for Positive Things.  You can keep up with your family and friends, communicate with your work peeps, give donations to charity with PayPal and gently encourage your elected officials to do the right thing.  But people don't.  They use their cell phones to compare themselves to other people, get into arguments, work themselves into a state of despair about Current Events and just in general make themselves really unhappy.  I include myself in that assessment; since Yahoo quit allowing commentary, I quit going there, because if I can't post provocative responses to articles and get other people mad at me, what's the point?  (Yes, I was somewhat of a troll on Yahoo.  Thankfully the sun has since come up and I've frozen in place.) 

Now that we have cell phones, though, I don't see people giving them up in large numbers.  They've kind of become ubiquitous to our landscape.  We expect them to be around, too.  I've seen a number of movies where the plot actually depended on the existence of cell phones, and it's kind of funny to watch a movie or TV show made in, like, the late 80s or early 90s and think how different the outcome would have been if the characters had had cell phones.  So nobody's probably going to get rid of theirs.  I'm not getting rid of mine; I need it for work, but of course everybody says they need their cell phones for work.  So the challenge, then, is to change how we use cell phones. To put it bluntly, we need to use them instead of letting them use us. 

We have had some practice with this.  If you own a car, you're probably familiar.  You can own a car, or you can let a car own you.  If you bought, say, a Maserati to show off to your neighbors or because you thought you had to, you can barely afford your payments, your insurance is through the roof, your car requires frequent and expensive maintenance and you lose sleep at night pondering what you're going to do about the damn car, then you don't own it.  It owns you.  If, on the other hand, you have a cheap, reliable car that's paid for, the insurance is a nominal amount, maintenance is occasional and not very expensive, and it gets you where you need to go when you need to go there, then you own the car.  It feels much better to own a car than to be owned by one.  I've never had a Maserati, but I don't think I'd enjoy the experience if I did.

(Sammy Hagar, though, who is practically a billionaire, owns several race cars and apparently enjoys them very much.  So, you know, circumstances differ for each of us.)

Back to cell phones, though.  How do we go about owning a cell phone, instead of being owned by one?  Well, I hate to suggest this, but I think we need to start by strictly limiting or even no longer using social media apps.  I hate to suggest this because I am a Twitter fiend.  I love Twitter.  Millions of humans gathered in one place tossing off pithy one-liners about their lives and how to navigate this crazy world we live in.  I follow something like 500 people and they all feel like good friends.  But, I spend way too much time on there, and inevitably some bad-news issue comes up that everyone starts commenting on and I read the attached articles and stuff and my old friend, chronic anxiety, rears its ugly head.  

I used to spend a lot of time on Facebook, too, but I've pretty much stopped.  Well, actually for the last I don't know how many months I've stopped altogether because when I went from Old Cell Phone to New Cell Phone, I somehow lost my password and I haven't been able to get on there.  Which sucks, in a way, because the only reason I was still going on there was to keep track of my cousins and their kids and now I've kind of lost track. But on the other hand, I didn't have access to Facebook during the whole election drama, the January 6 fiasco or any of the happy-go-lucky days that followed.  (Hey, did anyone else realize that January 6 is Epiphany on the Christian calendar?  That's the day the wise guys showed up to Bethlehem and acknowledged the Christ child as a newborn king.  Which seems significant in a way.  Hmm.)  Facebook is, I say without hesitation, a political sewer.  Unless, of course, you keep your friend list to your cousins and their kids, and unfriend anybody who wants to drag you into the political sewage.  So I really don't miss it that much.  I could, reasonably speaking, also drop Twitter.  But I hope I don't have to do that.  I hope we can come to some sane and moderate usage of Twitter---thirty minutes a day, let's say--that means I don't have to drop it altogether.

Then there are the news apps.  As much as I'm for moderation and not total abstinence, the news apps have to go.  For one thing, I'm not supposed to be watching the news.  Doctor's orders.  And while I interpreted that literally and quit watching local news, I'm pretty sure Doc meant all news, from all sources.  Anyway, I get plenty of news from Twitter.  If you follow the right people on Twitter, you will get not just a good idea of the prevailing issues of the day, you'll get the news before the news people even do.  For example, I am hearing about the fall of Kabul as it is happening. from people who are actually there.  (And in case nobody knows that Kabul has fallen to the Taliban, it has.  Just FYI.) Now, if Twitter is a source of news, that's another really good argument to get rid of it.  But again, moderation versus abstinence, if that's possible.  If it works.  We shall see.

Now I have to tell you something witheringly ironic.  I have a meditation app on my cell phone.  Yes, on my cell phone, the anti-Buddha, there is a meditation app.  And I love my meditation app.  I'm not getting rid of it.  But I need to get rid of the scrolling through the latest news and the Twitter updates and so forth and so on before I log into it.  (Does anybody else have this happen?  You pick up your cell phone to do a particular thing and it makes a chimey noise or something pops up so you go see what it is and 30 minutes later you put down your cell phone, having completely forgotten why you picked it up in the first place?  This happens to me a lot.  Annoyingly, it often happens at work.)  The meditation app is Important.  Everything else, somewhat less so.  Because the everything else unwinds all the time I spend on the meditation app.  Probably as effectively as alcohol, if not more so.  And by the way, if someone tells you that he/she believes that he/she is addicted to his/her cell phone, believe him/her.  It's totally possible.  It's even likely, in some instances.  

So that's the story of the anti-Buddha, the cell phone.  If Shakyamuni were a modern man, he'd be sitting under the bodhi tree chasing enlightenment and Mara would walk up to him and hand him a cell phone.  Hopefully, Shakyamuni would grab the cell phone and throw it to the ground, whereupon it would turn into a lotus.  I hope so.  What scares me is that he might pick up the phone instead and log into Twitter.  Cheers, all. 

Because Abortion Will Be Illegal In Texas by September...

...here is your compendium of information about how to not get pregnant, what to do if you think you are pregnant and how to end a pregnancy if you decide that you want to.  

Mandatory annoying disclaimer: Nothing in this post should be construed as giving legal or medical advice. 

How Not To Get Pregnant In The First Place

Yes, you can get pregnant the first time. And the second time. And every time. When you have sexual intercourse, both parties need to use birth control to avoid pregnancy. That means a new condom every single time for the man and a second method for the person who can get pregnant.  The best methods are the implant and the IUD, which work for 4-5 years without the hassle of daily remembering.  Unfortunately, they are not for everybody. Pills are also a good choice but they must be taken as directed. You can talk to your doctor about birth control or, if you don't have a lot of money, call Planned Parenthood, 214-368-1485. Also check out this web site here.  And don't forget that condom.

What If We Didn't Use Birth Control? 

Okay, so you forgot the condom. Or something else went wrong, or for whatever reason, you think you might have put yourself at risk of getting pregnant. If you don't want to have a baby, run, don't walk, to your local pharmacy and get the morning after pill. Better yet, go buy some now and keep them on hand. If you are 16 or older, they have to sell them to you. Common brand names are Next Choice One Dose, My Way, Take Action, After Pill, EContra Ez, Aftera, ella and Plan B. The pills are not cheap (starting around $50.00) and you may have to ask for them, but they stop a pregnancy before it starts. This is NOT an abortion; the pills stop a woman from ovulating. No ovulation, no pregnancy.  More information on that here. 

Note: If you are fat, the morning after pill may not work as well as it does in skinny people. You may want to choose the brand ella, which seems to work better in fat women.  A double dose of the other brands should work if you are over 165 pounds. Another good choice is to get a copper IUD, but that may be hard to do within the five days you have to get emergency contraception. More information on that here. 

What If It's Too Late For That?

As of press time, you can have an abortion up to at least 20 weeks in every state. It can be expensive ($300-$1500 depending on the method and how far along you are). You may have to travel. You may have to go through a totally unnecessary ultrasound. You may have to sit through a waiting period. You may have to put up with some bullshit propaganda the state wrote to talk you out of it,  But, you can have a safe and legal abortion in every state. At least until...

The Texas Legislature Just Said I Can't. 

Yes, I know. I'm sorry.  Actually, what they said was, you can have one up to six weeks, but almost nobody even knows they're pregnant at that point, so what they basically said was that you can't.  The courts may overturn this law, but nobody in Texas seems to be in any hurry.  So for the time being, you will need to think long and hard about whether or not you want a baby.  While you're thinking, it's safest to assume that you don't. I say this because you can always tell people later, and even have a big celebration, if you decide to go through with the pregnancy. Once people know you are pregnant, though, everything will get a lot harder.  Especially getting unpregnant.  So, for now: 

• Do not tell anybody. Nobody, not even your boyfriend or your BFF.  If you must talk to someone, call All Options at  1-888-493-009.  It's free and confidential.  Make sure that you're someplace you can't be overheard when you call them, though.  
• Do not go to a doctor's office to confirm the pregnancy.  That will create a record, and you don't want one if you fail to produce a cute, healthy infant nine months from now.  
• Buy a home pregnancy test from a drugstore that you don't go to on a regular basis.  Do the test in a public restroom and throw the package and the little stick away there. I am not kidding. You want nothing in your house that says, "I'm pregnant." 
• If you can possibly manage it, do your "How to get an abortion" searches on a public computer, like the ones at the library. 

Why? Because in some states, women have been charged with crimes like failure to provide aid to a (dead, in this case) newborn (Purvi Patel, Indiana), attempting suicide while pregnant (Bei Bei Shuai, also Indiana), abuse of a corpse (Lisa Jordan, Ohio), malice murder (Kenlissa Jones, Georgia), murder (Chelsea Becker, California), "manslaughter of a fetus" (an offense that also does not exist in California law) (Adora Perez, California)...I could go on.  Some prosecutors will twist laws that were never meant to apply to pregnant women to punish women who have the gall to say, "Fuck you, I'm having an abortion anyway."  So let's not deal with that unless we have to. You have enough to worry about.

Option 1: Travel

If you are in Texas, or anywhere in the west side of the country, really, your best bet is New Mexico.  Not exactly the most convenient destination if you have to drive from, say, Houston, but if you can get to New Mexico, do it.  New Mexico has among the most liberal abortion laws in the country.  Persons under 18 years do NOT need permission from a parent to have an abortion, and there is no upper limit of how far along in the pregnancy you can be and still get an abortion (though it's always easier and cheaper in the earlier stages).  The Women's Reproductive Clinic in Santa Teresa, New Mexico is just across the border from Texas.  Their phone number is (575) 332-9452 and they see people from Texas all the time.  

If you have to fly, go ahead and fly to Albuquerque where you have more choices.  (Southwest Airlines is highly recommended both for cheapness and flexibility if your plans change.)  Planned Parenthood of Northeast Heights, (505) 265-9511.  UNM Center for Reproductive Health, (505) 925-4455.  Women's Surgical Center, (800) 777-7630.  Avoid the Care Net Pregnancy Center of Albuquerque.  It's not an abortion clinic, it's a "crisis pregnancy center" that exists solely to force "abortion minded women" to give birth.  They will lie to you and try to scare you out of having an abortion, and I've even heard of women being physically kept from leaving the building or being made to feel like they can't leave until they agree, often by signing some bogus document, not to have an abortion.  There are plenty of "crisis pregnancy centers" out there so when you call to make your appointment, be specific that you want an abortion.  Don't pussyfoot around the word.  "I want an abortion.  Do you perform those?"  The answer should be "Yes, we perform abortions up to (number) weeks."  If it's "Come in and talk to us," beware.  

Your distant second choice in Texas is Louisiana (waiting period, minors must have parental permission, host of other restrictions).  The closest clinic to Texas is in Shreveport.  Hope Medical Group for Women, (318) 221-5500.  Other options are the Delta Clinic of Baton Rouge, (225) 923-3242, and the Women's Health Care Center in New Orleans, (504) 899-6010.  

Your third choice is Colorado.  Really good laws for the most part, like New Mexico, but farther away (most of the clinics are in the northern part of the state).  There are a lot of them, though.  Here's a link: Colorado Doula Project. Minors must notify a parent before having the procedure.

If you need financial help to afford an abortion, travel to an abortion, etc., call these people:  Texas Equal Access Fund, (888) 854-4852 or Fund Texas Choice, (512) 900-8908.  If you want to donate, go to https://abortionfunds.org.

 
If you are under the age of 18, can't talk to your parents and can't get to New Mexico, call Jane's Due Process, (866) 999-5263.  They are amazing people and if there's a way for you to have an abortion without notifying your parents, they will find it.  

By the way, if you have to travel anyway and you think you're going to end up getting on a plane, you can also fly to California, Washington or Oregon.  I don't know as much about the options there, but abortion is widely available and restrictions are few.  

Option 2: Abortion Pills At Home

You can get abortion pills for home use at https://aidaccess.org/ or www.abortionondemand.org   They will screen you to make sure your pregnancy is under 10 weeks and charge you a nominal fee.  Another choice is plancpills.org.  All of these sites will mail you the pills from outside the United States.  You can also order Cytotec or misoprostol (how to use) and Trexall or methotrexate (how to use) from a Mexican pharmacy.  Or you can go to Mexico and buy them without a prescription in any drugstore.

Is Just Ordering Pills Like That Legal? 

That's a good question, and I don't know the answer.  Lots of people would say "Of course it's illegal, how can it be legal to have someone mail you abortion pills?" and a lot of other people would say, "It's legal to bring your own medicines into the U.S. and these are commonly used medications that work for a variety of conditions, so how can it be illegal?" And again, the answer may be "It depends on what the prosecutor can find to throw at a woman who has the gall to say, 'Fuck you, I'm having an abortion anyway.'  So let's not worry about legal. Let's just worry about staying under the prosecutor's big bad radar:

• Do not tell anyone you have ordered pills online. Nobody, not even your boyfriend or your BFF.
• If possible, have the pills delivered to a P.O. box or a box at one of those mail/post stores.  Mail/post stores are probably better because most of them won't hand over your address to the police without a court order.   The Post Office will cheerfully say, "Yeah, Box Number 1250 is (this person) and here's how to find that person; why, has that person done something they shouldn't have?"
• When the pills show up, take them immediately as directed and then call in sick to work/school until you know how they will affect you.
• Do not tell anybody you took the pills, not even...yeah.
• You will bleed and cramp. That can't be helped.  For most people, it stops in about 24 hours.  
• Take iron supplements as directed and eat some red meat or spinach after the fact to build up red blood cells.
• Wait a few days, then take another pregnancy test in another public restroom to make sure you're not pregnant anymore.

These medicines are highly effective (85% and up) and your biggest possible side effect is that they may not work.  If it doesn't seem to work (no bleeding/ cramping), you may need a second dose. 

Bleeding is scary, especially if it seems like you're bleeding a lot, but most of the time it will stop on its own. Still, very rarely, the abortion may not completely finish and there may be pieces of pregnancy tissue stuck inside. So if you keep bleeding, if you start running a fever, or if you otherwise think you need medical care:

• Get rid of the package the pills came in by disposing of it in public trash.
• Do not tell anyone you took the pills. There is no medical difference between a miscarriage caused by "natural causes" and one caused by pills. Plenty of people, without knowing they're pregnant, will suddenly start bleeding/cramping. It happens in up to half of all pregnancies, especially in the earlier stages.
• The drugs cannot be detected in your system after the fact. Cannot be, it's not possible.  If a doctor or a cop says, "Your test results show that you took something," he/she is lying. Also, he/she is suspicious, so stop talking to him/her.
• Some people really have a problem with people having abortions, especially self-managed abortions (how dare you).  If you run into somebody who seems overly curious, outraged, or otherwise interested, do not talk to him/her and call the Repro Legal Helpline, (844) 868-2812.  They will do their best to hook you up with legal counsel, pronto.   
• If the police come to the hospital or want to interview you, ask them if you are free to leave. If the answer is yes, stop talking to them. If the answer is no, then you are under arrest.  You have the right to remain silent. Stop talking to them.
• Do not, under any circumstances, talk to the police without a lawyer present. Especially if they're being very friendly and they "just want to clear this up." They are allowed to lie to you. They don't want to "clear things up," they want to find evidence of a crime and ruin the next several years of your life because you had the gall to say "Fuck you, I'm having an abortion anyway."  So don't do it.  No attorney, no talk to policey. 
• Never, and I do mean never, go down to the police station to make a statement.  Make them come to you.  And once again, have a lawyer present.  

That's it.  That's all I've got.  I'm sorry I can't make it any better, but you can, and your friends can, by registering to vote and voting out the assholes who thought this law was such a good idea.  Good luck and Godspeed.

MIni-Post: Master & Commander

Two blog posts in two days.  Well, why not.  The other night the movie "Master and Commander" was on, and being a big fan of British naval warfare (past life thing maybe?)  I watched it again.  If you have not seen this movie you should really check it out.  Russell Crowe, back when he was still cool, plays Captain "Lucky" Jack Aubrey, of the HMS Surprise, and the rest of the cast is stellar too.  It's an action movie but the real heart of the film is based on the relationships between the characters, which gives it a resonance and depth that's rare in an action movie.  (It's also rare to have a thrilling action movie where the vehicles involved never go faster than about 30 miles an hour, but still, it's pretty thrilling.) 

Anyway, I'm watching this movie and there's this big scene where they're in a storm and one of the horizontal thingies that stick out from the masts has broken (for a fan of British naval warfare, I'm not that good at actual terminology) and they're trying like hell to either fix it or throw it overboard because it's acting like a storm anchor and the boat's being pulled down. People are scrambling up the rigging and down the rigging and chopping at the rigging with axes and it suddenly occurs to me:  Are there lots of fat people out there because none of us have jobs like that anymore?

I mean, seriously.  The sailors in this movie are climbing up the rigging to like 3 or 4 stories above the deck to do their jobs and then they're climbing back down.  They're working the pumps and turning the wheel and doing all these very physical boat jobs.  I don't know what they're eating, but whatever it is couldn't have been good; they didn't have the food preservation tactics back in1805 that they do now.  So they're not getting anywhere near the calories that we do now and they're doing these hard physical jobs and no surprise, most of them are rail-thin.  

We in the US have managed to create the most efficient calorie delivery system that has ever existed since the history of the world, probably.  Even poor people can get more than sufficient calories because we have things like Little Debbie cakes and other cheap junk food.  (Note, sufficient calories doesn't mean sufficient nutrition; the two are very different, and eating nutritious food is expensive.  I'll get to why another time.)  So while a lot of people still suffer from food insecurity (something else I'll have to get to another time), for the most part, most people get plenty to eat.  And then look at what most of us do for a living.  We go to offices and sit at desks.  Oh, there are lots of exceptions but that's what most of the US work force is doing.  I personally have to remind myself to get up and stretch once an hour or so or else I get stiff.  So we have the most efficient calorie delivery system and the most sedentary workplaces.  This is a recipe for more fat people.

But people can exercise! you say.  Well, yes, some people can, but taking the time to go out for a three-mile run is not likely to happen when you're working two jobs to put calories on the table and raising three kids besides.  And even if you do have the time, it might not be safe to go out in your neighborhood.  Gym memberships cost money.  (And try canceling one, if you don't believe me.)  B y and large you need a car to get to a gym, too, and poor people are less likely to have cars.  More and more, exercise is becoming the domain of people with enough money and time to do it.  Poor people aren't lazy; look at the workloads they're carrying.  They just don't have the money and the time to exercise.

Lots of people have been freaking out about the "obesity epidemic" (I hate that word, by the way; just say fat already) and especially how it's affecting kids.  Well, kids are raised by parents, and if those parents are working the two jobs and raising the three kids and don't have time or a place to exercise and don't have the money to buy nutritious food and count on things like McDonald's and Little Debbie snack cakes to keep their kids' bellies full, the kids aren't likely to be able to exercise or eat nutritious food either unless they're getting it at school -- and guess what part of school budgets keeps getting cut?   In Europe, people have desk jobs as much as they do in the States, but they at least do a lot more walking, and they take trains places instead of cars, which means fewer opportunities to get fast food. There are also studies that show that European folks don't go out to restaurants nearly as often as Americans do, though that's changing.  

Everything I've seen about the "obesity epidemic" has been saying, how are we going to get people to change their habits?  I saw this movie and what I'm thinking is, who's going to come in here and change our whole culture? Because that's what's needed.  QED.  Cheers!

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!

Texapocalypse

The Vikings, in case you did not know this, became Christians kind of late in the game.  Like the 800s to the 1000s, long after most of the rest of Europe had gone Jesus-crazy (except for Lithuania, but I digress).  Part of the reason for this, of course, is that it took a while to establish the trade routes and cultural exchanges that were necessary for Christianity to come along, but another reason is that Vikings, by and large, were doing a great job of taking care of themselves, thank you.  Now, their version of "taking care of themselves" involved raiding coastlines, robbing monasteries and just in general being bad citizens, but they were good at it.  Becoming Christians, of course, meant they'd have to stop doing that stuff and become better neighbors.  So it took a while to catch on.  

Iceland was the last country in northern Europe to embrace Christianity, in the year 999 or 1000, and like everywhere else, Christianity got laid down whole across a pretty well entrenched system of paganism, remnants of which still pop up today.   In Iceland, it's not unusual for road builders to encounter, say, a whitethorn tree, and rather than cut it down, just put the road somewhere else or go around it.  Construction projects sometimes get temporarily halted so that a local shaman can chat with the elves and make sure the project won't disturb them.  Stuff like that.  But if you ask me, Christianity was bound to overtake Viking Paganism sooner or later because Viking Paganism is really a downer.  All the gods eventually get killed or eaten by frost giants or meet other horrible fates, a wolf devours the sun, and then the world ends in a terrible snowstorm that lasts for a year and freezes all the humans to death.  A few of them manage to escape to the world tree, Ygdrasil, and crawl down its branches to start life again, but seriously, that is a bummer of a philosophy. I mean, how would you choose your world to end?  All the dead coming back from their graves to praise the return of Jesus, or freezing to death in a year-long snowstorm? 

Speaking of year-long snowstorms, have you guys been reading the news about Texas lately?

There's a withering irony here because honestly, it wasn't that bad of a snowstorm.  We got maybe six inches, maybe a little more.  Some places got up to a foot, but anybody from Minnesota or North Dakota would just laugh at us if we expressed that this was a lot.  Likewise the temperatures. It got to minus 5 or 6 degrees in places.  North Dakota's annual temperatures typically include at least 50 days below zero. So you would think a few days below zero would not be a big deal. Well, you'd be wrong. Millions of households all over the state were sucking down ridiculous amounts of power just trying to keep their homes warm, Power stations all over the state began freezing over, their generators started flipping off, the whole Texas electricity grid became unstable, and according to the good men of ERCOT, we were "just minutes" from the entire state being plunged into a monthslong blackout due to massive equipment failure.  (Now, I don't know if we can actually believe anything the good men of ERCOT tell us, but that's their story and they're sticking to it.) So ERCOT told the local power gurus (ours is called ONCOR) to start rolling blackouts immediately.

Here's where all hell apparently broke loose.  I used to live in California, and we had rolling blackouts there from time to time, and though they were disruptive, they generally weren't a big deal.  The power would go out for an hour, sometimes a little longer, and then it would come back on.  This would maybe happen a couple of times, the grid would stabilize, and it would be over.  What happened instead was that the blackouts started and didn't roll.  Once you lost power, you lost it, and it didn't come back in an hour, it came back in 80 hours. Maybe.  If you were lucky.  As of late Thursday, which is the most recent update I can get, there were still about 200,000 people without power, and many of them had been without power since Sunday or even earlier. And really, the only reason the situation is sort of stable now is that the temperature's gone up and power demand has dropped.  

By the way, there's a rumor going around that all the wind farm windmills failed, and that was why we had this event.  That is NOT TRUE.  The windmills actually did better under the conditions than they were supposed to, and wind farms in Norway, Iceland and Antarctica do just fine in below-zero conditions every day. The key failure in the Texas system was natural gas.  A lot of Texas's power plants run on natural gas, which is collected at oil wells and piped in.  The problem seems to be both the natural gas wells themselves, which froze, and the connections where the natural gas arrived at the plants. The connections, which let the gas into the plants for the generation of electricity, began to freeze up. When frozen, no natural gas could get through.  If you want to read about this in more depth, check out this article here.  My oil and gas company relatives can probably tell you more about this, as well, so they're cordially invited to fill me in here (I'll publish an update when I can). 

Now, you might think that power plants and natural gas wells should be winterized so that this sort of thing can't happen. Well, yes. You might also think that Texas's electrical grid should be connected to the rest of the country, so when something like this happens, other parts of the grid could help out. Well, yes again. You might also think that when this exact same set of circumstances happened in 2011, the forward-thinking denizens of the State Legislature would have passed some regulations about all this. Well, yes yet again.  Did any of that happen? Nope.  Texas is not fond of passing regulations.  Or mandating winterization of anything.  Or connecting its power grid to the rest of the country, which of course would mean that federal regulations would then apply to it.  Who made these decisions? Well, the fine forward-thinking denizens of the Legislature, naturally.  Am I expecting anything to actually change? Not really.  Why? Well, because this same set of circumstances happened in 2011 and nothing was done then. The only possible reason for anything to change now is international embarrassment.  And I guess that is possible. It could happen.  I'm just not expecting it. 

So how did yours truly and her wife and cats do, while all this was going on?  Well, actually, oddly enough, we were--fine.  Our power went off last Sunday, stayed off for some 4 to 5 hours, and then came back on. (Joan said she heard a loud popping sound right before the power outage, so it very well could have been your typical blown transformer.)  It has been on steadily ever since.  I am not sure why.  In 2011, the last time this happened, we lost power for four days.  Look, my house was built in 1958.  We have overhead power lines. My neighborhood is very working-class Hispanic, and there's no old money anywhere near here.  If there's a power outage in this town, it is pretty certain to find us.  But nothing happened. We had power the whole time.  Our pipes did not freeze.  Our cats did not get indignant and demand to know why we'd turned off the warm.  We never had to light the fireplace (which is good, we haven't lit it since 2011, and I don't even know if it's lightable).  I know not to what to attribute this miracle, except for sheer dumb luck.  

Which isn't to say things have been running smoothly, because they haven't.  We had all kinds of disruptions at my office with the network going up and down, perhaps due to power outages, perhaps due to other things (no one was physically in the building to check).  Colleagues lost power, got it back, lost it again.  ONCOR asked us to conserve energy as much as possible, so we sat in our home office (which doubles as our kitchen) wrapped in blankets, with maybe one light on, and I turned off my second monitor, which really helps me get things done in a more timely manner, because it is a power hog.  We lit a lot of candles rather than use regular lights.  

At one point, I had to go grocery shopping.  This is always interesting because I hate grocery shopping.  Normally we call in our order, then I drive over and they've already got it bagged up for me, so I just put it in the trunk and take it home.  No roving up and down the aisles with a cart and freaking out because there are 47different kinds of penne and I don't know which ones to get and who the hell needs 47 different kinds of penne anyway?  But of course the guys who bag up your order can't get to the store because this is Texas and nobody seems to know how to sand roadways after a snowstorm.  So I had to go to the store. Just backing out of my frozen driveway into the frozen street to drive to the frozen highway to get to the frozen parking lot was an interesting challenge.  Doubly so in that I was wearing vastly oversized galoshes, made to fit Joan, but I was really glad I had them.  And the grocery store looked like locusts had been through it. Especially the produce section, which was basically empty. I had to get creative about most of the items on the list:  "Canned mangoes? None.  Well, there's some canned peaches, those will do.  Soy milk?  None.  Well, there's shelf-storage soy milk in the baking section, that will do."  That sort of thing.  But I was able to fill a cart, and purchase it, and take it home.  I was doing LOTS better than a lot of other people. 

Oh, and by the way, guess what happens when your power is off in subzero temperatures for eighty hours? Pipes freeze and break.  This hasn't happened so much in Dallas, but a lot of the surrounding cities have had a huge problem. A friend of mine's daughter lives in Austin, and her house has no water due to pipe breaks in the area.  She and her kids collected snow in a recycle bin to melt for water.  I mean, that's crazy in a First World country.  But our pipes are fine.  (They run just under the floorboards in an enclosed crawlspace, which could be why? I don't know.)  We kept water trickling the whole time.  And now it's above freezing and nothing's exploded.  Again, I don't know why.  I chart it up once again to sheer dumb luck.  

I don't want to give you the idea that everything is peachy here.  Due to the 2011 goings-on, power outages are an extreme high anxiety event for me, and living under the constant threat of losing power for days at any moment has not been fun. And again, there are lots of people doing lots worse than us all over the state. (If you want to help, these charities are dealing directly with the crisis:  The Austin Area Urban League, the Dallas Housing Crisis Center, and the Red Cross, as well as all these guys.) But we have been incredibly lucky.  Maybe it was all the Lucky Charms that get consumed around here.  Or maybe it's just the fickle finger of fate.  Whatever, I'll take it.  Hope you guys are warm and safe and have water pressure.   Cheers!

The DAM Thing Is Missing

I dunno if you've been hiding under a rock lately, but there are plenty of words being written on what happened in D.C. last Wednesday and why it was so important.  There will continue to be plenty of words written in the future, especially once we start having trials and people start getting convicted and stuff like that.  Plenty of words. There will be volumes written, and court decisions and scholarly articles and all kinds of stuff.  There are journalists whose careers will be founded in the next couple of weeks, and there are scholars that will study the whole thing for, maybe, the rest of their lives.  What I'd like to just say here, at the outset, is that I am not one of those scholars and this is not one of of those blog posts.  

Why not?  Good question.  I have opinions, as I'm sure most of you do.  The thing is, I'm not sure anybody particularly cares about my opinion.   Certainly my Senators and Congresscritters don't care.  John Cornyn isn't even answering his phone anymore, and Ted Cruz--well, one could say a lot about Ted Cruz, but nothing says it better than "Goodbye, sucker." I will say that what happened in D.C. is not the end of something but the beginning of something, and if you think we've been seeing some weird stuff, baby, you just ain't seen nothin' yet.  But, they don't pay me to say things like that (or anything else, either, for that matter).  

So let's get back to something that actually moves and shakes within my sphere of influence.  If you'd rather just read the New York Times, you can head there now and I will totally understand.  No hard feelings.  I don't have time, anyway.  I'm in the middle of the biggest mystery to hit Dallas since somebody shot J.R.*

My swim team has disappeared.

Yes, I realize it's been defunct since March anyway, and even if there were banners rolled out across every pool in town saying WELCOME BACK, EVERYBODY, I couldn't start swimming again if I wanted to.  There's a pandemic and sick people running around without masks on and complete idiots flying across the country to see relatives, somehow missing the part where all the rest of us, who'd rather not get COVID, are not flying across the country to see OUR relatives.  And I can't bring this disease home under any circumstances because it will kill me, or maybe kill my wife, or even more maybe kill both of us.  So I can't go back there, anyway, until I've been vaccinated, and at the rate my state is mishandling the rollout of the vaccine, that may be quite a while.  What I'm trying to tell you, though, is very important.  What I'm trying to tell you is that my swim team has disappeared.

My swim team is, of course, the Dallas Aquatic Masters, a U.S. Masters registered swim team that's been active in Dallas for thirty years.  Started by two ex-Olympians, Bobby Patton and Jim Montgomery, the team is a typical swim team, if you remember what it was like when you were a kid, only it's for grown-ups.  Same swim drills.  Same kickboard workouts.  Same competitions, even (we have a meet four times a year for both DAM members and any US Masters people who might want to come in and join us).  We swim at Baylor, Tom Landry Fitness Center, SMU's amazing new natatorium, and several other pools around town.  There are something like 160 different workouts a week, which should tell you how many people we have.  I myself have been a member for going on 13 years now.  So what I'm saying is that this group is established.  It's been around these parts for a long time.  And yet, inexplicably, it has disappeared. 

I was on the Internet just yesterday and I thought I'd check the Web site to see what was going on.  We've had a few mass emails from Bobby and Jim basically saying that all the pools were either shut down or restricted to members only, that they were doing what they could, and that we should all be patient.  They stopped charging us membership fees about seven months ago and were charging everybody a dollar each just to keep the database intact, though I think it's been a couple of months since they even did that.  There were some instructions that came out about exercises we could be doing to keep our fitness level high and that sort of thing.  And then the whole DAM Web site disappeared.

(See what I did there?)

Now, the Web site isn't actually gone, gone. Instead it points someplace else; to Jim's swim school, which has added an adult program. They are meeting at one pool up in North Dallas, and from the sound of it, they're doing the same workouts that DAM used to do.  With social distancing rules, of course, and they limit the number of persons who can be at a practice.  Still, this isn't DAM, and I don't know if this is like a temporary replacement or if This Is Just It.  

I just checked my bank account and the last time they charged us the real fee was April.  They've been charging a dollar a month since, the last time being November 6.  So what happened between November 6 and January whatever?  I'm not sure how to find out. The person in charge of organizing the whole deal worked at a place called Club Assistant, and I guess I could bug them on Monday if I can find them.  But at the moment, the number of leads I have is zero.

So if any of y'all see a rogue swim team as you're traveling about the Metroplex, would you tell them to give me a call?  Because it would truly suck rocks if my swim team was no more.  In the meantime, think scholarly thoughts and try to stay away from government buildings for a while, folks.  That's good advice no matter what you think of what happened last Wednesday.

*Footnote:  Back in 2002 I was in England and was being introduced around the room at a party by my wife's ex-husband's new wife, who, by the way, is really good at this.  She told this veddy proper English lady I was from Dallas and the lady brightened immediately and asked me, "Oh!  Do you know J.R.?"  I was so thrown by this that I missed my opportunity for some witty retort and just said, "No, uh, no, I've never met him."  She seemed disappointed.