Whew! It’s hotter’n’a three-dollar cookstove. The air conditioning just ran through what it defines as a cooling cycle and shut off. Still frying in here. Need to go out and fall in the pool again.
Ugh! Reports have it that Apple is going, oh (grumpily) hallelujah, to replace our fine defective goddamn keyboards, for freaking FREE!
So. I guess Monday I will have to traipse over to the Biltmore and hand this thing across the counter, there to have it gone for several days, probably the better part of a week. How can I express my annoyance?
Okay, okay, OKAYYYY you’re right! How can anyone complain when a company wants to make one of its fiascos right all by its little self, not being forced to do so by the federal government?
All very nice, I’m sure. But for what this thing cost, shouldn’t we get a keyboard that…well…you know…works? From the git-go?
Having to attach a Microsoft(!) external keyboard is the least of the annoyances. Yesterday this fine expensive little beast experienced not one, not two, but three system crashes. Plus FireFox crashed, apparently overloaded by having too many tabs open. (Is that even possible?)
These crashes occurred while I was working on the Drugging of America book, sweating over a chapter that has, to give you a clue to its complexity, 83 endnotes. Woulda thought I was gonna die, thank you very much, without the damn computer stumbling around all evening long.
So it was 11 p.m. by the time I wrestled that mess into a corner and then posted Friday’s chapter of The Complete Writer.
And finally, ouch! Now we have some direct evidence that stress makes me clench and grind my teeth at night.
Stopped wearing the mouth guard after the burning mouth episode, which hurt quite a lot and took a good three weeks to clear up fully.
Apparently this was ill-advised. Woke at 5 a.m., sat up, and…YOOOWWWWW!!!!!
Worst pain I’ve EVER felt!
It felt like somehow I must have dislocated my jaw.
In my sleep??? HOW???
Whatever…it was just excruciating, and I thought I was going to have to go to the emergency room…A-fuckinGAIN!
Managed to stagger in to the bathroom, heat up a wet washcloth, and apply. Still couldn’t close my mouth, but did contrive to get online and find, at the TMJ site, the advice that less is more. They’d posted a little physical therapy exercise that supposedly would help this phenomenon.
Couldn’t get any worse. So tried it out, and damned if it didn’t help.
These things always, invariably happen to me on the weekends. So calling the dentist was off the table. Oh well.
By 9 a.m. it had calmed down enough to be more or less tolerable. Resuscitated the mouth guard and left it in all day. That also seemed to help. I guess.
What fun.
Unable to chew anything…luckily a very ripe (and delicious!) watermelon was sitting on the kitchen counter. So that was a lot like eating sherbet. But less fattening.
This afternoon it was off to the nearby Sprouts in Crime Central to pick up a cucumber. Developed a craving for xergis, a cold soup perfect for a day like this. And it doesn’t have to be chewed. 😉
Sprouts has a security guard looming at the front door these days. That’s good. I guess. Yeah. I live in a neighborhood where the local grocery store has to post guards to keep its customers from being brained or running off in terror. Ducky.
You’d think Sprouts would have a decent cuke, wouldn’t you?
Not so much.
You had your choice:
Organic… Armenian-type, wrapped in plastic but wimpy, no longer than a regular old-fashioned cuke, but thinner. Looked pretty puny under the plastic wrap: dented, scratched, verging on wilted.
Inorganic… Encased in wax.
The inorganic cukes were a buck apiece, but a) I hate that wax stuff and b) by the time you peeled off the contaminated skin, not so much would be left. The sickly-looking organic cukes were two bucks apiece(!!!!!).
Wave good-bye to the security guard…jump in the car…head down to AJs.
There the Armenian-style cucumbers also were $2 apiece — but you’d expect to pay that in the Jewel of Richistan. AJ’s is Arizona’s answer to Whole Foods, only it costs more.
Food’s better, too.
While there, picked up a package of overpriced dog food, obviating the need to drive out again on Monday, when the hounds will run out of the batch they’ve got in the fridge. So that was good.
At any rate, I’m pretty sure this jaw/TMJ thing is a direct result of sitting in front of the damn computer tearing my hair until 11 p.m. and then falling straightaway into the sack. It confirms the dentist’s suspicion: stress. And it explains where the stress comes from.
Working on a computer is a constant exercise in low-grade stress, punctuated by moments of frustration, rage, and despair. Last night’s Triple Crown crash-fest was more extreme than usual…but the fact of the matter is that a computer is a box filled with endless aggravation.
That notwithstanding, today I finished another chapter. It’s rather slight — only about 1670 words. But I decided it would be good to insert the “How to Read a Scientific Paper” squib closer to the front than originally planned. Follow that with the NNT chapter, which will require a degree of science-buff sophistication from the reader.
In theory, with chapter 2 I now have enough to put the proposal together and start sending it out. But I think I’d rather have a more solid chapter to include in the proposal, and the NNT rant is it. It will take two or three days to write that, I expect, using the original blog post as the bare-bones draft.
Really, the relevant posts are functioning like preliminary outlines. This stuff grows like algae on the side of the pool. And of course every word of the content has to be rewritten to sound like something a university press would care to publish… Bloggish doesn’t make it.
It’s 7 p.m., I haven’t finished the current chapter of Ella’s Story, which needs to go live on Monday. And I’m too tired to function. To reiterate:
Ouch! Ugh! and Whew!