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Crawling Out from Under the Rock

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Fell asleep last night along about 6:30…woke up this morning at 7:30. And today felt marginally better.

Even felt like eating, though not like slamming around to fix much. Running slap up against deadline, I managed to finish edits on the client’s last chapter and send it off to him along about 4 p.m.

Hope it’s at least reasonably coherent. That thing has now been edited in ER waiting rooms, edited in ER examining rooms, edited in the Mayo Clinic’s doctors’ waiting room, edited inside doctors’ offices, edited in bed, edited on the back patio…gestaltlich, we might say.

Meanwhile, this afternoon I had to report a nut case on Quora who emitted some threatening rhetoric. Dunno if the guy is around here, but it doesn’t matter…it would be very easy to track me down, if you’re crazy enough. Which, speaking of rhetoric, reminds me that I need to buy a long gun and some ammo for it and for the other armaments. And I really need to get off my duff, go up to the range, and practice. I’d like to take their safety course over again, too — it’s been a long time since I’ve even thought about those things.

But what with Trump’s Loonies carrying on about civil war should their hero be impeached, one ought to be prepared. At this point, there’s almost no question he will be impeached. The question is, what then?

Let us hope the U.S. military is capable of containing a guerilla uprising within the borders of our country. I’m fairly certain they are: they have their own guerilla training, plus they have the advantage of some very sophisticated hardware and software that a bunch of bumpkin revolutionaries can only daydream of. Nay, not even revolutionaries backed by the occasional billionaire.

Interesting, isn’t it? How can you be so smart as to make that much money and still be so stupid? Or…maybe one just doesn’t have to be real bright to make that much money. 😀

Arrrgh! What times we live in! Times that are getting late: gotta go scarf down some more cough medicine and fall into the sack.

 

Why, Exactly?

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WHY, seriously, does Word have to crash every time I’m about to hit the final “save” on a client’s manuscript, take everything down with it, and disappear a chunk of work? How does it know when I’m at my most hurried, most sick, most harassed and pick that moment to pounce?

Nineteen pages of calculus arcana, converted from LaTex into a very confused Word.

A team of the Chinese mathematicians are emitting a full-length book, and they’ve secured a convincing expression of interest from Springer. Being young mathematician things, naturally they’re very excited about this. Springer is a top-level publisher: that alone is enough for a promotion. Add to it that the text revolves around partial differential equations and that as you read it and as what they’re actually saying sinks in, you think hmmmm…i know some politicians who would like to meet you before November 2020, and as you can imagine this is a bit of a big deal.

It is wonderful and amazing stuff to read, in its way.

The math itself, equations pristine as snowflakes, is strangely beautiful. The narrative, its logic hammered into place with the precision of fine tilework, fascinates and astonishes. You can’t keep from wondering: What human mind could make this?

When the stars threw down their spears
And water’d heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

No doubt about it!

 

 

{moan!}

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In and out of ERs four times in the past week. So, sooooo sick!

It’s some kind of respiratory infection: sore throat, impossible cough, grinding headache. There’s also some kind of abdominal pain that I thought was a pulled belly muscle but now I think…not so much.

The Mayo doc gave me a repellent syrup to treat the UTI, which kicked off a high fever. That stuff damn near killed me. Then in the middle of that fiasco I came down with this bug — cold, flu, whatever it is. My temp has been swinging up and down from 98 to 102+. A-n-n-n-d now it looks like I just broke the expensive digital thermometer, grabbing it to keep it from sliding off the nightstand. Now I’ll have to get up and traipse around the house in search of the old mercury number.

Wheeee.

At any rate, during one of the junkets to the Mayo, I learned the repellent syrup apparently killed off the UTI germs. That’s something, anyway. I guess.

The other thing I (re)learned was WHY I’d rather drive halfway to Timbuktu to go to the Mayo’s ER than duck into the nearby John C. Lincoln hospital. To wit:

In my last sally, I was so tired and it was so late at night (11 p.m. and counting — bearing in mind that I’d spent the entirety of two preceding nights sitting around the Mayo) that I stupidly decided to go into JCL, a megahospital that serves a population who largely know no better and even if they did, can’t afford any better.

I get in there, to an empty ER, and they sign me over into the care of this amazingly dumb-looking male nurse. You know how some people just emanate “stupid”? This guy was one of them. How did you get through nursing school, bub?

He’s supposed to do a blood draw (again!) and he wants to insert an IV line (why?). But he is SO totally not up for the job that within seconds he has blood all over himself, blood all over me, blood all over the bed, and blood all over the floor. “Thankyouverymuch,” I say as I’m running out the door. Onward to the Mayo: another 20 or 25 minutes of driving over empty roads.

There, staff ascertain that the UTI is gone and conclude my problem appears to be a severe viral infection.

**

Oh jeez. Naturally Ruby picks 9:00 at night to have a doggy shitfit…I do not feel like getting up to shoof out what she’s barking at. Oh well: burglars, enter here.

Cripes. She’s getting madder and madder… Grab the shillelagh! Is there ever a dull moment around this place?

Well, I can’t see anyone. Must’ve been a moth flying past.

Still spectacularly sick this morning. And now no better by the dark of night.

Truth to tell, I deeply dislike the primary care provider the Mayo has foisted on me. And it’s painfully clear no love is wasted on her end, either. Nor do I enjoy, one little bit, the 40-minute drive through homicidal traffic to get out to her office. Especially when I come away annoyed as hell.

So I decide to call Young Dr. Kildare, 40 minutes on the other side of the Valley. Start dialing at 9 a.m. A half-hour later, his phone is still ringing busy, suggesting not so much that he’s so popular the hordes try to break down his door on Monday mornings but that his phone system is on the fritz. Finally gave up.

It would help one whole helluva lot if I weren’t allergic to aspirin, acetaminophen, and ibuprofen. There’s not a lot you can do to fight a fever, under those circumstances, than put an ice pack on your head and drink plenty of cold fluids. But believe me, when your head is splitting and your throat feels like someone stuck a blowtorch down there, the last thing you feel like doing is guzzling water. Yuch! I can’t even bring myself to consider bourbon & water…which is sayin’ somethin’.

My neighbor,WonderAccountant, brought over some soups and some light food. And my son showed up with more supplies this afternoon. So that was awfully nice. I guess I’m gonna have to find some way to be nice in return!

Meanwhile, I’ve fallen behind in editing a client’s book: a study in differential equations of…something epidemiological having to do with social media. Hafta say, it’ strangely interesting. But it’s damn hard to stay focused when every time you swallow it feels like a stab in the (former) tonsils.

The dog is terrorized. She apparently thinks I’m barking (or yelling) at her…dogs don’t cough much, I guess. She’s threatening to jump off the bed, a drop far enough to break her leg. If I were a responsible human, I’d get up and lift her down. But alas, I’m beyond responsibility.

Holy mackerel, there is such a thing as a “fixed-point theorem,” and by golly, it is hyphenated. Hmmmm… “The Banach fixed-point theorem gives a general criterion guaranteeing that, if it is satisfied, the procedure of iterating a function yields a fixed point…” Is that another way of saying “If you repeat something often enough and long enough, people will believe it’s true”? 😀

The Comeback Kid?

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Amazingly, despite yesterday’s miseries (and my dire expectation of three to four weeks of Fun with Influenza), today the body decided to make a little comeback. Yesterday, apparently having picked up a case of the flu at the Mayo’s ER a couple of nights earlier, I was classically miserable: fever, sore throat, splitting headache, aches & pains all over the bod’. I had to cut choir practice, and I really was thinking oohhh shit! here it comes!

Normally it takes me weeks — even months — to get over a case of the flu. One curious doctor did a series of blood tests on me some years ago, which revealed that I have some small genetic flaw in my immune system that indeed does make me more susceptible to these damn viruses than most people and makes it harder to get over them. For that reason, I try to stay out of public places when they’re really crowded (Costco at Christmastime, heaven help us!) and also do not take communion because I will not share wine out of a communal cup, and no, I don’t care that someone thinks having the cup made of gold magically disinfects the rim on which the members of the congregation have rested their lips. These strategies usually fend off disease…but not so much when you spend six hours in an emergency room while the current strain of influenza is “widespread” in your parts.

Last night I managed to steal a few hours of sleep, and this morning the fever was down to a balmy 99. Still high, considering that “normal” for me is around 98 or even lower. But a helluva lot better than 100º+. The sore throat: better (still there, but at least I can swallow now). The headache: still there, but not racking.

It’s a miracle.

Seriously: you have no idea how long these damn things can hang on with me. And to complicate matters, allergies to aspirin, ibuprofen, and acetaminophen mean I can’t even wangle a little symptomatic relief. A noticeable improvement after just a couple of days is a real surprise. The only explanation I can think of is that the flu shot I had a week or ten days ago must have just started to kick in and so somehow is helping the bod’ to beat off the bug.

So now, for the first time in several days, I was hungry. And there was exactly NO food in the house. What I wanted was some of that decently prepared soup that comes in boxes, under the brand names “Pacific” and “Imagine.” These are carried at Sprouts. And conveniently, there’s a Sprouts right down the road from the Funny Farm. There’s also a Walgreen’s in that shopping center — I needed a new bottle of nose squirt, so figured to pick one up there.

Heh.

You have to understand, though…the “road” is Conduit of Blight Boulevard. And the environs that fine avenue skirts have their eccentricities.

First, into the Walgreen’s.

Oh, God! You can not go into that store without some strange new experience.

First off, I couldn’t find the damn Afrin (and associated knock-offs). Nor can I find a roaming employee except for this strange guy who is moving goods around with a freight cart and making WEIRD noises. At the top of his lungs: OH! OW! OOFFF! and on and on. He appears to be mentally challenged. Nice of Walgreen’s to give him a job, but not very helpful for the customer.

I traipse to the pharmacy counter to ask where the hell the nose squirt is. Get behind a woman who is receiving zero satisfaction and is told to come back some other time. This, it develops, is because they only have one employee back there. Guess their other staff are all out with the flu. I think fuck it! and decide I’ll have to go across the street to the Albertson’s to find the nostrum, another of the Hood’s gracious landmarks. Please, please, please waste some more of my time!

But on the way out I take another look in the stuffy-nose section and discover they’ve put the decongestant sprays all the way down on the very bottom shelf. Well, that’s good…at least I don’t have to traipse across the damn train tracks (sitting through at least one and probably two interminable red lights). Buy this and then walk over to the Sprouts.

Incredibly, the store is now not stocking even ONE actual soup by Pacific or Imagine! No joke! They have a pile of boxed chicken broth and boxed beef broth, but that is not what I want. I need a hearty soup that is going to give me some nourishment without making me sick(er).

Fu*k!!!!!!!

Defies belief.

So I get in the car and drive all the way down to the fancy new Sprouts at Osborn and Seventh Ave, now the heart of Millennial Country. Yes. There I find the actual soups for which Sprouts is famed. Grab an armload of these: potato leek, tomato (creamy!!), and butternut squash. While there I find a package of frozen warm-it-up in minutes mussels in tomato sauce. Hot damn! That, I’m going to eat whenever I finish this blog post.

So when I get up to the checkout, I ask the guy — who is, by the way a retired professor funding his cruise travels with part-time cashiering, and quite a kick — why on earth they’ve taken these soups out of the market in the ‘Hood. Poor people eat soup, too, y’know! This gets their attention.

They have to allow that they don’t know the answer to this conundrum, but yes, it probably does have to do with the demographics. (Let’s whack’em while they’re down!)

A fairly entertaining exchange with the two idle check-out clerks and a wandering manager now takes place. The professor and the other check-out clerk, a mature black woman, slender and sharp-looking, are both old-time Phoenicians. When I remark that the ex- and I were part of the first wave of gentrification in the Encanto district, a great flurry of reminiscence ensues.

“Do you remember the Basha’s that used to be in this parking lot?”

“Yes, and the Osco drugstore that went out of business and just sat there empty for years?”

“Did you ever go to the China Doll, right next door?”

The woman told me, to my astonishment, that she and her family used to live in the apartments that once were behind the present fancified shopping center. But for the longest time, she said, black people weren’t allowed to live there.

I said, “You’re kidding!” I knew there was a lot of discrimination — Arizona is fundamentally a Southern state, politically and culturally. But you can’t live in Central Phoenix? It wasn’t exactly Whiteyville at the time.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s true.”

“When was this?”

“It was in the late 50s and early 60s.”

“Wow! That pre-dates my time. If that had been going on when all the Yuppies were moving into Encanto, there would have been riots in the streets.”

She laughed.

So now I make my way home, circumventing the accursed goddamn train tracks, backtracking to Feeder Street Northwest (which actually is a minor main drag that goes all the way down to the capitol area), then back-backtracking to the speedier 7th Avenue once I reach a road that moves smoothly east and west. Ugh.

And fall into the sack, having no energy to heat any of the fine delicacies in hand.

What a place we live in. And have lived in…

Never Pours but It Rains…

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LOL! This little comedy of errors is getting ridiculous. Actually, we could call it a “comedy of fiascos.” One damnfool thing after another.

So after spending the night before last at the Mayo’s ER and getting exactly zero sleep, of course (wouldn’cha know) the next day I had to go down to the church and spend the afternoon minding the front desk and answering the phone, a task I’m not very good at under the best of circumstances. And fully incompetent at under the worst of circumstances. So that must have been amusing to anyone watching. 😀

And yesterday as all the antics were winding down, I kept spiking a fever. It would shoot up to something over 100° — which is very high for me, since my temp is normally well under 98.6°. But I figured it must have to do with the UTI, which had gotten bad enough to produce some interesting pain.

But…well, no. Nothing can ever be that simple in these precincts.

I woke up this morning with a roaring sore throat, a fever, and a cough. So…presumably I’ve contracted the flu, a cold, or strep throat…also presumably picked up while passing hour after hour in a hospital emergency room. This, despite getting a flu shot while I was at the doc’s office a week ago. Yes: it takes two weeks for a flu shot to take effect!!!!!

Sumbiche.

So…now I’m having to cut choir practice tonight — not that I would be up for two hours of rehearsals even if I weren’t a latter-day Typhoid Mary. And I need to weasel out of staffing the church office’s desk tomorrow. This means, of course, I spent four hours yesterday spreading germs all over the phones, desks, and computer at the office…isn’t that ducky?

Meanwhile, it develops that despite the influenza hazard, it probably was a good thing I traipsed in to the Mayo the other night. One of the nurses there said, after I remarked that I felt embarrassed to occupy their attention with such a petty, stupid little ailment, that urinary tract infections can be “very serious.” Well…she wasn’t kidding. This morning along comes word from KJG that her mom has been in the hospital with a UTI that she chose to neglect — thinking that it would go away on its own.

Wrong. She ended up spending several days in a westside hospital, severely ill, and then being transported to a nursing home, where, KJG says, she “barely has awareness, is very weak, cannot do anything for herself.”

Good grief. Is that terrifying, or is that terrifying?

Well, I hope the poor woman recovers. She’s not in the best of shape to begin with — though I don’t think she’s much older than I am. But evidently, if you think you have one of these UTI bugs, you should trot off to the doc the minute the light dawns in your hazy little brain.

Meanwhile, in addition to being genetically susceptible to every damn virus that comes along, I’m allergic to aspirin, acetaminophen, and ibuprofen. So that means the only way I can address a fever is to stand in a cool shower. Which, it develops, is what I’d better go do right now…

WordPress to the Rescue…partly

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Well, that was…uhm…jolly fun… Spent the better part of the night at the Mayo’s ER after spiking a high temperature and enjoying a spectrum of annoying symptoms. Develops that the UTI that I was enjoying returned with a vengeance. The ER doc re-prescribed the stuff his colleague had given me. She’d written a prescription for only 5 days. He said I needed to take it for at least 10 more days. It was after 2 a.m. by the time I got home, and of course I didn’t sleep very well.

Head hurt like hell this morning…but  eventually I realized it was probably because I hadn’t eaten a thing since yesterday morning.

Client mathematician wanted a word count of the first five chapters of his current book, the edits of which I sent off to him the day before yesterday. In editing math copy, I don’t charge for content that I’m too stupid to understand: videlicet, just about every mathematical expression. Word counts every element in a mathematical expression — all those Greek letters, all those numbers — as a separate word. So in order to figure the actual editable number of words, you have to go through it line by line and delete every equation, every mathematical expression, every graph, every table…on and on and ENDLESSLY on.

Well, Word was having none of that. It kept crashing, and even when it didn’t crash, getting this done in any sane manner was almost impossible.

Finally it dawned on me (ever slow to tumble to the obvious…):

Hey! WordPress counts the words in a blog post. And when you paste copy from Wyrd into a WordPress post, it converts to HTML! 

Hot damn! Unlike effing Wyrd, HTML is extremely stable.

Or maybe just…dayum!!!

It took hours and hours and HOURS to paste each chapter into a post and then, in “Text” (HTML) view, to sift through line by line by line and delete every equation and every mathematical equation. Much of this stuff, WordPress converts into tables. You then have to find the table (even though it doesn’t appear as a table in the more easily comprehensible “Visual” view). This entails more sifting: through the HTML in search of tables, and then having to force WordPress to delete the damn things…which it does NOT want to do.

*******

Along about the time this adventure ground to an end, I realized I had a 100-degree temp on top of a number of unpleasant other symptoms. That’s high for me: my normal temperature is well below 98.6, so if I have a fever of 100 degrees, I am sick.

And I have a splitting headache.

Eventually I decide to drive to the Mayo’s ER, which is a distance. What time? Late…the roads were very clear, which is some sort of a miracle.

Though they kindly saw me promptly and were, as usual, marvelously attentive, it was after 2:00 a.m. by the time I rolled out of there and made my way through the black night to the Funny Farm. They called in a prescription to the Safeway near my house, saying I should show up there the minute the place opened — that would be 8:00 a.m. — to retrieve the pills and start gulping them down forthwith. In the meantime, the doc handed me one (1) of the horsepills to take while I was sitting in front of him and said “Get your tail to the pharmacy the minute they open, grab the Rx, and start gulping these things down!” This, as you will see, is a trick easier said than done…

*******

The few hours that remain to the night pass uneventfully and without sleep. Now I have to be at the Safeway at 8 a.m. to try to extract this stuff from their pharmacy.To make things even jollier, I promised one of the volunteer front-desk workers down at the church that I would do her gig this afternoon so she can visit family in California. That chore runs from 12:30 to 4:00 p.m.

So there’ll be no nap time for me. Can’t imagine how I’m going to get through the day.

First off, though, the problematic issue of getting to the Safeway pharmacy at 8 a.m.:

There are essentially three main drags that run from the north parts of the mid-city through the central commercial district to the downtown lawyers’ and bureaucrats’ district. Central Avenue goes through a genteel old-money residential area and ends at the North Mountains. Seventh Avenue also goes up to the base of North Mountain but then flows into Meth Lover’s Drive, which will take you westward if that’s the way you must go. Seventh Street indirectly joins a freeway bringing residents from the far northern bedroom communities, picks up people who live in the north central part of the city, and proceeds downtown.

Our City Parents, in their infinite “wisdom,” took it into their collective mind to convert the left-turn-only central lanes on Seventh Ave and on Seventh Street into one-way NO left-turn lanes during the rush hours: southbound from 6 to 9 a.m.; northbound from 4 to 6 p.m. While this sort of (marginally) speeds commute traffic (but not so’s you’d notice), it creates a GIGANTIC headache, because…well, no matter where you’re going, you can’t get there from here. Everybody who needs to go left to get to a destination travels on Central, so it’s bumper-to-bumper all the way downtown. The other roads move faster, but you have to perform what is known as an “Arizona turn” to get where you’re going.

An Arizona turn? That’s where you turn right to go left…and in the hands of a gifted driver, this can be quite the little maneuver.

This means that to turn left out of my neighborhood during the rush hours, you have to drive around and around and AROUND Robin-Hood’s barn. Because everybody else is trying to get to the same place you want to go, it creates vast traffic jams on the surrounding streets as people try to avoid those goddamn no-left-turn lanes.

Stupidly, I decide to drive across GangBanger’s Way to 12th Street (going north in order to turn south). This lovely boulevard is heavily traveled by my fellow law-dodgers but usually is navigable. BUT….I fail to take into consideration the goddamn high school on Gangbanger’s. At the high school, the city in its infinite stupidity has installed one of those crosswalk lights that holds up traffic whenever some pedestrian pushes a button. The upshot of that is that around 7:30, when I leave the house, traffic on this 7-lane main drag just flat comes to a dead stop, as kid after kid after kid ambles across the road.

But if you know where you’re going, eventually you can circumvent the schemes of Our City Parents and…yes: get there from here.

A hard left across three lanes of oncoming takes me and the pickup ahead of me into a neighborhood. We weave our way through this fairly dire little slum (there’s a reason I call it Meth Central), back to 7th Street, go north (opposite of the direction we need to go), shear right on Butler, cruise through a slightly less dire slum (yes, even this garden spot is beginning to gentrify), and come out on 12th Street. There we cruise southward, he toward whatever his destination might be and me dodging westward (a right turn) on Glendale toward the Safeway that I can’t turn left into because it’s at 7th Street and there’s no left turn allowed there.

Once I reach 7th Street (turning west now in order to go east), I sail into the nearly empty parking lot, shoot through the Safeway’s front door, and accost the two pharmacists, who bless their hearts are in a pretty good mood at this hour of the day.

However…the lucky soul who chooses to take me on has no clue to the Rx that was supposed to have been sent over at 2 a.m.  Finally she realizes: they’ve made it out in my unpronounceable legal name, a little horror that I never use. Being a little frazzled myself at this point, I don’t think of it, but just as she’s about to send me away (having tried and failed to get thru to the Mayo on the phone) it occurs to me that maybe this funny name thing has been applied to the Rx, and lo! So it turns out to be.

Finally I get home around 8:45. It has taken a full hour to make a twenty-minute round-trip drive and grab a bottle of pills!!!!!

Ugh. Now I have three hours before I have to schlep up to the church, where I stupidly volunteered to take on my friend Barbara’s afternoon shift at the front desk.

“When will they ever learn?”  NEVER volunteer!!!!!

I’m too keyed up to sleep now; I really should take the poor little dog for a walk; I’m sure there’s a sh!tload of things I should be doing right this very minute (pay the bills?); and I cannot even imagine how I am going to stay awake through three hours and thirty minutes of excruciating tedium down at the Church.

Why do you suppose they have a switchboard-like phone at all? I do NOT understand that. There’s no reason the staff/clergy (all of about 12 of them) can’t have their own phone numbers that will ring direct to their office phones or to a voicemail. They want somebody lurking around the front office to bounce out the homeless and greet the parishioners?? Whaaa? Maybe two people a day come in. Could the office manager, who appears to be a kind of Guy Friday, be parked in an office near the front, where he can see and greet whoever comes stumbling in the door?

Our rector is in the final running for the position of Bishop. That’s good for him: he’s a pretty ambitious guy and an exceptionally worthy candidate. But it means now we have to get a new pastor. That means major hassle, as you’ve no doubt noticed. I’d like to see them plant our associate priest in that job. She happens to be a woman. She also happens to be amazingly sweet and she can give a killer sermon.

The present incumbent was hired to rescue our merry group from a fairly dire financial predicament, after the prior regime took a richly endowed organization and within three or four years ran its finances right into the ground. Having performed what we might best describe as a dramatic rescue, indeed, he’s ready to move on to the next stage in his career.

We, on the other hand, are not and never will be ready for him to move on….