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Prescription Pills: Proceed with Caution

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The past few weeks, what with a new pup to tend to, a bunch of paying work (and more incoming), the scheme to self-publish three books, and a busy Holy Week, I’ve hardly had any sleep at all. Pup regularly lobbies to go out at 4 in the morning, and once awakened, I rarely go back to sleep. And night after night, bed-time has come along about midnight. Nothing out of the ordinary…but then there’s also the slacking off in the exercise department. When I’ve had time to exercise or walk, I’ve been too tired to bother. Result: ta DAAA! Resurgent back pain.

Sunday night I hurt so much I could barely hobble up the hall. So, along about 10:00 p.m. I decided to try a muscle relaxant the doc prescribed last year. Tried one of these a week ago, and it worked pretty well…next morning, I was actually able to crawl from the bedroom to the refrigerator, a large improvement.

The Rx instructions say the stuff should clear out of your system in about eight hours. Had a vet appointment at 10:30 Monday ayem, meaning I’d have to get in the car at 10. Eight hours plus 10:00 p.m.?  Six a.m., right? So by 10 a.m. there should be no problem driving across the city and life should be good.

Actually slept seven hours, a record, but figured the haze of exhaustion was normal, since it usually takes two or three decent nights’ sleep to make up for ten days or two weeks of sleep deprivation.

Drive to the vet. Get last set of puppy shots. Bring pup back. Tuck her into her X-pen, turn around and race back out. Schlep to the credit union, deposit adjunct paycheck. Schlep to Costco; return ridiculous bathmats (purchased as dog mattresses) that can’t go into the washer(!) and make a few new purchases. Unload car, unload dog, let dog out, feed dog noon meal.

Fix my own meal. It’s now around 1:00 or 1:30 p.m.: fifteen hours after I’ve ingested 5 mg of cyclyobenzeprine. Midday feast: steak, potatoes, vegetable. I have a bourbon and water with this. Again, nothing out of the ordinary: I usually have a b&w or glass of wine with the big meal of the day.

I sit down to this little repast around 2:00 p.m. Shortly before three o’clock, I fall face-forward on the bed: seventeen hours after dropping the muscle relaxant pill. A friend expects me to show up at 4:00 p.m.; set the alarm to go off a little in advance. Conk completely out.

Alarm goes off. In a stupor, I can’t recall what I was supposed to do. Shut it off. Fall back to sleep. Phone rings at half-past four: where am I?

Good question…

Think of that! A small amount of booze — no more than usual and certainly not enough to inebriate…at least not normally — and I’m passed out in the sack!

Presumably while I was driving around in a haze of exhaustion earlier in the day, I must have been impaired. And mistaking impaired for tired. Apparently the stuff took a good 18 hours to wear off: more than twice as long as the bottle’s label implies is the drug’s period of effectiveness.

Five milligrams is half the amount of the original prescription a doctor gave me of this stuff. I asked for a smaller dose and got it. But apparently half a dose is not small enough.

So…watch out for drugs that knock you out. The effect may not wear off as advertised.

 

 

Monday, Monday

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Another week gone by in a blink. How can it be Monday again? It was Tuesday yesterday, I’m sure of it…

This Holy Week seemed unusually hectic in the singing department. In addition to the usual Wednesday rehearsal, we had Maundy Thursday and then Good Friday with the Stations of the Cross followed by the Chamber Choir singing the amazingly lovely Seven Last Words by Bern Herbolsheimer followed by us — the Senior Choir — singing Lizst’s Via Crucis (yes, in Latin and in German). Then Saturday the Great Vigil with a baptism and a religious service. Then the Easter Day shebang, complete with brass and percussion.

Very beautiful music was performed. High religious emotion was felt. All in all, a pretty busy week.

And all in all, kind of tiring. I’ve been too exhausted to function, most of the time. Pup wakes up around 4 or 4:30 a.m., and once I’m awake, I don’t usually get back to sleep. Since it’s been 11:30 or midnight before I’ve stumbled into bed, that means I’ve been running on fumes most of the week. What little I have gotten done hasn’t been done very well.

This morning, it’s off to the vet for Ruby-Doo’s last set of puppy shots. I should drag Cassie with me, since the eye drops the vet gave me a couple of weeks ago haven’t helped much.

The whole week has been spent in a haze of fatigue. Struggled, usually without luck, to finish writing the current chapter of the latest novel, but I swear, every time I sat down to write, some damnfool interruption came up. Matter of fact, at one point I became convinced that I was being interrupted every 30 seconds, no matter what I tried to do.

The pool system is running OK, I’m told, despite the fact that it’s running at 20 PSI. The water, not having been changed out last winter because of my overall laziness, is infested with phosphates. To fix that, I’ll  have to dump in the better part of a container of an expensive chemical called Phos-Free. This damn stuff clogs the filter. I just had the filter cleaned, to the tune of $150 plus another $85 to have a pool guy come and tell me that it was just fine at 20 PSI, when I happen to know it’s supposed to run at 10 PSI when it’s clean.

So that will be another $150 or $200 (I forget how much the Phos-Free is, but it’s a lot).

The alternative is to scrub algae off the pool walls, all summer long. To do that efficiently requires me to get into the pool, since the best way to clean the stuff off is to wash the walls down with the hose and a high-pressure spray nozzle. Brushing doesn’t seem to work very well — it’s a particularly stubborn variety of green algae, and I can brush until I turn green without getting it all off the walls.

The pool water is warming up (that’s why the algae is growing), but it’s still a little chilly for actual swimming.

Which brings us to the fact that in the haze of fatigue I haven’t felt like or been able to break loose enough time for the regular walking routine. And that means the fat has been sneaking back. It was up to 132.9 the other day, far in excess of the 128.5 I’d like. Then down to 130.8, and now today, after eating a whole lot of oversalted restaurant food at a friend’s yesterday (they ordered dinner from Boston Market, which IMHO makes the absolute best down-home comfort food of any restaurant around here — certainly the best offering of any chain restaurant, and pretty darned good in comparison with even real, local eateries). Today the scale claims I weigh 130.4: two pounds overweight, by my lights.

So there’s another something that needs to be attended to.

Spent way too much time trying to format the adjunct rant for print-on-demand, following CreateSpace’s Word template. Time-consuming hassle, involving the usual Wyrd catastrophic crash with attendant loss of data in all open files, much redoing of work already done, much cursing, much tearing of hair. And after all that, the designer said it’ll never work.

And…OMG. Wish you could be here to see this!

Puppy has just found a new game here on the back  porch:

Waterbowl Frolics!

She’s got her little front feet in there and is splashing and digging around, apparently trying to catch tiny bits of dry leaves floating around in there. But better yet, she’s learned she can make bubbles in her water bowl! She sticks her schnozz in and blows out through her mouth and nose — just like a little kid playing in the pool — and goes burbleburbleburbleburbleburble. That is SO HILARIOUS!

She is now, of course, soaking wet, so she’s gone off to find some dust to lay in,  the better to coat herself with mud. This may not be so hilarious in another 40 minutes, when I have to pack her into the car for her vet-schlep.

So much to have to do, and so little of it getting done: get the adjunct thing online; get the diet guide/cookbook online; finish editing the novel and get that thing going. And I just don’t seem to be able to break free time to do that, at least not when I’ve got the mental wherewithal to focus on those jobs.

Just when a spot of time opens up, some client or the job presents a new chunk of paying work, which of course has to be prioritized over all this other stuff. Finished up with one client’s project last weekend, with depressing results. Two sets of papers incoming from the maga-writing students; finished those at 10:30 last night. And just as I was about to pop a muscle relaxant in an effort to beat back the latest back pain incursion enough so as I might manage to limp down the hall to the refrigerator, in came another iteration of another paying client’s book. He’s entered major rewrites and wants me to go through the ENTIRE damn thing AGAIN from beginning to end, line by line and character by character.

Oh God. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve read that book.

But I can’t complain. He pays well. And, bless him, he’s smart as a whip, a good writer, and in possession of some truly interesting subject matter.

I can’t complain, assuming I don’t care a whit about my own projects. {sigh}

Happy Easter Egg!

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Cassie and Ruby’s Easter “Egg”:

P1030018The THING, one of Cassie’s toys, hanging from a piece of clothesline rope off a rafter on the back  porch (click on the images for bigger and better resolution).

P1030023Cassie examines the object, to be sure it’s safe for Pup.

P1030020Ruby tackles the object…

P1030019A-n-n-n-d…the game is on!

Happy Easter to those of you who are believers. And to everyone else, a beautiful weekend, a magnificent Sunday, and a superb year to come!

aaa

First Experiment in Self-Publishing!

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Well, this is cool. The eBook Builder says our first adventure in self-publishing will be ready to go this week. And my old friend Jim Metcalf came up with a very handsome cover, despite the fact that every image of the rest of us could unearth with was totally, hopelessly politically incorrect. It is, IMHO, amazingly good.

IMG_3006🙂 I really like this. He came up with another with these sort of shadowy handcuffs. But those evoke law enforcement, to my mind, more than indentured servitude. The kind of cracked marble effect evokes the crumbling of the academy, a phenomenon epitomized by the fact that 50 percent of US faculty are now adjunct. Meanwhile, tuitions continue to soar: students get less and less for more and more.

This subject is starting to pop. The New York Times noticed us adjunct slaves a few days ago, and this morning the Diane Rehm show on PBS devoted an hour to the various attempts to organize adjuncts into unions  (pretty damned forlorn, as you’ll know if you have any experience with academics, every one of which is a wild hare). So we’re anxious to get the book online as soon as possible.

This little gem will be my first experiment in self-publishing, after three books through scholarly and trade presses (William Morrow, Columbia UP, and Folger Shakespeare Library). I think of it as a sort of sandbox, since there’s no reason to expect it will sell many copies. It represents an opportunity to learn from mistakes, of which I’m sure there’ll be a-plenty.

Meanwhile, I’ve been working on a print version of Slave Labor. There’s an adventure, if ever there is one: I are a english major, i are not a artist, and while you could say I’m not very fond of Word’s eccentricities, I truly do hate the ditz entailed in trying to format documents in the Microsoft’s accursed program. It crashed my whole system again today: asked it to import a photo…can you imagine the effrontery?

At any rate, this afternoon I got about three-quarters of the way through importing copy into a Wyrd template formatted for CreateSpace and finally got around to registering an ISBN for the print version. So there’ll be a physical version of the magnum opus as well as a digital one.

So this one will be a learning experience, through which I hope to develop a little familiarity with so-called “indie publishing” — i.e., self-publishing. With any luck, this will redound to the benefit of the next few books I intend to market.

Waiting in the wings is How I Lost 30 Pounds in Four Months, a diet guide and recipe book. That, I think, has more potential for sales. Who doesn’t want to lose 30 pounds these days, eh?

Then the first installment of The Cottrite Chronicles, set in the far future: a novel called Fire-Rider. I hesitate to call it science fiction. Looks like the term for it is speculative fiction. Now, IMHO, that one is a fun read. So I’m hoping it will actually build a readership…specially since I’m already launched in the second book for that series.

And I have an idea for another sci-fi story…completely off the wall. Haven’t started writing it yet, but whenever I contemplate its premises, the damn thing strikes me as funny as a Douglas Adams novel. But funny may be in the eye of the beholder. 😉

And of course, there’s the usual array of how-to’s and pet stories. Hope to have four books in circulation by the end of this year and eight by the end of next year. That’s how much copy I have in the can, languishing on the hard drive.

Welp, it’s past bed-time and I have to be out the door at 6:45 tomorrow morning. And so, to bed.

How Mu¢h I$ That Puppy…

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Killed the better part of the day cleaning house, a job made bigger and longer and far more tedious than usual by the amazing puppy mess. Had I started the day feeling well enough to get any productive work done (which I most assuredly did not), we could have added a substantial opportunity cost to the price of owning Ruby (as she’s made herself known).

Turns out that corgis in general tend to be a little slow to house-train. Add to this supposed characteristic the theory that small, runt-like puppies such as Ruby may (or may not) be underdeveloped at birth and so “younger” in a way than their chronological age, and what you get is a gigantic mess. I’ve never had a dog that peed on the floor so extravagantly.

Fortunately, the entire house is paved with ceramic tile. But still: even though it’s relatively easy to clean up, it still has to be cleaned up. Ruby pees by mental telepathy — today I cleaned up a dried patch on the far side of a kiddie gate, where one would imagine the dog has never gone. So puddles get missed. And puddles get stepped in and tracked around the house. What a gawdawful mess.

So today I took it upon myself to sanitize the Funny Farm from stem to stern. Normally I would vacuum first, then dust-mop, then steam-mop. But because there was so much dog urine on the floors, I felt I ought to smear it around with some detergent. So, the order of business was

1. vacuum 1860 square feet of tile;
2. dust-mop 1860 square feet of tile;
3. wet-mop 1860 square feet of tile with a hot solution of Simple Green; and
4. steam-mop 1860 square feet of tile.

In effect, that is the equivalent of cleaning 7440 square feet of flooring (1860 • 4). By the time I finished, I thought I was gunna die. It took hours! Hours in which I did exactly zero paying work.

LOL! Father, forgive me, for I have $inned in what I have done and (especially!) in what I have left undone.

• I have not graded student papers.
• I have not responded to the 16 messages from benighted li’l students.
• I have not registered ISBNs for the diet guide/cookbook or Fire-Rider.
• I have not created a for-reference-only “chronological” list of events in book 1 of the Fire-Rider series.
• I have not finished compiling the formatted copy for the print-on-demand version of Slave Labor: The New Story of American Higher Education.
• I have not tracked down the guy who runs The Adjunct Project and begged for a plug.
• Nor have I asked said guy to let me contribute a post to his free-for-all website.
• I have not nagged BlueHost to remove the unused Beady-Eyed Babe site for which I continue to pay.
• I have not transferred incoming cash from PayPal to the corporate checking account.
• I have not billed the client for the latest unholy frenzy of work.
• I have not sent to another client a discussion of a relevant passage in John Gardner’s Art of Fiction, which, IMHO, would help him a great deal in framing his current revision.

Of these, only one is an immediately paying task. But all of them either cost me money or may one day create money for me. Instead, what have I been doing?

Scrubbing floors.

If that’s not an opportunity cost, I’d like to know what it is.

This puppy is cute. Very cute. But as it develops, one pays for cuteness. The other day, in a moment of desperation, I asked the vet for a recommendation to a trainer who might help expedite the house-training process, at which I felt I was failing abjectly.

She recommended a franchise outfit whose strategy involves using a remote collar to jolt the message home to the offending dawg. The woman who showed up at my house to give me a “free demonstration” (i.e., a sales pitch) explained that this thing works with a vibrator that indeed does feel very much like your cell phone vibrating, or with an electric shock comparable to a mild static zap.

(Ruby, by the way, has begun to get the idea. She hasn’t widdled on the floor today, and we managed to get through yesterday with only one puddle.)

Today the woman followed up by calling me on the phone to prod me to sign up. I explained (with only slight exaggeration) that I’m living on Social Security and cannot pay their silly prices.

They want — hang onto your hat — $795 (!!) for a package that entails two or more private lessons and “unlimited group classes” held in public parks. For only $695 (!) you can get the same with only one private lesson; any extra private lessons will set you back $145 apiece. Then they have an “Indoor Only Training” package for — wait for it…are you ready? — $1,299 (!!!!).

If you want to buy the whiz-bang remote collar, you have to pay $225.

Understand…remote vibrator/shock collars can be had from Amazon for about $65. For two of ’em.

I hafta ask you: Is it or is it not amazing that people will spend that kind of money on their pets? For services and products they can get for a fraction of the money? Or for free, if they’re willing to look up the instructions on the Internet?

The pet industry is a freaking gold mine, isn’t it?

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