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A Show and a Nice Day

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Garrison Keillor was in town today. Tina, M’hito, and I bought tickets to the late afternoon show, which we prefaced with a splendid meal at our favorite fancy restaurant in Tempe. The recent cold snap has done snapped and gone, so we were able to sit outside in the restaurant’s pretty garden.

While we were there, Tina spotted her favorite Suns player. 🙂 On the way out she had to stop and tell him how much she admired him, and to our amazement he agreed to let M’hijito take a picture of the two of them together. LOL!

So that was a high point.

GarrisonKeillorGKpressWe all enjoyed the show. It was a good thing we got out there three hours early and loafed around the restaurant after lunch. The place was packed. Gammage Auditorium, a sort of a wedding cake created by Frank Lloyd Wright in his dotage, holds more than 3,000 people, and every seat was sold.

The weather is back to its balmy self: 70ish during the day and mid-40s at night. Too late to save our plants: M’hijito says his lemon tree got the coup de grâce, another icing too much for it after the freeze we had two years ago. All of my citrus are also freezer-burned; to what extent they’ll be permanently damaged remains to be seen, but I’m pretty sure the lime will lose about a third of its canopy.

Several years late and many dollars short, I finally had a little insight that will remove a great deal of hassle from the potted plant freeze protection frenzy.

Usually I drag all the outdoor potted plants inside, which gets them out of the deep-freeze but makes a mess in the house and also makes it difficult or impossible to water them. Usually we get rain when temps drop into the 30s and 20s, but the drought continues — not a drop of precip for weeks. The freezing nights lasted a week this time, so by the time the plants could be safely dragged back outside, they were pretty parched.

You’ll recall my white-trash scheme to protect the potted ficus from last summer’s broiling dawn sun, which came pouring onto the back patio after the Devil-Pod Tree was cut down? Looked tacky but worked.

curtainoutdoorWell, it struck me that with the addition of just a few more cuphooks screwed into the beams holding up the back patio roof and the westside deck roofs, I could simply hang a few of the 87 gerjillion old sheets and defunct curtains (never throw away a piece of fabric!) to enclose those two spots. Many of the plants are already on tho patio or the deck; the others aren’t far from them. So with the help of the dolly, it would be easy to tuck all the potted plants inside a curtained space. Then get a few halogen shoplights, set them inside the “tents” — making sure they’re a good long way from anything flammable — and plug ’em in.

This would almost certainly protect the plants from the kind of light freezes we get around here; and since no fabric would be directly in contact with their foliage, they should escape the kind of freezer-burn they get where frost touches their covering.

Brillyant, eh?

When the weather’s better, strings of lights could be draped along the hooks, creating some nice decorative lighting.

Coming home to a sparkling clean house was also mighty nice, for a change. The scheme to break up the tiresome and tiring housecleaning project into small, once-a-day tasks is working in a big way. It’s so much easier. This morning the bathrooms were clean before I was even out of my nightshirt.

In addition to allowing you to keep the house clean without having to dedicate a half to a full day each week to unpleasant work, it can also let you devote more time to a given task to do a job more completely and better. Yesterday was “clean-the-kitchen” day. After the routine sink, stove, and countertop polishing, I cleaned the oven manually, something that’s been pending since the discovery that the self-cleaning function is unusable.

So that leaves me with a clean warming oven that can’t be used for much else. Anything that might splatter grease or drip juices will have to be cooked in the grill. Pisses me off, but at least if I ever put the house on the market, I won’t have to stick my head in a metal box full of Easy-Off fumes.

The furniture that got oiled earlier in the week still looked great, so I decided to take the English oil to the kitchen cabinets, too. That was a big job. Though there aren’t very many of them, rubbing oil into woodwork that goes all the way to the ceiling and then polishing it off isn’t much fun. But it worked. The damn kitchen practically glows in the dark!

What an incredible sensation, to walk into a kitchen in the morning and find it completely, totally clean!

All this cleaning and gallivanting and wrestling with yardwork has kept me away from the computer, not an unwelcome development.

Lately I’ve come to feel mighty sick of sitting in front of a computer monitor. It’s no wonder my back hurts — who knows how many of this year’s little ailments have been brought on by spending hour after hour sitting at a desk? When scrubbing toxic oils into cabinetry and furniture feels like a welcome break, you know you’ve been sitting on your tush way too long!

This morning I walked away from 104 unread e-mails, several of them from clients and from FaM’s ad agent. Just couldn’t bring myself to deal with them.

This afternoon I deleted every blat from Twitter and Facebook and routed future messages from those sites into the trash. Deleted every blat from Google Calendar, figured out how to make it quit sending “notices” saying “you have nothing doing today,” a constant annoyance. This cut the urgent e-mail chores to only 30. And they will have to wait until tomorrow. I’m not workin’ on that stuff on a Saturday night.

Really. E-mail has morphed from a convenience to a nuisance. No wonder the young people decline to use it in favor of texting.

Image: Garrison Keillor. Jonathunder. GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.

 

Cute Li’l Place…

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Okay, all you folks who observed that seven rooms sprawling over 1,860 square feet is a bit much for one single old bat: how d’you like this little patio home?

Needs work, IMHO, but it’s kinda cute, isn’t it? That thing is about a block from the church — maybe a little less, actually. I could walk to choir practice (though walking back at 9:00 p.m. might not be well advised). It’s very central. On a good day I could actually walk to my favorite purveyor of gourmet groceries. I could even walk to my son’s house. Wouldn’t he be thrilled! 🙄

Theoretically the area is in a prime part of Our Beloved City, off North Central between Seventh Street and Seventh Avenue. In reality, though, it’s on a street zoned some decades ago for high-density housing, and so is part of a motley collection of aging apartments and patio homes. One of these little developments, right across the street from the church, has been converted into a rather grim-looking nursing home. If you can get to the page that lets you view the street, you see it’s right next door to a sixties-looking two-story apartment building. It must be pretty much surrounded with those, plus it’s sandwiched between two schools: noisy, crowded, and starting to run down at the heels.

On the other hand, the price is incredibly right: $129,000, and you probably could get it for less.

But back on the first hand…if I cleared $180,000 from the sale of my palace and scored that thing for $125,000, I’d have $55,000, all of which would probably be consumed in making the joint habitable.

Those pink carpets…OUCH! They make your eyes hurt just looking at them in a photo. The walls appear to be painted shiny raspberry, perfectly godawful. Or green. Or white. Whatever…I hate shiny paint, especially on the ceilings (!!), and so even if it weren’t Kool-Aid Pink, it’d have to be repainted. That glossy stuff would take some prep and might require two coats to cover: $1,000.

But before we painted, I’d be wanting to do something about the slit-shaped pass-through between the kitchen and the living area. Actually, the kitchen is kind of amazing for such a little place: look at all that cabinetry. Yes, it does appear to be pickled oak…yet it redeems itself by its plenteousness. But…it’s ugleeeeeeee! One might paint it. Or dub it “retro” and get used to it.

I’d want to take out that soffit with the long row of single-door over-the-counter cabinets. That would open up the space pretty well. Removing the ledge thingie and making the countertop flat would complete the effect. Imagine that countertop, flat, with no ugly soffit over it, and made of granite… Hm.

So, another eight hundred to a thousand dollah to pull out the soffit with the cabinets and do some drywall work. Countertop? Anyone’s guess. Can’t tell how long it is, really, so I’d hesitate to hazard a guess. It appears to be formica, not too offensive…if it’s in good condition, it could sit there for a few months or years while one dealt with more drastic offenses.

Pendantlight_Like, for example, that fluorescent ceiling. Oh gawd, hideous, eye-scorching fluorescents! What I’d want to do is take the lights out, and then build a skylight into the cove. Then install recessed lighting all around the perimeter of the thing, with maybe some cool glass hanging lights hovering over the countertops. Skylight plus drywall plus rewiring: about $1500, I’d guess.

Those pendant lights that used to be blindingly expensive when they were at the pinnacle of snooty high style are now available at Home Depot and waypoints, pretty reasonably priced.  Could be kinda nice over a completely flat, ledge-free counter, demarcating the living room from the kitchen.

Then the flooring. Holy mackerel. Tired vinyl (undoubtedly tainted with asbestos) in the kitchen and gaudy rose carpets throughout the rest of the joint. I’d probably want to put down wood or a convincing imitation thereof. Hm. Fifteen hundred square feet of it. What? $8000? Bet you couldn’t get it done for much less than five grand.

And we have the accursed electric stove. The place has gas service. “Gas heat” means they probably have a single line going to the gas pack on the roof that’s not a large enough gauge to serve any other appliances. So if you want a real stove, what you have to do is switch out the gas pack for a heat pump: $5,000.

Then you have a plumber run a line into the kitchen. Cost: depends on the difficulty of the job. I got mine done pretty cheaply, but it usually costs a pretty penny. All told, though, this project is going to run around $5,000 to $6,000.

New gas stove: $530 for a decent Kenmore free-standing gas stove; about a hundred dollah less for one that looks flimsier but would do the job just fine. Delivery & installation, probably another $100.

Usually the dishwasher has to be replaced: $500, plus or minus.

I’ve never moved into a house whose water heater didn’t have to be replaced forthwith: 40 gallons, nine-year, natural gas, $485. Plus installation, prob’ly another hundred bucks.

That strange little alcove behind the square arch looks like an add-on. It probably started life as a patio. That or a one-car garage: notice the ad doesn’t say anything about parking. Though it looks like a professional job, add-ons are notoriously hard to air-condition here in Arizona.

Notice all those floor and table fans. What are they trying to say to us?

There’s only one bathroom, and it looks like it only has a shower. Seriously? No bathtub?

If I’m right that the place has no garage, then the only storage may be that kitchen cabinetry. The bedrooms don’t appear to have anything special in the way of closets, and nothing else is highlighted in the ad. Explains the uglification, anyway.

No patio roof, meaning no shady place to sit and read the paper over coffee. No private place outside at all, though it must be said that the grounds are pretty pleasant.

Don’t you love the way the Realtor doesn’t mention what kind of plumbing is behind those walls? Interesting. Built in 1963…were they still installing black iron in those days?

Over here one finds a little more information: you get a storage shed, a carport, and a “slab” (i.e., uncovered parking space).

The homeowner’s association fee is a bracing $367 a month…but it includes a lot. My water, sewer, & trash pickup bill this month was $91; I pay Gerardo $75 a month for the yard work; I’m paying about $70 a month for the high-speed Internet connection, which is cable that doesn’t include television. So we’re at $236 right there, and that’s for a month when the water bill is low. In the summer water can go up to almost $200; so let’s imagine the bill averages around $145: total out of my pocket for services covered by the HOA fee would be $290, and the HOA fee also covers exterior maintenance, roof repair, and roof replacement. Looks like it’s about a wash.

It’s in the Arizona Public Service electric district, which means $300+ power bills in the summer. Way more than I pay APS’s competish, Salt River Project. It probably would cost the same or more to live there as it does to live here.

What would the fix-up and doll-up costs come to? Let’s see…

MoveToMdGardens

Mm hmh.  I’ve never had a move into a pre-owned shack cost me less than 40 grand, but that’s always included landscaping work. Ripping out the lawn and replacing it with desert landscaping ain’t cheap, even if it does pay for itself within a few years. So let’s assume the figure in the “realistic” column, conservatively adjusted for Murphy’s Law, is about right.

Maybe, I might clear around $55,000 in cash on the sale of this house after buying that patio home. Fifty-five grand minus $36,700 leaves $18,300, enough to buy a pretty nice new car, assuming a trade-in value of $3,000 on the Dog Chariot.

Not bad.

Think I should hurry out and buy it?

Breaking Down a Job into Its Components

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A little revelation dawned today: a part of a large job that I thought was the easiest part is actually the largest PITA and the hardest part of the job. Is it possible that when we think of a job that consists of a series of tasks, we may over- or underestimate the amount of energy or time required for any given one of those tasks?

As you may recall, if you’re doggèd enough to read this blog all the time, a week or so ago I decided to follow my friend KJG’s advice to divide the misery that is housecleaning into one task a day. This scheme has many things to recommend it, not the least of which is that one can maintain one’s shack without the weekly housecleaning frenzy that reduces one to a blob of exhausted jelly.

The plan  has been chugging right along this week: Monday, vacuum & dust-mop 1860 square feet of tile floors; Tuesday, steam-mop floors; today, dust and do pool maintenance…

Okay. Vacuuming and dustmopping were pretty easy. Steam-mopping the whole house: piece of cake. Dusting…ho-o-o-llleeee mackerel!

Maybe it’s because I haven’t done a halfway decent job of cleaning in more months than I’ve been alive. Or maybe it’s because I hate it, because here in lovely uptown Arizona you can dust the furniture on a Wednesday and write your name on the coffee table on Thursday. Something there is about futility that doesn’t lend itself to enthusiasm. Or…maybe it’s that dusting seven rooms of furniture, blinds, ceiling fans, bookcases, framed pictures, framed mirrors, door frames, molding, curtain rods, and miscellaneous doo-dads is, objectively, a MUCH larger job than merely pushing a machine or a dustmop across a couple thousand square feet of flooring.

Thot i wuz gunna DIE by the time i finished!

Part of the problem is, I’ve neglected this job for way, way too long. “Dusting” has entailed a kiss-and-run swat with a microfiber rag for lo! these many months. With the day focused on just one job, one is led to think…

• Gosh, those beloved Thos. Moser chairs are looking downright dessicated.

• Is there anything I can do about those gouges in the top of the family room desk?

• When did this chair in the bedroom develop a crack in its underpinnings?

• Dang, but my office desk is filthy! Can’t I scrub up all that body oil and grime from around the keyboard and rodent?

• How is it possible for so much dust to have accrued on the lampshades?

• Why does the rodent, in the absence of a mouse pad, deposit a galaxy of gummy little black spots all over the desktop?

• Maybe one ought not to pile a modem, a router, a gadget with a jillion USB ports, a defunct cell phone, a camera case, and a spaghetti pile of cables into one box thingie at the back of the desk.

• Why has it taken two microfiber rags to dust the bedrooms and now already I need another clean one?

• I’m going to have to sit down with a dry paintbrush to get the dust off all these accursed fake flowers and foliage.

And so on.

But neglect aside, I suspect that what seems like a small part of the project really has always been much larger than I perceived.

Consider: in the first place, you can’t pick up the office so as to find surfaces to dust without tending to the vast piles of paper that flow in through the mail. So the day started out with bookkeeping and filing tasks that I never welcome. Took an hour to move the junk off the desk, and there wasn’t even that much junk!

Or there was: Entered data from three months’ worth of brokerage and IRA statements. One could say I got behind…considerably behind.

Same is true with the rest of the rooms: stuff has got to be picked up and put away or thrown out before you can get to the stage where you can clean the dust off things.

Often, too, one repair or another has to be made, and these tasks may expand into more tasks. Today, for example, I happened to remember my mother’s folk remedy for scratched table tops: walnuts. This required me to defrost a walnut, since said provisions reside in the freezer.

Massaged a great deal of walnut meat and oil into the maze of scratches ripped into a rather beautiful desk top by whatever mystery material had attached itself to my laptop one day. A stone, presumably. Whatever, it made one heckuva a mess.

As a matter of fact, the walnut trick worked pretty well. Of course, it didn’t fill in the deep scratches that whatever-it-was inflicted. But it disguised them nicely, blending well into the cherry finish. Now I had a schmear of walnut oil in the middle of the tabletop.

Drag out the English Oil and some old rags. Apply said oil to the table; polish polish polish polish polish polish… DAMN but that looks good!!!!!!

And now that the family-room desk looks freaking gorgeous, everything else in the room, including two extravagantly expensive cherry and ash chairs, looks pretty tired.

Proceed to oil the chairs, the media cabinet, the dining room table, the dining room chairs, the three nesting tables, the Stickley table in the living room, the Indian table my father liberated from the docks in Ras Tanura, the weird Mexican folding desk, the annoying Ethan Allen coffee table whose excessively shiny surface the greyhound scratched within an hour after its delivery, and a fair amount of floor tiling onto which I slopped English oil. Scrub English oil off the tilework.

At this point, work has begun to expand to fill all available space…

By the time I finish, I’ve dragged pieces of furniture around and dragged them back into place, climbed up to the ceiling fans (balancing on the bed and chairs to reach them), crawled around on the floor, dragged basket after basket of trash out to the recycling bin, repaired a cabinet door latch, done battle with the Venetian blinds, cleaned the top of the refrigerator, scrubbed fingerprints off the woodwork, and on and on…

It may be that this is characteristic of jobs in the workplace as well as in our personal lives: that we think of some routine tasks as being smaller or taking less time than they really do. If that’s the case, it becomes a time management issue for each of us, and for managers or administrators, it becomes a personnel issue.

If we don’t have a good grip on how much effort or time a given activity takes, then we’re at risk of overwork, missed deadlines, or job burnout — and we may not even know why. With the teaching, for example, the amount of time consumed by course preparation and setting up websites is phenomenal (especially if you use Blackboard) — and since for adjuncts it’s unpaid time, keeping that task under control is useful. Similarly, when I was running the Great Desert University’s scholarly journals office, my dean undoubtedly was not aware of how much of my time was being wasted by riding herd on my eccentric secretary. As a result, she (the dean) allowed the situation to simmer along until I let it be known, by deliberately launching a message to a part of the grapevine that I knew would quickly get back to her, that if said secretary wasn’t gone by a certain date, I was going to quit. Had she been more aware, as a manager, of how her underlings’ time was breaking down, things never would have gone that far.

The take-away message? Maybe it’s a good idea to review tasks occasionally to identify those that are the most time-consuming, if for no other reason than to budget adequate time to complete them — but ideally, to consider ways to do them more efficiently.

 

 

 

Totally Tubuler ICE!

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Frozen_Wappinger_CreekGood grief. It is sooooo cold outdoors that the water in the backyard hose has frozen into a thirty-foot-long tube.

No joke. Last night I turned the hosebib to “dribble” by way of protecting the plumbing. Long about bed-time, the dog wanted to go out, and what should we encounter in the backyard but le deluge! The hose is leaking at the juncture of the two pieces I’ve connected.

These are RV hoses, much lighter than ordinary garden hoses and so easier for me to haul around. You can safely drink out of them, too, which is good because the yard dudes and other workmen will often gulp water out of a garden hose. But RV hoses come in short lengths, so you have to connect two of ’em to come up with a hose that will reach where you need it.

By 11 p.m. the hose that was furthest from the house had frozen solid. The length that was directly attached to the hosebib was still unfrozen, so water had burst out of the connection between the two hoses and flooded the patio.

This morning you could’ve gone ice-skating out there!

It’s after noon, and the two pieces of hose are still frozen solid. One has cracked, but the other looks OK. Disconnected that one and laid it out in the sun, hoping it’ll defrost by evening.

Temps dropped into the 20s here last night. At 7 this morning the thermometer on the back porch read 28. Everything that wasn’t covered is damaged or lost.

The citrus are already noticeably frost-burned, even the tough old oranges. Their leaves should grow back in a year or so, but it remains to be seen whether they’ll flower this spring and whether the fruit that’s on the trees — a LOT of fruit! — will survive.

I’m going to be extremely unhappy if all those candy-sweet oranges are trashed. Ordinarily that fruit supplies my breakfasts, generously, from January through the middle of April. I’ve pulled off a few and they look OK, but much more of this kind of cold and they certainly won’t be.

A sheet blew off one of the bougainvillas, so that plant is now history. The others look OK, far as I can tell by peeking under the coverings. Unfortunately the citrus trees are way too big for me to cover, so they will be seriously damaged if this keeps up for another few nights.

Down at the dentist’s office, the staff were huddled in heavy sweaters. They said the high-rise that houses their office was freezing when they came in this morning, the systems having been powered down over the weekend. The receptionist was shivering in her boots!

As for the dentist  himself, he wasn’t too alarmed by the current TMJ spate, since there’s no clicking sounds when I move the jaw and since the specific pain points are not out of the ordinary. He speculated that it was caused by the late, great infinite-loop of an indexing job said to go back to using the annoying mouthguard until it goes away.

At Chuck’s Auto Service, where I dropped by to see if they could fix a busted tail-light, the men had NO heater in their garage. Zero, zip heat. Ohhhhhh! I don’t see how they could hold a screwdriver in their frozen paws, much less do any work with it. Chuck was driving a customer home (no doubt taking advantage of the car’s heater…bet he was in no hurry to get back to the shop!), but two of the guys were under the lifts.

They said they knew an aftermarket retailer where they could get the part for a lot less than Toyota charges. I’m sure it still won’t be cheap, though…. Ran into a concrete planter that had been artfully placed in the middle of a parking lot and painted dark brown, rendering it virtually invisible after dark. Charming. The collision sounded like it did a lot of damage, but no: only the red glass on the rear turn signal shattered. The bulb inside still works, and there’s no denting of the body.

So it coulda been worse.

I hunger and so I am going to see if the grill works in Arctic temperatures…

 Image: Frozen waterfall. Juliancolton.  Public domain.

Live-Blogging from inside a Cotton Cocoon

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woo-OOOOO-ooooo! The world’s looking a little undulatory today.

The cyclobenzeprine gunk is working, thought it’s taken a couple days to kick in. The late TMJ episode was the proverbial straw: decided to take a chance that the stuff wouldn’t elicit visions of sugarplums floating on an island in the middle of the iceberg-cold pool to a sound track of “Bali Hai Is Calling.” Dropped half a pill that night; another half in the morning; then, seeing no serious ill effect, gulped a whole pill down in the evening.

Yesterday brought enough improvement to be noticeable, and by evening I was able to eat, more or less, by forcing my teeth to come together, and didn’t have to hang my jaw open like an adenoid idiot to make the hearing work in the right ear. Scarfed down another a half-a-pill before heading out to choir this morning.

By the time choir ended, I was feeling no pain, literally and figuratively.

Well….maybe not “no” pain, but today I can close the mouth normally and the hearing is back to normal. The spasmed muscle in the rib cage is now tolerable, the upper back spasm almost gone, and the lower back pain barely noticeable.

Wonder if you have to snarf pills forever to keep the muscle pain at bay, or if it’ll go away after it’s calmed down a bit. I really don’t want to  keep taking muscle relaxants any longer than absolutely necessary. The price for all this soothing (besides the $17 price tag) is a craving for gallons of water, mild dizziness, and a sense of being ever so slightly disoriented. I really can’t be driving around in that state.

All right. Enough of that! Let’s see what’s going on outside of LaLaLand…

Donna Freedman mourns the loss of yet another potential grandchild and her heart aches for her daughter’s sorrow. This is an eloquent, heart-rending piece of writing from an extraordinary writer.

At I Pick Up Pennies, daughter Abbie is picking herself up and trudging on, largely by focusing on the small everyday things of life.

In other precincts, Evan and The Wife are moving. And it’s one of those gawdawful moves where you have to get out of your existing house and have no place to go until the new place is ready. Fortunately they have family to help out. But this strategy is never fun.

Revanche, to my amazement, was brave enough to order a pizza from a widely reviled chain. After the comedy of errors that followed, she’s not  likely to repeat that experiment. In another lively post at A Gai Shan Life, she demonstrates why she and PiC were willing to spend $8500 on surgery for Doggle.

TB has another tale of the blue-collar life. Reminded me of the time I walked off a job…one of these days, I’ll have to tell you that story…

In the more-is-better department, Mrs. Accountability reflects that sometimes raising three kids can be cheaper than raising two.

Mrs. PoP poses a mystery in a winsome post about her husband’s hobby…or male bonding activity.

And in the WTF? department, check out Consumerist’s report of the weirdness that is Anthropologie.

Frugal Scholar compares accumulated household clutter to head congestion and braces for the cure.

Money Beagle has an outstanding post reflecting on the reasons for the pigheadedness that dominates today’s national discourse.

Nicoleandmaggie have got a brisk conversation going on the question of the dreadful gifts people give each other.

eemusings asks NZ Muse readers if they’ve ever recommended a friend for a job.

And Five-Cent Nickel asks if you’d be willing to pay a premium for the privilege of stashing more money into a Roth IRA.

Crystal at Budgeting in the Fun Stuff posts the 2013 post-Big-Move budget. Looks pretty promising, too.

Welp, time to go to chant choir…and so, off and running.

 

 

 

One Thing after Another

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Welp, I gave up on the resistance to the cyclobenzaprine. The back pain had about subsided to a normal level without a little help from my friends. Right now it’s just the standard stiffness of old age. But yesterday what should come along but a roaring flare-up of TMJ syndrome.

To my mind, the TMJ is worse than the backache. I can’t hear out of one ear, can’t close my jaw, can’t eat.

So yesterday morning out came the unopened bottle of pills. Took half of one in the morning. No little blue men materialized out of the air, so I figured it wasn’t going to have any psychoactive effects. Not soon, at least. Didn’t do much for the TMJ, either. So at night I swallowed a whole pill.

Slept all night. That was nice. Awoke refreshed. That was amazing.

Did it have any effect on the injured ear and jaw? Unclear. Still can’t hear well, but the jaw doesn’t have to be held open quite as far to ease the ear discomfort. Still can’t bring the teeth together without pain, which means I still won’t be able to eat without pain.

Shee-ut. This has become a pattern: Just get almost over one ailment and WHACK! Another one comes along. You can be sure that just as this starts to clear up, I’ll get the flu. Which probably will devolve into bronchitis again.

So this is old age, eh? Well. No wonder old people whine about their aches and pains all the time. I’d rather die than keep on like this, stumbling from one misery to the next. And seriously, if this sequence of ailment after ailment after ailment doesn’t quit soon, it may be time to think about how to make it stop. There’s really no future when you live from pain to pain and spend your days in doctors’ offices and ERs. Why bother?