Coffee heat rising

Angst

The Hotter’n’Hell, Pool Mess, Dog Menace, Little Ol’ Lady Jamboree

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These jamborees get better and better.

Arizona’s “monsoon” has finally arrived. What IS that? Rain, that’s all. It’s a late-summer rainy season. This is the time of year when reasonably tolerable 110-degree “dry” heat gives way to unreasonably intolerable swamp heat. Rainstorms blow in from the Sea of Cortez whilst it’s hotter than the hubs of Hades, combining soggy air with annoying temperatures. Sorta like a Georgia summer. ’Ceptin’ we don’t have no bitin’ flies…

Had to drive to the far West side to revisit the dermatologists, whose work of art looked less than artistic this morning. The current actinic diagnosis was regarded as just on the edge of flipping over to carcinoma…and it grew so fast it was enough to scare the bedoodles out of you, me, and a person with a degree in medical science. It’s not acting like previous frozen-off lesions have, so I called and asked….they said “get your butt out here.” That entailed about 90 minutes of driving through heat and unpleasant traffic.

There’s a big anvil cloud rising up like an angry cobra, off in the east. So I expect we’ll get more rain, more wind, and more mess in the pool.

The pool is cloudy again. Now it’s green cloudy, not gray cloudy. Just when I think I’ve got it fixed, it clouds back up again. Dumping wads of chlorine plus a third of a bottle of Skill-It into the water this morning did not help. Just dumped in more wads of chlorine plus more soda ash. I will be surprised if this works.

I think the filter needs to be cleaned. Its pressure gauge hasn’t moved off 10 psi since they replastered the puddle. And…y’know…THAT ain’t normal. Ohhhh no. You have no idea how ain’t normal that is.

I also suspect the plastering crew failed to apply stablizer when they refilled the puddle. That would explain the chronic cloudiness, and it would especially explain the volatility of the chlorine.

The pool replastering dude is supposed to come inspect on Friday. I called and suggested they should give me an estimate on jackhammering off the goddamned Pebblesheen surface and applying plain old-fashioned white plaster. He was audibly alarmed.

If you have or dream of getting a pool, for godsake do not EVER apply PebbleTec or PebbleSheen. I don’t know what that stuff is doing, but it has totally screwed up the system’s chemistry. And brushing the algae off the surface is a lost cause: the accursed coarse surface EATS pool brushes. It wrecks your pool cleaner, too, BTW.

Moving on…

I spent I dunno how long this morning driving around the neighborhood trying to map out a two-mile dog-and-human walking route that will take us out of the way of the Shi-Tsu Lady who, propped up with braces and two canes, hobbles along with her aggressive, lunging little doggy pest in a path that intersects our way. This remapping project is not an easy trick, since our usual route goes through the shadiest, coolest part of the ’Hood…and when it’s 90 degrees at 5 in the morning, “shady” and “cool” are fully operative terms.

No matter when I leave the house or what route I try to take through Richistan, we do not seem to be able to avoid the Shi-Tsu lady. The issue is that her little dog goes batshit berserk when it sees Ruby the Corgi, who tends to respond in kind. This would be annoying but maybe not problematic if this lady were not 93 years old (her admission) and barely ambulatory.

Here’s the issue:

Our lively old gal only barely has her 25-pound killer dog under control. In fact, she does not have it under control. And given the state she’s in, a frantic 25-pound dog could indeed pull her off her feet, with dire results.

I do not want this sweet old gal to get hurt just because I happen to be walking along her morning route with my dog, whose mere presence drives her dog into a frenzy. So…this is developing into a problem, since she surfaces over there no matter what ungodly hour I leave the house. Get out at 4:30? There she is. Have a halfway decent night’s sleep and leave the house at 5:00 a.m.? There she is. Wake up at 3:00 a.m., manage to get back to sleep (sort of…), and don’t hit the road until 5:30? There she is!

This is a problem, because when I see her I have to cut our walk short, and we don’t get the two miles needed to keep me in shape and the dog…doggish. Another potential problem has insinuated its way into my hot little brain: liability. If her out-of-control dog lunges at my lunging out-of-control dog, yanks her off her feet and breaks her hip (or her back, or God only knows what), what will be my liability for any such fiasco?

Dollars to donuts, a lawsuit will ensue.

So now I’m trying to find ways to get the doggywalk in without having to encounter this woman.

Welp, I made a little discovery. At one point the Shi-Tzu Lady remarked that she lives on a neighborhood street we’ll call Gentrification Lane.

The other day I drove past Gentrification Lane, a cul-de-sac off one of the streets on our route. Glancing up the road, I spotted a couple of white, unmarked mini-busses…the kind used by places like the Beatitudes to ferry the inmates to doctor’s appointments and occasional grocery-store outings. Hm. What if…thought I…what if she’s not actually “aging in place” in her own home but lives in one of those convalescent homes various marginal operators slip into neighborhoods?

So I drove down Gentrification Lane yesterday morning, on the way home from the gas station, where I needed to score a couple of overpriced gallons from the QT to fuel a junket out to the far west side and back.

Yeah. There are two houses down there that are suspiciously run down and do not look…well…like anybody who cares how they look lives there. Side by side. In the middle of an area full of upscale houses with high-value maintenance.

Look up the addresses and find, lo! one of them is owned by Hacienda Health Care, a place in which one vegetative patient was notoriously raped and impregnated by an employee. Said outfit was in the news a couple years ago when relatives found maggots in an out-of-it elderly patient’s surgical wound. Here in lovely free-market Arizona, though, this fine enterprise remains in business.

Intriguingly, Tony the Romanian Landlord has gotten out of the house-rental business and into the quasi-nursing home game. After the economy recovered from the recession, he bought a house over in South Lower Richistan, which he razed to the ground and replaced with  a two-story boarding house, which he presented as a convalescent home. He kept this for a few years, and then about a year ago sold it.

Then someone — Tony, dollars to donuts — purchased a house at the intersection of Secondary Feeder N/S and Main Feeder E/W and converted it into a residential care home. It had been a rental for a long time — well maintained and stable, so we know Tony was not the landlord. It was a rental before Tony came on the scene. And out of Tony’s price range, so one would think. But now I learn from my neighbor Josie that she managed to get out from under the truly grinding care of her demented husband Manny (whose marbles long ago fell out his ears and rolled off to Yuma) by getting him into Medicaid nursing care.

And where is he? In that house! He gets out and wanders around the corner there, looking kinda lost and embittered. That house last sold for $430,000…right about the time Tony sold the boarding house. It’s now estimated to be worth over $750,000.

And what do you bet Tony is either renting that house on Gentrification Lane to Hacienda or runs it as a nursing home himself and contracts to Hacienda for customers?

When he had the boarding house…uhm, first convalescent home…, he put Pretty Daughter over there in charge of it, as its “manager.” So now she would have Experience and could hire out to places like that as an administrator.

Never a dull moment here in Paradise. 😀

 

Stay? Or Move While You Can? The Old Lady’s Dilemma

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Had a 1 p.m. appointment with the skin doc yesterday, to get another sun-induced precancerous lesion removed. Normally I drive 9 miles north on the I-17 to the Loop 101, which will carry me 21.3 miles west and south to Indian School Road. From there it’s only a couple miles to the doctor’s office. (Think of that: 30 miles to find a decent doctor’s office! In the fifth-largest city in the nation!)

Well, stupidly when I go to turn off the surface street onto the 17, I go south instead of north (focusing what remains of my mind on getting to Indian School, eh?) Rather than get off the freeway a mile or two down the road, turn around, and drive back up to the 101, I decide to just drive down to Indian School and then proceed west the 10 miles across the surface street to 103rd Avenue. Said route is shorter, but more hectic.

Garden spot, west…

Surprisingly, this works exceptionally well! Everyone else is on the freeways wrestling with gawdawful traffic, and Indian School, now an eight-lane thoroughfare, is basically empty. I fly low through the westside blight and, to my astonishment, arrive at the doctor’s office a half-hour early. It’s only taken about 30 minutes, in spite of driving almost half the way on a surface street. This is a drive that can easily absorb almost an hour. On the effing freeways.

Huh. That was innaresting. So when I get out, I decide that instead of taking on the nasty freeway, I’ll drive all the way across the city on Indian School to Conduit of Blight Boulevard, and thence northward to the ’hood. Unless I get in a wreck, it’s unlikely the Venza will crap out in the (dangerous!) slums this route traverses. And anyway, being stuck in among lovely Maryvale’s title loan companies, marijuana dispensaries, warehouses, and corroding trailer parks surely would be no worse than being stuck by the side of the Interstate.

So I start driving driving driving, and once again I literally fly across the city. Hit every light green, and only one or two morons get in front of me or threaten to side-swipe me.

Now I arrive at Conduit of Blight.

You, too, can live in a fine shack like this…

SDXB and I used to live right down the road from this intersection. He, I, his mother, and his daughter & grand-daughter occupied four dwellings in a pretty, retro (read “agèd”) garden apartment complex that had been condominiumized. It actually was a very pleasant place to live, with irrigated lawns and huge, mature shade trees. Right behind it, to the east, stood a 1950s middle-class neighborhood that was in the process of gentrifying — it was sandwiched between our complex and the Phoenix College campus, and being just north of the VERY hot Encanto district was a target of the young and the upwardly mobile.

When I started to think about buying a house, I looked at a place in that neighborhood. It was very charming, and I almost bought it. SDXB talked me out of it, because it had an enclosed addition, and they’d kind of jury-rigged the air-conditioning ductwork into it. He thought the system would not cool or heat it efficiently, the power bills would be astronomical, and the room would never be especially usable.

Well. HOLY mackerel, did that man save my petootie!

I get to Conduit of Blight and start to drive north…and that whole area is a freakin’ slum! My god, what a wreck. The bank branch where Tootsie (his mom) used to do business: gone. The Greek/Italian restaurant where the local cops would hang out when they were off-duty: closed, and replaced by some bizarre…shady-looking…something. Stores where we used to shop: replaced with schlock, or empty and boarded up. Formerly solid middle-class to lower-middle-class housing: rotting away.

When I call this road “Conduit of Blight” on Funny about Money, I ain’t kiddin’.

Move to Phoenix and live next to this lovely train!

Drivin’ drivin’ drivin’… Arrive at the intersection where you turn east to get into the Costco parking lot. That area, which houses low-rise office buildings (three or four stories): blighted. No wonder Costco plans to close that store when the lease runs out! The office building where my son’s pediatrician used to practice: taken over by some kind of low-end social service thing, billing itself as a “school” but clearly…ghetto.

Not until you get almost to the southern border of the ’Hood do you start to pass beyond clear and present blight, and even then the apartments on the west side of Conduit of Blight are…well…shall we say, “low-end.” They’re Section 8 housing, a vast tract of alarming seediness.

SDXB may have been right to have moved to Sun City when he did. Amazingly enough, that was 16 years ago(!!!). I moved further into the ’hood at the same time he moved out to Sun City, getting myself as far from the obnoxious light-rail project (which runs up CofB Blvd, carrying the blight with it along with the drug addicts) as it was possible to move and still be in the marginally affordable part of the neighborhood. If you call $350,000 houses affordable…

I guess they do, nowadays.

What. A. Mess!!!

Which brings us back to the now-perennial question: Much as I love my house and love my neighbors and like living in a centrally located district, how wise is it to stay here into my dotage? In just another five years or so, moving house will be so difficult for me (given my age) that it may be impossible. And if this area goes to blight…one would not want to have to live in anything like the sh!t I drove through to get up here from mid-town.

The ’Hood has much in common with the historic Encanto District, which gentrified in our generation and which has remained gentrified — our house, for which we paid $33,000, recently sold for a million bucks. It’s a VERY hot area, because it’s centrally located (how do I hate driving on the homicidal streets of Phoenix? Imagine having to make a 30-mile commute to work through that stuff every goddamn day of your life! And back home: 60 miles a day!!) and because local people think older construction is better built than the new stick-and-styrofoam ticky-tacky. Lots are larger — my lot is about a quarter of an acre — and structures are built of block. Not necessarily a good thing, but people imagine it is. Which is what matters, I guess. And they think these 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s houses are — ohhhh! — “mid-century modern!”

Home, sweet (former) home

Well, we thought those old 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s houses were quaint as could be, too…so it seems to me that what we have here in the ’Hood is exactly the same thing. Encanto was surrounded by blight. The fanciest section — Palmcroft — was bordered by slum on the West, and the rest of the district had tired, run-down tracts to the south and east, with commercial stuff to the north. Not bad commercial stuff, but still…

You couldn’t put your child in the public schools there, because middle-class kids by and large don’t know how to use a knife or a club. One of our neighbors tried it and found their son, at the end of first grade, unable to read at all — the teacher had been reading their little kiddie books aloud in class and sending the kids to “read” them to their parents as homework…and this kid had simply memorized the teacher’s performance! One day they realized he couldn’t read street signs and billboards, and so asked him to read some other kiddie book. That’s when they discovered he couldn’t parse out a word! 😀

Ah, Arizona.

Same is true here: you’d be batsh!t crazy to put your kid in the public school that serves this area. Now, however, the city has capitulated and allows people to send their kids to any public school they choose, and so that gives young parents the option to live in a centrally located area without having to earn a king’s ransom to put the kids in private school.

If the ’Hood stays Encantoized — that is, if the present wave of gentrification sticks — it should be safe enough to stay in my home up to the end. But if it doesn’t? Holy sh!t. Moving out of here 10, 15, or 20 years from now — even if it’s possible for me to do so at all — would be quite a challenge.

So I agonize: whether to stay here, where I like it, or whether to get out now while I still can. We’re pushing the point where “still can” will no longer be operative.

Well, speaking of agonizing, gotta get up and work on the yard. And so, away!

Blood pressure drama, revisited…

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Those of you who follow Funny no doubt remember the saga that occurred when a doctor’s advice led me to obsess endlessly about my blood pressure.

Well, that stopped when I went out to the Mayo, where a PA in cardiology opined that I did not have high blood pressure and I should quit worrying about it.

I do have what is sometimes called “white coat syndrome,” in which a person with otherwise normal BP spikes high numbers whenever the measurement is taken in a doctor’s office or hospital. I am truly phobic about doctors and medical settings. I so hate going into doctor’s offices that I really do get pretty stressed out when I’m forced to go…so it’s reasonable to assume that nervousness and stress explain what led a cardiologist to try to get me on unnecessary medications for the rest of my life.

Losing ten pounds and exercising, however, seem to have brought the BP numbers down to normal, and down to almost normal in the doctor-office setting.

A few days ago, though, I read a report suggesting that people with white coat syndrome actually do experience elevated rates of cardiovascular events (heart attack and stroke), and so such patients should be saddled with blood-pressure meds willy-nilly. Well…fat chance! This is the sort of thing emanated by big pharma and spread through medical societies and government regulatory agencies whose funding depends on pharmaceutical companies. So I conditionally wrote that report off, pending more credible data.

But it did lead me to wonder what the BP numbers were doing, now that I’m older still and fatter again. And more to the point: now that my upper jaw no longer hurts chronically in the absence of the busted tooth. So decided to repeat the testing routine for a few days.

Hang onto your hat…

Over the past four days, my overall blood pressure average has been 124.64/74.95. The day before yesterday, my average day’s BP (morning & evening) was 119/67.

Heh. Wherever we are, it doesn’t seem to be anywhere near Death’s Door…

Adventures in Dental Science

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One fiasco after another. Old age is definitely no land for the young…

For quite some time, I’ve had a broken tooth, one of the forward molars. We haven’t been able to tell which one, because of the several crowns back there and because it was cracked, not actually busted. The dentist X-rayed that side of the mouth several times and could not find the crack. And I could not tell which of the two surviving upper molars emitted an electric shock of pain when I bit down just right…on just about anything.

Finally, however, the thing split apart. That hurt quite a bit. But interestingly, when the chip fell out a day or two later, the pain stopped altogether. Who’d’ve thunk it?

At any rate, all this meant the tooth had to be pulled. Dentist sent me to an endodontist, who proposed to dig it out, implant a “post” (which far as I can tell is basically a titanium screw).

However, when I told the endodontist about the supposed MRSA infection, he flew into a panic and said he couldn’t do the procedure.

What was I supposed to do about the broken tooth? He shrugged. Finally he suggested that I get a second nasal swab, and said if it was clear he would proceed.

Sooo…I had to trek out to the Mayo — halfway to Payson from my house — to get someone to stick a Q-tip up my nose. Again.

Astonishingly, the Mayo sent word that the MRSA test was negative. So the endodontist relented and scheduled a procedure for last Friday.

Naturally, I came down with a cold on Sunday. Never, EVER fails!

The cold is rather mild and the tooth situation was rather urgent, so we decided to go ahead with it. This meant I got to spend something over an hour on my back in the dentist’s chair, gagging on goop oozing down the back of my throat.

Ugh!!!!!

While it was uncomfortable — mostly because of the cold — the procedure was not painful. It was actually pretty interesting. His office has equipment that allows them to make 3-D X-rays of your teeth, which is amazing. And the amount of work and skill required to perform the trick of extracting a tooth in several pieces really is amazing.

So at any rate, the tooth is out. He insisted that I take a week-long course of clindamycin by way of fending off any potential infection. He remained concerned about the potential for MRSA, but resistant bugs or not, apparently dosing you with antibiotics is S.O.P.

Yes. Well. Unfortunately these days I’m allergic to just about every drug out there. And if a drug has a weird side effect that afflicts one in a million users, invariably I am number 1,000,000. At the risk of repeating myself: Never fails.

Clindamycin has a number of dire side effects. One of them is a skin thing that is incurable and causes your hide to fall off. Another is C. difficile overgrowth.

Right.

SDXB’s former wife died of a C. difficile infection. She died laying on her living room floor, where she was found by a neighbor about two days later.

Naturally, while I was at the endodontist’s having my gum sliced apart and the tooth wrenched out, the Mayo’s clinician Mona called on the phone asking me to call back to talk about that MRSA test. Naturally, by the time I got home it was after 5 p.m. and they were closed. So naturally, I get to worry about that all weekend.

Cripes. Let’s just hope all she wanted to say was that “negative” in your chart means “negative.”

Believing I would surely be in terrible pain, the endodontist handed me a prescription for oxycodone.

Besides the fact that I don’t take addictive drugs on principal, when I get it home I find it’s mixed with acetaminophen. I’m allergic to acetaminophen. It’s an NSAID. Interestingly, I’m allergic to all NSAIDS.

Luckily, I apparently don’t register pain the way normal people do. Probably because my menses were so excruciating, other pain seems negligible by comparison and tends not to bother me. Although the site where he’d extracted the tooth was sore, it certainly wasn’t enough to send me flying off the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. Got to sleep with no problem (so exhausted a jackhammer could have been going in the backyard and it wouldn’t have kept me awake).

Next morning I gaze into the mirror and find my face is swollen, which was not surprising. Then I developed a black-and-blue spot that makes me look like someone socked me in the face. Loveleeee. Both of these are normal, as it develops. But I sure could do without them.

Last night a member of the choir committee called to ask where the heck I’ve been and was I coming back. Of course, I’ve missed several times: last Sunday, and then again Wednesday evening. And yesterday morning: we have a concert this afternoon, which I’m also going to miss because I’m not rehearsed. I’ll be surprised, really, if he lets me sing this morning, since I wasn’t at rehearsal for today’s service.

And in fact, I’m still feeling pretty wrung out, so think I will just go over, drop off my choir folder & hymnal, grab my robes to bring them home to launder and store over the summer, and call it a day.

Or not. We have the annual end-of-season choir party tonight. My friend urged me to come to it. We shall see: by evening I am just wrung out, and by 5:30 p.m. I surely will not be the life of anything like a party. So that’s depressing. But I’ve just been too sick to think about it.

And so away, off to swallow another horsepill and toss some food in the blender. Whee!

A break in the clouds…

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Hallelujah, brothers and sisters, yonder breaks a beam of light through the clouds!

Yesterday developed into surprisingly de-toxifying day.

First off, I discovered the reason the MacBook was throwing out messages to the effect that it couldn’t hold all the data stored on iCloud was…ohhh, wait for it… BECAUSE… The damn computeris somehow CLONING ALL THE DATA FILES ON ITS HARD DRIVE…over and over and over again.

Call up the AppleCare people and reach the first tech there that I’ve ever talked to who hadn’t a clue. She had never heard of such a thing and didn’t know what to do, so she made me an appointment with the Apple “Geniuses.” Like I have nothing else to do with my time…

Whenever I get off the phone with her and calm down a bit, I think to do a Web search. Find an Apple user’s forum where a) some guy says you can get rid of the redundant files by shutting down and rebooting, and b) they will eventually come back. Another user reports that this is a function of the Sierra operating system. Say what????

Well, I’ve had this computer for two years and it’s been running on Sierra for almost that long and I’ve never seen endless strings of duplicate files before. Presumably older versions of Sierra didn’t do that. When the guys in Tennessee replaced everything in this device’s innards, they would have had to reload Sierra, and in doing so, they presumably would have loaded a slightly newer iteration of Sierra. Hence: iterations, all right: thousands of them!

Really, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I just CAN. NOT. DEAL. WITH. THIS. SH!T any longer!

At that point, I about decided to shut down The Copyeditor’s Desk. The computer headaches, the DropBox headaches, the PayPal headaches…all conspiring at once: it’s more than I can handle.

Naturally, the minute I make that decision, a new Chinese mathematician e-mails in a sweat, needing to get 10 (typeset!) pages of new copy edited and jammed into an article that’s already been provisionally accepted. He, however, is at the Great Desert University, where I have spies. And he has a bank account. So he at least can pay me. However, that means I have two book projects in hand, another pending, this math thing, and a computer that is laboring to undercut me.

But… But, indeed: his piping up reminded me that not all Chinese mathematicians, scientists, and scholars of business management labor away their lives on the Mainland! A whole lot of them live in the United States. And they can pay with checks. Or get their universities to pay with checks.

And how hard is it to make nice to these folks and cultivate that set?

He blinked not at all at my bracing  per-word rate, so I will be paid fairly for turning his golden words into publishable copy.

This sounds sooo weird, but I love copyediting these Chinese scientists’ copy. The beauty of a math paper is that if its author says something stupid, I don’t know it. That, alas, is not true of work in just about any other discipline. 😀

And most of the stuff is strangely interesting, at base.

He wants to meet next week and trudge through the new content, face-to-face. That’s a new one for me, but it should be interesting. I figure if I can make nice to him and not persuade him that I’m a complete idiot, he may refer me to colleagues.

Whiled away part of the day with another new client’s effort at science fiction writing. That was light and amusing and did not leave me in a rage. Which is good. Always good.

In the morning, I tested the blood pressure again — still obsessing about whatever it was that happened in the wee hours the day before yesterday. Back down into to fairly normal range: average 123/77. One reading was an amazing 115/75. Not bad for a 74-year-old, eh?

So I think it’s safe to assume the episode in the night was a stress attack, not a life-threatening cardiac event.

That alone relieved a whole lot of stress. So did the idea that I might simply fold The Copyeditor’s Desk and really, seriously retire retire.

And in the evening, we — the Women’s Schola — sang at Compline, a particularly lovely end-of-the-day service that, being absent the hoopla of a mass and all that, is a lovely, contemplative moment entirely sung and presented by candlelight. Meditative, it is. And a very fine antidote to crazy-making stress.

This service — Compline — is in my opinion the most lovely and spiritual event in the church’s entire repertoire. Hardly anybody seems to know about it: attendance can be numbered in the single digits. This is too bad, because a whole lot of people are missing out on something that ought not to be missed.

And now…away! Off to pick up the Old Folks, the first traffic-traipse of the day.

The Chaos Hangover

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The older you get, I think, the harder it is to deal with stress. And this past two weeks of unending techno-chaos have been nothing if not hideously stressful. Last night I enjoyed a fine hangover from that stress-storm…again, I think.

Along about 2:30 in the morning, a bright flare of pain and sweat woke me up. Gut pain, chest pain, shoulder ache…hard-to-tell pain.

Heart attack? Certainly could be. Chest pain and sweating are classic heart attack signs.

On the other hand(s):

  • It was 80 degrees in the house and I was under three layers of blankets.
  • The pain seemed to be on the outside of the ribs, not inside, not under the ribs, not under the sternum, not under the clavicle. Earlier this week I wrenched that shoulder again, wrestling the dog around the ’hood — the same shoulder I dislocated a couple years ago. Damn thing has been hurting for a couple weeks, every time I wake up.
  • The mastectomy scars hurt, in a low-key way. All the time. On the outside of the ribs. Press anyplace around that area, three or four inches to the north or south of the elegantly disguised scar, and it hurts. So if I’m sleeping in some kind of odd position, likely I’m going to wake up with my chest hurting. On the outside of the ribs, not inside, not under the ribs, not under the sternum, not under the clavicle….
  • Stress invariably creates some sort of malign hangover, usually of an unpredictable nature. And stress, frustration, time suck, and anguish have haunted every waking and sleeping moment of my existence for the past two or three weeks. I’ve lost 2/3 of my business base, my computers are a jumble, I can’t figure out how to use iCloud effectively (and don’t believe it can be used the way I need to have it work), and I feel generally f*cked over. In a big way. No wonder I’m having some kind of little tizzy…
  • Interestingly, sitting up eventually elicited a fine burp: gas! Maybe…ya think?…just maybe I shouldn’t have swiggled down that half-a-cup of cheap red wine right before turning off the light and pulling the pillow over my head.

Yes, I could call 911. They would not take me to the Mayo, where my doctor practices and which is the only local hospital in which I have anything resembling confidence. They would take me to the hospital of their convenience, where I decidedly do not want to go. And want or no want, I have soooo HAD it with doctors and doctoring, I would rather die right now today than go through any more of that. And no, my friends, I do not exaggerate.

Get up; repair to the hall closet. Chew a couple of vile Gaviscon tablets. As usual, this stuff has no effect other than to make me hate my taste buds. Remember the ranitidine stashed in the closet. That’s Zantac. Drop one of those. After about 30 or 45 minutes, this stuff seems to work.

Evidently not about to die, climb back into bed around the sleeping dog.

Resolve…

a) Quit drinking as a stress control strategy.
b) Test blood pressure sometime after sunrise; if systolic is over 140, call the quack on Monday. Maybe.

Well, come the dawn, the BP numbers are a little high: average 137/86.

On the other hand:

  • It’s hot.
  • I drank half a bottle of wine yesterday afternoon.
  • And then I spent half the night wrestling with the question of how to copy data from DropBox and from iCloud to Documents, whence we know for sure that Time Machine will copy it. It appears very likely that TM does not copy iCloud. Wouldncha know it. There is a LOT of data stored to these two fine thunderclouds…so much, in fact, that the MacBook just informed me that it doesn’t have enough space to absorb another gulp of this trash.
  • I hate loathe and despise taking my blood pressure, almost as much as I hate loathe and despise watching some underling in a doctor’s office do it wrong. That sentiment alone is enough to drive up one’s numbers.

Jayzus!

At any rate, planning a strategy for organizing and transferring all this data was quite the little project…as in “took two hours to figure it out in any rational way.”

Most of my stuff is now deleted from DropBox. It took two full days and then some to transfer this data over to iCloud, an apparent exercise in futility. Copying from iCloud to the MacBook’s hard disk only took a couple of hours this morning…but of course I can’t get it ALL on the hard disk, because the MacBook is now chuckablock full.

Next: run Time Machine to back up the MacBook, thereby saving this data in perpetuity. In fact, do a TM back up to not one but two external hard drives…hope to God the hard drives are large enough. Once this stuff is saved, delete all the really old, “archived” debris that no one, myself included, cares ever to see again. This should free up some space on the MacBook.

Then get into iCloud and delete sh!tloads of data, which has about maxed the space I’m paying for. A lot of this stuff is archived business and financial documents, which really need only to be saved in a couple of places — a backup drive and the MacBook. But other than that material, much of the remaining detritus can be deleted without much risk.

How do I hate this sh!t? Let me count the ways.

I am soooo sick of technohassles! Once again, another entire day is going to be spent watching machines grinding away. No work, paying or otherwise, is going to get done. I am going to be frustrated and angry by the time the day ends, and once again I will go to bed frustrated and angry. Which no doubt contributes to things like waking up at 2:30 in the morning with a hair-raising bellyache.

Please, God: send me a patient little quarterhorse, about 50 head of cattle, and 2000 acres of upland grass country.