Coffee heat rising

Annals of the Floored & Flabbergasted

Pool Dudes, Yard Dudes, Irrigation Dudes…Great Guys

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Y’day I was bellyaching here about the calcium build-up on the pool’s tilework. Figured to have to call Swimming Pool Service & Repair, an outfit whose service prices hover in the outer regions of the stratosphere. Long about evening, I jump in the drink to cool off. Paddle around. And discover…Lo!

Pool Dude, having visited Monday morning. has somehow removed ALL that stuck-on calcium!!!

How, I cannot imagine. For me to remove it, I have to take a paint scraper to it. He sure didn’t do that. Must be some kind of chemical that melts it off. Acid?

Didn’t test the water, ’cause I didn’t want to be scared off from swimming. It’s hotter than the Hubs here, and humid clouds are building up.

Meanwile, Irrigation Dude has fixed the busted sprinkler head, the one that was dousing the front window with Niagara Falls. The system is now working normally. Bless’im!

The Yard Dudes have, incredibly, kept the alley’s weed growth under control behind the backyard wall. Directly across the alley, the weeds are up to your fanny along the Kids’ wall. What a mess! And, might add, what a fine fire hazard.

Ugh. This damn covid really takes it out of you!

It’s only 8:30 in the morning, and I am gonna hafta go back to sleep. True: Ruby and I were up at 5;30. Slammed out the daily walk not only before the heat came up but before most of the morning commuters were up. I suppose that’s not bad for a human that’s halfway to Death’s Door. But the upshot is, I’m so tired I can barely function.

Some People Are Too Nice!

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To lay a little more frosting on the cake, the irrigation system sprang a leak. In front. Right next to the front bedroom window, soaking the window, the nylon screening, and the wall every morning as the water came on. Argh!

So I called the irrigation guy, who made some time in his afternoon to come over and fix the darn thing. Didn’t look very hard…but you needed the part and you needed to know what to do with it.

As we chatted about…what? Everything!…

• Our kids
• Our families
• Our pets
• Floating down the Salt River
• Living in Arizona
• Life
• The Universe
• And all that…

…I thought what a nice man!

If I were a guy… I think I might prefer a hands-on craftsman’s job to a desk job where you’re parked in front of a brain-banging computer all day. Maybe that contributes to his cheerful and pleasant nature.

But…hmmm…

Maybe not. It would depend on whether you could make a genuinely living wage in the crafts. He probably does — the guy charged $100 for the house call. Yes: from my point of view, cringe-worthy….but cheaper than eventually having to replace the window frame and screen. And for sure, there was no way I could fix that irrigation thingie.

From my point of view, he saved me a lot of aggravation (at least) and eliminated any further damage from spraying water.

From his point of view, he made $100 for an hour of his time.

That’s as much as my fancy lawyer ex-husband made! And for sure, a corporate lawyer doesn’t make small talk about the kids and whatnot while he’s engaged with contract law.

Y’know, it strikes me that some (not all) of the craft jobs could very well be better gigs, career-wise, than lawyering. Pay is certainly adequate — possibly comparable.  You’re not stuck in an office all day and then some. Most of these guys — Irrigation Dude is one of them — limit their work days to Monday through Friday and their work hours to 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. While it’s true you’d be driving through the crazy-making traffic all day, still…you wouldn’t have…

• firm meetings
• crazy partners
• political correctness
• crooked clients
• judges to deal with
• politicians to deal with
• office politics
• stress intense enough to make you sick

How is that better than filling your days installing, maintaining, and repairing irrigation systems? Or building furniture? Or painting houses?

Maybe, just maybe…it’s not.

 

Coviding to Pretoria…

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Yes…the covid bug keeps marching along here. Actually, the little fella seems to be slowly marching toward the door.

Maybe we shouldn’t even say “slowly,” come to think of it.  Truth to tell, I’m pretty amazed at how fast this thing seems to be clearing up. Not that I’m ready to rise from my deathbed yet…

Today the thermometer (such as it is) is registering in the normal range. Just took a reading: 98 degrees.

Since I’m quite the cold fish (you’re surprised?), that’s smack in the middle of normal for me: 97.6± to 98.2± . And strangely, I also seem to be feeling better.

“Seem” because that proposition strikes me as mighty bizarre. I was splendidly sick just the other day — felt like a heavy case of the flu coming on. But instead of “coming on,” it seems to have just struck a glancing blow.

Still have a resonant cough…but it’s better than it was yesterday, and has never reached the inglorious heights of the kind of cough I normally get with the flu.

Hmmm…  If this is not atypical, it would explain the rapid spread of the disease. People think they’re getting over it, so naturally get up and go about their business: off to the office, the gas station, the grocery store, the school room…. We’re probably moving  back into the current of daily life too soon. If you feel better but the virus is quietly lurking, no doubt you would spread it around by getting  back to daily business before the infection is fully cleared up.

It’s difficult if not impossible to NOT spread your germs or pick up other folks’ germs, if you live in American society. Virtually anything you need to acquire for your daily living needs — food, meds, pet gear, gasoline, propane, you-name-it — is to be had from retail stores. And a fair number of those things can’t be selected by an Instacart runner.

That’s especially true if you eat real food — fresh vegetables, meats, and fruits. Instacart runners are like most people. And most people tend to eat mostly processed foods. They don’t have the faintest idea how to select fresh produce. So they bring you limp, brown, under-ripe, over-ripe junk. You need to be there in the store to pick out those kinds of goodies. Same is true, to a lesser extent, of meat. Want a steak? They grab the first cling-wrapped cut they spot in the butcher cabinet.

Sooo…that means that if you favor whole foods, Instacart (alas!) is not for you.

No grocery shopping today…but nevertheless I found myself running unhappily from pillar to post. I lost my mercury thermometer — the one that registers an accurate reading, every time you use it. Searches in every place I might possibly have put it “away” failed. And those digital thermometers…what a joke!

I have two of them (because I’ve found they tend to be inaccurate). They’ve been all over the map every time I’ve used them. One will say 98; the other will say 98.7. One will say 97.7; the other will say 98 or even 99. So…I think they’re pretty much useless. They might tell you — or not — if your fever was through the roof. But the range is so wide they’re not very useful or credible.

So I ventured forth to buy a new mercury thermometer. A-n-n-n-d…guess what? NO ONE sells them. I went to SIX stores, from pharmacies to supermarkets, and could not find a one of them! Look up “mercury thermometer” at Amazon, and you get “mercury-free” thermometers. Gee, thanks, Amazon, for reading my mind! /eyeroll/

Evidently, then, this another amenity Big Brother has taken out of our sticky little hands.

At any rate, if indeed the present cold/cough is covid (how do I doubt it? let me count the ways!), IF that is so, then evidently the course of three anti-covid vaccinations was genius.

***

What a world we live in! Covid is the least of it. Today’s news is festooned with reports of shooting incidents. Locally: at a so-called “alternative” high school for less-than-perfectly-accomplished high-school kids. Dayum!

Well. If I were a kid, I would be less than pleased if my parents or the authorities shunted me off to an “alternative” school for problem children.  I personally hated school, starting in the 2nd grade. The idiot teacher who took over our class that year remains a searing memory, and after that…what? One outstandingly excellent teacher. The next: a mean witch who taught us little to nothing. Next: really quite a nice lady and a good teacher, but by that time the little monsters in the class had crawled out of their shells, noticed me, and begun to make it their business to make me miserable. They were good at it, too!  Fourth-grade teacher: not qualified to teach earthworms — truly, one of the stupidest human beings I have ever met. Fifth- and sixth-grade: HOLY mackerel what a witch!

If that’s comparable to what you find in stateside public schools, no one with a measurable IQ should be required to attend. 😀

Fortunately, it’s not. My mother finally figured out what was going on, along about the time I hit the sixth grade. At that point she demanded to take me home. Dunno if she threatened to divorce my father over it or whether the threat was implicit…but whatEVER. He did let us go back to the States, where my mother managed to get me into an excellent public school in San Francisco.

You know…we had gang-bangers in those schools — at least, we did in high school. We had kids in grade school who were as crazy and as alienated as I was (not many, but still…I never took my father’s Ruger to school and shot up the place) (maybe only because I never thought of it…). I wonder what conditions have changed so radically as to lead young Americans to plan and execute mass shootings?

Something HAS changed, apparently something fundamental.

If it’s not mass media — TV and music and movies in particular, and social media — then what is it?

Never Rains But It Pours….

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For CRYIN’ out loud! 

Firefox is the default browser on this computer. So along about 15 or 20 minutes ago, I come back from whatever I was doing to try to get into Funny…and LO!!!

I can’t get in! Apparently somehow the default browser has been switched to Chrome!

I don’t WANT to use Chrome. Chrome has NEVER been installed on this computer! But apparently it is now!

Getting rid of it was a trick! But it looks like, at least for the nonce, we’re back in Firefox and at least SOME of its pages are working more or less normally.

Since I have no idea why this happened, I also have no idea whether it’s going to happen again, and when, and why.

Honest-ta-Gawd! If my head didn’t already ache like Hell from this damned disease, it would hurt a lot now.

Hmmmm…  I see that somehow an icon for Chrome has popped up in toolbar. How or why, I have nooo clue.

Like I didn’t have ENOUGH headaches (heee! literally)?

No. Evidently not. Over to Facebook, only to find it no longer recognizes my log-in credentials.

Now, this is no great tragedy…EXCEPT that I do use FB to keep in touch with friends, and also to promote Funny about Money. So…both of those activities are now things of the past.

Speaking of the past, wouldn’t it be cool if you could walk through a Hole in Time and come out back in the Good Ole Days, when our worst headache was whether the Soviets were going to blow us to kingdom come?

GAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!

Day from Hell…on Steroids!

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HOLY mackerel, what a day!!!

Along about late morning, I started enjoying some breathing and coughing problems. COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGHETY COUGH COUGH!

Pretty much a dry cough — not hacking anything up. Well, actually, once or twice during the night I practically strangled. But…WTF? The coughing wouldn’t stop.

Nothing I tried beat it back one bit.

I’m thinking this does not look good. COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGHETY COUGH COUGH!

Eventually I come to light long enough to take my temperature: 101 degrees.

Holy shit.

My normal temp is around 98.2.

I’ve already been charging from pillar to post out there in the heat. The last thing I wanna do is traipse to a doctor. Way to hell and gone up in North Scottsdale!

Try the mercury thermometer. It’s off the scale: over 106.

Oh, sher…

RE-try the electronic thermometer: 100.8.

Prob’ly not very drastic, after all the crap I’ve been through this afternoon.

Call the Mayo. Nurse Kim gets all anxious. She wants me to drive right out there, or else call an ambulance and have them cart me up there.

a) I do not want to drive halfway to Fountain Hills to get to the nearest Mayo facility.
b) There’s no way in Hell I’m going to our nearest full service hospital and ER: John C. Lincoln, the home of the careless and the incompetent.
c) Nor am I trudging downtown to St. Joseph’s Hospital, where I’ve had a truly hair-raising experience.
d) I suspect these wacky swings represent…well…Looney Toons.

So we decide I should go to a nearby pharmacy or the neighborhood Urgent Care Clinic, which is right down by the Albertson’s. She wants me to get tested for covid-19.

Albertson’s has an excellent pharmacy, and straight across the street, Walgreen’s has one very similar to it. If it weren’t 96 degrees out there just this minute — at 7:20 p.m. — I could walk down there. In mid-afternoon, Wunderground suggests, the high was a balmy 99 degrees, with 19% humidity.

Garden spot.

No, Albertson’s pharmacy does not have covid tests. No, Walgreen’s does not have covid tests.

So I go to the Urgent Care Center next door to the Albertson’s. That fine institution has six people sitting in the waiting room. And outside, the most horrifying, pathetic bum…the poor guy is collapsed on the pavement, in the shade of the pony wall that separates the parking lot from the sidewalk.

Even if I had any cash — which I didn’t — I don’t give handouts to panhandlers. Many of these folks are dangerous, when they’re not making pests of themselves.

Inside the “Urgent” (yeah…) Care place, I wait and I wait and I wait and I wait and I wait and I wait and I wait and I wait, along with all the other “patients” (got that right) who are waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting.

Finally I think oh fukkit! Get up, walk out, drive back home. Gasping for air.

Call the Mayo. They try to get me to drive out there. I bang around trying to manage that…but finally think, once again, oh fukkit!

I just. can. not. bring. myself. to. drive, a half-hour or forty minutes. and then get to a place where I have in the past waited HOURS for care.

If I die, I die. Kulawahed!

Right now the mercury thermometer won’t let me shake it down below 99 degrees. Screw it. The battery thermometer reads 100.8.

So presumably I have a low fever. Or I’m fricaseed in the heat.

Here’s what I’m gonna do:

First, I’m going to set up the steamer to blast

I’m a-gonna traipse into the backyard and take a dip in that cool but not at all cold swimming pool.

Well. Maybe not. Now that the steamer is put together, I feel a little cooler. The headache could go, though….

Reset the electronic thermometer. FRANTIC beee-eee-eep beee-eee-eep beee-eee-eep!!!!!!!

WTF?????

Now it claims I have a temp of 101.1!!!

Make up your mind, ya damn thing!

WhatEVER: my mind is made up: throw on some clothes and head for the Mayo. DAYUM!

********

So…here I am, in the Mayo’s shiny, majestic new ER. Quite a place!  The computer’s iOs (or the surrounding architecture??) is not letting me save much to disk, or save copy written in Word or MacMail. My son is in the middle of a dinner party…offered to drive me out here, but that was not necessary.

How could I do without this little horror show? Let me count the ways…

I hate hospitals, to begin with.

Especially, I’m not fond of ERs, which are scary places…IMHO.

A little kid is back there being tortured: screaming her sweet head off.

My head hurts like hell, speaking of heads.

I need to go to the bathroom, but am afraid they’ll ask me to pee in a cup so I’d better not get rid of the present collection.

****

LOL! We’re now all pee’d out, X-rayed with a vengeance, ridden around in a chariot all over the new and old parts of the ER. Zowie! They’re still threatening to drain blood out of me with a damn needle: THE part of this sorta thing that I hate the most. But ohhh well.

This is a nasty li’l cough. I’m as sure as I’m sitting here that it’s GOTTA be a case of covid.

COULD be an ordinary cold, o’course. One could keep on hoping. BUT…I don’t get a fever with an ordinary cold. And rarely get a fever with the flu. So I think it’s pretty safe to guess that whatever ails me begins with a “c” and ends with a “d.”

My computer isn’t working right in here. Though I’m in Funny’s post-building function and it seems to be working…nothing else is functioning. This post is up and the system is letting me type in it, but other pages are nonfunctional. So it remains to be seen whether any of this copy ends up on the Web.

Lordie!!! All these professional folks with tattoos! About every second or third staff member is covered in skin artwork!

Heh… My mother would have been SO abhorred!!!! She thought tattoos were low-class even on men. And on women? Well! It just wasn’t done!

Another thing that would have sent my mother into a spiraling tizzy is the price of gas!

It’s well over $5 a gallon here. Yesterday I did manage to fill up at a QT: a bargain $4.99!

Back in the Dark Ages — this would have been in the late 1960s or early 70s, I think — my mother once remarked, reflecting on the State of the World, That when gasoline reached a dollar a gallon, we would have soooooo-shal-ism!!!

My parent were right-wingers, Goldwater types. My father: even more extreme than that. I recall him sitting me down one day to lecture me about the virtues of bigotry. He was, as you might imagine, an extreme bigot: anyone who wasn’t white like him was less than fully human. Not only white, but American of English and German extraction.

Ironically, though…as we’ve mentioned elsewhere in these precincts, he was a quarter Choctaw.

Soooo….how it came to be that he hated anyone who wasn’t lily-white is a great mystery.

Cultural thing, I expect. It was probably just the way people who lived in rural Texas were.

***

It’s almost midnight. I think they’re going to spring me out of here pretty quick. One of the staff was in here collecting my insurance information.

***

A-N-N-N-D…I was right. The disease of the day IS Covid 19.

Holeee sheeut!

STOP THE WORLD!

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Holeee shee-UT! What a day.

I’ve been around and around and around Robin Hood’s barn today, metaphorically and literally. The headaches and the hassles have gone on and on and ON, so many I can’t even remember them all.

Phoenix is Southern California Redux. I hated living in Southern California. Hated the crowds. Hated the traffic. Hated the smog. Hated the ubiquitous ticky-tacky.

And Late Ticky-Tacky is the dominant style here. Everyplace you look here is tacky. The tacky apartment buildings, the tired cheaply built ranch houses, the brain-banging maze of surface streets, the unholy freeways: tacky, tackier, and tackiest. This characteristic strikes you most strongly when you’re weary from trudging through bumper-to-bumper traffic over bland, faceless streets that carry you past bland, faceless neighborhoods and bland, faceless strip malls.

The high point of the day was weaving my way over and through this lovely landscape, down to the Best Buy. There I was told what I already knew: my laptop (admittedly, my aged laptop) is about done for. It’s just plain worn out.

So now I get to buy a new laptop. That’ll be another two or three thousand bucks. AND naturally — yes, naturally — my software won’t run on it. The Geek Squad is going to try to keep the present incumbent running a while longer. But you can be sure “a while” represents a limited stretch of time.

How can I count the ways I don’t wanna spend hours and hours and days and days running into weeks learning new programs that don’t do what I need them to do? Ugh!

Oh well.

Speaking of things one would think have Gone Away, at Amazon what should I find but some real, old-fashioned Mentholatum! Who’d’ve thunk it was still being made, anywhere?

This, I hope, will work on the peripheral neuropathy as it affects the lips.

Then at the Walmart I found something with lidocaine in it. One would hesitate to put that anywhere near one’s mouth…but I sincerely hope it will help with the mad tingling in the hands, the feet, and the legs.

A-n-n-d in the ether that is the Internet, once again I came across evidence that my grandmother did NOT die when my mother was led to believe she did. Apparently the cancer and the suffering and the drug taking and my 18-year-old mother being made to tend her was all a show. In fact she married a prominent San Francisco businessman, had a street named after her, and hung out in Hemet.

I knew those people were weird. But this stuff takes the cake.