Coffee heat rising

Dispatches from Hell

One of Those Days….

by

Do you ever have days where EVERYTHING YOU TOUCH goes ker-sproinnnggggggggg! And explodes in your hands? All over you?????

Okay, about 90 percent of this is because of my own carelessness. No question, I make a lot of extra work for myself by overlooking a LOT of stupid little mistakes. But DAY-um! There’s just too much of this stuff…and some of it — at least today’s some of it — is not of my concocting.

So I start at 5:30 a.m., as usual, figuring to toss off a short job and then feed the dogs and myself before getting on with the REAL work of the day, which is to plow through at least 50 pages of Most Honored Client’s current iteration of his magnum opus.

First, though, the latest Camptown Races masterpiece is on the schedule: post to Amazon. This is a nuisancey little job that can take half an hour or more, and because it’s a pesty thing to do, I’d like to get it off my plate first, before moving on with my day.

TWO HOURS LATER…finally I clicked “Publish” on the damn thing.

Problem the first: When I upload the cover art, I see that the font color selected for the title and author name is too dim to pop out against the mostly black and dark aqua background.

This is really a very cool, extremely strange and dark Halloween story, and I WANT THOSE COVERLINES TO BE EFFING ORANGE DAMN IT!

None of the oranges in my program’s standard color palette are bright enough, weirdly, to stand out against the dark background. So now I decide to create a shade of orange or red-orange or something that will work.

Three tries later, it’s clear that nothing in the red to orange range is gonna cut the proverbial mustard.

Understand, ONE try can take 8 or ten minutes. Or more, depending on how bad Cox’s “high-speed” (har har!) connection happens to be at any given moment. It takes for-freaking-EVER for a TIFF file to load to Amazon. Not as EVER as an entire MS, but EVER ENOUGH.

Finally I decide to change the font color to yellow. But the standard yellow in my palette is not gonna make it. Too grating. So once again, I have to fiddle around and fiddle around and FIDDLE around to develop a shade of yellow that doesn’t make my teeth grind.

(And I’ve broken another crown, BTW, with the tooth-grinding. Good morning to you, too.)

This looks much better. Create TIFF. Upload. Watch Amazon grind away and grind away. View result. Realize the blue “glow” effect is absolutely positively not gonna make it.

Back into the guts of the program. Adjust glow to the newly invented bright orange; transparency (against a black background!) 50 percent. Change color of font line to black. Re-upload. APPROVE!  Create new full-size JPEG, create new low-res JPEG, create new thumbnail.

How do you like it, by the way? Is this creepy or is this not creepy? That horse standing in the water is a kelpie, a type of Celtic demon. Be scared. Be VERY scared!

Click on the image for a view of the REAL THING.
Click on the image for a view of the REAL THING.

Upload edited, templated manuscript. Download the .mobi file into Amazon’s Kindle reader.

This process being one that takes forever, I finally get up and feed the dogs, who have gone back to bed.

Problem the next: Amazon detects a half-dozen “spelling errors.” These all appear to be Scottish dialect spellings in the Robert Burns verse I put in the front matter. Just as I click “ignore all,” I spot ONE real typo: Scottish is set lower-case somewhere in the MS.

Yes. Well. But that particular line is the book’s subtitle, which is set all caps, so no one would know whether you typed “Scottish” or “scottish.” However, knowing Amazon, I figure I’d better fix it. They can penalize you if they think you’ve got misspelled words in your MS: apparently part of the upload process is having one of their abused, terrorized wage slaves check the copy before it goes live.

Fix one character, reload. Go brush my teeth while this takes place.

Download the new .mobi file into Amazon’s Kindle reader. Go wash my face while this grinds and grinds and grinds away.

Back to proofing the .mobi file: In said front matter, half of the little definition of what a keltie is appears in italic! WTF? The name of the source, a website, is set italic, but the blurb itself is set roman. I can NOT figure out why a half-dozen words in the blurb appear as italic.

I screw around and SCREW around with this, racking up another couple of interminable uploads and downloads.

Finally I give up, scroll down the page, retype the copy, and retype the source, leaving it roman. Delete the corrupt passage. Pull up space pull up space pull up space.

Upload and download again. Pour another cup of coffee, open the back door and sic the dog on the new accursed cat that’s come over the wall, anti-cat barrier be damned. Takes almost as long to roust the puppy out of the sack as it does to re-download the .mobi file.

Return to proofing copy. The new passage I’ve typed spells “also” as “alos.” Alas.

Fix, upload, download.

And so on to infinity. Of course I find a few other errors. By the time this process is finished, it’s 7:30 in the morning! I haven’t had anything to eat. I haven’t walked the dogs. I haven’t come anywhere NEAR starting the project I’m supposed to be spending the entire day on.

A boxed set of the first six Fire-Rider stories is slated to go live on Wednesday. I haven’t updated the table of contents on a PC.

Yeah. Clever Amazon’s clever Word-to-MOBI converter cannot read the links in a TofC created on or even touched by a Mac computer. Don’t ask.

I send the MS to Tina. In the requisite 20 seconds, she returns it with the TofC updated on one of her terminals.

Now I need to enter new lines to break this thing up into the books it anthologizes. This, I hope and pray, will not fuck up in conversion (you may be sure the “hope” part is pretty forlorn). Ten minutes later I get down to the end of the thing and realize ONE CHAPTER in the last section lacks its numeral. Entering it in the TofC doesn’t work. AND the title of that book, which is supposedly formatted in a style undetectable to the ToC function, appears in the goddamn TofC as a chapter.

So I have to reformat the book title and fix the chapter title. And send it BACK to Tina to format on her PC. But not before deleting all the work I’ve interpolated into the TofC field, so as not to bollix it up on her end.

After all this screwing around, I see I haven’t assigned an ISBN to the damn thing. This requires ANOTHER ten or fifteen minutes of dorking-around time.

Right this very minute, I drop scribbling the present post (which I started as a device to vent and maybe allay some of the frustration factor) and head over to Bowker to get an ISBN.

Do you suppose I’ve written a stupid “description” for Bowker? Hell no. So now I have to write that, which you may be sure I don’t feel like doing to such an intense degree that I come up blank. I decide to wing it.

I upload the wrong cover image for the boxed set. Where’s the one Gary did? I search all over Digital Creation for the designer’s excellent rendition. Finally find it. Re-upload the cover image. Upload the PDF; watch the computer grind away and grind away. Jump through the remaining hoop after hoop after hoop after hoop. This consumes a good 15 minutes, maybe twenty.

BTW, you must get the first boxed set. It’s an incredible bargain: SIX FIRE-RIDER BOOKS FOR THE PRICE OF ONE!

fire book 2aiReviews of the serial installments are trending quite well. It is NOT p0rn0graphic and is, as a matter of fact and in my not-very-humble opinion, a truly terrific book. It will go live on Wednesday,  probably around 6 p.m. Pacific time.

Just as Bowker finishes killing fifteen minutes of my time, the pool pump kicks on.

Yesterday, while my friend Carol and I were at a concert, a huge monsoonish storm came up. I don’t know how much water was dumped, but…whatEVER. Because I was across town, I wasn’t here to shut the pump off by way of preventing it from sucking up bushels of flying debris. When I got home along about 5 p.m., it was making a weird noise. The pump pot was gorged. I ran outside and shut the system down, figuring first thing in the morning I’d clean out the pump pot basket.

Yeah, well… First thing this morning, I was working. And the second thing. And the third thing. And the fourth…and so on to infuckingfinity!

I swear aloud, LEAP up, and FLY to the pool equipment. Shut down the gasping system and discombulate it. So much crap has been sucked up it has burst the plastic basket. That’ll be another 15 bucks I can’t afford.

Satan, the former owner of the Funny Farm, was an inveterate Happy Handyman. As you may know, the work of handyman hobbyists is usually suspect.

One of Satan’s projects was installation of a 12 x 5 metal storage shed on the east side of the house. Instead of pouring a concrete foundation, he laid down paving blocks, upon which he set his structure. The floor of this fine building is — wait for it! — oh yes! PLYWOOD!

Yeah.

The Sonoran Desert crawls with termites.

A family of these little munchers has found the shed and is eating its way across the floor. They’ve also invaded the shelves on the brick-and-board storage I built outside the shed — so those have to be taken apart and the boards tossed, somewhere far away from the house.

Saturday, I called my pet exterminator.

His wife called this morning to explain what they propose to do. No, they can’t use their (stinky!) organic (maybe not quite SO poisonous to humans and dogs?) product on termites. They have to use a standard termite product. For the same price, she said, they’d trench and apply prophylactic treatment to the entire house. They do not understand what this will entail, and I fail to enlighten her.

Price to treat the Funny Farm with a toxic product that is almost guaranteed to make me and the dogs sick? EIGHT HUNDRED DOLLAH!

I can’t very well not do it. Once they get into your house, if a home inspector spots damage you can NOT sell your house without expensively treating it, and by “expensive” we do not mean a mere $800.

This reduces me to tears. I have no idea how I am going to come up with $800, now that I’ve quit my teaching job so as to free up time to work on the publishing endeavor.

Another client sends work that she thinks I’m going to do forthwith. Alas, it will have to wait until I finish reading Magnificently Paying Client’s project, which has to be done by Friday. I don’t even open her email: it’s now another message marked “unread” and flagged with a little red flag.

I need to pay my writers. Simultaneously, I should create another spreadsheet for WonderAccountant to display checks and deposits for the S-corp, as we are having to do with my personal account thanks to the kind ministrations of Intuit.

So I get into my checkbook register, another target of my haste and carelessness. Transcribe entries for checks and deposits going back to last April. Now I realize a $300 check I wrote to one of the authors has never cleared. I’m not sure how much I still owe her, since things were a little muzzy before this.

I get in touch with her and inquire about the missing check. She’s never received it, and by the way, the Copyeditor’s Desk owes her $700.

That’s exactly what I figured, but not for the reasons I thought. Oh well.

Now it dawns on me that the missing $300 check was written and mailed on the same day as a check I wrote to another writer, who also reported that it never arrived on his end.

This means the post office has lost two checks.

I drove these checks up to the post office specifically so I could drop them into THEIR box, so they would not be stolen out of my mailbox. Thank you SO much, dear USPS.

Neither check has cleared. So I decide not to shoulder the hefty stop-payment fee to head off any fraud. In fact, if someone succeeds in fraudulently cashing the checks, the credit union will eat it anyway, since they should’ve noticed that Clorox or some such was applied to the “pay to the order of” line. I write a new check to Writer 1 and send out two other checks to a couple of other contributors. These I place in the unsecured mailbox out front, since there clearly is NO EFFING POINT IN MAKING MY WAY THROUGH A MIASMA OF ROAD CONSTRUCTION TO TAKE THESE THINGS DIRECT TO THE POST OFFICE.

It’s now 12:36. I’ve had one banana and a handful of pecans to eat today. Plus three cups of cowboy-strength coffee (it’s ready when a spoon will stand up in pot).

Every single thing I’ve touched or so much as looked at today has devolved into some kind of fuck-up. I am hungry (whaddaya bet the grill is out of propane?) and I want a bourbon and water and that is exactly what I am going to have.

And so…to lunch.

One of Those ARRRRGGGH!@#$%^ Days

by

Have you ever noticed how everything always happens at once? Wonder why that is…

This has been one of those uphill-haul days, wherein every single damnfool thing you want to do has to be done the hard way, and you have a LOT of damnfool things to do.

That’s because you’ve left the damnfool things to do another day and, yes, this is another day.

I cruise back into town after this morning’s networking group meeting, having heard an excellent presentation and been the target of a rousing pep talk, after the meeting, by the presenter himself. I’m hot to get to work and full of ideas. But first…

But first, I  have to go by the electric supply house and pick up the lamp that was left to be rewired by way of repairing Ruby’s latest cord-eating depredation. It looks nice, and they charge me less than a quarter of what the last predator charged.

But…

Yeah. You get what you pay for. Twelve dollars and change does not enough wire to reach the outlet purchase.

The damn wire is about four inches too short.

I call. They agree to rewire it.

But this entails trying to get across Conduit of Blight Boulevard AGAIN. As you may recall, the city is building a ridiculous lightrail line up Conduit of Blight, making the entire corridor nonnavigable and rerouting rush-hour traffic through the middle of our neighborhood. You cannot get across Conduit of Blight at Main Drag South at all. So you have to drive up to Main Drag North, taking you way afield of the electric outfit, or else you have to drive two miles to the south and one mile back north  — three miles out of your way — to get around the construction horrors. Make that three miles x two, if you have any designs on coming home.

Either way, the environmentally chummy public works project converts a four-mile drive into a six-mile drive. One way.

I decide to drive up to the Depot and just buy a damn extension cord. There I pay almost nine bucks for a six-foot piece of overkill.

While I’m there, I return the hose connector that the very nice sales clerk told me was a set — male and female — and that was not. Whatever it was, it was not what I wanted. It was unusable.

I hate shopping in Home Depot. Hate it hate it hate it HATE. IT. Today there’s not a soul, not even an incompetent wretch who has no idea what she’s talking about, to help. I find the paint roller I need (only because past safaris have taken me into the Veldt of Paint) but have a bitch of a time finding the extension cords, which are nowhere near where two of the worthy employees pointed me.

When I get the eventually found extension cord home and discombulate its intricate packaging, I see it has a connection that would accommodate enough plugs to light a half-a-dozen Christmas trees.

Come ON, guys. This is for ONE freaking LIVING ROOM LAMP. And I have to tape it to the floor, the table, and the wall so as to keep Ruby from eating the lamp cord for the fourth time. A big honking clunky umpteen-plug connection does not lend itself to discretion. Or to transparent packing tape.

Two choices now: Take the lamp back to French Electric and wait another week to get it rewired again, or take the lamp cord back to HD and try to find one that works.

I believe the Depot does not have regular lamp-cord sized extensions, because two HD Dudes tried to help me find the same. We all failed.

Finally I decide to check the local TruValue and, if I can find a normal 1950s-style lamp cord with one count it (1) plug on the end, I will keep the short cord on the lamp and defer returning the ridiculous extension to a day when I’m in the vicinity of an HD for some other constructive reason.

Over to the TruValue. Yes, they have such a thing: four dollah.

Climbing into my car, it occurs to me that Home Depot is upselling by quite deliberately NOT STOCKING lamp-sized extension cords.

It is hot, and it is humid. By hot we’re talkin’ upwards of a hundred degrees.

As per usual, every moron in the county gets in front of me on the road. How the HELL do they KNOW when I’m out?

The last time Ruby ate the living-room lamp cord, I moved another lamp in there and used transparent packing tape to stick the cord to the inside of the table leg, the floor, and the wall between the lamp and the light plug. This a) worked and b) was very easy.

Not so today.

It may a) work, but it was b) incredibly NOT very easy. I ended up with broken fingernails from trying to peel the damn tape off of the damn roll and wads of stuck-together tape strewn all over the living room floor. By the time the job was done, my hair was yanked and my teeth were ground.

While I was at the electric supply store, we tried to remove the lamp shade. The finial was frozen on. None of us could get it loose. But we did succeed in ripping the fabric.

This lampshade was purchased back when I had a job and could afford nice things.

I get on Amazon to try to find something comparable. The cheapest selection: Seventy-five dollah!

Holy shit.

I take a more or less functional lampshade off another lamp (which now goes naked) and put it on the repaired lamp. It looks like what it is: a cheap piece of junk from Target.

Lurking at the back of consciousness: Pay the $1,588 Medigap premium! Find out how far in hock you are to AMEX! Figure out where the money to pay these extravagant bills will come from!

AMEX? Exactly $1,000 over budget. That is twice the amount I paid on the shoe extravaganza. We will have to wait for the itemized bill to arrive to figure out the other charges.

The Medigap premium, surprisingly considering the past year’s medical misadventures, is inflated by less than $100 over the 2014 gouge. And of course, it’s allowed for in the annual budget. But still. Fifteen hundred and eight-eight dollars is fucking painful.

Because I had a meeting halfway across the city at this morning’s crack of dawn, I have not cleaned the pool pump pot, which must be cleaned every morning because the fucking palm trees cannot be trimmed because DUCK has taken up residence in the tree trimmers’ direct line of fire. DUCK is absent this afternoon, it being afternoon and the time at which she forages. Does she not KNOW about the damned garden slugs that overrun the yard at night and that are turning the basil plant into a skeleton of itself? Why is she not doing her DUCK job out there? And where the Hell is she, anyway?

One of the eggs DUCK has hidden lies exposed. What part of “grackle” does DUCK not understand?

Avian concerns, however, do not form a major part of today’s Day from Hell qualities.

Web Guru’s bill needs to be paid. I try to get online to pay this quarter’s bill. His auto-collect software wants me to sign  in as…HIM!

Naturally.

I crash out of his auto-collect software and reboot. Now it tells me I owe an extra payment, which I happen to know I paid.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to cook my lunch, it being 3 o’clock in the afternoon and only slightly past lunchtime, by a mere three hours. Trusty Kitchen Timer is called into action to remind me when X or Y minutes have passed, so the grill will not carbonize the food.

Trusty Kitchen Timer is killed in action.

I try to revive her by replacing her battery.

No dice. TKT is deader than a doornail.

Why doornails are said to be dead is a question that has always plagued me, given that a) I do not know what a doornail is and b) I can’t imagine why anyone would impute either life or death to such an object.

So it goes.

The work I intended to get done was not, repeat, NOT done by 4 p.m., when I shook off the worst of this miasma. Instead of doing anything meaningful, I guess I’ll spend the rest of the day formatting another Fire-Rider episode.

And so…into the fog.

 

 

 

Day from Hell After$shock: The Water Heater Bill

by

Nine hundred eighty dollah and twenty-six cents. That’s what a new water 50-gallon water heater costs, installed.

I expected this, because the last time I bought a water heater — about 11 years ago when I moved into this house — the plumber said prices were headed for the stratosphere because of new safety requirements. He said then that heaters would run upwards of $600, which indeed they do. This one was $820, plus the cost of installation.

And now I see that Bradford White, the brand my new guy installed, is almost universally disliked and reviled. One buyer said their four-year-old model turned into a “blowtorch,” burned their house down, and killed their dog. That was just outside of Tucson…three months ago!

Well, the plumber didn’t get the icemaker line reattached. I may tell him to return the thing, when he comes over here tonight to connect that. Wish I’d had the sense to look it up yesterday before he installed it!!

Wouldn’t you think a plumber would know the products better?

What am I gonna do here…? There’s no way the guy is going to be able to return the thing, now that he’s installed it and filled it full of water. But holy mackerel…another Consumer Affairs commenter said a year-old model filled their home with carbon monoxide, poisoned her and her husband, and killed their dog. The thing is in the garage and the door between the garage and the kitchen is supposedly a fire door. But that door leaks like a sieve.

He wouldn’t take AMEX, so I had to give him a check. So that means I don’t have the credit-card warranty/insurance deal.

Why do I think I’m lined up for a royal screwing here? This does not look good.

I guess what I’ll have to do is buy a home warranty, which will replace the unit when it craps out (assuming it doesn’t explode my home), and also put a fire alarm and a CO alarm in the garage. There’s already a smoke alarm in the kitchen.

Another half-assed home warranty…dayum! Just what I need: another monthly charge. They cost about $500…maybe I’d be better off to simply put $42 each month toward the next water heater, which, if this one doesn’t burn the roof down around my ears first, will be in about six years and two days. It comes with a six-year warranty…which the guy failed to give me attached to the unit.

Five hundred dollah times 6 years is $3,000, enough to buy three new water heaters…

Well, meanwhile, it’s off to Costco to return the Panasonic telephone lash-up. The instructions are so complicated they are simply incomprehensible. I never have figured out how to bring up the “menu,” and to use the “Block Call” button to beat back the phone solicitors, you can’t just push the button. You have to somehow “select” the phone number, but you can’t find a way to “select.” And apparently “out of area” is not a blockable code.

The thing wasn’t that expensive, but with a thousand-dollar bill for a new water heater that may kill me, the dogs, or all of us, every little bit helps.

Day from Hell Peters Out in the Wee Hours…

by

It was quite the day yesterday:

  • Killer bees take up residence under the outdoor deck in my favorite shady bosque.
  • Duck returns; as expected, poops on CoolDeck, with the same effect as dog poop.
  • Speaking of the which Cassie finds another cache of the neighbor’s accursed cat’s deposits in the unused flowerbed.
  • The water heater goes out, after I pony up a chunk of dough to the new arborist dude.
  • Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner comes to a dead stop. He has, it appears, croaked right over.
  • The neighbors in the rental(?) across the street announce they’re having a big chivaree for a daughter’s wedding reception — we should expect the streets the be parked up and the “music” to be loud…hope that’s not too much of an inconvenience for you folks.
  • Programming the phone system I bought turns out to require a master’s degree in engineering; damned if I can figure out how you bring up the [MENU], which you have to accomplish to make it do anything. Decide to take it back, which will help because all these little surprise expenses are gonna land me in the poorhouse.

Ohhhhh god…

§ § §

Okay, so after Arborist Dude clued me to the new occupants of the westside yard, I jury-rigged a barricade across the backyard’s narrowest reach, by way of keeping Cassie and Ruby from enraging the little gals. Ain’t it lovely?

P1030450Logged into Angie’s List and called a couple of exterminators, in search of someone who could deal with the bee issue. All wild bees in Arizona are now considered Africanized, so our new occupants posed a potential threat — not just to small dogs given to annoying them by trying to catch them on the wing, but just about anyone or anything that disturbs them.

One guy, a fellow named Irish Doherty called me back. He offered to come by yesterday evening, but the Accountant from Heaven and I had tickets to a Chanticleer concert and plans to go to dinner beforehand. No problem, said he…how’s about he comes by around 10 p.m.?

Holy mackerel.

Well, we got back to the ’hood around 10:30. When I called his cell, I found him in the middle of another job. An hour or so later, he surfaced here, just about the time the noisy party across the street was breaking up.

Get this: the guy uses organic pesticides!

Uh huh. Lots of organic things, like, oh, say, nerve gas, are organics… But whatever. He proudly showed me the label. Enough remains of my long-lost photographic  memory for me to remember the ingredients long enough to Google the only one that had a chemistry-lab-bench name. It turned out to be a common ingredient of hand cream. The other stuff was mostly odoriferous “essential oils.”

Knowing my experience with objects and substances eco-friendly, you no doubt can sense my skepticism about this proposition.

Marginally, it seems to have worked. One lonely bee was flying around out there this morning. I thought she’d gone away, but now, a few hours into the day, four or five of them are going in and out. That’s a lot fewer than were out there yesterday, but… If the guys managed to kill the queen, then the surviving bees will die. But if not, they’ll soon be back in force.

Amazingly, in the middle of the night the guy and his assistant went totally beyond the call of duty to get at the nest, which the bees had established on the ground underneath a set of boards that were bolted down. They removed the boards, sprayed like crazy, and then replaced the boards.

It was 3 a.m. before I crawled into the sack, and  of course as usual Cassie and Ruby were ready to bounce at 5 a.m. Thank HEAVEN we have no choir this morning!

Meanwhile, as I was building the Great Wall of Corgi, it dawned on me that the wire garden fencing I was layering between the old strips of picket-fence garden fencing could substitute nicely for the chicken wire I figured I was going to have to buy and lay down over the empty flowerbed that damn cat is using as its toilet. Thank gawd I never throw anything away — one fewer thing to have to spend money on and hassle with.

So I took a bunch of the stuff and dropped it on the ground where the cat has claimed its territory. Probably all that will do is move it over to some other part of the yard. Wish I could figure out how to get rid of that cat without getting blood on my hands…

And yesterday morning when Ruby barked up the duck, I sprinkled the little gal with the garden hose. Hilariously, DUCKS DON’T LIKE TO GET WET!!!!!

No kidding! She took to the sky like a 747, and she didn’t come back until…just now

😀

Chased her off again. Later today when I take Harvey up to Leslie’s to be shoveled out — after I’ve had a chance to get some rest — I’ll see if I can get one of those floating pool alarms for a reasonable price (like I’ve got even a nickel’s worth of spare cash laying around…). If it’ll go off every time she lands in the water, she’ll probably give up in short order. Then I can give the contraption to the  young couple across the street, the folks who are raising four little kids on a teacher’s salary.

Called the plumber who surfaced at SBA a few weeks ago. Our building contractor guy liked him and was impressed, so since the beloved Mr. Lutz seems to have gone out of business, we’re trying him out. He said he’d come around mid-day on Monday, meaning two days (at least) without hot water.

So I’m washing the dishes by hand, which would be OK if the ACCURSED new dish detergents actually worked. In cold water they do not touch grease or stuck-on food. To get the dishes clean last night I had to boil a pot of water on the stove and pour it into the sink, therein to soak and rewash the damn dishes.

While I was waiting for the Bee Dude to show up in the middle of the night, I finally plowed my way through an enormous, difficult, and highly technical paper on the potential complications of the various types of mastectomy.

Holy shit. If women had ANY idea of the astonishingly high rates of adverse outcomes from reconstruction, no one would even think of subjecting herself to such a thing. Ordinary mastectomy, even one that does not involve messing with your lymph nodes, poses some serious risk of very unpleasant aftereffects. But reconstruction ups that risk by orders of magnitude and adds some special nasty complications of its own.

The fact that the medico-pharmaceutical complex has launched an initiative to persuade every woman who needs a mastectomy to elect breast reconstruction…well…it’s just abhorrent. The only way doctors could possibly persuade anyone who’s not just effing dumb as a post is to downplay the many potential negative consequences and the astonishing length of time it takes to recover from such procedures. What we don’t know won’t hurt us, eh?

It appears that, thanks to the Pink Craze, we’re not only performing large numbers of surgeries that probably are unnecessary, in addition we’re inflicting even more traumatic and potentially very harmful surgery on women by pushing reconstruction.

This book is going to raise the roof.

The research is going faster than expected — I’ve had a lull in stoont papers to read. I’m about two-thirds of the way through the stuff I printed out to annotate and organize; in the course of that job, I’ve also found a number of other relevant scientific papers, which I’ll need to print out, analyze, and annotate. But progress is definitely being made. With any luck, I’ll have the proposal ready to ship off before the end of the summer and the book pretty well written by December. Sooner, maybe, if I can shake clear of enough paying work over the next few months.

And so, away…

Stuff Not Done, Booze, and Wasted Days

by

So today after the time-sucking faculty meeting, I’d planned to…

a) make a Costco run;
b) drag another stack of Medicare & Medigap checks to the credit union;
c) return something to Petco and get the dog vitamins I forgot while buying the useless piece of junk there;
d) do all the college tasks I’d listed during the meeting;
e) have a nice lunch/dinner (big meal happens at mid-day here…supposedly good for your diet);
f) write 16 weekly posts for the online 102 course;
g) write more of the current difficult scene in Fire-Rider II;
h) return strange beads I didn’t order to Fire Mountain;
i) write a post for Plain & Simple Writers;
j) write a post for Funny about Money;…

…and so on.

Welp. Got the Costco run done. That’s something. I guess.

At CC, I bought one of their wonderfully delicious (salt-saturated!!!!) roasted chickens. And some sugar snap peas. And some asparagus. And…well, you can’t have chicken without white wine, can you? A bottle of cheap white.

By the time I shot out the door, a stiff breeze had come up, bearing dark clouds from the west. Weather reports had threatened more storms this afternoon. The area up around the college and over where the Costco was hard-hit during the recent monsoon blasts, and it looked like another one was blowing in fast. Decided the checks and the dog thingies could wait until tomorrow. Besides, after two hours of cooling my heels and trying to look interested in the new chair’s every word, I was getting damned hungry.

So flew back into the central city, flew in the house, wrung out the dogs, and proceeded to saute those lovely peas, slice that nice hot juicy chicken, and tossed together an amazing salad with tender little raw asparagus spears, beet, tomato, yummy sweet mini-peppers, LGOs, and on and on. And, well…naturally, took a wrench to the wine bottle’s screw-on cap.

Decided to write a post on the baleful need for a wrench, a pair of pliers, and a heavy-duty pair of scissors or tin snips in the kitchen drawer.

Sat down to eat. And drink.

Yesh.

After consuming a half-bottle+ of that soda-poppy wine, I staggered back into the back of the house and fell face-first on the bed. Slept until five-freaking thirty!!!!!!!

Helle’s belles.

Wine is dangerous. I’ve learned, actually, that hard liquor makes a lot better choice of boozie-poos. Believe it or not.

I love wine. It tastes so good. And it’s so easy to dispense. Just tip the bottle over and presto-changeo! There’s another whole glassful! So when I’m eating that big meal in the middle of the day, I tend to merrily keep pouring enough to go with the food still on the plate…and to lose track of how much I’ve had.

I love bourbon, too. But…making a bourbon and water requires a process. You have to get up off your duff, walk into the kitchen, get the bottle down, get out the jigger, get out a glass, fill it with ice, measure the booze, pour it into the glass, and top it off with filtered ice water from the fridge.

That is what we call a hassle. Enough of a hassle to get one’s attention and say “that’s enough of THAT!” So as a practical matter, when I’m drinking hard liquor I don’t drink anything like as much as I do when I’m pouring wine.

You also have a lot more control over how much alcohol goes into a given mixed drink. Lately I’ve discovered that a half-a-jigger of bourbon mixed with the usual amount of water and ice is not a heckuva lot less satisfying than a whole jigger. Really, bourbon-flavored water is what we’re lookin’ for here. So that means that if I pour two drinks to go with a large meal, I’m actually only drinking 1.75 ounces of alcohol — the amount the gummint classifies as “one serving” of alcohol.

You can’t do that with wine. Well. You can. But who would?

It’s along about 9:40 p.m. now. I did manage to write a new post for P&S Writers. Fed the dogs. It’s raining, a much quieter, softer, gentler, cooler rain than we’ve had of late. I’m sitting on the patio watching the juice run out of this computer. The charge is down to 6%, and soon the thing will give up the ghost.

And so, to Netflix.

 

Day from Hell? Or Day from Monty Python’s Flying Circus?

by

I have exceeded my capacity to write much further about yesterday’s little drama, so feel free to go to the my corgi blog and read all about it. [?? I do not know why this link isn’t working. Enter this URL instead: mycorgi.com/profiles/blogs/parvo-really]

Not for an instant do I believe Ruby has parvo (forgodsake!). For the past hour she’s been flinging herself around pestering Cassie, barking at the neighbors, racing up and down the hall squeaking a toy, stealing a sandal and banging it on the wall, climbing on top of me, grabbing Cassie’s ball, and (let us never forget) chasing cockroaches around the backyard. This is not the behavior of a dog that is trying to slip past Cerberus and sneak into Hades.

What I do believe is that last night I encountered an unethical veterinarian who took one look at an old lady with a puppy of an expensive breed and heard the cash register ring.

The pet industry in this country (and make no mistake: that is what it is officially called — even vets will tell you they’re part of the pet industry) is a vast cash cow. There is so much money to be made in fleecing people who are besotted by their animals, it cannot even be estimated.

I should have known when I drove up there and saw signs in the parking lot reading “Reserved for Pet Parents.”

Pet parents! SNORT!!!

That is a trope whose purpose is to encourage people to conflate their animals with their children. Once they have you thinking about your dog or your cat as though it were your child, it’s easy to play on your emotions and get you to fork over any amount of money the various merchandisers in the pet industry choose for whatever service, medication, food, tool, doodad, or piece of kitsch they can come up with.

Parvo, indeed. I’m still so mad, just thinking about it, I could throw this computer across the room!