Coffee heat rising

Dispatches from Hell

Mayo-Trapped!

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So here I am stuck inside one of the Mayo Clinic’s many blood-sucking rooms. Sunday morning again: once again.

Just asked my son why these appointments are always made on Sunday — one of the reasons I dropped out of choir. Got a crabby answer…but apparently he’s the one who’s been doing this. Like…he didn’t KNOW I had a standing activity on Sundays?

Innaresting.

***

Now they’ve got me trapped in a treatment room with a needle stuck in an arm, pumping some sort of gunk into me. The kid and I have been fighting — jolly fun — and so (reasonably enough) he has taken his computer and stalked off to the lobby, leaving me to sit here all alone with a needle stuck in my arm.

Dare not readdress the question of who repeatedly schedules these accursed appointments on Sunday mornings, guaranteeing that I can’t go to choir. That’s OK, I guess, because I dropped out of choir awhile back — for other reasons. But if that were not the case, by now I’d be outta there once and for all.

At any rate, I’ve come to hate this place with a passion — altruistic and marvelously scientific as it is. Actually, it’s a  sentiment that has a long backstory:

While I was growing up in Saudi Arabia, Aramco employees families and their families had to take rafts of shots every six months. None of those were pleasant, but some were notably painful — particularly typhus, typhoid, and cholera. The latter two REALLY hurt! So I learned to fear and hate clinics, hospitals, and medical staff.

That kind of prejudices me against this place, and against this seemingly ENDLESS stint of sitting here with a needle stuck in my arm, even though the treatment is pretty much painless.

Seriously: the infusion takes an hour…and that only covers pumping the gunk into your arm. Doesn’t count the hour’s driving time or any time spent sitting around in waiting rooms. Theee pitz! 

We squabbled on the way out here, so my invitation to take him to a late lunch/early dinner was rejected. Ohhh well: a lovely steak is sitting in the fridge, waiting to be barbecued.

But it’s only 1:30 in the afternoon, leaving a good hour (or more) to go. And GAWD, do I hate this place!

Reminiscences

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Achey this morning. Not sick: just tired from too much hiking around.

Crackpot neighbors are hollering at each other. Shut UP, folks!

Waiting for the toast to brown. Thinking….thinking back over my family’s life in Berkeley, California. Wishing I were still there. 

My relatives’ little house was right down the road from where the lightrail train came in from San Francisco and then shot through a tunnel to the other side of the hills.

My great-grandmother and her widowed daughter, my great-aunt, lived on Hopkins street, a long and mellow road that climbed up the side of a steep hill and ended where that tunnel carried the city train through from the far side of the Berkeley Hills.

Such a handsome place! I do miss it.

Their charming little house looked a lot like this one. CAN YOU BELIEVE that price!! Over a million bucks for an ancient, termite-ridden two-bedroom bungalow!

One thing you had to say for the neighborhood: it would keep you in shape. Where the relatives’ house stood, that road was mighty steep!

The relatives didn’t own a car, so just to go to the grocery store, they got a nice workout. And yea verily! Both of them lived well into their 90s, in excellent health. Without ever seeing a doctor.

Two blocks up that road stood what we today would call a gourmet grocery store. They didn’t: to them, it was just the corner market. WhatEVER: my great-grandmother (by then in her 90s) walked up there every day or two to pick up food and whatnot. Her daughter (my great-aunt), hiked up that hill five days a week to catch a train into San Francisco, where she worked for Crocker-Anglo National Bank.

On any given day, either one of them got about 20 times more exercise than we do. And it showed: they both lived into their late 90s, in excellent health. As Christian Scientists: they never went to doctors!

Heh. I guess the hill was their doctor, eh?

It was populated with pretty little houses. Walk the three blocks to the top of the hill and you came to what we today would call a gourmet grocery store. To them, it was just a corner store, a rather ordinary grocer.

Also on that corner were a dry cleaner and a set of concrete stairs leading up the hill into Sausalito, where my cousins lived. Next door to the cleaner’s was said gourmet grocery store: on the order of a Sprouts, only not so commercialized.

They were nice folks: the great-grandmother and the great-aunt.

Heh! Imagine having relatives who don’t think you’re a Communist because you’re active in the Democratic Party!

Yeah: the idiot woman my father married after my mother died dwelt somewhere to the right of Adolf Hitler. So did her her rabid daughter, who — Arizona being, after all, Arizona (Home of the Right-Wing Crackpot) — attained to the rank of Superior Court Judge. Both of them wild-eyed right-wingers, who regarded me and my husband as COMM-YOU-NISTS.

Yep. Our family life went straight to Hell after my mother died. 😀

My step-sister Marilyn, who merged into our family after my father married her mother (in the wake of my mother’s death), must have thought we were the next best thing to Communists. No doubt she and her mom just l-o-o-ved having us treasonous bastards in their home. But I enjoyed her and her kids. Politics aside, they were nice enough folks.

Dear step-sister died in 2018: IMHO much, much too young for a journey to The Other World. But that’s only from my point of view: in reality, she was some 15 years older than me. And a good 90 degrees further to the right than me! :-d

Seriously: I did enjoy Marilyn. Her mother, Helen: not so much. And ultimately my father turned out to be pretty miserable in that marriage. He was afraid to divorce Helen: “She’ll get all my money!!!” 

Yeah. Well. Some things are worth more than money, eh Daddy?

Actually, what I should have said to him was Daddy! I’m married to  a partner in one of the most powerful lawfirms in the Southwest. She’s NOT gunna get all your precious money!

Probably not so much as a penny of it…

Oh well. I was too stupid to think of that. So was he. And so they lived miserably ever after…

No Longer Even Bother….

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BRRRIIIINGGGGGGG!

BRRRIIIINGGGGGGG!

BRRRIIIINGGGGGGG!

CALL FROM “V….[ETC ETC ETC]

Oh, hey!!!  Turns OUT

it’s from my pal VickyC!  She wants to go out for brunch…lunch…whatever it is!

Yahoo! Now I have less than an hour to get off my duff, wash up, and get dressed.

The heck with that noise: I’m drinkin’ the rest of this coffee, come what may! 😀  😀  😀

And how convenient: I need a new lawyer, my beloved guy having retired. And she DOES know a good one, I believe. I hope…she was hiring my guy, but I think she needed someone who had a slightly different specialty.

Well! We shall see in an hour or so.

Must review the piles of legalistic paper and be sure my will and other paperwork remain set up to cover my son, with the least possible degree of hassle, for when I croak over.

*****

Aaahhhhh SHEEE-UT! 

No, we won’t see any such thing. Turns out my son has made a goddamn appointment with the goddamn Mayo Clinic…on SUNDAY MORNING!!!!!!!

This is not the first time those idiots have done this.

It’s a hour’s drive out there, one-way.

That means if I have choir: cancel choir.

If I have anything else to do: cancel that.

Get in the car and drive and drive and drive and drive and drive and…  Find a place to park in their maze of an underground parking lot. Ride upstairs and wait and wait and wait and…GODDAMMIT!

Just what I wanna do on a Sunday morning. Choir or no choir.

****

And now here we are in one of their draped rooms, waiting for…Gawd only knows what new torture. Presumably something entailing a generous jabbing of needles.

How do I hate this place? Let me count the ways.

One nice thing about it, I guess: if you croak over, you don’t regret it so uch…it would be a bit of a relief.

1:54 p.m.

“Morning,” eh? 

Well, it’s comin’ on to two in the afternoon. We’ve been here for HOURS. I’m still lashed up to a needle and fukkin’ tubes and…HOW can I say how much I hate this?

Yeah, I do recognize and understand how amazing our medical system is and how astonishing all the stuff we can do is and…boyoboyoboy…  And how much I hate this stuff.

Cruising the Internet. Come across a notice of my nephew’s demise. Poor guy. He never was…well…quite right. Short a few IQ points, from the git-go. Just…really sad.

This was the grandson of the woman who became my stepsister when my father married her mother…

2:15 in the fukkin’ afternoon…

Tied down to a couch in the Mayo with a damned needle in my arm for…how long? I’ve lost track of the time. Feels like fukkin’ hours, though. Son is yelling at me..I can’t open my mouth without pi$$ing him off.

One

Bitch

of a

Day

* * *

And now we’re on the way home. My poor son’s mood is not improved by our escape. He’s yelling at me. I just want to get home, get in the house, and shut the door!

And maybe, with any luck, find something to eat. Without having to hike to the grocery store.

EEEEK! Senility Attack!!!

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Well…that was a moment of high terror…

This morning I went to get my laptop so I could take it out on the back porch, there to play with the Internet by the dawn light of a gorgeous morning.

Get computer from bedroom…

Uh…no. Nope.

No computer in the bedroom.

Nor on the bed.

Nor under the bed.

Nor in the bathroom…nor…anywhere. 

Repeat searches. Search and search and search.

No computer.

Must have left it in the car, think I.

But…the car is at M’hijito’s house. He’s decided that it’s unsafe for me to drive (no kidding!!) and has purloined the vehicle. If I’d left the laptop in the car (not impossible: I take it to coffee shops all the time, for loafing purposes), then the computer’s at his house, too.

Shoot off an email to him. You know the variety: the “I’m nuts” type…

This is Sunday. He won’t roll out of the sack for another couple of hours, and probably won’t turn on his laptop for another hour or two after that.

Resign myself to having lost my most precious li’l object. Tromp through the bedroom to the bathroom. Tromp back out of the bathroom…and…wait for it! 

Right: THERE IT IS, sitting on top of the bureau drawers, right there in the bedroom.

Yep.

I must have looked at it three or four times and not even registered it.

WTF?

If I ever had any marbles, I seem to have lost the last of them.

***

Meanwhile: hurt hurt HURT lemme tellya HURT!

The gettin’ old stuff is NOT for the faint of heart. No, indeed not.

This morning a hip joint has gone out of whack. Every. Single. Step is excruciating. So is getting up out of a chair. I hurt so much I can hardly breathe!

All that notwithstanding: with no one here to help, I have to get up and limp around….

And…

And….

GOOD GRIEF!

I’ve limped out to the back patio. Plopped down in a chair. Opened the computer.

Realize that (what’s the matter with the damn computer NOW???) (??? naturally it’s stopped doing whatever it was doing…whaaa?) my coffee still awaits…on the kitchen counter.

O Hell O Damn

Drag myself out of the chair. Limp into the kitchen. Pour a cup of coffee. Limp back out here. Pull a chair up to the table…and find THE PAIN HAS STOPPED!!!

Huh??????

Not to say

WHAAAA?????

No idea why it stopped.

But lemme tellya…

THAT

DID

HURT! 

Argh. 

Now I’m afraid to sit down, lest the pain start up again..

So…

What we have here is one of those days!

Need to walk over to the Sprouts and reprovision a few favorite goods. But I’m kinda scared to try it, lest that pain flare up in the middle of the quarter-mile hike.

Hmmmm….what to do, what to do?

When in doubt, nothing. Right?

***

Yep! That seems to be the correct motto…  Just laid down on the bed. Put my feet up…and…OWWWWWWWW!

Holeee MACKEREL does that hurt!

Hmmmm… Whaddaya bet I ought not to stroll across a seven-lane thoroughfare plus a railroad track with this thing doing…whatever the.hell it’s doing.

Definitely something in the hip joint. But what? I cannot imagine.

Oh, yeah…ONE OF THOSE DAYS! 

What’s Your Favorite Phone Solicitor Bounce?

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EVERY….GODDAM…MORNING the accursed phone solicitors ring up this number. Even though I have the telephone set to ring through only on calls from specific area codes, almost every day at least one nuisance call gets through. Usually more than that.

They spoof area codes as well as local exchanges, trying to trick you into picking up the phone. I, for example, no longer answer the phone unless I recognize the caller’s name or the call is coming from an area where a client might be located. But this means,  of course, that if you do any amount of business over the phone, you really can’t afford to decline to answer the call.

Phone soliciting is a prison industry. So a fair number of the dorkuses who roust you as the sun rises are convicts, working some miserable job as part of their sentence. Others are more ordinary scam operators: crooks of one sort or another who have a special skill at putting on the Dumb and the Feckless.

To my mind, that files the whole lot of them into the category of Crook and Nuisance. So I feel no compulsion to be polite to them.

So…if they’re taking advantage of you (they know it’s 7 in the morning where you are, and you’re running around trying to get ready for work, wrangling the kids for school, or choking down breakfast and coffee), why not have a little fun with them?

Videlicet:

Them: Good morning, Ms. Bltzvck. {Pronouncing your name wrong…}

You: Hello, dear. What are you up to?

Them: {Launches into sales pitch.}

You: Is that so?!? That sounds very interesting! How long does it take to get {whatever they’re peddling} here to East Thailand?

*******

Them: Good morning, Ms. Bltzvck. Blah blah bl…

You: Omigawd! EEEEEK!

Them: Huh?

You: HOLEEE SHEEE-UT!  Call the fire department. The kitchen is ON FIRE!!!! 

Them: Where are you?

You: Eeeeeeeek! HAAAAAALP!!!! Ow, ow, ow, nooooooo!!!!! HEEELLLLPPPPPPP!

Them: What’s your address?

You: GAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

SLAMMMM!
(Mark slams down the phone)

****

Them: Good morning, Ms. Bltzvck. This is Dimwit Dummas calling for Ripoff Industries. How are you today?

You: Just fine, dear. And you? Now the Mark engages the predator in conversation. As the exchange proceeds…

You: By the way, may I ask you something?

Them: Sure?

You: I’ve heard telephone soliciting is a prison industry. What jail are you calling from?

And so on, to infinity. 

As if you had that much time to waste…

What’s your own favorite phone-solicitor revenge? Tell us about it in the comments below…please!

Awww, jeez! Guys!!!!

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Dare to sit down to breakfast, and ARF!!!!

Get up to see what the Hound is arfing at, and see Gerardo’s wondrous gang of yard dudes out front.

Dayum!!!

Get off duff. Trot around: pick up junk, put junk away; set up pool so guys can work around it; pick up more junk, put more junk away; pick up and discard mounds of dog sh!t… Finally get the place ready for the men.

Stumble back in the house. Look out front to see if they need me to go out there and unlock the side gate…

and…

and….

THEY’RE GONE!!!!!!!

WTF??????  Nary a sign of a yard dude! Or a yard dude’s truck!!

ohhhh…kayyyy…. So where’s the dog?????

Ruby!

RUBY!!

R-U-U-B-E-E-E-E!!!!!!

Nary a small fuzzy corgi!

Ohhhhh shee-ut! Did they open the gate and let her out?

Frantically search around and search around and call and call and search around and search around and call and call and…and…

Lo!
Here she is! 
Ambling out from underneath the toilet.

ggrrrrrr….  This is gonna be one of THOSE days, ain’t it?