Still buried in work! Was set to spend the day slogging through the rest of the Semiramis index (i hoped…) when the current Chinese Graduate Student send another iteration of her last chapter, slashed and burned by her dissertation director and reconstituted by her.
Rereading and updating edits on that consumed half the day.
So for the second day in a row (day before yesterday most of the hours were consumed by a client’s book formatting issues), I came back to the mind-numbing index job so tired I could hardly hold my head up. Keyboarded entries from a few marked-up pages (decided to dispense with the notecard technique, since this is already such a large and time-consuming job) and then crawled into bed around 10 p.m.
This morning I’m supposed to go out with a friend to breakfast/lunch (depending on when she gets away from her client). Then fly to south Phoenix to pick up page proofs of the client’s book and fly back up to Richistan to deliver them to the guy. Then fly home and get back to work on the index.
Really, I should farm this index out. But I need the money and don’t want to share just now.
Interesting news on the Hypochondria Front: since I have to submit to a major fishing expedition check-up in order to stay on the rolls at the Mayo, and since I’m supposed to revisit the cardiologist in another month, I decided to revisit the blood pressure issue. CardioDoc suggested keeping a running record of twice-daily readings for a period — when we were trying to shake off the hysteria engendered by the quack Young Dr. Kildare sent me to, he asked me to do that for six months, after which he declared me free of high blood pressure and probably free of any cardio-vascular problems.
Well, I hate taking my blood pressure — the act itself seems to drive up the numbers — so decided to limit that exercise to a week or ten days. But it seemed like it would be good to have a running record, because just walking into the Mayo (or any other medical facility or doctor’s office) pushes my blood pressure up. Way up. I’d like to have a little chart I can show this new doctor to fend off a new effort to put me on some not-so-benign med for the rest of my life.
Amazingly, despite the eight or ten pounds of overweight I’ve put on since the start of the bellyache problem and despite the endless, stress-inducing workload, the BP readings are well within the normal range: 116/72 this morning, after fiddling with the computer, feeding the dogs, and puttering around the house.
So that was a pleasant surprise.
Along those lines, I made another surprising discovery. In an idle moment while taking a break from the grind, I happened to google my father’s name. Discovered his brother is buried in Tarrant County, Texas, whence they came and where he returned after my aunt died. (He had moved to Sun City because my father retired there).
Turns out he remarried after moving back home in his old age. The new bride lived about ten years after they wed, and he outlived her another ten years. I had no idea!
My uncle lived to be eighty-nine. My father had told me he was 84 , and that his other brother had also died at 84. The only reason this uncle died was that he fell off a chair he’d climbed on to change a light bulb. He broke his hip and died of the ensuing shock.
If that hadn’t happened to him, he presumably would have lived into his 90s.
My father died at 84. The big difference between the two of them, besides the fact that my father worked on ships and my uncle had a quiet managerial job at a dairy, was that the uncle never smoked nor drank. My father smoked — and more to the point, lived with a woman who was smoking six packs a day at the end of her life — and he also had a drink or two almost every day.
At Find-a-Grave, I may have tracked down the third brother. If the record I found is his, then he lived to age 82. I believe he was a pretty tough character — a cowboy and eventually a ranch foreman. My father disliked him, and I knew almost nothing about him. The man I found in those records was married, briefly, to a woman who had a new last name by the time she died, and he is listed has having a son, born in the 1930s, who used his mother’s last name, acquired after his birth. So presumably they divorced early on, and it appears that this uncle never remarried.
At any rate, given that on my mother’s side, the women who evaded the family disease (cancer) lived into their mid-90s without ever seeing a doctor (they were Christian Scientists), it appears I have some pretty good genes in the offing. I may make into the 90s, too, barring a successful effort by one of my fellow homicidal drivers. 😀
Otherwise: all quiet on the Western front. It’s getting warm enough to swim, despite some unseasonably cool days. That would be nice, if I could find some time to do so.
😀 Literally! Along about 2:15 this morning, the dogs and I were lifted off the bed by the C-R-A-A-A-A-C-K kerBLAAAAAM of a lightning strike that sounded like it hit right outside the window.