Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

So, Where Were We?

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Where were we, indeed? I’ve lost track. But this morning a tiny  bit of normalcy trickled back into life: My accountant friend and I drove out to the weekly meeting of the Scottsdale Business Association, the business group that we’ve taken to calling “The Breakfast Club.” Business leads do get exchanged, but in such a low-key way as to be virtually unnoticeable.

Really. They do! Today I gave Francis the Gardener, who runs an upscale concierge service, leads to two of the Valley’s highest-end Realtors, one of whom went to graduate school with me. She quit at the master’s level to take up the practice of real estate. Some punkins are a great deal smarter than the rest of the vegetables in the patch.

If you’d like to see how the 1 percent lives, check out her featured listings.

Okay, that was a distraction. Where were we?

So it was pleasant and soothing to see my old bidness friends again. It’s a convenable and cheering group to spend time with, even when we’re grutching about the sad state of national and international affairs. Being too sick to go to those meetings or to choir has pretty much isolated me from humanity and that alone is demoralizing.

Yesterday the cough that prevented The Surgeon from doing the work she needed to do with me under a general anaesthesia got lots worse. So I betook myself to the precincts of the high-powered pulmonologist who treated the bronchitis I enjoyed two years ago; got in on the very day with his partner.

This guy diagnosed what ails me as a viral bronchitis. He wrote a prescription for codeine with Phenargan.

In the course of telling him how I came to this pass and why I was swallowing the pills I carried in to his office, I mentioned that I’m on cephalexin for a supposed breast infection that The Surgeon says is not an infection and allegedly proved it when she vacuumed out my boob.

He said, “If you don’t have an infection, why are you still taking an antibiotic?”

I said, “Because she told me to take the rest of it.”

“Why?”

Why? Trust me, dude, I was in no condition to ask questions! “I don’t know. Maybe she meant it prophylactically.”

“I think you should stop taking it. Don’t take any more of this.”

Oh. God. All. Mighty

So now once again we’ve got two heavy hitters dispensing diametrically opposite advice.

The Phenargan in the cough med he prescribed dried out my mouth and throat so much I couldn’t swallow. At all. Thinking my tongue was swelling, along about 11  last night I called 911. The paramedic felt that it could not be an allergic reaction because it had been so long since I took the drug; she thought it was a reaction to the Phenargan and so connected me with Poison Control, whose CSR opined likewise.

Lovely.

I’m prone to laryngeal spasms, a peculiarly disturbing quirk. They block off one’s breathing so that you can’t even gasp out your address to the 911 set, to say nothing of telling them what’s wrong. If you relish moments of sheer, unadulterated terror, try one of those in the dark of the night when you’re all alone.

So I decided I’d better not lay my head on the pillow or dast to go to sleep. So worked until about 3 a.m., when exhaustion won out. Then it was up at 6 to feed the dog and get ready to shoot out the door for the meeting.

At any rate, I got through 13 pages of a client’s project before accursed Wyrd did one of its infamous catastrophic crashes and lost two pages of it. Probably the re-do of those two pages was better than the first effort.

Just got a call back from the pulmonologist’s office; he wrote an Rx for Robitussin with codeine, which should do the trick. Still waiting to hear from The Surgeon’s underling on the question of why I’m being asked to take five more days of a powerful antibiotic if I never had an infection in the first place.

§ § §

In the absence of Ruby the Corgi Pup, Cassie the Corgi has come back to life. As we scribble, she’s in full Ball Pestering Mode, to her great delight. Pup had brought a stop to playing with Ball — in the first place because she grabs it away from Cassie and threatens to kill her if she comes anywhere near the thing, and in the second because I had to pick all the balls up and put them away (i.e., lose them) because she chews mightily on them — tennis balls are very dangerous to dogs that want to chew them up. Cassie does not chew balls, nor does she hold them in her mouth for any length of time. She picks them up and throws them (no joke — she actually can pitch one of those things clear across the room) at the sucker who gets started with her.

Cassie is eating her food in peace. Cassie is getting unmolested doggie walks — the last couple of days I’ve been able to crawl around the neighborhood, which I’ve not been able to do while trying to manipulate Pup with a boob that hurts at every tug and hurts even more every time I have to bend over. Cassie is resting beside my chair again (she was relegated to the back bathroom, where she went to hide).

She’s still not back to normal. She may never go back to normal.

What to do with Ruby remains to be seen. My son still has her, but he has said he doesn’t want to keep her permanently. I can’t deal with a puppy in my present condition, and it appears this isn’t going to get better for quite a long time. So I suppose she’ll have to go back to the breeder. And that is a whole ’nother difficult and depressing project to launch and see through. Just haven’t had the strength or the heart to get in touch with the woman.

But I guess that’s gonna have to be done pretty soon.

 

Rain?

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Lordie, it’s hard to sell newspapers! Or news websites… Local Play-Nooz has been whipping up hysteria over a HURRICANE (eeeeeek!) about to SLAM (yowwww!) Arizona and FLOOD PEOPLE’S HOMES AGAIN (auuuuugggghhh!).  They’re making as much hay as they can over Hurricane Odile, which is weakening as it passes over BATTERS Baja. This blather is great for sales just now, since folks are a little sensitized by the recent record rainfall. Three inches qualifies as “record” in Arizona…

And in fact, because the infrastructure isn’t designed to handle a real rain, three inches does max and overwhelm the roads and the drainage systems. There’s also the fact that Arizona homes aren’t built for rain, either. If your slab is at or below grade, then your door’s threshold is going to be….yup! at or below grade. My friend La Maya’s pretty office flooded during the late, great Deluge. It has a sunken floor and a pair of exterior French doors that look out onto an enclosed courtyard that lacks sufficient drainage to handle three inches of rain.

One of the few small mercies that have visited me of late has been here all the time: A slab built up about four inches above grade. I did get water on the patio, as I do every time it rains. But when I stumbled out, in a stupor, to see what was happening, it wasn’t anywhere near the door. In fact, the puddle rose less than it did the last time Lake Patio filled.

The other day Money Beagle, wondering whether changing habits and changing tastes signal the onset of decrepitude, mentioned a couple of alternatives to radio, streaming off the Net. One is Slacker and the other is Freegal. Checked them both out. Freegal I dunno about, because it requires you to set up a userid and password, which I hate and avoid when possible. Slacker, however, is free and uncomplicated. No annoying demands that you divulge your name (real or fake) and e-mail address. No advertising. And (so far) nonstop streaming of more music than you’d ever imagine existed.

Right now a bonanza of outlaw country is flowing into the MacBook’s tinny little speakers. There is, of course, a Slacker app, which I intend to download to the iPad. Then, I figure, a couple of cheap Bluetooth speakers in the Dog Chariot will free me from the vicissitudes of commercial radio and NPR’s endless talkathons. And begathons.

Actually, with this you could listen to the NPR shows you like on the car’s radio (assuming you have a superannuated car, like mine, that doesn’t have an entire computer lab in the dashboard) while letting the genre of your preference play as background.

Welp, it’s time to return some phone calls and then get back to reading copy. And so, to wyrk…

 

Damp!

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Okay, here’s the fourth attempt at a post today. In fact, this is being written in Word so WordPress (or, more precisely, Cox) can’t erase it again.

So the dawgs and I awoke to quite the little freshet this morning. It stormed most of the night, and by dawn water was hosing out of the sky.

The mayor and the governor declared states of emergency over the storm. Tina said all the freeways on the east side of town were closed, and they’d closed her daughter’s school. She was supposed to go in to Tempe for some big confab with one of her several bosses. Haven’t heard whether she even tried – it would have taken her two hours to get there through the frantic bedroom-community commuters. When a freeway shuts down in both directions, the gridlock defies belief.

This part of the city made out OK, as far as I can tell. My neighbor across the street lost a big branch of her beautiful specimen paloverde, which was quite a gem. She said she’d call our local arborist (guy lives here in the hood) and try to get it trimmed off. In the meantime, her hubby will trim off the broken branches and haul them into the alley.

We didn’t lose power, for a change, although some parts of town did. The water did not come up to the back door, thank goodness, so there was no flooding in the house. During the night there was a fair amount of lightning and thunder, I think. It scares the dogs and causes them to wriggle around.

Somewhere in the darkness, they tried to persuade me to get up and let them off the bed, but I was so heavily drugged they couldn’t get me to climb out of my stupor. So they finally subsided. In revenge, one of them peed on the floor come morning, when they were disgusted to find that vast amounts of water were still falling out of the air.

They hate to get wet. I mean hate to get wet. Cassie will not go out in the rain at all unless you pick her up and carry her out. When your boob hurts so much it feels like it’s going to fall off, that is not a very pleasant task. Carried her out three times and she still refused to go. Just stood there looking miserable. Same with the pup.

 Yesterday I worked up the nerve to try the cephalexin, after carrying it to a pharmacist and asking what would happen if I really am allergic to penicillin. She agreed that Cipro is, said she, “not the drug for you.” She said only 10% of people who have allergies to penicillin get a reaction to cephalexin, and advised having a bottle of Benadryl and the phone at hand.

Shortly after I arrived home from that venture, my friend The PC Magician (a.k.a. Your E-book Builder) showed up. When he realized what was up, he sat there and made small talk endlessly. I am pretty much on the verge of delirium and do not recall much of what was said, only that he did not leave after I swallowed one of the potentially toxic pills and then later decided maybe I should try a Benadryl.

He also has had negative experience with Cipro, and his lady friend is among the berzillions who have had seriously bad reactions to the stuff. He ranks, now, among the many who believe it is toxic.

Amazingly, yesterday I found a research study published in some journal of skeletal development where the team used Cipro to induce toxic lesions in the growing bones of adolescent rats.

That should tell you something, huh?

They discovered, btw, in this limited study (40 subjects, plus test groups) that magnesium supplementation worked to ameliorate damage to bones, joints, and tendons brought on by Cipro, which among other things chelates magnesium and calcium out of your body. That’s why the package instructions tell you not to take antacids with it (while the stuff is eating out your gut): an antacid containing magnesium, such as Gaviscon, neutralizes the drug by about 90%.

Magnesium supplements are nothing to mess with. You can make yourself good and sick overdosing on that stuff. However, quite a few foods are rich in magnesium, among them green leafies like Swiss chard, kale, and spinach, quinoa, bananas, certain nuts, and stuff like that. I, however, am too sick to drive around in search of more food – actually am out of food and surviving hand-to-mouth on whatever is in the fridge or kitchen cabinet.

Anyway, no ill effects ensued from the cephalexin. Can’t see that any especially good effects are ensuing, either. My fever dropped from around 100 to about 99.4. I need to get one of those digital thermometers: trying to shake the stupid mercury thing down has sprained my wrist, and it’s almost impossible to read.

My business has gone to hell on a skateboard. I had to blow off a client this morning who kept pestering and pestering about a stupid little detail and wanted me to revamp part of an index RIGHT NOW – before flicking eight o’clock in the morning!!!!!

My beloved novelist awaits a chapter that I haven’t even started.

PC Magician brought over an e-book proof yesterday and I haven’t read it. Spent the entire day in bed, unable to function. Actually, I hoped that maybe if I just stayed quiet all day while slurping down antibiotic pills, some improvement would take place.

So far, no dice.

Internet connection has been cycling on and off all day. Four times this morning, I tried to publish a FaM post, and four times Cox killed it. When you hit “Save” in WordPress, you’re engaging the Internet, too…so when I tried to save the things, Cox disappeared them by going offline in the middle of the process. Finally gave up and went to bed.

God. I must have food. Going to AJ’s to buy one of their overpriced dinners, which should last for two days. Bye.

Tiny Rays of Sunshine

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So come this morning the kitchen sink is still clogged.

A week or ten days ago, I paid an outfit found on Angie’s List $271 to install a new garbage disposal, which the plumber claimed would fix the problem. It did not.

When he saw it would not, he said, well, the way the thing is hooked up under there, this one piece of piping has settled so it’s no longer angled so water drains downward from it. It needs to be replaced, but he’ll have to order the part.  He’ll call when he has it.

Days pass. The kitchen sink continues to clog. It freaking hurts to have to plunge the effer, because of the dissected boob. I call. They say they’ll get in touch with him. Day or two later, I call again. They say he’ll come back NEXT TUESDAY.  Yesterday the sink plugs up and won’t drain.

Back to Angie’s List. Find a different plumbing co, one with 423 “A” reviews. I figured you could fake, purchase, or bribe 100 rave reviews, but 423? Not likely. At least some of ’em must be the real, genuine articles.

Lovely young fellow shows up: handsome, clean, nicely groomed, amazingly punctual and amazingly polite. I tell him the tale told by the previous plumber. He studies the problem.

“Let’s take it apart,” says he.

And yea verily, he shortly discovers the obvious problem: a fat plug of black grease in the drain line.

I do try valiantly not to let grease get down the drain. But when you eat salad every day and you dress it with olive oil and lemon or lime juice, it’s hard to avoid SOME grease getting in there.

He shovels the thing out, rotoroots the thing out, cleans and whacks and cleans and whacks: a miserable job in a cramped miserable space. Reconnects the plumbing.

It works!

He says the black iron plumbing is probably getting constricted, it being quite a few years since it was installed back in 19 and ought 71. It will never, says he, run perfectly. But it’ll do the job for now. Replacing it with copper or plastic, he says, will be extravagantly expensive.

With the Angie’s List discount, he goes out the door with $153 in his pocket.

So…I felt a little less taken advantage of than I have over the past several weeks.

Otherwise, it’s crazy business as usual.

Cleaned up two piles of dog mounds — undoubtedly Cassie’s. Installed the fancy hinged kiddy gate in the office doorway so the dogs can be penned in here with me when I’m working, thereby preventing them from sneaking into the front of the house to poop. Job!

The minute the new plumber showed up at the door a) the phone rang–a choir friend; and b) Ruby escaped from the room where I’d penned her and THREW herself against the front door.

Phone: Lovely and dear friend wanting to commiserate on my trials and tribs. I can’t easily excuse myself because her trials and tribs far exceed mine and … well, it would be rude. I can’t pick up Ruby with one hand while holding the phone with the other because the boob on the  Ruby-picking-up side hurts too much for me to lift 15 or 18 pounds. The young plumber dude waits patiently in the blasting sun.

Finally I corral Ruby, let the gent in the door, and, while chatting, show him into the kitchen. Friend and I get off the phone. She has had REAL cancer, not “precancer” or some such bejabber, and everyone is worried and heartbroken over her very considerable challenges. It was incredibly, amazingly gracious of her to call and offer moral support.

Call old, beloved gynecologist down at St. Joe’s. I want a second opinion, and before I let the high-powered surgeon lop off my boob, I want a third opinion.

The Plumbing Challenge takes some time. Shovel the excellent young man out the door along about mid-day.

Gynecologist’s office calls: will I come in next Thursday at 8:15 a.m.?

Well, of course.

Shit. Good-bye to next week’s Scottsdale Bidness Association meeting. Now have to find someone to foist the meeting-chair junk onto. One person refuses. Other cagily does not answer email.

SBA members have agreed to buy one of the pricey rosaries for our venerable and much-loved server, Cathy. She approached me last Thursday as I was on the way out of the restaurant; when I said they were $50, her face fell. So, tomorrow I have to retrieve one of the rosaries from Choir Director, and next week must find a way to get the thing to an SBA member who does plan to attend the meeting.

Shoot out the door headed for Costco, where I need to buy something, anything for tomorrow’s choir potluck.

Figure to get Whatever for the potluck, a box of dishwasher detergent tabs, and if I can find them, one of the packages of precooked mussels I saw at a different Costco last week.

Potluck: Tres Leches cake/cheesecake/whatever it is, obscene! No mussels. Substitute $moked $almon and some sourdough bread and get some more tomatoes and, having been burned on the peaches now one too many times, buy a bag of apples for breakfasts and snacks.

By the time I get out to the car, I realize my boob isn’t hurting as much as it did. Maybe the Cipro is kicking in?

Doc’s office leaves word saying it should start to work within 48 to 72 hours. It has not been 48 hours since the first dose. Boob is still hot and swollen, but slightly less swollen. Probably a fluke, but who knows? Any port in a storm…

You know…

I forgot how comfortable it is to drive without a seatbelt on.

Can’t stand to have the damn shoulder strap across my chest, so I’ve been shoving that behind me, though keeping the seat strap part connected.

Hideously dangerous, I’m sure. My antique car has no side airbags. But ohhhhh so nice to be able to drive unconstricted!

I’ve always thought people who drive without seatbelts are morons of the widest stripe. But now I can understand why they do it. It’s just soooo much better!!!!

They’re still morons. But comfortable morons.

So: a few bright spots:

• Finally got the kitchen drain running, despite being ripped off by the prior plumbing co to the tune of $271.
• Found a very nice New Plumber; finally get sink fixed.
• Dear, lovely friend gets in touch, commiserates.
• Boob may be getting at least slightly better.
• Nice gift found for business group’s loyal server.
• Potluck dish purchased (not made!)
• Appointment scored with a possible second opinion.
• Decision made to seek third opinion before allowing a mastectomy.

It’s 3 p.m. I have done exactly no work. The dogs and I are going back to bed.

The Worst Threat the World Has Seen Since WW II

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The Guardian is running a story titled “‘Apocalyptic’ Isis beyond anything we’ve seen,’ say US defence chiefs.” Now, it’s true, The Guardian tends to exaggerate. But lemme tellya: this one is no exaggeration.

I lived in Saudi Arabia for ten years, in one of the remotest parts of a remote kingdom. We lived among the local people, who, during the 1950s, were still dwelling in conditions Europeans would think of as medieval, culturally and materially. No love was lost on Americans among the Saudis, and let me assure you, the murder of an innocent victim such as James Foley as a device to express hatred, vengeance, dominance, and menace was culturally acceptable then and it remains so now.

The West in general and the United States in specific have made so many bone-headed mistakes in the Middle East that it is impossible to keep track of them. Those stupid moves are coming home to roost now. With the ascendance of the kind of people who make it a religion to hate the West — to some degree with good reason — and the suppression of ruthless dictators who had a vested interest in keeping the peace, we do indeed face an apocalyptic threat. The Moslem extremists who are fast seizing power are fully capable of and feel justified in exploding nuclear bombs, releasing poison gas, and spreading engineered disease in cities filled with civilians, in any country on the planet. And sooner or later they will do so.

The most serious recent  mistake the West has made was to support the overthrow of strongmen like Saddam Hussein and his ilk. That is because we operate under a fundamental error: we believe, as though it were a religious tenet, that because democracy works for us it must therefore be best for everyone else in the world. And that is not true.

Democracy does not necessarily fit every culture. That is especially so for cultures that spawn groups capable of the atrocities we’ve already seen — atrocities that, you may be sure, are just the beginning. We need to butt out of the governance of other people’s countries. If a dictator is what’s needed to keep extreme jihadists under control, then a dictator is who should be in power. But stupidly, we failed to take advantage of the strongmen who were in a position to do that. When we should have continued to cultivate them, we dethroned them, or encouraged the locals to dethrone them. This was exceptionally stupid.

Our longest-running mistake in the Middle East has been to build dependence on the region’s oil supplies to support America’s enormous, spendthrift energy needs. This forced us to intertwine our economy and our politics with cultures that are not our friends and never have been our friends. Surpassing exceptionally stupid. We would have been better off to dig up all of Alaska, Canada, the Dakotas, the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico than to establish the kind of dependence that we have now and have had for decades. When you compare the two evils, the former would have been less harmful to the United States as a nation and to the West as an alliance of technologically developed nations.

Our second-oldest mistake — hang onto your hats, folks, because I’m about to surpass myself in political incorrectness — was to support the establishment of Israel and maintain an alliance with it.

Think about Israel from an Arab point of view: This is a Western sovereignty populated mostly by people with European cultural roots that was forcibly planted on soil stolen from Palestine. Western allies supported its development shortly after the Second World War for a simple, truly evil reason: no one wanted to provide homes and safety for the millions of Jewish refugees from European tyranny. Instead of opening our borders to the beleaguered victims of a murderous time, we exploited a specious religious belief that a plot of territory on the Mediterranean was a God-given “promised land” to the Europeanized and Americanized descendants of an ancient nomadic tribe. After all, we persuaded ourselves, the Jews were there first.

Well. Maybe. But consider an American analogue. Let us suppose the European Union decided that Virginia should be removed from the governance of the United States and returned to the Pamunkey and Mattaponi Indians, on the theory that they were there first and Virginia is, after all, their land. Imagine how that would go over! It’s just about as rational, though, as ripping out a chunk of Palestine and handing it over to the descendants of the Hebrew tribes.

Given that Israel has systematically oppressed the local Palestinians and as we scribble is in the process of killing hundreds of civilians in its own defense (2000 Palestinians vs. 68 Israelis), it’s not surprising that Arabs feel a certain resentment toward the West.

In my opinion, ISIS is the worst threat to Western civilization that we have seen since Adolf Hitler. We need to crush this outfit NOW, even if it means dropping plutonium bombs on Syria, Iran, and Iraq, killing innocents along with the criminal extremists, and letting God sort them out. We cannot allow ISIS to gain any more power, territory, weapons, or political influence — period. If stopping ISIS means killing everybody in sight, that’s what we need to do.

We need to go all-out in building an energy infrastructure completely free of any association with any Middle Eastern country, even if it means despoiling our lands, raising the price of gasoline, building more nuclear plants across the nation, and perforce limiting the amount of power we expend.

We need to quit sending military aid, economic aid, and political support to Israel, even if it means evacuating every person of European ancestry and Jewish heritage and finding homes and jobs for them in Western countries. How about Virginia for starters?

My mother was not an educated woman. But she was perceptive. Sometimes she said things that amounted to metaphor. Once, she remarked, in so many words, that “Armageddon will come out of the Middle East.”

It sounds extreme. But she was commenting on an extreme situation.

World War III will come out of the Middle East. And WW III, given the kinds of weapons we have now and the fanaticism of our opponents, could very well be the Western world’s Armageddon.

Postscript, 8/23/2014: Don’t believe me? Well then, take a look at this authoritative article by Ed Husain, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a senior advisor to the Tony Blair Faith Foundation. It appears in this morning’s New York Times. What Mr. Husain describes exactly reflects my own experience of a decade in Saudi Arabia.

Stuff Not Done, Booze, and Wasted Days

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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.