Coffee heat rising

Techno-skeptic

To REALLY retire or not to REALLY retire?

by

That is the question.

It’s not so much that I’m all that sick of this self-employment stuff. It’s that the older I get, the lazier I get. And the less I feel like working at ALL. Barf.

Just now The Copyeditor’s Desk, a registered Arizona freaking S-corp, has about $2,000 in outstanding receivables. Among these receivables is one due from a university in Texas that paid through the monumentally faceless Oracle Corporation, which a few days ago sent me a notice saying the check was in the SNAILMAIL. And — get this! — reminding me to be sure it clears their banking institution (or whatever a monumentally faceless corporation engages these days) before trying to use it.

Uh huh. Days have gone by, as you might expect. No sign of this highly unstable and perhaps rubbery check in the mailbox.

Then we have the Chinese clients.

Not that I don’t love the Chinese clients. I do. They’re wonderful and interesting and great to work for. It’s getting paid by universities in China…therein lies the problem. Other countries, you understand — more advanced than the U.S. — no longer transact business with paper checks. They want to transmit payments electronically.

That would be fine if I were using a major international bank to hold my vast empire’s wealth. But I dislike major international banks, because, still living in the mid-twentieth century as I do, I persist unreasonably in expecting (of all things!) some customer service. And I deeply resent being dinged for fees to keep my money in their bank, where it is not in their bank but in investments turning a profit for said bank. Consequently, I use a credit union.

Most credit unions are too small to have a SWIFT number. This means that a Chinese client (usually a major university) has to send an international money transfer, but it has to be done indirectly. That is, they can’t just send the money direct to the credit union. They have to use an international bank, such as Bank of China or hateful Wells Fargo, as an intermediary: they send the money to the giant faceless international bank, and the GFIB sends it to my credit union, extracting a substantial gouge in the process.

This is time consuming, to say nothing of noxious.

No, they will not use PayPal. They are rightfully suspicious of PayPal. As am I. It can be done, but they don’t want to do it and so will tell you that their university will not allow them to do it. Could they pay by Visa? Probably. I haven’t looked into it, because I’m not sure who to ask. Plus I would have to pay to get into a system to make credit-card transactions. Blech.

Truth to tell, because I don’t want to work much, I don’t get paid much. By the hour, my clients pay many times more than colleges and universities pay for adjunct teaching. However, because the minimum-wage teaching gigs are more or less steady work, after all is said and done a couple of classes a semester put as much as or more into my checking account than the editorial work.

This leaves us with the obvious question: Why am I bothering with this?

Plus…frankly, I suspect I get less and less competent the older I get. My agèd secretary, who was a complete dunderhead, used to drive me freaking nuts because she could not figure out the digitized office procedures we had to accomplish tasks that we once did, much faster and much easier, by analog processes. Those analog processes had gone away at the Great Desert University (as in the larger world), and so she had no choice but to try to use the digital upgrades. And what a mess that woman could make when she did try.

Welp. This pot can no longer call that kettle black. I’ve found that I do not want to keep climbing an endless Mt. Everest of a fucking learning curve. I’m sick of trying to figure all this shit out, I’m sick of having it not work no matter how hard you try to make it work, I’m sick of the FUCKING TIME SUCK involved — spending hours to do something that should take ten minutes, every time you turn around.

Today — ah ha! Here it is: the immediate cause of this rant — I went online to pay the corporate and the personal AMEX bills.

The credit union’s bill-pay function, as we’ve found in the past, is problematic: It makes it appear that you’re paying electronically, but behind the scenes sometimes the CU is actually sending a paper check, meaning it takes up to ten days from the pay date for the creditor to receive its money. There’s no rhyme nor reason to this check-paying quirk, and the underlings cannot tell you why they do this and which creditors are likely to be paid by check.

As part of its ongoing learning curve, the CU recently instituted a shortcut to its bill-paying service. Instead of having to proactively click on “Bill Pay,” next to your list of accounts you now see a pane  labeled “Make a Payment.” We are told you can tell — after you’ve jumped through the hoops to schedule and make a payment (which in this new protocol requires more clicks than before) — how payment will be made: look for an icon next to the amount scheduled to pay. Lightning bolt means e-payment; envelope means snail-mail. But…those icons are not visible on the customer’s end. The CSR is unaware of that.

Farting around with this today took SO FUCKING LONG it would have been easier, faster, and infinitely less aggravating simply to have written checks, stuffed them in envelopes, choked up a half-buck apiece (!!!!!!!) in postage, and driven them over to the post office. (No. You can’t put them in your mailbox and flag them for the mailindividual to pick up. That would be insensate. They would be stolen long before the mailperson arrives, which these days is usually sometime after 5:00 p.m.). Half my morning was wasted with the simple chore of trying to pay the goddamn credit-card bills.

Well. Admittedly: I did have to transfer $2,800 from savings to checking to cover the homeowner’s and car insurance. But that took all of about 30 seconds.

So the point here is that this kind of electronic futzing to get simple clerical chores done is

a) endlessly annoying;
b) endlessly time-consuming;
c) endlessly unproductive; and
d) not something on which I wish to spend the limited amount of time left to me on this earth.

I don’t want to learn it. And once learned, I don’t want to do it.

And it is entirely possible that because of my age, I can’t learn it. The issue may very well be more than don’t want to.

Lately it has become painfully evident that I’m no longer competent to do even the chores that I’m (supposedly) good at. Long after editing and proofreading a document, long after sending it off to the client, I will happen to revisit something and discover…holy shit! Glaring errors interposed by me in the form of typos and passages that the computer has dorked up without my noticing it. Obvious inconsistencies or errors on the part of the client that I have inexplicably missed — despite proofreading, despite proofing again behind the computer’s “dictation” function that reads it aloud.

It should be impossible for me to miss these things. But…it is not.

Many of these errors have gotten past me and gone back to the client. That is a freaking menace.

Even in my own creative work, I come across weird stuff: chunks of copy moved…but moved to the wrong place and left there unnoticed. Inconsistencies. Typos. Wackshit stuff that would never have escaped attention even five years ago, to say nothing of ten or fifteen.

Week or two ago, I volunteered to do receptionist work for the church. They have a whole crew who staff the front desk during the weekdays. I should be competent at that: my first full-time real-world job was working as receptionist at a law firm. And I loved it. Best job I’ve ever had, except for the editorial job at Arizona Highways.

After sitting at an experienced person’s elbow for two shifts — six hours, all told — it occurred to me that I cannot remember how to operate the very simple phone. It is like a real switchboard and it is not like a real switchboard. It’s enough not — and staff’s wishes and nonwishes are complex enough — that it’s going to be difficult or maybe even impossible for me to learn how to do it.

Then we have the fact that I’m no longer a cute young girl. Back in the day when I had an acceptable face, no gray hair, and 34-23-36 measurements, my cuteness over-rode the strangeness of my personality. The god’s truth is, one reason I’m not good at marketing books (besides the fundamental laziness) is that I do not do well with people. I annoy them and offend them and do not know how or why.

This has been true since I was a little girl. In grade school, I had no friends. The kids simply hated me. By second grade (no kindergarten in those days), I’d alienated them all — well, except for one little girl who was as weird as I was. She was taken back to the States in the third or fourth grade. Some years later — after we also had come back to the States — I walked into an empty classroom where two girls were fooling with something in a closet. With their backs turned to me, they didn’t see me come in. And they were both going on about how much they hated me. I didn’t even know who they were! Couldn’t have told you their names to save my own life.

My guess is that today I would be “diagnosed” with a mild case of Asperger’s. I don’t get along with people because I don’t read their expressions well, I don’t pick up on their tone of voice well, and little verbal hints they drop often fly right past me.

Which, I suppose, explains why the more I get to know people, the better I like my dog…

These things were overlooked when I was a sexy young woman married (or about to be married) to a prominent lawyer. Today: not so much.

At any rate, I suspect that it’s best if I’m not around other human beings, for their happiness and for mine.

So that leaves, as a money-making gig, adjunct teaching. Online.

I loathe adjunct teaching. I’m not all that fond of teaching when I’m paid a respectable salary. But the sub-minimum wage that adjuncts earn is just plain insulting. After a semester of that stuff, you’re left with the same question: Why am I doing this?

Yeah. Why AM I doing this???

Driverless Cars: Brave(r) New World?

by

The Economist is holding forth about the future Brave New World of driverless electric vehicles. This week’s special report contains five articles on the subject, each more effervescent about the future than the last.

That august publication, ever progressive and ever enthusiastic about futuristic improvements to our lives, predicts a fundamental change in the texture of our society once autonomous (self-driving) cars take hold big-time. As the face of Western culture changed with the advent of the automobile, so it will change when cars can drive themselves. Strip malls, for example, will disappear, for stores will “come to you” with automated delivery of your orders. Urban cores, already plenty dense, will grow even denser as the need to provide parking space for commuters and residents disappears.

Suburbs will become “garden cities” once the need to park residents’ vehicles goes away. People will use the streets to walk on, not to drive on. (Uh huh…and these wondrous shared vehicles? They’ll fly?) Garages and driveways will be replaced by gardens.

And (the editors hope) people will no longer feel the need to own a vehicle at all. Everyone will get around on a combination of ride-hailing and public transit. If the light-rail that takes you downtown (elbow-to-elbow with your friendly drug-addicted panhandler) doesn’t go right to your office’s door, you’ll simply hail an Uber to pick you up at the station and take you the rest of the way.

Roads will, they allow, remain congested: crowds of commuters will be replaced by crowds of delivery vehicles. So if you ride from Outer Gardenville to your job in downtown Rabbit Warren City, it will take you just as long to get there in the rosy future as it does now. Well, probably longer. But buck up! You’ll be able to work — or better  yet, sleep — the whole way!

How d’you like them beer and skittles?

Seriously: Are you looking forward to this, or does it sound like Dystopia Redux to you?

As a practical matter, they may be right that when fleets of driverless ride-sharing vehicles become commonplace, a lot of people will want to shed the expense, hassle, and space demands of private cars. And the things probably will be very expensive, indeed. Plus to keep people off roads, legislators may inflict tolls — some would like to do that right now. So the trade-off for convenience, safety, and mobility in old age could be a pretty pricey ride.

And convenience may not be one of the benefits the price purchases. The cars may be so expensive that most people (Economist editorialists hope) will be forced to rely on ride-sharing services.

Consider: if you have to call a cab every time you want to go to work or run to the grocery store or take the kids to soccer, you will have to factor in substantial wait times. And your calculation will be influenced by a whole slew of variables:

  • The day of the week
  • Time of day
  • The season of the year, if you live in a tourist destination
  • Weather conditions
  • Major-league athletic events
  • Whether any civic shindigs are going on
  • What roads are torn up
  • How far a vehicle will have to come to reach you, and from what direction
  • How much it will cost to get from point A to point B

And probably a whole lot of other eventualities I’m not thinking of just now.

Then there’s the question of whether you really want to “share” a ride with everybody and his/her little brother, sister, and long-lost cousin. These vehicles, absent a custodian to ride herd on the Great Unwashed, are likely to be very dirty. The last rider lit up a cigarette: you get a ride that stinks. People will chow down on smelly fast foods and leave the wrappers on the floors. Mothers will change their babies’ diapers and leave the dirties under the seat. Drunks will vomit, leaving you a mess to enjoy on your way to the baseball game. Drug addicts will leave needles for your kids to play with.

Additionally, the companies that operate the vehicles will be able to track your every move, and they will have a centralized set of records available to anyone who can hack it, subpoena it, or pay enough for it. Privacy is already a scarce commodity in our own Brave New World. In the BNW of the endless rent-a-ride, it will be extinct.

Many people may consider true autonomy — owning one’s own vehicle rather than having to rent every ride — to be worth even a pretty exorbitant cost.

So what will happen? The roads will grow far more congested. If every store and restaurant converts to the Amazon model and every purchase you make is delivered to your home in a self-driving truck, then we’ll all be sharing the roads with that many more vehicles. This extra burden of vehicles will crowd roads and slow down traffic enough. Add to that the likelihood that a car that knows what’s best for you will move v-e-r-r-r-y slowly, and voilà! A drive that takes you 20 minutes now will take you 40 minutes or an hour in the balmy future.

Personally, I would very much welcome a self-driving vehicle: it would mean I could stay in my home until I die (with any luck), and hugely improve the odds against my having one day to check myself into a warehouse for old folks. BUT…

  • Only if it were my vehicle.
  • Only if it and the roads were available when I need them, not at some regulator’s behest.
  • Only if the cost were less than the cost of moving into an old-folkerie.
  • Only if it didn’t jack up the cost of my  power bills to unaffordable levels — i.e., more than the $40 to $60 a month I pay for gasoline now.
  • Only if it were as reliable as a Toyota.
  • Only if it were not tracking me and reporting my comings and goings to a central server.
  • Only if…only if…only if….

Communal living has never appealed to me. Communal riding doesn’t look much better. I do not play nice with the other kids and do not want to share…let’s be frank about that. And I’ll bet that most Americans, deep in their hearts, feel the same way. That, after all, would be why we have sprawling suburbs of single-family homes and vast herds of sheeple driving to work over bumper-to-bumper freeways.

It’s a trade-off. And the choices Americans have already made say something about how they’ll receive the scheme to “improve” private transportation with fleets of driverless ride-shares.

How about you? Ready for the brave new driverless world?

 

Techno-Crabbiness: It’s CONTAGIOUS!

by

Okay, okay…I admit: as a Techno-Crab of the first water, my crabbiness has gotten out of hand in the past few weeks. That notwithstanding, it’s refreshing to discover that Better Men and Women Than I also cast the occasional jaundiced eye upon the miracles of modern technology. Our friend Money Beagle, for example, reflects (in a much calmer tone than mine) upon the shortcomings of the smartphone. Ultimately, MB decides that despite a slew of aggravations, the smartphone is a kewl enough gadget.

But is it kewl enough to be worth $500 to $800? That’s the price range I saw in a quick web perusal this morning, ranging from refurbished iPhones to various Android devices. I dunno. That’s an awful lot of money. And I’m running out: don’t have enough cash in the bank, after the various major expenses, to keep me going until the next RMD in September or October.

Spiffikins comments, in a response to yesterday’s rant here at FaM, that as a practical matter all cell phones are required by law to be able to reach 911 — whether you subscribe to a service or not. So…that would mean that if you wanted to replace your land-line extensions with cells, you wouldn’t have to supply them with minutes at all: just keep the things charged up.

That IS an insight. The problem, of course, is that the reason you have extensions is so that you can answer the phone in whatever room you happen to be when someone jangles you up. If what you have is five different phones with five different phone numbers (or, if they’re not supplied with minutes, presumably NO phone numbers), then you would have to RUN to wherever you left your functioning, paid-for-service device at any given time. If you can remember where you left it…

Ooma (VoIP) begins to look better & better…now to find someone to help me figure out how to install it… The price is so low that I could probably afford a smartphone (someday) and still keep my antique set of base + four cordless handsets.

Techno-skeptic: I could’ve predicted this…

by

Friday: Dispatch to NextDoor readers…

Ohhhh the techno-life just gets better and better!

You may recall my whinging a few days ago about Cox’s announcement that it’s taking down the copper connection to our land-line telephones, and that if we want to continue to have a land-line-like set of phones (i.e., a phone in every room), we’ll have to get Cox’s digital phone service, which is connected through one’s computer via a second modem to clutter up your desk.

The Cox guy showed up: extremely nice man, seemed to be competent. Yes, he admitted: if the power goes down — no phone. If my computer crashes — no phone. If my computer’s modem crashes — no phone. If the extra annoying modem goes down — no phone.

Sooooo…now we have three ways from Sunday for your phone to die. And say what? you need to call 911? Well ..|.. very much!

Ohhhkayyy, well there doesn’t seem to be much choice here. I can buy an Ooma modem and pay a guy $90 or $180 to come over and help my untechie self connect it to my computer and attach my call-blocker to it. Or I can have Cox come over and install its wondrous modem for free. And continue to gouge me $35 a month for less-than-optimal phone service.

I decide to opt for Cox despite the rip-off, because it’s at least sort of a known quantity. The lash-up was installed Wednesday.

Two days into this Brave New World… A phone solicitor calls. I pick up the phone so I can cut off the call and capture the number in the call-blocker before the voicemail picks up. And what I hear when I pick up the phone is this LOUD racket that sounds like an unmuffled motorcycle engine accelerating: b-r-r-r-B-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R

I figure this is the robocaller SOBs doing a number on me. Hang up. Block the number. Pick up the phone and try to call another number, and when I do, I get the same racket. My phone has been taken over by a motorcycle on meth!

Now I walk across the street carrying one of the system’s handsets and call Cox from my neighbor’s phone. As usual, this entails a great hassle getting through the aggravating phone tree, but eventually I reach a very helpful tech guy.

He is beyond extremely nice and is anxious to help, but he has NEVER HEARD of what the phone is doing. But since my handset’s signal reaches all the way across the street and into my neighbor’s home, I dial up a phone number out of the device’s memory and get B-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R…, which of course he can hear loud and clear. He tries to manipulate the modem from his end, but it’s not working.

I go back to my house and disconnect the call blocker, which is in-line with the modem. This does not help.

He arranges for a workman to show up here tomorrow morning — because after all what DOES the little woman have to do with her day than sit around waiting for yet another workman, eh?

Meanwhile, he suggests I try unplugging the modem, letting it set for 20 or 30 minutes, and then replugging and testing. This I do, with baleful results.

The phones are now completely nonfunctional. You can sometimes(!) get a dial tone and if you do, you can dial out, but within 30 seconds the meth-headed motorcycle starts back up again.

Okay, I’m willing to allow that maybe there’s something wrong with my phones. But I doubt it. LOL! Guess I should be glad this little fiasco hasn’t taken my computers down. Yet…

* * *
Comes the Dawn…
* * *

So it is now “tomorrow”: Saturday.

Right about as scheduled, a new Cox guy shows up. Actually, this one is not “new” but grizzled and road-worn. This is a fellow who has had long experience. Let us, I reflect, hope that most of his experience has to do with the electronics of telephone systems.

The guy is flummoxed by the motorcycle on meth serenade: admits he’s never heard anything like it. He tests every piece of equipment on the line. He discovers an outmoded DSL connector, which he tosses. So far: nothing works. What, he asks, is really connected to this line, amongst the 6 handsets I say I have online???

Finally we figured out that the problem is the old Panasonic base, which for reasons unknown continued to operate after I plugged in then five-handset Uniden base with which I intended to replace it. Long as it was working, I just left it sitting there, giving me a 6th phone. Very convenient.

Upon examination, we realized the reason it was working was that it wasn’t really talking to the Uniden. It was plugged into the copper wiring, and so was ringing on its own: not as a de-facto sixth handset, but as an entirely separate unit. That thing, he theorized, could be causing a short.

Interestingly, the copper wiring has been disconnected and none of the outlets work anymore. Yet…wait…that phone does have a dial tone. Wot the hell?! We unplug it, and damned it that doesn’t work!

So now the phone system is working. I’m down one handset in a location close to the floor, where I might reach it if I fall and hurt myself. Fortunately, one of the Uniden handsets was in a location where I rarely go, and so I just moved it into the family room, where…yea verily, I can crawl to it if I fall in the kitchen, dining room, or family room. I hope.

Once again, then, all is well in the Brave New World. For the nonce…

Cox vs Ooma: Erring(?) on the Side of Caution

by

So I sent the Cox tech away while I thought about the options presented by the coming exit from copper land lines on the part of Our Honored Communications Provider. It seemed to me that what the guy proposed to do was not one helluva lot different from switching the land line to VoIP. Big difference: Ooma, a prominent VoIP provider, costs about five bucks a month. Cox, having purchased a few Arizona corporation commissioners, soaks its customers for $35.

Find a guy who will babysit me through connecting VoIP, a chore that I do not feel technologically competent enough to engage. So, it’s off to the Ooma website to order up the device needed to connect through their…network, platform, or whatever it is.

Well.

Since last I reviewed this service, Ooma has added a lot of new features. In the process, they’ve added to their website. One of the additions is a certain brain-banging opacity. Nowhere, far as I could tell, can you find a page that says “Buy this, Get this, Pay this per month.” They babble on about a “smart phone for your home” (I don’t want a smart phone, dammit! I can’t figure out how to use those things), but it’s unclear whether you have to buy their phone sets to connect through their service, or whether your existing handsets will work.

Call a sales rep and get…what? Yes: a person who simply has no fuckin’ clue! No joke. So small is the clue this chickadee has that she cannot even understand the question I’m asking!

Yes. So alien is the concept that a person might have actual phones in different rooms in her house that she is incapable of grasping that I’m not talking about cell phones.

I think…fukkit. These are hoops I am just flat not gonna jump through. At least when I call Cox, I get a human being right away, and that human being usually has at least a FEW measurable IQ points between the ears. That, I suppose, is worth $35 a month.

I guess.

So now I have another Cox dude slated to come over next week and convert the damn phone system.

Do I WANT this conversion? Shit, no. My feeling is, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. You know and I know this is going to create some kind of PITA, driving up the blood pressure, creating vast inconvenience, and eventually eliciting yet another hummingbird-like rage.

In a few days, we will have telephones that go down every time the electricity is out (that will be once or twice a year), every time Cox’s cables are down (that will be every goddamn time a drop of rain falls and every time the City digs up the roads, an ongoing endeavor whose sole purpose apparently is to keep their employees busy), every time the WiFi modem disconnects itself (not so frequent as before, but still unpredictably often), and…hey! EVERY TIME I NEED A PHONE URGENTLY.

Of phones and securities and numerals…

by

So, to start with the securities part: We’re told yesterday’s crash is a “normal,” nay even a “healthy” correction. The US market has wobbled around all day, closing up 567 points, though that’s not true all over the planet. My investment guru doesn’t seem to be very exercised. Says he: “We were certainly due for a pullback as the market has been going straight up for some time. I don’t think it is anything to get overly worried about. We do have a position that we will sell to raise cash if the market breaks down further.” Meanwhile, at the endlessly entertaining circus playing inside the Beltway, we have this amusing story.

Ever feel like you fell off the tightrope spanning the Gorge of Unreality? 😀

Yesterday I flew into one of my fits of hummingbird rage when SDXB jangled me up in the middle of the tedious morning blood-pressure measuring ritual, causing a spike into the 140s. DAYum, but I hate the sound of the accursed phone ringing.

Once I calmed down and alit on a branch somewhere, I began to reflect upon the effing phones, which very rarely are rung by friends. Most people email me these days. Usually what’s on the other end of the line is a robocaller, and of course that’s what made me so angry — I assumed it was another nuisance call. The phone is so fucking annoying because — among other things — it is so fucking LOUD.

For safety (so that I can reach a phone if I fall), there’s an extension in every room, many of them within easy reach of the floor. All well and good, in a little-old-lady sense, except…that adds up to eight phones!

No wonder the things lift you up out of your seat when they ring in chorus!

Contemplating this state of affairs, I chanced to wonder if it was possible to adjust the volume on the things. Or even turn the damn janglers altogether OFF.

Dug out the owner’s manuals. Believe me, figuring it out was not easy — the instructions are scattered in three places through 40 pages of obscure how-to instructions for functions you do not want, never have wanted, and never will want. But finally, LO! I did discover that not only can the volume be turned way down, you actually can turn the ringers off. Not only that, but the annoying, incomprehensible talking caller ID on the ancient Panasonic hidden in the family room cabinetry — which mysteriously is compatible with the vast set of Uniden cordless phones — actually can be made to SHUT UP!

I’ve tried to shut that thing up in the past, with no luck. Even though the manual says it can be done, it directs you to a function button that does not exist on the set! Of course. But somehow, by accident, I managed to shut it off. The other handsets were pretty easy to fix; turned off all but two ringers, and those I turned down as low as they will go.

So now when the phone rings, it’ll be annoying but it should not be tooth-jangling.

Speaking of annoyances, I made a surprising little discovery. If you take a nap in the afternoon — or maybe just lay down for an hour or so, without even sleeping — you can beat the tendency of your blood pressure to rise late in the day.

Yesterday I was pretty infuriated (you wonder why my BP is high? Because I’m mad as a hummingbird about half my waking hours…) when as an afterthought I took an evening reading and found the damn blood pressure elevated into the 140s. It hasn’t been that high in weeks, even though the hip thing has had me too crippled to walk more than about a quarter-mile — and that far only in the past couple days.

Yesterday was the last day of Week 4 in my six-week effort to lower average blood pressure into the low 120s or (preferably) the 110s, and this stratospheric set of readings was the last reading of the week! To my dismay, it pushed the week’s average from 125.7/82 to 128.4/82.7. I was enraged, needless to say, since there hadn’t been a reading in the 140s for quite a while.

Think this happened because right beforehand I spent two hours with a computer on my lap and my feet crossed and propped on an ottoman, without once budging. Obviously, that kind of immobility can’t be good for you. But still…seriously??????? 146/90? Really????

This morning, though, after an hour or so of physical therapy exercises and dog wrangling, the figures were back in their more typical range: 121/82. Not as low as I’d like, but not life-threatening.

Out of curiosity, then, I decided to see what would happen if I took a nap. In the past researchers have imagined that a regular afternoon siesta may lower overall blood pressure (this is not a great source, but just now I’m feeling too lazy to look up the studies…they’re out there, though). Some speculate that the mere anticipation of an afternoon nap may lower the numbers. More recently, though, other researchers claim to have found evidence that napping increases the risk of hypertension.

Well, I’m not fond of sleeping in the daytime. Life is too short as it is, without wasting part of every day in bed. On the other hand, I sure don’t want to take those pills. So as a practical matter, I didn’t actually fall asleep this afternoon. But I did lay down and rest. The result: average at 5:30 p.m. was 118/81, one helluva lot better than yesterday, that’s for sure. And the lowest reading in that set was an amazing 114/81.

Cardiodoc would be ecstatic.