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The extravagant belly pain that brought me to the Mayo’s ER turned out to be a bowel obstruction caused by scar tissue from an old appendectomy. Fortunately, the docs were able to fix it laparoscopically — that was not a given when I was rolled off to the ER.

At any rate, the surgery is done and apparently successful. I’m still stuck here and getting more & more miserable.

Main source of misery is that I can’t get them to remove a nasal-gastric tube that’s no longer needed and is increasingly uncomfortable & painful. They stuck this down my gullet to relieve the excruciating pain from the obstruction by suctioning out all food & such in the stomach & gut. It worked. But now the gut is empty — I haven’t had anything to eat or drink since Thursday morning — but I can’t get them to take it out. I can’t get the floor nurses to get a doctor’s permission to remove it.

So that’s fairly horrible.

Meanwhile, the rest of my life is going to hell on a handcart. The summer session is winding to an end and student p apetrs are coming in. The monsoon dirt storms are also rolling in, meaning catastrophic messes in the pool and no one there to clean it up. My bills are going unpaid. Fortunately most are on autopay, but AMEX isn’t… It’s a fuckin’ nightmare.

The church has a woman who does its healthcare ministry. She used to be a nurse at the Mayo. I’m going to see if she can advocate for me. First I’ve gotta get this tube out of my throat and then I’ve gotta get out of this place.

In the hospital. Have been for several days. Bowel obstruction. Surgery probably upcoming. Not very coherent: doped to the teeth on morphine.

Watch this space. Will be back someday. 🙂

Following a  lurid story on Google News, I googled up the name Randy Howard — that would be the drunken country singer who was murdered by a bounty hunter. YouTube videos bring up a few performances whose value seems greater in their testimony to sadness than in their quality.

Turns out there’s — or there was — a real talent named Randy Howard. My goodness! Check these out:

The man died in 1999 at the age of 38, of cancer. The good die young, so they say.

This morning Other Daughter’s goddamn cat came over the wall and attacked DUCK. The dogs and I chased it off but DUCK is so terrorized she won’t come back to her nest. So presumably the eggs will die.

God DAMN that fucking cat. It came over the east wall where the vines are kind of thin. I’d hoped they’d be enough to stop the animal from jumping up there (some of them have grown over earlier layers of carpet tacks). But that was wrong.

I set the dogs loose on the damn thing.

Cassie of course will go after anything you sic her on. She shot off like a rocket. Ruby also went after the cat in the direction I was pointing — it went to ground under the Texas sage and cassia on the east end of the pool. But she was easily distracted and tried to chase DUCK, too. DUCK was  terrorized.

Interestingly, though, Ruby stood down when I told her NO, and despite all the hubbub, she even came right to call.

Eventually DUCK came back and landed on the cool decking, quacking piteously.

I went out to the sidewalk and began zip-tying and taping more carpet tack strips up, to fill in the areas and the slump-block support column caps that weren’t covered. That whole side of the yard was a bit neglected in the de-cattification scheme.

Eventually Sally came over to ask what on earth I was doing. When I told her what was up — cat, duck, and all that — she agreed that she ALSO hates Other Daughter’s damned cat, which jumps over the wall into her yard and poops in the GRAVEL landscaping.

She came over to see DUCK, who was still standing miserably on the cool deck. While we were ogling her, she flew off.

I figured she wouldn’t come back. They say if a duck is frightened off a nest, it’ll abandon the nest.

Here we thought that STUPID woman had decided to keep the cat in hand because she imagined a cat she found dead in the alley had been killed by coyotes.

But no. I guess she can’t maintain a train of thought in her batty little brain long enough to stick with any plan very long. Other Daughter is on disability for her mental illness. Her husband, now estranged (again, probably temporarily again) is also on disability — he’s schizophrenic. Did you realize that a parasitic disease carried by cats is believed to be a cause of schizophrenia?

It’s far from the only disease the little darlings carry.

Did you realize cats can carry MRSA?

Did you realize cats kill more than a billion birds every year in the US?

Did you realize Trap-Neuter-Release programs not only do not work, they harm cats as well as humans?

* * * 2 hours later * * *

DUCK is back on the nest, amazingly enough. I covered her eggs with debris, the way she does when she leaves to forage — you’re not supposed to mess with them, but apparently that didn’t disturb her enough to aggravate her fear any further.

Game and Fish says a nesting duck won’t come back if she’s scared off the nest, but there she is out there. That is ONE determined Duck.

My friends out in the sticks have a cat trap that they’ve used to deal with their cat problem. I’m going to pick it up in tomorrow.

They discovered that if you catch the cat in a trap and then soak it liberally with water from the hose, the cat will take off and never come back. At least, not to your backyard. This cat and the neighbor’s other collected stray cats continue to use my friend’s front yard and front porch as their toilet.

The other option is to get a motion-activated sprinkler. Trouble is, I’m not sure the cat came in over the east wall. That was how she got out, but it doesn’t mean she didn’t come in over the west wall. Those sprinklers are expensive, besides the fact that they tie up a hose bib. I can’t afford even one, much less enough to cover four long fence lines.

Damn it. I thought those carpet tacks were working.

Sally says she’ll shoot the cat with her BB gun the next time she sees it in her yard. Sally, despite being quite an old gal, is still a pretty good shot.

I can’t find the air rifle. Think SDXB has it. I may borrow it so I can zing the little monster. Problem is, I can hit a stationary target but have never tried to shoot at anything in motion. And it’s been a mighty long time since I’ve even shot at a target.

I came unstuck in time during the night and woke up convinced it was Saturday morning. Workman supposed to show up at 9:30. Pigpen house therefore had to be picked up. Pool tending to do. Duck accommodations to be made. Dogs and human to be fed. Clothes to be washed…ugh. More potentially productive work hours lost to trivial pursuits.

Stumbled out to get the paper and found LO! It’s Friday!

WaHOO! This means I can use at least part of today to work on the Boob Book, something I’ve had to put off repeatedly in favor of constant nagging other tasks. The only thing that absolutely positively HAS to be done is to pick up a container of dishwasher water softener stuff. And maybe some food would be useful. Otherwise, here’s a WHOLE DAY to get something constructive done.

After yesterday’s full-bore Day from Hell, I was too whipped to spend the evening on anything that requires full intellectual engagement, much less on writing about the intricacies of the mammography controversy. So spent a couple of hours pouring Fire-Rider serials into one of the templates to create e-books out of them. Got two of them mostly done last night, sitting in front of NetFlix. I still have to write intros and enter some links to a site that has yet to exist, but because the artist is still working on the (18!!) covers, there’s time for that. The scutwork got done, anyway.

I think I’ll create the Fire-Rider website on WordPress.com, probably using the very template we’re enjoying for Funny about Money. Or something very like it. The banner image is a little deeper than I’d like. But the template does have three columns, no longer easy to find in the Google-enforced mobile environment. Gary’s FR image is something to behold! It’s so arresting I’m afraid readers may not scroll down to the content but will just be transfixed by the artwork.

At any rate, I’d like to get that site up and have it in “private” mode until such time as the first installment hits Amazon.

And I need Twitter, FireFox, and Pinterest sites for the thing. That’s going to take some figuring out, since I’m not very fond of social media. However, a lovely young man recently surfaced at SBA: his new business is social media marketing! If he doesn’t propose to bankrupt me, I’ll probably hire him to at least start these sites up and set them so that the FR website feeds into them. We need sites for Plain and Simple Press, too, which also could feed Writers Plain and Simple into those things. Then we also have Periscope and Meerkat. Exactly what these would do for a person who spends most of her time in her garret escapes me, but Meerkat also can be made to feed to Twitter and Facebook.

More to do — much more — on those fronts.

Meanwhile, my friend who reported on her friend’s $30,000/month porn-writing income is every bit as interested as I am in that as a money-making strategy. She is a much better writer than I am, especially when it comes to fiction. We’ve been looking into the whole thing and…well. To say one is sitting on a gold mine is to understate…

So I hope to get together with her to consult and plot. She’s interested in hooking (heh) into the first stage of my business plan — which actually is a strategic plan. In the first phase, more than one person could certainly collaborate in studying the market and learning how to exploit it.

The only question I have about this scheme is how I would keep the existence of the proposed business enterprise away from my son (who, don’t worry, refuses to read Funny about Money). He already suffers from chronic shock brought on by the activities of his aged mom. One hesitates to contemplate his reaction if he learned his mother was making her way through the world as a porn queen.

And if this works the way quite a few folks claim it does, after I croak over he’ll find a stupefying amount of money in the corporate account…holy mackerel. What on earth will he think when the accountant explains where it all came from?

😆 😆 😆

Moving on…

In search of a lampshade for the living room, something a little better quality than a Target Special, I visited the Lamps Plus website. Lamps Plus was my last choice, partly because they closed their mid-town brick-and-boards stores, forcing people who live in North Central to drive way to Hell & gone to the far east or to the far west valley, and partly because they have a pricey reputation.

But lo! Lamps Plus is underpricing Amazon! And they have free shipping, no $35 minimum purchase bullshit entailed. I found the same shades, same brand, same sizes, for a whole lot less than what was on offer at Amazon.

So after the current budget fiasco settles down, I’ll probably order a new living-room lampshade from them.

And speaking of moving on, it’s time to go to work!

A  little too busy for much more bloggifying today. Over at Writers Plain & Simple, though, see today’s comparative review of Word templates designed for e-book and print book design.