If I won the lottery…

What would you do if you suddenly came into SOOO many bucks there was no question of your ever having to work again?

Tellya what I’d do: I’d find an incredible resort somewhere and rent a suite…not for a week or so, but for several months at a time.

The thought of owning a vacation home makes me cringe: isn’t one house enough to take care of? 😀 But if I won the lottery…ah, if I won the lottery, I’d make a resort my vacation home: a getaway where someone else takes care of fixing the plumbing and maintaining the septic tank and repairing the roof and…whatEVER. Where someone else fixes breakfast, lunch and dinner whenever you want it. Where someone else cleans the pool, and someone else cleans the house and changes the sheets and does the shopping and there’s not a Costco within driving distance.

Yeah.

What I would like to do right now, right this minute, is zone out and write another storyline in the ineffable Fire-Rider saga. There are a lot of ideas on the float, but I haven’t had a moment in months and months to sit down, think them through, draft, redraft, create… Nary a moment.

Not that I’m complaining. By the end of this week I will have billed enough to make up for all the cash I’ve diddled away in the ridiculous self-publishing venture. But my god! The amount of work!!!

I’ve been working from 5 in the morning till 9 or 10 at night for so long I’ve actually lost track of how long it’s been. Weeks and weeks. This morning I was up at 3 a.m. wrestling with what I thought was a corrupt PDF. (Not so, thank god: the client’s magnum opus was SO long it took the print-on-demand vendor’s website about eight hours to upload the damn thing.)

As a practical matter, it looks like I’ve succeeded in working myself sick. Yesterday morphed into a Day from Hell along about dawn.

A couple of days ago, a swelling developed under and around an eye. I thought a mosquito had bitten me right close to the eyelid, because it itched a lot.

By yesterday it was clear it wasn’t a mosquito bite. The old-lady bag under that eye was so swollen, it looked like a big blister.

I suspect this is a side effect of the omeprazole — remember, if a drug has a weird side effect, I will be among the .01% that gets it. So I look this up and discover…yea verily. Facial edema is a side effect, and it’s considered a bit of a medical emergency. “Seek medical care immediately.”

Of course, it’s five or six in the morning by the time I figure this out. I call the Mayo trying to get through to the internist on duty — all I want to do is ask a doctor is this is something I need to have checked right this very minute, or if I can safely wait until I can make a normal appointment with a normal doctor. The stupid answering lady will NOT let me through. She says I need to go to the ER.

I do not think this is an emergency-room problem.

There’s an urgent care place just down the street. I get in the car and drive over there. Naturally, it’s closed.

Why call it “urgent care” if you’re not going to be open when people urgently need care?

So I end up driving up to the Mayo’s ER.

This consumes most of the fuckin’ morning. The doctor there, after a cursory look, says he thinks it’s an infection and prescribes an antibiotic.

Fortunately, the copay only cost me a dollar at the Walmart, since it made my tongue turn red and swell up and my lips tingle like they were getting ready to explode.

Dropped a Benadryl, which beat that back to some degree. Called the quack’s office, which by now was open. She prescribed another antibiotic, one that has to be taken every six hours, on the button. Luckily I wake up at four in the morning every night anyway….

So now I’m ripping up my already tender innards some more with a drug I do not believe is appropriate for the purpose. I still do not believe this is an infection: there’s no redness, no heat, no fever, no general malaise. I’m as certain as I’m sitting here that it’s a direct reaction to the omeprazole.

But right now I’m too damn tired to argue.

Finally, after endless dicking around, I put the client’s 463-page book to bed last night. But it refused to stay down. As mentioned above, the PDF seemed not to be loading. Screwed around and screwed around with that until I couldn’t screw around another 30 seconds.

At 3:00 this morning, the file was still blank after page 35. Holy shit.

Emailed a desperate cry to my spy at the PoD joint.

Also at 3:00 a.m., I remembered I’d forgotten to edit a Chinese mathematician’s latest paper, in which he and two esteemed colleagues prove mathematically that Twitter works to help diminish contagion in an epidemic. Ripping myself away from the magnum opus, I got to work on that thing. And what a tangle it was: passages where it was hard to tell what the authors intended to say; crazy formatting where it was converted out of Latex into Wyrd.

But better yet: Section 4 was missing! I would’ve seen that if I’d started on the paper the minute my guy had sent it. But I couldn’t — I was fully immersed in two other projects.

Translated that, tidied that, made two copies of that, and sent it off to the client with an offer to read the rest of it ASAP if he’ll send it right along. So far nothing back from him: it’s probably still the middle of the night in China.

About 8:30, the PoD angel e-mailed saying he couldn’t see a problem. He thought we should just go ahead and order the four copies Client wants.

?????????

Now I get back online and lo! There the thing is, in its glorious entirety. Looks as good as it’s going to get at this point. So yea verily, I ordered the four copies Client wants.

Then of course he wants another copy. And note that he wants these by Friday.

Well, I hope they’re done by then. This is Tuesday. I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow and if I have any sense, I should actually call the Mayo and make an appointment with an ophthalmologist to look at this damn eye. And I had to cancel the mechanic’s appointment to work on the car: that needs to be redone, too. I have a serious suspicion that I’ll be wanting to do something — make that having to do something — far, far away from the Third-World country that is lovely South Phoenix.

Well, the ice pack has probably been on the face long enough to reduce the “blister” enough so I won’t frighten small children. And so, away to run an errand or two. Then back here to drop some Benadryl again. Ugh.