T makes it official

Jimmy proposed to her last week, and she has her ring, so I don’t think I’m breaking any confidences at this point. 🙂  The wedding will be sometime in 2012 in Houston, probably at AvantGarden in Montrose, a converted 1906 Arts & Crafts house. She said she refused to look at contemporary “wedding chapels” ’cos they were too new and tacky looking, and AvantGarden was an old enough house for her to like it.  I replied, “My work is done,” and she laughed and agreed.

Oh, and the ring:

Taz - engagement ring

That’s an amethyst as the central stone, with diamonds and tanzanites enclosing it.

And T must really mean it this time; she called earlier today to ask that M set back four boxes of GS Peanut Butter Sandwiches for Jimmy.  Anyone for whom she will voluntarily buy peanut butter ANYTHING (she detests it), she’s gotta be serious about.

 

Today’s fnord is brought to you by the letters Yuzz and Snee.

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Thoo ath the dentith

Perhaps it’s not QUITE that bad, but I still have a partially frozen face from anesthetic injections I got while getting three of the four teeth filled that HAVE to be taken care of before L’s dental insurance, supplemental to mine, runs out on the twenty-eighth.  The dentist I’ve seen for years was booked way too far out for me to beat the insurance deadline, so I ended up seeing young Doctor V., who did good and quick work.  (He’s “young” Doctor V. because I don’t think he’s yet thirty; he certainly didn’t look it.)  I have to go back Wednesday afternoon to get one final filling done, and to have impressions taken for an “occlusal appliance”—i.e., a bite guard, which I’ve needed for a LONG time to counteract TMJ syndrome, which is probably what cracked all my back teeth to start with.  For a mercy, my dental insurance has better coverage than I thought, so I’ll be about $300 to $350 out of pocket overall.

 

A font in the revivified plank works through an orrery.  Fnord.

Posted in Health | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

M makes a spectacle of herself

Following on Tuesday’s optometrist visit, M got a new prescription for glasses, which she needed to fill.  As her old frames were (1) bent, (2) pink, which she detested, and (3) Barbie designer label, which she despised, she and I got together this afternoon and went on a trip to get her new glasses.  I decided that since she was the one who’d have to wear them every day, she got the majority vote on questions of taste and color, and I would intervene only if she picked something really pricey.

And after we got our other errands run (library day, leave my spectacles to be patched again at the shop, Goodwill, Half Price) we set out for Barton Creek Square which, when we got there, was a mob scene.  It was the first really pretty day in a week, and every girl who wanted to show off her new sunsuit or shorts or baby-doll top (with obligatory navel piercing), plus half the families who had been cooped up together for too long, had come out.  We consulted the mall map, located the three opticians, and started looking.

The first place we went, Bellingrath Optics, was probably too designer chi-chi to suit M’s ideas; at any rate, it took her about ten minutes to decide they had nothing for her, and we left.  It was the same story, but took longer to come to the same end, at Eyemasters.  M ran the clerk all over the shop looking for this frame, or that color, but in the end we left empty-handed again.

Lens Crafters was more promising.  M got taken up by the general manager, who was run off her feet, but said to give her a few minutes to finish a couple of short repairs and she’d be with us.  She also handed M a tray to use as a shopping cart and left us to browse, which we did.

By this point M was pretty sure what she was after:  rectangular lens, probably not a plastic frame, half-frames would be a plus.  I suppose she tried on twenty pairs while we waited, and by the time the manager came back to us she had five possibles.  I turned it over to them, and went over to help hold the counter up—today is my first day out of bed, and I was running down.  The two of them ran all over the store for another quarter hour, but at last M came over and said ’It’s between these two; I want a second opinion.’  She tried them on for the counter associate and me to look at, and we agreed on one—a mid-line Anne Klein wire-frame, anodized purple, with medium temples and the Klein lion-head logo stencil-punched in each temple.  The associate took us over and got the final width measurements and entered the order, and we left.  LensCrafters doesn’t take the vision insurance that M’s on (it’s the state plan, which is pretty indifferent), but they offer half off the entire pair—lenses AND frames—for under-12s, so the final price of $200 was about what we would have paid with insurance somewhere else.  I’ll have to run out there tomorrow or Monday and get them; M’s lobbying for tomorrow so she can wear them to school Monday.

Once we were outside, I told M that she’d obviously been a Young Woman of Vision Making a Spectacle of Herself, which is what I expect really.  She ran the whole show save for the money part, and ended up with something she wanted and is more likely to wear than otherwise.

Conditions at 20:03

Temp 53° F. (12° C.), dew point 12° F. (-12° C.), humidity 19%, winds calm, barometer 29.69”↓, sky clear, visibility 10 miles.

 

Fnord led to the foundation of 163 monasteries in Europe.

Posted in Eyes, Health | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

Dispel this cloud, the light of heaven restore

My ophthalmologist has suspected for several years that I was on my way to glaucoma, but he never could get intra-ocular pressure readings in line with that diagnosis, so he kept having me come in every six months so he could check again.

In 2009 I ran out of time, money, and patience all at the same time and didn’t keep one of those appointments—or the one after it, or the one after that.  And in this way twenty-one months went by.

But M needed to get her eyes checked so we could get her a pair of glasses to replace the four-year-old ones she dropped, or stepped on, or something.  And if I was taking her, I didn’t have any excuse for not getting checked myself, so I made appointments for us both to go last Tuesday.

Tuesday, the doctor finally got the readings he’d been anticipating for so long:  20 mm Hg pressure in the left eye (VERY high normal) and 22 mm Hg in the right (early disease range).  He’s still not proposing to do anything precipitate at this point, just told me to come back in ninety days and we’d check again, to make sure the reading wasn’t an artifact.

While I appreciate his restraint, the little man who lives right above my belly button and gives me gut feelings is saying this wasn’t an artifact, and I do have early glaucoma—and the more so after the doctor told me glaucoma, like prostate cancer, is one of those diseases whose incidence increases sharply with age.  For example, people aged 70 or older are thirteen times more likely to have glaucoma than at 50.  Live long enough, very good odds you’ll get it anyway.

The good part, and I keep reminding myself of this, is that there are lots of good treatment options now—you aren’t sentenced to eventual blindness or Coke-bottle spectacles.  (I remember that in my childhood a local bank president wore such glasses after cataract surgery, and his expression always put me in mind of my great-aunt’s Boston terriers.  Same jowly, bug-eyed look.  The only difference in the two was the bank president didn’t have perpetual sinus problems.)

So I’m consciously working not to flip out about the diagnosis, and not to act like I’m gonna be the next John Milton, with M having to read everything to me.  So if you catch me doing that in a down moment, positive reinforcement would be good.

Instead, I’m having my annual case of winter bronchitis, which I’ve already been to the doctor about.  This is proof that for me, flu shots work.  Last year I got one (for both flus) and sailed right through winter without trouble.  This year, I failed to get one until too late, and here I am in bed again.

 

You say that everybody you see seems to look like a rabbit, Mrs. Jones.  Fnord.

Posted in Eyes, Health | Tagged , | 8 Comments

A sunny, chill morning

Friday morning’s snow has disappeared from all but the most sheltered corners, and the temperature has already risen to sixty, up from yesterday’s high of 41.  L and M are discussing (or maybe squabbling over) the cloth goody bags L is making for M’s birthday party this afternoon.  (M turned ten on Wednesday, but scheduling prevented the party from happening before today.)  They’re having a cupcake-decorating party at JoAnn’s this afternoon, with six of M’s friends.

I baked the cupcakes last night:  chocolate with cream-cheese filling, and a bittersweet chocolate chunk floated in the centre of each one.  I need to revisit how many cupcakes that recipe makes; I thought I made a recipe and a half, which should have given me two dozen, but I barely squeezed out enough chocolate base for twenty-two, while I had a ton of cream-cheese filling left over.  (Fortunately, I only needed twenty-one—three for each girl.)

Conditions at 12:00:

Temp 62° F. (16° C.), dew point 19° F. (-7° C.), humidity 19%, wind variable at 3 mph gusting 4½ mph, barometer 29.21” ↓,  sky clear, visibility 10 miles.

 

A button buck has a grass glass for his painted lady.  Fnord.

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Unplug them people

Watching the last broadcast of Austin City Limits from Studio 6A . . . when I came to Austin, ACL was barely a year old.  And now they’re moving to a new studio, which they’ve needed for years—parking around the University is impossible, the studio was never designed to do what it’s done, there’s not nearly enough seating (320 if you fill every seat the fire marshal will allow) and the building’s just plain old—41 years now.

  • 7:05  I wonder what the new studio’s backdrop will look like; it’s gonna be a lot different from the 1984 skyline reflected in the current backdrop.  I hope the College of Communication is going to preserve/conserve the original, though that’ll be a challenge.  The old backdrop is nothing but half-inch plywood sheets drilled full of holes, painted and fairy lights sunk in it all over the place.
  • 7:10:  The styling minimizes it, but Lyle’s starting to suffer from pattern baldness.
  • 7:19:  John Hagen gets the first break in Townes’s “White Freightliner Blues.” 35 years, and John’s been there the whole time.
  • 7:21:  “White Freightliner” has turned into a kind of guitar pull; a different band member gets each verse, and then a solo break afterward.
  • 7:25:  Lyle invited all the crew to join the band onstage for the closer.  Producer Terry Lickona just gave the order:  “Y’all abandon yer posts!”
  • 7:26:  I see so many faces onstage whom I know—crew I used to see every year at auction.  They’re still there after all this time; starting to sway back and forth slowly with the music now.
  • 7:27:  The audience is standing and applauding in the middle of the song—I’m crying now; actually seeing the end hurts badly, more than I knew . . . .
  • 7:28: “Go on home; it’s closing time.”  Yeah . . . .
Posted in Austin, Music, Personal History | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

I feared this would happen

L was laid off today, part of a ten percent headcount reduction in her agency.

Posted in Family, Work (WORK!!?!??!) | Tagged , , , , | 12 Comments

If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium

Yesterday morning my dotted-line manager (P&L) came up, to ask whether I thought I could find a used-exchange match for one of our big-dog Roswell gaming portables, in a real hurry.  Turned out that he’d gotten an SOS from someone in Sales who was trying to help contain an escalated Consumer case that was threatening a huge multi-national corporate account; the Roswell portable in question belonged to the president’s daughter, and a previously-set-up system exchange had been mired in bureaucratic Fail for three weeks now, so the president was ready to take the corporation’s account, with its seven-figure annual spend, elsewhere.  P&L asked me whether it might be possible to find a refurbished machine that would match the hardware spec of the original system, and would ship sooner than ten days from now, which is the minimum lead time for a new-build machine to get built.  I said give me a minute to look, and I’d tell him.  He said fine, and forwarded me an email chain to give me an idea of what was happening, what was wanted, and who needed to know about it.

I dug into the used inventory at Returns, and lucked into a system that matched Daughter’s original.  I stuck it into a shopping cart in my ordering tool and emailed the laundry list of managers, account executives, and high-powered upper management to say “hey, I found this used system that matches, do you want me to order it for her?  Oh, and I need to know in the next ten minutes, ’cos the shopping cart will expire in fifteen and dump this system back out into general inventory.”  Five minutes later I had an email from someone in India, who turned out to be the vice president for Consumer Services, saying “please yes, let us ship it.”  So I got the order for the refurb set up, and ten minutes later emailed the laundry list saying “OK, the refurb exchange dispatch is set up, and I’ve alerted my contacts at the fulfillment center to watch for this order and make damn sure it goes out the door tonight.”

A little later, I got a snippy email from some level-two consumer support tech in India, asking me WTF did I think I was doing as a commercial agent meddling in a consumer-segment unit exchange, that they were going to cancel my order, and I was to get my nose out of their damn business.  (Well, it was dressed up in politer language than that, but that was what it amounted to.)  I fired back that they needed to get a lot nicer to me in a big hurry, ’cos I did what I did at the express direction of their own vice president, and if they didn’t like what I had done they could fucking well take it up with him, I wouldn’t put up with being hectored for doing them a favor.  And I cc:’d the vice president, just so he’d be aware of how his underlings were acting.

Meantime, I had the sales account executive for the large corporate account on the phone with me, telling me to get the new-exchange dispatch fixed, and if I couldn’t do that, here was his corporate credit card number, get out on the Empire.com Web site and order a new Roswell system for M. le président’s daughter, order it to be delivered to the account exec’s home address, and he was gonna drive it over to her, himself.  I realized this was the wrong time to hold a debate about whether that plan would do any actual good, and said “yes sir, right away” and placed the new order.  Fifteen minutes later, I emailed him “OK, here’s the order number, placed exactly as you told me to.”

With that off the front burner, I dug back into the new exchange that had never shipped to find out why.  It didn’t take me long to discover that the order was stuck because whoever entered it (in India, but I probably didn’t need to tell you that) had entered half the SKUs twice, resulting in an invalid configuration that would never ever ship.  And no one in Manufacturing had yet gotten around to looking at the rejects queue, so nobody knew this was an invalid order and would never ship.  I swore some at the idiots who had entered such a mess, cancelled the order and tore everything out, then re-built it in a configuration that would actually work and re-launched it.  Once that was done and I saw the order drop to in-production status, I emailed the account exec again to say “here’s why that first exchange never shipped—after, that is, it had sat around in bureaucratic limbo for two weeks waiting for this and that approval; I fixed and re-launched it.  By my count, we now have one refurb and two new systems ordered, and all pointed at this one escalated case.”

Then, in the middle of all that whoop-te-do, I started getting emails from the manager of the level-two consumer tech in India, wanting to know what was I doing, had I been in contact with the customer to tell her she was getting a refurb, I needed to be sure she was aware because she was expecting a new system, and on and on.  I told him that what he thought was just a garden-variety consumer escalation was actually the above-water portion of an enormous Corporate iceberg, that his “consumer” escalation was placing a huge corporate account at risk, that I did what I did because his VP had explicitly told me to do so, and if he screwed this up with his meddling and we lost the corporate account, we’d all know where to assign responsibility, now wouldn’t we?  And then I cc:’d all the engaged Corporate people again, so everyone knew just who was being an obstructive ass, and just what kind of an ass he was being.

And that was how it sat when I left yesterday afternoon.  This morning, I came in to find an email from the Consumer VP asking for a status update, and an email from the refurb fulfillment center saying “O HAI, we shipt ur used xchange like u sed, here iz FedEx traking numbr.”  I sent that info to the VP along with information I had on the two new-build systems in the pipeline and copied all the laundry list, and told the VP I was getting push-back from manager xxxxxxxxxx in Consumer tech support who didn’t seem to understand the scope of the escalation, and perhaps a word from someone in his organization would help manager xxxxxxxxxxxx understand.  Which was a polite way of saying “get this motherfucking idiot of yours OUT of my HAIR, I’m tired of getting the third degree for doing YOU a favor.”  I guess I got through, ’cos a little later I got this meek email from the manager saying “we understand that the Corporate sales account exec is point of contact and will keep the customer informed, we’re going to go away now, kthxbye, Sahib.”

And that was what my Tuesday was like.  What was your Tuesday like?

 

The Warren Commission will hold an unscheduled meeting at Groom Lake.  Fnord.

Posted in Empire, Work (WORK!!?!??!) | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

A typical Saturday morning

I had my annual physical yesterday and was neither surprised nor pleased to find that I’ve put on between ten and fifteen pounds since November, and I bet my A1c number isn’t gonna be good when my CBC comes back, which means my wellness coach will be unhappy too.  I don’t know how I’m gonna do it, but I must find a way to get myself walking regularly and frequently again.

But instead of doing that this morning, I went to the blood bank and let ’em have three units of platelets and a unit of plasma.  This is probably the biggest volunteer/charity thing I do; I have donation down to a regular once-a-fortnight appointment, every other Saturday morning.  I’ve become one of the Usual Suspects, and am on a first-name basis with everyone in the pheresis lab.  Then I ran around with M, going to the library, getting new batteries for my cordless drill at Home Depot, and returning a cordless phone that I turned out not to need to Target.  And now I’m working on migrating blog comments again, from Movable Type to WordPress, and ripping L’s old prog vinyl (ELP, Renaissance, Styx, Moodies, et al.) onto CD for her.

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EEEEEEEEEE!!!

I FOUND ONE I FOUND ONE I FOUND ONE!!!

Just look:

Uncle Walt's Band - Six • Twenty Six • Seventy Nine

That is the unicorn for fans of Uncle Walt’s:  an original copy of their fourth and final album.  Recorded in 1979, just after the band had re-formed, it sat in the can for reasons unknown until 1988, long after the band had broken up for good.  I never have been able to get the story of why Walter shelved it, nor why he changed his mind and released it.

I looked for a copy for a long time without success, until a a conversation a while back with a buyer at Waterloo Records who also turned out to be a collector/dealer and an Uncle Walt’s fan.  I was moaning about how I was afraid I’d never find one, and he said, “Well, Heidi (Walter’s widow) and Steve Clark were selling these for a while and I think I might have a couple of copies.” I gave him my card and asked him to call or email if he found one he was willing to sell.

That was a year ago.  Last week I got an email saying “Hey, I found a copy of that cassette we talked about.  Are you still interested in it?”

I was interested enough to get myself down there two days later, ready to pay for what I expected would be an expensive collector’s piece.  My guy was there, going through an LP collection a couple were trying to unload on him (the collection, at a by-eye estimate, dated to about 1980).  I waited my turn, kibitzing the collection a bit, until he was done, and then he went off to the back to get the cassette from his desk.  In a few minutes, here he came with it, and I had my checkbook out, but he said, “No, just take it—from one Uncle Walt’s fan to another.”  I managed to stammer my thanks, since I certainly hadn’t expected that.

And I brought it home, dropped it into my cassette deck and ripped it to CD (twenty-year-old cassette tape is always a crapshoot, so I wanted to get an archival copy made soonest).  And now I have it, and it’s on CD where I can listen to it!

:: Insert more varieties of squee here ::

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