Finished and conscious

Posted on April 25, 2007 by Marchbanks

Actually, been finished since mid-afternoon and am conscious again after napping.

The whole affair ran more than an hour behind schedule; I showed up at 0815 for check-in as directed, then sat in the waiting room for 45 minutes. Finally I went and complained to the admissions clerk about the long wait, and she quickly rounded up a nurse to escort me downstairs to the surgical floor.  The floor nurse efficiently ran me through taking vitals, went over the HIPAA form to be sure I understood just what was being done to me (I did), started my IV, and put me to bed, where I dozed and waited for another hour.  L kept me company while working on a dresser scarf for her grandmother.

Finally the anesthesiologist who was NOT doing my job came in and reviewed the anesthesia protocol (Versed and Fentanyl for pre-sedation, then Diprivan to knock me out).  Fifteen or twenty minutes after he left, the anesthesiologist who WAS doing my job came by, followed in short order by Doctor Jim Bob, who wore a full-head covering that made him look a bit like a member of the French Foreign Legion.  (His beard is bigger than mine.)  The circulating nurse collected me, got points from L for pronouncing my name correctly, and gave me a bunch of points for pronouncing HER name correctly.  She gurneyed me down to the OR door but allowed me to walk in on my own feet and get onto the table with only minimal steadying.  I don’t know why, but sedation isn’t bad to screw around with my balance.  The anesthesiologist disconnected the forced-air heater from the table (now THERE’S a notion, a warming pan for operating tables!), and chatted for a few minutes as they strapped me on.  For my part, I decided I might’s well close my eyes and take advantage of the sedation while they stirred around, so I never did know when the Diprivan went in.

L tells me that Doctor Jim Bob came and fetched her about two and brought her back down, where I was just starting to be at myself.  I was surprised to discover much less packing than I had had after previous procedures, but Doctor Jim Bob said it was sewn in there and unlikely to be coming out until he was ready for it to go.  He also didn’t tape one of those irritating gauze pads across the bottom of my nose to catch any seepage, mainly because there IS barely any seepage, and what there is comes only from the left side and is easy to blot with Kleenex.  I got dressed and an orderly wheeled me down about quarter past three.

As long as we were out, L decided to go ahead and pick up M to save another trip.  We came home, I ate breakfast, and got back into bed to sleep off the rest of the anesthesia.  About seven I got up again, and went to find some supper.  Happily, I don’t appear to have bled enough into my stomach to nauseate me, so I dodged the whole “eat three bites, run to throw up a stomachful of blood, eat the remainder of the meal” routine that sometimes happens.  The light gauze packing means that instead of having the Worst Hed Code Ebbar, it feels no worse than a spring allergy attack and mouth-breathing for a few days.  Weren’t for Doctor Jim Bob’s instructions, I’d be thinking about going back to work on Monday, but instead I’ll be a Good Little Boy and stay home, stay quiet, and try not to stay bored, a task in which I encourage my readership to help me.

 

Bunjee the swirly chinaberry across seven.  Fnord.

Posted in Health | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

Under the knife

Posted on April 24, 2007 by Marchbanks

I have a date with a scalpel tomorrow morning about nine.

For the last couple of years the polyps in my nose have been growing back, and finally got to the point of blocking one side almost completely, leading to almost continual sinus infections.  Thank you, I had quite enough of THAT when I was a kid and I don’t care to go back to it.  I consulted Doctor Jim Bob and he tried me on a VERY experimental, non-FDA-approved off-label medication regimen he’d learned about at a medical conference, which can sometimes produce almost magical improvements, even to the point of making polyps go away completely.  The treatment involves taking high doses of itraconazole (Sporanox), an anti-fungal drug.  My insurance company just LOVED this, because even though there is a generic substitute, the generic still costs $250 a month or more, and they could only charge me a $5 co-pay per refill under my insurance plan because it WAS a generic.  They retaliated by refusing to let me fill more than a week’s worth at a time, forcing me to pay $20 per month in co-pays rather than $5 and go to the extra bother of going to the pharmacy every week.  Finally, they wrote me a letter two months ago to tell me that after May first, they would require Doctor Jim Bob to obtain prior authorization and approval for every single refill.  (You’d think I was costing ’em money or something.)

The itraconazole certainly helped and shrank the polyps some, but it didn’t make them go away completely, and as I also have some old scar tissue inside from previous nasal surgery (I had five nose jobs across a period of ten years in the Seventies and Eighties), we decided to say “the hell with it” and get out the knives.  I put off scheduling a table time until our tax refund came in, so we’d have about enough cash to pay deductibles and co-payments, which look to be $2,000 or so all told.

Doctor Jim Bob’s current plan is to cut out the polyps, remove the ethmoid sinus tissue (after which I WILL have holes in my head, thank you!), and enlarge the openings of the other six sinuses to improve drainage.  Better tools and imaging technology have made the procedure far less complicated than it was thirty years ago when I first had it done to me.  Barring something TOTALLY unexpected happening, I’ll be back home tomorrow afternoon, and at home I’ll stay for the next several days.  Doctor Jim Bob will have to pack my nose with gauze, and leave it all in place for several days while the tissue begins to heal.  The feeling is rather like having the Worst Hed Code Ebbar, and I’m sure I will snore like a grampus because of it.  Can’t be helped.  However, based on past form I also expect that I won’t need many painkillers, and will quickly be bored and ready to hear from the world, so beginning about Friday, phone calls or chats will be welcomed.  Just be aware that if you DO phone, I AM going to sound as though I have The Worst Hed Code Ebbar.  Don’t let it freak you out; I’ll tell you if I’m not up to talking right then, but I’ll be surprised if that happens.  Our home phone number is (five one two) four five three zero seven three zero, and we’re even so retro that we’re listed in the phone book!

 

Lavender hair cream reinvigorates the Pleistocene lemur dispenser.  Fnord.

Posted in Health | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

I never did that before

Posted on April 23, 2007 by Marchbanks

Actually showed up for Poly BigFun, that is, for more than a few hours.  This time I was at least present, if not really participating, the entire time from Thursday afternoon to Sunday morning.

Moon picked me up about noon Thursday, having managed to find our house without even calling for me to talk her in!  (Fascinating.)  Instead of dashing straight out to Bastrop, which would have put us there at least two hours before we could check in at the site, we did stuph like (1) a tour of my neighborhood, which Moon had never seen properly, (2) a stop at Blue Moon Glassworks so she could pick up some tools for working glass beads, (3) lunch, and (4) a credit-union run to deposit some late PBF registrations.  THEN we went on to Bastrop.  Moon handed the mini-van keys to me, saying she’d enjoy it a lot more if she could just look instead of trying to drive in an unfamiliar area.  Fine by me, I’m a lousy passenger.

As two of the first dozen people out there we had our pick of barrack space, so we pitched our stuff onto a couple of beds in the Vanilla cabin (cabins for the weekend were, respectively, “Kid-friendly,” “Naked,” “Vanilla,” and “Kinky”).  We realized almost simultaneously that we had hit the bottom of our circadian cycles, so the next hour or so was devoted to a nap—or as much of one as we could get given a stream of people squawking the door as they went in and out.  (More about the door later.)

Poly 101 that evening, down at the tiki-torch ring, started with a round of introductions from everyone, and whatever blurb each felt like sharing about himself.  Moon and I were halfway round the circle, so I had time to think about what to say.  When the toss came to me, I said “I am He-Who-Does-Not-Wear-a-Name-Tag; I am the Ineffable Listowner; I am the Treasurer.  I’ve been a member of this group since—oh, since about the time that God was a little boy.  I’ve been poly for rather longer than that, and this is STILL the first BigFun I’ve really attended.”  To which Hero Woman quickly added “and his name’s Sam” before I could shush her.

After 101 was finished and we’d visited around a few minutes, Moon and I went back to the cabin to crash for the night.  Yeahright.  There was even more of a procession of Residents and Visiting People in and out of the cabin, the lights were blazing (official “lights out” was scheduled for 0100, which was perfectly absurd), and the door continued to groan and complain every time someone opened or closed it.  Fortunately, I’d had the gumption to stop at a gun shop and pick up shooter’s earplugs for us both, so we stuck them in, covered our heads with pillows to block out as much of the light as we could, and tried this “sleeping” thing we’d heard about.  It was only middling.

Because my body is The Way It Is, i.e., middle-aged and male, I was up two or three times during the night to visit the toilet across the way.  During these trips, I discovered the cabin door didn’t groan if I lifted up on the doorknob as I opened or closed it, which gave me an idea of what might be its problem.  Friday morning after breakfast, I took a proper look at it and found that, as I suspected, the screws holding the hinges had worked loose and the door hung crookedly, dragging on the threshold each time it moved and creating a commotion.  I borrowed a screwdriver and tightened the top hinge screws, but THEN!  I looked down and saw the bottom hinge had torn completely loose from the door, and also saw that the dipshit installer had tried to hang a solid-core door with FIVE-EIGHTHS-INCH LONG SCREWS!!  Hell, no wonder it had torn loose.  You can’t hang a heavy exterior door with screws that short and expect it to stay up there.

This discovery annoyed me so that I got in the van, drove to town, bought a box of #8 x 2” screws and a ratchet screwdriver, and came back and re-hung the door one hinge at a time.  Total cost to fix it:  twelve dollars and an hour’s work.  By the time I was done and the door was being held up by a dozen LONG screws instead of eight dinky ones, it opened in a very peaceful, civilized way and didn’t give a second’s more trouble the whole weekend.

My cabin-mates gradually discovered me fixing the door, and the way they carried on you would have thought I had performed some major feat of civil engineering.  I was astonished at them, and as baffled as a water heater at the notion that this door had been giving trouble for a long time (more than a year, as I later learned), and that no one, either TPWD staff or any of the many people who had used the cabin, had had the basic gumption to SEE a simple problem and then do something simple to FIX it.  Driving twelve wood screws isn’t HARD, people!  That night we still had a procession of people in and out, but the door wasn’t adding to the ruckus.

Friday I didn’t go to any of the sessions, but I didn’t really want to either.  My goal this weekend was to begin re-connecting with Moon, as we try to rebuild and relaunch a wrong-time, wrong-place relationship from several years ago.  I was quite content to stay with fuming about home repair, visiting with the few attendees I like and care for (a limited list), and reading or napping.  Moon did go to several sessions, and was pleasantly surprised to find herself running into some spiritual learning she hadn’t expected to happen.

Sessions or no sessions, Moon and I did a LOT of talking all over the map.  She’s working on just who I am and what that means for us, and I was doing some of the same.  I did a lot less of it, to be truthful, as I’m not an introspective person at bottom and also tend not to ask other people about things they don’t volunteer, on the premise that what someone doesn’t tell me should be presumed as None of My Business unless I explicitly find out otherwise.  Even so, there was enough for LOTS of talking, and maybe some of what I said either made sense, was enlightening, or (in the happiest of cases) both.

Saturday morning I came close to being the epicenter of an explosion.  As I walked through the mess hall after breakfast I saw crumbs, dripped food, spills, and who-knows-what on the floor; some of it I could identify as having been down there since Thursday night!  It annoyed me hugely that of almost a hundred people registered, it appeared nobody had bothered to get a broom and sweep up.  I don’t know whether they were all supposed to have Minds Above Such Small Matters, or were a bunch of Lower Slobbovians, and honestly I didn’t care.  I found a broom, dustpan, and mop, and spent the next three-quarters of an hour policing the entire hall, winding myself with bending over picking up drifts of toys and papers scattered by various Small Children, and generally getting more and more Pissed Off about it.

I was in a wheeze, a sweat, and a right fury by the time I was done:  fully loaded, primed and ready to go off at the first person who annoyed me at all.  I went out and leaned myself against a big pine tree, and devoted the next few minutes to Keeping It From Falling Down.  Fortunately, the first person to come along was Hero Woman, one of perhaps three people who were capable of dealing with me in that frame of mind.  She spent several minutes backing me down from “boil” to “high simmer.”

By then it was time for the session Moon was facilitating on “Building your Poly Family/Tribe,” and I felt I ought to go to show willing.  However, a few minutes down there made me realize that I had no business trying to sit through the session.  A side conversation about legal status and custody of children produced so many fatuities that I went right back up on flame.  I realized that if I stayed I would likely kill the whole discussion with the amount of mental negativity I was broadcasting (LOTS), or perhaps end up savaging several someones, so I quietly excused myself and went away, and spent the time until lunch re-reading The Five Red Herrings, one of my Comfort Reads.

Rather than stay at PBF, I suggested to Moon that we run into town and take Saturday afternoon for ourselves.  She happily agreed, so we drove in and had lunch at a deli housed in a converted commercial storefront (perhaps a drugstore originally), then explored the tourist-trap tchotchke and antique/junque stores along Main Street in the historic district.  The “just us” time was exactly what I needed, and by the time we went back to the park I was in a good mood again.  Saturday’s supper was far better than Friday’s had been, and we happily helped ourselves to a variety of mildly peppery and garlicky dishes.  After, Moon got out a bottle of sloe gin (her preferred tipple) and we sat for a long time drinking sloe gin and Cokes and talking even more.  At one point I got maudlin, drawing a comparison between Alexander the Great and Walter Prescott Webb.  We finally gave up about half past midnight and went to bed, for additional communing.

Sunday cleanup and checkout, fortunately, didn’t involve TOO much beyond reassembling the bunk beds in our cabin that had been dismantled for the floor space and the mattresses, and sweeping out to find the odds and ends people had left behind (a pair of Jockey shorts, a pair of flip-flops, a book on some flavor of Wiccan theology).  We got back to Bastrop just in time to find several thousand bicyclists from the BP MS 150 just making the turn off 71 into town, so I turned the other direction and we came back via Elgin, which gave Moon the chance to see a whole bunch more old houses, of which she’s as fond as I am.  She dropped me off at home about one, and L and I sent her home up 183 to Lampasas, 281 to Stephenville, and 377 to Fort Worth, which she later said was FAR more pleasant than fighting up I-35.

 

Subatomic derivatives flocculate some left-handed asphalt.  Fnord.

Posted in Poly, Relationships | Tagged , , , | 10 Comments

ABEND*

Posted on April 19, 2007 by Marchbanks

Moon will be here in a few hours, and then she and I are going to Poly BigFun, which starts this afternoon.  While the state park where we’re staying does have WAPs, I have no laptop with a WLAN card and hence no Net access until Sunday afternoon sometime.  I will have the cell phone with me, so if something in your life starts to burn down and you need to find me, call (five one two) four two six nine zero two one.

Meantime, I need to go find some breakfast.  I think I’ll treat myself to a trip to Quack’s today.

 

* ABEND:  2. Absent by Enforced Net Deprivation, a term originating in the alt.callahans newsgroup on Usenet to account for missing group members.

 

The majolica psittacine confers over a USB allergen.  Fnord.

Posted in Poly, Relationships | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Soda run

Posted on April 16, 2007 by Marchbanks

But not just any soda, of course.  The soda.  Dublin Dr Pepper.

Some weeks ago, Shiny Woman, Hero Woman, and I made a date to make a run up to Dublin to tour the Dr Pepper plant, the oldest one still in service.  It’s been in continuous operation in the same building since 1891.  I enjoy taking friends up to see the plant; I first toured it with my Cub Scout den in ’67 or ’68, back when the bottle washer (newest hardware in the plant; installed in ’65) was still new.  They picked me up at eight and started up 183 toward Lampasas.  (I told Hero Woman, who was driving, to ignore the map from the Web site, ’cos it takes you about an hour out of your way.)

A short stop in Lampasas for them to get some kind of convenience-store breakfast and a bathroom break for everyone, and we went on up 281 to Hamilton.  At Olin, we turned off on FM 219 and did the Meandering Farm-to-Market Road thing for 35 miles or so, through Carlton and Purves and coming out on the east side of Dublin, maybe a mile from the plant and in time for the second tour of the day at eleven o’clock, which we almost missed because I forgot to watch the time.  However, an alert employee got us herded in only a minute or two late, before we missed anything.

Since the last time I was there they’ve spruced up a bit—given the bottle washer a coat of paint and cleaned up the alkali encrustations, and gotten a much prettier full-color reproduction of the washer’s cross-section.  The original one, which had been in place since the washer was put in, was badly faded and water-stained.  Our tour guide, as is so often the case with young tour guides, had no notion of pacing his speeches and gabbled through them at ninety miles an hour.  He would have done a lot better had he slowed down to an intelligible speed.  Even so, he obviously knew the material; he works the bottling line on Wednesdays, the only day of the week they run any more because (1) the machinery, some of which dates to the 1920s, is prone to breakdowns and (2) “they can’t get the wood bottles, you know.”  The last domestic glass company making returnable bottles quit doing so in the 1990s, and non-returnable bottles are too fragile to stand up to being bounced around the bottle washer.  (A side-by-side comparison of returnable and non-returnable bottles will show you how much thicker the returnables were, all round.)  When the stock of returnable bottles are finally all broken or worn out, the bottling line will have to be decommissioned.

Some of the memorabilia in the “museum” had been changed out since I’d been by last, so there were some new things to see.  The museum contains a selection of memorabilia from the collection of a former owner, who collected absolutely ANYthing that said “Dr Pepper” on it, including one or two items that are so rare as to be literally priceless; e.g., the 1941 “Patriotic Girl” stand-up—created for a 1942 ad campaign, her stars-and-stripes halter-and-shorts outfit outraged the bluenoses and Dr Pepper was forced to end the campaign and destroy all copies—except this one, hidden in a storeroom to re-emerge in a more broad-minded time.  Because it is unique, no one is willing to put a value on it, and hence it’s uninsurable.

We left about noon with six cases in the hatch, three of bottles and three of cans.  I mentioned at work that I was taking the trip and had orders for four cases right away, I always have to bring back a case for T or she’ll have a conniption, and the last one is for domestic use.  For the variety of it Hero Woman decided to drive back via Meridian, Clifton, Valley Mills, and Waco.  We stopped for a few minutes in Clifton to let me take pictures of a darling abandoned gas station/grocery, a survival of the 1920s built of peanut-brittle flagged limestone.  (I wish I had the money to buy and restore it; I would in a minute.)  The ninety miles to Waco took several minutes too long given we all wanted our lunches—I had something of a “need-food” headache myself.  We stopped and ate at a Texas Roadhouse, where I fortunately didn’t find the wall-size mural of Poppy and Dubya as stagecoach drivers until it was too late to fulminate about it.  On the way out of town we stopped at Best Buy to let Shiny Woman look for the B5 Season 3 DVD (they didn’t have it), and then drove home down I-35, getting back around four.  It was a good day-trip excursion, and I certainly didn’t object to getting to spend the day with two of my favorite people!

 

The platinum-reinforced possum created a bluebonnet genre painting.  Fnord.

Posted in Food and Cooking, Relationships, Travel | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

I have a hemstitcher

Posted on March 17, 2007 by Marchbanks

Ghods help us, I have a hemstitcher.

For years, my mother has been gradually clearing out the barn at her parents’ house.  (This clearing goes on although she sold the house several years ago.  That’s how things go in a small town.)  The barn was full of my grandparents’ household goods that never got moved back in after my grandfather “remodeled” the house in 1970.  Lots of it is ruined, some isn’t, some is on the edge.

One that is on the edge is a Singer model 72w-19 dual-needle hemstitcher, S/N W538319.  Singer’s lost their records for the W series, and will only say “after 1911.” I’m guessing it was made before 1930.  The model 72w had a LONG production run.  Mother, who was born in late 1932, says she “can’t ever remember not having it.”  C got to poking around on the Net well before I got into the act, and found that working examples sell for $2,000 and better, mainly because they’re industrial machines, built to last forever and then make you a pair of pants afterward.

C and Mother got to dickering back and forth about whether they should try to do anything with it—sell it to someone as is, try to have it fixed, haul it to the dump in despair.  On being asked my opinion, I consulted Piroshki, who sounded fairly encouraging about it provided it wasn’t a solid mass of rust.  Mother and C kept dithering at each other in email and cc:ing me but without ever asking me anything directly, “should we bring it to Sam?  Should we junk it rather than wish it on him?” &c. &c. until I finally told them both “Just bring the goddamn thing down here and let me worry about what happens to it after!  I’m quite old enough to make that decision for myself, and if it needs to go to the dump I can arrange to get it there—but I WANT TO SEE IT FIRST!!” which drew a hurt-sounding “we were only thinking about you” email from Mother.  The hell with that.  I get pissed off when I think they’re trying to talk over my head as though I was M.

Finally Mother stopped by last weekend on her way home from a scholarly society meeting, and dropped it off with us.  Now, at least, I know what I have.

The machine’s in rough condition.  It’s sat in a dirt-floored barn with no climate control for more than 35 years.  The paint on the bed is chipping (not on the body, though), rust has eaten through much of the nickel plating, the whole head’s COVERED in a thick layer of dust and dirt.  For a miracle, the mechanism might not be completely frozen up; I haven’t had a chance to fool with it.  Penetrating oil is gonna be my friend.

The power cord (cloth-covered) is completely rotted through.  My brother cut through the (original cloth-covered) wiring from the power switch (original) to the 1/5-horse Singer motor (probably original).  Barring a miracle, the motor would have to be completely rewound anyway.  The leather drive belt is perished, of course.

Paint on the irons is astonishingly good.  The table, a one-inch-thick hardwood laminate of some kind, is also covered in dirt and delaminating on one corner; I think THAT is probably fixable with care, soapy water, beeswax, and hide glue.

Even taken to bits, it weighs a motherfrelling TON, especially the table.  I strained one wrist carrying that in.  Pictures will follow once I can get my camera in order.

ETA: L made the sensible suggestion that it might have originally belonged to my great-grandmother.  That’s certainly possible.  She was VERY good at all kinds of domestic arts, and it wouldn’t surprise me if she “took in sewing” to supplement the income from her boarders, and bought it for that.  It would have been a big investment for her; in 1914 one of these combination treadle/motorized machines sold for more than $150.

 

Stitch, stitch here, stitch, stitch there.  Fnord.

Posted in Comanche, Family, Needlework and Crafts, Personal History | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

When I consider how my light is spent

Posted on March 17, 2007 by Marchbanks

Today was another of my appointments with my ophthalmologist.  I’ve been seeing him a lot recently because, when I went to see him last year after five years of “not being able to go because I couldn’t pay for a visit out of pocket,” he found I have a larger-than-usual optic cup in one eye.  He didn’t have any other recent data points, so he couldn’t say whether this was because I just had larger than normal optic cups or came from a very early case of glaucoma.  He had me come back in six months to be checked again.

The next visit or two gave . . . well, abnormal but not worrying results.  A retinal map showed that I have thin spots in both retinas, but again, nothing wildly out of range—in the yellow rather than in the red.  The last time I was in, a peripheral vision test showed a maybeso slight loss of peripheral vision.  However my intra-ocular pressures were normal to low-normal, which argued against me having glaucoma.

The results of today’s visit were more disturbing.  My intra-ocular pressures continue to be low-normal, but the peripheral vision test this time showed a distinct deterioration from previous visits, and the retinal map continued to show some abnormality.  Coupled with somewhat impaired low-light vision, which I’d noticed on my own a while ago, it suggests that I do have glaucoma, and never mind the pressure readings.

Today for the first time the ophthalmologist suggested that I may want to start taking medicine to reduce my intra-ocular pressure, even though it’s normal to low.  Possibly I have fragile, over-reactive retinas that won’t even stand up to normal pressures any longer.  He wants to have me come back in three months this time rather than six, and to see me in the early morning rather than late afternoon.  Intra-ocular pressures are the highest when you’re lying down and he’s got a better chance of catching something abnormal, if it’s there, early in the day.

The prospect of losing vision is one of the more distressing things I can imagine.  So many of the things I like to do are dependent on being able to see.  While I expect that I would learn ways to deal with it if it should happen (and it might not; if treated early, glaucoma can be managed almost indefinitely), the idea still frightens me.

Posted in Eyes, Health, Lungs | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Should I disappear . . .

Posted on February 28, 2007 by Marchbanks

online, don’t necessarily think the worst.  I’ve only got a hard drive that hasn’t failed . . . YET.

Norton Disk Doctor bleeped day before yesterday to warn me “hey, the SMART monitoring function on your hard disk says you’re accumulating more errors than you should; you might wanna checkitout.”  Good ol’ Peter Norton, he was right.  I ran the onboard hard drive diagnostic and it flunked, as big as life.  An hour in “chat” with a tech in the consumer-group support queue in Hyderabad got a case set up and a repair dispatch created—the wrong way.  She set it up as an onsite service call and utterly ignored my instructions to send me a Seagate drive as replacement, that I wouldn’t have another Western Digital like the one I have now, which failed after only eleven months in service.  She dispatched it with a Western Digital drive anyhow, and the hell with me.  (I wonder what she thought she was about, as the address I gave her was for my cube at the Empire, and I would just LOVE to see a service provider’s onsite technician try to get into our building!)  Messes like that are why corporate customers pay extra to get support from my queue.  Sweartogods, if I could have done so without causing a commotion I would have just set up my own part dispatch in the first place.

I came in the morning to find the onsite call mess as well as a second parts-only dispatch sending me installation media I’d told the Hyderabadi tech I already had and didn’t need.  I cancelled both dispatches and asked an L1 on our floor to do it over properly for me for a favor; he did, and twenty minutes later I had the single parts-only dispatch I’d wanted to begin with, and with exactly the drive I wanted as well.  (It’s very nice to have a “do not substitute” flag available that can keep you from getting parts you wouldn’t have on a bet.)

I just checked on the shipment.  It has a tracking number assigned from DHL, which means it ought to ship tonight and be here tomorrow, but at the latest it should arrive Friday.  I think the old drive will hold out that long; it hasn’t done any really ugly hardware-failure tricks yet, and once I have it I think I can use Ghost to mirror the old drive’s applications and data onto the new one, which would save me several days of reinstalling and configuration.

 

A pukka sahib ordered the immediate re-institution of the Raj.  Fnord.

Posted in Them Computin' Machines | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

On being naked

Posted on February 12, 2007 by Marchbanks

I detest wearing clothes.

No, really I do.  In the best of all worlds, I’d be able to do completely without clothing except for warmth, sun protection, or entertainment.  Even the best-fitting clothing annoys me a little, and being the body shape I am, most non-tailored clothing doesn’t fit me well and annoys me a lot.  I’ve been like that ever since I entered my teens; if I was at home and there were no guests, I was probably naked.  Once I moved to Austin and had my own place to live, the likelihood of me being unclothed at home approached unity.

Fortunately, L shares my willingness to go bare, so the issue of “put something on!” never comes up unless it’s cold, one of us has to answer the door, or we have company who isn’t comfortable with nudity, and we raised T and M the same way, ensuring the American-Puritan linkage between nudity and sex never got made for them, and when they were old enough to understand we explained why we thought it silly.

But there’s another piece to it.  (With me there is almost always another piece to anything.)  Nudity, whether social or otherwise, has always been a symbol that I have a certain level of trust in someone.  If I’m willing to be naked around you (and if you’re reading this you may presume I am), it means I have confidence in and feel secure enough with you to extend that trust, and to offer reciprocity to you in our home as well if you want it.  Social nudity’s nothing that either L nor I would demand or automatically expect of any of our friends, but the option’s there if ever you should want to exercise it.

 

Eve was framed.  Fnord.

Posted in Personal History, Relationships | 2 Comments

Another shoe hits the ground

Posted on February 11, 2007 by Marchbanks

No sooner do we get one part of L’s family on its feet than another one’s laid up.  L’s mother was supposed to come visit this weekend to (1) get out of the Maryland snow and (2) be here for L’s birthday (on Sunday) and our anniversary (ditto), but she called today and said she couldn’t come; L’s sister’s husband had a bad wreck last Thursday, which put him into Greater Baltimore Medical Center with a broken back.  It’s only cracked vertebrae and no spinal damage, as far as anyone can tell, but the doctors can’t agree on what to do about him.  One neurosurgeon wants to operate, and another says no, he only needs physiotherapy, not an operation.  In part they’re arguing because Matt’s broken back was due to a congenital spinal condition that hadn’t declared itself so no one, including Matt, knew he had it.  Hence the argument.

It was an ugly accident as Linda described it.  Matt was driving north on Charles Street by Sheppard Pratt psychiatric hospital, and someone pulled out from behind the entrance guardhouse without stopping, clipped him as he swerved to avoid, and shoved his truck across the median into the southbound lane, where another car hit him head-on.  For a mercy, Matt was wearing a seat belt because his youngest has been ragging on him recently to wear it all the time.  He wasn’t cut up, and broke no bones save the cracked spine.  Had he been without a belt, I expect he’d be dead.

Of course L’s sister Nat is almost at wit’s end trying to cope with running to and from the hospital, working as many hours as she can (she’s still an hourly employee for schedule flexibility), and taking care of their three kids (15, 10, and 9), with some help from Linda and from Matt’s family.  (At least she has that option open to her.)  Linda said she didn’t feel at all happy with the notion of going out of town right now, and of course I agreed.  It’s a pity, because we’d been planning a small dinner party on Saturday to celebrate, and now that’s off, so I have no idea WHAT we’ll do for the weekend.  Maybe nothing, no better than this is getting on.

 

He would invite the plastic re-enactors to anticipate Trimalchio’s dinner.  Fnord.

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