Saw Tom today

He greeted me, and said a goodbye after my couple of hours by his bedside watching him breathe, (Peggy and Ben were there) but didn’t say much else. He’s essentially in palliative care. We’re all sad, but he’s getting the care he needs, very good care thank you very much, for the stage of life he’s in, and there are friends and family with him pretty much all day.

We must love each other while we can.

swithering

Dishwasher is running thanks to me, tea is seeping thanks to Jeff, and I just realized that I didn’t get my goddamned bloodwork done because I was about to go in to Lifelabs and I got an email that Tom is sick and it literally (THANKS FOR NUTHIN ADD and also may I just mention that not getting a fucking email reminder of your pending requisition from the doctors office doesn’t exactly fucking help even if you don’t have ADD) knocked doing that out of my mind. So I must must do that today. Which means I have to walk over to 6th and 10th anyway, maybe I can mail the 9 page (large print) letter I wrote to Mary over the last week, and pick up a coffee for Jeff on the way back since he was hankering for one.

weather is frickin GLORIOUS  I mean seriously.

I have a list as long as my hair (which reminds me, I need to tie it up again or Jeff’s going to be spitting out my hairs reproachfully while watching tv as they drift over his face (sometimes he goes GAAAH and flaps his hands because it’s like having a spider web land on you and then OH THE REPROACHFUL LOOK)) and slightly more motivation than yesterday for attacking it. More laundry, working on Finale writing down songs and messing with the voicing, tidying up the music/guest room, working on a couple of new fanfics, responding to Tish’s letter, actually reading the rent increase notice and diarizing it. A small fraction of the goo sticking to me.

I have subscribed to the NYT for a year, it was 1/20th the normal price so I actually thought that was fair. Jeff, it was the article about Jared Harris that made me subscribe, I am such a celebri-fluffer.

Crows called for food this morning, but I put out sunflower seeds instead of roasted unsalted peanuts so they are sulking. (later, there they go again. It’s four-call, whoever she is)

Keith has apparently had an excellent visit with the grandparents in Victoria. I’ll be meeting up with Paul at some point today to walk and possibly visit Tom and exchange stuff, since items keep migrating between our two households.

Jeff’s car is still in the krankenhaus. The problem can’t be replicated, so we’re beginning to think it’s bad fuel.

I think I have blown through yet another set of orthotics, so that’s going on the list as well. NO DO NOT WANT. I mean I want comfy feet but I do not want to spend 400 dollars even if my fOlks are underwriting it with my remittance woman stipend.

ADD meds day two. I AM ITCHY. Is it allergies? is it medication? LOL who knows. Much imitating of the Archer character Woodhouse saying in his crackly voice, “It’s going to be an itchy weekend.”

I bought some Red Racer Street Legal Pilsner and IPA for Paul so I have something festive to drink while I’m over there. Got some for myself as well. It’s about the equivalent of a piece of bread, for carbs.

I now have a nightgown for every night of the week. And okay, enough potchkeying around on my blog, I have to go have a phlebotomist stab me, baby.

Nobody wants to know

If you’re feeling low.

Unfortunately Peggy’s biscotti won’t bake ’emselves. I have other stuff to bake as well.

It’s a Wittgenstein kinda day: (and here’s me thinking this was Nietzsche

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”

Fortunately I have lots of friends and family to talk to… I’m low, but I’m not lonely.

NO just no please no

Interesting

Norm Macdonald is dead and the only people I can see who are mourning him are men on Reddit…. quite interesting. Waiting for a woman celebrity OTHER THAN SARAH SILVERMAN who really is a Sspecial cKase to praise him.

When Robin Williams and George Carlin died there was an incredible outpouring from a huge range of people and with Norm… just men. And Sarah Silverman. Makes ya think, don’t it?

I have started taking the medications. I’m not experiencing side effects so far, bar being a little off my feed. The real whoopsiedoodle will be the ADD meds, but I’m going to wait a while to start those.

PLEASE DON’T DRINK AND DRIVE.

Ken Burns made a documentary about ‘the greatest athlete of the 20th c’ – Mohammad Ali. That’s funny, because by many objective measures the greatest athlete of the 20th C was Babe Didrikson, and she sewed her own fucking clothes while she was winning.

 

what a thing to have a brO (and friends)

REPENTANCE BEFORE UNITY

With thanks for the many simple pleasures of MST Country, with thanks to the people and the stories that make this place, for the sky, land and water, for all the beautiful creatures herein. It is a good day.

Jeff has (like Thorkel) stood in the ‘undeviating stream of my complaints’ as I whined about my health (okay the rumours about brain damage are true! what it is!) and survived!

Also I called Dave and wordsaladed all over his uncomplaining ear. He’s got to haul himself off to a doctor as well, shortly, and he’s looking forward to it about as much as I did. I have to go into the clinic 14 days hence.

Today I am going to wander down to the drugstore and find out what manner of side effect lies in wait for me there. DO NOT WANT a YEAR OF NAUSEA.

Tomorrow I’m going to the Junction to help Katie set up the baby room and nag her dad about how old he got, since he’ll be 72 tomorrow. Last time I was there we had a talk about the things that could have killed him, like the time he hit a wall on his motorcycle at 50 miles an hour, then (limping four ways from Sunday) rode what was left of it to Ron M.’s place in London and crashed on his couch. Shook it off and beat most of the dings out of it the next day. The shit we get up to when we’re young! and then after we’ve survived it we wake up in a cold sweat decades later going HOLY SHIZZBALLS OF RECKONING. I still get a chill when I think about the plane crash. Surviving stuff like that should make you a better person, but as best I recollect the only thing that came out of it was that we should have wills, although we didn’t actually DO anything about it until years later.

I’m up to 2700 words on the haunted object story and I’m loving the dialog, it’s most hilarious and effective (and yes I do say so myself, dialogue is one of my writing skillsets).

I now veer wildly off into Schadenfreude land. He was a cruel and evil and anti-science man, and now he’s fondling Satan’s dick in hell, and GOOD. For when the link disappears:

(Ed Mazza, Yahoo News, Monday September 13 2021)

Bob Enyart, a notoriously homophobic right-wing radio host who refused to get vaccinated against the coronavirus, has died of COVID-19.

The death was announced on Facebook.

“It comes with an extremely heavy heart that my close friend and co-host of Real Science Radio has lost his battle with COVID,” wrote Fred Williams, co-host of the ironically named show, which routinely pushed anti-science talking points, including creationism.

Enyart was 62, according to Newsweek.

My age. LOL Fred do tell me your vaxx status

after all, repulsigans, you have taught me that the cruelty is the message as “Cops” returns to Fox Media

later that morning – Mike called and told me about the Reddit Herman Cain award and it’s all for vile people who said covid was a hoax and then died of it so I was able to tell Mike I already had an award recipient on my blog this morning DOUBLE LOL

Finding my health

It’s worse this morning… both the rib and the dry cough. There is no way I’d be going to either Bowen or Mike’s in my current state. Time for a roasting hot shower and ta cough up a lung. When that’s not happening there’s a squeaky wheeze in there.

So if I’m watching comfort food TV, eating comfort food, doing laundry and writing fanfic who can be surprised. Posted another 2500 word story, 150 hits already so far, but fewer kudos. It isn’t funny, the way most of my stuff is, so maybe that has something to do with the ratio.

Next story up will probably be one of those cuddly funny stories; I just had to get the fix-it and parallel universe little stories out of my system first.

SHNERK oh make the mucus stop ROY KENT GRUNT

A demented pubic louse has more ethics than this buh

A B.C. Naturopath is never a way to start a sentence that will end well. Eventually this link will rot and die, so let me extract the first two paragraphs so you can have an expression of wide eyed revulsion cross your face too:

A B.C. naturopath who claims he can treat autism with fecal transplants at a clinic in Mexico has been barred from producing pills or enemas made from human feces while he’s under investigation by several agencies.

The College of Naturopathic Physicians of B.C. says it has taken “extraordinary action” against Jason Klop in response to a complaint from a whistle-blowing former employee, who alleges that he manufactured these products in a “household lab” in B.C. without standard procedures or quality control.

little bits of happiness

I’m still working through the throes of coming out of a twitter addiction but the results over the past two weeks are:

1 I’m no longer subject to strangers hitting me up for cash

2 I’m no longer getting live feed of people being killed by ‘their’ governments, drowning in floods, being shot by police, wildfires and other up to the minute disasters

3 I’m posting more to my own blog

4 My mental health has improved marginally – I feel less desperate and less oppressed by the state of the world

5 I’m writing more

6. I miss Pebble in the Sky and so many other people on twitter, I want to hear their voices in my head, I miss them so much. But I’ve been telling people on twitter for years how to get hold of me, so if they don’t, they’re busy, and that’s okay, or they didn’t make a note, and that’s okay too. I miss the funny ones, the writing ones, the dead serious about the working class ones, the technoweenie anarchists and the Ottawa grannies and the filkers and the local journos.

speaking of writing more, out of the 1500 words I sent to my mOm the other day, she unerringly picked out the single sentence of dialogue that encapsulated it and I just want to say publicly that mOm can claim to be suffering from mental deficits and I’m going to repeat what the cognitive scientists say; old people get to the same place as young people when given time for the tasks they must solve…. and when not subject to be hassled while they’re thinking.

I am old too, you know. I’ll get there eventually. And in the meantime I’ll quit telling her to respond fast, I’m stepping on my own cloak there.

woke up coughing in tandem at 2 am

I was coughing too hard to even greet Jeff as he walked by my door. I’ve had a good, strong, restorative and hydrating cuppa and now I’m 1500 words into a destiel fic that kinda swooped in on me.

This is a chest cold. In time of plague one worries, but this is merely one of life’s annoyances not a two in a hundred chance of dying. (1.8 but who’s counting really)

LATER AROUND 9 AM oh look, something two blocks from my house caught fire and the not for profit food insecurity charity Quest got extensive smoke damage. The innocent suffer and the hookah lounge burns down.

a collection of symptoms flying in close array

Today is the first day of me getting ptosis in my left eye. It’s always been in my right eye before; I’m miffed at the encroachment. It’s now time to stop looking at screens (I’m assuming that’s the cause) and nap because even if sleep doesn’t make things better it sure makes things go away (I don’t remember my dreams, so I carry things into my sleep and don’t carry them out.)

However temporarily.

My troubles await my awakening.

Buster wants me to throw some more treats now so I’ll do that and then nap. Oh yeah, I left something out of the fridge. I’m sort of wandering around in a diminished capacity which probably has something to do with that good hard slug of coff sirp.

Oh great visual disturbances time to close the laptop.

sick but not entirely

so it’s a little after midnight and I woke up rather congested. My sinuses are either clogged or producing simply miraculous quantities of runny goo and sitting up is a better option for now so that’s what I’m doing. All but one of the ribs seems to have gone back into place, so I’m experiencing much less discomfort in my ribs, but I still can’t bend over or torque my spine at all. I’ve figured out how to roll over without too much discomfort. Buster wanted my attention so I gave him some, (hey Buster don’t forget to check for treats on top of the fridge haw haw) but now I’m thinking of taking some more cough medicine (this stuff works great) and trying to catch another three or four hours before the day starts…

non stop cough

I am producing a teaspoon of respiratory tract mucus about every 3 – 5 minutes. My ribs still hurt, but I can cough without injuring myself further so that’s okay. My nose is running like a tap but I feel much better today than yesterday, that’s for sure, and I got some more sleep between 4 am and 8:30 am so I’m better rested. I have the right kind of cough medicine and I’m pushing fluids as fast as I can. Despite it all I don’t feel too bad. If this is a cold I AM SO SORRY I TOOK IT INTO YOUR HOUSE MOMMA.

going home today

We went to the Butterfly House and the Country Bee House yesterday. At the Butterfly House Little E the parrot was three deep in Taiwanese uni students, as far as I could tell, so I didn’t get to love on him at all, but I had the great joy of telling a little girl that a tortoise had ‘broken out’ of the tortoise pen, and otherwise it was much as it usually is, and Alex enjoyed it. Alex enjoyed me imitating the goats and sheep at the Country Bee and we talked a bit about the animals and what they were eating.

Slept until about two, woke up not able to breathe, got up and brushed my teeth and drank some water and forced myself to lie down. Fought with sleep for about an hour I guess and then finally found a comfy enough position to go back to sleep.
My hand is much better today, but the ribs are sore and tight and I can neither bend nor twist, and there’s a hot patch, so I’m thinking I need to get a chest xray at the very least, which I’ll arrange when I get back.

kinda beat up

my left wrist and ribs under my left breast still hurt quite a bit but I’ve established that I can at least nap… rolling over takes about 30 seconds and is accompanied by sounds of me hissing like a snake

I was thinking of making one last stab at climbing Pkols tomorrow or the day after but I know I won’t be able to and I’m just disappointed in myself turning my ankle on the paved part of the pathway…. My foot slipped into the divot right next to the paved part and then I flung myself around so I wouldn’t go down the embankment and crushed my left hand under me. Paul was with me. I had the wind knocked out of me for about a minute and then slowly stood up with Paul’s help – a kindly stranger with a dog rushed to check on me which felt very comforting under the circumstances. And no, I shouldn’t have driven afterwards now that I think of it, but I just couldn’t deal with getting out of the car to mail Tom’s letter so I stuck him in the passenger seat. I think my reasoning is kinda weird sometimes.