I know I’m officially “middle aged”. While I don’t necessarily embrace the fact, I do (begrudgingly) accept it and even think of myself as such (from time to time).
I was stunned by my reaction when Fritz over at Commute by Bike referred to me as “This middle aged man“. I wasn’t surprized that he wrote it, but I was quite shocked by how much it stung, if only just for an instant, seeing it in print. Ahh… the power of the printed word!
Oh and Fritz, you’re still missing the point of my story. It wasn’t about being complimented by a teenaged girl. It was about her subsequent mortification and embarrassment. The compliment was just the icing on the cake.
Thursday night they got the furnace running. The water heater was doing its thing in time for me to enjoy a hot shower before work Friday night. And… Sunday my neighbor downstairs called to let me know that she had found my missing house key.
As an added bonus, I just realized that all the rain and flooding should have washed all of the evil salt from the roads, so hopefully I’ll be out rocking the ‘good’ bike wheels this week, with nary a worry that my pristine, practically frictionless bearings will be infiltrated by salt water or my bike otherwise besmirched with unsightly salty grime.
Today after considerable time steeling myself for the inevitable horrors of an ice-cold shower, I bit the bullet and took one (with quite a bit of, shall we say, “colorful language” thrown in for good measure). Along the way I discovered something, an ice-cold shower is a sure way to put me in a foul mood. It’s not “exhilarating”, it’s not “invigorating”. It’s horrible, it’s truly awful. It’s just a blindfold away from being actual torture.
Anyway, after doing my best to put this awfulness behind me it was off to the big reference laboratory where they’ll be drawing blood and doing my labwork, some 30 minutes away. I arrived at 3:40 feeling quite pleased with myself until I discovered that they closed at 3:30! Who the Hell, aside from elementary schools, calls it a day a 3:30?!?
So, having accomplished exactly nothing aside from wasting well over an hour driving, I arrived back home. Imagine my delight when I discovered that I didn’t have my house key. After several minutes attempting the old “credit card trick” I concede that I’m going to have to go retrieve my hidden emergency key.
Guess where it’s hidden? In the basement. The same basement that is filled knee-deep with ice-cold water which backed up through the floor drain from the storm sewer. At least when I was done I could rinse off with yet more ice-cold water and bask in my 55° apartment.
And that was my day.
Tuesday and Wednesday it absolutely poured rain, at one point Wednesday evening it even started to snow big fluffy snowflakes. For a brief time everything that wasn’t underwater was coated in snow.
The bad news is that my basement flooded and I therefore have no heat or hot water until they get it pumped out and the various pilot lights can be re-ignited.
The good news? There’s a family of ducks who seem to be having a splendid time swimming around what used to be my back yard.
Just for the sake of clarity here’s my car minus the bizarre cloak of wind-driven snow.
Apparently, it’s mutated it into some sort of abominable snow wagon.
Click to embiggen.
I could go outside and get a better shot, but I’m not going to. Looks like I “picked” a good weekend to be off work.
Man, this blog is a God damned downer lately, isn’t it? I promise to work on that, really.
First, forgive the length of this post, brevity is not my forté.
I try not to make this a place for me to bitch about whatever maladies or ailments I might have at the moment, but this was a fairly life-changing (and damned near life-ending) experience.
Hopefully this can serve as a cautionary tale for someone out there. As some of you (my imaginary fan club) may or may not know I work in group home with four adults with “intellectual disabilities” (that’s the latest PC term, anyway). I work 3rd shift 14/14/12 hours.
Now just a bit more setup. I have an undiagnosed (so far) bleeding disorder, generally not an issue, unless I’m subjected to some sort of trauma. Sometime back I saw a “Dr.” for a stiff, very sore, and inflamed big toe. When I got home with my prescription of Naproxen (an NSAID) I immediately realized that I’m not supposed to take those, and so, I didn’t.
Flash forward to a few weeks ago. The toe is flaring up again, and tylenol proves to be ineffective. Naturally I remember the Naproxen and decide to give it a try. It works and I’m thinking that 500mg once or twice a day, a few days a week should be fine.
So, flash forward to this past Sunday night/Monday morning: I’ve just had a slice of apple pie and my toe is starting to really hurt again, so I take another (my second of the day) Naproxen. I’ll try to keep what came next as in-offensive as possible.
My bowels began grumbling that they needed to be moved, so I did. When I looked into the bowl and saw that one end of the stool (sorry) was composed of the stereotypical ‘old coffee grounds’ I said to my self, “Oh, that’s not good.”
I’m thinking at that point that I’d be ok to finish my shift and can worry about it later.
Within minutes I began to realize that I had miscalculated.
After evacuating (shitting, if you prefer) several gushers (I lost count) of increasingly bright-red blood I knew I was in serious trouble and needed to call someone to take over for me, and ‘maybe’ an ambulance. The problem was; at this point I couldn’t stand without blacking out and didn’t have a phone within reach.
Finally during a break in the action, I crawl to a phone, get my boss’s number and make the call, (from the toilet) downplaying the situation not wishing to alarm her. A few minutes later as my hold on consciousness grew extremely tenuous I called back telling her “This is really bad, I’m going to have to call an ambulance.” (Which I should have already done, literally, hours earlier.) I did, then crawled to open the front door, so the EMT’s could get in.
The ambulance arrived, followed immediately by my boss, and it was off to the ER. I won’t bore you with my tales of the rampant, and apparently institutionalized incompetence I witnessed in the ER.
The bleeding stopped on its own by the time I’d been in the ER for a bit. They did all sorts of tests, revealing nothing that I hadn’t already deduced. They eventually moved me into a room, gave me two units of blood, all sorts of fluids and anti-biotics and such and they were even quite generous with the Morphine.
Tuesday afternoon (I arrived at the hospital around 5:30AM Monday) they finally let me eat, then Tuesday I was parolled, just in time to miss out on getting to vote.
Caldonia (my cat) was overjoyed to see me. She’s a little fat and I’ve noticed that she eats a lot more while I’m at work; so naturally I’d picked this weekend to start leaving her just enough food for the night.
They want to give me a chance to heal before they do any scope-work. So I have that to look forward to; colonoscopes, endoscopes, kinoscopes, otoscopes, kaleidoscopes, oscilloscopes, fluoroscopes, gyroscopes, telescopes, periscopes, all sorts of ’scopes.
I just wish they could tell me something concrete, right now I’m a complete wreck. Every twinge or grumble from my gut absolutely terrifies me.
I’ve already taken next weekend off from work, I’m a nervous wreck and I’m exhausted.
Oh, and the moral to this story?
Don’t take stupid chances with your health.
If you missed the first installment, you can bring yourself up to speed here.
So Tuesday he’d said he be here around noon. Sometime after 2 he showed up. He gets everything apart, loads up the parts that need to be replaced (the defrost timer and the thermostat) and tells me “I’ll be back to finish up either today or tomorrow. If I have to go to Dayton to get parts, it’ll be tomorrow. I’ll give you a call and let you know.”
I didn’t hear from him again Tuesday, so I tried to call Wednesday morning. I left a message and I waited. Finally at 5:30 he calls. “Well, I’ve got some good news and some bad news,” he says, “the good news is I got the timer, the bad news is I won’t be able to get the thermostat until the truck comes tomorrow around noon. So, I’ll be by tomorrow afternoon to get it all put back together for you, are you going to be around tomorrow?” Dude, that’s not ‘good news and bad news’. That’s just bad news. When the bad news negates the “good” news, you don’t get to invoke that phrase… seriously!!
Not even attempting to disguise the disgust in my voice I tell him, “Well, I don’t guess I have much choice… yeah, I’ll be here.”
He finally comes Thursday (remember this all started Monday) around 2:45 and starts putting my refrigerator back together.
So, after spending 4 solid days waiting; waiting for him to call, waiting for him to show up, waiting for him to finish working on it, and now, waiting for it to cool off, I finally have a working refrigerator again!
Here, all I can say is: “Damnit!”
Naturally, I stuck a can of Welches Grape Soda in the freezer and went for a bike ride. You really can’t beat a nice cold grape soda after a ride, I always say.
Are they all rather, shall we say, flaky? It’s been my experience that people that go into this line of work are somewhat peculiar. Interesting folks, fun to chat with, but exceedingly frustrating to deal with on a professional level.
Here’s my situation. My refrigerator quit working. The freezer still works, but the fridge? Not cold at all. I’ve been keeping a supply of drinks and a few perishables in a cooler with Blue Ice
packs which I rotate in and out of the (thankfully) still working freezer. I’ve been doing this for longer than I am willing to admit to because, well, I’m a bit of a flake myself. I abhor anything that interferes with my routine, or lack thereof. When my work week is done, I value coming and going as I please above all else. If it’s a nice day and I want to spend it on my bike out in the countryside, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. That’s my reward for working those 14 hour shifts.
Anyway, back to the fridge. I’m on vacation this week so I bit the bullet and decided to take care of the situation. I call my landlord and she says she’ll have her handyman call me. He calls Monday around 12:30 and asks if I’m going to be around for awhile. He’s got a couple of stops to make and will come by later in the afternoon. “Yeah, yeah, that’s fine” I tell him.
5 o’clock comes and goes, no handyman… finally around 5:30 he shows up. He chips at the thick frost in the back of the freezer (which I didn’t even realize was there) for awhile, then says he needs to let it thaw for a bit; he’ll go take a look at a leaky faucet nearby and be back in a bit.
He never comes back, or calls. Tuesday morning, I call him and try to pin him down as to what time I might expect him. He asks when is good for me and I tell him that I’m on vacation and that the soonest he can be here would be great. When I mentioned being on vacation he commented that it “Must be nice.” Oh yeah, it’s great; sitting here waiting on your ass all day. Sheesh!
So, he’s coming around noon (we’ll see about that). Hopefully he can get it fixed in time for me to get a ride in this evening. I sure as Hell hope so.
Let me just say from the start, I’m irritated. There are so many things going on in the world that irritate (and sicken) me right now I don’t even know where to begin. What the media tries to convince us is (and isn’t) “news”, irritates the piss out of me, but more on that later.
Society’s asinine, lemming-like allegiance to “political-correctness” irritates me. I’m all in favor of inclusive language, up to a point, but that point is a rapidly vanishing dot on the horizon behind us. Allow me to illustrate. I was accidentally watching the Fox “News” channel earlier. You know how they run the crawl across the bottom of the screen with news headlines and snippets of news? Well, one particular item caught my attention. Something about a “homicide” bomber blowing up a car and killing 10 people in Baghdad.
What they mean, of course, is a “suicide bomber”, but because some group (I vaguely recall this discussion a few years back) took umbrage at the use of that term, some in the media have adopted the phrase “homicide bomber”. Here’s what’s wrong with that:
Isn’t anyone who uses explosives to blow people the fuck up, thereby killing them, a “homicide bomber”. Yes, of course s/he is. What makes a suicide bomber different is that they go along for the ride, not unlike (well not really like, either) Slim Pickens’ character, Major T.J. ‘King’ Kong, in Dr. Strangelove. The point here is that they blow up too; on purpose!
When someone says “suicide bomber”, everyone knows what they mean. “Homicide bomber”, on the other hand, doesn’t really carry much more meaning than the word “bomber” and leaves the listener/reader to guess at the meaning.
On FMNC (the Foul-Mouthed News Channel), we’re going to call them “Blew themselves and some other people right the fuck on up bombers”. Kinda catchy, don’t you think?
More fun with grammar from our friends at the Associated Press:
Whose your daddy? Chimp Haven wonders
AP Tue Jan 16, 8:19 PM ET
SHREVEPORT, La. - It’s both a surprise and a mystery. At Caddo Parish’s Chimp Haven, where retired male chimpanzees all get vasectomies, a female chimp has turned up pregnant.
Whose? Whose?
Who’s checking the copy before they publish it, that’s what I want to know.
I wonder if the author of this piece had been previously ridiculed for gratuitously using apostrophes where they don’t belong. Maybe that’s it; apostrophe anxiety. Yeah, that’s probably it.
Postscript:
I see that they have now corrected their error (due, no doubt, to my tireless efforts).
