Sporting my canvas

Quick personal update as I scrounge for source materials on 1914 reconnaissance.

The divorce proceedings move on, with the "settlement" (the draft of the final decree) being in process. Nothing dramatic, just the slow dissolution of twenty-two years. Sad. I already miss my wife, and to a great extent, my kids. Even the cat.

And, to a surprisingly great extent, my old house. Where, in one of those "what the fuck..?" things, I ended up back working, taking down the old fence we built decades ago. Here's what the front of the house looked like in April 2003, several years after we moved in:

That's the left front of the house looking northwest. The former owner had planted tulips all along the top of the retaining wall that the cats are inspecting. Here's the opposite corner:

Some time in the next couple of years we built a picket fence along the wall, both to keep The Boy and Quinn the dog from catapulting off the edge. Here's the same corner as in the second photo above in March 2007:

We're already working to change up the suburban dream; the bulbs are still there, but we've planted a couple of natives. Pacific wax myrtle in the corner and the vinca at the base of the dogwood is already beginning to crowd out the non-native stuff. 

The fence outlasted Quinn and the Boy's random running days, but not time and the Northwest weather. It was a good fence. But it was time for it to go.

So...

Wednesday while Mojo was at work and the grown children doing...something, I drove around with wrecking bar and power drill and sawsall.

The panels came off and took a one-way trip to the Metro dump...

The Girl asked me to save the posts; she says she wants to run espalier wires or a trellis. So I took only the two interior posts, and replaced the rotting bannister on the lower steps, then painted everything with that thick "Kilz" anti-mildew paint.

 Panels off, pre-paint:

And post-paint:

Drachma, the idiot, insisted on sleeping in the work area. Of course, he got painted (a bit) too...

Thursday afternoon it was all done, painted and pretty:

And then I took my soon-to-be-ex-wife out for a beer.

It's...very weird. I really LIKE her. A lot. More and more I'm missing Mojo the friend, the good companion, the funny one, the salty, smart, wisecracking long time sharer of confidences, hopes, fears, and dreams.

Lovers? Those come and go.

But friends? Real good, solid, dependable, heartfelt friends like her?

Goddamn it, they're beyond price.

Well.

Last weekend I had my first political ground-game work; canvassing in the spendy Southwest Lake Oswego district. Hours of pounding pavement and ringing doorbells. Nice houses, polite people.

But.

My first encounter with The Portland Voter In The Wild was...not reassuring.

Lots of "well, I'm not really sure..." and "I'm pretty much an independent..." as if this November wasn't a black-and-white choice between a bog-standard corporaDem and a raving headcase of a lunatic egotistical madman and his pack of loony little fascist running dogs intent on a New Gilded Age.

What the fuck, over?

I'm back at it this coming weekend, too. Plus writing postcards (?) to hesitant voters.

Which is nice. But I'm getting to the point where I want to be throwing fucking bombs, not writing fucking postcards. I can barely open the news without losing my composure. It's not enough to "beat" these goddamn people. The GOP needs to be destroyed, root and branch, burnt hull and sticks, plowed under and the ground sown with fucking salt.

Oh.

And as a reminder that I'm Old, between all the canvas walking and being a good lad and riding the stationary bike once I got back in my legs thanked me by spasming and cramping so badly I was up half Saturday night and slept through kendo practice Sunday morning.

Ugh.

The only thing worse than aging is the alternative.

Living in RonaLand

I'm in my second week of the Stations of the COVID.

Week one was pretty miserable until the Paxlovid kicked in, and tolerable - more or less just a bad flu - through the weekend. Yesterday - about four or five days after the last Paxlovid dose - the head congestion got worse. This suggests I'm moving into the "Paxlovid rebound" I've read about.

Frankly, if the symptoms get no worse? I'm fine. It's irritating (for some reason decongestants seem to have no effect on this damn bug) but no more than that.

Other than that I've been faintly...amused is too gentle a word for it; I think "scornful" is closer...at the ridiculous antics of my supposed "fellow Americans" who've been sucking on the FAUX News crack pipe.

First, what the actual fuck is this:

Is this some sort of fucked-up Narnia cosplay? Tubby as Emperor complete with lion wingman and some sort of UH-60 pimp-my-ride? Who could actually think of this tangerine-colored crook like this?

Whatever.

Beyond the usual idiocy, though, it's telling that all the news out of MAGAtLand is about various culture war stuff, but what the hell else do these gomers have to sell their C.H.U.D.s? 

"Tax Cuts for Rich Fucks - Now In Your Face!" "Our Insurance Company Bureaucrat Will Totally Fuck Your Medical Care For Good Profit Reasons, Not Woke Shit Like A Government Bureaucrat Would!" "We Promise - Your Grandpa CAN Eat Nutritious Cat Food...and Like It!"

Take away the grade-school-homo-bullying and Bible-banging and what else do the sonsofbitches have, anyway..? I just wish they'd fuck off and do it somewhere that nice people don't have to see it. Like writing and masturbation.

Speaking of lions, though...here's our own domestic predator:

See the bald spot?

That's where the little goof got his flea treatment. It's NOT supposed to do that. Why he got a bald spot there I have no idea, but it might be stress, because he's on a diet and he haaaates it. He woke me as usual the other day:

Cat: Food!

Me: Keep yer fur on. I’m coming.

C: Food!!!

M: Jesus wept. Okay. Here.

C: Nomnomnom

M: (making coffee)

C: Outside!

M: Ooookay, chief. But be advised - it’s fecking cold out there.

C: Outside!!!

M: (opens door)

C:

M: Gah! Hurry up! It’s freezing-ass cold!

C:

M: Well? Don’t just stand there!

C: Feh. It’s freezing-ass cold. Not going.

M: No, duh? Okay, Imma get coffee.

C: Umm…there wouldn’t happen to be a smackerel more cat food just lying about, would there..?

M: Not for your chonky ass, no.

C:

M:

C: What a hellhole this place has become. Okay. Fine. If anyone calls I’m doing some important butt-licking and can’t be disturbed. Just take a message.

 

Well, that's about all I got for now. Time to go lie down and blow my nose for the gajillionth time. Ugh.

 

Wednesday morning, 5am

 

Cat: WTF is this?

Me: Your breakfast. Mmmm, chicken hearts, yummy nummers.

C: Where’s the rest of it?

M: That’s it, Senor Chonkorito. The vet says you need to drop some of that pudge.

C: Sez you, fatboy! Well, this is bullshit. I need to speak to your manager.

M: The Bride is asleep and she’s totally onboard with this, so…bon appetit!

C:

M:

C: What a fuckin’ fuckstory. Everyday it gets worse around this hellhole.

M: And did I mention the change in the kibble distribution..?

C: Nomnomno…wait. WHAAAAAT..!!??

Put a bird on it

 

The whole "Elon Musk takes over Twitter and immediately pilots the bird in controlled flight into terrain" thing is remotely fascinating. 

To me, anyway.

I really don't have much of a fighting-dog on that particular flight. I don't use the app personally (I'm here, still blogging away like the refugee from the Nineties I am, or on Facebook - largely only because I still have long-distance friends that the Metaverse lets me stay in touch with...) so whether it lives or dies in a spectacular collapse is kind of a matter of indifference to me.

So the interest here at the Fire Direction Center is purely academic and out of curiosity.

But I am fascinated, in a sort of bemused way, watching a whole bunch of things very "21st Century America" slam into each other in this Twitter crash.

1. The whole tech-"genius"-worship thing.

I've never "got" the Musk-fanboi. The guy owns a company that builds...ohmigoadSpaceRockets!

Yeah, well, so did that old Nazi Werner von Braun.

But somehow this seems to have created a club that looks at this joker as some sort of culmination of The Buddha, Johnny "The Wadd" Holmes, and Croesus. Mostly because of the space rocket thing.

(There seems to be a subset of fans of his cars, but the rockets seem like the big draw).

But...c'mon. 

Einstein's Wall means that manned space flight is a nonsensical macguffin best left to science fiction, and since the end of the big NASA programs the inevitable consequence of letting plutocrats take over - space tourism - turns the whole Right Stuff legacy into WTF? Stuff. 

The fact that the USG has let this fuckstick take over the launch of communications satellites is infuriating, mind you. It's the astronautic equivalent of what we've let Republicans and greedy privatizing bastard (but I repeat myself) do to the Post Office; turn what should be a public good - communicating with each other - into a cashbox held by a greedy bastard.

Turns out that you don't really have to be that much of a "genius" to own a rocket company. You can be a greedy bastard and clueless outside your lane so long as you start by being a rich greedy bastard. Turns out that the best way to make millions is to start with millions. Who knew!?

2. Tech.

We're Americans. We're enthralled by shit that goes fast, makes noise, or beeps when you push its buttons. Twitter is just another tech gimmick, albeit a fairly useful one for talking to other people.

The notion that it's something "important" seems a fairly accurate metric of the sort of thing that the American public finds "important", and runs concurrent in my estimation with the amount of time that the recently-concluded election spent talking about "transgender".

There are such things as transgender people.

They're a tiny subset of the set "people", and they - like all people - just want to live their lives. Some happily and productively and sensibly, some madly and dramatically, some...well, just like everyone else.

In a sensible world, we, the "rest" of us, would mind our own fucking business and let them mind theirs.

Instead, because of a bunch of nitwit wingnuts, we've wasted an immense about of time, money, and intellectual throw-weight fretting about them.

It's the same with tech.

Twitter is a postcard. Facebook is a letter. TikTok is...sort of a postcard with moving cat pictures.

The platform is just another way of talking to one another. The "how" may be gee-whizzical. But the "what" is the same old-same-old that Sumerians did with clay tablets.

Which is to say, if not Twitter? Something else will be there to talk through.

Clay tablets, maybe. Whatever.

If we were willing to think of it that way, we'd realize that what's important is what we say and show and do, rather than the how.

And that brings me to...

3. "Free speech"

Supposedly the whole nonsense began because a) Musk was baked, and b) pissed off because one of his favorite right-wing assholes had been STFU by The Bird, so he c) did some dumb things that forced him into paying way more for this thing than he should have, so here we are.

Supposedly this all started because Musk (who may have been baked, remember...) wanted to "Free the Bird".

And yes, all the wingnuts have been raving for a long time about "freedom" and "their freedoms".

Those "freedoms", so far as I can tell, are largely the "freedom" to fuck around and not get kicked in the ass for it. To do rude, stupid, destructive-to-the-commons stuff and then not have to hear the non-rude, non-stupid, and/or non-destructive bystanders tell them they're being rude and stupid.

(kinda looks back at the whole "transgender" thing here...)

The "open-carry" fucknuts? The "rolling coal" d-bags? The sorts of people who want to pry into your bedroom, or your uterus? The white-is-right open racists, the "wimmens-is-stupid" misogynists?

Yeah, all those assholes.

They're cranky because they were told to sit down, shut up, and stop being rude stupid assholes.

Y'see, I grew up in the Sixties, when ALL that rude, stupid stuff was just "how Americans are". 

I remember hearing and using the expression "Jew him down" for bargaining; it wasn't "racism", it was "how Americans talked". 

I remember hearing my Chinese friend described as a "slope" and not immediately pounding the speaker senseless because that was "how Americans talked".

I remember seeing how badly the black kids in my school were treated, how girls "did this not that", how there were one set of rules for rich and powerful and another for everyone else, and that ws just "how America is".

Then, slowly, painfully, sometimes violently, incompletely, some "Americans" started pushing back against that rude, stupid shit.

It started to become unacceptable to call people playground names, because, well, that IS rude and stupid. 

It became less-acceptable (if not completely UN-acceptable) to treat people like shit because of their skin color, or their gender, or because of who they liked or loved.

And the rude and stupid people haaaaated that. So they fought back.

They found a natural ally in "conservative" groups - since most of the "conservative" groups believed, like them, that "bitches" and "faggots" were icky and that the Good Old Days when you could just call them "bitches" and "faggots" and beat them up were Good - and turned their rude stupidity into "free speech" so they could push back the pressure on them to be less-rude-and-less-stupid by slamming it as "woke" and "politically correct".

So all these rude, stupid wingnuts have been foaming at the mouth in anticipation of Musk turning his new Twitter toy into a place where everyone can be rude and stupid to the people that wingnuts hate.

And that seems to be happening.

And if that's not "America 2022" I don't know what is.

A rich, greedy rude (and, it now seems, pretty stupid) "genius" makes a dumb move while baked because his rude and stupid fanbois are fapping to him making the dumb move, and in the process takes something that other non-rude, non-stupid people find useful to communicate and makes it ruder, stupider, and worse.

The fucking Post Office?

Medical care?

Politics?

It seems like there's nothing that 21st Century America can't find a way to let - or encourage - rich, greedy, stupid douchenozzles to make ruder, stupider, and worse.

So.

I'm hopeful that the good (not-rude, not-stupid) people I visit on Twitter (hi, Arielle Dror! Hi, Mark Hertling! Hi, Scamperbeasts!) don't go away if (when?) the Bird hits the window.

Perhaps that's the most irritating part about all this, and what makes me less "fascinated" and more "irked with the antics of greedy rich bastard"; that all these good people (and cats...) are going to take it in the shorts because some baked knucklehead has a bunch of rude stupid asshole fanbois.

But people, eh?

As one of my old platoon sergeants summed it up:

"Some fuckin' people could fuck up a wet dream."

Probably as pithy an epigram for the damned human race as was ever coined, and so, since I can't add anything, here's another cat picture.

I gotta go gas up the Prius. But I'll be back later with more less-rude less-stupidity.

It's Fucking Hot

 Well...not now. But until this morning we had a week (and more) of 95+ temperatures thanks to those cunning Chinese climate-change hoaxters. 

 Being the hardy American pioneers were are...we all hid inside the air conditioned Little House

...even this goofball.

State of my Union, July 2022

I don't have any particular thing to say. Just sort of noodling around and had nothing better to do than peck at the keyboard, so here I am, on a cool gray morning in mid-July, wondering what to say and do.

Well...not really wondering; I've got a busy and, I hope, fun day ahead. Volunteering at a local park. A Japanese brewing exhibition. Block party around the block. And then a home game of our women's pro soccer club.

But now? The Little House is quiet (as the local garage band has finally given up trying to cover Paint It Black, thank Asmodeus...) with everyone asleep except Drachma the Merkitty and me. So let's start with them.

Okay, Me; wassup?

Mostly the usual; work.

But that's not as business-as-usual as usual. 

For one thing, the local branch of my company is kind of imploding. We've hemorrhaged good people - three in the last quarter - and we're down to four:
1) the least-liked and least-respected senior engineer,
2) a complete noob who comes across as utterly green,
3) a tech who is at best marginally competent and has a weird, shifty personality, at that, and
4) me.

The fucked-up part is that my corporate doesn't seem to either know, or care, how to improve this. They know the senior engineer is kind of a putz - it's been his clumsy lack of management skills and greed to bag shitty development work that has gone a long way to driving off the good people - but won't either can him or try and fix him.

Instead their solution is to bring one of the Puget Sound office rainmakers down here to generate work.

The supposed plan was that this would help kickstart getting Portland good work...but this particular guy doesn't bring in "good" (that is, interesting, challenging, demanding engineering project-type work) work. His stuff is just the other guy's writ large - boring Earthwork 101 mass-grading development projects.

And, to make things weirder, he's set up a completely parallel-but-separate construction monitoring program here, all run out of the Seattle office. His staff and tech people use our equipment and office space while keeping their schedules and needs utterly hidden.

It's ridiculous and frustrating.

Add to that we just lost our last good field staff guy last Friday. I've got to work with the noob and the creepy guy, neither of whom I trust.

Frankly, I'm ready to hang it up.

Seriously. Our financial person looked at our assets and the actuarial tables and told me that I could legitimately retire this fall and not end up living under a bridge before I die. That's looking ever more attractive right now. I'm sick of trying to herd these boobs and noobs, I'm tired of the boring bullshit development work, I'm ready to give something else a shot.

(Narrator voice: "It became obvious that not all was well...")

Okay, wow, that sucks? What about Me, Personally.

Meh, fine.

I'm relatively healthy. I like where I live - sorry, Tucker, Portland still isn't burning down amid Antifa terror - and I like my life outside work. My knees are slowly healing, tho it took a fuck of a long time and I still have weird after effects - the top of my feet, the instep? is sort of numb, like when your arm or leg "goes to sleep"? Like that, and I have no idea why - but the horrible insomnia is gone, at least.

I am getting old. I can feel it in the slowing of my pace, lower energy, and slowly growing stiffness and creakiness. I don't feel like I'm going to take an Ivana-tumble-down-the-stairs (and how about that for a conspiracy-theory story, eh..?) but five years ago I could pretend that I was still in "vigorous-late-middle-age".

Now?

Fuck, I'm old.

I still enjoy the things I've always enjoyed: the world around me, the world of imagination and creation (I've recently gotten on a weird manga kick, and my reading is now vigorously interspersed with stuff like Sweat and Soap...). I've set up a gaming table downstairs to renew my enjoyment of tabletop wargaming. 

I still follow soccer - the Timbers (tho the cost finally persuaded me to yield my season ticket- a grand a year is too fucking much - and write the Thorns over at the Riveting! website.

My Bride is a treat. She's hitting the gym regularly and sewing and (also) reading and just being her, which is fun. 

The Girl is deep in teenland; she's salty and quirky, she's become a horror of a mess in the kitchen (where I'm rapidly becoming even more of a Neat Nazi - I hate when she cooks and leaves ingredients and cookware scattered all over...) and creates shockingly professional drawings and ever-more-impressive pottery.

The Boy is...gah.

His brief foray into low-end low-wage unskilled work (bag boy at the local grocery) ended in less than 100 days. Now his "plan" is to strike at a lineman job at PGE, but he seems in no hurry to get there. He mostly hangs out and games - which is mostly what he did in grade school, middle school, and high school - so it's like having a monster (because he's grown up into a big beast - with a neck beard, which is "ugh" but fuckit, it's his neck) kid still around the place.

He drives me kind of nuts; I want to chase him out of the house into the Navy or VISTA or to college or...something. It just feels to me like he's wasting his youth sitting in his old room playing HALO or World of Tanks.

But...he's an adult, technically. So he's his own boss to an extent.

I just wish corporate would kick himself in the pants a bit.

Oh, and Drachma the Merkitty?

He's living The Best Life.

Since little Nine's death he's the One and Only Boss Kitty. He gets to prowl his range, demanding with imperious meows that the support staff open doors for his entering-and-exiting pleasure. He has splendid quantities of food whenever he wants it. He gets to hunt - his latest prey appears to be dragonflies, for some bizarre reason - and proudly presents his game bag to the suitably-appalled humans.

The Girl still grieves her Little Cat and still wants another, more loving kitty...

(Drachma has become slightly more affectionate - at least, to me - but he's not really a "lover kitty". He won't cuddle with you or tolerate much holding, unlike Nine who was a complete love sponge. He really is how my Bride described him when asked whether he was a Good Kitty: "Well...he's good at being a cat.")

...but she's up against it. Drachma, obviously, is a hard "no", as is The Boy. The Bride is a "maybe" and I'm a "maybe but leaning no", so the Girl - after a brief spasm of cat-looking - appears to have conceded the One-Cat Family setting so long as Mister Mister is the cat.

So. That's that.

What about this place?

Well...I'm still struggling with that. This is the most writing I've done here in a long time. I've taken several stabs at doing a Brusilov Offensive battles piece but just can't seem to work up the enthusiasm. It's just dire Great War shit; people dying in pointless ways and to make matters worse it's the two most incompetent of the combatants, Austro-Hungary and Russia (the Italians are a special case...) finding ways to get their own people killed. 

And outside of personal stuff like this?

Well, for soccer I have my other blog. I'm really done with writing filler and oddball-news stuff. I've given thought to completing the Army I Knew series but am kind of at a point where it becomes less gripping and more All About Me. Maybe I'll give it a stab after I retire.

Politics? Oh, God. That's just dire.

Seriously. How many ways are there to say "Wake the fuck up and stop electing fucking Republicans!" How many times can I return, like a dog to its vomit, to the appalling reality that somewhere between a quarter and two-fifths of the American public are worthless, Bible-banging, gun-humping, woman-and-minority-hating, learning-despising, disease-enabling, fascist-loving shitbirds who will cheerfully either herd me and mine into the camps or look away while their Three Percenter and Oath Keeper bros do it?

I'm fucking sick of what my country has become, fucking angry that all the shitty things that I thought we'd driven from the public square - racism, proud ignorance, white power, religious nuttery - and into private muttering have returned out and loud.

The GOP must be destroyed. It's really just that simple, and just that impossible.

But that's for the next post; a State of the City and the State and THE Union.

Nine

This was a hard post to write, and I almost couldn't bring myself to do it, and if that seems strange for someone who writes about his dead child every year, well, life can be like that sometimes.

Because this is about losing a little cat.

This - the cat, not the woman, is "Nine".

After we lost Nitty Kitty our daughter insisted that we were a "two-cat family", and that just Drachma the Merkitty alone wasn't enough. She insisted that we needed another kitty, was the guiding force behind the search, and finally found the Perfect Kitty; a small gray-and-white rescue cat. 

Her name came from the number of the storage unit in which she had to live for years.

Nine.

She'd had a tough life. One of her former families had another cat that objected to Nine, so the poor kitty had to live in a mudroom with a cat flap. 

That was it; the mudroom, the flap, and the yard, was her world.

She'd had a horrific case of ear mites that had given her a savage infection that was so bad that it messed up her inner ear, and thereafter she lived with her head cocked to one side, as though she was faintly perplexed by the entire world.

She was a foster kitty, so The Girl brought her home in hope. 

Drachma was an utter shit, of course, but the little newcomer was so sweet and loving that everyone but the Boy was willing to tell him to suck on it. 

Small Cat - as we started to call her - was a perfectly adorable and immediately well-beloved member of the family.

She had some kind of adorable quirks. 

Dirt. She loved dirt, dry, fluffy, dusty dirt; she'd race outside to wherever there was a delightfully fluffy bare spot and roll in it until she was utterly and happily filthy. So she was thrilled when we started the excavation for the front walkway; the spoil piles were perfect.

She was a cuddler, a real lap-kitty. After going through a series of very cat-cats (when asked whether Drachma was a "good cat" my Bride thought about that for a moment and replied that he "was very good at being a cat.") it was wonderful for the Girl to have a loving kitty who would cuddle with her.

The only snake in Eden was the little one's health. The damn ear infections just never seemed to completely go away. Every so often we've have to clean her ears, and we had to make sure that after her dirt-baths we brushed her thoroughly. But she was such a dear and loving kitty we were happy to take care of her.

So it was concerning but not exactly an emergency when her ears started troubling her again this summer after about a year and a half in our home. 

We took her to our regular vet, who told us she had "polyps" in her inner ears, and recommended a special "skin vet" who could remove them surgically.

So one morning in August I fed her her pre-op pill...

...which turned out to be a kitty-cat Xanax, and it was worth the price of admission to see the little one experiencing what must have been a goddamn amazing cat-buzz, and off we went to the vet. They extracted the polyps, returned the small one, and sent off the polyps for biopsy.

One came back cancerous. 

We scheduled a visit to a cancer specialist in January.

Then right before Christmas the Girl called in panic. Nine's ear was bleeding again. A hastened trip to an emergency vet showed that the mass had grown back in her left inner ear.

After that the end came painfully quickly. 

We tried to get her in to see a kitty-cancer doc and couldn't until after the new year. Between the holiday and January 6th she developed a palpable swelling on the left side of her head and down her neck.

I put her in her carrier and took her to the kitty oncologist in January hoping, frankly, for a miracle.

The oncologist was fresh out of miracles.

I cried in the car on the way home.

We knew it was weeks and not months, but within a fortnight she was wheezing as the cancer invaded her lungs, and though her appetite was undiminished she could no longer swallow solid food. 

We called the people at Compassionate Care. The kind, quiet vet arrived late one weeknight. The small one went quietly, first into drug-induced slumber in the Girl's trembling arms...

...and from there across the threshold of the Great Sleep.

If I ever lose my day job I'll be able to make a living as a cat gravedigger; Nine's was the third (after Lily's and Nitty's) I dug in the backyard.

The small one lay in state on the table for an hour as I dug in the cold wet earth under the drizzle that seems to be a household tradition for burying our cats. 

A final drink of sake' and candles at her head.

We all cried again when we laid her in the ground and covered her little cardboard coffin with the clods of soil that will divide her from us forever.

I told the Girl, and it was the simple truth, that for all the cats I'd known since I was small little Nine was the sweetest, lovingest kitty I'd ever known, and I'd loved her best of all.

The Girl grieved for many days. During her mourning she found a little temple bell at our Asian grocery. 

She hung it over Nine's grave.

So now the gentle chiming of her bell still reminds me of how heart-full little Nine was, and how much we all miss her. 

Your time with us was so short, little one. I wish your warm, soft body still curled on top of mine. 

You had too short a time to be happy and beloved.

Life can be like that sometimes. I'm sorry.

We miss you.

Nine Gellar 2013?-2021

Getting on with things

Today is four weeks post-op for Knee #2 (nearly two months for #1). The aftermarket parts are...settling in; still stiff and creaky (the right obviously a LOT more than the left) and requiring lots more work to approach anything like normal walking.

But I can walk. It's not fast and it's not graceful - I'm still pretty stiff and tottery, particularly on the stairs - but it's doable with just a cane or even without, if I go slowly enough.

Sleep is still a huge issue which is why I'm typing this at 3am on a Friday morning. I've gotten into a weird sort of routine where I turn in about 11ish and then spend the next four to five hours just lying around. Occasionally I can sort of drift off into a doze, but seldom for more than a quarter-hour or so.

Until about 4:00 to 5:00am; then I drop into a light sleep. It's not a great sleep, it's like when you're so exhausted that you don't so much "go to sleep" as "fail to stay awake". When I wake - usually around 8:00 to 9:00 - I feel mazy and disassociated, wanting to get back to sleep but unable, but still not very "awake". As you can imagine, this shit is getting very old, and I sure wish I could do something about it.

I'm slowly beginning to re-engage with my job, with the intention to return to indoor work at the end of October. This past week I was yanked back in abruptly by a minor crisis and not happily.

I am the "Radiation Safety Officer" for my office. We have several machines - "nuclear density gauges" or "nuclear densometers" - that are used to test soil (or asphalt) density and, as the name implies, use radioactive isotopes for the measurement. Needless to say, they're expensive and have to be handled with great care; the isotopes (Cesium and Americium) are quite radioactive for the small size of the sources.

That's me in 2009 with one of them - it's the orange thing just behind me. The long black rod sticking up is the "probe"; it's all the way retracted so the source is enclosed in a little lead box with a sliding lead "shutter" on the bottom. When you use it you push the rod down into a pre-driven hole in the soil - the shutter slides out of the way - take your test, and then pull the rod back up to shield the source again.

Well...I got a call from one of our senior engineers who had been dragged out to the field because we're short-staffed. He described a litany of problems with the machine, the worst of which being that the sliding shutter that is supposed to close when the radioactive sources are in the "safe" position was jammed open.

This shutter thing is kind of a kludge. It needs to be decently clean to function, but it's used in all sorts of filthy soil materials which, unsurprisingly, will build up inside the shutter well and cake the thing and make it stick.

The solution is to remove the cover plate and remove and clean the shutter and then put everything back together again. It's a pain, but it's fairly safe (you face the bottom of the machine away from you and reach around to clean the shutter well...) if you know how to do it right.

Well...in the seven or eight weeks I've been out our two staff-level people have thoroughly trashed two of the three gauges, the worst problem being that the shutters were both jammed open with crud.

I spent a frustrating evening trying to solve the problem before deciding that standing a foot in front of an unshielded radioactive source was a fool's business. I shoved the things back in their carry boxes and sent them off to Seattle for our depot maintenance person to fix.

But I can see I need a little wall-to-wall counseling with the staff people involved. That sort of negligence - hell, they could have called me at any time and I'd have come in, knees and all, to try and clean and repair the things - is truly culpable. These aren't $1.49 gadgets from Radio Shack, but because of the staff guys' laziness now $8,000 worth of density gauges are both useless and dangerous.

How freaking hard is it to clean up your damn equipment..?

Rrrrrr.

Oh, and the other excitement is that Little Cat has started scratching herself again.

 

She was doing that when we adopted her; clawing out bits of fur and injuring herself for no reason we could see. It wasn't fleas, and we went to a vet allergist for several months, spent a shit-ton of money including this horrible "rabbot-and-pea" food that Little One hated, and got nowhere.

Well, she's at it again, so this time we went to a little kitty-cat ER and got some corticosteroids and a special flea treatment and she seems to be better. Still a goof, and very sweet and affectionate - she's our lap-kitty now that Drachma is too proud to let himself be mauled by hairless monkeys.

One last note; for some reason I got interested in a bit of history I'd pawed over and kind of tossed aside; the 1071 Battle of Manzikert; Seljuk Turks versus Byzantines for control of the Anatolian heartland. So that should be coming along here not too long.

I'll probably be back before then, though, with something.

But not I have gotta try and sleep.

G'night.

Knee Replacement - The Adventure Continues

This coming Friday will be both six weeks post-op left knee and surgery date for the right.

I won't kid you; I'm not looking forward to the NEXT three or four weeks. It's going to be a pain-suck mess just like the first three or four weeks post-op was, and that's assuming that everything goes as well as the first replacement.

But the alternative - living with knees that are effectively destroyed and continue to deteriorate - is worse.

The really sucky part, though, is for my Bride, who this week finally got some relief from driving me everywhere, and now is thrown back into the tied-to-the-immobile-mass-of-living-tissue that will be me for a month and a half assuming everything goes well.

We've been taking turns sleeping on the couch, since I still haven't licked the insomnia problems, though after this coming weekend she's back out there for a solid three weeks or so until the post-op pain management becomes manageable. Which means this:

Little Cat luuuurves a nice warm person to sleep on. And the couch is perfect for that. So this was 3am this morning, when - after finally dozing off - I woke to a heavy, hot, furry little body lying on my sternum.

She really is a very sweet cat. But...damn, catto, I made you a special soft fluffy cat nest so you wouldn't do this, fer crying out loud.

Well. At least it keeps my mind off this coming Friday.

Tuesday morning, 4am

 

Me: Well, the hell with it. I'm awake. You want some coffee?

Little Cat: WTF? Are you tweaking or something?

M: No, just can't sleep again. Imma make a pot of coffee. You want anything.

LC: Ragganafraggana...OK, fine. I'll take some of that "beef-like mystery meat substance" only with extra gravy this time.

M: K; coffee and mystery meat coming up.

LC: EXTRA GRAVY, goddamn it! You wake me at four, I get extra fucking gravy or imma do that thing where I bite your ankle when you walk past.

M: Not if you want extra gravy, furbag.

LC:

M:

LC:

M: OK, I'm on it. You gonna wait in the bed or come with?

LC: Oh, Christ. Fine. I'm coming. Extra gravy!

M: Careful or I'll give you that "fish and shrimp" shit instead.

LC: Ohhellno. You gotta hurry up and get off your dead ass and get back to doing the marketing. (sotto voce) That mate of yours has the taste buds of some sort of shelter dog.

M: (halfway to kitchen) I heard that! Big talk from someone who cleans her butthole with her tongue.

LC: EXTRA GRAVY! Goddamn.

Laid up in the Plague House

Two weeks ago today my Bride rolled me up to the big south doors at the Providence hospital out by the Banfield where in slightly less than three hours an orthopedic surgeon and his straphangers proceeded to hack open my left knee, part out all the worn-out bits, slam in some aftermarket replacement parts, zip me up and roll me on my way.

Since then all I've been able to do is lie around with one leg in the air, prodigiously bored, and try and distract myself from the results of someone hacking my knee open and replacing all the parts.

The distractions, unfortunately, largely consist of watching the news as the horde of diseased C.H.U.D.s fills places like Providence with sickly COVID patients and try and desperately find something to read.

(So far I've re-read Naomi Novik's His Majesty's Dragon - which was good fun the second time around - and slog through Rick Atkinson's The British Are Coming, his first volume of a general history of the army in the Revolution. So far Atkinson has been desperately disappointing; decently researched on the military history side, but marred by 1) Atkinson's fanboi pash for the rebels - the Americans are all stalwart, noble, and heroic, the British stodgy, foolish, and faintly ridiculous, and 2) writing at an almost embarrassingly low YA level. Did you know that CPT Prescott, the commander of the redoubt on Breed's Hill, was "azure-eyed"? Ugh.)

I was warned going in that knees are an order of magnitude worse than hips, so it's not so much that I didn't anticipate the long recovery time. It's that I didn't expect the way I feel; weak and sick, like a bad flu, all over - not just an achy leg. I feel utterly whipped most of the time, and it doesn't help that I have to lie in bed with my leg up all day to try and get the post-op swelling down.

The Little Cat has taken it on herself to be my constant companion, which has proved less irking than I'd thought. She doesn't ramble - much, tho when she does her little claws are a hazard - and she's fairly quiet - for her, who is a chatty, meow-y kitty generally - and mostly picks a vacant part of the bed.

But that's the boundary of my world, at least at the moment. My poor Bride is doing the work of a hero AND sleeping on the couch while I loll about in the big bed like some sort of Roman sybarite.

Supposedly the third week post-op is when things improve.

Let's hope so. This is only a fortnight and it's already REALLY old.

Except for the cats. But, then, cats...

Update 8/24: So I'm on my third week post-op and so far the various anecdotes I've heard about this procedure have been pretty much correct. 

The pain is manageable now, other than the nighttime. 

And even that's not really "unmanageable"; it's just that the discomfort level is just barely too high to sleep easily. I've been trying a combination of pain meds and a sleeping pill (technically it's an antihistamine, but it's basically a sleeping pill...) but that hasn't been particularly successful. So the only real issues at this point are 1) sleep, and 2) books, in that I'm still looking for something readable. Tried a usually-decent potboiler (one of the later Jim Butcher Harry Dresden series) and was as grossly disappointed as I have been with the recent ones - dude, you should have stopped before Ghost Story - although the latest in Lois Bujold's Penric and Desdemona series (The Assassins of Thasalon, in case you're interested...) was an all-too-brief treat. I'm still struggling with Atkinson, who is improving now that we've gotten past the Siege of Boston, but is still just not well written (and I should note that I enjoyed his WW2 series immensely; the history was solid and the writing was...well, not this purple.)

I get my first physical therapy today. We'll see how that goes; the damn thing is still really puffy and resists bending - I can do it, but it's a real fight - and I'm gonna bet I'll be sore as a boil tonight.

A Week of Solitude

 Last Sunday evening I picked up the rest of the family at Portland Airport.

The Bride and kiddos had been visiting the grands in Massachusetts, making the week-long "duty visit" that grandparents require every so often.

FWIW, it was reported to have been dreary but tolerable except for the weather, baking and humid the first part of the week, cold and raining the second.

Everyone was tired and bored and happy to be home.

Within a day everyone was also happily back in their respective ruts; The Bride on her paddleboard on the Willamette, the Boy in his headset in front of his gaming computer, the Girl with her trowel in the garden.

Me, looking over what had been a quiet house now full of not just them but all their stuff.

I missed them when they were gone. 

The house was desperately quiet and more than a little lonely without them. I got up alone, went to work, came home alone. Cooked a solitary dinner, read or watched the television, played with or was tolerated by the cats. 

Went to bed alone in the silent dark house.

I was like being a childless widower, and that wasn't a comforting thought. 

Now they're home, though...I remember all the things I liked about it.

The principal one being the tidiness.

I'm not obsessively cleanly, but I retain a pretty strong sense of military order. I like things to be clean and stowed neatly where they belong. During the previous week the kitchen was spotless, the bathroom clean, the floors swept, the counters and table empty.

Suddenly there was people's stuff everywhere. The Girl, who - although I'm the primary cook - likes to make her peculiar spicy versions of whatever food is in the house, has put the paprika on the over-the-stove shelf where it doesn't belong and has left dirty dishes in the sink (my particular button-pusher...). The Boy has dumped his laundry on his floor again and who the hell left the goddamn paper scraps on the bathroom floor?

At least my Bride is as neat as I am, so there's that.

I love them dearly.

I just wish that life with them wasn't so...messy.

Which is kind of a good metaphor for Life in general, isn't it.

Well. I've gotta go do the dishes, so here's a cat.

Aww. Isn't that...hey. Wait.

Okay. That's a good kitty. That's...hey, wait!

Ack!