La Boîteuse

One week post-op 2, and it's about like you'd expect. I'm tired and achy, my legs hurt, and to make them "not-hurt" in the future I have to make them hurt worse now - my physical therapy involves forcing joints that are a mess of scar tissue and damaged tendons and tendon sheaths to move through that damaged material, which, obviously, they don't want to. 

It's about as much fun as you'd think. Here's a post-exercise icing session to give you an idea.

Anyway, they're coming along. More slowly than I'd like, but not as slowly as possible, so things cold be worse.

So that's what I'm doing; resting, exercising, resting again, reading, watching television. I'm still in the post-op "not feeling well" phase, so my appetite is poor and I'm too shaky to do much cooking, so I'm kind of at the mercy of my Bride ("If you wait long enough they'll just eat cereal...") so the mess hall has been kind of...iffy.

You'd think this would be opportune for binging TV series, and it is. The weird part of that is the only things I've found to binge are a couple of wuxia series (well, one wuxia and one wuxia-adjacent-sorta show). My favorite is something called My Heroic Husband, a 2019 production from the PRC.

It's pure fluff; a romantic comedy set in some sort of generic medieval-Chinese period. Our hero, the husband of the title, gets time-swapped into the body of a "matrilocal" marriage victim - apparently this means that the husband, instead of being properly Confucian and patriarchal, is a sort of trophy-husband to a more socially powerful wife.

Our boy Ning Yi awakes to find that his knowledge of the 20th Century is intact but he's supposed to be an appendage to Su Ta'ner, his cloth-merchant bride. She, in turn, is vying with her male relatives (as well as her male competitors) to make the Su family store the biggest deal in Jiangning.

So the story consists of our hero using his modern business savvy to McGyver his way out of whatever trouble the various rivals try and engineer for the Su clan. Which he always does and in so doing is winning the genuine affection of his wife (who originally agrees to take him on only until she wins the family business).

The two leads have a genuinely sweet and funny chemistry, the plots are goofy and entertaining, and the heroic husband is proving to be a solid lead character.

The story is taking a much more serious turn, though. Suddenly events outside Jiangning are intruding; the state of Wu our heroes inhabit is nervously eyeing events to the north, where one of the other two major powers looks to be conquering the other. When Jing gets done with Liang it seems inevitable that it will look south hungrily, and the last episode involved some sort of tricky political gimmick where rival players at the court of Wu came looking for "tribute cloth" to send to Jing, and it looks like our gang might be tossed into politics like it or not. We'll see.

I'm all in, anyway.

Speaking of politics (and by the way of political/medical stuff...)

One thing this rehab has given me lots of time for is observing the state of our Union, and, frankly, I'm even more depressed than usual. I mean...look at this fucking idiotic thing.

Of all the fucking weapons-grade stupid ideas...the horse paste is a vermicide. COVID-19 is a respiratory pathogen. You can't fucking treat respiratory illness with a medication designed to kill intestinal worms. Period. There's no physically possible means that the one will interact with the other in any meaningful way. It's like treating a bump on the head by applying skin cream to your foot.

But this is where the GQP is now.

What's frankly terrifying is that this has gone beyond just the "own the libs" contrarianism. This is a full on cult. This is impervious to argument, debate, or reason. To paraphrase Voltaire, whoever can make you believe that a horse de-wormer can treat a respiratory pathogen can make you commit fascism.

Look at the reaction to the equally ridiculous Arizona Cyber Ninja scam.

Having proven to be nothing like an actual "audit", this joke took months and millions only to end up with what we knew almost a year ago; that the Maricopa County voting was perfectly legit and reported correctly.

You'd think that, having had about ten "recounts" by now including this nonsense that ended up in the exact same place, that everyone would throw up their hands and say "Well, okay, there it is."

No.

The wingnuts are still roaring about fraud and preparing to steal the election in 2024. The Trumpkins still insist their bloated nitwit won. Even after all the proof. Even after all the facts.

Roughly a third of the U.S. public is not going to be persuadable by any normal means that anything other than a Trump win is possible.

That's...not workable any more than using horse paste to treat COVID.

And I don't see any way to get back to sanity by somehow managing to brain-wipe that rogue 30% short of bloodshed.

Well...shit.

Anyway, I'm going to get back to my exercises and my heroic husband and try not to borrow trouble. 

I have an unpleasant suspicion that trouble will be coming along all by itself.

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.

The Big Heat

2020 was kind of suck-ass here in Portland.

First antifa and BLM ran riot in the streets and burned the whole goddamn town down.

And then we had massive forest fires that burned the whole goddamn woods down.

And then we had goddamn MAGAts that came around trying to sweep the goddamn ashes into Idaho's goddamn trash bin.

Jesus wept!

And then - just this past weekend - we had a giant, creepy iron high-pressure dome or something come oozing in off the Pacific and hunker down over us for three days or so bringing the big heat.

As in, 115 degree heat.

Cliff Mass at his Weather Blog has some terrific posts discussing what happened and why. Here was his warning Sunday afternoon:

Tomorrow: The Day of Unimaginable Extremes

But tomorrow, it all goes horribly wrong.  The thermal trough moves northward and westward, pushing the strong easterly, downslope flow northward to over the central Cascades (see map for 11 AM Monday).  The sinking air will compress/warm as it sinks.

The burst of downslope, compressional heating will cause temperatures to warm beyond the experience of any living inhabitant of the region (see forecast temperatures at 5 PM Monday).  

Temperatures will rise above 112F on the eastside of Puget Sound and above 100F for everyone more than a few miles from the water.  Portland will be similarly warm.  And so will the lower elevations of the Columbia Basin. 

The first and most obvious question is; "is this due to a warming climate"?

And Mass' answer (and mine, since his data appears quite sound) is; sorta;

"...a number of people have asked about the role of global warming on this event.   

Is global warming contributing to this heatwave?  The answer is certainly yes.  

Would we have had a record heatwave without global warming.  The answer is yes as well. 

Our region has warmed by up to 1-2F during the past fifty years and that will enhance the heatwave. Increasing CO2 is probably the biggest contributor to the warming. 

But consider that the temperature anomalies (differences from normal) during this event will reach 30-35F. The proximate cause of this event is a huge/persistent ridge of high pressure, part of a highly anomalous amplification of the upper-level wave pattern. 

There is no evidence that such a wave pattern is anything other than natural variability (I have done research on this issue and published in the peer-reviewed literature on this exact topic). 

So without global warming, a location that was 104F would have been 102F. Still a severe heat wave, just slightly less intense."

I do wonder if the intensity of the tropical storm that helped create this immense high pressure ridge might have been heightened by the warming climate...but, I defer to the subject matter experts.

So how did we do here in the Fire Direction Center?

Pretty much just fine.

I hid inside all weekend, pretty much, other than taking my Bride and the Larvae to the airport Sunday morning for their pilgrimage to the Gramma Shrine.

It was pretty damn hot when I dropped them off at 11:00am...by Monday morning it was insane:

By Monday afternoon it had gone waaaayyyy past insane...

The Little House is one of the fortunate older ones here in the Portland region to have had central air installed. So I cranked that baby and kept it cranked all through until the heat broke Monday night.

Mind you, when the outside of the house is 112 degrees even the butch-est air conditioner struggles. On Monday afternoon the thermostat was set to 72 but the interior temperature was 83. That was the best the poor bastard could do; fight a delaying action against the heat.

It worked well enough.

With the family off tickling grandparental fancies just the cats shared the Big Heat with me.

Mostly they were smart enough to stay indoors to do their eat-and-sleep-repeat cat thing. But, being cats, they couldn't STAY indoors, so every hour or so they'd swagger out into the heat in a manner entirely inappropriate for an animal wearing a fur coat.

Once there, mind, they'd flop over and just lie there, like, maybe it was too hot to do anything, like, move. No shit, cats.  No wonder you aren't the top of the food chain, never mind the whole opposable-thumbs thing.

The residents that suffered the most were the vegetables.

My daughter has recently developed a huge taste for gardening. So the Little Yard is now verdant with plants of all kinds, mostly flowers. We have random sunflowers along edges and by fences, potted plants on benches and tables, raised beds full of goodies...they're all over the place, and the Girl is besotted with her flowers.

And it is flowers. The Bride and I are raising tomatoes and squash and peas. The Girl is raising dahlias and zinnias and passionflowers.

(The Boy is raising nothing but digital hell in the HALO universe, so he's not really in the frame...)

Well, most of the in-ground plants came through the big heat okay...

...a little wilted by Monday night when I went out to water again (I'd watered in the morning, as well) but still living. But the potted ones..?

...not so much. Three of the Girl's beloved dahlias look pretty fried. I'm still watering when I do the rest of the garden, but I'm not hopeful.

Meanwhile, two-thirds of the fire direction crew are unimpressed by the historical (and historically awful) event they just lived through, as the Senior Enlisted remarked when we woke up Tuesday and walked out into a cool morning;

Little Cat: My butt cold. Why my butt cold? Where hot?
Me: It's gone, the heat wave is over. We're back to normal-ish.
LC: My butt cold. No like!
M: Yeah, well, it is what it is. Have some cat food.
LC: No! Where hot? No like! You fix!
M: I can't fix the weather, doof. Look, there's some nice kibbles.
LC: Meh. You fix.
M:
LC:
M: Fuckit, Imma drink my coffee. You do whatever.
LC: ...the fuck? The goddamn service around this place has completely gone to hell. I'm going over here until I can speak to your manager.

K. Good luck with that.

Talking about believing unbelievable things...

 ...here's the Little Cat being fooled by digital images of delicious prey:

I've seen videos of cats doing this, but I haven't before lived with a cat that was enticed by video images. Miss Lily loved to sit at the window and imagine massacring the feeder birds, but video didn't elicit the same response.

What was kind of fascinating is that The Girl played a whole series of these "cat video" clips, and the Little One's reaction to them was very different.

As you can see, the birds and rodents were boffo box office. She sat on the couch and followed the bird movements with her head as they flicked across the screen. But the rodents - a mixture of rats and squirrels - were utterly irresistible. She tried to catch them with her paw, and, finally, climbed up to the screen and tried to get behind it to where the rodents "were".

I'm not sure whether she was entertained by all this digital predation or just frustrated that she couldn't taste the sweet blood of her victims, but either way we all had quite the diverting half hour before we cut the cord, she looked at us with disgust, and jumped down to lick her backside.

Cats, go figure.

But now people? 

You'd think that almost two million years of evolution would make us harder to fool with digital simulation.