Mouthful of spit

Since late winter I've been dealing with muscle tremor.

First my left leg - occasionally, then steadily - now my left hand.

I saw a neurologist in midsummer. He did some physical "tests" - write this, hold this, walk there - and concluded that the shaking was likely "essential tremor", a relatively benign symptom of brain function desuetude that accompanies aging.

But he wanted to see me again this winter to rule out Parkinson's Disease.

Well, the shaking has grown slowly worse. Not shocking or scarily so...

...until last weekend. When I realized that I was salivating. Constantly.

The fancy name for this is "sialorrhea", and it's just plain old drooling. It's to the point where I have to carry around a spit cup like some goober sucking on a bag of worm dirt (that's "snuff" for you non-Eighties-GIs).

Point is...the drooling is strongly - as in reeeeeally strongly - associated with Parkinson's, or other severe neurological issues like ALS.

So.

It's VERY likely I have Parkinson's.

I'm going to call the neurologist Monday to try and get seen ASAP. While Parkinson's has no cure there are treatments that can help quality of life. 

It's going to kill me.

But I won't go easy. I'll fight as long as my life is worth fighting for.

But I thought I'd just say this here and now, so you few remaining readers would know where I'm coming from. It's...not a good place.

H&I Mission

One of the now-long-forgotten Army things is the "harassment and interdiction" mission. This Texas A&M site sums up this artillery technique as it was used in Vietnam; "(unobserved fire which) engaged suspected targets with no more than a few rounds fired at random intervals throughout the night, and sometimes during the day."

My understanding is that a typical H&I target would have been a crossroads, or some similar linear intersection (bridge, paddy dikes, treelines), where the local S-2 thought that Charlie would be using to move around.

As the A&M site points out, while this sort of shooting could have been at least plausibly effective in a war where you had "enemy" roads, or crossroads, or bridges, doing this in a notional ally's house? NOT a very good idea. Your chance of blowing away some random villager was so high as to be nearly unavoidable compared to the likelihood of catching the NVA 309C Division in the middle of an admin move. 

Anyway, I don't have anything momentous to discuss. I'm threading my way through the Yarmouk references with the idea of getting something out before the end of September. What I really want to do is travel back in time and grab Abdallāh al-Azdī al-Baṣrī by the stacking swivel and choke him until he got a fucking editor! Dude! Seriously! I get that early Arabic writers were mostly in it for the poetry (that's the c.w. on a lot of early Islamic "historians" all the way up to Ottoman times, as I kept encountering writing up Constantinople 1453 and Vienna), but this is ridiculous.

In the meantime I didn't want to leave this joint untenanted, so...

First a quick personal note.

Had kind of a scare the other week. Sight went out temporarily in one eye. No more than three or four minutes, but the doc checked my blood pressure and things there were not good, so off to E.R. I went for the full meal; CT scan, EKG, blood work, all of it.

The end result was:
1) No idea about the vision, even after numerous pokes and peeks at the eye clinic. The term "ocular migrane" was tossed about but in truth nobody really knows.
2) I'm now on BP meds. So far, better, but not perfect. Need to drop weight, too. That'll be fun.

Other than that, the second creature to find itself in trouble was the big fig tree out by the back sideyard...

This thing was a cute little sapling when Mojo bought the house more than twenty years ago. Nobody here really likes figs, so it was just kind of an unminded but seasonally-messy nuisance for much of the ensuing couple of decades...until it got freaking huge. It shaded out the whole back yard, dropped fruit (which was now too high to pick) all through the autumn that drew crowds of aggressive yellowjackets, and we generally a nuisance.

So we lopped the bulk of the thing down:

But there we were stuck.

A handsaw worked well enough for the upper parts of the trunks. But the lower? Yike. That meant power.

Chainsaw power, to be precise.

So off to the local rental store and back with a nifty little electric saw that proceeded to take the bulk of the damn thing down to the ground...

...where I then applied the 21st Century version of the Roman Plow; a full bottle of Round-Up poured directly over the remains.

That will probably have to be repeated several more times this year - the sonofabitch is full of vitality and has already shrugged off a soaking with this poison.

But who's higher on the evolutionary scale, goddamnit. Two of us enter, one's gonna leave, and it ain't you, tree.

Let's see...what else should I send a round out at..?

Oh, yeah; this thing turned up in the World's Worst Newspaper the other day:

Tl:dr, the minor league ballclub that plays out on Portland's western 'burbs is being held up by the big leagues' ploy to extort more money out of the little communities where they play. The bigs are forcing their minor league slaves to force their local governments to pay for ballfields or lose their teams.

Some guy named Knudsen has a nice little takedown of this extortion racket. Keep in mind that, as he mentions, 1) the current minor league ballpark is only ten years old, that it 2) has the capacity for over 4,000 fans, and 3) typical crowds at these Hillsboro team games runs about half that, at best.

So Oram is all in on getting tax dollars for this gimmick.

Which is insane, given that supposedly we can't afford to get our hoboes into apartments or keep our junkies from scaring the normies, but which is also business as usual for the whole sports-owners-and-politicians-frolic-through-the-public-trough tradition.

I'm hoping that the gang over at Field of Schemes will have more on this disgrace before the City Fathers out in Hillsboro can start backing up the dump truck full of cash to the loading dock at Tonking Field.

And speaking of politicians and cash...

Oregon's governor has muscled into the homeless "crisis", shaking out a "task force" that's supposed to provide recommendations on how to rid the parks and streets frequented by the Good People of Portland of smelly poor people.

The whole business is secret, run as a private meeting because it's working under the local business alliance. Many of the usual non-profit and non-commercial suspects (i.e. organizations that work with or advocate for homeless people) are shut out.

My guess is that the business people will recommend the usual - more sweeps, more laws, more jails, more shelters - instead of the simple and practical solution: "tax rich people and businesses, fund jobs programs and cheap housing". That's how these characters usually roll; it's never worked before. That's never stopped them. I trust that the latest round of political circle-jerking will produce nothing practical.

I've seldom been disappointed.

And speaking of politicians living down to their expectations...

Dahlia Lithwick has a good piece at Slate (paywalled, I think, but if you don't go there often I think you can get it free...) that points out how fucked we are because Mittens is as "good" as it gets in the GQP and he's exactly the sniveling piece of pond scum you'd think if you remember his presidential run.

Bottom line? He wants a tongue bath for saying mean things about Tubby...while doing nothing substantial to interfere with all the shit Tubby and his cult are doing. Tax cuts for richies? Sure! Privatize? He's all in! Fuck the poor and the sick? Anytime! 

Oh, and speaking of shitheels...

Here's the thing about this.

First, Boebert is an asshole. Not because of who she is but because of what she does in Congress. This idiocy doesn't change that.

Second, though, is that this says something truly sad about her intelligence.

Because I love Broadway. I've been to two big touring musicals in the past several years; Wicked, back in 2021, and Hadestown this past year. Both wonderful, both memorable, both parts of my life I'll treasure.

Both expensive as a sonofabitch.

I took the Girl, and for both shows we had orchestra side-aisle seats, and for both the seats ran something like $150-$200 each. IIRC orchestra center seats ran $200-300 and up, first balcony and boxes even more - $400-500? Anyway...a LOT of money.

Point is, this isn't 1984, when I could drop into the TKTS booth in Times Square and nick a Sweeney Todd seat for thirty bucks. Musical theater is a big-money event, and tickets are hard to get.

To go to a big Broadway show to vape and grab ass? To be obnoxious to the point where you geet kicked out?

That's just fucking bone stupid. You might as well just set fire to a pile of twenties.

I mean...copping feels in a dark theater is a great tradition...for the matinee of Weekend at Bernie's.

I'm not blaming the woman for being an idiot.

I blame her voters for electing the dumb fuck.

And here we all are.

Jesus wept.

Ya got me, podnuh

 I got the 'rona.

If you've had it, I feel for your ass.

If you haven't?

Do NOT fucking get this shit.

And I'm fully vaxxed and triple-boosted AND I got on Paxlovid within a day of the symptoms showing up.

Which they did as we were cleaning up the living room walls last Sunday night.

We painted these walls, oh, maybe ten years ago. The paint was a specialty brand called "Devine" that we found at the local Miller Paint store. We loved the smooth shades and cool textures; pretty much the whole Little House is done in this Devine paint of one shade or another.

And we've been very happy with it, by and large. Except the brown color we painted the front room and the hallway.

Not that we don't like the color - we do! - but over the years the walls slowly developed this odd white discoloration. My guess, from the home improvement literature, is that this was "chalking", apparently something that happens the paint deteriorates and the pigment and binder separate.

It wasn't harmful to the paint, just ugly.

I found out purely by accident - cleaning up an area where the Little Cat had shaken her bloody ear (we still miss you, sweetie!) - that windex-type cleaner removed the white discoloration for some time - at least a year. It seemed worth a try to avoid repainting the entire room.

So we moved everything away from the walls and went to work.

It pretty much sucked as much as you'd imagine, and so I wasn't surprised that I was sore and tired when we finished. What was odd was that I was also stuffy and was developing a nasty cough from the drip in my throat.

And that was late evening.

By midnight I was perfectly miserable. Think "the worst flu I've ever had" miserable; congestion like  stone in my forehead, body aches like I'd been pounded with a hammer, sneezing, coughing...ugh. Like I said; miserable.

One of the few good things about getting old is that your immune system has pretty much seen it all. You tend to miss the colds and flus that the younger people around you contract simply because you've had it, or something enough like it, to keep you immune.

So I'd forgotten how utterly shitty it is.

So, yeah. Sunday night (and Monday morning) was a total shitshow. By the time I got out of bed (I won't say "got up" because I didn't get more than an hour or so of badly broken sleep) I was convinced that I had the Plague and, sure enough, the faint line faded in below the "T" that confirmed that, yes, finally, more than three years after it had exploded out of southeastern China the fucking coronavirus had nailed me.

Monday was a misery punctuated by trying to figure out how to avoid dosing three other people in a tiny, 1,100-square-foot house. I did a video call with my GP, who got me a course of Paxlovid that, as sucky as the drive was, I ran up to Janzen Beach to pick up.

Lemme tellya. Paxlovid? That stuff is just better than sliced white bread.

I took the first dose Monday night and had another shitty night, but by Tuesday morning I was feeling more human. By the time I' writing this - Tuesday night- I have a "head cold", no worse.

Mind you...had I not been vaccinated, not been boosted, not had the Paxlovid?

You might well not be reading this.

I've got another four days of Pax before I'm out of the woods, and apparently there's a "rebound" that this fucking Plague slaps you with once you've finished the meds. The damn thing is a genuine threat, and a wag of the middle finger towards the idiot antivaxxers and Republicans who try and pretend otherwise.

K. Well, I gotta go put some pictures back up. Catch ya later.

Update 1/25: So this Paxlovid stuff is the bomb.

Seriously. It's kicking the 'rona's ass (along with the vaccines, I'm guessing). By this morning I was up and running around - mostly getting meds for pets (the cat's flea treatment) and people (more Paxlovid for my Bride, who probably has this damn Plague, too). Still achy down my back and still with headcold gunk in my skull. But otherwise? Good to go.

I'll be around here in a bit, I've got some thought but need to get them organized.

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.