Wasn't That Fun?

     There I was yesterday, with a distressingly swollen and tender shin, lurid bruising extending down to my foot, concerned I might have cracked the bone....

     I made an appointment at the closest drive-through doc.  We've got one in Broad Ripple again, and they've been businesslike and easy to deal with, the couple of times I've gone there.

     They got me in quickly, checked my temperature, blood pressure (just fine -- the "white coat syndrome" that used to overwhelm the good effects of my blood pressure medicine at any doctor's office is doing better these days), and had a look at my leg.  There was a fair amount of cogitation on the part of the doctor and nurse.  The conclusion was that it was a sure-enough clot, and maybe rather more than might be expected from the accident as I described it.  (I fell up the basement stairs and took the edge of a sturdy step right on that shin.)  My left ankle was over twice as big around as the right.

     The thing to do was to get an ultrasound -- and to go do so at an ER.  I expressed doubt at going to the hospital over this.  Say "stroke risk," and they bring out the fancy toys, much excitement, high cost--*

     Oh, no, says the doc, not that.  Go to one of the standalone ER/urgent care combinations.  They're quicker anyway.

     So I did.  The closest place was halfway across town, a long drive with me thinking all the time how very interesting it will be if the big blob breaks loose and fries my brain, right there along Westfield Avenue or one of the crowded east-west numbered roads in the hundreds, where the northern suburbs have just continued Indianapolis street numbers past the county line.  Got there with skull contents intact, boiled same slightly stuck in traffic gridlocked by dog-in-the-manger drivers and eventually checked in and got led back to a comfy exam room forthwith.  Physical exam followed: "Yes, yes, probably a hematoma, but.  Um, that's pretty far down on your calf, in front.  The big veins are around back, and they're branched out and skinny that far down.  I guess I see why they sent you but the risk is low.  It's not that kind of clot."

     Sonogram next, to confirm there were no chunky bits up where they'd make trouble.  X-ray after that, and hey hurrah, the bone's okay.  But there is a big, ugly splotch, a hematoma right on the bone, almost certainly under the layer of tissue normally next to the bone.  "That's going to be a long time going down, weeks and weeks.  And it's gonna hurt the whole time.  Normal recommendation is compression, but as you already observed, it'll be painful."

     He was talking about socks with that last line.  I usually wear knee-high compression stockings; I'm an old lady on blood-pressure meds that make my ankles swell.  The fix is easy, cheap and supposedly good for you, but I hadn't been able to wear them for a couple of days.

     The doctor's conclusion was that I wasn't at any risk of a stroke from that clot.  It was going to stay right where it was, slowly being nibbled away by the normal process of healing, and it was going to remind me it was there the entire time, all day and all night.  I'm not a fan, but it beats having my brain scrambled by leaps, bounds and miles.

     I took today off, to elevate my calf (also recommended), complain online, and, ouch, wear compressions stockings.  I peeled a set on last night and they can darned well stay on all day today.  I'm in no hurry to slide anything over the big bruise again until I have to.
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* It also bugs me that you jump the triage line in a hospital ER with this kind of thing, at least for the initial diagnosis, and I worry that they're going to be poking at me and my stable situation when someone gets wheeled in, smashed up after an auto accident or whatever.  I have been that person and I don't want to be the reason they have to lay there bleeding and hurting before anyone gets around to them. 

Skipped A Day

     While working on the dryer, with frequent trips up and down the basement stairs, I fell.  Tam and I are convinced one step is slightly off, because it's easy to trip about two-thirds of the way up those stairs.

     Whatever the reason, I took a worse fall than usual, going up the stairs.  Caught my right foot and fell forward, with plenty of time to get my hands up -- but I banged my left shin against the thick step, good and hard.  They are open steps, without risers.  I slammed my shin squarely into the two-inch-thick step and it was extremely painful.

     But I have fallen there before.  You pick yourself up and keep going, right?  So I did.

     I didn't sleep well the night before last.  Couldn't get comfortable.  Kept waking up.  It was my shin.  Yesterday morning, I soaked in hot water with Epsom Salts and got dressed, wincing at the pressure of my knee-high sock on the bruise, gathered together everything for the day -- and realized I'd run out of steam.  Just nothing left.  I was maxed out on OTC pain meds by that point.  I ended up calling in sick and feeling like a whiny nitwit about it, but I was wiped out.  I rested most of the day and managed a quick trip to the grocery that evening.  I made supper with big plans for after, but fell asleep in front of the TV instead.

     My shin is just as painful today and the bruising is most visible well below the impact site, with colorful markings along the inside of my foot around the ankle and heel.   I think I'd better go get a professional opinion -- it's probably nothing, but I'm not getting any younger.  Or, apparently, any more graceful.

Automat Soup

     Last night, after wrestling with the dryer for a lot longer than I realized,* I found myself hungry and with limited time and resources to do anything about it.  There were a couple of sandwich-sized slices of deli ham in the fridge, but I'd had a ham and egg sandwich for breakfast....

     There was a microwavable rice-and-beans pouch in the cupboard, good brown rice and black-eyed peas, and the maker called it "Hoppin' John" on the label.  Why not give it a try?  I snipped up the ham while the rice and beans were nuking, and mixed it all together in a bowl with a dash of Cajun-style seasoning.  Not bad, but it needed something.  I gave it a generous shake of dried onion flakes and a dash of hot water, but it was still not quite right.  A big dollop of Heinz Chili Sauce (just revved-up catsup) did the trick.  That was when it hit me: I'd just reinvented Automat soup.

     See, Automats -- coin-operated cafeterias, where you paid for each item as you went, unlocking little windowed compartments, a nickel in the slot for a sandwich, a nickel for a slice of pie, and so on -- generally had free hot water, condiments and crackers.  For the price of a cup of coffee, you'd end up with an empty mug, a spoon and fixings for rough tomato soup: ketchup, hot water, salt, pepper and saltines.  Dinner!  (You could pull the same trick at a regular cafeteria, too, though it was best done when they were too busy to notice.)

     Good ol' "red lead" didn't make the greatest tomato soup in the world, and it doesn't make prize-winning Hoppin' John, either.  But it wasn't bad, it was quick to make and the price was right.  Tam had already gone to off to sleep by then, so I can't give you a second opinion.
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* The dryer works now, though it runs a bit rough.  And a test run smelled slightly of burned hair.  I vacuumed the dryer out while I had it open (so much lint!), but there's always some you miss and it inevitably ends up in the wrong place.  We'll have to keep an eye on it.

Thump.

     Weekends are for laundry here.  Tam does hers Friday, I do mine Saturday, and Sunday is for catching up and washing big items -- towels, bedding, etc.  Or that's the general intent.

     I'd run one load of wash yesterday and had a second one in the dryer, with a third just starting in the washer.  Just T-shirts and not too many, a "catching-up" batch.  I was doing other things upstairs when I heard something in the basement go, "Thump."  After that, the dryer seemed quieter.  Odd.

     Once I'd reached a stopping point, I went down to check.  The dryer was humming along, but--  I opened the door.  The dryer did not slow to a stop.  It didn't have to.  The drum wasn't turning.  Uh-oh.

     The classic clothes dryer is a frustratingly simple device.  A single electric motor runs a blower that moves air over the heating element (gas or electric) and, via a long belt, that same motor turns the drum.  If the blower runs but the drum doesn't turn, the belt is broken.  Oh, it might be other things; at least one end of the drum is supported by two or more small wheels, and they can jam up; but that usually breaks the belt.  It's the simplicity that makes them frustrating: parts count is down to the minimum and after you have opened them up for service, it can be tricky to put them back together.*

     After some research in how to open up the dryer (easier than I thought) and replace the belt (not so easy; you take off the front and work around the now partially unsupported drum), I unplugged it, opened it up and had a look: yes, the belt is broken. I ordered a belt and some wheels.  The belt should arrive today, so I'll try that first.

     Meanwhile, I filled up the clothesline with T-shirts and washcloths, and ended up bringing them inside after sunset to finish drying indoors.
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* There's no margin for being half right.  The kinds of things I work on for a living come with detailed drawings and a lot of them will run at least a little when partially disassembled.  Consumer goods are not that way.

Corncakes

     There's been a box of cornbread mix in the cupboard for quite some time.  The oven in my old-but-not-antique gas range is questionable at best.  It's not usually a problem for me, since I enjoy cooking on the covered grill; roasts and curries and holiday turducken or corned beef work out well in a graniteware pan over hot coals.

     I haven't tried to bake in the grill.  Breads are tricky and home baking was a high art until the introduction of thermostatic controls*.  There are ways around it -- most breads and small cakes can be microwaved, though you don't end up with much in the way of crust.

     The cornbread mix microwaves well enough, but I wanted to do something different.  Can't you make cornmeal pancakes?

     Of course you can!  A little more milk and some melted butter, and there you go.  I cooked up a batch this morning, golden brown and slightly crumbly, and when it comes to rising pancakes, I think they're better than the all wheat-flour version, a little sweet (as the boxed cornbread mix tends to be; modern people put sugar in it, having no idea how to make proper cornbread) and full of flavor.

     It's a nice change from the usual.
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* You can bake bread in a clay-dome oven, fireplace-side oven, or a cast-iron wood or coal stove, and plenty of people did.  But it's a skill with a long learning curve, especially judging and maintaining the correct temperature.  Both of my grandmothers would have grown up learning how to run a cast-iron stove with an oven, the latter addition patented in 1867, a decade or more before either of them was born.  They adopted improved stoves eagerly. (Unlike an earlier generation; Mom spoke of her grandmother's irritation at her grandfather, who would mark up the wood-stove blacking by flipping slices of potato onto the sides of it, to stick, sizzle and fall clear when cooked! Caught on a plate, the proto-chips were a treat for him and his grandchildren.†)  Later versions of those stoves included a dial thermometer in the oven door, but a number of methods were used to check temperature from early on -- the boiling point of water at 212°F gives you a low oven, and the ignition temperature of paper, 451°F (a number made famous later) a high oven.  While my covered grill offers the same air-and-damper controls as a cast-iron range, it has far lower thermal mass and is difficult to refuel while burning.  --Oh, I'll try some day, just to see how it goes.  The kitchen is a workshop with a highly-developed set of tools, prosaic though it may appear.
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† So what's in stove-blacking? Plumbago -- graphite, that is -- lampblack -- which is carbon -- and a binder, like fat or paraffin grease.  Tasty!  I don't suppose small amounts of pencil-lead and carbon are all that immediately bad for you, but the state of California has probably already checked and found they are carcinogenic.

The Mysterious Door

     It wasn't so much the door that was mysterious.  It was the way it kept opening uncommanded.  About a month ago, the overhead garage door here at Roseholme Cottage kept opening itself for no reason.

     At first, I thought it must be old leaves, caught in spiderwebs, fluttering in front of the floor-level safety photocell that keeps the door from closing on objects, people and other critters.  I cleared out the corners and checked if breaking the beam would open the door when it was fully closed and in "lock" mode.  Nope.

     And yet it kept opening.  There's a green led in the middle of the big "open" switch on the hard-wired control panel, and it flickers in a particular way when you have the remote opener disabled.  I finally noticed that while it was indeed flickering, the speed of the flicker had become very different.  Odd.  There are three buttons on it, a great big one with a led to open and close the door, one to turn the lights in the opener on and off, and one to lock out the remote.

     Our control panel has been missing the cap on the lockout button for years.  When I bought the house, the previous owner warned me to "be careful with that panel.  They're fragile, and really expensive to replace."  So when the button popped off, too worn out to stick back on, I just used the tiny switch it had actuated -- carefully.  Maybe I had broken it?

     I went online, identified the make and model of our opener, and priced out a replacement control panel.  They were not expensive.  And they're connected with only two wires, to light up one led and perform three functions.  This seemed like something that could go wrong.  So I bought one.

     The thing showed up and I looked it over.  The parts count was very low: three momentary switches, two capacitors, one resistor, one light-emitting diode.  It kind of makes sense; I can think of a couple of ways to do what they're doing with those parts and there's probably an even simpler answer.  But whatever; I shut down the power,  took the old one off the wall (a bit tricky) and installed the new one.

     When I plugged the system back in, the led flickered the right way, the garage door opened on command, and after a week of careful watching and unplugging it when away or asleep, it hadn't randomly opened.  Weeks later, it still hasn't.  I'm hoping it's solved --but I'm going to go have a look before I click on "Publish."

I Just Realized

     I haven't yet weighed in on the most recent iteration of the many trials of former President and promoter of conspiracy theories, Donald J. Trump.

     Hunh. How about that.

Nota Bene

     If you're going to write as if you slept on a thesaurus, you'd better not hit a single wrong note.  Use the right word, not one that smells vaguely like the word that ought to be there.  Remember, Mr. Roget is not big on nuance; that part is up to you.  If all the words in that great big heap on the page meant the exact same thing, most of them wouldn't exist.  Those puppies might be in the same litter but they've each got their own set of spots.

     One of Lester Dent's characters from "Doc Savage" is known for his fondness for feature-length words.  Dent had great fun having the character apply them in a slightly askew way around everyone except Doc -- presumably because he knows Doc wouldn't tolerate being BSed.  Unless your name is William Harper Littlejohn and you're confident you can get away with BSing the people you're nattering at, stick to using plain old everyday words.

     They work just fine.

Elon Musk And The Car Biz

     Much has been made of the floundering-at-best Tesla Cybertruck, of layoffs at Tesla, top management bailing out, and so on.

     We're used to having relatively stable big car companies; Japanese automakers were disrupters in the 1970s, with Korean ones in their wake, but the dust settled and there were still just a few names making cars.  You could set your watch by them.  And that's how it has always been, right?  That whole Tesla messiness, it's an outlier, isn't it?

     Wrong.  Here in Indiana, I grew up among the remains of the first --and second -- generation of car makers, and of ideas that came and went.  Driven a Stutz lately?  Ridden in a nice, luxy Haynes?  A zippy Apperson?  Jay Leno produced a segment showing off his 1920s steam car, a gorgeous piece of sophisticated engineering that made running a steamer almost as simple as a gasoline-engine car, and in quiet comfort.  Indianapolis once had an entire fleet of electric taxis loaded up with lead-acid batteries.  Gone, all gone; step down the row, past name after name, and marvel at the Tucker, come and gone in the blink of an eye, with a tang of shady dealing hanging in the air.

     Maybe Tesla's one with them, and all it'll leave behind is a robust charging infrastructure and collectibles.  Maybe it'll have a few ups and downs, like Ford did; the big, dominating car company was his second or third try.

     Elon Musk is mostly a money and PR guy, and a little bit an idea guy.  He didn't start Tesla or SpaceX or Twitter, he bought into struggling enterprises and they will rise and fall however they do, in part due to his input and in part based on their staff and management.  It's fun to muse on the great Captains of Industry who forge the future -- but there are a whole lot of ships sailing that sea under a great many leaders, a whole horde of forge-fires flaring, and most of 'em aren't gonna run the entire course.  We only know who the big ones are in retrospect.  Haynes and Stutz and all the rest helped to build an industry and it wouldn't be what it is if they hadn't been there.  The foundations of the future are built on a lot of crushed dreams, but they do keep on piling higher.

     Someone's got to pioneer the rear view mirror; someone's got to try out hydraulic brakes or stick a Diesel engine under the hood, boil up steam or make one of the thousands of efforts at electric cars.  Even the companies that first apply the ideas that last do not necessarily thrive themselves.

"Brainwashed"

     With the U. S. Supreme Court set to take up the question of just how actively obstructionist a person needs to be before the behavior rises to something that counts as "obstructing an official proceeding,"* I was reminded yet again of my longtime friend, a lifetime moderate Democrat, who was horrified when one of his family members and their spouse were arrested for actions in the Capitol on 6 January 2021.  "I don't know how they got so brainwashed," he told me.

     The answer is that they didn't.  Nobody put them under psychological or physical duress and worked on their opinions.  No one deliberately "love bombed" them, whisking them away from their established connections in a sea of overwhelming positivity.  From rioters to graffiti-scrawling kids, from crowds shouting down their foes to people trying to break heads or break into government buildings, from Right to Left and back again, all of these individuals have agency.  Nobody brainwashed them.  They did it to themselves.  They freely chose their opinions -- and they freely chose violence.

     Violence carries a price, both personal and societal.  Participation in violence will mark you -- yes, even if you're the perpetrator.  And perpetrating violence quite often begets official violence in return.  Maybe you won't get shot by a cop, or bopped over the head (or painful joint) or pepper-sprayed or proned out with force; you're still likely to experience arrest, jail, criminal charges and a fine and/or prison time.  And those things will happen as the end result of choices you have made.

     That's the way it is for grown-ups.  You don't get to blame the other kids.  You don't even get to blame whatever handy-dandy group label you've picked, no matter how good their graphic artist might be.  You did it, not your T-shirt or sleeve patch.  You did it, not your Great Leader or Big Idea or long, painful history.

     I'd love to tell you that bad choices are the result of broken homes, cheap hooch and bad companions, but that fact is that little J. Random Citizen is still in charge of their own actions.
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* Someone else can try reading those tea leaves; I gave up relying on the sober legal scholarship of the Justices outweighing their partisan and/or personal interests at some time over the last couple of years, and boy, do I ever miss that confidence.

An Ancient Dilemma

     Those of us who have had outside cats, or barn cats, or have fed ferals know that many cats regard snakes, especially small to medium ones, as A) great fun; B) a dire and traditional enemy; or C) all of the above.  And you you will find yourself, from time to time, with a cat in one hand and a snake in the other, trying to decide which one to let go first.

     You're not alone:

     Yes, that's the real deal.  Of course, the ancient Assyrians put together an entire legend, with gods and lions and serpents, but I think the story behind it is pretty obvious. (And speaking of legends, the "holding back the cat while accepting a pizza delivery" statue dates from dim, ancient 1987.  I still love it.)

Set

     The cover of "Holly Holy" I posted day before yesterday was reminding me of something else, just a little.  It wasn't until this morning that I picked it up: it has some structural similarities to theme from The Mandalorian.

     The TV theme goes off in its own direction, picking up cues from big-orchestra Western theme music, (like "Old Trails" from Gunsmoke); and that leads to another interesting performance from a smaller ensemble: Pink Martini's "Andalucia."

     Play them one after another -- you decide in what order -- and you've got an interesting set, perhaps something for my "Wrong Elevator" music format.