Not Much Today

     About all I did today was struggle with paperwork.  The extended leave time and medical stuff involves two big and doctrinaire insurance companies; a large medical practice that includes hospitals, all manner of specialists, physical therapists and imaging specialists, and is singularly stubborn and uncooperative when it comes to filling out forms; and the very large and procedure-bound company I have ended up working for, after decades of working for a much smaller one in the same business where you could solve most problems by finding the one or two people who knew how to deal with it and having a short conversation.

     There are no short conversations now, and nobody's interested in helping solve someone else's problems.  There are only rules, and if they don't make sense, tough luck.

     At present, I need a form filled out by licensed experts so I can be allowed to return to work; or they can fill out another form that says I shouldn't.  I have to turn the form in five days before I return.  I can't come back without the form -- and if I don't come back, even if I don't have the form, they will assume I'm playing hooky and I'll be in quite a lot of trouble.  Nevertheless, I won't be allowed to return unless I have the form, and it needs to be filled out and signed by a doctor familiar with my treatment.  (No, I can't just find a shiny new MD who needs a chrome-plated dingus for his or her Benz and offer 'em $500 to fill the damn thing out.)  And there's no direct number or email for either the doctor or the form-filling-out center (yes, they have one), only voicemail and a frustratingly indirect messaging system.  Multiple messages over multiple days have gone without answer.

     The medical care I'm receiving is fine.  The doctor and physical therapists are, as near as I can tell, all competent and highly qualified.  But the whole outfit not real big on other people's paperwork, especially when it's the patient asking.  And the insurance company who require the form before they will give my employer the all-clear won't ask them to fill out this one, even though they have already requested and received a lot of other documentation from the same medical practice.  Why?  I don't know, and apparently damn me for asking; they acted (politely) like I was trying to get them to cheat when I asked them to ask the medical practice to fill out the form, since they weren't responding to me.

     I have no idea how any of this will work out.  I went home with a gimpy back thinking I'd be out a week or two at the most, and I left my main toolbag in a cabinet at the North Campus with a few thousand dollars worth of my personal hand tools in it, some of them irreplaceable.  I left more of my tools in my desk at the Main Campus.  (I'm kind of picky about tools, and I'm even more picky about being able to do the job without having to wait for some other geek to remember to return the tools he got out of the company toolbox to work on his project.  I'm not going to impugn my peers over poor toolbox discipline, but it's not impossible that one or two of them might be a tiny bit forgetful about returning tools to the box after use.*)

     Presently, all this soap-opera stuff is up in the air, despite my having a letter from my back specialist on the practice's letterhead that says I can return to normal duty at a date in the not-too-distant future.  It's not the actual form, you see, and so therefore -- medical license and specialist certifications notwithstanding -- it may not count.

     I'll bet all of them just leave screwdrivers and staplers, etc. lying where the gadgets were last used, too.  I know the doctor does -- but he's got people whose job it is to clean them up and put them away.
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* One of the things I routinely do -- when I'm working -- is walk through the technical areas and see that all the widgets are lit up properly, picking up abandoned tools and materials as I go and putting them them back in their normal storage places where the next desperate slob can find them.  I don't know why other people don't do this, but I'm not the boss of them; I'm only in charge of how I deal with it, so I do.

A Rain Day With Rain -- And Wind, And Worse

     It wasn't worse for me, though it could have been.  I was on the standby list for physical therapy, and the called this morning with an opening at 1:30 p.m.  Was I interested?  The last set of exercises the therapist assigned me left my back sore, so you bet I was; he's been good about adjusting the therapy when it hurts.

     What with one thing and another -- I got absorbed the last chapters of a book I was reading -- I rushed out the door at the last minute, ahead of the day's second wave of storms coming in from the north.  The first set hadn't been too bad, but there were thunderstorm and tornado warnings along the track of the second one.

     I checked in just in time, got the new exercises and ran through them, and all the while, the huge windows of the medical building gave everyone a front row seat to an ominous wall of dark-gray clouds.  I had my back to them, laying on a table and doing knee lifts, when the PT specialist said, "Better wrap up, this thing's about to hit.  You can go out the employee entrance it's closer to your car."

     I sat up and turned around to look out the window as wind guys bent the plantings outside over.  He handed me a printout and led me to the door.  I made it to my car barley ahead of the rain and drove home to the booming of thunder.

     Got from the car, though the garage and to the back door as the rain picked up, and was inside before it started sheeting down.  The lights flicked a few times, and I started hearing sirens.  The got closer and closer, and I went out on the front porch to have a look.

     Next house to the north, a home health nurse scurried from her car to their porch, looked at me and said loudly, "I called it in."  Just then, two fire trucks pulled up, crews got out, and headed towards the house to the south.

     I hadn't looked in that direction until they did.  The last big tree on my lot (well, half on mine and half on my neighbor to the south's lot), a big oak, had toppled across the one-story house, smashing the living room and dining room, and coming to rest with limbs poking through the roof of the next house to the south.  It looked like someone had slammed a sledge hammer down on a dollhouse.  It took out the long dropwire from the alley to a streetlight along the road, tucking the wire under itself and into the house.

     The house was empty.  No one was hurt.  The guy who owns it lived there several years ago, got married and had a baby on the way shortly afterward, and the house was going to be too small.  He and his family moved to a bigger place and he's been a landlord ever since.  His most recent tenants moved out two weeks ago!  If the tree had fallen north instead of south, it would have done similar damage to my house.

     I think that house may be totalled.  The oak was pretty solid, but had deep splits at the base and shallow roots.  It fell like the wrath of Zeus, shattering the far wall, reducing the roof to pieces, and forcing the front wall to lean out several feet at the top.  The homeowner showed up shortly after the firemen left, having done a safety check and put up caution tape.  He was joined by a man from the gas company, who confirmed IFD had shut off the gas and checked for leaks, and before he was done, a representative from a commercial recovery company arrived.

     Within an hour, a large tree crew with large machines was cutting away the tree and lifting out the pieces.  Power & Light had shut off electricity to the streetlight and the house (update: or not; the streetlight still works, which is unsafe), and by twilight, the tree crew was gone (they've pretty well trashed my raised flowerbed; I haven't been able to do anything with it this year and the old, soft landscape timbers were knocked askew and battered, my front yard being the only place to stack the pieces of the fallen tree before loading them into a big truck.  They did their best to put it back together, but I'm going to need new 4x4s.) and a recovery crew was wedging in bracing 2x4s and nailing them to the sagging walls and stakes freshly hammered into the ground.  They tarped up the roof of the next house south, too.

     My former neighbor's not sure what he's going to do, rebuild or demolish, rent or sell, but the last big tree is gone.  (So's my G5RV ham antenna -- the oak provided support about 3/4 of the way along the east half of it.  The various supports for the antenna worked just as I had hoped; the wire snapped as the oak fell, and the unsupported pieces were too short to get into trouble.  I'm out of the G5RV business for awhile.)

     Next time, remind me not to complain about rain days without rain.  The alternative can be much worse!

A Rain Day With No Rain

     The rain missed us!  Storm warnings to the north but we dodged it.  But there's another chance tomorrow.

Slow Going

     Other than routine -- laundry, dishes and the network politics shows -- I spent today on antenna projects.  Between heat, humidity and my bad back, it's not quick.  I measured and assembled the long side of an off-center-fed dipole antenna, having already done the short side, made with heavy solid wire.  I'm not sure how well it will hold up, but I've always wanted to try, and I had a small stock of what once passed for industrial scrap, accumulated over decades.  It's cut for the 40 meter ham band, which means about 66 feet of wire overall -- some "scrap!"

     I'd had an older version once, taken down years ago when we had tree work done, coiled up and stashed in the flowerbed it used to hang above.  The insulators survived, and maybe the homemade matching transformer, but the stranded wire was greenish and the coaxial cable looked iffy once I located my antenna analyzer and tested it.  (My YouKits imported antenna analyzer is at least ten years old; modern "nano vector network analyzers" will run rings around it* for about what I paid, but it's simple and gives a quick indication if you've got an antenna or a lump, a good coaxial cable or a bad one.)

     This week promises rain, so progress may be even slower.  That's okay -- stringing up an antenna in a hurry is never a good idea, and that goes double when trying to avoid back strain.
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* Almost literally "rings," since they'll do the useful Smith Chart display, while mine only gives a plot of impedance and SWR over a selected frequency range, around a selected center frequency. 

Doc Savage Flashlight

     I've got my Doc Savage flashlight -- and they work just the way Lester Dent described!  Of course, he was writing pulp magazine stories in the 1930s, long before high-strength magnets, light-emitting diodes and supercapacitors.  Whatever kinds of dynamo flashlights were available in his time would have been bulky, clumsy things, eking out extra life from carbon-zinc batteries.

     The iFixit people sell an inexpensive hand-powered flashlight that is small and charged by squeezing a little lever whenever the beam starts to dim.  They're far from the only source -- the various big online retailers list a wide variety, from basic squeeze-charged units to fancy ones with a hand-crank, a radio receiver and a jack to charge your phone.  None of them are high-end tactical lights, but if you're looking for something to leave in useful places for jobs like finding your way to the basement when the lights go out, a few of these wouldn't be a bad choice,  The supercapacitor "battery" on most of them isn't going to turn crusty after a year or two of neglect, though it may need a quick charge by the lever.

     You've already got a better portable communications device than Doc and his associates ever had -- or even Dick Tracy! -- so why not add a flashlight like theirs, too?

Uncapped?

     FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has led the commissioners in a 2-1 vote to end the longstanding limits on how much of the broadcast media landscape any one company can control.

     Starting in 2004, no single entity was allowed to control what was (potentially) on the screens of more than thirty-nine percent* of the national over-the-air TV audience, and it may still be.  (Before that, the limit was lower.)  Those limits were not set by the FCC; Congress told 'em, back when George W. Bush was President and his party held the majority in both houses of Congress.  The number was a compromise among Republicans: some wanted it raised to 45% while others wanted it kept at 35% (set in 1996, up from an even lower limit) -- and part of the deal was that the FCC wouldn’t and couldn’t raise it higher on their own.  After all, Congress makes the laws and the FCC only makes rules to ensure the things within their purview are done lawfully.  Chairman Carr's opinion on Executive Branch agency deference to Congress seems to vary depending on who's in the White House.

     But before I continue, take another look at that 2-1 vote: the FCC began with seven commissioners in 1934 but quickly settled down to five, no more than three of them from the same party, appointed to staggered terms by Presidents and approved (or rejected) by the Senate; it was established by the various Communications Acts passed by Congress and the general notion is a balance between Presidential power and the need for stability in regulations for the regulated entities, mostly direct users of the radiofrequency spectrum and "common carriers," the latter being telephone and Internet providers.  What's at issue is a limited resource, bandwidth; just as there's a finite amount of land to build on, there are only so many signals you can usefully emit or cram into a given wire or fiberoptic cable.  Right now, we've got only three Commissioners on the FCC, one Democrat appointee and two Republicans.  We're short one of each and the current administration has shown no interest in digging up a couple more (and it's a paying job, too!  Hell, I'd take it.  I hear the benefits package is pretty decent).

      There are lots of specific effects from this possible change (court fights are sure to follow, and we already live in an age of media giants -- the regulatory question is really about their becoming even more gigantic or not), but it's the bigger picture we should be looking at: an understaffed Federal Communications Commission, acting in direct contravention of the clear intent of laws passed by the United States Congress.  The greater issue is one of Caesarism versus small-r republicanism, and you'd never guess which side many -- but not all! -- of the big-R Republican politicians are on.
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* It's more complicated than that, of course.  Get out your slide rule -- here's a simplified (!) explanation, still on the FCC's website as I write this, though that may change:
     "There is no limit on the number of television stations a single entity may own nationwide as long as the station group collectively reaches no more than 39 percent of all U.S. TV households. For the purpose of determining compliance with this National Television Ownership rule, television stations operating on UHF channels (14 and above) are attributed with only half (50 percent) of the number of TV households in the DMA, as opposed to 100 percent of the number of households attributed to stations operating on VHF channels (13 and below). This is known as the UHF Discount. Unlike the rules discussed above, the National Television Ownership rule is no longer subject to the FCC's quadrennial review."

Friday, Ugh

     I spent over two hours in the dentist's chair Friday morning.  Went in for three fillings, came home with four, a numb upper lip and a sore nose, and still had to get to physical therapy in the afternoon.  So you will, I hope, excuse me for not posting on Friday.

Hooray For Breakfast!

      Today, I managed to make it to Good Morning Mama's in time to enjoy their home-made corned beef hash, with a scrambled egg on top.  Between physical therapy and doctor appointments, I have only managed that once before during this extended leave.

     Speaking of doctors--  I've had a minor irritation in my left eye for weeks,  I thought it might be an ingrown eyelash (the ancient Romans, who would pluck an eyelash for luck much as you might knock wood, were so plagued by ingrown eyelashes that the tools to deal with the problem were part of every physician's instruments).  My family doctor, back in July, thought it was more likely an allergy and had me start using over-the-counter allergy-relieving eye drops, but the problem continued and was getting a little worse.  I finally called my eye doctor's office.  They wanted to see me the next day, if not sooner.

     After one of the more awkward eye exams I've had (it's not easy to get a good look at the inside of an eyelid), he told me it was an infection, with a couple of cloudy spots, and phoned in a prescription for steroid-antibiotic eye drops.  Even a single day later, I think they're working.  The infection caused a funny feeling along the edge of my eyelid, like there was a little something in there that wouldn't wash away.  If you get that kind of sensation, don't ignore it even if it's not that bad; it could be something that won't go away on its own.  (And no, it's not eyelash mites gone wild.  Those, the eye specialist tells me, have such distinctive symptoms that they're easy to diagnose.)

Shell Game

     I guess it appeals to a certain kind of mindset: the so-called "mass deportation rally" that was going to be in Fishers....wasn't in Fishers, just north of Marion County.  Instead, the $50-a-head would-be mass-deporters were sent to a parking lot in Greenfield, off to the east of the metro, and from there to a secret location in Boone County, to the northwest.  (After all, fuel is so cheap, what's another hour's drive in the rain?)

     This fancy double-shuffle was apparently because there was a march of about a thousand people in Fishers in support of immigrants.  And I'm not going to condemn anyone for conflict avoidance.  I'd rather have 'em dodging than fighting.  It's way less messy for everyone else.

     But the whole thing seems kind of skeezy, and prerecorded addresses by Micah Beckwith, our religious oddball Lieutenant Governor, and by the always opportunistic more-MAGA-than-thou Attorney General Todd Rokita did nothing to change the impression that the event was mostly a way to separate the credulous from their cash with minimal effort for the people collecting the take.  A lot of skulking around, self-directed Nacht und Nebel to enhance the experience.

     Press coverage was relatively thin, too -- here's the most complete story I have found.

Hair Of The Dog?

      Hair of the dogweed,* maybe?  I spent most of today playing an ultra-cautious version of Hiram Bingham in the back yard, slashing away months of growth an inch at a time along the north fence, where thorny vines and sweet, flowering weedy honeysuckle bushes are threatening to take over.  I carried along a folded thick-paper leaf bag, and when the weeds were trimmed so low I was tempted to bend over, I knelt or sat down instead.

     Did it work?  I got in a warm tub with Epsom salts afterward, did my back exercises before and after, and I'm not unusually sore as I write.  Ask me tomorrow.

     Yesterday, I did a different thing.  Near the fence, my long-abandoned DirecTV dish (standard definition -- the HD feed uses different hardware) has been occupying a driven metal post.  It's never going to be lit back up, since A) it's outmoded and B) through no fault of DirecTV, there's nothing on it I'd want to watch that I can't pick up over the air or stream via the internet.  So I took the dish off the post.  I've wanted to put up a simple vertical antenna† for my ham radio stuff for quite some time, and that post would do nicely.  However, it stuck up nearly five feet above the ground, a lot more than I needed or wanted.

     Swinging a sledgehammer can be hard work.  But it doesn't have to be.  I learned years ago, sinking ground rods, that unless you are John Henry setting out to beat a steam drill, you can let the hammer do most of the work.  Don't swing it!  Lift it, and then guide it down while letting the weight fall.  Yes, whatever you're driving only sinks a fraction an inch when the few pounds of hammer head strikes, but what do you care?  Bring a bottle of water and enjoy the slow thump, thump, thump, eight or ten or a dozen in a row, take a sip and start over.  It took me a couple of hours, off and on, to sink the heavy galvanized tubing until about thirty inches were still above ground, and I wasn't sore afterward.  (All the underground utilities come in from the street and this is behind the house -- "Be sure before you dig" includes hammering stuff into the ground.  If you're not sure, don't do it!)

     There was plenty of time to look around while I did that, which was when I realized the honeysuckle roots and nasty thorn vines were way out of control.  I'm probably going to have to pay someone to dig up those darned honeysuckles: there's no making a shovelful of dirt any lighter or the process any easier on my back, and no matter how close to the ground I trim them, they keep on growing.

     All of these activities go very slowly, and I no longer grab the big toolbox with a wide assortment of tools on my way out the door.  Only what is needed, and if I have to make extra trips, that's fine.  I don't like it, but I like the alternative a lot less.
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*Scrub oak, deadly nightshade, a little poison ivy (but less every year), what I think may be hemlock, and pokeweed.  The latter is poisonous, too; the berries can be squeezed to produce hot-pink ink that dries brown -- but don't lick the pen!  At least the scrub oak isn't poison.  (There's no part of pokeweed that isn't poisonous.  People used to make "poke salad," but it starts with young leaves and requires multiple boilings and rinses.  Your grandmother or great-grandmother knew how to do it safely, but I wouldn't want to try.  There's about a zillion different kinds of tasty, safe greens you can grow and enjoy before turning to that stuff.  Or to commercial iceberg lettuce, but that's another story.)
 
† Specifically, a quarterwave ground plane for the twenty-meter band.  Amazon sells an imported "multiband" vertical that is nothing but a hose-clamped 19-foot telescoping pole on an insulating mount with a balun transformer at the base.  With an antenna tuner and a long coaxial cable feeding it, I suppose it is technically a multi-band antenna, and certainly better than no antenna.  But the telescoping construction means I can shorten it to be resonant at 14 MHz, add ground radials, and have a single-band vertical antenna without having to buy and build all the hardware.  I don't know how well it will work, but the hardware looks adequate and it's an inexpensive experiment.

I'm Not Sure

     I don't know how well I'm recovering from my back problems, or adjusting to them, or whatever I'm supposed to be doing.

     The defect was there all along.  I just set it off, woke it up or irritated it with my efforts at yard work on the last day of May.  It's not going to heal; the bone was always wrong and it's not one a surgeon can fix.  Here it is August, and if I forget and bend over to pick up debris two or three times within a few minutes, I feel it.  The physical therapy exercises make my back hurt, too.

     Am I making progress?  I don't know.  The howl-at-the-Moon pain of the first few weeks hasn't come back, and I am grateful for that, but I can tell it's waiting in the wings, and it makes me timid.  Or maybe just careful.  It's frustrating.

Orb Weaver

      It appears we've got a Golden Orb Weaver spider putting up her nets in various spots around the front porch!

    I was delighted to go outside tonight around sunset, glance to my right, and see a large, yellow-kneed spider in the center of a barely-visible web between a pillar of the porch and the house, right at eye level.  It's a safe spot, to one side of the path from the front door to the step, and I wish her every success.  More spiders means fewer flies; they also put a dent in the June Bug population, but we don't seem to be at any risk of running out of them.

     The local Orb Weavers tend to be neatniks, who string a web for a few days, and then take it down before trying another location.  It's an admirable habit. I have often wondered if Penelope, wife of Odysseus, was modeled on a spider, patiently weaving every day and unpicking her work every night, buying time until her husband returns.  Of course, spiders do have their ways, and for the hero's sake, I hope she's not too much like the spider, or, well, you'd never guess what's for dinner when the clever man finally returns!  Was that why he took so long to get back?