Whiplash! (Cough, Cough, Cough)

     We now know how long "Forever" is in the Trump Administration: less than twenty-four hours.  Day before yesterday, the recent tariffs were going to be in place forever.  The President said so himself, on video.  Yesterday, he tweeted (or Truthed, Tictocked or blarthled or whatever the kids are doing these days) that most of the tariffs were suspended for three months, right then.

     I supposed they're technically still in place during a "suspension."  It was amusing to watch the various department heads and mouthpieces doing their level best to pivot and get the new shade of lipstick on the same tired old pig, but I'm not really up for nearly four more years of this.

     I wasn't really up for a trip to the clinic yesterday, either, but after a couple of episodes in which I couldn't draw breath for a bit, expert advice was needed.  It took something of a wait to get in, and they weren't very impressed with my pulse rate (rapid) or blood pressure (surprise! Or not).  The doc ran the list of my symptoms, from coughing, panting, night sweats, chills, dizziness, screamin' tinnitus, sinus drip, scratchy throat and so on all the way to low blood oxygen levels, then did her listening, poking, peering and prodding.

     "Viral bronchitis," the ultimate paperwork says, adding, "Most...infections last for 2-3 weeks and a post-bronchitic cough can last for 1-2 months." Two to three weeks?  One to two months?  Yikes!

     The doctor told me to keep on with my expectorant pills and acetaminophen, and drink plenty of liquids.  The paperwork adds "...research shows...increased water intake is more effective than a mucolytic...." when it comes to thinning out the thick stuff.  Good to know!  (Hot lemonade or limeade is a good source of liquids when you get tired of tea, just don't make it too strong.  Coffee, well, I love it, but it's not ideal in this application.)

     Antiviral meds for this sort of infection are few to nonexistent, and you have to narrow down which bug.  Conservative treatment addresses symptoms and relies on the tincture of time.*  So I have a witch's brew of a steroid (to calm the inflammation that's keeping my lungs full), a non-narcotic drug that sings the stretch sensors in the lungs to sleep so I don't hurt and can cough intentionally rather than getting ambushed, and a rescue inhaler.  The drugstore had the first two ready in a trice but the inhaler had to wait.  I managed to arrange for delivery, but I have already needed it three times and not had it, between last night and this morning.  Should be here in the next few hours.  I'm already short-tempered and I am mustering awareness that the steroid can turn me into an utter jerk, in the hope of mitigating the effect.

     Did the dishes just now -- three mugs, a glass, a bowl, a small skillet and some silverware -- and found I had to go sit down for awhile to catch my breath.  That's how annoying this is.
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* The doctor's secret is that many of the ills that affect us will run their due course in a healthy person, and the best way to address them is to ensure the symptoms don't beat the patient up while their body is fending off the aliment: the job of the physician is keeping the patient going while the tincture of time does the actual healing.  We've got cures for many diseases now, and time alone won't fix, say, a broken leg, but the best doctors I have known were keenly aware that time was the healer and they were there to help matters along.  --And that patients could be counted on to get in the way; but that's another story, about why Doc K envied veterinarians, whose patients couldn't talk back or scare themselves sicker looking up symptoms on WebMD. 

But About Me

     I can't fix the collapsing world economy, but after passing another lousy night complete with waking up panting, sweat-soaked, ears ringing a tune to the rhythm of my fast-hammering heart, I am going to try to get to the clinic today.  I think the deciding event was the breath I tried to draw that didn't work until I panicked, coughed and hacked my airway clear and beat my target pulse rate.

     Doctor stuff frustrates and annoys me.  I have very little dignity and they want to take away every scrap of it.  But there's a time to admit defeat.

     It is -- and you may read this as widely or as narrowly as you like -- it is never too late to realize you've been stubbornly sticking to a tactic or a plan that's not working, give up on it and try something else.

Wasted Day

     I was determined to get on the downhill side of this cold today.  Got up, had a sketchy breakfast, showered, took one of the twelve-hour OTC expectorant pills I had ordered and took Huck to the vet for his arthritis shot.

     Drove back home and had nothing left.  Nothing.  I called in sick, laid down and dozed off.  Woke a couple of hours later, made easy Eggs Pomodoro (a strip and a half of peppered bacon, fried and set aside; canned plain tomato sauce with the run of the spice cabinet: "Italian mix," basil, diced minced onion, garlic, chives, parsley, a little celery salt, a half-dozen wasabi peas for zing: crumble the bacon in, get it simmering, break three eggs into it, add a little diced cheese to the yolks -- I break 'em, YMMV -- and save the rest for serving), ate it and felt like a well-used washcloth again.  I laid down, dozed off while posting something silly on social media, and woke up twenty minutes later, panting like I'd tried to run a mile.  It took several minutes to catch my breath.  I felt chilled, and dozed off and on under the covers with a heating pad.

     That was six hours ago.  Tam woke me at dinner time (a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for me, and that may have been too much).  I finally gathered enough wits to stick an oximeter on my finger: 92% with activity, flirting with the "maybe go see a doctor" level.  Which I will, if I still feel this lousy tomorrow.  Might be dancing around something ugly.  I'm still breathing like a bad imitation of Darth Vader in a housedress.  "Luke...I am your grandma!"
"No....!" [Lets go and falls away.]
Rats, and I had even baked cookies.  Ungrateful child.

Insightful Analysis

     It would be lovely to give you insightful analysis about what's going to happen to the economy next, but after the way this cold kicked me around yesterday, I don't have any.  I barely made it home from work, and crawled into bed as soon as I could change into a nightgown.

     And after fifty-some years of working for wages, mostly hourly, I'm about that optimistic about the economy.  Every time I have gotten a little bit ahead, either the politicians stagger into a war or they and/or their big-business friends get to tinkering, pull the wrong cord, and whatever gains I have made get mostly wiped out.  In 1980, I had a decent job and I was buying an older house in a kind of artsy neighborhood.  In 2025, I'm in the same position -- only the 1980 house was a duplex, and I could usually rent out one side of it for what I needed to make the house payments.

     Oh, time marches on; the big anchor stores a couple blocks away from that first house -- a local grocery chain (Ross), a pharmacy (maybe a Rexall?) and an oversized five-and-dime (Zayre) -- closed not long after the city took out the bridge that had connected that neighborhood to a nearby college, and spent multiple years replacing it.  I had long since moved away, and a good thing, too: the area hit the skids and has never recovered.

     Meanwhile, the fat-cats and pols who were in charge through wars and recessions, gas-price crunches and downturns are still there, or their kids are.  They'll be all right.  You and me?  It remains to be seen.

Still Sick

     Last night was considerably less miserable than the night before and I have every reason to believe the trend will continue.

     The economy's got a cold, too, and perhaps today is the day we find out if it is only a cold or devastating influenza.  The stock market, here and elsewhere, is a useful if imperfect proxy for economic health, and...  Um.  It's not looking so good.  Time will tell, and only a bad person or a lunatic would wish for a crash.

But What A Cold It Is

     Holy cow, what a cold.  I was pretty puny yesterday, temperature up and down, fuzzy-headed, but I managed to make a nice breakfast omelet, and much later, heat up some chicken soup for supper.

     The fun started when I went to bed.  I hit the hay early and alternated between freezing, burning up, having to clear my sinuses so I could breathe and needing to tinkle.  Along about two this morning, I woke up soaking with sweat and feeling an urgent need to head down the hall -- if only I could remember which way to turn!  It's literally five steps from my room to the smallest room.  It should not be a challenge.

     Once there, unfastening the fluffy robe I had fallen asleep wearing over a flannel nightgown was almost too difficult to do: two simple shoelace-type bows, pull on a free end and knot falls apart.  I finally figured it out.  It was about that point when I realized I had a dangerously high temperature.  But hey, no hallucinations, so still okay.  Just a quart low on brains.  I managed to take care of what needed taking care of, including swapping the sweat-wet nightgown for a dry one, and made it back to bed.  The next time I woke, I felt more clear-headed than I had in some time.

     Clear-headed but beat up and dragged through a knothole: I hurt all over.  I still do.  I was awake and asleep several times, and the last time I started feeling overheated, I got out the thermometer: 99.5°F.  No telling how high it was earlier except I start seeing things around 104, so it never got that high.

     This is a lousy cold.

And Now I Have A cold

     It was inevitable.  This one comes with aches, runny nose, scratchy throat and a productive cough.  I'm going back to bed.

It's Good For You

     Tam's been fighting a cold and yesterday, it was pretty bad.  So I made chicken soup.

     Thursday is Trash Night, when we change all the litter boxes, gather up all the trash, and get it out to the curb for Friday morning pickup.  We usually order pizza, to avoid time spent cooking and cleaning up the kitchen.  To make matters worse, I worked over.

     But canned chicken soup is--  Well, it's good enough and some brands are better.  Still, for full effect, home made chicken soup is best.

     I compromised.  The neighborhood grocer had diced fresh white onion in deli containers, about a third of a cup, and snack-sized celery right next to it.  A small bag of baby carrots rounded out the vegetables.  They had nice, big chicken drumsticks in the hot deli counter, too, so I got four of them.  Noodles were going to be time-consuming, but Pacific brand chicken soup has lots of nice, broad noodles.  I picked up a 16-ounce can of soup and an eight-ounce container of chicken broth.

     Once home, I didn't want to fiddle around too much.  I heated up about a teaspoon of good olive oil in the medium stock pot, dumped the onion in and gave it a couple of shakes to coat.  The baby carrots were skinny enough to snip with kitchen shears right over the pot (no cutting board!) and once they were in and cooking, I gave the celery the same treatment.  I followed with the chicken.  It's a little tricky, but the meat snips right off, skin and all.  By the time I finished the last one. the onion was translucent and the carrots and celery had brightened up.  I poured the can of soup over, added the broth, put in a shake of Bragg's seasoning mix, gave it a stir, put the lid on and went about setting up for supper.  Ten minutes later, we were enjoying big, hearty bowls of not quite homemade chicken soup, loaded with fresh vegetables and roasted chicken.

     No, it's not as quick as using the phone or computer to summon food.  It's not as quick as opening a can and heating it up.  But it's not that much slower, and it's better for you.  It's a lot faster than doing the whole thing from scratch, and while I didn't simmer the broth down for hours, the profit-minded hippies at the soup company did, or at least used some process with the same end result.  And the deli roasts chicken as well as anyone.  If I'd had more time, I would have thrown the drumsticks in whole for a half hour, then taken the meat off and put the bones back in to simmer with the broth; but sometimes you have to choose your degree of difficulty and the end result was a healing treat on a busy night.

"What's In The Box?"

     The title of this post is a line from Dune.  The young hero (or is he?) Paul is about to undergo a test meant, "To determine if you're human," if he can deal rationally with fear.  What's in the box is pain.

     America's economy -- the global economy -- has been handed a box, too.  We don't know what's in it.  The President and his advisors who devised our new tariffs say it's full of wonders.  Many highly-qualified economists say it's full of pain.  The history of tariffs is, at best, alarming; the Smoot-Hawley tariffs didn't cause the Great Depression, but the general consensus is they made it worse.

     What's in the box?  We'll find out -- and you can bet none of the higher-ups in Washington will feel any pain, including the spineless Congress that has, once again, dodged responsibility by handing the Executive a power, in this case taxation, normally reserved to the Legislative branch.  The power to declare war, they abrogated that long ago; the power to make laws is ebbing, what with Executive Orders now being treated as if they were laws; impoundment of allocated funds and the imposition of "emergency" tariffs cede the power of the purse.

     Anyone with an eye to Classical history can tell you that the Emperor of Rome didn't spring forth full-fledged, but by the gradual accretion of powers and responsibilities once held by the Senate and people of Rome and their various Executives to the office of Emperor.  The framers of the U. S. Constitution were wary of such a thing happening in their new republic, and did their best to hedge against it.  Did they do enough?

     What's in the box?

Quick Dinner

     Last night, I wanted something easy for supper.  I'd had a lousy day and I didn't have much energy.  Our corner grocery often has fresh vegetables and a basic seasoning, bagged up and ready to microwave.  Last night, their "mixed vegetables with Tuscan butter" was front and center, a collection of green and yellow zucchini, pea pods, broccoli, cauliflower, onion, asparagus and shredded carrots with a dollop of seasoned butter.  There's a bit over a pound per bag.

     It's a good assortment and "Tuscan" had me thinking.  I picked up a container of fresh cherry tomatoes, a 16-oounce container of quality red sauce (Michael's of Brooklyn "Homestyle Gravy," which we here in the Midwest know as spaghetti sauce with everything, the full garden of vegetables, cooked down) and a little under a pound of mild Italian sausage.

     This is not the cheapest collection of stuff, but it's still far less than dining out or ordering in.  I browned and drained the sausage with some extra spices, adding a generous double-handful of chopped cherry tomatoes after draining.  I ran the bagged vegetables in the microwave while that cooked, adding the sauce to the meat and tomatoes after a few minutes.  With the pan bubbling, I put in the vegetables (leaving any excess melted seasoned butter in the bag), covered it and let it simmer for a few more minutes -- but not long enough for the vegetables to get mushy.

     The end result has enough sauce to coat everything but not drown the other ingredients.  You could have it over pasta if you wanted to, but we didn't.  Tam even went back for seconds!  Total time was around fifteen minutes and it will easily serve four or five adults.  We had leftovers.

In Which I Address Fools

     An unpublished commenter has chided me. "The right to an education isn't a real right," they claim, leading into a basic explanation of the difference between positive rights (requiring some action on the part of others) and negative rights (requiring only that others refrain from interfering).

     It's all stuff no one who was awake and paying attention over the last 30-odd years could have possibly missed, especially if they inclined to libertarian or even conservative views.  It's also not the point.  Free public schools exist; our taxes fund them.  Speaking as a childless homeowner (Indiana school funding comes from property taxes), I would just as soon live in a world with fewer ignorant children left with plenty of idle time to get up to trouble and I'll pay money to get it.  Like it or not, free universal public education through Grade 12 is how it works.

     If Billy, who was born here but whose parents came from elsewhere and Ramon, who was born here and whose ancestors came here before the Civil War, one of them on the Mayflower, both get a free education, but Billy's big sister Daphne, who was born in the old country before Mumsie and Daddy sneaked across the Canadian frontier, does not, that's pretty plainly bullshit -- especially when Vladimir and Valerie, children of legal immigrants, one born in Undershirtistan and the other here, both attend the same public schools, free for nothing.

     One of the biggest problems with this exclusion is it amounts to punishment of a child for the offenses of their parents -- while Billy and Daphne's parents are presumably still some sort of scofflaws,* little Daphne had no choice in the matter.  In Indiana, this is known as "corruption of the blood," and our state Constitution specifically forbids it.  You can lecture me about it all day, but it's still there, in black and white.  It's got antecedents that go right back to the Old Testament, for that matter.
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* Or possibly not; there are a number of paths, now and in the past, that might let 'em stay here under various sorts of residency.  And just how a law barring children of "illegals" from public education might apply to those situations is unknown and untested.  It's nice that attorneys have a chance to earn a living finding this stuff out, but we don't owe them the opportunity.