Hooray, Hoo... Oops?

      Got my FMLA paperwork today,* which is good.  It's got me covered through my next ortho doctor's appointment.

     Then I read on down, seeing which boxes are ticked.  Like this one: "Due to the condition, incapacity is permanent or long term and requires the continuing supervision of a health care provider (...)."

     Yeah.  See, per the specialist, my back was never right, and having been riled up once,† from here on it's a matter of managing it.  I'm not a candidate for any kind of hardware (or knifework, and I'm happy about that), but I will never again dance the maskirovka while balancing a 25-pound sack of potatoes on my head.  Or is it dance the mashed potatoes while balancing a 11.34-kilogram matryoshka?  It doesn't matter, they're both out.  Along with some other stuff.  I'm going to have to go a little slower and more carefully now.  If they'll let me.

     Guess I need to save up for a lightweight telescoping ladder.  That ham antenna isn't going to fix itself.
___________________
* Wait, I'm in the Five-Meter Liberation Army now?
 
† Unfortunately for me, they've got X-rays from 2021 to compare the current set to, and things have, in fact, moved a measurable amount, no squinting required.  I'm not gonna be able to BS my way out of this and take more Tylenol to cover, the way I do with most migraines.  It's spondylolisthesis, which until last month, I thought was the name of a general who marched an army out of Greece and fought the Persians to a faretheewell. 

Status Report

     I am in sufficient pain and of such restricted mobility that my temper has no fuse at all.  Every minor annoyance or household mishap triggers anger bordering on rage.  This is nothing I am proud of.  It's annoying.  It's embarrassing.

     One of those remote-grabby things is on its way to me, along with a front-porch delivery of bottled water.  I have a 24-pack, but it's in the back hatch of my car, on the far side of the garage, and I can no more carry it in than I could fly.  Getting those should help with some of the frustration: I'll be able to pick things up from the floor without a heart-pounding series of scary moves to get down to floor level and, far worse, back up.  And Indianapolis city water is nothing to write home about.  It's okay fresh out of the tap but carries the faintest aroma of wet dog after it sits a spell.  (It has been this way for years, no matter how well our reservoirs are doing.  Is it that hint of canal water?  The scattering of city wells?  Some purifying chemical or process?  Our water company draws on a variety of sources and they do honest work, but it's a bulk business, not a boutique bottler.  It's clean water and plenty of it.)

     Just took the second muscle relaxer pill and the first anti-inflammatory.  The latter is some turbocharged prescription-only relative of naproxen, so I had to wait for the previous dose of aspirin to time out; you can't take both at the same time.  Fortunately, acetaminophen is still okay, and I'm watching the clock for my next dose.  Such excitement!

     First commenter to suggest horse-paste, moxibustion or a chiropractor gets punched in the face as soon as I'm feeling better.

Naw

      Why beat a dead horse?  Look, I'm just worried that we've got people headed out for a trip aound the Moon in one of the dumbest times in U. S. history, and the bulging brains in Washington are gonna decide trigonometry or calculus is too "woke" and then smash 'em into Earth or the Moon by trying to get some slop-ass AI to do the trajectory calculations and issue course corrections.

     "Yes, I see what I did wrong there and it was of course an error to send the Orion in on a straight ballistic reentry and delay parachute deployment by five minutes to get a better photo op, but you have to admit, it looked beautiful in the moments before it impacted the water at seven miles a second and broke apart.  I'll be sure to be more careful next time."

Lost Keys

     I stopped at the store on my way home last night, to pick up a little supper and this and that.  It was around seven p.m., dark and near 25°F.

     A chicken salad sandwich, some sliced deli ham and a bag of coffee beans for later, I was back at my car, reaching for my...  No car keys.

     After misplacing keys for years, I started keeping my house and work keys on a lanyard, clipped to my purse with a little clip like a double carabiner.  My car key and its ring go on the same clip.  Sometimes I fumble it, and it ends up jumbled in my purse.

     I did a quick dig-through in the main compartment of my purse.  Nothing.  I looked over the area around my car, very carefully.  Nothing.

     Back into the store, eyes on the sidewalk and floor.  Nothing.  I retraced my steps through the place.  Nothing.  I found a quiet corner and checked through my purse again, as well as I could without emptying it.  Still nothing.

     I let the manager know I had lost a key, in case someone turned it in, and texted Tam: Lost my car key.  Walking home.

     It's a brisk walk in good weather, several blocks.  In the dark and cold, it's lousy.  Still, I was layered up under a warm coat and I had my heavy gloves; any more, I carry a pair of thin, nice-looking leather gloves for working keys and doorknobs, and windproof motorcycle gauntlets for when  I don't need to do fine manipulation.

     Switching to the warm gloves and settling my hat firmly on my head, I set out for home.  It's not much of a hat, a beat-up denim gardening hat with a wide brim, but it's better than nothing.  Double-time up the alley to the next street north, where a gust of wind blew my hat off as soon as I rounded the corner.

     I managed to grab it before it got away and tightened up the chinstrap.  It quickly became clear that I was well-bundled -- except for my ears.  They got cold and stayed cold, but as long as I could still feel them, they were okay, right?  Step, step step.  I kept moving.

     As I approached Roseholme Cottage, a tall person was coming towards me, all bundled up, moving purposefully.  Closer, closer....  Tamara!  "Where you headed?"

     "The store!  I don't want to have to report your car missing."

     "Do you have the spare key?"

     She frowned at me.  "No."

     "I'll get it and catch up."

     "We still have to find your key."

     She was right.  I headed on home.  Tam went the other way.

     At the house, I put groceries away, spoke to the cats, and, as a last resort, dumped my purse out on the bed.  No keys.  I checked through my purse just to make sure and at the bottom of the open compartment where I keep a couple of spiral notebooks for work and two sets of clip-on sunglasses (also cough drops, a pocket rule and a magnifying glass; don't judge), there was a key-shaped lump.  It was wedged into a corner.  And yes, it was my car key.  Oh.

     I texted Tam, Found it, grabbed a fleece ear-warmer and a knit muffler, got coat and gloves together and set out again, quick as I could march.  I was facing the wind part of the time and it wasn't fun, but the added insulation kept it from being entirely miserable.  My bad knee was throbbing slightly, but, hey, what's a little exercise?

     Tam was headed out of the store as I headed in.  I asked, "Did you get my text?"

     "No."

     "I, uh, found my key."

     She gave me a Look.

     "Thank you for your help!"

     "I didn't do anything."

     "Hey, moral support.  It counts."  It does, too.  I hadn't been looking forward to the cold walk back to my car, and even less so to having a car key floating around in the great unknown.  We got in my car and returned home uneventfully, me to dinner and Tam back to her warm bed.

I Took A Break

     I am finishing up a week of intensive training on some fancy hardware for work, and it hasn't left a lot of energy for anything else.  It's been a long time since I last had this kind of "brain upload," both easier (no tests!) and more demanding (a lot of highly specific information in a very short time) than a college-level class.

     A fair amount of my education has come this way.  There's a lot to be learned -- if you pay attention.

---

     On politics, I don't have any insights.  I'm just watching it like everyone else.  For me it's like being a block away, watching two trains headed towards one another, unable to prevent the crash, hardly able to look away and wondering if I'm far enough back to avoid personal harm.  Probably not.  Probably none of us are.  Maybe it's an illusion, maybe the crash won't happen, but "maybe" is nowhere good enough.

Is This America In 2025?

     Committee To Protect Journalists: "Trump’s first 100 days portend long-lasting damage to press freedom."  More than mere portents.

     New York Post, and a zillion other news outlets: "President Trump is set to receive a “flying palace” Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet from Qatar’s royal family, which he will use as Air Force One." But don't worry, folks, DOJ says it's totally not a violation of the Emoluments Clause and couldn't possibly be mistaken for a bribe -- even though it's entailed to be donated to Mr. Trump's Presidential Library after it's done serving as Air Force One.  Just a fill-in until Boeing finishes the real replacement Air Force One, some time in...well, it's way overdue and they aren't sure.

     ICE agents making raids with their faces and badges covered -- or no badges at all; the Executive Branch wanting to suspend habeas corpus; gold and more gold in the Oval Office; FEMA trimmed down to almost nothing; cranks and quacks running HHS and subsidiary agencies.  What are we doing?  What are we allowing to be done?

Drat That Infection

     Tam and I both fought viral bronchitis and I have to say, too many more victories like this and we will be undone.  We're both struggling to get back to the lung capacity we had before it struck.  I can't speak for her but I tire easily at present and I get foggier when I am tired.

     I struggled to finish manuscript critiques for the writer's group I chair, and then I discovered I've run the black ink tank dry on my color printer.  I still have the big, fancy all-black laser printer, at least, so I got everything printed out.  The highlighting doesn't work quite as well, but it should do.

"TDS"

     Of course I've been accused of "hating Donald Trump," with the implication that I have taken some unthinking personal dislike to the man, sneering at how he combs his hair or ties his necktie.*

     Yeah, no.  I think he's a lousy boss; he's certainly got all the hallmarks of every bad boss I have ever had, and none of the behaviors of good ones.  But Presidents don't necessarily need to be super-duper bosses.  We've had some real assholes in the job who did it well enough.

     My problem with him is he's not a very good President.  He doesn't delegate well and he dodges responsibility.  He makes decisions I think are poor, from contradicting his own subject-matter experts to ignoring issues of Constitutionality and legality when undertaking Presidential actions.  (Sorry, President Nixon, but things are not presumptively legal just because a President does them, and you can tell your pal, the odious Woodrow Wilson, that the U. S. Supreme Court, James Madison and I said so.)

     As for the man, I think he is more to be pitied than loathed.  He appears to me to be deeply insecure.

    As President, he's going to break something you value; he has let Elon Musk and Mr. Musk's minions rummage around in the system that issues individual income tax refunds and Social Security payments and nobody appears to know what they're up to.  I don't know if that's where the fed.gov writes checks for Army bullets, Air Force jet fighters and Navy submarines, but I sure hope not.  That's not TDS.  It's not even PDS.  It's me, with my usual lack of trust in anybody in some sort of authority, looking with alarm at alarming behavior.  All U. S. Presidents are Just Some Guy, and all of them are capable of screwing up the job very badly.  It's not deranged to keep an eye on 'em, and to point out when they're messing up even worse than is usual for the office.
_______________________
* Let us distinguish between the questionable sartorial choices and oddball behavior of Presidents on the one hand and how they actually do the job on the other.  Tan suits, weird ties, goofy jogging outfits, press conferences while on the john, bitey pets or ugly kids do not actually matter.  Running the Executive branch and avoiding civil disruption and unnecessary war matters.  Mr. Trump doesn't have a real good record on civil disorder both Left and Right, especially compared to his last several predecessors from both parties, and he seems to be working on the second.

So, Yeah

     Yesterday, I managed to get moved out of my old desk at work, took the darned thing apart (because I'm in the Engineering Department, and we do that), picked the parts for a "new" desk (adjustable-height, because apparently that is now what we do), moved the parts of the old desk out of the way, moved the new one in, added a power strip (not standard because, I don't know, it's 1890 and we don't have any electronic gadgets on our desks?) and moved all of my stuff back into and onto it, with the remainder relegated to a couple of large plastic bins.

     This had to get done because the boss needs half the space of the (under-occupied) shared tech desk area to set up a big project, and I'm off all next week when that project begins.

     Today, I completed a story, which came in at a bloated 8200 words, and trimmed it to 7230 before sending it out to get looked over.  This is still too long but it's as much as I could manage today.

     I even got some laundry done, just like a grown-up.

Worrisome

     When I go to the home-improvement store and I am looking around in the lumber section, the last thing I want to be smelling is woodsmoke.

Border Fence Issues

      The border of my back yard, that is.  There's a nice double gate, where the previous owner kept his fishing boat in the back yard, with heavy 6x6 posts holding each half of the gate.

     At least one of them -- and the 4x4 two feet from it that helps hold up a little stretch of privacy fence -- was not quite as pest-proof as could have been hoped.  Last winter (or would it be winter before last?), that half of the gate fell over, and I propped it back up.  I spent most of last summer trying, off and on, to find a fence company who would replace it for less than the price of a well-used car, and had no success.

     It broke again in the storms a few days ago, and took the 4x4 post with it.  I'm about halfway through putting in a replacement that should do for a few months, and I'll just have to see what I can do or hire done from there.

     So, let's see, that's a large gate and a little fence, plus a bad post or two in the neighbor's fence that they're not going to fix (it's a rental now), a dead dishwasher, a lousy garbage disposal and a very worn kitchen range.  Yeah, I'm doing great at home ownership.  And it's time and past for a new coat of paint.

     A massive advance on an uncompleted novel being unlikely, I'm probably going to have to dip into savings.

I'm Exhausted

     The cold has mostly passed but I'm worn out.  The next few days, I'm going to concentrate on trying to catch up.  I lost over a week of planned work around the house, and a couple of days of paying work.  It's going to take some time to only be normally behind on things.

New Year, New Start

      It's a whole new year.  Let's see if we can get this one right -- push back against the bullies, encourage debate on the issues instead of emotions and keep looking for facts no matter where they lead instead of picking the most comfy opinions to lie on.

      And for pity's sake, let's get together with the other civilized nations and figure out how to stuff a cork in Putin's ambitions.  Waging wars of aggression was supposedly what the UN was set up to stop.  If it's not doing that job -- and it certainly hasn't so far with this one -- the countries that care about peace need figure out something better.*
________________________________
* Vlad, no stranger to history, seems to have taken a different lesson from WW II than most people.  The Allies won based on two things: the immense natural, industrial and scientific resources of the U.S., Canada and the UK plus the USSR's willingness to throw soldiers at the German army.  (The Soviets lost between 8.6 and 11.5 million military personnel, while the U.S., Canada and the UK together barely broke 800,000.)  His actions imply that he believes the West will run out of willingness to provide materiel support to Ukraine, from food to infrastructure to weapons, before Russia runs out of fighters.  Is he right?  I hope not; but even more, I'm hoping somebody on the anti-Russia side is taking an orthogonal approach -- and that enough people within Russia decide it's time to reshuffle their government before it gets even worse.

I'm Not Facing The End Of Whatever Without Coffee

      I don't know about you, but the pandemic-driven shortages prompted me to up my food (etc.)-to-keep game.  Thanks to my Mom's good example, I always did keep some pantry items stocked, enough for a week or more.  These days, it's more like a month, though it would run pretty heavily to rice, beans, pasta and tomato-based entrees supplemented by canned meat, once the fresh and frozen food ran out.

      There are a few things I stock in depth these days and other than paper goods, they tend to be semi-luxuries.  Fancy butter, whole-bean coffee, "raw" sugar (it's not that raw) and coffee creamer: I keep well away from running out.  While I sincerely hope and expect that things won't get too terrible, when it comes to coffee and butter, I'd just as soon hedge my bets.

I Tried

      The never-ending din of plain wretched news -- war in Europe, dysfunctional U. S. politics, ongoing bad weather (can't call it climate without starting an argument) and so on left me with nothing to say Monday, especially given that the day started with ongoing worry over our sick neighbor, who I'd been unable to reach at all Sunday.

      At least she resurfaced late Monday morning, possibly after another minor misadventure: it's difficult to be physically frail, and a lot more so if you're unwilling to admit it.  The moral dilemma involved for others is acute: if someone can (barely) get along by themselves and they refuse help, at what point is a well-meaning bystander obliged to step in?  Where are the lines between pushy meddling, kindly helping, letting people have as much independence as they can hang onto and craven indifference?  I don't know; they're not easily drawn except at the extremes.

      Much the same could be said of national and global affairs, though at least there I can take a certain cold comfort in my own relative powerlessness: I'm voting with votes and economic choices for the future I want -- but the future we'll get will the be result of everyone's choices.  That's a lot easier to face than someone in deep trouble right down the block, but it's got the potential to be every bit as grim.

1930s All Over Again

      It gets to be too much.  It feels like I'm living in the 1930s, a Doc Savage story or something, only without the Man of Bronze, without the radio dramas or pulp magazines, no soda fountains or amazing technical advances in radio, none of the good stuff.  Just the quack medicine and worrying disease outbreaks, just the economic uncertainty, cynical political demagogues, bloody-handed dictators and a horrifying civic hunger for authoritarianism.

      Some days, it's all I can do to cope with it.  It feels as if the world is going crazy.

      (In the original posting, I left out the thing we've got now they didn't have in the 1930s: the threat of thermonuclear war!  Yes, we don't have dirigibles any more, but we've got the nukes.  Ain't progress wonderful?)

Can't Find It

      Arrived home last night to discover I didn't have the garage door opener remote.  My purse has a pocket that just fits it, and it's normally either there or in the center console of my car.*  I hadn't used it Friday morning because Tam and I left at the same time.

      Thursday night, I had messed around, bringing in a new piece of home-made furniture for my room along with my briefcase and lunchbox.  I'm pretty sure I put the opener in its special pocket then.  Friday morning, I managed to capsize my purse in the back seat of my car, dumping out my cell phone and a pen.   Repeated car and garage searches haven't turned it up.  It might have fallen out at work; the noise level at the North Campus is so high that I wouldn't have heard it.   If it doesn't turn up at home, I'll go up there and check.

      This is annoying.  I started using the former flip-phone pocket of my purse for the garage door remote after misplacing it a couple of times; I gave up the flip-phone when AT&T started to become restive about me walking around with a 3G cellular phone and making noises about sticking me with some ugly replacement.  The cheapest iPhone was a much better option, and integrates seamlessly with my other Apple devices.

      But it doesn't help at all with finding that darned remote.  It may be time for a garage door system.
_________________________
* The center console only at work, where I'm parked behind locked gates.

Blogging

      It is more and more difficult to find anything to write about  that hasn't already been beat to death.  Those dead horses aren't going to rise again.  I, on the other hand, need to go get dug in.

      So I will.

I'm Tired

      Think I'll go back to bed.

I Thought This Roller-Coaster Ride Was Ending

     Here we are again, headed uphill with the ratchet going tick, tick, tick....  Indiana is back under stronger coronavirus preventative measures (although no "lockdowns") as of the coming weekend.

     Here's why:

From https://www.coronavirus.in.gov/

     I'd ask my friends and acquaintances who were saying, "This virus stuff will all end after the election," how this can be, but most of them have headed off to their own bubbles, whatever new variations of social media are currently popular among the folks who took being fact-checked or banned as a mark of pride rather than evidence of poor research or clumsy presentation.  Of course, the problem with bubbles is that eventually you'll stifle in there, unless something large and sharp pops the thing.

     It doesn't look like this bug is going away just yet, and that sucks.