He's A Biter

      Holden still can't grasp that his adoptive mommies are relatively fragile.  He sits on the typewriter shelf of my desk, and if he thinks he's not getting enough attention, he'll bite me.

     Flinching doesn't help.  Scolding doesn't help register with him.  So I've started crying, as soon as I feel the little cat teeth.  I pull away before he can get a good nip. put my head down and sob, in as heartfelt a way as I can.

     And that works.  He'll either start smoothing on me or go into clown mode, rolling and grabbing at small items on the desk, very much, "I'm playing!  See?  See how amusing I am?  Please stop crying!"

     I just started a few days ago.  We'll see if the lesson sticks.

It's Labor Day

     Anymore, I'm not all that sure what we mean by "labor," and to what extent a Federal holiday to celebrate it means anything.  Sure, sure, both big political parties will tell you they're the party of the working man (and, occasionally, woman) and the other guys are the party of the "elites," moneyed and/or intellectual.  Socialists and Communists and Labor -- and far-Right -- parties overseas will make similar claims (usually around May first in most countries, and you can ask the Communists to explain that one).

     But as a species, we don't actually like work all that much, and given a chance in literature or art to side with a sweat-of-his-brow farmer or the barbarian who shows up to steal from him or worse, a lot of people prefer Conan to the plodder behind the plow -- and we admire Tom Sawyer, half-covertly, and think the peers he gulls into doing his fence-painting are saps.  We keep coming up with ways to dodge even intellectual work; Socrates was none too sure about literacy and writing things down, fearing it would weaken memory and devalue being present in the moment, and we've kept on cheating -- log tables, printing presses with moveable type, typewriters, word processors, abacuses, slide rules, calculators, photography, computers, and now A.I.: forget tractors, why do the heavy gray-matter lifting when you can build a machine to do it for you?

     And yet -- we do still have gardeners, farmers, stonemasons, poets, singers, miners, men and women toiling in the kitchen or on the assembly line.  One of them might be able to do the work of ten of Socrates' students (or their wives or servants), but work they do.  (Alas, genius still resists force-multipliers; we don't get ten Greek philosophers of the price of one).

     Labor still matters.  It shouldn't be disparaged, not scrubbing floors or unpacking the mysteries of subatomic physics.  We must, still, work, and it's probably built right into our genes, long-haul hunter-gathers who stumbled out of Africa, ganging up to harvest tasty megafauna and sweet, sweet berries, singing before they went and telling each other stories about it afterward.

The Spider

     It's not a metaphor.  A large Orb Weaver has set up shop in our side yard, between one wall of Roseholme Cottage and a skinny wooden post for the temporary fence around the tree-smashed house south of us.

     I noticed her weeks ago, initially with a medium-large web between one of the pillars holding up the roof of our porch and the front wall of the house.  A gold-kneed Orb Weaver!  She'd weave a new web every evening, seine the air all night and take it down each morning.  A few days later, I blundered into an anchor strand in broad daylight between our house and the wreck of our neighbors, and didn't give it much thought.

     Thursday, Tam and I were taking the trash can to the curb.  The usual division of labor is that she wheels the bin and I stand watch;* it's large and heavy.  Even though it has wheels, it's an awkward thing and there are plenty of places to take a fall between the back yard and the curb out front.

     Tamara was in the lead, puffing with effort, and came to an abrupt stop.  "Uh-oh!"

     "What is it?  Are you okay?"  Our normal route follows the narrow sidewalk to the south of the house.  After the tree fell and was rapidly cleared up by a team of a half-dozen men, the usual bumps and little hollows were supplemented by more of the same, and they're big enough to catch a wheel.

     She paused before saying, "There's a huge spiderweb!"

     I walked around her, flashlight on.  There was indeed a huge spiderweb, at least a yard across and about five feet high, supported by a very heavy diagonal of silk from our gutter to a foot above the base of one of the neighbor's fence posts.  It was neatly signed with a white squiggle, and at the very center, a large, light-brown spider with pale knees, half again as big as last seen.  The fishing must be good.

     Tam was unhappy.  She's uncomfortable with spiders, especially big ones.  You know how some people who are nervous around cats or dogs seem to attract them?  She's like that for spiders.  If a spider's going to screw up rappelling, she's who it will fall on, panicked.  "We can't go this way."

     I like spiders.  They catch and eat noxious bugs, and often perform fancy dances (ever watch a zebra spider hunt?  They leap and spin like a cartoon ninja!) or weave elaborate nets in the process.  "I'll take the trash around the other side of the house," I said, "if you'll open the gate on that side."  I took the bin from her, backed it up and got it turned around, and horsed the heavy thing through the long detour.

     Once we'd got the bin to the curb, I went around to the south to see the spider and her web from the other side.  Her abdomen is marked with a pattern like snake scales, with a paler + right in the center.  She didn't seem to mind the attention -- an annoyed Orb Weaver will start to bob up and down while holding on to the web until the whole thing is rippling; they'll let you know when you're in the way.  I didn't want to spoil her fishing by getting too close.  The web is one of the largest I've seen in years, truly impressive work.

     When Tamara and I returned from our morning walk right before sunrise today, I had another look.  The anchor strand is still there, a good sign she still considers that spot her patch -- but she'd taken the web down.  There's plenty of room to walk under the anchor at the high end.

     I guess we've got a new helper!  Around here, the Orb Weavers usually fish a spot for a few weeks and then move on, folding their nets and slipping away.
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* While this may seem unfair, on Trash Day I clean out the fridge and change two of the three litterboxes, and usually buy the pizza as well.  It evens out.

Radium Water! Now -- With Vitamins!

      The thing about "A.I." is that there's a lot of smoke over very little fire -- and every coat-tail riding grifter and half-baked amateur futurist is emitting their own clouds, huddled over the flames and seeing the Promised Land (or at least a fat bank account) in their glow.

     The latest comes from the very top: the current administration in Washington, DC* is pushing a "golden age of science" built around applying A.I. to, well, everything.  Exactly how anyone is supposed to do actual science -- which is based on working out the actual facts about actual things and ideas -- using a tool that has a great and apparently inherent tendency to just make up plausible bullshit, no one can say.  In practice, it hasn't worked out, and the scientific journals have the same problem with specious A.I-generated article as fiction publishers do with A.I. dross that falls short of human efforts (and takes several pages to do so†), and the same problem with made-up A.I. citations as the legal profession.

     A.I. doesn't create new stuff; it uses the old stuff we already knew to create patterns of plausible stuff.  It may be able to pick out patterns in data that elude humans, too; but those results must be evaluated very carefully by subject-matter experts to determine what's real and what is only another "hallucination."  A.I. fools us in much the same way we fool ourselves, so it's not a simple task.

     Poorly understood by most people, with characteristics even the people who work developing it are struggling to understand, A.I. today occupies the same cultural space that radium (and radioactivity in general) did over a century ago, or vitamins a few year later.  The radium thing did not turn out so very well; vitamins did better.  The hype and hoopla‡ lingered, as the hype and hoopla from A.I. is now.

     Maybe let's not be in such a hurry to gulp it down by the gallon.
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* Here's a question for later: if the District of Colombia ever achieves statehood, will we start calling the Pacific coastal state "Washington, AC," or "Washington, OG?"  Or something else?  Yeah, yeah, the new state would be called something like District of Colombia, or maybe just Capitol District (for all those Hunger Games fans out there), but the city is Washington and you know we'll keep on using the old, familiar synecdoche.
 
† The problem is not so much that the writing is lousy -- Sturgeon's Law predicts 95% of all unsolicited fiction people send in is unpublishable -- as it is the sheer volume.  Typewriters let us write faster than we can think, and word processors let us edit so quickly that getting it right in the first draft no longer matters, but A.I. churns out fiction in greater volume than any collection of editors and assistants can manage to read.  There are gems in the slushpile, and 5% of the total was a sufficiently productive return at the pittance paid "first readers" to sort through it.  0.5% is not, and if A.I. was capable of recognizing the flaws well enough to sort through it, it wouldn't be creating so much unusable work.
 
‡ Even for vitamins: for awhile, every breakfast cereal advertised itself as so packed with vitamins that between them and the sugar, there couldn't have been much room left for grain.

...And The Waters Receded. Very Slowly.

     The White River peaked through Indianapolis last night, having set new records at several measuring stations -- but never quite overtopped the levees.

     That was scant comfort to the people on the river side.  Oh, they knew the bet, but when it's your home, a once-in-a-century flood still feels unfair.  Ravenswood, Rocky Ripple and few other locations will be a long time drying out and taking stock of what they've lost.

     Successive waves of heavy rain keep sweeping through, keeping the flood higher than predicted.  It's still dropping, just not as fast as we'd all prefer.

     On the personal hobby front, I decided I could string my off-center-fed dipole ham antenna on the other side of the house from where I had planned, away from the neighboring house that got partially crushed.  There's going to be a lot of activity over there by and by, and one end of that antenna would have been barely inside the fence line.  It was a possible complication nobody needs -- especially not me.  I managed to get the antenna in place in the new location, but I haven't run coaxial cable to it yet.  That will take a little planning and a new hole in the wall with a special fitting.

     Tomorrow, I plan to go back to work.  Way back in June when all of this started, I tried twice on successive Mondays to go back, and had to give up before putting in a full day each time: too much pain, too little energy.  I'm doing better now.  Maybe not a hundred percent, but I may not get that again.  85%? 90?  I'll take it.

We Aten't Ded

     Despite rising floodwaters, Tam and I are, so far, nearly untouched.  Roseholme Cottage is about a mile away from the White River to the north and west; the river makes a kind of drain-trap bend to our north around Broad Ripple (and the old town of Wellington, long absorbed into the city).  It will peak early tonight, and we're probably going to be sufficiently protected by the levee finished a few years ago, and by our neighborhood's slight elevation above the flood plain.

     Spare a thought for the Broad Ripple Art Center, its grounds and outbuildings being on the river side of the levee along with a few residences and an apartment building; and for Ravenswood, upstream and low-lying (that neighborhood floods at the drop of the hat, and we're in a fumble-fingered milliner's convention), and for Rocky Ripple, the not-quite-an-island (and independent municipality) downstream, across from Butler University, between the river and the canal and also, in a cost-saving compromise that avoided removing multiple houses along the old river levee, on the wet side of the new levee.  Homes in those places are already awash or worse.

     Welcome to a hundred-year flood, after thousand-year rainfall levels.

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 in 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 gusts bent the plantings outside over.  He handed me a printout and led me to the door.  I made it to my car barely ahead of the rain and drove home to the booming of thunder.

     Got out of 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.  They 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.

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?

Valley Of The Shrieking Sky Kings?

     Today's title is beyond unlikely.  A few days ago, I exited the front door for my morning walk and discovered a large cicada had run out of gas and crash-landed right next to the door.  I flipped him over with a twig, but he was gone.

     Within a day, the ants had found him, forming a long procession to the remains and back.  The next day, it was closer to the edge of the porch.  This morning, it was gone.

     I have a mental image of a great mob of tiny ants bearing the relatively enormous ex-cicada away like people in Ancient Egypt carrying the sarcophagus of a Pharaoh, to be entombed at the heart of their nest, no doubt with goods for the next life heaped 'round it and chanting ant-priests keeping watch.  The reality is more like the ant collective having dim memories of the long, cold winter we recently endured, and wanting to keep their larder stocked.

     Either way, the cicada surely received fitting respects, and the darned ants now have something better to do (for a few days, at least) than sneak in and try to suss out crumbs in the hard-to-reach parts of Tamara's TV tray.  It annoys her no end to get it out and find that a work party has been mining the corners of the frame-like rim around the top of the thing and are still on the job, no matter how carefully she has wiped it down after the previous use.

The Doctor Says

     I'm off for four more weeks.  Well, the doctor actually prescribed light duty, still not lifting any more than fifteen pounds, and that's a downcheck for work, where they require us to be able to lift fifty pounds -- or at least be able to try.

     That's a lot of weight, and far more than I routinely lift.  There are plenty of good workarounds.  The kicker is, there's a possibility of overhead work, and you really don't want to be dropping expensive, heavy equipment, especially when expensive people are working not too far away.  I don't like it but I understand it.  I'll do my exercises and hope for improvement.

Doctor Today, Dentist Tomorrow

      Saw my regular doctor today for general follow-up on my back and some discussion of long-term prognosis.  It is, as I suspected, partially a dice roll: I should avoid undue stress, but even then, it may flare up from time to time.  I've got a glitchy back now.

     I did very well on blood pressure (see what six weeks off gets you?).

     Tomorrow, the dentist will probably not give me good marks for tooth-grinding.  It's been a problem all my life, and some times more than others.  These are tooth-grinding times, and I bear the marks.

Looking Back

     The thing about a gerontocracy is that it crumbles away at the upper edge: with age comes power, but nobody lasts forever; the same "bathtub curve" that explains why most of a batch of light bulbs or hard drives fail around the same time shows that the men at the top, once they get there, die off.*

     Lindsey Graham went last night, younger than many but a year older than the age at which his father passed.  His political career followed an interesting path, one that led Anne Applebaum to feature him prominently in a prophetic 2020 article on the compromises some people make and others do not, when power outstrips constitutional limits and trumps political philosophy.  It's worth reading.
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* The horrific second-order effect is that the ruling elite of a gerontocracy has little or no interest in the future: they're not going to be around for it, after all, and so they'll take their pleasures now, and leave dealing with the consequences for those who will come after.

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.
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* 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. 

Idiotic Posturing

      So, the Mayor of NYC asked New Yorkers to set their thermostats no lower than 78° through these hot days -- and the Federal Department of Energy, which has given the generic version of the same advice on their website for a long time, took those pages down.

     Elsewhere, conservative politicians grumbled about "socialism."

     Of course, the Mayor of New York has no authority over people's thermostats.  Nor does he run that city's electric utility which, like most of 'em, struggles to maintain adequate infrastructure.  Power companies can usually keep up, but extreme weather events -- here's looking at you, Texas -- stress the grid, and it doesn't make any difference what flavor the local politicians are.  You can only draw X much current before it's too much, at which point the system breaks at the weakest points.  Power companies stock parts and size staff for the normal failure rate and a little more when possible, but there's a limit.

     Nature has a way of testing limits.  Nature doesn't take politics into account.

     There's nothing especially political about managing your air conditioning (or heating), either.  People who are careful about money have been doing so for as long as fuel has had a cost, which is forever (the cost of cutting your own firewood is pretty high, just not in dollars).  The poor insulation and undersized cooling here at Roseholme Cottage means we ran for years at 75° in the summer* and 65° in the winter, though I have cheated up to three degrees on the winter setting as I have gotten older.  The main positive effect of air conditioning is to lower the humidity and move the air, and if you get too far off the outside air temperature, you can start to have problems -- the A-coil may freeze up, the motors for the fan and compressor in the outdoor unit could overheat, and so on.  And boy, will your electric bills soar.  (You can also have personal problems -- going from 70° or 68° dry air into a 95° wall of wet air is physically stressful.)

     I keep the fan running in our HVAC system nearly all the time.  In summer, I add a small floor fan in the dining room/library to blow air from the floor register up, because the return intake is in that room, and there's no point to letting it suck low level cold air right back in.  In the office and living room, simple home-made extensions sit on top of the registers, and discharge cold air about four feet above floor level.  A similar trick in my bedroom makes use of existing shelves to channel the air up, and in the very worst weather, a clip-on fan pushes cool (or heated) air towards my bed.

    Some of those tricks are compensating for the 1990s upgrades to the 1920s system design, which left floor registers near room doors instead of at the farthest corner on an outside wall.  In 1920, a big coal furnace with "gravity" thermosiphon air circulation through ducts would have also kept the basement almost too warm for comfort in the winter, with air warmed by radiated heat from the furnace flowing up the outside walls to slit vents under the eaves (and up a few inside walls to the attic as well).  Forced-air climate control doesn't work that way, and the original furnace replacement was done when energy was cheap and labor to relocate registers and run all-new ductwork wasn't.  (In winter, I also run an oil-filled electric heater in the basement whenever I'm home and awake; but plug-in electric heat isn't something to turn on and ignore, and it'll never do the same job as the the smelly, sooty old coal furnace did.)  

     Big-city downtowns are full of this kind of relic infrastructure, electric wiring that was adequate in 1920 or 1930, cooling that relied on open transoms, windows and getting outside -- and people expiring from the heat.  You can stick a modern split-system air conditioner just about anywhere, but running big enough wires from the pole to the outlet to actually power it is another story.  There might not even be enough room in the conduits to do that in an old apartment building, and copper is costly.  And how big is the stepdown transformer on the pole or in a manhole vault?  How fat are the wires that feed it? 

     There are tricks.  The 110-Volt wall-socket juice my then very modern home had in 1924 is now 125 V most places in the U.S., because they have turned up the voltage on the high-voltage distribution side.  You see, the power available through a wire is the voltage multiplied by the current -- the current is limited by the "ampacity" of the wire, which is proportional to how big it is.  Big wires can carry more current.  Voltage limits rely on how good the insulators are -- and they have always been far better than they had to be.  Ceramic and glass are relatively cheap, power-line insulators aren't all that tricky to replace when they fail (if you happen to be a power company lineman -- don't try it on your own!).  So Power & Light turns up the voltage and hey, presto, they can supply 15 or 20 percent more power!

     That's something, but in a bad heat wave, it's not enough.  It helps run your TV and computer and automatic shiatsu massager and super-slice-o-matic self-cleaning air fryer with vacuum cleaner attachment on a system designed to operate a handful of light bulbs and a coffeepot, but when you and everyone else in Manhattan, or Washington D.C., or Pigsley's Corner turns on the air-conditioning and sets it to "Arctic," something will pop.  Maybe your breaker.  Maybe the pole fuse or transformer that feeds your house, and the Smith's, Jones's, Brown's and Doe's apartment house and the bungalow of old Ms X next door.  Maybe it trips a disconnector that keeps cycling, or a transformer's regulating tap-setter at a substation that gets hung up, and a whole neighborhood flickers, goes dark or browns out.  Multiply by a hundred, a thousand--  A power company crew can keep ahead of a few outages, clearing them in mere hours (hours, at 95°), but there is no politics on this planet that will make skilled electrical workers magically appear from the air, along with fuse wire, replacement transformers, and all of the massive, slow-to-replace stuff that fills up a substation.

     There's also no politics that has ever managed to overbuild power grids (etc.) to always hold up to extreme events.  Oh, Ukraine has had a little advantage from hardened Cold War substations, but only if you happened to live in area Soviet planners had deemed critical, and it was never as capacious as its Western counterpart.  Central planning won't save you -- and neither will capitalism.  If you want your power company to turn a profit, you figure out how to price it in such a way that people can afford it;  you build it for the routine loads you have, and you count on having enough staff to keep it going.  For rare localized trouble that gets too much to handle, you hire outside help. But a heat wave isn't like a tornado; it doesn't affect just a few townships at a time.

     The DOE's former advice pages and the lefty-Democrat Mayor of New York City were telling people the same thing because that's how you deal with this intersection of physics, economics and weather, period.  It doesn't matter who you are or, which party or person you voted for or how you think things ought to be done.  We have the power grids we have.  We have the outdoor temperature and humidity we have.  City cliff-dwellers in particular aren't going to be installing rooftop solar, home generators or water wheels, and the choice is to turn up the 'stat a few notches now or sweat like pigs by and by, and shovel out the vulnerable dead afterward.

     Freaking out because your side gave the same advice as the other side for coping with this is simply bullshit, practiced by people who are insanely out of touch with what it's like to live a normal life on an average income. 
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* That's not entirely accurate. I chase 15° to 20° below ambient in summer and will settle for 10° on the worst days, guided by condensation on the older windows, state of the A-coil (once it has iced up, you're done until the ice melts), and experience.

Yes, Still

     I woke up yesterday with a sharp increase in my back soreness.  It wasn't a surprise.  Thursday night is Trash Night and no matter how careful I am, there's a certain amount of lifting and bending to be done.  I kept the weight down to under my fifteen-pound limit and sat on the floor for low work as much as possible: no bending over!

     Nevertheless, there's a price.  Tam and I took a walk around the block soon after we were both awake, which is something that's been helping, but I was still achy.

     And Friday morning, Holden the tomcat was due for a checkup and rabies shot.  I got ready and loaded him into the carrier, which Tam took to my car.  I carried him into the vet, with great care.  He was brave but scared throughout his exam, hiding under a towel most of the time -- a fourteen-pound tomcat!  They are among Nature's great fighters, but they pick their battles and as far as Holden Wu is concerned, the veterinarian is like Sauron or Attila the Hun, far too terrifying a foe for one creature to handle alone.  The folks at the vet were kind enough to carry him to the car and Tam brought him in when we returned home.

     Afterward, I was still sore -- and hungry!  Addressing those needs might as well be a combined task; Good Morning Mama's diner is several blocks away, so I got my ultra-light purse (I'm down to pocketbook, keys, sunglasses, lipstick, hankie, one [1] pen and a backup phone) and headed out.  An hour later, I was back home, fed, feeling a little better, and tired.  I stayed vertical but I didn't do much.  The paperwork for work is at an impasse and I'm getting a little pressure over it, but I can't make doctors fill out forms or insurers process them any more quickly than they already are; I sent out another round of pleas via phone and e-mail.  Presently I am in limbo, neither on official leave nor allowed to return to work without a 100% all-clear from the doctor.

     "When I get better" is a will-o-wisp, and I'm done chasing it.  There are things I can do, things I need to be doing more of (gentle walks and recommended exercises) and things I need to stop fretting over being unable to do.  I may never carry another boatanchor radio up or down the basement stairs, and that's that; there are plenty of lightweight widgets along those lines and I can fiddle with them, if I am careful about it.

     By bedtime, the pain was much reduced and I slept on a cold pack.  This morning I am, at least, no worse.  

Reflecting Fool

     While the rule of law (national and international) and long-established government functions come crashing down, I'm hearing a lot of news about the Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC.

     It's a distraction.  Was the repair work graft-laden?  Probably.  Was the previous condition and repair effort over-hyped?  Almost certainly.  But look -- this is a big, shallow hard-surface pool in warm-climate city.  It's filled from the Tidal Pool and/or city water sources,* and in recent decades, every time it gets drained and refilled for whatever reason, it ends up full of green gunk for a while.  You can't have a shallow, slow-moving pool of water in a Washington, DC summer without stuff growing in it, no matter what you have done to the thing.  They'll solve the current mess, including the self-created elements, by and by, and yeah, probably someone's going to line their pockets over it (again!) to the tune of millions or tens of millions.

     But there are people within the Federal government or closely connected to it, ripping off the public coffers or cheating private-spending suckers and rubes of billions of dollars; the destruction of USAID has resulted in deaths on an enormous scale and helped fuel the present ebola outbreak in Africa, which is on the edge of breaking containment.  The only thing that keeps ebola in check is that it kills infected people pretty quickly, and even those who survive it are usually too sick to travel far until they have recovered.  The present version appears to have a slightly longer period of ambulatory-but-infectious, and that's a problem.

     A little bit (or a lot) of green algae in a (usually) pretty part of DC's memorial landscape is insignificant compared to the infectious dead and burial efforts that are barely keeping up.  Millions of dollars are way smaller than billions.  Yes, it's one more embarrassing farce -- but Europe's melting in the summer heat, disease is way up in Africa, and screwworms are infesting American cattle and pets.  We've got more urgent business than pointing at the green water and snickering.
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* Various infographics show a system of nearly Byzantine complexity.  Make what metaphors of it you will. 

Conversations With A Doctor

     So I show up at the ortho specialist's this morning, trudge up the stairs to check in just past the dot, and they ask which doctor, then tell me, "He'll see you downstairs."

     The old lady probably needed the exercise anyway, despite what my knees are telling me and my back is hinting at.  Down to the other waiting room, and after a short wait, they take me back, weigh me (under 14 stone, which is awful but improving) and tell me to change to be X-rayed.

     Zap, zap, and I'm sitting in an exam room, glowing slightly and looking over someone else's manuscript when the doctor comes in, introduces himself and asks, "Has anyone ever discussed the defect in your spine with you?"

     The which in my what?  I tell him no and he sits down, calls up the images, and proceeds to show me in today's images and in a set from 2021 when I did something stupid that I have since forgotten, how the important very last bone at the bottom of my spine is, in fact, two bones, a big one carrying the weight and a little one, floating around, not linked up as it should be.  They start out as two bones, but should fuse well before your first breath.  Mine did not.

     It turns out that this biological miracle is so rare, so dire, so weird that, per the doctor, "If I X-rayed the spines of a hundred people at random, around seven of them would have this."  It's not a problem, unless it is, and then...yeah.  Technicolor pain, if you do it wrong.*

     He wrote a couple of new prescriptions, one of which the pharmacist wants to talk to me about (get enough daily prescriptions, the darned things gang up on you), has me in line to schedule physical therapy (oh, joy) and says I can go back to work -- if I refrain from twisting, bending, twerking or trying to pick up anything heavier than a full-grown tomcat.  I didn't ask about parachuting or rock-climbing but they're probably off for awhile, too.
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* The correlation between this and the share of people with glitchy backs isn't perfect, but it's not insignificant.

Sunday Night

     I should post something, maybe pithy commentary about whatever in the hell it is that's going on at the White House, but it's past my bedtime and a stripy yellow tomcat keeps walking into the office and rearranging things to suggest I ought to go to bed.  He's right.