Lots to unpack today

First I’m still getting used to my dentures. The lowers hurt and also cause irritations on my lower jaw but not actually on the gums, and I have trouble drinking from a cup with both of them in because my lips are impeded from closing on the cup to prevent spillage. That will come with practice.

Second, there was a Tweet I can’t respond to because I’m not allowed to since I quote Tweeted Agent Orange and said he should get what he suggested for BLM protestors (if IIRC) and Twitter booted me for suggesting violence. Anywho, the tweet was saying we live in unprecedented times, but we don’t, this is 1930s Germany with two people trying to out-Hitler each other, trying to control what’s left of the GOP after Qanon and MAGA took the party over making it the GQP. The only thing unprecedented is the depths each side is going to, to prove they are the one that “deserves” to run the country. My opinion on which side deserves to run the country is neither because both are not just evil but borderline maliciously evil and cruel, DeSantis demonstrably so.

I think I might have stated a few times on social media that the GQP should have to live with the same treatment they have forced on women and trans people, denial of medical care and constant harassment over using the toilet in public restrooms being the easiest to enforce. Of course there would have to be some way of telling who these people are so they can be instantly identified and their sanctions enforced. Maybe a red “Q” tattooed on their foreheads? Of course the tattoo would have to be done poorly and under unsanitary conditions so that infection sets in and they would need immediate medical care that would be denied as a matter of course because that was why they were getting the tattoo. But that would be cruel, maybe too cruel because the purpose of the tattoo is to make these loons suffer as much as they want women and trans people to suffer. So just have a red “Q” and prohibit them from seeing a doctor or using a public restroom, or maybe trying to vote since they are working so hard to prevent young people and minorities from voting. Or maybe allow them to get shot on sight because they keep voting against preventing school and mass shootings. Or any of a litany of things that the Q wing of the Republican party has been voting to restrict or prohibit. I would add entering a public library since they are so gung-ho about banning books, but they don’t read anyway so that wouldn’t impinge upon them in the slightest.

And I really don’t want to continue this rant, so I’ll put this post to bed.

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It’s my Blogiversary

Fourteen years ago today I mirrored my first post on this site. I forget how many links or even what kind of wreck was most common that day, and I had a bunch of trouble because this site and MySpace used different flavors of HTML for links and neither one had it automated back then. Now WordPress uses another flavor of HTML from the one I used back then, and MySpace is where you go to listen to new music and not where people meet to discuss whatever. And also, today is the 59th anniversary of JFK getting shot. And also the same anniversary of the first episode of Doctor Who.

Also, I did not win either the Powerball or TX Lotto yesterday, so my financial status is still p’, as in too impoverished to buy a vowel.

Things have been happening

But now I have a minute to actually write about them. First of all Mrs. the Poet is mostly OK, she’s in the hospital because of the not-mostly part. We now have proof that Mrs. the Poet would deny she’s in pain while being eaten alive by a monster, because she was. Denying she was in pain, not that there are any monsters in the house to munch on her.

Let’s start from something close to the beginning. After getting out of rehab in September Mrs. the Poet had to wear a diaper because she couldn’t get to a toilet fast enough to not pee her pants. Or sometimes poop her pants. The fact that we have a pre-ADA house and the bathroom doors are not wide enough to get through with a rolling walker (the walker I had after the wreck was not a rolling walker and had no problems with the bathroom door but that’s a different story), has a definite bearing on this story.

Anywho, because she can’t get from the bed to the toilet quickly she’s been sleeping on our recliner-couch in the living room with a commode next to it, which was good as long as she ate and drank and consumed enough calories to maintain her health. And I think y’all can see where this story is headed, but don’t get in too big a hurry to get to the final destination that you miss taking the journey. We did good for about a month, and then I think she got tired of doing her business in the living room in front of the picture window (with the blinds down and closed so nobody could see in, but that wasn’t the point) and started limiting her intake to limit the number of times she bared her butt in the living room.

Now a contributing factor was our different sleep schedules, I’m nocturnal and she’s an Early Bird. Before her problems with UTI and her tummy she would sometimes get up about the time I was going to bed. Now I kept the same -to-bed time as before but her rising was much later, so there was a considerable period she sat wet on the couch until she could nag me awake before I was through sleeping, leading to a general lethargy on my part until after Mrs. the Poet went to bed until she started shifting her sleep to later in the evening but still not much past midnight. This let me get a few more hours of shut-eye, but still not enough to let me be my cheerful happy self /sarcasm. I’ve never been cheerful or happy since the wreck and TBI in 2001, but moving on. I think that the periods she sat in the wet diaper might have had an effect on her outlook on life, and she started consuming less fluids, which led to a possible UTI and rashes and (worse) skin ulcers. And she also started eating less because food was still tasting bad, but I think she just didn’t want to poop in front of the window.

And the combination of not enough fluids and calories caught up with her and she just got too weak to stand with the walker when I pulled her to her feet from the couch. And too weak to stand means too weak to use the potty because she has to stand to get her pants down and diaper off and butt wiped (she has to be standing clear of the potty for me to get in and clean her). And Tuesday of last week she fell getting to the potty and had to be helped to her feet by the EMTs and didn’t get her diaper changed and had to sit in a dirty diaper all day, and the next day and the next and on until Sunday when I called for an ambulance to transport her to the hospital where they cut her clothes and dirty diaper off and found massive skin infections and other things I don’t even want to think about, all because she was embarrassed to potty in front of pulled and closed blinds. [exasperated sigh] And this makes several trips to the hospital because of potty issues. The first trip at the beginning of Summer was over her not drinking enough and getting a UTI, the second trip was because the antibiotics she took for the UTI caused her to have C. diff, and now because she was embarrassed about going potty in front of the window (with the blinds down and closed). Now the first two were because she was actually sick from diseases, but the last trip was because she was sick because she was embarrassed. And because while she was still relatively healthy she didn’t want to go to the hospital. And now she’s practically immobile in a hospital bed with 3 IVs, one in each arm and a third in her hand. [another exasperated sigh]

And if she hadn’t been able to convince the nurses I wanted to have her transported on Tuesday instead of waiting until Sunday I would be in jail now for elder abuse. And I still want her to be healthy and sleeping in my bed even if we only sleep for a couple of hours together, because we belong in the same bed, sleeping together.

Sorry again for no updates

Still nothing much happening beyond another huge burger and a sundae on my Birthday courtesy of Red Robin and their loyalty program. Oh and the reward card I got for doing an online thing that was mostly good for buying things online but I could also spend at Red Robin was mostly drained right before my birthday, it went from $75 to $3 before I could even spend it.

I’m still thinking about the Sprint-T, and entering any free engine give-aways I can find, a free engine that runs beats an engine I don’t have. It might not be the engine I wanted, as almost all the give-away engines are iron block with aluminum heads, and I’m hoping for aluminum block and heads, but they’re all better than no engines. I’m also thinking about the transmission, as some of the give-away engines are set up for an automatic or exceed the torque limit for the T5 by a substantial margin. So, I’ll need to buy the appropriate transmission for the engine. The “appropriate” transmission being the lightest thing I can bolt up that doesn’t break and has a high enough overdrive for driving on the freeway without excessive fuel consumption, or that has a low enough 1st gear that I can install a final drive the same as what I would have with a more normal final drive and a really tall overdrive. Racing will be mostly in 1st gear until about 40 MPH, above that I can use 2nd. And the only time I’ll use 3rd or higher is on the highway getting to race venues.

Mrs. the Poet is getting better, her digestive issues are working their way out. Our other problems are also working their way out. They’re not fixed yet, but progress has been made. My major problem with her is her insistence that I adhere to her sleep schedule. I usually end up with about 5 hours of sleep and wandering around in a daze until sundown, when my normal sleep schedule tells me it’s time to wake up. I will be so glad when she gets well enough to sleep in a bed and not need someone to change her diaper. I will be even more glad when we can sleep together in the bed.

And speaking of bed, it’s past time to put this post to bed.

Finally got Mrs. the Poet to go to the doctor

Since I haven’t been keeping you in the loop, Mrs. the Poet has been sick. Like not real sick, just kinda poopy and listless, and borderline dehydrated but even water tastes yucky. Well they don’t think she’s gonna die and her symptoms don’t come close to COVID, so that’s been ruled out. She has a mild fever, and I’m still as healthy as a horse, so at most she has some kind of allergy with maybe an opportunistic infection on top of that so the prescribed anti-nausea, anti-diarrheal, and something for the infection they aren’t sure she has but are pretty sure she might have. Like I said her whole diagnosis pivots on the point that I sleep with her and kiss her and I’m not showing any sign of her illness. I eat just about anything with no stomach problems even though I can barely chew because I don’t have many teeth. So whatever she has is presumed to not be communicable. So if she improves enough to travel she’s not going to be a plague rat spreading disease, either. Personally, I think she has allergies because her nose is also running and some of it is post-nasal drip down the back of her throat. This is probably the source of her digestive woes.

I finally got something to use to function test the lights I got, and I’m Not Happy with the results. The turn signal lights work as expected, low until the high is activated so I’ll just leave the low on all the time as DRL and connect the high to the turn signals. The headlights are a bigger problem, half don’t work at all and the other ones only have high beams. And the warrantee has expired on the headlights. So I’m at an impasse for my lights right now, and also I’m not 100% on those test leads working all the time or that I have the polarity right on the power supply output.

Late addendum: Mrs. the Poet has had 2 servings of applesauce since noon and everything is still where it’s supposed to be, no unfortunate discharges.

Been having problems getting it together to write

Basically I’ve been too distracted to write. The racing season just started with the 24 Hours of Daytona and the hype preceding it, the RPG group is assaulting an eldritch horror disguised as a convenience store, and my card was blocked because Fraud Detection flagged a project on Kickstarter, but the operator had a thick accent that basically removed the letter “r” from her vocabulary so she pronounced it “kickstop” and I didn’t know what the heck that was (and the project was Australian so that’s the country they flagged so I was very confused and also several hours away from normal waking up which added to the confusion).

Going in chronological order we start out with the Fraud Protection waking me up shortly after sunrise Saturday when I had only been asleep a little over an hour because of annoying aches and pains from my damaged nerves feeling like I was getting stabbed with burning knives (I forgot to mention neuropathy has been getting worse since the start of the year), so I wasn’t really “with it” to begin with, and then it bothered me so much I didn’t get to sleep the rest of the day. So I did the grocery shopping also in a daze because Saturday. I remembered to get most of the stuff on the list plus the spaghetti sauce and the green pepper. Then I watched the first part of the 24 mostly catching the action, then fell into bed.

I slept for about 10 hours and woke up to catch the last 2 hours of the 24 to see Helio Castroneves drive the last stint to win the race with a wreck behind him on the last lap. Then I had another cup of tea and fired up the electronics for the RPG game, which my character spent most of this session plugged into the car waiting to go Pink Mohawk as we tried to infiltrate the Omega Mart in McKinney that was Physically Too Big on the inside, was also a Matrix Server, and had some weirdness on the Astral Plane so it was spooking a number of magic users, hackers, and other people who had just enough resonance to pick up the weirdness but not know what it was. My character does not fall in any of those categories so he doesn’t feel a thing beyond his normal out-of-phase with reality getting killed 16 (or 26 or 36) times has gotten him to. Everything feels “off” to him, but somehow he muddles through it. When we had to quit because of time we had just rolled for initiative getting ready to fight something we didn’t know what it was because it was different on the material plane, the astral, and the Matrix. And we had been hired to destroy the convenience store anyway because people had been spooked and didn’t want it near them and Zoning couldn’t do anything because zoning laws are toothless in the Shadowverse. Anywho when we left off I had just jacked out of the van and threw a magazine of HE into the grenade launcher because I was supposed to take out things on the Material Plane and let other team members worry about the Matrix and Astral Plane.

The road goes on forever

But the party ended a long time ago. This pandemic is going to kill me. I don’t like to keep harping on the same subject (almost 8 years of articles on bicycle wrecks and infrastructure notwithstanding) but this keeping socially distanced is causing me actual harm. I have needs that preclude keeping any distance, much less 6 feet.

And the source of today’s headline is this mournful tune: Robert Earl Keen- The Road Goes On Forever And The Party Never Ends I picked a version that wasn’t as long as the others, because the song shouldn’t go on forever.

I’m still trying to stay mobile enough to climb in and out of the cage of the Sprint-T, but between the lack of range-of-motion in my hips and the pains in my shoulders and everything getting worse it’s a race between getting the raw stock in and the main hoops bent and not being able to move right to get in. I’m hoping I win this race, by finishing the car before I can’t swing a leg over the top of the cage.

And this feels like a good place to wrap up for the night.

Am I allowed to be angry?

On the one hand I’m a white cishet male, with all the advantages that entails. On the other hand it has been almost 10 months since I had “that kind” of contact with a person of my desired gender in spite of actually sleeping with one in the same bed, that I paid for, in a house that I paid off, and that I pay the taxes and insurance for every year. And I don’t have the budget to pay someone to get “that kind” of physical contact.

So, am I allowed to be angry? I don’t get any free, can’t buy any, so basically don’t get any at all. On top of that things hurt all the time, which I think is related to the previously stated problem.

Took Mrs. the Poet to dinner last night

I fired up the old cell phone for a trip to our favorite local (to us) restaurant and bought Mrs. the Poet a good dinner. Well I don’t know about “good” as in it wasn’t haute cuisine, but the food was pretty good tasting, and there was a lot of it.

I had my usual burger from this place, which was two quarter-pound patties, 2 full strips of bacon, and a fried egg, with the usual vegetables on a burger. Mrs. the Poet had a grilled chicken sandwich which was like, half a chicken worth of meat on a patty, I have no idea how they did that to look like a grilled chicken breast unless they have made some GMO chicken that is 30% breast by weight, that said sandwich she pronounced “Delicious”. It had a bunch of sauces and garnishes that I didn’t recognize, but as Mrs. the Poet said it was good, so as long as she’s happy with the food I’m happy she was happy. I’m sure the Long Island Iced Tea did a lot to improve her perception of the food and her mood. I had my usual Coke Zero. We also had Too Many Onion Rings as our appetizer, and a single scoop Sundae for her dessert. I skipped dessert because I was going to have something at home later.

The Former Guy was in town for something or other at a local church that has more money than sense, and fortunately the Giant Meteor managed to not wipe out the state, by not showing up. Also in the news was the forecast for Christmas is going to match the record high temperature of 80°F, which is crazy hot for the end of December. Well last week of December, not the actual end.

Also I installed the antenna on Mrs. the Poet’s TV to see how viable cutting the cord will be. Answer: not very. We get 2 channels and about 10 sub-channels, and pretty much none of it is what we watch on the regular. This is puzzling, because almost all the broadcast TV comes from an antenna farm 13 miles away in SE Dallas except for one a little closer but in the same area which was one of the channels we got. Also puzzling what we got was crystal clear and solid, but other channels less than a quarter-mile further away were nothing but static. Basically everything but the two channels we got was static, but what we got was rock solid and clear as cable TV. Don’t ask me to explain it, my experience with TV was from the analog days, this digital stuff I understand intellectually but not in practice.

I may have to abandon the Sprint-T project because I won’t be able to get in and out of it. I had a terrible time installing the antenna on the wall and that was just 2 steps up and down the stepstool, not clambering over the side and through the top of a roll cage. It’s not a matter of strength, it’s I’m losing agility. Basically all my hip and knee injuries are coming home to roost, I have trouble moving my leg high enough to make the step, same problem I had trying to get on a bike two years ago but worse. I don’t have the range of motion I need to climb over the top of the cage and get into my car. There’s nothing that hurts, it’s just my leg doesn’t go that far anymore. I can make a regular ladder step, but not the move I’ll need to swing into the top of the roll cage. I might have to build a roll cage simulator to practice getting in and out of my car…geriatric jungle gym? America’s Funniest Home Video candidate?

I had a great idea for a product

I had an idea for a product to sell to the foil hat people. You know, all those conspiracy people thinking that 5G cell phones are emitting mind control rays to make you vote for Democrats? Well foil hats don’t actually work, because they don’t send the energy to ground, they just keep the MCR all around your brain, scrambling it.

What you need is something that goes on your shoe to connect to ground, and then a clip to connect to the foil cap, and a wire between the two. After you make the foil hat and make sure it’s firmly attached to your head, you attach the clip to it, then run the wire inside your pants down your leg to the grounding plate on the bottom of your shoe. That makes sure the mind control rays have someplace safe to go away from your brain. Put the plate under the wear point on the ball of your foot so it stays in firm contact with the ground.