Mrs. the Poet is free from her prison

Not that she was in actual prison, just in isolation until her C. diff infection cleared up which it did yesterday. So she did some PT in the gym this morning. She still has a long way to go, but at least she’s on the road to recovery. Now she’s complaining to me about not having enough pants. The problem is her clothes have to be marked with her name so they can be washed and returned from the rehab center’s laundry. And most of her pants are too dark for the marker to show up.

So I ordered another 3 pack of sweatpants for her and also for me. Because I’m running out of clothes that fit, because everything I own is old and worn out. Now I will have clothes that fit and are not worn out. They are due on Sunday, but Mrs. the Poet’s pants will be here on Friday.

And that’s pretty much all I have for today, sorry for not being more interesting while my wife is sick.

Mrs. the Poet is almost ready for PT

Right now they had her in the rehab center for a week and her diarrhea is almost gone, she has to be clear of that before she can use the Gym for her physical therapy. We brought her peanut butter and crackers so she can get more protein to build up her endurance. The protein drink we got her makes her diarrhea worse, so scratch that. Also she has this thing where meat just makes her full which is why we are looking for alternative protein sources she can eat. She did manage to eat what the rehab center calls a cheesesteak last night, which is great improvement. And I got to give her a kiss last night for the first time since before she was transported to the hospital the second time back on 8/8. So it’s been like almost a month since we kissed.

While I was composing this I was also playing Shadowrun as The Old Man and just slashed the $h!+ out of a bad guy with my katana because I was within the lethal splash range for my grenade launcher. Another player was able to draw a bead on her and burst fire her to a lingering death. This accomplishes the payout goal of the run, get her teeth and fingers to ID her for the Johnson. We’re just brining the teeth in a convenient container, and the fingers still attached to the hands. The torso and her implants were not part of the bargain, so we’re keeping the implants to get access to her finances to make this run pay something other than pure karma. We had to end the session early so we find out how much nuyen and karma we get next week.

Hard as it may be to believe I haven’t been thinking about the Sprint-T in a while, worrying about my wife was using up those processor cycles I would have been spending on thinking about the car. So, no progress on the Sprint-T. It’s about time for me to fix dinner so I’ll call this one over for now.

I’ve been a bit preoccupied

And by that I mean Mrs. the Poet is in the hospital again for round 2 of her digestive issues. This time around the antibiotic she was getting for the UTI and to head off any opportunistic infections destroyed her gut biome leading to a C. diff infection. I mean C. diff is supposed to be there but if its the only thing left of her gut biome it just makes a mess (in more ways than one).

What they’re saying now is they may move her to rehab until she gets strong enough that I can care for her again, because I hurt myself trying to get her off the floor when she fell on Monday night. And I’m still hurting. So basically she needs to be able to get in and out of bed and on and off the toilet, by herself, because I can’t lift her anymore. My back has been in a fragile state pretty much since I got off the walker back in 12/01 and started using the cane. Working hypothesis on that is somehow the broken hip didn’t go back together right leaving one leg way shorter than it was before the wreck, because as I recall it was my right leg that was the short one up to that point because my bobbing up and down on my short leg drove my drill sergeant up the wall, because I stood out like a sore thumb, and there was nothing I could do about it. But anywho, short leg, bad back, can’t pick up Mrs. the Poet.

So she’s staying until Monday when we will see about getting her in a rehab bed, which are almost as scarce as hospital beds. This means we get to use the long-term care policy I’ve been paying for for over a year now, if I can find where Mrs. the Poet hid the policy.

Well I’m starting to fade so it’s time to put this post to bed and me shortly thereafter.

I’ve been busy with Mrs. the Poet being sick

Mrs. the Poet has been ill for over a month, and lately I have had to step up with her transportation issues, as she doesn’t have any transportation apps on her phone. Not that she could use them if she had them. That’s how sick she has been, on the verge of throwing up constantly and still unable to eat until we can get her meds from the pharmacy.

Anywho that’s why I haven’t been posting lately, either taking Mrs. the Poet somewhere, or trying to sleep, or trying to get my neck fixed. I have been good at taking Mrs. the Poet places she needs to be, so-so at trying to sleep, and failing at getting my neck fixed. Nobody has been able to keep the neck fixed for more than an hour or two. I think I might need another surgery to fix my neck after the surgery in 2015 to remove the roughly one-pound fatty tumor that was squeezing muscles and nerves and just about paralyzing my right side. But that will have to wait until my Medicare kicks in next September if the GQP can be prevented from taking my Medicare away. But that is a discussion for a different blog.

OK I’m getting rid of Mrs. the Poet

For most of the month of July, she’s going to see her mother for the first time since she had her operation. She’s leaving 7/6 and coming back 8/3. So I’ll have to fix ramen and frozen pizza for a month, or some kind of other quick-fix food. I usually lose several pounds when Mrs. the Poet visits her mother. My blood pressure usually goes up a bit while she’s gone as well.

Anywho this excursion is costing me over $400, which will get replaced in my account soon. But this also means I’ll be all by myself without even any cats to keep me company for the entire month. I’ll live, “but I von’t enjoy it.” In case you don’t know where that quote comes from, it’s Chekov from TOS, when they found the thing that made people age rapidly, everybody but Chekov and they took tons of samples for analysis. But getting back to nobody to cuddle this is the first time since 2015 Mrs. the Poet has gone away without any kitties to snuggle and take care of. She didn’t go 2020 or last year because of operations and the pandemic. 2019 she went twice because our niece got married. She had to get pushed around the airport in a wheelchair because her back was so bad, but she got where she was going. This year I got her non-stop tickets because 2019 one of her flights she had to spend the night sitting in a wheelchair because her connecting flight was canceled for weather. This way if a flight gets canceled she can just stay home and not spend the night at DFW or LaGuardia.

Well the month of July is going to be a lonely one for me so if you wanna stop by and bring me dinner it would be much appreciated. It’s either a lot of beans and rice (because each batch makes like 8 servings), frozen burritos, pizza, and ramen, or people sharing food because I only know how to cook beans and rice, and reheat frozen food.

I’ve been dealing with health issues

That’s about all I’m gonna say about my hiatus from the blog. Health. Issues.

In other news I’m taking Mrs. the Poet to get her first Moderna shot tomorrow. I have to go because she has no idea on how to use the Lyft app, and because there has to be someone with her to keep an eye on her in case she has a reaction to something in the vaccine. I make frequent jokes about Mrs. the Poet being a Luddite, but she really is “challenged” by technology. Witness that her phone has no apps that were not pre-installed from the factory. And she has no interest in learning how to use my Lyft app to get around even when all the rides are paid for by me. So if she needs to get someplace she can’t go by bus, she has to get me to take her on my Lyft, or talk someone else over the phone into taking her.

On other fronts I got out and got a full massage for the first time in weeks. The weather and fallout from it has kept me almost house-bound since the Snowpockalypse as places recover from the damage of the cold and from the electrical blackout that came with it. And also walking around paying my phone bill showed I was really close to having to call 911 for help because of my balance when I just walked from the house to the bus, from the bus to the phone store, store to bus, bus to house, and collapse in the house. Those last few steps from the mailbox to the house were hard, especially for balance. And no, these are not part of the health issues that have been keeping me off the blog. I’m also thinking about using the parts and tools I bought to get some work done on the front axle of the Sprint-T.

I know what to do, I’m just having problems getting to the garage and doing it. A big part of the problem is navigating the obstacle course between the house and the garage, because I have to move the garbage can and the roll-around in order to get to the door, the navigate the garage to get too my tools which also got moved to places I can’t find them. If I didn’t know better I would swear my stuff got moved to the places it was hardest for me to get to on purpose…

So, anywho, what I need to do is mock up the axle brackets with the heim joints I’ll be using so the spacing is correct, set them on the garage floor 31″ apart outside-to-outside, then set the axle down centered on the brackets and rotated so the kingpin bosses are inclined 7°±0.5 positive caster then use my oxy-acetylene torch to heat the tips of the brackets and where they rest on the axle cherry red to pre-heat the joint before laying a tack from my flux-core welder. I have to do that because even at its highest setting my poor welder can’t handle the thickness of the brackets and the axle. The brackets are ⁵/₁₆” and the axle is ¹/₄” wall thickness, and the max rating for the welder is ³/₁₆” wall or bracket. And that’s probably more information than you wanted to know. Yep my cheap Harbor Freight welder can’t handle the biggest joint on the car, but if I do it right I can get a good tack weld so it can be welded by someone with a bigger welder.

And that seems like a good place to end this.

Things in the kitchen that only I use

I mentioned the crock pot and how I was the only person using the slow cooker yesterday. Well there are some other things in the kitchen that I’m the only one using them.

One thing I’m the only person using is the rice cooker. I think that might be because I bought it a while back with money I made with M-points, back when they were still a thing, and that gives you an idea of how many M-points I got, that first I could pay for a rice cooker and second that the rice cooker was high enough quality to last this long. Or it could be that Mrs. the Poet really doesn’t like to use the rice cooker/vegetable steamer for some reason unknown to mankind.

Now this is an odd one, but I’m the only person using the Keurig, for anything. I use it for many things that don’t include making coffee, like teas, soups, and other hot drinks. I can use it to get 2 cups of decent tea out of a teabag, and every once in a while we actually buy the K-cups and I make coffee with it. But that is rare, mostly because we (I) drink a lot of coffee and making it one cup at a time in the Keurig is Ex$pen$ive and for the most part not as good as making drip coffee by the pot. I drink coffee from a mug that holds almost a quart, Mrs. the Poet has an 8 oz. cup once a day. So unless it’s coffee that someone has given us, or a nearly free buy at the local grocery, we don’t use the Keurig to make coffee.

So we have 3 kitchen appliances that Mrs. the Poet doesn’t use but I do. Make of this what you will.

This is boring

I have been mostly staying in and taking care or Mrs. the Poet as she recovers from her surgery, and she’s slowly getting better. And as she gets better there is less and less to take care of because she’s trying to assert her independence while she’s recovering her mobility. But I’m still cooking dinner.

The lady who used to live with us was laid off from her job as the owner decided she didn’t have the money to ride out getting shut down by the city as a non-essential business. Which pretty much describes her used clothing store in a nutshell. It’s a “nice to have” rather than “essential”. I mean when the new clothing stores are “non-essential”, used clothing is definitely not essential. Which means she needed help to navigate applying for unemployment, applying for a new job, and also finding a new place to live as the place she lives now is also downsizing for what I understand is the person who owns the house wants to sell and move into either a smaller house or an assisted-living apartment, the person relaying the story was not very forthcoming on that one. So after much pulling of hair trying to do the computer things with so many other people trying to do the same thing, we cued up some movies on the DVD player we had to buy because we couldn’t keep on the internet with the laptop also playing DVDs.

I got to catch up on some movies I hadn’t seen, basically all of them, I haven’t been to a movie since the last How to Train Your Dragon came out. We saw Secret Life Of Pets 2, SWTLJ, and another movie that made so little impression on me I can’t remember the title. Also some parodies of Batman V Superman done with cats.

And I bought things online. I just got a case of Cactus Cooler via Amazon that you can’t get in stores here in TX because we are outside the distribution area. If it ever gets to local stores I would definitely buy it in 2-liter bottles, because it costs too much in 12 oz cans, but it was definitely worth the $30 I spent to get the case to find out if I liked it. I wonder if they have a sugar-free version, because it’s basically flavored corn syrup diluted with carbonated water in the state I bought, and that’s a bit heavy for me.

I’m still waiting for the hat I bought online to get here because it was delayed by the CA shelter in place order only allowing 3 people in the warehouse to ship stuff which is way under the regular staff. Last update my hat should get here tomorrow.

Something else I should mention is my appointment was moved to May 26. So about 4 months after the last appointment I get back, which is twice as long as was planned and also a month longer than normal, but I have an appointment.

OK we have a date

Mrs. the Poet has a really bad back, but it’s something that can be fixed with an operation. But she also doesn’t like hospitals and she really doesn’t like operations. Even just thinking about them causes her distress, the closer the person is to her the worse the distress gets, so you can imagine what it’s like when the person getting the operation is her.

Well now she has a date for/with a spinal fusion. She is getting three vertebrae turned into one, and then as soon as that heals she is getting physical therapy to strengthen the muscles on either side of the fusion to keep it stable. I think I mentioned at some point her main problem is stenosis compressing her spinal nerves because she has scoliosis from repeated insult to her back. And no, not because I was making fun of her, the other kind of insult, repeated minor injury to her back, in this case her back muscles. As she got injured the injured muscles got tight, making them more susceptible to further injury, which made them tighter and led to a vicious circle that wound up with Mrs. the Poet unable to get to the bus stop, even with a cane, because the scoliosis causes the top and bottom of the stenosis to compress the nerves in her spine causing numbness and paralysis.

And now March 3 2020 that’s going to get fixed so that her legs and feet will work normally, again. That means I have to cook and clean the house, and basically act like I do when she’s not here except I have to take care of her as well. Now what I’m told is she will be eating at the table, or at least capable of that, before she gets out of the hospital. And it might only take 3 days for her to get out of the hospital. All we need to do is get stuff I can fix to feed her with, that we can get a bit at a time so we don’t have to spend the money all at once the end of February.

The pre-op synopsis is that Mrs. the Poet should be walking as normally as she ever will be by the end of March because that’s how little surgical insult there is with this operation. Basically there will be no tendons, ligaments or muscles damaged that will be still allowed to move after the surgery fuses the vertebrae (or vertebras if you insist on anglicized plurals) so the recovery time is essentially just the time needed to heal the incision enough to not bleed every time she moves her back. This is entirely unlike when my hip was repaired 18 years ago because there were 3 major muscles that had to be cut to get the hardware in and then back out 18 months later. As I understand it there will only be one small incision that they work/look through and instead of cutting through muscles they will be spreading apart the muscle fibers to get things out, which has a much better end result than cutting through the muscles.

Anyway, when I know more about it, and Mrs. the Poet approves of me posting it, I’ll tell you more. As for me I find it fascinating in a mechanical sense, because we are all just organic machines moving around and breaking down and either self-repairing or getting repaired. Machines that can repair themselves has been either a dream or a nightmare, depending on how you feel about getting replaced by a machine. But since we are all machines already (Calcium is a metal according to the periodic table, between Potassium and Scandium) just using a different mode of using energy than electricity or steam. We aren’t getting replaced so much as making way for the newest models.

Another update without real information

First of all the good news, Mrs. the Poet has lumbago and can be treated by a combination of steroid injections and physical therapy. That means she might stop yelling every few steps as her back locks up and her feet go to sleep at the same time as her back goes wonky. Her TBF is about 6 feet now when it was 10-12 feet just a few weeks ago. She also has an issue where here spinal column is smaller than it should be where the actual nerves pass through which also contributes to her pain and feet going to sleep.

The “meh” news I was awake all night last night thinking about alternative rear suspension/engine mounting for the A/MOD car and I’m writing sleep-deprived again. Also was thinking about alternative front suspensions for the same car because why only change one thing? This was because I changed the engine from the cruiserbike V-Twin to a Predator 670 V-Twin and the exhaust and the drive are on the same side meaning the engine has to go on the left of the car to keep the engine from blowing exhaust right in the driver’s face. The cruiserbike engine has exhaust on the front of the front cylinder and the back of the rear cylinder meaning it can be run out the right side of the car and the drive is on the left. All this means is the jackshaft for the 670 has to be longer than for the cruiserbike because it has to go all the way across the engine while the bike engine just has to go far enough to reach the drive chain from the transmission.

I also thought about a mount on the rear suspension like the old Malibu Virage cars and some Chinese kart style dunebuggies and some RC cars, but I discarded the idea as having too high an unsprung weight with the engine bouncing around with the rear axle. It sure did simplify the drive to the rear axle though and lightened the car up a bit.