Letters From Home

I was digging around in my “writing misc” folder today, trying to get things more or less organized (more less than more, as always) and unearthed a sheaf of paper containing notes about my novel based on my grandmother’s life.

See, at my former job, we were constantly under the edict to “look busy.”  Heaven forbid anyone ever see us not looking busy.  Unfortunately, as in most organizations where there is such an edict, there’s only so much totally-job-related busywork anyone can come up with.  So when I’d run out of drawers to rearrange, and pieces of paper to stack neatly, and magazines to pick up, and counters to wipe, and chairs to push back under tables (etc etc etc) I would write.  Little notes about various plot points, or reminders of things to put in the family history.  I could look busy by writing, and of course if anyone came along who needed help, the little notes were quick and easy to put aside or put away.  Win-win situation.

I’d also carry a note pad around with me on my off-work hours, so if I was sitting in the doctor’s office, or waiting for something, I could write more.  That was in the pre-PDA days.

Eventually I had quite a pile of small pieces of paper.  I laid them all out on the copy machine so I could combine several small pages into larger pages, which would, I hope, be less easily misplaced.  (Yeah, that worked.)  *snort*

Well, today, I not only found the pages, I carefully transcribed all the notes into a neat little desktop/PDA outliner program called BrainForest, and now everything is arranged in logical groups.  I don’t usually work from an outline–but then again, I don’t usually work from a stack of scribbled notes, either.  I think the groups will make it easier for me to add more thoughts, and from there the writing of the actual novel will be easier.

Because I’m really, really going to write it, this time.

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Having incurable health problems tends to wear a person down after a while.

Type 2 diabetes is the pits, but that’s a story for another day.

High blood pressure runs in the family. I’ve been on medication for it for about twenty years now. A LOT of medication. My dad took so many drugs for his blood pressure that he was literally staggered; he went from a natural athlete to a guy who wobbled. I never got that far, but I’m convinced that the five medications I take daily have clouded my mind and sapped my energy. No, I can’t blame all of my lack of accomplishment on medication, but I think it contributes.

Today, I begged my doctor to let me taper off all the medications and start over again from the beginning. She adamantly refused. She’s afraid that if I do that, I might have a stroke. That’s a scary thought, but living with all those pill bottles doesn’t make me feel good either.

We compromised. I can taper off two of the medications, keep monitoring my blood pressure, and see what happens. Two out of five, all right. She’s putting in a referral to a hypertension specialist. Maybe that will work.

So many health sites and books push supplements of various kinds to help deal with hypertension. I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t know what to believe any more. I’m taking extra potassium because I take a diuretic and my potassium level is low. I’m taking extra magnesium because it’s supposed to be an antihypertensive. I’m taking extra calcium because calcium and magnesium go hand in hand. I’m taking fish oil and CoQ10 to help offset the effects of statins and creeping brain fog.

Does any of this do any good? I don’t know. I’m tired of trying to figure out what will help. Years ago I lost 50 pounds and my blood pressure went up. My father was never fat and his blood pressure was higher than mine has ever been. It’s genetic, somehow, but what is it in us that makes it happen?

Just saw another supplement that’s supposed to help with blood pressure control. I’m tired tonight and can’t make an informed decision without doing more research. Am I really falling prey to snake-oil sales?

Sometimes I wonder.

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Found something neat tonight, and it wasn’t even via Gizmodo or LifeHacker.

I told the story a while ago about the classic bentwood cane that I found in the storage space behind the first apartment F’zer and I lived in.  I’ve kept it all these years, resisting F’zer’s best efforts to get rid of it.  (Isn’t that a kicker, F’zer the Pack Rat trying to get me to throw something out!)  But it was too long for me, and too long for Blinkie, too, so nobody’s actually used it up till now.

Today I put the new saw blade in my miter saw, and it worked perfectly, so I sawed the rest of the dowels to length for the replacement panels for the screens in the living room, and then I took that venerable cane out there and sawed it to length to fit me.  Which, coincidentally, meant cutting it off right above the rubber cane tip.

When we went out tonight, I put the sawed-off piece in my purse, intending to stop by SavOn or Walgreens and pick up a new cane tip.  Which I duly did, except that both drugstores were out of them.  Ah well, no problem, thought I, I will go home and order one from drugstore.com.

Except that they don’t carry them.  Hmf.  So I put “cane tip” into a Google search, which eventually led me to NexTag, which led me to Fashionable Canes.  Now this is a site that has everything imaginable for the person who uses, or wants to buy, a cane.  Blinkie could get a cane to match her moon-and-stars motif.  I’ve got my eye on a lovely folding model with a pattern of compass roses (perhaps for the future).  And I was able to find not only the rubber tip at a bargain price, but a nifty little doodad that clips to your cane so you can balance it off the edge of a table.  I thought that was a great idea, so I ordered one of those too.

And this gives me yet another source of goodies for my mom’s upcoming birthday.  Yeah baby.

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I wonder how many people nowadays always bend down and pick up pennies they find on the floor or the sidewalk?

I always do.  Whether it’s heads-up or tails-up.  Some people think that heads-up pennies are good luck and tails-up pennies are not, so they either leave the tails-up ones, or turn them heads-up for the next person to find.

I don’t think it really makes any difference.  To me, finding any kind of money on the ground is good enough luck for me.

Today I picked up a dime in the post office parking lot.  Guess that means extra good luck (and nine cents change). 

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I have come to the conclusion that it takes a certain amount of raw courage to ride a two-wheeled vehicle of any description through the urban landscape.  I’m beginning to think I should save up the bucks for a puke green motorcycle jacket and then attach, oh, two or three dozen megawatt strobe lights to it.  And then maybe, just maybe, I will be able to get through a journey without some dick in a four-wheel vehicle coming close to hitting me because they just didn’t see me.

Heaven help me when I start riding my bicycle.

All the books on “proficient motorcycle riding” talk about the concept of countersteering.  It’s something that isn’t exactly intuitive; according to the books, to countersteer you turn the handlebars on a motorcycle in the opposite direction from the way you want to turn.

Maybe it’s necessary on a motorcycle.  I dunno; all my motorcycle-riding experience has been from the back of the seat.  But on a scooter, it’s definitely not necessary.  You hardly ever need to turn the handlebars at all, in any direction–just shifting your weight or leaning over will turn the scooter the way you want it to go.  Maybe the countersteering business is necessary if you’re making a sharp turn at high speed.  I’ve never done that, either.

I want to take the CHP motorcycle class.  I want to learn how to ride an honest-to-gosh motorcycle.  F’zer has said he wants to take the class, too, but I’m suspecting more and more that he really doesn’t.  So maybe I’ll just sign up for the class by myself.  It’d certainly be cheaper that way.  I wonder if the technique for riding a motorcycle is radically different from riding a scooter?  Other than the fact that a motorcycle is built like a boy’s bike and a scooter is built like a girl’s bike, that is.

I’m seeing a lot more scooters on the road these days.  I think the lure of 50mpg (or better) travel must be sufficiently great that people are finally seeing the scooter as a really good, really practical means of urban transportation.  There are only three real drawbacks: No protection from the elements, limited cargo (and passenger) carrying space, and the fact that there are a lot of dicks out there in four-wheeled vehicles upon whose consciousness a scooter does not impinge.  Maybe as there are more and more of us on the road, that last drawback will change.  I hope so.  I have the feeling that someday I’m going to get knocked off the Vespa, though, and I don’t particularly like that feeling.

I used to just ride around, mostly way up in the hillside neighborhoods, for the fun of it, but I haven’t done that in a long time.  I wish I could find some nice, relatively safe, relatively long ride to take just for fun (and some other scooter riders to go with–I’m sorry that my friend Heather, who used to be known as Scooterwitch, moved back east before we ever got to take the ride up to Ojai that we’d talked about).  The dealership used to sponsor rides now and again, but either they don’t do that any more or my name’s off their list.  There were a couple people who used to show up for those that I’m sorry I’ve lost touch with.

I love my Vespa.

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I put some Google ads on my two other web sites, but haven’t taken the plunge on this one yet.  I guess I should probably work out the design so the ads will fit and not look too garish.  I finally printed out the manual for NetObjects Fusion 9 and will have to sit down and read through it to see what I can do with it that I couldn’t with the previous version, which is what I used to construct my sites.

I’m not the kind of mom who whines that she works her fingers to the bone for her kids, but I did sweat clean through my shirt while cleaning up my daughter’s no-longer-occupied room today.  Twice.

Speaking of which, I think said daughter must have gone to the Imelda Marcos School of Bag and Shoe Acquisition.  Good lord.  She can’t be my kid.  I just wear the same old pair of Tevas till they fall apart and then I buy a new pair!

I got my registration materials today for my return to school.  OK, it’s the community college and it’s just one class, but I feel pretty good about it.  Now I just have to hope the class is still open when comes my appointed time to sign up.   I’m looking forward to this!

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When I graduated from college, back in the Mesozoic era, my dad offered to pay to send me to grad school.  It was a nice gesture on his part; both of us knew that my grades were so terrible that no reputable grad school would have given me the time of day.

I told him, quite truthfully, that I would never stop my education, but I really didn’t want to pursue another degree.  Even if I’d had the grades to go on, I didn’t want to pursue someone else’s curriculum any more.

I have held to that.  I really do try to learn something new every day.  She who stagnates is lost.

However, a couple days ago I sent off my application for admission to the local community college, with the idea of taking their fall-semester computer networking class.  Now, all I have to do is hope the registrar’s office moves ahead with all deliberate speed, before that class fills up.  The other section meets at a way inconvenient time.

I am really looking forward to going back to school.

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Since I’ve been watching the 10pm news on KTLA (Channel 5) for as long as we’ve lived in LA (22 years and counting) I decided to pass along my remarks about the Hal Fishman commentary on the Mel Gibson situation via the KTLA web site.  I wrote a short explanatory note and then just pasted in the text.
I was pleasantly surprised, yesterday, to receive a personal reply from Hal Fishman.  He said that he agreed with some of what I had written, but disagreed with my opinion that reporter Ted Garcia shouldn’t have been standing in front of the bar when he gave us the latest on Mel’s travails.

I think it’s yet another indication of the high caliber of the Channel 5 news department that Mr. Fishman actually took time out of what must be an incredibly busy schedule to write a reply to a random emailer from the net.

Yet another reason I’m going to keep watching.

Now, if they would only do something about those dratted car chases.

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Maybe I should start up one of those panhandler web sites.  “Send us some money so we can get even with the neighbors, big time.  Please.”

Our neighbors across the street, the same outfit that had the earth mover whapping its bucket against the dump truck all day last week, had a concrete pumper start up at just about exactly 7am today.  And it doesn’t just quietly pump the stuff.  Besides the noise of the cement mixer, it also involves banging, scraping, the same kind of released-air sound that a big truck’s brakes make, and shrill, insistent beeping as various other vehicles back up.

Oh, and also (so far) four dump trucks, two loads of sand on the street (!!!), at least three men shouting and a bunch of other unidentifiable racket.

AND this is Tuesday, which means the neighborhood’s crew of gardeners are also out there with their 5,903,101 leaf blowers.

I don’t know whether having our concrete lawn removed, our driveway replaced and several truckloads of topsoil delivered would work out to anywhere near an equivalent amount of noise, but I’d sure like to be able to try it and find out.

The panhandler web site is looking better all the time.

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Things I’ve discovered so far today:

• The 3-hole puncher works SO much better now that I have oiled it.
• I still wish I could afford one of those take-no-prisoners 3-hole paper drills.  It’s definitely on my list of future purchases.
• Even though I got a paper jam by leaving the paper-catch-doojobbie up after putting paper in the printer, it didn’t impinge on my consciousness enough to keep me from leaving it up again when I refilled the printer, and thus I got another paper jam.  DUH!
• A lot of the articles I tore out and saved are more than a year old.
• Thus, throwing a lot of those articles away gave me a whole bunch more space to save new stuff in the same plastic envelopes.
• Putting a catnip toy in the top perch of the cat tree encourages a pesky calico cat to stay there instead of re-inhabiting my desk chair every time I get up.
• According to the UPS tracking site, my miter saw got put on the truck for delivery at 5 this morning and IT’S NOT HERE YET.  How the ^$%@! long does it take to drive to here from Sylmar, for pity’s sake?
• I forgot where I put away all those Swiss Army knives I won on eBay.
• A catalog stands a much better chance of my opening the cover if the sender gets my gender correct on the address label.  You call me Mister, your stuff goes straight in the trash.  Period.

Back to work.

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