Letters From Home

You know how it is–get one interesting semi-spam email, check out the link, and they want your email address before they’ll let you see anything. So you give ‘em an address and all of a sudden you’re getting all kinds of similar semi-spam email.

I long ago created a special mailbox to have that stuff sent to, with a fake name. So far, that’s kept the “make money on the internet” stuff separated from the mail I really want to read.

Some of those sales letters are pretty darn persuasive. I remain a skeptic, and I’m definitely not going to shell out the kind of money these people all seem to want. (Funny how the price points are almost all identical, huh?) So what I generally do is look at the sales page (most of which look nearly identical) and save the email that sent me there in a special mailbox in Eudora. I go back and re-visit the site a couple days later to see if it still has any appeal.

You know what? That stuff doesn’t look nearly so enticing the second time around.

Oh, I’ve downloaded a few things and I’ve filled up a couple notebooks with printouts of this, that, and the other, and some of it has been helpful. The really helpful links, I think, are not to sales pages but to the various blogs run by the people who are peddling this stuff. Those are often worth reading not so much for what the salespeople write but for the comments they get. I know that most of those blogs are moderated, so I bet it’d be an eye-opener to see the comments that don’t get approved for public consumption.

Have I found the way to make a steady income yet? No. I do have a collection of e-commerce bookmarks, an AdSense account, an Amazon Affiliate account and a ClickBank account. That and about $3 will get me a cup of coffee at Starbucks if my son’s not buying.

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My parents were very, very, not-mechanically-inclined. Fixing things was not within their realm of experience, and neither of them looked at broken items with the kind of inquiring mind that would lead to a solution to the item’s problem. Either they would pay to have someone else fix it, or if they felt they couldn’t afford to fix the item, we would do without it and maybe get another one eventually.

When my brothers and I were growing up in Lynchburg, we were fortunate to have a neighbor who worked for the phone company and who understood how to fix almost anything. Many was the time Foster Dixon came over and fixed in short order some item over which my dad had been fussing. He even came over and installed the elaborate electric train set that my dad went crazy and bought my equally not-mechanically-inclined oldest brother one Christmas.

My mother did not sew and did not bake. She was an excellent cook otherwise, but the only time she could be persuaded to bake cookies was for the annual faculty Christmas party. She’d make cakes from mixes once in a while, but she wasn’t interested in anything much more complicated than that.

So what happened to me? I sew well enough to have once tackled making a man’s three-piece suit and a woman’s double-breasted camel-hair overcoat. I knit and crochet (no expert at either, but comfortable making intermediate level patterns). I bake, and I have canned and preserved and made jelly in the past.

I once built a computer monitor from a kit. I fix computers. I build them. I fix watches and make picture frames.

And today for the first time I fixed an iPod.

I like fixing things. If I didn’t see so much of my father’s genetic heritage in myself, I would wonder if I were a changeling child.

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I inherited a lot of things from my dad. Not much in the way of tangible goods, but a lot in terms of genetic heritage.

High blood pressure runs in my dad’s family. It might have killed his older sister (we’ll never know for sure because no autopsy was performed when she died suddenly at age 45). It certainly incapacitated my dad for many years–not so much the blood pressure itself but the multiple medications he took for it, that literally had him staggering.

I understand how he felt, since I’ve been taking multiple medications for it for years, and some of them left me feeling pretty staggery, too.

Recent revelations that taking beta blockers seems to increase the likelihood that a person will develop diabetes don’t encourage me, either, because I am the first known diabetic in the family. The idea that this might be an iatrogenic illness annoys me no end.

A bit over a week ago I came down with a pretty bad cold. Since I was feeling so crappy in general, I wasn’t eating properly, and thus tested my blood sugar more often. And thus found out that it was running noticeably higher than usual. When this continued throughout the week, I went to see my doctor. And she discovered that my blood pressure, which hasn’t been “normal” for over ten years, was running even higher than usual.

Thus, yet another blood pressure medication was added to my daily handful of pills. Over the course of the past 20 years or so, I’ve tried every class of bp medications there is, and none of them worked well and most of them caused side effects I couldn’t live with. This latest one is a calcium channel blocker. I forget what it was about calcium channel blockers that I couldn’t live with the last time my doctor tried prescribing one, but I know exactly why I’m not going to put up with this one much longer. It lists “flushing” as a side effect. No kidding. I’ve gone around looking like I fell asleep in a tanning booth since about an hour after I took the first pill.

My diabetes medications have also been doubled, and that, at least, seems to be having some effect. Of course, nausea is one of the predominant effects of increasing one’s dosage of metformin, but I suppose I can live with that a day or two. Having no appetite when your blood sugar is elevated isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

But, like my dad, I’m getting weary of taking handfuls of pills every day. The doctor says, lose some weight, that should help. Alas, I took off 50 pounds about ten years ago and my blood pressure went up. This is not to say I couldn’t stand to lose another 25 or so, and I’m working on that, but as a cure for high blood pressure–I doubt it. Neither my dad nor his sister were ever fat a day in their lives.

It’s very, very discouraging. If I could get off the beta blocker, would my blood sugar control improve? I wanted to try that, but the doctor felt it would be too dangerous.

As the saying goes, some days you’re the dog, some days you’re the hydrant.

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I have a google news filter that alerts me to “fitzrandolph”. It led me to this site. Looks like you found another distant cousin. My Great-Great Grandfather was John FitzRandolph and was related to Nathanial. The Nathanial of Princeton fame?

I like your site and your calico. I had one too.

– Fitz

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Months ago I was idly Googling stuff, as I do now and again. I put in my great-great-grandfather’s name to see what would come up.

What came up, eventually, was a family tree for Barack Obama. And that’s how I found out we’re distantly related. I had no idea what the exact relationship was till tonight, though.

We are both descendants of Nathaniel FitzRandolph, 1642-1713 and we are something like ninth cousins. Woo hoo!

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I have a theory, and I’m sure it’s not unique to me, that the farther away we humans get from what we evolved amongst, the worse off we are. It’s already been shown time and time again that people who keep too clean actually end up less healthy, and I’m sure that when we try to manufacture food products not found in nature we cause ourselves untold problems that may not be immediately apparent.

This train of thought is brought to you by Infmom Went Back To School And Immediately Caught A Cold. All the years I was working in customer-service jobs, I seldom got sick, because I was out there amongst the germs every day and my system learned to ward them off after a period of adjustment. Now that I’m retired, though, and I only go out amongst mass quantities of people when I choose to, rather than most days, I encounter much less in the way of microbial nastiness. And therefore when a new semester starts up at school I inevitably get sick shortly thereafter.

It’s the same with kids when they start in preschool and kindergarten. They get one cold after another for what seems like forever, and then Mom and Dad realize the kidlet hasn’t been sick for ages. Kids’ systems adapt. That’s what we evolved to do.

Of course, I probably shouldn’t mention that in kindergarten, my son got such a mild case of the chicken pox that I didn’t even realize he’d had it till (a) his younger sister came down with a major case of chicken pox and (b) we got a note from his teacher saying that other kids in the class had gotten it and to be careful. Ooopsie. Needless to day, I did not call the teacher and let her know which kid had unknowingly spread it around.

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Today we discovered that our fish tank was leaking. Just a slow leak, thank goodness, but enough to leave a small puddle on the floor.

We’ve had that tank for at least 20 years, probably more like 25, and it has been used to house multiple rodents when it wasn’t being used to house assorted fish, so I decided it would probably be better in the long run if we bought a new tank rather than trying to fix the old one.

Want to know how to change from an old leaky tank to a new one?

• Pull the plug on all the electric stuff and remove the lid from the tank.
• Take the hoses off the power filter and put them in a bucket.
• Chase calico cat out from behind tank.
• Carry tank lid, heater, filter hoses and filter to kitchen sink.
• Chase calico cat out from behind tank.
• Siphon out a full bucket of water and set the bucket close to the tank.
• Net out each fish and put it in the bucket.
• Chase calico cat away from bucket full of fish.
• Siphon most of the rest of the water out of the tank, one bucket at a time, pouring the water in the kitchen sink and chasing away calico cat as necessary. When tank is mostly empty, remove plastic plants.
• Scoop all the rocks out of the bottom of the tank, one handful at a time, and put them in a bucket.
• Pick up the tank with the last few ounces of sludge filled water and move it to the kitchen.
• Pick up the tank stand and put it outside to dry.
• Wipe up water and loosened paint from the floor inside the fake fireplace. Put small fan from bathroom in there to blow the area dry.
• Sit down to relax and read a magazine, with calico cat on lap. Periodically remind cat that she does NOT want to get into that bucket of fish.
• When everything is mostly dry, reassemble stand and replace new tank. Put all electric stuff back. Put rocks in tank, carefully. Put plastic plants back.
• Carry water from kitchen, one bucket at a time, till tank is mostly full. After second bucket, put calico cat in bedroom and shut door.
• Turn on filter, air stone and tank heater.
• Catch fish in bucket with net and replace in tank. Pour water from bucket into tank until tank is full.
• Feed fish, stand back and admire tank.
• Release cat. Tell her “tough noogies.”

(the following is the calico cat in front of the old fish tank–new alignment looks the same)

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Wow, it’s been way too long since I posted anything. Of course, this isn’t exactly the Grand Central Station of news.

However, we’ve started the search for a new gas grill and will probably buy it this weekend (seeing as F’zer’s birthday party is coming up) and the new semester has started at school. So at least I have some legitimate distractions to keep me away from all my blogs.

I’ve got three blogs now, plus managing three forums on CompuServe. That’s a lot of writing, if I do it right. Sometimes I just zone out in front of the computer and don’t get anything accomplished. I should actually be working on my book manuscripts as well as keeping up all the journals and forums.

And going to school, and running errands, and… man, I don’t know how some people accomplish all that they do.

But I bet I could get a lot more done if I’d quit zoning out, idly flipping through the same web sites every day. Maybe I should go on a URL diet? It couldn’t hurt.

At least I now have a new favicon and a new main web page!

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