29 October 2003, 3:18 peeyem
They have countered again with full asking price. They think that I will blink first. They are wrong.
28 October 2003, 1:52 peeyem
I'm glad we don't use the metric system. I mean, I can figure it out and all, being as I am in that generation that they thought was going to be the generation who used it full time, so I had it more or less drilled into me. But it's far less colorful than the English system, with its feet and bushels and scruples and short tons and long tons and the mythical smoot.
You might be wondering what brought that on. I have been reading the dictionary again. For a grown-up, I use the dictionary an awful lot, and not one of those little paperback abridged dictionaries, either, I like the fully Merriam Wester Lexicon with its red cover and speckled edges and tiny type. I never bother to put it on the shelf, because I use it all the time and it's just easier to leave it right there.
I was very fortunate to get a really good public school education in Laurens County, Georgia. I had (for the most part) fantastic teachers who didn't really care if we found the class entertaining as long as we learned and learned how to learn more.
Mrs. Rowe, my Sixth Grade teacher taught us all about Thesauruses and dictionaries and how to use them, and every night we had to go home and copy ten words and their pronunciations and defintions out of the dictionary, and then write a sentence for each word, using it in proper context. She also taught us to sing Jadda Jadda and Molly Malone, and she had no qualms whatsoever about disciplining any of us for anything.
Anyway.
Have I mentioned that I am selling my house and buying another one? I made an offer on the one I really want, and they countered me with full asking price and they will pay closing costs. I have countered their counter, and am very proud to say that I have told my agent that that is my final offer. I will just wait until my house sells and see where they are, and then I will decide what to do. Very important to always do the next right thing, and the next right thing at the moment is to hold.
22 October 2003, 4:31 peeyem
I can see it coming. I am going to be that crazy lady with the affliction that everybody knows about and admonishes the rare few who don't to ignore it.
My neurophthalmologist, the lovely and talented Dr. Nancy Canter Weiner, and I had a little meeting Wednesday last and I am on the Diamox, following the conversation.
She asked me if I'd been having headaches and I told her yes, ma'am, I have, and they've grown in intensity and I really can't get at them with Zomig, unless I take enough to choke a horse.
She also asked me, as she has in the past, if I have been having any tinnitis. Now, I have seen William Shatner talk about his tinnitis on the TV, and I, like you, know that tinnitis is ringing in the ears or clanging sounds. I have just yesterday looked it up in the dictionary and am now aware that it could also be what they call "roaring." But since I only knew what William Shatner has been telling us all when she asked me, I told her no, just the normal ocean sounds. She asked me what "normal ocean sounds." I told her, why, the ones everybody hears all the time anyway, you know, like when you listen to a big shell. At any rate, I wouldn't call what I was hearing roaring, perzactly, since it was actually kind of pleasant.
She paused a beat or so and finally said, "You know that's not normal, right?"
You could have knocked me over with a feather. I have heard the ocean, albeit sometimes not so much, my entire damn life. I assumed everyone else was hearing it too.
That was when she decided she might ought to put me on the Diamox, being as how that ocean sound is caused by too much spinal fluid. Now my head doesn't hurt, but I kinda miss living at the beach, just a very little bit.
But anyway. Back to the crazy lady part. The side effect is that it makes my feet tingle (Your fingers and toes might tingle a bit, she said). The tingling is not inconsiderable, nossir. It seems to be confined to my right foot, mostly, and sometimes up my leg to my kneecap, and it feels just like it feels when your foot falls asleep and is waking up, or like it would if you whacked your imaginary funny bone down there on something. It happens a good ten or twelve times a day, and the only thing that seems to help at all is to get up immediately and go for a little walk; if that doesn't work, I jump up and down here in my office. I don't think I could make it through, say, an entire wedding or funeral like this. I'll have to stand in the back, like I've had my butt operated on or something.
The other side effect is that it makes carbonated drinks taste like sheet metal.(You are allowed to have carbonated beverages, she said, if you can choke them down). Even right now, I would sell your mother to be able to drink a Coke in a can.
But my head sure doesn't hurt.
14 October 2003, 12:17 peeyem
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." General Dwight D. Eisenhower, POTUS
Today would have been the General's birthday, so you know.
13 October 2003, 2:22 peeyem
This happened to my friends:
"Is that blood or karo syrup?
Haunted houses are never really scary, are they? I mean, there's only
so frightening 18-year-olds in ghoul makeup can actually be, for one thing,
and Rob Zombie music really inspires headaches more than stark terror,
no?
So, we weren't expecting much on Saturday night. We figured we'd all jump
at least once, and run politely when the chainsaw man came calling. You
can always smell the chainsaws a half-mile away, so it isn't like you're
surprised.
My friend Michael had his arms around my waist when we were finally exiting
the maze, and someone at the facility stuck a gigantic rubber alligator
out across our ankles. It went between my feet mid-step, and knocked both
of M's feet out from under him. We ran a few steps to try to get our feet
back under us and couldn't.
I bellyflopped onto the concrete, twisting my ankle and bruising my ribs,
elbow, and hand. M fell face-first into the brick wall, splitting his
forehead all the way to his skull.
My glasses had flown off on the way down, so all I saw after hitting the
ground was a huge splash of blood. The thought is that real blood flickered
through my head while I tried to catch my breath. I rolled over as Michael
stood with his hands pressed to his face, gushing blood.
Michael looked dazed. He looked at me and said, "God, I'm so sorry,"
and staggered into the parking lot. I shouted to P to take off his sweater
and give me his t-shirt, so he immediately began stripping in the parking
lot. He yelled to a police officer, "First aid kit?"
Everyone who worked there walked away. No one brought a first aid kit
or offered to call 911.
Michael's car was nearly out of gas, so we jumped into the back of a friend's
pickup truck and he rushed us to the hospital.
At the hospital, I became rather irate when the nurses in the hospital
wouldn't touch him. I had to hold his arm down for a tetanus shot--which
the nurse gave from as great a distance as her arm would allow--and wash
the blood off of his hands and face. They would hold a gauze pad out with
two fingers and tell him to hold it to his head. He was stuck into a room
in the nearly-empty ER for five hours without anyone even looking at his
head where his skull gleamed through.
Michael is pretty obviously gay. He gave his partner's name as his emergency
contact. After considering several reasons nurses might be reluctant to
help him, the only conclusion I can draw is that they feared him. I am
furious.
I was not aware that people are still denied medical treatment because
people in the health care industry don't care if someone lives or dies
based on their assumptions.
A doctor had wandered by around 2 am. Laughing, she said to one nurse,
"I need a cup of coffee. I'm on break for a while."
I spent the time from 2 to 3:30 am rolling on a stool up and down the
hall, yelling, "Can anyone here sew? I got an exposed head here.
Anyone?" One nurse left her computer unattended, so I rolled up and
began calling out to Michael who the other people in the ER were, what
they had, and long they had had to wait.
Two hours later, the coffee-wanting doctor drifted up to Michael's room,
coffee in hand. She glanced at me and the otherwise empty room and walked
away. I chased her on my stool.
"HEY!! HEY!!" She stopped.
"Where is the patient?" she snapped.
"He gave up and bled to death. How was your coffee?" I was livid.
A nurse told the doctor that he had merely gone to the bathroom.
Michael's partner finally arrived at the hospital just as the doctor was
cleaning his wound--the first time anyone had approached him with so much
as an antiseptic. Todd had left visiting a friend in Nashville and had
still arrived before anyone even looked at Michael.
Public service announcement: If for any reason you find yourself
in need of an ER in Gwinnett County, DO NOT go to Gwinnett Medical Center
on 316.
Yesterday Michael and I checked on each other's well-being. I am only
bruised and puffy in spots, but he is going to a plastic surgeon in two
weeks. Hopefully, the surgeon will touch him.
10 October 2003, 1:17 peeyem
Establishing a spot on a counter to stash your finds and then making sorties out into the store to bring more things back does not constitute standing in line. Yet I have a weird admiration for the woman who did just that, coming back and inserting herself in front of me and saying, "I was just getting more things. Now I'm done." I did not express my admiration, of course. I merely lifted my eyebrows at her; she at least had the decency to blush and look away.
I could sleep for about two days, given the chance.
9 October 2003, 4:49 peeyem
Do you know that you can get the lyrics to "Alice's Restaurant" on the Internet? I mean, I'm sure you do know that, because you can get everything on the Internet, up to and including HUMAN DNA, but I never thought to look for them. And I've heard the song practically every Thanksgiving of my life and never known all the lyrics. But people do. John Kniess, PhD, of Young Harris College knows all the lyrics by heart. And here I am, just ignorantly humming along once a year, and not even carrying the tune when I do.
That was all, except that I somehow managed to wipe out September, so that's pretty tough luck if you were interested in September.
7 October 2003, 1:21 peeyem
I am a freak magnet.
Sunday afternoon we had a match at Piedmont Park. Those of you who live in Atlanta know that Piedmont Park is purportedly Atlanta's Backyard. As Atlanta's Backyard, Piedmont Park is generally full of a very diverse group of individuals, doing a very diverse array of things (not the least of which is apparently having sex all over the place, if the proliferation of condom wrappers is any indicator– this is in no way intended as a remark on what I do or do not do in my backyard, by the way).
Anyway.
I went around the courts and the clubhouse to go to the ladies room, and there was a wild-eyed woman in the lobby holding one hand in a wad of paper towels and clutching a leash in the other. She was repeating, over and over in a somewhat autistic fashion, "Please call 911. Please call 911. Please call 911." There were two park employees standing there looking at her and I assumed that 1) she might be a crank, and 2) they were handling the situation. You know what happens when we assume. I trotted on into the ladies room, and when I came out, there was a not inconsiderable amount of blood soaking through the paper towels and she was still asking them to call 911.
As I am a take-charge kind of woman with an oddly soothing (no, really) personality, I asked her to sit, please. She sat down and I asked what happened. She pulled her finger out of a styrofoam cup of ice and said, "My dog bit my finger. Off." I gasped for a second, as I was not expecting to see a severed finger before my eyes. I pointed to the dog and said, "This dog right here?" "Yes," she said, "but his rabies shots are up to date."
Let me interrupt myself here to say that I think it's a fine thing to be a responsible pet owner, but rabies or no, I don't want to lose a digit to my own damn dog.
The park employees were still standing around looking flummoxed, so I very clearly said, "Please call 911 This Instant," and then asked her if the finger was in the cup or in the dog. She didn't know where the finger was, and she was still asking for someone to call 911.
In a moment of remarkable charity, I volunteered Brenda's nurse practitioner services and left them there waiting for the ambulance. Brenda went up there and reported that someone had gone outside and found the finger, but that they wouldn't put it back, since it was just the fatty end of the finger and not the bone.
In other news from Sunday, I am ashamed of myself, so very ashamed of myself, for my behavior during my match. I am more or less inured to guilt, but I have a heaping helping of seflo and shame. I behaved like an ass in response to other ass-like behavior, when normally I would have let it go, kept my cool, stayed on the high road.
Finally, go here.
Living
in the
Past?
2003
2002
