I have been injecting Twitter directly into my fucking veins for roughly 24 hours now, in between games of God of War: Ragnarökand ferrying my wife and child around, and I’m at the point where I don’t even care who wins for everything else (except for Boebert Boebert must go God damn it stop teasing me) any longer because I don’t feel like I have the right to ask for much more than we’ve already got. I’m going to be out of town tomorrow night because my dad and I are running some stuff up to my aunt in Michigan, so I’ve got my shit recorded through Saturday afternoon.
I am starting to have some concerns about next week, as we get closer to the actual start date. I feel like I don’t know nearly enough about how things are supposed to work in this building and, weirdly, I can’t get anyone to send me any information. Like, I don’t even have a class schedule yet. I have asked multiple people for a staff manual and the request hasn’t even been acknowledged. It’s starting to piss me off, frankly. Help me be good at my job, please.
Anyway. Good chance of no post tomorrow, or maybe a picture or two, but I’ll be back on Friday and then the cascading anxiety disorder can take over. Excited? So am I.
We put in new carpeting last week; you know that if you’ve been around much. Since then we have decided to radically rearrange all of the public-presenting rooms of the house; the former dining room has become a reading room, the “fireplace room” that we never really settled on a name for is due to become a dining room as soon as our dining table is no longer three feet deep in books, I have a meeting tomorrow with someone about custom shelving in the living room, and another meeting with someone else about some minor renovations in the former-dining-room-now-reading-room, and tonight we went out and bought a new sofa. We got it as a three-piece, so it’s a sofa with a chaise and not the wraparound sectional that you see there, but it’s in that charcoal color and I love it.
Look at this nasty-ass filthy-ass ugly-ass carpet:
Nonetheless, the only things remaining in the room are those lamps and that vacuum; the dolly and the small pile of electronic detritus have both been removed, and the room is officially empty.
That stain on the blinds predates our ownership of the house. I’m looking at you next, nasty-ass blinds.
The piano was moved, and while it didn’t go far it frankly wasn’t nearly as much trouble as we feared:
And check out the current state of our dining room. The boy is included for scale:
New carpet goes in tomorrow. God, we should have gone ahead and repainted in there. I’m going to end up regretting the decision to move so quickly on it.
IN OTHER NEWS, I went to the doctor’s office today. Roughly three weeks ago (time post-Covid is meaningless, it could be anywhere from five weeks ago to yesterday) my cat, the one who managed to insert herself into two of the three pictures on this post, attempted to jump into my lap and, somehow, missed. This led to one claw– one fucking single claw— digging through my shirt and deep into my stomach, and me having to literally pry her claw out of me by grabbing her by the one leg she was dangling off of. I have had a hydrocolloid bandage on the injury for most of the time between then and now, and the fucking thing wasn’t healing right. The last two bandages had to be swapped out when it became clear that the wound was somehow continuing to bleed under them, and it was still looking kind of red and ugly and hole-like, and I finally called my doctor’s office yesterday and forced my way into an appointment this afternoon.
Naturally, when I got up and changed the bandage it looked more healed than it’s ever looked, but it was still redder than I want and slightly warm to the touch. I decided to keep the appointment. My mom spent most of the last year of her life with a wound vacuum attached to her in one place or another, and if I’ve inherited her disinclination to heal when cut I’m not fucking around with it. The doctor looked at it and asked me a bunch of questions that all had “no” as the answer, then got real thoughtful for a second and asked me if I thought there was any chance there was still a bit of cat claw left in the wound. I said I doubted it , as I feel like I’d have noticed if I broke something off when I grabbed her, but we decided out of an abundance of caution to put me on a quick course of antibiotics and, and this was fun, do a stomach x-ray to see if we could detect any sort of foreign body. She couldn’t feel a “pus pocket” by manipulating my abdomen, so she was pretty sure there was nothing in there, but what the hell; x-rays are free in America, after all, right?
I highly recommend the experience of having someone try to detect a “pus pocket” in your stomach by touch, by the way.
There’s not much of a story about the X-rays beyond the look on the tech’s face when told that we were looking for claw bits in my stomach. She was, I think, skeptical of the entire enterprise, and I haven’t gotten a phone call yet about whether they found anything. I assume the aforementioned pus pocket would show up before the actual claw bit, which is, after all, at least organic.
Hey, speaking of my doctor, remember that sleep study I did? I never heard back! Not a thing. And for a while I was doing that thing where every single time I remembered that I never heard back about the sleep study was at a time where calling the doctor’s office was simply not practical, ie, right before going to bed, and then eventually it just fell off my radar and became something to remember to ask about the next time I saw my doctor. Which I did today! And I remembered to ask her about it, and I was really entertained to watch her face as she went through several stages of 1) trying to remember ordering me a sleep study in the first place, 2) “wait, I never got the results on that either,” and 3) “Oh, shit, leaving this guy on the hook for three months is kinda unprofessional.”
Well, turns out they never got sent to her either, at least not through the usual channels, and one way or another she found them, and …
Man.
Y’all.
I’ve got apnea apnea. Like, I have the kind of sleep apnea that regular sleep apnea is afraid of. It appears that I’m not breathing while I sleep at all. This paragraph, which I was howling with laughter at the utterly incredulous look on her face while she was reading it to me, is directly from the interpretation report of my results, HIPAA be damned:
There were 17 obstructive, 25 central, and 0 mixed apneas resulting in an Apnea index of 4.3. There were 728 hypopneas resulting in a Hypopnea Index of 75.2… Baseline oxygen saturation was 87%. The lowest oxygen saturation was 70%. Oxygen saturation was below 88% for 296.5 minutes or 51.1% of the total recording time… This is a markedly abnormal polysomnography study with almost continuous respiratory events and results in an overall respiratory events index severely elevated 79.6.
Now, I’m not a doctor, and I don’t know what all of those words mean, but a “hypopnea” is ten seconds of shallow breathing, and that happened seven hundred and twenty-eight times.(*) And I’m seriously considering renaming the blog Markedly Abnormal.
So. Yeah. They’re ordering me a fuckin’ Darth Vader mask to sleep in, I assume.
(*) I just looked, and they consider it “severe” hypopnea at thirty an hour, which would have been just under 270 times. So … yeah.
The YouTube channel is, at least by my not-quite-lofty standards, blowing up lately, and the current series I’m doing on A Plague Tale: Requiem already has four or five videos over a hundred views. I’m not sure what’s driving it but I’m definitely happy about it, especially since all of my other social media stuff has been pretty stagnant lately. We’re back to two videos a day until I’m back at school again, so this is a good time to jump on, especially if people being eaten by rats in fourteenth-century France is your bag.
(sudden realization)
I’ve been seeing big jumps in page views at night, although today that pattern has been broken somewhat. I just now figured out why– it’s because I’m playing through the game in French, and I bet if I check in a couple of days I’ll have been getting lots of traffic from France. That’s cool for now but it’s not great in terms of people sticking around once this series is over. We’ll see, I guess.
Let’s see, what else is going on? Carpet Man is coming tomorrow to measure my living room. After that Project Empty The Living Room starts, which I’m not looking forward to, and then over the next week we have two different sets of contractors coming over for two different projects, and my brain is melty as hell right now because there’s too much going on.
I read Kara Jorgensen’s excellent The Reanimator’s Heart, which you should read and I should do a full review of. I’m starting Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Eyes of the Void tonight, which … I may talk about that tomorrow too, because it’s not the large print edition and yet somehow has the biggest type I think I’ve ever seen in any non-large-print book. We all know Tchaikovsky can write long, so it’s weird that they felt like they needed to increase his page count like this. I’ll post pictures eventually, trust me, but it’s gotta be 14-point text. I should check the first book in the series and see if it was huge type too. It’s actually distracting.
… yeah, that’s what I’ve got. What’s up in your neck of the woods? Do you even live in the woods? Nobody lives in the woods anymore.
I have done some grading tonight, but not much, and I regret to inform you that you cannot make me do any more. Nor can you make me get any lesson planning done; this week is going to be by the seat of my pants, more or less, and it’s going to be fine anyway because this shit is muscle memory by now. This weekend was kind of nuts; my father-in-law’s memorial service was Saturday morning in Plainwell, Michigan, which means I got up earlier on Saturday than I typically get up during the week and spent the drive up hurriedly composing the eulogy I was supposed to deliver in my head, sans paper, because for some fucking stupid reason I hadn’t written it yet.
Don’t leave eulogies to the last minute, people. I pulled it off and everything went fine because I am exceptionally talented, but … don’t do that.
Oh, and the … hole? Is it still a grave if you’re just using a box with an urn and some Beefeater Gin in it and not a casket? Well, whatever it was, the Goddamned thing was too small, and everyone got to take turns digging the hole wider and deeper with what I think were technically stolen shovels before the service started. My wife briefly considered putting the box in sideways, an idea that was quickly vetoed out of existence, and we all just sucked it up and got to digging, my father-in-law’s amused laughter echoing from inside his box.
Afterwards the whole extended family went out for Mexican, because really, what else are you going to do? Sure.
And because emotional whiplash is how we do things nowadays, we had tickets to see Barenaked Ladies Saturday night. By “we” I mean all three of us; it was slated to be the boy’s first concert, and I think he was pretty excited about it. Which meant we were all a bit surprised to be leading a sobbing child out of the theater barely four songs into BNL’s set, meaning that we really only got to hear the (shitty) opening band’s set, and we didn’t get to hear the one BNL song that the boy has memorized and really wanted to hear, as I’m sure it was the last song of the night.
Parenting advice! Concerts are fucking loud. This particular concert was perhaps too loud. And, like, I mean that as a reasonably veteran concertgoer; it was too loud for me, and I’ve seen shows in that venue before. That said, though, like, BNL doesn’t need to be blowing my Goddamned eardrums out. This isn’t a hard rock band or some shit like that, and even the shitty opening band was too fucking loud, and they were going for some sort of pop/bluegrass nonsense or something like that, so they definitely didn’t need to be super loud.
Anyway, we were unprepared. We should have brought headphones and/or earplugs, or at least warned him thoroughly, and we did none of those things. I’m not mad at him and this is one hundred percent our fault as the adults in the scenario. He doesn’t necessarily Have Sensory Issues in the way people generally mean that, but we should have been able to see this coming and we didn’t. The worst thing is that he was clearly upset about ruining the concert for us, and it’s hard to convince an upset eleven-year-old that you’re not mad at him and you’re not disappointed in him when he’s absolutely certain that both of those things are true.
So … yeah. I’ve mostly laid around like a lump today. I have started the new Stephen King book; it is terrible, and I am currently deciding if I’m going to drop it or hate-read it. It is about a seventeen-year-old who is somehow actually however old Stephen King is, and said fake teenager uses slang that no teenager, including King when he was a teenager, has ever used, except it’s not about that somehow. We’re supposed to believe that this ancient old man who refers to earning money as “folding green” is just a regular teenager and pay attention to the rest of the story, where he’s inexplicably befriending an old man, except the old man is actually an old man and not an old man masquerading as a teenager.
Anyway, it’s bad and I’m tired and I’m a shitty dad and somehow I have to go to work again tomorrow and I kind of want a redo on the last couple of days.
Feeding the giraffes was awesome, although it turns out they’re super skittish right now, because they’re not terribly used to people yet, so a lot of the experience involved being Very Patient and standing Very Still as an animal that could kick me into the upper stratosphere if it wanted to thought very carefully about whether I was too scary to accept lettuce from. Moving your arm slightly and watching as a sixteen-foot-tall, 3000-pound monstrosity turns and flees from your presence is kind of hilarious. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen giraffes run. It does not look right.
My training on Monday was, surprisingly, pretty good.
Everything else in the last few days has sucked, and I had my first shit day at work of the school year today as I showed up in a bad mood and absolutely could not shake it. This situation with the teacher who was attacked last week is becoming a bigger problem by the day. I’ve also taken on two additional classes– more on that later, as I don’t think I’ve actually talked about it around here yet– and right now my exhaustion level is back to first week of school levels. I didn’t want to skip three days in a row, though, so … giraffe.
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