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.
I’m not sure why the walls look so yellow; I can assure you they are white, although we’re considering repainting because they’re ugly white.
This is what the dining room looks like now:
There is a row of bookshelves behind that row of bookshelves, plus the one against the wall that decided to commit suicide rather than be relocated. In all honesty, I’m surprised we got away with only one going ‘splode on us, given how old and cheap these shelves are.
We haven’t moved any furniture yet, really– the piano is being moved into the hallway tomorrow, which I am not excited about– but we got a lot of “small and movable” types of things out of the room, and prepped the dining room and the family room to have other stuff moved into them. These books? That completely cover our dining table? These are just the books that were on the shelves wrong. In other words, these are the books that were on top of the bookshelves, or on the bookshelves but in front of the books that were shelved properly. In other words, you would be completely accurate if you looked at the bookshelves in the living room and pronounced them to be completely full. Because they are.
I have to empty every piece of furniture and every book– and there are a couple thousand– out of my living room by Wednesday, so that we can put new carpet down.
Super exciting, in an “I want to die” sort of way.
I decided that the basic, entry-level Rubik’s Speedcube that I have wasn’t as much of a challenge as it used to be– I still need the directions in front of me, don’t get me wrong, but I can solve it from basically any scramble to done in a few minutes, so I lost my ever-loving fucking mind and bought a Gan Mirror M Speedcube today. It took a good half-hour to solve from a pretty thorough scramble and broke my mind about halfway through. What the image to the right doesn’t really show you is that the colors will shift, going from blue to purple depending on your angle. It makes the cube absolutely beautiful to look at, but it means you can only go by the size and shape of the various sides to solve the thing, which is absolutely maddening, especially the first time you have to wrap your head around it and that one piece looks like it’s in the right place only shit it’s half a millimeter too thick so it can’t be the right piece.. I managed it, though, and once I can solve it as fast as I can a traditional speedcube I’ll start working on actually memorizing the algorithms so I can do it without the damn instructions on the screen in front of me.
I have been having a really relaxing break so far– recall that even if I hadn’t quit my job, this would be a four-day break because of fall break, and I’m technically employed by my previous district through next Friday anyway– and I spent a couple of hours a day working on the Lego set for the Space Shuttle Discovery that I bought a month or so ago. The thing is a beast, coming in at just over 2300 pieces, so naturally as I was moving it from my office to my room, where it will be displayed alongside all the rest of the NASA Lego sets (excepting the Apollo Saturn V rocket, which I haven’t built yet) I managed to knock half the fucking wing off by bashing it into the doorway. I got it fixed, nothing missing, but the torrent of swearing attracted attention all over the house. I think this will probably turn out to have been more fun to build than the Saturn V, which is probably going to end up kind of repetitive, but either way it was a blast to put together and I think the model of the Hubble Telescope that came with it is cool enough that I’d happily have bought it as a separate purchase on its own.
Also, somehow, my wife and I went from “Should we replace the carpet in the living room?” to having an appointment for a man to come out on Wednesday and measure our living room for our new carpet in less than 24 hours. Have I posted pictures of my living room recently? Because there are thirteen completely full bookshelves, a sofa, and a fucking piano in there. Guess who said the words “I have the next three weeks off, I can get the room cleared out!” out loud, like an idiot?
Hello, dining room table! I forgot what you looked like, what with keeping you under a tablecloth for five years. You’re pretty nice! Enjoy the living room; you’re going to live in there today.
The view from the doorway. Still some cleaning and straightening to do, obviously, and the books need to go back on the shelves, but:
There is a cat in this picture, by the way:
So that’s that, for now. There was some fun with archaeology the way there always is when you do any kind of renovation in an old house, as the little nook in the back appears to have had some built-in architecture removed at some point– there were tack strips nailed down across the middle of the floor and some weird traces of paint and one bit of wall with missing baseboards. The floor is otherwise undamaged, though, and as you can see it looks great.
Oh, and we just pulled up a corner of the carpet in our perfect rectangle dining room to reveal ordinary subflooring underneath, and I said the words “This would be the easiest hardwood flooring job ever, if we wanted to try it.” I don’t know why I said those words.
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