Corylea

 My parents are 89 (mother) and 90 (father).  They're frail and are not really safe anymore, staying where they are, especially since they live in the country, so they have an enormous lawn to mow and no neighbors close enough to hear them if they cry out.

I've been trying to get them to move into assisted living for several years now, and they've finally agreed to go.  But they're putting up all kinds of roadblocks (as one does when procrastinating on doing something one does NOT want to do).

I'm not in good enough health, myself, to drive 400 miles to where they are to help them; luckily my younger cousin has been going there to assist.  But there are lots of things that need doing that don't require a physical presence, and I've been assisting with those things.  One of those things is mediating between my parents and my cousin, because my cousin wants to take over and do everything HER way, but my mother still has most of her marbles, and she naturally wants her house and her life taken care of in her way.

All of this is exhausting and stressful, and when I'm not helping with my parents' move, I'm generally hiding from the world because I'm overwhelmed.  So I apologize if I haven't read your news or answered your email, but I'm maxxed out at the moment.

Even though we knew this day was coming, it's still very sad. Still, a life well lived is a beautiful thing, and Ms. Nichols did so very much with her life, not just in the performing arts but also as a NASA recruiter. The number of people she inspired is huge, and the effect she had was profound, especially -- but not exclusively -- on women and people of color.

Thank you, Ms. Nichols, for making the world a better place through your actions and your example. We should all be so lucky as to have an effect on the world as excellent as your own.
 

 Norman's and my 16-year-old niece came to visit recently.  She's a lovely girl, and it was great to see her.  Norman wanted to take her out to a Thai restaurant while she was here, even though the place is small and poorly ventilated.  I was uneasy about this, but most of the restaurant's business is take-out, and I thought maybe it would be okay.

It wasn't.  My throat started feeling sore yesterday, and I'm coughing and blowing my nose today, so I took an at-home Covid test, and it's positive.

So far, it just feels like a cold.  I've called my doctor's office to see if I can get some Paxlovid, since I fall into SEVERAL high-risk groups.  The receptionist said the nurse would call me back, so I'm waiting for that.

I should have listened to myself when I felt uneasy, but Norman really wanted to go to the restaurant.  When will I learn to stop letting him override my best judgment?  He always seems so much surer of himself than I am of myself -- thank you, female socialization.  And he's from a much higher social class than I am; his father was a professor with a PhD; mine was a mechanic with a high school diploma.  I've spent a lot of my life deferring to Norman when I shouldn't.  I hope that doesn't end up killing me. :-)

Update:  I waited two hours for my doctor's office to call me back, and when they finally did, they told me to go to Mass.gov and have a telehealth appointment with them to get some Paxlovid.  Funny, I thought my doctor's office was where I went to get meds, not the government!  Sheesh.  Still, the prescription is in the process of being filled at my local pharmacy, so I should have some tonight.

They say there's a Chinese curse that goes, "May you live in interesting times."  I don't know if there really is, but times have been interesting in a Chinese-curse way lately.

Norman's and my 10-year-old niece, Aria, had her appendix burst on the day that her whole family plus Norman were supposed to go on a family vacation in the Adirondacks.  Instead, Aria went to the hospital, and Norman went to his sister's house to watch Aria's twin brother, so Aria's parents could be with her in the hospital.

She was on intravenous antibiotics for more than a week and couldn't eat or drink for nearly a week; in the age before intravenous hydration, she'd have died.  She had complications from surgery, so she had to have a second surgery to address those complications and to remove the pockets of infection that the first surgery missed.  She spent 12 days in the hospital and was very sick, poor thing.  She's back home now, though, and seems to be doing well, which is a great relief for all of us.

While Norman was gone, our air conditioner broke down.  Like many modern appliances, our air conditioner has a computer that's supposed to report what's wrong with it, so the repairman can replace the defective part.  Our air conditioner's computer reported "none of the above."  Gee, how helpful!

It took a week for the repairman to come, and he seemed very discombobulated by not having the problem spelled out for him.  Repairmen used to be like physicians -- they looked at the symptoms and figured out the problem from that -- but now they just do whatever the computer tells them to do and don't actually know how to diagnose a problem.  After several hours of poking around, the repairman decided that BOTH of the fans on the central unit had failed at the same time.  This seems unlikely to Norman and me, since the unit is only four years old and is under warranty for five, so the fans should be made to last at least five years.  And TWO of them failed AT ONCE?

In any case, the repairman had no replacement fans and couldn't get any for two weeks.  So the A/C has been broken since August 7th, and we're not scheduled to see the repairman again until the 26th.  IF he manages to get the fans by then, and IF the fans really are the problem, then we should get the %$#@ thing repaired three weeks after it stopped working.  In August.  If he can't get the fans, or if the fans aren't what's wrong, then who knows when it might be repaired?

To add insult to injury, the A/C repairman who failed to fix our machine gave me a cold while he was here.  It laid me flat for a couple of days, then went away, which is not the usual course of a cold for me.  That makes me wonder if perhaps it was Covid, which my vaccination vanquished after a couple of days of fighting.  In any case, I seem to have recovered from whatever it was.

I'm wildly over-sensitive to heat, to a degree that people who've never met me in real life have a hard time believing.  I lose half my brain and become lethargic and cranky at anything over 75 degrees Fahrenheit (24 C), and yes, I know that's bizarre and extreme.  My grandmother was the same way, and I seem to have been unfortunate enough to inherit her genes.

This means that the A/C isn't a minor matter for me; it's a necessity for me to be able to sleep at night or to cook dinner or to be able to have my mind with me basically at all.  When we got the central air conditioner four years ago, Norman wanted to get rid of all of our window air conditioners.  I insisted that we keep one for emergencies, which he thought was crazy.  Well, I'm not looking so crazy now.

Norman put our one remaining window unit in my bedroom when he came home from his sister's house, so I've been cool enough to sleep at night for the past few nights (although it's really horribly noisy).  Norman is not sleeping well at night and has put a mattress on my floor, so he can sleep in the air conditioning if he needs to.  He hasn't actually slept there yet, because he doesn't want to listen to my CPAP machine all night, but I'm having trouble sleeping because I keep waiting for him to come in.  So even with the A/C in my room, I'm not sleeping as well as I might, though I AM very grateful to have it.

We're living on frozen dinners, because we don't want to cook and add heat to the house.  And I haven't been able to exercise!  I had been so proud and happy to have developed an exercise habit just a couple of months ago, but I can't exercise when it's 90 degrees with 90% humidity, so I haven't been able to do more than ten minutes a day since the A/C went out.  I'm really bummed about that; it feels so unfair that I've FINALLY developed this good habit, only to have it snatched away from me.

My 88-year-old mother has been diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, which means that her heart is beating wildly out of rhythm and too fast.  She feels dizzy and exhausted all the time.  They put her on medication to try to fix it, but that didn't work.  They shocked her heart twice, but that didn't work.  Now she's on a new type of medication, to try to strengthen her heart before they try shocking it a third time.  I'm very worried about her, but it's hard to get information out of her.  Half of the time, she doesn't feel well enough to talk on the phone; the other half of the time, she deliberately minimizes what's going on with her so as not to worry me.  I keep telling her that I'll worry LESS if I have ALL the information, but that doesn't seem to sink in.

My cousin, who has a tendency towards drama that sometimes manifests itself in confabulation*, told me today, "Your mother will be dead by Thanksgiving."  Gee, thanks, Rayna.  That helps so much.  I mean, it might be true, but she doesn't know that, and thinking that way isn't really helpful.

Yep, interesting times.  But probably not interesting to read.  Sorry!  I haven't really got the energy to be interesting to read right now...

*Someone who confabulates makes things up, but they aren't deliberately lying; they believe the fairy tale that their mind has created.

I've been quiet for the past couple of months -- I haven't even managed to answer all of my birthday e-mail, for which I apologize -- because I've been sleeping horribly for the past couple of months. I'm managing four hours of sleep, then dragging through my day in a daze. I can't even consult my doctor about it, because my doctor quit the practice, and now I have to find a new one. If I'm ever actually awake enough to do that.

Anyone local have a doctor or nurse practitioner they recommend? Someone who sees middle-aged obese women as actual human beings would be preferred.

In GOOD news, I'll be fully vaccinated on Thursday afternoon. (I was eligible for a shot early because of having cancer twice in the past five years.) If I ever get some actual SLEEP, I want to go to the library and the park, now that I'm about to become eligible to leave the house.

Yesterday, I got my first shot of Covid vaccine (Pfizer).  Since I've had cancer TWICE in the past five years, I'm "lucky" enough to get my shot before the general public.

The day before yesterday was my birthday, so what a great birthday present!

I'm gonna tell you about it in some detail, so those of you who haven't been vaccinated yet will know what to expect.

The mass testing site was well organized, and everything on the medical end went smoothly.

The first thing they did was make us sanitize our hands.  Then they verified our appointments.  Then they made us take off whatever mask we'd walked in with and put on one of theirs.  I guess they didn't want to have to individually evaluate everyone's mask, but the mask they made me take off was actually much better than the mask they gave me, since mine had a nose wire, whereas theirs gapped around the nose and eyes.

There was a large space for people to wait in line, with marks on the floor to make sure the line was socially distanced.  But actually, there was no waiting in line; by the time I'd walked and walked down the entire waiting area, there was no one in front of me.

The nurses were very sweet, and the shot didn't hurt at all.  The needle they used was so very thin that I actually didn't feel the needle go in.  I thought for a minute that they hadn't even given me the shot, but since the nurse was putting a band-aid on my arm, it was clear that SHE thought she had.  I actually half wondered if she'd somehow missed my arm, and I was grateful when my arm was a little sore several hours later, so I know I actually did get it. :-)

The bad part is that I had to get the shot in a mass inoculation facility that's in the city of Boston.  That means that there's no parking nearby, and one has to take the subway to get there.  It turns out that there's exactly ZERO social distancing on the subway!  All these people are packed into a small metal container without much ventilation, breathing each other's air.  And on the way home, I had a lousy mask.

If I get Covid from the subway because I went to get the vaccine, I will be royally PISSED!  I've been staying home and being extremely careful for an entire year now, and to get Covid by taking the subway to the vaccination would be the bitterest irony.

Twenty-four hours after the shot, my only side effect so far is a slightly sore arm, but the other side effects usually take a couple of days to develop.

I've posted a very short story for Valentine's Day, "Unconditional".

Every Valentine's Day, Star Trek fans post lots of stories where Spock is taught that he HAS to make a grand romantic gesture for Valentine's Day.  Those always leave a bad taste in my mouth.  Spock's culture views the public expression of emotion as a terrible infraction, and asking someone to go against their own culture for something as completely frivolous and unnecessary as Valentine's Day ... yuck.

So of course I had to do something different.  I spent several years as a professor, and I guess I never managed to get all of the chalk dust out of my blood, because my stories usually have tiny lessons tucked inside.  But then, it's not truly Star Trek unless there's a message somewhere, so I'm firmly within Trek tradition. :-)

If anybody reads the story, I hope you enjoy it.

 I'm extremely ready for the days to start getting longer and for the light to return, though I think the light won't truly return until noon of January 20th. :-)

Happy Yule to all my Pagan friends!

I've been so full of HATRED lately that I can barely stand to exist in my own skin.

I usually try to understand people, but I don't want to try to understand conservatives anymore. When it's reached the point where HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of Americans are dying because of the intentional misinformation of the conservative media and the intentional neglect of the pandemic by the man in the Oval Office, then those people aren't just misguided, they're actively EVIL.

I know that a policeman's job is difficult, and they have to make split-second decisions about whether or not they're in peril of their lives. But when Black person after Black person gets shot by cops when White people in the same circumstances don't, I don't want to try to understand how hard it is to be a cop anymore.

My mother's sister is a Trump voter. My mother is a lifelong Republican who loathes and despises Trump and who's planning to vote Democratic for the first time in her life, at the age of 87. She won't talk to her sister about the election, because she "doesn't want to cause a rift in the family." I want to bop both of them over the head and tell them to GET A CLUE.

I really hate being so full of anger and hatred. I feel as if I can barely breathe for all the anger and hatred that's choking me. I don't plan on hurting anyone, but even so, the intensity and the awfulness of these feelings still scare me. I feel as if I'm not myself anymore, as if I'm becoming someone I do not like.

Today is the 54th anniversary of the first broadcast of Star Trek.

1. If anybody's reading "An Embarrassing Savior," I uploaded Chapter 5 today. I had intended to refrain from posting updates to this story until it was complete, but I had Chapter 5 ready on Star Trek Day and just couldn't manage to sit on my hands. :-)