 Nostalgia, DVDs, old movies, television, OTR, fandom, good news and bad, picks, pans, cute budgie stories, cute terrier stories, and anything else I can think of. Contact me at theyoungfamily (at) earthlink (dot) net . . . . . . . . . .
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» Sunday, June 16, 2024
Cracks in the System
 This has been a week of shocks.It started out harmlessly enough: James had an appointment for a Procrit shot. We talked to Dr. Kongara and Bruce, and wondered if James needed a urinalysis. Based on what we told him, he didn't think so. He did say James' BUN number was very high, so to cut back the torsemide (diuretic) to one a day. Alas, next day James was peeing very red, so we ate a good breakfast, packed a lunch, and went to Urgent Care. Providentially, it wasn't crowded, and we were in almost immediately. He did indeed have a UTI, and they gave him an IV bag of antibiotics and then a 10-day prescription for cephalexin and asked him to come back next week for a followup. They also took a CT scan of his back, which is still killing him—to get out of bed at night to use the bathroom he has to put the head of the bed up to help him—and they did indeed confirm that nothing was broken or torn. No painkillers offered this time; they just told him Tylenol and heat/ice. On the way home, something frightening happened. You remember that I mentioned a few weeks ago that I had expressed concern about the chair lift on the back of the truck, that it wasn't holding the chair on properly? And then we took it to Mobility Works and paid $165 for a "tune up" in which it was checked out and lubricated and they recalibrated it with the chair and they said it was fine? When we left Kaiser we put the chair up on the lift and I gave a puzzled little look once it was up because there was still a gap a finger's width wide between the end of the bar and the chair. But we were tired after everything at Urgent Care and just drove home, through the park, downtown Marietta, and about 45 mph at least down South Cobb Drive. James turned down side streets, and we were waiting for the light at Windy Hill when I noticed the little blue flag at the back of the chair was looking awfully low. I figured it was just the angle we were at. The light changed and when James put the truck into drive we heard a funny little jolting sound. We crossed Windy Hill, finished going down Olive Springs, made the sharp right turn onto Smyrna Powder Springs, stopped at the stop sign, then did the left turn into Trellis Oaks. As we turned left into the driveway, something scraped the concrete. James came to a stop, I jumped out of the truck, and nearly had hysterics. The base of the lift was almost at a 45-degree angle and his $8,000 power chair was being held on it by the barely two-inch tall outer rim of the base of the lift and the inner edge of the crossbar that usually extends across the seat!!!!! The two welds that fasten the inner edge of either side of the base to the vertical part of the lift were both cracked completely in half--looked like metal fatigue. At least one of the cracks had rust inside it--which means I was right all along about it not clamping properly when I first noticed it at Costco. I think I need to go light a candle somewhere to thank God the freaking chair didn't fall off, get damaged, and worst of all, maybe cause an accident with the car behind us. Can you imagine if it had come bouncing off in the middle of South Cobb Drive? Or downtown????? I left a hysterical message on Mobility Works' message machine and the next day I followed James and the truck to get it examined and drove home. Mobility Works had that bottom platform in stock and will replace it for a nice fat $1400. Just wondering why it cracked in the first place. It was sold to us as supporting this wheelchair. So we were in need of a distraction and never got it, as the internet crashed Saturday afternoon and never came back until Sunday night. We watched DVDs for the duration. We will never put our eggs all into that streaming basket; it's too easy to take down.  » Sunday, January 21, 2024
De-Christmased At Last
"Doggedly I continued." And finally today, Sunday, January 21, it is all put away in the closet and I vacuumed downstairs to boot.It took a while, although there was a Monday rush: I had to get everything downstairs removed and stored because we were going to have a severe cold snap (lows in the teens) this week. I didn't want to freeze my feet off downstairs. So Monday, between chores, I took down everything in the library and the airplane tree in the hallway. Happily, the foyer stuff was already down. On Tuesday I took down all the dining room decorations and the Christmas village and the board it sits on over the mantel shelf. The latter killed my back, so I spent Tuesday evening watching Killers of the Flower Moon, which I was so interested in seeing after reading the book. I found it turgid and overlong, and wondered why Martin Scorsese chose to center the narrative around Molly's useless husband Ernest, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, and his larcenous uncle, played by Robert DiNiro. It was gross watching these two slimeballs plotting the deaths of Molly's family so they could take over their oil shares, while Ernest professed to love Molly! Oh, the cinematography was great: there's one haunting scene where Molly is dying because blockhead Ernest is slowly poisoning her via her insulin, and there's a fire outside, and her sickroom is lit with flames as she burns up with fever. It doesn't help that I'm not a DiCaprio fan at all; I would have liked to seen more of the Native Americans and also of the FBI search for the culprit instead of Leo as a lazy horse's ass. The cold came rushing in on Wednesday; I wore my "Rhode Island weight" winter coat to physiotherapy—finally, already, Kaiser!—and to Publix. The wind had a blade edge. Compounded with this, our internet service was dead all day. It's not like we didn't have stuff to watch, and we both ended up hotspotting on our phones and could get on the internet, but it was still frustrating. It was very localized, too, just in our neighborhood; I suspect that some idiot with a backhoe or a ditch witch severed the fiber line and that's why it took so long to restore. Thursday we had a big fat dose of reality. James goes to podiatry every six weeks to get his feet inspected due to the diabetes and get a proper nail trim. Pretty much every night I rub lotion on James' legs and feet and treat any injuries on his legs where the skin is fragile. Today the doctor found a sore on the right side of his right baby toe, about 5 millimeters in diameter, with evidence of penetration under the skin. I put the lotion on from the left side and usually check his feet and toes, but this got completely past me. James got an x-ray to see if there is infection down to the bone—there is no pus but the toe is faintly redder than the others—and I have to keep Mupirocin on it with a covering of Mepilex AG, and we have to come back in two weeks. James thinks it might be because he's wearing the Skechers instead of slippers and they are a little narrower, and the wound came from the shoe rubbing his toe. But he's been wearing them around the house since October and the raw spot was not there when he went to podiatry six weeks ago! I'm just appalled that I missed it in the first place and am kicking myself. The tests came back by yesterday and the infection is not in the bone, but he does have staph. I hope the Mupirocin works. I took the Christmas tree down on Friday, to the accompanying scream of my back, taking solace in Lassie episodes. There has been a "Lassie channel" on Xumo for a month or two, but they were mostly repeating the Jeff episodes and the transitional episodes over and over and not in order. Well, the same channel is now a Roku Live Channel, and they appear to now go through eighth season. So seventh season Lassie took my mind off my aches and pains on Friday, and when we got done at Lidl, Publix, and Kroger on Saturday, then had a nice trip to Barnes & Noble, I lucked out when we got home and "Lassie's Odyssey" was just starting! Solid gold Lassie, my favorite story from when I saw the original broadcast in February 1962. (Of course the asshole chimpanzee story "Casey" came next, but one can't have everything.) I wish I could say "now we can relax" but starting Wednesday we have a marathon three days of doctors' appointments (and of course it's going to freakin' rain) and then another spate of them starting Monday the 29th. ::groan:: And I still need to bathe the dog and change the bed. Sunday I got all the Christmas stuff back into the downstairs closet. Yay! Labels: Christmas, Christmas decorations, internet, Lassie, movies, sickness, television, weather » Sunday, March 26, 2023
The Coming of Fiber
We've talked about getting rid of Dish for some time. We were actually going to do it two years ago, but ratcheted back to the Flex plan instead. I can't complain, since that's how I started watching Law & Order: Criminal Intent regularly. But, again, a lot of the reason why we kept Dish around was to have something decent for Snowy to watch. Even if he was just a bird, I didn't want his brain fried by talk show crap and the other rubbish that's on the Flex channels like A&E and TLC. That's why we left WEtv or Sundance on most of the time: he watched LOCI or NCIS or "the mothership" Law & Order.A week or so ago we got a postcard from Earthlink saying they were going to be offering fiber. Now we started out with Earthlink back in 1996, as GEnie was winding down, and dial-up (further annoying my mother, who could never reach us by phone since we spent evenings online). We went to DSL to keep out of her hair, and converted over to broadband in 2018 (a multiday clusterf*ck due to rotted wires and incompetent techs. Broadband was giving us a nice, steady 35-45 mps, and we really had no trouble with any of the channels when we got a Roku box to aggregate everything we subscribed to, like Netflix, Britbox, etc. But 350 mps? Up and down? As usual, they tell you the install will be "an hour or so." This actually took most of the day. The technician was competent, but had to be very patient. He started out putting a cable through the wall, and then hitching it to the router. Problem #1 was now that the router was on the opposite side of the room. We like to have the desktops hardwired into the router because (1) it's faster and (2) even though it's secured, I don't like my online banking bouncing around on wireless signals. When the tech finally did get everything hitched up, the television, plugged in, of course had no trouble, nor did James' desktop, which is basically the same model as mine, have a problem hitching right up to the wireless; my desktop refused to get half the signals, as did the laptop. Plus we were supposed to use the information e-mailed to us to sign on to the fiber app, where we could change the name of our router, change our password. I was never able to get into the app. We finally ended up stringing a network cable along the floor under the sofa and under the clear plastic chair pad to my computer because it would not connect to stuff I needed, like the uploader for my website, Amazon, my bank, Nationwide's site, the water bill site...ya know, important things. And once again James couldn't access the printer. So after Hair Day, we drove out to MicroCenter and bought a network switch. Now both desktops and the printer are networked on cable and now I can get to all of my links in Firefox (yes, the cable is still across the floor, but very little of it is exposed). I also had a problem getting the DVD recorder and the Chromecast to work. The Chromecast seemed completely dead and the DVD recorder was giving me a U99 code. It was fine when I watched Little Drummer Boy in December. The plan right now: I get some stuff dubbed off the DVR, cancel Dish, get Philo (which is $25 rather than $80whatever and gets us everything but TCM, which I will miss), probably subscribe to Peacock's low tier. I already canceled our Disney account via Verizon and got the Hulu/Disney/ESPN triple package (not that we're going to watch ESPN, but they didn't have a dual package Hulu/Disney sans commercials and for some reason the Roku won't do Disney with commercials. Still think a little about AMC+ so I can see Dark Winds, but I haven't watched Those People since they canceled Remember WENN and don't know if I want to fall in with traitors even 25 years later. In other news, James got a new pair of orthopedic boots. He gave in and instead of getting lace-up boots he got velcro fasteners. Labels: health, internet, television » Saturday, December 18, 2021
Downtime, Hawkeye, and a Trip to Canton
Well, it was an up-and-down sort of week, and I do mean down...Monday at least was good: the blue tree I ordered from Home Depot arrived, so I finally got to put up the airplane tree. I thought from the photos on the website it would be a light blue, but it's a royal blue, but it still does look nice with the ornaments on and the white lights. There aren't a lot of blue planes in the collection, so there's a nice contrast. Labels: chores, Christmas, food, health, internet, shopping, television, work » Saturday, September 07, 2019
After DragonCon Comes GroceryCon
So, we've spent the last three days bouncing around from grocery store to grocery store, with some fun stops in between.But first there was Wednesday, which was James' birthday. After I tossed some clothes in the washer, I was going to sneak into the bedroom, pull a book out of my stash, pair it with a homemade card. Instead I spent the day being sick. At least cooked dinner and did the laundry. In a half-hearted attempt to make the day festive, I put on Solo: A Star Wars Story, which we still hadn't seen. It was fun—whatever chick-lit for guys and adventure fans is called. James was amused by the solution to the Kessel run story; as we got ready for bed that night, he mused, "So I guess all Han needed to make the Kessel run in 12 parsecs was 'Liquid Schwartz'?" ROFL! (If you do not get this, please watch Spaceballs.) This is the weekend we always attend the Yellow Daisy Festival; we usually go on Sunday because the crowds are low early in the morning. Alas, we didn't have that option this year. So I had an idea: why not go Thursday? A lot of people will be at work, so it should be okay. This worked better in theory. First, we had to get up at six since we had to go across town through rush hour traffic. I said to James, "We'll get out there, and then we'll stop somewhere like an IHOP for breakfast, then go to the Festival." Well, we left the house at seven, but by eight were barely twelve miles from home because we had had to stop for gasoline, and then we had to stop for money. So while James availed himself of the Presto ATM at Publix, I went inside and bought us two sandwiches for breakfast instead. By the time we got to Stone Mountain, we discovered that the handicapped lot was nearly full. Of course! It was a weekday! Who was here? All the grandmas and grandpas, and all the stay-at-home moms! Even with us getting the Early Bird admission, it was still crowded. We also missed several of the regular vendors. They were not on the vendors' list at all, so I assume it was not a "we only attend on weekends" problem. 1st Sergeant Salsa, Meadowcroft Farms, and Smack Yo Mama barbecue sauce were nowhere to be seen. Meadowcroft and Mama may turn up at the Jonquil Festival or the Apple Festival, but if James wants the other he will have to mail order, as we've only ever seen them at Yellow Daisy. Also, One Screw Loose jellies was on the vendor list, but we never saw them. I even went back to the space they were assigned to in the vendor's guide, but it was a metalworker's booth there instead. We did get more maple barbecue sauce, the first of our two yearly Ginny's Fudge purchases, some sugar-free chocolate cheesecake mix, and of course a purchase from the nice folks from Country Pickins. I was delighted to see that this year she has added some Thanksgiving-themed items, a couple of flat plaques with little turkeys, and some other items. Of course I've already done my own Thanksgiving-themed items and didn't need them. I did get a little vignette of Pilgrims and Native Americans, but broke down and bought a Hallowe'en shadowbox and some additional Hallowe'en items for it (I had bought a few some years ago, to put on the fall shelf in late October, but most of the time I kept forgetting to use them). We were flat wiped out when we finished right before noon. I considered we might stop at Publix on the way home, or maybe have lunch instead of the breakfast I promised James, but we were exhausted from the heat. We basically came straight home and it took us three hours to cool off properly. Later on we watched Ralph Breaks the Internet, the second of the Wreck-It Ralph films. Very funny satire on the internet along with the story of Ralph and Vanellope's friendship, and they hit every single internet cliché. Seriously. Right until the very end. The scenes with Vanellope encountering the Disney princesses was priceless. Favorite line: "Look up there! A big strong man who needs rescuing!" Probably won't buy a DVD of Solo, but will this. Thursday was the chief supermarket day: both of us in Publix, me running into Kroger for mushrooms and Lidl for milk, ground turkey, and chocolate. However, we had a nice break in the middle of the food restocking: lunch at Uncle Maddio's Pizza Joint with the Spiveys, Aubrey, and the Boroses. We mostly talked about DragonCon; Aubrey won a keen backpack! Thursday night I went rooting around on YouTube and found both the David Tennant panel that I was able to see (I didn't realize I had missed so little of it; just the chair racing) and the one I missed on Friday, plus the Catherine Tate panel I couldn't get into. There were very few duplicate questions on the Tennant panels, and, of course, lots of Good Omens discussions. Today we had to gird our loins, due to it being a Saturday, and go to Costco, as we were running out of both trash bags and Breathe Right strips, and James needed generic Flonase. This was relatively painless, though, since we found a handicapped parking space right away, and found all of what we were looking for, with the generic Flonase and the Breathe Rights on sale. Also got him some Hippeas and a "Cook's Country" magazine and sliced cheese, and noted that we had to come back before the 29th because the Swiffer mop sheets were also on sale. We can get more generic Flonase and nasal strips then, too. Today we were just getting things we needed. A break: a visit to Barnes & Noble. The fall "Bella Grace" was out, with a breathtaking cover of a woman in a sunset, and I also picked up "Blue Ridge Country" with an awesome fall scene on the cover, and "Country Sampler's" autumn decorating issue. The newest Flavia deLuce mystery was out in paperback and 20 percent off, so I got that as well. We'd forgotten onions yesterday, so I popped into Publix for them, and then we drove to Town Center and the Kaiser office there which is always open because it's urgent care, too, so James could pick up his new medication for his arthritis pain. We are wary of this because it can affect his eyesight, so he'll have to make an eye appointment to get a baseline reading of his eyes and he will have to keep tracking it going forward if he stays on the medication. We had bought a streaming membership for DragonCon so James could see some of the panels he missed, but they only have Monday up still. So I've switched to YouTube and we're watching the parade as the sun sets and we wander into the sticky evening. Labels: birthday, books, crafts, DragonCon, events, festivals, food, friends, internet, magazines, movies, shopping, weather |
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