Life's little disappointments

I had the first round of cataract removal done Thursday afternoon. It was remarkably boring. You don't actually get to see much when you're strapped to a table with a surgical drape over your face. 

Oh, the flashing lights and weird psychedelic effects in the eye that was getting sliced and having a introcular artificial lens implanted were moderately entertaining, but overall the experience made a person feel more like one of those chocolate bonbons in an old "I Love Lucy" episode than anythng else. I was halfway hoping to hear some Beethoven as the nurses adjusted the eye speculum and got stuff ready in the operating room but, nope, nothing but idle chatter about what the weather's been like and how ridiculously expensive ground beef has become.

It really was an assembly line operation. Patients checked in, were parked in recliners in a holding pen, had their vitals taken, eye drops to cause dilation dropped into whichever eye was about to be sliced, and were handed a Valium to mellow them out. Every 10 or 15 minutes or the occupant of a recliner would be led into the OR, be gone for not much time at all, return to the relciner just long enough for a blood pressure check, and released back into a regular waiting room. None of the recliners stayed vacant long.

The Valium, incidentally, was the only sedation. I had a vague memory of the S.O. being given more drugs to mellow him out, but maybe not. I was relieved. I always dislike the rohypnol variety of sedation, the stuff that keeps you conscious at the time but leaves you with a blank space in your memory. Mellow, strapped down, but mentally present was fine with me. They dripped enough numbing material into the eyeball to block any pain that might be associated with the actual surgery, and that was the important part. For that matter, there may have an injection of something, too. If there, things were already numb enough that I didn't notice.

The S.O. netioned having some pain after his cataract removal, but about all I noticed was more of a dull ache, kind of like my eyelids were protesting having been forced wide open for longer than they would have liked. On the 1 to 10 pain scale, it was way over on the low end. An annoyance, not actual hurting, and it didn't last long. Now that it's been almost 48 hours, about the only thing I'm noticing is a vague dry, itchy feeling, which hopefully won't last much longer. I'm keeping the eye shield on 24 hours a day until that vague itchy feeling goes away. I got told to wear it while sleeping for two weeks, but I'm paranoid enough about accidentally rubbing the eye too soon that I'll live with it on all the time. I sprang for the high dollar intraocular replacement lens in the hope that I'll be able to do counted cross stitch without wearing glasses. I have no desire to screw that investment up.

Technological weirdness

Or maybe it's social media weirdness.

Odd stuff has been happening lately when I try posting on Facebook. When I start to type an update, a response to Facebook's "What's on your mind?" question, the text ends up scrambled or backwards. Started typing "Awake much too early" and witnessed the letters appearing on the screen as "ke Awa." It's like it was automatically translating the phrase into Hawaiian. Very strange. It's been happening for a couple days now and it doesn't matter which laptop I'm on. If it only happened on one, I'd assume it's a computer glitch, but when it's on both machines? Nope. Gibberish on both.

Oh well. Good excuse to step away from Facebook and stop wasting time. I need to focus on wrapping up the written report for the museum's heritage grant. It's supposed to be in the online drop box by close of business today. It's a moderately tricky report to write. As is really common with oral history projects, it turned out there's a rather noticeable difference between what people remember and think is true and what the written documentation from the time shows. The fact our chosen area of interest -- the history of Indian gaming locally -- proved to be considerably more complicated and controversial than I thought it would did not help. You'd think that after almost 30 years of Indian gaming being a fact of life there wouldn't be much left to debate. You'd be wrong. Indian casinos were controversial when they first started opening and they're still controversial.

Although the trickiest part of doing the report isn't actually the words. It's the numbers. We're in the rather awkward position of not having spent all the money we were given. We over-budgeted for honoraria. We didn't spend it, so now it's got to go back. No big deal except, of course, the project officer for the humanities council is acting like he just saw a unicorn. Apparently having money returned causes accounting headaches. He's done some pretty heavy hinting that it would be really nice if our unspent/unneeded funds just happened to be exactly the same as what the final payment for the grant would be, i.e., 10% of the total. That way all they'd have to do is simply not issue one last check.

Dealing with the humanities grant has had me muttering about never applying for a grant again. It's been a classic "be careful what you wish for." The simple truth is that we were much too small an organization to take on the project, especially when we're all volunteers. We were fortunate in that our contract researcher knew what he was doing, but that was more a matter of luck than skill on our part. Bottom line: apply only for grants that involve tangible issues, like getting a new roof put on the storage building. Avoid the messy stuff that's hard to operationalize and close to impossible to quantify. And think small, at least for awhile. A couple hundred to help pay for printing an activity worksheet for kids is a lot easier to deal with than $25,000 to use for an oral history project.

The worst part of that $25K, of course, is that almost none of it could be used for anything permanent for the museum, like a few nice vitrines or a slat wall for doing displays. The only money that could be spent on anything remotely physical was for printing, photography, and photocopying. We couldn't even buy a good camera -- we had to rent one. We could legitimately purchase office supplies, but let's face it -- there are only so many reams of paper we're going to use in the foreseeable future. Maybe a more creative (less ethical) Financial Director could have figured out a way to siphon off some of the unspent funds to use on other museum needs, but I wasn't up to the challenge. 

It doesn't take long to take stuff for granted

Today's example: tasers. I'm a fan of John Sandford's books so have been going back and trying to read the books in his "Prey" series that I missed when they were first published. The one I just finished, Silent Prey, came out in 1992. Having the characters depend on land lines and pay phones didn't feel too odd. What stood out was the introduction of a taser into the action -- and it was still so new that no one was calling it a taser. It was a "stun gun." The cops are trying to figure out just how the psychotic serial killer is overcoming his victims, but it's not until about the 6th body that someone notices the burn marks from a "stun gun" on a victim's neck.

After reading about the cops in the book talking about "stun guns" and what a novelty they were, I started trying to remember when I first saw one. I can remember a time when suddenly everyone was talking about how they were the thing to get for self-defense, I just can't remember when that time was. Had to be sometime in the '90s, but I can't recall if it was during my Virginia Tech days or shortly after. I do know that when someone did the heart-to-heart just-between-us-gals talk about the need to carry one for self defense, I declined. I know me. I figured out a long time ago that anything I carry for self-defense is far more likely to be snatched from my fumbling fingers and used against me than it is to deter a mugger or a rapist. If I were dumb enough to spend real money on a taser or a hand gun or even some cheap pepper spray, the low life harassing me would have no difficulty snatching my self-defense weapon up from where I'd managed to drop it in the process of trying to get it out of my pocket or purse. And if by some minor miracle I managed to actually hang on to the device, odds are I'd shoot or shock or gas myself before I did any damage to an assailant. 

Come to think of it, I guess I could wonder about just when pepper spray became common, too, because it does seem to go hand-in-hand with the taser. In my memory, both seem to pop up around the same time, the early to mid-90s. Which, now that I think about, correlates with the racist paranoia that popped up during the first Bush administration about "super predators" and amoral urban youth terrorizing the rest of us. So which came first, I wonder? The market niche (hyper-paranoid white people) or the tasers and pepper sprays? 

I have actually carried something for self-defense, but it didn't fit in my purse or briefcase. I was moderately paranoid when I lived in Washington, D.C., when I first got there so I did what a number of self-defense experts suggested: I carried a large umbrella, something big enough that it was real clear it could function as a club if necessary, and I tried to walk like I knew exactly where I was going. If you don't look like an easy target, you're less likely to be targeted. Of course, whether or not I would have been capable of flailing away at a mugger's head with the umbrella is debatable. More likely I would have done the sensible thing and just handed over my bag. Maybe. If anyone had tried snatching the briefcase with my dissertation research notes in it, serious violence might have ensued.

A small digression: during my time in D.C., two people I knew personally were mugged. One was a friend who was on her way to 7-11 to buy donuts at about 7 in the morning. She said she was really torn by the incident: she was mad as hell that she missed out on the donuts she was looking forward to but at the same time impressed by the mugger's work ethic. After all, no one expects street crime to happen just as the sun's coming up. The other one was a guy, someone I knew through the Smithsonian, who got mugged in the DuPont Circle area when he came up from the Metro. In his case, it was fairly early in the evening but still late enough that the big commuting rush was over and there weren't many people around. He definitely didn't fit the profile for a mugging victim (he was a physically fit young male) but he told us he was distracted, trying to figure out which way to go to get to a party he'd been invited to, and looking lost can cause giant neon signs saying VICTIM in flashing letters to appear over your head. (And it just hit me: all those people wandering around staring down at their smart phones instead of paying attention to their surroundings must be a purse snatcher's idea of heaven. . . which gives me yet another reason to avoid ever owning one myself.) 

Looks like a paperweight to me

My PC died recently. Right around Christmas it decided it really didn't feel like seeing in the New Year. Shut it down one evening, went down the next morning to turn on the power, and discovered it had expired quietly in its sleep.

On the one hand, I'm moderately envious. I'm getting old enough that I tend to respond to a peaceful demise, even if it is just a device and not a person, with "lucky bastard." We all would like to go peacefully in our sleep (instead of screaming in terror like the passengers in Grampa's car). On the other, it was my computer. I may have kvetched about it taking up too much space on my rather small desk while mumbling about not really needing an actual PC when for me it was basically just a glorified typewriter, but it was kind of nice to be able to do mindless Internet stuff without having to share.

Which is what I'm doing now. I'm pretty obviously not totally without access to the Internet. The S.O. has a laptop, and we jointly own a tablet. I'm not too thrilled with the tablet -- it has a separate keyboard that never has worked, so if I want to do anything that involves much typing I have to do it with the onscreen touchpad -- but it's fine for reading the news, checking to see the latest stupidity on Facebook, or playing mindless games. And, given that I am a morning person and the S.O. most definitely is not, I can generally get whatever I want to do on a computer done without feeling too annoyed. Today, for example, I've been up and wandering around the intertubes for a couple hours and probably have at least another hour to go before the S.O. comes stumbling down the stairs hoping I haven't consumed all the coffee. Do I really need to spend more than an hour or two online on any given day? I don't think so. . .

In fact, maybe I should be relieved the desktop PC died. One of the fringe benefits/side effects of being computerless is I'm suddenly discovering there are other things to do around here. I'm not seeing a whole lot of Facebook status updates lately, but I have gotten more letters written. Instead of using the glorified,typewriter for correspondence, I've fallen back on a legacy technology: a ballpoint pen and sheets of paper. (Here's hoping all my correspondents still know how to read cursive.) And, curiously enough, I'm answering letters faster when there are no distractions like online Sudoku games.

One of these days I'll probably haul the desktop PC to a computer repair place to see if it's worth fixing. Maybe. The longer it sits in a corner gathering dust, the less urgent getting it repaired becomes.

Why I don't worry about the NSA

Yesterday was a museum day for me. I spent a good chunk of it doing data entry in PastPerfect, but when I'd get up to stretch I did the usual digging around in filing cabinets and other spaces as I slowly figure out just what all we have. I'm a volunteer and only go in one or two days a week for a few hours at time so my efforts at cataloging and organizing are not moving particularly fast. Well, one of yesterday's discoveries was a box of 5-1/2 inch floppy disks. They were all neatly labeled and appear to have some interesting material stored on them: family trees, notes on local history, etc. There must be a couple dozen. Depressing.

Why is it depressing? Well, among other things, when was the last time you saw a 5-1/2 disk drive on a computer? Unless someone took the time to print out hard copies of whatever is on those disks, that work is gone forever. Not only are 5-1/2 inch drives a historical curiosity, odds are that whatever program was used at the time no longer matches up with its many generations later descendant. When the disk drives evolved from 5-1/2 inch to 3 to compact disk, I transferred various files. Not long ago I tried looking at some of the stuff I wrote 25 years ago, back in the days of WordPerfect 4.2. I had the latest version of WordPerfect, but it could no longer open files written in the multiple generations earlier version. The same thing happens with files done in early versions of Word.

Long, long ago, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth (the early '80s), I worked at a daily newspaper that used a Compugraphic typesetting system. The files were stored on 8-inch floppies. I wonder if there's a machine left on the planet that can read those disks now. Probably not.

And this is why I don't worry about the NSA or other government snooping a whole lot. As a society we tend to live in the Now with no thought of past or future. The guys working for the NSA are every bit as inculcated with that mindset as the rest of us. I think we can take it as a given that they're going to be just as gung ho as everyone else when it comes to constantly updating and getting the latest version of their various spyware programs and data storage systems, possibly more. After all, it's the techno-geeks who always want the latest version of anything. Back when the government spies were typing out transcripts of conversations and filling file boxes with hard copies, information would live forever -- or at least until silverfish and roaches got into the boxes and ate the paper. Well, information may still live forever, lurking in some NSA "cloud" (aka server farm in Utah), but I'm willing to bet that the more time that elapses, the less retrievable that information will be. Some programmer will have a bright idea, she'll tweak a couple lines of code, and decades of snooping will disappear behind a software wall. And, yes, the data will still be there and theoretically retrievable but will anyone bother? If you run a query and get a null result, how would you know that the null result is an artifact of the software and not an actual reliable answer?

So what happened to the 5-1/2 inch disks I found? The circular file, of course. Technology has moved on; the disks aren't usable. I kept a couple as artifacts to include in a display at some point in the future, but most got tossed. I felt the usual twinge of guilt about throwing away someone's hard work, but you can't win them all.

It was, however, a nice reminder that I need to periodically do hard copy reports of the data I've entered in PastPerfect. If we're going to have an inventory, it needs to be in an old-fashioned paper-filled notebook as well as on the computer.

Odd dilemmas

What does one do with a spare refrigerator when there is neither a garage nor a basement family room in which to park it? Back in October we arrived home from vacation to discover our refrigerator had died in our absence. Tried a couple of things and concluded it was really, truly dead. There are no refrigerator repair persons within a reasonable distance of our place, so we went for the easy option: drove to Marquette to Menard's and bought a new refrigerator.

Since then, the old refrigerator had been sitting outside while we tried to figure out what to do with it. A couple weeks ago we decided to drag it into the Camp (aka The Woman Cave; I've got all my sewing stuff set up there) so the S.O. could tinker with it in a warmish space. If it was salvageable, like if all that had gone wrong was a relay got fried, we'd order a part online. If it wasn't salvageable. . .  well, I do like to garden, and they say that as you age, raised beds are a good idea because you don't have to kneel to weed. We shoveled the snow off, dragged it in, and then let it sit for a few days so all the snow and ice could melt off and the electrical wiring could dry out. Yesterday the S.O. decided to start the diagnostic process. First step: plug it in.

Next step: do some muttering, mostly of phrases sounding suspiciously like "What the fuck?" and "Why the hell. . . ?" Bottom line: the repair work apparently consisted of letting it get snowed on for awhile and then plugging it in. Just like it mysteriously died back in October, now in late January it is working just fine. It's a mystery. Now all we have to do is figure out where to park it so it's not in my way. Maybe the S.O. would like a beer fridge out in the barn?

The Obesity Epidemic Explained

Okay, maybe not. It's probably a totally spurious correlation, but after doing some refrigerator shopping, I couldn't help but wonder: is there a connection between the U.S. population going from using this:

to using this:

26.5 cubic feet capacity refrigerator

The number of people in a household has been dwindling, with the typical family having fewer kids in recent decades than they did 50 or 60 years ago, yet the capacity of the refrigerators in our kitchens keeps growing. Why on earth would any household require a 26.5 cubic feet capacity refrigerator? Even when we had kids at home, I think the biggest refrigerator the S.O. and I ever owned was one with 14 cubic feet capacity. What do people fill those humongous refrigerators with? It has to be convenience food (aka junk) because it doesn't matter how big the fridge, fresh food (i.e., salad greens, meat) has a limited shelf life, and even yogurt goes bad eventually. What else can a person fill those multiple door shelves with other than soda or beer? No one has that many bottles of condiments. 

It is, however, remarkably difficult to find a refrigerator that actually matches up with your real world needs. Anyone who's ever seen "Househunters International" knows that quite a bit of the rest of the world manages just fine without the mega-appliances Americans insist on buying: under-the-counter refrigerators not much bigger than a typical dorm fridge here are the norm in European countries. But try finding a smaller refrigerator if you've decided that's what you need -- it's not easy. 

The S.O. and I found ourselves refrigerator-shopping right after getting home from a 3-week vacation the other day. We walked in the door Friday evening and discovered a puddle of Breyer's in the freezer compartment of the refrigerator. The appliance had mysteriously chosen to die right about the same time we left Texas. We could tell it hadn't been dead long because the ice cubes were still basically ice cubes, but it was definitely dead. It made noises like it was working, but the temperature in it kept rising. I've had better homecomings.

We were limited in just what size replacement appliance we could buy; the old refrigerator (a 10.3 cubic foot Haier) lived under the stairs in a space that was basically built around it. This is a small house with a galley kitchen; there simply isn't the square footage for one of those mega-Frigidaires. Whatever we got had to be less than 24 inches wide; that considerably narrowed our choices when it came to what was available immediately.

We did toy with the idea of going even smaller than the 10.3 Haier and getting a 4.6 cubic foot refrigerator that would have been small enough that we could have put a base cabinet under it. I was briefly psyched by the prospect of adding more storage in the kitchen. In the end, though, it was the door shelves that decided the matter. The 4.6 models were all set up with a can rack in the door where you could stack your cans of Coke or cheap beer, and we had no use whatsoever for such a "convenience." We found a 12-cubic foot Whirlpool and hauled it home. I can tell already it's more refrigerator than we actually need, but it fits in the space and the price was right. 

According to the various pieces of information I could find on Whirlpool, it's possible this new refrigerator was actually made in the USA. The S.O. did a fair amount of cursing while trying to reverse the doors because the screws/bolts/whatever were actually American Standard instead of metric. He's gotten so used to everything being made in China or wherever that he automatically reaches for metric parts and tools whenever he has to work on anything these days. 

I keep thinking about the Kelvinator we jettisoned earlier this summer. It no longer worked particularly well, but it did still work -- and it was 70 years old. There's a Frigidaire at the museum over in Baraga that dates to the 1920s, and it still works. The made-in-China Haier died after less than 10 years; I wonder how long this Whirlpool will last? 

Farewell, Kelvinator

Today, if all goes well, we're bidding a fond farewell to the Kelvinator in the camp. I'm not sure just what vintage that refrigerator is, but it's got to be about the same age as the  model pictured in the ad, which is from 1940. I have a hard time picturing any appliance made today lasting for over 70 years, but our Kelvinator is still muddling along, sort of.

Unfortunately, although it may work, it works inconsistently. There's a real fine line between "not cold enough" and "everything freezing solid." It  has a freezer just barely big enough to hold two ice cube trays, and, despite its ability to freeze lettuce on the bottom shelf, it can't manage to prevent a pint of ice cream that's actually in the freezer from turning to soup. It also takes up more than its fair share of floor space in a camp that's not especially big. Considering that the amount of usable space inside the thing isn't much bigger than a dorm fridge, it's massive (it easily takes up as much space as a modern 15-cubic foot fridge, but has barely 6 cubic feet of interior space) and, the one reason someone is willing to haul it away, it  sucks up a lot of electricity when it's being used.

We noticed an ad in the REA magazine informing members that turning in old, energy-sucking appliances, like our ancient refrigerator, would garner us a small credit. Given how difficult it is to get rid of an old refrigerator (landfills and scrap metal yards won't take them unless you can prove the Freon's been removed), we would have been happy just to have them haul the beast away -- the credit is a bonus.

The S.O. and I were wondering, though, just what happens to the refrigerators once they're collected from people's homes. Where do old refrigerators go to die? Our assumption is that their fate must be similar to that of cars traded in during that "cash for clunkers" program a few years ago -- the crusher, the shredder, and a slow boat to China -- but who knows?*

[*rhetorical question. I know perfectly well that if I were sufficiently curious I could Google it and learn more than I ever wanted to know about appliance recycling.] 

Something for which I can thank Rick Santorum

Thanks to Mr. Frothy, I finally got around to figuring out how to do screen shots:

I must say, it's rather reassuring that more people would rather read about old snowmobiles than read about a Republican trolling for votes.

Another WTF moment

In the parking deck at work. This behemoth of a vehicle

proudly labeled "Hybrid."

So that means what, exactly? It gets 7 miles to the gallon instead of the usual 5?

It only took 2 years and 3 ergonomic evaluations

but yesterday I was finally able to replace this:

with this:

More weirdness

Had two interactions with DeKalb County's finest last night, thanks to AT&T.  Our landline started acting up shortly after I got home from work, both phones connected to it kept making strange noises and the DSL became extremely erratic.  Disconnected everything, but it was late enough that I knew we weren't going to see a service technician until the following day regardless of when we called so otherwise didn't worry about it.

Around 1 a.m. someone knocking loudly on the front door woke me up.  Opened the window to look out before heading downstairs (yelling out a window being less energy intensive than putting on a robe and actually opening the door), and discovered two patrol cars sitting in the parking lot.  The officers said there'd been a 911 call made from our phone.  Bizarre. 

They looked a little skeptical when I said I had no clue why that would have happened because the S.O. and I had both been sound asleep for at least an hour, but eventually they believed me.  I connected one phone to demonstrate the loud staticky noises, and, after following SOP to ensure that there really was no one in distress (no hostages locked in a closet, no recently demised spouse sprawled in a pool of blood in the bedroom), they left.  Two hours later we got treated to a repeat performance:  same thing, report of a 911 call with the dispatcher reporting it was an open line (which implies someone desperately dialing and then keeling over before being able to say anything).  This time, because it was a repeat performance, they didn't bother coming in the house.

First thing this morning I did call AT&T; the technician was here before noon to check things out and apparently found a bad ground -- but he had no explanation for why our telephone would decide to call for help on its own.  Definitely very strange.

And I am really, really happy that we lead a remarkably boring life -- no hash pipes on the coffee table, no whips and chains in the bedroom.

Modern marvels

Just discovered what the organization in which I am embedded is doing to save the planet, stave off global warming, and prevent ecological disaster in general: they have switched to using "coreless toilet paper" in the rest rooms. According to the information sheet taped to the ladies' room mirror the switch to "coreless" TP is going to save 1.3 trees annually. Wow. I shouldn't mock the effort, but 1.3 trees? I'm not sure that's worth bragging about. Does that mean the pulp savages doing the harvesting are going to be instructed to leave extremely tall stumps because the whole tree is no longer needed? And is it 1.3 trees per stall, per rest room, per building, or for the entire office park this particular company manages?