Forcing Myself

Since WordPress first introduced the Block Editor in 2018, I have avoided using it like the plague, going to far as loading a plug-in that activates (or at least recreates) the Classic Editor.

After 8 years, however, I’ve decided it’s time to embrace change and give the Block Editor a serious try. It’s still confusing as hell to someone like me who has been using WordPress for the last twenty-some years and didn’t immediately adopt the new paradigm.

Maybe you can teach old dogs new tricks. Let’s see how it goes.

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The Beginning Of A Mellow Afternoon

Joey Alexander – Warna  (2019)

And believe me, it’s needed.

I took Sophie in for her annual shots this morning.

“Dad! I do NOT like this! Can we please go home?”

She was such a good girl however, that we stopped for a pup cup on the way home.

Prior to leaving this morning, I was about to do my usual breakfast routine, but discovered I was out of the Kate Farms solution (haven’t received my monthly supply from the healthcare distributor and my most recent order from Amazon hadn’t arrived yet), so I combined my iced coffee with two cartons of isosource. All was well and good until right before I left for the vet and the most horrific reflux hit. Apparently I overdid it on the volume and my stomach didn’t like it one bit.

The worst part of not being able to swallow is when you get reflux. If everything were functioning properly, I’d whip up a glass of baking soda solution, swallow it, and  everything would be right as rain. Unfortunately, that’s no longer an option. Yeah, I can still do the baking soda solution via the g-tube (after using the tube to drain the excess stomach contents) to quiet my stomach, but there’s no way of immediately relieving the burn left in my throat from the reflux. And of course there was a certain amount of aspiration, so my O2 (after being 98-100% for weeks now) took a—thankfully brief—nosedive to under 90%. It’s since recovered  to the mid 90s, but damn…it wiped me out and I wanted nothing more upon returning home than to take a nap.

That’s passed now, but it’s still going to be a very low-key, quiet afternoon and Joey Alexander is a perfect accompaniment for that.

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Evening Tunes

Peter Erskine – Transition (1987)

I originally bought this disc in 1987—for obvious reasons—long before I had gotten into jazz. Despite the bear on the cover, after a few listenings, I just couldn’t get into it and ended it selling/trading it at Streetlight Records on Market Street. Nearly 40 years years later I ran across it again and wondered if my musical taste in general or appreciation for more freeform jazz had changed any.

It had. It’s that one disc I always pull out when I can’t decide what to listen to. But to be honest there is still one track on the album that I consistently skip over if the remote is handy.

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I Could Live There

I would definitely rip out that entire kitchen/maid’s room area and convert it into one large kitchen with adjacent 1/2 bath and laundry room. Might even open it up to the Dining Room. The Sleeping Porch would make a nice home office.

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Will It Blend?

Of course it will. A mere shadow of its former self at only 280 calories. I used to love the full-sized ones.

Yeah, it’s Taco Bell again. If I was going to go to the trouble of getting there, I was going to get a couple day’s lunches out of it.

 

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Nutrition

This—along with pureed soups or very occasional pureed solid food— is what I’ve been surviving on since last September. After speaking with my nutritionist around the first of the year we realized I wasn’t getting nearly enough of it (hence, why I dropped nearly 60 lbs.) and she upped my intake to 7 cartons a day (twice what I’d been doing). Easier said than done, because it seemed my stomach had shrunk and now barely tolerated two cartons at a time. She suggested I split up my feedings until I can go back to three, 2-carton “meals” a day.

This was unacceptable, so I didn’t. I powered through two cartons three times a day with a “snack” in the afternoon.

The problem was this shit is boring as fuck. It’s unflavored, and as unlikely as it seems, even with tube feeding I still have a (vastly diminished) sense of taste of what goes into my stomach even if it doesn’t take the usual route.

I told the nutritionist that in addition to the isosoure, I was supplementing my diet with Premier Protein drinks. She checked the nutritional values and suggest we up the game. She had a sample case of Kate Farms vanilla and Boost High Calorie chocolate sent to me.

Initially I preferred the Boost. The Kate Farms didn’t sit well and seemed to cause more reflux than I was willing to deal with. But once again, I powered through and came to prefer the Kate Farms over the Boost. When I spoke to her again last month, I asked if we could ditch the isosource completely and do Kate Farms exclusively. The Kate Farms is hella expensive (even discounted on Amazon it’s still $60 for a case of dozen cartons) so it would be great if my insurance would cover it like it did the isosource. She said she’d check with the vendor and my insurance to see if it was covered.

Turns out it was, so the next shipment I receive will be exclusively Kate Farms. I’ve discovered it mixes extremely well with my morning iced vanilla (or lately orange vanilla) latte, boosting my caloric intake even more. Both it and the isosource (I still have about 8 cases of 24 cartons each so I’m going to be using that for quite some time regardless) mix well with the Premier Protein drinks, so yum!

So by mixing all this up and throwing in some pureed real food on occasion…

Yes, it’s another Taco Bell enchirito. This time I had the forethought to pick up sliced olives beforehand for the full retro experience!

…I get enough variety daily and since my stomach has now stretched out to the point where I can handle more than 16 oz of material at a sitting, I’m consistently reaching my nutritionist-set daily caloric intake of 2.7K calories and often reaching above to more then 3K calories a day.

Have I gained back any weight? Not that I can tell, but I haven’t lost any more, so that alone is a good thing. Putting any weight back on is going to be a long, arduous process.

In other health-related news, my endocrinologist has upped the dose of my thyroid medication (my last TSH test was through the roof) and my energy level is back to “normal,” and I’m no longer falling asleep at my desk or while watching television. I’m also sleeping much better.

Insurance approved my dermatologist’s request to put me on Duplixent for the Keytruda rash. The current therapy of prednisone and cortisoid cream has helped greatly and the skin eruptions are healing nicely, but the generally accepted therapy for getting rid of Bullous pemphigoid completely includes Duplixent. The first double dose, as I mentioned a few posts ago was administered at the doctor’s office as a “sample” and the first of many followup doses due next week—through insurance—was $1K and satisfied my remaining yearly out-of-pocket Medicare Part D requirement. The good news is that because of that—and those two week-long stints in the hospital in April—I shouldn’t have to pay for anything health related for the rest of the year.

Yay, ‘murika?

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“Eight Is Enough” Of Anything

Famous last words.

I suppose there are worst things to spend my money on, but collecting shit is a fun hobby no matter what you collect, be it antiques, Hummel figurines, Beanie Babies,  Candlewick glassware (in the case of my sister), or in my case, portable CD/Minidisc players.

Yeah, I know I should be saving, saving, saving with all the uncertainty in the world right now, but let’s face it: with that madman in the White House everything could go up in a mushroom cloud at any moment because someone disrespected his fragile ego one too many times and the only solution in his addled brain was to start WWIII. And even if it doesn’t get that crazy, none of us has any guarantee of tomorrow—especially if you’re dealing with ongoing health issues—so find joy in what and where you can.

And these little nuggets bring the geek in me much joy.

I’ll admit there is a fine line between collecting and hoarding, however. Fortunately I don’t think I’ve crossed that line, nor have any of my living relatives. My late father, however, was not a collector. He was a hoarder, and no matter how many times we tried to help him declutter (or even so much suggesting that he move into a new apartment) we were met with incredible resistance to the point of outright meltdowns. When he went into skilled nursing and we knew he’d never be going home again, I spent a couple days cleaning his place while I was in town and ended up filling an entire residential dumpster. After he passed it was a Herculean task for my sister (I was back in Denver at the time) to clean the rest of his place out and get it ready for sale.

I hope that when my time comes, whoever has to go through all my shit doesn’t feel like I had crossed the line.

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Tuesday Tiedrich


there are days when everything in the news is so profoundly idiotic that I don’t even know where to begin. yesterday was one of those days — so once again, I’m just going to drag out the Big Wheel of Moron™, give it a spin, and see where it lands. ready? here we go.

 

what. in the actual. fuck.

first of all, let’s all breathe a sigh of relief, because this vulgar abomination isn’t real — at least, it isn’t real yet. what Preznit Fuckwit’s shat out onto his crappy app is the product of some janky six-fingered plagiarism robot.

but the question must be asked: was the AI that ginned this up trained on a copy of The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich? it’s a legit question, because you know who else was in madly in love with eagles with their wings all spread out and shit? of course you do.

oh look, it’s Adolf Hitler, giving a speech in front of a ginormous Nazi eagle, and everyone in the audience is sieg heiling to beat the band. which, as long as we’re on the subject, reminds us of —

why does everything this administration does turn out to be something the Nazis did first?

nobody asked for this. nobody said, ‘gee, Donny there isn’t enough golden shit trashing up the White House yet. is there any way you can wedge some vulgar Nazi-themed eagle into the mix, maybe above the front door?’

it’s bad enough that all of Donny’s policies remind that he’s trying to build his own fucked-up Turd Reich, does he really have to steal all their symbolism as well?


well, that was fun. are you ready for another spin of the wheel? here we go

fuck, it landed on Donny again. come on Donny, stop being such an attention hog.

reporter: “what are your plans for the housing bill?”

Donny: “I don’t— know. I think it’s so— unimportant by compared to— by compared to the Save America Act. the housing bill is a bill that can get approved. they worked on it long and hard. it’s very— bipartisan. that means Democrats like it. and it’s uhhhhh— maybe— even— uhhhhh, it’s, it’s probably maybe more that way, they’re getting things that I wouldn’t necessarily agree to. nobody knows more than housing in the history of the presidency, nobody, nobody, no— well like me, in housing. I made a lot of— I made a lot of money. I made a lot of money with housing.”

heh heh, he said ‘long and hard.’

oh my god, Donny’s brain is fried. folks, I want to assure you there are no transcription errors in that excerpt. I took great pains to type out that torrent of incoherence exactly as it seeped from Dear Leader’s rancid anus-mouth. yes, he actually said ‘by compared to’ — twice.

let me ask you a question: do you think Donny even knows what’s in the housing bill he’s refusing to sign? because he sounds like a fifth-grader called upon to get up in front of the whole class to give an oral report on a book he absolutely forgot to read.

‘… and so if you have courage, they give you a red badge, and that’s why everyone should read The Red Badge of Courage.’

Donny’s oral report on the Red Badge of Housing Bill is just as nonsensical, because — spoiler alert — the illiterate fuck didn’t read it, and he can’t remember what he was told about it, because he was too busy watching himself on Fox News to listen. all he knows is that Democrats like it, which means it must be baaaaaad.

look, you can take Donny’s word for it, because he knows more about housing than all the housers. big strong housings, with tears in their eyes, come up and tell him so every day.

this guy’s a fucking idiot, and he’s making policy decisions based on vibes. what could possibly go wrong?

ugh. help us, Big Wheel of Moron™, and spin us the fuck out of here.


“let anyone who comes to this district, who thinks that he or she is going to vandalize the reflecting pool, you’re facing 10 years in prison.”

Jeanine Pirro sure loves to talk tough and come out with guns blazing, doesn’t she? Jeanine is what would happen if Yosemite Sam drank the entire box of wine in one gulp.

so, for those of you keeping score at home:

if you come to our nation’s capital and you so much as dip your pinky into the sacred and holy Epstein Reflecting Pool, you will spend the rest of your life in the hoosegow.

but it you come to DC in order to bludgeon cops with flagpoles, break into the Capitol, and take a shit on the floor of the House, the government will pardon you, apologize to you for the inconvenience, and — if Donny gets his way — enrich you beyond your wildest dreams

holy shit. spin us out of here, Big Wheel.


Dr. Oz has no freaking clue how insurance works, does he?

“of the people who signed up, 40% never use the insurance. let me ask you, John, you have health insurance — do you use it once a year? in Obamacare right now 40% of the people ostensibly signed up never use the insurance … we have a lot of fake people on the policies.”

wait, what?

on what planet is paying for insurance and not using it proof of fraud?

now look. I pay X dollars a month for car insurance. I’ve never filed a claim, because I’ve never had an accident. according to Dr. Oz, that somehow means I’ve been defrauding that cute little Geico gecko for years. I would never do that. I mean, look at this little homey. he’s fucking adorable.

now, this would all be hilarious of Dr. Oz were merely some loudmouth drunk at the end of the bar, ranting about all those goddamned Obamacare fraudsters, before passing out face-down in a puddle of his own sick.

but Oz is the administrator of the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. that’s way too much power for any crackpot this ignorant to hold — and he’s going to use this counterfactual bullshit as an excuse to kick people off Obamacare.

my head hurts. let’s give this accursed Wheel one final spin.


ha! you knew we’d eventually land on Donny’s Big Vacant Shitpile Of Nothingness, didn’t you?

as Aaron Rupar sagely observed when he posted this clip, this is some epic cope.’

Larry ‘Three Sheets’ Kudlow: “help me out, I want to be a part of this.”

Fox correspondent: “perhaps now that the closing bell is here, we’re gonna get more people out here.”

yeah, you keep telling yourself that — that people were only waiting for Wall Street’s closing bell to ring at 4pm before heading to the Mall. let us know how that works out for you.

my god, Fox News wants so hard for Donny’s Ginormous Barren Abyss to be a success, and it just ain’t happening. four days after it opened, the Great American State Fair remains a ghost town.

oh, wait — here comes someone. let’s see if we can get them to stop for an interview.

oops, our mistake. it was just some random tumbleweed.

it’s four more days until July 4th, and things are just going to keep getting stupider.

lucky us.


this is going to be my closing message for the foreseeable future:

practice self-care. do what you need to do to keep sane. if that means you need to disengage with my daily posts for a while, I get it. this community of ours will still be here when you return.

to all the people who have signed on in the days since the election, welcome aboard. settle in as we all try to deal with the shitfuckery that’s ahead of us.

we are all in this together, and we are all here for each other.

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