Category: Anxiety

Life …

Not a double exposure as such …

A reflection … I love the mystery of this kind of shot. Then a bit of framing and cutting and voila … a meaningful and metaphoric intersection.

I’ve been having to prep all week for a medical ‘procedure’ on Tuesday coming and it’s played havoc with my nerves. Meaning it’s played havoc with my routines, with writing, any reading except the sort of thing I can get engrossed in and forget that the consensual world exists.

To that end have thrown myself into the Broken Earth Trilogy by N K Jemisin. Have read Parts one and Two so far, and they are every bit as good as I’ve been told. Will be re-reading them as Number Three had to be ordered in. More on them in the goodness of time.

I had six weeks to prepare my mind for this thing, so did nothing until a week and a couple of days ago, then started with writing out the whole deal in long hand in my health diary and making lists. working of the lists now.

This morning the hospital called. Was I going to do an online pre admission form? Something I had completely forgotten. Not anywhere on my lists. So did that, now going shopping. Again.

It’s ridiculous how much stuff we need for this sort of thing.

The weird thing about the prep … for me … was that I couldn’t get started until I had my clothes sorted for travelling there and back. I’m not any kind of dress-up person, most of my clothes are old and worn.

So when a hospital says ‘loose and comfortable clothes’ they’re talking about the rags I wear at home. So it was only after I had one of my clothes try-outs with all my clothes endingin a pile on the bed, and finally deciding to wear my one and only rarely worn skirt, a tshirt and a longsleeved shirt and hanging them ready …

only then could I start to think about any dietary difficulties I might have with the prescribed diet, the fact I had to drop off my antihistamine a week ago and have my nose leaking and my skin allergies popping and so on.

Does anybody even sell plain gelatine these days? Haven’t found any.

A ‘Blast from the Past’

Trying to get into an organized frame of mind … we’ve been warned there is to be a Fire Drill this morning, and also I should/must get my new mobile phone SIM installed that I have already done the online stuff for.

Now just waiting for the old SIM to stop working … no that’s not right … they’ll first send me a code that I’ll need to put in somewhere. Then wait for the phone to stop working and THEN change the physical SIM card. Something which I will need help with.

My weak old fingers can’t even get the case off the mobile, let alone negotiate the teeny tiny fork to open the little draw, to then insert the minuscule card! None of this stuff was invented with old people in mind. And times like these, I really do feel like the geriatric aviatrix (IE the geriatrix negotiating the virtual skies of the web) I sometimes write about.

I stopped thinking of myself as any kind of surfer about the time I did the research about surfing I needed to be able to write knowledgeably about the process in MONGREL. I knew just ordinary body surfing was simply giving myself to the power of the water to take me, straightened in a torpedo shape, with itself to the shore. Surfing using a board was a whole other process.

As a child in the 1950s I was pretty sure that one day I would be a pilot. I collected cigarette cards of planes, identified planes going over (not nearly as many as these days) and imagined being a pilot by extrapolating from my father’s actions at the wheel, driving his first car.

Which was a share car, by the way. The two families owning the car used to take turns going on camping holidays.

This example from http://www.simoncars.co.uk/coachwork/woody.html

As near as I can recollect, the sides of our woody were all wood panel, that there no windows in the sides of the back. And of course it was old and decrepit. Traveling in it, if I wasn’t staring out the front at the horizon, between my father driving and my mother in the passenger seat, I’d be car-sick, the smell of petrol pervasive. As it was originally a tradesman’s van, there were no seats in the back, and we kids had pillows and an old mattress to sit on. And I do seem to remember that my mother and father sat in old arm chairs.

What happened to the dream of becoming a pilot? A girl, in the 1950s? It was kindly explained to me that girls did not become pilots, but that I could become an air hostess instead. I grew and grew. By 1960, even that dream went by the way. There was a height restriction of 167 cm, 5′ 6″ for air hostesses in the days of low cabin-ceiling prop planes. I was too tall!

And that was only the first fly-away this morning.

Reading my emails and posts, I side-tracked into Susan Cornelis website again this morning, this time about her Norwegian memories. She quoted the Garrison Keillor sign-off from A Prairie Home Companion,

“I couldn’t help but remember Garrison Keillor’s sign off on Lake Wobegon “where all the women are strong, the men are good looking, and the children are above average”.”

That was so familiar, I can practically hear Keillor say it, a radio show I used to listen to way back when. I clicked away from what I meant to do and to the website, and it’s all still there.

Not that I’m listening to anything right now other than the sounds of people in the corridor. Next, the announcements and the siren … the cat shot under the couch … and it’s time to gooooo!!!

While down on the podium, and after signing my name off, a kind person with strong hands helped me by getting my phone case off.

Now. Off across to the shops where I’ll get the SIM changed.

In Hospital

Anthony Roberts from Tony’s Bologna reminds me to talk about something I’m emotionaly responding to … not sure of the grammar there.

I’m not in the mood for grammar. I’m cold, hospital aircon is like the Antarctic. I’m standing swaying, with a blanket over my shoulders in my ED hutch (roomlet in the energency department) at the Mater (Hospital) in South Brisbane.

Been here for four and a half hours, had a canula put in that’ll give me the pip for weeks the bruise surrounding it is momentous.

Waiting for the results of the CT scan I had half an hour a go figuring if there’s a good/bad reason for the blockage in my gut. Waiting for the pain to be flushed out.

ED beds are the pits, as I’m sure everybody who has ever languished in ED knows. I’m too tall, my feet always flush against the footboard. How do really tall people manage?

Does it sound like I’m moaning? Does to me. Emotions are totally tied into physical sensations, you know? There is no brain body separation.

The time is 13.13 … one of those synergies I have with time. When I check the time, ther’s more often than not a little pattern to enjoy. Synergies might be the wrong word. I’m frazzled, frustrated and freaking!

OK, I can still do alliteration. Can still think. Discomfort is in overdrive. Now to find a pic that describes how I’m feeling …

Skewed in Favor of Who …?

How is it even a fair election when people can choose whether or not to vote?

Everybody of the voting age in Australia is required to turn up to vote. You can of course mess up your ballot papers, but people are far less likely to do that it seems, than in the US where you can just not turn up.

Hope the Republicans have stacked the wings with a few strong influential honest stalwarts. Could be they’ll be needed.

The article below is the most uplifting thing I’ve read so far about the election results …

https://substack.com/home/post/p-151265805

And just a couple of hours later, one of my favorite magazines opened with this article …

On excitable neurons and how we craft our future

Microsoft Word: the installation update …

I’ve cancelled! The only page I was able to access the whole time was my account page. I never was able to access the word processor, the bit I need more than all the other frills. All work is meant to happen in the cloud these days … I know that … I don’t have the inner fortitude to wrestle with passwords every single time I want to use a word processor.

I’d really like the installation to happen without hang ups. I’d really like it if after I click on Install, the behemoth just installed itself without hanging itself up somewhere. I’d really like it if I didn’t have to uninstall, then go through all the steps outlined in the Troubleshooting page then reinstall and go through it all again.

All the boasting going on in the clean no-frills accompanying text isn’t having the required effect, because I can already see, that despite that they have already taken my money–which wasn’t outrageous this week–this is not going to be a smooth operation. I wonder if the reason that it’s only the third week after the end of the Financial Year, that the buy-price was a full $30AUD less than the original?

[And you know what? There is a bot following me around. Just got a suggestion for a less complex word for ‘purchase’ … fits better in the grammar, apparently … ‘buy-price’. Sounds like US slang to me. And apparently following is also too complex. Not buying that and this is WordPress, not the subject of the post.

Well, my online account works. Naturally, they start pushing more products the minute my feet hit the deck. Like, will I want a co pilot? No thanks. I’m used to flying alone, and am quite capable. And why would I want to pay an extra $33 a month for having a co-pilot?

They don’t see any devices? Well, duh. No devices, thank you. Trying to do this on a shoe string. Why would I open an Outlook account when I have had one operating since I got this computer? Another problem rearing its ugly head. Well, that’s My MS Account explored. Seems to be working. Its hiccups might iron out overnight. Wouldn’t that be something?

Next? The installation process … was encouraged to save the License agreement. Have you ever noticed how an encouragement like that is hedged by the further choices being grey-ed out and your attention narrowed to the word that must be reacted upon?

It seems to be happening. Then … per-ling-lingk … that Microsoft-specific sound of success. it says it’s done. A couple more hurdles, because not quite done yet. It has to initialize.

You should to laugh, I think at myself. A window just popped up. 2 updates available! I haven’t even opened anything yet. Update in progress is the next message. At 27 minutes that’s going to take longer than the installation process.

So the Updates are done. I click it, and it then tells me that a number of the new programs, since they were installed back in May 2024,… which they definitely weren’t … need updating. Ha ha ha! It’s like a maze. And I still don’t have anything to work with.

So finally I get a couple of aliased icons on my desktop … and here is the test … open one of my previously clamped documents and get …. taraaaahhh! Drum roll, please!

Nope! Forget the drum roll! A bit of Bosley and his crew from long ago, see those two little angles just under the Header? The clamps. My stuff is still not usable. Up in the top left it says I must ‘Activate‘ Microsoft.

Huh? Haven’t I done that already? I click on Activate just in case …

You know what? I’m calling it a day. Cheers all

Reading: “The 2084 Report” by James Lawrence Powell

A gripping read, I think partly due to the verifiable facts often quoted with present day or historical dates attached to them.

Although promoted as fiction, it’s worrying when you’re reading about increasing bushfires in Australia, for example, the fires in 2019 (!) are part of the story.

And that’s only one incident among hundreds. most events that happen in this account have their verifiable roots in the last decades of the 20th century and the first two of the 21st century.

And by 2020, Powell posits, it all already was too late. Even if by some God-decreed disaster, CO2 emmissions had stopped right then … four years ago … it was too late to stop or even ameliorate what he calls the baked-in effects of global warming.

This book is powerful enough that I will change my political affiliation and vote for the party that promotes nuclear power.

The final and short chapters in the book “Look to Sweden” twice. Sweden turned to nuclear power starting in the 1970s and was able to ride out the cascading avalanche of effects because of having enough power … presumably to power aircon and grow enough food indoors to keep their population from starving.

By the late 2010s, 10% of the world’s electricity was produced by 449 power generating reactors in 31 countries. the final chapter describes why nuclear failed in the story.

More than two dozen countries, including the US, China, Russia and India had says the author and have say I, the necessary experience and controls to build enough nuclear power generating reactors between 2030 and 2050 to limit global temperature rise to 2 degrees Centigrade or 3.6 degrees F.

Yep. I know it’s supposed to be fiction but I call it a thin veneer of fiction tieing together the masses and masses of facts into a palatable account of what’s facing us.

I doubt I have another ten years, but there are all you and you, my kids, and grand kids. Go read this book. Hate what happens to your country. Do something about it.