Not postmortem yet!!

I have been one sick camper. Dad asked me when's the last time I ate last and I ate last Saturday. Not postmortem just yet!!!

Poor Poor Pitiful Me…

I’ve been running a high fever today along with neck and back stiffness and pain. Hopefully, I will be back tomorrow for a more informative post.

Something’s Amiss! Some Medications are Missing!

My medications are goofy. Many times the color of the pills change due to SoSec wanting cheaper generic drugs. I will give the pharmacy staff this, though: I would never be organized with regards to these Med-Packs helping me know what I need to take.

I was studying my medications after breakfast and my Trazodone is in my noon dose and there aren’t any Lithium in my noon dose as well. I called my father and he said to drive down to the pharmacy and he would check them out.

“Your Lithium is missing and your Trazodone should be taken at night,” he told me. “Everybody bowls a gutter ball sometimes!”

Dad gave me a correct Med-Pack which I had to wait a few moments for and got the girts started in making new Med-Packs right away. 

Back to the Hum Drum of Life…

I saw Tracy off to work after a big breakfast around 7:45am. I will see her again at noon when the animal hospital shuts down for lunch.

“Aren’t you about out of your medications?” dad asked earlier on the phone today.

He was calling me from the pharmacy and told me a pharmacy tech. has four Med-Packs made up for me.

“I’ve got two days left and will head to the pharmacy after I get a shower,” I told him.

It kind of takes a family effort with me sometimes and all the various things that keep me sane. You should see all the medications I take at noon and at night. I take each big handful with a big gulp which always worries my father I am going to get choked. I take ten pills at night in the hopes it will settle me down for sleep. Right now, we have the perfect combination, but it can change as well if bad luck and brain chemistry gone awry afflicts us.

“When is your injection?” he then asked worriedly as soon as a walked into the pharmacy.

“That's next week,” I told him thankfully. “Look at your next appointment card.”

I grabbed my bag of medications and two Cherry Cokes with his permission and headed home situated for another 4 weeks medication wise.

Yes! Back to the Safe Confines of Home!

I made it through the shadowy social veil of Mordor and emerged unscathed. (Lord of the Rings joke.)

It is about an hour’s drive to my sister’s house. Tracy kept drinking these all natural fruit drinks saying she was dire thirsty.

“You keep that up and we are going to have to stop at every gas station and fast food restaurant on the way to Alex City to use the bathroom,” I told her.

Well, it certainly happened. It took us an hour and a half to reach Mary’s house. 

My sister pulled me to the side at one point and asked,”Were did you find her? She is gorgeous!”

I smiled an “aw shucks” smile and said we met when I was volunteering at the Humane Society. It was the first time for my sister to meet Tracy. Of course, Tracy is a mostly social creature that enjoyed getting to know my family.

“You’re right about the grandkids being pod people,” Tracy told me on the drive home. “They walk aimlessly around with their faces buried in their tablets and phones.”

“I am wondering how they manage to keep from falling over stuff,” I quipped back jovially with a smile. “It must be pod people radar.”

Over Hill and Under Dale…

Tracy and I are soon driving to my sister’s house for Memorial Day today. Charlie’s grilling burgers so you know they are going to be good. His secret is Lea and Perrins Worcestershire sauce. He lets the ground hamburger marinate over night in that sauce. Tracy is also fretting about what to wear. She has already tried on 3 tops.

“What sandals do I wear?” She just asked me walking into the computer room with a few pair dangling from her fingertips.   .

I just chuckled and told her she looked beautiful in anything she wears. That was not what she wanted to hear.

I expect for there to be a lot of people in attendance. My social anxieties are already working on me overtime. Many butterflies are fluttering in my stomach.

Obsessions…

I had this poor deluded soul who lived in Toronto reading my blog in the beginning. She had a vendetta against another homeless blogger named Crystal who she said had Munchausen's by Proxy. She actually found my parent’s phone number somehow and called my mother who gave my phone number to Diana (her name). She began calling me very regular – all a plot and ploy to ensure I was really homeless beforehand. She was an intense woman with a lot on her plate. She was also trying to get the loud ice-cream trucks off the streets and also kids on minibikes. Obsessed would be a better word to describe her. Yes, that would describe her to a T.

My point is I don’t want to be like this woman I so disdained with regards to my campaign against the truck driver in this neighborhood. I won’t write about it again until something more major happens. This is not going to turn into the Andrew vs. Big Truck Show. More normal posts will commence as of now.

Comment Replies…

Summer said...

Do you think he lives in your neighborhood or is he a trucker taking a short cut?

Andrew Replies…

Summer, he definitely lives in the neighborhood. He has some kind of fly-by-night freight service. Sometimes he will be in a big rig, and other times in will be in a large Penske rental truck like a U-Haul. The Penske truck is usually large enough to take out my cable drop as well.  

I Think I’ve Had a Bright Idea!

I’ve put some fresh batteries in my camera and sat it on top of the piano ready to film. Next time that Hombre comes driving down the street, I am going to film it all. Like Tracy said, it’s a matter of time before he shows up again. Then I am going to call the police and let them find where he lives in the neighborhood.

Yeah, I am Friends With the Key Disease…

Dad, me, my brother and my sister all got the key disease where we temporarily lose our house and car keys all the time. Charlie likes to say it is what put my mother in an early grave as my mother always knew where her keys were.

“Y’all all drove her crazy over all these years,” he says.

We inherited it from dad’s mom who could never find her house keys and car keys as well.

Last night, I ran to Kroger to get some sausage and milk for breakfast this morning. I purchased my items and walked back to my car. Well, I put my sausage and a gallon of milk in the truck and got back in the car and couldn’t find my keys. Marshall, a Down’s Syndrome man who works at Kroger, knocked on my window and said, “Your keys are still hanging in the trunk.”

I walked around the car and there they were – still in the trunk hanging from their key receptacle.

Well, dad loved hearing this story when I got home and called him. We both laughed and laughed.

“I can’t fault you, son,” he said. “I have the key disease, too!”

Let Tracy’s Voice Be Heard! She’s the Breadwinner!

The poor soul – missing all her favorite TV shows this week. She is scrambling and trying to catch up online.

“What are you going to do when another big truck passes down our street?” Tracy asked me this morning getting ready for work. “You know it is going to happen again. It is just a matter of time.”

She is always the consummate worrier and rightly so. I can understand now what she’s thinking after all we’ve gone through since last Friday and the other outage as well earlier in the month.

“I’ve got a pad and pencil on the piano by the front door and I am going to write down their license plate of the offending truck and call the police.” I told her. “We are going to start filing a police report every time it happens.”

“We always have plan B as well,” I then told her. “Charlie is big buddies with the mayor of our fair third world city, Kyle McCoy, and we are going to get semis in residential areas outlawed and off limits.”

“Who DON”T your dad and Charlie know in this town?” Tracy replied laughing. 

Tracy heartily laughed some more.

“Savory or sweet?” I then asked her changing the subject which is our custom every morning.

“Let’s try sweet this morning,” Tracy replied. “Let’s have some of those cream cheese Danishes we bought the other night in Kroger’s deli.”

This makes breakfast easier on me. I popped two Danishes in the microwave on a plate and breakfast was served.

I AM BACK ONLINE!

Let’s Try Again Tomorrow…

Well, for starters, they (WOW!) are knocking off half our cable bill next month. Tracy will be delighted. We’ve had no joy with regards to getting my internet back up and running, though. I saw the WOW! guy drive by the house and he didn’t stop. He was looking for downed lines on my street. Just one of the many mix-ups we’ve had this past week. Why he didn’t just stop and look at how things are at my address I cannot fathom.

I Feel Like a One Legged Man at an Ass Kicking Contest…

glittermom said...

Don’t you have other internets you could get? We have AT&T, directv,spectrum,wow and dish available to us. I have AT&T and they just ran fiber optic cables in my area so I’m hooked up to that now. Suppose to be better and faster.

Andrew Replies…

Glittermom, we have two main choices of internet in town and that is WOW! and Charter’s Spectrum. The fastest speed Spectrum offers is 100 Mbps. I am using WOW!’s 1000 Mbps service or Gigabit service. So you can see my conundrum. I want the speed, but it seems to be coming at a price. I would love to have fiber optic internet here as it is fast and reliable as all get out.

As far as Dish and DirectTV are concerned, they are alternatives, but if my memory serves me correctly, the upstream with those services is still old 56k dialup and latency reigns supreme with above 100ms pings.

As soon as dad gets finished eating his breakfast, him and I are riding back out to the WOW! office nearby. Dad is hoping his favorite receptionist and old customer is working today.

Flimflam Man…

I am still without my usual source of internet. I had the bright idea to piggyback off of an unsecured wireless connection in the neighborhood. The connection is slow as molasses, though. Hopefully, I will be back up and running soon. Be thankful for your internet service if they are reliable. WOW! is a joke. Dads already been out to their office once and they said they would send somebody out to look at it and they never came. I hope dad goes back out there this afternoon and raises a little hell. Thank y’all for putting up with my whining or whinging as the British would say.

The problem is semi trucks keep coming through my neighborhood and knocking down the cable drop to my house. Friday, I saw a Southeastern Van Lines truck passing down my street and I said to myself, “There goes my internet.” It was exactly as I foretold. My internet was soon down.

“Be proactive when they come,” my father told me the other day. “Tell them all about your cable drop and these big trucks.”

Internet service is down. I hope to be back soon.

Friday Comes In With a Boom and a Bang…

The alarm went off at 6:45am this morning followed by a very, very loud clap of thunder. Of course, the ubiquitous freight train was rolling through downtown as well, flanges squealing loudly on the curve, as it often does during inclement weather.

“Was that thunder?” Tracy raised up out of the bed and asked with a deer in the headlights look.

“Yes, it was!” I replied happily and I hurried to the computer room to turn my computer on and check the radar.

One small little complex of thunderstorms was just parked and sitting over the Valley and putting on quite a show.

“Is it raining?” Tracy then asked as she was getting in the shower.

“No rain,” I replied. “We are getting what Sally Lou (dad’s mom) would call an electrical storm.”

The rain and humidity would make Tracy’s hair extra curly and she already has an ample head of curls as it is – my girl with the curls and the curves.

I got in the kitchen and made us a simple meal of cheese toast and fried bacon. Maggie was underfoot the whole time I was cooking hoping to get some bacon as well.  

Tracy left for work about 40 minutes ago and Mother Nature is still putting on a grand show of lightning and thunder. It is music to these old addled ears as long as the power stays on.

Computer Woes! How Slow Can You Go?

Charlie’s Janice called me at 9am. I was cleaning up the kitchen after a big breakfast. Tracy hadn't been gone to work for just an hour.

“My computer is running as slow as ever,” she told me woefully over the phone. “It is aggravating to say the least.”

“I’ll be right over,” I told Janice.

She’s running Windows 8.1 with only 4 GB of ram and a cheap Intel Celeron processor. That is her problem. Well, I gathered up a plethora and mötley crüe of sticks of spare RAM and set about hoping one or two would work and fit.

“Surely, she’s still not running DDR2,” I said to myself with a hope and a prayer as I headed to my car.

Janice nervously watched as I took apart her computer on their living room floor.  

Two sticks of Corsair XMS DDR3 8 GB RAM worked much to my surprise! I was elated. That gave Janice 16 GB of RAM. I must've carried twelve sticks with me. It was like a whole different computer. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this first! I was thinking that Dell would have some proprietary RAM and nothing I had would work.

I didn’t leave without getting a big bag of regular and diet Coke which is Charlie’s payment for when I work on their electronic gadgetry. I was happy to get them.

Janice called me back after I had gotten home.

“I don’t know what you did, but you supercharged my computer,” she said with a relieved sounding laugh. “Bless you, Andrew!”

Late For an Important Date…

No one in my immediate life remembered my injection this morning. Not even Tracy and she is so keen on my injections. I was sitting in front of my computer at 9:30am when I realized my shot was due. I almost panicked. I hurriedly put on some clothes with time of the upmost importance and essence. The longer I waited, the busier Kamath Medical would grow. I could be sitting an hour waiting on a nurse.

I was then driving down the Valley to my father’s former pharmacy at a speedy rate – putting my trusty Honda Civic through its paces.

“What are you doing here?” my father asked worriedly looking over his counter.

He thought something dire had happened for me to be at the pharmacy so early.

“My injection is due this morning,” I replied, proud of myself for remembering. 

I even puffed up my chest in bravado a little bit as well.

Dad checked my appointment card that he keeps in his wallet and looked up and said, “Good for you, Andrew!!!”

“I was just about to call you!” Rebecca, my nurse, told me as she called me back to an examining room. “I was just waiting for the clock to hit ten and I was going to be on the phone.”

I thanked Rebecca so very profusely for looking out for me.

I know it is psychosomatic, but I am already feeling better this morning.

Dido - Sand In My Shoes (Video)