Never Enough Server Changes Department

Money's so tight that I have forfeited my long-standing domain, foolspress.com, as well as the web server that was hosting it. Appy polly loggies to anyone who missed my presence.

Never Enough Ironic T-Shirts Department

Seen last Friday: While waiting for my bus to show, I witnessed an overweight kid--early teens, I would guess, if not younger--run right across Lake City Way during rush hour traffic. (Bear in mind that Lake City Way is a state highway.) He barely managed to avoid being hit, and returned to his friends at my bus stop, presumably waiting for the school bus. And that's when I noticed his t-shirt:

"The only exercise I get is in just pressing my luck."

No, really.

Never Enough Crazy Living Department

Sorry if I have been quiet lately. Cynthia has recovered from her surgery but we then had to start the road to financial recovery, and that has been proving rather difficult. But at least we are paid up on a payroll advance loan which paid for my stepson's travel expenses a couple of years ago, and now can pay down the electric bill. Then we can start paying down the personal loans we have taken from friends to help us get through these rough times. Once all this is done, we'll be no more broke than before, but at least we'll be free of obligations outside the usual monthly bills.

Becklin is now driving as a learner and has gained quite a bit of road skill. He still needs to develop a sense of being able to pay more attention to traffic about him than to his own driving, but that will hopefully come along on its own.

As for myself, I am feeling pretty exhausted but not as bad as I was just last week. I was covering a coworker's Monday shift, and since I work Saturdays, I had just one day off--which I spent trying to plug a leak in our plumbing. (More on that momentarily.) Fortunately, the coworker covered my most recent Saturday shift, so I had a three-day weekend in which to try to recover from that week. Still, I was busy most of that three-day weekend, and my back aches to prove it.

I don't think I posted about the water damage here. It's been kinda rueful, really--I moved in thinking this would be a Slack Recovery Center, only to have more slack removed due to problems with the house that clearly predate our moving in. (Gee, I wondered why the previous tenant delayed their move just to paint and to clean carpet! Now I know. But I digress....) At first we thought it was the roof, which needs obvious re-shingling at minimum, and probably a complete re-roofing just to be safe. But then we noticed the increase in the water, and how warm the water was. In fairness, Cynthia noticed it before I had, and I feel badly for not investigating sooner.

So on that one-day weekend, I prepared to knock a hole in the wall just to locate the leaking pipe. It was obviously leaking in the bathroom wall--we could hear the dripping just beyond. And there was no need to knock a hole, per se--the drywall wasn't dry at all, and gave with a push. And that is when I found a pipe that had appeared sheared at the top, pouring hot water. I have reason to suspect the pipe is intended to vent excess air in the pipe, or else to allow air for reducing water hammering. Either way, I doubt the plumbing is up to current residential code. And regardless, it is necessary for us to stop the water leak, if only so we can repair as much as we can and move out as soon as possible.

It's formidable, and probably will cost money we can ill afford right now. But at least there is a glimmer of hope.

Never Enough Health Updates Department

St. Thea, my partner, is recovering nicely from kidney stone surgery. Yes, surgery--they couldn't get at the stones with ultrasound, so they had to cut a hole though her back into her kidney and then guide a laser probe into the hole, to blast at the stones. She's still in remarkable pain but it's manageable--far more so than the stones were. One of the stones was about 2 cm (0.79 inch) big and so wasn't about to pass on its own. As far as we know, a lot of her pain that we chalked up to endometriosis or IBS might've been the stones, all along.

It figures, though, that we got snow the day that we were told the ultrasound wouldn't work and on the day we went to the hospital for the surgery.

As for myself, I got a case of the crud. I'll try not to cough on the blog.

Way Enough Custody Setbacks Department

You might've heard that Rev. Magdalen--Rachel Bevilacqua, the mother whose child was taken from her in part due to her involvement in the Church of the SubGenius--won her custody battle.

More accurately, she won round one; the father is appealing and managed to get the judge to issue a stay against the order to release Magdalen's child back to her. More details on Rev. Modemac's wiki.

Never Enough Global Warming First Blood Department

"Never Enough"!? I take that back--this is too much to start with. A damn shame it will only get worse. I wonder how long until Seattle's underwater?

Never Enough Yuletide Sneers Department

Courtesy of WFMU's Beware Of the Blog:

Christmas is an inherited holiday about a theoretical peace for all of humanity. There is no national or social necessity to believe in this. However, we can present it as a holiday of actual domestic national peace... If we make visible the blessings of this actual peace, along with its foundations and requirements, then "Christmas" doubtless can be a high point in the course of the political year. Both according to popular custom and popular view, the Christmas holiday can justifiably be seen as a festival of the nation.

And some might wonder why I don't approve of this "War On Christmas" myself, humbug I may well be. I still prefer celebrating Y'all amongst the 273 different holidays celebrated between Thanksgiving and the New Year.

Me, I was thinking of playing Krampus this year. Life got ahead of me.

Oh, and if you must get a "live" tree next year, keep it watered. (Also courtesy WFMU)

Never Enough Prophet Insights Department

The wisest words I've read in Wired yet:

Prophecy, I've come to realize, is a complex meme. When prophets provoke real trouble, bring confusion to society by sowing reverberant doubts, spark an active, opposing consensus everywhere – that is the sign they've hit a nerve. But what happens when they don't hit a nerve? There are plenty of would-be prophets in the world, vainly peddling their provocative claims. Most of them just end up lecturing to undergraduates, or leading little Christian sects, or getting into Wikipedia edit wars, or boring their friends. An unsuccessful prophet is not a martyr, but a sort of clown.

I can only add one thing to this, but you can't hear me honk my red nose from here.

Never Enough Gender-Bending Bulldada Department

Courtesy of Boing Boing, here is a weird story of woman-clubbing cavemen and misogyny and an absurdly strong and sexy hillbilly amazon and some interesting gender-bending angles. I'm still not sure what to make of it, but I must admit there's something wonderful about it all.

Never Enough Medical Surprises Department

"Well now, if I gave 'em my money, I would be a SubGenius."

"Yeah, I guess so."

"But what would happen when I woke up the next morning and started breathing?"

HA HA HA.

You may have heard that old recording of the guy calling into the talk show in the 80s when Stang and Drummond were on as guests. And maybe you laughed at his comment. But I bet you didn't fully get that last line. "Started breathing"? Huh? I know I didn't get that bit.

Until now.

St. Thea urged me to go to the doctor because I had a lot of symptoms of sleep apnea, a disorder where you stop breathing while you sleep. It's actually fairly common, but most people have a fairly mild case of it. But in more acute cases, it can lead to lethargy, trouble handling stress, depression, anxiety, and a dozen more symptoms which sounded disquietingly familiar.

So it was that I let a cute Russian girl glue electrodes to my head, tape them everywhere else, and install special straps to measure chest activity, leg motion, and blood oxygen levels. And I slept--or tried to--while in this get-up. Oddly enough, it was the *pillow* that made it hard to sleep.

The next morning, Thea was comparing the glue in my hair to the aftermath of a bukake filming, for which she suffered mightily, giggling despite herself. Or maybe BECAUSE of herself. Hard to tell with that gal, some days.

Two weeks later, I had the results. Boy howdy. They showed me the graphs of my breathing, brain activity, pulse, etc. And then they showed me the average number of times I stopped breathing in my sleep, per hour.

EIGHTY. 80. LXXX.

Every 45 seconds, as I relax into sleep, my windpipe closes up, and my brain has to jolt me "awake" enough that I open up my windpipe again and resume breathing. Then I try to relax again, and get zapped once more. Relax--ZAP. Over and over. Based on that, it's a wonder that I've ever had a good night's sleep.

EVER.

Explains a lot, doesn't it?

Well, the proof is in the sleeping, and for the time being I have become partly cybernetic, wearing a soft silicone mask over my nose while a CPAP machine maintains air pressure--not so much that it's uncomfortable, but enough that the windpipe never closes off. Your lungs get a workout the first few nights, and then you hardly notice it, beyond the fact that you have a mask strapped to your face, and its tendency to make you make weird noises now and then. More on that later as experiments permit.

But LO: I can wake up and not feel like I've been buried under warm Silly Putty. I can wake up without threatening all annoyances with endless suffering. I can deal with issues without feeling overwhelmed. Most importantly, I can decide NOT TO TAKE CRAP FROM ANYONE. It's not perfect yet, but it's been utterly amazing how much easier it has been to NOT act like a total emotional mess, just in the past week since I started using the CPAP machine.

And maybe it's just all the oxygen I'm suddenly breathing, but it seems like I'm bobbing lazily in a warm, clear ocean of slack, IN COMPARISON.

It makes me wonder if I should rewrite that "Misanthropes Anonymous" bit I wrote almost a decade ago.

...NAH. Humans still suck.

(Slightly edited version of my alt.slack post on September 20.)