C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 36

Back from cataract surgery—

Doing real well. Good job on it, no needles, just eyedrops, one iv, which is a piffle, and stare straight at the light, which is real, real bright.

Of course you have doubts—I’m pretty possessive about the body parts I was born with, but the new one is functioning well. Only real pain was the incision pain after surgery, managed with 2 Advil—about like getting soap in your eye level pain—and the fact you have one eye dilated a whole lot, and the other not.

The new lens is set for distance, and it’s already way sharper than the other one. Still having a little filmy (too much light) effect, but I’m real happy.

Most of the time (3-4 hours) was waiting. The operation itself is about ten minutes. They hand you a bottle of oj and a plastic eye shield and tell you come back tomorrow (for the followup exam.) Now one eye sees in slightly browned tones and one eye (the new one) sees brilliant whites.

It’s a wonderful age we live in. Now I’m under don’t-bend-over restriction and no lifting anything heavier than a milk bottle.

We’ve nearly finished Jane’s room—and our speed is picking up…

Just in time for me to go inactive come Monday.

But we’re doing ok. Trying to clear the floor of trip-hazards, and arrange things so I don’t have to bend over to get stuff.

Tomorrow morning I start the preparatory meds that I’ll continue afterward as well, and I plan to follow doc’s instructions and avoid problems.

And…the rains come.

Meaning another stall in our work, with surgery Monday. I’m not going to get that fish tank moved before then, and after surgery I’ll have another month before I should be clear to do heavy lifting, with second surgery scheduled for January 6. After which I STILL can’t do heavy lifting for another month. Valentine’s, anyone?

Well, we’re better off than the people getting flooded, or the people with holes in their roof, so we’re not to feel sorry for, but shucky-darn!

We only got a little floor actually laid yesterday, but we’ll just plug away at it, and carry planks to and from the garage for sawing when it isn’t raining.

SNow’s in the forecast. Including for Monday. But the worse things was the 50 degree day that melted the snowcap off the mountains and sent it down the rivers—along with the rain—which has made misery for people living near the river.

I swear, we expect zombies and Martian invaders next.

We’re ok.b

We have a 4×20 area of floor laid, including 3 hours on the first row, which is always a bear!—and I am so sore I may spend the night in this recliner because it hurts less.

Would you believe—our fairly new furnace has gone out? We have no heat.

In the gallantry department, however, remember I mentioned a house down the street with a tree down whose exposed roots stand higher (equal to the missing part of their lawn) than their house eaves?

They’ve decorated the fan of exposed roots with giant red Christmas balls.

We have engaged a moving company who will come in and shift that tank.

This is a great relief. Got to calculating weight, and the water in that tank weighs a thousand pounds. We’ll remove that, but not quite all the sand and rock; we’ll bucket the fish and corals. And remove 40 lbs of canopy, which we’ll set aside. But the shipping weight of that baby was 800 lbs, counting 40 lbs of pallet and maybe 20 lbs of plywood sheeting. That means 700 lbs of stand and half inch glass (with about 5″ of mixed sand and rock and water still inside) which has to be coaxed off the old carpet and up a teeny bit onto a new laminate edge (which can accordion and ruin it if we blow this) while receiving felt glides to replace the teflon glides it’s sitting on.

This is going to be interesting. And if we can’t get it done this week—we’re going to have to manage it when I’m not to lift anything heavier than a milk carton.

Leveling Jane’s floor—then painting the walls…the Rubik’s Cube method…

…of room refinishing.

Poor Jane’s stuff had to ‘splode out of her room and into kitchen and living room until we can get the work done in there.

The good news is, the floor is level, and we’re nearly finished with the painting. Everything is fresh and new—we have come to realize the previous owner was a chain smoker who, yes, smoked in bed: there’s a dark haze on the ceiling in one spot. All that is dealt with and done, along with spackle patches to every ding and dent on the walls.

My room got a repaint when we moved in, as did almost everything else—except Jane’s room. So now it has a fresh new coat. It’ll be the first to get the new flooring; and maybe we can start laying it tomorrow. We’re hoping that part will go really fast and let Jane get her ‘stuff’ back in order soon, because Shu is really upset. ‘His room’ smells weird and all the stuff is piled up, and he’s blocking your path every time you go anywhere—‘Don’t leave the cat!’

We’re hurrying because I’ve got eye surgery in 7 days, and won’t be able to lift or bend for at least a week after, maybe longer. And of course by then we’ll be putting up Christmas decorations, on whatever floor the living room has by then. We’re just about saving enough by doing the floor ourselves to make it a real bargain…and we had to do something. This carpet is getting old enough to ripple in spots—it’s worn and stretched, and won’t go too much longer. Hiring an installer piles quite a bit of money onto a project like this, and I don’t know how we could get any installers to cope with the ‘stuff’ we’ve got, much of which is heavy, and/or bulky, with no place to put it. The fish tank requires expert moving, and that would be us. We have to drain it way down, preserve the water, and house the fish temporarily in the sump, the corals in a bucket, and a lot of the rock in another bucket. It’s going to be quite an operation, and we only hope we can lighten it enough to move it onto the new surface.

Cold, cold, cold.

Headed for 17 tonight. Not sure what we hit during the power-out, but it was 20’s-like. Thank goodness this place is insulated.

And if you have windows that are a problem during winters or summer sun, http://www.bedbathhome.com/BlackoutLi...

OR from Penneys: search blackout curtain liner

http://www.jcpenney.com/ultimate-blac...

The blackout liners we got because of the glare-prone old telly—really made it possible to keep this living room warm. Magnetic closure means no light. WE just have these mysterious little points of light—kitty help.

You just put them on the same hook as your regular window drapes, granted you have regular window drapes. One of the best investments against overheating in summer or chilling in winter.

We’re proceeding with the new flooring, which we were doing when the blackout hit…

Yesterday we leveled the floor in Jane’s bedroom. Two 50 lb bags of Quikrete leveling underlayment, and an ordinary power drill. Because we couldn’t use a 5 gallon bucket-type mixer, we divvied it into 5 pound lots with a kitchen scales, added 2 cups water, and mixed in a little bucket with a paint stirrer and our little regular drill. We got ‘er done.

I’m going to have the first cataract surgery on the 14th, so I have to do all the heavy lifting and exertion before then. Trying to get the house back in order. It’s getting to where I can’t distinguish pastel colors as well, and it’s like looking through a fog on the right eye–you know how it looks if you get oil in your eye, just kind of filmy. Real annoying. I can’t drive after dark because of the multiple refractions. The right eye is the worst. Really worst. And it was getting markedly worse last year. By this summer, when we found out about the shortened deadline for Convergence, it was profoundly worse and getting worser… By early November, I realized I should NOT drive after sundown. I can use the computer, I can see far off, but the reason I got the smart phone was that it was the only number pad I could cope with, something I could read. If this works, maybe I can go to a cheaper phone—though having it during the recent emergency was really helpful.

Two weeks!

Bit the bullet and ordered a generator.

The thought of what it would have been had this happened on the tail end of Convergence is pretty persuasive. I turned that book in literally on the deadline, with a lot riding on that date: miss your publishing ‘slot’ and a whole series can lose out, bigtime.

So…Black Friday sales, Home Depot…and a deal of fast research on generators.

I settled on Honda, who makes a motor many of the best ‘others’ buy to use their own product.

I settled on lightweight, because Jane and I together can’t get a 170 lb ‘whole house’ generator out of the Prius’ back end.

I settled on a generator-inverter, because it produces what the sales folk call a ‘pure sine wave’, aka power without the wobble produced by a generator alone. It converts AC to DC and then converts the DC to a ‘tamed’ AC that is pretty well as steady as what your house wall sockets offer from the electric company. If you’re running computer equipment or devices that use an internal microchip (and what doesn’t, nowadays) the ‘pure sine wave’ stuff matters. You can also connect two of these fellows together, if you turn out to need more power.

So Home Depot offered a Honda 2000 inverter generator, 45 pounds approx., runs 3-8 hrs on a gallon of gas, and produces 1500 watts of steady running power. We’ve got the propane for heat, we can use an ice chest for perishables, and that 1500 watts would let us charge the laptops, charge the phones, and then unplug and plug in the fish tanks for a number of hours, and by juggling plug-ins, keep the whole house going. The deal was 899 for the thing, which is 100 to 200 off the normal price. You can run the thing day and night for a couple of days for about the amount of gas you’d have on hand for a lawnmower, so you don’t have to store a mega-tank of fuel in anticipation. Honda engines also have a rep for starting, no matter the condition of the gas. I think it’s a good deal. Sure better than what we just went through, and losing over a week out of our productive year.