C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 78

It’s snowing!

Woke up with the sunlight, on this ‘fall-back’ day—for those of you overseas, we say ‘spring-forward, fall-back’ to remember which direction to reset the clocks for daylight savings time…

And though it’s starting to be slush now, there were fat pretty flakes descending when I woke.

I love winter—with all its troubles, I love the winter, when it really sets in to be winter, with snow, not just brown dead stuff.

Remember that flu shot?

I almost opted for the shingles shot as well—had the world’s worst case of chicken pox as a child—lost a week out of my life, semi-conscious; and the druggist at Safeway said it was ok, no contraindications; but I always read the literature: and it says—life-threatening allergy to Neomycin is a contraindication. Well, I have a real bad and accelerating sensitivity to Neomycin. I can put it on a pinprick of an injury and within a day or two, the pinprick is the size of a half-dollar and welted up, gone soft and weeping. I’m not anxious to shoot the substance into my veins, thank you, which goes just everywhere… So I said nix that, but I’ll take the flu shot AND the pneumonia shot, yes? Well, at least they went into different arms, so I could tell which if I had a reaction.

Yesterday evening the pneumonia shot needed ice. An area about 6″ radius was red, swollen hard in places, and turning purple where the shot was. Painful as what you get from being kicked by a horse. I took 2 Benedryl in case I was allergic to some component. And 3 Advil. I did get some sleep (the new pillows!) but couldn’t sleep on that side.

This morning there’s a 4″ circle on the biceps that’s swollen hard and sore (wasn’t the biceps she shot it into.) and the area of the shot is bruised and also sore. It’s going to be Advil for breakfast, lunch, and supper, I fear. L looked up the shot and side effects and what I have is a ‘mild to severe’ reaction with a tilt toward the ‘severe’. There is a federal form for reporting it, but it requires the batch and info I don’t have. I may call the pharmacy and tell them to report it. The arm hurts not just in use, but just staying still. Plaque welt, the size of both fists, fever in the area. Nasty.

I begin to think pneumonia would have been the better choice, and I’m not sure I want another of these next year. No problem at all with the flu shot.

And Jane, poor thing, has a very unhappy tooth that is going to send her to the dentist Monday, we hope. Naturally it really flared up Friday after hours, but she has a call in.

Our aching backs…

Jane’s in having a hot soaky bath.

I went off today at 10 am to go to Costco to get more pillows, the most wonderful pillows ever spawned. I let Jane borrow mine last night, and she agrees with me: best thing since sheep dip. So that was job one, quick before they sell out.

Job 2: total bust. I needed to get some Prime water conditioner and some fish food: if your household doesn’t own a bottle of Prime, I recommend it: soak something in Chlorox, rinse, run more water, add Prime, totally deactivates the chlorine, including the smell on your hands. We clean a lot of things in the marine hobby, and Prime is the final mopup.—-The store had neither. They had 10 different brands and forms of bloodworms, a freshwater food, but no cyclopeeze, which marine fish love.

Job 4: get my flu shot; got talked into a pneumonia shot as well, though I’m healthy as the proverbial horse. The Safeway offered a 10% discount coupon if you got shots from them–so I got my two shots and my coupons, (good to Feb) and went and bought a huge amount of holiday liquor, frozen meals, and such—the spendy things, which gave me enough discount to pay for the flu shot. Ill use the other coupon around New Years. And do exactly the same thing. So I’ll have ‘made’ money on the transaction.

Job 5: I get home and Jane is hauling gravel. OMG. No help for the wicked—I haul my own stuff in, 6 trips out from the car; get it into the freezer or the bottle rack, as appropriate, and Jane informs me that the invertebrate cleaner crew I ordered for the marine tank had arrived, chilled down and with inadequate heat pack. She’d had a hell of a time figuring what to do to warm them up, and finally just put them in the sump, after trying to move the heavy tank lid: definitely a 2-person job, because of its weight, size, and balance. So I had to fix the blown autotopoff with a replacement, (which had come) and get the water balanced, and get these creatures out of their bags safely, and try not to let them land 30+ ” down in the tank upside down: these snails can’t right themselves. So a few landed upside down and I have to go in and flip them over…

Job 6: the ivy has overgrown an area we will need to snow-blow come winter, so all that had to be trimmed, about a 20 foot run, with hand-clippers since we can’t find the proper ones. The apple espalier had to be trimmed of summer growth, and again, the big loppers are missing: I gave up on the hand shears and went for the hacksaw, not the neatest job ever. The stuff has to be raked up. Jane’s been trying to re-gravel certain areas that need it, and has been shoveling and raking and dumping, repeat 200 times…

We are now quite, quite done in. My back’s trying to lock up. Jane’s is. This getting older think sucks pondwater.

But the larder is stocked. They’re forecasting a weather change. Snow is possible in the area next week.

We have, however, nice new pillows. And we did get the snails flipped. One, a chiton, which is kind of like a fuzzy sowbug, is so primitive he was trying to twist his segemented shell to solve his problem, I flipped him, and the poor thing went on trying to twist to get a grip, because he has no brain, just a complex set of purposes…and upside down means nothing significant to a creature who crawls on every side of rocks…he just ‘remembers’ his ‘foot’ was in the open, and now it isn’t, and he’s confused.

A flying tour of pre-Fire London…

The Tour

Found: a Roman eagle (statue) in a London dig.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/30/world/europe/uk-london-roman-eagle/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

picture

I hoped when I read the headline that they had found an actual legion eagle, but it’s a representation.

I disagree with the museum’s interpretation: the snake did not represent evil to the Romans, who did not even have a Christian concept of evil. It represented the earth, rebirth, and the realm of the dead. The eagle is the bird of Jupiter, and Jupiter Tonans (Jupiter of the Thunder) is the god at the crest of the Capitoline, the capitolium of Rome. It represents Rome overcoming the forces of the earth, or as we would see it, the sky and the forces of civilization overcoming the chaos and darkness of the world-below, ie, the disorder.

Jane has some Morgaine and Vanye progress pix plus her birthday party!

She does.

Usual link!

Ta-da! another pound down and I’ve reached 175, which I haven’t been since 1977.

Size 12 jeans are now a comfy fit.

I found a really neat little cooking aid: Le Crueset mini personal casserole dishes. Not inexpensive, but resistent to heat, cold, all sorts of things, and microwaveable, with a lid. This automatically measures one serving of whatever, and last night, eg, I boiled up some penne pasta, half a cup dry each person, spooned it into 2 mini-casseroles, added black pepper, and shredded sharp cheddar. Lid, microwave 4 minutes for the pair together, and out comes a nicely bubbly peppery mac-and-cheese that’s actually within our guidelines. Serve with a serving and a half of steamed veggies.

Anything that can be made within the little dishes or fit within them for heating, when accompanied with that serving and a half of veggies, is fair game on this end of the Long Diet. Add, eg, chicken bits, cheese, bacon bits; or chicken bits, taco spice, cheese, and top with sour cream when done. Or potato, bacon bits, cheese. or…

It’s a fast way to get your head around ‘proper size’ of things that would be dietary suicide if served with a spoon. The Sensa is definitely helping…particularly Jane. No more snackies. An unintentional blind test: she came in a moment ago and asked, “Did you forget the sprinklies [Sensa] on breakfast?” Answer: “Yes. I did. Sorry.” She was having a snacking urge 2 hours after breakfast. And felt it. There’s no taste to it except if you get it straight, so if it’s missing you’re not apt to notice its absence. In this case, we have fruit-flavored ‘straws’ we can dump into a cup of water that will turn off the snackies real fast.

So if you’ve battled the snackies, this IS a good answer. I can resist it, but why try? I may go have one of those ‘straws’ too, this morning.

And the jeans now have comfy room.

Alas, we’re getting a raft of spammers again…

They’ve gotten past the wicket. Got to devise a new wicket.

Meanwhile, use the Contact Us and e-mail me personally if you’re a real person trying to register. I have a set of tests I apply at a glance, and while a Real Person may have one of several characteristics, if I spot several of them at once on one person, that member gets booted. Again, if you’re not a bot and I tossed you unjustly, just email me and we’ll get you through.

The tank lives…

Not only that, I recovered 2 of the skinny fish that had escaped through the drain-slots into the sump.

Everybody’s happy and healthy. The jawfish relocated in a temper tantrum last night and made a new burrow, but now has returned to his old one, which is far finer and lined with shells.

It’s Jane’s birthday. I’m taking the day off.

Last night I relaxed with a genealogical puzzle in which I *might* have solved a little historical puzzle…it’s under Genealogy, tabs above.

How did the day before Jane’s Birthday go?

Yesterday Jane helped me work with the marine tank. We were doing a water change. She unplugged the auto-topoff as she should. We had to leave it off, because we spilled water, and that plays hob with the plugs.

This morning as I was cooking breakfast sausage, I left it to cook, went downstairs to the sump/topoff area and plugged it in. As I thought.

We had breakfast. I went to wrap Jane’s b’day present. On my way back, I passed the tank. Light wasn’t on, but the water was snow white.

Wak! I run for the basement to see what happened. The topoff tank has ‘kalk [limestone] powder’ in it, which feeds the corals and clam. It is supposed to go in when the float switch detects the water level has fallen by, oh, a couple of tablespoons.

I heard water running as I came down the basement stairs. Yep. The sump had overflowed and a waterfall was making a saltwater puddle around the area. I realized it wasn’t the topoff regulator I’d plugged into the power strip (which was now, incidentally, in mid-puddle) but the topoff pump itself, which normally is plugged into the topoff regulator. Jane’s method of stopping the topoff is different than mine. Oops. And my eyesight betrayed me. I didn’t even see the second black dangling cord in the shadow of the handle.

So…I grab a 32 gallon barrel and start siphoning to stop the waterfall. This means the tank AND sump have been hit with an overdose of fresh water. This is potentially lethal. I bang on the AC duct to get Jane’s attention, and keep siphoning, trying to think. She arrives. We take inventory. We have a) 20 gallons of proper salinity saltwater as yet unused. We have b) 20 gallons of kalk-laden fresh water in the topoff barrel: don’t need more kalk, thank you. And c) I’m running the ro/di filter to get more salt water going, and have put 15 cups of salt mix into that, with a mixing pump. It’s going to take about 8 hours to run 30 gallons of water and mix it. Things can die in the meanwhile. Jane suggests we start the ro/di instead to creating pure fresh water, which is yet one more barrel (fortunately we have enough) and take the salt water we have upstairs, draining off part of the problem water in the main tank.

Good idea. Jane starts carrying massively heavy 5 gallon buckets upstairs, climbing a ladder, dipping 5 gallons out, putting 5 in, until we have lowered the water level in the 100 gallon main tank by about half and put in 20 gal new salt water.

Meanwhile I’m trying to use what I drew off by siphon plus what’s dissolved in the salt water bin to regulate the salt water in the sump, which should be 1.025, and is 1.020 salinity. Upstairs is 1.022. Not too bad. So—the electrics shorted out in the waterfall—thank you, GFI switches.—and we now start raising the salinity of the sump to match the salinity upstairs, plus a .002 overshot so we can RAISE the salinity upstairs. Marine creatures survive a salinity drop of .004 fine, but raising it too fast can kill them. So we get it up to 1.024. Excellent. Bottom of the ‘good’ range.

Then we get a hair dryer to dry out the plugs, and plug the pump in, because we have had them purely on circulating pumps to try to keep gas-exchange going in the water, above and below. We pump a little water upstairs, test, add more downstairs, and keep this routine going…never more than .002 at a go.

We install a ‘sock’ to try to catch some of the kalk that’s adhered to floating particulate, which is working.

Water begins to clear. Salinity is proper above and below. The fish are all alive. The clam is open for business. All the corals are open and happy. The water is still white, but you can make out the rocks and corals. We’re gaining on it…

My plan to finish work with the tank and get the heavy canopy seated back on has come a cropper…Jane’s party tomorrow is going to have a marine tank that looks like January in Fargo North Dakota, and the canopy will still be sitting in the floor.

But all’s well that ends well. Everything’s alive.