Year: 2017

28

My wife provided me many prompts. I’ll be using some of them this summer. The remainder will wait until NoJoMo in November.
Maybe by then, I’ll have figured out how to get my old content back. I think I am going to move all this off onto something hosted here at my place; I’ve still got unused IPv4 addresses. (And a ton of v6 space, of course…..)
So, on to her prompt….
Do you think it is necessary to filter yourself around others (professional life not included)?
Of course I do. I’ll admit that I do have issues holding my tongue sometimes. Some of that might be related to my condition. At the same time, when I was younger, I found that remaining silent about wrong assertions didn’t get me anywhere.
If the sky really is fascia, as you’ve contended, can you tell me what you’ve taken? It just looks gray to me. (It is supposed to rain today, probably heavily….)
The lack of personal interaction today probably makes it easier to just let things slide.
As I’m trying to work through more to say about this, one of my staunchly Democrat friends posted something from a Boy Scout about President Trump’s address to the Jamboree a few days ago. None of the scouts showed any of the scorn Democrats would have liked, so the whole thing was terrible. I get thinking back to the outrage shown when Justice Alito shook his head, and mouthed “not true” about one of President Obama’s unhinged statements about a recent decision during the State of the Union address. Maybe a Joe Wilson, “YOU LIE!” would have been more appropriate?
For too many these days, though, politics has replaced religion. It’s refreshing to know that one of Virginia’s senators routinely rolls out treason accusations. Hey, Timmy, I assume you’re aware that the punishment for treason is death. As someone who portrays himself as a Catholic, I’d think you’d know that the Church is vehemently against the government executing people. No?

Other stuff that’s going on? Job search is odd. Would you like to do this six-month contract in Richmond with no benefits? If there’s anything that could interest me less, I’m trying to think of what it might could be. One of the unintended consequences of the Patient protection and Affordable Care Act is that in order to avoid having to pay for health insurance, companies simply aren’t hiring full-time employees. People like me end up buying plans on the Federal exchange. People as sick as me aren’t exactly cheap to treat, either.
I’m meandering, so I’m going to stop. It’s time.

27

I’m on the phone with a hospital system, trying to figure out payment stuff.
The medication I’m on for MS is incredibly expensive. They pay up to my out-of-pocket maximum on my nearly $700/mo. plan through the Federal Exchange. Even if I was currently employed, I’ve not had a job since 2014 that paid benefits that work in the local area. If I lived in Northern Virginia, none of this would be an issue. So vote Democrat. They didn’t create this whole mess. Nope, no responsibility whatsoever.

For the entry, re-sampling. This time from 2011. Have my needs for a place to live changed?

NJM Day 7 – 11/7/2011

I may catch back up. I may not. We’ll see. All I can say is that Alabamastan moves even slower when the Crimson Tide are on TV.

So, today’s topic….

If I could live anywhere, where would I live?

I honestly don’t know. I’ve lived lots of different places.

So, what’s important to me at this point?

1. Public transportation and walkability. My driving days are numbered. My balance is shaky. I need good sidewalks, and ways to get places I need to go, like…

2. Good hospitals and doctors. Being sick blows. I like that there’s fresh ideas and approaches to my treatment. I probably wouldn’t get the same from a rural doctor.

3. Food and drink. I eat unhealthily. I drink too much. But I haven’t had any real tobacco in something like nineteen months, and……

So, where’s that leave me? Probably somewhere northeast of where I am now.

Am looking harder in DC for a new gig. My friend from college is going to stop in day after Thanksgiving; he works in NYC for a large IT company (you probably use their product every day you’re online….)….see, maybe, if there’s anything for me in NYC.

Who the hell knows?

If I could live anywhere, where would I live?
I need somewhere with good public transportation and medical care. None of that has changed. In fact, the first part has gotten more pressing. I can’t imagine living in suburban sprawl where I’d have to stagger miles to get to a bus stop. Where I am no, I have trouble finding the motivation a lot of the time to leave my building. I do consider Lyft/Uber to be public transportation, but even that can get expensive if you’re using it several times a month.

26

I’ve been really bad about publishing my prompts. Lots going on, unfortunately, combined with my body being in protest.
So, what’s a Wednesday look like for me? Check to see if any of my job applications has updated, listen to the repeat that was put out by Mouthy Broadcast. There’s things I could have said about some of the banter, but…..
So, what have I been doing during my unplanned (and unpaid) vacation?
Well…

  1. I watch local news. Sure, I watch one channel more than the others, but I do watch all that I can pick up over the antenna here.
  2. Check social media whatevers. Maybe where my Gen X comes out is that I really don’t pay that close attention to Instagram.
    (Part of that is probably related to how bad my vision is, and that I can’t zoom in easily on photos….
  3. I check my many outstanding job applications. I’m now over the century mark for outstanding Federal stuff. As someone with a disability, I qualify for special hiring preference. I also don’t have to hide who I am, or what’s wrong with me. One of the higher-ups at my last job really didn’t want to know what my major malfunction was. I did end up telling, but it wasn’t until several months after I’d had my first hospital stint.
  4. Work on my long-neglected virtual host. That’s where I host control-h, as well as several other site

I apologize that I really can’t concentrate on this right now. Maybe I’ll write another later today; I owe a couple of entries with the late start.

25

Recycling, again, to see what’s changed since November 2010.
Here’s what I wrote then:

Day 29 — Relearning – 11/29/2010

Have you ever had to re-learn something that used to be second nature?

Yes, I added this as a suggestion. I’ve had to re-learn many things, and still haven’t gotten the knack of all of them. What I had in mind when I left this was running. Since my latest MS flare, I cannot run at all. When I was in bad shape last spring, I could barely walk, really. Since then, my gait is almost normal, but I can’t run at all, really. My feet get tangled up.

It’s kind of incredible when you actually think about everything your body does to run….the signals being sent to your brain to make it happen. For me, that includes signals your feet send every time they hit the ground.

Imagine trying to run when your feet are asleep. My feet feel like that all the time.

Still, there’s been other things that have been affected.

*clutch*

Early on there, driving was difficult.

*clutch*

Oops, caught the brake with my toe….

Some more even basic life functions were and are still out-of-whack.

Some days if I give myself my shot in the wrong place, my diaphragm doesn’t work.

*breathe*

I’m penciled-in for physical therapy in a few months to learn how to jog again. While all this has let me lose a lot of weight, I do want to be able to effectively exercise. Right now, I can’t.e stuff below the waist. I mean, I was potty trained by like three. Urgency, make it to the bathroom on time, then can’t let go…..

What’s your personal fashion statement when it comes to dressing? Which look describes you and what are your signature clothing accessories?

The others weren’t working, so I’ll take a stab at this one….

I guess the most notable one would be button-down shirts. I really don’t like wearing anything else. But not everybody can pull off wearing a white shirt without a suit. I can, so I do. And I do manage to keep them clean most days. 🙂

I also rotate my glasses. I have about four pairs I vary, depeding on what I’m wearing, and what I’m doing. My big black and brown acetate ones are probably most comfortable. I think I paid about twenty bucks a pair for them….

When I need to look nice, I have more stylish stuff. My nerd glasses haven’t gone with a suit and tie…..yet.

I still haven’t bought that brown suit I’ve been wanting. Thing is, I don’t need to wear a suit very often, and I’ve been hesitant to buy something until my size stabilizes a bit more.

Have you ever had to re-learn something that used to be second nature?
Back in the 2010 entry, I was writing about driving.  My vision has gotten so bad that when I moved, I didn’t renew my license.  I haven’t even tried to drive since about the end of 2012.
Quick primer on what MS does to vision.  While I don’t have really bad double vision, my acuity is very bad.  It must have been sometime in 2012, I visited a neurological ophthalmologist, and she wasn’t able to even come close to correcting me to 20/20.  Combined, I was at about 20/50.  In my right eye, I was correctable to 20/60.  She couldn’t even correct me to 20/200 in my left eye.  I am left eye dominant, so this is a big part of the problem.
You really can’t re-learn seeing, but there’s other physical things I’ve had to try to remaster.
Stairs aren’t my friend.  I quipped about something yesterday about dipping my perpetually-numb toes into something (the NYC market, maybe?).  Going up is a lot easier than going down, because I can’t feel my feet hit.  I don’t know that I have a good foothold.
My weird crosshandedness has made things even tougher as my nerve damage increases.
I find myself doing a lot more things with my left hand.  Sinister.
That does include things that I learned how to do right-handed.  I wonder if I was to do some sort of physical activity if now I’d try to do it lefty.
Holding a racket, even throwing.  I’ve batted left-handed since I was about fifteen years old.  I know that I’d still do that if I was able to see well enough to actually make contact….
I hold my cane in my right hand, so my left will be free to do things.  *shrug*
What’s your personal fashion statement when it comes to dressing? Which look describes you and what are your signature clothing accessories?
I really don’t have one.  When I’m home, it’s jeans and a T-shirt.  When I got to work, it’s slacks and a button-down shirt.
This prompt from years ago does start to walk on something that’s bothered me a lot lately; who gives a fuck about my style?
Maybe that’s the sort of thing that’s from a generation prior to mine.  One of the local shady car dealership groups has a flowery jingle telling buyers that YOU can have it all!  *headdesk*
Get over yourself.  You have a car.  You take care of it.  You drive it.  That’s not remarkable, and nothing you do will make it so.
I could launch into a long tirade about this, but I understand that probably nobody is reading this.  Someone from the Me Generation wouldn’t be okay with that.
I am.

24

I didn’t reference Blink 182 for yesterday’s entry, so there’s that. What I’m going to do for today is revisit something I once wrote, and see what’s different today.

Life Review – 2/22/2000

Periodically, I do a full review of everything I do in life. Every little thing. I then rate those things on an evaluative scale: like, dislike, indifferent.

Examples would be like this…..

Like: Reading OD, messing around on the computer, being on the air

Dislike: Doing Dishes, thinking about my psycho ex girlfriend, watching Kathie Lee, doing my taxes

Indifferent: Brushing my teeth, paying bills.

I then try to cut out the things I don’t like, and don’t absolutely need to do. Normally, I can hit upon some things I’m doing that I don’t like, and are really holding me back in life. I haven’t been able to find anything certain in this round.

So why am I in such a funk?

Why do I feel like I’m having so little success?

Why can’t I, for the life of me, find a girlfriend?

Sorry for the bitching, but I’m a bit frustrated right now.

I was twenty when I wrote that.
I haven’t done much in the way of life reviews since about my thirtieth birthday.  To paraphrase someone, the die is cast.  (Yes, I know who it is….)
Likes:  actually building things, spending time with my wife, eating good food, drinking good drinks, trying to follow football and baseball.
Dislikes:  working to just stay above water, MS (and all its negative effects on me), the segment of the population for whom politics has replaced religion.
Indifferent:  There’s too many to list, really.  (And, no, that doesn’t mean I’m really depressed…just that I don’t really get excited or depressed about mundane things.)
Changes are happening in my life, whether I’m ready for them or not.  I fully expect something by the time I finish up this round of writing (20 August).  Whatever those changes entail, I’m good with.
Things are better than when I wrote this two years ago.  Worse than last year, but I was getting frustrated with what I was doing.
I am getting back into things that I really do enjoy, though.  Rediscovering that which made me me.

Three Things

I didn’t get out prompts yesterday.
Much of the afternoon was spent trying to get my mother’s laptop working.
Then my in-laws’ house, the supermarket, and home for dinner.
After dinner and a beer, I was in dreamland.
So, onto a prompt I’m recycling for today….
Tell us about 3 things you have done in the past year that you have never done before, big or small.
1. Spent a night in hospital. One of those bucket list items, I suppose. I ended up spending five nights in three trips between September and June. When you’re killing your immune system every four weeks, bacteria can have a pretty miserable effect.
2. Ditched a day of work to go on a job interview. One of the changes that Amtrak made was extending the Northeast Regional down to Norfolk. I had an interview with a Federal agency, so I went up, interviewed, had lunch with a friend at Union Station, and rolled back home. It’s a long day, and I didn’t get the job, but the whole experience was probably more worthwhile than spending a day analyzing network scans.
3. Considered moving to NYC. This is something that’s come about in the past few months, really, but I’m sick of what I’m seeing here, and want something different.

Double Deuce

The last two years, I’ve written in the month leading up to my birthday.
I also write in November.
I am starting late this year, however.
This week has kind of been a week from hell.  My in-laws had to put their dog to sleep on Sunday.  Tuesday I got laid off.  Again.  Third time in the past four and a half years.
While it hurts, I was actually considering whether or not to give them any notice when I got another offer.  In the IT world, and I can’t help but think this is one of those unwritten side-effects of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, companies don’t seem to be hiring full-time employees.  Keep everybody as a W2 contractor, and you don’t have to spring for expensive “employer-sponsored” insurance.
The group I was supporting was going through all sorts of fun financial gymnastics, so what was supposed to be a six-month contract-to-hire, became fifteen.
No benefits.  No PTO.  No sick leave.
No paid time off.  That includes Federal holidays.  While others were getting paid for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day, I was just not working, not getting paid.
That I landed in the hospital three times over the past year probably didn’t help matters.  (One night in September, two in October, and another two in June.)
C’est la vie.
But it’s over now.  On to other things.
I need to get up my writing prompts.  My wife said she was going to help me find some, but I’m still open to suggestions.  I will probably dig up stuff from my old diary, and previous writing efforts, but I just haven’t had the time.
I just got my PC up and running.  We had to move very unexpectedly in May, and really haven’t gotten the new place fully set up.
Maybe I’ll get some prompts up this afternoon.  Maybe.