Technology foibles

    The smart phone has suddenly decided that it doesn't like being the WiFi slave to the laptop. I eventually had to change the settings for the former on the latter to "Connect even if it doesn't broadcast its name" (or something like that) and it's still being fairly moody. I can't think of any reason the situation would have changed in one day. I did download several apps. None of them should have had anything to do with WiFi settings, but maybe they did. Anyway, the point to this discussion (such as it is) is that it would be very difficult to blog from the phone, so if someday my ability to Wifi via smart phone should go away, this blog most likely will, too. I suspect that my vast readership will somehow cope.
    Speaking of discussion such as it is, I'm enjoying silly thoughts about snow, particularly in that we dodged any major danger from it this time. Mainly, it's very odd how one yard can look like it survived a blizzard and the place next door looks like there's no snow at all. I'm not really seeing major differences in the amount of shade or sunlight the neighboring lots are receiving. Perhaps some kinds of grass are warmer than others. It's beyond me.
    In the just plain crazy stuff department, I was getting tired of how long the ice on my front steps (three in number) was taking to melt. As it refreezes overnight, it might still be dangerous. So I boiled a big pan of water and dumped it on the steps. Not surprisingly, it didn't help. I did sweep off most of the new water, so at least it shouldn't hurt either. As it's going to be 60 degrees tomorrow, it wasn't a big risk.:)

Greased lightning-- er, waxed skis

    Things went perfectly straightforwardly today. The roads are almost perfectly clear, I swept almost all the snow off my car, persuaded the driver's side doors to unstick and moved it to sit in the sun. Margaret had had the good sense not to go get her newspapers or try to take out the garbage so I brought the former in and took the latter out in good time. There was some snow in her yard, but very little, so Dad's way was not impeded, nor was he in any danger of slipping or falling, as the driveway was totally dry. The waiting area at dialysis was very crowded, but not so much that we couldn't get a seat, and in the end they called him back only 15 minutes after the time they had asked us to be there today. I was maybe a bit over-careful on the drive home, avoiding both the overpass I would normally use and the back street I regularly use when taking the overpass-free route home. In a moment, I'll head to Aldi, going to the location I don't have to cross a bridge to get to. Probably over-cautious too, but always better safe than sorry.
    Weather is supposed to warm up ten degrees every day for the rest of the week, so this is probably all the alarming weather we'll see for the next little bit. A lot of ice is falling from trees on to the roof, which alarms the small cat to no end, but I find it fairly amusing. And heck, if that's the worst that we get, boy were we lucky!

Lucky

    While we got two or three inches of snow last night, a lot for the South, we really got off easy compared to Birmingham, Atlanta and other points west of here. It's pretty and it's pretty much shut down the city, but we don't have hundreds of stranded motorists all over the place. I guess the fact that it hit late helped a lot. That and the dire warnings beforehand, which most people seem to have heeded. Big problem is that today isn't all that warm and tomorrow is going to be really cold, so not much melting is in the offing.
    Of course, where this affects me is getting Dad to dialysis. I doubt that the driving is going to be a bad problem. Although there are a couple of hills that I have to negotiate, they're on reasonably busy streets, which will be both sanded and pretty heavily trafficked by tomorrow. The streets in my neighborhood are already clear even though it's flat (so if snow were going to accumulate anywhere it would be here) and not very busy. So I'm not too worried about the roads.
    The dialysis facility is a complicating factor. I just called and they said that they would be opening three hours late, so Dad can come at 12:30. As his normal time is 11:30, you would think he would then come at 2:30, but 12:30 is what she said even when I made clear what his regular time is. So, I'm expecting a zoo, basically, and a long, tedious wait. Also, he only got two hours Tuesday and he's only getting two hours tomorrow and his feet are already swelling again. So I'm worried about a return to congestive heart failure. But what can you do?

CR-RUNCH!

    As I think I mentioned, we're supposed to have a blizzard today. For that reason, dialysis asked Dad if he could come in early and he could manage a half hour earlier than usual, which is at least something. I dropped him off, and though there was a vast number of people in the waiting area, they got him back for dialysis pretty quickly. I got in my car, started it, backed up-- and immediately whammed into a pickup truck that hadn't been there seconds earlier. We got out, looked at the damage, exchanged insurance information, and waited on the police. My car had more of a scratch than a dent. His truck, much newer and nicer had a slight dent to the wheel well, I guess you would call it. Anyway, not quite the fender.
    We were not exactly jumping up and down shaking our fists. Our only problem was that it was cold. I was willing to lend him my gloves; he was willing to lend me his pen. The policeman who came was also genial. He told us to wait in our vehicles and he'd have us on the road in 20 minutes, which he more or less lived up to. He gave me my FR-10 and told me to send it to my insurance company. My last accident was in the era before personal printers, when the policeman would tell you you would get a copy of the incident report, but you never did. I can't cope with all this efficiency.
    Anyway, I called USAA and they told me they would prefer me to fax it to them and mail in the hard copy to the DMV. I said that I don't have a fax or scanner, but I could put it in the box at the main post office and it should reach them in plenty of time. (DMV might pull my license if they don't get it in 15 days.) Thing is, I was so flummoxed, I just mailed it to them untouched, realizing later that I was supposed to fill in some blanks.
    This might be a good time to mention that while we were sitting in our vehicles, both cars were running, but his was parked backward, so his tailpipe was right by my air intake. I've been a bit nauseous ever since. Perhaps my brain was a bit affected as well. Anyway, I've been a bit off my game. Regardless, another USAA rep called me while I was in the park on my pre-blizzard walk, and we worked though the details of the accident again. He warned me that my rates might go up a bit, but I had expected as much. Mr. Watson will get his truck fixed up and will get to ride in a rental in the interim. I will try hard not to hit it.

Wind chill

    Oh nothing. I just noticed the other day that at a certain temperature level, no matter hard the wind is blowing, there is no wind chill in the weather report. I think it must be 50 degrees; anyway the temperature was somewhere in the low 50s with a gale blowing but the "feels like" temperature was the same as the actual. Similarly, there's no heat index below a certain temperature; it might be 90 degrees, but 80 is more likely. I noticed at the time (OK, there wasn't really a gale blowing, but there was significant wind) that there was in fact a chill factor; that's why I was looking it up on the Weather Channel app in the first place. Perhaps some adjustments are in order.
    In general, it's a nerve-wracking period in weather, as we have snow in the forecast for tomorrow. No big deal anywhere else, but here we're not exactly familiar with driving in winter weather. At the moment, the forecast is for it not to start until after I get Dad home from dialysis. I can really go for this. More worryingly, sleet and ice are expected, so power lines are at risk. Strangely, the brunt of the storm is projected to hit south of here. With all sympathies to those potentially affected, I can go for anywhere but here on the whole. I'm pretty much polar vortexed out.
    Oddly, it's in the upper 60s at the moment, although it has clouded over in a fairly threatening way. We have a grand tradition for predictions of snow that never pan out. I can so endorse this happening again.

Sacks (not Fifth Avenue)

    (PS: Yes I know how to spell "Saks.") Long-time readers might remember that there was a time when I was actually uncomfortable carrying a reusable canvas sack into a grocery store if it didn't come from that grocery store. I have since gotten over that, which is just as well. Yesterday, I went to Publix with my Publix sack, and the checker put all my stuff in plastic bags. I was a little non-plussed. Rather than ask her to put my stuff in my sack instead, I just said, "This is my bag," somewhat impatiently, which was neither very good etiquette nor very good English, but it got the job done. Point is, bringing the right bag to the right store doesn't necessarily help.
    Later, I took an Ingles sack that I'd picked up at the local celiac group to Trader Joe's. Ingles is a supermarket chain that doesn't in fact have any stores that I know of in the Columbia area. The checker at TJ's said that the bag took him back, that his mom lives in Greer (where they do have Ingles-- Ingleses?). So the message is, don't take canvas bags back to the supermarkets they came from! It only confuses the checker, whereas bringing alien ones entertains the checker.
    Dad still wanted oxygen as of the time he came out of dialysis, but after supper he was feeling (and breathing) much better. Anne and Malcolm offered oxygen (granted requiring an ambulance ride to the emergency room, the only way to get it on a Saturday night), a home health care or home physical therapy, but he declined them all. So at least we tried, and at least we showed that we care. Maybe that helped more than anything.

Fine I guess

    So Dad thinks that his diaphagm is failing and that he needs oxygen therapy. The number of things that I can't convince him of is reaching the thousands. A: that heating the house to 75 degrees is a bad idea; B: moreso if you're not going to run a humidifier; C: that he had a heart attack, kidney failure and congestive heart failure a couple years ago when he was in the hospital for the subdural hematoma; D: that congestive heart failure is pretty serious business and takes a while to recover from, particularly if you're going to set yourself back by doing A and B; E: that it took him months of therapy to recover last time (see C). That'll do for a start.
    My friend the social worker (who has many elderly clients) says that after congestive heart failure the patient needs at the least a home health care nurse and physical therapy. We had him set up for rehab and PT at a nursing home, but then he decided to go home. Why nobody followed up on his aftercare is beyond me. I'll try to find out. But it's all very frustrating.

Genius detective

    I am making a good faith effort today, even more than usually, to set some kind of record for inconsequentialness (which is now a word) in blogging. The dentist gave me a new toothbrush the other day, like he always does. It's an Oral-B with his name printed on the handle. There's language on the package saying that it isn't for retail sale, presumably so it doesn't fall into the thriving black market for toothbrushes with dentists' names printed on them.
    It's always puzzled me that I can never seem to find quite the same toothbrush (without the dentist's name) in stores. If it's a good enough product to give away through dentists, you'd think that it would be good enough to sell at retail, too. Mind you, I could never be sure the ones in stores weren't the same, since I could only eyeball them.
    In a genius move, this time I tore off the bit of cardboard with the product number (or maybe the number of batches of bristles, I don't know) before throwing out the rest of the package from the toothbrush I got from the dentist. The mystery can be solved! I'm so excited! OK, I'm not remotely. But it is nice to be able to solve these little mysteries. And I warned you that it was inconsequential.:)

Keystone Kops

    My dreams lately have been almost entertaining enough to be worth paying for, at least the short stretches I remember. There has been an antic, almost Keystone Kops quality of everything happening very fast and very silly (or sillily).
    Two nights ago, I was in the army, then in college, then on the football team. But football was a little different in this dream. There was a little bare patch in the middle of the field called the Jail, like a penalty box in hockey. I got sent there immediately, for no reason that was obvious in the dream.
    Night before last was wacky, too, but last night drove it out. Guess I should have posted about it yesterday. If it should come back, I'll edit. Last night, I was driving on Highway 15 in Lexington County east of Columbia. Anybody familiar with dreams can guess that Lexington County is west of Columbia and there is no Highway 15 there. Highway 15 turned into a river, which I was walking alongside, or in. Then I was able to turn off and I was driving again. I stopped in a fictitious town for a rest, by which time the road had turned back into a river, or rather a seaway. Battleships were going by, but very pretty battleships. White and silver, rather than battleship grey. I'm not sure if there was any transition, but later, I was living in a mall. I mean my house was a storefront in a mall, with the traditional glass front. Other people lived in adjacent storefronts, but there were also retail shops in between. I was relieved that the space was no longer vacant, but I was concerned that my house looked too much like a store. Real people I know were around and seemed highly amused about the whole situation, as indeed I guess I was, too. Only problem: now I want to go live in a mall!

Now spit!

    It isn't a new thing, especially not for my dentist (who digs new things), but I got a cleaning today in a room with no bowl. I didn't rinse out with a cup; I didn't spit in a bowl. The hygienist washed my mouth out with a hand-held device and dried me out with a vacuum. (I think she may have gotten my uvula as well, but that's another story!) She looked like my usual hygienist, but I guess that's a fault in my memory from only seeing a person every six months. At least if she had been my usual hygienist, the dentist probably wouldn't have referred to "the person who usually cleans your teeth" as if she were absent, or so I assume.
    So I guess the no-bowl room was because I had a different hygienist. The dentist himself prefers to do cleanings with high-pressure water, which to me at least is ultimate torture because of the high-pitched noises involved. Since I don't hear those noises anymore, I take it that I'm not the only one who feels this way. But the no-bowl method worked out well; my teeth are much less wobbly and my gums less bleedy than they used to be after a cleaning. Then again, that probably has more to do with daily flossing on the whole. Still, I hope that all dentist's office bowls don't go away; how will kids make sense of Steve Martin's part in "Little Shop of Horrors"?
    Changing topic radically (like I said I wasn't going to do anymore), my latest batch of lentil soup was awful, as I used Aldi's organic vegetable broth instead of Kitchen Basics. For the record, a good fix for anemic lentil soup is cloves, cumin and ginger. Although part of the improvement may be due to relief at the fact that this is the last bowl. Ya never know!

This modern world

    Somebody died. It wasn't someone I know. It was the husband of someone who is a Facebook friend of mine. But I don't know her either. She's a friend of another Facebook friend of mine, who is in fact a friend of mine. But though we're quite good Internet friends and though we're distant cousins, I've never actually met him in person either.
    I'm not looking for etiquette lessons. Even though I've never met the grieving widow, I can grasp that I need to extend sympathies. It's just weird the way things go nowadays. I suppose 100 years ago I could have become acquainted with a distant stranger by someone reading them my telegrams, or 200 years ago or more my letters. But it's just odd how intimately lives impinge on one another without the people living them actually meeting. Said the guy who just got friended by a stranger from Bangladesh yesterday.

Attractive nuisance

    I forget whether or not I've mentioned already that this area is getting a new park. As it has a historical theme, it will be called the 10,000 Year Park (I think). It's being built right along one of my favorite areas to walk, Old State Road in Cayce, so far still unpaved, the old road to Charleston in colonial and early American times. I suspect that I blogged about it a month or so ago when I kinda sorta did a little illegal entry to explore the new trails. But the thing is, there weren't then and still aren't now any Keep Out or No Trespassing signs. It's more a matter of common sense (a commodity that I have none of) that you don't wander around on construction sites.
    Today I was a good boy and confined my stroll to Old State Road itself. It was such a glorious day, with highs around 70, that I wasn't the only one with the idea. Several vehicles drove up and down Old State and there were two bicyclists. One of the motorists stopped and asked me what the trail situation was and I told him that, basically, that the park isn't open yet but I wasn't seeing any signs saying to keep out. However, he and his wife mainly wanted to walk their little dog. As it happens, already open and nearby Congaree Creek Heritage Preserve is ideal for that, so I directed them there. He had asked one of the construction workers about the park, and the answer was that it would be ready in two months. Two months! I can't wait!

364

    Readers know what I'm doing more easily than I do in at least one sense. The reader sees how many posts I've made in a month or in a year, whereas I normally only see the total posts. In the normal way of things, I don't have much reason to go look at my own blog. When I need to search for an old post, it's easier to find it in the Notepad document where I compose this stuff. Thus, I just noticed that my total for 2013 is actually 364 posts. In other words, I missed a day without noticing it. I am somehow bearing up under the shame. I'm almost anal-retentive enough to do another post so this year (if I actually carry on another whole year) will total 366. Almost. But then, as I've said, I may start posting more than once a day to avoid changing theme and tone in mid-post just like this:
    Apparently, I'm the only person on Earth who thinks that Peyton Manning yelling "Omaha!" all the time is funny. I've done gags about it on both Facebook and Twitter (my first repeat between the two) with equal lack of response on both. May as well go for three and go post one on Democratic Underground!

Permanent POW

    I don't know about any other US state, but in South Carolina, former POWs get permanent license tags. This means a lot less than it once did. Back in the day, you got a new license tag every year. Nowadays, you just put a sticker for this year on the old tag. I don't know if permanent tags mean that you don't have to pay taxes or registration fees annually, but I hope so. Point of all this blithering is what the tags actually say: at the top, "PERMANENT," and then the tag number, starting with POW. This struck me as almost alarming, certainly ill-advised. I don't know if these are just for Vietnam-era POWs (in which case "permanent" has already meant 40 years) or if they also cover combatants in our subsequent more-or-less perpetual wars. If it were me, I wouldn't want to be defined by having been a POW. I remember that Vietnam vets sometimes wore as a badge of honor what might have been a stigma in other generations, but still. If you're going to put PERMANENT on the tag, maybe HERO would be more appropriate for the tag number part. Wouldn't it?

Trust in music

    That sounds like I'm suggesting that the reader trust music, but I'm actually talking about trustworthiness. I went to a show last night featuring a free jazz combo, a saxophonist, a drummer and a multi-instrumentalist. The latter, a young woman, started out making improbable noises by beating hell out of a shampoo bottle with a stick, including a tympani solo. After that, I never knew what to expect. When she opened up her toy xylophone, I wouldn't have been surprised if it sounded like Jimi Hendrix playing the National Anthem. Mind you, it didn't; it sounded like a toy xylophone. But I think it's a good idea for musicians to wrong-foot the audience as soon as possible to keep us guessing.
    Later, she switched to accordion. It was the most heavy metal accordion of all time. Somehow, she hit almost all dissonant chords. I'm pretty sure this was entirely intentional; in my experience of accordions, it's actually pretty hard to make unpretty noises. (I mean, the name says it.) The band blew up totally; it was absolutely awesome. So maybe I DID mean "Trust music."

When things break

    In the house I grew up in, when things broke, you kept them and made do. The Great Depression, by all signs and portents, never ended. The other day, I locked myself out. It was cold and wet, but I had a key hidden in one of those little magnetic boxes so I was relaxed about it. However, it was next to impossible to get the box open. If I hadn't left the car unlocked, I couldn't have done it. I got it open a millimeter or so and then pried it the rest of the way by sticking an arm of my sunglasses in the gap. Otherwise, I'd still be out there.
    The box had also been hard to open the last time I had locked myself out. So hard that I cracked the cover, which must have been why it was even harder this time. In a rush of sanity, I went and bought a new one today (which opened easy peasy) and threw out the old one. Nothing major or significant, I realize, but I felt like I had changed my last name. When things break, you replace them and then throw them out. What a concept!

Bad cop

    Dad had an appointment with the cardiologist today. It wasn't anything to do with his recent troubles, or at least not primarily. He had labs, basically, and a check on the pacemaker. His stamina is so bad that he had to rest every 20 feet or so. If I were a cardiologist, this would give me pause.
    This is a side issue, and one I've probably brought up before, but why do doctors' offices with a strong expectation that their patients are sick, infirm or weak, make them walk so far? It's insanity. Of course, far is relative; if I were the patient, I would laugh at the walking distances, and also run up and down stairs. But not all, probably not close to a majority of patients at a heart clinic, have these abilities. (I offered to get Dad a wheelchair, but he said he thought he could walk it. And he did, eventually.)
    During one of his rest periods, Dad said he would like some water. He had already passed the water fountain and would have to go a distance back and then return again. I went to the desk, explained that he was very weak and asked if they had any cups. The nice lady found me a styrofoam one and I got Dad some water.
    I have found before that if you hand Dad a cup of water, he will drink it all. I pointed out to him that not only is he on a low salt diet but also he's supposed to be restricting his water intake to avoid going back to the hospital with further congestive heart failure. At length, I persuaded him to give back the cup without drinking it all, but felt really rotten. I don't think it's fair or a good idea to make family members be the bad cop. This is yet another reason why I wish Dad had home health care. I don't think that we can control him, and I think he's going to get into trouble again quickly if somebody doesn't get him to restrict his fluids. It is infinitely frustrating.

Solved another mystery

    Long version is "solved another mystery nobody but me is interested in," but is truth in advertising really required in blogging?
    I earlier wondered aloud (or as loud as I type) why or how lentil/cornmeal cooked in olive oil kinda sorta tastes like burgers fried in beef grease. The ingredients have nothing in common, right? It occurs to me that they do have one thing in common: sugar. And what tastes similar between the two is not, as I was thinking, hot grease, but rather caramelization. What brought it home was that I cooked this batch of polentil hoecakes a bit longer than usual and the similarity was greater. Almost as if the caramelization was greater. By the way, since this isn't the Food Network, you aren't actually required to drink now. (I think that was "caramelize" anyway.) In short, cook anything in grease until it's browned (or anyway anything that's got sugar in it and you should get a nice hamburger-like flavor. Worth trying anyway!

Do I have to?!

Oh all right, I'll admit it. There's a series of TV commercials I like. Well, two so far. James Earl Jones and Malcolm McDowell in tuxedos, reading teenagers' texts. I was watching either "The Simpsons" or "Family Guy" last night and laughed hard, and the commercial came on and I laughed harder. Only drawback: I still have no idea what they were selling. Back to the drawing board, funny ad writers!
    I do also like the Grill Class ad with the Superfans, and I even remember that it's for State Farm. (At Christmas, I was arguing with my brother whether "Grill Class" would enter the lexicon, but then they started editing that out of the commercial.) Am I calling State Farm? Would I if I were looking for insurance? Well, no. But hey, dang funny commercial.

Reassessing

    In recent years, I've lost so much that I sometimes will refer to my tragic demise as having happened already. This tends to make people think I'm crazy or at least think that I'm somebody that they don't want to hang out with. But there is another way to look at it. That yes, that guy I used to be may be gone, but this new guy born in his place is pretty neat, too. This guy actually seems to be able to do things, sometimes. Think of it as the good kind of crazy.
    Meanwhile in real life, I'm some kind of relieved! All that awful weather expected yesterday actually happened, but somehow laid off for the times I was taking Dad to and from dialysis. Considering that there was a tornado watch practically all afternoon, this could be considered borderline miraculous. (Though there was no tornado, there was rolling thunder, which also sounds a lot like a freight train. So a teeny-tiny bit nervewracking.) Between that and just having Dad safely out of the hospital = a lot of relief. Yay!

Bravura performance by Mother Nature

    Yeah yeah yeah, I know it's crazy to blog about the weather report, but then, the weather report is crazy. Three days ago, the overnight low was 16 degrees, I think. I had heard forecasts ranging from 12 to 18, so it was definitely around there. And it continued to be freezing until the night before last. The high today is in the 70s. But for the neverending rain, it would be totally comfortable. I understand that much of the rest of the country is nothing like this temperate, so I'll try not to complain too much about the unremitting rain. (Actually, I would be quite enthusiastic about it if I didn't have to take Dad home from dialysis through it, including a front yard with a tendency to flood. But so far the flooding rains are holding off. Knock on wood.)
    What's it all mean? I'm no meteorologist, so it's a bewilderment to me. For me it's just an excuse to trot out, "You got global warming in my polar vortex!" --"You got polar vortex in my global warming!" -type jokes. And I get that it's not any historic temperature change. But it sure is dramatic!

Greased lightning-ish

    Boy, for a while there it was looking like that discharge would go really smoothly. And it did, eventually. As usual, communication was a little on the minimal side, so I had no idea when to go pick him up. I had to laundry though, so I got it in the dryer before going to investigate. When I got to the hospital was when Dad called to say that the nurse said that he would be going home about noon. So I started home.
    However, today is a rainy day, but at that moment it wasn't raining. So I figured, what the hey, and stopped at the Canal Park to take my daily walk. When I got home, the nurse called to say that they were running early and Dad was ready for a pickup. When I got back to the hospital, Dad was still in his chair, still in his gown and still hooked up to monitors. Eager to get home, he wanted me to dress him. I was certainly willing, but wasn't sure what the procedure was. I hunted down a nurse who tracked down Dad's nurse while I got him in socks and underwear at least.
    They got his wires disconnected, finished dressing him and gave him his discharge instructions. These were to watch his salt and fluid intake and watch his weight. He also had some new prescriptions that he wanted to pick up before going home, but actually leaving the hospital was pretty straightforward.
    The prescriptions were a bit less so. Since it's a new year, he should have had a new insurance card. I waited about 20 minutes before the checkout person (or anyway, the person not in a white coat) told me that that was the holdup. I explained that he had been in the hospital all year, that he hadn't in fact been home yet, that he was waiting in the car, that he was nearly 93 years old and that it was raining and asked if the matter could somehow be expedited. I'm finding more and more that by smiling and asking politely instead of yelling and screaming and throwing things that service gets a lot better. Regardless, roadblocks magically and mysteriously evaporated and suddenly I was checking out.
    Dad is home and very glad to be. Hopefully he won't have too much trouble with low salt and low fluids. The desire not to return to the hospital ought to provide a lot of motivation.

Quick resolution

    To recap the recap: Dad is all better but Margaret thought she was going to the hospital so he was going to go to a nursing home for rehab he didn't particularly need but then she found out she didn't need to go to the hospital so it was just a matter of communicating to somebody that Dad just wants to go home.
    I took Margaret to see him at the hospital yesterday afternoon and verified that she wasn't going to the hospital and wanted him to come home and that he didn't want rehab and wanted to go home. The holdup that had kept him in the hospital that long anyway had been that the Lowman Home doesn't work with his normal dialysis facility but he had agreed that that wasn't a problem and so they were getting him set up to get dialysis somewhere else. I went and found the case worker (or possibly the case worker's assistant) and explained the new situation. She went and found Dad's actual case worker and I explained it all again and no one had any problem with Dad going home Friday and getting dialysis at the hospital one more time today.
    Can I just say that I love the case workers at Palmetto Health Heart Hospital's Murray Suite and want to have their babies?

Guess what? Complicateder

    To recap: Dad is all better, but Margaret has to have a procedure tomorrow so she thought she would be in the hospital for a week so Dad is going to a nursing home for rehab he doesn't need because basically he can't go home.
    Now it appears that there will be no hospital stay for Margaret, so the nursing home trip is basically unnecessary. Mind you, Dad could use some rehab. But basically, he's probably going to Assisted Living (which, as I've noted, everybody hates) just because Margaret may be away from the house for one day. Nobody has called me to say what's going on; I don't know who to call. Meanwhile, the weather is playing havoc with everything, and Dad's dialysis complicates matters further. Wheeeee!

RIIIIIIIIIING!

    It isn't my favorite old-time radio show, but a guilty pleasure that I enjoy is a show called "Crime Club." The budgets were low, the actors were mostly obscure and the plots didn't necessarily make sense, but the writing tended to be solid and everybody seemed to be having a lot of fun. Unfortunately, for some reason, possibly the passage of time since the original shows or possibly the years now that I've had the CD, the MP3 CD that "Crime Club" is on doesn't play all that well. Episodes will end suddenly and the CD skips on to another episode. Every episode starts with a ringing phone. Our gimmick is that our host is the librarian for the Crime Club (sure, why not?) and every week he gets a call requesting a particular story, which fortunately he always has. (There's also a call at the end of the show where he tells what the next week's show will be. When they got canceled, he apologized and told the caller that "Racket Busters" would take over the time slot next week. I think I would have had him say, "Screw this crazy job! I quit!")
    There are also a lot of phone calls within the show. Thus when a phone rings, I can never tell if it's a new plot point in the episode I'm listening to or if that particular MP3 has failed and I've cycled around to another episode. This should be really annoying, but somehow there's a certain surreal accidental art to it that I kind of like. However, there are limits. So I've gone back to my old CD MP3 player, which somehow is more forgiving than my newer one, and have been enjoying complete episodes for the last few nights. I have some other shows which have the same problem (even if without the telephone rings), so I'm going to be enjoying full episodes of those, too.
    The point to this blitherfest is that old-time radio has been getting a lot older lately. We had many decades there where telephone rings didn't change; though the show might have been 20 or 30 or more years old, it still didn't seem old or alien. These days, I'm not sure kids would even know what a ringing phone is. Of course, some people still set their ring tones to sound like an old-fashioned ringing phone, but not all that many. It's not bad; it's not worrying. It's just a little odd.
    Sorry if this was weak; it's too dang cold to blog intelligently today!:)

Complicated

    So Dad was set to go home today, but wasn't feeling at his best. So the nurse suggested that he might want to go into rehab briefly at a nursing home. He was trying to call Margaret to find out what she thought but kept getting busy signals. Meanwhile, I talked to the nurse in the corridor and we agreed that he didn't need rehab. She was going to do his discharge paperwork and meanwhile I went home to eat lunch, since paperwork takes a while.
    On the way home, I get a call from Margaret, who says that she had heard from Dad and they agreed that rehab would be a good idea, since she's going to the doctor Thursday and may have to go in the hospital for a week. Now I knew she was going to the doctor Thursday, but this is the first I'm hearing about a possible hospital stay.
    When I get home, I call the hospital and amazingly am able to talk to the people I had just talked to. I explained the situation, which they grasped better than I did. Essentially, it's easy to get into a nursing home straight from a hospital stay of three days or more; it's vastly more difficult otherwise. So if we took Dad home and then he needed a nursing home starting Thursday, it would have been next to impossible to get him in, particularly for a short stay.
    Thus, Dad has to wait a couple more days in the hospital while he has another TB test (required for nursing homes) and waits on the paperwork. However, he got his first choice, the Lowman Home near where Margaret's daughters live, so she'll be able to visit easily when she can visit. So due to a series of miracles, we got the best result we could. Hard on Dad that he has to be in the hospital another couple of days, and probably in Assisted Living (which everybody hates) for a few weeks, but it was the best result possible. And to be honest, he could use the rehab. So a conditional yaaay!

Trapped

    What I kept meaning to say, either here or on Facebook, is that it's kind of sad that I never see anyone else taking the stairs at the Heart Hospital. Maybe now I know why.
    I took Margaret to see Dad this afternoon, then took the stairs back down like I always do. When I got down to the Atrium (ground floor) level, I tried the door to the corridor and found it locked. So I went back and tried the door to the stairs I'd just come from and it was locked, too. The other door had a sign saying "Emergency Door-- Alarm Will Sound." There were also stairs leading down, but since I was already on the ground floor, I didn't feel any strong incentive to explore the basement.
    I had my cell and even though I was in a fire tower, the facility's WiFi meant that I had phone service. In another minute, I was going to call the front desk and request rescue, but I heard people in the corridor and banged on the door and asked them please to open it. They did. So not much of a tale of deadly peril, I'll admit, but I was surprisingly amped on adrenaline. Mainly, how crazy is that? How American is that that so few people use the stairs that it seems like a good idea to lock the doors ever, at all? Glad for the happy ending, of course!
    The cardiologist doesn't work on weekends or Dad no doubt would be home already. As it is, he'll probably be going home tomorrow or Tuesday, the only logistical complication being his dialysis Tuesday. But he's lots better, more or less back to normal. So yaaaay!

Calling old people

    Yeah I know I can google. But eventually I'd probably also have to YouTube, and I'm trying to conserve my data use. Also, I just wanted to blog about Possible Possum.
    There was a cartoon in the '60s or possibly even the '50s called Possible Possum. I would nearly swear that his entire schtick was to respond to every situation with (in a syrupy Southern accent) "It's possibul." Now I get that there were tens of millions of baby boomer children to entertain, so maybe standards were a little low. But is that all there was to this cartoon or am I misrembering? If anyone remembers better, feel free to comment or email to elucidate. (Yeah, I also know: It's possibul.)
    Dad situation continues to be pretty OK. I tried to bring Margaret to visit today, but by the time we had made it to the building, he called to say that the transport people were there to take him to dialysis. Darn it. On the other hand, Thursday, they took him so late that he couldn't have a full treatment and they had to take him back for a couple of hours yesterday. So at least that shouldn't be happening again. And he should be done with dialysis for a couple of days whether or not they send him home in the next few days. So there's that.
    Oh, I also just received an email with the phrase "moralistic elitism" in the subject line. Do you think that's any different than "elitist moralism"?

Feel a change coming on

    What kind of change? That would be telling! But I think it's fair to say that this blog and my life are likely to be a good deal more cheerful in the nearish future.
    One change I definitely feel is that it got a lot colder! My dear sister has sent two scarves, which have come in handy and proved to be a really timely gift. I'm not sure if it's really different than when I was young, but lately these cold snaps never seem to last as long as a week. I won't mind if this one doesn't either.
    Another change is that I finally studied my data use. The vast bulk goes to either running the laptop Internet through the phone (like I do when posting to this here blog) or posting photos to Facebook. As my data allowance (and thus my fast Internet) always runs out midway through the month, I'll likely be doing less of both those things. Thus the odds are greater that I'll not be online and thus will more often forget to blog. I'm sure everyone will cope somehow.

Stable

    Nothing much is going on on the Dad front. We are reminded that "No news is good news" does not mean that all news is bad, but rather that a lack of news often is a positive sign. He seems better to me. He has to stay in the hospital all weekend, but I'm pretty sure this is just so he's under observation while he recovers from congestive heart failure. As usual, communication with the doctors is fairly minimal.
    Our crisis yesterday was that his phone didn't work, so Margaret was convinced that he was very ill or dying. But eventually they gave him another phone, so communications were restored and all was well. Today, he's likely spending the afternoon in dialysis, so no major excitement is likely. We hope.
    South Carolina played its bowl game yesterday (and won) and Clemson play theirs tomorrow, so at least dialysis fit in well around football. Sheer luck more than anything, I think, but we'll take any luck we can get around now!

Criminal mastermind

    I took Margaret to visit Dad for New Year's Eve and she stayed the night to be able to see the new year in. (No, that isn't the crime.) He had asked her to bring a bottle of his pills from home. (That is.) When I went this morning to take her home, he asked her to hand him the bottle of pills while a tech was in the room. And by the time I had gone back to get his dirty clothes, the tech was explaining to him that he couldn't have any medications from home. I mention this every time he's in the hospital; not a great listener, my dad. Hopefully he won't start being a PITA patient. That isn't the way to get the best care.
    Still no guess how long he'll be in the hospital. USC Gamecocks are playing in a bowl game in an hour. I'm slightly worried that they might take Dad to dialysis (at the hospital's facility, where I don't think there's a TV) since he went on Monday. However, it's a holiday and I'm sure they know that his regular days are TThSa, so I'm hopeful that he'll get to watch the game. I'm expecting him to join him for the second half.

Finally did miss a day

    Ironically, this was because I'm so relieved that Dad is doing a bit better. His speech is still a bit off, but his brain is definitely still in there chugging along.
    He has finally accepted that his heart is permanently damaged and that he needs to be on a low sodium diet. Explaining what this means logistically to Margaret was a bit of a trial, but I think she'll figure it out pretty quickly.
    They were together for New Year's Eve, which was very sweet. This town had a Main Street celebration, with ZZ Ward and Kool and the Gang. I went for ZZ, but ironically it was too cold to stay for Kool. Fun show regardless, though. Subsequent fireworks have made sleep a little iffy, though.
    This was typed without glasses. Could you tell?