Thursday Not Feeling Well

I cannot, as you can tell, dear reader, if you have been enjoying these blogs for a while, to let a day go by without filling it with something. Thursday was filled with naps, not feeling well, and I feel I failed the day. Here is Thursday.

Thursday started well with me rising early, before 7, making coffee (I forgot to assemble the coffee the night before). This coffee was a gift from Michigan and is Kalamazoo coffee (I do not remember who to thank). I did not eat anything (a mistake, I believe), had coffee, and wrote the blog. I managed, to my surprise, to find the focus to finish it and publish it before I was time-boxed by a medical test.

I showered and cleaned up, shaved, and all that. I was in Air VW the Gray, 60% charged, and headed to Portland. I arrived early at Good Sam Hospital, and my new insurance, despite claims, does let me use their second-floor imaging. I sat in my car, parked in a regular spot, because I didn’t want to wedge my EV into a free spot in the garage. It cost me $11 (I could have paid less, but I mangled the Parking Kitty process in their app, which first offered the all-day charge and then let me reduce it), and I decided to enjoy my paid-for spot and read for thirty minutes.

Good Sam, having endured shootings and other terrors, now has security in bulletproof vests and a metal detector. My suspenders got me wanded. I headed directly to the second floor. A woman behind the left-over Covid-19 glass was very direct, but my smile and offers of an insurance card and a driver’s licence, already out, got her to lighten up. She actually granted me a smile back. I was relieved that the insurance was holding.

Rebecca was my ultrasound person, and she soon found the mass in my neck and took excellent views of it. A fluid (icky stuff) filled area that seems to be an infection of some sort. Not a hard irregular mass of cancer cells. Prayers answered, relief granted, and my stay on this earth will not be shortened by this. Just yet-another-medical-issue (YAMI) to deal with. With the YAMI defined, I returned to my car and read for a while before enjoying the light traffic back to Beaverton.

I parked at McMenamins Cedar Hills Pub and read more. I finished the story and the series, The Regicide Report (Laundry Files Book 14), and I am sad that this is the last Bob and the Laundry story. I will miss this unique mix of hacking, computer science, and Lovecraft horrors.

I might have to write another Howard story to get my own mix of Sci-Fi, the present day, and Lovecraftian horror. I usually wrote about my work experiences and things on trips. Letting the bleakness we deny when working for a multinational corporation on another business trip, color my writing with just a hint of despair. Retirement has been too great to again mine that source of darkness, irony, and ridiculousness. But the current politics and Trump administration certainly are granting me new sources, and a near-overwhelming source. Hmmmm.

Aside: Howard stories are here, with pay-what-you-want pricing (including $0). I recommend “Howard’s Lockdown.” If you want my Sherlock Holmes story, it is here for $4.99, which 2600 could use (vive la Hackers!).

Scott pulls up in his jeep, and we find a booth and order beers and a burger for me. We talk about my health and my happy revelation that my newest issue is not cancer and a YAMI. We talk about stocks, bonds, and the markets. It is messy out there, and we are both running very conservative investments. Scott is not following the diving into AI investment we see in the market (I am not sure the waters are deep) and is directing his investments toward a more EU-focused plan. I have seen that my small-cap investments are still tanking, and those are US-based. We talk of my disappointment in my investigation of AI in my challenge to translate Akkaidain to English. It seems the high-scoring attempts are using a pre-made model/thing and just feeding data. It seems, again, to be an orchestration problem. Worse, my brain-dead sledgehammer approach scored 6.7 with the high score still not breaking 40; yikes! Where AI is going is to build, from what I can tell, average to bad intelligence–you might ask your cat for help before relying on this stuff; a personal opinion there.

I ordered a tummy-bomb of a Captain Neon Burger (bacon, blue cheese, and burger) with fries, which I will regret later. We talk about travel and family, and again, about how the chaos is at a level where it is hard to know what to do. We agree to keep meeting, maybe a walk on Wednesdays too; Scott does tours of the Jenkin Estate nearby my home.

I return home, and I nap and rise, and then I am ill. My meds and tummy, I think, rebelled about the caloric intake. I was done, read, and slept.

Results came in on my scan, and a request for a CT scan followed. According to Deborah’s research, it is an unusual infection, and the request is for better imaging. That is scheduled for Sunday, too early. More to come. I  suspect there is a connection to the brain surgery, but I wait for more information.

I was feeling better. I made a tomato-and-pepper soup from a Trader Joe’s box and a ham-and-cheese sandwich, heated in butter and steamed to stay warm throughout. I could not finish either and saved it for Saturday’s lunch.

I read Make Magazine while I couldn’t sleep. I started to get sleepy and soon nodded off. I entered a dark, near-empty sleep, but I do remember wandering somewhere in a dream, in the Pacific Northwest with Deborah, and enjoying the view together.

Thanks for reading!