I give up. I’m just coming back to Squarespace. It finally occurred to me that WordPress would never import my backlog in a format I was happy with and that retained some of the weird stuff that was integral to a few of my posts. It was going to take a ton of work to get something close, there would still be problems, and I was going to spend more time maintaining it than I lost re-writing posts I lost due to Squarespace not having an undo, autosave, or save and continue.
Really, all that was driving me at that point was spite. Spite is a poor motivation for doing something, so I think I’d rather just write here and deal with it.
So, what’s been going on? It’s very “Facts of Life” around here, in that we are taking both the good and the bad and now I hope that song is stuck in your head. We have a leak in our roof that is going to set us back a bit. The weather has been, for want of a better word, stupid. Does it normally rain every week (or day!) from May to the end of July in Texas? No. Not it does not.
On the plus side of the ledger, Nicole fell in love with a kitten. Meet baby Ramza:
This cat tree has seen some things.
She saw his photo at the shelter’s site and couldn’t sleep until she met him. He jumped into her arms almost immediately (in part perhaps because the shelter staff were determining whether or not he was ready for the required surgery and the way they tested him was not gentle). She had to wait until he recovered from the surgery and she was on pins and needles waiting to until he’d recovered enough to adopt. Shelters, for obvious reasons, tend to be “first come/first serve.” So, she went a day earlier than she’d been told and that proved wise as she returned home with a tiny orange ball of fur she named Ramza Charles Soyuncu.
It’s been a tough few months for these dusty old bones. We had a lovely date night in New Braunfels that ended badly. Crossing the street between crosswalks, the heel came unglued from my boots and my feet went out from under me in almost cartoonish fashion. I tried to scramble upright without realizing the cause of my fall and fell a couple more times in front of (slowly) oncoming traffic. I finally got across, crawling, scrambling, I don’t remember. I broke a bone in my wrist trying to catch the fall and my muscles, such as they are, were aching.
In addition, I later tripped over the lid of a trash bin I was about to wash (pushing it at a low angle with the lid open, in case you’re interested in the mechanics) and fell head-first into the bin. I managed to catch a previously-broken toe on the corner of a storage bin and that sucker is in bad shape.
The worst, though, is that my skin symptoms came back. Awful red dots started spreading on my elbows, shoulder, forearms, and shins, just like they did before I started injecting mouse proteins (and that is as strange to write as it sounds). It was very a very “Flowers for Algernon” mood around here. So, I called my dermo and I’m seeing her on Friday. The good news is that the topical treatments seem to have it under control and receding, but I still need to find out if the drugs are just not going to be as effective or if this was a one-off.
A one-off is a reasonable possibility. Adopting a kitten has led to countless small (and several more-than-small) wounds appearing all over me. Turns out kittens are sharp. Who knew? There are other new environmental factors that could be contributing as well, and, to be honest, I’ve been less diligent about wearing only the most hippie-approved clothing on the planet. There’s a real chance that the mouse proteins still work just as well, but I’ve just been asking to much of ‘em.
Other than that, I’m doing great.
I’ve missed this. Sorry for the “old guy talks about his health” post, but I wanted to warm up the fingers a little before I talked about the stuff that’s filling me with joy these days. I’d rather write poorly about my complaints. Overall, things are good, but this week has been full of panic and foreboding because if the drugs stop working, then it could be pretty bad.
I hope y’all are holding up and doing well. More soon. I promise.
-RK