stoutfellow

I took a bit of a nap this afternoon. I awakened to the (internal) tune of "Wake Up, Little Suzy".

My Inner Minstrel is a bit cheeky sometimes.

I don't know what I did to myself, but sometime yesterday I must have done something.

Basically, every muscle on the right side of my torso, from the shoulder to the base of the rib cage, hurts. Breathing is slightly painful, coughing or sneezing very much so. Hot showers don't seem to help, nor does Tylenol. I was at least able to close my eyes a bit during the night, but I didn't get any real sleep.

I hope this will ease up soon. I've got work to do, and intermittent spasms of pain do not help.

I am saved! My lawn care people have shown up, and are now mowing my lawn!

:does happy dance, dissolves in fit of coughing:

Oh, dear. I'm going to have to mow my lawn. Repeatedly.

For the past however-many years, I've had a lawn care company do it for me. They have not contacted me this year, and I doubt they will.

I have a corner lot. I have a fenced-in back yard. And I have a (probably rusty) push mower.

:groan:

"It is even more shameful for a person to pay no heed to his own body and to fail to protect it against the plague the best he is able, and then to infect and poison others who might have remained alive if he had taken care of his body as he should have.

He is thus responsible before God for his neighbor’s death and is a murderer many times over. Indeed, such people behave as though a house were burning in the city and nobody were trying to put the fire out. Instead they give leeway to the flames so that the whole city is consumed, saying that if God so willed, he could save the city without water to quench the fire.

No, my dear friends, that is no good. Use medicine; take potions which can help you; fumigate the house, yard, and street; shun persons and places wherever your neighbor does not need your presence or has recovered, and act like a man who wants to help put out the burning city."

- Martin Luther, "Whether One May Flee from a Deadly Plague"

(h/t The Slacktivist)

I just gave myself a (partial) haircut, for the first time in my life. I kept getting hair in my eyes and even my mouth, and finally lost patience with it.

I didn't try to cut the hair in back, but lopped several inches off most of the hair in front, from the forehead and sides. I feel much better, and the mirror doesn't look too awful.

I did have to fight off an attack of mirror disorientation - getting the scissors tilted correctly, moving them *towards* my hair instead of away, and so on. But only once: most of the operation, before and after, went smoothly.

In the Questionable Content forum, there's some ongoing discussion of middle school (what we called "junior high" in my time and place) and bullying. I guess my experience was exceptional; I only recall two instances when someone tried to bully me. Both occurred in shop classes. One of them isn't particularly interesting, except that teacher intervention did resolve it. The other...

This was a wood shop class. There was a small classroom attached to the shop, and we would meet there for five or ten minutes before getting to work. On one particular day, the teacher not being in the room, Mitch Collins decided to pick on me. Mitch was plumpish, but had a fair amount of muscle, and I was a skinny little kid, an obvious target. We exchanged words, and he threw a punch - a light one, and I dodged most of it, but still a punch.

The teacher came into the room, and a few minutes later sent us into the shop. As we passed through, a guy named Alwin Holman - black kid, nobody I knew in particular, physically well-built - came over to me and asked why Mitch hit me. I mumbled something noncommittal, and Alwin walked away. I went to my station to work on my project, and a few minutes later Alwin came by again and said, "Mitch won't bother you any more." And he never did.

Alwin, if you're out there, I remember, and am grateful.

The Good: this morning, I placed an order with Schnucks. I checked "First Available", which, they informed me, meant Saturday afternoon. The order just arrived, and included a gallon jug of orange juice, a couple of boxes of cereal, cheese and lunchmeat, some dishwasher detergent, and a two pound box of Alpo Variety Snaps.

The Bad: the delivery did not include the milk I had ordered. Given that I have enough milk left for, say, two cups of coffee, this kind of vitiates the delivery of the cereal

The Confusing: the delivery included four boxes of Lunchables. I can use them, but I did not order them. Also, they do not appear on the receipt.

Ah, well, It is possible to eat Corn Chex dry.

Schnucks has earned my loyalty. I have placed three orders with them in the past couple of weeks, and though the first was rather a botch, the latter two have been close to perfect. The last delivery, last night, included a gallon of 1% milk, a quart of orange juice, two jars of jelly, and my preferred Melitta cone filters. (I have a stock of Mr. Coffee style filters, and will use them in a pinch, but they're not really satisfactory.)

Meanwhile, my one order from Dierbergs was a complete disaster. Shipt will not get any more business from me.

*Some* things, at least, are working properly.

I'm gonna bitch a little, 'mkay?

Buster is limping badly again. I've been giving him half-tab maintenance doses of his medicine, but I'm going back to full tabs for the next while. (I helped him out to the back yard to do his business, but it's hard to lift a hind leg when one foreleg is already off the ground!)

I'm out of milk. My Schnucks order includes a gallon of 1%, but I'm not sanguine about actually getting it. I can drink coffee black if I have to; I have a box and a half of Swiss Miss, and partial boxes of English Breakfast, Constant Comment, and chamomile tea. Also, I always have a quart or so of water in the fridge. But I crave milk...

Shipt has given me a $5 credit on my next order. However, the bill for the undelivered goods is still on my credit card.

I'm still fighting a persistent respiratory infection (not Covid-19: wet cough, runny nose, wrong symptoms). Nothing serious, just a lot of coughing and phlegm.

Bah. I'm alive, health issues are minor, I have enough food for a couple of weeks, and I can carry Buster in and out if I have to. I'm better off than a lot of people, I nonetheless reserve my right to gripe.