Hallelujah Mary loved her son

I'm back online after a week or two, and I think that'll be nice. Between the ten hour days and the housemate's new work schedule and being the only person I know who doesn't have hot and cold running Internet at their job, I've been feeling quite isolated. Hope this will help. I've spent the last three hours getting caught up on LJ and now I only have the 287 email messages to plow through.

Very little was going on in my life aside from working and packing and moving and unpacking until recently. When I finally got a day where I didn't have to work or pack I managed to run the errands that had been backing up for the past month. I finally got the headlight on my car replaced, and had lovely yummy bad for me lunch with Stuart at La Bamba, and got a haircut. (Reactions to the hair cut have been nearly universal, divided into two groups: Folks at work and folks not at work. Folks at work: Damn! That looks good! You're a sex machine, just like James Brown! (Actual quote from Diana: Chuck! Hair cut! rrRRRrr!) Folks not at work: You are missing some hair. (Actual quote from Laura: It's very weird to see you with *short* hair. I mean *really* short.) Drew's reaction tonight was the single variation. Perhaps he should get a job with SkyWest. (: In any case, shorter means less miserable with our newly arrived summer weather. Did I mention hot weather? Hot enough to boil a monkey's bum, I heard the Prime Minister once say.

There was a great deal of stuff I wanted to look at or for when I got the net back and since I didn't write any of them down I of course forgot every single one of them.

I don't remember if I talked about my mid-May meeting with the Mental Hut people at Kaiser, but it was there that I learned that perhaps telling your health care professional the truth is not the best of ideas. Or at least it will cost you a lot more time than you might expect.

Today's appointment, all I wanted (was a Pepsi! Just one Pepsi!) was to get the bloodwork done so I could safely resume taking the Drug That Kills You If Your Levels Are Wrong. Instead I ended up re-learning about telling the truth to a health care professional. In addition, I had to explain polyamory and wicca to a woman with a very strong Russian accent. She also had many many questions to ask me, and once again I was questioned about thoughts of suicide. Other new things in this appointment were the discussion of my rape, if I read medical texts, how many people I was 'close to' or 'intimate with' (this was before she got interested in the poly thing) whether I was having sex with my housemate, whether I'd ever been committed to psychiatric care, if I'd ever used illegal drugs (asked twice), and how I knew what Haldol was. (I was updating my address with Kaiser and said '917 Sierra Vista Avenue, apartment H as in 'Haldol'.)
Lots of questions about sex. I was occasionally tempted to tell her that I hadn't had any in over a year and if she was looking for some vicarious excitement she really should go on to her next patient. But, in fairness, lots of questions not about sex. Lots of questions in general.

I finally got the god damn paperwork to take to the lab and the lady there was probably the best blood drainer I'd ever encountered. I hardly felt the insertion and there was no pain when she switched out the cartridges.

Cindy took me out to lunch and also to buy motor oil for poor Nauti who has been quite quite neglected the past few weeks. She has a big blob of pine sap on the windscreen and is all dusty and water spotty. I'm considering a trip to Avalon tomorrow to give her the automotive equivalent of a trip to WaterCourse Way.
Which, by the way, I nearly ended up at last Monday with a naked co-worker who bailed at the last minute. Can't say I'm surprised, nor that I'm not disappointed.

So now I have drugs, a new headlight, coaxial cable and something resembling a bedroom. The house grows ever more like someplace I live rather than someplace I pile all my stuff in awkwardly-located piles and then scurry over around and between them. And tonight after gaming wonderful lovely Cindy came over and blessed us with a house network. In case I have forgotten to mention how smashing she is.

I just finished reading Jane Eyre which I really enjoyed, and it surprised me because of the passion I hated Wuthering Heights with. It very definitely affected my speech patterns and vocabulary choices while I read it, much like Shakespeare or Wodehouse does. Rather, not in the same fashion, but the same areas. And now I'm reading a murder mystery which is being solved by the Harvard Dante Appreciation Society (Longfellow is just finishing up his translation of the Divine Comedy) and I'm not at all certain what that will do to me. But there are a great deal of maggots and blowflies thus far.
Must dash--housemate's alarm has gone off.

Note to Cindy: Haloperidol ( Haldol, Haldol Decanoate, Halperon ) is an antipsychotic drug of high-potency, strong tranquilizer. Haloperidol ( Haldol, Haldol Decanoate, Halperon ) is used in the treatment of acute psychosis, acute schizophrenia, manic phases, to control aggression, to control agitation, disorganized and psychotic thinking. It may also be used to help treat false perceptions. (E.g. hallucinations or delusions) or in the treatment of Gilles de la Tourette syndrome. To treat psychosis associated with dementia, depressions, or mania. This drug however is more likely to cause movement side effects like Tardive Dyskinesia, then most other antipsychotic drugs. Generally accepted uses not FDA approved include, adjuvant for in chronic pain, control vomiting from chemotherapy, ease refractory sneezing, control refractory hiccups, lessen delirium from LSD flashbacks, lessen delirium from phencyclidine intoxication, or may be helpful in autistic persons.

Deep in the heart of Texas

Does anybody know if there's an RSS feed for Molly Ivin's column?
If not it shouldn't be too hard to create, right?

Working in a coal mine

So I meant to mention it but didn't because I forgot.
Until last week I had a 10-8 shift. This meant that I was at work in time for the big 11 o'clock block (when a bunch of flights go out at the same time) but technically was supposed to sign off in the middle of the 8 o'clock block. Schedule started the last week of April, and I was still taking the train. I discovered that if I clocked out and ran to the front of the airport I could grab the 8:15 bus and just make the 8:30 train home. If I missed the 8:15 bus I missed the 8:30 train and had to wait until 9:40. This was not so good.
In May I had no money and couldn't afford the big chunk of change needed to buy a train pass. So I told my bosses 'Since I'm driving now I might as well stay for the eight o'clock flights.' And I discovered that the fifteen minutes daily of overtime I was getting would come pretty close to covering my expenses to drive to work.
However.
This shift had been created by taking the usual ten hour shift (10-8:30 with a half an hour unpaid for lunch) and cropped half an hour off it as a money-saving effort and no real thought put into the effects of that missing half hour.
So last week Headquarters informed my grandboss that *gasp*horror* people were getting overtime, and this must be stopped at once. So Tony 'adjusted' my shift, and now I'm working 10:30 to 8:30, which means I am comfortably working through the 8 block but I have much less prep time for the 11 block. Which is usually okay but if I have to travel far to get to my gate or there's a really fucked up flight then there's trouble.

I thought there was something else I was going to write about but I have a very tiny brain and cannot recall it.
However, it does look like most of my friends/readers are stern and unforgiving grammar fascists and I love you for it. Poll #137667, about people who can't spell and then proceed to write email, indicates that all but one of you (the merciful lizard) would like to see people use a spell checker or be executed. Those of you that ventured further opinions overwhelmingly felt that people who can't spell have less trouble reading other people who can't spell. But you were evenly divided on whether it was easier for them to read people who can spell.