Kitanzi's Colloquium

Why is it that the sight of someone quietly sitting and reading in a public space INVARIABLY prompts anyone and EVERYONE walking in to start a conversation with them?

I suppose it could be a useful phenomenon if I was actually trying to find a way to strike up conversations, but it was my all too short lunch hour and I was reeeeading..... (/whine)

Yesterday, I had a sore tooth. It happens every so often, usually seems to mean something got stuck irritating the gum. I am a little extra careful in brushing for a day or too, and it goes away. I figured that would do it this time, and basically expected it would be much better this morning.

Instead, at 2am, I have a dream that I've bitten a sliver of glass and guess what - it comes complete with drastic pain for a special effect. Wide awake, I find the Oragel left from ACat's tooth adventure last week and slather it on. The whole side of my mouth goes numb, but that so special "bit a piece of glass" feeling is still there, so about 2:30 I take one of the pain pills left from ACat's prescription (for the record, this is basically generic Vicodin, heavy stuff) and manage to get back to sleep. 5:00, just two and a half hours later when the pills should be full strength, it happens again. Wide awake, serious stabbing pain, and I can't be sure because I was asleep, but it felt like there was a small crunching sensation just before it hit. Owwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

Don't ask me how long it's been since I've been to a dentist. Just don't.

As soon as his opens, I'm calling and begging for an emergency appointment. I don't know what this is but good god it hurts. I'm guessing a cavity that maybe just hit a nerve. I really don't know, I've never had a cavity (that I know of). And of course, I can't take any more painkillers until I find out what they need to do.

OWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW.

So, I'm distracting myself by all reasonable means available, including whining on LJ *sigh*

Oh, wheeeee. The insurance company pulled the plug on the surgery, until I get an additional 4-6 weeks of physical therapy. What the hell that's supposed to do for a bone spur I have no clue. ACat talked to his HR people, I talked to his HR people (since I'm on his insurance), they gave me a phone number and explained that my doctor would have to make any appeal on this. I called my doctor and left a voice mail. I got a voice mail back from his nurse - he got some sort of faxed note from the insurance company and apparently said "Fine, she needs therapy." So, he's useless for any appeal. Maybe I do, maybe he just doesn't want to be bothered. ACat suggests that maybe he knows the insurance company well enough to know it's pointless.

So, no surgery for a while at least. When I talked to the nurse (I've lost track of which phone call this was, lots of calls and voice mails back and forth, I'm sure she detests the sound of my voice by now) she told me that I should call them after the therapy was done and she'd make me a appointment for the surgery right away. I think she meant to be kind, and let me know that they'd try and get me a quick appointment rather than make me wait, but to me it sounds like she just doesn't expect the therapy to do anything useful. I asked her as much and she backpedaled quickly, but...

So, at least another month to a month and a half on pills and ice packs, chronically short on sleep and at war with my own body over such ambitious things as combing my hair or wiping my mouth and with no real faith that I'm doing anything but wasting my time to placate the insurance company.

I was outraged. I was furious. Right now, I'm just out of energy.

EDIT: The phone number I got for the PT clinic doesn't work, which seems about par for the course. Another back and forth on voicemail, and I have a new number. I also have an appointment on Tuesday bright and early for a cortisone shot, which gave some temporary relief last time. It's something.

I think half of the horror of Katrina's aftermath is that it's all in slow motion. Evacuations are slowed, even stopped, by people shooting at the rescuers. Looters have gone far beyond getting food and clothing and necessities of life (where the hell are they going to store a television set right now anyhow??) and are compounding the misery and horror tenfold. Resources are moving, but seemingly too little and too late for a lot of the people trapped in the nightmare, and from here how much better can I say I could have done it? What the hell can I do, besides give spare cash? It's a feeling of helplessness, even worse than 9/11. Imagine if the people trapped in the fires jumped from the buildings, and fell for four days, and we watched them fall, heard them screaming, and still couldn't do anything to save them...

No, I didn't sleep very well last night, why do you ask?

Anyhow, I'd like to recommend a filk Harold Feld wrote recently: http://groups.google.com/group/rec.music.filk/browse_frm/thread/149c9f1639209d1e/151132658d37ff51?hl=en#151132658d37ff51

Now I need to get ready for work, where I will sit on my hands and wait for someone to eventually find something for me to do (curse of being too efficient, apparently), read news on the net and feel utterly useless.

EDIT: For those who asked, we came through just fine. We got a fair amount of rain and some fairly brisk winds, but it never got scary in our part of GA. Tornado sirens went off once, briefly, but nothing seems to have come of that. Thank you for being concerned, though!

It's days like these when I come home ready to vote for whichever imbecile will offer the simplest taxing plan, just so I don't have to keep wrestling with the numbers at the end of the year. I HATE TAXES. And I hate software, and I hate people who call with STUPID stuff that they "forgot" to mention for the last four months, and I hate people who can't follow simple instructions, and I hate people who haven't any common sense at all and jump ahead of what you're trying to tell them to do, and I hate .. well, I hate year end. I never thought I'd say it, but damn, I miss working at the mall at Christmas. It was a lot less stressful.

This vent brought to you by the number 6.4%, the letters IRS, and my supervisor who finally told me to transfer the last caller to her and go home. I'm gonna go have a damn drink.

This week I've been more eager than usual to identify myself as a Damn Yankee from Massachusetts, even if I do live in Georgia. There's the presidential election... well, enough and more than enough's been said on that. I voted, I got outvoted. People presumably voted how they thought best, and there's the end to that, at least for the time being. This is a story that never does end.

I'm actually more ashamed of the passing of the Marriage Protection bill, however it was named - Question One. It wasn't asking anyone to give any extra rights to anybody, it was merely asking whether people chose to leave things as they were or if people would choose to gratutiously slap people in the face to say no to a question that had not even been asked yet. ACat points out, quite correctly, that as much as anything it's to allow GA to explicitly deny the customary "full faith and credit" constitutional clause as far as it applies to other states who have legalized same sex marriage. Fulton county, where we cast our votes, is apparently flamingly liberal by GA standards. We were only sixty something percent in favor, as opposed to the eighty to ninety something percent most GA counties voted in favor of it by. Gee.

Anyhow, I happened to be looking through bookmarks tonight, and bumped into this, just thought I'd like to put it up - somehow it's accreted a chunk of what I was thinking about on the way home from work around it.

http://www.w00t-comic.net/20031012.html

Five cents worth of rambling rant.... we now return you to your regularly scheduled program.

The good - I'm much happier than I was, say, a week ago in my relationships. I'm walking around smiling at random people, humming happy songs. Communication has been clarified, happiness has been expedited, redefinition has been embraced where needed, and I'm considerably more content with the universe than I was. This is a Damn Good Thing, because...

The bad - work is being insane. Seriously. At the moment our department is down to 5 people on the phones including me, down from over twice that when I started a year ago. All five of us are grumbling and bitching back and forth, and the lunch our supervisor has promised to buy us Monday just isn't going to fix this morale problem. *And* I'm going to only half days on the phones, which will reduce coverage further. Unfortunately, that's still too MUCH time for me on the phones, because I'm moving to a different department asap and part of that is training which is designed to be five weeks of EIGHT HOUR DAYS doing nothing but training. Instead, I'm getting half days to train from now through December 6th, except for such days as I don't get to train at all. That would include today, since the people who are apparently supposed to be agreeing between them WHICH half of the day I am doing what can't seem to get this worked out. December 6th I go to Parsippany for two weeks of intensive training on the new (to me) mainframe computer system I'll be using. By all description it's a beast and a pain in the neck, so I'd better have the rest of this licked before I go. Ha.

The bored - However, I am completely bored at the moment. Nope, can't effectively start the training on my own because I can't seem to get fifteen minutes straight without someone interrupting me for something, plus I can't seem to get to the software demo I was told I would be able to practice on. Legitimate interruptions, mostly - phone calls, coworkers asking for info, whatever. Still, I give up. They're boring, I'm bored, bleah. I'm counting days to OVFF... hell, right now I'm counting breaths to OVFF.

Well, we are told this is not actually Hurricaine Ivan. Nope, it's just Tropical Storm Ivan or some such by now. I'm just so glad, aren't I?

Because if this were Hurricaine Ivan, I would have presumably been blown off my feet while standing thigh deep in the puddle my car is currently trying to dogpaddle in back at work, instead of being able to stand there in the downpour and shriek when I saw the water was up over the bottom of the doors. Sigh.

Hopefully things will drain and it will work happily in a day or so... meanwhile, ACat came and got me. I am SO glad I live this close to work. (Yeah, it could be far worse and I know it - we have power, and work let out early. I just really feel aggravated about the damn car!)

Look - I don't think any of my friends are stupid, but just in case you don't think of it, I am going to tell you all what I'd love to tell the dozen or so people who have called about this today. Only I'm going to tell you all much more politely that I'd like to tell them.

This is April 15th. This is the day your personal tax filing is DUE. If you haven't looked at your W2 until today to see if there are any gross idiocies on it, well, my sympathy is VERY limited. And no, I can't magically make it go away for you, or for any of your employees - if I could work magic, I'd be in a different line of business and making MUCH more money. Seriously.

(Like I said, I really don't expect this to be true of anyone who reads it - but gaaaaaaaaah.)

Regarding the idiocy of arguments that legalized gay marriage is the first step on a terrifyingly slippery slope, seen in at least two places, attributed to columnist Mark Morford:

You know, just like how giving blacks the right to own their own land meant we had to give the same rights to house plants and power tools, or how granting women the right to vote meant it was a slippery slope until we gave suffrage to feral cats and sea slugs and rusty hubcaps.