Rants

Last Sunday while sitting in front of the PC I felt an itch on my inner right forearm. Looking down I noticed a little bump, dang a mosquito got me. Twice, as now the outside of my left ankle is itching. If I can avoid the first scratch I can tolerate the urge pretty well, but if my guard drops the scratching feels so good that it is hard to stop.

Monday morning while mousing at work, because of the location of the one on my arm, I notice that the itch is worse and I have got a little seepage from the bite. I head on over to the nurse’s station and get one of those little dots to cover it up. Monday night at shower time the bite has turned red. So too has the one on my ankle, might not have been a mosquito.

By Tuesday night it is ugly, pencil eraser sized and raised about 1/16 of an inch. My wife tells me that I better go see the nurse again tomorrow.

Wednesday morning our nurse gets our her little scalpel, picks away for awhile and squeezes out a bit of ooze. She then gets out her cauldron and mixes up some hydrocortisone and a little antibiotic cream to apply over the top, then covers my little red mesa with a 2″ x 4″ bandage. She tells me to come back tomorrow and if it is any bigger I will have to go to the doctor.

Thursday I report in for boo-boo inspection. It doesn’t look any worse, but it doesn’t look much better either. Then she tells me why I would have had to go to the doctor if it was bigger, she at first suspected it was a Brown Recluse Spider that bit me. I get another coating of duo-cream (patent pending) Because I whined some when about 50 hairs were yanked out by the roots during bandage removal, now I graduate to a folded 4×4 gauze pad held in place by a 3″ wide magic wrap thing that feels like rubber coated gauze that stretches and adheres to itself by molecular adhesion. She wants to see it again tomorrow.

This morning when the dressing is removed it now looks like a small red mole with a black dot in the middle. Better. More cream and a rewrap. Good thing as I was worried where we were going with the ever escalating bandage size…

I guess I got lucky and it wasn’t a Brown Recluse, maybe just a Tan Hermit Spider or something. If you ever want to get scared about spiders, forget Tarantulas or Black Widows, do a little Googling for Brown Recluse and read some. I’m warning you though, don’t ever click on any of the picture links, because seeing as the Brown Recluse can’t bite through clothing, you will never get naked again.

You cannot put the same shoe on every foot.
Publilius Syrus (c.42BC)
Writer

My manager at work has subscribed to a little monthly motivational handout called Bits & Pieces. The above quote came from the July 2005 issue he handed out today, it was the second bit, or piece if you will, in the magazine, right there on page 1.

My question is why was this particular piece of “wisdom” saved? Did someone other than Mr. Syrus hear him say those words and instantly think, “Ooooh, I’d better save that, it sounds like it will be inspirational in about 2,047 years?” Well, here’s hoping that the July 4052 issue of Bits & Pieces includes this:

Be careful what you write, no matter how inane, it might be permanent.
Brian the Red (c.2005AD)
Blogger

We have one of those single arm kitchen faucets and it has developed some leakage. Anywhere from a drip to a small stream depending what the angle of the arm is when it gets pushed down. The work around for this bit of annoyance is to shut off the faucet and then lift the arm ever so slightly. I am perfectly happy with this arrangement, Donna is not.

All it probably needs is a replacement washer inside the faucet. Because she watches a lot of HGTV, Donna sees a 15 minute job rated 1 screwdriver at a cost of under a buck. I see an all day job costing hundreds of dollars because I know my limitations and luck.

Here is how I see it going: I turn off the 50-year old shut off valves under the sink so I can work on the faucet. Because they are so old they don’t shut off the water completely. So I then have to go outside to the main water shut off. (Fortunately this works because it was replaced 4 or 5 years ago when we had lawn sprinklers installed.) I now disassemble the faucet and extract the mangled rubber piece. I will then spend 15 minutes looking thru the junk plumbing bits I have in the garage in hope of finding a match. With no success, I head over to the local mega home repair place and spend 30 minutes wandering the aisles and pulling open plastic drawers looking for a match. I find something I think might work, spend $2.98 and return home. With the new piece I reassemble the faucet and close the outside valve and am greeted with barely any water pressure. Oh, yeah, the inside valves. I open them up and the faucet now leaks all the time because the rubber piece I brought home was not an exact match. To compound matters, now that I have disturbed one of the inside shut off valves from its comfortable spot it proceeds to start dripping from the packing around the handle. Outside to shut off the water to the house again. Back to the mega home repair store. This time, in disgust, I just buy a whole new faucet. Back home I spend the next 3 hours pulling out the old faucet, scraping the old caulking and plumber’s putty off the sink and installing the new one.

The nice new shiny faucet won’t drip, but it will make our well-worn kitchen sink look, well, well-worn. This will bring about talk of replacing it. But to do that, the tile counters will have to be replaced which would then make our well-worn cabinets look, well you get the picture?