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Lyme bullseye II
Tuesday, July 5 2016
This morning I had a few little things to do over at the Brick Mansion, and I stopped on my way there for supplies at Herzog's hardware store and the nearby Hannaford (aka "Ghettoford"). I thought I'd have plenty of time to do the couple things I needed to do, so I began what I thought would be a fairly easy plumbing job. There was a half-inch copper pipe that protruded unnecessarily far out into the stairway coming down from 1R, and I'd been wanting to cut a couple inches off one side of a 90 degree bend so the pipe would hug closer to the wall. I turned off the water and proceeded to cut the pipe, and then wait for it to drain. The pipe appeared to go vertically up through the abandoned stairway overhead to the attic apartment (also known as "3"), and that long length of pipe contained a surprisingly large amount of water (well over a gallon). But the worst thing about it was the pipe took a forever to stop dripping. Remembering that the pipe would have to be open on one end in order to solder it successfully, I went up to the attic apartment and had one of guys living there open the hot water taps so air could enter the pipe and gasses could also escape. I also sucked and blew on the pipe in hopes of agitating pooled water in pipe so it would flow my way. When, after longer than I wanted to wait, the pipe seemed to stop dripping, I fluxed up a fitting, popped the pipes together, and proceeded to bathe the joint in the heat of my MAPP-gas torch. But there was still just enough water coming down from above to keep the joint from getting to the melting point of solder. Eventually I gave up and waited for more water to drain. My second attempt at soldering the pipe seemed to work, though I still couldn't get the joint hot enough for solder to flow in the unambiguously good way that assures a leak-free joint. Still, when it was done, the joint looked good. And when I turned on the water, nothing seemed to leak from it. So I ran upstairs and told the tenant he could shut off his hot water. But then when I returned to the basement, I saw water was spraying out of a pinhole leak. That's the kind of leak one gets when pressure inside the pipe has nowhere to escape during soldering and so is forced out through the solder. Evidently there was enough ponding of water further up the pipe that the gasses couldn't easily escape from the faucets on the third floor.
By this point in the morning, I only had about a half hour left before I had to start my remote shift at The Organization. There wasn't time to drain the pipe and start all over again. But I couldn't leave things as they were; I couldn't let the water continue to leak; a surprisingly-large flow was coming from that tiny pin prick. But I couldn't turn off the water either; the boys in 3 needed their hot water. So I jumped in the Subaru and drove to Herzog's as quickly as I could, almost going the wrong way on Fair Street and failing to yield for a pedestrian gentleman with a grossly-deformed face (who was not the Face Guy of Kingston).
I had in mind some sort of improvised solution involving tape, epoxy, and hose clamps. But then I saw a brand of fitting that normally makes me chuckle at the incompetence of the market it caters to. It was called SharkBite and didn't require soldering at all. It just snaps in place and supposedly holds. I wouldn't normally trust such a fitting and, at $7/each, using them for routine plumbing work would be expensive. But in this one case, it was precisely what I needed. I could make the junction without it needing to be dry or open on one end. From a strictly functional standpoint, the only issue I could see with a SharkBite fitting in this application was that it constricts the flow of water to a relatively narrow passageway inside the fitting, something that doesn't happen in a normal soldered fitting.
Unfortunately, all that dicking around with an unnecessary plumbing project meant I didn't have time for another thing I'd come to do: better secure the other pocket door in 1L. I was also supposed to meet up with a guy who would give us another boiler replacement estimate, but he never showed up. It later turned out that he'd left a message on Gretchen's cellphone, and she hadn't checked it.
[REDACTED]
In my scramble to get home in time for work, I'd somehow managed to misplace a bag of refrigerated groceries I'd taken out of the car for fear they'd overheat in the sun. That bag included two 64 oz jars of grapefruit chunks, a large tray of mushrooms, and a large bottle of mango smoothie. I was so upset by having left them somewhere that I wanted to go back to look for them. But I had a lot of things I needed to do, so I managed to get Gretchen to go instead. She looked everywhere in and around the brick mansion, but found nothing.
Meanwhile Kay, the 91-year-old matriarch of the property to our west that I call "the Greenhouses," had called to say she was having computer trouble and wondering if I had any time to help her out. I never have time for anyone or anything, but it's good politics to keep the neighbors happy (particularly when most of our front yard is on their property). So I went over and had a look at Kay's computer. These days she uses a laptop running Windows 10 attached to an extra screen, and she may in fact be the oldest person in Ulster County who routinely uses two screens with a computer. Kay said she used to have a computer guy who would come over and help her out, but he recently got a job in Connecticut, so she didn't know where to turn when her computer "stopped connecting to the internet." I soon realized her problem was more fundamental than that. The computer wouldn't run any applications at all. You'd double click on an icon and nothing would happen. Even the task manager was inaccessible. It was looking like the operating system would need to be reinstalled, but I thought first I'd try powering it off and back on. This time the computer came up and applications could be opened. All was well, but only for a time. Eventually a malware program claiming to be antivirus software started up, and after that the computer became completely useless. Kay admitted that she had "bought" this program after mistakenly going to one of those jarring websites that simulates a sudden attack of malware, and I didn't have to tell her that this had been a mistake.
Using task manager in the brief period after reboot when the computer was usable, I managed to find the place in the file system where the malware was lodged, and once that was eliminated, the computer worked well enough. In the course of all this, Kay and I talked about the wackiness of Donald Trump, our new dog Neville, the fox that had been living in one of their outbuildings, and John's (her husband's) dementia, which mostly manifests as a need for routine. The old man is now 96 years old, and this afternoon he was watching CNN live as Obama appeared for the first time on the stump in support of Hillary Clinton in Charlotte, North Carolina. On my way out, I had a brief chat with John, and he seemed pretty much the same as always.
After being very responsive to the needs of another department in my remote workplace, I found myself scratching an itch near my right armpit I'd first become aware of yesterday. So I took off my shirt and looked at it in the mirror to see if it was the dreaded Lyme Disease bullseye. Unmistakably, it was indeed. Eleven years ago (almost to the day), I'd discovered a Lyme rash in almost exactly the same part of my body, though on the left side. I showed Gretchen the rash and we quickly moved into a uniquely American conversation: health care logistics. The last time this had happened, we hadn't had health insurance, so Gretchen had gotten her father to call in a prescription for me (it had only cost $5). Now we have insurance, so we decided to do things the way you're supposed to. So I went online and remotely checked in to Emergency One's emergency room and, after telling my remote co-workers the situation and that, not to worry, I was going to be fine, I immediately drove to the Emergency One on Hurley Avenue. I'd heard the remote check in advertised on the radio, though it didn't seem to speed up the process at all; I soon ran out of things to do on my smartphone (somehow reading articles on it just isn't the same as doing so even on a small laptop).
When I eventually got called up, a young woman measured my vitals with some fancy blinking equipment that attached to the tip of my finger like something from the less-horrible part of the future. That got things like my pulse rate (84 beats/second), my respirations (16/minute), and my oxygen saturation (97%). For my blood pressure, the woman had to use an old school sphygmomanometer. My blood pressure measured in at 124/88, which, I learned later, is "pre-hypertension." It probably wasn't helped by all the old school Fritos I'd eaten on my drive back from the brick mansion today.
After another wait, the doctor came in. He looked to be of some sort of Indian (dot-not-feather) ethnicity, and all he did was look at my rash. He quickly confirmed my theory that it was a Lyme tick rash, and prescribed a 21 day course of doxycycline. After one more wait, I was on to my next destination: Nekos Pharmacy. When I learned they would take some minutes to get my prescription together, I immediately headed out on a couple additional errands. My first stop was the brick mansion. When I'd been there earlier, the only parking I could find was on the street in front of the house to its east. There was a pile of primary-colored plastic kids toys on the curb there (seeming to be picked up by garbage truck), and just beyond that I saw the brightly-colored reusable grocery bag. Evidently Gretchen hadn't ranged that far in her hunt for it, and it had been somewhat cloaked by that pile of garish toys. In any case, I was delighted not to have lost those things.
I then went to Hannaford for the second time today, this time to get things like soy milk, two pints of a vegan flavor of Ben & Jerry's icecream, and beer. When I returned to Nekos, they were only just finishing up my big bottle of doxycycline. With insurance, it cost $15, three times what a course of doxycycline had cost in 2005 without insurance.
The appearance of the bullseye as my course of doxycycline began.
[REDACTED]
In the process of trying to rescue a tiny vole from Oscar the cat, the little guy did exactly what I should have anticipated him doing, which was to bite me. His little incisors on the top and bottom of his jaw pinched up a little fold on my left index finger and then poked through that fold. Reflexively, I flung the vole away. I was left with two holes in my finger 3/16ths of an inch apart. They proceeded to bleed copiously. I would've been worried about getting an infection, but I'd just started a 21 day course of doxycycline.
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