Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   off-brand peanuts
Thursday, September 14 2017

location: Room 501, Best Western Sovereign Hotel, Western Avenue, Albany New York

I awoke not long after 6:30am and never went back to sleep. Eventually I took a bath in the hotel room's tiny bathtub and then, leisurely, made my way down to the hotel's restaurant area, where the breakfast was being served. I'm not into breakfast, particularly as it is practiced outside the constraints of veganism, but I have an interest in coffee and any buffer to keep it from eating tiny holes in my stomach lining (not that that actually happens). So I sat alone by myself in a booth eating bread and drinking coffee and pecking away at Hyrax, my trusty seven year old laptop. Periodically I'd get up and try to wrangle some toast out of the semi-operational toaster, averting my eyes so as to avoid looking at the breakfasts of the others. Eventually Gretchen's parents materialized and occupied a nearby booth. I offered to let them sit with me but for some reason they either wanted to give me privacy or wanted privacy for themselves. (I don't mind breakfasting with other vegans.)
On the drive back to the hospital, I stopped at a strip mall mostly to get myself some provisions from a RiteAid. In the face of Gretchen's dire medical condition, I hadn't been complaining much about my own trivial medical issues. But the ache in and around my left hip joint that I've had since February has become especially bad of late, and I've been taking ibuprofen to keep it from distracting me. (Interestingly, that discomfort went away entirely while we were in Uganda, though it returned the moment I got back.) I've also been suffering from bad bouts of acid reflux, though fortunately I keep a big bottle of antacids in the glove compartments of both cars. My main reason for going into RiteAid was to get myself a bottle of ibuprofen, though I also wanted some form of food to complete the partial nutrients offered by the bread I'd just eaten. I settled on a $1 bag of off-brand peanuts. While there, I also looked at all the little gadgets and office supplies that drug stores sell, particularly the memory sticks, USB adapters, and scientific calculators. (When I was a kid, the only accessible form of miniaturized computational power came in the form of a scientific calculator, so I will always have a nostalgic interest in them.) Interestingly, RiteAid had such gadets in two or three totally separate parts of the store. And the prices (unlike those for off-brand peanuts) were grossly inflated.
I have to tell you, those $1 were almost inedible. For most commodities, brand makes no difference. But for peanuts, you don't want to go off-brand. These tasted old and stale. I should've kept looking until I found peanuts packaged by PlantersTM.
In Gretchen's hotel room, I found Gretchen's parents but no Gretchen. She was down in radiology getting another CT scan (after having choked down one or two quarts of that foul "contrast" they make you drink). The roommate from yesterday was in the process of leaving, making the room temporarily single again.
While I was eating some tempeh-based "chicken" salad from the Honest Weight Food Co-op, Gretchen was wheeled back from radiology. She was in a horrible state, having gotten nauseated and thrown up the contrast. She also hadn't had pain medication in many hours, and was reporting a pain level of 6/10. The nurse immediately gave her morphine and an anti-nausea medication (both via injection), and, after awhile, this seemed to take the edge off Gretchen's discomfort. She drifted into that non-sleep twilight that passes for sleep in a hospital setting.
Meanwhile I went off in search of a good place to have a videoconference with the backend team in my remote workplace. The place where I'd done this two days ago on the first floor was much noisier today, and a nice lounge on the sixth floor was dominated by a too-loud television (I wish I'd brought a TV-B-Gone!). But a little further down the hall, I found a room with no beds in it (the type of of place rcommended by Gretchen's father). It had a chair and little desklike area, so I set up there. The only real noise was from the ventillation system and occasional loud nurses in the hallway. Nobody bothered me during my videoconference, which went as well as such conferences go at home. Surprisingly, the hospital's internet had the necessary bandwidth.
I went back to check in on Gretchen briefly, but then it was time for back-to-back meetings about the new online store. Nicole is super supportive of my need to care for Gretchen and wondered why I was even doing anything for The Organization. I told her that there's a lot of downtime in a hospital and I might as well use it for something, though "I'm not at 100%."

Back in Gretchen's hospital room, she already had another roommate, an old grotesquely-fat white woman. You see a lot of fat people in a hospital, making it clear that, under a utopian regime where healthcare is free, there should be a medical surcharge on a large range of fattening foods (including a few that I myself enjoy).
Gretchen was still in a morphine haze, and hanging around in that hospital room was unpleasant, so I set off to work in a place with non-medical noises and a solid table. I wanted some place non-medical enough where I could be comfortable eating food, and that bedless hospital room seemed inappropriate. So I went to the cafeteria, dominated by a Boar's Head franchise. There were actually vegan options in the prepared-food cooler, including California-roll sushi (which would be expiring tomorrow). I got that and, down at the Starbucks Franchise on the ground floor, a large (and surprisingly cheap) soy cappuccino. I set up on a round table nearby and put on headphones so I could listen to music. I proceeded to work at about 30% efficiency on my usual tasks, hobbled partly by the size of the single screen on my laptop. Eventually some alarm that seemed like a fire alarm went off, but it was accompanied by a robotic voice speaking in code, and nobody seemed to be responding to it. So I kept doing what I was doing.
When I returned to Gretchen's room, she still seemed zonked out, but in actuality she was a bit miffed at me for having failed to check in for a couple hours. The news was that the drains to the fallopian abscesses had been removed (without anæsthesia!) and Gretchen would be released from the hospital tomorrow. The original plan was actually for her to be released today, but one of the doctors thought she should be monitored through the night to make sure the oral antibiotics she was now on would be sufficient. So I gathered what Gretchen didn't need (including three of the four vases of flowers, the latest having come from my employer earlier today) and drove back to Hurley.
The poor critters had slept in the house by themselves last night, something that almost never happens for the dogs. But they'd handled it okay and nothing bad seemed to have happened.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?170914

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