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medical marijuana proves its power
Sunday, September 17 2017
With Gretchen in her sick bed, I have a number of extra chores in the morning. I fetch her orange juice and then two pieces of toast. Then I give her her two antibiotic tablets (one is big so I snap it into two pieces, so she actually has to swallow three different objects). With the antibiotics, I supply a little applesauce to cover the bitterness of the smaller of the pills. Gretchen also usually needs an expensive anti-nausea tablet (ondansetron) some time before eating the toast. Once Gretchen is all squared away, I can take the dogs on their morning walk. They usually go off on their own and don't return until some time later in the afternoon.
Mercifully, our tenants in our various rental properties had been strangely quiet during all of Gretchen's recent adventure in the American healthcare clusterfuck. But within the past few days that all changed. Suddenly the woman in 1L at the brick mansion was freaking out about the security of the building. They'd apparently been trying their keys on each others' doors and finding that all their keys open all (or most of) the doors. Gretchen had tested the keys in the past and thought this not to be the case, but perhaps that had been wishful thinking, as some of the keys open some of the locks more easily than others. Today I planned to go to the brick mansion to change three of the locks to make them so they required a different key from the front door. Before leaving, I thought I'd look over all the keys on the landlord keyring to see what was what. Indeed, a lot of the keys for a lot of the doors were all identical. There actually appeared to be two different key shapes spread out across all the locks. What a mess!
I drove out to Home Depot and bought three sets of locking doorknobs with matching (but separate) deadbolts. Amusingly, if one buys locking systems at a place like Home Depot, it's easy to buy several that all have the same keys. Apparently they are not randomized much between production and shelving. Obviously, if I installed locks that accepted the same keys in different apartments, I wouldn't be fixing anything. So I had to look at the keys that came with each locking kit to confirm that they were all different (at least the packaging was clear!).
I then went next door to the ShopRite, which is undergoing massive reconstruction on its north end. The parking lot between it and the Home Depot is now a construction site featuring tilt-up concrete walls and a huge mountain of gravel. Strangely, though, the ShopRite itself was open and as busy as ever. I found myself behind an old woman with splotchy skin who was buying nothing but cheap cooking oil and heavily-processed animal products (including a package of pre-fried chicken drumsticks). As for me, most of what I had was orange juice, cranberry juice, and various vegan soups for when Gretchen starts feeling better.
At the brick mansion, I quickly ran across the young male half of the couple who live in #2, and he helped me install his new lock first thing. The installation wasn't perfect, as the damn deadbolt was hard to turn with a key, but it didn't take long to do. I quickly gave up on the lock on the back door of #1L, which had a surface-mount deadbolting system that shot bolts vertically through a special chunk of metal attached to the door frame. It was an unusual design, and I didn't have anything to replace it. So I finished up by replacing the lock on #3, the attic apartment.
While at Herzog's to make copies of the keys for the new locks, I saw they were selling a mechanism similar to the odd vertical-deadbolt lock I'd seen on the backdoor of #1L. It was, I learned, something called an "anti-jimmying deadbolt." And it turns out that one doesn't always have to buy whole new locksets for a door (unless you need matching deadbolts, as I had). For the anti-jimmying deadbolt, all I needed to replace was the key cylinder, a $7 item (the lock sets, by contrast, had been about $30/each).
After my landlording chores were done, I celebrated with a Little Sumpin' Sumpin' and a drive to the Tibetan Center thrift store. I couldn't find anything I wanted there until I looked under a shelving unit to see a long-neglected plastic container full of old tools: screwdrivers, a crescent wrench, and numerous pliers (some of the channel-locking variety). With a price of only $4, I took it immediately to the cashier. The woman working today is not the ideal staffer to buy from, and she seemed taken aback by how cheap the box of tools was. But there was the price, so that was what she charged me.
Gretchen's health was decidedly worse today than it had been yesterday. This evening she even ran a bit of fever, peaking out at 100.2 degrees Fahrenheit. She called her father in a bit of a panic, but he talked her down by saying "anything less than 100.4 is not a fever." By this evening it was down to 99 point something, though her anti-nausea medication was doing no good. So I put some fresh marijuana in the vaporizer and had her take a couple puffs from that. To her delight, this seemed to work nicely, quickly erasing her nausea and then making her relax in bed and fall asleep in a way she'd been unable to do in the past. So yeah, I know it's illegal because of its association with black people, hippies, and Mexicans, but marijuana is a real drug with useful properties. (It should be noted that Gretchen is not normally a fan of marijuana and is about as skeptical of its medicinal value as any coastal progressive, but she was sure in this particular case that it had worked much better than the ondansetron that pharmaceutical companies pass off as their best solution to the nausea problem.)
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