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quickly diagnosed
Monday, September 18 2017
I was committed to working on The Organization's online store today, and I made myself proud by figuring out how to implement a tricky thing in WordPress that none of the WordPress experts on our staff had wanted to tackle (this was to give shoppers the ability to specify a donation amount in a free-form field instead of just accepting a value). This afternoon, I took a break from my work to run some errands. Checks needed to go into the bank, one of Gretchen's poetry books needed to be mailed to a customer (someone I actually knew, it turned out; she is a friend of my mother's), and Gretchen needed medication to treat a burning in her urinary tract that I quickly diagnosed as a yeast infection, the predictable result of the massive doses of antibiotics she is on (naturally, at CVS they don't have female health products in the place where you'd expect to find them, so I was forced to ask where the fuck I could find medications to treat a yeast infection). The only thing I couldn't pull off while I was out on my errands was mailing off a Verizon DSL router in a small cardboard box. (The tech support guy on the phone had said the $60 router would have gigabit ports, and when it didn't, I certainly wasn't going to be paying $60 for it.) It turns out that you cannot put even a small cardboard box into one of those UPS drop-off boxes. And I didn't have time to drive all the way out to 9W to drop it off at the UPS Store.
This afternoon, I finally decided to do something about the gnawing smell of cat urine in the laboratory. The fragrance finds its way on little tentacles of air to my nose and eats at my ability to focus. The smell was so strong, I'd assumed it was from near my workstation. But I could never find it there. Today I followed my nose back behind the desk near the northwest corner of the laboratory (my workstation being near the northeast corner) and, in the crawspace back behind a bookshelf, I soon determined the culprit was a narrow carpet fragment running where the sloped ceiling meets the floor. That strip of carpet has been there since 2002 and has been host to many a creature needing to go some place and hide. But it had never been pissed in. The piss instead always ended up on some plastic sheeting nearby. But evidently one of the cats finally pissed in it and then they all decided it was a de facto litter box. I rolled it up, cutting it off where some old flatbed scanners and an acoustic guitar are stored on top of it. With that out of the laboratory (never to return!), the air quality improved enormously.
Meanwhile, Gretchen was feeling noticeably better. She was puttering around straightening up things and even sitting at her desktop computer to do a little work. Earlier today she attempted to take a puff on my inhaler to dull her nausea, but the act of taking the puff actually made her throw up a little. But that was as bad as things got. There was no detectable fever and not all that much pain.
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