Member Posts

Entry tags:

animal,
health

the plan

I've got an 11:20am emergency dental appointment. I've got a 3pm emergency vet appointment in another city at the U of Minnesota vet hospital. My 2 regular vets and a 3rd vet had no availability and recommended urgent care.

It took some effort, but I figured out how to order a Lyft with pet privileges. Not difficult once you know how to do it. Living alone has its own challenges. Living without a car presents other challenges. Living alone without a car and needing to manage 2 medical emergencies at once does make planning a little more stressful than usual.

It seems accomplished, though. Now, I'm just waiting until it's time to take the metro bus to the medical center for my dentist visit.

Entry tags:

animal,
health

constipated kitty

After work today, it was clear that Hope is severely constipated again. It started with the puking. Now, she's got everything out of her belly, but she squats everywhere in the house and tries but fails repeatedly to poop. I've already mixed some laxative again in her soft food, but she won't eat or drink anything. I'll have to try getting a vet appointment for her tomorrow.

Unfortunately, I've already got an emergency dental appointment for myself tomorrow morning. I cracked the temporary cap on my molar again, waiting to get the permanent cap. We'll see if the dentist just repairs it with another temp until the permanent mold arrives, or they decide this tooth is too problematic and just pull it finally.

The cat is meowling in pain/discomfort occasionally. Thankfully, I'm in no physical pain myself. We'll both have an unpleasant evening though, waiting for tomorrow to arrive and hopefully some peace of mind for both of us.

Entry tags:

my optimism is getting shaky

Climate change remains, as it was in 2019, my #1 topic of concern requiring immediate political action worldwide. I haven't really discussed climate news for... a long while. It's because what news I find is usually bad. Very bad.

I recently saw a chart that made a non-scientific forward-projection of data from a not-yet-peer-reviewed pre-print article. That's a lot of caveats, basically, for unvalidated ideas. It was an extremely depressing projection, though. It was a convincing "smoke 'em while you've got 'em" argument.

This page offers the pre-print, see the "Download PDF" button at the top right. The Reddit post I saw seemed to get its future projection from a source I tracked down to this Facebook image as the earliest source I could find. Here is a YouTube discussion of that chart too.

It's depressing stuff. I sympathize with David Suzuki on this one. I hope to snap out of it soon and post something positive about our collective future.

Entry tags:

economics,
politics

why no USA cyberfinance infrastructure?

After a recent discussion with brian_bogue about costs of online transactions, I have to wonder publicly a question that I've pondered before:

Why doesn't the USA provide infrastructure for the online economy?

The USA for the last 2 centuries has provided infrastructure for physical money. It performed the costly services of minting coins and printing bills, even vaults and security for storing gold-backed money, so why doesn't it provide the online equivalent? No, I absolutely do not mean selecting a favored cybercurrency. I mean providing the network and database to process microtransactions, providing the bare minimum necessary to maintain a financial system. Why should they? Using a credit/debit card includes notoriously high fees even on tiny transactions. That's profit, sure, but it's profit to some corporation siphoning its benefits from the currency of the nation. This non-cash issue came to the foreground of some news stories during the start of the pandemic, when some businesses decided to not accept cash, since it was thought to be a potential vector for virus transmission.

The currency of the nation seems to be the national government's responsibility, right? I've tried to read up on the Constitution's wording, but clearly I'm not the first to be confused by its vagueness.

My argument is this: The USA federal government is responsible for the creation of durable (enduring frequent transaction between citizens and corporations) money. In the modern age, that transaction is digital, so the USA federal government should be responsible for creating that enduring methodology, and that means providing a "currency network" of servers and databases which people may access "for free" (paid by taxes) with the same ease and zero-transaction-cost of using physical money.

So... does anyone know why we don't do that? It seems obvious to me that we should.

House Items and Cast Finally to Come Off

I have felt good enough starting last weekend to finally start trying to get caught up on everything. The cast doesn't come off until Monday, but I've started working on my IMDT course (Learning, Motivation, and Reinforcement). I think considering I'm in the cast I did pretty solid. I posted to social media some of my first dog-walking client's photos and video. I'm less worried about that because I'm not really trying to become a 'professional' and more of just a hobbyist that maybe gets enough work to subsidise my dog sports with my own dogs.

I finally pulled the wallpaper stripper out and I've removed almost half the wallpaper in the sitting room. It will need a lot of cleaning down further. The floor's a mess - I wasn't worried about the 50-year-old carpet. My plan is to get hard floor installed anyway, preferably a pet-safe flooring. I'm thinking recycled netting for the carpet by Sedna. It'll take ages because I'm waiting until I can feel confident I can install it myself (I am consistently doing more of the housework than Patrick, which I expected, but so far that is including house modifications. It's irritating when I have something like a broken bone going on, but then, I've been borrowing money from the shared account while I'm struggling to cook. I did way better than when I broke my humeral head but I still get tired and irritable trying to cook and clean so I've been eating too many take aways.)

Anyway, that's okay because we're going slow. For this room my goal for now is:

1. Get the walls stripped of wallpaper and clean the walls.
2. Update the sockets in the sitting room - I want to get double sockets with USB connection.
3. Repaint (technically we also want to replace the doors and frames, and install shutters. But extra paint will let us fix that later.)
4. Media wall/bookcase.

Rinse and repeat for the entryway, stairs and landing (except we will want to be moving the entryway - installing a frame/door so the burner room and kitchen are together. That way when we convert to heat pump or GFCH or whatever, we can turn the burner room into a utility/dining area.

Then we'll be doing it for each room. Patrick's room is more urgent because the wallpaper and plaster situation in his room is not looking good (and his closet area needs TLC.) I basically just need to remove the wallpaper, update the sockets and light fitting, get shutters in. When we've converted to Heat Pump or GFCH the water tank will be removed. Then I can turn the wall by the door into a bunch of additional closet/storage space.

I am so desperate to get this cast off.