September 21, 2012

"It is better to go to the hospital to find out it is nothing than to stay home and die of diphtheria."

Advice to a friend last week while we were in Argentina - he had been suffering for 5 days and it was getting worse rather than better. We were in Argentina for 2 weeks of major beef fest! That is pretty much what tied us together as a group, we were the major partners in buying a cow each fall and parting it out. Mrs. Grumpy worked with the sick dude, the older couple were his girlfriend's parents. It was a really fun time but like all such vacations they end on an airplane which can only really, really suck - though on good days it just sucks.

Two days before we left for AR. Mrs. Grumpy declared that she was 50 (I knew that) and that she did not want to be 51 and still living with me (I should have known that but kept talking myself out of believing it). Kind of sucks too since we have been together for about 23 years. We both cried a bunch, promised we would stay friends, and she really did want me to go on this vacation (though I am not sure if it was my company or my share of the expenses that she wanted). Of course, the awkward part is we have a lease that does not run out until February but she is looking to buy a condo. Who knows how this will end. I am not really good at seeing how events will unfold until it actually happens but this does not really bode well. Since she she is the one who is breaking up and moving out, she says that she will continue to pay her share of the expenses until such time as....

For some reason, in the back of my mind I assumed that all the gay people knew all about each other and talked freely amongst themselves but 'Big Guy' asked us "what is with 'The Cop'? Is she/he in the process of changing genders?" she is just herself, I have no idea and would not ask her even if I was interested in the answer. Big Guy is in a 10 relationship and his partner is transitioning to womanhood - Big Guy is gay and proud and it sort of bothers him that when he is walking with his partner, he is considered straight; so I told him about Other Big Guy who has been married for 20 years and his wife is transitioning to man. Other Big Guy is absolutely straight but when he and his wife walk down the street everyone thinks he is gay. What do I know?? b-t-b I use 'Big Guy' for both because both are over 6'4", over 300 pounds and each can bench 400 pounds. Big Guy is able to use a concrete cutter on a wall - think about that for a minute, he can lift that big fucking gas-driven hunk of metal and cut a door-frame out of a concrete wall. Other Big Guy plays with boomerangs.

So there is a couple thousand dollars of electronics in the room - the only sound is of clicking keyboards and/or tippy-taps of smart phones as everyone but me is blogging about Argentina as it happens. Anyway, we came back the beginning of the week (yeah I am blogging about it but after not during).

The trip back was hell for me; I ran out of Vicodin a couple days before the trip home and it was really difficult to get NSAIDs out of the AR pharmacies so I ended up spending 24 hours with no pain-relievers. Now you have to realize that I have a problem with pain - I have peripheral neuropathy (translates as unexplained pain in my hands and feet - they kind of burn all the time), rheumatoid arthritis, and carpal tunnel - and, temporarily, tennis elbow) and so I was in pain for the entire trip and only fell asleep a couple times for about 2 or 3 hours. There was no distraction which is my usual way to combat the peripheral neuropathy. My doctor laughs and says that I have a prescription to play first person shooters for pain as needed.

June 12,2012

We have learned that a furlough is coming soon - at first, I thought it was this week but they have to give us at least 5 days notice. I was talking on the elevator with a couple of the managers and they said that the temp. seasonals (they are so temp that they do not get benefits) were kept on past their 'due date' and now get benefits; this is hint that there might not be much of a furlough. The rule for seasonals is that they have to be furloughed for at least one pay period each year or they become permanent (or some other harsh punishment). Yesterday, I had my 2 vacation requests okay-ed; 2 weeks in September so I can go to Argentina with beef crowd (we buy a cow every year and split the meat after it is butchered. Our farmer is a Mennonite from across the mountains gets them at 6 months and finishes them on grass. Anyway, we are 6 couples who are renting a 6 bedroom house for 2 weeks in Buenos Aires - should be fun. I am taking my birthday off + the rest of the week. They denied my request for the week of the 4th of July.

The issue with the furlough this year is that there has been so much ID theft (you know, where people buy ss#s and names so they can file a couple hundred return hoping that a couple get past the internal testing. Most of the returns are stopped from refunding out but it causes an immense burden on the real people who have to go through the process. It generally takes 120 days for the ID theft unit to send a letter of confirmation that they are indeed victims of ID theft and that we will watch their account for the next 3 years. We have no time frame for when the refund will come out - it could be 6-8 weeks, it could before Christmas, or you might get next years refund before this years. Some estimates are that there are of a million victims of ID theft this year. We are swamped; we log on in the morning and do support all da

June 2, 2012

Gender perceptions and sexual preferences have been on my mind lately. A friend of mine was griping the other day that people see him as a straight man because the love of his life has changed her gender. She was a guy when they fell in love and in the intervening years she decided to transgender (can that be used as a verb that way? Nope, I just found this blog/post). My friend still loves her but is a loud and proud gay so it kind of bothers him (on an intellectual level at least) that when people see them together, they see a heterosexual couple. A different friend had been married to his wife for 15 years when she decided that she was a man and started hormone therapy. They are still together; they both have beards and now when people see them walking down the street they think they are a gay couple. Oddly enough both of the 'husbands' are over 6 ft 6 in tall and weigh over 300 pounds, one can use a concrete cutter overhead and the other slams 350 pounds in the squat machine; one of the partners is trainer in a gym and the other is a network geek. The couples do not know each other - they are from different decades.

My first experience with a transsexual man was back in the 1970s. I played D&D with a pretty diverse crowd; we smoked a lot of dope, did some acid, and played D&D 2 times a week for hours on end. One of players was a woman who was a stripper down on First Avenue (across the street from the Pike Place Market). She called herself The Grey Mouser (we just called her Mouser). We assumed that she was a lesbian but when she and her partner came back from a cross-country trip in an huge old van they named Leviathan she started on her hormones and then he grew a beard. It took me a while to get the pronouns right. One friend kept kicking me under the table; I got fed up and yelled "Mouser has been a friend for 8 years, he understands that mistakes will be made". Pissed me off a bit - but I did eventually stop using feminine pronouns. He went in to get his driver's license renewed and the clerk looked at him and said "looks like someone made a mistake and checked female on your license; let me fix that for you" and he got his gender changed. Later he got married and move off into the country way south of town. When Mrs. Grumpy and I went off on her post-doc hot-time tour, spending about 7 years split between Tuscon and Raleigh (in a car with no a/c!). By the time we got back the 'tribe' had pretty much gone their separate ways. I did run into Mouser's ex-wife who complained about community property and how Mouser got half of everything without yadda, yadda, yadda.

You haven't played Dungeons And Dragons until you've played it high on acid.

April 27, 2012

I have given up on the 'cute' titles for my post - they make sense when I start but.... Oddly enough, the whole reason I started my blog never actually happened; as far as I can tell, no kidney stone (yay!). Work is a bitch - I have been on ID theft since the second week in January. The plan during the first week of Jan was that ID theft was such a 'harsh' duty, they would spread it out - instead of having a week of id theft each month, more people would be put on call and each person would only have id theft 1 day a week. That changed real fast; it is believed that there have been more than a half a million cases of ID theft this year alone. Compare that to approximately 400,000 cases from 2009 to 2011.

It is pretty intense having to help people through a pretty harrowing experience while keeping an eye on the clock - the tax payers tell me they waited almost an hour to get through; many hang up out of frustration. Worse yet, they put the phone down for a moment and I take the call and I have to disconnect if no one answers within a certain time frame. Once I walk them through getting their return filed and telling who else to contact to protect themselves, then I have to tell them it will be 90-120 days before the ID theft team contacts them - even worse, that is only informing the taxpayer that we have verified their identity - there is no time frame for the actual processing of the return which does not start until we verify the TP's id. There are people right now who are just getting their 2010 tax refunds.

Today, Friday my manager came by at 4:00 to tell us we can get off the id theft line for the rest of the day - I turn off my phone at 4:20 so "yippee!" I got 20 minutes of helping people pay their past due tax bill. I do what I can to help; I try to keep up-beat. I think that being a seasonal worker will keep me sane; my tour of duty ends June 15 - they can extend it but they have to furlough me for at least 14 day by the end of June to keep me in seasonal. They can call me back after that. Last year, I was called back for 6 weeks early September, then again at the beginning of December. Boom, it was January and my ToD began; they up-skilled me to ID theft during the first week and suddenly, here I am.

Thanks for letting me rant.

More distractions

I have not written much lately; mostly, because Deus Ex: Human Evolution is so much fun. I am working - I finally got my dream hours (8:00am to 4:30 pm) - I work out after work; I play a PBeM game (Olympia), try and keep up with the Liberal blogosphere, and play Deus Ex - I played the first 2 and loved them - it keeps me from many other things I could/should be doing.

Have you been paying attention to politics lately? What do you think of the Republican presidential candidates?
Boring! Not even worth laughing about right now. I wonder if the Republicans will end up actually having their convention and choosing someone who might actually have a chance to beat Obama - I don't think the conventions have actually had an impact on who the candidate is since the 1960s. This one could prove interesting. The other possibility is that one of the non-winners (normally, I would say 'losers' but....) will run as a 3rd party candidate who might peal away some independents from either side.

The Oscars are on and it is boring me; I sent off my turn to Olympia and can't make any more changes until some of my allies get back to me; I am at a Boss fight in DE:HE and the Boss is kicking my butt - he has this really bad-assed gun that I can barely avoid plus he is tossing gas grenades at me and he disappears and jumps over walls while I have had my 'upgrades' disabled, sigh!

BRB (I think I will read a couple more blogs /BRB

Well, I made it through all the blogs I wanted to read, the Oscars are over, I have been killed 4 or 5 times now and it is time for me to do my drugs for bed (the actual med.s I take aren't many - the most important is the Ambien generic)

Just died a couple more times and I am pretty adrenalled up so I had better sit here and calm down or i will never get to sleep. Next major purchase will be my passport - it is now about $150 to renew one.

Ah, well - time for bed and then another week of work.

The lost years

I think I know where it started; it was a comment made on the spur of the moment, trying to look cool. I have never been part of a group; I have ADD, sleep apnea, and insomnia - these have been with me for as long as I can remember. Heck, even in high school I played football for 4 years (lettered 3 of them) but I was not a jock - a buddy and I stole a box of Mars Bars (specifically because of their soft interior), a bunch of chocolate flavored x-lax, some Chicklets and some Chicklet-like laxatives; we carefully opened the Mars Bars on one end and pushed 4 squares of x-lax into each, swapped out the chicklets for the gum laxatives and gave them to the rest of the football team. I swear the sewage system overloaded; with the entire football team sitting on the toilet all night. We only wished we could have seen it. Of course, the payback was painful - in practice, the team tackled us constantly (and I was the center, heh - Jim Strickerts my friend, was a halfback).

Anyway, by the time I got to college I was lost; ADD does odd things, like if someone is not in my face I forget about them (really, I lost some friends both male and female because if I did not see them or they did not call me, I would forget about them), I slept all the time and just sort of wandered around campus in a daze. My final GPA was .69 and it was that high because I got "A"s sports classes like karate, and stuff. Anyway, I was in the locker room when I hear someone around the corner say that he had some pot for sale. To sound cool, I said "hey, if you have any extra, let me know". Next thing you know, I got a call from the guy, saying he had a bag of pot for me. He sold me a lid for $10.00 (this is back in the old days - 1967 - when pot was cheap and sold by the lid, the match-box, or the joint. So I started smoking pot. Then I joined the Marine Corps, think about that for a moment - ADD, insomnia, sleep apnea and weapons, lots and lots of weapons. I got to shoot M79 grenade launchers, toss grenades, shoot m60 machine guns, shoot marksman+ at the firing range but I could fall asleep with a DI's hand on my throat screaming at me to wake up. A buddy and I rented a car and took a trip to Chicago on Route 66 - the car was a Carmen Ghia.



We got caught, put in the Great Lakes brig and flown back to San Diego, my buddy went back to our company,but since we were separated and I was put into Headquarters Battalion and Casual company made up of Marines who were their way out for in-service/pre-service use of drugs. The corporal sold me my first LSD, the gunny sold me some pot, and a couple jar-heads kept saying "it smells like pot", "who's smoking pot" as a joke because they were sure no one would be dumb enough to smoke pot in the common room. I had to go up to the guys and offer them a toke if they would shut up - they were stunned and apologized for being stupid. Later that night while I was like really, really stoned on acid, the MPs came crashing into the barracks; after a bunch of shouting and hollering, the Sargent said "Look if you are going to smoke pot in here, please warn the firewatch so they don't keep making fire reports! Can I get a toke?"

Some things still puzzle me.

Late one afternoon I walked near an area that was closed, bummed me out; when I turned around there were a couple black guys were standing there. One of them said "What are you doing here,N&&&r?" I looked behind me and around then looked back and said "You must be talking to someone else". They laughed, walking away saying "I didn't know white guys had a sense of humor". I never did figure out had happened.

I was sitting in the S.U.B. at Eastern Montana College (Billings, MT - now a University, used to a 'Normal' school meaning a teacher's college), when this black guy sat down with us and introduced himself. He chatted for a while; told us that he did tan by showing us the tan-line under his watch; then he went off to another table. This was the first time I had ever seen a black guy, let alone talked with one.

I was snorkeling about 200 yards off of Green Island on the Great Barrier Reef, taking pictures and generally being completely blown away by the colors, the fish, the whole 'abundance of life' thing going on. Something bothered me but I don't know what. I looked around but did not see anyone or anything around but I was really, really uncomfortable so I headed back to the beach - just in time get evacuated from the island due to Cyclone Muni. The boat-ride back to Australia was on a trimaran which made the 14 ft swells FUN! There were a bunch of us standing the front of the trimaran riding it like a roller-coaster - up to the top of a swell, then drop 14 feet to the trough; there was nothing like it (the fact that it was a trimaran kept all the motion up and down with very little side-to-side motion). Green Island was swept pretty clean by the cyclone.

I was playing with the fire in the fireplace at our cabin in the tobacco root mountains; this annoyed grandma (seems like everything annoyed her) and she told me to go outside to play. I grabbed a handful of kitchen matches and went out to play. Bored with the tiny flames from burning pine needles, I opened the valve on the 40 gallon gas tank and trickled some gas and the flames got pretty large. When the flames began to die, I opened the valve a little more so more gas would come out; hah, this produced even more flames in a wider pool. This eventually got boring so I wandered off to do something else. Nothing burned down and I did not start a fire; the only reason I can think of that I survived was the gasoline was too cold - it is the fumes that burn not the liquid.