Old Guy

This was Mystery when the Engineer brought him home almost nineteen years ago. He was the runt of his litter, eternally struggling with seven other siblings to get at the teats of a mother who really wasn’t interested in the job. (The Engineer had negotiations with the feckless college kid friends who hadn’t gotten their cat fixed, but that was another story.)

At the time, the Engineer didn’t live with me, but I got to watch Mystery grow up, all the same. He liked my hair.

He arrived here in 2015, along with two of his sisters. He’s the only one left now. Big, derpy, shamelessly greedy for food, to the point that he’d butt other cats’ heads out of the way to get at a dish; passionate about the juice off water-packed tuna, a mighty hunter of crocheted cat toys, around which he would utter that deep-throated cry of triumph with which cats celebrate the capture of wily prey. Both sisters learned that a perfunctory lick on Mystery’s forehead would be rewarded with a full-scale grooming session. He became Mr. Ferguson’s dopey bowling buddy, the only other cat Nickel the Bengal would tolerate; eighteen pounds of blond doofus, rapidly learning that a leap to the back of the couch facing the entry door would garner petting and attention from my clients, to the point he became something of an attractive nuisance (feature me waiting patiently through ten or fifteen minutes of firehosed baby-talk while a triathlete Amazon kisses and skritches History’s Greatest Attention Slut).

He weighs about eight pounds now, if he’s slightly damp.

Old kitties get dicky kidneys, and for a couple of years now he’s been getting infused fluids, a by now choregraphed ritual involving a towel wrap and me seated on the commode lid holding him while the Engineer pops a #18 needle under the skin of his scruff — first three times a week, then every day, and now twice daily. He sits patiently, rarely uttering a sound. Afterwards, there are treats.

Over the winter he stopped eating the treats. Gradually he stopped eating much of anything.

He walks haltingly, the arthritis supplement no longer helping because he won’t eat the food it’s mixed in. He’s taken possession of a cat bed next to the heat register, a location that’s been a fan favorite in this house since before he arrived. Last fall, when we rebuilt the screened porch off the kitchen into a full-glass enclosure, he gravitated into the sunbeams that strike the pedestal of a cat platform out there for most of the day; when we pick him up to give him his fluid treatment, his fur is toasty even when the porch is cool.

Sometimes I stand there looking down at him until I can tell he’s still breathing.

He still loves the Engineer’s head, which he uses for a pillow at night, and the sealed-oil radiator in the bathroom, which he communes with every morning. I haven’t heard his deep, almost subsonic purr for a while now, though, and being petted doesn’t seem to make an impression. The last time I saw him get up on the sofa back was a few weeks ago. He doesn’t groom to speak of. When I see him stumble, or take a few steps and then sit down; when I see him leave his heatybed, look around with a confused demeanor and then hobble back, I wonder if there’s anything left for him, and if it’s time to make that call that you eventually have to make.

But then I see him like this — this morning, when he jumped stiffly down from the bed and went to the top of the stairs, announcing in no uncertain terms that it was time for him to be carried down. He went straight to the porch.

I see him like this, and I still see joy.

It’s not time yet.

Dirt

So I have the dirt.

I mean, literally. What happened was, for the first time in two years we had enough rain at one time to be measured (thanks, global warming). Two back-to-back snowstorms had already saturated ground that had been pretty much fired in a kiln for most of 2022 and 2023, and disagreeably enough, there I was with an obscene-looking object called a Hot Hog, sopping up the water that began to seep into the basement.

(A Hot Hog, or hazmat pig, is a sort of absorbent draft blocker used by emergency workers to contain spills; each one is a yard-long sausage of cloth in a suggestive pink color, stuffed with a material that can suck up an impressive liquid volume. I used to date an emergency services groupie. One useful thing that came of that.)

I don’t usually get water coming in — twice in almost thirty years, once after a week’s deluge, once after an enterprising chipmunk dug his burrow straight down beside the house. So after I tucked the Hot Hog flush against the baseboard and spread out old beach towels, we went looking for the problem. Downspout okay. Gutter clear. The Engineer finally homed in on the site of the trench dug in late 2021, after he replaced a Jetta that had seen better days — about 20 years of them — with a little electric Cooper that’s barely been driven now that he works from home in his jammies. At the time, we didn’t expect that to be a permanent thing, and we jumped on a tax credit for installing a home charger, which meant drilling through the house wall and running conduit through a trench to the driveway. It looks as if the excavated area has slowly developed into a swale that collects water and runs it toward the foundation. At least that’s the theory.

So. We needed dirt to rebuild the grade. I discovered there was a business that will sell you any amount of fill dirt (and a couple dozen other earth products), no order too large or too small. Some back-of-the-envelope calculations, a few e-mails and several ridiculously cheerful field videos later (guys just LOVE operating dump trucks and backhoes, apparently) I made a new best friend. Chuck actually answers the phone when you call, without your having to sit through Please Do Not Bypass Because Our Prompts Have Recently Changed. Chuck responds to e-mails with a thumbs-up emoji the size of a salad plate. Chuck wanted to know what the Engineer and I did for a living that we could both do from home, and looked up my address on Google Earth, and wanted to know if that was a Cape Cod and wow, new roof and new siding, sweet little house. Chuck promised to use his smallest truck and deliver himself and be careful not to take down my phone line.

Chuck showed up at eight-fifteen this morning, a good old boy in the classic mode — sunburned, balding, big-bellied and grinning — and delicately, daintily tilted the bed of the cutest little dump truck you ever saw, neatly avoiding the power lines and heaping fill dirt as clean as beach sand on the end of my drive.

“You said you were a massage therapist?” he said. “My son’s a massage therapist. He taught me about the woo woo. I’m all into the woo woo now. The universe! Good energy! I try to have good energy!”

Then he gave me a thumbs up, leapt back into his little truck and rumbled off.

I think he does have good energy. My back, which was giving me gyp when I got out of bed, feels better now. A good thing because now we have to shovel all that dirt.

It was almost worth a leaky basement.

Novavaxed!

I thought it’d never happen.

I have been wonking Novavax since the early weeks of vaccine development. The first publicized graph of efficacy jumped out at me: Novavax, a more traditional protein-based vaccine (like the flu shots you probably get) outperformed the mRNA vaccines in early trials by more than a squeak, specifically with respect to protecting you from viral variants. As we know by now, mutating is Covid’s superpower. It’s like the Skrull in the Marvel universe; it just changes its appearance to something your immune system doesn’t recognize. The Novavax technology concentrates on proteins that are common to all the variants. Made perfect sense.

Naturally, the FDA and CDC sent it back to the drawing board. Ostensibly that was about a flaw in early trial protocols, but if I have sour thoughts about cozy relationships between the government and the much wealthier pharma companies that made the mRNA vaccines, can you blame me? It took over a year and several boosters of Moderna and Pfizer, both of which kicked the shit out of me (which no vaccine has ever done before), to see Novavax finally become available. And then…

The CDC made a bullshit rule that if you had already had a booster of the mRNA vaccines, you couldn’t get it.

No rational explanation whatever given. I’d followed studies that showed equal or even superior protection from mixing the two technologies, and no downsides (every man jack who’d gotten Novavax and cared to report out on social media said they had zilch reaction). But the embargo dragged on from the fall of 2022 right through most of this year.

I have to hand it to people who are willing to show up in person and raise hell, which is what happened over the summer when the three-initial agencies were making plans for fall boosters. There were people testifying end to end before the FDA, repeating “Give us Novavax” with the persistence of the protestors who objected to the Gregorian calendar back in the day, crying “Give us back our eleven days.” I’m way too exhausted with this bullshit and sick of people to gird my loins like that any more, and only added my voice online. Anyway, we got it.

And this Monday — over a month since the mRNA fall shots rolled out everywhere — my pharmacy got it. (A few places had it earlier, but no, I am not going into the teeming hell that is Costco.)

Of course there was a dick-dance.

The Engineer and I showed up only to find the pharmacist apologetically saying that she had gotten mixed messages from her managers, and had to call someone at a yet higher pay grade and make sure she was authorized to give it. Dafuq. (What was she supposed to do with it, have it bronzed?) That took fifteen or twenty minutes, most of it spent out in the parking lot avoiding all the exhaled air from the uniformly unmasked patrons of the local Safeway.

Then it turned out the Engineer’s insurance wouldn’t pay, because his company only offers Kaiser, and they want you to go to one of their facilities to get vaccinated, except they still don’t have Novavax, and despite not having been eligible for a booster for over a year, he’s been holding out to get it. A hundred and sixty dollars later we were in business. An option that a lot of people don’t have, I know full well.

So that’s what has to happen before you can get what may well turn out to be the most durable and protective immunization against a WHO class 3 pathogen (for comparison, that’s in a category with HIV and tuberculosis): first you have to wait two years past the debut of the next best option, then fight an uphill fight against the Protectors Of Public Health ™, then wait weeks more while you hover over the online Vaccine Finder, then, if you’re not carrying the right insurance (or not insured at all), open up your wallet. This fucking country.

Mr. Saxon

There are few things more chilling than that feeling you get when you press a familiar button and nothing happens.

This was the third time — the last two occasions disturbingly close together. Each time, something eventually took, in a delicate echo of the time-honored rite of kicking the Coke machine, but clearly steps had to be taken.

Since 2008, I’ve run hand-built computers, thanks to The Engineer, who at the time was de facto godfather to a teenager who’d built his first machine when he was eleven. (He’s now thirty-three and a freelance videographer, but that’s another story.) This is humbling for a surrogate parent with a graduate degree in his field and all sorts of certificates, and nothing would do but that he tackle the job himself (occasionally applying to the sprout for technical tips), replacing my failing Dell with a custom rig housed in a case brand-named Bach. The first iteration was obviously Johann Sebastian. Johann Christian (the “London Bach”) came next, when Sebastian’s motherboard started to age out, and a few years ago, after a round of quaint malfunctions, Carl Philip Emanuel replaced him.

The historic Bach had eighteen kids but clearly I was not going to get through them; when the power button starts to fail, it’s the contacts in the case that are breaking down, and I reflected that 2008 was, well, fifteen years ago (fuck me, how’d that happen?). Several days of comparison shopping later we settled on a new case and some upgraded peripherals (“upgrade” is probably a fancy word when the old optical drive, forex, just doesn’t work any more). I settled on the model that the Engineer had eventually chosen for his own machine, the “Cooler Master.” We spent all Sunday performing the brain transplant.

Meet Mr. Saxon.

Yes, he’s named for my favorite iteration of Doctor Who’s archenemy, The Master. It may seem counterintuitive to adopt a mustache-twirling villain into my electronic household, but for one thing, you can’t seem to kill the bastard, and for another, he is a truly magnificent bastard — especially John Simm’s unhinged version, who boasts the added feat of coming back as himself before regenerating into his next incarnation. (If this makes no sense to you, just accept that anyone who tries to explain Doctor Who to an unacquainted party comes off sounding like a mental lunatic.)

In that video, he’s already gotten himself elected Prime Minister, invited the Hostile Aliens Of The Week to rain destruction on Earth, and refused the customary regeneration of his people, the Time Lords (regeneration into a different body was a dramatic device that originated when it became apparent that enthusiasm for the show was going to outlast the career of the first Doctor, cast back in the Sixties). But never fear, he’s got a Death Eater-like cult of devotees and a plan.

Well. I’m all for that kind of durability.

Mr. Saxon’s quite spiffy, with four USB-3 ports and audio jacks on the front (no more fumbling behind the case), a daintier footprint than the Bachs, and the quietest fans ever. You’ll never hear him sneaking up on you.

The Mask Fairy Strikes Again

Today the air quality south of DC is “your next-door neighbor used too many charcoal starters and burnt his barbecue,” with haze visible from the opposite end of a suburban block, but my N95 held up admirably yesterday and I went for it again this morning. There’s something to be said for having a giant assortment of the requisite prophylaxis — my collection of masks spans several models of N95, plus four options of KN95 for people passing through, including petite and tie-dye. When I started going back to the dentist — a situation that’s still fraught, as I seem to have alienated everyone by refusing point-blank to be treated by the hygienist with The Worst Personality In The World ™, who came on board during the pandemic — I went up and down the office, handing respirators to everyone in a sloppy surgical and explaining “I am the Mask Fairy.” You haven’t seen weaponized incompetence at its finest till you’ve seen someone (like the horrible hygienist) claim to be defeated by the double headstraps and nosepiece of an N95, but carrying a few KN95s, which no one can complain are hard to figure out, has become a habit.

So I rounded the corner near my house, still half enjoying the eerie, art-film color of the filtered sunlight, and found myself across from a guy in a baggy blue, walking his dog. At least he clearly got the whole “mask in the Code Red air” thing, so I skipped over to him and said “Hello, fellow masker! Let me offer you something twice as effective as that surgical mask!” I am sure I looked like one of those 1960s commercials for Glad Wrap, or the ones where an obscenely genial home invader says Hi Guy out of your bathroom cabinet and gives you a better shaving cream, as I expounded on the difference between leaky basic masks and fitted multilayer respirators. But he took it, and thanked me and wished me a great day as he put it on.

The runner I met a mile further on politely declined, but I guess batting .500 is better than not trying. Maybe seeing the air turn orange and blowing out boogers the size of jellybeans will get across to people that you can inhale things that will fuck your shit up, and the whole notion of masking will have a chance of making a comeback. I stand ready to be the Mask Fairy again.

Smoke

This morning, when I checked my mail, the Washington Post weather forecast was “partly sunny, smoky and breezy.”

So this is where we are now.

I haven’t posted in ages because nothing has changed in ages. There’s still a pandemic that no one wants to talk about (everyone I hear from has “a cold I can’t shake” that couldn’t possibly be Covid), so I’m still essentially living in my cave, seeing a few masked, equally unsocial clients in an unfunny iteration of Groundhog Day. The news is a steady drip of the Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse doing a world tour. Congress can’t pass gas. It’s like a pretentious art film where you keep returning to the same weird, ominous place, no matter how many times you try to get out of the labyrinth; like an episode of The Prisoner where you never meet the new Number Two.

At least today’s climate meshugges creates an interesting change of scenery. The last time I smelled smoke in the air, I think the wildfires were in North Carolina; more recently, as I understand it, Nova Scotia, but this is the first I’ve been able to notice it. The sun has a lens-flare look behind a lemony haze, turning everything outside into the townscape of an old, yellowing celluloid film. I’m living ten years before I was born. There’s another weird world around the corner. I’m going to get to the top of the next hill and find myself in a different version of reality, like someone in a Philip K. Dick novel.

It’s not the same depressing prospect I’ve been waking up to, feeling increasingly numb, for what must be months now. I’ve been losing the ability even to imagine existing any other way. It’s still depressing, but at least it feels different. An illusion, but I’ll take it.

I Could Wear This All Day

It was going to happen.

What it was, was in the fullness of time, my phone and Internet plan came up for renewal, and there was a better and faster and cheaper plan available but, as we used to say, you had to fuck a moose (this was the generic term in my home, back in the day, for direct-mail Free Offers of Wonderful Things that only required you to drive somewhere two hours away, or Sit Through A Short Presentation). Meaning, in this case, that equipment inside and outside the house had to be changed out, which meant blocking out a morning, which is definitely a First World Problem, but in These Our Times it’s also a “someone has to come in my house in the age of plagues” problem.

We do not screw around with this thing. If someone has to cross my threshold, the casement windows get cranked open in any weather that won’t blow out the HVAC, all the Corsi-Rosenthal boxes are always running and we wear N95s. Belt and braces. The wild card is making sure the workpeople who show up wear something better than a dishrag on their faces and keep it on (some people think that “taking breaks” is a thing). It gives me white hairs, more so with time as people continue to kid themselves that Covid is over for some mysterious reason (since people are still catching it, still dying from it in their thousands every week in the US, and still getting permanently ill from it).

So I get the “on my way” call from “Antoine,” who asks if I’m sick (fair enough; I have a husky voice and it’s usually either “Do you have a cold?” or “Sir”). When I say no, but we will all wear masks and will ask you to wear one, he flat out refuses.

To wear a fucking mask. For a half hour service call.

I repeat that we have plenty, and that no one comes in our house without a mask on. Then we’ll have to reschedule the call, he says.

I cannot imagine what makes anyone so brittle that it will break him to put some blown-fiber fabric over his face, but there it was. One conversation with customer service and an hour later, a delightful gentleman showed up with a black surgical mask on — okay, but not really good enough. I handed him a KN95, the kind with a seam and nosepiece so that it fits your face without squashing your nose, and he thanked me and did the job, and when it was done thanked me again. “This is so comfortable! I could wear this all day!” (I kind of heard it in the voice of Steve Rogers, musical version. 2:35.)

I tore the endflap off the box and gave him the Amazon ordering info. A little sad that after three years of a pandemic someone who has to go into people’s houses all day long hasn’t been offered effective PPE by his employer. Glad I could help.

Fridge Or Dare, An Agon

Yeah, I went there. Sue me.

It occurred to me that I had never brought the saga of the fridge to a close. To be fair, this is partly because for a while it appeared that the failed repairs would become a sustained cycle, to be observed eventually with incantations and rituals whose symbolism was lost in time.

When last we saw our heroine, she had been told to wait for a call from the manufacturer of the recreant appliance, which three days after delivery had begun building up frost inside the freezer drawer faster than snow falling in Wisconsin. Unsurprisingly, this did not happen.

What followed was a numbing epic of diagnostic calls by the retailer’s service department (“yup, that gasket’s not sealing, I’ll place an order”), return visits with the replacement part, the dreary routine of setting up air filters, opening windows and asking the repairmen to please wear this fucking face mask, waving bye-bye as one and then another announced it was All Fixed, and eyeballing the new gasket two hours later to find it had pulled away from the freezer door again. My remarks during each successive phone call and visit that there seemed to be something wrong with the way the drawer hung on the rails fell on deaf ears; they just kept replacing gaskets. At one point a stalagmite the size of my fist formed on the roof of the compartment. Along about *checks calendar* August the fourth repairman showed up, exhibited some signs of intellectual curiosity (to wit, he wanted to know all about my Corsi-Rosenthal boxes), and after sizing up the problem said “Hey, it’s the rails! It’s not mounted right. I’ll order a part.”

No shit.

Eventually another repairman appeared, and after a good deal of whirring from a power screwdriver and yet another ceremonial heating of a new rubber gasket on the scorching asphalt out front, the drawer actually moved smoothly on its rails and shut cleanly. It looked as if the long nightmare were over.

Two days later the new gasket was just as deformed as the first three, and clumps of ice had begun to accumulate on the freezer door again.

The salesman didn’t even put up a fight when I asked for a replacement in the same general design and price point from a different manufacturer (“clearly this company does not know how to build an appliance or manufacture a part”). (There’s something to be said for buying from a local retailer small enough to give a damn about your business and large enough to have its own service department.) Along about the beginning of November — remember, I bought this sucker in April — an e-mail informed me that the next day between noon and four, a team would arrive to haul away the carcass and replace it with…

…the identical make and model of refrigerator.

I have never heard a salesperson say “Oh Jesus Christ!” on the phone with a customer before. I have never actually heard the blood rushing out of someone’s face over the phone before.

It took until the week after Thanksgiving. The sky had opened. The air was raw. Lo, the year which had opened with tender buds and passed through the punishing heat of summer to autumn’s bracing breeze was descending towards winter’s sleep, and the long agon of my refrigerator came to a close as the heavens wept.

Saxon alliterative verse, Homeric hexameters or terza rima? I’ll take all suggestions.

Goodbye 2022

And good riddance, I might say (not that I expect 2023 to be much of an improvement, at this point), but I’m trying not to be grumpy.

Just trying to send up a flare that I’m still here and had a typically quirky New Year’s Eve.

That’s the now-traditional New Year’s Eve tapas, strongly influenced by the friendship I formed with azahar here on WordPress in (checks watch) 2008. Little nibbles of this and that seem such a civilized way to celebrate; here we see goat cheese stuffed mushrooms, pate made from the mushroom stems, scallops in parsley and butter, Brussels sprouts pan-roasted with honey and cider vinegar, wasabi deviled eggs, a little French onion soup with Basque cheese, Manchego and Marcona almonds.

Just a light collation.

You will see there both champagne flutes and sherry glasses. What happened was, out of nowhere exactly, I heard from Izzy on Friday. He still tells me how not to screw up my retirement account, and something about my asking him an end-of-year question must have sparked a train of thought, because he sent a picture of a bottle of Chandon bubbly and asked if I would like it for New Year’s. Apparently, in our locked-down existence, he has been reluctant to open it because Mrs. Izzy has no head for alcohol and he had no intention of drinking the whole thing himself.

“It’s been in the wine cellar for decades,” he added, “so I should warn you it might not be any good. Let me know.”

We were game. I got the last of the food on the plates and turned to see the Cute Engineer deploying the pliers. This is not the usual tool for opening wine, but apparently the foil at the neck of the bottle had become one with the wire cage securing the cork, and had to be prised away delicately. (There is a story about why we keep pliers in the kitchen to begin with, but another time.) Shred by shred and twist by twist the disturbingly amalgamated mass of metal came away. The Engineer positioned the bottle and braced his thumbs against the cork.

It snapped like a balsa twig.

I’m really afraid to ask how many decades Izzy meant. We are both a half century out from legal drinking age. Anyway, we’re not sure what to do with this bottle; you can maneuver a broken cork out of still wine, but the projectile potential here is nothing to trifle with. Is there some kind of possibility it might explode during the weekly collection if we put it in the trash bin? Should we take it up to the glass recycling dumpster with all the other household jars and jeroboams, shot-put it inside and duck? Bury it safely on the property?

Izzy was piqued by my neither/nor answer to his question about the quality of the wine (there are apparently some things Mankind was not meant to know) and, generous as he has always been, slipped by while I was doing hill repeats today to leave a bottle of Israeli Cabernet in the porch. “I promise it will not explode,” he said in an explanatory e-mail.

We had a nice Lustau Amontillado (which had been chilled as a backup) with the tapas. Yeah, Az, I know it was supposed to be Palo Cortado. We hosed the shopping list. What can I say? It was still fabulous. Happy New Year.

Altered States

The Engineer’s big doofus Mystery started stumbling last week, and we freaked a bit. He’s almost eighteen and already has old-kitty kidneys, and watching him fall conk onto his side like a tree in the forest was a little alarming.

(He’s not really a doofus. He’s just an uncomplicated, big, yellow cat who has a minimum of settings: “Food?”, “Petting?”, sleeping, grooming his sister Lilly Bast, scarfing catnip, and sloping into your vicinity with an expression that says “whatcha doin’?”)

We were lucky enough to have a cats-only vet move in just up the hill a few years back, a practice I’d already been following on an Instagram account curated by one of the vet techs to show off her special needs rescue kittens, her interesting cases (“CW: surgery pictures”) and Discworld tattoos. The considered diagnosis was probable arthritis. Cats, especially kidney patients, don’t handle the equivalent of Advil et cetera very well, but they had some Chinese herbs for pain that helped immediately, and yesterday he went for his first acupuncture treatment.

My Beezler of blessed memory had miserable arthritis that was completely managed by acupuncture, which also sorted his allergies and slowed down his kidney decline, so I was right behind this. The clinic asked permission to take photos and post them on the main Instagram account, but we got a first look.

(That’s the bottom of his cat carrier he’s sitting in. He resists getting out at the vet’s. He knows.)

Is it just my imagination, or does he look… stoned?

(Acupuncture used to put me in the Twilight Zone. I’d still be doing it as a sort of spa treatment, except that my acupuncturist suffered from a vice common in the alternative health professions, or as my late and ex used to say, “the basic vice of all therapy is the therapist’s need to be considered hot shit.” Her prices I could just manage, but the incessant feeding of her ego was too exhausting. Apparently the veterinary branch of the field suffers less from this.)

He ate for the rest of the evening, which isn’t all that atypical of Mystery, but his appetite’s been less aggressive lately. News as I get it.