Blessed by the Potato

Warning: explicit, nasty, overly descriptive accounts of bodily functions gone horribly awry follow.

I’ve been pretty sick the last few days — I haven’t slept well the last few weeks, partly due to work, weddings, allergies, allergy medication-induced paranoia, and a nasty case of the nerves regarding the impending Japan trip. So it seems to have caught up with me in the last few days with some mild nausea, severe fatigue, and the sweats. I threw up a little yesterday, but after that I started to feel a bit better, and after taking the day off work and sleeping for 12 hours, I actually felt normal when I woke up yesterday evening (my sleep schedule is completely off-track now). Then today, it’s back to feeling sick again. I threw up a little again today — just a small purge like yesterday, but this time I didn’t feel better afterwards. I went to the sink to rinse out my mouth and brush my teeth, when I was hit with another wave. I took a quick step to the left to get back over the toilet…

Now, Wayfare has said that I’m terrible at throwing up, and apparently it’s true: I focus more on getting my head above the toilet than close to it. In other words, I don’t hit my knees fast enough (or, as is usually the case with me, at all: and leaning over while upright does seem to give more leverage, it doesn’t lead to aim)…

…so I lean over the toilet, and a huge wave of projectile vomit flies out. I’m pretty sure it was the entire contents of my stomach in just two heaves. Now, the interesting thing about this is that it makes a huge mess. In the force of my expulsions, I managed to create a cone that was wider than the toilet bowl — there’s mess on the back, on the sides, on the front… ugh. My eyes are all tearing up and my throat burns, and I don’t feel much better. Then I see that there are little droplets that have bounced off the toilet bowl and flown around the room — there are even a few on the wall behind me! That’s some crazy reflection ability! In fact, I’ve always kind of been a little bit in awe of just how hard my stomach could convulse when it wanted to. I always figured that disgusting slurry would lose some velocity on the way up, since I doubt reverse peristalsis is going along that quickly (or can handle a bolus that big), or at the very least when it has to make “the turn”. Although, to get even more disgusting, sometimes I get some in my sinuses that way (and all it takes is a drop to ruin breathing for the rest of the afternoon).

Of course, that leads to two very unpleasant conclusions: the first being that I am likely inhabited by some kind of demon, or possibly a hostile alien parasite. The second is that it is highly likely that if I got… ick… on the wall behind me, then I almost certainly got it on the nice, clean hand towels behind me as well. So I have to go down to the basement and do some laundry. And of course, as soon as I get to the bottom of the stairs, there’s a giant black spider waiting for death. I don’t get the creepy giant black spiders I’ve been seeing so much of lately; for years house spiders were small and pale yellow and liked hiding in corners where they didn’t bother you and you didn’t bother them. Now they’re these great big scary looking things that like hanging out in the middle of the floor or halfway down the wall — places where they look intimidating, ready to strike. This is also just perfectly horrible because part of the reason I haven’t been able to sleep is that I had a run of nightmares about spiders last week.

I think I’m going back to bed.

I really enjoy reading Orson Scott Card’s columns, even when he’s mostly wrong on a subject. I particularly disagree with him when it comes to global warming — but I do agree with a lot of what he has to say when it comes to creating pedestrian-friendly cities and a car-free life. Here are three of his recent columns:

Oil, past the peak
Walking Neighbourhoods
Life Without Cars

Now I have to ask myself, what can we do about bringing these principles to the new developments in the 905 and 519? I remember a conversation with Wayfare’s neighbours about one “innovative” housing project in the 905 that was popular precisely because it was on a grid layout with interspersed light commercial zones that aimed to be pedestrian friendly.

Oh, and I’m sure everyone’s already heard of New York Taxis going hybrid (it just makes sense — its a technology that works best in a city environment, and hybrid cab owners in BC have said that with a cab the cost of fuel over the lifetime of the car is far more than the car ever costs up front).

Update: Just wanted to add this post from the Green Party blog.

I just spent my long weekend Sunday writing a stupidly long article on hybrid cars, and it’s not even as helpful as I was hoping it would be. Ah, well, it’s up as a permanent link on the right there. Have a look (if you dare), and I welcome any other questions that it may have left unanswered! To give a quick reason for doing this, Wayfare suggested I take some of the insane amount of research I’ve been doing on cars and write an article, perhaps try to sell it freelance to the London Free Press or another paper that would have it. I don’t think either of us expected something like that to result.

I haven’t included many references, but I don’t really think too many are necessary for an article like this (plus, there was a long link list in one of the previous posts on the issue, which is linked in the article). There are probably mistakes, both factual and grammatical lurking in there: it’s why something like that can be churned out in one afternoon, but a scientific review paper of the same length languishes for years unwritten :)

Warning: the following post may contain information of a graphic and disgusting medical nature.

My parents, in the wisdom of keeping small children away from medication, have for decades stored almost all of our medicine in their bathroom. This is a bit of a pain now though, because it means I have to wake them (no matter how small a flashlight I bring and how softly I tiptoe) whenever I need something in the middle of the night. Usually, what I need is Alka-Seltzer for heartburn. I’ve tried, at various times in the past, pepto-bismol (the thick pink nature of it made me want to vomit), and a few other antacids (TUMs always sounded promising, with their use of calcium salts rather than sodium, but believe it or not I could never figure out how to take them — surely you don’t swallow that giant tablet whole, or chew it?), but Alka-Seltzer is always what I’ve come back to: it works pretty well for me, and pretty quickly. It does of course, have it’s own fairly nasty taste, but even as an extremely fussy child I could pinch my nose and get it down — at least it looks kinda like water.

Stuck as I was this last night with heartburn, no sleep in sight, and no desire to wake my parents (my dad has such trouble sleeping lately that it would be a sin), and no Alka-Seltzer, I decided to be creative. “What,” I asked myself, “was in Alka-Seltzer really? Just baking soda and aspirin, right? And the aspirin is an acid just there for pain relief — the antacid effect comes just from the sodium bicarbonate neutralizing the stomach acid…” So I got a glass of water, stirred in a spoonful of baking soda, and downed that. (Did I mention I was sleep deprived and not thinking too clearly?)

It tasted gross, even worse than Alka-Seltzer. Then pretty much immediately, I started foaming and puking. I had forgotten my grade 5 science fair volcano principles: baking soda, added to an acidic environment produces lava! Err… carbon dioxide, that is, which in a liquid — like vinegar in a volcano or stomach acid — produces a foamy, disgusting mess.

So, my chemistry lesson is that the fizz-fizz stage in Alka-Seltzer is really the sodium bicarbonate letting off the carbon dioxide so you don’t fizz up when you take it. The real antacid properties come from the reaction products left over (sodium citrate, sodium acetylsalicylate), the ones that bring the pH back up without producing gas.

Contains:
• Aspirin 325 mg
• Heat treated sodium bicarbonate 1916 mg
• Citric acid 1000 mg
• Alka-Seltzer in water contains principally the antacid sodium citrate and the analgesic sodium acetylsalicylate.

I really like our new house. It’s cute, spacious, quiet, in a decent neighbourhood (from the front), and even has an as yet untested guest room. Renting has an advantage because we’re not responsible for a lot of the big-ticket items, and they even come to mow our lawn. (Plus the hot real estate market still scares me) Our landlord’s a nice enough lady… but man is she useless when it comes to making repairs (and there aren’t that many that are required). Most of her suggestions involve “buy a tube of that yellow expanding foam and just spray it everywhere.” I don’t really mind helping out and putting some work into the house, largely because I plan on being here for a few years, and because I’m a bit of a nonconfrontational sucker, and often find it easier to just fix something myself than harangue my landlord. I’m somewhat handy, but only somewhat.

One problem we can’t fix though is the water that seeps into the laundry room periodically. It lead to a mold problem a few months ago that we spent a fair bit of money trying to control — first we bleached the wall a few times to kill it off, but it grew back. Then we got this mold inhibitor stuff that worked fairly well on most of it, but there was this one brick that kept resprouting. A UVC lamp helped clear the air of spores and made it smell decent. We called her a few more times to fix the root problem, and she tried to pass it off to us to caulk or patch, and fortunately Wayfare was very good about staying on her case and making it clear that the problem was bigger than that. So finally she broke down and called in some guys (including her step son in law, if I got the relation right) to seal the entire wall with this blue foam stuff (she’s big on her foam). The guys did a decent job of sealing up that wall, but to get to it they had to move the washer/dryer out from the wall, and in the process disconnected the dryer from the wall vent, and just left it for me to fix. I’m not entirely sure how to go about it, either. In principle, it’s simple: plug the steel tubey bit into the port on the dryer. The problem is that the port is in the very far bottom corner, and the tube they used for the vent is completely inflexible with no joints, so I can’t connect it to the dryer away from the wall (where I could reach), and then push the dryer back. It has to be done with the dryer nearly against the wall. I don’t know if I should just get some flexible tubing for the job, or call a professional, or try moving the duct from the top to see if I can correctly jam it in the dryer port (blind). Hey, speaking of flexible tubing, I think I saw some in the ceiling of the laundry room, not really connected to anything…

The house, being over 100 years old, has certainly gone through numerous renovations. I’m afraid it looks like the current landlord hired some pretty questionable contractors along the way (from what we’ve seen so far, nepotism seems to be a big factor in her decision making). The newly redone bathroom (apparently finished just months before we moved in — it still had unpainted patches where the toilet paper holder was to go) has a vent, as many modern bathrooms do, to help blow humidity and unwanted vapours out of the bathroom, and ostensibly, outside. Ours has this flexible piece of ductwork (the kind that, IMHO, should be on the dryer) that goes into the laundry room, and just kind of sits there in the ceiling joists, not connected to anything. Likewise, many of the water seeping in problems (there was a problem with the stairs right before we moved in) has simply been fixed (rather sloppiliy at that) with expanding foam and paint. Now, I don’t play a house inspector on TV, but that does seem like it’s only going to do so much to help the problem. I would think that then the water would just pool up behind the new barrier and rot away the wood or brick, or in the winter, freeze and cause some real havoc. On the other hand, it is a much more involved task to get to the other side of the foundation and water proof that. And, as pointed out earlier, some of the plumbing work was “creative”. By the way, we’re still waiting for that pipe to be fixed.

My current theory is that she doesn’t consider the house a big part of the property value any more. Technically, her dental practice owns the house, and uses the “backyard” for parking (there is in fact, no backyard, just a nice sized deck for us, and a paved parking lot). While the house is very cute, has lots of history, and is in generally good condition, it’s now “just” a rental unit for her practice. She has said that she plans to sell the practice soon (and the house with it), so I think she’s already trying not to sink too much money into something that won’t offer her much return (that is, the state of the house is not really going to help her sell the practice for more, she just needs to do the minimum to keep us as tenants). Looking a bit further into the future, I think she might also consider that if the house were to be sold, the lot would probably be valuable enough as a place to build a newer, bigger house (or rental complex) on that the state of this house wouldn’t factor in greatly.

PS: We’ve lived here 6 months now, and the cat still thinks forced-air vents are the coolest, most interesting thing you could put in a house. Far more interesting than ants, for sure.

PPS: We also need the bulb on the security light fixed. It’s on the roof, and when the landlord suggested I change it myself and just bill her for the lamp, I was willing — it’s only a single storey bungalow, how bad could it be? Of course, after getting up on the ladder it turns out I’m more afraid of heights than I thought. I don’t want to start bugging her about changing it, since it’s clearly not the sort of thing she’d do herself, and it seems stupid to make her hire someone to do it… But without the snow to reflect the ambient light around, it’s really dark back there. So is there anyone brave in the London area that would like to climb up on my roof and change a lightbulb? I’ll make you some cinnamon rolls!