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sticking with non-narcotic painkillers
Thursday, October 19 2017
Gretchen was definitely better today, though her first stagger down the stairs into the dining room didn't look particularly promising. Soon, though, she was eating and taking her medication. She'd decided to stick with non-narcotic painkillers today; we've both pretty much decided that narcotics are only useful for occasional isolated recreational purposes, and that taking repeated doses of them every few hours is a recipe for misery (if only from the resulting constipation). Gretchen was able to join me in a very slow walk down the Farm Road to the jog at the culvert where it passes between two dead white ash trees. We thought maybe the dogs would go off and walk themselves, but alas, they came home soon after we did.
For lunch, Gretchen's mother cooked up a can of black beans with potatoes and box of Barilla bow-tie noodles (another from my secret santa stash), and, when mixed with diced jalapeños, that made for a delicious meal.
Later Gretchen's father drove out to Home Depot to buy some things he felt we needed at the house, particularly products related to unclogging blocked drainage pipes (which he insisted was a problem in the bathroom part of the master guestroom where he and Gretchen's mother had been sleeping). One of these products was Instant Power Hair & Grease Drain Opener, which comes in a black bottle in a plastic bag (just in case the contents were to leak, though that, along with its somewhat generic labeling, might be part of the marketing). The other was Adolph's Meat Tenderizer, a powerful enzyme that is great at breaking down animal hair (and, evidently, has branding so powerful it overcame the stigma was the world's worst villain).
After dealing for much of the day with a vexing data assembly project plagued by, among other things, long confusing alphanumeric codes that a third party had entered incorrectly, I cooled off with a gentler project: adding user preferences to our mass e-mailing system. (These preferences are for the spammers, not for the spammed.) At the customary time of 7:30pm, it was time for IT's Thursday night happy hour, and I was already drinking (I'm trying Cutty Sark, which is an inexpensive blended scotch; it's okay). This evening we had as our invited guest the VP of Education, who is so good at these sorts of things that she imposed her own order on our vaguely-intoxicated chaos. She suggested we each tell about some highlight from the week, which was a somewhat difficult given how shitty the week had been for most of us. Dan had been sick, Cameron's childhood dog had died. Nicole had been quoted a exorbitant figure for the expense of performing life-saving surgery on one of her dogs, my wife had just had a hysterectomy, though perhaps the others were doing okay. The highlight of my week had definitely been reading Cathy O'Neil's Weapons of Math Destruction, so I shared a juicy fact from that and suggested people read it. "I never read books anymore," Nicole sighed. She works too fucking hard.
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