Friday, July 1, 2016

Entry 339: Throats, Hands, Feet, Mouths, and Showers

Quite annoyed at the moment.  My throat felt normal almost this entire week, so I thought that maybe, possibly, hopefully it was completely better, and then literally threes minutes before I started writing this entry I ate some lunch and afterward it started bothering me again.  Why?!  Why?!   Why has my own esophagus turned against me?!  And to make matters worse another malady has entered the fray: hand, foot, and mouth disease.  I don't have it, but Lil' S2 does, which is worse.  It looks quite gross, but thankfully he doesn't seem too bothered by it.  Lil' S1 might have had it a few years ago.  It's pretty common in babies.  It typically runs its course in about a week and isn't that big a deal.  As I said before, however, it really needs a new name.  It sounds so much worse than it is.  It reminds me of mad cow disease (I think because there is something else called foot-and-mouth disease that affects cattle), and the two couldn't be more different.  With one your get little red bumps on your skin that clear up in a few days; with the other your brain degenerates into a spongy mess and you turn into a deranged lunatic before dying a horrible death.  There really should be some way to distinguish linguistically between the two.  I suggest the word disease only be reserved for things that are gravely serious, and for everything else we should use a term like illness or condition: Hand, foot, and mouth illness sounds much better -- it doesn't make you think your kid is dying when you first here it.

[I don't want to disgust you by posting photos of kids with hand, foot, and mouth disease, so I will put up a picture of former Colts defensive end Jon Hand instead.]

On a tangentially related note, I once knew a guy who had a genetic predisposition for Creutzfeld-Jakob disease (CJD), which is the human version of mad cow disease (formally known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy).  It's extremely rare, but some people in his family had it.  He said he watched his uncle die from it, and it made him very ambivalent about his own mortality.  He told me he often hoped he would die early (he was about 20 at the time) rather than risk contracting CJD later in life; it's that awful.  He was smoking a cigarette at the time, and I joked, "Well, if you keep that up, you might get your wish."  And he replied in the most matter-of-fact way possible, "Absolutely."

I've noticed that about kids who grow up with life-threatening disorders; they are very blasé about their own deaths.  I suppose you just learn how to cope without freaking out, like you learn any other survival skill.  I grew up with a kid who had something wrong with his internal organs -- I never really knew what -- and he always told people he was going to be dead by age 19.  I never paid it much attention because we were, like, 12 years old at the time, and at that age seven years might as well be 70 years, and also because he tended to be overly dramatic about other things.  But then he died in his early twenties, so yeah... he was actually pretty accurate on that one.

Okay... This entry got off on a more morbid note than I intended.  In happier news, FiveThirtyEight pegs Hillary Clinton as the very likely winner in November's election -- 80%, which is a bit higher than the 75% from the betting markets I cited last entry.  Now, the obvious counter to this is that FiveThirtyEight was totally wrong about Trump in the primary, and that's true, but the funny thing about that is that their poll-based modeling was actually right!  It consistently showed Trump being a very strong candidate in the primary.  The problem is that nobody actually believed it.  Everybody thought Trump was a joke (he is), and that being a joke precludes somebody from winning the Republican primary (it doesn't).  Even the people who run a data-journalism website fell into the trap of believing the narrative instead of the numbers.

It's like when I was in Missouri with my family for my cousin's wedding last year, and we put the wrong address in to the iPhone maps app, so the GPS took us the wrong way.  But then we changed it to the right address, but we were already going the wrong direction, so the GPS had to turn us around, and we ended up taking an absurdly circuitous route to travel a few blocks.  After that, my uncle refused to use the GPS for the rest of the trip, even though it was completely right.  The problem was the humans using it.

So Clinton is a heavy favorite at this point.  This is very good news.  Sure, the odds could change between now and November, and even if they don't, Trump could still win in an upset (20% ain't nothing).  But I would much, much, much rather have it be 80-20 Clinton at this point than the other way around.



In other news, we had to pay nearly $700 to fix a leak in our shower -- yay.  In a way, it should have been expected.  Before we moved in, we had the bathroom completely redone, and we kinda did it on the cheap.  S had a contractor she had used before, and he did the job for like a third of what other contractors were quoting a friend of ours who had her similar bathroom remodeled around the same time.  The job he did looks really good, so at first I was quite pleased, but then I started noticing evidence of shoddy work -- like the toilet paper nook is to shallow to hold a full roll of toilet paper, so we never actually use it, and also there is a small (nearly inaudible) leak in our sink faucet, and the handle on the shower would untwist and just pop off for seemingly no reason from time to time, and we would have to screw it back on.  But those were all small nuisances.  There was nothing majorly wrong -- until there was.  And that time was about a week ago.

There were three big problems, only one of which was fixed.  The first was the leak, which was caused by a piece in the hot water stem being slightly off-kilter.  There was no way to completely shut off the hot water.  The handle would just spin around and then turn the water back on again.  (It was the same handle that would pop off sometimes; I'm guessing this is not a coincidence.)  The second problem is that there is no valve for just that shower, so the plumber had to shut the water off in the entire house while he worked on it.  (And, as it would happen, I had to take a huge dump shortly after he arrived.  I knew that I would have one good flush from the water that was left in the tank, and I would have to use it wisely.  I did.)  The third is that he had a very hard time getting back at our pipes.  The aforementioned contractor installed our shower so that there is no way to get behind it (the other side is another shower in our other bathroom), and he didn't put in an access panel (and we didn't know enough to ask for one), so the only way to replace a major component would be to cut out a huge section of tile.  Initially that's what the plumber told me he was going to have to do, but he managed to get at the defective area by taking the handle out.  It's kinda jerry-rigged now, but it works, and the leak is gone, so, okay, I guess that's worth $700.

It's a lot of money, but we saved several thousand dollars going with a cheaper contractor, so if you look at it that way, we are still way ahead (for now).  I was saying this to S, but instead of taking it as a positive, which is how I meant it, she got defensive (probably because I was criticizing "her" contractor's work -- they have a good rapport, and he's a very nice guy).

She was like, "Well, how do you know it was something he did that caused the leak."

And I was like, "I don't know for sure, b-u-u-t... he installed it, and it's not like everything else is perfect.  Look at our toilet paper nook, and our sink, and remember when he came out to fix our bedroom door that wouldn't latch?  Well, it broke again like a week later.  And also he ran out of paint in our basement.  Oh, and don't forget..."

And she was like, "Okay.  Stop.  Whatever.  I don't care, anymore."

And I was like, "It's funny how you stop caring as soon as I start making good points."

And she was like, "Babe, I just got home.  I'm hungry and tired and we just spent $700 that I had earmarked for savings.  I'm really not in the mood to argue right now."

And I was like, "I think there's some leftover quiche in that blue Tupperware in the fridge, if you want to eat that."

On that note, until next time...

No comments:

Post a Comment