Get Your Grump on Thursdays - Was (What's chapping my @ss today?)

[Tom]

Grumping in anticipation. As a winter weather enthusiast, I think I have heard just about enough of the terms "warm nose" and "dry slot".

[Tom]

I guess I am just a serial grumper. Gotta work on that.

Yesterday: Ruptured a trainer tire. No excuse, that thing was as thick as a car tire and as hard to get on the rim this January and off the rim yesterday. Developed a big bulge and the thump-thump-thump made me a little nuts. When I took it off the inside was all coming apart at the bulge. I'm going to have to harden up and go riding outside even if it is below freezing or blowing 35 miles an hour.

Today:
- Company quarterly results commentary sent to all employees from our CEO comes out. With paragraphs 3 and 4 repeated word for word as paragraphs 5 and 6. Nice proofreading, you nimrods.
- App team on an infrastructure conversion project I am leading sends out their production pilot with the config file set for testing. Pilot users get no results as they do their job functions. App team figures it out, has desktop engineering update the package and reship. Now nothing works. Two areas I have to rely on to do their job right and can't step in and fix it myself. I do have to sit on a meeting all day until they fix it for themselves. Too bad I have my own work to get done.
- And that app? "Scraping" is spelled with one "p", guys. Every banner, every popup box says "scrapping". (Don't get me started on screen scraping as an application design...)
- And the vendor that sends me two meeting invitations. No indication of what the meeting is about (and spells "platform" with no t and two rs in the second invitation) - no agenda, no context, no nothing. I can only guess from the invitation list that it is something our enterprise architecture group has hatched and since they haven't the first clue about how the infrastructure is configured and implemented or the basic principles of operational simplicity I'm not totally suprised they haven't bothered to provide any information or invited the right people.

The bright spot is that tomorrow I get to write in the Friday thread "Five months, one week."

[htwoopup]

Had a horrible night last night with coughing, sniffling, chills, etc. Did the test this am and even though I am vaxed and boosted, I am positive for Covid. That’s not the grump.

Doc said I can’t have the anti-viral because of some other old man med that I am on. But I really should get the monoclonal antibody thing and she would put in an order because I need it done by Sunday.

But, NYU Langone (her facility) can not possibly take me until Monday. Nor can any of the other 5 hospitals I called in Manhattan (we have a shitload of hospitals here).

Every single one of them though says if you come to their overburdened/ jammed ER and wait they will eventually (after several hours of hanging out in their ER waiting room) be able to do it…probably.

The grump is that no one can explain to me how that works if they all say stay away from people. Oh, and NYU just called and said they could do it in Brooklyn today but he couldn’t explain how I could do that if they instructed me not to take the subway or a taxi for fear of spreading the disease.

[ColonelJLloyd]

Well, shit. Hang in there, my friend. Hope you're somehow able to get any beneficial/appropriate treatments.

[72gmc]

Good luck getting to Brooklyn, Jon, I hope it works out.

I'm on day 5 of being the basement troll in my house, quarantined to the extra bedroom. Tested positive on Sunday. Hoping to test negative tomorrow.

[rwsaunders]

I’ll join you gents with the sickness grump, but I tested negative with an at-home test and a clinic administered PCR test. I feel fine otherwise and I’ve been riding, but I was afraid of being Mr. Superspreader. Turns out that I have a sinus infection accompanied by an irritatingly dry cough, so hang in there guys.

[bigbill]

Mom and sister are recovering from Covid that followed them home from my son's graduation. Mom is 81 with some heart health issues. My wife and I have both tested negative and have no symptoms. My mom is mostly annoyed, she is a real estate broker with some closings coming up.

My dad was hospitalized with pneumonia and was discharged yesterday. He's 82 with diabetes and dementia. He's fallen twice since being home and the neighbor has to help get him back on his feet. I've been on the phone with siblings in the area and asking them wtf they aren't helping their mom. I'll be there on Saturday. Hopefully after a doctor visit today, he'll have home health care.

[defspace]

Well, lets get this started.

Last week was US masters track nationals. I raced the kilometer TT on Thursday. Fastest through the first lap, fastest through the second lap. Then hit with the world's worst last lap fade. Finished 3rd, 0.8 seconds off the top step. I finished up the night by shivering under the blankets with the AC off during a heat wave. I tested positive for COVID the next morning. I pulled out of the rest of the events, notified the promoter and anyone I knew I was in close contact with.

So frustrating. Three years of this thing and the one week I was banking on my body being 100%... In some way encouraging to know that I'm close to the mark even when my aerobic system is on vacation.

[j44ke]

"Like" because even though you are grumping you sound pretty upbeat. Get 'em next year.

[endo shi]

Poor sick baby.

We can't seem to link up a successful 2 week run of healthiness for our 1.5 year old. We both work, send her to a great daycare, but the whole routine only works when she's healthy. Last night she was throwing up, no one slept well, and we needed to keep her home today.

That means my partner and I deciding who's work day is less critical, arguing through a sleep deprived grumpy haze in the morning, and finally deciding I'm the one with the least important work day so I stay home.

I'm happy to be home with my baby girl today but feeling guilty about burdening my co-workers and the fact that she's sick and was there anything I could have done to lead to it, and also that I have the blessings of a job that can be worked remotely in a pinch.

[bigbill]

Today was a virtual memorial for my late mother-in-law. She died of advanced Parkinson's in hospice last October. Her remains were cremated and we're making plans to have them scattered in the places she loved most. She served in the Peace Corps so the places are pretty far-flung.

During the memorial, I got a text that my former mother-in-law had fallen down the stairs at her house and had serious injuries including both collarbones, several ribs, some vertebrae, one arm, and several fingers. She has heart failure and is 86 so I'm surprised she survived the fall. She is in the ICU in Charleston but I don't really expect her to live long. I hope she is being made as comfortable as possible.

[bigbill]

I retire next Friday which isn't a grump, but even with tomorrow and next Tuesday off, it's still four days of lame duck. I'm salaried, can't say I'm doing 8 a day.

[Marvinlungwitz]

After reading the Velosnooze article on heat measures, I’ve come to the conclusion that it was penned by a bidon journalist (pun intended).

An affectation is not elegant nor witty, imo.

In any case, it’s almost as grating as using the word kit.

(Very grumpy this AM, I need a bike ride).

[vertical_doug]

The latest round of why we can't have nice things.....

https://news.yahoo.com/los-angeles-e...114137370.html

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/th...ok/ar-AA104KHl

[beeatnik]

^I grew up two blocks east of The Bridge. I would run laps on it Rocky style and in a decade period, I must have crossed paths with another runner or pedestrian about two times.

https://chusmachusma.noblogs.org/pos.../columpio-l-a/

What is frightening for authorities is a wild, revelrous, playful chusma (Spanish, for riff-raff) that breaks with the regime of work: where a bridge meant to facilitate the movement of commodities (whether goods or labor-power), loses its original purpose and becomes a playground for those the city has worked to eliminate.

On a cycling related note, I've had the bridge KOM for over 10 years. The fact the bridge didn't exist for about 6 years helped.

https://www.strava.com/segments/32253746

https://www.strava.com/segments/3278397

Stravaz is so weird.

[bigbill]

My former mother-in-law died yesterday. I really loved her like a mother. Unfortunately, she spent the last month of her life in tremendous pain after falling at home and breaking numerous bones, including a collarbone, vertebra, fingers, and ribs. She had heart failure and was 86, she should have just died in her sleep or not woken up from a nap. I'm thankful she was at my son's Naval Academy graduation and saw him become a Marine officer. Her late husband was a career Marine.

What's chapping my ass today? Retirement is hard, we're spending a month preparing our Wyoming property for an RV slab, shop, new fences, and a road. I've been slide hammering t-posts, installing gates, clearing brush, cutting down saplings, and hopefully running a mowing deck over much of where we want our driveway and building site. We flushed out the black water tank yesterday and refilled the potable. We don't have water connections on our current location, but we do have power and septic. We use a 500 gallon water tank normally used to fill livestock watering troughs to fill our potable. I have a submersible pump and hose so we pull a suction in the top 3-4" of water. The big tank gets filled from city water at an amazing cost of 75 cents.

[jimcav]

1st world grump. 2nd Thursday in a row where I am suffering some sort of bee sting on a ride. Post-COVID I now react severely compared to before. Stung on thumb and hand so swollen it hurts and I can’t type or use it really.

[rwsaunders]

1st world grump. 2nd Thursday in a row where I am suffering some sort of bee sting on a ride. Post-COVID I now react severely compared to before. Stung on thumb and hand so swollen it hurts and I can’t type or use it really.

Welcome to the Benadryl and Epipen club with me a verticaldoug.

[beeatnik]

First day of 1st grade! Vaccine mandate for all staff, 99% of children over 5 vaccinated, 40% plus boosted, 29 year old 1st grade teacher. 80% of the kids in class masked, in a community where less than 2% live in multi-generational households. We'll be back to "normal" by the time my kid graduates in 2034, right?

That said, I haven't seen a masked cyclist in over a year!

[jimcav]

Welcome to the Benadryl and Epipen club with me a verticaldoug.

Yea well, I'd like to disenroll, but I may start riding with an epipen.

I have Benadryl and Atarax on hand (as I now also react more violently to skin stuff--like poison ivy reaction but to all sorts of other more benign plants like mustard, tar weed, oh and most tall grass). Last Thursday I was hit twice within 5-10 seconds by the same bee-like thing--once on my right forehead, once on abdomen. Bad swelling on the area around head/face, and a weirder hard/indurated area the size of my hand over the other one. In years past the extent of my reaction was it hurt when I got stung, and that was it.