It’s the first Friday in Women’s History Month (also Girls' Day), the first post-Dobbs WHM, with Republicans at all levels scrabbling to out-rage their mullah and Taliban confrères around the world to return us to those halcyon days of the 15th Century, and I am done.
So here’s Queen Latifah in her early days, giving us “U.N.I.T.Y.”
I spent three hours yesterday trying to connect a 27” monitor to my Megalithic Tech Company corporate laptop. That includes trying to follow the IKEA-level instructions and then on a chat and then a call with MTC’s IT support. Guy kept trying to get rid of me—go to this web site and do that; no—I told you, the monitor has power and is connected to the laptop. Oh—then go there and do this; no—I told you, it’s connected.
He finally initiated a call, again trying to fob me off on some
goose chase, even bringing someone else on the call, who started by telling me
to connect the monitor via the cable.
Three
cables came with the monitor: HDMI/HDMI (I have no HDMI port on the laptop or
the docking attachment), USB-C (no more available Type-C ports on the laptop
& all ports on the docker are Type A) & Type-C to Type-A. I used that
last one, but the laptop absolutely doesn't recognize that a monitor is
attached. The only display that shows up in what Chrome OS is pleased to call a
settings menu is what’s in the laptop lid.
Tech
Guy’s last take was to send me to a public site to do a “hard reset”, which
should have taken at least 30 minutes to repopulate the machine. Nope—just like
a restart, instant.
Then,
I was to order a new cable. Well, when I did that (using the link TG gave me),
I got a reply saying I should go to a different site to order the cable, but I
have no idea what to order.
Meanwhile, I'm trying to work on a 14" laptop screen, with an alien OS, in the shadow of a 27" monitor. Ugh..
Ordinarily when I do yoga, my energy level rises so much that I wear basically only sweat pants and tee-shirt; even so, usually by the end of the lesson I need to cool off. However, since my knee surgery, I find myself cold most of the time—and since my thermostat is set to 72F, I know it’s not the environment, it’s me.
So last Friday when my instructor showed up
via Zoom, I was still wearing a hoodie, zipped up, which stayed on for most of the lesson. I pretty much never pay
attention to which tech swag I’m wearing, and Lord knows I have enough tech
company tee-shirts to outfit Sacramento. So I didn’t think anything about it as
I was moving about, until my instructor asked, “When did you work for Goldman
Sachs?”
Well, I had to parse what she was talking
about, and eventually arrived at:
And the mundane answer is that I got it at a
party during one of the Grace Hopper Celebrations of Women in Computing. It’s
all cotton, a little on the thin side, but comfortable and comforting to wear. Also, it has pockets. And I can top it with an oversized fleece I got from yet another STEM
organization if I have to go out. The hood part has no drawstring, so it's more an ornamental feature than a functional one, but still.
(As an aside, GHC is a great place to get wearable swag, because if you ask the women handing it out, "What size should I get?" they'll tell you. No problem. The Goldman Sachs woman gave me the once-over and without hesitation said, "Large." She was exactly right. Go to any other tech conference and ask the guys handing it out that question and they start backing away, stuttering and shrugging because they're too afraid to answer it honestly.)
But Saturday morning, I realized that my
answer should have been, “Oh, yeah—George Santos and I…we were besties.”
That’s a Dorothy Parker moment I’ll never get
back.
Last Thursday I walked to the end of the cluster and back, a journey of perhaps 700 steps total. I was absolutely flummoxed to see fully grown and blooming daffodils at the side of one house.
It’s not even March, people, and daffs are
acting like we’re headed straight into April. Those flowers had to have stuck
their noses up through the surface of the earth at least two weeks ago to be
this far along. It’s whacky.
I know why they’re doing it, tho—we’ve had
such bizarre weather really all winter. Thursday, in fact, it hit 81F in The
District They Call Columbia; it was 78F in the People’s Republic. Then it snowed (well, dusted) on Saturday and the temps stayed in the 30s all day. The plants
are confused.
Like the rest of us.
I think this means that we’re going to have a
really bad year for fleas, now. Folks with furry friends better stock up on
remediation.
Thursday marked four weeks since my total knee replacement surgery. SITREP as of Friday’s PT session:
Flexion: 122 degrees
Extension: Two degrees off flat (have to work
on that, which involves lying supine, propping my ankle up on a rolled towel and
letting gravity pull the knee down for a couple of minutes; try it some time
and see how much you like it)
Walking up and down stairs with some fluidity
My therapist says I’m doing fantastic,
although I confess I am still not at the stage where I can say with a straight
face, “I’m so glad I had this done.”
SITREP from Friday’s yoga lesson:
Careful sun salutations, including lunges and
planks
Warrior I and Warrior II, and Triangle Pose
Very lopsided Tree Pose (I can bend the right
knee only enough to get the foot along the left shin, but the right leg will
sustain the left foot against the thigh as normal)
Bridge against the wall (although, TBH, the
left leg was doing about 65% of the work)
Can’t do Child’s Pose,
but can do Melting heart.
And my verymost favorite: Twisted Puppy!
So today's gratitude is progress. I know I've had a better recovery that some people, and I'm grateful for that. I'm also grateful that this process has made me appreciate things I've taken for granted, like mobility and flexibility. That has enriched my life.
The utterly unique Randy Rainbow released this a couple of weeks ago on Twitter, and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head. So I’m sharing it with you, so it’ll worm your ear, too.
Whenever I see something like this, I always wonder about the backstory.
What aspirations shaped the original purchase, and what
disillusionments paved the path to being left out for trash day?
Same with Tuesday’s
pic of items for another trash day. What’s the story behind acquiring that
picture, and what changes led to just chucking it out?
Gotta be something.
Time for some more vanity plates, I think. (I haven’t been taking walks any longer than to the end of the cluster and back, so no new photos.)
It took me about a week to go through the frozen dinners I’d stockpiled for knee replacement recovery. (As an aside, let me just comment that I grotesquely underestimated the recovery period, because I had about eight of them.)
But in point of fact, I didn’t care, because I have completely
lost my appetite. I haven’t had anything for breakfast since 25 January;
perhaps three or four days since then I’ve managed some yoghurt around midday.
And except for those frozen meals, dinner has been soup. (And a can of
Progresso soup is two meals.) I just don’t care.
Well, last Wednesday I discovered that it apparently takes my
gastro-intestinal system two weeks to empty out; I spent the day in some
distress, but here I am, so all’s well.
Still, I don’t want any repeats of that. Friday evening I got
kabob takeout, because it “tasted” good in my mind and I thought the rice would
be easy on my stomach.
It did taste good, and I got three meals out of it, so it was a
good investment.
Also—I’m now at the point where I can walk both up and down
stairs in the normal fashion—step, step, step, step (as opposed to step, match;
step, match). I remind myself that I’m still short of one month out from having
my knee carved up like a pumpkin, so I'm taking both these things as wins and
reasons for gratitude.
