My gf Aelys is going back down to San Francisco for the winter to work so I'm spending the next several days with her at her house in town. She wants me to regularly check on the house while she's gone. She's worried about pipes freezing when the temperature falls below 0 degrees Fahrenheit this winter. Without her around, I will have more free time; she's the kind of girl friend who wants me around always to help her whether or not it's somethign that she can do more quickly and with less stress by herself. Maybe it's not so nice to say, but I'm looking forward to this.
With more time and the fact that I will be here periodically, I signed up to volunteer at the local Soup Kitchen. The soup kitchen provides free food for the needy, and with the poverty level in this part of state as high as it is (>25%) and the fact that it is becoming increasingly difficult to get on public assistance, there are a lot of needy people. Also, by helping at the soup kitchen, I hope that I might be able to work on cultivating my empathy and compassion.
A couple of weeks ago on my way back to the cabin from the library, my bicycle suffered a catastrophic breakdown. That's the kind of equipment failure that, no matter how diligently you have prepared in terms of carrying tools and spare parts, you can't fix the bike on the road and ride it home. The rear skewer broke. Considering that I have a 60 mile round trip commute, I bring along an extensive bicycle repair kit. If only I was in the habit of carrying an extra set of skewers in my tool kit, I would have been OK. But those things almost never break if you are careful not to over tighten them. I had to push the bike home, and by then I was so disgusted with it that I left it leaning outside against the cabin and couldn't bring myself to even look at it until Saturday. After finally building up enough motivation, I pulled off the wheel and found that not only had the skewer snapped, buy the hub itself was broken inside. That must have been why the wheel started rubbing and grinding when I first heard the pop.
Anyway, the hub was a relatively expensive 36 hole Shimano Deore XT hub, and it shouldn't have fscked up like that because high end bike parts are supposed to be better than that. Luckily I own several bicycles. I can afford this by not owning a car. Money that would have been burned up by the daily expenses of car ownership, taxes, gas, fees, etc gets put toward nicer things like bicycles. So I rode another one here yesterday, a Bianchi Bar Bike I bought for $50 on craigslist several years ago. A "Bar Bike" is a bike that is so cheap and beat up, you don't have to worry about it being stolen when you ride it to the bar and leave it locked to a parking meter or tree in a high-crime neighborhood like Haight-Ashbury where I lived in San Francisco at the time.
So, today, I decided to buy an entire new wheel and cassette. On the old wheel, the rim, tire, chain, and cassette were worn out. The bike shop in town didn't have the wheel I wanted, and they weren't willing to quote a price and order one for me so I bought one online. $300. Bike parts are not cheap.
Hobbits are diminutive creatures who inhabit Middle Earth in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings novels. My favorite thing about Hobbits is their extraordinary feet. Their feet are unusually large, hairy and unaffected by harsh climate or conditions. They don't need to wear shoes, and they don't. They can roam barefoot all day across the sharp stones of the talus slopes of mountainsides, across deserts of thorny plants, or snow fields and never get a cut or even a blister or frostbite.
Thus inspired, I've been working on toughening my own feet. In San Francisco, I would spend my day barefoot some times. But invariable, I would end up picking bloody shards of glass out of my feet by the end of the day. Despite its reputation for being a progressive and environmentally conscious city, I have found that it is in many ways the opposite. For example, the people of San Francisco defiantly recycle their glass by throwing it out of their car windows. Need I say that very few actually ride bicycles and that the mass transit system is gentrified to the point where only the 1% can afford to ride it regularly?
When I lived in Portland, it was much safer to go barefoot. Mostly, shops (cafes) would ignore me. It's mostly old people who get upset by that sort of thing. I would sit and move about in a way that my feet weren't conspicuous. Now going barefoot here in the desert is an entirely new challenge. Every thing that grows has some kind of thorn or spine, especially by the late summer and fall when the sun and heat have desiccated most plants. But I still go barefoot mostly and in spite of all of the thorny plants that grow here. At the end of the day I prefer to pick thorns out of my feet rather than glass. So, it's not so bad as going barefoot in San Francisco.
I've tapered down to 1 100 mcg/hr fentanyl patch every 2 days. This morning, I took a couple of naloxine (Aleve) tablets and an ibuprofin as well. Still, I have a very uncomfortable feeling. I'm restless and have back and leg pain. I wonder whether I have not actually injured my back this past year without knowing about it and that the fentanyl has been masking the pain all this time. And then there is the psychological craving and restlessness. Mentally, it's as though my favorite food were dished up and sitting on a plate in front of me, and I'm very hungry, but I can't eat it because my mouth has been wired shut. It's also like sitting through a very boring lecture on a subject you aren't interested in high school. You have been sitting for the past 8 hours. It's Friday, you usually get let out a few minutes early, and it's one minute before the bell rings, but the Professor keeps going on and on and on because that one kid keeps asking him to explain and expand upon a trivial point that nobody cares about. This discomfort is all I can think about.
I feel that the following is now safe to write about publicly because the Fentanyl is now gone. After my father died of pancreatic and liver cancer several years ago, he left behind cases of Fentanyl patches he had been issued by the VA hospital. In those cases were thousands of unused patches of varying dosages ranging from 12.5 micrograms per hour to 100 micrograms per hour released. Supposedly, each one lasts 72 hours.
to be continued due to exceeded word count
With more time and the fact that I will be here periodically, I signed up to volunteer at the local Soup Kitchen. The soup kitchen provides free food for the needy, and with the poverty level in this part of state as high as it is (>25%) and the fact that it is becoming increasingly difficult to get on public assistance, there are a lot of needy people. Also, by helping at the soup kitchen, I hope that I might be able to work on cultivating my empathy and compassion.
A couple of weeks ago on my way back to the cabin from the library, my bicycle suffered a catastrophic breakdown. That's the kind of equipment failure that, no matter how diligently you have prepared in terms of carrying tools and spare parts, you can't fix the bike on the road and ride it home. The rear skewer broke. Considering that I have a 60 mile round trip commute, I bring along an extensive bicycle repair kit. If only I was in the habit of carrying an extra set of skewers in my tool kit, I would have been OK. But those things almost never break if you are careful not to over tighten them. I had to push the bike home, and by then I was so disgusted with it that I left it leaning outside against the cabin and couldn't bring myself to even look at it until Saturday. After finally building up enough motivation, I pulled off the wheel and found that not only had the skewer snapped, buy the hub itself was broken inside. That must have been why the wheel started rubbing and grinding when I first heard the pop.
Anyway, the hub was a relatively expensive 36 hole Shimano Deore XT hub, and it shouldn't have fscked up like that because high end bike parts are supposed to be better than that. Luckily I own several bicycles. I can afford this by not owning a car. Money that would have been burned up by the daily expenses of car ownership, taxes, gas, fees, etc gets put toward nicer things like bicycles. So I rode another one here yesterday, a Bianchi Bar Bike I bought for $50 on craigslist several years ago. A "Bar Bike" is a bike that is so cheap and beat up, you don't have to worry about it being stolen when you ride it to the bar and leave it locked to a parking meter or tree in a high-crime neighborhood like Haight-Ashbury where I lived in San Francisco at the time.
So, today, I decided to buy an entire new wheel and cassette. On the old wheel, the rim, tire, chain, and cassette were worn out. The bike shop in town didn't have the wheel I wanted, and they weren't willing to quote a price and order one for me so I bought one online. $300. Bike parts are not cheap.
Hobbits are diminutive creatures who inhabit Middle Earth in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings novels. My favorite thing about Hobbits is their extraordinary feet. Their feet are unusually large, hairy and unaffected by harsh climate or conditions. They don't need to wear shoes, and they don't. They can roam barefoot all day across the sharp stones of the talus slopes of mountainsides, across deserts of thorny plants, or snow fields and never get a cut or even a blister or frostbite.
Thus inspired, I've been working on toughening my own feet. In San Francisco, I would spend my day barefoot some times. But invariable, I would end up picking bloody shards of glass out of my feet by the end of the day. Despite its reputation for being a progressive and environmentally conscious city, I have found that it is in many ways the opposite. For example, the people of San Francisco defiantly recycle their glass by throwing it out of their car windows. Need I say that very few actually ride bicycles and that the mass transit system is gentrified to the point where only the 1% can afford to ride it regularly?
When I lived in Portland, it was much safer to go barefoot. Mostly, shops (cafes) would ignore me. It's mostly old people who get upset by that sort of thing. I would sit and move about in a way that my feet weren't conspicuous. Now going barefoot here in the desert is an entirely new challenge. Every thing that grows has some kind of thorn or spine, especially by the late summer and fall when the sun and heat have desiccated most plants. But I still go barefoot mostly and in spite of all of the thorny plants that grow here. At the end of the day I prefer to pick thorns out of my feet rather than glass. So, it's not so bad as going barefoot in San Francisco.
I've tapered down to 1 100 mcg/hr fentanyl patch every 2 days. This morning, I took a couple of naloxine (Aleve) tablets and an ibuprofin as well. Still, I have a very uncomfortable feeling. I'm restless and have back and leg pain. I wonder whether I have not actually injured my back this past year without knowing about it and that the fentanyl has been masking the pain all this time. And then there is the psychological craving and restlessness. Mentally, it's as though my favorite food were dished up and sitting on a plate in front of me, and I'm very hungry, but I can't eat it because my mouth has been wired shut. It's also like sitting through a very boring lecture on a subject you aren't interested in high school. You have been sitting for the past 8 hours. It's Friday, you usually get let out a few minutes early, and it's one minute before the bell rings, but the Professor keeps going on and on and on because that one kid keeps asking him to explain and expand upon a trivial point that nobody cares about. This discomfort is all I can think about.
I feel that the following is now safe to write about publicly because the Fentanyl is now gone. After my father died of pancreatic and liver cancer several years ago, he left behind cases of Fentanyl patches he had been issued by the VA hospital. In those cases were thousands of unused patches of varying dosages ranging from 12.5 micrograms per hour to 100 micrograms per hour released. Supposedly, each one lasts 72 hours.
to be continued due to exceeded word count
