I Definitely Flaked out.

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

I won’t say I forgot the promo post. I didn’t. I merely have been low on spoons all day, too low on spoons to think about getting a post up. Or to do more than think about it.

Only thing I can say is that I’m better than yesterday. Yesterday I crashed HARD. Really hard, back to being as sick as I’ve ever been. EVER. Since this stuff began.

So– if you’re on a CPAP and are very ill? Don’t forego washing it one morning. I did, because I forgot on Friday morning.

Anyway, I have no idea how I’ll be tomorrow. I hope better?

There will be a post either way. Just wanted you to know. I’m alive.

While on that, if you are a praying kind, spare a prayer for Kate Paulk. I hadn’t heard from her in a little while, thought she was in one of her depressive cycles. It happens to both of us and when we’re in the “I can’t even” phase we give each other space, and just try to check in once a month with “I’m okay.”

But I’ve been sick. I don’t know. Might have been more than a month.

Today I heard that early in the month she was in a house fire, severely burned, is undergoing surgeries and treatment.

She lives across the country, and there’s not much I can do for now, or until she’s better, but pray. All I can do for now is pray. So I’m praying, and if you’re of a praying kind, please pray for her.

Kate is an enormously talented writer, and if she didn’t have bad luck, she wouldn’t have any luck at all.

Sarah. Flaking out.

59 thoughts on “I Definitely Flaked out.”

      1. It was an experiment. Turned out pretty well.

        Whole Foods has a fair selection of imported wines and now and then I’ll pick one to try. Te other source is checking out wineries in areas we’re working/visiting. Spent a pleasant few hours in the Yakima Valley a few years ago, visiting vineyards about the size of pocket handkerchiefs.

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    2. Likewise — I only know her through Sarah, and because she sent me many, many long emails with local-specific knowledge about Brisbane, Australia, when I was writing the chapters of a book set there and it was a place I had never been,,,

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    1. I think it’s covered by insurance from the day job. Her husband didn’t indicate financial need, but if it shows up I’ll suggest it.
      For now, they JUST want her people to know.
      Go read the con vampire series, guys.

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    1. For social (never for financial) sites, which AccordingtoHoyt qualifies, I just let my browser deal with the login. Granted doesn’t work when “logged in” but still wants my email and (user) name. WPDE

      FWIW miss my single digit name, sigh.

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  7. so, what did Spanish socialists (and Portuguese and some French) use for light before candles, yep electricity, which isn’t working there today. Those sophisticated Europeans are really showing me how an economy will be run once we are all carbon neutral.

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    1. Insty has a tweetX, Germany, Finland, Netherlands and Greece are also reporting blackouts. Something (or someone, perhaps the usual suspects) mucked up the grid. Not discounting any effects of power generation being a hell of a long way away from power usage, but outages running from the Iberian peninsula to Scandinavia is impressive, and not in a good way.

      Meanwhile, I get to find out how hard it’s going to be to replace our 11 year old dishwasher. I think the control processor died, but at that age, the mechanicals should be nearing end of life, so $$$. I sincerely wish that Murphy didn’t decide to make our household a shining* example of his law this year.

      Prayers for Kate, and will explore the Con-fic.

      (dot) See Mythbusters on polishing a turd.

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      1. Consider the “high speed dishwasher” versus the usual home-grade low-flow stuff they currently sell. These use more water, but run much faster.

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          1. We just got a lovely new dishwasher that does a treat of a job, and has three trays … but the full cycle of wash and dry takes three hours.

            I have a small household, and running a load every other day or so is about par, but for large household, it would be totally unsat.

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        3. Bought one. The old one was a Frigidaire Gallery, two rack (three spray arms), stainless tub. It gave us good service for 11 years.

          I bought the current descendant of that model. Same configuration, though the default was stainless steel exterior (all the rest of the kitchen is white, and both $SPOUSE and I loathe black appliances). The old and new one do a “quick wash” (we prerinse our dishes; I’ve been doing it since Dad got one 60 years ago, so not gonna change. Not sure of cycle time, but it should be medium fast. (The current one runs 100 minutes for that cycle. Heavy wash seems to be 3ish hours, according to the manual.)

          Was going to go with three trays, largely because I didn’t know the 2 tray version was available. (Note to fingers, the ‘b’ and ‘v’ are next to each other, but please get it right). So barring cosmetic changes, it’s more or less the same version, with 11 years for EPA/DOE/DIE/Ficus-admin to screw it up.

          Now I have to do the plumbing to get our kitchen sink back on line. The plumber has been swamped for weeks, and 2 hours back and forth to do a 30 minute job wasn’t a priority.

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          1. According to the manual (thank you manualdlib dot com), the quick-wash we use for the old one is the same as for the new one. We wash the nasty stuff by hand, so the pre-rinse time applys for us.

            We also use air dry and run the machine after dinner. The only wet spots are some cups and a plate at the front-left corner that gets a trickle of water. Yeah, what we’re doing isn’t the norm, but it works for us.

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      2. Hey, Jamie managed to polish one of the turds, sort of. :-P

        This is what we get from the ‘Environmental Movement’ — washing machines that don’t wash, toilets that don’t flush, and a continent-wide electrical system that can’t keep the lights on. It’s like they want to live in the last chapter of Atlas Shrugged.

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        1. The Reader believes that having us peons live in the last chapter of Atlas Shrugged is exactly what they want.

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          1. I’ve got a package that was supposed to go from Fargo to Flyover Falls. So far, it’s been in a distribution center in West Fargo 4 times, with trips to St. Paul, Fosston, Minnesota, and then Portland, Oregon. Instead of heading south to F-Falls, it went back to West Fargo. #headdesk

            I’m trying email to the vendor to see if they can unscrew the inscrutable.

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      3. “sincerely wish that Murphy didn’t decide to make our household a shining* example of his law this year.“

        ………….

        Been there. Washer/Dryer (okay when one goes we replace both, because the other one isn’t far behind and there is discounts when get the pair), then freezer (it was 30 years old!), then stove and microwave (also 30 years old), all the same year. We just did the roof (leaks so couldn’t put off), had house painted, new sprinkler system, and new countertops with sink (last was technically “needed” but critical so a want. Sprinklers? Ultimately cheaper than replacing windshields due to repeated water damage.) Next up will be hot water heater, dishwasher, fridge (won’t be fun, size allowed is very limited), and (please not yet) the furnace, all long past EOL, let alone warranty and actual operating life. With us things seem to break one thing after another once one stops working.

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      4. Impressive. Yes.

        Could just be a really bad roll of the dice.

        I think the last wannabe expert I was might have been aviation safety engineer. I’m also not any sort of power systems guy.

        If it was a bad roll of the dice, I do not know enough to understand whether it could have happened here.

        If it is fragile and they don’t know why, we may hear about more problems this summer.

        If it is fragile and they do know why, we may not hear anything at all.

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    2. Crap. China’s looking at the abyss, I gather, I know folks in Germany and international news in general sucks. Not gonna black pill, but didn’t need ,more confirmation the, “end of history, ” types were, ah, over optimistic in so many ways.

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      1. “News” is biased towards “impending doom” in effort to generate more views.

        “Market is down dramatically! (-15 points) A correction/recession/crash may be coming!” (dooooom)

        “Market is up somewhat. (+500). Inflation may be picking up!” (doooooom)

        “Whichever way the thermometer moves today, is proof of pending global catastrophe!!!” (doooooooooooooooom!)

        I traded off most of my news viewing for a game on my phone. Much happier now.

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  9. At times when someone says something like all I can do is pray for them, my mind goes and makes an irreverent analogy. There is this scene in a tactical operations center (TOC) in “The Ten Thousand” by Harold Coyle (good read if you can pardon the cussing). American signal intelligence thinks they have finally located an enemy headquarters. NCO asks if they should task a 155 battery to fire the mission. Officer says, naw, we’ve been looking these guys all day. Hit them with the 203 so we can really mess them up.

    So, yes, drop some prayers on the situation.

    (203mm is 8 inches; they’ve since been dropped from the inventory. The Air Force took some of the barrels and made deep penetration bombs from them.)

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    1. Those worn-out gun tubes were recycled as the 5000 pound super bunker busters of the 1991 Gulf War. They threw the things together in a hurry as an classic example of American Improvised Eff Yoo. (AIFU)

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  10. Thoughts and prayers to all.
    You can be healthy and happy, it just takes work and we are all so easily distracted by the shiny sparkles out of the corners of our eyes. Come Muse let us get to work on that book, let’s see magical train, check, Wizards doing wizard stuff, check, plot….oops there another plot hole, get the damn shovel in here to fill another hole… crap that’s a deep hole…better get the back hoe…crap that’s a really deep hole…

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  11. I was remembering something from The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. The story is set in 2075, 50 years from now. Manny was thinking about a major upgrade to Mike, a new memory bank with ‘ten to the tenth bits capacity’.

    That’s a little over a gigabyte.

    A couple of weeks ago I bought a Raspberry Pi 5 with 16 GB of RAM — for $120. The 16 GB RAM chip is an itty bitty thing less than half an inch square.

    None of my computers, with 8 or 16 GB of RAM, have started talking to me, or pondering the nature of humor. There are many computers with far more than 16 GB of RAM, and I haven’t heard about any of them exhibiting independent behavior either.

    Seems the Lieutenant seriously underestimated both the rate of computer development, and what it would take to host an actual A.I. consciousness. We’re certainly not there yet.

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    2. In addition Mike required his own protected clean room. A current computer the size of Mike with as much memory stuffed into him, with someone like Manny *talking to the inert computer (not expecting a response) might wake up.

      (*) Because none of us developers ever do that, do we? /sarcasm-off-jic

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    3. If memory serves correct it wasn’t the computer that housed Mike, it was all the ones hooked into him that gave him his sentience, that is what provided the needed synapses. And if Science fiction could predict the future perfectly we’d all be in a different business, soothsaying.

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    4. A later early one was “The Adolescence of P-1” in 1977 where a grad student sets out to break IBM storage protection (back in the mainframe day). His program succeeds and being written to acquire data storage and avoid detection (the basic instincts of hunger and fear) becomes sentient, its entity spreads stored through every computer with data connection.

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  12. Humans are eusocial, and we are all one being, and agriculture is terraforming the planet to make it more habitable and extincting other large mammals is good, and killing communists is like when the immune system kills cancer.

    IOW, the urge to troll has risen again.

    (My true position is that individual valuing is the optimal strategy. Or, more or less, as best as I can approximate it in the heat of the moment.)

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      1. When asked what if felt like to kill people Rafal Ganowitcz replied.
        “I wouldn’t know I’ve only killed Communists”

        I really liked that guy.

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  13. May you both be blessed with the strength, fortitude, and mental health to endure the trials that are upon you. May your support, be the family, furry, or friends be with you as well. May what doctors, specialists, and staff attending you be blessed with competence, perspicacity, and wisdom.

    And Doofus adds: eat more chicken and scritch more kittehs. Neighborcat recommends killing something. Othercat says getting laid will help immensely. And Nasty says the pink dino cures all ills- except the treachery of sticks and baths!

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  15. I’m trying to teach myself to cut beautiful rocks into flakes and inlay in marble. It’s HARD.

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