Week 263: No Boom Today, Boom Tomorrow
A 3000-word catharsis
I have kept a few quotes in my head that I drag out in appropriate situations. Three of those come from old episodes of Babylon 5. When I was awakened by Huey deciding that 5am was the perfect time to lie on my kidney and make biscuits, I would always shout “What is it you moon-faced assassin of joy?!” When I was seeing someone enact some first step toward something in quiz bowl, that I had been working on for years, I’d mutter “The avalanche has begun, it is too late for the pebbles to vote.” And not frequently enough, when something that by all rights should have exploded directly in front of me didn’t explode directly in front of me, I’d misquote the line “No boom today, boom tomorrow.” I’d stick a “Maybe” in there to match the context in which it was originally said. I certainly don’t use the final bit “There’s always a boom tomorrow” because that covers a long chain of tomorrows. Last week at this time, I was looking at a lot of situations where I wasn’t going to be graced with a maybe boom tomorrow. So I cut last week short enough to let you know something was up, and tried to keep it all together.
Setup
The sinking feeling of commerce post COVID
Sunday night wrapped up the home show and I spent the evening breaking down my wife’s booth and hauling back into storage. Sunday afternoon, I commiserated with the other vendors. Only one of them was ahead of last year’s numbers, and last year’s numbers were pretty awful. A quick study of our receipts matched their anecdotes. Her booth had sold pretty much the same number of large ticket items from last year, within one item in each category, and had the same number of sales among previous customers. But the new customers and the lowest priced items were both in the tank. We’ve been in steady decline since the return 2022 show, and nothing has even come close to the 2020 show, where we lost the last weekend to COVID.
The prevailing thought a lot of these vendors had after last year was that it would/might/could be better after the election. I was skeptical of that opinion, this year saw a lot of vendors bolt so there were entire sectors of the home show which longtime attendees would call them missing. What’s set in is mechanical, not economic, psychological or political. People are not coming to this because they don’t need to come to this. And the corresponding principle of that is the vendors don’t need to come to this to sell to their customers. So I packed it up, drove it back and dropped it in storage. No boom today.
Plumbing
After the show, I came home to find the pump had failed again. This had been a long-running problem with our well. The pressure drops precipitously and flow to the bathrooms goes to a trickle for fifteen or so minutes until the pump kicks on again. I had a plumber in who fixed it for a while by adjusting the pressure on the tank, but it continued and then through February it had become regular failure. I had spent a couple evenings adjusting various parts. It had been a regular cycle, I’d make a little adjustment, see the gauges return to normal, make the change, come up slightly triumphant, saying I’d fixed part of the problem, and realizing during the aborted shower that that wasn’t a big enough part, and I was further disappointing my family. Finally, Sunday night, I had found some char on the pressure switch that could be causing a short. So at half past midnight, I gave up and queued a call for the plumber to come on Thursday. I wasn’t looking forward to what I figured it would cost, but I wouldn’t know how much until Thursday. No boom today.
The realization that the bet I'd been making with myself suddenly came true.
On Monday, I noticed a meeting had been scheduled for work at the end of the month which was to arrange the wastebaskets so we could clean up the office. It was about how I expected to find out we were moving out of this office back to the main building, completely in media res. Now it wasn’t quite as bad as that, they do want us to start clearing up the floor so we can move over to a section of the old building, but we won’t be doing it until Q3. Since that will involve every flex and WFH worker coming in and losing a day of production packing up, it’s best to space it over a quarter.
So no boom today.
The feeling that I'm so boring that they lost track of the script.
Tuesday morning, I got up bright and early for the annual trip to the cardiologist. I actually had to start at Canonsburg hospital at 7 to draw blood to test, because I had mistaken the day of the appointment as Thursday. So I tore through that testing, hopped in the car and drove into the city to make my 830 echo, which was prep for the 930 appointment.
The echo went well, but I was struck by the feeling that they really didn’t know what exactly they were looking for. In past echocardiograms, I’ve known that’s the problem, they never were able to diagnose exactly what happened when I got sick because there wasn’t the expected long-term damage. So as they took the first series of pictures, and then injected contrast to see if there was something subtle there that they just missed, I was aware of the result just from the process. No decline from previous year, no new evidence. Boring.
When the cardiologist came, I knew how it would run, except for one thing, she wanted to see if my anemia had returned. I immediately asked “what anemia?” While I had had many, many symptoms when sick, the blood never was the issue, it was always the muscle. And with her sudden remembering that that was not my case but her next appointment, I started to worry. Not only was I boring, I was becoming forgettable and nondescript. As a tester, I know that’s a worrying sign, because it means the tester isn’t paying full attention to the right test output. They’re looking for something else because the things being monitored aren’t changing. That is a way to get away from the solution that is working. It takes your eye off the ball, and takes your confidence in your own evidence away. And that was exactly how I felt leaving the hospital that morning.
No boom today.
Hospitalization
When I got home, Dana had brought John back from his most recent hospitalization. As I’ve mentioned here before, Dana’s ex-husband (Catie’s dad) has been living with us for a while now while he recovered from a fall and he’s been preparing for foot surgery (why he had been away) and neck surgery (why he can’t be on his own as a fall risk.)
An aside: In every exchange where we explain this situation to someone, there’s invariably that moment where they praise how generous we are to do let him in to our home… please DON’T. You don’t need to apply morality or virtue signal to this scenario, it’s just what had to be done. This was instinctive, the alternative was likely too horrible to contemplate, but we didn’t contemplate that, we just did what was needed.
So he had gotten settled in after the foot surgery, and was working on being able to walk again, and then coming back on Tuesday, having had some complications, losing two toes as an infection kept attacking. He was fighting for the next step, and as he stabilized he was able to come back to our place while I was at the other hospital.
Then boom today.
Overnight Tuesday into Wednesday, he ran a high fever, pain radiating from the foot, and a spot showed on his leg where the infection had spread. He went by ambulance to Canonsburg’s emergency room, and we sort of went along with our lives. It wasn’t the first time he’s had to go for treatment, but it was the first time he went in the middle of the night. As they treated him, in the afternoon, he arrested. His heart, which had otherwise been fine for the period, stopped for ten minutes while they tried to revive him. They got him back up, but for most of Wednesday, we had to prepare for the worst. Catie was at the point of using phrases like “Whatever will happen will happen,” which is not something you ever want to hear out of your daughter in that case, but I couldn’t counter.
I don’t mean to make this sound callous, but I had to leave him in hands that knew more, and just be present for the others in the room, I couldn’t do much else. Mentally I was shut down, and I wasn’t much help to Catie or Dana, but I guess just being there was sufficient. So that is why last week’s stuff was such chaff. I fell asleep in the chair. That was out of my control, it was out of all of our control. At this point, we couldn’t fix or stabilize him, so the only thing left was to fix the other things.
Fixing and stabilizing
Plumbing
Thursday, Dana and Catie left for the hospital just as the plumber came. I didn’t have the time or the memory to move the appointment, and as we replaced the pump switch we found the issue we were looking for. In the midst of the pump cycling back and forth well outside of its range, it had managed to pick up a flat pebble from the bottom of the well and carry it up into the check valve of the pump switch. It was a solution that explained everything we had been seeing for months, the pressure couldn’t hold because the check valve couldn’t close completely, and water leaked back down at pressure, the pressure tank looked like it was developing a leak, because its gauge was fluctuating to atmospheric pressure. The switch was shorting because it couldn’t go down all the way because the flap wouldn’t travel its full distance. And none of this matched anything we knew because the readings on our instruments couldn’t tell us anything about inside the valve. While I was happy to put it together finally, I couldn’t escape the feeling that I had just spent a couple months trying to make sense of my echocardiogram.
In the afternoon, I met up with Catie and Dana, and after an abortive attempt to visit practice, thwarted by player schedules, we went over to the hospital. John had been moved from the emergency room to the ICU, and was awake, but was still recovering from bruised ribs from resuscitation and sore throat from intubation, and had no sense of how much time he had lost. But he was stable, and coming back from the edge slowly. All you can ask.
Utterly missing a vacation day
Friday I had had it. I was so completely strung out I needed the quiet that my office provided. I slipped in there at 7, got my cup of tea, and knocked out a few tasks that needed to be done before the final week of development. By 11, I had punched out enough stuff that I thought momentarily that I could even finish my tasks a day ahead of schedule. Not ten minutes after I started feeling guilty about thinking that thought, I got a text from Catie that “Patsy passed”.
Boom today.
I’ll confess, I read the last word of that text first, and then I recovered myself. Patsy was the sister of Dana’s godmother, and she had been in a nursing home and hospice for a while. So while it wasn’t unexpected, it knocked me right back in the pit I had been climbing out of. Oh well, nothing to do but keep climbing.
It was around 2 when I realized I was achieving my dream. I had gotten enough done to be ahead of the deadline, and it was just the lush and calming quiet of the air conditioning. In fact the lights in my section never came on all day. Nobody else was in the office, and nobody had any requests for me all day.
I had completely forgotten the date. To balance out the number of holidays that had been given to workers in other countries, the US offices were extending Memorial Day and Labor Day to five-day weekends, and put a holiday right on March 21. And though this month I knew that I had an extra day off coming, I had completely placed it out of my mind.
It was at this point I figured I had found bottom.
Self-Care
I rarely partake of a self-care routine, but this was necessary, and fortunately things aligned for the weekend to feel like that. For me it starts with admitting that “I need a win.” and is usually followed by a very hot shower and the accomplishing of a nice small normal task that I have needed to do for a while. Friday night, I did those in succession. I assembled ten books for prizes, from a box I found in the basement, while I was puttering with the well pump. It was a beautiful set of books, dense with knowledge, and balanced across categories; and I was able to keep two other books I’d been searching for for years. (We’ll cover those later) I needed a win, I got a win.
Saturday, I still needed a win, so I took the books down to Pitt and gave them out as prizes, after reading the whole day. Nine rounds, a nice small tournament, that got me out of my rut. I commented repeatedly about how nice this was to be able to put the stress to the side for a while. I even got to meet two teams new to the circuit. One came from the TV show, another came from West Virginia’s state competition. Touching base with them, and getting to see them have fun was relaxing. I’ll try to help them, but I know they’re going to get help from other teams they met at the tournament.
No boom today.
Because it was a short tournament, I actually got out ahead of my next appointment. I had to go to Monroeville because Catie’s dance team had a competition this weekend, and she needed to be there for the team, and for her own self-care. While she knew he was still improving slowly, she needed an outlet for all the bad energy she had collected. Dance was her way of needing a win this weekend. Regardless of how she placed this weekend she got the win she needed.
Before she danced and after my tournament, I drove around to the garden center and the bookstore. Salt for the water softener, dirt for the spring planting, and two of the Nero Wolfes I haven’t read, and I at least had a couple small wins in reserve.
Sunday, I dropped off John’s backpack at his hospital room. Clothes, phone, charger, mints, and conversation. Part of it was to confirm he’s doing better, part of it was to make sure he had some more fight left in him, and to ensure they didn’t perform the ultimate cruel irony of giving him the room I stayed in. He still had no memory of the three days, or even that I had seen him before, but I filled him in with the information that everyone at home wanted him to get well, those kittens wanted their favorite human lap back. I now had two points of data to be able to tell Catie he’s doing better, and mean it. He’s got a long way back and he’s not assured to get out of this, but like everyone else he needed a win, and to know that he had gotten one.
Tonight, after I finish this, I’m going to book my next win of the past few days. Having nothing else to do but stew in a low panic Sunday night, I started the press releases for ICT a week early. They’re going out tonight, and then I’ll start on the IPNCT press releases. I’ve already signed out of work and practice tomorrow, I have a funeral to go to, and we need to be there for Patsy’s sister Liz. Hopefully, no boom tomorrow.