You're Doing It Wrong

When I drove up to my folks place I saw this.

I said, please tell me no one is using this ladder to go on the roof.

Like, maybe they had it out for a band of roving teenagers who like roofs. (Is it weird I want to pluralize that rooves?)

My Mom and Dad gave me a guilty look and said, we meant to put it away before you got here.

So then I tell my sister this story and she says, “So, we’ve reached the point when our parents are hiding what they’re doing from us?”

—

In other news, the project of August is now the project of September. I have all my notes back and I need to buckle and make my manuscript pretty before it is sent off to the editor the first week of October. Don’t expect much from me.

I don’t think this photo adequately shows how smokey it was in California while we were there. It wasn’t terrible. We have had worse. But there was a haze – it makes the light pretty if you can bring yourself to appreciate such things.

One night we had a Skunk Wars. (Not fire related). Both Bob and woke up to skunk smell. In the morning Mom and Dad said they’d seen the motion lights keep coming on — what was going on? We don’t know. But there was at least one skunk that wasn’t happy.

Later in the trip we had a nice rain storm. The air smelled amazing – sweet, green and clear. You got sorta stoned just breathing it. And the sky was pure blue. It was beautiful.

And we had some major rain on the drive home. As in rain spraying off the highway, white-knuckle driving. I kept saying, “I can do it. I can do it.”

It was so novel it was a treat. Oddly.

I can’t remember if I already posted about this and I’m too lazy to look.

I found a thread online about modern music that sounds like eighties music. Finally, something for me!

I found some music to download.

And to make you cringe: I burned it to a CD so I could listen to it in my car.

I told Bob I was listening to some music that was recording in this year and he said: what does it sound like.

I said, “Eighties music.”

What is it about clutter? No matter how much you declutter, the clutter finds you. I cleaned out a bunch of stuff but now the laundry room is ground zero for clutter.

For example, you know how you can’t buy small quantities of office supplies anymore? You need to mail off some official forms but you have to buy a pallet of envelopes?

All that stuff is in the laundry room. I’m going to put off decluttering in there for awhile longer.

Did I tell you about the app I’m developing? It’s a quick and easy way to get cheap medical care.

Hear me out.

These days we watch so much TV and there are so many medical shows. We know more about advanced medical procedures than ever before.

Also, there are endless medical advice websites. And you can learn how to do anything on YouTube.

The way the app works is this. Let’s say you need a pelvic exam. How hard can it be to do a pelvic exam?

You open the app and into the query box type: I need a pelvic exam.

People in your vicinity that have the app will get an alert based upon their self-reported skills and interests.

They will respond by bidding on your procedure. You can sort by location, appointment time and price. Click a button and go get your exam! Or have your examiner come to you. Whatever works best, is cheapest, and gets you the care you need.

I think this is going to change the way America does healthcare.

[Edited to add: I scheduled this post over the weekend. The day after I wrote it I found this article about DIY gynecology.

A collective of radical bio-hackers and TransHackFeminists are out to reclaim gynecological medicine for those women, and for themselves. Under the name GynePunks, they’re assembling an arsenal of open-source tools for DIY diagnosis and first-aid care—centrifuges made from old hard drive motors; microscopes from deconstructed webcams; homemade incubators; and 3D printable speculums.]

[Even more edits added: I guess I should explain myself in case anyone is paying attention. I added the DIY bit just because I’d made a joke about pelvic exams. To clarify, I think a lot of women don’t have access to healthcare and if DIY can help them, terrific.

The app riff is intended to be a comment on the start-up culture bypassing traditional licensing, training and safety measures in the name of providing better, cheaper, more convenient service. (And often, shitty jobs.)

I probably shouldn’t have put both in the same post, but it’s done now.]