A week ago I suffered a case of vertigo that was so sudden and severe I couldn’t stand, or even sit. All I could do was throw up and moan. I thought I had food poisoning, but it was actually a viral infection, a condition called vesitbular neuritis, caused by the cold I had. The dizziness persisted, I was incapacitated, and a nurse practitioner recommended meclizine, an over-the-counter motion sickness medicine. Within ten minutes of taking Bonine, I went from feeling like the room was spinning, to being able to sit up, then stand and walk. A miracle!
Bonine is great stuff, and there’s even a formulation for dizziness after cow-tipping. It’s called Bovine. 😉
There’s nothing to be done about the ice dams on the roof. Everybody in this region with a house that’s not insulated perfectly underneath the roof has this problem. There’s water coming down along where the finished porch in back meets the house, and it was starting to get into my office in the basement, but it stopped after I stacked plywood boards on top of a long piece of 2×4 that’s leaning against the house. It seems to be helping direct the water away from the foundation. The only thing left to do is forget about it, with the help of Kahlua and chocolate milk.
Tax time is here. Argh. Yesterday, I downloaded TurboTax and installed it, after clicking on a promotion for returning customers that promised a free copy of Quicken. Microsoft has discontinued its Money program, so I figured I’d go for it. But when I got to Intuit’s site there was no mention of my free copy of Quicken, and after completing the purchase there was still nothing, so I’ll have to bug them about that. Argh.
Follow-up: I logged back onto Intuit’s site, and now there’s a redeem link.
We already have a lot of snow, over five feet of it, with not much melting. I got out and did some cross-country skiing, and I wanted to do more, but with the promise of another 20+ inches coming tomorrow and Wednesday, I’m not very enthused about anything to do with snow.
I’m worried about the weight of the snow on the front and back porches, where the roofs aren’t supported as well as on the house itself. So I borrowed a snow rake from my friend across the street and got to work. In back of the house, on one side of the porch, I couldn’t reach very far up, but I was able to clear the other side completely because I could stand on the deck. In front the roof is much lower, and I needed to be up high and far back to get a good angle. To do that I got clever and used a couple of pieces of plywood so I could climb onto the pile of snow next to the front walk.
We’re getting low on rock salt, and there’s no de-icer of any sort to be found, but other than that I’m as ready as I can be. I’ll get up extra early in the morning to see how things look.
This is the “maybe an inch” of snow that was predicted. In the spring this will be good, because the area needs more water, but right now it’s a major pain.
When I was a lot younger, I had a do-or-die attitude about snow. One time, while on a business trip, that attitude nearly killed me when driving from Denver to Fort Collins, Colorado. In heavy snow, with very poor visibility, I almost drove off the edge of a cliff. Today I’m sitting this one out at home until the snow lets up… which… it seems… it has just done. One thing I won’t do is mistake this weather as proof that global warming doesn’t exist. Tell it to the polar ice that’s melting.
Had a great surprise tonight. Joe Sinnott’s son Mark called Denro to say he was in town with his wife Belinda and their daughter Erin, who’s attending college in Boston. Erin is a writer, who already has two published novels to her name, with a third in the works right now.
We all met up downtown and went out to dinner. I love talking comics and music, but I have to take a backseat to Mark and Dennis when they get going on sports. My sport is running, and being not far from the Boston Marathon finish line this evening, I’m wavering on my decision to give up 26.2-mile road races.
