Weather Report

Snow. Lots of it. Inches deep, drifting to a couple of feet in places, most of them inconvenient.

Salt. None I could detect. Not so much as a grain twixt road and tire.

Result: I ♥ my Traction Control Subsystem. The Steviemobile rules the slippyness! If it won't go it is because both wheels are spinning equally easily, and that only lasts for a second or so. Yes, it is so slippery out there that it isn't possible to pull away without wheelslip even in low gear.

Normally I would have simply taken one look at the conditions and gone back to bed but I've had so much time off of late that I really can't do that on a whim any more.

The Long Island Rail Road was suprisingly unaffected. Claiming 20 minutes backlog, it was actually more like 5 by the time I got into Jamaica - late, owing to my having to widen the Stevieling's kind attempt at driveway snow clearance so I could actually exit the driveway. She had dug an exit and in the process piled up two mighty ramparts across the drive with only the sally port open. Sadly, she had not judged the dimensions of the car quite correctly and so I was effectively walled in.

I eyed the defensive snow-works with a jaundiced eye and came to the reluctant conclusion that it would require the ultimate in snow clearance toolfoolery to correct the problem. I would also get rid of the bits the Stevieling had decided were not worth shovelling while I was at it, since we might need the space and the snow appeared to be of optimum consistency and depth for the rotating muncher of Troll, The Snowblower of Supreme Spiffiness.

Of course, the Stevieling had decided that the path from the gate to the garage door was one of the bits not worth shovelling, so I had to battle the forces of nature in a World Gone Mad just to get the bally garage door open, but once I had, it was all over for the snow.

Each winter I carefully top off the fuel tank, check the oil and fire up Troll's engine to avoid any cold weather shenanigans not essential for snow removal. I gave a running commentary on how important each of these was as I instructed the Stevieling to connect an extension cord to the power supply so I could fire up Troll. I emphasised how forethought in even the most obscure minutiae of engine maintenance and regular starting to circulate lubricants and prime the carburretor would pay dividends in such freezing weather.

It would have all been much more impressive, of course, if this year I had thought to turn Troll around so the whirly bit pointed outwards.

As it was I was forced to back Troll out into calf-deep snow (which naturally entailed my wading through it first) while vouchsafing the most potent Words of Power I could summon first thing in the morning. It turned out that even at the slowest speed Troll's ability to move through deep snow outpaced my own by a mile per hour or so, causing it to push me over in an amusing fashion¹ eight or nine times before I had the wretched machine liberated and oriented for snow removal.

Once pointed in the right direction though it was the matter of only a few minutes to widen the hole in the glacis of Fort Steviemanse and to pass on to ancillary snow removal. Fortunately there were no frozen newspapers or fragments of truck tire hidden in the Stevieling's mighty ramparts of snow², and the muncher made short work of them without busting a shear pin.

The rest of the snow was about nine inches deep and slightly damp, just about perfect for snowblowing, and in no time the neighbours were gaping in awe at the twenty-foot arc of white powdery goodness shooting out of our driveway and all over theirs. Mr Singh indicated with a wave of his hand that I was Number One in his estimation, and I don't blame him. How he must have struggled to shovel his drive at six thirty this morning. Now, with consumate ease, I was showing him a better way. I suspect he was also impressed by my howls of manly triumph as hectares³ of white inconvenience were made Someone Else's Problem.

All too soon there was no more snow in the drive and I was forced to cease and desist from snow removal and recommence commuting. It is truly mind-blowing how time-saving the snowblower is when the flakes are down. It's also the best fun you can have outside on your own with your clothes on⁴.

Thank Azathoth for Troll, The Snowblower of Supreme Spiffiness.

1. to judge by the noises coming from the Stevieling↑
2. Papers are a frequent hazard. For some reason a person or persons unknown keep throwing them onto our driveway so they will get soaked and freeze solid to the concrete↑
3. Well, square yards at the very least↑
4. After the nocturnal activities I partook of at the onset of Domestic Flood Xena, the subject of Outdoor Home Maintenance While In State Of Dishabile is one of heated debate in our area. There are basically two schools of thought on the subject: I say that when events dictate it, and sometimes even when they don't, clothing is optional if donning it would impede damage control operations or just not feel as nice. Mrs Stevie, the local Homeowners Association, The Deer Park Chamber of Commerce and representatives of the local Police Precinct say it isn't↑

Look Who's Coming To Dinner

Jack McDevitt has been invited to attend I-Con 28.

This forces a complete reversal of my previous stance, which can be worded as "I'm not going to I-Con this year come hell or high water", since I view McDevitt as one of the recent greats of SF and have yards of his books I want signing.

I-Con has for years been a staple on or around the end of March/beginning of April for La Famile Stevie, as a three day event (actually, Friday night through Sunday afternoon, and Friday could often be a bit of a let-down) on the grounds of the Stoneybrook campus of SUNY.

Although it has morphed a lot over the years, and the old regulars who made it such a great event are now largely absent¹, we have also changed in our expectations of it. We originally went mostly for the guest speakers. Then I started to get more interested in the author-driven events and Mrs Stevie and the Stevieling got more caught up in the SCA-ness of it all. Somewhere in there a whole Anime subculture sprang up and threatened to dominate the entire con.

And the prices kept rising every year. I was getting a bit tired of it to be honest, and when SUNY announced that they were renovating the campus and therefore were declining to host I-Con this year, and when I saw the absolutely dreadful "arrangements" the I-Con management committee had made I decided enough was enough.

The Hotel Ronkonkoma has (apparently) always been a staunch supporter of I-Con, being the "official" I-Con hotel, location of the con ball and banquet for some years now and the place where everyone goes to filk² and so the committee decided they would have to be kept in the mix. The only fly in the space-ointment is that the Hotel Ronkonkoma is nowhere big enough to house the entire Con, and the committee felt there was nowhere else in the vicinity that could take the overflow, so other sites were sought out.

They've ended up with three different sites. One in Brentwood, right next door (sorta) to the Steviemanse. Yay! And one in Islandia, only a few miles from the Steviemanse by car. Yay-ish. And, of course, the Hotel Ronkonkoma some 15 miles east. Yeesh! The committee feels that no-one will be more than 15 minutes from the next site, but neatly elide over the issue of getting between sites to attend consecutive eventsusing the Long Island Expressway³, so knowing what sort of things will be happening in each site is of primary importance. This information has been non-existent up until about a week ago.

Add to this the fact of Mrs Stevie's extreme poor health of late and you might understand where my "Not on your nelly" attitude was coming from.

However, I was informed last night that since Sam Gamgee from Lord of the Rings (The epic saga of the One Ring by J.R.R. Jackson) will be attending as Media Guest of Honor, the womenfolks would put a brave face on things and required tickets buying at once. I grumbled a bit but went to the website to check it out and saw that McDevitt was a confirmed guest. I immediately returned to the living room and told the women in no uncertain terms that they could sit at home on their fat butts if they felt so inclined, but as Asimov was my witness I was going to I-Con and nothing they could say would persuade me otherwise.

I first encountered McDevitt at I-Con some years ago, and it was there I bought Polaris and got it signed. It is a relatively recent infatuation of mine to get books signed by the author. In previous years I didn't get excited by the prospect and never bothered, missing chances to get my C.J. Cherryh, Larry Niven, Ron Goulart, Barry Malzberg and Harlan Ellison collections properly endorsed. This sort of treachery by Mr Brain is why I never got on in life. I digress.

These days at I-Con I follow interesting authors⁴ around from panel to panel, even if the panel subject is not obviously of interest to me. Sometimes this pays dividends and sometimes it just gives me a chance to sit down. Bit of a crap shoot really. But McDevitt was very entertaining, enough so that I bought Polaris and Hello Out There, and, with one minor reservation, they were well worth the finding, leading me to a new (for me) source of highly entertaining reading. As a result I own about a dozen of his works now, and I jump at the chance to meet him again, get him to sign the buggers⁵ and tell him that his previous visit paid off, at least for me.

But oh, those sods on the committee have arranged for the panels to be split over the Brentwood site and the Islandia one, which means I will likely end up missing something I want simply because it will cost a significant portion of time to move the handful of miles down the Long Island Expressway. They could NOT have made life more difficult if they'd set out to do so. And I still don't know how much racing around I'll have to do in the fabulous Steviemobile over the three days because they still haven't nailed down what panels will be where (they could at least make a stab at dividing them up by genre).

But Jack McDevitt will be worth the hassle.

1. Octavia Butler has passed away of course, Barry Malzberg was very ill last year, Harlan Ellison just hates to travel and hates to travel to New York even more, and I don't know what happened to George Zebrowski↑
2. Yes, "filk". Google it for Azathoth's sake↑
3. A-List contender for the much-prized World's Longest Parking Lot designation↑
4. Like Ben Bova, Charles Stross and Norman Spinrad to namedrop shamelessly↑
5. I make the authors add "I-Con xx" rather than a year so that in fifty years when the Stevieling is slinging out my paperbacks, she can at least get a brief clue as to where and when it all went down↑

Never Mind The Cancer, We're Talking Unauthorized Car Parking Here!

There is no disease so terrible the non-medical staff of Long Island Jewish Hospital cannot make the patients feel worse after a visit.

Mrs Stevie has finished her Chemotherapy and Radiation Treatments. She thought that she would immediately start to get better, but has been dismayed by the one to three month timescales quoted by the doctors. I don't blame her a bit, since the radiation has burned the inside of her throat so badly she cannot talk or swallow, and has damaged (probably permanently) her salivary glands so that her saliva is very thick. The pain and the occasional chocking fit this combination causes is close to a definition of hell on earth for her.

Chemotherapy has been explained to me as an attempt to poison the patient in the hope the tumor dies before he or she does, and judging by the side-effects, after-effects and sundry other effects I think that is a fairly accurate description. What I wasn't aware of was the cumulative effects that make the symptoms of chemo-poisoning get worse as each treatment is applied, nor of the chemo-inertia that makes the patient actually continue to get worse for a time after the treatments have ceased. Mrs Stevie has somehow managed to continue the regimen, mostly, although the fluoride tooth treatments that will save her teeth from being destroyed by it all make her so ill she stopped doing them without telling anyone. I guess they're her teeth so it's up to her, but it's worrying nevertheless.

Last Thursday we returned once more to Long Island Jewish Hospital so the surgeon could check her out. These visits to LIJ are a source of great trepidation since the non-medical staff that infest the place seem to think that their jobs involve pumping up the misery for all concerned.

I have told already of the perplexing doings of Chauncy, now on his best behavior since Mrs Stevie tearfully asked Doc Teaspoon (the ENT specialist) if he could take over her evaluations and was gently questioned as to why. Since Doc Teaspoon and the surgeon were ex-university buddies I have no doubt the word got back that there was trouble in paradise. It's all good fun until the cancer patient won't come back to the doctor because his staff are being idiots.

I have also told of the strange and awful Guardian of the Carpark, who seemed to think on our last visit that the intricate rules and procedures governing when he would unlock the barrier could be divined by some sort of mental osmosis. Thursday's visit was made ugly by this individual, reprising his role of Jobsworth Hitler in the pageant of our lives.

I was careful to arrive shortly after 9am this time, in accordance with the mantra "The Carpark Opens At Nine O' Clock"¹ only to find it wasn't, yet.

I got out of my car, checked my watch carefully to ensure there were a good two minutes elapsed since the putative barrier removal time, and beeped my horn twice while calling towards the booth that last time had a human in it: "it's gone nine, please open the barrier". I got back into my car and spotted the J.W. Hitler striding the long way round towards us.

He arrived in theater and flapped his hand imperiously to indicate he wanted me to lower the driver's window. Upon doing so I was asked if I had an appointment. I answered that my wife did, and that we were now late for it so would he mind opening the car park please. He demanded to know the name of our doctor, which I was initially reluctant to supply². He insisted. I heatedly asked why he was delaying my wife's treatment. He wouldn't budge. I told him the surgeon's name but he still wouldn't move, so I began shouting at the top of my not inconsiderable voice "Why are you trying to kill my wife?"

I was so angry it didn't occur to me to simply get out of the car with my wife and take her inside, leaving the carpark entrance blocked by the Steviemobile.

After the third or fourth iteration of my extremely high-volume question, J.W. Hitler finally realized that he had gotten all he was going to and that I was deliberately making a scene over which he could not make himself heard so he unlocked the barrier and walked off.

What is it with this sorry excuse for a hospital? They are supposed to be the premier cancer treatment center on Long Island, but I can tell them right now that Mrs Stevie will beg anyone who asks to go elsewhere (Sloan Kettering in Manhattan is a longer commute but the agro of LIJ more than makes up for that). I mean, what is the percentage in pissing off people who aree sick, some of them terminally so?

Never mind that J.W. Hitler clearly has issues with me³, why in Azathoth's name does the clinic have a car park assigned to it that isn't open for business when they are?

The surgeon took a look at Mrs Stevie and said that he was pretty sure the cancer was all gone now. They'll be doing a PET scan in about two months or so to check for sure. He also wants to see her again in a month.

I decided to apply a cunning strategy and scheduled it for 9:30 am, long after J.W. Hitler will have scuttled back under whatever damp rock he spends the rest of his day under. Of course, I am older and wiser than I was before that fateful November day when we first set foot in that miserable place so I am under no illusions that this appointment will be annoying little shirt-free. The Mordor-like Long Island Jewish Hospital has vast subhuman resources to bring to bear when it comes to slowing down the process of applying healthcare.

What I thought was, up until recently, a slight upside in the business - that Mrs Stevie was unable to speak and therefore unable to comment adversely upon your humble scribe - has in fact been turned into a new nightmare for me since she regained enough strength to retrieve a pen and a pad of paper.

I had naturally placed all such items well out of her reach in order to ensure a quiet convalescence, but in the last few days she regained enough strength to start walking about the place with a determined look on her face that spelled trouble for all in her path.

Now my once-peaceful after work session with Mr Telly is accompanied by the annoying sounds of mad scribblings, and key parts of the plots of the detective dramas I find so compelling are disrupted by the sudden appearance in my field of vision of sheets of paper, thrust into my face and shaken back and forth until I snatch them from her hand and read them. They generally contain philosophical works pondering the existence of fresh milk in the fridge and lengthy instructions regarding the care and feeding of the common or garden Stevieling, but occasionally wander into the familiar territory of genealogical speculations with respect to me, grievance lists and so forth, along with lengthy streams of crazed babble after she's had her pain meds.

Some idiot sent her one of those bells you see in 1930s movies about hotels, the sort you slap the button on the top to get a loud "Ding!" with. Now the house rings to the incessant and capricious dinging as the woman, stir-crazy from six weeks of hellish chemo and radiation-induce confinement, takes it out on everyone. I no sooner settle down at the computer than it's "dingdingdingscribblescribbledingscribbledingdingding" and I have to drop everything so that an urgent frozen sausage shortage outrage can be rectified or the Stevieling can be lectured-by-proxy on the need to properly coordinate the colors when she dresses. Telephone calls are especially tedious, what with one ear on the handset and the other filled with indignant dinging and rustling and attempting to read what is written while listening to whoever is on the line. If it is the Mrs Steviemom, who is partially deaf and has problems with her hearing aids, the whole thing descends into farce worthy of Fawlty Towers or Brian Rix.

The English language has no phrase that adequately expresses the degree to which I look forward to the return of Mrs Stevie's speech and the ending of the Time of Bells and Notes.

1. Da da () da da-da da da () da da - where () is an unvoiced "da"↑
2. My exact words were "what do you care, we have an appointment and the carpark opens at nine o' clock"↑
3. That I would be pleased to resolve one-one-one with the aid of Mr Crowbar in a frank exchange of views. I'm old and slow but my residual anger would carry a lot of weight and I think I could take the twbleept in single combat↑

More Stupidity, LIRR Style

Last night we got four inches of snow.

Naturally, this was a pain in the backside which cried out for the complete and utter failure of the snow plow infrastructure to get in gear, so that the trip to the radiation clinic that now forms part of my morning commute took almost 45 minutes instead of the normal 20 as idiots tried to get vehicles monumentally unsuited to the task to move in a controlled fashion on roads completely clogged with inches of snow. About halfway through this ordeal by snowstorm it began to rain, revealing a nice coating of ice polished to a high sheen by the morons I was sharing the road with who don't ever seem to get the point about not spinning their wheels for the sake of it.

By the time I got to the station a fine sleet was coming down. I drove to the small side street I now park on, and was truly impressed by the number of idiots determined to see how quickly they could lose control of their expensive vehicles. I decamped and walked to the station through an increasingly bitter icy drizzle. As I did so I narrowly missed being run over by one of the Long Island Panzerführen.

This one was a doozy. Back and side windows obscured by at least three inches of wet snow. Lights completely covered by same front and rear. Small patch of windshield scraped "clear" but the hood and roof retaining their nice deep cover of snow for camouflage purposes.

Which made it all the more puzzling why the idiot driving the Deer Park Fire Department vehicle, for such it 'twas, had bothered to turn on all his blue flashing roof lights. All that trouble to avoid detection by the other motorists was jeopardised by the bizarre need to light the blanket of snow from beneath with what looked like three watt blue bulbs.

I ducked into the station house, where the nice new computer display informed me that the next train was on time and was due in at 9:33 am. Mr Casio Wristwatch, now synchronised to Jamaica time, informed me that it was now 9:33 so I left the warmth of the station house and made my way down the packed snow and ice which coated the entire platform until I reached the aluminium shelter erected about halfway down. I usually don't ride in the front of the train to avoid noise from the train's klaxon.

No sooner had I completed this journey, all of about 60 seconds of travail, than I was privileged to hear a recorded announcement that the train was now an estimated eight minutes late. In the space of one minute, the train went from being "on time" (though nowhere in sight) to eight minutes late. Magic.

I passed the chilly time by observing the LIRR crew who had invaded the platform with snow shovels in the quest for a snow-free environment and passenger safety. They were very busy, shoveling like madmen, which is why I found it so utterly perplexing that they had chosen to begin work at the extreme East end of the platform. Since the station house is at the extreme West end of that same platform and passenger turnout was almost certain to be light at this time in the morning compared with the period from 6:30 to about 8:15 - not to mention the effect the weather was having on getting people to just stay home - this pretty much guaranteed that they would have no chance whatsoever of clearing any of the platform people would actually be using to board that next train unless it was really, really late.

The train pulled up a few minutes later and we all tramped out to the doors so we could board. We stood and we stood as freezing rain soaked us through, but at no time were we in any danger of being forced to get on the train. In all I estimate we stood around getting drenched for about 45 seconds before someone got a bleeding clue and pressed the "open door" button. By then my coat was soaked through, still is as I type in the early evening, and the change at a very windy Jamaica was pure misery as a result. At least I had the reason for the train being late.

There wasn't a single person on board the thing that knew how to work it.

Funny Thing, Irony

Probably one of the most debated coffee-house topics is that concerning what does or does not constitute irony.

Poor old Alanis Morrisette fell afoul of this one when she wrote a song about it. "It's like rain on your wedding day" she sang, and people said "No it's not. That's just annoying."

I don't know so much.

From where I sit, irony would appear to be a matter of context, which in turn demands knowledge of the culture in which the reference is being made. This would seem to argue that not only is irony not absolute, one man's annoyance could very well be someone else's irony.

Rain on your wedding day could be seen to be ironic in the context that your archetypical American Girl spends vast amounts of her young life dreaming about her wedding day, and when the actual thing hoves into view it therefore tends to be stage-managed to the nth degree in order to make everything comply with the vision of what it should be like. Given that the young girl's dream undoubtedly includes the entire day, the one uncontrollable thing going totally nails-up could very well be interpreted as irony.

At least, that's how it seems to me.

This thesis is born out by the scene in the movie Con Air, in which some convicts seize control of the aircraft in which they are being transported and begin partying hard while Sweet Home Alabama booms from the radio. Steve Buscemi leans across to another character and says that this defines irony: a bunch of people on a plane singing along to a song performed by a group all-but wiped out in a plane crash.

Well, yes and no.

It is ironic if you consider that the last thing these guys want is to crash, and you happen to know that Lynrd Skynrd were involved in a plane crash that killed half the band and put the rest in hospital, I suppose, maybe, although it's a stretch even so. But if you consider that only a small fraction of the English speaking world contemporary with the film's release would know that, well, it pretty much fails the test as badly as Ms Morrisette's song did. That is why the writers felt the need to have one of the characters tell everyone where the irony was of course.

Which is a round-about way of saying that I'm rarely sure I've correctly identified irony when I've encountered it.

Changing the subject: This morning I raced to catch my train, the 8:53 from Wyandanch (Pearl of the East) to Penn Station (change at Jamaica for trains to Brooklyn). I am usually on this train these days, which gets me to work at the extreme end of my "flex time" window and requires that I work late and miss my only straight-through train home, since I have the honour of driving Mrs Stevie each morning to her radiation treatments.

This drive is now made in silence since her voice is no longer audible. Many's the time I've begged for a halt to her shrill admonissions of my good self, but for some reason there's no sense of satisfaction in being able to get a word in edgeways when she's so ill, just a mood of crushing sadness tempered by the sure knowledge that the cancer is in retreat. No doubt I'll regret not making the most of this time once she is back to ordering and nagging at the drop of a hat. I digress.

Snow had been falling since about 5 am and was blowing around and covering up the windows and headlights of the cars most inconveniently. Once again the elusive Long Island Panzerfüren hit the streets in force. This year there seem to be flocks of idiots in white cars who do not see the point of cleaning the snow from their vehicles nor of turning on their headlights. The resulting montage pretty much defines the art of camouflage. White car, covered in irregular heaps of snow (yes, even on the hood/bonnet), small slot scraped in snow-covered windshield, producing a very good simulation of a mobile snow bank. Add in a swirling snowstorm to help in further breaking up the outline of the cars and you have the perfect hide from which to snag caribou or snap candid photos of penguins at play. Whoops, I digress again.

I got to the station with about a minute to spare, but I needn't have worried. The Long Island Rail Road was having one of it's "days" and the train dawdled for another eight minutes before showing up, allowing the would-be passengers just the right amount of time to synchronise their bodies to ambient temperature conditions. I've believed for years that we, the paying customers of the LIRR, have been the unwilling subjects in an unannounced and inadequately overseen series of experiments in human cryogenics performed by the rail road, and today was proof enough for even the most hard-nosed skeptic. We staggered aboard the train, snapping icicles from out earlobes and noses and greeting the train crew with the traditional curses and threats, thinking the ordeal was over.

A sad mistake.

The train proceeded as far as the next grade crossing, about a hundred feet down the track, then stopped for about ten minutes. It them crept to the next crossing and did the same thing. then it did it all over again. And again. And again.

In a mere twenty minutes we had arrived in Farmingdale, about five minutes west of Wyandanch by sedan chair. Another fifteen minutes saw us in Bethpage, where we were so late everyone seemed to have lost hope and gone home. Would that I had done the same.

There were periodic "announcements" by someone doing a fair imitation of Mrs Stevie. I heard the word "signals" but nothing else was intelligible. Each crossing was guarded by a convoy of MTA Police vehicles, lit up with flashing lights like so many full-sized Hess Trucks, leading me to believe the automated circuitry that raises and lowers the booms had gone bye-bye. What was most galling (as it always is) was having to watch the off-peak east-bound trains get priority over our west-bound peak train.

By the time we reached Hicksville we were 47 minutes late. This was so late that there was no-one there to board the train. Hicksville is a major hub for commuters¹. Finding it empty was more than a little surprising and a good indication of how badly screwed up everything was. The doors opened so we could all sample the cold air from the elevated platform, unshielded from the wind by so much as a single tree, about the time I should have been boarding the Brooklyn train at Jamaica.

By the time we reached Jamaica, we had missed all the connecting trains and I realised I could either ride to Manhattan and use the subway to get to Brooklyn, or I could wait for forty minutes on the unsheltered platform at Jamaica for the proper train. I stayed put.

Sometime around 11am, an hour after I was supposed to be at my desk, we pulled into Penn Station and I started getting ready to debark. It was then that I actually took time to read the many flyers littering the seats², which were from the LIRR propaganda arm and were trumpeting their on-time performance.

I'm pretty sure that was irony.

1. and a source of a particularly gittish species of commuter too, but that's another story↑
2. I am currently re-reading my collection of Jack McDevitt "Hutch" books and had brought along Cauldron, the latest in the series. It was very engrossing, much more than whatever the LIRR was trying to make me believe↑

Scrawled In The Empty Spaces Of The Pages Of "Brass Orchids", Pub. 197? by Roger Calkins, Bellona

Mrs Stevie had to visit the Oncology Surgeon last Friday.

Yes, once again she had to deal with the infrastructure of Long Island Jewish Hospital, including the clueless front desk and Chauncy the Fbleepkwit, and they hit the ground running by not returning her initial call made to schedule her appointment. She gave them a couple of hours, then called back. Then did it all over again, giving them a slightly shorter time to do nothing.

By the time I got home she had called them six times and still had no idea if and when they would deign to let her see the surgeon. That's the one person in this whole sad, sorry house of cards that actually does something useful for the patients who are, lets remember, all suffering from some form of malignancy in their ears, noses or throats and might actually benefit from a bit of coddling.

She got so fed up that she eventually called Doc Teaspoon, the ENT who dealt so effectively with my ear infection and who did the initial medical work-up on her tumor and who is a very effective communicator in addition to being good at what he does¹, to ask him if she could she him instead.

Doc Teaspoon was kind enough to spend some time on the phone with the distressed Mrs Stevie, talking her through the reasons why she really needed to see the surgeon, but also offering to get in touch with him and alert him to the fact that his front office were not representing his best interests. It seems they were at ENT school together or something.

So the appointment somehow got made for last Friday morning, and I took the morning off and drove her to Long Island Jewish Hospital so they could begin the process of annoying the living crap out of us.

The first act started when we drove in the front gate and Mrs Stevie instructed me to turn into a small car park just before the large multi-storey one I was aiming the car at. I wrenched the wheel over and we made a hard left turn, tyres and Mrs Stevie screeching, into the short driveway next to the ENT clinic where I brought the car to a halt in front of a yellow lift-arm type barrier.

Which didn't lift.

I sat there for a few seconds, then I noticed a sign on the card-reader next to my door which said: "Press button for assistance". Winding down the window I confidently pressed it, but was perplexed to feel no movement in it at all. It seemed to be a dummy plastic casting, painted to resemble a bell-push type button, which had been glued to the card-reader as a sophisticated car-park joke. I snarled at Mrs Stevie and started to put the car into reverse so I could back out into heavy traffic driven by distracted people looking everywhere but at the road while they tried vainly to figure out where they were and where they needed to be in this nightmare of a place.

I'm not joking here. There are few signs in this benighted den and some of the ones they do have point to places that have been dug up in some sort of hospital-wide renovation project that involves demolishing random roads and stringing chain link fence at random with no regard for roads, sidewalks or large sandy pits. I tried to remember Mrs Stevie was very, very ill and therefore excused bad judgment (she clearly didn't know as much about the car parks hereabouts as she insisted she did) and began to reverse.

Which is when I noticed the old lady who had pulled in behind me.

And the person optimistically signaling her intention to join us as soon as we would stop messing about and enter the car park, and who was therefore creating a reversing issue for the old lady.

I looked frantically for a sign of some sort that indicated whether or not I was, as I suspected, trying to get into some sort of staff car park where card-entry was the only way of passing the barrier or someone I could ask, but there was only the roads, holes in the ground and the traffic. I pulled forward enough that I could get out of my car and tried again to use the call button on the card reader by hammering it with Kung-fu like jabs of my finger, then my thumb and finally my clenched fist smashing it hammer-wise while shouting morale-boosting phrases.

Definitely fake.

I walked back to the elderly lady, tapped on her window and explained I couldn't proceed. Before I could ask her if she knew whether there was a secret knock or something, she had backed her vehicle smartly into the road, narrowly missing my foot, and departed for the multi-storey car park. I keep forgetting that the elderly frewuently had prior careers as NASCAR and Demolition Derby drivers.

As I walked dejectedly back to The Fabulous Steviemobile, an Osamamobile pulled up to the exit barrier. Before the driver could depart the scene I hallooed her and asked her if this was in fact a staff-only car park. She explained that no, it was in general use but probably hadn't opened for business yet, and suggested I visit a hitherto unseen security guard post in the multi-storey car park to see what was up. I blubbered my thanks, and ran across to the booth, only to be told that someone was already coming to help and that I should go back to my car.

In due course a well-dressed Indian gentleman arrived in theater waving a key. He was quite cross.

"The car park does not open until nine o' clock!" he snapped.

I could see by my watch, synchronised to Jamaica LIRR time, that it was a couple of minutes past nine. My first instinct was to complain about the late opening, but I had a second thought that a more constructive suggestion might save the situation from deteriorating into nastiness. "Well, if there were some sort of sign to that effect..." I began in a neutral tone, smiling to show I was being helpful rather than pointing out the bleeding obvious.

"The car park does not open until nine o' clock!" he snapped again.

"And if I had been made aware of that in any way, shape or form we would not be having this discussion. However, as you can see there is no indication of when the car park opens or what to do if you've already pulled into the entranceway before that time" I said, still trying to stem my instinct to go for the jugular.

"The car park does not open until nine o' clock!" he snapped, in tones of one trying to communicate with shirt-thick morons.

At this point Mrs Stevie let loose with a stream of dockyard invective that set the headlining of the car on fire. Mr The Car Park Does Not Open Until Nine O' Clock was saved from the worst of it by the simple fact that her voice was completely gone due to the effects of her radiation therapy. I just shook my head and said "Thank you. Think of me each time you have this conversation." and drove into the now-accessible car park.

We entered the clinic and got a second pleasant surprise. Chauncy the Sbleepthead was manning the desk.

I promptly began a holding action in which I distracted Mrs Stevie from her building rage by reminiscing about our early married life, and our first few months in the company of the Stevieling, who could charm the birds out of the trees at three months. Of course, this only served to remind Mrs Stevie of the time we had all gone to Florida for a big family reunion.

We had taken everyone to Disney, and on one occasion at the MGM park I volunteered to wait outside with the three month old Stevieling while everyone else went into the Muppet Theater². You may not know this, but July is the off-season for Florida, being so hot no-one would want to go there usually, and hence it is awash in Brazilian tourists who are used to the heat, know a cheap airline ticket when they see one and who have no concept of personal space. I generally avoid them whenever I can, and it was just bad luck that Mrs Stevie emerged from the attraction to find me surrounded by about two dozen young Brazilian women, all somewhere between the ages of 18-25 and all possessed with the sort of dress-sense that dictates the dental floss bikini as sensible Disney park wear and all in skin-to-skin contact with yours truly while they crooned over the "bella bebo" in Portuguese.

Needless to say this went down like a lead balloon, as did the accidental trip into the memory of it all while attempting to preserve morale under fire. Anyway.

During this, Chauncy wandered over and announced that we would be seen by the doctor soon. He apologised for the delay and explained that it was because of a surfeit of doctors crowding out the examination rooms. This spontaneous display of helpfulness was so shocking it completely derailed Mrs Stevie's line of attack. We just looked at each other in amazement. Clearly, someone had "had a word". He even got her surname right.

The surgeon eventually hove into view and took a butcher's at Mrs Stevie’s mouth. He blinked in surprise and said that the "primary site" appeared to be completely free of cancer. He owned to being very surprised at the rapidity of the remission and said he was impressed that she was responding to treatment so well. He confirmed that the swollen lymph gland was half the size it had been when she was referred to him (something she had not believed when I had told her, nor when two radiation oncologists had told her). I saw the weight come off her shoulders and she visibly brightened.

We were brought back to reality when we attempted to schedule a follow-up appointment though.

"What time did you want to come in? Eight thirty?" said the suspiciously helpful Chauncy.

"The car park doesn't open until nine" I parroted.

"Oh, that's right! Okay nine it is. What day? he responded.

"How about Friday?" I said. "I have meetings on Tuesdays and Thursdays."

"The doctor only has Thursday hours" he replied.

Mrs Stevie made a warble of puzzlement, but I saw where this was going. "Thursday will be fine" I said, and steered Mrs Stevie for the door.

"That's absurd! she rasped in her Rod McKuen voice as I helped her into the car. "It makes no sense whatsoever!".

"I know. Don't get upset about it. The world won't end if I miss one meeting" I said.

"But they were the ones who dictated the day we came this time! It makes no sense! How can they say the Doctor only has Thursday hours when..."

"...Today's Friday" I interrupted. "Yes, I know. This whole place is some sort of demented mental equivalent of an Escher drawing. Every time you try and make sense of something here, the definition of "down" changes and the whole picture abruptly changes. Don't get upset. At least we got out of the place in under three hours this time."

"Just thank Azathoth you don't have to be admitted" I added as I gunned the engine and made a break for the exit.

1. Judging from personal experience↑
2. One of the best Disney creations ever IMHO↑

Ph'glui mglw'nafh Cthulhu Chateau Stevie wgah'nagl fhtagn

Post Santa
Report

Christmas came and went in depressingly quick order, but the loot haul wasn't half bad.

Mrs Stevie got the entire run of Upstairs Downstairs on DVD. I estimate it will take her four years at her current viewing rate to finish it. She also got something called The Elizabeth Gaskell Collection which is set in Victorian England. Truly, she will be costume drama'd out by the summer.

The Stevieling got an iPod Nano, and as a result I got to spend Xmas morning configuring bloody iTunes. I wouldn't mind but the damned thing installed a stealth "helper" executable that launches in every logon, despite iTunes being required only in the Stevieling's account. No doubt this is another case of my not seeing how the Apple Way is better than, say, the Norton Way which pulls exactly the same sort of shenanigan for which Symantec are roundly criticized by the world and its dog. She got a bunch of other stuff, but the iPod was the great hit of the day, so kudos to Mrs Stevie who made it happen¹.

I got a bunch of DVDs including Hogfather, Universe season 1, the UK version of Eleventh Hour, the entire run of Red Dwarf and The History of Britain which is spiffy with a capital spiff. I also got this year's Hess Truck², which is ultraspiffy and features a self-propelling component for the first time. Hess Trucks are truly wonderful toys and worth every penny. No-one is allowed to play with mine.

I also got the Horrorclix figure of Great Cthulhu, which is so far beyond spiffy that radio messages take four minutes to reach it from there. A truly magnificent realization of the ultimate in antediluvian cosmic horrors, and dead good to fondle while making appropriate noises³.

However, the Stevieling’s eyeballs, only just unbugged-out after getting used to the idea of being an iPod owner⁴ sprang from their sockets when she unwrapped the family's Wii console⁵.

All in all, Mrs Stevie engineered a Christmas to remember.

Mrs Stevie felt we should all go to church this year, and since I was exhausted from iPod installation, Wii wiring, Hess-Truck figuring out and making Appropriate Noises, I couldn't marshal enough cogent arguments to gainsay her so we decamped for Lutheran indoctrination.

Now everyone here knows that as god is my witness I am an atheist. Not the sort that makes a religion of it, but I just don't think there's anything there. I don't say you have to agree with me, and if you do Believe and you are right, you'll have the last laugh if I have understood the set-up, but I've had a long think and it doesn't make sense to me (not that much ever does these days).

However, I don't believe in making other people unhappy for what would be at worst an hour of standing and sitting in a cold church watching everyone else get closer to redemption, and Mrs Stevie badly needed the morale boost so I said "okay", which was enough to get her to release me from the Full Nelson she had me in too. In any case, I love a good sing-song and have fond memories of compulsory choir membership while at school being actually enjoyable at Christmas. Even Lutherans can't ruin Christmas with the duff hymns they so often trot out on other occasions to spoil the mood.

Or so I thought.

We got changed (my "iCephalopod" T-Shirt depicting Cthulhu "rocking out" to an iPod was deemed unsuitable for church attendance) and soon were ensconced in a pew before the altar, whereupon the pastor gave a service that seemed to miss the point a bit.

I'm no expert, but I thought that Christmas was all about the baby Jesus having been born. The service that day seemed to dwell on the horrific death the man was put through, which should have been thirty three years down the road, sometime around Easter if my maths is right. This wasn't the pastors fault, since I understand that the service is pretty much put together by a committee and all the pastor does is put a friendly face on it all. This seems wrong to me, but I'm not a fully paid up member of the club so I don't really get a say.

Each reading was bracketed by a carol to illustrate the text and emphasise the narrative. Each carol was truncated to only two verses generally, which was just enough for me to get the tune down before the song ended. Lutheran carols are sung to tunes subtly different to the versions I learned at school, so I occasionally end up soaring away from the pack or taking a left turn a bar too soon. It is all very trying, but I was doing okay until we came to The Appalachian Carol.

Set to a funereal dirge not unlike in feel to the tune of Poor Judd Is Dead from the musical Oklahoma, it features a folksy lyric supposedly written by a simple mountain man, and I suppose the idea was to throw into relief the idea that Jesus was as much for the simple common man as anyone. I think that was the idea. What I know for certain was that it was almost tailor made to cause an Incident In Church and get me into trouble with Mrs Stevie.

First of all it had a plodding tune that I was unfamiliar with, which gave me time to get bored and actually read ahead in the lyric.

Now anyone who has read this far should be secure in their knowledge of my grasp of grammar. Some may be under the illusion that I cunningly break the rules of grammar to achieve poignant literary effects, but the truth is I am somewhat blind to it and any grammatical cleverness in The Occasional Stevie is actually a result of the signal to noise ratio occasionally producing a random artifact, or unintended fallout from rare post-composition editing. In short, if I spot a grammatical problem, it is by definition a scorcher. Such was the case in The Appalachian Carol.

I've also confessed to being totally poem-blind. This is a curse. I'd love to read a poem and luxuriate in its rhyme, meter and imagery, but unless it's so obvious a cow could see it I can't spot the rhythm in any poem, and the effort of trying hurts so much I'm in no mood for cunning imagery and just want the poet to say what's bothering him or her and be done with it. That just leaves the rhymes, which I believe a cow could spot.

All I've just said should make it obvious I have insurmountable problems telling a good poem from a bad one⁶ (or indeed, spotting any poem from a bunch of instructions on how to apply carpet glue), but I was utterly convinced that with The Appalachian Carol I had in my hands a glowing example of Bad Poetry. It went like this:

I wonder as I wander out under the sky
How Jesus the Savior did come for to die
For poor on'ry people like you and like I
I wonder as I wander out under the sky.

When Mary birthed Jesus, 'twas in a cow's stall
With wise men and farmers and shepherds and all
But high from God's heaven, a star's light did fall
And the promise of ages it then did recall.

If Jesus had wanted for any wee thing
A star in the sky or a bird on a wing
Or all of God's angels in heav'n for to sing
He surely could have it, 'cause He was the King.

I wonder as I wander out under the sky
How Jesus the Savior did come for to die
For poor on'ry people like you and like I
I wonder as I wander out under the sky.

It really needs the dirge-like music to fully convey the effect of course, but notice how in each verse each line rhymes with the previous one despite where the normal use of language might like to take the text. Masterful, I suspect.

Mr Brain, feeling quite jolly and no-doubt mad at me for this enforced religious indoctrination, decided it was show time and piped in the thought "Where's the verse about Judd Fry being dead?" and threw up a visual of Hugh Jackman singing at the top of his voice, in a burnoose and flowing robes, somewhere in the desert-like countryside, heading toward Bethlehem with his thumbs stuck in his rope belt, striding in an exaggerated western rolling swagger with his spurs jangling softly in time to the beat.

I began, quietly, to lose it.

I removed my glasses and held a hand over my eyes in the hope that from the rear and sides my shaking shoulders and the tears flowing freely down my cheeks might be interpreted as some sort of holy rapture brought on by contemplation of the birth of Christ, rather than a bout of barely restrained hysterical laughter brought on by this daft carol.

I almost got myself under control, but another small Georgian voice, dragged from an expository piece in The Stuffed Owl - An Anthology Of Bad Verse, whispered "Why, 'tis the most ridiculous thing that was ever wrote" and I was off again into the place where I flirt with death by asphyxiation due to a surfeit of humour.

I began biting the web between my thumb and the palm of my right hand in an effort to quell the spasms of laughter demanding egress from my head. Given Mrs Stevie's stance on Appropriate Noises earlier that morning, I had a good idea of the reaction a volley of Inappropriate Noises in church would trigger. I was dicing with death.

It was at that moment, with impeccable timing that speaks well for her future in the World At Large that the Stevieling leaned over to me and whispered in my unprotected left ear: "Dad? Is it my imagination, or does this song belong in an episode of The Black Adder".

Non-fans of that show will not know what the hell that meant, but she and I have often watched and loved the episode from Black Adder III in which Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Connor star as two Georgian actors, Mossop and Keenrick. They perform the most ghastly pseudo Shakespearean dialogue at the drop of a hat - "Oh to torture him I lust, Let us singe his hairs and up his nostrils hot bananas thrust" is a small sample of what has to be seen and heard to be appreciated and both the Stevieling and I urge you to do so as soon as you stop reading this dribble. Mr Brain, not to be outdone, connected her comment and the referenced memories in a trice.

That was it. The Stevieling and I sat leaning against each other, rendered speachless by increasingly less silent laughter while Mrs Stevie hissed threats and punched me. All this did was to make things worse, as the mental picture of what this family tableau must have looked like from anywhere back of row three sent me into overdrive. By the time the carol was over I was a ghastly purple as the red from the effort of not laughing out loud mixed with the blue of acute anoxia. I haven't been in such a position since the fiasco at the altar during our wedding vows.

But that's a story for another time.

1. With her seemingly endless supply of frequent spender reward points↑
2. You can see it here if you don't wig out about Flash-driven sites. The link opens in a new window↑
3. Which Mrs Stevie will tell you to stop making after only a few minutes. Mrs Stevie doesn't hold with appropriate noises↑
4. Oh Jobs, you have so much to answer for↑
5. Again, courtesy of Mrs Stevie and her frequent spending reward points↑
6. Which is tragic when you consider that I would dearly love to be able to write Bad Poetry, but lacking the ability to do halfway Good Poetry I could only ever manage Terrible Poetry which, in the topsy-turvy world of poetry is actually not as desirable or meritorious as Bad Poetry↑

Deer Park Carol

'Tis The
Season

Oooohhhhh Christmas comes but once a year,
foddle-diddle foddle-diddle foddle-diddle dee,
And when it does we all drink beer,
foddle-diddle foddle-diddle foddle-diddle dee,
And come home drunk and curse our wives,
foddle-diddle foddle-diddle foddle-diddle dee,
And end up sleeping on the lawn,
foddle-diddle foddle-diddle foddle-diddle dee.

Simply Having A Wonderful Xmas Time

Ho! Ho! Ho!
Take That, Brain!

By last Friday I had just about had it with Mr Brain's shenanigans.

So far the score was Mr Brain: Several, Stevie: Nil.

There was the car key fiasco, in which I turned the house and all my clothing inside out in an ultimately futile search for the spare keys to the Fabulous Steviemobile over the course of two weeks because when I had reached for them they weren't on the hook I always put them on, forcing me to pay an absolutely usurous 140 bux for a new key and a "clicker", only to have the bloody thing turn up on a hook on the opposite side of the basement stairs! That's right: when I was frantically searching the collection of hooks on the right hand wall, the keys I was looking for were behind my bleeping head! I only found them because I hang packs of batteries on that left-hand wall hook, and had occasion to add another pack to the collection hanging there. Even then I didn't recognise the bloody key fob until I picked it up to move it! This represents an epic level of perfidy by the sardonic Mr Brain: complete visual discombobulation in the pursuit of sticking it to yours truly¹. Thank you Mr Brain.

There was the Medical Spending Account debacle, in which I managed to forget about re-upping for this rather round-about way of making medical expenses tax free². I only had three bleeping months to fill in the form! Merci bien, monsieur Braine!

There were a couple of "forget the train ticket and have to go home, making yourself late for work and losing the nice parking spot to a tardy git in an Osamamobile" episodes, far too tedious to detail here. A couple of near death experiences while attempting to chlorinate the pool while listening to Mrs Stevie rant about something irrelevant when I pulled the lid off the chlorine tablet bucket while inhaling, triggering a World War One Trench Warfare Hazard moment. There was the moment of discovery when I fed my hand into my miniature router while it was spinning down from 30 000 rpm.

You get the picture.

So on Friday, I was asked out to lunch with a pack of former colleagues. A hard-drinking, hard-playing, hard-swearing bunch, I had discontinued their company for some years on account of not being able to withstand the lifestyle they kept up. And the men were almost as bad as the women. However, what with one thing and another I had just about had it up to somewhere quite high and was ready for a bit of down-time, so I accepted and we decamped to a local boozer.

Now the others decided to have lunch, but I had already been suffering the onslaught of the day's slings and arrows, so I elected to forgo food and lunch on Southern Comfort instead. I had a large lunch, and an even larger dessert over the course of the afternoon (I was in no mood to return to work that day). Mr Brain kept trying to insert a voice of 'reason" but as I've said before, nothing good ever came of folowing the instructions of the voices in my head so I ignored it and went about killing some of the mutinous brain cells that had been working so assiduously against my best interests all year. I think I did rather well, and I staggered out of the pub at about 5 pm to begin my homeward commute, during which I would sober up.

Now Southern Comfort is almost pure alcohol, and it³ has a peculiar property that it will scavenge water from the drinker's body like nobody's business. Dehydration, as anyone knows, is the primary cause of hangovers, so it is imperative to add as much water to one's system before, during and after consuming the beverage as one can to avoid the after-effects. Unfortunately, Mr Brain had been at work and prevented me acting proactively in this regard. I seem to remember drinking a pint of water during the afternoon, between pub trivia sessions, but I needed to rehydrate tootsweet if I was to avoid toxic fallout. I boarded my train and straightway knocked back one of the two pint bottles of water I had with me.

A sad mistake.

Southern Comfort⁴ has a second property, in that if you have some in your stomach and you pour water on it you immediately get a massive alcohol hit, and go from being soberish to demonstrably unsober in an eyeblink. The journey from Flatbush Avenue to Jamaica was almost psychadelic, and just outside the station itself the rocking of the train and the random seesawing of my vision finally achieved criticallity and I became aware that I needed to visit the bathroom at once. I lurched up the car, maintaining my upright stance in a World Gone Mad by grabbing seat-backs, luggage rails and passengers, until I was at the door to the lavatory.

Which was locked owing to some idiot being inside.

I retired to the vestibule, heaving softly in time to the rocking of the train, with a view to being able to stick my head out of the open door should the bathroom not become available in time (I calculated I had about 15-20 seconds before matters were taken from my control). The train, obeying some law of comedic timing ground to a halt.

Just when I thought I would be decorating the rather informative posters set on either side of the vestibule with my lunch, the door to the lavatory opened and I was able to rush inside. No sooner had I applied the lock⁵ than some fool began hammering on the door demanding entry. I made to reply, but couldn't owing to the miracle of anti-peristalsis. Eyes watering as my diaphragm attempted to climb up my throat, I reflected how lucky it was for the person outside, now howling in distress, that I had had nothing but water to eat that day. In a matter of a couple of minutes I was done and had cleaned up the area. What a different scene would have greeted the gibbering loon on the other side of the door had I gone with my original urge to try the Shepherd's Pie.

Not only did I feel much better, apart from the distinct feeling I had just gargled with battery acid, but I was again able to see straight and walk straight. Probably still legally drunk, but not visibly so any more. Bonus!

I opened the lavatory door and was face to face with a demon from hell. Face white, eyes bulging and haunted, fists bruised blue, I took it all in and leapt to an intuitive conclusion: he was upset about something. I drew a deep breath of the cool air coming from the open train doors and blew it out as I stepped past him, whereupon he went green, cried "Arrrrggggleugh" and dashed for the commode. From this I deduced two things: a) he had been unwisely over-indulging in the Christmas Spirit and 2) I probably should suck half a dozen Altoids before I spoke with Mrs Stevie.

I love Christmas.

1. Interestingly, since I got the new clicker, the original spare one doesn't seem to be working. No doubt there is an unpublished rule at Hyundai about not having three remote door lock devices active at any one time for my driving convenience↑
2. You set up an account in which you place money deducted from your salary. The money comes off before taxes. Sounds great? Don't forget that this is America where nothing fiscal can be simple. I believe it's in the Constitution somwhere. You have to guess how much money you will need. That much gets deducted by year's end. You claim it back by (of course) filling in forms which have to be approved by someone. If you don't use it all, you lose the balance. No carry-overs. I forget why this is better than simply making medical expenses tax free at source↑
3. Along with Pernod↑
4. Along with Pernod↑
5. I find I prefer the contemplative atmosphere of total aloneness at these times↑

Marginalia From a Spiral Bound Notebook, Found in a Park in the City of Bellona

Mr Stevie's treatments have come close to putting her in hospital.

Two weeks ago she got her first dose of chemotherapy drugs. That day, Tuesday, she was upbeat. Wednesday she began vomiting, and didn't stop until Saturday morning. Nothing she drank would stay down. Eating was right out. Each day she went for radiation therapy. By Friday I almost had to carry her from the car to the facility doors.

The original idea had been for two doses of chemotherapy over the course of the six week regimen, with weekly intravenous hydration in between. By Saturday morning she had undergone four hydration treatments just to keep her out of the emergency room. The chemotherapist was astounded that the reaction - which she had expected to be strong in a not-good way - was so strong so early in the treatment. On the Friday, once she was hydrated, they gave her an intravenous anti-nausea drug. Ten minutes after getting it she was violently ill. She stabilized over the weekend (when she got no treatments) but was back to throwing up on Monday.

Last week the radiological oncologist came to the conclusion that she was having a bad reaction to the drugs they give her to protect her salivary glands during the radiation treatments. Without it she may loose her salivary glands to the curative regimen¹ but she may not survive the course of treatment if they continue giving it to her.

This week began with her having a small rash over her chemotherapy port. This is the device they embeded in her chest, in front of her shoulder, so she could get needle-stuck for a month and a half without her veins collapsing. By Wednesday the doctors had her on a course of anti-biotics and anti-fungals² and the rash was three times larger. By Thursday the radological oncologist was warning that the chemotherapist wouldn't use the port unless the rash cleared up, and on Friday the vascular surgeon who put the damned thing in decided to take it out and put one in on the other side. They will put this off until the last minute to avoid a second infection taking hold on the site of the new port before she gets her second round of chemotherapy on the 29th of December, so Mrs Stevie has another operation to look forward to on Boxing Day.

Yesterday she remarked that her throat is closing up. This was expected, and signals the onset of a time in which she will have to take all her nourishment through a tube directly into her stomach. To say that she isn't looking forward to that time would be a collossal understatement, and I am left wondering how she is supposed to take the painkillers she has been prescribed if she cannot swallow the capsules. I'm pretty sure we're not supposed to grind them up a-la Doctor House.

The next time you say to yourself "I just can't catch a break here", think of Mrs Stevie, who is working on arriving at a scientifically rigid definition of the term by experiement.

1. Yes, I know oncologists don't talk about "cures", only percentages of populations free of cancer after 5 years, but you know what I mean↑
2. Fungal infections are quite common during chemotherapy I'm now told↑

Xmas Atmos, 2008

Xmas Atmos
2008

It's snowing properly, finally, so despite everything it is beginning to look a bit like Christmas.

Mr Brain has perpetrated another perfidious ambush, thwarted by my need to replace a chequebook in the very nick of time. A tax rebate that was issued by cheque to us for a princely 600 bux¹ and that had required countersigning by each of us before it could be deposited, had been stuck in the back of the chequebook after gaining the oh-so valuable signature of Mrs Stevie. Mr Brain then took advantage of certain distractions in my life to clear the registers and thereby erase all knowledge of it from my head. This is why sometimes I feel like taking an electric drill to him.

Fortunately the villainy was discovered before 90 days had elapsed and place us iun the position of having to go cap in hand to the government for a new cheque.

Walking back from the bank I was caught up in the beauty of the large, white flakes of fluffy snow falling silently from the sky. Such was my joy at this sight that I gasped aloud, thereby inhaling one of the large, fluffy, white flakes which hit my tonsils with great force² and brought on a violent coughing fit. As I reeled around the street, empty a moment before but now full of speeding vehicles, my tastebuds informed me that the snowflake had formed in the lower regions of the atmosphere above Brooklyn, dictating a composition of 5 parts water, 1 part volatile exhaust byproducts from the petroleum industries of nearby Hoboken, 1 part powdered aerosol of bird dung, 1 part asbestos fiber, 1 part Jet-A vapour and 1 part soot. I decided on the spot to forego lunch and have another look at breakfast.

Returning to my building I met the half-dozen people who still smoke. William was enjoying a small panatella of the sort Leo McKern made famous in his iconic portrayal of Rumpole of the Bailey. The fragrant smoke wafted over to me and I realised something. Two things actually. Firstly that Christmas and the smell of small cigars are inextricably linked in my mind as much as the tree and presents are.

Secondly, I gave up smoking more than 15 years ago, but right then I would have committed murder for a long Dutch panatella and a match.

1. Near as dammit↑
2. For a snowflake↑

The Saga of the Dryer Continues Continuing

And so we come to the latest¹ chapter in the sorry Saga de Dryer.

As reported here, the dryer was once more hors de domestic usefulness due to some unspecified annoyance. To recap: It was tumbling and blowing air out of the vent, but said air was cold and has little going for it in the speedy drying of the clothing department. Action was called for². The burner appeared to be non-working after the usual lying-on-the-floor-with-my-eye-to-the-spyhole session.

I took stock of the situation. I had replaced the coils that turn the gas on and off. I had replaced the most complicated thermostat and I had tested them all during the last session with the damned machine. A failure in one of them was unlikely. Part of the decision-making process involved in these diagnostics was my admitted reluctance to remove the back of the machine again. Or to put it another way: I wasn't taking the back of the machine again unless hell itself froze over. Research showed that the next likely culprits would be the igniter (sort of like a small kettle element, it glows red hot on command to set the gas on fire) or the thermal sensor (which makes sure that the gas doesn't get turned on if there is no chance of it being lit).

Getting at these items, both components of the burner assembly, would involve essentially the same process as that used when I replaced the burner solenoid coils last July. The two screws securing the fan/lint filter housing to the top of the casing would have to be removed, the front levered up and hinged back and the front of the casing removed. This would involve uncoupling the door sensor, the one that turns off the machine when you open the door so all the clothes don't get thrown on the floor. This in turn would necessitate separating one of those multi-wire bayonet-style nylon couplings that have an integral snap-lock built in.

Everything went about as expected, which is to say I slashed myself to ribbons on the razor-sharp panels and found that no matter how I squeezed, pulled or swore the nylon electrical coupling would not separate. I ended up using my trusty Leatherman tool, which had a sort of screwdriver-cum-paint-can-opener on it that I could use to pry the nylon catches apart. It worked like a charm, and in some time at all I was able to hurl the front panel, door and all, away from me and the machine with a triumphant howl of manly triumph. I took it as a good omen that the drum did not fall out of the machine like last time, scattering bits everywhere, but remained properly mounted on its rear bearing.

I mentally made a note of the position of everything and reluctantly concluded that I would have to dismount the drum anyway in order to get at the burner, when fate intervened to save me much valuable time and the drum fell off its rear bearing, striking me smartly on the right kneecap with a resonant bong!

I took the opportunity to gather certain tools as I hopped around the basement clutching my knee to my chest with my mouth. Once the agony had subsided to manageable levels, it was time to start.

I whipped off the igniter, but it stupidly showed no signs of having burned out. No black marks, no gaps melted in the element and, most damning of all, the correct no-load resistance when measured with my new multimeter³. So the burner was nominally all right. This was disappointing in that I hadn't fixed the problem at the most likely fail point, but I was buoyed up by the fact that there was another component still to be tested, and that at least I hadn't had to remove the back of the machine.

Next up was the sensor. I disconnected it by gripping the little brass "spade" connectors with my pliers and heaving with all my strength. In only ten or twenty minutes of cursing I had both wires off and was able to measure the resistance of the sensor, which is essentially a switch with a resistor in it. The reason the wires have to be pulled off is that if you don't you measure the resistance of the component in parallel with all the other circuit components, which can throw off the reading, sometimes by a lot. It also acts as a guard against destruction of cheap meters and the possible loss of life caused by poking the test leads onto live circuits mistakenly left plugged in due to the murderous perfidy of Mr Brain. No stranger to electrocution, me.

The sensor checked out as okay. There was only one thing for it: I would have to run the machine and test the various voltages floating around it when it was in operation.

This raised several important concerns. Firstly, there was the concern that when testing for volts they are always one distraction away from applying themselves to one's body with potentially lethal results. Not optimal. Next there was the concern that the machine was in parts, but there should be no problem running the motor for a short time with no working load (sometimes they are designed to work under load and can be burned out by running them freely). Finally there was the issue of the bloody door sensor, which would have to be reconnected for the test since the disconnected wire was pretending to be an open door which prevents the machine from running.

This was a bit of a poser, since the wires in the socket were not straightforward enough to short out with bits of wire⁴ and the wire in the front panel of the cabinet wasn't long enough to reach with the panel dismounted unless I wedged my foot under it.

In the end, the need to be far from the volts along with the fact that my foot did not articulate in such a way as to allow me to be prone on the floor in optimal test-lead poking position while at the same time supporting the front of the dryer - together with the annoying realisation that my arms were four feet short of being able to reach the controls of the dryer from that prone position - provided the answer: I would attach the test-leads to the bit that needed testing and do all the other stuff while standing. First up: testing that the igniter was getting volts when it should.

For a wonder it worked like a charm and in no time I had the rather puzzling datum that when the motor was started there were 18 volts RMS⁵ on the burner all the time. Now I don't know why 18 volts when there should be none, but there should have been a swing to 110 at some point and there wasn't. I triumphantly concluded that this meant there was an undiagnosed fault in the electrical switching circuitry, which in turn meant I would have to remove the back of the machine after all.

Naturally, this epiphany brought with it strong feelings and I was so o'ertaken with emotion that I spoke in tongues for about ten minutes straight while walking around hitting things with other things.

I pulled the eviscerated machine from it's niche and began the tedious business of removing the back of the damn thing. Once again the removal of the last screw caused the liberated panel to undergo some impromptu topological explorations of the planar form and I was struck smartly in the head as it reshaped itself unpredictably with a musical bong! Once again I sustained ten or twenty small slashes on my hands from the edges of the bloody thing. Many and wondrous were the words of power uttered on that day I can tell you.

Once the panel was off I hobbled to my feet, squeezed out of the niche behind the dryer and pushed the dryer back into its hole so I could retrieve the multimeter I had forgotten to bring with me in my rage. Then I was able to pull the dryer back out of its little space and squat back down to begin the business of electrical circuit diagnostics to the tune of my knee joints popping.

Which was when I saw the dangling wire.

Investigation showed that one of the wires connecting the thermostat I had replaced three weeks before to the circuit had disconnected itself because when it was removed a tiny locking tab in the "spade" connector had folded back and collapsed. The result was a connection that would slowly shake loose when the machine was running. Since this thermostat was the one that determined whether or not the burner would turn on initially, it was obviously the problem.

It was the work of a few minutes with my needle-nose pliers to re-form the connector so it would work properly, and to reconnect the thermostat. It was the work of a bit more than a few minutes to get myself out of the tiny confines of the dryer's space, move the dryer back into it, dummy-up the door sensor and run another test.

Bingo! The burner lit and once more my lungs drew in volumes of air tainted with the combustion byproducts of natural gas (mainly carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, all good for many things but sustaining life isn't on the list of either). I had triumphed over adversity in a World Gone Mad and fixed the dryer and like that.

It took forever to get the bloody machine re-assembled. First there was the back panel, which was somehow now two screws short of the required ten but I no longer cared. I refuse to waste any more brain cells on the whereabouts of two machine screws that are verifiably not in any of the moving parts of the machine (I checked). Then there was the remounting of the drum, which involves mounting the drum on its rear bearing (a sort of huge felt hoop) while lying on the floor, then holding it in place with my feet and knees while simultaneously attempting to attach the belt tensioning idler to its mounting lug in the base of the machine while hooking it up to the belt itself using the hands, forehead and teeth. There was the reassembly of the casing which only takes two screws but uses up dozens of swear words. It was all very tedious, but the machine was finally working and still is as I type this some two and a half weeks later.

All in all a Great Triumph.

1. One hesitates to say "final" since that word could only summon a swarm of anti-handyman demons to further confuse things↑
2. Again↑
3. The burner igniter works by passing electricity through a metal ribbon. If you use enough force, defined in this case by volts, 110 to be precise, the electric current passing through the material causes it to get hot. Red hot in this case. This is pretty much how any pilot-light-less gas system works↑
4. i.e. Why were there three cables when two were all that was needed for switch duties? No man could say without access to the wiring diagram which was in the back of the machine which I did not want to have to remove again↑
5. Root Mean Square, the only way that measuring a voltage that goes backwards and forwards sixty times a second makes any sense whatsoever. If you don't measure it like that you can end up deciding there are no volts on any live wires and experience shows that is a path to burned hands, flashing lights in the eyeballs, singed hair, unintended levitation and possible death↑

The Saga Of The Dryer Continues

The Saga of the Dryer: Part II.

A little history: People may recall the previously documented fiasco de dryer, in which he bloody thing tumbled our towels until they were paper-thin and all the fluffy stuff was in the lint filter, and I ended up having to take it completely to pieces to replace the burner solenoid coils. Well about three weeks ago, it began malfunctioning again.

It all started one week night, when I had just returned from work in a state best described as tired, fed up and looking forward to watching a couple of hours TV before bed time. Mrs Stevie greeted me with the news that she had had a little accident with the dryer, thus making the veriest papier-maché of that plan and substituting an altogether more tedious one of her design.

It seems that she had pulled out the lint filter for some reason, then dropped a small sponge into the hole. The sponge in question was one of those that starts life as a flexible oblong of porous material about four inches by two and a half, and about a half inch thick. One adds a small amount of water to it, one wrings it out and leaves it to dry at which point it hardens into something resembling cinderblock. It was, it turned out, just the right size to drop completely down the lint filter vent into the blower fan.

Realising that the job might require the complete dismantling of the venting manifold system in the ruddy machine, I decided to verify the seriousness of the problem by running the machine briefly. No sooner was the "go" button presses than the usual sounds of healthy tumble drying mechanical goodness were drowned out by a grating rattle reminiscent of a bicycle with pieces of card held in the spokes of the wheels by pegs, a common method used by children to emulate motorcycle engine sounds and one I'm sure everyone is familiar with.

In a trice I had leaped to the machine, turned it off and deployed some class two swear words¹. There was nothing for it, I would have to remove the back of the machine.

I heaved the machine from the wall, eyeing the four-foot long flexible gas line with distrust and noting the rather eclectic collection of stuff that had made it past the lint filter into the vent pipe. Coins, ballpoint pens, small rocks² and some lint, but no bits of sponge, dammit. It would have to be spongectomied the hard way.

It took only a matter of 15 minutes to locate my socket set and figure out which socket fitted the self-tapping screws without chance of slipping and damaging the hex-heads. In order to comply with the secret American Design Aesthetic that calls for maximum tool deployage for any seemingly simple job, the screws do not feature a slot of any kind. I undid the ten screws securing the back of the machine to the body, a thin steel affair that had to be distorted to make it fit, which promptly reshaped itself with a resonant bong! and flew off its mountings dealing me a sound blow to the head. This was a perfect opportunity to deploy a few well-chosen class threes, so I did, exploring themes having to do with the machine's ancestry and that of the people who designed it. Fortunately, the razor-sharp steel plate hadn't hit anything delicate or valuable so I picked it up and carefully hurled it somewhere I deemed not likely to contain anything I cared about or my own body in the predictable future and assessed the next step.

The dryer is a fairly simple thing in essence. The drum rotates and gets the clothing airborne so the hot air can do its job. Air, heated by the burner, is pulled into the drum by a fan located in the exhaust (presumably so the air can have time to cool before it gets to the plastic fan), through the lint filter to the fan itself and then forced out through the vent, which in our case is a flexible pipe that ascends about seven feet to a horizontal run to the wall of the house. I needed to disconnect the cover for the vent connecting the drum exhaust with the squirrel-cage fan used to pull air through the system.

The first annoyance was that the screws that held this piece of razor-sharp bent steel plate in place were a different size than those holding the back on the machine, requiring me to climb out of the confined space I was working in to select a new socket. The next was that the top of the vent had to be detached from the top plate of the dryer casing, which you might remember involves two Phillips head screws requiring yet another tool, one which was still on the other side of the basement. Eventually I had all the screws out and in a matter of only ten minutes of rattling, prizing and swearing I had the cowl removed from the fan assembly.

It was then a simple matter to remove the sponge from the fan rotor, along with about a metric ton of lint ³, twenty-three cents in assorted loose change, the cap off the ball-point pen and some more rocks ⁴. I noted in passing that the rubber seal that bungs up the gaps between this cowling and the outer drum housing so that all the air sucked by the fan comes from the drum rather than from the machine's works had gotten a bit ratty and was, judging by the lint scattered throughout the machine's wiring (the other major feature exposed when the back is off the damned thing) leaking rather a lot. Such was my tiredness and my total lack of empathy for this benighted dryer that I didn't pause to ponder the strangeness of lint coming out of the negative-pressure, i.e. suck, part of the air-flow circuit. This would prove to be a most unfortunate oversight as it turned out.

Reassembling the cowling turned out to be one of those tasks that would try a saint. The steel panel would not go back into the gap I had pulled it out of only two hours before. I pushed, pulled, twisted and swore. Nothing worked. Finally, a passing dimensional warp altered the space-time continuum just enough for the panel to go into place, possibly helped by my inserting levers into the various panels and heaving, most likely not, and the panel was back in place, ready to be screwed to the outer drum. By dint of using my feet, forehead and one hand to distort the springy steel panel, I managed to get the screw holes properly aligned which left me one hand to insert a screw, hold it in place and use the socket wrench to screw it down.

Not surprisingly, the first few times I tried this, as soon as I let go of the screw to grab the socket wrench, held ready in my mouth, the panel would change shape with a soft bong!, the screw would be torn out of the hole and would fall into the base of the dryer casing, where it would be redirected into a special area just out of reach so that it couldn't be recovered without removing the fan cover again, thus requiring more heaving, cursing and space warpage to get it back together again. It seemed like I went through this two or three hundred times before I got the first screw in, but it was probably only a dozen or so in reality. Then I dropped the second screw while trying to get it into its hole, a task that required hands able to rotate 180 degrees on their wrist joints and fingers able to bend in both directions at will. Realising immediately that this would necessitate the removal of the first screw so I could pull off the fan cover again, I deployed some heroic class four words of power and used Mr Head to pound on the fan cover in sheer rage.

Sometime around midnight I had everything reassembled, the machine back in it's place and the vent attached. I marched upstairs, instructed Mrs Stevie that from now on she was under no circumstances to remove the lint filter when anything smaller than a billiard table was on the shelf above it and retired to my bed, blotting the two dozen or so wounds I had received from the edges of the various steel plates with the tail of my shirt.

A week or so later, on a Friday, The Stevieling reported that the clothes were not being dried by the infernal machine once more.

I performed the usual diagnostic, which involves pulling a plug out of the lower front panel to reveal a spy-hole set at exactly the wrong height for comfortable viewing no matter what pose is adopted by the unfortunate would-be dryer-fixerator. The machine is set into operation and the observer leaps into the best position for attempting observation of the burner under operational conditions. This involves me lying on my side on the concrete floor (now at a comfortable 34 degrees Fahrenheit) for ten or fifteen minutes. This time I was in luck, and was able to observe the burner operating properly. Good News in that I didn't have to figure out why the bloody burner wasn't igniting, but Bad News in that now I had no bloody idea what was wrong.

I once again searched my "favourite" web-based suggestion boxes, and was convinced that the thermostats were not operating properly. That would cause the burner to light normally as I observed, but then it would cut out prematurely allowing wet clothes to tumble uselessly for hours on end. Perfect! All I needed was to find the evidence of buggeréd thermostats with my trusty multimeter.

First things first though. To expose the wiring harness and the thermostats I would have to remove the back panel.

Once again I had to schlep all over the basement looking for my socket set. Once again I had to pull out the machine, risking fracture of the flexible coupling and death by gassing. Once again I flirted with slipped discs as I bent into various shapes to get to the screws in the confining space revealed by moving the dryer. Once again my head was struck a sound blow as the back panel adopted the shape-o-the-day with a soft bong!. The vent, being a push fit, disconnects itself if I forget to do it, which I did this time.

Now it was time for the electrical mensuration phase of Operation Fix The Bleeding Dryer Again⁵.

Many years ago, during a flirtation with electronic kits in the 1980s, I bought a nice, if boxy, multimeter from a store in Canal Street, that has done sterling service ever since. I have used it for all sorts of jobs including home wiring projects, christmas lighting issues and the occasional electronic circuit build. It has been one of my most useful and dependable tools and I therefore keep it on a special shelf in the basement.

Or not, as it happens.

I spent about an hour turning the place upside down for that wretched meter but could not locate it. Fearing that this would be the stupid "tool search" thing that causes the loss of the entire day, I elected instead to dash down to Radio Shack and buy another one. Twenty minutes and twenty dollars later I returned with a bright yellow thing about the size of a pack of cigarettes that would do the job.

It took me about ten minutes to prove that the thermostats looked okay-ish, and that the various resistances were within tolerances. However, one of the thermostats has a heater built into it and there was no guarantee that the thing was working once it heated up so since I already had a replacement stashed inside the upper casing (more screws to be removed of course) I decided to replace the thermostat anyway. It took all of ten minutes, then I was ready to test run the dryer.

It worked! Volumes of hot, wet, carbon-monoxide laden air were discharged into the basement upon starting the dryer, so I declared one in the "win" column. There was a considerable amount of air leakage around that old seal though, so I reluctantly came to the conclusion I should replace it.

This meant taking the fan cover off again, which was tedious, but it also meant putting it back on again which I think I've shown was tedious^tedious. Still, it had to be done sometime and it might as well be now. The seal proved to be nothing more than a strip of sticky-backed rubber of the same sort used to seal window-mounted air conditioners in place. This would be easy to get, I predicted.

Four hours later I managed to track down a source for the bloody stuff.

It was then an anything-but-simple matter to remove the old rubber strip from the outer drum housing, put a new one in its place and refit the fan cover. The difficulties of the previous occasion were as nothing to those engendered by adding a half-inch thick rubber strip into the mix. Any attempt to slide the fan cover around to locate that oh-so-necessary space warp resulted in the strip being pulled away from the outer drum housing. It was all very tiresome and required my using up a considerable stock of class three and class four swear words before I had the whole thing back together again.

Surveying the machine, now ensconced once more in its nook in the laundry, I triumphantly wiped the sweat from my brow with the backs of my hands, then screamed like a girl as the salty sweat got a good grip on the network of slashes I had sustained on the razor-sharp metal panels. I hopped around crashing into things for a bit with my hands clenched under my armpits and a small rubber ball I keep handy for these occasions clenched between my teeth until the unbearable agony had subsided, then I reconnected the vent hose and sought the sweet embrace of a warm shower, before retiring to my bed, safe in the sure knowledge of a job well done.

Two days later Mrs Stevie informed me that the damn thing was not drying again.

Gone, just like that, a carefully hoarded cache of special edition class five swear words.

I once more lay on the almost-freezing floor and watched for the burner to light, which it did. What on earth could be wrong now? Back to the website for some much-needed advice.

Once I was connected to the site I use most for appliance diagnostics and replacement parts, I noticed a forum posting entitled "So your dryer isn't working - things to check first" and a familiar feeling o'ertook me. This sort of post would be so massively useful it was unthinkable I wouldn't have read it, but I didn't recall seeing it before. The date belied the idea that it had just been added and I was forced to conclude that once again I had been ambushed by Mr Brain (who is not my friend). No doubt he had blanked out my visual cortex as my eyes parsed the forum postings, or simply not transfered the sighting to long-term memory, effectively erasing it from my knowledge without my permission.

Item one was "Check the vent isn't blocked", which was a great place to start because it didn't involve socket sets, multimeters or getting slit up a treat on metal panels. Accordingly I decamped for the basement, retrieved Mr Shop-Vacuum, which I deployed in "blow" configuration and made my way to the laundry.

I removed the pipe from the machine, which I pulled forward in anticipation of needing to get stuck into the damn dryer's vitals once this idea proved a bust, switched on the vacuum cleaner which threw up a dust storm of epic proportions from every surface of the basement and, choking and coughing, used my hands to form a vacuum-hose to vent-pipe manifold. There was an immediate and rapid build-up of pressure resulting in the vent hose "popping" out of my grasp and spraying me with compressed air laden with small rocks, ballpoint pens, coins and a surprising amount of water.

Aha! The vent was blocked! Also, now I came to think on it, that business with the seal blowing out lint when it should have been under negative pressure made more sense.

I dashed upstairs, ran outside and reached into the vent exhaust, where I discovered a plug of lint about the size of a Marks and Spencer pillow. I feverishly pulled it all out and tossed it decoratively all over the South Lawn, not pausing until after the job was done to consider whether or not some animal, possibly rabid, had built a nest from the soft, comfy lint (TOG # 40) and might yet be inside the vent to be rudely awakened when the Steviefingers jabbed it in the ribs.

I raced back inside, ran down to the laundry, reconnected my improvised blower and blew out the remains of the lint, then manhandled the dryer back into place and reconnected it to the vent-pipe. Muttering a few protective charms to ward off any anti-handyman demons lurking nearby, I dialed up a nice hot cycle and pressed "go", then ran back upstairs and out of the house to observe the vent at the business end.

Success! Volumes of hot, damp, monoxide-laden air were once more being pumped into the neighbour's airspace for their enjoyment, and, far below my feet⁶ the clothes were once again being tumbled in warm, dry air.

All of which goes to show that sometimes my life is so busy happening at me that I have little or no time to write about it, and that sometimes it does so relentlessly. The feelings of inadequacy this produced in me were offset by my triumph over all things dryer in a World Gone Mad.

Little did I know then that the dryer had one more trick up its drum.
(To be continued)

1. Keen readers and amateur handypersons will recognise that class twos were inadequate for the situation and that I should have deployed my more usual class threes, but I was tired and couldn't summon the effort required for professional cussing↑
2. !↑
3. So much for the filter↑
4. !!↑
5. Project title copyright Mrs Stevie 2008 all rights reserved↑
6. And a bit to the left if we're being accurate↑