Thought while unpacking: there should be a law mandating that if a product comes with a detachable power cord, the cord must carry some indication of what it supplies the power for.  (On the other hand, while I do have a bag full of unlabeled cords with plugs, I don’t actually have any elec­tronic devices that I find myself unable to plug in.)

From a peak of nearly three thousand stores, there are now only five Sears locations still open in the United States.  But it turns out that one of them is near my new apartment, be­cause when I went looking for places to eat around here, I saw a Oaxacan place recom­mended that turned out to be in an ’80s-style mall, and right next to the Oaxacan restaurant was an honest to goodness Sears that was still in business.  Nostalgia compelled me to go in and buy a shirt.  It was eight dollars.

One reason I was reluctant to move to Lafayette was that it is outside Sonic’s service area, so I would have to get my Internet service from somewhere else.  I really didn’t want to have to give money to Comcast.  I saw that Earthlink did advertise fiberoptic Internet service in Lafayette, so that seemed like a decent backup if I couldn’t get Sonic.  Now, even within its service area, Sonic doesn’t offer ten gigabit fiber service everywhere⁠—in some spots, only one gigabit service is available.  So I entered my prospective address into the Earthlink web site to see what kind of speed I could get at my apartment complex.  It said five, so that sounded fine to me.  I signed up for Earthlink.

Then my equipment arrived, and that was when I discovered that I had misunderstood: Earthlink did not offer 5Gb fiber service here.  It offered 5G service, as in, Internet via a cell phone network.  The instructions said to place my receiver near a window.  I did give it a try, and the speeds topped out at forty megabits⁠—torturously slow.  So I called up Earthlink to cancel my service… and the representative asked whether I would reconsider if the company knocked eighty-one per­cent off my monthly bill.  I said no, because the service was useless to me even at that price, but the very offer suggests some truly breathtaking levels of price gouging⁠—that they’d ascertained a price at which offering the service was still worthwhile to them, and then thrown a 430% markup on top of that.

All corporations are bastards, part two: I sent my web hosting service the digital certificates needed to supply the https:// connection that most browsers require these days, and a representative replied that this would all be taken care of automatically if I switched to one of their new service packages.  Not having to mess with these certificates every year sounded great, so I signed up.  The web hosting rep said that all my information had been ported over to the new service, so all I had to do was update my nameserver links and I’d be good to go.  I did so.  A month later, I got my bill and discovered that I was now being charged for two web sites.  See, I was told, I’d never actually specified that I wanted to cancel the now unreachable version of my site when I’d migrated to the new service.

One reason I decided to apply for this apartment was that during the last renovation the front closet had been con­verted to a laundry room with a washer/dryer combo⁠—and by “combo” I mean a single machine that serves as both washer and dryer.  “How does that work?” one of my friends asked me, and the answer turned out to be, it doesn’t.  Whenever I tried to start a load of laundry, within a couple of minutes the machine would beep and flash an OE error code, meaning that water couldn’t drain from the appliance.  I tried following the internets’ advice about how to fix it on my own, but nothing worked, and I kept having to manually drain the water into a tray, which was gross and tedious (it took about half a dozen trips to pour the tray of water into the bathtub before the washing machine was fully drained).  So I requested a maintenance visit.  On April 7 the guy came and cleaned a bucketful of sludge out of the machine, and it seemed to work after that… for about ten minutes.  Then the OE errors returned.  The guy talked to the property manager, and she agreed to just replace the washer/dryer entirely.

On April 9 maintenance came to swap in an identical appli­ance from another apartment.  It was even more identical than it initially seemed, in that the new one didn’t work either.  The maintenance guy said that it seemed like the central belt was broken.  The property manager ordered replacement parts and said that maintenance would return on April 14.

No one showed up on April 14.  I wrote to the office and the property manager said that the parts had been delayed.  As it turned out, they were quite delayed!  I didn’t get another visit from maintenance until April 30… and then it turned out that the new belt didn’t fix the problem.  This time the property manager agreed to have the combo W/D replaced by a separate washer and dryer from yet another unoccu­pied unit, and to get that done the same day.  And so that evening I was able to wash a load of laundry!

I was not able to dry it.  The dryer would only run for about two minutes before throwing an F066 error, indicating a ventilation problem.  Maintenance returned yet again on May 5 to clean out all the filters.  And that was when I learned that the the F066 code wasn’t an error, exactly⁠—the machine was just incredibly temperamental and would shut down if it detected a speck of lint on any of its five filters.  So drying a load of laundry means cleaning the filters, starting the machine, waiting two minutes until it shuts down, clean­ing the filters, starting the machine, waiting two minutes until it shuts down, cleaning the filters, etc., etc., until it finally runs for a full hour or so.  It will usually do this on the ninth or tenth attempt.

I did need to do laundry between March 31, my last day in El Cerrito, and May 5.  There is a laundry room here at the complex for people whose apartments do not have washer/dryers, but it turns out that the machines in that laundry room do not take coins or credit cards⁠—you must pay via a smartphone app.  Since I don’t have a smartphone, I had to go to a laundromat.  And since this is not an area with a large population of people who lack access to laundry ser­vices, I wound up going back to my old place in Albany, because I remembered that there was a 24-hour laundromat across the street.  I’d never used it, because my Albany place had a washer/dryer in it that worked with no problems whatsoever for thirteen years.  In February and March I had checked out a few different apartments that had coin-oper­ated washers and dryers, and they tended to charge any­where from $1.50 to $2.75.  So I was gobsmacked to discover that the cost for the full-sized washing machines at this laundro­mat was fifteen goddamn dollars.  Even the very smallest one wanted $4.50.  I put about 10% of the laundry I had brought with me into one of those machines and hoped it would be enough to get me to the next maintenance visit.  Fortunately, I did have a new shirt from Sears that bought me an extra day.

But I guess I’ve been burying the lede for this set of minutiae, because the main thing I will remember about the past month and a half or so is that in mid-April, I woke up one morning feeling like I had pulled a muscle in my back, around my left shoulder blade.  That is actually nothing new.  It feels like it happens every couple of years⁠—always that left shoulder blade, never the right.  It’s sore for maybe three or four days and then it’s fine.  Except this time each passing day made it worse.  Not only did that spot in my upper back feel worse, but the pain started to radiate outward: one day it reached my left shoulder, a couple of days later it went halfway down my left arm, and a couple of days after that the pain was all the way down to my hand.  And if I moved my arm around, parts of it would go numb, with that awful pins-and-needles feeling.  Everything pointed to a pinched nerve, but what do you actually do about that?  And it just kept getting worse and worse!  Soon I could no longer bear to stand up or even sit upright for more than a couple of minutes at a time.  Holding my left arm up in the air could buy me a couple of minutes more, but then I would have to run back to my bedroom and lie down.  Only when I was horizontal⁠—and only in a very few horizontal postures⁠—could I ever get some relief.  I tried ibuprofen, acetamino­phen, even naproxen, and eventually maxed out the doses, but none of it helped.  And this was during the crunch of AP season, the busiest time of my work year⁠—I had appoint­ments stacked to the point that I was going for anywhere from eight to thirteen hours, seven days a week.  It was very lucky for me that the pandemic had forced all this work online, because if we were still back in the days when I had to drive to students’ houses, I would have had to cancel everything.  As it stood, I couldn’t even do my job from my desk anymore⁠—from April 25 on, I had to conduct all my tutoring sessions from my bed.

I had booked a doctor’s appointment, but the soonest I could get in was May 5.  The doctor said that, sure enough, it was almost certainly thoracic radiculopathy, a.k.a. a compressed nerve, and that she recommended that I take a magnesium supplement and consider physical therapy, but that the problem would probably resolve itself in six to eight weeks.  I did end up getting an appointment with a massage thera­pist who said pretty much the same thing: that the problem with injuring a nerve is that it takes forever to heal, but the bright side is that it doesn’t literally take forever to heal, and that I should give it six to eight weeks.  It did very gradually start to improve a couple of weeks after that, and as I type this (while lying in bed), it’s maybe 60% of the way better.  It’s still very annoying⁠—my shoulder and back are sore all the time and my left arm goes numb about 75% of the time I try to move it, but by May 22 it had improved enough that I was able to do my job from my desk again.

One thing I discovered is that while I have spent the past fourteen years tormented by pleasure dissociation, I may have some pain dissociation as well.  If you were to ask me to rate the physical sensation of the nerve pain on a scale of one to ten, I probably would only say like a four or a five.  But my body seemed to think it was much worse.  If I moved the wrong way, I would involuntarily scream.  Frequently tears would come to my eyes.  And as the seconds ticked by, I would get totally frantic, my body telling me “MUST LIE DOWN, MUST LIE DOWN, I AM SUFFERING SO MUCH, THIS IS ABSOLUTELY UNBEARABLE”⁠—even as my conscious assessment of the pain was that maybe it had risen from a four to a six.

One major test of the improvement came on a Sunday morning.  Longtime readers will remember that I absolutely love Earliglo nectarines, but they’re only available one week a year.  It is actually easier for me to get to the Sunday farmers’ market in Temescal from my new place than from my old one, so one Sunday morning I thought, okay, off to the market!  Let’s see whether this is the week the Earliglos are in!  And… no.  Driving to Oakland in this state would have been genuinely unsafe.  I couldn’t even make it to the door without whimpering.  But a week later I did feel up to it.  I really, really hoped that this would turn out to be Earliglo week and that I hadn’t missed it the previous Sunday while out of commission.  And as luck would have it, the Earliglos were indeed at the Kashiwase booth when I arrived!  I bought six.  And they were fuckin’ delicious.

But then when it was time to head home, scraaaaaaaaape.  A godawful sound got me to stop the car and, with an involun­tary scream, duck down to see what the deal was.  A huge plastic piece had fallen off the bottom of my car and was now wedged between the car and the pavement.  I had some “gorilla tape” in my car for emergencies, so I was able to tape the plastic piece back into place as a stopgap, but hav­ing to yank that tightly wedged plastic free from the asphalt, with my bad arm totally killing me… actually wasn’t that bad, because adrenaline had kicked in to the point that I felt better than I had in a long time.  When I got home, the adrenaline was still blocking the pain to such an extent that I felt a little giddy for a couple of moments there.

By the way, the magnesium supplement lasted three days.  The side effects were too gruesome for me to take it any longer than that.

Once I was able to get out of bed I walked down to Trader Joe’s to stock up on some things⁠—a month in bed had me low on supplies.  (Though, again, I wasn’t literally in bed the whole time.  My supplies had dwindled because I had been cooking meals while I was ailing, just in two-minute bursts.)  The song “Mickey” started playing on the PA system, and I started singing along, partly out of habit (I tend to sing along to any song I know, often without even being aware that I’m doing it) and partly, I guess, as a way to channel my response to my back pain⁠—better than just screaming, right?  But after a minute or so, I found two Trader Joe’s employees striding purposefully toward me from different directions.  Ulp!  Had I been too loud?  Was I about to get banned from the Trader Joe’s?  Then one of them addressed me directly: “Okay, you’ll know! Who sings this song?” 

It took me a moment to process what I’d been asked.  “…Toni Basil,” I said.

The other employee said, “TONI BASIL! That’s right! Thank you! Now I don’t have to stay up all night trying to remem­ber.”

A friend encountered no small amount of frustration trying to apply for a job in an era when job applications are sub­jected to “A.I.” screens before passing in front of human eyes, if they ever do.  She asked for advice on what to do and was told that her résumé was too “human-centered” and needed to be translated into “searchable professional language”.  I have lived too long.

California’s primary election is coming up in a couple of days; we’re a vote-by-mail state now, so I turned in my bal­lot four days ago.  Normally I vote a month in advance, but this time around I thought it best to wait, because we have a dumb system in which you vote for one candidate out of, in the case of this year’s gubernatorial primary, sixty-one can­didates, and the top two advance to the general election.  Setting aside candidates such as Livingforgod Andcountry Demott, there are ten candidates who ran serious cam­paigns: eight Democrats and two Republicans.  California is about a 60/40 Democratic state, but if you divide 60% up eight ways and 40% up two ways, you end up with the two Republicans advancing, and that is what the polls showed for some time.  It therefore seemed that the smart play for those of us who do not want our own local Trump in the governor’s office was to wait until close to the deadline and vote for the top-polling Democrat in order to maximize the chance that at least one of them appears on the ballot in November.  Anyway, that’s not actually what this item is about.  Once I had voted in the statewide races, I turned my attention to the local ones, most of them involving people I hadn’t even heard of.  For one race, I found that the candi­dates had answered questionnaires, so I used their answers to make my decision.  Specifically, this answer:

Q: What was the first historical event that happened in your lifetime that you remember?

A: When my daughter was born! It was a miracle to hold her.

Abysmal reading comprehension, or egocentrism?  Either way, that is not what I’m looking for in a county auditor-controller!

If tank explodes, toxic vapor will smell like fruit