I was sufficiently perturbed by the typographical error in the version that I most recently submitted of my paper on indecision that I decided that, were it not bounced back to me before the first mensiversary of its submission, I would offer a correction. (My thought in waiting a month was that I should limit the frequency with which I pestered them.) I did so, and the journal accepted that with perfect helpfulness.

I am still wrestling with Sprint over charges to my account for mobile broadband service.

On 11 May, I opted to switch my principal operating system to Fedora. (I had been considering Scientific Linux as well.) I've since had some problems with installing fonts for all users, and the system has been a little bit flakier, but on the whole the new operating system has been a satisfying choice.

I am scheduled for some non-trivial dental work on the mornings of 26 and 27 May. Two fillings that I have had since childhood have eroded to the point that they should be replaced, and there is to be a deep cleaning below my gum-line.

The Woman of Interest and I will be visiting my parents for a few days at the end of the month. (I plan to stay-on for some time after she has flown away.)

A few weeks ago, I got a standard seasonal influenza shot. None-the-less, a bit over a week ago (more than two weeks after the vaccination) I became ill with what seems an awful lot like a flu. It can be hard to distinguish a bad cold from a flu, but a even a bad cold should be over in a week or less. It's also possible that I've been hit by more than one infection (one opportunistically following on another), but Ockham's razor argues for one cause. So I'd say that I contracted a flu that was not covered by the vaccine.

I've tried to get some work done; but, mostly, I've felt that the last week-and-something has been lost.

During this episode, while dreaming in a feverish state, I invented a very fine pair of characters for Li'l Abner. (An immediate problem is that Li'l Abner ceased to be an on-going story in late 1977.)

One of these characters is Amicable Jones, who is known in Dogpatch as someone who has always been able to settle any dispute amicably. The other character is his father, who was unfortunately unnamed in my dream but whom I'll here call Irascible Jones. Irascible Jones has not been in Dogpatch for a great many years. He's instead been all over the world, creäting conflicts or involving himself in disputes that are never subsequently resolved.

Now it has been learned that Irascible Jones is returning to Dogpatch. Amicable Jones doesn't much want a reünion; not so much because he has some generalized fear of new conflict, but specifically because, to settle his own disputes amicably, he has often given the other party something that, in fact, properly belonged to Irascible Jones.

In response to my entry reporting that I'd developed plantar fasciitis, Ronnie Ashlock suggested that I look at an entry in Rational Fitness Blog by Scott Helsley. I was persuaded thereby to increase the amount of stretching that I did, and to order a pair of Heel That Pain heel seats and a Strassburg Sock™.

I first tried the heel seats in my boots (which I normally wear every other day), replacing the more ordinary heel seats thereïn. Rather than seeming to help, the new seats made the left foot hurt as if its fasciitis were worsening, and the right foot hurt as if it too had fasciitis. I then tried the seats in my walking shoes (which I wear on the days that I don't wear the boots), on top of the replacement insoles that I'd put in those shoes after the fasciitis developed. The seats seem to work well in the walking shoes.

The Strassburg Sock™ is to be worn when sleeping or sedentary. It stretches the fascia by flexing the toes upwards. My sister-in-law offered me the use of splint that instead flexes the heel, but the Sock seemed like a better idea. (When my sister-in-law had suffered from plantar fasciitis, she'd been unable to use a Sock because of recent injury to her toes.) Anyway, the Sock certainly keeps my fascia stretched while I'm wearing it. I cannot sleep wearing it for more than a few hours, but my sister-in-law reported the same problem with her splint. The Strassburg Sock™ has to be hand-washed and air-dried, so I'd need to have two (or live somewhere that afforded faster drying) to wear one every night.

Quite some years ago, I damaged both of my knees, especially the left knee (martial arts), and as a consequence I walk with limp. But I none-the-less do a fair amount of walking under normal circumstances. It seems that, as a consequence, I have developed plantar fasciïtis, the plantar fascia being a thick structure of connective tissue in the sole of the foot.

Apparently, I should do less walking for a few months. Additional treatment options include an orthotic support, which I almost certainly should get; stretching exercises, which I am doing; and a night splint, which I will probably get, to keep the foot flexed as one rests. I intend to avoid steroids and surgeory.

The reader may recall that it was a toe of my left foot that I broke last year. In fact, I have chronic tendinitis in my left arm (ancient weight-lifting injury), and within the last few months injured my left shoulder (I don't remember how, because whatever it was didn't much hurt initially) to an extent that the pain became literally nauseous and continues (albeït abated). I am evidently just especially hard on the left side of my body.

The major muscles around my left shoulder — trapezius, deltoid, latissimus dorsi, and especially pectoral — have been hurting a great deal whenever I've moved that arm in the last few days. I hadn't recently engaged in any major physical activity nor been in an accident. I'm wondering whether I've injured a nerve with my back-pack.

On Thursday night or Friday morning, at the Hillcrest CVS/pharmacy, I noticed that bags of pistachios, regulary priced at US$3.99, were on sale for US$4.99 for those with a loyalty card. I brought this problematic sale to the attention of a supervisor, but the offer continued at least through Friday night.

On Friday night, I was walking to my car, when I spotted a feral mouse running ahead of me on the side-walk. All of the feral mice that I'd seen before were wood mice or deer mice, and all back in New Jersey, on property adjacent to woods. Here in San Diego, the only feral rodents that I'd seen were pack-rats (about the size of domesticated hamsters or gerbils[1]). This little creature looked like a house-mouse. At one point, the mouse was cornered in a door way. But, of course, I had no intention of hurting it and wouldn't even have wanted to catch it — it might have pups back in a nest somewhere, and I'd have to worry about the diseases that a wild mouse might carry.

This morning, near my home, I came across a relatively young immigrant man and woman, trying to figure-out how to start her car. They had another car with them. I asked if they needed jumper cables, and the man said yes, so I got mine. (Most people in this area don't have jumper cables; I keep long, heavy-duty cables in my car.) I let the guy do the connecting — I just discreetly watched to ensure that he didn't wire the batteries in series — because I neither wanted to make him seem ineffectual in front of the woman nor wanted to be blamed should something go awry.

He really didn't know what he was doing. He connected the negative line directly to the batteries, repeatedly clacked clamps together as a way of ensuring that the connection to the running car was good, didn't listen to the car that wasn't starting, and didn't seem to understand that a bad battery wouldn't explain the inability to start the parasitic car.

I couldn't hear the solenoid. I tried to explain to them that there was a problem with the ignition or a blown fuse. Anyway, they eventually gave-up on trying to jump-start the car, and returned my cables. I wished them good luck. The car is parked in a metered spot, but they have until 8 AM on Monday before that meter has to be fed.

I have an intermittent, vertical, purple line appearing on the display of my note-book computer. This tells me that the LCD panel, only about a year old, is beginning to fail. Bah!

[1] I'll rat myself out: One night several months ago, thinking that a rodent (which I could not see well) might be an escaped pet, I caught one of those pack-rats with my hat. A neighbor told me that the creature was a rat; it plainly wasn't a domesticated R. norvegicus, so I released it. The Woman of Interest noted to me that I needed to do something about mites and what-not that might have been transferred to the hat. I felt foolish.

The toe that I injured more than six weeks ago still hurts when flexed in some ordinary ways. I'm fairly sure that I broke the thing. According to what I've read, it may take up to a year to completely heal.

Recently, two different people at different places on different days have asked me about my having a foreign accent. As far as I'm concerned, I have a very generic American accent. The Woman of Interest and I speculate that the lack of more precisely identifiable regionalization is what has people wondering about my being from elsewhere. That is to say that I cannot be placed from my speech as from the South, Northeast, Midwest, or whatever.

I don't think that I was ever much inclined to adopt regionalisms. For example, my mother had a very strong Arkansan accent when I was a child, my father has a Missouri twang, and from some time in my fourth year until some time in my seventh, my family lived in North Carolina; yet it was noted that neither my brother nor I developed southern accents. Much later, I became very consciously deliberate in selecting the characteristics of what amounts to my personal accent. I wasn't interested to appear to be from a particular place or of a particular social standing; I was interested in things such as clear enunciation and as respect for the language.

A few days ago, while barefoot in my apartment, I stumbled a bit, and came down wrong on the largest toe of my left foot, basically stubbing it on the floor, with most of my mass coming down behind it. It swelled and bruised darkly. Since then, its swelling and bruising has abated, but the bruising has been moving back, following the underlying skeleton, now to the first cuniform. If the earlier bruising and swelling hadn't been visibly diminishing, I would have responded to this backward movement of bruising by limping to one of the nearby emergency rooms. As it is, I look at it as a painful curiosity.

Well, to-day the new shower hose came apart as I was rinsing-off the stall with scalding water. A fitting involving a couple of pieces of metal (which would expand when heated) and a plastic tube (which would soften) came apart, and the hose came loose from the shower-head. Propelled by the water, the hose squirmed-about like a frightened snake.

This time it was my right foot that was scalded before I shut the valve, and that area of my thigh which was scalded last time seems to have taken a lesser hit this time.

I guess that my practice of cleaning the stall with scalding water needs to be changed or abandoned.

My lack of posts here have been an artefact of my illness. I managed to comment here-and-there to various journals and 'blogs, but putting together an entry to my own 'blog has seemed too much. I'm considerably better now, though I'm still coughing and somewhat congested.

One of the aspects of my being ill has been that I don't have a clear sense of the timing of events over much of the last few weeks, even though I felt fairly lucid during most of that time.

On the worst day, whenever that was, I awoke as weak as a kitten — I had to lay down and rest after the effort of simply finding two matching socks in my laundry — but had to go out and get something for food energy. I managed to get to CVS/pharmacy (a half-block from my home) and got orange juice. After I drank it, I was very cold. I wasn't thinking clearly enough to reälize that I was cold because, on the one hand, I had just put about a pint of cold fluid in my body, and, on the other hand, was too low in energy to generate off-setting body heat. I just climbed under my bed-covers and passed-out. When I awoke, I was over-heated, and thought I'm like an old mouse, who has lost his ability to regulate his body temperature. But I was otherwise feeling much better; the carbohydrates and vitamins in the orange juice had been put to good use.

Later that day or some time on the next (I really don't remember), worried about me, the Woman of Interest placed an order for home delivery with Vons while I was asleep. This was probably a good idea, but in the event Vons quite dropped-the-ball. They originally gave her a two-hour window for expected delivery; at the end of that window, she got a call telling her that it would be another 20 minutes. She told them to telephone her if there were any problem. After instead about two more hours, figuring that local restaurants would soon close for the night, I went out. On my way, I let the Vons delivery man thorough a pedestrian gate to the apartment complex. When I got home, there was no food at my door; just a Sorry we missed you note. And, no, the delivery man hadn't called the Woman of Interest; as I noted to her, he didn't want to have to admit that the ostensible 20 minutes had been more like 120 minutes. (FWIW, I live less than half-a-mile from the nearest Vons store. As the Woman of Interest notes, they probably don't run the delivery service out of the nearest store, but it is none-the-less absurd that they cannot perform the equivalent of a half-mile delivery within two or even three hours.)

I don't know whether the flu that I had has resurged, or I contracted another while still weakened by the first. (Some years ago, I spent about half-a-year sick, a fair part of that with pneumonia, because I caught one flu after another, each before I'd fully recovered from the previous.) In any case, I'm back to being quite ill.

Before I came home and took various medications, I'd eaten a fairly large meal, and for whatever reason the food stayed in my stomach for hours. A problem with that was that the medication stayed there with it, instead of being absorbed by my digestive system.