Is There A Doctor In The House?

A couple of months ago I complained of a stuffy head to my PCP. Leaning over to tie my shoes made my head hurt and coughing hurt worse. He said it is probably seasonal allergies and wrote a script for the generic of Singular, said his wife swears by it. I’ve never had an allergy problem before, but there is always a first time for everything. The medicine notes said it might take 3 to 14 days to reach full effect, so I settled in for the long haul. One week, two weeks, three weeks – nothing – I finished the bottle and didn’t refill it.

Another month goes by and I got no better, but I got no worse either. Then, last week about Tuesday I noticed a different sound sensation on the drive home, the wind noise with the top down had a rumble to it. On Wednesday the low frequencies of music were muddy. My stuffy head had migrated to my left ear. I figured it was time to do something about my problem. And I wanted to elevate the issue and just go ahead and get an appointment with an Ear, Nose and Throat doctor. See as I hadn’t yet ever seen an ENT doc, I had my choice, stay local and try one of the two docs in a practice here in Aiken or try and get in and see the same guy as Donna used out of a larger practice in Augusta.

I started with the Aiken ENT. I called their number about 9:30 on Thursday. A very official sounding voice mail system picked up after 2 rings giving the impression that you are dealing with very large, finely-tuned operation instead of a small medical office. I wait thru “call 911 if this is an emergency” instructions and the “your call is very important to us”, then I get “if this is a doctor’s office press 0” followed by “for appointments press 1”, so I do. Now I get the “this call may be recorded, blah, blah, blah, the next available representative will be with you shortly.” Followed by hold music…do, do, do doo, do, do doo. Not long later the phone starts ringing, so I know I’m close, but after 8 rings it is still ringing! I hang up.

The heck with that, I’ll show them, I’ll call Augusta. The drive to the downtown place wasn’t bad and I’ll ask to see Dr. Barfield, he was cool. So I look up their number and call them. IT IS THE SAME EXACT VOICEMAIL SYSTEM (different voice, but same script) AND THE EXACT SAME THING HAPPENS (I hang up after 8 rings.)

About 20 minutes later I tried the Aiken number again. As soon as the voice mail system picks up I hit the number 1, wait through the automated voice until I get the ringing. This time I count to 12 rings before hanging up.

I email home to Donna to say I give up, nobody is answering the phone at either place. She emails back, “You want me to try?” “Go ahead,” I tell her. Not long later my desk phone rings. It is Donna telling me that someone picked up right away when she called. She got me an appointment with her guy, but it wasn’t going to be until the 13th because he was going on vacation the next day…

Bicycle Friday

The bike riding to work on Fridays continues even if only one of us actually rides all the way to the Valve Store. In the morning Donna rides to the halfway point and turns around and heads home on a different route and I continue on pedaling our old standard route to ASCO. At the end of my work day I saddle up and Donna meets me right across the street from the plant having ridden the standard route to within the last tenth of a mile. There is really no reason for her to cross the busiest road on the route only to have cross back 10 minutes later.

People are so used to us riding the tandem in together that you might be surprised to learn how many people wonder how the whole thing works now when I tell them she rides halfway in with me in the morning. “Does she have to walk back home?” “What’s it like to ride that bike with no one on the back seat?” “Ohhh, you have other bikes…”

This morning when a cubicle1 neighbor said, “I didn’t think you were here.”

“It’s Friday,” I reply, “I bike rode in.”

“Oh, I didn’t notice the bike.”

“That’s because it is half as long as the tandem,” I tell him eliciting a chuckle.

This got us talking about cycling and as it turns out he was into mountain biking about the same time as we were back in the middle 1990s. I wonder if we ever crossed paths as we talked of riding some of the same local trails and we both even had ridden the Tsali Trail up in western North Carolina. But I don’t think we were at the same places at the same time because even though it was 20 years ago Donna and I would have been hard to forget. Among all the usual pick up trucks, jeeps, SUVs and big cars, it was hard to miss a Miata with 2 mountain bikes mounted on the trunk at trail head parking areas.

Lick Fork Lake Trailhead

68,000 Excuses Not To Blog


or I Fell Into An Orphan Black Hole.

I haven’t blogged in about 2 weeks and I’m going to do better in June and post every day. Promise. Or your money back.

I am going to place the blame of that post hole on actually buying (at the exorbitant cost of $1.99) that silly little Orphan Black game. Before I bought it I thought there were only six levels, AKA worlds, to complete because that was how many walk-thrus someone had posted on the internet. But the game itself actually has 10 worlds consisting of either 8 or 9 rooms to navigate successfully to advance on to the next.

And even though the game gives you plenty of decent hints if you ask, I still used the walk-thrus to help me finish up those first 6 levels. Worlds 7 through 10 were all on hints and trial and error and I was really happy to finally wrap up Room 9 of World 10 the other night.

But I was gifted with 4 extra rooms along with some sort of flying demon, that in room two I just can’t seem to get by using the hints and trial and error. I’m going to have to go ‘old school’ and print out the level map and start counting squares or something.

Somewhere during Donna’s errands on Tuesday the Sonata passed the 68,000 mile mark.

Arts & Crafts Engineer



Last Friday: Hey Brian can you make me a banner for my Relay for Life Event…tonight?
Monday: If I email you the pictures and bring over the words what I want on it, can you make me up a Lost Dog flyer?
Tuesday: Not enough people have returned their Safety Survey. Can you design something and print out five of them on 18 x 24 paper?
Wednesday: I print out my usual Service Level chart to hang outside the cafeteria.
Thursday: I need a banner for my Dad’s 75 birthday can you fix me up?
Friday: If I send you a picture with something circled could you erase it somehow?2

Raining Clones

Normally we would be about halfway thru the season on Orphan Black by now, but we are still 24 days away from Episode 1 of the 5th and final season. Wish I had thought about it 16 days ago so I could have watched on episode a night, starting at the first episode of season one and finishing up with episode 10 of the 4th. I guess my next option is to watch all forty in a row, ending just before the premier on that Saturday night, starting at 6:00 AM on the Friday before (I’ll have to take a vacation day.) With the average length of each episode being 44 minutes, that’ll leave 16 minutes between episodes for bathroom breaks, microwaving popcorn and cat naps.

Or I could just play Orphan Black: The Game and hope to complete/solve it in time for 10:00 PM on June 10th. When it first came out on March 24th it was only available for iOS, but just a couple days ago it became available for Android users. I burned up a little over 1/10 of my data for the month downloading the massive game. And I think that is really just the free demo, if I do decide to pay for the whole game I’ll be where I have WiFi access that is for sure.

Another Exciting Day at Work

Two of the Valve Store’s engineers were standing outside my cubical discussing a housefly problem. The engineer with the problem had tried a couple things with little success, so the other says, “Have you heard about air-power gun that shoots salt that kills them.” “Nooo..”, came the reply. “It is sort of like a shotgun water pistol that fires table salt.”

I hadn’t either, so I looked it up. It’s called Bug-A-Salt, cute, huh? So, the housefly host says, why don’t you get a couple of them and bring the boys over (non-fly guy has 5-year old twins) and they can hunt the flies down. I’ll offer up a bounty. At this point I jump in with, “Hey, I want in on this bounty. How much is it?” The answer is $50 a ton. This is a perfect answer because the kids will jump at the size of the bounty and not really have a sense of how much a ton is.

I on the other hand know how big a ton is and how big a fly is, so I’m no longer interested in hunting houseflies. But I am now curious as to just how many flies it would take to get a ton of them. A quick search turns up these figures in a couple places, so they are going to be accurate enough for our little math problem.

Typical housefly: Adult size: 5-7 mm = 0.005-0.007 m Adult mass: 12 mg = 0.000 012 kg

1 Imperial Ton = 1016.05 kilograms, so we divide 1016.05 by .000012 = 84670833.333, or just a mere 84.7 million flies in a ton. Not nearly as many as I originally thought, I would have guessed some number followed by about 10 or 12 zeroes.

Next I guess we will also need to figure out how big a bucket we are going to need to hold ton of flies. I couldn’t find a volume for a house fly, so I’m going to take a SWAG and say if the fly is 6 mm long and it is roughly cylindrical shape of about 2.5 mm in diameter. This gives me, fudging for wings and legs, let’s call it 30 cu/mm per fly. So the 84670833.3333 x 30 = 2540125000 cu/mm. Converting to cubic feet gives us 88.90437499965 or a slightly overfilled 3-yard dumpster from California Waste Services.

53,000 ng/dL of Testosterone

Better late than never. This post was supposed to written last weekend, but somehow I got on the write-about-bicycle kick and forgot it my drafts folder. Not that you are missing much as all it was was a CTBNL mileage update.

Last Saturday we drove up to Kershaw, SC to meet up with some other MMC members at the Carolina Motorsports Park. Club member John Haff is big in the NASA racing thing and he arranged for us fellow Miata owners to take some “parade” laps of the track during the lunch break. We of course turned that into a Motoring Challenge themed event as we needed a photo of a parade…

Somewhere, quite literally in the boondocks, the odometer clicked3 passed the 53,000 mark. I say literally, because we had just passed an intersection with a small country store on one corner that had “Boon Docks Store” painted on its outside wall.