Getting out of the car

roots

As someone who doesn’t drive, I recognize the variables of drivers getting out of the car. They have to be aware of cars, bicycles, and the occasional jaywalking pedestrian.

Unless they’re parking on a one-way street with parking on both sides, they don’t have to worry about uneven curbs, trees, and the like.

In front of the houses both to the north (pictured) and the south of our house, there are large shade trees. They are wonderful in keeping the street a bit cooler in the summer. I would hate for them to go.

But each of them is pushing the curb into the street and slightly upward, no more than a few inches, but just enough to make it difficult for someone on the passenger side to get out of the car. And walking over the roots is an adventure in balance.

You say verges, I say berm 

I’ve become ve, I say ry cognisant of uneven road verges. What?  It is “a strip of ground cover consisting of grass or garden plants, sometimes shrubs and trees, located between a roadway and a sidewalk. Verges are also known by other names such as parkway, grass strip, nature strip, curb strip, berm, park strip, or tree lawn, the usage of which is often quite regional.” There are other terms.

Recently, I was getting out of the car, and the verge was at a 30-degree angle, at least. I don’t usually need my cane to get to the sidewalk, but I did that day. 

Operating on low energy

Not Detected

I’ve been operating on low energy.

After I went to the urgent care place on Sunday, June 14, and it appeared to be just allergies, it seemed to abate. But it, or something, came back with a near-constant variation.

And THEN, I got what I suspect was food poisoning; my wife, eating at the same venue, had some symptoms as well. (For a time, I thought I might have the parasite Cyclospora, except I never had a fever. When you are unwell, you look at all sorts of reasons.)

So I went back to the urgent care place on Wednesday, July 1,  and got my nose swabbed. The next day, I got the results:

Streptococcus pyogenes – Not Detected

Mycoplasma pneumoniae – Not Detected

SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) – Not Detected

Influenza A – Not Detected

Influenza B – Not Detected

RSV A/B – Not Detected

Rhinovirus – Not Detected

Enterovirus – Not Detected

Still, everything was an effort. We had severe weather that Wednesday night: driving rain and lightning so severe that I unplugged my laptop.

The next day, my wife was going to drive me to my podiatrist; usually, I would have just taken the bus, but it was 96F (35.5C), with a heat index of 107F (41.7C). According to the WRGB meteorologist Steve LaPointe, “the peak heat index matched yesterday’s peak, but the duration of heat indices in the 100s was twice as long.”

Power line?

We had left the house to get to the doctor’s office when we found a power line draped over not only our car but our daughter’s. It didn’t SEEM to be live, but we don’t trust our “expertise.” We gingerly got in the car. After my wife drove off, I called National Grid; of course I have their emergency number programmed on my cellphone.

When we got back, we found the loose wire rolled up in a tree. The message on my landline – my account is tied to that phone – indicated it wasn’t their wire, but Spectrum, the cable company.  

This mean I needed to call Spectrum. Since their default menu is to try to fix a problem that I don’t have, I yell (or squawk) “Representative” so I can get a Real Person. 

All of this is not really onerous, but in low energy mode, meh. I’ve been doing a BRAT diet, expanding it of late because it’s so damn boring. 

I can’t sing more than an octave. Someone asked if I would participate in a brief 4th of July musical bit. I would have loved to, but I simply could not, which made me sad.

Okay, I’m done whining for now, mostly because I’m too tired to zzzz… 

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