Blog Review: StorytellERdoc

Rating: 5/5

In the wake of the big hard drive crash that killed off a lot of my projects, I've been rebuilding my Firefox browser's bookmarks. This is one I threw into my links while I was combing through my regular blogs looking for recommended reading.

StorytellERdoc is a 16-year ER veteran. He uses his blog to tell us about his job--not in a scalpels-and-blood technical way, but from the heart. Given that many of the blogs I read regularly feature people doing and saying incredibly stupid things and rightfully getting ripped for it, it's good to have one to read where the author is just giving us little vignettes of the human experience as he experiences it.

Shed Wars continue...

Got the building permit ($62.00); but after one inspector said I only need the one permit, the original one--the one who started this crap 2 weeks ago--says I still need a roof permit. $97.00.

I've got 30 days for that one...and yet I haven't worked on the damn shed since October. I can't do much more to the roof, anyway, until I get 4 more bundles of shingles. For that $97 I'm wasting on that permit, I could almost buy the rest of the shingles.

I don't even want to work on the thing. *grumble*

The Weather Channel--back to movies!

Yeah. They tried this in November of last year, picking movies with "weather" in them so they'd have a gimmick.

It's baaaack. Now they're calling it "Flick and a Forecast" (ugh). I didn't find any real buzz about it via the Google--just the hype from TWC itself, and this post about Jen Carfagno, one of the hosts of the evening program, and her legs. I have yet to sit and watch; I see it as just more fill.

See, they've got a ton of clip-shows, a badly-named "history" show, a sort-of "Mythbusters" clone where they bust stuff up with simulated weather, and what looks like another clip-show with Cantore, all carefully scheduled as to be on when I'm looking for the "Local on the 8's" segment, which is really the only thing I tune in for. Once I see the regional Doppler radar and chance of rain, I'm out. I don't think I'm alone in that. All that buddy-buddy horseshit with their weather actors--oh, sorry, their on-air meteorologists can't be bringing a lot of eyes, can it?

Probably not--that's why they're filling more and more screen time with pop-in-a-tape-and-see-you-in-an-hour crap. Less payroll spent on the weather actors.

Instead of all that crap, I'd rather see--and would sit and watch--stuff about the science of weather and forecasting. Real content.

Bleah. That's like expecting Bravo, A&E, TLC, History, Discovery Health, and all the other crappy programmers to stop doing reality shows about washed-up celebrities desperate for attention, midgets, clown-car-vagina breeders, and crab fishermen. It's all crap, but it's cheap and easy.

April 8--Two Bad Days

  Updated Nov 23 25.

April 8th marked two events with devastating impact on my life.

I wasn't even alive for the first one. His name was John Garner. He would have been my grandfather.

On April 8, 1965, John Garner killed himself with a 12-gauge shotgun.

  This is open to speculation, since all the people who'd know what really happened are all dead. My adoptive father told me in 2017 that word had it John was shot by my grandmother. If he was abusive or violent the way Alzheimer's folks can be...understandable. And it changes this entire part of the post.

I don't know much about him. I know John was full-blood Cherokee, small in stature. I know he was a blacksmith who made and repaired anything a farmer would need. There's a length of fence still standing, decades after he built it, along a highway north of Castleberry, AL. I've got a knife he made. But I have no memories of him.

  Correction: John was, in fact, lily-white from both sides of his family. The "Cherokee" thing was family folklore-we're also supposed to believe John's father James was Geronimo's kid. He wasn't--and Geronimo wasn't Cherokee. I wonder what other bullshit I was told.

I know he wasn't one to start a fight, but he'd end it. I was told about a day when he was working in his shop; a few white guys came up to start some trouble. He gave it back in spades--and two of them went to the hospital. That's the kind of man I only wish I could have been. Someone with a backbone, one who wouldn't just back down. I never learned how to fight.

I've wondered about him for much of my life, wondered what it would have been like to have a grandfather, wondered what hurt him so badly that he would kill himself, wondered what made him so selfish that he would deprive me of a father figure, something I never really had with my stepfather.

I wonder how much different my life would have been if he'd been around and showed me how to make the emotional tools I'd need later in life, but still don't really have.

  He had Alzheimer's. I wonder how much of him was left by 1965. How much would be gone by September 1967?


April 8, 1995 wrecked me. She doesn't have a name here, other than Pocahontas...or Piglet, depending on my mood. She was my first love; I fell hard for her the night we met at a Halloween party. I'd never had a woman flirt with me before, let alone find me interesting, attractive. She wanted to spend time with me. I was always the loner, the lonely, and she was intoxicating. I didn't know anything about relationships, didn't know what to do or say. The only thing that mattered to me was that I finally had someone of my own, the one thing I'd ever wanted.

We lived 200 miles apart; out of just over 5 months, we were actually together, face to face, for less than 2 weeks. There were letters and long-distance phone calls, but they can't compare to curling up in bed and reveling in that other person's breathing while she sleeps, or waking up to feel her tracing the lines of your face and hearing her whispering, "All mine." The first kiss, clumsy and uncertain, growing in confidence and enthusiasm. Still feeling her pressed against me hours after parting the first time. Hearing her call me the "love of my life."

April 8th is the day I got The Letter and The Call. This guy she'd dated in high school was back in town; she'd been out on a couple of dates with him in the past few days and now had a decision to make. I was too stupid to just say "good-bye" and hang up. No, I sat there listening to her babble about Mr. Perfect and how much money he made, and his great car, and how the sun shined out of his ass, and I suddenly understood the meaning of "on the outside looking in." It was a complete surprise to me--but I later learned that she'd been yapping to everyone around her for weeks about Mr. Perfect--even before the last time we were together. Her farking DOG knew shit was coming down. But the one person who really needed to know was the last to know.

When I finally hung up, I just sat there in my room, numb. I hardly ate or slept for three days. For more than three years afterward, I tried being "just friends," just more of that stuff I didn't know not to do (more of those "emotional tools"). Once I'd gotten enough of that, I sent an email telling her to either come back or stay away from me. That was the first smart thing I did, I think. Haven't seen or heard from her since, and I'm good with that.

I wonder how things would have gone if I'd had a grandfather.

There's More!!

Yup.

Got to have a permit to tear the shed down.

The good news is that the inspector's word wasn't final. I called him this morning and learned that what I need is a single building permit (which would cover work on the entire building, including replacing the bad studs, all the outer sheathing, and the re-roofing) instead of one roof and one siding permit.

So now I get to try getting the permit...and hopefully people will leave me (and that damn shed) the hell alone.

Hope the Neighborhood Douchebag is happy, now.

I called for a City inspector to come out to look at the shed so I could get the permits ($97 APIECE, I'd need one for the roof and another for the walls. Assholes).

The Dick (a different Dick, but a Dick all the same) comes out, apparently takes one glance at the wall around the door, and fucking condemns it. Termites, he says.

Bullshit. No termites. Ants, Dick. ANTS. I know, I found their nest while I was ripping shingles off the north half of the roof. You could have looked IN the shed, Dick. I left you the key, Dick. You might even have left me a voicemail when you called me at work, Dick, but you didn't.

Dick.

I could have explained that I knocked a hammer on every support stud and already have 2x4's to replace the bad ones, Dick. You're doing a great job with my tax dollars--way to interact, Dick.

Nice. I've got 21 20-gallon totes full of books stored in there, some tools, some car parts, and nowhere else to put them unless I go with $40 a month for rental storage.

Whomever you were, Neighborhood Douchebag...thanks for nothing, asshole. Would you like a useless pile of 30-year-old rotted plywood? I was going to throw it out anyway while I was rebuilding, but hell, you can have the whole goddamn thing.