17
Jul
2020

Why even bother ordering online if you, well, can’t?

categories: personal; word count: 200 words

Good news: You can add your EBT card to Amazon so that they can bill from it.
(Well, in my state, you now can, at least. So that’s exactly what I did.)
Bad news: Amazon is so picky about what can actually be billed to your EBT card.
In which case, why bother even using your EBT card to buy from Amazon? Seriously?

Case in point, I thought I would buy myself some chicken chow mein, which happens to be one of my favorite foods. Ironically, I could buy the rice noodles with it. That would bill my EBT card no problem. But the thing that would not bill my EBT card… was the chicken chow mein itself. No retailer that I could find on Amazon would actually bill my EBT card for the chicken chow mein. It almost seems to be an exercise in futility to find actual retailers that will bill your EBT card for the foods that you want to buy. I’m sure that is the whole point.

“Make it so difficult for them to use their card that they won’t actually want to use EBT.”
“This is how we will make them want to get jobs!”

15
Jul
2020

Oh look everyone, we’re still in a pandemic.

categories: augmented reality, personal; word count: 583 words

It stupefies me that people are taking some of the risks that they are, or have been, during this pandemic. Even though my lung doctor pulled me off of prednisone (unless I really, really need it) in the event that I am exposed to someone who has COVID-19 and come down with it myself, I know that I am high-risk, being someone that… does not have mild asthma. I have not left the house unless I have had to leave the house, and when I have left the house, I have worn a face mask, frequently washed my hands, maintained the proper distance from people who are not part of my household unless they have been my doctors needing to check me, and used hand sanitizer. But to hear stories of people practically blowing this pandemic off, casually socializing with each other, acting like we aren’t even in the midst of a pandemic blows my mind.

And in case I actually need to confirm this, my pulmonologist actually had to make the decision to pull me off of prednisone unless I really, really need it because of the pandemic. If I am actually exposed to COVID-19 while on it, or having just recently come off of it, my immune system is going to be weakened, and that means that I am going to have a much more difficult time fighting it off… and if I actually come down with it, we do not need that. So we need to try to deal with my asthma in other ways, as I’ve mentioned in previous posts in here. And I can completely see why that decision has been made, given that people who are completely healthy prior to infection have actually died from this or have had a profoundly difficult time fighting it off. People who have been healthier than me prior to onset of infection have had their lungs (and bodies) absolutely ravaged by it. So yeah, I can see why this decision was made from me. It still does suck that one of the medications in my toolbox had to be removed like that, though. But… I can see why it was.

It’s getting harder to remember the way things were before this, when they were nearly all laissez-faire.

When I could just casually take Bub on Pokemon Go walks to the nearby cemetery, which is amusingly not only a PokeStop but also a Gym, sit in the gazebo in the middle of it for several minutes, take the Gym on behalf of Team Mystic if it didn’t already belong to us, get several spins off of it, enough to fill our inventory, make sure I’d caught my breath, then walk back home. Or, if I was really feeling up to exhausting the hell out of myself (pun definitely intended now), walk past our road to the funeral home on the other side, which is a Pokemon Gym, take that on behalf of Team Mystic if it didn’t already belong to us, then walk home. Bub was always up for the walks, and since he doesn’t have asthma and is in good health, never got tired from them — he maintained excitement the whole way through because we were catching Pokemon and taking (or helping secure) Gyms in the name of Team Mystic. Me, on the other hand? My inhaler was my best friend…

Funny to think that now I miss completely exhausting myself in the name of making my child happy, but hey.

14
Jul
2020

This doesn’t surprise me, but it saddens me.

categories: personal; word count: 331 words

As a direct result of this pandemic, my pulmonologist does not want me to take prednisone unless I really need it and there is no other alternative. This is because prednisone is a fairly potent immunosuppressant and we are seeing an uptick in the number of COVID-19 cases in this state (once again) because of our governor’s incompetence, and if I am on prednisone — or have been on prednisone really recently — and am actually exposed to it, this may incapacitate my ability to fight it off. This would obviously be bad for me for a number of reasons, the least of them being that I am definitely not a mild asthmatic. And I mean, I can see where my lung doctor is coming from making that recommendation. But it just sucks that he has to make it…

We could have ridden this out longer under a longer stay-at-home order, opened the economy up over a longer period of time, but no. The governor pandered to people literally whining over “the economy” and “going back to work”, and as a direct consequence of this, we have to pay the price of closing everything back up again because the largest hospital in the state and the country could not handle the ICU caseload.

I can’t help but know for a fact that if we had any other president this would have been handled better.

Although prednisone is not the wrecking ball for me that it can be for other people, it has helped in the past when I have had more severe, enduring exacerbations, so it does suck that I can not fall back on this right now, so I am hoping that Symbicort works well in the interim. And speaking of that, when I get a chance I’m thinking of replaying Final Fantasy XIII with New Game+ or maybe even Final Fantasy XIII-2 while I conveniently slow walk Lightning Returns — yes, I’ll get around to finishing it, someday. Really, I will here.

13
Jul
2020

This seems like the best workaround for now, so…

categories: personal; word count: 474 words

Okay, so after coming to the conclusion that one game in particular from Epic was taking up… nearly all of the free space that we had left on our PC’s hard drive, and that continuing to download every free game that we qualified for would put us on an unsustainable path with a hard drive that was one terabyte large, I decided to uninstall all of the Epic games that we are not actively playing even though I will continue to “qualify” for all of the free games that they release each week and grow our library that way so that I can download them at our leisure when we do want to play them… that way, they will be there and ready, but our hard drive won’t eventually completely fill up. That seems to be the best way to work around this for now, especially given that Epic games seem to be larger than any other PC(/Mac) game’s (developer? manufacturer? releaser?) that I’ve encountered so far. And to think that I honestly thought that a one terabyte hard drive was large… at least until that happened, you know? And maybe it is. Maybe to have a proper “gaming rig” though, you need something even larger than that. That honestly just blows my mind.

At any rate, we finally have (almost) everything that I can think of for Baby’s First Altar. Bub is continuing to be monitored around it because he’s taken to not leaving things alone when I want, or need, him to leave them alone. We’re working on that. It’s coming along, bit by bit. And weirdly enough, one or two people every now and again have asked me if I’ve ever regretted opening my mouth to Bub’s father’s family about my lack of belief in a higher power, not going along to get along, not keeping my mouth shut about how I really felt about them and their beliefs, and… no. I don’t regret a single thing. Because if we did get married, our marriage would have been incredibly short-lived (and invalid in the eyes of his church because I wouldn’t have been open to life, let alone “willing to be faithful” since I did not want to be monogamous and had made that clear to him). Also worth noting: my own family members were actually unwilling to come to my own wedding if I had one, and pretty much saw the writing on the wall for exactly what it was there. They were more willing to support the fact that it would be a short-lived marriage. Especially my own mother.

None of my own friends (bar the friends that, at the time, were our own mutual friends) were willing to come.

That should have said something right there about the level of avoidance people close to me would’ve had.

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