johnpowell

This probably wouldn't translate well to software. But it works great if you are installing ducts. Same goes for plumbers and electricians. My sisters first husband was a union electrician. That is why I looked into getting a union gig. I hate job hunting.

In the years I did it I worked for five different companies. I didn't have to run around dropping off resumes and doing practice tests. I just got a call from the union and was told where to go to work. And I made significantly more than my non-union counterparts. Easily more than the dues I had to pay.

But I have a feeding tube. That is how I ended up down here. We thought it would be the safest place to be while I was going through chemo. For six months while my immune system was garbage I just stayed down here and would only go up to get groceries or go to chemo/radiation. So I always joked that I think I could deal with solitary. I prefer being alone.

All that changed about a month ago.

The balloon on my PEG tube (DDG it) had deflated. And one night I went to change the gauze and while I pulled the gauze out it just started pouring out blood. In a matter of seconds my boxers had blood all over them. I was terrified. This much blood on the outside, how much blood is going into my stomach? Am I going to bleed to death? On the ride to the ER I was feeling faint..

I am getting to the solitary part.

But I saw a nurse right after checking in. And she determined I wasn't bleeding to death. I was going to have a bit of a wait to see a doctor. 4 hours to be exact. But they wanted me out of the ER waiting room due to being on pembro and there had just been a case of C-19 8 hours away.

So I was being walked to a room and she said they were low on places to put me. I was going to be in a "mental health" room. But they got a bed in there for me. White walls, a bed, no problem..

Huge problem!

It is so hard to describe. It was basically a cinder block box and a massive metal door. Everything tucked away so you couldn't kill yourself. And it was so loud since the air had to be pumped in. And I had a bed they wheeled in for me. And the door was open so I could go to the bathroom when I wanted. If that door was closed and I couldn't get out I would have lost my shit. And I nearly lost it anyway. Something about that room was just unlike anything you can imagine. It was like being buried alive.

I would imagine solitary is about a million times worse. I would classify it as torture.

And my feeding tube had slipped between my stomach and the "outside skin" tearing up everything making it bleed. Just shoved it back in and loaded up the balloon with more saline and went home. And then had the tube replaced the next day during normal hours.

But I also don't believe this speech would have happened tonight if it had been a up day on the stock market. I think that is the only lens they are looking at this through.

And I am not saying all masks are dumb. Just this specific one when it is marketed as protection from the current problem. It is fraud.

I spent six hours on the cancer floors of the local hospital the other day getting injections and we had to wear masks in the lobbies. It was the only part of the hospital I know of that required them. But it is the cancer floors and people have very little immune systems. When I was a few months into chemo my WBC count was under 1200. So low they couldn't do anymore chemo.

So every little bit helps. And perhaps I am a bit angsty thinking that people are using the masks for no reason when there are people that actually need them. Again, I am not talking about the ebay garbage mask. I am talking about the ones that actually could help our sickest people.

I stuck in a spare ssd and 8TB drive. It is running Ubuntu.

Right now it acts as a pi hole, nextcloud server, Channels DVR server, Plex Media Server, and runs Transmission. It barely breaks a sweat.

I used to just have a Pi 3B+ doing duty as a pihole and nextcloud box.

This works better and overall cost less than the pi once I added in the sd card, case, fan, power supply.

So maybe went Gig went cheap when choosing a cell partner.

The cancer has spread since I have been taking it. But I don't know if the cancer is spreading slower with taking it or not.

I'm 1.5 million deep in medical bills from the last year. I no longer open my mail or answer my phone. I am just waiting for the day I go in for treatment and they turn me away.

Been through the cancer game.

Three months of mouth radiation and chemo. They numbed me and poked a hole through my stomach to insert a feeding tube since swallowing wasn't going happen after week 5 of radiation kicked in.

The feeding tube was interesting. This was the "You have got to be fucking shitting me Monday".

I basically did not use DDG to look into what was going to happen to me. I wanted to know nothing about chemo, radiation, feeding tubes, and all the other horrors that would come my way. Clean slate, go in ignorant, just deal with it as it happens. This turned out to be the best approach. Like a frog in a warming crock pot. You adjust while your family gazes in horror as you lose your hair and 25% of your mass.

But back to Monday. Radiation at 9AM. Feeding tube at 10AM. Chemo at 2PM. Radiation was nothing. Get my head put in the mesh mask made during the simulation and you go in the machine for 20 minutes. They have Pandora so you can have music piped in during the treatment. I picked New Order.

Then the feeding tube. I was put into the operating room. Then put to sleep. Then I woke up with my sister staring at me in a room that was not the operating room. And I was told they couldn't do the tube. And plan B was needed. I was not told what plan b was until the horrors of plan b were already over. We will get back to plan b in a bit.

Now I will talk about round one of chemo. 2 liters of saline in the vein. Tiny bag of cisplatin. Then two more liters of saline. The entire thing would take 4 hours. But my god. I was nearly cocaine amped. It was a massive rush after chemo for a few weeks. Then it got different and I don't really want to talk about that. There is a reason my radiologist said to remove guns from the house. I can see how suicide would be a good idea.

Back to the feeding tube. They had to send me off to interventional radiology. They had to do a scan while installing the tube. From what I gather my stomach rides high under the ribs and they had to go in through my mouth and push my stomach down and then poke a hole between my stomach and the outside world. And then three things I would describe as "buttons" were stitched in to keep everything in place.

If you get a normal feeding tube you get Advil after you are done. I got 16 hours in a bed with a button that would call someone for a injection of something that would put me to sleep for hours. It was lovely. Like I said. I like drugs.

But I was given Hydromorphone to deal with the insane pain. This is when I realized opioids do fuck-all for me.

But opioids. I just watched that Pharmacist thing on Netflix. And I am kinda pissed off.

Really? Like heroin? When you have cancer you are showered with pills. I got a ton of OXY and they didn't really help. Lorazepam (the best) and Hydrocodone helped the most.

In the documentary they compared OXY to heroin. I get a bit of pain relieve from it (but I have never used it outside cancer). And they said you get high from it. I don't. And I asked my sister and she said oxy didn't get her high either. So I feel a bit cheated. And I have hundreds of oxy just sitting in my medicine cabinet.

Cocaine is great, not as great as heroin and cocaine has some drawbacks (sniff). Like everyone knows you are on it. And you can only snort so much before you get nose bleeds. And I have been that guy where my right nostril starts pouring out blood so I snort with my left. Heroin is relatively tidy.

Looking back on things it is probably for the best I made minimum wage after high school. The only thing that really tempered my substance abuse was poverty and my aversion to stealing peoples stuff to get high.

People say how taxes are too high in California, and the crime, and so on. Go to Texas and it will be better. Maybe I want to go to Peru or Canada.

I think that should be easy. Let countries compete for talent and allow free movement just like states do.

I bought a cushion for my desk chair from Amazon and it turned out to be garbage so I tried to return it. They said they could only give me a refund if I sent them a picture of the cut up cushion. I didn't have to send it back, just send a picture of it with a big gash down the middle.

I guess, at least with 1800 Junk there is a good chance a employee will pluck the mattress out and put it up on Craigslist.

I have given about 50 old cell phones I collected to the battered woman's shelter here. Even if they don't have cell service they can still call 9-1-1.

So we stayed at a battered woman's shelter in Cedar City. Lovely place, lovely people. Everyone helped out cooking. It was a small place, maybe 20 woman and children there and a few staff.

But one night my mom volunteered to make a cake. I remember this vividly. It was a Cherry Chip cake from a box and there was a thing of vanilla frosting. I ended up adding the ingredients and mixing them up. So the cake goes in the oven and bakes and something is wrong. I forgot to add eggs into the batter. So we ended up with gross sludge.

People were nice about but you could tell everyone was really disappointed. And cake was a luxury, it wasn't like we could go out and grab another one.

I'm going on 20+ years of mailing them cash with a note saying to buy cake.

But they both used Chrome. Today I switched them over to Firefox with uBlock Origin. And with some wankery you can make firefox look like a reasonable Macintosh application.

https://i.imgur.com/VaMnux3.png

But so far so good. And, as I have commented in the past about the pihole and when people leave the wifi at home they worried their phones were compromised because ad people have lost their fucking minds.

So now the twins can can have a reasonable internet on their computers.

If you don't like it, FUD..

I guess you trust Facebook to never change the TOS and toggles.

I made a comment a while ago about how when IE6 was destroying computers (~2003) I charged a lot of money to fix people computers unless they switched to Firefox. But if they used FF I would help for free. That was the beauty of my plan. I didn't care about money I just hated fixing my families computers. And using FF solved nearly all my problems.

And then a guy said he would go as far as putting the IE icon on FF so people wouldn't have to really do anything different. Ideally they just wouldn't notice.

So now that there is a stupid token I wonder how many installs of brave are actually legit. Seems trivial to just install it on families computers and fake it as Chrome and use your account to collect the tokens.

That is a image from:

https://brave.com/brave-ads-waitlist/

Notice the page is about the Grammys and the ad is about the Grammys. This is important.

So Brave strips the ads from my site and inserts their own as (even more annoying system notifications). And they are relevant to the page so now my visitors might think I was the dick that triggered a notification that must be dismissed.

And If I want a cut I have to sign up for some rando cryptocurrency company, the bastions of ethics and security.

Please Brave. Use a unique user agent string so I can just block people using your browser. And I don't care if people block ads, I do too. But when you get desperate and start showing ads for dildos on my site discussing cross-cut table-saw blades I'm not going to be a happy camper.

I have accepted that I will probably be dead in a few years. It is why I haven't had the PEG removed. I'm keeping it in so I can dump pills and vodka directly into my stomach if things hurt too much.

I have accepted things. I have all my end of life stuff sitting in a envelope on my desk. I have already paid for my remains to be taken care of. Sigh, the funeral home I paid in advance is probably going to end up on a episode of of American Greed.

But yeah, don't take it personal if we give up. There is a point where the bad is greater than the good and just checking out is the smart thing to do.

This is my junior year picture that is in the yearbook. https://i.imgur.com/qDmYOJV.png

High school wasn't great for me. But by 29 I knew people had it worse and I realized nobody wants to hang out with a perpetual victim. Do you think you shouldn't have to work to get laid?

Again, really curious how you are are being bullied. Are people pushing you into lockers? Or do you just equate bulling with not getting the respect you think you deserve?

Is there a homeless problem in Portland, sure, in the sense that there are them. But it isn't a inconvenience to me. You see them but they aren't a swarm of bees trying to swallow your spare change.

I lived on 14th and Alder in Eugene when Jerry Garcia died. That was annoying. All the people that toured with the Dead decided to land in Eugene while they found Phish.

It is like when public transport is talked about here. It is garbage because it isn't the same or better than my car. No fucking shit. It isn't meant to be. But it gets me where I am going for 60 bucks a month.

Public transportation in Portland is great. The homeless problem is a problem if you are uncomfortable around homeless people. But I just keep on walking and loving Portland..

edit :: I think I replied to comment that has been edited between when I hit "reply" and when my comment appeared.