doubting thom

This morning I had an appointment for a physical–I’ll write more about the overall examination, and my feelings about a doctor’s visit last month, separately–during which my doctor recommended that I be revaccinated for tetanus and vaccinated for Hepatitis A and B. We also agreed upon some laboratory work for which blood would be needed.

While as a young kid I assured my mother she’d never have to worry about me getting involved with drugs because I 1) couldn’t swallow pills; 2) was allergic to smoke; and 3) was very squeamish about needles, in fact, any sharp or pointed object (my sister used to terrorize me when we were very young by pointing her fork at me; I used to have this fear that somehow I’d end up getting speared in the eye). As a freshman in college, however, when my allergies were diagnosed, I soon got used to a needle, receiving three desensitization shots a week for a couple of years.

Moreover, my veins are easy to see and get a needle into, so I wasn’t particularly concerned or nervous about the shots or the need to fill a few vials for labwork. And, indeed, while I did feel the tetanus shot a little, the nurse who delivered the hepatitis shots did so with such skill that I couldn’t even feel the needle or the serum going in.

However, I wasn’t so lucky with the phlebotomist, who may just have been the worst such I’ve ever encountered. I should have been warned when in an attempt to throw the cap of the syringe into the trash she accidentally bounced it off my head. To be fair, the first stick in my right arm went fine, and she drew two vials of blood quickly and easily. After she finished, though, and was about to send me to the restroom to provide a urine sample, she realized that she’d missed seeing one additional test on the lab paperwork, and that she’d have to stick me again. She decided to take it from my other arm, and I don’t know what she did, but I’ve never felt such pain from having my blood drawn, not just from the stick but during the entire draw, which took much longer for some reason. In fact, even after she removed the needle, my arm continued to hurt and even started to feel numb for a couple of minutes.

Much to my surprise, at least, I didn’t end up with a bruise on that arm, and she did apologize (maybe my little yelp and full body shudder clued her in), but still, not fun. Ouch! It’s interesting how any number of good experiences can be overshadowed by one bad; I find myself hoping that next time I need blood drawn, she won’t be there, and feeling a little queasy now just writing about it–when I got to the point to writing about the second stick, in fact, I had to stand up and walk around a few seconds before finishing this entry, and my arm began to tingle again sympathetically–whereas before I’d accepted the procedure with no apprehension and even a little interest, always watching the needle stick and the entire draw with some fascination.

James Doohan, well-loved and best-known as Montgomery “Scotty” Scott in the original Star Trek series, died early this morning of pneumonia and Alzheimer’s Disease, at age 85.

When I heard the news, I thought of the scene in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, when Scotty is playing “Amazing Grace” on the bagpipes after Spock’s death. Today those pipes play for him.

Coincidentally, today is also the anniversary of the Apollo 11 first manned moon landing on July 20, 1969 (which the almost seven-year-old me watched, idolized and longed to be part of). In honor of the latter anniversary, Google has incorporated lunar imagery into its wonderful Google Maps technology, at Google Moon. Zoom in all the way to find out what the moon is made of after all–albeit yellow, not green, as it turns out. You can also see the front page of the New York Times from the following day.

Well, at just 50, former Fox Television attorney John Roberts can’t be considered old, more’s the pity, but he’s certainly got the rest of “yet another old white guy” covered.

It’s not like there was going to be good news from the president’s announcement tonight, and I guess it could have been worse. But his record still makes for depressing reading, and given that he’s only seven years older than me, he’ll likely sit on that bench most of the rest of my life, along with whomever Bush names once Rehnquist steps down or dies.

People tend to complain about Verizon, but I have to admit that I’ve been pretty happy with their services. Among the multiple wireless providers I’ve tried, for example, Verizon is hands-down the best for me; neither Sprint nor AT&T were able to get a signal into several of the buildings in which I’ve worked, but Verizon works even in my current government facility, whereas most of my colleagues end up having to walk outside to take or make a cell phone call. They’re also the only national provider that offers service both here in Arlington as well as down in the mountains where my Mom lives; in fact, I get better cell phone coverage there with Verizon than Mom does with her own local provider.

And I’ve been very pleased with Verizon DSL, having been one of their first couple dozen customers for the service. Recently they’ve introduced a new 3.0Mbps home DSL service, from the older 768kpbs, and I’d been hearing that people were able to upgrade for no additional cost just by calling and asking. So today, while I was home sick from work, I gave them a call to see if it would be available for us.

I did have to wait on hold for 20 minutes (though that turned out to be partly because one of the local call centers was closed for the day due to a power failure or the like), and the answer I got at first didn’t make me happy: I was told that because I’d had one of the original accounts, it wasn’t in the same system as the newer accounts and couldn’t therefore be upgraded automatically. I expressed some dismay that as someone who’d been supporting them from the beginning that I didn’t have the same opportunities, even though I was paying the same monthly fee, as new customers. The salesperson actually agreed with me that it didn’t seem fair, but that those were the rules. However, she countered that I could switch my account to the new system, which would then potentially be eligible–based on the availability of service to my condo, which didn’t worry me since I can see the central switch from my balcony–for the 3Mpbs upgrade. She cautioned that this could mean that we’d be without service at all for 24-48 hours as they moved my account from one system to the other, but said that she’d fix me up with a dial-up account if that happened.

So I went for it, and she made the switch then and kept me on the line to see if the service stayed online in the interim. After about ten minutes, she said that if it hadn’t been disconnected by then, she thought it likely that it would remain in effect until the new service took over. And indeed I didn’t lose service all day.

I’d been checking the speed of the connection off-and-on since then, and it was still showing roughly 721kpbs downstream, 132 up. But after picking Jeff up at the Metro tonight, I came home to discover that we’re now getting rates of about 2.7Mbps down and 700 up; I can now download four times faster than before, and even upload faster then the previous download speed. And at the same monthly rate I’ve been paying: $29.95.

To top it off, the saleswoman at Verizon was charming and patient, turning the experience from a frustrating one at first into actually a delightful one.

So, props to Verizon. And yay for the faster broadband!

Off-and-on throughout the weekend I wasn’t feeling quite up to snuff, suffering from a mild fever and general malaise. Unfortunately, I had committed to doing a fair amount of work over the weekend on a project with a tight deadline; I ended up putting in about 13 extra hours over the weekend (along with about another 6 hours in the evenings during the week itself), mostly late at night into early morning (alternating with chapters from the latest Harry Potter, two-thirds of which I’d completed by bedtime last night and the final third earlier today), so I also wasn’t particularly rested. On Saturday night we were supposed to go to a colleague’s new condo for a housewarming, but by that evening I just wasn’t feeling up to heading out, especially given the severe thunderstorms passing over (and which continued sporadically throughout the weekend).

Sunday afternoon I was feeling well enough that we did make it out to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and have some dinner, but when we got home I was still feeling a little unwell, but still went back to work on the project until after midnight. This morning I was again running a fever alternating with a cold clamminess, so I made a last-minute decision to stay home and rest, after sending in via email the work I’d done over the weekend.

I expect I’ll feel up to working tomorrow, but for the past month, I’ve already had an appointment scheduled for a physical on Wednesday anyway, so I can have it checked out then if I’m still not back to near 100 percent.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was enjoyable, if a little underwhelming in some regards. The reviews I’d seen were mostly pans, and even the more positive reviews commented, not always very kindly, on Johnny Depp’s strongly idiosyncratic portrayal of Willy Wonka. I thought Depp was fine and, if anything, understated in his performance; Wonka, after all, is supposed to be eccentric and even a little dark. I could really have done without the psychological back story, though, which added nothing and, in fact, rather cheapened the mystery of Wonka.

Tim Burton’s sets, of course, were fantastically exotic and stylistically lush, and using Deep Roy to play all the Ooompa-Loompas was quite interesting and, I think, successful. Danny Elfman’s score delighted, as always, and this movie gave him a chance really to stretch, with the Oompa Loompa moralizing tunes–featuring lyrics based on Roald Dahl’s original book–running the gamut from 70s sunshine pop to Bollywood spectacles to hard metal.

And Freddie Highmore, the young actor who plays Charlie Bucket (and who earlier starred with Depp in an affecting performance in the wonderful Finding Neverland), was simply perfect. Jeff and I saw a short feature over the weekend on the making of Charlie…, and Highmore exhibits such a maturity, and a real knowledge of the craft of acting in which he’s engaged. I’ll be eager to see what he does next.

While several of my friends are braving the heavy thunderstorms in the area as they make their way to local bookstores at midnight, I just got the following email:

Greetings from Amazon.com.

We thought you’d like to know that we shipped your items today, and that
this completes your order.

Thanks for shopping at Amazon.com, and we hope to see you again soon.

The following items were included in this shipment:

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Book 6) (Harry Potter)

When I ordered the book last month, Amazon guaranteed delivery by 7:00 tomorrow evening, the day of release, or they’ll refund the purchase price. And, in fact, checking the tracking number indicates that the book already was shipped a couple of days ago, and has been in Alexandria, just a few miles away, since early this morning.

Since I’m going to be working a good deal of the weekend, I won’t really have time to start reading the new book yet anyway, so midnight or 7pm tomorrow doesn’t make that much of a difference to me. Meanwhile, it’s air-conditioned and comfy here in the condo, with chances of heavy thunderstorms close to nil in the bedroom.

There have been a few recent changes to the blog. If you’re reading this via any of the RSS or Atom feeds, you’ll already have seen the new Feedburner feed I’m using. That new feed includes the blog entry text, along with spliced-in photos from my Flickr account and quicklinks from my del.icio.us account, for starters.

Related to that, and partly as a consequence of email from a friend who reminded me that not everyone who reads my blog has broadband, and that while she enjoys my pictures, they do tend to negatively impact her ability to download the blog, I’ll no longer be posting every photo I upload to Flickr as a separate blog entry here, except where I may put them in the context of a greater blog entry. If you’re getting the RSS feed, you’ll still see all the individual photos, and if you read the blog itself in the, ahem, old-fashioned way, they’ll still be accessible in the Flickr badge on the main page [update 071405 2036EDT: that is, at least, when the Flickr badge is working again; at the moment, the code from Flickr is broken].

In the same vein, I’ve also decided not to continue to include the quicklinks as separate blog entries, except again where I may have more to say about them. For now, they’ll only appear in the RSS feed, though I’m considering some changes to the blog template that would put them in their own portion of the page, rather than interspersed among my own writing.

Since my last posting, Jeff and I have seen two plays: Red, White and Tuna last Thursday in the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater and Signature Theatre’s Sunday night closing performance of Stephen Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures. We almost couldn’t have picked too more different shows.

Red, White and Tuna is part of the Tuna series of lowbrow two-man plays featuring Joe Sears and Jaston Williams, and set in the fictional little town of Tuna, Texas. Last winter, Jeff and I saw Tuna Christmas at the Warner, and years ago I saw the show that originated the series, Greater Tuna. Red, White and Tuna certainly was enjoyable, though we’d both found Tuna Christmas a little more so. We had half-price tickets, but really pretty good seats on the aisle; these plays really are best-suited to more intimate venues like the Warner and the Eisenhower.

I’m still not really sure how I feel about Sunday’s performance of Pacific Overtures, which I’d never seen before. One of Sondheim’s earlier works (1976), it seems even less accessible than the rest of his oeuvre. Don’t get me wrong; I’m quite a Sondheim fan, but his shows are not typical Broadway fare, and this one perhaps even less than most. Local reviews of Signature’s production (and Signature is well-known for its Sondheim repertoire) were uniformly positive and full of high praise. I’m not sure why. Well, the voices were fine enough, and there were even some real standouts among the performances–like Donna Migliocci’s central role as the Reciter–but overall I came away, if not necessarily disappointed, somewhat uneasy.

Partly its the book, which seemed to me uneven and disjointed; the story surrounding the roles seemingly at the center of the story–the samurai-turned-governor and the fisherman-turned-samurai–ends abruptly, and the final scene with the now-grown emperor seemed rushed, pretentious and full of artifice. Yes, I realize that Japan itself was the true central character, but its treatment here, to me, felt particularly shallow and poorly developed.

I must also admit to some discomfort at the fact that the entire cast consisted of Caucasian men and women in kabuki-style white makeup and the same cartoonish black wigs for each; some actors affected Japanese accents, while others didn’t, though there seemed no particular reason for the discrepancy. I don’t know if any of this was deliberate, but it had the effect of making me feel a little uncomfortably like I was watching a minstrel show, only with blackface replaced here by whiteface and some overinked eyeliner used to simulate epicanthic folds.

I do want to listen to the music some more–it definitely displayed that familiar Sondheim genius for rhythm and rhyme, and I want to explore it further–and likely will buy the recent Broadway revival album off of iTunes. But I’m not sure I’d see the show performed again.

My lack of the flag-waving gene notwithstanding, yesterday evening we had our own little Independence Day dinner–open-faced chicken barbecue sandwiches with onions and cole slaw, french fries, and salad–and then went out to watch the fireworks. I have to admit to some grousing about the latter, since I didn’t really want to go, but it was clear that Jeff did but at the same time wouldn’t go on his own. I generally end up thinking that putting up with the high heat and humidity, crowds and insane travel times doesn’t really measure up against a mere twenty minutes of fireworks, and so end up usually just watching the display on television. However, once we were actually out–we just drove over to the shopping center at Pentagon City, about a mile and a half away, and watched the fireworks from the parking garage, which has an excellent view of the Pentagon and Washington Monument–it really wasn’t that bad; we were together, after all, which is the important thing, we had a good spot from which to see the display, we were relatively close to home, and I also had my camera with me and could focus on the photographic possibilities of the experience. We weren’t in a good location to use the tripod, but I was able to balance the camera body on the parking garage wall and the end of the lens on my prone hand. Altogether I took over 170 shots, and I’ve uploaded a selection (just sixteen so far) to Flickr.

Because we didn’t go downtown or over to the river, traffic wasn’t as horrible as I remember, though it still pissed me off. I’d checked and double-checked the postings of road closings on the Arlington County web site, but at the last minute they must have made some changes. While Columbia Pike was supposed to be closed east of Joyce Street to the Pentagon, when the fireworks ended and we headed up Joyce Street from the mall, intending to turn left–west–on Columbia Pike, they weren’t permitting traffic to turn that direction, instead routing us down toward the Pentagon and onto I-395 South. When our two lanes went down to one, and the woman beside me decided she was too important to honor the alternate merging that was taking place, I completely lost my temper, and Jeff got to hear me lobbing some choice words–and a particular finger–in her direction, not that it helped or made any difference. Thirty-five minutes later, we had made it back to the condo, for an overall average of slightly less than 2 mph.

All in all, though, I’m glad now that we went, and I regret that I was a little sullen and bitchy about the whole thing. Next year, though, we’ll walk down the Pike to the hills overlooking the Pentagon and watch them from there, and not have to deal with the traffic at all (well, except as pedestrians trying not to get smooshed).