So the Internet connection was dragging along, not really connecting to any site that consisted of more than words and still pictures. It would let me read blogs, but would not open live comment sections, if they had any. It was of course moving at a pace that made my old Dell laptop, The Sickly Snail, look brisk. And then, at about 4 p.m. on Thursday, it stopped even pretending to move except between 9 and 10 p.m. Thursday night.
Meanwhile, on the Sunday--I mean 7.21.24--I ate some beans that weren't all that canned beans should be, most if not every single one I'd swallowed landed in the bucket before I'd finished the bowl, and that seemed to be the end of that, but I kept feeling draggy...and 48 hours later I was feeling something I can only describe as "just like COVID only moreso." And dry, dry, dry...because the cheerful deliveryman had not brought the water I needed to flush it out, so it just dragged on, and on, and on. The cats and I shared our last bottle of Pure Life water on the Tuesday morning.
Here let me say that I'm not blaming the cheerful deliveryman for having missed a biweekly delivery for more than two extra weeks, because if what I had was COVID, then COVID is in our town, and when original COVID was in our town this cheerful chap spent a month in the hospital, denying that what he had was COVID. He has regular cardiovascular disease too. I sincerely hope he is resting and recovering.
I spent two full days mostly lying down under a blanket thinking "Well, a fever is to sweat out," only it wasn't working because, although I was sweating through towels and sheets all right, I wasn't rehydrating. Pulse and blood pressure all over the place, no reason to any of it, chest pains, headache pains, from the Tuesday to the Saturday, at which point I was feeling better enough to form thoughts like "This is feeling like the kind of reaction people have when they try to eke out their water supply by just slowly sipping their last bottle of soda pop, more than like COVID, as such."
I stumbled down the road on Sunday morning thinking "The cats can drink rain water if they have to, and I can get tap water in town," but one day's rehydrating was not enough for me to haul any tap water back home, so I still had to trudge back into town today to finish rehydrating. And to notify the sponsors that, although nobody is getting the Internet service for which we're paying, I have spotted another potential physical problem...on Sunday, 7.28.24, I sent the message that they weren't getting what they were paying for.
But it did help...this morning, after a day mostly drinking water and Coke in McDonald's, and then a day mostly going through the liquid contents of all the canned goods in the house at home and eating the solids if the first few bites didn't seem to be triggering a reaction, I was able to walk about a mile of the way without even carrying a stick. All COVID-like symptoms are gone. All that remains are symptoms of not eating or drinking between Wednesday and Saturday. They didn't give me a senior discount on that refillable drink cup and that annoyed me to the point where I'm now trying to work out exactly how much water and caffeine, in what combinations, I can drink. At least under the strong light in the bathroom my hair looks respectably frosty, to my eyes anyway, which may admittedly still see better than some burger-flipping kids' video-screen-frazzled eyes.
When I left the house there was still no Internet connection. The wire appeared to be where it ought to be, above the ground, parallel with the ground, all the way up the road.
A few yards below the property line, however, where the wire runs right over a wide, shallow, fast-moving part of the branch creek, I saw that the descendants of "my" White-Faced Hornets have built their nest right on what I believe to be the electrical ground wire. I could be wrong. If that's the phone and Internet line, that would explain why problems with it may be very hard to correct...
1. These are not, strictly speaking, my White-Faced Hornets. None of them ever lived on my porch or in my house. They do not know me better than they do other people. I may fear them less than most people do, but I respect them. I'm not going to move their nest until the temperature is freezing. (And I will need professional help to get at it, then.)
2. They are, nevertheless, a protected native species of animals. They are valued and protected by me, as well as by the law.
3. They are nesting directly above water that runs down to the Tennessee River, that hundreds of thousands of people have to drink. And that water is too shallow, at that point, to offer any protection to anyone they think is a threat to that nest.
4. Anyone who sprays poison at any of those hornets is spraying it in the face of God and the law, and I will do all that can be done to enforce the laws of God and humanity in defense of our native animal species.
5. These are by nature a very peaceable, goodnatured family--as hornets go, anyway. I will help relocate the nest onto my own property when the weather is appropriate.
6. My uninformed guess would be that the hornets are not a problem, anyway, as long as company employees move steadily past the nest and don't disturb it. If stung, accelerate away from the nest and crush broad-leafed plantain to rub onto the skin around, not directly on, the wound. But they're not at all eager to attack people.
7. The hornets are not, for example, likely to defend any place where any method of sabotage or wiretapping I know anything about would take place--which would be on my property. At this point cables are attached to poles well above the nest, so investigation of the cables should not disturb the hornets more than weather conditions do.
This web site will resume regular posting when possible. Due to the immense volume of e-books it has received, this web site will deliver book reviews for every day missed, when possible. Hello, I spent most of that recovery time reading Book Funnel and Kindle books. I can't promise poems, Long & Short Review question posts, or Petfinder photo contests for the weeks missed. I will deliver butterfly and moth posts and the rest of the frugal posts, though.
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