Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Helvetica, Times Roman and Courier. Life was so primitive.

Welcome to chapter one of “Marcy Rocks the Goddamn Boat,” the ongoing adventures of a lovely yet belligerent senior citizen fighting back against the medical establishment. I’m housebound with mobility difficulties, raging bacterial cellulitis and leaking pressure sores on both legs, and this morning my doctor refused to prescribe an antibiotic to my visiting nurse, commonly known as Karen the Cutie, because she wants me to come in for an appointment. We need to keep two things in mind here: 1) it was Dr. M who suggested a visiting nurse in the first place; and 2) Dr. M is fully aware that it’s damn near impossible for me to get to her office. I travel in a bariatric wheelchair, and Sam and I have to arrange for rides on the city of Mesquite’s senior citizen transit bus — a round-trip that takes half a day even though we live less than a mile from the clinic — to get back and forth from the Baylor Family Health Center because my new wheelchair doesn’t fit in our car and it’s too damn heavy for Sam to lift, anyway. (I’m sure that pushing me is no big thrill, either.)

So when my visiting nurse called a few minutes ago to tell me that Dr. M won’t write a prescription to treat my cellulitis until I come back to her office, even though I was there a couple of days before Christmas (less than three weeks ago) and the nurse assured her that my condition hasn’t improved one stinking whit, I decided to shake things up. I told Karen I can’t get to Dr. M’s office, and we need to set up a visiting doctor over here to verify my medical condition and prescribe whatever the hell I need. I’m just too damn miserable and too damn uncomfortable to shlep back and forth to the clinic in a wheelchair for extra-large butts on a bus with my husband in tow every two weeks because Baylor Family Health Center wants to charge somebody for a lot of follow-up visits. I’M DONE WITH THIS. Please stay tuned for additional information but feel free to continue your normal routine in the meantime. Thank you.



It’s like my worst nightmare coming true. A few days ago I joked with Sam that I was afraid one day soon my favorite new website, BeFonts.com, which gives away for free gorgeous fonts that every other website on earth is charging real money for, will wake up and realize they’re not supposed to do this and take their site offline. So what happens? Today I spent almost all day trying to access BeFonts.com but kept getting that terrifying “Server Not Found” error window on Firefox. It’s enough to make you throw up your Tic Tacs.
Fortunately, twice, briefly, I was able to access the site and download three new fonts, which appear below followed by their download links. I hope you like them, because they might be the last of the Mohicans unless there’s divine intervention to prevent yours truly from having a brain hemorrhage. FYI, “Argumentum” is a jumbo font that includes eight different weights and italics, and Lush Script has lots of curly things and fancy swash alternates.



As I write this post I’m watching President Obama’s State of the Union Address on the White House’s YouTube channel. I tried CNN and MSNBC first, but for some reason I couldn’t connect to their live stream broadcast. I have a hunch the responsible party is my seven-year-old iMac, which will probably have to be replaced within the next couple of years. Naturally, with another iMac. I wouldn’t own anything else. On Apple.com I see that a brand new 21-inch iMac costs $1,099 ... which is actually a thousand bucks less than the first 128K black & white Mac that I bought back in 1985. It ran on a 400K floppy disk, there was no such thing as a hard drive and you had your choice of three putrid little fonts: Helvetica, Times Roman and Courier. Oy. It was so primitive!


It’s 9:15 and Sam will be home from work within the next 20 minutes or so. I’ve begun experiencing a few gross health issues tonight related to those goddamn pressure sores ... I won’t go into detail — you can thank me later — because I know things will be better in the morning after Karen the Cutie (my visiting nurse) drops in to change the dressings and survey the overall landscape on my miserable legs. She said she’d be here between 9 and 9:30. The sooner the better. I’m going to sleep on the chaise in the family room tonight so I won’t disturb Sam or accidentally dislocate the bandages, which seem to get caught on the sheets and come off during the night.



Incidentally, I thought you might like to see this eyewitness photo of the mile-wide killer EF-4 tornado that ripped through Garland and Rowlett, Texas, on December 26. The scene below is less than a mile from our house on Interstate 30. The star on the following map indicates Howdygram headquarters; the location of the tornado in the picture is indicated by the red box. This is scary shit, people, and definitely too close to home.
Thank you for putting up with me.

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