ProfessorTomoe

A photo of the grandmother in question. She was 93.

Peruse this Wikipedia document, especially the bit about the Texas Heritage Trails Program.

SECONDED

There were ... issues. Issues that made me look forward to getting up to my grandparents' place and away from my parents (and later, step parent) every summer. You wouldn't want to know the details. Trust me. They last to this day. Here, here. Driving's the only practical mode of transportation anywhere in Texas, unless you've got someone to pick you up on the other end (we do not) or unless you're taking a vacation. Mrs. Prof will have to be behind the wheel, since I still can't drive (due to pain and hydrocodone). Many thanks. It's a massively complicated situation, as I mentioned above. It'll be an uncomfortable situation, no matter what.

I have lost my last remaining grandparent. My paternal grandmother, who was in a nursing home in Houston, died suddenly last night. I found out at about 5am this morning via Facebook message from my sister. After I made several attempts to contact her, she finally called me. She said my grandmother's blood pressure started crashing late last night. She was dead soon afterward. I'm almost 100% certain that the funeral will be held in Austin, because she has a plot next to her husband. So, she'll have to travel from Houston, and my wife and I will have to travel from Dallas. There's also another thing headed in the general direction: Tropical Depression Harvey. Lord only knows when things are going to converge. At least I've been given medical permission to travel, but I know I'll feel like crap all the way there and all the way back. I'm still trying to get over all of this. Please forgive me if I'm somewhat subdued for the next few days.

Exhibit A for the defense against.

4:18 a.m. CDT 20170823. Somewhere around 4am? It must be time for the Prof to be awake, taking his pills, going into the kitchen, and not remembering what he went in there for. Oh. Right. Coffee. /* goes back to the living room, fetches coffee cup, and returns to kitchen */ No protein coffee today. I need the straight stuff. to cut through my allergy phlegm. Tried two twists to my right. Still found back pain. Right twists still cause crunching and back pain as well. If I had to say right now whether or not I'd received any relief, I'd have to say yes, but only about 10% relief. This is the time that the steroids are supposed to begin kicking in—five days after the procedure. I'll have to call the doctor on Monday the 28th to do a post-procedure check-in, and I'm notoriously lousy about what I say during those things. I hate doing them. I either under-describe my symptoms and sound like I don't know a whit about medicine, or I try to sound like a doctor and wind up making a crucial mistake which ruins my credibility with the real doctor. Then, there's the doctor side of the equation: he'll either be in a hurry, forgetful, insensitive, overworked, or something else, depending on the doctor (or the nurse, which introduces an entirely new set of variables into the conversation). IMHO, that's the biggest problem with health care today: communication between the patient's true symptom's and the doctor's brain. This is why medical science should concentrate on developing a real-life Star Trek-type medical scanner, so that this problem can be removed. When you remove the verbal element, you remove another block to effective medical care.

http://www.egscomics.com/?id=2386

I asked her. She said it would be "pretty ridiculous." She has a thing about a person being able to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, as it were. I told her that if this first round of shots doesn't work, we might want to look at it then. No reply from her.

If this had happened yesterday, I'd be heading for the hills right now ...

Back to my junior high school days of 1976: I spent a lot of my summer vacations in Austin, my home town. My parents would ship off my sister and my self and then do God knows what. (One summer they got separated, but that's another story.) Anyway, my grandparents and great-grandmother gave me pretty free-rein through the city via the Austin bus line, which in 1976 was safe, cheap, and dependable. I explored a hell of a lot of downtown Austin that way, but one of my favorite places to explore was the State Capitol. One day, I heard that there was a special session being held to impeach a State District Judge. I went straight to the Capitol and started asking how I could be a page for the special session (get your minds out of the gutter—we're talking running errands, making intra-building deliveries, etc.). I was finally directed to the District Representative for my home in Pasadena, TX at the time. He was already there, preparing for the impeachment sessions. After a few minutes of talking and him explaining that they don't use pages in special sessions, he finally agreed and ordered his secretary to type up something for me to present to the House Sergeant at Arms the following day. My grandparents went nuts with excitement along with me! The took me around from store to store after they got off work and bought me a whole new wardrobe to wear for the next couple of days. You can imagine what it looked like (think Saturday Night Live of the 1976 era), but they were so proud that I could have gone in a diaper and I'd still have made them happy. The next day I boarded the old #21 Airport bus route and proudly got off across from the State Capitol, permission slip in hand. I walked straight to the House chamber, found the Sergeant at Arms (I hope, or I'm getting a lot of this story wrong), and presented them with my official permission to work as an Honorary Page for the 1976 Special Session. Turns out I wasn't the only person, so the secretary had us take seats and wait for jobs to come along. We didn't have to wait too long. I did a lot of copying, picking up, delivering, getting lost, and even once going out along the side of the Floor of the House of Representatives to get to the Speaker's office and make some copies. I can even remember what I ate for lunch: Frito Pie and Coke. The second day wasn't as exciting, since most of the business had been wrapped up on the first day; I was basically told to go on home after a while. Still, there's no way in Hell or Texas that I'm ever going to forget my legitimate brush with real, live back-room Texas Politics.

I would skip the error part and take them straight to trial.

I made a guess over in the comic discussion thread that Edward might be upset about Tedd's female form because she reminds him of his ex-wife, Noriko. My question: has Edward ever seen Tedd in his FV5 form? My reasoning: if f!Tedd merely reminds Edward of Noriko, fv5!Tedd would blow Edward's mind, based on the photos we have. Noriko seems to be the epitome of FV5 form, at least when it comes to her hair. If Edward has never seen his son looking even more like his ex-wife, he might have an aneurysm when he does.

7:58 a.m. CDT 20170822. Okay, how the hell did I wake up with a sore throat? It feels like a damned infection, but it could be my allergies kicking in again. I'm drinking my protein coffee to try and put it out of my misery. I've also given my nose an Afrin spray to blast out whatever is in there out of there. Not having a fun morning. Found a well-hidden container of cranberry juice in the pantry. Am now mixing it with my tea to get that extra vitamin C burst for my throat. Last night's disaster with the ice cube pick-up has mostly dissipated. I won't be trying that again for at least the next week. Had to play a Daft Punk song to exorcise a Christmas song out of my head. That could be the worst of the symptoms from this morning.

I'd forgotten about that. Thanks for the reminder. Aneurysm avoided.

Oh, no no no. Thanks, but no. Mrs. Prof would have a stroke if I got one of those.

I did a damned dumb thing. Bent over to pick up an ice cube I dropped. Oh hell. Head straight for the hydrocodone. God it hurts.

6:32 p.m. CDT 20170821. This has been a sleepy day. Mrs. Prof and I did manage to get outside and see what percentage of the eclipse we could see from the D/FW Metroplex (only 70% or so) via a pinhole camera and the shadows on the ground through the leaves (a neat trick I learned from National Geographic magazine). Other than that, most of my day has been day has been spent asleep or taking medication. The steroids have yet to kick in, and my left big toe is still hurting very badly—something I need to discuss with my pain management doctor. I don't know when I'm going to get a chance to get to talk to my primary doctor about the thing on my ear. It's going to have to be dealt with soon.

I assume toy lobsters are easier to come by in Denmark than they are as far inland as Dallas. ;)

I still have not seen EGS appear on the Library of Congress's list. The list has grown slightly, if memory serves, but not by much.

The United States Library of Congress, caretaker of copyrights for this country and main aggregator of published works in the United States, has begun a Webcomic Web Archive. Several well-known works are already in the archive, such as Hark! A Vagrant, xkcd, Girl Genius, Shortpacked, and Girly. I think if those are in there, then EGS deserves to be in there, hands down. I used the linked contact form to appeal to the curators to add EGS. I made sure to include a mention of the criteria listed on their main page that EGS fits in my request. I don't know if multiple requests would help the cause, so I leave it up to you as to whether or not you wish to join in. I hope you will.

Mrs. Prof will happily provide more of those when she has time. She'll be pleased as punch, in fact.

I do use one of those, actually. However, I have a USB mouse sitting behind my laptop, just in case I need it for an emergency.

Bed pee isn't over yet, either. somehow, Loudmouth (we assume) got under the waterproof cover and spent a penny on the sheets. He's been finding new and more exciting places to do it as well, like the floor mats of the guest bathroom. We're starting to fear that this is something we'll never get under control.