Bastard - and Dark Lord Elon!

by Pa Rock

Curmudgeon

Generally speaking, yesterday was a very nice day, at least the daylight portion of the day.

My sister and her oldest son drove out from northwest Arkansas for a visit.  It was the first time Abigail and I had seen each other since our trip to Oregon last July, and it has probably been three or four years since Justin and I last saw each other.  Their family lived in Mountain Home, Arkansas, which is fifty miles from here, when Justin and his siblings were in school, but they have been away from there for over thirty years.  Justin said that yesterday was his first trip ever to West Plains.

We did a tour of the town while they were here which concluded at a local restaurant for lunch.   While we were waiting for lunch to be served, which was delayed because the fryer "broke down," one of the waitresses came through pushing some sort of electric broom which appeared to be pulling dirt into a tray at the end of a long handle, a gizmo that I found to be intriguing.  Justin told me that his family has one of the robotic vacuums, the disc that scoots around on the floor sucking up dirt, and that they have named the vacuum "Walter."

My sister, Justin's mother, names her vehicles.  I know that she has had a "Fred" and an "Ethel," and at one point she had a green car whom she cheerfully referred to as "Kermit."  So I did not find the fact that her son has a vacuum cleaner named "Walter" to be too surprising.  He comes by it naturally!

As a general rule of thumb, I do not name inanimate objects or household appliances.  I've been involved in the naming of three children and a legion of pets and farm animals over the years - and given names to fictional characters whom I have invented, but until late last night I have never given a mechanical device a human name.

I wear a sensor under my arm that tracks my blood glucose level, and I carry around a monitor which reads that device and gives off an annoying series of three beeps when my blood sugar is too high, and four beeps when it is too low. and it keeps giving off those beeps for several minutes or until I respond by doing an actual read to see what my blood sugar level is.  This morning, just within the last hour, I have gone from a series of four beeps to a series of three beeps - as a result of eating breakfast while I sat at the computer typing.

The monitoring system is a very helpful annoyance, and it can be particularly infuriating when it goes off in the middle of the night.  When it goes off, the monitor not only starts beeping, but the screen lights up as well.  Sudden sound and light in the middle of the night can play hell with an old person's sleep patterns.

(I keep a bag of cookies next to the bed in the event of a low blood sugar reading, and when those four beeps wake me, I eat a couple of cookies and then try to get back to sleep.  But when the high sugar alarm goes off, a three-beeper, there is not a lot a person can do - drink some water and lay there waiting to expire or go back to sleep.)

I have learned to be very careful about what I eat before going to bed and am generally able to keep the alarm from going off during thee night - which proves its value as an operant conditioner.  (Did I get that right?  It's been awhile since B.F. Skinner and I had a serious discourse.)   But the reader, which I place on the bedside table at night, will also go off when I am turned in such a way as to interfere with its reception of the signal from the sensor that is attached to the underside of my arm.  (To complicate that, the sensor lasts two weeks, and I switch arms each time I change sensors - so if I learn to lay in bed one way to keep the sensor from going off, two weeks later all of that conditioning goes out the window and I have to quickly adjust to sleeping another way.  I thought retirement was supposed to be easy!)

Last night at 1:31 a.m., according to the clock on the bedside table, my glucose monitor started beeping, just a series of short beeps indicating that it had lost the signal.  "Bastard!"  I said, sitting up in bed and reaching for the offensive device.   I quickly checked my blood sugar and found that it, too, was one-thirty-one, a very good reading in the middle of the acceptable range.  (But were the matching numbers a weird coincidence, or something more nefarious engineered by Dark Lord Elon?)  Then I did what all elderly men do when they are rudely awakened in the middle of the night.  I got out of bed and stumbled off to the bathroom.  Joe Biden does it, Donald Trump does it, and I do it.

I got back in bed a few minutes later, and while staring at the ceiling for most of the rest of the night I had plenty of time to think about things, and one of the things that slowly trudged across my very tired mental landscape was the naming of inanimate objects. Sometime around 4:00 a.m. I decided that "Bastard" was a fairly appropriate moniker for my blood-glucose reader.

So, "Bastard" it is!

(Follow-up note:  This morning my blood pressure was 124 over 84, the exact same reading as it was yesterday morning. I think my number universe may be shrinking, so it may be a good time to dust off my old lotto numbers and begin playing them again.  That's how my mind works when I don't get enough sleep!)

I'm thinking of you, Bastard - and of you, Dark Lord Elon!