Apple People

This week's post comes to you by way of my new MacBook Air, my tougher-to-get-than-you-can-hardly-imagine MacBook Air.

I'll start the story with the punchline, which is Bruce saying "No way," to my suggestion that he buy an Apple product when he replaces his PC lap top.

The rest of the story begins with the power surge mentioned last week that fried my poor old iMac, rendering it dead as nails.

This is what happens next:

• we gather up my spent computer and, after confirming at Best Buy that there is no way to repair it cheaply, we take it to the Apple Store in the Eaton Centre
• after a long wait in our hot coats, a nice young man assures me the MacBook Air I'm buying will serve all my computing needs and that it will take two days to migrate the data from my old machine to the new machine
• two days later an Apple person contacts me and tells me my new machine doesn't have the gigabytes to hold the data from my old machine, so, says the Apple person, "what data don't you want migrated?" I ask another question in  response, "Is it possible for me to buy another machine that does have room enough for all my data?" She thinks that's possible.
• five minutes after that call, another Apple person calls me. This one says there was some kind of power surge (this is happening a lot) at the Eaton Centre and it might take more time than normal to migrate my data. I say, "I'm coming by the store after work to buy a bigger computer, maybe you can update me then." He says sure. I say good bye.
• that night, after a long wait in my hot coat, another Apple person processes my purchase of a larger machine and tells me the data migration will take seven to ten days.
• I ask to see a manager.
• after a long wait in my hot coat, another Apple person comes out and offers an apology sufficiently abject that I grudgingly accept it but also demand that Apple give me some consideration for the inconvenience of my having to buy my computer twice and stand around so much in a hot coat. The $250 price difference in the two machines is hardly worth my time, and that's my opening bid for how they could buy back my loyalty as a customer.
• later that day I get a call from another Apple person; they are so sorry they wasted my time that they will give me a $50 gift card along with my new computer.
• two days later I am contacted at work by another Apple person; this one tells me my new machine doesn't have the gigabytes to hold the data from my old machine ...
• I wonder if this is just never going to end.
• Oops. No. They made a mistake, says one Apple person on the phone arguing with another Apple person in the background. They look further into the file and see that I did buy the new computer. This Apple person says he will call me when the data's migrated. A few hours later I get that call.
• later that day, after a long wait in my hot coat, I open up my new computer to make sure the data migration went well and ... I'll spare you the details about the phantom password problem that added half an hour to the time I spent waiting in my hot coat. 
• I am actually out of the store, my new computer tucked under my arm, when I remember the $50 gift card. One more long wait in my hot coat later, I have that, too.

The moral of this story is if, unlike Bruce, you want to buy an Apple product, you should shop when you don't need to put on a coat to go outside.

Thanks for reading! Have a great week!

Karen  

Things to Do When the Power Comes Back On the Coldest Day of the Year

It was Saturday, February 13th 2016. It was 21 degrees below zero celsius. Bruce I and were chatting over breakfast, sorting out the day ahead of us. We were hosting the condo's annual general meeting on Tuesday night; our house was in ruins and we needed to tidy up.

Suddenly, there was a house-shaking BLAM and a flash.

This had happened a couple of weeks ago. A transformer across the street had blown. Last time this happened, thanks to the redundancies in the system, our power was back on in less than three minutes. It looked like this was going to be the case this time. After the BLAM, flash and sudden creepy silence that descends on a home without power, the power came back on.

"God bless Toronto Hydro," I said.

Then, ominously, the house fell silent again.

We cracked open the front door so as not to let too much freezing cold air in. Yes, there was a blasted transformer and, more importantly, a fallen high tension wire snaking along the bike lane on Sherbourne. Because the wire was down, they had to shut off the back up systems.

We reasonably expected that we would not see power again for a while. Using the water still hot from our gas water heater and keeping ourselves warm with our gas fireplace and our exertions, we washed the kitchen, hallway and dining room floors, dusted all the rooms and scrubbed the surfaces in the kitchen.

We checked every once in a while to see what was going on across the street.

The progression of emergency vehicles around the fallen wire went like this: first, the fire trucks, with fire men who went, "yup, that's a high tension wire in the bike lane," and then the police cruisers who brought police men who decorated the sidewalk and bike lane around the wire with bright yellow DANGER bunting, and then a guy in an electrical contractors truck, who exchanged the DANGER bunting for hazard cones. This fellow sat in the truck for a couple of hours, keeping an eye on the fallen wire, until the Hydro truck came with the replacement transformer and guys who knew what to do with the wire.

The power went off shortly after eight in the morning. It came on again around two in the afternoon.

By then, we were ready to use our recently restored power to vacuum the living room, haul out all the furniture and wash the floor for the first time in ... I dunno ... maybe a couple of years.

Those who have visited us know our living room is at the level of our outdoor patio. A few of you may have noticed that the patio gets kind of buggy in the summer. The sharp-eyed among those few may have also noticed that a lot of those bugs are spiders.

So here's the thing. Spiders like the indoors when the weather gets cold. Especially when they are female spiders and they need to find a sheltered place to leave their egg sacs - things that seem so sweet and appealing when the spider's name is Charlotte, but....

Operating on a hunch, I asked Bruce to help me flip over all the furniture in the living room - including the tv table and even the little magazine rack. I'd seen tell-tale marks on the floor. I thought there might be a spider or two lurking under our furniture.

Make that a hundred or two. The double-seater right by the patio doors was the worst, closely followed by the TV table. Dozens and dozens of egg sacs all lovingly laced to the undersides, thickly coated in hobbit-grade spider webs. Ick.

Once that horror had been gobbled up by the vacuum cleaner, I had one last thing to do now that the power was back on.

When the transformer had blown the last time, I'd had to nurse my iMac back to life. Even though it's plugged into a surge protector, the poor little thing wouldn't power back up right away. I'd had to mutter some spells, hold some buttons down, unplug and replug it a couple of times then go away and pray. Last time, this had worked.

This time, nothing worked. So, added to the list of things to do on the coldest day of the year after the power came back on was to get a new computer and hope someone could extract the data from my inert and lifeless five-year old machine.

It's one week later and I still don't have that new computer - although I've already paid for it, twice - and it'll be another week before I have it loaded with all my data. That's another story.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Every Point on the Spectrum

A "Master Level" Blendoku puzzle, solved. These start with all the colour tiles in a random array at the top and you have to figure out their proper order based on the colours of the tiles themselves. Fun, and mentally exhausting. I can do about four and then I have to go for a nap.

Now that it's 2016, I'll be celebrating my 10th anniversary with the Ontario public service. If you add the time I spent at the City of Toronto, I've been working for one government or another for fifteen years.

The line of work I've chosen - policy development - makes it a normal part of my job to reach out and chat up other public servants. I know people all over this government, and all over the federal and other provincial governments. 

If I were to pretend that I was contacting these people as part of a clinical study to assess instances of symptoms of ADHD, Aspergers or OCD then I might also pretend that my research shows a statistically significant higher instance of these conditions in the public service than elsewhere in the general population.

Think about it. Where, other than the military, would a hyper-active and/or socially inept and/or detail obsessed and/or risk adverse person find more happiness than government?

And think, too, about what this means for the general population. 

All those elaborate forms, overlong processes and obsessive sets of rules ... suddenly they make sense.

As for where I, as a public servant, fit in this spectrum ... well, I did start this blog with a picture from a game developed by a team identifying itself as "The Lonely Few" and that I just love.

A Reflection on the Trial of the Month

I never gave a moment's thought to Jian Ghomeshi before the story broke and am looking forward to March 25 2016, because the judge will have handed down his decision the day before, and I'll never think of Jian Ghomeshi again.

A recipe? Really?

Here's a meatloaf recipe - arrived at after many attempts. It's a tasty, low fat, easy source of lunch meat for Bruce's sandwiches.

500 g of extra lean ground beef
Half an onion, chopped finely
1 medium carrot, peeled and chopped finely
250 g of mushrooms, chopped finely
One celery stalk, chopped finely
Half a cup of ketchup
Quarter of a cup of yellow mustard
One tablespoon of your favourite steak seasoning
One half cup couscous (uncooked)
One egg
salt and pepper

Pre-heat oven to 425F.

Saute in a small amount of grapeseed or safflower oil the onion, carrot, mushroom and celery. Season with salt and pepper.

When the vegetables are very soft and most of their juices have cooked out (after ten minutes or so), take off the heat and set aside to cool.

Place the ground beef, ketchup, mustard, steak seasoning, egg, couscous and salt and pepper (to taste) together in a bowl and mix well. Add the cooled vegetable mixture and stir until it's all combined. Don't worry about over mixing - this is a meatloaf not a pie crust.

Shape the mixture into a loaf in a casserole so that the top, ends and sides are exposed to the air.

Place uncovered in 425 degree oven for twenty minutes (this sears the outside and seals in the juices); cover and reduce heat to 350 and roast for another 30 - 35 minutes.

Let cool. Slice when completely chilled. Use as lunch meat.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen
























  

Same Evidence-Based Decision-Making

Monkeys are just like squirrels: appealingly fuzzy, nimble, cute, destructive little stinkers

In mid June last year, a woman named Veronica - a nurse at the Holland Centre associated with Sunnybrook Hospital - told me that no surgeon in Toronto would give me a new hip. She said this even as we were looking at an x-ray clearly showing what had been diagnosed by an anonymous technician as "moderately severe arthritis" in my right hip.

I was perplexed by that pronouncement, and a number of readers of this blog were simply outraged. How could it be, we all wondered, that I could so obviously need one and still never get a new hip from any surgeon in Toronto. I got a lot of advice about how to deal with this problem, ranging from attesting to multiple falls to heading out on my own, knocking on surgeons' doors.

I ended up doing a combination of these things. 

The Holland Centre did nothing good for me, except plant the idea that a physiotherapist might be able to help me. A physiotherapist did help me. Adam Brown of Cornerstone Physiotherapy gave me both gratis advice about how to stay fit and the name of a doctor - one of those surgeons in Toronto who purportedly would never give me a new hip - who I could talk to about my options.

Hooking up with that doctor was a process of some months. First I had to get his name - Dr. Paul Kuzyk (DPK) - and then get that to my GP, so the slow-moving person in her office could send out a referral request. Then I had to wait to hear back from DPK. When I did hear, they offered me a date for an appointment early in December, when I was in Paris for the climate conference. So I called, from Paris, and arranged for a new appointment, which was this past Wednesday, February 3.

In all my other life's endeavours I have learned the best way to get the outcome you want is to arrive prepared. At the Holland Centre, I had brought only the short list of medications I take, leaving to the clinic and its processes to fill in all the other blanks about me. But, rather than ask me about quality of life or what I need to sustain a feeling of well-being, they asked me if I had difficulty tying my shoes or getting in and out of a car. Since I was OK with those things, by their metrics, I was just fine.

I had no idea how DPK would assess me. They had asked for the standard information about what doctors I see and medications I take, but I knew how far this had gotten me before. I wanted them to know my side of the story, too.

So I wrote it all down - just like they say you should when you're visiting the doctor. I considered claiming multiple falls, but ended up just setting out the plain facts of what I was going through and its effects on me.

I wrote about myself as "the Patient." Here's a sample:

The patient was an active person. Until onset of the arthritis symptoms (see next paragraph), she walked between five and ten kilometres a day and practiced yoga four to six times a week. The patient’s level of activity is important to her quality of life... and contributes to her overall feeling of well-being.

Around mid-January 2015, the patient began to experience severe pain and a feeling of weakness in the right hip and leg. The sensations were especially strong during and after yoga classes, while walking and at night when the patient was trying to sleep. ... The reported diagnosis by the patient’s family doctor was “moderately severe arthritis in the right hip.”    

I also brought along the x-ray from the Holland Centre. 

So this is what happened: an intern/resident came into the examination room where I was waiting and said, "I've been reading about you." 

I said, "And here's some more for you to read" and handed him the information I'd brought. He skimmed it and made some random expressions of "oh!" and "it's all here!" 

Then I handed him the x-ray. Again he said "Oh!" and "This saves a lot of time!"

Then he left the room.

The intern/resident returned a few minutes later with DPK in tow, a short, slightly built strange little dude whose skills as a surgeon, I hope, are inversely proportionate to his skills as a social animal.

DPK introduced himself, said "um" and "aw" a couple of times and then said, with a "I'm trying to soften the blow" tone in his voice, "your x-ray shows a level of cartilage loss that really can't be treated any other way than with a hip replacement."

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is all there was to that.

They couldn't give me a firm estimate of time-to-surgery, but August/September 2016 is probably in the ballpark. 

While I was finishing up the paperwork with the clinic receptionist (this is all happening at Mount Sinai Hospital, by the way), the resident/intern came by and said, "that was really great information you gave us." 

He stopped and thought a bit more. "Did you write that yourself?"

DPK may not be the only dude who needs to work on his skills as a social animal.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen