early Saturday afternoon

Waiting for the soil to soak, so I have a few minutes. Allergies are very bad, to the point where my ability to focus my eyes on the middle distance is slightly impaired and my eyes feel gritty, but I need to get this done.

Kind of anxious today:

1. Got to thinking about the Looming Procedure right before bed last night. I KNOW a lot of this stems from the fact that I'm a very healthy person and have not have had to have any surgeries or even things like this before - because maybe familiarity would take some of the anxiety off. I have literally had general anesthesia twice in my life:

sodium pentothol for setting a broken nose when I was 13 (I vomited for three solid days afterward, but that could also have been the codeine shot "for pain" they gave me without asking my permission. I HOPE they had asked my parents....I have a fairly high pain tolerance and I suspect I'd have refused it had I been given the choice)

Whatever the heck they were using for wisdom-tooth removal in the early 1990s. That was a lot less traumatic and I didn't vomit (thank goodness, considering what I'd just had done) and in that case the "pain management" was a prescription for pain pills that the doc said "fill this if you need it but try Ibuprofen first" and between ibuprofen and following the icing regime he gave me, I was FINE and tore up the prescription.

I was also give a prescription for....I think it was Toradol? after I broke my elbow in 1992 but I also never filled that one because once they got the cast on (simple break, non displaced, so no surgery required) I was fine and really the only problem I had was the cast was heavy and cumbersome and it was hard to find a comfortable position in which to sleep. I also tore up that prescription.

So yeah. (I also have a horror of being "dopey" or "out of it," which is why I tend to refuse the stronger pain meds and make do with anti inflammatories and stuff like ice. But that also explains why I have a horror of general anesthesia)

I'll see what the doctor says but if I can persuade him to let me to the less-invasive test for now (seeing as I have precious few weeks of free time this summer left in which I could schedule The Thing) and if it doesn't come back 100% clear, do The Thing at a later date.

but seeing as he's a GI surgeon, I bet he pushes for the full test, because he's probably seen too many people who let stuff go too long...

2. I get a "daily informed digest" over e-mail from the USPS. Most mail - well, except for catalogs and magazines, the stuff that passes a scanner, I guess - is photographed and those photographs are sent to you. I signed up for it back when I was concerned about mail theft (a package from Amazon that never showed - the seller reimbursed me but I am still baffled about what happened to it; I assume either a porch pirate got it (enjoy your bowls, freak!) or the system glitched and it's still riding around on a mail truck somewhere)

anyway, today's mail showed a letter from the IRS. You might remember a month ago when there was some horrific error the Jackson-Hewett person made that led to the IRS basically claiming I owed them most of the contents of my savings account. And I thought I had got it sorted (with another Jackson-Hewett agent's help, and a marathon FAX session).

And I thought: oh crud. This is the final decision. When this letter gets here, I'll know if:

- Jackson-Hewett woman was 100% right, and they're sending me the $800 that it actually looks like they owe me

- Jackson-Hewett woman was terribly wrong, and I owe a great deal of money and many penalties and I'll have to either totally deplete my savings, or dip into my retirement funds. And have the added stigma of somehow feeling like I am viewed as a Bad Person* and will be at greater risk of future audits and the like.

- Some combo platter, where I owe SOME money but not the frightening sum proposed before, and I'm still at greater risk of audits.

(*Yes, I know: it was not my fault, I was not trying to defraud. But I worry so much about how I "look" to others. And yes, it's a sad irony in our times that literally every city in my state has public officials dipping their hands into the till and justifying it themselves, that they are Perfectly Fine People and then someone like me, who is fundamentally pretty honest gets caught up in a mistake and she feels like she's a striped shirt and a kangaroo court away from being in the federal pen...but that's how life is, in'nit? The best lack all conviction while the worst are filled with passionate intensity?)


And so I was useless for several hours (well, mostly: I got my piano practice for the day done). Finally right before I was about to say 'forget it, I'm eating lunch and going to work" the mail arrived.


Guess what it was?

A crummy "we got it and are working on it" letter. A month after I spent a long, long time FAXing, and tried through all channels I could find to ask a person if they'd gotten it.

Yeah. So it's 60 more days before I hear.

Thanks, Universe! 'Cos I just needed another source of stress so badly today!


(A friend of mine who is a CPA tells me this is bog-standard and not to read anything into it, not that they're weaponizing to prepare to take me for everything, but also, I suppose, not that they owe me money and are trying to hold on for it as long as possible)



ANYWAY.

I need to get some useful work done over here and then maybe go home and get into comfy clothes and decide whether I want to brave the slightly-warmer-living room (it's STILL hot here) or if I watch something streaming on my laptop in my bedroom with the whole-house AC turned hotter but the little bedroom unit on...

I confess I will not be all that unhappy once summer is over. For one thing, it will be getting cooler, but for another, I won't be so alone with my thoughts for such long stretches of time and either wind up frantically looking for distractions or else uselessly ruminating.