Now that I'm working at home so much (quieter and with a better computer), I need something more than my IKEA dining room chair with a thin pad on it. I can only sit for an hour because my butt and back are aching so bad that I can't concentrate. Because it's so important to get something quality, I set a budget for a whopping $250 and started looking.
And saw an absurd number of options... each being declared either "the best chair ever" or "the worst chair ever." So I asked friends on Facebook (many of whom work from home) and got some incredible options (including gaming chairs, which I had never even considered, but making perfect sense given how people sit for hours on end playing video games).
Ultimately I needed something thusly:
Little did I know that $250 to get all of the above is an absurd fantasy that will never happen. Sure I can get some impressive chairs, but they are either cheap or missing something that's critical to me. At one point I thought it might be less expensive to buy separate chairs for my desk and drafting table, but decided I'd rather put all my money into something that works for both so I can get better quality.
And so I thought that I could probably justify a $500 chair if it was worth it and did everything I need. I'll be sitting in it a lot, so it's probably worth spending the money.
A friend highly recommended Steelcase, and they had a nimble chair that looked like it might be perfect for my needs: The Steelcase Series 1 for $486.
Great, right?
Nope. After a consultation, I found out the best Steelcase for me was the Amia (I ruled out the Amia Air with the mesh back because I figured my cats would have an absolute field day with it)... FOR SEVEN HUNDRED AND SEVENTY DOLLARS... EIGHT HUNDRED AND SEVENTY DOLLARS IF I WANTED ADJUSTABLE ARMS AND HARDWOOD FLOOR CASTERS!
Way out of my budget.
But... I could make it work if I supplemented my pending tax refund with some of my savings. And it seemed a wise move for something that will make it easier sitting for work for hours and hours.
So I went to order. But couldn't. Because Steelcase's website "has a problem with Safari web browsers" according to the customer service agent I spoke with. Well, fuck you. Safari is a web-compliant browser, and having a website that doesn't work for the most popular Mac web browser is a slap in the face.
So I started looking at office supply stores. But eventually found the chair I needed on the Steelcase Amazon storefront... for $716.00. Which is cheaper than even the baseline model when purchased directly from Steelcase, which makes no sense because Amazon takes a big cut of the money they make. The only downside is that it had a grey frame instead of the black frame I wanted... but for $154 savings, I can deal with it. Plus I had $90.31 in Amazon Card reward points, which made the Steelcase Amia Chair with Platinum Base & Hard Floor Casters, in Graphite even cheaper...
I congratulated myself on my bargain find (despite being way past what I wanted to spend) and waited for the chair to show up.
Which it did.
And it was very nice.
Except it had carpet casters (rock-hard) instead of hard floor casters (soft). So I called Steelcase. They had me call Amazon. Amazon said that if there's a problem to be resolved I needed to talk to Steelcase because it's their storefront, and all they could do was accept a return or exchange. I called back to Steelcase and was getting the same run-around when eventually I got ahold of a guy who gave me an email address to try. Long-story-less-long... she asked for photos and determined that this was an error on their part. Then she set up a case with customer service to have the proper casters sent to me so I don't have to return the whole chair.
And so now I'm waiting for my new wheels so I'm not scraping up the hardwood.
Overall I'm happy with the chair. Once I got it configured it's quite comfortable, and the size is only slightly larger than I was imagining (would be nice if it were an inch or two narrower). Would also be nice if the seat could be moved forward another inch for people with long legs, but there's still plenty of support, and my butt is situated into the actual groove of the seat instead of on the hump (which happens in so many "ergonomic" chairs I've used over the years).
The only thing I don't like about The Amia model I got is the "4-Way Adjustable Arm Rests," which are shit. They do go up and down so I can move them out of the way and slide the chair under my desk. No problem there. The issue is that you can only lock the height in place. The left/right and in/out and swivel cannot be locked in place. Which means every time you use the arm rests to get in or out of the chair, they are sliding all over. WTF? Hugely annoying. I thought adjustability would be a good thing, but it's actually terrible. I wish that I had just gotten the fixed arm rests that go up and down only. Would have been less hassle than having to adjust them back to where they were every damn time I sit down. What I might see if I can do is get them to where I want them, then glue-and-screw them so they won't fucking slop around the arms any more. I am still stunned that you can't lock adjustments into place.
In all seriousness... who in the hell dreams up stupid shit like this? FOR A SEVEN-HUNDRED DOLLAR CHAIR?!
And apparently the movement only gets worse over time. There are literally videos on YouTube how to tighten everything back up!
The good news is that there's plenty of places I can permanently lock-down the movement where it won't be seen! I can't believe that people actually pay SEVENTY-TWO DOLLARS EXTRA for these shitty fucking arm rests.
Because it's always something with me, isn't it?
Oh well. At least now I can work for ten hours straight without having to worry about my ass falling asleep.
As I mentioned, my blog was hacked and I was worried to post in fear of making things worse, so I stacked up my entries until I could take a look over the weekend. So far so good, as I didn't see anything amiss when I woke up this morning. No errant code being generated. No weird posts being linked to. Just some failed logins which were waiting in my email inbox this morning.
And since I don't want to review all my rants over the past week, here's what you missed (some of which I'm certain will appear in my upcoming entries because I can't just let shit go)...
FEBRUARY 25th, 2022
AS THE BUTTER CHURNS
This was all about things I learned that I was doing wrong when it came to securing my blog. I wrote this more for myself than anybody else, because anybody actually needing this information could Google it just like I did and get something more up-to-date than anything I was rambling about. So... yeah... useless. But it was all that was going on in my life at the time, so I'm choosing to forgive myself.
FEBRUARY 26th, 2022
CATURDAY
Now that the snows are melting and birds and other wildlife are everywhere, Jake and Jenny have been much more active than usual. No laying around the house... instead they are sitting at all the windows taking in the sights and hanging out in the catio to experience all the new smells that are being unearthed by melting snows.
FEBRUARY 27th, 2022
BULLET SUNDAY
Let's see... looks like I was discussing heartbreak for people suffering from the invasion of Ukraine... Girl Scout Cookies... Old TV shows I'd like to see resurrected... Sony's new Spider-Verse trailer for Morbius... Freedom Convoys... the Freedom of Information Act... and the mind-numbingly high cost of printer ink.
FEBRUARY 28th, 2022
PRE-SPENDING MY LIFE AWAY
I calculated out (roughly) what my meager tax refund would be so that I can buy stuff that I desperately need to get. A new chair, because mine is so uncomfortable that I can only work in it for an hour at a time. New shelves for my studio, because they are literally being held together with duct tape and fell down in the middle of the night terrifying my cats (but mostly me). And an Xbox Series S (AKA "the cheap one") refub unit to replace the one that I gave away, because I need something to treat myself after the crap year that was 2021... plus the price was too good to pass up (I'm choosing to look at this as an investment!) and I really want to play Halo Infinite.
And... that's a wrap. Hope you enjoyed not having to listen to me for four whole days!
And I thought yesterday was bad.
Today I had an eye exam. My eyes, which had miraculously been getting better from where they had been, have snapped back to where they were in 2016... for whatever reason. And my right eye has worsened more than my left. What's that about? Guess I need to take eye vitamins or eat more carrots or something.
In other news... yesterday I went to Amazon to buy something I needed and a banner popped up that said I already bought it in 2019...
Apparently I've experienced a pandemic-based blackout.
My house is fairly orderly, so I was confident that if the item wasn't in the two places I would have put it, that it wasn't in my house. So I went poking around in the garage... ten minutes later and there it was. Didn't remember buying it. Didn't remember where I put it. Didn't remember anything. Guess I need to take some ginkgo biloba or eat some dark chocolate or something.
Could be that everything's going wrong because my sleep is so awful.
Guess I need to take some melatonin or drink some chamomile tea or something.
I don't do Twitter or Instagram. I mean, I have accounts, but I look at them rarely and hardly ever post. TikTok is something I actually enjoy, but I never post there. I'm merely a voyeur. The only social media I'm involved in is Facebook and I hate it. They can randomly ban you for arbitrary reasons that make no sense. I once got a three day ban for posting "sexual content." There was nothing remotely sexual about it. I don't even understand how they came to that conclusion. I appealed, but nothing came of it. Meanwhile, friends have been targeted with threats of violence and reporting it only gets them ignored. Needless to say, if you're popular enough, powerful enough, or rich enough, you get to post whatever the fuck you want. Including hate and misinformation which is literally killing people.
But, alas, Facebook is a necessary evil because friends from around the world are there and it's the only way to easily keep in contact with them.
And then there's Blogography.
Blogging isn't the social platform it once was. It used to be that everybody had a blog and you kept in touch by reading and commenting back and forth around the blogging community. Now only the tiniest fraction of my blogging friends are still at it. Bloggers who were only in it to keep in touch moved to social media platforms because it was so much easier. Bloggers who were in it for the money left when the money dried up. Bloggers who were in it for fame abandoned it when the fame never came.
Those of us who remain each have our own reasons.
At this point, blogging is a habit for me. But I do like being able to go back through old posts and remember stuff I was doing my life. Next year I'll have 20 years worth, which is a big chunk of my time on this earth.
Although...
From a historical perspective, I sure wish that blogging existed in the 1980's.
That's when my life just started getting interesting, and all I have are random memories from 1985 through 2003. That was college. That was time with the best friends I'll ever have. That was when I first started traveling. Sure I have photos, but they're just snapshots. What happened in-between is a messy blur that's mostly lost because alcohol might have been involved. Had I written things down, I'd be able to remember them too.
What triggered this post was my struggling to remember details of my first trip to Japan in 1996. I had found a journal where I wrote out single sentences with a bunch of space between them. I had always intended to go back and expand on what I had seen and done so it would be documented and I wouldn't forget. Well, that was over 25 years ago now, so there will be no filling in anything. Half of the sentences are meaningless to me. Take this one, for example...
"I hear it is a custom over there, to exchange cigarettes as a form of greeting..."
All I know is that it was a tag line written in English on a cigarette vending machine in the lobby of my hotel (which I was able to find thanks to some Google sleuthing back in 2014). I guess I wrote it down because I thought it was funny. But four pages later I wrote...
"Lonely night in Akihabara. Was happy to get back to my hotel where my best friend Fred was waiting to exchange cigarettes with me again."
And I'm like WTF? Because I have no clue what that means. If I were to venture a guess, there was probably an illustration or a photo of a guy holding out a pack of cigarettes next to that tagline on the cigarette machine. And I guess I named him Fred. Or something. I haven't a clue. And there's no way I'll ever know. Unless they invent time travel. Or I invest in hypnotherapy... maybe.
If this trip had happened any time after 2003, it would have been documented here. If it had happened any time after 2007, it would have been photographed multiple times and posted. But oh well.
There's still 20 years sitting here for me.
The Season 3 opener for Rick and Morty (The Rickshank Rickdemption) still boggles my mind. I've seen it a dozen times now, and I can't find a fault. It's flawless from start to finish. And while the show is still entertaining, it's nowhere near the level we got with Season 03. It's where we were introduced to Pickle Rick, after all.
My Monday started out with a fuzzy little spider paying me a visit in my upstairs bathroom.
The first thing that crosses my mind every time this happens is "A spider... UPSTAIRS THIS EARLY? IT'S STILL WINTER!" and I start wondering if there's a spider nest under the sink or something. Because how did the little guy get here? The second thing that crosses my mind is "What do I do now?" I loathe to kill anything, but I loathe having spiders in my house even more. Even cute little fuzzy ones. I always worry that Jake or Jenny will eat them and get sick or something. So I do what I always do... try to catch it so I can take it outside...
It's still pretty cold out... and there's still snow on the ground... so I'm not sure if the poor thing can survive outside. Which is something that will bother me for far too long.
But at least he won't be puked up by a cat on my floor, and that's not nothing.
Getting older definitely has its drawbacks.
Yesterday morning was fine. I woke up a little tired because I worked late, but was otherwise in good spirits and health. I fed the cats, answered my morning emails, took a shower, packed a lunch, hopped in my car, then drove to work.
Embarrassing enough that I've thrown my back out when I twisted around to lock my front door... but sitting down in my car is now all it takes?
When I went to climb out of the driver's seat I was in absolute agony. Searing pain in my lower back ripping me apart from the inside. I could barely walk to my office. Things got better when I was sitting. No pain at all while sitting. But the minute I got up to retrieve a document or whatever, the pain was back. And it just kept getting worse and worse. By the time I headed home at 4:00 I was hunched over and hobbling. It was the only way I was able to move. Then once I was home I had to haul the garbage can and recycling bin to the curb, at which point tears were streaming down my face. I was in so much pain that I couldn't even scream.
Usually what I do is just "walk it off." Carry on as usual in the hopes that whatever broke inside of me snaps back into place. Except it never works like that, does it? Usually I just make it worse and suffer for a week. So instead of doing that, I did something revolutionary. Well, revolutionary for me anyways. I went straight to bed, laid flat on my back on top of a heating pad, then worked as best I could until I had to hobble downstairs to feed Jake and Jenny their dinner. Then it was straight back to bed. Eventually I fell asleep on the heating pad while hoping I wouldn't move in my sleep.
This morning I woke up after 5 hours and 56 minutes of restless sleep and was very sore. But the searing, stabbing pain was gone. I could move mostly normal-like, and tried to be gentle on my back in the hopes that it would heal more quickly that way.
And so... lesson learned.
Time to start acting like the old man that I am. Try to be more careful and not crash through life at full force like I've been doing.
I may even start holding onto the handrail when using stairs.
Because apparently I'm too old not to now.
I was deeply saddened to learn that Zen Master Thích Nhất Hạnh has died. He was a welcome voice and teacher for me since I became interested in Buddhism way back in 1998 (his book The Heart of Buddha's Teaching was one of the first I read). A consistent advocate for peace, the last book I read of his, The Art of Living: Peace and Freedom in the Here and Now was in 2017... and his last book from 2021 (Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet) is on my list...
In a world that's besieged by darkness, his teachings were a light that guided me. And will likely continue to do so for the rest of my days.
In the darkest time of my life Master Thích Nhất Hạnh was there. His words about his own mother's death got me through mine...
The day my mother died I wrote in my journal, "A serious misfortune of my life has arrived." I suffered for more than one year after the passing away of my mother. But one night, in the highlands of Vietnam, I was sleeping in the hut in my hermitage. I dreamed of my mother. I saw myself sitting with her, and we were having a wonderful talk. She looked young and beautiful, her hair flowing down. It was so pleasant to sit there and talk to her as if she had never died. When I woke up it was about two in the morning, and I felt very strongly that I had never lost my mother. The impression that my mother was still with me was very clear. I understood then that the idea of having lost my mother was just an idea. It was obvious in that moment that my mother is always alive in me.
I opened the door and went outside. The entire hillside was bathed in moonlight. It was a hill covered with tea plants, and my hut was set behind the temple halfway up. Walking slowly in the moonlight through the rows of tea plants, I noticed my mother was still with me. She was the moonlight caressing me as she had done so often, very tender, very sweet... wonderful! Each time my feet touched the earth I knew my mother was there with me. I knew this body was not mine but a living continuation of my mother and my father and my grandparents and great-grandparents. Of all my ancestors. Those feet that I saw as "my" feet were actually "our" feet. Together my mother and I were leaving footprints in the damp soil.
From that moment on, the idea that I had lost my mother no longer existed. All I had to do was look at the palm of my hand, feel the breeze on my face or the earth under my feet to remember that my mother is always with me, available at any time.
I cannot fathom how many lives this gentle man's teaching have touched. Because it's not just those who listened to his words, read his books, and learned from his teachings... it's all the people that those people touched.
Kindness can be more contagious than Omicron.
You will be sorely missed Master Thích Nhất Hạnh, but your love and light will never die so long as somebody somewhere offers a kindness to another. Because it's not irrational to think that a kindness you initiated was patient zero for a kindness today.
And tomorrow.
I don't see why we have to say "I will die," because
I can already see myself in you, in other people, and in future generations.
I wish I could afford to save money.
Allow me to explain... but first... I know that I just published this Pratchett quote in March of last year, but I can think of no better way to illustrate what I'm talking about than this...
The Captain Samuel Vimes theory of socioeconomic unfairness...
"Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet." — Terry Pratchett, from his Discworld novels.
This is hugely relevant to me right now.
Take for example my refrigerator and stove. I purchased the best that I could afford when I moved into my home six years ago. Which is not the best available, but not the worst either. I'd say my appliances were in the bottom end of the middle. But even so, they were still very expensive to me.
But not expensive enough, apparently.
My refrigerator has been a pile of shit since I got it. The thing was noisy as hell after the installers plugged it in, and after waiting for three months for Samsung to get me a repair person, they showed up, did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, said that the noise is "normal," and then left... all within 15 minutes. And it's like, there's no fucking way that the noise is normal. So I pulled out the refrigerator, found some metal plates that were vibrating against each other, pushed them apart, and the "normal noise" vanished. But two or three times a year I have to pull it out and move the plates again.
Samsung doesn't give a fuck.
I know because that's what they said when I called to complain (not an exact quote).
And now the stupid thing is falling apart. Plastic pieces are all brittle and snapping off. Drawers are losing their smooth glide. After only six years.
Same for my stove. The thing is nearly impossible to clean, and the one time I used oven cleaner it totally trashed the finish of the interior. And when I called to complain? "You should have used the steam clean feature." Well, I DID use the "steam clean feature" and found it to be useless. It didn't clean shit. And now it's starting to heat weirdly, which can make cooking difficult.
The writing is on the wall. I will likely have to replace one or both of these things before they are ten years old.
MEANWHILE THE OLD SPEED QUEEN WASHING MACHINE THAT I KEPT FROM THE PREVIOUS OWNER IS OVER 22 YEARS OLD AND STILL WORKING FLAWLESSLY.
Thank God I didn't have the money to toss it and buy a new one like I wanted. Apparently Speed Queen washers are not what they used to be... but still. Is it really too much to ask that your major appliance purchases aren't a pile of shit from the start and that they can actually last more than a decade?
Had I been able to afford double the price for better quality, it would have likely lasted 25 or 30 years, meaning that they would ultimately be cheaper in the long run since I will have to buy two or three new appliances of lesser quality in the same amount of time.
And don't get me started about clothes. I have shirts that are still perfectly wearable even though they are well over 20 years old. But shirts I just bought last summer? Already wearing through in the elbows. Two shirts got thrown in the trash this morning... one is under six months old... the other managed to hang on for just over a year.
It's categorically absurd.
But what else can I do? I will try to save up the money to get better quality when the appliances finally die... but the odds of my being able to afford true quality... ASSUMING IT EVEN EXISTS ANY MORE... are likely slim since I could easily be blindsided by some other appliance failing in the meanwhile. Or my HVAC system. Or the garage door opener. Or the water heater. Or... Or... Or...
Yeah. More like slim to none.
I woke up last night shortly after 2:00am with a blinding headache. By the time it was time to get ready for work, a full-blown migraine had developed. Just standing up to take a shower was a struggle. So I called in sick, took a nap, then got up to drive into the office late. But my eyesight had gone all tunnel-vision and blurry, so I couldn't get there. Instead I Zoomed in from home, managed to keep a pill down, then went back to bed.
It's now 10:00pm. I still have a headache, but at least I'm able to keep food down and sit upright. And write a blog post, apparently. What a crappy segue into my weekend.
I haven't had a migraine this bad in over a decade. No idea why I was so afflicted now.
Just unlucky, I guess.
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