Date: Tue, 27 Sep 2022 03:19:51 -0500
Subject: in the path of looming disaster...

A bit of a general update, while I still can before the inundation arrives,
with a bit of included barefoot-relevant content.

I'm in FL again, due to a particularly crazy set of circumstances around an
aging parent and having to shoulder many new functions on very short notice.
And now, staring straight down the barrel of hurricane Ian.  I believe I
am in-land enough that "evacuating" is neither necessary or prudent in
this case, so I'm staying put -- either in my Mom's detached house at the
retirement facility, or over in the skilled-nursing center across campus
where she is, still undergoing rehab and between us, also trying to figure
out her next living situation.  The central buildings and particularly the
nursing area are somewhat storm-hardened, and the intent is that people from
other areas of the campus can shelter there if needed to ride this out.
They are predicting a lot of flooding and storm surge, and hopefully this
place is far enough from the coast and on high enough ground [in *Florida*?!]
to not be affected too badly.

It has been about THE most bizarre two+ weeks of my life, a mix of frantic
machinations to get a lot of stuff done on several fronts at once and on
others, a whole lot of hurry-up-and-wait.  I've referred to it as juggling
sixteen flaming weasels at once.  Well, now I'm down to three or four, but
they're still in the air and at least somewhat smoldering, and this ride is
not over yet.  Taking over the entire operation of someone else's finances,
for example, is not easy -- but we did a lot of advance planning, making it
easier for me to convince various institutions that I'm legit without starting
from dead-zero.  And I'm learning a lot more healthcare industry jargon.

So this campus is one of the very few places where I still have to deal with
footwear, at least when going from the house over to the main building
complex, where the dining rooms and facility offices are.  Now, I've had to
deal with that a lot more as I make daily treks over to the rehab/nursing
area to hang out with Mom and bring her stuff.  For the first few days I was
using my uppers-only "fakeout" or "deceiver" foot-covers, but the nursing
staff eventually figured it out and one afternoon, one of their lead people
confronted me and said I had to have something that covered the *bottoms*
of my feet as well.

She claimed there was some "federal regulation" around medical facilities
that required this.  I asked her for a reference, which she promised to try
and find for me, although I doubt that she had any intent of following up
on that.  I did a little searching around on that topic, and kept coming
up with nothing but the typical OSHA stuff about ASTM-rated protective
footwear for truly hazardous work environments.  Not that my "O" is anything
other than concerned family member keeping someone company in what's about
equivalent to a typical office or home environment, and certainly not being
paid for the privilege.  So she was basically full of crap, but adamant that
my little flappy "anti-freakout" not-quite-shoes deception wouldn't fly.

She did offer an acceptable alternative, though, in the form of those silly
little hospital sock-booties with the lines of rubberized stuff on the
bottom.  I followed her down the hall to the supply area and she handed me
two pairs of them, packaged in plastic.  They are fairly short, not the almost
knee-hi types you see in some other places, and fit easily into a pocket
when I'm not yet in the building and just cruising around campus outside [which
they obviously can't care about].  So now instead of the deceivers in my
pocket, I simply arrive with these little blue sock-lets -- which amusingly,
have a sort of repeating "pawprint" pattern in the rubberized stuff on the
botttom, and slip them on at the door from the parking garage into the actual
building space.  Which is still the entirely artificial "boundary" between
where the misguided still believe that footwear is mandatory vs. optional.

It's still pretty stupid, as socklets don't offer much protection against
sharp things on the floor or the pools of deadly bloodborne pathogens present
only in that lead nurse's mind [and unlikely to penetrate healthy feet even
if they were real, of course].  But if they're good with it for the time being,
so am I, just so I can still coexist with their staff long enough to get all
of these various jobs done.

Anyway, that's my tiny squeak of news, emitted just before the biblical deluge
comes.  Oh, and I'm like 100+ messages behind in SBL in general, simply been
too busy to look through where I split that mail off to recently.  If I'm
going to be pinned down here all week and if the internet doesn't go out,
I might get some chance to finally catch up...

_H*