¡Buenos días a todos from the Old Pueblo! It is 8am and 46F (7.8C) with an expected high of 63F (17.2C) and bleary skies in Tucson.
Well, my newish Dell desktop is already failing me! I purchased this not cheap piece of garbage in June of this year and had a Geek from Best Buy come out and set it up. I do not know if it is Windows 11, the equipment itself, or me (or all the above); however, the thing froze, and I was amidst working on this chat at 7:30am.
Actually, prior to the chat, I was responding to an email from a colleague. We wrote a book chapter for Women and Health (2nd edition) in 2012 and got a request to do an updated chapter for the 3rd edition earlier this week. Our chapter addresses ‘poorly understood illnesses’ (e.g., multiple chemical sensitivity, chemical odor intolerance, fibromyalgia, Gulf War Syndrome, etc.) I was trying to access a publication on my external hard drive and was getting nowhere. I finally went to PubMed to get a summary of the article to send to my colleague. Then I tried working on my chat about 45 minutes ago and got nowhere. I shut down this stinking piece of Dell garbage by hand (given that I could not even access the restart button on the task bar). I can only hope I can finish my chat before this piece of junk freezes again. I will have to go to Best Buy when I return from the Midwest and see what they can do about this not even 1-year-old piece of junk!
Speaking of publications, my nurse sleep researcher colleagues and I had our monthly zoom meeting this past Wednesday. Some good news…the journal to which we submitted our publication on night shift, nurse health outcomes, patient/public safety and costs got reviewed and they have found it of interest. The reviewers want us to provide more depth to our Table 2, specifically changes the health care organizations can implement to promote night shift health. This is a relatively easy fix, and we have until February 1, 2023, to revise and resubmit. Based on our prior experiences, we are hopeful that it will be accepted for publication. Meanwhile, we are already planning to write a policy brief based on our findings and recommendations from this paper.
I have had a ‘to do’ with my internet provider and am not sure what to do. I moved from DSL, which provided a very ‘iffy’ signal to xfinity (aka Comcast). I started with them last year at a special rate of $19.99/month for the first year. This is only internet, no cable TV. In August of this year, I spoke with an xfinity person, and they told me that if I set up automatic withdraw from my checking account, I could get a special rate of $24.99 for another year. I was charged this amount in September but have been charged $40 every month since and have called every month since. This past Monday, I was on the phone for over 3 hours and go nowhere with the three people I spoke with, and I believe they were somewhere in the Philippines. I was told that xfinity’s customer service was the worst and now I know what people mean by this. I am now looking into other internet providers as all I am getting is wifi, nothing else, not to mention being cheated of an extra $15 per month.
As to genealogy, I have moved from the Kneelands and their kin to finishing up a large family of Crocketts, who were born in Maine and Massachusetts. These families are very labor intensive given that several had three husbands, or three wives and I really cannot move on to the next person until all the husbands, wives and children have been accounted for as best possible. After the Crocketts, I am going to do some work on pre-1500 Baldwins. I will likely be asking some of my England teammates to help me out a bit as I try to become adept at writing pre-1500 profiles.
Pip, one month from today you will be in Tucson! Thanks as always for wrangling the chat. I wish all of you wonderful chatterers a healthy and productive secondweekend of December 2022!
