I haven’t always liked facial hair, but living in Vermont, I guess has changed that, since so many men up here have beards. I still don’t like the long unkept beards, like you would see on Duck Dynasty, which is so unattractive to me, but a nice well trimmed beard can be very sexy on the right man.
Whenever anyone visits me in Vermont there are two place everyone wants to see: Church Street Marketplace and the Ben and Jerry’s Factory. Church Street Marketplace has been the center of Burlington, Vermont, with its colorful cafes, thriving art scene, and good vibes. A couple of weeks ago, Sweetwaters American Bistro, a staple of Church Street for over 40 years, announced that it would close. Labor Day will be their last day. I’ve always liked Sweetwaters, and I often took visitors to eat there. Since they will only be open a few more weeks, two of my friends and I decided we wanted to have one last dinner there, so we are going tonight. It just so happens that Church Street Marketplace’s annual sidewalk sale is also this weekend. It should be fun to walk around looking at the shops and then having a nice relaxing dinner.
Tomorrow, we are going to get together again to go to Cider Fest In Waterbury. It’s taking place at Cold Hollow Cider Mill which makes delicious hard cider and they are famous for their cider donuts. Cider Fest will be celebrating 48 years of Cold Hollow Cider Mill. They bill it as one of the last restful weekends at the Cider Mill before the new crop of apples start coming in. The festivities will include BBQ, hard cider slushies, ten varieties of hard cider, and a large selection of Vermont beers. I am most excited to try the BBQ and the hard cider slushies. My hope is that Prohibition Pig, the best BBQ restaurant in Vermont, which happens to be in Waterbury, will be making the BBQ.
It should be a fun weekend. Sunday will be for doing laundry and getting some rest.
I don’t play video games, but I’d love to watch him play. Although “dressed” like that, I might have to distract him from his game.
I have Spectrum cable at my current apartment. For the most part I get good service with Spectrum, though it is more expensive than my previous cable, and I no longer have HBO. When I first got Spectrum, I realized there were several channels that I wanted that I did not get, such as TCM (I love old movies), so I went with the expanded package to get TCM and some other channels I didn’t have. One of those channels was Heroes & Icons, which I didn’t realize I had until last night. H&I shows Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, and Star Trek: Enterprise every night. Though I won’t stay up until midnight to see all five shows, I would like to have the option. When I tuned to the channel, it says I need to upgrade, even though I already upgraded to this channel, also there isn’t a 🔑 icon after the channel title, which means I’m supposed to have the channel available. I can access the channel through the Specteum app on my iPhone, iPad, MacBook, and Roku, but I cannot access it through the cable box.
Because it would not let me tune into the channel, I decided to contact Specteum. I was first told to reset the cable,box, which I did, and it did not fix the problem. My next option was to use the chat feature on their website. It was not working correctly because they were supposed to try resetting the box remotely, but it never reset. So, they then said I needed to talk to a representative instead of their automated system. It said there was a 25-30 minute wait, so I waited. And I waited. And I waited. Finally, I got “near the front of the line” before they said it was taking longer than usual and to continue to wait. I spent most of my evening waiting on a Spectrum representative, but eventually it was my bedtime, so I had to disconnect. I never was able to speak to anyone. I’ll have to try again when I get home from work tomorrow.
I hate waiting on customer service representatives. Usually, once I get someone on the phone or through the chat in the “Contact Us” section, the representative is usually very nice and helpful. The problem is getting someone to talk to. Oh well, I know like most people in the service industry of any kind, they are overworked, overwhelmed, and trying to do the best that they can.
Yesterday was the Vermont primary. It was my first time voting in my new town. The funny thing is that I was confused when I changed my voter registration to my new address (the confusion happened with the power company too). You see, my apartment complex sits at the junction of three towns. My address is one town, because my mailbox is on that side of the line. My apartment, however, is in another town. So, when I registered to vote here, I thought I was signing up for the town that is my address, but it turns out that I had to register for the town where my apartment actually sits, even though my mailbox is only about ten or twenty yards away from my apartment. Vermont is a strange little place. Half the people in my apartment complex vote in one town, and the other half vote in the other town. None of the apartments are in the third town, you drive through it while driving down the driveway of my apartment complex. It’s quite confusing. The way I initially found out that my physical address and my mailing address are in separate towns was when I called the electric company to set up that account. My physical and mailing address are different for them too.
Anyway, this was actually a pretty exciting primary for Vermont. With Patrick Leary’s retirement, his Senate seat is open, so our Representative Peter Welch is running for that seat. As I am writing this, 27 percent of the vote is reporting and Welch is winning with 86 percent of the vote. The AP has already declared him the winner, and he will likely win the general election, as well. This is Vermont after all, the home of Bernie Sanders. In the Republican primary, the front runner had been Christina Nolan, who is a lesbian. However, the hate group National Organization for Marriage, better known as NOM, came out against her solely because she is a lesbian. Gerald Malloy, a West Point graduate and businessman who has only lived in Vermont for two years, seems to have gotten a boost because of NOM and is leading the race with 43 percent to Nolan’s 37.5 percent. The other candidate has just over 19 percent of the vote.
The more interesting race is to fill Peter Welch’s soon to be vacant seat. Honestly, the Republicans in that race don’t matter. It’s the Democratic primary that everyone is watching. Three candidates are vying for the nomination. Becca Balint is a long-time Vermont legislator who is currently president pro tempore of the Vermont Senate. She is a former social studies teacher and the first lesbian to lead the senate. Her main rival is the current Lieutenant Governor Molly Gray, whose only political experience is two years as lieutenant governor and working in the congressional offices of Welch and Leahy, who both endorsed her. Bernie endorsed Balint. The third candidate is Dr. Louis Meyers, whose main campaign issue is that Vermonters care about the issues not sending their first woman to Congress. It was not a winning strategy for Meyers, who at the time of writing this had 1.5 percent of the vote. The AP called the race for Balint, who with nearly 40 percent of the vote reporting had over 61 percent of the vote and over a thousand more votes than Gray.
There are also a number of other statewide races up for grabs. With Gray running for Congress, the lieutenant governor office is up for election. The two front runners there were David Zuckerman, the lieutenant governor before Gray who stepped down to run for governor and Kitty Toll who was endorsed by Howard Dean and has had the most television ads.. I personally don’t like Zuckerman, so I voted for Toll, but it appears that Zuckerman May win as he has 45 percent of the vote to Toll’s 38 percent with 43 percent reporting. The other recently vacant state offices were for attorney general and Secretary of State. Both candidates I voted for in these two races are trailing in the reported results.
I’m most happy about Balint’s win. The others were not very important for me. I think we need more good social studies teachers in Congress. The good ones who teach civics and government know what really goes on in politics. They also tend to know the history of the American political systems and the ups and downs of American History. We also need more LGBTQ politicians.
The Migraine: An Original Poem About Migraine
by Kathleen Dempsey
Vertiginous,
Equilibrium off,
Exhausted.
Comparable to a drug-induced haze,
I have fifteen minutes to prepare for HELL.
Nauseated, I retreat to bed,
In the fetal position, I hold my head.
It pounds, like a sledgehammer against steel,
As waves of fireless burning flow through my being.
I’m hot, I’m cold, I’m a broken thermometer.
I can’t eat, I can’t drink.
It won’t stay down.
Waves of sickness clutch my stomach,
It will not settle without a pharmaceutical.
An invisible knife punctures my head,
Entering the base of my skull with perfect precision.
I cry ——
But only on the inside. Begging, pleading to an unseen force,
I whimper, as my head is in an ephemeral vice,
MAKE IT STOP!
I wonder —is this punishment?
for some mortal sin in a past life…
Or is it a trial, of how much I can endure.
I take another pill.
It subsides a little.
Enough to function,
But not for long.
Not long enough for commitment,
Not long enough to make money.
I have survived the first pang of days.
But like a long-lost bad memory,
It will return with a vengeance.
Each time trying to break my spirit.
But it will not because I persevere.
Savouring the in-between times,
When I can create,
I can travel, I can live.
And forget the shadow of my agony,
If for just a time.
Yesterday, I had a terrible migraine. It started Sunday night, and I slept fitfully through the night, waking up to the pain several times. Yesterday, I had to call in sick. There was no way I could handle going to work: the bright lights, the noise, the heat (it was 92 here yesterday). I have mostly been doing good since the new treatment, but a major storm front came through Vermont. It’s the pressure changes before the storm hits that begin the migraine attack. Sometimes, they subside when the rain actually begins, but that did not happen yesterday. I went to bed in pain last night.
The poem above was written by Kathleen Dempsey of Toronto on January 4, 2018. She has suffered from migraines since she was 24 and has suffered from chronic migraines for the last three decades. I have suffered with them for more than four decades. (I’ve had them all my life, and I will turn 45 this November.)
I knew I suffered from migraines, but until I began going to the Headache Clinic at Dartmouth, no doctor ever really took them seriously. During my first visit, they diagnosed me with chronic migraines and began trying to find the correct treatment for me. For Dempsey, it took a few visits to the hospital before she was officially diagnosed. Like me, she has tried just about everything to manage her migraines. Some of her attempts to relieve her migraines included opioids, preventative medications, holistic treatments, a decade of triptan use, and even the silly suggestions on social media, like sitting in the bathtub with frozen peas on my head! I have tried many of the same things.
Sadly, like me, she has not been able to get more than temporary relief and has had to give her migraines more control over her adult life than she would like to. I learned a long time ago to persevere. I push and push until I can’t any longer. The pain becomes all-encompassing. Like many with chronic migraines, Dempsey was unable to work for many years. Despite this, she says she’s a fairly happy person with a life full of hobbies, family, and friends. As her poem shows, living with migraines can sometimes be depressing.
She comforts herself by knowing that when the attack is happening, it will only be short-lived, and then she will feel okay. She hopes that one day her migraine attacks will stop. I never know how long my migraines will last. Sometimes, it’s hours; other times, it’s days. Eventually, I get some relief.
Dempsey copes with her pain through creativity. She creates through poetry, photography, painting, drawing, and jewelry design. She has said that writing poetry about her migraines helps her show others the impact they have on her life and that they are not just another headache. Like Dempsey, I have learned we should never wait to do the things we enjoy, and we should spend as much time with the people that we love as we are able to. Like Dempsey, I try to incorporate this philosophy into my life, spending as much energy as I can creating through writing this blog, having fun, doing a job I love, and traveling when I can. I try to do as much as I can when I can. I make a point to learn something new every day and to know my limitations. For Dempsey, the purpose of life is to have fun and help others, making memories as she goes along — and that is exactly what she does when she is migraine-free. I try to do the same.
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The Closet Professor 