Texas seems to be testing me to see if I’m worthy to live in the state.

First, before we bought our house I got what I refer to as a “Welcome to Texas Sinus Infection.” Just note that I never get sinus infections and even when I have a cold it passes pretty quickly. Mrs. EMS Artifact says that all my years in EMS have given me a strong immune system. Maybe, but it’s also probably the fact that I work out frequently, eat properly (for the most part) and watch my weight.

Anyway this whatever it was made me miserable enough to go to urgent care not once, but twice. The first time got me a prescription for cough medicine and some suggestions on how to get through the next few days. After the next few days and I was worse, I went back to urgent care and got antibiotics and a steroid. In the interim I had a nose bleed that almost caused me to go to an Emergency Department, but fortunately stopped before that.

In due course I got better and we proceeded to buy our house and move in.

Move in day came and I had to use the bathroom. Flushing the toilet resulted in nothing happening. Well nothing good. I went on line and found a local plumber. He came out and cleared the line, but told me it was likely that the lovely Live Oak in the front yard had invaded the pipe via the roots boring through the PVC. He dropped a camera down and sure enough there were pieces of root sticking through the PVC. The prospect of having to call the plumber at random intervals to clear that obstruction was not viable, so we paid to have that section of soil pipe dug out and replaced.

We also had a refill valve replaced because of what my wife refers to as a “Toilet Ghost.” The tank would partially refill at random. The usual cause of this is a bad seal on the flush valve, but in our case the fill valve also needed replacement.

Side note: We never met the sellers of our house as that’s not done at closings any more. We only met the buyers of our house because they wanted to come over and do some measuring before the closing. Elsewise, we wouldn’t have met them.

My post move in impression is that the sellers were not all that much interested in routine maintenance. Which is not to say that they knew about the root problem and didn’t tell us. Those things aren’t predictable. Still, I’ve been doing a lot of little repairs that are not all that much different than what I did to our old house before we put it on the market and even after we had a deal to sell. Just the way I was raised, I guess.

One of the things that they didn’t take care of was the water softener system. As in it never worked in the five years they owned the house. Apparently the original owner didn’t do anything about it either. Our section of Texas has the hardest water in America. Yay us. Which means that water softeners are pretty much a requirement unless you like to buy new appliances every five years or so. We don’t, so we are having the plumbers come back sometime in the next few weeks to install a new system with a ten year guarantee. Hopefully that will save our four year old water heater and less than four year old dishwasher and washing machine.

So, that brings us up to Sunday. Which happened to be my birthday. I decided to move one of the very nice recliners we moved with us to my new “TV room.” Forgetting that I was no longer 40 years old (or close) I decided to move it without partially disassembling it.

Mistake.

I felt a pop in my left bicep followed by a burning pain. At which point I decided to disassemble th chair into it’s three components. I was able to move everything and get the chair back together.

My bicep was another question. Being quasi medical, I self diagnosed and decided that Tylenol was in order for the pain. Truthfully, there was no sense in going to urgent care or a free standing Emergency Department because that’s pretty much what they would do. Plus, before a surgeon could look at it the swelling had to subside.

In the mean time, I selected a new Primary Care Provider and signed up with his office. My only source of information was on line reviews of him. They were uniformly excellent and because he deals with a lot of older people he has a lot of experience with things that afflict older people.

While talking to his scheduler I mentioned my arm and she suggested a visit to an urgent care affiliated with the hospital with which he is affiliated. That way I could get my problem into the system and get a referral to an orthopedic surgeon.

So, today I went to the urgent care facility and was examined by a very nice and competent Nurse Practitioner. The good news is that it’s “only” a bicep muscle tear and not a tendon separation. Which means that the surgery is much less extensive as are the recovery and whatever rehab I might need. She ordered an ultrasound of my bicep and sent in the request for a referral to an orthopedic surgeon affiliated with the same hospital.

The doctor who was overseeing the urgent care center advised that I’d be better off foregoing my three times a week rowing machine sessions as that could cause scar tissue to form and make the surgery that much harder. Great. I’ll have to develop some other exercises for my forearms and shoulders.

Also on the good side I was successful in navigating the Texas process for registering motor vehicles and was able to obtain license plates for both of our vehicles. That’s important because Texas will not issue drivers license if you don’t have a vehicle registered or can prove that you don’t have a vehicle. After that Mrs. EMS Artifact and I found a state drivers license office that isn’t booked into next year and got our licenses.

Why the rush? Because you need a Texas drivers license to file for property tax exemptions. Who doesn’t love property tax exemptions?

While talking about the differences in how things are done in Texas versus our old state I joked that Texas is like a whole different state. Mrs. EMS Artifact said, only half joking, that it’s more like a different country.

Which ever it is, I sure hope that it likes me enough to let me stay.