Still autistic

    I decided to go to Charleston this weekend. First I wanted to take the ferry out to Bull Island. But Paul and Ross couldn't go, and the weather forecast was highly discouraging. I didn't feel all that eager to get up at 6 am to drive two hours to pay $40 to get thundershowered on. So then I was just going to go down to lay lilies on my mom's grave, something I had wanted to do since last summer but couldn't. However, the forecast was the same, and Charleston was having the Bridge Run where the Cooper River Bridge is closed for people to run across it. Traffic snarls were a certainty.
    Common sense would have said to do it another day. There was nothing sacred about Saturday except that I had said I was going to do it today. So dammit I went. Rain proved minimal, as were traffic disruptions. Granted, I canceled the other goal of the trip, going to Whole Foods in Mount Pleasant for gluten-free cookies, due to the Cooper River Bridginess of that journey. But I got to see Rheta and her baby Thomas, and I got to see the Morris Island Lighthouse and what's become of Folly Beach after all these years. It was a lovely time, and maybe being a little autistic is OK.

The little man with the flashlight

    The little man with the flashlight who lives in the refrigerator and turns his light on every time you open the door seems to have some other jobs. I live mostly on stews and I cook enough for several days in advance. To reheat my stew, I usually need to add some fluid so the pan doesn't burn up. I like Kitchen Basics chicken broth best. I set the carton behind the large resealable containers that I keep the stews in.
    Every time I would put the stew container back in the fridge and grab the broth carton behind it, I made it a point to put the stew back where it had been sitting before. When I went back seconds later to put the broth back, the stew had invariably moved back to where the broth goes. (This sentence is a special Bulwer-Lytton award winner for most gratuitous use of the word "back.") Poltergeists! That little man with the flashlight! Gremlins!
    Of course, the stew was just getting knocked back by the closing refrigerator door. (There's that word again!) But it took months or maybe years for me to figure this out. (I thought I must have been putting it down in the wrong place and just wasn't noticing.) Moral of the story: I'm really dumb.

Fun with robots

    I'm the local host for Drinking Liberally until they find a better one. Through nobody's fault (at least on our side), the venue where we had been meeting became unsatisfactory. I eventually found a new venue due to useful suggestions from the membership, and yesterday made the move official. This required interacting with the robot software at the Drinking Liberally national site. After making the change, I got the message: "Because the event location/time has been changed for this chapter, all future regular events will be deleted and regenerated." I just went all Keanu and said, "Whoooa!"

Walked through waistdeep snow uphill both ways

    I already know what my generation will say to our young relations when we're crotchety old grandparents. (Or crotchety older-still grandparents.) "When I was young, we had to listen to music on big black long-player albums. You had to get up and go across the room to change the song. And you had to tote all those albums around wherever you went!" I was just remembering a time when I moved back from Philadelphia to Columbia via Amtrak with three or four big boxes of LPs. It was all kinds of no fun schlepping those boxes around, and even less so on retrospect realizing that today I could have put all those records on an iPod Nano. And I probably wouldn't have half-filled it.
    Also, you kids get off my lawn!

Truckload of nasty

    I saw a tractor-trailer labeled Cheerwine. The phrase "a truckload of nasty" popped into my head. Really, I don't have anything other than that, except for a certain disbelief that enough people anywhere drink Cheerwine to merit a tractor-trailer load.
    While we're kvetching about language, what's the deal with bridal veils and wedding dresses? Shouldn't the modifiers agree? Why not a bridal veil and gown, or a wedding veil and dress? Or, ya know, a wedding veil and bridal dress?
    Meanwhile, my nephew and his wife are about to have a daughter, making me a great-uncle. She will be my  grandniece. Again, shouldn't the modifiers agree? Why can't I be a grand-uncle instead? Wouldn't that be grand?

She KNOWS

    At this late date, I don't remember all that much from college. One thing I remember clearly was a party in the dorm at Penn. "Space Oddity" by David Bowie was playing. People were chatting and having a good time. Nobody much was singing along until one sequence: "'Tell my wife I love her very much'/ 'She knows.'" And everybody in the room was singing along.
    I don't really know what Bowie meant by those lines, if it's a commentary on the creepy omniscience of Ground Control or something else entirely. I always thought it was just a sweet thought. I have a feeling that everyone else in the room felt the same way.

Edit: It only took a year and half for me to notice I typed "life" instead of "wife"; continuing proof of my geniushood!:)

Unreliable

    I never actually took Creative Writing, so my only exposure to the concept of the Unreliable Narrator is in the horror novel "Ghost Story" by Peter Straub. In it, our hero (a writer and writing instructor) goes through various frightening doings while serving as a guest lecturer at Berkeley, I think it was. He notes that his output during this time could have been an exercise in the Unreliable Narrator.
    I thought it was Secret Creative Writing stuff, some kind of arcane plot device. And maybe it is. But one thing I've noticed in my listening to old-time radio is that there are a lot of unreliable, even flat untrustworthy narrators running around. And equally unreliable characters. Because the writers get to their twist endings by lying to the listener. The narrator or the character him/herself present the character who turns out to be the murderer as if he/she is pure as the driven snow. Agnes Moorehead, who of course killed her husband (it's Agnes Moorehead, for goodness' sake) instead tells the microphone (there's no one else to hear; it's internal monologue) that she loved her husband and is going to find out who killed him whatever the cost.
    This is cheating. I appreciate that the writer only had a half hour to work with and probably only had a week to work in. But still. They could at least throw a bone and say that the character had a split personality or something. I think it would be fun to write twist ending stories where every line has been vetted to make sure that it doesn't contradict the ending. I mean you can be ambiguous all day long, but when the character says to him/herself "I must find the killer" but then turns out to be the killer, the listener can't help but feel cheated. Narrators: you just can't trust 'em.

Buying is easy; comedy is hard

    When I used to spend all my time watching, or at least listening to TV, the ads made me crazy. Now that I spend less but still significant time listening to the radio, the ads still make me crazy. And unless I'm in the car, it's a lot more trouble to change the channel.
    What I notice is that a lot of companies are trying to use comic effect in their ads when maybe they ought to try something else. Not that many months ago (though this was when I was watching TV with my dad), I realized that the economic situation was indeed serious when I saw that Walmart was trying to make witty TV commercials. Fellas? Try harder. Meanwhile, State Farm and Allstate are trying to replicate the success Geico and Progressive are apparently having with the younger demographic. Now I'm 50 years old; maybe there is someone young and dumb enough to fall for this stuff. But I tend to doubt it.
    At least State Farm keeps the same jingle and slogan. So even if you don't particularly like the spots, you remember the company. The less-than-stellar "Mayhem" campaign is just annoying, and I can't remember who it's for. I assume it's Allstate because everybody else seems to be covered. But I don't remember. I'm on record as saying that the actor in it should become a big star because only a great actor could be that annoying without sounding like Gilbert Gottfried. But that doesn't make it funny.
    In general, I think all these guys-- the Walmarts, the Cokes, the insurance companies-- need to get a hold of whatever ad agency did the Geico ads about 10 years ago. Now those were funny!

I should be embarrassed

    but apparently am immune. The two-time defending national champion University of South Carolina baseball team is taking on the #1 University of Florida this weekend, starting last night. Last night, USC started their ace, Michael Roth, and I was really looking forward to using the headline (or more likely, status update), "The Roth is mighty and must prevail."
    I don't know why. It's 2012, I know, and making puns out of Babe Ruth headlines is maybe a little dated. The point is that when I looked it up to make sure I had the quote right, I found that it was already a pun on a famous Mark Twain quote, "The truth is mighty and will prevail." As obvious as it is when you see it, it never ever occurred to me that the Ruth headline was a takeoff on something else. I just thought it was great because it was so bombastic.
    I feel like an idiot. And it became a moot point since, although Roth very much held his own, he left with the game still in a 2-2 tie and so could not prevail. But the mighty Cocks did, 9-3, so at least the story had a happy ending.
    So did yesterday's dialysis, where they delivered Dad back to me with practically no delay and with an analysis that said his protein numbers were low. So that might explain his tiredness and feeling poorly. Hopefully with a pepped up diet he'll be feeling better right away.

Squeaky wheel

    Whether it was because the squeaky wheel gets the grease or for some other reason, Dad didn't have to wait a second to go back for dialysis today. This was particularly good because he wasn't feeling particularly chipper. Margaret said he didn't seem to be feeling well; he said he was just sleepy. Hopefully he gets to nap during the ordeal. And hopefully there won't be any complications; Tuesday, after the 30 plus minute wait at the start, he then had to endure a wait to leave because they took out too much fluid and his blood pressure was thus too low. With any kind of luck, nothing of the sort will happen today.
    I am ditching many of my old useless possessions that are just in the way. I threw out a broken cot (the frame obviously patched with duct tape) and a not particularly good, but not broken knee chair. The pickers took the former and left the latter. Go figure.
    Other possessions I'm getting rid of include my many too many pairs of shoes. I'm trying them all out to make sure I don't want them anymore. I notice again and again that nearly every shoe I buy forces me to walk flat-footed. Dr. Scholl helps, but I can't help but think that there is a basic design problem in men's shoes. Of course, I can beat this by focusing on walking on the outsides of my feet. But I don't think walking is something you should have to think about.

This is all the faith that I have

    I was cooking yesterday. Nothing earth-shattering; just my apple-cinnamon mini-muffins. And the words came into my head: This is all the faith that I have. I suppose it's true. Cooking is about all the faith that I have. Of course, anybody would probably find it a more or less religious experience if they went along for 45 years dogged by anxiety, then got better by eliminating an ingredient or three from their diet. Not well, mind you, but better.

Patience is a virtue

    So today dialysis did not start so well. Or at all for the longest time. We had to wait more than a half hour. I didn't complain exactly; I asked for a chair time when there would actually be a chair available. A lady in the waiting area said, "Patience is a virtue." I smiled back; I confess I was amused.
    It's not that I think that I'm too big to wait; it's that I think Dad is. Not him personally, but him as a 91-year-old man. I recommend that he call his nephrologist and pull rank. As I mentioned, their practice owns nearly half of the dialysis facility. One would expect them to have a certain degree of pull.

My cutest time of the week

    Because I like breathing, I vacuum twice a week. Otherwise, even apart from my kitty allergy, the sheer volume of cat hair is just overwhelming. Amelia the cat is not a fan. I keep hearing about YouTube videos of riding the Roomba or Zoomba or whatever it is. They must be pretty quiet vacuums or pretty deaf cats. Amelia just runs and hides.
    This place has two rooms, more or less (one gigantic room partitioned by a double fireplace, to be exact). I always start with the back room and then go to the front. Amelia knows to go hide when I start moving the furniture. When I finish the back room and move to the front, I see a little kitty face on the other side of the double fireplace, as she creeps to her second hiding place, the fireplace, in fact. It helps that she's very cute anyway of course, but it always hits me as flat adorable. Some day I'll get her her Roomba, and she can ride instead!

Still crazy after not that many years

    Yesterday at Aldi, I demonstrated again that I'm not all that well-balanced. The lady in front of me had a bag of flour that leaked on the conveyor belt. And I flipped a bit. I just couldn't go through with buying anything. Even though I ate gluten for 45 years, and clearly didn't die from it. Even though there was an area by the checker that the conveyor belt didn't touch; I could have just put my stuff down there and carried out the transaction just as easily. Instead I flipped out and left. Time to switch to de-crazy I guess.
    Today, Margaret went to Abbeville for a christening, so William and I get to take Dad to Lizard's Thicket for lunch. Should be fun. Yay!

St. Pat's

    People from more than 50 miles from here are surprised that there's a major St. Patrick's Day celebration in Columbia SC, as there are no Irish people to speak of here. There are, however, a great many two-fisted drinkers, and an excuse to get stinkin' is always popular. This complicates my life insofar as the party is in Five Points, smack between where Dad is living and where he needed to go for dialysis today. Also, there was an underpublicised Run for the Cure event along Devine St., so my detour got detoured further. But we got there on time anyway, since I'm pretty good with detours, and I worked out the route back on my way home.
    In Dad news, he had some kind of bathroom emergency this morning and Margaret had to clean him up. She said "I didn't sign on for this!" I'd say I hate to say I told her so, but that wouldn't exactly be true. Also, the pharmacy can't give him his medicine because the prescription was written by a nurse-practitioner instead of a doctor. Hopefully, just getting the doctor's name will be sufficient. Seems stupid and sexist to me, though. Fortunately, he isn't on anything he'll die without, but it would still be nice to get through a whole week without this kind of unnecessary headache.

Pie nation

    Out on Bluff Road this morning, on my way back from Congaree National Park, I saw a tractor-trailer up ahead the back doors of which advertised Pie Nation. When I caught up and passed it, I learned that one of the doors must have been replaced at some point. The rest of the trailer declared itself to belong to Pierce National, apparently a trucking firm from Alabama. I much preferred the shorter version.
    Dialysis didn't go well yesterday, either, as it took forever to get his arm to stop bleeding. However, unlike the other facility, these guys actually listen. So they're cutting down the Heparin (which I'm pretty sure is also rat poison) they give him. And they may also cut back his aspirin dosage, as that's the only other blood thinner that he's on. So hopefully things improve from this point on.

Knock on wood and stuff

    Dad's new dialysis place is working out well so far. Everybody's very friendly, they seem quite competent, and they bring him to the back from the waiting area promptly. Just like at the other place, they had trouble getting his arm to stop bleeding at the end of his first dialysis session Tuesday. I suggested that maybe he should suggest in turn that they could stop prescribing him blood thinners, including aspirin. Maybe this would also help with his shortness of breath. Anyway, it's a thought.
    Unfortunately, 11:30 is a very busy time for them, so their excellent loading/unloading setup isn't a lot of use. Today, there was already an ambulance and a minivan in the way. But we coped. Also unfortunately, St. Paddy's day is going to prevent us using our usual route through Five Points Saturday. Again, I expect that we'll be able to cope.

Red tag sale

    A new chain store has moved into the area called Ollie's. It's up the same street as Big Lots (literally, as it happens, but I meant that their in the same business), meaning that they sell a lot of Chinese crap which is ostensibly overstocks from other stores and thus extra cheap. Ollie's adds a new wrinkle. They put red price tags on everything. This is because most stores use red price tags on clearance items only. It works, too. I was really swayed to think that the prices were particularly low. (In fact, items that I could check against other stores' prices were cheap, but not cheaper than anywhere else.) So I should say that the trick worked up to a point; I didn't in fact buy anything.

Gave a nice lady a heart attack, but I meant well

    I was walking this afternoon on the Cayce Riverwalk when I saw a large snake right next to the walkway. It was a garter snake or something similarly harmless, I'm sure; anyway, I'm pro-snake, so it didn't even cause me to change my stride. But a lady was coming from the other direction on the same side of the walkway, texting while walking. So I said, "If you don't like snakes, you probably want to walk on the other side." She just about had a heart attack. I felt bad about it and said so. Still, I think she might have had a real one if she'd taken another 20 steps walking while texting and stepped right on a snake. Next time, I'll at least remember to open with "Pardon me."
    Dad is having his first dialysis session at the new facility. This time, he signed all the paperwork. It was extensive but not intrusive. As of the time the nurse came to get him, he was pretty impressed with the place. Hopefully, that continued through the session. It turns out that 49% of the facility is owned by his nephrologist's practice. Don't know if it's a good sign or not, but it does explain why the receptionist there was shocked that he was both a patient of theirs AND doing dialysis at ARA.

I can't NOT read

    So I took Dad's old car and drove over to the mechanics to see what needed to be done to the Camry. They open at 8, but not surprisingly on the first day of Daylight Savings, they didn't open on time. So I tried the Camry just for the hell of it. And it ran no problem. Whatever the problem was with the idle, it had reset itself over the weekend. Yay!
    The mechanics still hadn't arrived, so I drove home to make breakfast. I took a couple of laps around the block first to be on the safe side, a move that I would come to regret. Because just as I got to the railroad crossing at Rosewood Drive and Assembly St., a very long freight train reached it just ahead of me. If I'd gone straight home, I would have beaten it easily. Ah well.
    I just can't not read. As the train went by, I was reading the assorted inscriptions and instructions on it and getting dizzy. I had to take my glasses off to stop myself. Back when I ate cereal out of boxes, I could never keep from reading the back of the cereal box. But at least it didn't make me dizzy.
    The owner of the garage did look over the car with me eventually, and agreed that there wasn't anything that they could do for it at the moment (except refill the antifreeze, which he did, for free). I mean, it's still an 18-year-old car; there's plenty of preventive maintenance that needs to be done, eventually. But as of now, I'm good to go. Yay!

Would've been funny if somebody'd tried to steal it, though

    Yesterday, the much-beloved '94 Camry attempted suicide. I went out for the first time in the early afternoon, planning to run some errands and go for my walk. But the old fellow wouldn't start. All I got was a clicky noise. Having had this happen before, I called brother William (first hero of the story) to come and give me a jump. He did and I set out to drive around on the expressways to charge the battery up again. This was problematical, since I was also nearly out of gas. However, I went 3/4 way around town and stopped for gas. Filled up and started up again without incident. But that was all the luck I would have yesterday.
    Dad called to ask me to take him from Margaret's to his own house to get some more stuff. I also needed to look over his computer and see if I could figure out how to connect him to Margaret's Roadrunner connection. I could figure out the wiring part, but not the getting it to work part. Called sister Anne (the second hero of the story) and after a certain amount of sturm und drang (all on my part), she figured out that if I disconnected the Roadrunner modem (or whatever they're calling them these days) and waited 10 seconds it would reset and be good to go. This proved to be the case and Dad was again on the Internet. Yay!
    So we set out. All the way to the car. Clicky noises again. So I called Bill and he gave me another jump and took Dad to the house instead of me. Margaret called her grandaughter's husband Rick (who owns a battery/starter garage, and who is the third hero of the story) who was willing to come in from the lake to the shop to give me a hand.
    It turned out that I just needed a battery. Unfortunately, once it was in, the car's idle suddenly went down to zero. I had to keep a foot on the gas at all times or it would stall out. Sort of like a manual transmission. The big problem is that you have to have the brake depressed to be able to move the car out of Park. So it was a matter of two-footed driving, but I was able to back out to the street after a couple of tries.
    I went with Rick to the office to pay for the battery. (The shop specializes in starters and batteries; they can't do anything about drivability.) When we got back to the car, I realized I'd left it unlocked with the batteries in. I noted that it would have been funny if somebody'd tried to steal it.
    I have a mechanic over on this side of town. I didn't have any major difficulties getting it across town, though this did give a new meaning to stop-and-go traffic. Eventually I realized that you can still start a car in Neutral and that made the going a lot easier. However, turns were very exciting since it was near impossible to execute one without stalling out and when you stall out the power steering goes away which makes the turn a little more challenging. But I got there, parking pretty easily despite one last stall.
    I walked the mile or so home, then got Bill to pick me up again so I could borrow Dad's old Crown Victoria. It, too, has seen better days, so I hope the mechanics can find and fix whatever's wrong quickly Monday. I stopped on the way home from Dollar Tree to get myself some more fake flowers. It had been a rough day.

La vache qui rit

    A million years or so ago, or anyway thirty, I went to France for the summer between my junior and senior years of high school with a group of students led by our French teacher (and travel agency owner) Jeanne Palyok. We were stunned by the new French institution, the hypermarche. (Uh, hypermarket.) The way our trip worked was that we got an allowance for lunch (out of our own money, but still) which we usually spent at the hypermarche. As it was a small allowance, we usually wound up with ham sandwiches and Laughing Cow (La vache qui rit) cheese.
    If a seventeen-year-old American went to France now, or anytime in the last ten years, s/he wouldn't be too shocked by hypermarches anymore. They just prefigured Walmart supercenters. And just to demonstrate again how symmetrical life is, at the Walmart the other day, I saw a display of Laughing Cow cheese. I hope any French kids visiting for the summer felt more at home.

Jacobson Flehmen

    When kitties smell something bad, they make this horrified (and horrifying) face by dropping their lower jaw just a bit. This is called flehming or flehmening. They do it because they have a secondary scent organ, Jacobson's Organ, and opening the mouth a bit is how to activate it. The Monkey does it both on my sweater and on the comforter. Since they're mostly said to do this when they've done #1 or #2 in a given place, this doesn't speak well of the her behavior towards either my clothes or my bedding. But it's pretty funny.
    Meanwhile, Dad has been accepted at the nearer-to-town dialysis facility. We are warned that they are much bigger and busier than the place he's gone to heretofore and that he might get lost in the shuffle. I looked it over and it didn't look like any kind of snakepit. And hopefully they can manage to stop dialysis without leaving him dehydrated and with dangerously low blood pressure. Or if not, we can always go back to the old place.
    He'll be going on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, so he'll be free on Friday nights if Margaret and he want to go to the dances at the Senior Center again. (Yay!) We start at the new place Tuesday morning; please wish him luck.

PSAs

    Generally, it's old-time radio that I won't shut up about, but I also listen to a lot of contemporary radio. One difference is that there are untold numbers of public service announcements (PSAs) on radio these days. It often seems like all the ads on radio are PSAs. Most are irritating, idiotic or both. It's odd that they run for ages and ages. It's odder still that a brand new crop came out last month. As if the Ad Council, which produces most of them, said "February 2012! It's about time we made some new PSAs!"
    While it's a relief to get a change in the audio diet, some of the new ones are already getting to be as annoying as the old ones. (For instance, the bizarre one about the kid who died on a trip to Japan, so we all have to raise awareness of safety issues when travelling abroad. It's certainly tragic that the kid died, but considering how many young people go abroad and how few die, maybe these resources could be put to some better use?) I wonder if TV had a new crop of PSAs in February, too? Notice I'm not tuning in to find out.
    Boy did I have weird dreams last night! There was some dealio where a monster was coming for me, and it had come before so I was prepared, and anyway I was leaving but I left a protector behind. It was apparently a pretty small monster, because the protector was an ant. Oh, and a spider. Very scary monster though as I recall. The rest of the dreams were of roughly equal weirdness but mercifully I have forgotten them.

Force of habit

    I use the front left burner on the stove much oftener than any other. When I need to use the back burner, force of habit nearly always makes me turn on the front one instead. Sometimes, this leads me to burn up my non-stick saucepan a bit. The other day, I turned on the wrong burner three or four times while trying to make beef stew. (The three or four times were due to having to leave the house several times.) Fortunately, I didn't have anything on the front burner any of those times, but I wasted a bit of electricity and a lot of cooking time.
    Fortunately, Paul suggested going out for pho, which we did. So I didn't need the beef stew, which was just as well since it wasn't ready until 9 or so. Don't know how to shake off force of habit. Just got to pay more attention, I guess. Brain transplants don't appear to be feasible yet, darn the luck.

Nutty

    It annoys me mildly whenever something is said to taste nutty. It comes up a lot in gluten-free world when someone is describing the flavor of an unfamiliar grain. It's just unhelpful. There is a hellacious variety of nuts in the world, and all of them taste different. To me, teff porridge suggests pecans somehow, so I throw in pecans. Amaranth somewhat evokes pistachios. I threw some in, but as they were years old, this wasn't the most brilliant move in history. Need to go out and get me some fresh(er) pistachios. I just don't think "nutty" is a helpful word since nuts don't have one flavor. Perhaps I need to learn how to generalize.
    Last night I dreamed that Dad was trying to get around in an M.C. Escher house without his walker. I brought it and that somehow helped him negotiate all the stairs better. A little stressed out about the situation still, me. But at least it wasn't an MC Hammer house!

Seeing red

    Back in the day, when I was in another living situation but with the same cat, I slept under a red comforter and said kitty tended to pounce on my foot much oftener than I like. Fast forward to a few weeks ago when I brought the comforter out of exile and started sleeping under it again. And the kitty started pouncing my foot again. Since kitties are colorblind, it couldn't be the redness. Though since the blanket I had on top in the interim was white; I guess even a colorblind creature would perceive a difference between red and white. Or maybe she's just more rowdy because it's warmer. When it gets warmer still momentarily, the comforter will go away again and it will become a moot point. Unless she keeps pouncing my foot of course.

Bob and Carole and Errol and Lana

    As I've mentioned, I'm a fairly big fan of old-time radio. There were a lot of radio shows offering condensed versions of contemporary movies. I would guess that this was mostly so that the studios could promote their movies at relatively low cost. Synergies, a later decade might say. I have several sets of several versions of the same movie.
    One of the sets is of "Mr. and Mrs. Smith." Not the Brangelina vehicle, but another one. A couple learn that the town where they had been married was in Nevada rather than Idaho. Thus, they were never married. Carole Lombard starred in the movie, but I don't recall if anyone mentioned the male lead. (OK, IMDB says Robert Montgomery. And directed by Alfred Hitchcock!)
    One of the radio shows features Carole Lombard but co-stars Bob Hope. The other one stars Lana Turner and Errol Flynn. The scripts are different, but there aren't any major story changes. The plot involves the husband's best friend and law partner trying to persuade the wife to marry him instead. In the Hope show, the law partner was also a former Alabama football player; for some reason he became a Michigan man in the Flynn one. The accent didn't change much.
    The big change was just not having Bob Hope. He was a lot funnier back in the day than he would be later, but a romantic lead he wasn't. The Hope-Lombard pairing was just uncomfortable, though she soldiered through well. Errol Flynn and Lana Turner were a lot more smooth. Maybe a bit less funny, but a lot less jarring.
    OK, so I didn't have anything particularly deep to say about the shows. I just liked the subject line!

Vacation

    Or evacuation. My brain seems to be taking this opportunity to take a little vacation, or possibly evacuation. I don't have anything on the ball at all. All I seem to want to do is play elderly computer games. So forgive it please that this blog entry is about not making a conspicuously cogent blog entry. I do have glimmerings of bright ideas, but then they run away again.
    Continuing my second favorite theme, I had another interesting dream, this time just as I was waking up. I was on a train that had a lot more grades to traverse than any train I've been on in real life that wasn't a roller coaster. When it crested one, I saw the last light of a copper sunset reflected on a great river to my left. I thought "Copper dawn-- sunset." Which is about how my brain's working in real life, too. Anyway, a rare lovely vista in a dream, or at least in my dreams. When the train reached the station, of course, it was no longer a train  but rather a school bus. I had been on a field trip with a group of adults. Hey, it could happen!

And he's out

    In the end, it wasn't any big deal getting Dad out. We needed one of those clothing racks on wheels, but none were available since other people were also moving in or out. So I just carried everything out myself. Everything fit in my car, so I sent Dad ahead with William. I took all the stuff to Margaret's, though she most likely won't want any of his sweat clothes with his name written all over them. I figure we can move the superfluous stuff over to his house later.
    The nursing staff was great. They were going to give him his medication information on a printout, but he said he couldn't read it. So the really nice nurse recopied everything by hand in large print. Margaret needed me to get her a few groceries, so I did. Dad was trying to get his doctor on the phone to get prescriptions written. Though Rice Home sent along a pretty good supply of everything he's taking.
    So it all went well. Hope things keep up that way. Today, I have to take him to dialysis from Margaret's for the first time. It sucks that her birthday falls on a dialysis day. But they'll get to celebrate sooner or later.

Free to go

    Dad is leaving the nursing home today. As ever, communication is slightly less than ideal. So I'm standing by waiting for somebody to call to tell me it's time to come pick him and his stuff up and William's standing by waiting for me to call him in turn to come help. As we both have small sedans, neither of us is likely to be able to take everything alone. Since most of Dad's stuff is clothes on hangers, it isn't really workable for us to get his stuff down from the room without help. And they probably would have liability problems with us barging through with armfuls of stuff. So we wait. Probably for hours yet.
    On the brighter side, the morning forecast featured showers; the afternoon sunshine. So it might well be worth the wait. Anyway, hope all goes well, and that he and Margaret are very happy. Her 91st birthday is tomorrow, so she's certainly getting a very special birthday present!
    Noon update: Dad called to say they had started getting his stuff together, but he still wasn't clear when this would finish. Guess I ought to be getting out there.