So wrong, so right

    So I was completely wrong, but I was completely right, or may have been. Dad was correct that he was very ill and was in fact admitted to the Heart Hospital with congestive heart failure. So I was completely wrong not to take him to the emergency room. (However, as I told him, I had no doubts about HIM; my doubts were all about the emergency room.)
    On the other hand, there is the question of how he got congestive heart failure. Sister Anne (a doctor and a diabetic) says that his systems in general are shutting down and that the heart attack he had two years ago left him with much reduced heart function. She thinks he just caught a cold and that's where the fluid buildup came from.
    I still think that the root problem was keeping the house too hot, not running a humidifier, and instead trying to cope with dehydration by drinking water. This never works. If your kidneys work, you just pee a lot. If they don't, you have a huge buildup of fluids that dialysis eventually can't cope with. As we saw with his ever more swollen feet.
    Regardless, he's relatively happy to be in the hospital, though worried that his speech is a little wonky. This may just be the result of having oxygen spewing in his nose; he never reacts well to that. Or maybe he's just tired. Or maybe it's the Heparin IV drip they have him on. At least he's happy to be under treatment, or anyway the watchful eye of medical professionals. He doesn't know how long he'll be there. As it's officially just for observation, it's not likely to be too long. Brother William did a good job getting him there; Dad holds no grudge against me for declining. He's good like that.

Neverending crisis never ends

    I did in the end persuade Dad and Margaret not to set the themostat at 76 degrees and to accept a humidifier and I got him a knit cap to help him survive the rigors of 72 degrees. But he still feels shortness of breath and still thinks he's dying. He declines to wait and see if the humidifier helps. The cardiologist on call said that he could either see the doctor tomorrow afternoon or go to the ER. He wants to go to the ER. I apologized, but asked him please to ask my brother William. I've already done my ER run, where you get to wait hours, get no help, then have to go home. I feel terrible guilt, I feel like a terrible son, but I just can't do it anymore. I'm glad at least that he's finally listening to me at least a little. (Did I mention that the nurse at dialysis also told him that he needed the thermostat lower, to wear a sweater when he's cold and to use a humidifier and he didn't believe her either?) I hope the ER can help him; my guess is that giving him some IV fluids would fix him up shortly, but whether they're willing is another question. I'm still standing by if needed.

End of year crisis

    Dad is convinced he's dying because of shortness of breath after very little exertion. And I have no desire to ridicule or minimize his concerns. However, he keeps the house at 76 degrees. He insists that Margaret controls the heat, but then admits that she raises the thermostat when he complains that he's cold. He won't simply put on a hat or a sweater as we've been telling him for two years, and indeed as he no doubt told me when I was little. I asked Malcolm to get them a humidifier and he and Margaret flatly refused. He insists on going to the cardiologist Monday, if necessary instead of dialysis. (It would normally not be a dialysis day, but because of the holiday he was moved up a day.)
    I tell him and tell him and tell him that central heating is not a radiator, that it dries you out, that drinking water doesn't help because it goes right through you (or in his case, right to his feet) and that he needs to turn the heat down and get a humidifier. In the mean time, I got them a digital thermometer with a hygrometer (i.e., humidity gauge). I'm hoping that that will help convince them. Also I have two humidifiers, so I can just bring them the less scary-looking one so they get that if it doesn't help I can just take it back. In theory, he agreed to the humidifier, lower temperatures indoors and sweaters and hats. There's no reason Margaret should disagree, but she might. (She wasn't home when we got back from dialysis, so I'll call her later.) Hopefully, we can fix things right up.
    Anyway, it's supposed to rain tonight, so the situation should fix itself temporarily anyway. Maybe when it rains and the humidity rises and he feels better, he'll finally figure out I know what I'm talking about. Also I'd like a pony.

All in the same jail

    We're all in the same jail, it seems. Some with responsibilities to elders, some with responsibilities to youngers, many with responsibilities to both. I guess it's a measure of who and what we are that we don't just say "Bump this" and run off to Fiji. Feeeeeejeeeeeeee! Fiji sounds pretty good about now. But no, no Fiji in the offing.
    Took the Casio on the road to show it to a 4-year-old, who was delighted by it. I also learned that my ancient Casio shares an excellent feature with the new high-tech one. So whuddayaknow! You DO learn something new every day!

Casio, baby

    I got a new toy for Christmas, a peachy keen Casio, with stand. So I won't be posting anything bitter and remorseful today. Much. We're having fun trying to figure out chords, or maybe the Casio is. The instructions are lengthy but not clear. Still, I dig just noodling around. It has 400 pre-programmed voices, all of which are very cool, even the ones that don't sound all that much like the instruments that they're emulating. Amelia hasn't decided it's her enemy yet, another big plus. Were it to fall, I don't think it would hurt her or her it, another other big plus. Big win on the gift front for brother Malcolm, who also gave me a doohickey that lets me listen to my iPod on the car radio. Kudos!
    So bitter recriminations will wait for tomorrow. No complaints, I trust!

You value what you pay for

    With a subject line like that, this should be a deep Christmas Day message, but alas no such luck. No, nothing to do with Christmas; it's just that the other topic I wanted to do was even less holiday-appropriate. (You'll find out tomorrow, most likely.)
    No, the observation of today is that Dad never takes his doctor's advice. It occurs to me that if he were actually paying them, he might pay them more heed to go with the money. This is not to say that old people shouldn't have free medical care. Just a suggestion that if they can afford to pay anyway, they might find they get more out of it if they pay for it. Hell, there's no way to generalize. In his case, and perhaps only in his case, he might get more out of his medical care if he were paying for it, and thus was motivated to pay attention. Or maybe he's just a grumpy old cuss who thinks he knows best and wouldn't pay any more attention regardless. Anyway, just a thought.
    To be more Christmassy, I hope everyone has a very merry one and the happiest of new years.

Hot grease

    I keep making my lentil hush puppies or polentil fritters or whatever I'm calling them this week and they keep tasting like hamburger. There's no meat in them and no animal fat. For once, I'm actually embarrassed to be making such a dumb observation, but it may be that what people like about hamburgers is salt, pepper, and hot grease. I always thought that beef fat tasted different than vegetable oil (sunflower seed oil, in this case), but I suppose I was mistaken.
    Regardless, the latest iteration (1/4 cup of red split lentils, cooked for a half hour with a LOT of salt, pepper, Crystal hot sauce, Tabasco sauce (OK, not a lot of that), cloves and cumin and a tiny bit of crushed garlic) with a quarter cup as well of organic yellow corn grits thrown in for another 5 minutes cooking. Baked at 350 for I think 15 minutes. (The Anal Retentive Chef has apparently left the building.) Cut up and fried, two minutes to a side, in extra virgin olive oil. Really good! Even when they weren't hot anymore. I may live off this stuff!

Technical difficulties

    As I've mentioned, my smart phone isn't very. It seems that using it to run my Internet through isn't the sharpest idea. When I get a call, the Internet hot spot stops working, or coincidentally the entire Internet chooses that moment to stop working. Calling out leads to similar results.
    This morning, I got a call. As it turned out, it was a wrong number. I had the laptop running the Internet via the phone's hot spot. When I went to answer the call, the phone crashed and restarted. As I say, it was a wrong number. (Later I called the number and asked and he said it was.) However, if it had been an important call and this had happened, I would have been apoplectic. So it may be time to make the break from T-Mobile and Windows Phone and find a better carrier and or phone. This is one of those times where it was nothing, but it could have been serious. It may be time to go.
    Definitely not serious is all that I remember from my dreams last night. There I had lost my two front teeth. At one time, this would have been a pretty upsetting dream. This time, I was tickled, if anything, and made a note to see the dentist about getting them replaced. Cool as a cucumber in my sleep, me.

Rat a tat tat

    Over the decades, ex-Beatles have one thing in common. They all tend to introduce at some point in a song something that sounds a bit like a military tattoo. To my ear, rat-tat ta-tat-a-tat on a snare. This is odd, mainly because I can't think of this sound ever really coming up in any Beatles numbers. Half of it in "Glass Onion," and not too far off in "I Am the Walrus," but never the whole thing anywhere. Of course, I'm not the biggest Beatlemaniac in the world. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that it came up dozens of times.
    However, it definitely does for ex-Beatles. Three or four times on the album "All Things Must Pass." "Back Off, Boogaloo." "Instant Karma" and all many Plastic Ono numbers. And now Mr. McCartney joins the club on his new song, "Queenie Eye." This one sounds like "I Am the Walrus" in other ways as well. Maybe he DID learn something in all those years.

I've lost count already

    Well, it would have been "Sudden burst of common sense, # I've lost count already" since I know I've used that subject line before, but that would have been pretty long and still pretty unclear. (Isn't it?) Anyvay, recently, on a junket to Super Dollar I blogged about (where everybody in the Greater Columbia area should go at least once), I saw steering wheel covers. What I didn't see was the price, so I may be kicking myself later. Thing is, all year my steering wheel has been hurting my hands, such that I actually think I've been stung by some creature when I let the wheel slide through my hands, which of course is after every turn.
    Today, it happened again, and I went "Oh." On the way home from dropping Dad off from dialysis, I stopped in at Family Dollar and looked and they carry them, too. They want $6.50 for one, so if I find out later that Super Dollar is cheaper, I'll kick myself a little. But they have a really pimpin' one that nearly matches my interior, so it'll probably be worth it. I wasn't sure of my approximate literally arm's-length measurements, so I came home to measure, but the lady says they're open 'til 10 so I'll have one shortly. Thus always to getting stung by my steering wheel!

Totally out of hand

    One thing I'll say about this nightmare: I was fighting to get back to sleep to see the end. So I guess you'd call that more exciting than scary. Or it's a commentary on my unexciting life. The only really unpleasant part was that it started with a murder. Me and this totally fictitious guy were working for a small company. (All this may have something to do with the fact that I watched the 1951 version of "A Christmas Carol," "Scrooge" last night.) We sort of murder the boss. The idea was to get the payroll. Apparently, the company pays everybody in cash, or it wouldn't make much sense. We encourage everybody to bring in time sheets with the largest number of hours, and I practice forging the boss' signature. (Even in the dream, I knew that I wouldn't be very good at this, as I have enough trouble with my own signature.)
    For some reason we had to go to Georgetown (100 miles or more from here). For some other reason, we stopped at a basketball arena. For yet some other reason, the basketball arena hadn't worked out for basketball, because the floor was too hard or something and players kept getting hurt. After this pointless digression, me and the other guy went to the bank.
    At the bank, we thought we wouldn't get the money, but then they brought it out in big sacks and put it in a long wheeled conveyance like a '60s race car mated with a suitcase. There was a light inside at either end and we thought the dye packs were going to go off, but they didn't. We rolled it out to the parking lot and the other guy got ahead of me. I fell down a stream bank, a short but steep cliff and was hanging on and also keeping the money somehow slung over my shoulder, trying to make sure that the other guy had to rescue me before he got the money when my wristwatch alarm went off and the scene blew all to hell. I hit snooze and got back to sleep but never found out how it turned out. I'm probably still hanging off that cliff, holding onto that money. No wonder I'm tired!

Monkey approved

    I had an office chair. Since I only needed it to use the PC and since the PC is almost 13 years old, it was and is more or less an affectation to have an office chair. But the small cat, Amelia or The Monkey, liked it. You might even say that she loved it to death. Being a cat, she claws the heck out of most things, and she certainly clawed the heck out of this. Eventually, the stuffing started to come out. As Amelia is not exactly the smartest cat in the world, I was worried that she would eat the little bits of foam rubber that spilled out. So it was time to get a new (to me at least) office chair.
    I already blogged about the minor fiasco when I first tried to get a replacement, but the event was not important enough to recapitulate here. I went to the same thrift store and got a much nicer office chair, also with four casters, but this time designed that way. And it was half-price for some mysterious reason, possibly because the Habitat ReStore is moving soon. I dunno.
    I got the chair home and Amelia went a little beyond the usual clawing at it. This chair has eight decorative cloth buttons, and the Monkey seemed intent on claiming all of them. The quest also made a fairly irritating noise, so fairly quickly I said "Bump this" and put my fleece blanket over the chair. Since then, she's lost interest in it entirely, even though it's the same blanket she had been happy to crawl all over when it was covering me.
    This left me short a blanket, in December. Nearly eight years ago when this creature came into my life, it was into a house that already had a cat. I had a small dome tent at the time and a blanket I liked. We put her in the tent with the blanket in hopes that she would ease her way in. And I guess eventually she did. But first she peed all over my blanket. I just put it in my trunk and left it there, and Alice gave me a comforter to substitute.
    All these years later, I find myself needing a blanket for reading time, so I finally laundered the dang thing. Eight years took the smell away, except for maybe a bit of car trunk smell. But Amelia would have nothing to do with it. This is fairly normal with her; anything new tends to be the enemy for a while. But she would have NOTHING to do with it. She would climb up and stand on my collarbone to avoid touching it, or stand on my also fairly new fleece chair, which she had previously avoided. Yesterday, she finally deigned to lean down and knead the heck out of the blanket, and then was willing to sit on my lap with the blanket between us. Whew!

Backwards

    At Canal Park today, a couple was walking backwards at speed for no apparent reason. Then when I got back near the park entrance, one of the rangers was driving the maintenance cart backwards. I decided not to tell him why this was so funny, but did perceive an emerging theme.
    That's all, really, but it was pretty funny at the time. This being the Internet, I looked it up; it seems that walking backwards for exercise was a hot topic all over a year or two ago. If I were sufficiently coordinated, I would definitely try it.
    Readers are excused from my dream diary for the day. Dreams for the last two nights were most bizarre, but I remember little from them. All I do remember is that last night's dreams were so odd that when I woke up, I was most reluctant to go back to sleep. Not that they were scary nightmares; it seems that I'm more leery of being puzzled than of being scared. The only thing I remember for sure is that I was living in a mansion both nights. I was fairly puzzled about that, too.

Edit: I didn't miss this day either; when I published (actually yesterday), this stayed a Draft. Not my fault!:)

Not entirely un-pecan-sandie-like

    I really really should stop posting once-a-day only and at the same time get away from grab bag type postings. Instead, I should post whatever complete thought occurs to me. Wait, that's a sentence; to be clearer, I should post on only one topic per entry, however short that makes the entry, and post several times a day if that's what my brain spits out. Hmm, I'll think about it.
    Except for that thought, though, this should be fairly singleminded. Ages ago, I tried and failed to come up with a way to make gluten-free pecan sandies. More recently, as I mention almost weekly, I've been trying to find some way to bake with cocoa butter without buying an emulsifier factory. Also, I had some brown rice flour which I never much liked baking with because it's dry and gritty. And I thought, hmmmm... something that's too dry and something else that's too wet... NAW, that's just crazy!
    So I tried it. About an ounce of cocoa butter chunks, melted. I tried to squirt out 1/4 cup of honey, but it was probably more like a couple, three tablespoons. A half cup of brown rice flour. A quarter cup of coconut, and another of almond milk. A half cup of chopped pecans. A teaspoon of vanilla. An egg or a tablespoon of chia seeds pureed with 3 T of water.
    I preheat the oven to 350 degrees. As usual with these experimental trials, I just spatulaed the whole mess into one gigantic pancake on parchment paper on a pizza pan. I cooked the thing 20 minutes on one side, flipped it and gave it another five. The result is very pleasant. Probably needs more vanilla. Possibly needs more honey. Would probably be lighter and more pecan sandie like with some baking powder. But they held together well, cut up into bars. They probably would do the same as cookies. The coconut should have been weird, but really isn't. And very little cocoa butter leaked out onto the parchment paper. And the texture didn't seem dry at all in spite of the rice flour. So... a success? I don't know, but not a failure anyway. Pleasant erring towards tasty is OK by me!
Edit: I had forgot to mention the egg or chia seeds. Since then I'm up to a tablespoon of vanilla and 2 oz of cocoa butter chunks. Strangely, the flavor didn't change much. Darned pleasant cookies regardless.

"Thanks for what?"

    I'm in a bit of a funk, so Paul and I went around to a couple of thrift stores, where he found many books and I found a 20-disc CD rack. Then we explored a bizarre (or possibly bazaar) new store called Super Dollar, which was a lot like Chinatown under one roof. Very weird toys, including an amazing array of air and pellet guns, and a rather alarming assortment of women's hats, each on its own bald little head. And endless selections of other junk, including a Confederate dream-catcher, and no, I'm not making that up.
    In the same strip mall is my favorite Thai restaurant. As we were hungry and I was still bummed, we went there for supper. After a while, a party including a very tiny little girl were seated next to us, with the little one right next to me. Her mom occupied her while they awaited their food by having her write Santa. When the little one, who was at most 4 but who was definitely writing since her mom corrected her spelling, finished, her mom told her to write, "Thanks." "Thanks for what?" the little girl said, instantly showing a greater understanding of the world than anyone else in the restaurant. Cheered me right up.
    The problem bringing me down is pretty much the same as ever. Dad is still having the endless gastric problems, and still can't find a doctor to help him. He made an appointment with a doctor from his primary care physician's practice for Wednesday. Hopefully, they'll at least have some suggestions.

Deep fried umbrella

    Last night, I dreamed I was playing a game. I leapt into the future, which was not at first very interesting. I looked into a bunch of rooms that proved to be empty. Then I met a person who needed me to bring back an item he'd had stolen. It was a sort of club that looked like a furled umbrella, deep-fried. And it had been stolen by Mel Gibson's girlfriend.
    I returned to the present. Because of my impressive network of contacts, I was able to track down Mel Gibson easily. But it turned out that it was his ex-girlfriend who had stolen the deep-fried umbrella. She also had Mel in hiding, with his present girlfriend. I reached her by phone, though, and tried to ask if she would talk to Mel. I kept getting silence in response, but eventually gave the phone to Mel and they made up. Also the deep-fried umbrella magically appeared at this point, although of course that could mean that it was Mel's present girlfriend who had actually stolen it.
    I took the deep-fried umbrella back to the future. The man was very glad to see it again. I got no reading about how he felt about Mel being able to emerge from hiding, but I'm feeling pretty ambivalent about it myself.

Failing to jump out of my skin

    For a while there, I was using Publix brand body wash that came in a really big bottle. A bottle that was actually too big for the shelf it was sitting on in the shower/ bathtub space. Not surprisingly, it was also heavy. Not surprisingly, I knocked it down with a fair degree of frequency. When I did, it made an enormous WHUMP sound. And when it did, I almost invariably was standing on one foot, in a soapy shower, soaping up the other leg.
    When you hear a gigantic WHUMP behind you, you can be expected to jump out of your skin, and I was certainly inclined to. However, in a soapy shower, standing on one leg, it would be pretty dangerous to jump anywhere at all. I don't think in the split second available to me, my brain consciously went through the possibilities and thought, "Oh, big body lotion bottle. Nothing to worry about." But somehow, it did seem to figure out that it's just too dangerous to jump right now, so we'll sort out what the stupid noise was later. I really did jump out of my skin in my head. (OK, you can query the use of "really" here; perhaps I should say simply that I was sufficiently startled to jump out of my skin, but didn't.) I dunno; I just thought it was cool each time it happened, which was several times.
    Eventually, the ants that overrun my bathroom every day or so decided that they LOVE that body wash, so I looked at the ingredients. I didn't see anything particularly ant attractive unless they dig soybean oil. However, I myself don't dig soybean oil. Even though I don't exactly lick my hands, I still would rather not have it on my body. So I switched to another brand which also uses smaller bottles. So jumping out of my skin in my head should be a thing of the past. One hopes.

Sleep transit

    I dreamed last night that I was helping out a musician I know (just virtually, via Facebook in waking life) with some music videos. He would call me every morning at 6 and I would turn up in New Jersey for the shoot. Now this either bespeaks a much much quicker rapid transit system in this country than I had noticed previously or teleportation abilities that I have hitherto kept hidden. Seemingly, I was back home again by evening, or even by the afternoon. If only I could do this stuff when I'm awake!
    What delighted me, though, was that my wish was granted, even if imperfectly. Because it was another case of my brain waking me up to tell me that I needed to go to the bathroom. And although I would have preferred a more straightforward prompting, I much preferred this to my brain's previous preferred method, that is via nightmare. Maybe I'm teaching my sleeping brain how to behave, finally.

Junction ahead?

They don't know
They won't know
unless I tell them
but I can't tell them
because I don't know
I don't know
I just think so

It's a very serious matter
Joy is serious
Fun is serious
Union is serious
Love is very serious
and I don't know
I just think so
I really think so.

Bob Jones University

    My buddy Paul wanted to go to the museum & gallery at Bob Jones University in Greenville for his birthday present. His birthday was in October. Unfortunately, we couldn't get around to it... until today. Strangely, the museum is only open from 2-5 on Wednesdays. This definitely gave us the opportunity to get up late, have a leisurely lunch, hang out in a used record store (where I got CDs by Ellington/Coltrane and a mellow reincarnation of the King Cole Trio), get lost and still get there more or less on time.
    It's not a gigantic museum, but has a lot of paintings to try to fit into three hours. Even moreso for two. (We eventually decided to leave early to beat traffic, and also because I was getting a little wobbly and still had to drive home.) Much as I disagree with Bob Jones University about nearly everything, I don't want to cast any aspersions. The paintings were very nice. The descriptions were mostly knowledgeably written, though any time the Virgin Mary turned up, the writer(s) felt the need to denounce the doctrinal errors leading to the Marian cult. And there was a tendency to put "School of" a given artist after the artist's name rather than before, which looks a little deceptive.
    Still and all, the pictures were pretty and we managed not to get thrown out, which was a plus. And we had a very nice day. And I have Nat King Cole to listen to. So there.

Alleged cookies

    The problem was that quinoa is very healthful, but not very flavorful. The secondary problem was that quinoa flakes, which cook much faster, taste actively bad. Not very bad, but not very good. The part of my brain that does flavors said, "Needs peanut butter!" Thus this recipe:

Stuff:
3/4 cup almond milk
1/3 cup quinoa flakes
1 oz cocoa butter chunks OR 1T cocoa
1/4 cup honey
1/2 cup peanut butter
1 tsp vanilla
1 T of chia seeds blended with 3 T water OR 1 egg

Preheat oven to 350.
    I followed the package directions for cooking the quinoa flakes except for substituting almond milk for water and reducing the amount. I also threw cocoa butter chunks in to let them liquify. (The reason for reducing the amount of fluid, apart from keeping the cookie dough from getting runny, was with the hope that the melted cocoa butter might be absorbed.)
    So, bring almond milk to a boil. If you don't have cocoa butter and if you aren't avoiding caffeine like me, you can always substitute baking cocoa. Add quinoa flakes, bring back to a boil and cook for 90 seconds, stirring frequently.
    In a mixing bowl, mix all the ingredients. I've been using chia seed paste in lieu of eggs, not because I'm going vegan or anything but because they're supposed to be even better at holding baked goods together than eggs. Also they don't get sulfury if they get overcooked. As chia seeds are crazy expensive (like the cocoa butter), I won't judge you if you just use an egg (like the baking cocoa).
    So far I haven't found a blender that can handle a quantity as small as 4 tablespoons. So I have to use 2 T of chia seeds and 6 T of water, then half the result. Unfortunately, this time around, I accidentally murdered the blender, so my cookies had no chia seeds to hold them together. As a result, they didn't hold together too well. But they were pretty good.
    I had no notion whether these would work out, so as I usually do in that circumstance, I just made a gigantic pancake on parchment paper on my pizza pan. I cooked one side for 15 minutes, flipped it as best I could, and cooked the other side for 10 minutes.
    The problem with cocoa butter is still that it's liquid when hot and solid when cold. This is to say that much of it ends up on the parchment paper. So I wound up putting the whole pizza pan in the freezer for 20 minutes to try to get the stuff solidified. Then I broke the pancake into pieces.
    One suspects that even without the egg or chia seeds, these would make good mini-muffins, though a lot of cocoa butter would probably wind up suffusing the muffin tin liners. Also, they're very rich; maybe the chia seed paste would bring that down a bit. I'll certainly try again.

Still grumpy

    BUT! My wonderful sister (also a doctor who has worked with old people a lot) talked to Dad and explained to him that the pacemaker only works when and if he needs it. She got him calmed down so now he's gotten over the idea that he has to go to the cardiologist this morning and have it checked again. So yay!
    In general, I'd like to apologize to whoever might still be reading this. At the dialysis facility, I get to listening to people carp and complain and bitch and moan and cavil (See? At least you get to see the word "cavil") and certainly understand how tiresome it is to hear or read this all the time. On the other hand, I have very little outlet and unleashing my spleen on the people causing my problems (when that isn't me, of course) would help little. So while I'm very sorry, just as the news is a neverending compendium of If it bleeds it leads, a blog tends to be a neverending spew of bitching and moaning. I'll try to do better.
    Tomorrow. This weekend was again frustrating. At least they were simple First World type problems. The washers in this house (subdivided into two apartments, so there are two) wouldn't drain without making the toilet blop and blurp. We had an earlier run of blopping, blurping toilets and at that time it tended to go on all night. This time, it stopped when the guy in the other half of the house finished doing his laundry, so that was a blessing. Still, we couldn't exactly do any further laundry. Nothing important in the long run, but a bit annoying. Happily, the plumber arrived before lunch and cleared the lines. Hell, now I feel like laundering something.
    Meanwhile, the heat pump wasn't running this morning, meaning that I was relying on much more expensive auxiliary electric heating. Of course this happens every time it's cold, and every time I look it up on the Internet. The Internet says that heat pumps are less efficient when it's below freezing. In this instance, though, it didn't get particularly near to freezing. So I panicked a bit. However, the heat pump came back even before the plumber got here. It appears that the Internet may have been wrong about something. Imagine! So First World problems were all solved. Yay!
    Oh, except for AVG Free antivirus. This morning, it told me that a file was missing so my protection was incomplete! Oh no! I clicked on the message hoping that there would be some suggestion as to how to fix it, but no! So I restarted the computer and the message went away. Knock on wood!

Forgive nonfunctioning computer

    AVG free antivirus is updating very, very, very slowly. It's more than a little distracting.
    OK, that's done! What was really distracting was that it appeared to hang at 39% Complete. When it was finally done (about a second after I closed the Notepad window where I compose these turkeys, so maybe that was the problem), it gave me the opportunity to change my search engine to its own, so maybe THAT was the problem. I declined.
    In general, AVG Free doesn't seem to play well with either Firefox or Thunderbird. Over the years, I've bounced back and forth between AVG and Avast. They seem to take turns annoying me. It may be time to bounce back to Avast, which has the advantages of a silly name and sometimes having an interface that looks like the Yellow Submarine. (Hey, you have to have intelligent criteria!)
    Meanwhile, Dad still seems a bit off his game from the hospital stay. This morning he called to say that he thought the pacemaker wasn't working since he couldn't feel his pulse. It seems more likely that the sensation in his fingers is lessened because it's cold, but what can you do? So we have an appointment to go see the cardiologist in the morning to have it checked. And a previously scheduled appointment in the afternoon to see the eye doctor. Thus, I spent the morning at Congaree National Park in spite of somewhat inclement weather to get my brain and spirit somewhat re-energized. Hopefully.

Forgive nonfunctioning brain

    While I wait for my brain to check in again, here's something conspicuously stupid that I've been pondering for a long time: monograms. Every time I see one, which is nearly always on the back of a vehicle since I'm not much going door to door looking at people's towels, I read it straight across. Of course, it's supposed to be left letter, right letter, middle letter. I don't think I've suddenly gotten stupid; I think they're doing them wrong. I think the outside letters are supposed to be slanted towards the outside, with the idea of subtly suggesting that no, you aren't supposed to read this straight across. Instead, all three letters tend to be at the same slant. Yes, I know it's of no importance. For once, I'm not even mad or up in arms about it. I just couldn't figure out why suddenly I can't read monograms, and then maybe I did.
    Dad is still a bit weak after his procedure, and uncomfortable, but he was glad to be home. Dialysis thought he was still in the hospital and weren't expecting us, but when we turned up they made room for us pretty quick; we barely had to wait any extra time at all. If I had banged on the door to say, "Y'all knew we were coming, right?" we probably wouldn't have needed to wait that long.

He's home again

    Due to the vicissitudes of my Dad's life, I've probably used "He's home again" ten times already, but there you are, he's home again. He could have come home first thing this morning but for whatever reason, the paperwork wasn't ready, so he just hung out in bed. As he hadn't slept the first night, catching up on his sleep further was a good thing. Eventually, when paperwork still wasn't appearing, I went home to throw the laundry in the dryer and maybe to eat lunch, and of course the moment I was ready for the latter, they called and said they were ready for me to take him home.
    But unsurprisingly, that didn't exactly happen either. They had brought him his lunch in the meantime, so he went ahead and ate that. But finally, we were all ready to go. A nurse got him into (onto? whatever) a wheelchair and I met them downstairs with the car. (First they had to give us a notification form that I had to sign that if we thought they were throwing him out too soon, we could appeal. I, at least, was fairly amused.)
    As a newly made cyborg, he now has some extra external equipment as well. Specifically a doohickey that reports back to the cardiologist what his heart is up to, especially at night (since they wanted it within 15 feet of his bed). I got that set up and plugged in, so I think he's good to go, and happy to be home. And even happier to be out of the dang hospital. May he not return any time soon.

Post-op update

    It was successful. That's the main thing. Hospitals are legendarily no fun at all, and this one is no exception. Everything is tied up in red tape. Dad brought his own pills and could have just taken them, but that is forbidden. So he had to wait all night for everything to get through the computers and the paperwork and he finally got a rough equivalent of his pills. He was fairly upset about it, but honestly I think mostly due to the disruption of his routine.
    The major point is that the procedure was successful, that it will probably help him, and he'll probably get along a little better in the future. He has to have dialysis (and a chest x-ray) this afternoon, and he has to stay over another night. Brave Margaret is willing to endure another night of "Oh Gods!" Hopefully, this time they'll both be able to sleep. Or at least catch the NFL game. He should go home tomorrow and can settle back into his routine. Hopefully.

Brief pre-op update

    Here's what I know that I didn't know before about Dad's pacemaker procedure. Even though we had to be there at 10, it doesn't happen until 3 at the earliest. (That's when it's scheduled, but they had an emergency procedure and computers are running slow, so the odds that it happens that early are remote.) He was already expecting an overnight stay, but depending how things go, it might be two nights. He hasn't eaten or drunk since midnight and can't until the procedure is over, so he's very uncomfortable. At least he has a blanket and a TV. He'll have to wear an immobilizer (the big metal dealio that rides your head and shoulders, I think) for 24 hours. I'm pretty sure if they'd told him this in advance, he would have said, "Uh, I don't think I need a pacemaker all that badly." He's scheduled for dialysis tomorrow, which they say he can get done in the hospital.
    I'm on lunch break, and also running out to get some groceries, but I'll be back there before 3. He thinks Margaret will be staying the night with him, but I don't know how workable this is going to be. But if they want it to, I'll make it happen. I suspect that I'll be the one staying instead. The cat will be highly displeased.

Dum dum da dum

    I just tweeted, perhaps mysteriously, that "Dum dum da dum doesn't necessarily equal Here Comes The Bride." (Earlier and briefly I posted the same thing on Facebook, except with an extra dum. Unfortunately, the tune in my head was "Hail To The Chief," which would have made for a great joke 5-odd years ago, but rather spoiled this one. It's just been that kind of day.)
    What brings it all up is that I bought an office chair at Habitat for Humanity's thrift store ReStore. It was a fairly nice one for $10. Unfortunately, by the time I got it to my car, it had four casters instead of five. I walked back around to the checkout area to look for the fifth one, but it was nowhere. They don't accept returns, so I just shrugged and took it home.
    My thinking, such as it was, was that the caster must have been missing all along and I just hadn't noticed. I had sat in the chair and rocked in it and it worked well, so I decided that I didn't need all five. Later, I thought about it and remembered that when I was pushing the chair to the checkout area, the base was spinning around, and all the way around. I definitely would have noticed if a caster were missing. So presumably when I picked up the chair to carry it out, one caster fell off and some person picked it up immediately. I should have asked if anyone had seen it, but as I say, at the time I thought it must have never been there.
    I got it home and set it down on the front walk and tried sitting and rocking. Indeed, missing one caster made a lot of difference. So it never even made it in the house, going straight to the curb. And the That's What I Get For Being Stupid file, already voluminous, gets one more entry.
    Dad is getting his pacemaker tomorrow. We're pretty relaxed about it, actually. We're more worried about being bored to death or starving to death than any more dramatic event happening. He does seem to think he'll be admitted to the hospital, but we can cope with that, too.

Ralph Bell and Leon Janney

    The long title is "Ralph Bell and Leon Janney always messing with time machines." One of my favorite old-time radio actors, Ralph Bell, appeared in a very wide range of roles and shows. On two separate episodes of a show called "Mysterious Traveler," he costarred with Leon Janney in episodes about time machines. In one, "The Man Who Tried To Save Lincoln," he played a scientist sending Janney into the past to try to save Abe Lincoln. (Spoiler: he didn't succeed.) In another ("Operation Tomorrow"), a scientist sends Janney into the future to find out what happens then, and he meets Bell.
    I appreciate that a story only has to be internally consistent; a series need not be. Still I think there's a certain irony that the twist in the Lincoln story was that Janney couldn't save Lincoln because the time machine was supposed to send his mind into the mind of someone in 1865 who could stop Booth. That didn't work so well. In the other story, the time machine didn't work because Janney couldn't bring anything back to the past from the future, not even memories.
    In other words, the Mysterious Traveler couldn't make up his mind. If you wanted to take your time machine to the past, then your memory would work fine going backward, but your aim might not be so good. But if you wanted to take your time machine to the future, suddenly you won't be able to remember anything when you get back. Or maybe Ralph Bell and Leon Janney just weren't very good with time machines. By and large, they always seemed to need a bigger tube! (Not really an inside joke; just a plot point that sounds silly, retroactively.)

Transcribed

    I may have mentioned already, but many of my old-time radio shows, especially from the '50s, identify themselves as being "transcribed." As far as I can tell, what is meant here is exactly the same as what TV people meant when they said "pre-recorded" or "recorded." I have no idea why the word changed. My friend Terry Lynch, who sometimes reads this blog, recommended that I read a book by the musician David Byrne called "How Music Works." Mr. Byrne describes how pre-recording shows on tape started (because Bing Crosby wanted to play more golf, and thus invested in Ampex). I was thinking that "transcribing" might have been used to refer to recording to disc. I do know that some radio shows were put on wax, because that's how they were rebroadcast to the troops abroad.
    However, since Ampex was founded in 1944 and the word "transcribing" was used for years thereafter, that can't be it. I suppose that transcription just sounded overly literary for TV, or rather overly word-centered for the recording of words and pictures, so another word started being used. I remember when I started listening to old-time radio how weird that word "transcribed" sounded and how long it took me to figure out what in heck it means. So if you ever get into OTR, well, now at least you know.

80,000 of my closest friends

    This is the day of the state's hugest rivalry game, South Carolina vs. Clemson. It's the first time in history that both teams are ranked in the top 10. It certainly isn't the first time that the game is televised nor is it the first sellout of the season. However, for some reason, my Internet connection has been almost totally blocked all day, possibly because of high traffic from excited Gamecocks and Tigers, possibly from ESPN, or possibly just because I've had the TV on all day (which I don't usually). Regardless, it's more or less a miracle that I'm online at all and I don't know how likely it is that I'll actually be able to post this. So that's why I'm phoning this in even more than usually. Later when the football fanatics have all left, I may try to post a real blog entry. But since that will be late, this one will probably stand. Very exciting game so far though!

Very high, ultra high

    Some time ago, my sister gave me a TV and antenna, not HD but digital I think. (As both a technopeasant and a Luddite, I'm not so great on such terms.) I think I mentioned closer to the time of receiving these gifts that I was having a bit of trouble with tuning. I'm embarrassed to say how easy it was to solve these problems, and how long it took for me to figure out the solution. Where I live, there's one VHF station (Very High Frequency) and I guess six UHF (Ultra High Frequency) stations. (What did you think I was talking about?)
    I don't know if VHF stations are inherently more powerful or if it just turned out that way here. (I do remember that there was an Al Yankovic movie called "UHF" about a terrible station, at least implying that that's where the weaker stations are.) Regardless, channel 10 is really powerful and all the other stations are pretty weak. And so the solution was... turn off the antenna for channel 10. That's all. No moving the rabbit ears back and forth endlessly like I had been trying to do for years. Just turn the gain all the way off and voila! TV magic! Turn it back on for any other station. I tell you, except for being an idiot, I'm a genius!

Inserted

    I'm feeling better about the whole pacemaker situation because of one word. Dad said that he's having a pacemaker "inserted." This seems a lot more gentle than the kind of procedure that I was envisioning, which involved opening the rib cage. But indeed, I did have the impression that it was more of a procedure than an operation, and insertion is a lot more procedure-sounding than what I was thinking is. So I'm considerably more relaxed about the whole scene, and expecting to be able to take him straight home, feeling a lot better himself, hopefully.

Went off

    This is another of those "Dammit, I have to describe something" ones. The dialysis facility has an overhang over the front door, meaning that if it rains the patient's ride can pull up to the door and the patient doesn't get rained on. Yesterday, there was a nice lady in the waiting area asking if her family member (a dialysis patient) had left his phone. Unfortunately, even though she wasn't picking up a patient at that moment, she had left her car in the loading area, in other words in my way. Because at that moment, Dad came out and was ready to go home. I asked her to move her car and she did. However, while I was going to get my car from the parking area, a van for another patient rolled up and took my place. I was cussing and fussing and yelling and only gradually realized that car windows aren't particularly thick and that I was probably audible.
    She didn't actually hear me but she knew that I was certainly mad and cussing. I was suitably abashed and told her quietly that I certainly wasn't mad at HER. Fortunately, the rain had abated and I was able to park by the side of the building. Dad only had to go an extra few feet and barely got wet. No harm was done; frankly, I was fairly giggly about it all day. But I will try to remember that cussing loudly in a car is not the best idea in the world. It's possible that I'm still a little stressed out.

Runaround

    So along with the joys of finding out yesterday whether or not Dad needs a pacemaker (Yes, as I've mentioned), I also got a call from the dialysis center about Thanksgiving. Dad goes on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, so he was scheduled to go on T-Day. However, they had told him that he would need to come an hour and a half early. As this would make Thanksgiving dinner with Margaret's family possible, he was more than OK with it.
    However, yesterday they called and asked him if he could come in Wednesday and run from 4-8. Moreover, they called me instead of calling him, which wasn't terribly useful. I asked and he said he'd prefer to stick with plan A, so I called back to say so. After sitting (strictly speaking, driving-- shhhh) on hold for five minutes, I relayed this message. Then I was told that plan A is no longer possible and if he wanted to come on Thursday he'd have to come an hour earlier still. I just handed him the phone, since nobody had mentioned this before. (Would have been useful information, wouldn't it?) He wasn't happy, but decided he could live with it and we went on to go see the cardiologist.
    Today they wanted him (for Thursday I mean) another hour earlier still, and he dug in his heels. Then they suggested he come in Friday at 10 (an hour and a half early or rather 22 1/2 hours late) and he decided he could live with this. I'm all in favor of the staff having time off for Thanksgiving, but I think they needed to plan this out better in advance. And Dad winds up skipping a day's dialysis and then coming in two days in a row, which is fairly pointless. But hey, that would have been the case if he'd gone for the Wednesday afternoon proposal, so six of one, half dozen the other I suppose. No harm done, I hope, and at least Thanksgiving Day is clear. Glad we got it resolved at least.
    Dreams were gentle and filled with friendly people. Apparently my brain knows that I need a break.

Pacemaker

    Dad is getting a pacemaker a week from Wednesday. I don't know what all this entails, but suffice it to say that I'm very nervous. There is no such thing as minor surgery at almost-93. Still, I'm hopeful that it will be as simple and straightforward as possible. No one has mentioned anything about a hospital stay. Hopefully no one will, but then again hopefully they won't try to send him home (again) when he can neither walk nor use a walker either. I apologize in advance for nightmary blog postings.
    Speaking of same, my devious brain expanded on the new wave nightmare. This time I was on a cliff and couldn't get the photo and dropped my camera phone and was about to fall off the cliff trying to recover it. I wish my brain would just announce, "Excuse me! You have to go to the bathroom!" instead of going through all this rigmarole to get me up. I will try to train myself to dream that way. Before that, I was wandering through an endless subway station and before THAT I was wandering deeper and deeper through an underground (cinema) multiplex trying to find the subway station. Brain? Chill out! Oh well; guess that's not happening in the next 9 days or so.

2 Cold

    No, I don't think I'm Prince. I'm noticing that I'm feeling the cold a lot more this year, but I don't think it's just because I'm getting old. In recent years, the autumn/winter pattern in Columbia has been to have a few days in a row cold and then a few warm. Of course, it isn't actually winter yet, but so far this year, the pattern has been more like two days cold then several days warm.
    Mind you, I'd be delighted if this were to continue all the way through spring, but the cold days really seem to bite harder. You can't really get acclimatized in two days. By the time you're starting to get acclimatized, it's warm again. By the time you get used to that, it's cold again. Of course, I could stop going outside naked and soaking wet first thing in the morning, and-- just kidding!

Diminishing returns

    My royalty check from sales of the hiking book for the last 6 months came to $35. There was a time when the check was for several hundred dollars. It was never a vast amount, but a lot more cheering somehow. I remember years ago visiting Costco in Charleston and seeing books from my publisher there at vast discounts and feeling sad, knowing that that day would come for me. It has come.
    I'm sure the book itself is still going great guns, or good enough. What happened was that my writing partner, reasonably, concluded that I wasn't going to get going on the second edition. I had failed to do so over a period of years, although not so much out of laziness as out of having a car that was failing on me and a limited desire to get caught up a mountain with a disabled vehicle. So he bought my rights to the second edition. Then he failed to do anything about the new edition, too, and the publisher got somebody else to do it. But he still gets royalties as the original author. Granted I got paid for my rights, but I did the same he did on the second (i.e., nothing) and get bupkis in perpetuity. I'm not bitter or mad; just amused as ever about what a brilliant businessman I am.

Dawn

    As everyone knows, I am a born Trotskyite who hates all advertizing. However, there is at least one ad that I have believed. I've been buying the dishwashing liquid Dawn religiously for years, perhaps decades now, because of the little elementary-school-filmstrip type passage in their old ads demonstrating that "Dawn destroys grease." Mind you, the words aren't in fact written; perhaps they meant Greece. Because come to think of it, I've been using the stuff on my greasy dishes all these years and have yet to notice any evidence that it's at all effective against grease. (I think the quote is "Dawn cuts grease," but it's funnier my way.)
    While I'm carping about dishwashing soap, I recently looked and couldn't find any that aren't ultra-concentrated. Now I get that companies jump on bandwagons and moreover words and slogans on labels don't necessarily reflect any aspect of reality. But what I was noticing about Dawn was that as it dried around the nozzle, the resultant goop was fairly hard to get off. It wasn't a major impediment to my life, but it would be kinda neat to have a dishwashing soap that was maybe a little less thick. Ah well...

Fleecier

    I got a fleece blanket to go with my fleecy new chair. Just to bring this cuddliness to an even higher plane, I already had a folding electric blue shag carpet ottoman. (I swear I am not making this up.) The combination equals instant nap whenever I choose.
    Now this is very pleasant. Being a guy who traditionally has always found it difficult to get to sleep, I never thought that being able to fall asleep easily would create a problem. But all this dang napping is starting to cut into my ability to sleep at night. Hey, I've got it! I'll sleep in the fleecy chair at night, nap in the bed! That'll fix everything! (Hey, no nightmares at least.)

A mystery solved

    One of my favorite places to walk around here is unpaved and historic Old State Road in Cayce. Lately, there has been a lot of mysterious and fairly inexplicable construction going on. The other day, though, there were two pretty gigantic pedestrian bridges parked in the middle of the road (in four parts). I might be a little slow, but even I could figure out that this means some kind of park with hiking trail is happening, and I gotta know about that!
    One of my friends is map librarian at the University and also lives in Cayce, so I asked him. It turns out that the local power company is funding a 12,000 Year History Park featuring Native American pot sherds going back that far but also the earthworks for the Civil War Battle of Congaree Creek. It's supposed to be a national park quality facility. Also it will have 2 miles in hiking trails. Call me charged up!
    Actually, two mysteries were solved today. No, three! I got out an apple to eat at lunch and it rattled. I don't think that in all my long life I ever heard an apple rattle. Being familiar with the story of the Mexican jumping bean, I cut it in half. It just had seeds loose inside there. No idea why they had extra space, though. So I guess that mystery is just half-solved. The best mystery, though was at Publix. Signs on the front doors said that the Mystery Item, Publix 6-pack spring water, is one cent today. Solved that mystery and I don't even have a pencil-thin mustache!

New wave nightmare!

    OK I admit it; I'm phoning 'em in. Life seems to be transitioning back to crisis mode, but there isn't anything definite enough to post about. Probably also the source of the nightmares.
    I woke at 2:30 am from a nightmare thinking it was morning. I woke at 4 am from a nightmare thinking it was morning. I can't remember anything from either nightmare. At 7 when the alarm woke me I was peeved because by then I was finally ready to sleep all night. This even though I was having a new wave, 21st century nightmare. I was confronted with the most beautiful scenic vista ever, a total wraparound panorama, and my cell-phone camera totally refused to photograph it. So I was trying to get the phone to give me GPS coordinates so that I could at least tell somebody where it was, but it wouldn't do that either.
    Amusingly, I was supposed to be in Center City Philadelphia which, while a very fine place indeed, is not exactly crawling with gorgeous natural scenic vistas. The place was unbelievably lush and verdant, with unpaved alleys leading off through the evergreens diagonally in five or six directions.
    Eventually I went off on a paved street to find an intersection, which proved to be 22d and 29th. In real life, as you can probably guess, 22d and 29th are 7 blocks (including the Schuylkill River, at least in Center City and University City) apart. I was trying to reach Mary, who lives in Philadelphia in real life, to tell her about it. Given how the phone performed in the dream otherwise, I must assume that I failed to reach her. So OK, it isn't A Modern Prometheus; I just thought it was funny how my brain finally updated to the present day after all those decades of knocking around in college.

Nightmares that ARE nightmares but yet aren't scary

    To clarify, the subject line refers to an earlier entry about nightmares that aren't nightmares, i.e., scary dreams that shouldn't be. Now I'm getting the reverse, or maybe obverse. Last night, all night long I dreamt that I had jobs. That isn't the nightmare part. They weren't very prominent or remunerative jobs, but I found them satisfactory. Even the last one, which as a tipoff was set in the kind of gigantic city-encompassing building that I dream about often as not.
    Then our company was attacked by another company. Not like a leveraged buyout, nor even a Monty Python's Meaning of Life pirate attack. (Well, like that, but with heavier weapons and no punchline.) And I mean, it should have been a nightmare; people were trying to kill us. And I was just leading people out of danger, calmly, almost boredly if that's a word. (Is now!) That's one good thing about working in a building the size of a city: lots of hiding places. Fortunately I woke up before anyone with weapons reached us.
    I don't know what all this stuff means. I seem to have more violent dreams when I eat curry, like I did yesterday. I guess my brain is smart enough not to get scared after all this time.

Free chai

    Or Free Chai and the Grasp of the Obvious. My buddy Paul and I go out for Indian food nearly every Sunday evening. There are at least four Indian restaurants in town, but we tend to focus on alternating between two. At one, the very nice proprietor brought us a couple of cups of free chai the other week. Which was very nice indeed except that I no longer ingest either caffeine or dairy. So I was a wee tiny bit uncomfortable. In the end, Paul solved this by drinking his, switching cups, and then drinking mine too. Then of course I was uncomfortable because now the nice proprietor would be bringing us free chai until the end of time thinking we'd slurped it down.
    Captain Obvious eventually stepped up to the plate. If he brings chai again, I'll just thank him profusely and tell him I can't drink it, but point out that Paul is happy to drink both. Then it's up to him to decide whether to bring it again, isn't it? Gosh I'm getting smart now that I'm really really old!

Fleecy!

    As it turns out, the way to make me happy is for Goodwill to sell me a silly, fleecy chair. A problem with buying from thrift stores, or at least writing about it is that you have to find out after the fact what in hell you're talking about. Googling tells me what the chair is called, but I'm not sure that that will help. It's a round folding chair, very very low. The sitting surface is black and fleecy. People who have seen the photo say it looks moth-eaten, but I don't think moths have a lot of interest in polyester. Google says that such a thing is called a Hang-A-Round chair, though labelage calls it an XL disk chair sherpa. Further labelage suggests that it was new in July and that it was for sale by an outfit called Def Salv for $44. It has had a hard if brief life, but Goodwill still took me for $15.50 for it.
    I don't care; I'm delighted. I can practically nap in it, it's so comfortable. The Monkey has so far been wary of it, as she is with all new things. I have an offer from my friend Evelyn to sew a new cover for it, but I want to see how dedicated Amelia is to destroying it first. Custom-sewn seat covers and kitties of mass destruction probably don't mix. But who knows? Maybe we can rub it with catnip!
    Instant edit: Googled Def Salv and it turns out that this is Target's code for "We ain't sellin' this; it's broke!" The Google hit in question led to a site about shopping for bargains at Goodwill; apparently these items always go to Goodwill. The $44 would have been Target's price, though. Good to know!

Customer service tutorial

    T-Mobile did something really smart. They texted me a questionnaire about how I felt about their service. 7 texts: one to explain, five questions, one to thank me. All the questions were set up to be answered by rating them from 1 to 5. I gave them abysmal ratings for how likely I was to recommend them, for their coverage and for my likelihood of staying with them, a middling one for the price, and a comparatively good one for how much I like the phone. Quick and painless; I didn't mind at all.
    Then they did something really dumb. They called to follow up. At dinner time. And the woman would not accept a brushoff. "I didn't know it was dinner time because it's 4 o'clock where I am..." "Well if you want to call back, the phone rings direct into our office..." I could not convey that I didn't want to talk to her at all ever, that I highly approved of the texting approach, and that if they wanted to offer me a free month or a deep discount to make me happy, maybe that would have been a good thing to lead with. Thus far I haven't received a text nor any further phone calls. Generally speaking, when you have an aggrieved customer, making him more aggrieved is probably not a brilliant customer service strategy. Their problem is that their coverage area for Columbia is much too small and their signal much too weak; there isn't a lot that a nice lady on the phone can do to fix that. Calling at supper time is not one of those things, though.

Easy peasy

    'Cause "lentily" wouldn't rhyme. For reasons that I cannot explain, I keep trying and trying to make lentil hoecakes, which is to say fried cornbread with lentils mixed in. I think the original thought-- Oh hell, I just have to leave that as a sentence, don't I? Just too cool! OK, let's try again: My thinking probably had to do with the fact that corn, although it has a lot of amino acids, is nothing like a complete protein. Lentils are much better in this regard. (I years ago posted that beans aren't a complete protein without brown rice; this I am told is not true. All apologies.)
    Anyway, I seem to have mastered lentil/polenta fritters, or as I prefer to call them, polentil hoecakes. (This will also be my drag queen name, by the way.) They take about an hour, as a minus. As a plus though, they're big fun to make.
    So far I've made them with black lentils (from Whole Foods) and split red lentils (from Trader Joe's). The latter are problematical mainly because TJ's kind of omits the instructions. There's a recipe on the package, but no simple How to Cook These if you don't feel like following the recipe. However, with a lot of added ingredients, the recipe time is 20 minutes, so it stands to reason that the same time would be adequate for just cooking them in water. And, uh, all the spices in the house.
    Regardless, I start by putting a half cup of filtered water in my saucepan and put the pan on medium heat for 5 minutes. I add 1/4 cup of lentils. I add ground cloves and cumin as well as Crystal hot sauce and Tabasco and salt and pepper. So far, I've been adding all these by random shakes and taps, because I'm a rebel. Someday perhaps I'll get organized and measure them out. So far, the problem is more too little spices than too much. So, uh, feel free to have a free hand.
    I cook the red lentils at medium-low heat (2 on this electric range) for 20 minutes, the black for 30. Then I add another 1/4 cup of filtered water and raise the heat back to medium (5). This is also a good time to start preheating the oven to 350. After a minute, I add 1/2 cup of organic yellow grits (aka polenta). I cook for 4 or 5 minutes, stirring like a madman (or anyway poking at it with a spatula) in hopes of keeping the stuff from sticking to the sides and bottom of the allegedly non-stick saucepan. Fairly futile, but fun.
    I dump the goop out on parchment paper on a baking pan. An ambitious person or one with time on his or her hands could put the pot in the fridge or freezer such that the goop is not so hot (or, ya know, wait 10 minutes or so) and then form the polentils into patties. Because the point I was getting around to eventually is that the resulting product is quite burger-like, particularly if you use the black lentils because then it even looks burgerish.
    However, being lazy and impatient, I just spatula my polentil (Hey, it's my word! I get to decide if it's singular, plural or both!) onto the paper and throw the pan in the oven. You do not want your pan on the top rack or the parchment paper will hit the top element and you will be very unhappy. I cook for 15 minutes. I cut up my polentil at this point into maybe 2" by 2" chunks, because when I tried to flip the whole dealio it mostly wound up on the floor, making me very VERY unhappy. Flip the chunks, put back in oven for another 5 minutes.
    Grease your skillet with EV olive oil. Turn the heat to medium. Good cooks do this before putting their fritters in; as you've no doubt guessed, I did it the other way around. They turned out; maybe it was a brilliant innovation! Cook on one side for two minutes; flip and cook on the other side for two minutes. Corn is fairly unpleasant tasting burnt, so do err on the side of undercooking.
    Yeah I know, there's a lot of steps and it looks really complicated, but it just isn't. They're tasty hot, they're tasty warm and much to my surprise, they're tasty cold, too. I think they're pretty good burger substitutes for vegetarians and vegans. You can just cut them up patty-sized midway through the baking stage rather than 2X2 (or going through all the cooling it to make patties before the baking.)
    Try 'em! You'll like 'em!

Edit: Previously, it said to cook the lentils in a cup of water rather than half a cup. Strangely, even though I didn't come back and look this up, that's how I remembered it too when I tried to make this again. You wind up trying to fry lentil soup. It didn't turn out that well, though it didn't turn out all that badly either. My apologies if anyone in the world actually tried to follow the recipe as originally written.

The Other One

    Many, maybe most, of us are prey at some time in our life to the notion that there is a perfect mate for us somewhere out there in the world. Nearly all of us get over this idea. It isn't to say that we settle for something less; it's that perfection is impossible and we accept reality.
    Unfortunately, I am very disinclined to accept either that perfection is impossible or that reality is worth signing up for. More unfortunately still, I keep nominating women to be that Perfect Other, and then I'm surprised when they turn out not to be. Or more often I totally fail to follow up on finding out if she could be at least some close approximation of a perfect match, and eventually she winds up with somebody more aggressive (at last count, everybody). A disinterested observer would probably conclude (A: that I'm nuts, but also B:) that I was so burned by the last relationship that I'm too scared to get anywhere near the fire again. This would be a reasonable inference. But I think I'm going ahead anyway, given the chance. Anyway (mistyped "anywazy," which I think I'm going to coin now), I at least feel grown up enough now not to worry about finding the Other One. After all, one of me is quite enough!

Sunday go-to-meeting knife

    Boy, that sounds violent, doesn't it? Nothing like that, I promise. I think I mentioned that I recently shed my Dollar Tree cutlery buying ways and moved up market... all the way to Kmart. Well I don't need a knife for haute cuisine; just something sturdy enough to cut vegetables. Amazingly, the Dollar Tree ones aren't. (OK, maybe it isn't amazing.) The $5 Kmart knife is better, quite good enough. But the funny thing is that I've had a better knife for years that I barely ever used.
    I got it at Aldi at an end of the year sale. It was marked down from $30 to $20 or so. As I recall, it was made in Germany from Japanese steel. (In the '60s, we would have gotten a big laugh out of that.) I can't figure out why I never used it. I don't think I was treating it as my Sunday go-to-meeting knife, too good for everyday use. I think I thought it was too heavy to be waving it around all the time. But it turns out to be no heavier than the Kmart knife. Anyway, I'm trying to turn over a new leaf. If for some reason I thought that it's somehow inappropriate to use a $20 knife to cut up cucumbers, well I think I'm over it. I think. If not, I have the $5 one and the $7 one to fall back on. Figuratively speaking of course.

1,000 straight

    That's 1,000 days in a row blogging. What?! I need to say anything else?! This is blog entry enough any day, I say!
    Dad's visit to the access center today was blissfully straightforward and boring. As I've mentioned many times, boring is our favorite. The flow through his fistula (i.e., dialysis access in his arm) was down by 66%). So they wanted to take a picture of it and probably do an angioplasty. They did both. He was in no discomfort and required no anaesthesia. So he also walked out no problem at all. I hadn't realized how stressed I had been (previous visits to the access center not having been filled with delight) until we came out and I realized what a gorgeous day it was. I literally hadn't noticed before.

Hoss thief

    I'm coming up on my 1,000th consecutive day blogging tomorrow. So clearly I'll be phoning these in for DAYS.:) Last night, I had conspicuously bizarre dreams. First, I was at an Indian reservation, and somebody wanted me to steal a horse. There was no explanation, and I stress that this was set in the present day. My viewpoint was fairly weird as well, kind of like a scrolling video game.
    The first scene was largely deserted, because everybody was in the concert hall for an opera performance. (It was kind of an up-market reservation.) But there were no horses, so I moved on. Then it was like a very high-falutin' central business district. But then my brain decided this was supposed to be a reservation and provided a shop selling used 8 track tapes and another with similar bric-a-brac. But no horses.
    Then suddenly, I was on the roof of a house, almost a mansion. I seemed to have stepped down to the roof, from where I don't know. I was clearing off pine cones. Then I decided to look inside the house. It was unlocked, in fact open, and totally deserted. Then I heard a kitty moaning from upstairs. It worried me a lot, but I couldn't find the cat, nor any cat food nor any water I could put out for it. But it didn't worry me enough to wake me up; clearly in the real world a cat was moaning. As far as I could tell in the morning, Amelia wasn't anywise discomfited in the night; sometimes she just hollers. ("Hey John! I used the litter box! Come see!") So, ya know, I wish I had gotten up, but on another level I'm relieved I didn't since most times Amelia seems to be hollering just to be hollering.
    Since Daylight Savings Time ended, I've been collapsing fairly frequently by 10, often without even turning out the lights. This was one of those nights. Dunno if that added to the weirdnesses or what.

Excuses

    Last night, one of my favorite bands from the '80s, the Swimming Pool Qs came to town to play a bar gig. We're all a lot older, so although I've seen them a year or a couple ago, they don't go out on tour as often as they used to. Since I had to take Dad to dialysis today and since they were only going on stage at 9, I regarded these factors as more or less sufficient excuse not to go. Which is silly.
    Not having been born in the last 10 minutes, I have been tired before. I could have easily gone to the show and just drag-assed a bit today. I did make some effort to take a nap beforehand, but barely got to sleep at all. But what the hell. I need to stop using Dad as an excuse not to have any life. I no longer have the kind of anxiety disorder that keeps me hidden in the house all the time. It's more like the ghost of an anxiety disorder, a habit of mind. It's a habit I need to break. I owe it to the other old balding guys trying to dance in front of reunited bands from 30 years ago.

Cooler

    My friend Evelyn posted this morning that there's now a place in town serving Ethiopian food. I evinced enthusiasm, so we planned to go there for lunch. However, I had to call to see if their food was actually gluten-free. If authentic, it would be, but for goodness' sake, this is Columbia, SC. And anyway, I remember that the Africa News cookbook recipe for injera (Ethiopian flatbread) featured Bisquick and soda water. So, uh, I wouldn't judge them harshly if they weren't gluten-free; I just wouldn't eat there.
    The guy I talked to didn't know and would call me back, so we went out for Indian instead. (He later did call and they aren't gluten-free, dang it! Then again, there's still an authentic Ethiopian place in Charlotte and I never mind having an excuse to drive up there.) The Indian food was good, and hopefully gluten-free. A lady at a nearby table just would not. stop. talking. including a detailed retelling of a food poisoning episode from a movie. But we were amused rather than annoyed.
    Afterwards, being adults and all we went up the mall to DollarTree to buy silly things for $1 each. She got actual utilitarian stuff, but also hair extensions and a Santa beard. I got a cross between a hat and a mask; the top of a dinosaur head to be strapped on the top of my own. I saw it before Hallowe'en, but at the time they only had one and I felt bad about depriving some child. Now they had a bunch, and Hallowe'en's gone anyway, so I felt no compunction.
    Evelyn had told me about a little cemetery, quite old, a few blocks from her house, and the creepy cooler in what might be an exhumed grave. We went to check it out. The hole could have been an exhumed grave or it could be a sinkhole. Regardless, there was an Omaha Steaks cooler in it. I made one pass, but didn't open it and looked at the rest of the cemetery. Then I said what the hey and went to look. I didn't look closely, but as near as I could tell, it contained a blanket or other cloth item, and a dead black cat. One assumes that somebody hit it with their vehicle, saw no tags nor any way to find an owner and didn't want to leave it just by the side of the road. Putting it in an Omaha Steaks cooler was pretty creepy and ditching it in a hole in a cemetery is maybe only marginally more respectful than leaving it by the side of the road. But I guess there is that margin.
    It didn't suck the fun out of the afternoon; it was sad in and of itself, but the day was just as groovy as it had been before. And maybe I love my little kitty even a little better.

Facebookville

    I dreamed last night that I bought food from a place that was kind of a takeout restaurant version of Trader Joe's. Having already heated up the food, I read the ingredients and found that one just read "cornbread." In waking life, there would be another set of ingredients in parentheses, but in the dream that was all it said. In both dream and waking life, I've learned that cornbread usually includes wheat flour and is thus something I can't eat. So I went to Mary's house and tried to palm it off on her. She wasn't interested, so we went over to Robert's house to see if he wanted it.
    Now in real life, Mary lives in Philadelphia and Robert lives in Vermont. And in the dream, I think I knew this; it was just that Philadelphia was maybe five miles away and Vermont maybe 10. Of course, I had dreams like this before Facebook, like the one where I got on a tram in Columbia, passed through Philadelphia and wound up in London. (I've still GOT to find that tram!) But I still feel like the sense of virtual proximity is partly due to the feeling of mental proximity engendered by Facebook interactions. And that's a good thing, right?

Kind of a warm day...

    No no no, I don't propose to do another weather report. Note the ellipses. It was kind of a warm day to leave frozen food in the trunk for, uh, I think 5 hours. We've been having adventures. Not exciting adventures, but at our combined age of 140-odd, we don't really need any of those.
    Dad had an appointment with the gastroenterologist today at 3:30, and I needed gas. I also needed a few items from Aldi and wanted to take my daily walk. So I went to Aldi, getting the produce I needed and some frozen fruit I'll need soon, got gas and took my walk. When I got home I only had minutes before I had to go get Dad and I needed to go to the bathroom. So I completely forgot to unload my groceries. Oh well.
    The appointment was a trial, a grueling test of our patience such as it is, a reminder of the B. Kliban cartoon about the boredom of St. Cecil by the Turks. You'll probably have to cut and paste the link: http://www.gocomics.com/kliban/2013/06/14#.Unrb3-KQORM We were prepared for a pointless one-hour wait; we were not ready for 2 1/2 hours. In a chilly room. I complained and at least was granted the right to open the door. Thus I overheard it when one of the staffers said something like, "We should have told them in advance it was going to be a two-hour wait." I said, "No kidding!" and went out and said my piece. I received profuse apologies and, after asking permission first, kicked the wastebasket. I felt much better.
    Eventually, the doctor came to talk to Dad. He tried to explain to Dad that the laxative he's using (Senecot) would eventually quit working and when it did, so would Dad's bowels. A colostomy would then be unavoidable. He couldn't persuade Dad, but did suggest and prescribe a different laxative, of which Dad approved. So hopefully Dad will get off Senecot and the other one will work as well or better. He also prescribed Dad another course of antibiotics, and gave us an appointment in February. We are not unhappy not to have to come back before that.
    On the drive home, I got a call from a frantic Margaret wondering where Dad was. I told her it was just a colossal wait and that we were on our way. I got home to an equally frantic kitty who has just about calmed down. I ate supper and finally remembered that I had frozen foods in my trunk. Or rather that I had had frozen foods in my trunk. Oh well; there are worse fates than eating refrozen peaches and strawberries. On the whole, not at all a bad ending to a trying afternoon.

Camden liquor run

    In the What The Hell Were We Thinking Department, there was the time that Robert and I decided that we needed to go to Camden, New Jersey to buy liquor. We were sophomores at Penn, putting the "moron" in "sophomore." The young people out there need to know that 21 was not always the legal drinking age everywhere. In South Carolina, by coincidence, the age was raised, one year at a time, from 18 to 21 when I was, you guessed it, 18 to 21. In Pennsylvania at that time it was already 21 but in New Jersey it was 19 and we were 19. Now, people know themselves. I have to believe that Robert and I knew that we both looked about 30 so long as we didn't open our mouths.
    However, Pennsylvania has or had another eccentricity. Booze was sold in State Stores, liquor stores run by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. I guess we didn't think we would pass muster and we aren't or in any case weren't fake ID type peoples. Goodness knows why we were so hell-bent on buying retail liquor; we weren't heavy drinking peoples either. Maybe we just wanted an adventure.
    We got one, but no liquor. Memory draws its usual gracious curtain. I remember that the only professions evident in Camden were storefront churches, liquor stores (all closed), and the world's oldest one. There was a LOT of that. I was reminded of this trip when the American Top 40: The '80s rerun played "You Can Have It If You Want It" by Kool and the Gang. We heard that many, many times on that particular evening. Women on the street walking in front of us slowly singing it. Eventually we got tired of freezing solid and stopped in at a bar to call a cab. (No cell phones in '81, y'all!) The ladies there put the Kool and the Gang number on the jukebox. Subtlety is not a big thing in Camden, apparently.
    We got this psycho cab driver. He was not happy to be taking a couple of college boys back to Penn from Camden, but that's not why I call him psycho. He kept telling us about belting his wife. We aren't the two most courageous guys in the world, but we did tell him that, uh, you shouldn't be doing that. The worst we got out of it was him spinning his wheels after dropping us off at the dorm. As far as I can remember, I never intentionally returned to Camden again.

Housebreaking

    I had to help somebody break into a house last night. Fortunately I had permission. The somebody in question had locked himself out and couldn't reach a locksmith on a Sunday evening. Two things were funny. One was that I just happened to be wearing a knit cap, a black sweater, and rubber soled shoes. The other was that the locked out person had already tried my method of access, knocking out a window with uhhhhh, I guess you'd call it a flagstone, and couldn't do it.
    Now he's just as strong as me, and probably stronger at the moment since I've been a bit fluey lately. I think it's psychological. You just don't want to hurt the home place; you don't want to break a window. So he tried, maybe half-heartedly, and said to himself that this window's unbreakable. Since he had told me that, too, I was freed from all restraints (I mean, the window is UNBREAKABLE) so I put the flagstone right through it. It was very dramatic, and fairly funny. Getting the window replaced no doubt will be less so, but much easier on a Monday (or whenever he gets around to it) morning than on a Sunday evening.
    What isn't funny is that my phone refused to work in a crisis. Three people called me a total of at least four times to let me know about the situation. The phone froze on the first call, never ringing or vibrating. (Well, more on that later.) It was plugged into the wall, so it definitely wasn't a battery situation. In fact, I had to pull the battery, put it in again and restart and then I got another call, this one I could answer. I later found that somehow the phone had been set to vibrate; I'm pretty sure I didn't do so intentionally, though I get so few calls I might have done so at a show or a movie and then forgotten about it. It's possible that the first person who called did so as part of a three-way call (as she is wont to do) and it was just too much for my phone's little brain. But it certainly shouldn't be. So, I'm considering ditching T-Mobile and the fairly well-liked Windows Phone. At least I got all the messages. Since I check the phone frequently, I wouldn't be too late responding to a crisis. But still.

Inchworm commando

    I was walking along Lake Weston loop trail at Congaree National Park when I noticed an inchworm dangling over the trail. I'm not sure they're inchworms, but they do move like inchworms when they land on you. Green animals that hang from silk for some reason, maybe looking for a ride. More like a centimeterworm anyway...
    REGARDLESS, it was a danglin' and I didn't feel like giving it a ride. So I waved my stick above it with the idea of catching its strand of silk and then setting it on the ground. But NO! It came with the stick, but it would not be set down. I would lower the stick and the inchworm would go sideways instead. I couldn't and can't figure it out, I mean the physics. Maybe he was an inchworm commando on a little inchworm zip-line. Eventually, I moved my stick away and he stayed where he was and I decided that the inchworm and I would just have to accept one another. So long as he didn't try to follow along, he was welcome to go wherever he wanted, horizontally or vertically. I wish him well on his commando mission.

Stress dreams that just... aren't

    Last night, I had some classic stress dreams. Except they didn't bother me at all. For some reason I was in New York City with Dad and Margaret. I guess it's a big step for my subconscious that Dad had a walker and my late mom wasn't present. They didn't play a big part in the dream though. As in real life, I was mainly trying to take cool photographs. For some reason, I was hanging around something my brain had invented as the Time Warner Tower. It was more or less intertwined with what appeared to be an abandoned hotel, which was the cool building I was trying to photograph. I went into the abandoned hotel and found a diner. The diner had a senior citizens' menu. It didn't give discounts; instead, it was supposed to be a bunch of items old people would like, but it didn't make any sense.
    I pretty much figured that Dad and Margaret wouldn't be interested, and they pretty much vanished. The hotel then became an apartment house where I was living. I was in the basement, rooting around and noticed a stick holding up the whole building. Naturally, I pulled it out, and the entire building fell over. It was pretty cool. Somehow I escaped and also got to watch; some other how nobody got hurt, and some other other how, I still had an apartment.
    I took the elevator up, but of course this being one of my dreams, I couldn't find it. Instead I walked into somebody else's apartment, thinking I was opening a door to a corridor. A bunch of people were sitting around in their underwear, but they weren't embarrassed so I wasn't either. I just apologized and moved on. It was all like that; episode after episode of stuff like in a stress dream, where you'd normally be gritting your teeth even in your sleep, but again and again, I'd just be amused. Awake, though, I'm definitely going to look into amending my Dream New York City Building Code!

Bad hair day

    Circumstances conspired to make me head to Publix prior to taking my shower. Thus I was out in public with stupid hair. And it occurred to me that you know that the crises in your life have receded somewhat when you start worrying about things like bad hair days. Or in my case, being amused by them.
    Not that it was ever a crisis, but I'm thrilled to say that the assorted weirdnesses associated with taking probiotics seem finally to be at an end. Along with identifying better than I would have preferred with Ernest Hemingway's amoebic dysentery reporting from Tanganyika, there was the matter of still another odd pins and needles sensation, this one where my spleen is supposed to be, or possibly used to be. All gone now, hopefully for good. Remind me not to take probiotics daily again, ever. Though let's face it, who ever uses their spleen anyway?

Paving

    When I was a tot, in our neighborhood were paved, but it wasn't the blacktop invariably used today. Instead, it looked like... well, hell, I looked it up, so let's go at this from the other direction. It was tar macadam. Now because later on, people (mainly British ones) also use the same term to refer to blacktop, it got a bit confusing. The roads I grew up with were like peanut brittle made out of gravel. Well, not that flat, but anyway like gravel glued together. This apparently is tar macadam.
    I was still a child when the city started resurfacing out neighborhood streets using asphalt. And since I could see bits of gravel in the asphalt, I thought that this was how the tarmac streets had started off. The black stuff just eventually washed away and left just the glued together gravel.
    Now I swear that I suggested this explanation to an older person at the time, a sibling or a parent, and they told me that I was right. Perhaps I imagined it; my family took pains to give me correct information about everything in life, and I can't see any reason this would have been the exception. Still, in my heart of hearts, I believed until I looked it up the other day that this was how those glued-together gravel roads were created. Truth to tell, I still believe it.
    Looking back, I have no idea why it ever seemed like a good idea to use this surface on residential streets, especially during a baby boom. I certainly remember scraping my knee pretty thoroughly when trying and failing to ride my tricycle down the big hill on Mimosa Road next to our house at age 5. Mind you, asphalt probably wouldn't have been a big improvement. Better on bare feet, though, as I recall.

Sex education in the '70s

    An organization that I support asked for video testimonials of experiences with public school sex education in South Carolina. I'm not so well set up for video testimonials, so I figured I'd write it down and give them the link if they're interested.
    There isn't really that much to say, and that's probably the very point. I appreciate that people not living here think that we're conspicuously backward, bewildered by horseless carriages, metal birds in the sky and that consarned telegraph. But really, as out of step as we are in many ways, what is really alarming is how IN step we are.
    People talk about their sex education classes in the '50s and '60s being very minimal. Usually the boys and girls would be segregated and each gender would watch an 8 mm film about birds and bees. I am getting on in years and it was a long time ago, but what puzzles me is how little I remember. I think the triumph of public school sex education in South Carolina during the '70s was making sex seem uninteresting. Maybe those abstinence-only advocates should take note.
    All I remember for sure was that there was a class called Health that was given as a part of gym class during 6th grade, taught by Coach. Coach had gone to State and then washed out with the Minnesota Vikings; meaning no disrespect in any way, I don't think Coach took his formal education too seriously until after the NFL dream evaporated. I don't remember any teaching at all. Forty years along, that doesn't mean that it didn't happen. But I remember Coach teasing Russell and Joel about their braces. In other words, my memory still works; if the classes had had much substance, presumably something would have been retained.
    I do remember that there was a Health textbook. Probably we had reading for homework and quizzes in place of actual teaching. I'm pretty sure we did the gender-segregated 8 mm movie thing as well. I don't recall taking anything away from that, either.
    Short answer then is that public school sex education in the '70s was very, very minimal. It's a miracle in fact that I ever did learn anything about sex-- oh wait, I didn't.:)

Ch-ch-ch-ch-chia!

    To my credit, I saw the fiasco coming at least a mile off. Frankly, I have no idea why it ever seemed like a good idea. My cookies are fantastic. Delicious. Couldn't be better. So of course, I went out and spent a gazillion dollars (well, 16) with the idea of making them so. Well it could still turn out that way.
    It's like this: when you give up gluten, you also give up the glue that holds baked goods together. Most people get around this by using xanthan gum. For no considered reason whatever, I just don't want to do this. (Can't pronounce xanthan? Maybe.) So I've been using one egg in my baked goods to hold stuff together to the extent that they need to be. As my baked goods are usually muffins, this extent isn't particularly great.
    Sometimes a bit of my batter goes astray on the muffin tin and gets burned up. Really, I'm not a total idiot; I appreciate that burned up stuff doesn't usually taste good. But this batter kind of tastes bad per se, apart from the burnedness. With my last batch I finally figured out what the bad taste was: the sulfur taste from eggs.
    So I looked up egg substitutes. The crazy people on the Internet (CPOTI) seemed to feel that chia seeds make a terrific substitute, especially if you're looking for a binder. They bind better than eggs; all you have to do is take one tablespoon of chia seeds and three of water, blend them together and there you are. If you own a blender, you may have already spotted the flaw in the plan. A quarter cup of stuff (they tell me this is equal to 4 tablespoons) won't actually reach the blades. So I put in another tablespoon full of seeds and three of water. Then I could puree and blend.
    I should have just divided the result in two and used half. Instead, I spooned out a quarter cup, which after all that pureeing was probably more than half. I forgot to mention that the other ostensible reason for using chia was that it isn't supposed to have any flavor. This may turn out to be true, but the scent was a bit minty. Not unpleasant anyway.
    So my spectacular, wonderful, perfect cookies have a new alien ingredient in them. We'll see if they turn out better or worse or not at all. Or if we'll all have little green plants growing on top of our heads.

Supreme allied commander

    I dreamed last night that I led an invasion of a small country somewhere very far away. It was also a very small invasion. We all fit in one house. I think the house had one room and one bed. As Supreme Allied Commander, I had the right to hang back at the house while my forces carried out the invasion and took advantage of this right. At some point, a guy who looked like and probably was Colonel Sanders wandered in. I'm not sure if he was in on the invasion or just highly confused, but I let him stay. Eventually, the rest of my troops came back, having had their butts kicked. It was a fairly unarmed, non-violent invasion, apparently. I let Colonel Sanders have the bed and the rest of us just sprawled out on the floor. About half the time, I seem to dream about sleeping. Is this weird or merely mildly ironic? I don't know.
    About all I can conclude from my dreams last night is that I want a house. My other dream was that I had one; still small though. This one didn't involve any invasions at least. It lay next to an unpaved road which appeared to lead to a small unpaved bridge. However, when I went to investigate, what had appeared to be a bridge was in fact a gigantic deck overhanging an infinitely beautiful body of water. I DO want THAT house!

I can dance

    Long long ago, there was a radio station in Los Angeles called KROQ. (I probably won't mention the call letters again, because my brain helpfully keeps suggesting the letters QSKY instead, due to a movie called "FM." But that's another story.) At that time, around 1980, disco was supreme and it was suggested in some quarters that rock music was dead. This LA station programmed all rock n roll and was wildly successful. This success would lead shortly to MTV, which also reigned supreme for a while, but more significantly it led to the biggest thing to hit radio since payola: I'll call it playlist subscriptions.
    First, the LA station sold its playlists to other rock stations across the country. I wasn't in the business and don't know how this worked physically. But even before the Internet, we had typewriters and the US Mail, not to mention teletypes. Judging by what the listener heard, the stations weren't playing literally the same playlists, but rather selections from the same playlists. As the '80s wore on, the same thing happened with other formats, and Adult Contemporary and Classic Rock were born.
    The point of all this blithering is that the other day, my friend Mary in Philadelphia posted on Facebook that she had tuned into an oldies station and heard "I Can Dance" by Leo Sayer (which is actually called "Long Tall Glasses," but SHOULD be called "I Can Dance"). Then a couple of days later, listening to an oldies station here, I heard it, too. It reminded me of my travelin' days, when I would range up and down the Eastern seaboard and hear roughly the same songs on every station, even if all those songs were 10 or 20 years removed from their days on the Hot 100. It always amused me, but it is a little weird. And it outlasted MTV's days of dominance by... oh, a little bit.