Easter

    I drove Dad and Margaret out to Margaret's daughter Bunny's for Easter and to celebrate five birthdays. It was a delightfully toddler-heavy gathering. Our lesson for today was that Tuesday Morning carries vintage toys, including metal tops. They're noisy, but very big with the sawed-off set. Also, "Kids Sing Along Melody Magic in Musicland," while not conspicuously enjoyable the first time, gets even less so on the third repetition. But the kids LOVED it, which was all that was important. A lovely time was had by all, the food was terrific, and the predicted rainfall never arrived. So a lovely Easter celebration all the way around. Only problem was that a picture I took of all the ladies and all the toddlers came out all blurry. 100% operator error of course, dang my eyes.

Microclimates

    I mean really, really microclimates. Just before Spring sprang, these little light purple (almost white) wildflowers sprouted all over the lot across the street. A few days later, they sprouted all over my yard. I guess my yard is shadier and theirs has more eastern exposure. Or maybe they're sci fi space alien flowers and they're hopping from yard to yard as part of their sinister plan to take over our planet. Or anyway Olympia. Naw, it must be the eastern exposure.
    Anyway, they're pretty!

Uppsala

    Thirty years ago, I visited the very nice city of Uppsala, Sweden. Anyway, I assume it was very nice; time and distance have dulled memory. All I really remember is walking into town on a main route in the rain. Very much a scene from one of my dreams, to tell the truth; apparently the youth hostel was not quite in the city center. I remember noticing that though it was daylight, everybody had their headlights on. It was raining lightly, but in those days nobody in the States (that I knew of, at least) had a law saying you had to shine your headlights when it's raining. Being not quite a total idiot, though, I figured that there must be such a law in Sweden, or at least in Uppsala.
    The reason I mention it is that nowadays when it rains, next to no one turns their headlights on except for me. I don't know if this is just a result of everybody forgetting due to a prolonged drought, or if police have decided not to enforce the law anymore, or even if there was never such a law here and my iffy memory is playing tricks on me again. Regardless, I think it's a good idea, just like I did 30 years ago in Uppsala, and I always turn on my lights in the daytime if it's raining. Unless I forget, of course.

On-off switch

    Turning ever more into the blog about nothing, isn't it? My brother Mal gave my brother William and I Skullcandy earbuds to use with the iPods he also got us. (Quite a brother, isn't he?) I noticed immediately that there was an oblong plastic piece on the left earbud's cable, but thought nothing of it, figuring it to be some audiophile detail that I wouldn't understand. Today I happened to grab the cable by this piece, inadvertently squeezing it, and learned to my great surprise that it's an on-off switch. I have no idea why this completely captures my mind. There have been on-off switches of various types on electrical cords for all or practically all of my life, but somehow having one on a headphone cable completely blows me a way. It's like a zombie iPod man, controlled by its earbuds. Or some damn thing. Also the fact that it took me this long to figure it out amuses me boundlessly; I always like it when I'm dumb.

Oh no! Almost forgot to blog

    I'm sure the sun would not drop out of the sky if I missed a day. But the comet might, so I didn't want to take the chance.
    Paul and I went up to Charlotte for the day. We met my buddy Russ at the Ethiopian restaurant and had a fine old time. We were just awed by what Russ plans to do next year. He's taken up mountain biking something astonishing and intends to do the Great Divide ride, from Banff, Canada to... someplace in New Mexico, I think. Heck, I think I could ride across town if you really pressed me. Maybe.
    Then Paul and I went to the Bechtler, which is a nifty if small museum of modern art. It tends to show a lot of birthday and Christmas cards that their artist friends made for the Bechtlers. And they're all very nice, too, but after a while you start wondering if they're really museum-worthy. And it would be nice if there were more explication and context given. But they also have a lot of astonishing stuff besides the Christmas cards. We've enjoyed every visit there, and the changing exhibits are always fascinating.
    OK, so I mailed this one in. It was kind of a busy day. Fun, though!

Cross traffic does not stop

    Now some regular stop signs have an added inscription as in the subject line. I am not in this instance trying to do '80s standup comedy, nor to deliver an old guy "back in the old days" rant. It seems, however, that somebody should have thought all this through a little at some point. The 4-way stop sign was never a terribly good idea, exactly because it isn't quite a stop sign. Since everybody has to stop, it's more like permission to make a rolling stop. (However, I once got ticketed for doing just that, so it isn't REALLY permission to make a rolling stop.)
    They probably should have come up with another sign, something between a yield sign and a stop sign. An orange square saying "All-way stop" or something. (OK, orange is already taken for construction signs; there must be some untaken color, though.) It just seems crazy that they now have to add subtitles to stop signs to convey the message that this REALLY is a stop sign. Maybe that would be a better line than "Cross traffic does not stop." So no, not a rant, and nothing at all important. Just... huh... that's weird.

This is my place; these are NOT my people

    Not that I'm complaining. The other night, I went to a show at my go-to spot Conundrum Music Hall. The performers were playing a style of Brazilian music called choro. They had done a seminar for a World Music class at the university; thus most of the (large, enthusiastic) audience was from that class. Coincidentally, none of my friends made it out to the show; heck, none of my acquaintances made it. There were a couple of people I thought I recognized, but I wasn't even sure of that. As I say, it's nothing to complain about; it was really neat! However, it's very weird to be in a supremely familiar place where you're usually surrounded by quite familiar people and instead be surrounded by strangers.
    It was a nifty show, though, and Tom the owner and William the bartender were there to keep me from getting unmoored. Also the drum kit was a tambourine (well, a pandeiro). No joke! He got astonishing sounds out of that one little frame drum. Now to find a seven-string classical guitar or a Brazilian ukulele!

Still in college in my sleep

    I find it peculiar (or if I've mentioned it already a dozen times, I STILL find it peculiar) that although I've defeated the well-known anxiety dream where you're in a class that you forgot you registered for and never studied and OMG it's time for finals (by simply saying, OK, guess I'd better study) but still have the I-feel-lost dream by getting lost in unbelievably large college dormitories. Last night's model was one story high and miles long and only seemed to have one entrance. There weren't really rooms, just walls now and again. Tired students would grab a rug and throw it down on the carpet, as in kindergarten. I never seem to be in school in these dreams; just visiting, and fairly bewildered about it even in the dream.
    My dreams also tend to have me in multiple settings at the same time. This time around, I was in Columbia, Philadelphia, Rome, and I think New Orleans. I was trying to find out what was playing at the Tower Theater which, 30 years ago at least, was at the end of the Market-Frankford subway/elevated line in Philadelphia. Then we were looking at restaurants, one of which was supposed to be an Italian restaurant that used to be a steakhouse in Columbia. (In waking life Columbia, ex-steakhouses tend to become Mexican, Chinese or seafood restaurants.)
    There was also some kind of business climbing an endless staircase which except for the stairs and the drunken Filipinos nodding on the ground (How did I know they were Filipinos? My dreams have a narrator, apparently.) would have been the Moonwalk in New Orleans.
    Anyway, for all that it was all quite bewildering, I got to hang out with nice, friendly people who reminded me a lot of my Drinking Liberally friends in real life. So apparently my stress and happiness levels are much improved; just need to work on feeling less lost.

Infill

    The area I live in, Olympia, is an unincorporated section of Richland County that happens to be contiguous with Columbia. Columbia is fairly well-known for annexing any land it can get, but somehow has never gotten around to Olympia. This was a mill village back when there were textile mills in this town, but that was all done with many decades ago. Olympia has a bunch of vacant lots (including on two sides of the building I live on and a lot of lots with one or more mobile homes on them. As we are very, very near the river, I sort of thought that nobody was building on these lots because they weren't allowed to. But no!
    In the time I've lived here, two houses used as apartments suffered major damage, but were rebuilt, or at least rehabbed. The laundromat burned down and was demolished; the adjoining Chinese grocery/restaurant was demolished shortly after. Whether this was due to fire or smoke or water damage or just battle fatigue, I don't know. Nothing was built in its/their place(s). So it was a surprise recently to find one of the vacant lots in the neighborhood growing a newly built house. A pleasant one; it's nice to see that with all the subtractions we still get additions from time to time. And it's always nice to see a new house going in close in to town rather than ten or twenty miles away. Urban planners, when there was such a thing, called this "infill."
    So I guess the reason why there's so little new building in Olympia has nothing to do with flood plain issues and everything to do with why I want to leave: frequent freight trains blocking us in or out, and football fans taking over 6 Saturdays every fall. And the two quarries shaking the ground periodically. Ah well; nice to see that somebody's willing to build anyway.

Putting three cents in

    Years ago my siblings Malcolm and Anne got my dad a cell phone and set up an account with a local firm so he would have service. He practically never used it. Two years ago, when he was rehabbing for many months and I had to handle all his bills, I would get a bill from these people most months for four cents or so. I thought it was very funny and would go pay them the four cents. In the mean time, the phone that they were billing for gave up the ghost for the last time. Today, I found that they had sent still another bill, this one for three cents. It cost them 38.4 cents postage to send it, let alone whatever employee time it might take to maintain the account. I stopped around (with my three cents) and told them off a bit. It's just not all that funny anymore. Also it's both a waste of my time and their money. And I mentioned that the phone in question has been defunct for years. The lady who took my pennies said she would send word to the account manager to deactivate the account and stop sending damned stupid money-losing bills. Well, she didn't say it that way, but still.

Fun or funk

    Drinking Liberally meets Tuesday nights; I am their humble host. Once upon a time, my friend Tom Law had a jazz band every Tuesday night at Conundrum, his music hall. This was highly awesome as it allowed me to pile two very fun things up on Tuesday nights. However, those of us who showed up were very sparing with our drink orders, so he was actually losing money on the proposition. So the jazz band moved on. The new venue already had their Tuesdays set with a blues jam, so the band plays on Wednesdays. (The new venue is called Utopia; I didn't mean to keep that secret or anything.)
    So now the DL auxiliary meets on Wednesdays to listen to jazz. The fellows are just as awesome as ever. Last night, Glynis the bass player told us they were trying to come up with a band name so they could start a website and otherwise promote themselves. So I got to thinking. Jeff is an unbelievably propulsive drummer, while Glynis is both a heavy and a versatile bass player. I thought Jazz Force captured what they are; it's a terrible name, but it's accurate. I also tried Funketeers and Key of Fun. Fran suggested Famously Hot Jazz Band ("famously hot" being the slogan Columbia has been promoting itself with these past several years), which I thought was very good. Brucie, whose name I'm probably misspelling, had already suggested H.A.Jazz because Glynis' day job is in the heating and air business. Debbie altered this to Hey Jazz, and also suggested Key of Bliss. This is the one that Sara, the band's godmother and unofficial manager (and sometime singer) liked best. So DL may have named a band last night. Yay, Debbie.
    I, of course, just beat myself up for not conveying what I was trying to. "Key of Fun" was supposed to suggest "funky," but it doesn't, really. I probably should have gone with "Key of Funk," or both fun and funk. It isn't important on any level, of course. But they're so damn funky (only in the good way, naturally) I hope they find a way to fit it in the name somehow.

Human attention span

    Yesterday I blithered about kitty memory span, so I'll do it again about myself, again calling it "attention span" on the subject line to be consistent in my dumbness. Dad had an appointment today at the same clinic he took his hiccups to a couple of weeks ago. It was nothing significant; just a checkout since they hadn't seen him since he went into rehab/nursing home/dialysis world. Even though it had been so little time since the hiccups appointment, I was convinced I would completely forget the way because the period around the previous appointment had been so stressful. However, visual memory came to the rescue and I found that I knew the way perfectly well. Take that, kitty!
    Dude continues not to be exactly brimming over with common sense. He said that he hadn't mentioned to the doctor (his internal medicine doctor, and also at least on paper his primary care physician) what bothers him most, which is the burping. I don't know if he's quit eating clementines on an empty stomach; I can only hope that common sense at least extends that far. Or we get to start it all over again. Let's all sincerely hope not.

Kitty attention span

    OK, not attention span exactly, but memory span. I generally vacuum twice a week, every Monday and Thursday. In fact, I did so religiously for ages, maybe years. Every time, when I started moving the furniture, Amelia would jump down from her bed and go hide. (Amelia is NOT a fan of the vacuum cleaner.) Lately, I had a mini-run of actually having something not entirely unlike a social life, and I missed a few vacuumings. And when the next time to vacuum came around, Amelia would stay up on her bed magisterially (if that's a word) until actual vacuuming commenced. This indicates to me that a cat can remember stuff for as long as half a week, but not as long as a week. Or maybe it's just this cat.
    Then again, it may be also a matter of time of day. Because as I noted yesterday, I'm also making a greater effort to keep my evenings clear, so now I'm vacuuming earlier in the day. Her little brain may be thrown off by Big Stinky Man Thing getting the Big Noisy Thing out while the Hot Sun Thing is still in the sky. Hell, sometimes it confuses me, too.

Thing with feathers

    The darkness at the edge of town seems to be abating somewhat for reasons of its own. Major depression seems to be receding in spite of unhelpful weather today, which strikes me as a good sign. My brain suddenly started making all the decisions for me, the major one being to quit sitting on my ass all morning every morning and instead get out and get groceries and get started cooking or do the laundry or do the vacuuming or do whatever needs to be done. Thus for the first time in four years, I have my evenings free. Now I don't see any evidence that there's anyone out there with any interest in filling in my evenings, but if any such person turns up, well they're there.
    This may be evidence that the longest mourning period for any failed relationship ever is finally drawing to a close. Or that I may have finally latched on to some particles of hope. Or, more likely, that I've returned to my more usual state of "Well OK, there's no hope, but what harm in acting as if there were?" Does it help that Dad's doing better and seems likely to continue that way? Bet your ass!

Ow!

    Woke this morning with a sore back. Partly this makes me want to expedite getting rid of the memory foam mattress in favor of finding some kind of claw-proof air mattress. Of course, that's really what a memory foam mattress is supposed to be, but somehow it never quite works out that way. I just get terrible circulation whenever I sleep on my sides, and often as not have a sore back when I get up anyway. But the latter probably isn't the mattress' fault.
    Somehow, the new laptop seems to be doing me in. This makes no sense. It's just a laptop. It's shaped a little differently than the previous one, being a bit wider. But there's no reason that I can think of that it would make me shift in the chair in any way such that it would result in back pain. However, I adjust to realities sometimes. The old laptop was raised from the table on a, well, another table, a breakfast-in-bed tray. I've put this one on a couple of telephone books on top of the tray on top of the table. This is to say a couple of inches higher. (Hey, Columbia isn't a really big town.) Hopefully, this will result in less back/neck pain, just like putting the old laptop on the breakfast tray did. I'd hate to go through with that spine removal surgery I've been threatening to have for all these years.
    Dad had another good day and is feeling both good and well. I'm starting to believe that I may at last get though as long as a couple of weeks without some other fiasco occurring. Yay!

Crazy from the heat

    OK, grinning like an idiot from the perfectly beautiful weather (though it is a little hot in the car) but I'm not sure I can manage an actual blog entry that makes any noticeable degree of sense. For once, my only complaint is that I HAVEN'T SEEN THE DANG COMET YET! In spite of the crazy beautiful weather, it might not be in the cards this evening either, as the beautiful skies still feature a pretty good sprinkling of clouds. (Have I said "beautiful" enough yet?)
    I feel doubly good about the good weather because it means Dad and Margaret will be running the heat less, and thus getting dehydrated less. Knock on wood and everything, but he's still doing quite well. Crossing all available fingers and toes that this continues.
    I think it's funny that with the old computer dead, I have to go back and read my own blog to read my own recipes. My vegan stew probably doesn't rate a recipe (Take Kitchen Basics vegetable broth, a potato, a cup of beans, a cup of brown rice, all the vegetables in the world, a sauteed onion, a teaspoon of minced garlic and blops of Pickapeppa sauce and Crystal hot sauce. Cook until you get tired of cooking. Brilliant!) but I'm very happy with it. Although this may have more to do with the B vitamins I take every time I eat vegan. Works for me either way.

The harpsichord part

    A while back, I was kvetching in this space about how limited the playlists on oldies radio stations are, specifically noting an odd tendency to play "Do You Know what I Mean?" by Lee Michaels considerably more often than seems necessary. Today, they did it again and this time I let it play, more from inattention than any keen desire to hear it. It isn't that I don't like the song, but I owned the single and played it to death back in the day. I don't really need to hear the darned thing anymore.
    However, I was surprised as hell to hear during the bridge ("Lee, you haven't loved me in nearly four years...") a very loud harpsichord part, or something that sounded like a harpsichord part. Now I realize that 1971 is a long time ago and everything, but really, we had stereo back then. Maybe not really good stereo, but stereo nonetheless. It tended to be printed on all the records in REALLY BIG LETTERS. So I don't know where that damned harpsichord part has been hiding for 42 years. It's also true that the balance on my car stereo is very iffy; it loses the lead guitar part from CDs that I know by heart. But still; even if it's normally faint, I think I would have heard that harpochord (I know it's a typo; I like it better that way though) somewhere. Anyway, maybe I'll start listening to all those overplayed oldies (at least once each) and find what else my car stereo can reveal. Pretty cool.

UPS Safety Training Vehicle

    This town is a UPS hub, so perhaps that's the explanation. But then it has been for almost 20 years, so it's odd that it's taken this long to see one. Or two. What am I talking about? That IS the question, isn't it? Last week, I saw what appeared to be a UPS truck, with all the markings, but with windows on the sides and seats in back. The day before yesterday, Dad saw one with me, too. This one was marked UPS Safety Training Vehicle. (If you run a Google Images search on this phrase, you'll be SOL as far as trucks with back seats go, but you will see some very cool looking German UPS trucks. Go figure.)
    Now I'm having trouble figuring out how much you can teach future UPS drivers about safety by them driving around in the back of what amounts to a bus. Nor can I make much sense out of making a UPS truck into a bus instead of, say, taking a bus and painting it brown. But I'm sure it all makes perfect sense to them. I guess having a bus look like a UPS truck lets the future drivers see exactly what kind of situations a UPS truck gets into. I guess. I think my dad's approach (and everybody else's dad's approach, for that matter) of letting the learner drive while the teacher sits on the passenger side and offers gentle guidance (or in my dad's case, stomps the floorboard and hits the dashboard when he wants the driver to stop or slow down) works pretty well.
    Mainly, as with orange and green, I'm just relieved to find that I wasn't hallucinating when I thought I saw a UPS truck with seats in back. Or if I am, I'm very consistent and convincing in my hallucinations. That kind of stuff will get you elected around here.

Orange and green

    I think I've mentioned before that I have some odd brain damage that makes me confuse the words "orange" and "green" but not the actual colors that the words refer to. I always thought it was just me. Last night at a show at Conundrum, a young woman unwittingly referred to a bright orange shirt as a a bright green one. I was ridiculously relieved to find that there's somebody else out there with the same problem. I told her that I do that, too, and she was just as surprised as me. Now the question is why. The gentleman in the bright green shirt (who was the main act at the show and who had bought the shirt earlier in the day at a thrift store and who had just discovered that it was in fact a shirt from Wendy's, which is what made it the center of discussion in the first place) thought it was the Gs, but since they're pronounced differently and you learn colors as a baby this seems unlikely. It's a mystery, I say.
    Dad had an appointment with the heart doctor today and was downright chipper. He did find it a bit taxing doing all the walking to get around in the Heart Hospital, but was still pretty chipper when I left him. So yay!

Learning to speak

    It's kind of odd being this many years old and finding myself unable to speak to an attractive woman. Once I get started, it's no longer a middle school/high school situation. In other words, I can talk perfectly normally; it's just in starting to speak at all that I'm all 14 years old again. I guess after this long in the cold I shouldn't be surprised, but I rather am. I had so given up on the idea of ever getting involved again that I guess it's hard to get the door open on that part of my personality. (On the other hand, having given up so thoroughly was why I could suddenly talk normally to attractive women. So perhaps I'm un-giving up without letting myself know, and that's why I'm tongue-tied again.) Anyway, something to work on.
    Dad is having another bad day today, but a different kind. He was just very, very weak, and also working his jaw somewhat spasmodically. I suspect that these are side effects of the Thorazine he used to stop the hiccups. He has already quit the Thorazine, so hopefully the side effects will pass without the hiccups restarting. Knock on wood.

Circus train

    Considering yesterday's entry, it's best to update Dad's story before I start blithering. He's much better. Somebody talked him into trying the Thorazine again, and eventually it worked. Of course, now the next priority will be getting him off Thorazine as quickly as practical, but since he called today asking for enemas and laxatives (which I went and got) since the Thorazine was making him constipated, that shouldn't be too hard a sell.
    Ringling Brothers & Barnum & Bailey Circus just came through town. I think maybe they've changed their circus train. I saw it both coming and going this year (well, it was stopped both times so I got a good look) and it seemed really odd. Especially the end of the train, which featured various vehicles, including a school bus, on flatcars. I guess they must know what they're doing as regards the cost effectiveness of such a move. It just looked really odd.
    I also can't quite figure how they're getting all those vehicles off the train at every stop. A crane would be cost prohibitive, I imagine. I guess they must have an incredibly sturdy portable ramp. I think it's too much to expect every city the circus visits to have some place you can drive a school bus right off of a railway flatcar, but perhaps I'm being naive. I have half a mind (I could stop right there, couldn't I?) to email them and ask just how that works. Not long ago, they made a big production out of the unloading of the circus train, and there would be a caravan to the arena led by the elephants. Granted, I'm not in their target demographic, but I haven't heard anything about that this year or in recent years. Kind of a shame, but no doubt safer for the elephants if they have quit doing the caravan.
    Point of all this was that it was a crazy cool looking train; I wish I could have taken a picture, but I was out on my laxative hunt. And that was a little more important.

Beat goes on

    Dad still isn't getting better, nor is he getting more rational. Yesterday evening, he called saying that the hiccups still hadn't gone away, that he had called the ER to see if he could get them to write him the prescription that they had refused to write Friday and they said that he would have to come back, and he told me he wanted to. We had just spent 6 hours of Friday morning and afternoon finding out that they don't write prescriptions for hiccups. He wanted to go back on Saturday night. BEST result would be that after 12 hours, we would find out that they STILL don't write prescriptions for hiccups. I told him how sorry I was but that I just could not do it. I'm not being selfish; I'm on a restricted diet and have to do my own cooking and had gotten two days behind due to the previous adventure. I suggested he call my sister Anne (a doctor in Boston).
    I didn't quit trying to help, though. I came up with a number of suggestions which I relayed to Anne, some of which may have been useful. I haven't heard further. Hopefully he's feeling better, or at least not worse. I think the best suggestion I made was that he stop eating clementines on an empty stomach. They give me reflux when I eat them not on an empty stomach. As he was burping for months before he started hiccuping for a week, it would be reasonable to infer that he has GERD. I think and hope that if he would stop, he would start getting better immediately. I hope Anne has better luck convincing him than I did.

I STILL think it's funny

    No doubt I've used that subject line several times over the years, but I mean it differently this time. I STILL think it's funny that I've gotten this old and my parents never gave me a hard time about being gone for hours or coming in late, no girlfriend has ever given me a hard time about being gone for hours or coming in late, but my CAT! My cat is another story. She gives me whatfor any time I'm gone more than three hours. It would be further evidence that she is the reincarnation of my mom except that as I say, my mom never much bugged me about my movements. Maybe her stay on the astral plane changed her attitude of course.
    So the funny (in the peculiar sense, possibly) upshot of yesterday's ER adventure was hearing about it from Amelia when I finally got home. I just stopped in to feed her before going out to supper (having missed lunch and also the opportunity to cook my own supper) so I gave her all the attention I could in a flying visit and promised I would be home again soon. Not surprisingly, I heard about it all over again when I got home at last for good. I would get the possessive kitty. I keep hearing about these indifferent, standoffish cats. I think it would be very interesting to meet one of those.
    Dad unfortunately is still hiccuping and had a very bad day at dialysis. ("Miserable," he said.) He had another shortness of breath episode on the ride home, but the silver lining is that it was bad enough to stop the hiccups. So hopefully his evening is better, and the situation improves.

Emergency room again

    I'll make a long story short because, essentially, nothing happened. It took a long time not to happen, though. Dad is still hiccuping, day and night, after more than a week. Even this would be OK except that after a while he struggles and struggles to breathe and it's very scary to all concerned. He called his doctor this morning but the practice is only open until noon today and they couldn't give him an appointment and recommended he go to the ER. So we did.
    Friday morning is a quiet time in the ER so we got a lot of attention, maybe too much. He had bloodwork done, a CT/CAT scan was most frustrating, because Dad was reasonably sure it wouldn't show anything, but we had to wait an hour and a half for it and about that long again for the results which proved to be (wait for it) negative.
    OK, I promised a long story short. They found that he had a bad bladder infection, and started him on antibiotics. They gave him Valium for the hiccups, but this didn't help either. The doctor swore up and down that however scary the breathing problems might seem, Dad is always getting oxygen and he won't die from them. So we wasted 6-odd hours of our lives on a gloriously beautiful day that we couldn't see at all and got a treatment for what we weren't looking for help for, and none at all for what we were looking for help for. However, it was important to knock out the bladder infection, so I'm glad we made a good start on that. And it was good to hear that we don't have to be scared of the scary-sounding whooping breathing sounds.
    Having missed lunch, I used it as an excuse to go out for Thai food for supper. So there's that, too.

Concentrated sleep

    I've gone back to listening to old-time radio while I'm sleeping. Specifically, I'm listening to my favorite show, "Escape." Because the individual episodes were recorded and re-recorded by a lot of people over a lot of years, the volume levels vary a lot. So generally, I'm not so much listening as hearing a low mumble that I can't quite make out. A few episodes are recorded louder (or anyway play back louder) and are actually audible. These tend to enter my dreams in strange ways, such that I dreamed last night that Raymond Burr was interviewing an Italian man, partly in Italian. While Raymond Burr did relatively little radio back in old times, William Conrad and Paul Frees did a lot, especially "Escape," and sound a good deal like them. I doubt that there were any interviews in Italian, though.
    The point to all this blithering is that I seem to be getting more rest with less sleep, possibly due to the radio shows triggering more dreaming than I normally do. Anyway, I wake at 4 or 5 or 6 and feel like I had a full night's sleep. Not being a total idiot, I generally go back to sleep just the same, reasoning that if feeling like you're getting more sleep is good, actually getting it is even better. The probability is that this trick won't work too much longer (as none of them ever seem to work long) but I'm enjoying it while it lasts.
    Very, very unfortunately, Dad's hiccup medicine only worked for one pill's worth, although I suppose he's doing a little better than he was before. I'm about ten miles and two years beyond the end of my tether. I'm far more than ready to go more than a week without some new disaster cropping up, and even more ready still to have something major go right for a change. Or even minor.

Better

    Dad's hiccuping got considerably more serious, such that he was having trouble breathing and was considering the emergency room, but he was able to get an appointment with his primary physician for this afternoon and I took him over there. They gave him a prescription and there was a little pharmacy in the same building, so we got the pills no problem. And they worked! So hopefully, that crisis is over, and he has the pills for any recurrence that might happen. So yay.
    I'm doing OK with the new computer, though it has little quirks and eccentricities that I could live without. I remembered all the important passwords (well, one was written down somewhere other than on the dead computer), so life returns more or less to normal. I still think it'll be no major problem to get the old computer back up and running, but it no longer has any kind of priority. The last couple of days has been a neat short course in what is important and what isn't. As have the last couple of years. (Somewhere all my English teachers are shaking their heads regarding my notion of subject-verb agreement.)
    Also I went back and got the closest picture ever of Al. E. Gator. Unfortunately, his head wasn't really visible, but it was still pretty cool. Also fun to hook the Nikon up to the new computer without bothering with its associated CD. I was pretty sure that that would work and it did. And it was a crazy beautiful day, in spite of the cold and the wind. So winners all the way.

Not having a good time

    The elderly laptop has apparently given up the ghost. This is no major loss since I've had a new one ready to go since my last birthday, but unfortunately it took my passwords with it. (Also my jigsaw puzzles; oh no!) So I can Facebook and I can Webmail, but buggerall else. I'm a little pressed for time and stressed out, so this is likely to be one of the more bare bones blog entries ever; just mainly wanted to note that the only email addresses I still have are those from prior to 2009, so if you have changed email addies since then or if you haven't known me that long, I'd appreciate it if you would send an email so I can stay in touch.
    Also the dialysis facility took an hour to get Dad in today. Also he's been burping and hiccuping constantly for five days straight. Also it's supposed to rain and pour all evening. But other than that, everything's great!

More clods

    I had a lovely hike at Congaree National Park today, but due to all this rain it was very, very muddy on the trails. Once I posted how stupid I felt leaving clods of dirt on my floors after returning from hiking. I'm feeling better now. I knew the boots were muddy, so I scraped them on the boardwalk, I scraped them on the bricks and I scraped them on the asphalt, and when I got home, I wiped my feet carefully on both welcome mats. And mud still fell off. So I wiped them again, and mud still fell off. So I went out and kicked the railing on the porch. I looked like a petulant three-year-old, no doubt, but that's OK. Mostly I am. Anyway, I seem to have defeated the clods at last. Dang clingy clods!

Shot that gator!

    Twice! With two separate cameras! My friend the alligator is making a habit of basking in roughly the same spot as he did the first time I saw him, though never as close to the trail since then. Wednesday I went to Congaree Creek carrying a camera and determined to get my shot, but it had rained torrentially in the previous days and rising waters made the trail into the alligator zone impassable. This confused me as I had actually been back there since the rain and made it through; those waters took a few days to rise, I guess.
    Yesterday I went back, but I wasn't overly optimistic about alligator viewing. I thought the odds were good that I would be able to pass the trail, but it was very, very overcast. I wasn't at all sure that alligators bother basking when there's no sun. So I only brought my older camera. It turns out that they do bask even without sunshine. (45 degree air is preferable to 45 degree water, apparently.) But I didn't see it, walking right past.
    As I climbed out of the alligator zone, I met a very nice father and son ahead of me on the trail. They stayed back to ask me if I had seen the gator and when I said I hadn't, they led me back and pointed him out to me. (They also loaned me binoculars, but I'm awful with binoculars and couldn't see him with them. But he was perfectly visible without.) I shot a picture, which turned out OK once I had cropped it down to just the alligator. But it was very dark.
    Today the forecast was sunny, but it wasn't turning out that way. But I decided to have faith and struck out with my super-duper Nikon given to my by my super-duper sister Anne. This time nobody had to point out the alligator to me. However, s/he/it was still far enough away that I had to crank the telephoto all the way. The sun did indeed come out, which helped a lot. I think it's a pretty brilliant picture, but then I would, wouldn't I?

Did gas come out?

    I got gas yesterday evening at Li'l Cricket on State St. The display on the pump was stuck on "for shopping here. Have a nice day," so I wasn't absolutely sure that the card reader was working. The pump worked and I filled up, but I still wasn't sure. I didn't feel like being prosecuted for driving off without paying, so I went in to ask if the pump had accepted my card OK. The attendant asked, "Did gas come out?" I laughed and said yes, explaining that it was stuck on "Have a nice day." She said "Have a nice day," too.

A very very brief history of advertising

    Some years ago, ten maybe, Geico had a series of unbelievably funny TV ads. The ones I remember were two. The first featured emergency personnel investigating a bouncing house, only to find that it was caused by a man jumping up and down because he wasn't going to pay too much for insurance anymore. The second one demonstrated that they provided above average customer service with a counter example: a man at a diner tells his waitress that he had asked for his toast with no butter. Without changing her dour expression, she scraped the butter off on the side of the table and put it back on his saucer.
    One suspects that Geico noticed faster than I did something important. People loved the commercials, but took away from them that... there's... an insurance company that makes funny TV commercials. They were spending a lot of money and getting practically no returns. Thus was born the Geico gecko. These commercials are sporadically funny. Mostly they're just peculiar in that everyone asks, assuming a gecko could talk, why would he do it with a British accent?
    However, the ads are successful in that it's impossible for anyone who has ever seen one (or two or three anyway) ever to forget that there's an insurance company called Geico. The cavemen? Well OK they got a sitcom briefly, but I'm not sure they had the same impact.
    Which brings us to Scott's. I don't know if they also have ads on TV, but there's a lawn care products company called Scott's which has recently decided to make infinitely irritating radio ads featuring a fake Scot named (I bet you can guess) Scott. I find myself with the wan hope that the company will abandon this line of promotion, but remembering the gecko's example, I see no possibility. After all, I remember their name and their business now. Next? Exxon Mobil the gerbil!