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.