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.

Ready for our closeups

    My friend Paul got an iPhone somewhere around a year ago. I got a Windows phone earlier this year. We both like the cameras on our phones except for one little thing: we couldn't shoot little things. We didn't know how to zoom. We thought that we couldn't zoom. It made us sad.
    Last night, Paul told me he thought he had figured out how to do closeups with his phone camera. He was mortified that he hadn't figured it out before. He opened the camera app, put his hand on the screen and, uh, ungrabbed. Balled up his hand, touched the screen and flexed his fingers outwards while still touching the screen. I'm sure that could be better phrased. I'm sure if we had read the effing manuals, we would find it better phrased there. Oh, I tipped the end of the story, didn't I? So I got my phone out, turned on the camera, did exactly the same thing, with exactly the same effect. Bingavast! (One gets so few opportunities to say "Bingavast!") Zoom!
    So now, instead of boring my Facebook friends stupid with pictures from far far away or by manufacturing closeups via cropping, I can bore them stupid with actual closeups. Let's get started!

Sour grapes

    I visited the State Fair three times and never rode any rides. Obviously, if you're feeling sour grapes, the last thing you're going to admit is that you're feeling sour grapes. By definition, what you're going to say is that those grapes were sour anyway. But I have more than a suspicion that they really were sour, at least a bit.
    News reports suggest that they might be a little worse than sour. A bunch of people were injured yesterday or the day before at the NC State Fair on a ride called the Vortex, which started up again when they were trying to leave it. (De-ride?)
    So yeah, rides built and operated by carnies have a certain level of safety issues, but the selection of thrill rides is also a little odd. Mostly, they take your really really high and spin you around. I'm not the world's biggest fan of either heights or dizziness. For some reason, I have next to no problem with being on the side of a cliff one or two thousand feet in the air with no safety equipment, so long as my feet are in contact with the actual ground. Put me in a harness and throw me a hundred feet in the air and I'm much more alarmed.
    I like roller coaster kind of rides; this fair only had one, and it was decidedly mickey mouse. (I think it did have mouse in the name. Google says Crazy Mouse.) Seven years ago, a child was thrown from a roller coaster at our State Fair (then the Mad Mouse), which may be why the coaster is so mild these days.
    The only other thing I would have liked to ride was the log flume, but those are ever so much more fun in the summer when getting splashed with water is delightfully cooling. Seems like a trip to Carowinds is in order! For all that they have a lot of throw-you-around new roller coasters, they still have the old ones, and the old log flume, and the lines are a lot shorter. I'll plan on going next summer, and save my sour grapes for the ones with long lines!

Stuck in the nineteenth century

    Last night I dreamed that I walked to the nineteenth century. Apparently there was an admission charge. But then I walked a ways on a paved, though not very well-paved, road. At some point, I noticed that I was next to the sea and that clipper ships in great numbers were going by in both directions. So maybe it was the eighteenth century. I didn't get to enjoy much tourism there, whatever century it was, but I was able somehow to return and get my stuff and my cat. But then I was back here again and worried about my cat, lost in time.
    The rest of the night, whatever I would dream, I was impatient with the dream because I wanted to get back to the first dream and rescue my cat. The other dreams were pretty interesting, too, though the only one I remember is one where a good friend from high school was charged with some serious crime. In real life, his only crime is not participating in Facebook. I never did succeed at getting back to the nineteenth century, though since the actual cat was lying across my legs it's a fair bet that my not-quite-sleeping mind knew that everything was all right. There was never anything like a nightmare level of alarm; just a slight annoyance. I have asked Amelia what the nineteenth century was like, but she just gives me a look like, "What?"

Still an idiot

    Not to, you know, overstate the obvious, but there is further evidence that I might in fact still be an idiot. First evidence relates to the agony of da feet. The broky foot sensation that I complain about periodically appears to be due to... tying my shoes too tight. Yes, it's true, at 51 John yet again demonstrates that he is almost, but not quite yet, ready for kindergarten. I'm going to get this dressing myself stuff down yet!
    But I can top that. Last night, I ran the battery down on the smart phone to the point that the screen dimmed and it was otherwise complaining about it. I went and plugged the phone to the charger. I did NOT plug the charger into the wall. Unbelievably enough, this morning the phone stopped working. Isn't that weird? I blame the incipient Alzheimer's. Or my dangerous one-glass-of-wine-a-week drinking problem. On the bright side, when I did get it plugged in, it charged up much quicker than the previous smart phone did, and maybe even faster than the previous dumb phone did. So that's what it was! An experiment! And a successful one at that. And not the least bit evidence of dumbness. No sir!

Tie a string

    Maybe it's just me. Every time the car starts running out of gas, I feel a slight uptick in nervousness, or tension maybe. The odd thing is that after I fill the tank, it's a couple of days until the feeling subsides. I've tied an invisible string around my finger to remind me to get gas, and it takes a little while for it to untie itself.
    I'm trying to figure out if this is an evolution artifact. Did ancient man think, "Gotta knap me some flint!" and when the flint is knapped, did he still feel a left over imperative towards flint knapping? I guess there aren't many precisely analogous situations. Getting gas is so easy; failing to do so in time has such serious (or anyway annoying) results. I guess it's worth tying a particularly strong knot in the mental handkerchief. But it's very peculiar getting into the car the day after getting gas, knowing (and seeing) that you have a full tank, and still having a particularly strong urge to go get gas. Hopefully, it IS just me.

Poison. Deadly poison.

    Traditionally, I try to fake people out when my cooking is good by telling them it's awful, horrid or disgusting, and/or I apologize profusely for same. The latest muffin creation, the one with cocoa butter and coconut, is so good however that I had to go on right past these mild approaches. I labeled the bag, "Poison. Deadly poison." Truth to tell, this second batch isn't quite as overwhelmingly excellent as the first one, possibly because I used almonds instead of pecans and the almonds were maybe a little past their prime. But they're still dang good.
    A stranger thing: I've been making these things for years now. (You can find the basic recipe by googling the name of this blog and add "heaven one bite at a time.") For ages, I would put the puffed brown rice in a bag and pound on it, with the idea that I would produce a little flour. Finally and only very recently, I decided that the very little bit of flour produced couldn't possibly make a difference in the final product, so I quit bothering with this step. Since then, I can't get all my ingredients in the muffin cups. So I guess all that pounding did something. Anyway, I'll try pounding again next time and see if my muffins start fitting again. It's possibly of course that I used regular muffin cup liners instead of mini-muffin liners all this time, and just now have switched to the minis. But I don't think so. Anyway, these are the life-and-death issues that rule my life. I know; must be nice not having real problems.

You'd think there'd been a shutdown

    Since the gubmint reopened, crowds at Congaree National Park have been much greater than I've seen in years. Of course, summer just ended and mosquito season just ended, so there would probably be better turnout than there had been all summer regardless. And although low water levels make for little in the way of scenic vistas, the hiking is much better and easier; apparently I'm not the only one to appreciate this. I ran into more people out on the trails than... practically ever. But it was a great day and a wondrous hike. And my new Keen boots coupled with my old Dr. Scholl's orthotics seem on the way to fixing my feet and back. So yay across the board.
    I fell asleep on the Bosox-Tigers baseball game, so I put on sports radio to find out the result and fell asleep on that, too. Perhaps for this reason I dreamed that because they did well in their series, the Dodgers were going to the World Series, too. It would be a round-robin affair. Well I thought it was funny.

The AT40 effect

    I'm pretty sure I've mentioned before how odd it is hearing American Top 40 episodes from the '70s and '80s and finding that songs I thought I knew which year they came out in fact came out much earlier or later than I thought. Today I got it condensed into one record: the not very funny novelty number "Mr. Jaws" by Dickie Goodman. This is a record where a reporter is supposed to be interviewing characters from "Jaws," including the shark. All the answers were short excerpts from hit records of the day. I had no recollection that "The Hustle" was already a hit in 1975; I thought it didn't come out until I was in high school. There were a few others, but memory draws a blissful curtain. I'm not sure that I ever actually heard "Mr. Jaws" before, but then 38 years does offer a lot of blissful curtains. It's on YouTube if anyone is curious, but I can't say I recommend sharing the experience. Still, though it wasn't particularly funny haha (and I can hardly imagine it was in 1975 either), it was certainly funny peculiar.
    Last night I dreamed peculiarly as well. I was in this neighborhood built on the side of a hill. I guess I should be grateful that for once I didn't dream I was inside a world-encompassing building; might reflect an improved mental outlook. It was an old, seedy neighborhood peopled with fairly seedy individuals. However, it was rapidly gentrifying, to the extent that mansions were going up. Then I saw what the mansions were replacing; a bunch of tombstones were lying jumbled together as if a graveyard had been cleared. There was also an obelisk commemorating an archbishop of Argentina. What an archbishop of Argentina would be doing getting buried in Columbia SC (or even if there is such a thing). Presumably not a reference to the current pope. Anyway, just in time for Hallowe'en!
    I later dreamed that I was with a girlfriend, but it wasn't Alice. However, we were with my cat Amelia and Alice's late cat Madeline. It wasn't a creepy dream as it was happening, but returning dead cats are also kind of a Hallowe'en theme. Only 12 days to go!

Glorious boredom

    Nobody gets to complain that this one's boring. We're thrilled that it's boring! Dad had his catheter for dialysis removed this morning. (It's called temporary, but they had been using it all year.) The procedure was quick, straightforward and as far as I can tell painless. They used only local anesthesia, so he was neither weakened nor groggy. So yeah, boring. Yay for boring!
    Because it was quick and without complications, I find myself with a lot more free time than I was expecting today. The weather isn't exactly anything that the Chamber of Commerce would brag about, but Congaree National Park is open again, and I mainly go there for the breathing rather than the vistas anyway. I was planning to go Sunday, but I think I'll jump the gun by two days. If that's boring too, well I can live with it.

Comedy gold

    OK, now and again, here and there I may whine and moan a bit about the advertising on radio. I've been paying attention to my own responses, and to be honest what I object to is advertising per se. Or rather, being forced to listen to something that I don't want to. By and large, any kind of voice annoys me more when used in an ad. Any approach to humor gets on my nerves more if used in an ad.
    That said, the ultra-macho pissed-off guy approach to trying to sell pickup trucks has a special place on my pet peeve list. Moreover, I just can't imagine who they're reaching with this strategy. "Oh hell yeah! I'm mad at Ford and Chevy, too! Lemme go get me a new Ram truck!" I'm just not seeing it.
    However, one delightful aspect of these ads is when they get to the end and the POed actor has to read all the legal warnings very, very, very fast-- and still in character. ALMOST makes up for how annoying this and all other radio ads are. Almost.
    While I'm blithering yet again about the radio, something else weird that delights me: CBS has restarted their sports radio network. When they play their jingle, every time I hear "C-B-YES!" I'm not sure that it's really intentional, but for some unfathomable reason I get a kick out of it every time. Googling indicates that many, many local stations have used this as a slogan over the years; I didn't see any indication that the national network had done so. But then, they may have selected the name in the first place because it naturally creates that sound. Hey, it's possible!

Fiascoes that work out = still my favorite

    As I mentioned yesterday, I made some muffins with much too much too much cocoa butter in them. Or so I thought. It turned out that 6 fluid ounces of cocoa butter (or 2 oz. in weight) coupled with 4 fl. oz. of honey pretty much makes white chocolate. And fairly va va voom white chocolate. My muffins turned out crazy good; I told the guys at Drinking Liberally, "why am I giving these to you losers for free?" (They laughed.)
    Dad goes in Friday morning to have the catheter in his chest (for dialysis) removed. Hopefully, this means that the access in his arm will be adequate to handle the full load. As the previous one got clogged (or rather clotted) repeatedly, one could feel more confident. But we follow our orders and hope for the best.
    In less important news, the inflatable mattress bit the dust. I could blame the kitty, but really I was having to pump it up twice a day from the time I bought it. It's just as likely that it was poorly sealed from the beginning and got worse. The kitty, however, is still claiming victory. The return to the too hard memory foam mattress is... painful really. A rethink may be in order.

Ounces

    For the record, ounces are a measure of both weight and volume. Often this doesn't make a difference. ("A pint's a pound the world around.") Sometimes it does. What brings it up is one of the latter cases.
    I like cooking with cocoa butter. I have to buy it from the health and beauty section of a local natural foods store. It comes in chunks, sold by the fraction of a pound for astonishing amounts of money. I bought .13 of a pound, or 2 oz., for almost $7. As it turns out, two ounces of cocoa butter weight becomes about six ounces of fluid volume when it's melted. My mini-muffins are going to be very, very interesting. Hopefully interesting in a good way. They sure smell cocoa butter heavy, though!
    Anyway, I appreciate that this has very little applicability in most people's lives, but this IS the Internet; somebody out there might be trying to cook with cocoa butter and might need the information. I live to serve. Also, I always think it's really funny when I do something conspicuously stupid!

Adultish

    People are always being accused of being childish, but maybe we're looking in the wrong direction. I'm not aware of any wars started by children; I'm pretty sure the Children's Crusade, the only possible exception, was run by adults. Even if they started one, they're many thousands behind us adults. Maybe we need children to start reminding us to stop acting adultish. I could really get behind a children's crusade to Washington about now to deliver this message to the US House of Representatives. Really fellas, start acting childish; it could only be an improvement.
    I finished the antibiotics this morning. Just to say bye, they're tearing up my stomach one more time. I had planned not to take any more probiotics, but it may be necessary to take just one more. It might be totally psychosomatic, but they seemed to fix me up every time, whereas every time I took the antibiotics without them, I was nauseous and urpy all day. One thing for sure, I'd just as well never take Doxycycline again!

I didn't mean to sabotage the antibiotics!

    I'm posting early before T-Mobile goes away again. When I went to Urgent Care for my leg, I had the option of getting the antibiotics from them or just getting a prescription and going to an actual pharmacist. Common sense said to do the latter; expediency and politesse, the former. I went with expediency with a dash of politesse.
    The girls behind the counter were attractive, but I'm not sure I'm being belittling saying "girls." I mean they may have been in high school. They were quite nice, but I'm no sure either how on the ball they were. Anyway, I asked if I should take the antibiotic with food or not and they didn't know. One said that antibiotics could make you nauseous so she thought it would be better with food, so I took that advice. They also only had a 14-pill bottle, whereas the prescription was for 20, so they got the doc-in-a-box to change it. As I mentioned, when I returned after 48 hours for the checkup, the supervised doc-in-a-box wrote me a prescription for the other 6 pills. This time I went to a pharmacist and got the actual dispensing information, which was that I was supposed to take the pills on an empty stomach. Failure to do so might lessen the effectiveness of the antibiotics.
    However, they did say that if the pills made you nauseous, you could take them with food. Considering how nauseous they made me when I did do so, I can just imagine what they would have done on an empty stomach! Also, all's well that ends well; my leg got better on weakened antibiotics anyway. So no harm, no foul. But for future reference, it's probably better to get your medications from an actual pharmacist rather than the doc-in-a-box.

Did NOT miss a day

    T-Mobile missed a day! For whatever reason, I couldn't get online all yesterday evening. For some other reason I can again this morning. Dunno if T-Mobile was down or if I hit another chokepoint on my data plan. Anyway, the following is the blog entry I wrote but couldn't post, complete with my blitherings about my inability to post it. Not going to bother changing it at this point.

(Subject line:) Area code 808
    I just got a call from area code 808. Since this is area code 803, I had an immediate reaction that somebody called the wrong number. So I said so. And he hung up immediately. 808 is Hawai'i, probably not as big a site for boiler room operations than, say, India (or for that matter South Carolina); presumably my guess was correct. Or it was a telemarketer deeply terrified of being told that he had called the wrong number.
    Sorry for the non-entry blog entry. Downtown U. sent their football team out on the road, which is usually a recipe for disaster, and it was. But this time it was disaster for the other team. I'm just sort of awed. I appreciate that nobody out there needs a sports report, but the University of South Carolina beat the University of Arkansas (who usually stomp us) most emphatically, 52-7. Really, "awed" is very much the word!
    Meanwhile, my leg is all better. I know there's a bad spot on my leg because I know there's a bad spot on my leg, but even I (world champion hypochondriac) can barely see it. And only two more days of antibiotics. I know I have to complete the course to avoid creating antibiotic resistant bacteria. But I very much look forward to being done with them.
    When I bought this smart phone, I posted very manic depressively about how much I liked it, disliked it and was bewildered by it. Now I'm even more bewildered by it. Mind you, nobody ever claimed that I could run all my Internet off it. (OK, they did, but still.) The phone is so bad at multi-tasking that I sent a tiny text message, and that knocked me off the Internet. Then I got the wrong number phone call mentioned above, and THAT knocked me off the Internet. Or possibly T-Mobile just sucks something amazing. I haven't been able to get back on the Internet yet; if you're reading this, I have of course, but it's taking eons. (PS: it appears that the problem was a new Flash Player update throwing me off somehow. Go figure.)

Turkey leg

    I went to the State Fair a couple blocks stroll away to take advantage of their lunch deal. You pay $5 after noon and so long as you're out by 2 you get your money back. Of course, the only fair food that I can eat (maybe) is the smoked turkey leg. As these are $10 each (seriously!), it's maybe not that much of a deal. And the lemonade is $6; even bottled water is $3. I think they've gone up a bit since my childhood.
    The last time I had a smoked turkey leg at the Fair was before I went gluten-free, but I think the added anxiety about the possibility of gluten is not what made it less good. The extra cost is a factor of course (Ten bucks?! Really?!) but mainly I just got a not very great turkey leg. It was overcooked on the outside; better inside, but maybe a bit undercooked there. Also because they're so very large, it's hard to handle a leg and a drink, so I went too long without buying my expensive lemonade. All that grease and nothing to drink was not a good combination either. And the weather got warm again, which made me overheated pretty quickly.
    However, it was pretty good, it was a crazy gorgeous day, the student art was unusually good (the kindergarteners have finally surpassed not just what I could do in kindergarten but what I can do now) the Eau Claire High steel drum band was excellent and the crowd was impressive without being crushing. Also the kids' rides looked to be a lot more fun than when I was a kid, so yay for them. Still days of fair to go (to capitalize or not to capitalize) so I may return. It's crazy fun.

Not informative

    So the situation that I can't tell you about has ramified into another situation that I probably can't tell you about either. (It's nothing particularly bad or dangerous, still, which is why I can be flippant about it.) They wouldn't have known about the second situation if it hadn't been for the first situation and the second situation, while not dangerous per se, could have become dangerous. So suddenly we're all grateful for the first situation for alerting us to the second one, even though the second one was even more expensive than the first. Was that clear?
    Last night I had a particularly odd dream where I was playing this game on a really gigantic TV, but it was very low on graphics for such a situation. Basically it was a version of Civilization. I had an array of technologies to choose from, but I had to be black to use any of them. I mean in real life, not in the game. How the game could tell, I don't know. I was playing alongside a bunch of other guys on other giant TVs. I was complaining about how much I missed Nintendo and particularly about how much I missed a specific game, a fictitious one that I've been dreaming about for decades now. Wish I could find that one; I guess I'll have to keep a notepad by my pillow and then design it myself.

The inadvisability of virtual jigsaw puzzles

    I return to my unfortunate obsession with imaginary jigsaw puzzles. First, the jigsaw puzzles I had downloaded for Windows turned out to be not my friends. I ran Malwarebytes Anti-malware for the first time in a long time, and all those puzzles turned out to be trojans. Moreover, after they were removed, I lost sound on Firefox for some odd reason and had to download it again, reinstall and reboot to get the sound back. So not good.
    On the phone, the jigsaw puzzle presents a more straightforward problem. I chose a picture with too many dark areas, so I was trying to examine the puzzle as closely as I could without my glasses. Not surprisingly, I have a hellacious headache now, bordering on migraine. I'm tellin' ya, they're out to get me!
    Unrelated to jigsaw puzzles, but too short for its own blog entry, I dreamed the other night that I was driving in Shandon, a nearby residential neighborhood, and was stopped by a procession of zoo animals coming up from the river that runs through Shandon. (You will be unsurprised to learn that in real life no river runs through Shandon.) I was very delighted by the entire situation and thanked the two rangers who were helping the animals out of the river.

Passed acid test

    I quit the Tylenol and had no fever nor chills overnight. So the "being sick from the infection" portion of the program appears to be over. Now we deal with the "being sick from the cure" aspect.
    My friends online are advising me very strongly to go get probiotics to restore my gut from the depredations of the antibiotics. As the nausea has continued without Tylenol, there can be little doubt that it's the antibiotics causing it, and associated diarrhea. Inasmuch as it's really getting irritating, they didn't have to argue very hard. So far, I do feel better, though that's probably the placebo effect. Or because it's nice that people care.
    I'm going to have to start a new blog just so I can reuse all my subject lines! Just saw one in my stats from a year and a half ago that I had meant to use the other day. I had changed my mind about using it for other reasons, but somehow it didn't even occur to me that I had used it already. A bit enslaved to the catchphrase, me.

Acid test

    Unfortunately, as I mentioned, the only way to find out if my fever has gone away is to quit the Tylenol. So what the hell, let's quit the Tylenol. I mean I feel completely better all the way around, so the odds are good that all fever is gone. And I have to find out someday. And if I'm wrong, all I have to do is take two Tylenols again. So on the whole, very little downside and maybe a little upside. What's that, you ask? Something seems to be making me nauseous. It should be the antibiotic and it should not be Tylenol (which after all became popular because it was supposed to avoid aspirin's stomach upset) but it mainly happens after I take Tylenol and not after I take antibiotic. I appreciate that stuff doesn't happen immediately after taking a pill; still it would be nice to have that cleared up. And nicer still not to be nauseous.
    Meanwhile in Dad news, he had to return to the dermatologist to have another cancerous lesion removed from his face. It went well, though it made a big enough hole that sutures were needed. We return in a week to have them removed. Hopefully, we can give them a rest for a while after that.
    With regard to the crisis I STILL can't tell you about, it should all be wound up this week. Margaret is expecting to be able to move home Saturday. I hope this turns out to be the case; I will most certainly be highly relieved. Though I also think they kind of liked many aspects of hotel living, and it was good for Dad to be able to get around everywhere with his walker. I wish they would move to a house like that.

Better still

    Last night, I had no fever and slept straight through. A little longer than I had planned to in fact, since I had somehow disabled my wristwatch alarm. But heck, I needed the rest and I didn't need to get up early on Sunday morning anyway.
    Of course, there's no way to know in hindsight whether I would have had fever if I hadn't taken my two Tylenols. I'll probably take them again tonight, and then give them up. So I guess I'll find out in a couple of days that they helped if I have fever and chills again. Obviously, I'm hoping that it stays a mystery.
    Urgent Care told me to come back today and get another antibiotic injection. I slipped on short pants in hopes of not having to wear a hospital gown again and hied along on my way. I saw a different doctor this time. He felt that my wound was obviously healing and waived the second injection. He did make sure that I have the full ten-days oral antibiotics course (they only had a 14-pill bottle on my first visit), so he at least knew what he was doing.
    The prescription he gave me for the rest of the pills said that he was supervised by another doctor, which was odd since he was or at least looked older than me. I don't know if he lost his license and is working his way back or if he went to med school in his 50s. The guy who was with him couldn't even figure out how to work the lights, so didn't strike me as either a doctor or a supervisor. As I say, odd.
    Upshot though is that I'm almost all better. The infection spot still looks awful and inflamed, but is barely swollen anymore nor is it actually hot to the touch. I think the only discomfort I have left is from the antibiotics or the Tylenol making me slightly nauseous. I think I can live with it.

Rapid improvement

    All these antibiotics and whatnot have me feeling a lot better already. I did have a lot of chills and fever from 2 to 6 in the morning, but none since then. I've been a little confused because I'm supposed to take Tylenol for fever. The aftercare recommendations from Urgent Care said to take them every 4 hours. The box however said that you take 2 Tylenols at a time but you can only take 6 in 24 hours. So I've finally decided to compromise: one in the morning, one in the afternoon and two at night. But I hadn't figured that out as of bedtime last night, and I only took one when I started getting chills in the night. I suspect that I'll have the problem handled as of tonight, or preferably that there won't be a problem.
    Otherwise, I feel pretty nearly normal. The spot at my thigh representing a pissed-off lymph node (my suspicion, but confirmed by the doctor) is feeling a lot happier. The actual infection spot looks horrible, but the red lines leading away from it representing the infection spreading appear to be gone. As far as I can tell, the fever hasn't affected my brain particularly. I probably wasn't using those brain cells anyway.
    Urgent Care called to follow up today and I asked if I should have gone to the emergency room overnight because of my chills, as a Facebook friend had suggested. The caller put me on hold. For minutes. At lunchtime. I just hung up; they never called back. Maybe she had a fever, too.

Sudden gust of common sense

    So yesterday I was feeling quite a bit under the weather, very very very tired and somewhat weak. Then by the end of the day, I had a sudden attack of chills and was then feverish all night. There were a couple of what I took to be insect bites on my leg that had been there for some days; I did notice this morning that one of them was really really hot to the touch. Like it was seriously infected.
    I went to CVS because they have something called a Minute Clinic, but they were on lunch break. I bought some Neosporin instead and came home and called my own (though they haven't seen me in years) health clinic. The nurse called back and said that at that late point they wouldn't be able to see me but strongly recommended I go to a doc in the box. I kept mentioning the Minute Clinic and she kept mentioning Urgent Care. I took this as a strong hint that I should go to Urgent Care, or at least not to Minute Clinic.
    The staff at Urgent Care were quite impressed with my abscess. (Really, it's just a little boil; it sounds so much more frightening when you call it an abscess.) They gave me an antibiotic shot, oral antibiotics and a recommendation that I take Tylenol for the fever and apply warm compresses every four hours. I also have to come back for another shot Sunday.
    Now! The probability is that it would have all cleared up by itself. However, the infection was clearly spreading (duh, hence the fever) so I'm definitely glad that I went. Except for the two shots in the butt part. But I'll live.

Water heater

    The water heater, or as we call it at these geographical coordinates, the hot water heater, has failed. Some time ago, perhaps not this year but probably during the bloggery era, the same thing happened. I don't know if it was tedious enough for me to blog about it, though.:) First, the hot water became less hot for a period of weeks. Then it became steamingly, scaldingly hot. Then it just went altogether cold. So when the first two items in the sequence happened again (scalding part was yesterday), I asked the landlady to send a repairman. The electrician, however, said that he couldn't come out until the heater stopped heating altogether.
    I'm maybe a little peeved. Yesterday, my decks were altogether clear. If he would have just taken my word for it that the EXACT same thing was happening again, I'd be all up and running again. Today is a dialysis day, so I'm only home for a couple-three hours. The odds that the electrician will be able to come around during that window are slim, especially since he hasn't called back. Of course, in general, with my totally non-busy lifestyle, it should be no problem to wait until tomorrow, but I really wanted to devote tomorrow to getting new tires and shocks and maybe a tuneup. So pisseroony. I am grateful, however, that I don't have any REAL problems.
    New booties are so far working out. There is some broky foot sensation, but no pins and needles. Knock on wood. The cocoa butter macaroons (day before yesterday's blog entry) didn't go over as well as I expected. I really thought they were outstanding; Drinking Liberally consensus was that it wasn't one of my better efforts. Do you think I'm starting to develop weird tastes? The very idea!

Edit: Hey, he's here! Consider me unpeeved!

New booties

    This won't take long, either. There's an establishment on Main St. called Mast General Store. It's a small chain from the mountains of North Carolina; I had previously encountered them in Asheville and Greenville. Until recently, I had just thought of it as a good place to get old timey candy. Because Asheville at least is much more tourist-oriented than Columbia will ever be, I always thought of it as basically a place for rooking tourists. But a few months ago when I was desperate for decent Ragg socks, I found that they had much better than decent ones for a very good price.
    Now I've found that they have very very nice boots, for an extremely good price. That's just because it was a clearance sale, but still. So I got a pair of new Keens for $69 including tax. They are dang ugly, but both waterproof and machine-washable (which somehow seems mutually exclusive, but what do I know). So far, so good. My broky foot seems to be responding well; weird pins and needles have stayed away from my left leg thus far. It occurs to me that I could have solved the problem simply by buying my Dr. Scholl's orthotic insoles once a month, or whenever my foot started acting up. If the Keens don't work out, that will be my next semi-brilliant move. Anyway, they're cheap and comfy, so at least I feel optimistic that they may work well.

Cocoa butter macaroons

    This subject line has been in the on-deck circle for just ages, but the only store that sells cocoa butter has been sold out, also for ages. I finally mentioned it to somebody there and magically, there was the cocoa butter again! (They bag it and label it themselves.) It's in the health and beauty section, but I am assured that it's food grade.
    So, I blogged earlier about trying to make oatmealish cookies with quinoa flakes instead of oatmeal and buckwheat flour instead of wheat flour. I was very taken with the result at first, but less so as time went by. The quinoa (which has virtually no flavor in its non-flake form) just tasted too corny. Or maybe I should say too corny in a bad way, meaning kind of bitter. I had already substituted coconut for some of the quinoa flakes; next I substituted coconut for all of the quinoa flakes. That went well. This time I'm trying again, only using cocoa butter instead of sunflower seed oil. The dough texture was more pancaky (my day for making adjectives with Ys; it's all adjectivy!) than cookie-like, but I am hopeful. If it turns out brilliantly, a recipe may be posted. If a recipe is not posted, you can assume it did not turn out brilliantly. But I shall persevere! No, seriously, I'm sure that cocoa butter macaroons would be really great; just not sure that I'm on the right track with this particular approach. At least I finally got rid of the subject line!
    Continuing on the food theme, the lentil hoecakes really went stinky after a few days. Putting in an entire Vidalia onion was probably a good idea; thinking that I could leave them out on the counter for days probably wasn't. Next time, they live in the refrigerator.