80,000 of my closest friends

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

Very high, ultra high

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

Inserted

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

Went off

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

Runaround

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

Pacemaker

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

2 Cold

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

Diminishing returns

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

Dawn

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

Fleecier

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

A mystery solved

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

New wave nightmare!

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

Nightmares that ARE nightmares but yet aren't scary

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

Free chai

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

Fleecy!

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

Customer service tutorial

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

Easy peasy

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

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

The Other One

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

Sunday go-to-meeting knife

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

1,000 straight

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

Hoss thief

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

Excuses

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

Cooler

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

Facebookville

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

Kind of a warm day...

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

Camden liquor run

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

Housebreaking

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

Inchworm commando

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

Stress dreams that just... aren't

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

Bad hair day

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