Still dicing with fate

    I'm now up to four miraculous saves from trees for the drone in three days. Today's rescue, also at USC's Horseshoe (or if you aren't from here, the nice part) required throwing a hiking boot at it. I was very much expecting to lose the hiking boot, too. The kick in the head (besides the hiking boot) is that I only went there because it's really pretty and I wanted some pictures from the drone camera of something other than me and none of the pictures were interesting at all, especially not the ones I was too focused on trying to take such that I wound up running it into the tree in the first place.
    I'm scanning what I wrote already and I don't think I've discussed the oint in the flyment (Thanks Terry!), which is that the video comes out in avi format. This is huge and can't be viewed on my phone. I have to convert it either to wmv to see it on my phone or to mp4 to share to Facebook. Not a major issue, but if anybody wants to get a Syma quadcopter, this is about the only criticism I have to make. Well, that and the fact that it'll probably be up a tree permanently soon, but that's all my fault. But seriously, I may as well blog the heck out of dronyism; how long is this likely to last? My sister said she was glad I liked it, especially as this means she can just get me another one every few months. Fair enough, no doubt.

Drone people

    I met my first fellow dronians. It was more than a little bit of a relief, as I was starting to wonder. Here I am playing with the best toy ever and nobody seemed to be taking a blind bit of notice. Granted that I'm grumpy and mean looking at the best of times, but it's a freaking quadcopter! Geez! Anyway, a couple were at Canal Park with a quadcopter somewhat larger than and upmarket from mine. Monsieur was much more charged about it than madam. I broached the topic (since I had no visible drone) by mentioning that mine was in the trunk of my car. I was worried about the proximity of the river and told him so. He said that that's what makes it fun, when it gets dangerous. I saw him flying later; he was much better than me, but he wasn't exactly skimming the river either (although he was way closer than I ever got).
    I took mine to Earlewood Park, where there's a very well-kempt ballfield that isn't secured in any way. As I wasn't goint to do any harm, I didn't feel guilty (though I do feel white-privileged) about invading. It was, of course, crazy-stupid fun. I also did some flying in a clearing in the neighborhood, where I freed Droni Moroni from a tree for the third time. (Jumped up, grabbed a branch, shook it down.) Yesterday late in the afternoon, Paul and I flew it a while at the Horseshoe at the University, where there are way too many big trees. That was the second time I got Droni out of a tree. We tried throwing Paul's flip-flop but we're the worst throwers ever, so I just flew it out of there, which was way more satisfying. Also impossible if it had been any worse ensconsed, but sometimes heaven favors its idiots with luck. This was one of those times.

Quadcopter

    The drone has been with me for 2 1/2 days and I haven't destroyed it yet, although it isn't for not trying. I flew it around in the kitchen a bit the evening that I got it just enough to realize that this wasn't a really fabulous idea. The next morning I flew it in the yard in hopes of getting a picture of the magnolia blossoms that only start about 20 feet in the air. This wasn't such a hot idea either. As I mentioned, I crashed it in one of the red cedars in front of my door. It was a plain miracle that it was exactly high enough but no higher such that I could get it down. Years ago, a tree fell on our cyclone fence, destroying part of it. Fence posts are hard to uproot but fence poles (the horizontal part) are easy to carry off and "neighbors" did so. But one was left so I liberated it. Getting up on my lawn chair, I brought my little friend down. It would barely fly, but I had been burning up the battery to make a noise so I could find the darn thing (red cedars are pretty dense). When I charged it up again, though it was fine.
    Yesterday, I took it to the park. It's remarkable how few tree-free areas there are around here. There's the river, but that doesn't help. Fortunately school is out today, so a lot of athletic fields suddenly become available. (Hopefully!) I had silly giggly fun flying it about and kept it out of the river and out of trees. Eventually it became too windy so I actually bailed before the battery ran out.
    Today I tried to combine my interests in hiking and aeronautics and went to a spot on 12,000 Year Historical Park trail where there is an underground natural gas line and thus the trees are cleared to road width. (The park I picked yesterday, Canal Park, is also dominated by high tension power lines which did indeed introduce an element of, you know, high tension.) The cleared area looks a lot smaller when you're trying to fly a drone than when you're hiking by. But it was a pretty good spot and I had fun. Interesting thing as that there are several switches for fine tuning flight but I never got around to trying them. The quadcopter seemed to correct itself, which was lucky. My first few experiences were very much "OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD! THING REALLY FLIES!" which probably didn't help. But I don't think I was all THAT panicky; I think it's just flying better. Eventually I got a good enough hover that I could take pictures of it and with it. They haven't turned out great, but I bet a cloudier day will help. Dang thing is major fun; when the spare battery arrives and I can play with it twice as long, I'll be dangerous. (It takes an hour and a half to get eight or nine minutes fly time. Always a fly in the ointment!)

Exciting stuff

    ...that I'm probably too tired to post about. Forgive it please if I'm as brief as I can be. As today is worth about three blog entries, I'll probably wind up making it into that. First, I got my drone yesterday. Since FedEx brought it to the front apartment instead of to me, I didn't get it until dark though, so I couldn't play with it until today. It was mega-crazy fun! Also, the camera is surprisingly good. I crashed it high in a tree, but miraculously got it down, and played with it again in a more open area. I'll kill it sooner or later, but right now, what fun!
    This is one of those little annoying things not worthy of recording except to set up what followed. As I've said, my bank machine ate my ATM card last week and I was sore annoyed. But the bank sent another card the next day no problem. However, now they've sent another. It's identical except now the Member Since space is filled in. Also, there was no sticker with the validation phone number on it. So I went to the bank to ask what it was all about. They didn't know either so I tried it in the ATM to see if it needed validation. It didn't. But the driver's side window wouldn't go back up. And we are expecting rain.
    So I called the Toyota dealership that offers rent a car and asked if they had anything cool like an Avalon and they said not. So I called the closer Toyota dealership to see if they could manage a loaner and they said not. So I went to the far away one with rent a car. When I got there (4 pm), the service rep suggested that since they're open until 7, they might be able to get it done today. So I went to the waiting room and took extensive advantage of the free WiFi. Eventually I was offered a choice between after market parts for less money and being finished today or Toyota parts for more money and having to wait until Saturday. I bet you can guess what I chose. So they had me out the door again by 6:30, and I'm fairly pro Dick Dyer Toyota right now. Out $400 so not crazy pro, but comparatively well pleased. I still think I could have gotten that window up if I could find a big enough tweezers!

Scattered showers all over my daily walk

    Given the situation in Texas, I reiterate that I am NOT complaining about the weather. We are very lucky not to be under water. It's just odd that on a day when there seems to be very little rain, sporadic and brief, it decided to POUR the minute I tried to take a walk. And it rained every time I got into or out of my car going to or from a store. I started feeling like that character from L'il Abner whose name I'm not going to try to spell but who always had a rain cloud over his head.
    When I got home, it was gorgeous, but of course it clouded over within minutes. We have more important things to worry about where I live, although I don't know if it made national news. A gasoline tanker was involved in a fiery 10-vehicle accident on the main commuter route into and out of town this morning. The interstate was closed for hours although amazingly it's open again already. Equally amazing, no one has died at least as of yet. Pretty alarming stuff, makes me even gladder than usual that I don't commute. I'm not sure if the weather was a factor or not.

You're getting even while I'm getting odd

    (The above is the title of the first post Peter Wolf J. Geils Band record, which anyone who knows me even slightly could guess I went out and bought immediately because of the title. Or anyway eventually. Generally, it was a waste of space, although one number, I Will Carry You Home, was very much worth the trouble.)
    I've always had a phobia about or anyway a predilection against odd numbers. I don't care for odd years and I don't care especially for the more than half of every odd year where my age is also odd. However, this year has been so abysmal, I'm doing a rethink. Maybe it's worse to have an even numbered age in an odd numbered year. Maybe when both the year and age are odd, the fact that added together they make an even number makes everything all right. Yes I know it's insane, but hey-- all superstition is. If I can come up with a formula that lets me feel like I can have a happier time with the rest of the year, I think I'll run with it.
    For my birthday, yet another zebra butterfly taunted me and almost let me take its picture. I'm pretty sure supermodels would be easier.

Everything

    Oh maybe not everything. But as smart phones approach toward becoming one's everything-- toy, library, connection to the wider world, and, you know, phone-- it gets alarming when the battery runs down. Today I took a long walk and the butterflies gamboled and frolicked... unless my phone camera was switched on in which case, they scarcified. But I couldn't help it; I kept switching it on in the fantasy that I might just once get a picture. The funnest ones are zebra swallowtails. I've seen pictures, so somebody can certainly photograph them, but it isn't me. They would buzz my head if the camera phone was safely in my pocket but might as well not exist if it was in my hand and ready for action.
    You burn a lot of battery keeping the camera ready for minutes on end. I did get some pictures of another favorite butterfly, a swallowtail that might be the black form of the tiger swallowtail or it might be the spicebush or pipevine. They all mimic one another and my skills do not extend to telling them apart. The zebra would not cooperate, however, but I had a lot of fun trying to get a shot. Mercifully, the charger brings the phone back up to snuff very fast, which is lucky, because I'm supposed to be using it to read my friend Joe Abramos' very fine new novel Circling The Runway and give it a five-star review on Amazon. (I'm not just handing it out; I've read more than 3/4 and it definitely merits the five stars.) See? Everything!

Facebook tries positive reinforcement

    Facebook is always making changes and nearly none of them seem to be for the better. This either means that Internet users are inherently conservative or that Facebook had a pretty darned good service to begin with so that any change seems unwise. One change though they didn't make. As the years go by, more and more people drop off and fewer seem to join up. I'm probably not the only person on there with comparatively few actual friends on Facebook (compared that is with Facebook Friends, mostly people I don't actually know).
    So I mainly interact with organizations, institutions, bands and publications, most often making fun of posts by The Onion. Lately Facebook has started allowing users to reply to other people's replies on any status update, including these. And just lately, like yesterday, Facebook has started giving me (because let's face it, it's all about me) notifications when other people Like my replies to The Onion or Scientific American's updates. Previously, finding this out required a lot of legwork and scrolling. So kudos to Facebook for as long as this lasts.

Reverse zen

    Buddhism teaches that to attain happiness you have to accept the world as it is. (My knowledge of comparative religion was all picked up in the gutter, so forgive it please if I'm far from the mark.) The reverse, or obverse, or converse, or second verse same as the first, is that if you aren't changing anything (and thus are accepting the world as it is) then you must be happy. This seems to describe me to a T. I don't seem happy. I don't feel happy. But I'm not changing anything, so I must by definition be happy. Zen as all hell, don't you think?
    Then again, it may be that not having a fire in the belly just means that you don't have a fire in the belly. I've never been hungry, not literally, but I've never gone hungry in the sense of having no food and no money for food. Decades of three squares a day may be why I'm down with keeping the status quo and expecting decades more of three squares a day. Not that Bill Gates or Steve Jobs were ever starving. I guess the roots of ambition are hard to root out or elucidate, but the roots of no ambition are maybe easier. Or maybe the puppeteer has just gotten bored and removed the hand from my back. Who knows?

Why don't people TELL me when they do a lobotomy?

    Better day than the last two, but not a high-function day. My bank is still not giving me a lot of satisfaction. When the bank machine ate my card and I threw the ing-bing, the young man assured me that the new card they would send me would work with my old PIN. They sent it, but the other half of the prediction was overly optimistic. I tried to buy gas using it as a debit card and was turned down.
    This is the lobotomy part. I was halfway from the gas station to my bank branch when a guy in another vehicle gestured at me. He told me that my gas cap was on my trunk. The lobotomy part is not that I left the cap on the trunk; the lobotomy part is that I couldn't and still can't remember taking off the gas cap. I usually wait to do that until after the business with the credit card. Brain leaked right out of my ear!
    At the bank branch, I had to wait for the guy with ATM expertise to finish a phone call, but somehow managed to stay frosty. The last time something like this happened, I had to go to two or three branches to find a working put-in-a-PIN machine, but this time it worked no problem. And all was well. Or anyway better. I can't help but think, though, that it wasn't my imagination that that guy at the Trenholm Road branch wasn't terribly competent. Still, it was a glorious, gorgeous day and I have not thus far lessened the world cat population any further. So there's that.

Oh god no

    Congaree National Park is one of the few places where fireflies give a synchronized lighting show. This happens only a few nights a year. Last night, the park announced on Facebook that it's happening now, so I decided to go. Unfortunately, to get there, you have to take unlit, narrow, somewhat windy Old Bluff Road. And there are houses there. And pets. And I hit and killed a cat.
    There was nothing I could have done. It ran in front of me at the last second. I can't help but think that I should have been going slower, or I should have straddled the road, or I should have done something to prevent this. I'm horror struck and devastated. The house nearby showed no one home, so there was no one to tell. The best I could do was move the cat out of the road so it wouldn't be damaged further. Apologizing to a dead cat obviously doesn't help but I was and am so sorry and said so.
    I wish I could kid myself that the lack of collar meant that this was a stray, but as I've noted, there aren't that many brown cats out there and this was one. I pretty much have to accept that this was somebody's pet and it tears me up. Not that strays are in any way lesser animals, but it hurts more that somebody probably cared about this cat. My cats are going to be extra spoiled and I will intensify efforts to persuade Harry to become an inside cat. At least I don't live next to a highway.
    This sucked the fun out of the visit, but the fireflies were ultra-cool. They absolutely declined to be photographed, at least with my equipment. But they were neat to see. I may go back someday, even some day soon. But I won't use the same route.

Not complaining about the heat exactly

    What I can't figure out is why I can never get heat or air conditioning adjusted such that it's comfortable. It's very hot outside but generally comfortable in here in spite of me keeping the thermostat near 80. Some of the time, this is uncomfortably warm and I find myself wishing that the a/c would come on... until it does and I feel like wrapping up in a blanket. I have already expressed the opinion that maybe I'm just not a fan of heat pumps; maybe I'm just not.
    Weirder still is that with the onset of warm weather, the car is lately surprisingly comfortable. I mean I need the a/c there, too, but not as often as I would expect. It's hot out there and the car is mostly in the sun. I get in and am surprised not to be boiling. Not going all Jerry Seinfeld here and not expecting it to continue; it's just odd.
    I'm toying with the idea of getting a white Kia Soul on the grounds that they look like Imperial storm troopers. Briefly I thought of getting the electric version, but can't see much use for a 90-mile cruising range. Isn't that a little short for a storm trooper?

The customer is always... annoying

    Note: it's hard to maintain a proper level of righteous indignation with a small cat trying to lick your nose. Also I'm not that indignated. But still.
    I went to Trader Joe's and my bill wasn't great enough to require use of the debit card. But then I had only $7 left and have Drinking Liberally tonight. So I went to the nearby NBSC branch and attempted to use the ATM. I should have known better when the guy ahead of me shrugged and drove off. Didn't. The machine took my card and wouldn't do anything else. I tried every button, including of course punching in my code several times. Bupkis.
    So I went inside, sore annoyed. The young man handling problems with the ATM was not very concerned. He just said that they can't get my card back and that it would be overnighted here. I asked if they could overnight it to a branch nearer to me. He just couldn't understand, and I'm reasonably sure that we were both speaking English. He kept telling me that I had to be there to sign for it and I kept telling him that I wasn't asking him to overnight it to my house but to my branch. Eventually I got this across. There was never an apology of any kind, never any attempt to soothe. Yeah, sure I was fairly irascible, but who wouldn't be? The rest of the staff was perfectly cordial and I had no difficulty being cordial with them. I guess I should have pulled out the ol', "When I was your age, sonny..." but there just didn't seem to be any point. My bitter little heart hopes that he has an endless stream of POed customers with missing ATM cards trooping through, since he also was too lazy to go out and put an out of order sign on the machine. And I'm totally not being bitter because he had better hair than me!

It isn't a miracle food if you can't make more

    I saw a news article indicating that the South American peasants who used to live on quinoa (pronounced like keen-wah, in case you hadn't heard) can no longer afford it because we health conscious Americans are driving up the price. Now. I'm as prone to white liberal guilt as anyone on Earth could possibly be, but I can't help but notice that there's a whole lot of acreage under tillage in a crop that most governments claim that they don't want their people using. (I speak of course of roses. OK, coca.) So maybe some expansion of quinoa acreage would be possible to help bring the price back down.
    However, it strikes me, as it has often before (ouch!) that our food distribution system is insane. Supermarket after supermarket filled with shelf after shelf full to the brim of stuff that most people may or may not buy. Apparently, it's very important psychologically for those shelves to be filled at all times. (Maybe it is. The one time I was in a store where the shelves were not filled, I was damned sure that it was going out of business shortly-- and I was right.)
    As it applies to this case, our food production and distributions companies have decided that Americans want quinoa. So there's a glut of quinoa related products out there that people don't necessarily want or even know if they want.
    Now I don't know if the news story I saw was accurate. I don't know if there are Bolivian peasants forced to eat Big Macs because they can't get their quinoa on. And I don't know how workable amping up quinoa production would be either. But it seems crazy to take a chance on creating a shortage in places where something is a staple commodity when you don't know if Americans even want it.
    I wrote a Masters thesis on Japanese carmaking, and it occurs to me that it would be really great if we could reduce inventories massively in our food distribution system and thus reduce duplication and waste. Amazon may eventually bring back a speedier version of the Sears catalog version of the earlier 20th century. I'm not sure that that would be a bad thing.

Some things you don't have to see

    I took a picture of Dad and Margaret holding hands in their sleep on their last day together. It was achingly sweet and I was very proud of it. A half hour earlier, I took a picture of the sunset over the pond at Lowman Home. It was also an excellent picture, but also bespeaking a certain sadness and of ending.
    I printed and framed both, just using my printer and Dollar Tree frames. I thought and think them awesome. But I've been having increasing problems with depression and had an idea that they might be helping. Lately, I got an app that changes photos into paintings. I've had a lot of fun with it, particularly with my abstract expressionist cats. The pictures are made to look good on a tiny phone screen, so they don't necessarily blow up that well. However, a couple of them look all right larger. One is the wallpaper on this laptop now. The other two have temporarily taken the places of the pictures that were making me a little sadder than I might have been otherwise. It isn't like I'll forget; both images are written on my brain. I just don't have to have them looking down on me 24 hours a day. Or anyway not right now.

Huffin' at Dollar General

    After all, I already used the title Ultra-concentrated. It's possible that someone out there recalls me blithering about ultra-concentrated dish soap and the difficulty of finding any that isn't. I eventually settled for a bottle of Ajax which didn't say that it wasn't ultra-concentrated, but didn't say that it was either. I wound up with the same pile of dried up guck around the nozzle that I'd been getting with ultra-concentrated and which had led me to seek out the un-ultra in the first place.
    I'm running out of the Ajax. I went to Dollar General because my oven mitt has long since burned up and I wanted a new one. Found that, but also found... un-ultra-concentrated dish soap! Palmolive Classic (where's Madge?!) and Dawn Non-concentrated. So I was sniffing bottle after bottle to see which had the least offensive scent. This didn't seem to bother the patrons or staff, but did allow me to claim via text that I was huffin' at the Dollar General. No doubt someday a novel title.

And they'll smell like bacon!

    The county had a recycling day today just up the street at the fairgrounds. They took many items that they don't normally take in home pickup. Mind you, both the county and the city have recycling centers where you can take such items, but since neither is terribly conveniently located, one never gets around to going. Alice gave me a scanner ages ago. She didn't have a power supply for it nor driver software. The former wouldn't have been a problem right up until a month or so ago when Radio Shack bit the dust. The latter shouldn't be a problem per se, but the odds that a 10+ year old scanner would work with Windows 7 is/are fairly poor.
    So they took lots of stuff, and I decided to offload the scanner, an equally elderly smoke detector, and some collected bacon grease. I'm not sure if the latter strictly speaking constitutes used cooking grease, but the head of the local biodiesel company himself took it; I guess he would know. He told me the county garbage trucks ran on biodiesel. I said, "And now they'll smell like bacon!" Long way to go for a little punchline, but it made me smile at least.

Swinging into motion!

    My bank statement showed I had markedly less than I thought I did, like a nice new car worth less. (Don't get excited; it's nothing bad.) Suddenly, all lassitude and procrastination left me and I was in gear like nobody's business. Or anyway, nobody else's. (Do you think the fact that all the stuff I'm currently putting off is mostly not my own business might be a prime reason I keep putting it off?)
    Anyway, I went to the bank this morning loaded for bear or at least ready to huff and puff a bit to get to the bottom of it. The bottom of it was not hard to find. I couldn't read my own handwriting. It was a copying error on my own checkbook. Darn it. Hell, I don't mind being wrong and I'm not surprised that I had less money than I thought because I had been thinking that my balance was bigger than it should have been. But still, I liked that extra-big balance! And I was just about to get that nice new car. Back to carjacking, I guess.

I suck at anniversaries

    Today is the 32d anniversary of a terrific party. 2/3 way through junior year abroad, my roommate Rick (also an American from USC) moved out. He wasn't fed up with me so much; we were living in college (ie, in a dormitory) with all younger students, mostly English, and they wouldn't have exams that mattered for another year or more. So it was a party all the time, fun to a point but sleep is nice, too.
    He moved out to the country, to a village called Highstead. I'd love to regale you with great stories about the party, but it was a really long time ago. All I remember with confidence is that Marks & Spencer had a terrific fruit juice blend called Sunfruit Drink and a supermarket called International had cheap vodka. Combining the two in quantity had unfortunate results, which is to say that I didn't remember that much about the party when it wasn't 32 years ago either. But the impression it left was a pleasant one.
    I made up t-shirts to commemorate the occasion some years later. The front read "Incident at Highstead" with the date. The back had "Get this man to a hospital!" (more or less; I was using the youth hostel phrasebook) in a dozen languages. Bright red, size small. I never did have any common sense. I think Rick's then-wife asked us to get him presents to remind him of his youth after the kids started being born. I wore mine to Drinking Liberally last night; pretty sure it will be the last time I wear a small t-shirt in public again. It was the return of the pregnant man!
    But the reason I noted that I suck at anniversaries is that a year ago yesterday is my best approximation for when Harry, the stinking, rotten emergency backup cat (then Starvin' Marvin) came into my life. Anyway, that's the date on the first photo of him on my phone. It's been a hellish, rotten, godawful year; he brought some of the little joy that there has been in it. So thanks li'l bro!

Edit: Checking the ol' archives, it was a year and a day ago when I first fed Harry/Marvin. He had turned up once before that but ran off before I could get food out. So first met, early May, but first fed May 12th.

Genies

    I had another genie story, but I can't get it out. Or rather, I can't think of a way to make it good. The payoff would be that I'm the genie, that I'm the one keeping me away from my wishes, which is pretty obvious anyway. Very hard to create a believable setup for one thing. Where does one find a magic lamp these days?
    Speaking of things that are hard to find (the king of segues strikes again!), that leaping before looking thing has bit me on the ass again. I bought another box of Aldi angelfood cake mix (which still requires a dozen egg whites). I thought it couldn't be hard to find powdered egg whites. Somebody I know assured me she had found them locally. I've tried every natural food store I can think of and am stumped. Of course, there's always Amazon, so I'm never stumped, but it just seems silly that no one would carry this. Apparently, nobody but me has difficulty separating eggs. No doubt if I went to a kitchen store, they would sell me an egg separator. Anyway, after further review, the muffins made with pasteurized egg whites aren't all that terrible. Eating all of them may wind up landing me in dialysis, but they're actually pretty good. So there's that!

Post tax stress disorder

    I don't at all believe that (HEY WAIT A MINUTE! I'M NOT SUPPOSED TO BE USING THIS THING DURING A THUNDERSTORM! MAYBE THIS WILL BE THE FIRST HALF-SENTENCE BLOG ENTRY! NAW; TOO MUCH LIKE COMMON SENSE) my last month of double extra Hamletification is all due to stress over taxes. For one thing, I wasn't all that stressed over taxes. A little mad for one day, but I got over it. I think taxes, and not just for me, are a safe thing to be mad or go mad about, so I let it be the focus of a lot of things. I had a lot more to say about this, but if the thunder keeps up, I may just let brevity be the soul of wit any minute now. Bear with me as best you can.
    One thing I've noted before but it's still coming home is just what it means for the crisis finally to be over. I mean in day to day living. I don't have to have my phone with me at all times. I don't have to cook for myself four days in advance all the time. I can go to places where the cell phone coverage is spotty. I can do fun things on Saturday. I can leave town when the cats let me. (New blog title?)
    Sure I'm not happy about taking on additional responsibilities that I never signed up for, probably the ultimate cause of the big ing-bing. But regardless, even though I'm still not exactly getting more productive, I'm at least done with fretting all the damn time. And that's something, hey?

King of leaping before looking

    Last Wednesday was Gluten-Free Independence Day. Aldi came out with another slew of gluten-free items. Truth to tell, due to other (self-diagnosed) sensitivities, I can't eat most of them. But I was still rather thrilled about it. The rest of the world is backlashing against gluten-free everything pretty relentlessly, so it's cool to see support anywhere.
    One item that I could eat was angel food cake mix, so I bought it. Leap before looking 1: I failed to notice that the directions called for 12 egg whites. I can separate eggs pretty well, but 12 strikes me as post-doctoral. But it's ok; they sell egg whites in cartons these days. Leap before looking 2: I bought the carton (cartons actually) without reading much of the text written on it, including the warning that because the egg whites have been pasteurized, they shouldn't be used for angel food cake. I'm going through with it, with cocoa added. How bad could it be? I'm assured that powdered egg whites are also for sale; I will check, I promise, that they can be used for angel food cake before buying a dozen eggs worth.

Don't taunt the tropical storm

    For a while there, we had a tropical storm off the coast of the state and here 100 miles inland it was perfectly beautiful, if breezy. Now it's overcast and a glance at the weather radar confirms that these really are the outermost bands of the storm. However, nearly all forecast models suggest that the storm will skirt the coast, rain all over Myrtle Beach and Wilmington, but leave us almost totally alone.
    But I don't want to push our luck! So I won't mention that I liked Ana better when her last name was Ng. Nor will I make fun of her for not being able to drop any rain a mere 100 miles from her center. Nor point out that even the National Weather Service can't spell her name. Because it isn't nice to fool with Mother Nature and it's unwise to piss off tropical storms. (Seriously, best of luck to all on the firing line. Hoping, hoping, hoping that this is another one that produces much less damage and flooding than is forecast. Over the years, eastern North Carolina has had enough.)

8 ball

    I got a new Magic 8 Ball app for my phone. It's really great, even better than the ones I had for my old phone. You ask your yes or no question, shake the phone, and a little android answers you. Couldn't be simpler!
    I do wish it had happier answers for me though. After I let Harry the cat out this morning, I asked if I could let him back in. It said no! And I asked if I should feed him outside then and it said no again! I asked it if I should put Amelia in a sack and take her down to the river and it said yes! Sorry Harry! Sorry Amelia! I don't think this android likes cats!
    I think the key is not to ask open-ended questions. "Should I let Harry in now?" asked periodically is probably a better approach, especially when a No answer can be so shattering. "Will we be able to leave Ridgeview today?" is a much better thing to ask than "Will we ever be able to leave Ridgeview?" See? I'm really getting the hang of this thing!

Crap Font

    There's an outfit out there called Salt Life. I have no idea what they do for a living except sell rear window decals and t-shirts that read "Salt Life" in a really, really, really crappy font. I think of it as Serial Killer Script. Among other problems, it's very hard to read, so for ages I was trying to figure out what message these strange people were trying to convey in serial killer script.
    Anyway, I decided today that the way to strike back would be to make decals in the same font reading, "Crap Font." Googling suggested that I was not exactly the first person to try to find the Salt Life font, though most of the others actually like it. (LOT of serial killers on the Internet!) Some of them had found that whatever Salt Life does for a living, they're fiercely protective of and litigious about their logo. So apparently, this isn't going to be how I make my million. However, so long as I don't try to sell any, I imagine I can still design a "Crap font" logo, print it on a decal, and put it in my back window. I'll feel better.

You F-word!

    No, not you! I was out hiking Congaree National Park due to dry trail conditions and few mosquitoes and also the whole it isn't 150,000 degrees outside yet thing and saw a Carolina anole. I got out my phone and clicked on the icon to open the camera app. Unfortunately, the phone chose to interpret this as a sweep towards the right, which instead opens Android's useless and unwanted and can't be deleted newsmagazine app. So I said a rude word very very loudly. Unfortunately, I had recently passed a young woman also hiking alone on the trail. It would be a better story if she came up at that moment and slapped me or said "My word!" or fainted or something, but I don't know if she even heard. (I had been moving pretty fast.) I did say, "Sorry," just to be on the safe side, though.
    More worryingly, it should have spooked the anole, which would have been my just desserts, but it did not. I got a reasonably good picture when the right app finally opened. Apparently, I wasn't on the No Cussin' trail. I had a really wonderful hike, pressing myself because I had forgotten to defrost the chicken thigh I planned to cook for supper. So far, it appears that I made it back in time to defrost it properly the quick way anyway. (You don't want to know what that is.) If you don't see me again, you'll know that salmonella doesn't have a sense of humor.

She was right!

    A while back I posted that Dad had written out a set of instructions for me as executor several years ago, that we had trouble finding them, that Margaret thought she had and gave me a notebook she thought contained them, and that I couldn't bear to tell her that she was wrong. Well, lucky thing! I had been looking for pages and pages of material, but it turned out to be only 2 1/2 pages, front and back. So I'm thrilled to say that she was right and I was wrong and the instructions have been found!
    Now admittedly I've done most of those things already, and also even a couple-three years ago, Dad's handwriting wasn't the easiest to read. So I haven't actually read through every word he wrote yet. (The priority for the day was meeting with the CPA to make sure that Turbo Tax had done Dad's 2014 taxes correctly (it had) and print off the hundred million pages of tax forms in order to send them in. I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to this.) But it's ultra cool to have the information and to be able to double check in case I missed anything. And I'm ultra proud of Margaret for finding it. So major yay!

Reset button

    I had pretty much dragged to a stop regarding estate matters and for that matter life in general, but I finally heard back from the CPA and we'll be meeting tomorrow morning. Hopefully that will be a bit of a kickstart. I decided that I really want to have everything cleared away to the extent possible in time for my birthday, but having made that decision apparently decided that that was enough work for one day/week/month. I am finally cheering up a bit with the much better weather. As a reptile, I dig warm; not cool, not hot, just warm. But I guess reptiles dig hot. Maybe I'm a cat.

Registered trademark

    I saw a book at Goodwill entitled, "Contemporary Diagnosis and Management of Fungal Infections" and the title was followed by the circle-R registered trademark symbol. I wanted to know and still want to know if the title was the registered trademark or were the fungal infections? It seems like a fair question. Are loads of people ripping off the title (or the fungal infections)? This just doesn't seem to be a problem I can imagine coming up that often. If anybody is curious, interested or doesn't believe me, I did take a picture (like I was going to remember all that) and would happily share it at the slightest provocation. But yeah, I got nothin'.
    I got nothin', part 2: all this cooking experimentation kinda rebounds on me when something actually turns out well and I didn't keep any kind of notes on how I made it. As I think I said, I bought Ian's (brand) Italian-spiced Japanese panko breadcrumbs (which I'm still not making up) to make fried chicken with because that's what the recipe said. But I found it a weird flavor combination at best, and anyway I don't eat the skin on fried chicken so it was a waste. So I used the rest to make pork scallopine, which came out much better. I mean, not cordon bleu (or the Italian equivalent) but better than Stouffer's and also gluten free. I think I could wing it again equally successfully. But perhaps I should return to being a little more methodical in my cooking.

On the run, but which band?

    I found a video for "Band on the Run," identified by the uploader to YouTube as the original video for the song. Elsewhere (Songfacts) someone also mentioned this as the original video, claiming that it had been withheld for years. I mention it because the video is very, very, very Beatles-heavy. The Songfacts person was arguing this as proof that the song is primarily about the Beatles.
    It's annoyingly hard to find. (OK, not that bad. Search "band on the run original video" or try this: Might be the original video ) To me, it looks like something VH1 put together in the '90s. The sound is odd enough that it could be 40-odd years old; it doesn't sound quite like the single, but not that unlike either. It looks like somebody with a Terry Gilliam fixation got loose in an editing studio.
    I just don't see it. Paul apparently never said the song was about the Beatles. If we're believing Wikipedia, he said it was about marijuana arrests. He seemed to be making every effort to make a clean break from the Beatles at the time is how I recall it. Also, it would be nearly 10 years before MTV came along; what exactly would they be making a video for at the time of the record's release?
    I think people are just assuming that that is the original video because it should be about the Beatles. Obviously, Beatlemania was a lot more insane than Wingsmania ever became. Obviously, one's experiences affect one's songwriting and the Beatle experience probably informed the song more than a little. But why would he lie about it back then? "It's about the Beatles" would have probably been a much more market-friendly answer than "it's about marijuana arrests." Right?
    I just wish I could find a more definitive answer as to whether this is actually an original video from the '70s. About the only argument I can offer in that direction (apart from the weird sound) is that I'm pretty sure that VH1 stuck their logo on everything that they made. But I don't remember that with certainty either.

Edit: The Wikipedia entry for the actual song also notes that the Beatle-oriented video was made at the time of release, with no further details except for the director's name. Not that this is definitive, but it seems to be the best I could do. Perhaps it was an EMI/Capitol move that met with Paul's disfavor. Or maybe the video just went clang because as I noted, MTV didn't exist yet. Go figure.

Experiments

    I had around a pound altogether of various old gluten-free flour packages. Some, like the buckwheat flour, were too old when I last dipped in, some time last year. Google searches indicate that buckwheat flour is just as good past the expiration date. This may be true to a certain point. However, six months to a year after the expiration date, just throw it out. It wasn't rancid exactly (or I would have smelled the rancidity and thus wouldn't have used it) but it was awful. Once I started eating the pancakes I made with it, I remembered that that was how it tasted last time, too. Why I didn't throw it out then is beyond me.
    So anyway, yes, experiments. I've been trying making pancakes. The first outing with the buckwheat flour is best forgotten. The second and third, with Trader Joe's all purpose gf flower (old but not past the expiration date) went better. The thing is I can't seem to master the skillet. Or the range or the kitchen. Either the skillet is tilted or the range, or the kitchen floor. The latter wouldn't be a surprise; the whole house seems to be subsiding. So I get a pool of oil (because grease isn't a nice word) at one end of the skillet and the rest of the skillet dries up and burns up. I find this a little worrying. When I run out of flour, I'll probably abandon my pancake making career until I find a better skillet, range or kitchen.
    I've also been trying my hand at gluten-free fried chicken, as I mentioned the other day. That has turned out comically, or at least I haven't died so far. I'm trying again today. This time, I swear I will remember the Colonel's eleven herbs and spices. (That is to say, salt and pepper.) I imagine that might work an improvement. You notice that no recipes are forthcoming. So far, none of my output has been worth saving for posterity. Although today's apple pancakes made it all the way up to "not terrible." Hey, it's a start!