Beep boop

    So I was driving down the road, oblivious, when this douche in a pickup passes me on the right (on a wide portion of a two-lane street), stops at the subsequent Stop sign, and starts yelling back at me. He's yelling at me about not stopping for stop signs and cutting him off. I have literally no idea what he's talking about. My best guess is that when I turned onto the road we were on, I stopped a little briefly and pulled onto the road he was already occupying (but at least 100 feet away). Which might not be the best way to drive, but is certainly legal and certainly not the worst cutting off he's going to experience in Columbia. He was threatening to crack me in the head and I pulled out my cell and told him to get in his truck and go or he'd be talking to a police officer in a matter of minutes. He did so, spinning his wheels of course. The odd thing is that I was never afraid. I guess when you stare down Death for long enough, other stuff isn't so frightening.
    Dreams have been wacky lately. Last night, there was some business about a car dealership where four guys were painting everything green. Thing is, they started with themselves. They looked sleek! Then I had to wake up at four in the morning to take my friend Evans to work. (He's been dead five years now.) Then the real alarm went off. The other day I dreamed that my brother was going to get my blog published. (Not this one; a fictitious, interesting one.) He said that it was up for some awards and he wanted to get those cleared away first. For example, there was this joke that was up for an award. He told me the joke and I said that I didn't write it; I didn't even know it. That didn't seem to be a problem.
    I bet you're wondering what the deal with "beep boop" is. I've been making ready to change out my first 8 Gb of old-time radio on the iPod Nano for a second 8 Gb. This has required a good deal of copying files from my OTR CDs to my hard drive, which has in turn required a great deal of listening to beeps and boops. I think the CD/DVD drive on this poor old ill-used laptop is failing. Anyway, I'm done a-ripping and will very shortly be able to make the changeover. You could hardly believe how excited I am about this. Well, you probably could, but I'm fairly surprised about it.
    Meanwhile, I threw my back out this morning and barely anything happened. It may be that my somewhat halting efforts to improve my upper-body strength are actually paying off. Or maybe I was just lucky. Happy about it regardless.

Kmart of my dreams

    So the Kmart of my childhood, which creeps entirely too often into my dreams, bites the dust momentarily. As I've noted elsewhere, I'm not at all sure which is worse: losing the Kmart of my childhood, or just having to admit that I had a Kmart of my childhood. I still have some 45s with the 68 cent Key 1 sticker on them. Their efforts ten-odd years ago to turn the store into an imitation Super Walmart never quite panned out. I would go there from time to time, but service varied from miserable all the way up to very poor. So it's hard to miss them very much. But it's always hard to lose a link to younger days, even if those weren't all that stellar either. Now if they'd only close the one in my dreams.
    Dad will get to go to Brittany's wedding after all. He just skips dialysis. The official word is that although they can't recommend him doing so, there are no adverse consequences. (Assuming his kidneys can do the job for two extra days, that is.) We cross our fingers and hope for the best.

Birdies

    I love Spring. Really. But when the world's greatest mockingbird goes off at 4 in the morning, I love it maybe a trifle less. At the moment, some blessed creature is chirping so as to be audible even over slightly loud music. The latter isn't much of a problem, but the 4 am concerts are. At one point a freight train went by (also a problem, but at least I knew the tracks were there when I moved here) and I could still hear the dang mockingbird.
    I play music low in hopes of sleeping the night through, but birdy easily overwhelms it. If I played it loud enough to drown out the bird, it would also be too loud to let me sleep. Maybe I should get CDs of birds singing. I think it's the randomness and intermittentness that wakes me. If the bird song were constant, maybe I could sleep. Maybe.
    I got to talk to the social worker at the dialysis facility and voiced my concerns. They got him in a lot quicker this time. I did convey that although I wasn't asking for priority because he's a big wheel, I thought that being 91 did give him a certain priority. Hopefully the message was received.

Missed it

    When I was 17, I had the good fortune to tour France all summer with a group (mostly) from my high school. I also had the good fortune to miss "Ring My Bell" by Anita Ward. On the other hand, I also missed "My Sharona" and, I think, "Roxanne." You pays your money and you makes your choices.
    Three years later (or I guess it must have been four since I was a junior both times), I was even more fortunate to spend a year abroad in Canterbury. It was a tremendous hoot in almost every way, but my bad song dodging karma definitely deserted me. I got to experience "Come On Eileen" as a monster hit in Britain. Then I got home and it became a monster hit stateside. Tura lura indeed.

That again

    We had another instance of a lovely almost one-hour wait to get Dad into the dialysis area. I again used the "Can we get him a chair time when there's an actual chair available?" strategy, which at least got him in fairly quickly. But even better would be not having to use any strategy.
    Meanwhile, my brilliant idea of having him come in Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday instead of Monday, Wednesday and Friday has yet to pay dividends, as they haven't gone dancing on a Friday night yet. But it's already imposed a cost, as Margaret's great-granddaughter is getting married a couple of Saturdays from now and the only way dad can miss dialysis is to go on both the preceding Thursday and Friday. He's not too bummed, but I suspect that Margaret will be. Dang it.
     (Not to suggest in any way that he doesn't want to go to the wedding. It's just that with the walker, going anywhere is kind of a pain in the butt.)

Drum circle

    Somewhere along the line, some time in the last 20 years or so, there was a bestselling book called "Iron John" and a men's movement that grew out of it, complete with men going off into the woods to beat on drums. And then the next trend came along and that was it for the mighty drum circle movement. I don't know if anyone got their consciousness noticeably raised or not.
    I was thinking that a better kind of drum circle would be to have one as an exercise class. Of course, I'm largely thinking of really kinetic drummers like Keith Moon or Mick Fleetwood; a lot of drummers move about as much as an accountant. And even Moonie had gained a lot of weight at the end. Still, moving all four limbs at the same time is more exercise than most of us get most of the time, and it would be crazy mad fun.
    I rely of course on technical advances that I'm not absolutely sure have happened. You would need drum kits that are largely synthesized and channel most of the sound into headsets you could wear. (Or it would be a REALLY loud exercise class.) But I think it would be a tremendous blast. There's no need to limit it to men, though most of the people I know who like generating random noise at great volume are from my gender. I want to do it. Even if I'm not Iron John.

The Great White, Black and Brown Hunter

    As I may have mentioned here and there, my small four-legged sidekick has a tendency to pounce my foot now and again when I'm sleeping. Now that I'm down to one blanket, this can be painful. (Ditto her need to knead my shoulder, now less likely to be blanket-insulated. Ouch.) I noticed that this mainly happens between 6 and 7 in the a.m.. When the birds start twittering. I guess they just wind her up. So I'm considering getting a clock radio, not to get me up (the wristwatch alarm is adequate for that) but to drown out the birds. 'Cause wearing steel-toed boots to bed probably wouldn't be all that comfortable.