Marital aid

    Dee at the Aldi on Augusta Road is the fastest checker in the history of the world. (Her real name is Diana, so perhaps that's spelled "D.") This morning there were two checkout lines open, each filled with people with completely loaded shopping carts. Aldi draws a lot of folks who either do all their shopping for the week at once or who are supplying their entire restaurant. (You can tell the difference by the count of loaves of bread and dozens of eggs.)
    I got in the longer line, the one that Dee was handling. Shortly, another fellow got in line behind me with his week's shopping. His wife, however, got in the other line and castigated him for being in the longer line. He said that he had his faith in Dee. I backed him up, quietly. ("Dee will get us through," I said.) But at length, there was only one cart ahead of her, and he gave in and switched lines.
    Now since I only had four items, the nice fellow ahead of me let him go in front of him. Thus we'll never know if I really would have gotten through the line before him otherwise. Nevertheless, I was checked out before he had even started to be rung up. We laughed our asses off. And he learned an important lesson about marriage.
    What? What marital aid did you think I was talking about?

Facial recognition

    I, I just can't cope. A morning without Blogger! It was just too much to take. Somebody hand me a tissue! (Blogger was down this morning due to some kind of virtual septicemia, recently cleared up. Hopefully, we're all done now.)
    We autism spectrum folks are noted for not being terribly good with facial recognition. We're especially poor at picking up facial expressions. My grasp of facial expressions runs from smiling to... not smiling. I can pretty much pick up the stink-eye, but after that, it's mostly a matter of bewilderment. I do a fairly good job of recognizing faces, however, though on average more people seem to recognize me than I them.
    The one face I can't recognize is Amelia's. I like to think it isn't just me or just Asperger's. Perhaps people just aren't set up to remember animal faces as well as we're programmed to remember people faces. But this particular animal has been a gigantic part of my life for over 6 years. Also, she believes in being literally in my face just as much of the time as possible. Also, when she fails to be, she's also the wallpaper on my notebook computer. So you'd think I'd be able to remember her face, but I can't, not even a second after looking at her. Maybe I just suck at black and white. Often I think I'm just practicing to be blind. I go by voices.

Fluent in kitty

    Amelia the monkey cat is very, very chatty, though she mainly confines such activity to when visitors aren't present. (As such, she represents my version of having voices in my head.) She says a lot of English words, or anyway three: Yes, No, and Hello. Unfortunately, she doesn't do so in any predictable way, so YouTube superstardom is relatively unlikely. Nor does she say them at any time that would suggest she knows their meaning (except for "Hello," which is always appropriate).
    The only word she says that seems to have a specific meaning unfortunately isn't in English. Also unfortunately, I don't understand it a bit. It sounds most like "ah-HEE-ya." She'll say it when I'm brushing her, or when she's following me around suggesting that we should play more kittyball. I'd guess it's just a way of saying she's charged up, something like "Wow!" I hope it means she's happy.
    The area of kittyese where I'm achieving fluency is her actual communications, mainly conveyed by looks. If she wants to jump on my lap, she'll look up. I look up (or nod up) too and she jumps up. When there's a kitty outside or a particularly obstreperous squirrel, I've learned to look intently out the window. Amelia will often come running if it doesn't interfere with her strenuous nap schedule. I used to try telling her to come look; that never worked. Maybe I'll learn to speak kitty yet.
    Update on yesterday's entry: Posted, went to Congaree NP, and EVERYbody I met greeted me with hi or hello. This here is one powerful blog; it's magic!

"Morning."

    Since this latest iteration of Walking John started a couple-three years ago, almost everyone I meet on the trail, boardwalk or sidewalk greets me with "Morning." At first, it mainly happened on the boardwalk at Congaree National Park. I thought, "That doesn't sound very Southern," and decided that maybe I was meeting some of our out-of-state visitors. But then I started getting it on the Riverwalk all the time. While it's a lovely place, it isn't exactly a tourist draw. So presumably these are locals.
    I don't know what it's all about. Maybe it's the economy. Perhaps everyone is so down that they can't bring themselves to call it a good morning. Or maybe people just want to save a syllable. But if so, they could do like me, say "hi," and save another one. So far, I've resisted the temptation to correct them ("GOOD morning!") or go smart ass ("Yes, it is!") and mainly just smile and say "Hey," "Hi," "Hello" or "Howdy." But maybe I'll branch out to "What's your story, morning glory?" Oasis won't mind.

This time with animals

    Someday soon, I'm sure, real life will be more interesting than dream life. Not today, however; maybe it's the avocado chocolate pudding. Last night's dreams were odd even by my standards, and featured an especially unusual array of animals. First there was a dream that left little in memory in the way of details, but I was for some reason with a family and they had a red fox for a pet. Housebroken and cute as a button; sometimes things work better in dreams than they would in real life.
    A middle dream was animal-free but involved my traditional impossible mass transit. I was in a store that had a secret subway-surface station (what they call the trams in Philadelphia) in the basement. As I recall, the line went to London. I mean, don't they always?
    The last animal dream was alarming. For a while I was in a dream where I was basically in a video game. I had a party of adventurers and our task was to find a specific adventurer in a bar and get him to join us so that I could go to sleep. (Presumably, it was a really dull video game. I need to dial back on the William Gibson reading.) I found him, but then just left my party and went to a completely empty building, which as usual was some part of a college. I came to a door and opened it, and found myself in a hotel room unoccupied except for a half dozen dying minks. Well, they were white, which would make them ermines but in the dream I called them minks. I woke enough to turn it into lucid dreaming so that I could find a way to revive them and get help. Good trick if you can do it.

Artisanally sweetened

    I swear, one of these days I'm going to stop with the dream diary stuff. (Or I'll rename the blog "Dream Diary," one or the other.) Last night, I dreamed I got drunk, which I don't remember ever dreaming before. And I was getting drunk on rum drinks, which I'm quite sure I've never done in real life. The drinks were coming in individual cans or bottles, or maybe the glasses they were in were labeled (it being a dream and everything). I checked the label and was annoyed to find that it said "artificially sweetened," odd I thought for a rum drink. Then I looked again and saw that I had misread, that it actually said "artisanally sweetened." I thought that was clever, and I especially think it was clever of my subconscious mind to come up with it. Anyone have Coca-Cola's number?
    (Spellcheck offers "artisan ally"; I like this a lot, too.)

Brain damage

    Someone long important in my life suffers from polycystic ovary syndrome, a fact I wouldn't mention except the phrase has lately been stuck in my head all. the. time. And the reason for this is an odd sort of brain damage I have where my brain pointlessly but consistently switches words. Last year, when I had vertigo, my brain helpfully supplied the word "inertia" every time I tried to talk about or even think about vertigo. Going much further back, my brain has always switched the words "orange" and "green." I'm not color-blind, but apparently my speech center is.
    The word my brain is refusing to supply when it comes up with PCOS is... is... What's that word again? Vasoconstrictor! (Think "boa," John.) Owing to certain doubleplusungood feelings coming up lately, I've been amping up my avocado consumption in the past week or so. Avocado, as I've mentioned before, is a vasoconstrictor, meaning that it cuts down circulation. I think it explains the cramps I get in my forearms and calves. I think it explains the word switching, at least the ones more recent than "orange" and "green." I think what I have here is an avocado overdose, silly as it may sound.
    So I'm going back to my original idea of balancing the vasoconstrictor (avocado) with a vasodilator (cucumber). I did it yesterday, and my arm cramps magically vanished. See? Finding your way to health is fun and easy. This only took me, what? 49 years?