Red tag sale

    A new chain store has moved into the area called Ollie's. It's up the same street as Big Lots (literally, as it happens, but I meant that their in the same business), meaning that they sell a lot of Chinese crap which is ostensibly overstocks from other stores and thus extra cheap. Ollie's adds a new wrinkle. They put red price tags on everything. This is because most stores use red price tags on clearance items only. It works, too. I was really swayed to think that the prices were particularly low. (In fact, items that I could check against other stores' prices were cheap, but not cheaper than anywhere else.) So I should say that the trick worked up to a point; I didn't in fact buy anything.

Gave a nice lady a heart attack, but I meant well

    I was walking this afternoon on the Cayce Riverwalk when I saw a large snake right next to the walkway. It was a garter snake or something similarly harmless, I'm sure; anyway, I'm pro-snake, so it didn't even cause me to change my stride. But a lady was coming from the other direction on the same side of the walkway, texting while walking. So I said, "If you don't like snakes, you probably want to walk on the other side." She just about had a heart attack. I felt bad about it and said so. Still, I think she might have had a real one if she'd taken another 20 steps walking while texting and stepped right on a snake. Next time, I'll at least remember to open with "Pardon me."
    Dad is having his first dialysis session at the new facility. This time, he signed all the paperwork. It was extensive but not intrusive. As of the time the nurse came to get him, he was pretty impressed with the place. Hopefully, that continued through the session. It turns out that 49% of the facility is owned by his nephrologist's practice. Don't know if it's a good sign or not, but it does explain why the receptionist there was shocked that he was both a patient of theirs AND doing dialysis at ARA.

I can't NOT read

    So I took Dad's old car and drove over to the mechanics to see what needed to be done to the Camry. They open at 8, but not surprisingly on the first day of Daylight Savings, they didn't open on time. So I tried the Camry just for the hell of it. And it ran no problem. Whatever the problem was with the idle, it had reset itself over the weekend. Yay!
    The mechanics still hadn't arrived, so I drove home to make breakfast. I took a couple of laps around the block first to be on the safe side, a move that I would come to regret. Because just as I got to the railroad crossing at Rosewood Drive and Assembly St., a very long freight train reached it just ahead of me. If I'd gone straight home, I would have beaten it easily. Ah well.
    I just can't not read. As the train went by, I was reading the assorted inscriptions and instructions on it and getting dizzy. I had to take my glasses off to stop myself. Back when I ate cereal out of boxes, I could never keep from reading the back of the cereal box. But at least it didn't make me dizzy.
    The owner of the garage did look over the car with me eventually, and agreed that there wasn't anything that they could do for it at the moment (except refill the antifreeze, which he did, for free). I mean, it's still an 18-year-old car; there's plenty of preventive maintenance that needs to be done, eventually. But as of now, I'm good to go. Yay!

Would've been funny if somebody'd tried to steal it, though

    Yesterday, the much-beloved '94 Camry attempted suicide. I went out for the first time in the early afternoon, planning to run some errands and go for my walk. But the old fellow wouldn't start. All I got was a clicky noise. Having had this happen before, I called brother William (first hero of the story) to come and give me a jump. He did and I set out to drive around on the expressways to charge the battery up again. This was problematical, since I was also nearly out of gas. However, I went 3/4 way around town and stopped for gas. Filled up and started up again without incident. But that was all the luck I would have yesterday.
    Dad called to ask me to take him from Margaret's to his own house to get some more stuff. I also needed to look over his computer and see if I could figure out how to connect him to Margaret's Roadrunner connection. I could figure out the wiring part, but not the getting it to work part. Called sister Anne (the second hero of the story) and after a certain amount of sturm und drang (all on my part), she figured out that if I disconnected the Roadrunner modem (or whatever they're calling them these days) and waited 10 seconds it would reset and be good to go. This proved to be the case and Dad was again on the Internet. Yay!
    So we set out. All the way to the car. Clicky noises again. So I called Bill and he gave me another jump and took Dad to the house instead of me. Margaret called her grandaughter's husband Rick (who owns a battery/starter garage, and who is the third hero of the story) who was willing to come in from the lake to the shop to give me a hand.
    It turned out that I just needed a battery. Unfortunately, once it was in, the car's idle suddenly went down to zero. I had to keep a foot on the gas at all times or it would stall out. Sort of like a manual transmission. The big problem is that you have to have the brake depressed to be able to move the car out of Park. So it was a matter of two-footed driving, but I was able to back out to the street after a couple of tries.
    I went with Rick to the office to pay for the battery. (The shop specializes in starters and batteries; they can't do anything about drivability.) When we got back to the car, I realized I'd left it unlocked with the batteries in. I noted that it would have been funny if somebody'd tried to steal it.
    I have a mechanic over on this side of town. I didn't have any major difficulties getting it across town, though this did give a new meaning to stop-and-go traffic. Eventually I realized that you can still start a car in Neutral and that made the going a lot easier. However, turns were very exciting since it was near impossible to execute one without stalling out and when you stall out the power steering goes away which makes the turn a little more challenging. But I got there, parking pretty easily despite one last stall.
    I walked the mile or so home, then got Bill to pick me up again so I could borrow Dad's old Crown Victoria. It, too, has seen better days, so I hope the mechanics can find and fix whatever's wrong quickly Monday. I stopped on the way home from Dollar Tree to get myself some more fake flowers. It had been a rough day.

La vache qui rit

    A million years or so ago, or anyway thirty, I went to France for the summer between my junior and senior years of high school with a group of students led by our French teacher (and travel agency owner) Jeanne Palyok. We were stunned by the new French institution, the hypermarche. (Uh, hypermarket.) The way our trip worked was that we got an allowance for lunch (out of our own money, but still) which we usually spent at the hypermarche. As it was a small allowance, we usually wound up with ham sandwiches and Laughing Cow (La vache qui rit) cheese.
    If a seventeen-year-old American went to France now, or anytime in the last ten years, s/he wouldn't be too shocked by hypermarches anymore. They just prefigured Walmart supercenters. And just to demonstrate again how symmetrical life is, at the Walmart the other day, I saw a display of Laughing Cow cheese. I hope any French kids visiting for the summer felt more at home.

Jacobson Flehmen

    When kitties smell something bad, they make this horrified (and horrifying) face by dropping their lower jaw just a bit. This is called flehming or flehmening. They do it because they have a secondary scent organ, Jacobson's Organ, and opening the mouth a bit is how to activate it. The Monkey does it both on my sweater and on the comforter. Since they're mostly said to do this when they've done #1 or #2 in a given place, this doesn't speak well of the her behavior towards either my clothes or my bedding. But it's pretty funny.
    Meanwhile, Dad has been accepted at the nearer-to-town dialysis facility. We are warned that they are much bigger and busier than the place he's gone to heretofore and that he might get lost in the shuffle. I looked it over and it didn't look like any kind of snakepit. And hopefully they can manage to stop dialysis without leaving him dehydrated and with dangerously low blood pressure. Or if not, we can always go back to the old place.
    He'll be going on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, so he'll be free on Friday nights if Margaret and he want to go to the dances at the Senior Center again. (Yay!) We start at the new place Tuesday morning; please wish him luck.

PSAs

    Generally, it's old-time radio that I won't shut up about, but I also listen to a lot of contemporary radio. One difference is that there are untold numbers of public service announcements (PSAs) on radio these days. It often seems like all the ads on radio are PSAs. Most are irritating, idiotic or both. It's odd that they run for ages and ages. It's odder still that a brand new crop came out last month. As if the Ad Council, which produces most of them, said "February 2012! It's about time we made some new PSAs!"
    While it's a relief to get a change in the audio diet, some of the new ones are already getting to be as annoying as the old ones. (For instance, the bizarre one about the kid who died on a trip to Japan, so we all have to raise awareness of safety issues when travelling abroad. It's certainly tragic that the kid died, but considering how many young people go abroad and how few die, maybe these resources could be put to some better use?) I wonder if TV had a new crop of PSAs in February, too? Notice I'm not tuning in to find out.
    Boy did I have weird dreams last night! There was some dealio where a monster was coming for me, and it had come before so I was prepared, and anyway I was leaving but I left a protector behind. It was apparently a pretty small monster, because the protector was an ant. Oh, and a spider. Very scary monster though as I recall. The rest of the dreams were of roughly equal weirdness but mercifully I have forgotten them.