Two good things

    Thing one is that I cheered the heck up spectacularly yesterday. At first, I was thinking it was the best day of the year, but then I reconsidered and decided that it was a fairly normal day. The thing is, at 3 or so I decided to try again to make chocolate pancakes. This time I put in almost as much cocoa as flour. THAT did the trick. It also finally got enough caffeine in my system to get my thyroid working again. OHHHHHHH! So we may finally have a solution to the chronic depression problem. That was easy! I just got to get in my caffeine before 4; that way I cheer up and also can still sleep. So simple.
    Thing two is that the IRS wants to give back 40% of the money I paid them on Dad's behalf in April. At first I was fairly annoyed because as nice as the refund is, there were also small but not tiny fines for paying his estimated taxes late. This is fairly crazy because he had no way of knowing when he worked out his estimated taxes that his income would be half again what it had been in earlier years. Finally, though, I figured out that they had worked out how to do the taxes to my greatest benefit, which was to work out what those estimated taxes would have been, reduce my overall burden and fine me for small amounts for the late estimated taxes. This may just be me being pollyannaish, but it works for me. Or maybe it's just the caffeine talking.

Impressing the small fry

    Yestereve it was hot and everything, but I had a lot of battery on the drone and I had somehow persuaded Harry to come in the house so I figured I would go down to the vacant lot at the end of Ohio Street and try to improve my mastery of the flight controls again for a little while. Before I quite got there, a guy living across the street from the lot asked, "Hey! Is that a drone?" I said yes and I would show him and he brought out his little girls. I think he was drastically more interested than they were, but they liked it, too.
    He turns out to be an enthusiast about R/C helicopter flying, so he's a natural to join the drone people. He also reminded me that there's a baseball field at Pacific Park across Whaley Street, or less than a mile from here. I went this morning and it was a blast, except to some degree literally. That is to say that it's windy. New horizons in complaining about weather: I never noticed it was windy in Columbia until I started droning. Also the camera didn't take any pictures even though I thought I had shot more than a dozen. I tested the camera when I got home and it works. Gotta hit the button harder I guess.

Genius!

    I love it when I do something brilliant by accident. I particularly love it when I'm trying to do something else brilliant which fails abysmally but then turns out to have been accidentally brilliant in retrospect. I made my chicken pasta e fagioli (which is a lot easier to spell if you just call it pasta fazoo). Not brilliant yet, but rising to the level of nearly normal: in a revolutionary move, I actually cooked the chicken first. What'll he think of next?! You don't want to know what I did before. (Seriously, I cooked the chicken first before, too; just not all that well.)
    It turned out great, but I forgot to put in the mushrooms. So I thought, no problem, I'll just put olive oil in my saucepan/ heat stuff up pan and thaw and sautee some frozen mushrooms, then throw in the dinner portion and heat that up, too. This should have been a brilliant idea, but I guess I needed more olive oil. I wound up with a lot of material, including much of the mushrooms, stuck down to the supposedly non-stick pan. Nobody died and the pasta was still tasty. I unstuck as much as possible of the burnt down stuff as possible and that was the brilliant part. I loved it!
    So! All I need to do is figure out how to dry up mushroom/tomato paste/ brown rice quinoa pasta/ olive oil and assorted vegetable juices. It'll be easy! Ironically, I have some quinoa chips from Aldi at the moment that I'm not too thrilled with. All they need is tomato paste, mushrooms and olive oil, apparently.

A (very) little perspective

    I found another good place for droning, defined as any large field without joggers on it. This is another baseball field. Ever since I started this thing, I snap pictures with the drone any time it gets particularly high assuming it isn't about to fly into a tree or something. This policy resulted in some neat skyline pictures early on but lately mainly a lot of shots of trees, more trees and grass. Today, though, the tree shots were strangely close up. I'm very careful, since I have practically no tree climbing ability, to avoid getting anywhere close to trees at all, so I have no idea how this happened. Later pictures revealed another ball field just the other side of the adjacent parking lot. This I have much trouble believing in; how could I have not seen another baseball field a couple hundred feet away? Really, I'm going to have to go and check.
    None of this is exciting, I realize. Nor are they brilliant pictures or I would post them. (Not worth 1,000 words, I guess.) I am going nuts somewhat with regard to the drone and photography because all the places I would like to shoot, mainly near the river, are just impossible until I have absolute mastery of the controls, which is kind of hard to attain at 10 or 20 minutes a day flying time max. Otherwise, it lands in the river and I'm out one quad copter. There's a beach drop at Bull's Island Sunday. That's to say that the ferry boat lands you on the beach instead of at the regular landing an hour's walk from the beach. I'm thinking of going and I'm thinking of bringing the drone. But if the powers that be tell me not to fly it, I'll be easy to persuade. It's windy down there and the Atlantic is pretty big. I can always hold it up and take pictures that way!

Two wrong orders don't make a right order

    I've been having Drinking Liberally at a pizza joint (really, that's in the name) called Uncle Maddio's for the past several weeks (not counting my birthday, where I went Thai) on the grounds that they do gluten- and dairy-free well, I like it, and because this is the time when one can get parking there. They're right next to the university, so normally parking is impossible.
    It's been a pretty successful move in the sense that people sometimes come and seem to enjoy it. Last night was slightly less successful. Paul and I were the first to arrive and we ordered together, and maybe we just threw too much stuff at them. Paul ordered corn as one of his toppings; when his pizza came out, there was no corn. When mine came out, there was the corn.
    We weren't upset or up-in-arms or huffy or anything, but gmo corn is another thing that I don't much eat, so I asked for another pizza. Before that came, they brought the first one back in a box for no charge, since otherwise they would throw it out. Paul ate several slices, so he got his corn after all. It was an admirable solution and I like them even more for it. I also dug the heck out of my pizza when it finally arrived. Paul had picked the garlic and olive oil sauce so I shamelessly ripped him off. It was really good. He went with sun-dried tomatoes and I went with Roma; mine were chopped so tiny it was hard to say what kind they were, but they were good. Yay Maddio's!

We're in the money!

    I was really stumped for a topic today. Granted, I finally found a good place to fly (Southeast Park, has a large field nobody seems to use). Of course I went there this morning and they were mowing it. But mowing, like all things, passes, so I got to have fun anyway. And the MP3 CDs seem to be working better, so it's possible that the lens cleaner actually helped. But neither of these topics, however delightful to me personally, have a lot in the way of legs.
    Well this doesn't either. For months, maybe years, we've been getting bills from Dad's USAA credit card saying that he has a $3 balance. When he died, I told them and they canceled the card-- and kept sending the credit balance bills, including one about a week ago. Today, the big humongous $2.94 check finally came in the mail. No it's not of any importance whatever. Still I'm relieved to have one less pain in the butt phone call I need to make, especially about three friggin' dollars. I will try not to spend it all in one place.

Oops.

    So the toy, while a wonderful thing, is not really working out. Maybe if I moved to a Great Plains state, or even a Pretty Good Plains state, I would be in clover (which may or may not be a pun), but where I live there just aren't any wide open spaces. This isn't to claim that this is anything like Manhattan; the furthest thing. We're just lousy with trees is all.
    My old middle school would be the best place to play, as half of its lot is an open field the size of a city block. Unfortunately, it is very popular with joggers. This wouldn't be a problem if drones were easy to control. However, this one at least is not, particularly. Sooner or later, I'm going to bring it down too fast and too inattentively and clock somebody on the head.
    That isn't what happened yesterday, but it was worrying enough. Drone got away from me and was headed for the school so I cut power and it landed atop a metal covering for a walkway from the school to the parking lot. I bounced it off but then crashed it behind a fence. By sheer miracle it landed rotors up so I was able to fly it out. Otherwise, I would have been climbing a fence, never a good idea in front of witnesses and never a good idea in hiking boots.
    So I call that a lucky escape. The problem is that you can only get fun interesting pictures if you go really high. The ancillary problem is that the range of the controller is only 90 meters so when you go high is also when you no longer have control. Also the wind up there is often a lot stronger than the wind where you're standing. Result: I need a really really big field with nobody else around, or anyway nobody else around who is likely to sue me.
    I'm stumped. This morning, in a continuing effort to put off real life to the maximum extent possible, I went to Camden to Goodale State Park on the grounds that they used to have an unpopular 9-hole golf course and that should have been a great place to drone. Alas, I hadn't been keeping up. They seem to have closed the course many years ago. The area around the park's mill pond would be great for somebody with skills, but that is not yet me. I will definitely go back should I ever develop any.