Payola in bluegrass not what it once was

    There's a station in town called The Dude, 94.3 on your dial, playing autotuned country 6 and 23/24 days a week. The other hour is 8 on Sunday morning, when they have a bluegrass show. It's fine as far as it goes. But they only play about 10 songs. Over and over. Every week. They're good songs and I like them. I just can't get over the idea that with 100 years of bluegrass recordings to choose from, they could maybe try introducing a little more variety.
    Of course, cynic that I am, another idea that I can't get over is that there's some kind of payola involved. Why anybody would pay to get the same 10 songs played over and over at 8 in the morning in a relatively minor market is another question that I can't answer. Presumably they're the only 10 non-autotuned records that the station owns. That would also be sad. Maybe they'd like me to loan them a few.

Just light brown

The question comes up again and again
Is there difference
between white and brown eggs?
And it's just like the question
about difference between white and brown people
except there are no white people
just light brown ones.
The difference is that one is white
and one is brown.
There is no other.

I, for one, miss our crappy river

    Columbia sits at the confluence of the Broad and Saluda Rivers, forming the Congaree. The Congaree is not a notably mighty river, by and large. Most of the time, you see people standing in it halfway across in water nowhere near their waist, trying to fish. I'm not going to try it but I suspect that you could walk across. The deal is that there are many lakes and reservoirs upstream on both the Broad (called the Catawba closer to Charlotte) and the Saluda. We've been in a drought for about 30 years, so the flow of the Congaree was fairly restricted for most of my life, as the water was needed upstream. Apart from the people standing in the river, you could nearly always see rocks in the river. On the one hand, it made the river look... piddling, maybe. On the other, it never, ever looked threatening.
    Although there weren't floods exactly, the kookoo weather started last year in April, as I recall. It just rained like crazy. The actual floods started at the end of September if I recall correctly. (I could look it up, in this blog if not on Google, but the actual date isn't that important.) And though we've had breaks, we've had torrential rains every week or so ever since. The river recedes, but never to the levels I'm used to from pre-2015. And it is more than a little threatening. There's a poem etched into a large stone at the entrance to the still-closed Canal Park. An awful poem by a presumably local bard named Max Revelise. It was about the Congaree and all I remember about it is that it starts, "O tawny flood!" I always thought this was soooo funny. I don't think it's so funny anymore.

Walking again

    It would appear that I was correct in thinking that it was the lack of trail options and not the bad weather that was keeping me indoors more than previously, because having had some of my trails restored to me, I've been walking every day in spite of further poor weather. Now, will I keep it up when it actually gets cold again? well that's another question!
    Rainy Day Pal Books, the bookstore in Lexington's Old Mill wiped out in the flood, has reopened. Fortunately, the owner had 50,000 books in a warehouse, so he still has some inventory in spite of losing what was in the old store. He's moved upstairs, which only seems smart. I will try to kick him some money the next time I am in need of books to read. Crazy mad glad that he's back in business, though.

Keystone Kops Skool of Kooking

    As I mentioned, I invented lentil pancakes the other day, probably for the twentieth time or so. The problem with this is that I made a brilliant innovation caused by making a bonehead mistake before that. Now I want to figure out how to get the same result without either boneheadedness or brilliancy, the latter of which had a fair quantity of boneheadedness as well.
    What I was doing was cooking black lentils. The Whole Foods package had different directions from what I remembered (four times as much water as lentils instead of two times) but I think I did ok. The whole recipe was inspired by finding two things at Aldi: their gluten-free flour mix; and tomatoes with lime and cilantro. (Also jalapenos!) The idea such as it was was to make pico de gallo pancakes. I also steamed butternut squash cubes and collards because I try to make balanced meals and because I knew it would excite shock and dismay on Facebook. And I added crushed garlic, cumin and cloves to the lentils becase it's my freaking religion, and sauteed sweet onions because that's another prime tenet.
    I mixed all this stuff in the stew pot, then worried that all this hot stuff would prematurely cook the pancake batter. So I ran some water in the sink and put the pot in without putting a lid on (did I not say boneheaded?) and went off to take care of something. By the time I returned, the ship was foundering and taking on water. So I dumped it all in the strainer and got rid of the added water, but also the tomato juice and lime juice from the canned tomatoes.
    This was all accidentally brilliant, because I wound up with perfect pancakes, whereas if I hadn't done the straining operation, they would have been runny as anything. I had almost as much stuff as I had pancake batter and I was sure that this would never work, but it really did. So all I have to do is drain the tomato can first and use that as part of the water for the lentils. Right? All solved! Well, if not, we'll just have the glorious fiasco I expected to have the first time I did this. Fortunately, there are a lot of good things in my freezer and if that doesn't suit, there are a lot of good restaurants around here. Big fun regardless, I figure.
    Amelia the cat still wants to escape, but is being slightly less of a pain in the butt about it. She joins me in not being a fan of clouds, apparently.

Amelia the cat continues to baffle

    Once I started feeding the cats wet cat food four times a day (half a 5.5 oz can split between them mornings and afternoons/evenings), Amelia started behaving better and no longer agitating to go out. I thought we'd seen the dawn and were entering on a new horizon. Unfortunately, it was just because it was cold outside. Now that it's nice again, she's back and agitating like crazy. I guess I'll have to put up with this forever except when it's cold or raining. I'm SO getting her a leash and harness!
    Mid-range quad copter's mysterious return to life went the way of all zombie movies in that it didn't last long. It's back up on the shelf. If I remember, I'll try it again on 2/17 (also Dad's birthday but in this instance notable as the last day before one has to register one's large quad copters) and see if it just needs astonishing amounts of rest. Meanwhile the DJI Phantom 3 one notch above the one I lost in the river and with better range has gone down $200 in price. Please help me forget this fact.

Did I mention that Jennifer Love Hewitt is in love with me?

    The other night, I dreamed that I went back to high school. Not the thing I had for years where I had to do all my years of schooling over again for no apparent reason. All this had in common with that was the no apparent reason part. Anyway, I was back in high school and friendly with two insanely attractive young women, both of whom fell in love with me when I told them that they were beautiful. The first didn't resemble anyone famous as best I can remember, but the other was a ringer for the young Jennifer Love Hewitt. I thought, why didn't I try this when I was really in high school? I'm afraid I dropped the non JLH lookalike like a hot rock. Such an awful person I am in my sleep.
    I believe I posted exactly the same thing about Obamacare last year, which is why I buried the subject this time in the second paragraph. That is, it's insane to pay out a huge amount of money for the cheapest policy available which has a deductible bigger than the amount of money spent on me for medical care in my entire life to date just to avoid a $700 penalty. I swear I'm really going to start a company called Fauxbamacare which will charge $500 to certify that one has insurance and thus doesn't have to pay the $700. (Don't worry; I won't really.)
    My mid range quad copter isn't as dead as I thought. One thing I learned from Roscoe the better copter is the concept of warming up. If I turn the old one on somewhat in advance of trying to fly it, it does a lot better. And my grasp of the totally obvious just keeps getting better and better. It's no Roscoe, but it isn't terrible. The pictures show a lot of jello effect, i.e., bendy telephone poles, light poles and even buildings. But heck, it looks like Salvador Dali came to town! So still very cool. Control isn't the best, so it might be following Roscoe to the great beyond at any time. Fun in the mean time, though.