Some progress

    Following on yesterday's post, when I think about it, I do notice a good deal of progress in my never-ending battle against stick-up-the-butt disease. For instance, I no longer look up every symptom I have every ten seconds. I don't know what the Mayo Clinic and Merck Manual websites are doing without me. Wait! Not looking up symptoms might be a symptom of something! I'd better go look it up! But how?!!!!
    Further, working out with dumbbells seems to me to be a more rational and reasonable approach to improving my back pain than believing everything anyone ever said on the Internet on the subject, or indeed on any subject. And it may be working. Or it may be that my back just quit hurting by itself. Anyway, I shall persevere; having arm muscles for a change is kind of neat, too.
    (Note: "symptom" is one funny looking word!)

Got to get out of this prison

    Not that it's a bad place, mind you. But I just can't shake off the autism. My life seems to be more, rather than less, constrained by invisible rules and regulations. It may be of course that I'm just paying better attention and noticing things more, and in fact am making progress at throwing off the shackles. It's mainly silly stuff such as: the blender plug MUST go in the top outlet. Lately I've been putting it in the lower one; the world has not yet quit spinning. Yet. But YOU NEVER KNOW!
    What worries me is that there may be other invisible rules and regulations that I am living by and not even noticing. Like the ones that make me rabidly defend against anyone ever getting close to me. Really, I like people. (John D. MacDonald suggested that you can always tell a sociopath when they insist that they like people. Nobody else has to mention it.) I think that I made a lot of progress against autism when I cut the goitrogens (thyroid-inhibiting foods) from my diet. As such, all I need to do (having added them back I mean) is ramp up my iodine consumption. I'm still leery of such a move, but I'm pretty miserable as is. Maybe I will.

7 Mares

    When Alice and I lived in Oak Grove, our most convenient Mexican restaurant was in the Piggly Wiggly strip mall at Oak and Augusta Roads. Alice was particularly fond of their chilaquiles. If we called them chilli-killies, well, don't sue us.
    Shortly after Alice and I went out of business, the restaurant did, too. Now a new Mexican restaurant has opened in the same space. Specializing in seafood, it's called 7 Mares. Now I don't know Spanish, but I know enough Latin to know what this means. (Or I hope I do; I'm bettin' 7 seas.) But I have to feel that just about any name would have been a better one than this one. Even writing out "siete" would have been an improvement, I think (as in "Hey, folks! This is SPANISH!")
    Hopefully, they'll thrive and get a lot of laughs out of it. But the previous place was great, with friendly service and wonderful food, and didn't have a name that suggested you would be eating horse, and didn't succeed. On the other hand, I'll probably go there. Mexican seafood seems right up my alley.

Lawn chairs

    However much it might appear to be the case, I am not being eccentric just to be eccentric, or at least I don't think I am. But well might one wonder. For some time now, I've been seeing these lawn chairs in assorted discount stores called stackable slingback chairs. Eventually, I decided that a couple might fit in with my needs (ie, something people can sit on that the cat would have difficulty destroying). But everywhere, the price was somewhere around $25 each, which seemed a little steep for something I was planning to sit in a corner until that distant day when I might have guests.
    Finally Aldi had stackable slingback chairs, and they were $15 each. So I went for them. Problem came in when it turned out that they're bigger than they look. First, it was a challenge getting them home in the Camry. Then it turned out that they were higher than the window sill. (I wanted them next to the window so Amelia could climb to the sill on them, but I'm not sure it would be comfortable for her.) So just for a lark, I tried them out as dining chairs. I love 'em! So in a completely not self-consciously eccentric move, I'm using lawn chairs as my dining chairs. Amelia claws at them a bit, but so far hasn't done any damage. If she does, though, what do I care; they were $15!

The Rascals and The Raspberries

    Maybe I'll stick with playing jazz all night. Last night, I had some very odd dreams indeed without it. I was at a very, very, very crowded youth hostel with friend Robert (apparently in some kind of pre-Gail pre-Orion flashback) and one or more fictitious and little-defined companions. This very attractive young woman perked up at my approach, suggested that we had met at another youth hostel, and expressed her very great attraction to me. Then she vanished in the crowd. (In real life, that's what they do without expressing great attraction to me.) Later, she magically reappeared, and asked me if I, like her, also liked the Rascals and The Raspberries. I said, rather like I would have in real life, "How old ARE you?!" Then she commented on some imaginary novelist with straight gibberish. Again as I probably would in real life, I tried to look interested and not bewildered. That's about as far as that one went; I just thought that it was funny that my subconscious is apparently arranging defunct bands in alphabetical order.

Oh wait-- that really happened

    When I wake during the night, I will sometimes review my dreams to see if there was anything particularly wacky. (Shows, doesn't it?) Last night was also one of the times that I decided to play jazz softly all night; I just had the sense that I was going to have a rough night, and sometimes jazz helps. Over the years, when I've done that, I often have cool dreams about times past in jazz clubs. So when I was having my dream review, I thought that it was weird that I dreamed that I was at DL at Thirsty Fellow and suddenly "Sing Sing Sing (With A Swing)" came on. Then I realized that that was no dream; it really happened yesterday evening. It was very cool, too!
    My weird freaky dream last night was only slightly so. A friend of mine was working in an office and needed to clean up for a colleague for some reason. Old newspapers and magazines, mainly. I pitched in to help. The weird freaky aspect was that sometimes it was an office and sometimes it was hiking trail cum Flintstones-type terrain. Which is indeed the kind of office I'd like to work in.

Failure to thrive

    The University of Chicago has a celiac disease research center. I follow them on Facebook. They say a lot of reassuring stuff, indicating that maybe I could relax my hoodoo on gluten a little bit. But then, they also say that they're going to find a cure to celiac disease and that the way to diagnose it is STILL to keep eating gluten and then get a biopsy. This is STILL like a doctor in the 1950s saying, "That's an ugly cough you've got there, but we can't say for sure what's causing it, so why don't you keep smoking until we're sure?"
    A common indicator for spotting celiac disease in children is "failure to thrive." I like to think that there are additional guidelines to make this less vague, but if there aren't, here's a suggestion. My brother Frank and I used to work out with free weights a lot. (Hey! It was the '70s!) We never developed any muscles that anyone could notice. We got wiry strong, but not muscular. My dad and my oldest brother are quite muscular; the rest of us not at all. Lately, I've been working out very lightly with dumbbells in hopes of making my back stronger. In spite of how very lightly I'm going, I'm noticing muscles developing on my arms. Hmmmmmm. Maybe one aspect of "failure to thrive" that folks should be looking into is "ability to develop muscles after extended exercise." Maybe.