Is this the end?

    The new versions of Firefox and Thunderbird led to new versions of Adobe Reader and Java. (Each of the latter two also gave me the opportunity to download in addition software I didn't want, and each thoughtfully checked the Yes box for me as well. I unchecked each, thinking again how nice a life without Java and Adobe Reader would be.) The downloads were lengthy (this is still dialup) but manageable. Then I decided to restart, since that's usually a good idea after adding big new software.
    A week later, here I am again. When Windows makes you restart, at least it gives you a Blue Screen of Suspended Animation saying something like "Updating... don't turn off your computer" but all I got was a black screen and no explanation. Annoyed, I turned the computer off many times, which no doubt didn't help. But eventually everything booted up. 'Course, I probably didn't reboot after the Firefox and Thunderbird updates, so it was 4 rather than 2 new programs that Windows had to make way for. But still. Seems like somebody could have thrown in a little box telling me not to panic, that Windows is updating files. Don't you think?
    Dreams last night were gothically peculiar, including being in somebody else's gigantic house for a change, but all I remember apart from that was that for my birthday (which it isn't) my friend Walt gave me pictures of my friend Robert in imaginary places from other dreams. I thought that was a nice bit of thorough work for my subconscious mind, or anyway I did when I woke up.

Rice cakes

    The Jack Sprat situation has improved by adding rice cakes to nearly every meal. This makes no sense, as rice cakes are practically nothing but air, but I'm not complaining. I guess it takes my digestive system just long enough to figure out that hey, there's no food here such that my bowels or liver or bile ducts or whatever the hell otherwise gets irritated to chill out instead.
    Still, I plan to scale back my fat intake a bit, and I may still go vegetarian. I'll probably stop eating my (unusually healthy, but still) sweet Italian style chicken sausage. (Al Fresco brand, available at Publix. Really excellent, assuming you aren't having trouble with fat intake, which isn't to say that it's particularly fatty. Just easier to cut out than EV olive oil.)
    But the takeaway is that I'm feeling a lot better, if maybe a trifle grumpy. A LOT of people seem to feel that way when they add rice cakes to their diet. All that air I guess; normal brown rice tends to make me happy. Another one for the GoFigureAThon.
    Dreams last night suggested that I might be feeling a little frustrated. I absolutely had to get to NYC immediately, but I kept forgetting to call the airlines to see if I could get a flight. It was for a week-long conference. I know what you're thinking: I didn't know that elderly derelicts HAD week-long conferences in New York City. Well there you are.

Ma Belle Amie

    The other day, something reminded me of the old song "Ma Belle Amie." More on that something later; it's fairly mortifying, too. But I couldn't remember the name of the song, nor as it turned out anything else. I always thought it was by the same guy who did "Montego Bay." More embarrassing still, I thought that that was Bobby "Blue" Bland. (Hey, I was close! It was Bobby Bloom.)
    "Ma Belle Amie" proves to be by a Dutch combo called The Tee Set. The something that set me off was a request on Facebook for a song containing a specific lyric ("when the one that left us here/ returns for us at last," I think). That proved to be "Get Together" by The Youngbloods, but reminded me of what I thought was a line from "Ma Belle Amie," "for the man on the hill waits there." Google searches featuring that line were supremely unsuccessful and I'd already found out that Bobby Bloom had been a one-hit wonder, which ruled him out.
    Turns out that the line is "for the man after him waits here." The song is a whine about how his belle amie left him for another man, but he's confident that she'll come back to him. Which makes it a lot less poetic than I had thought, but at least it makes sense. But I still like it better my way.:)

That guy

    OK, I'm going to stop starting these with "OK." (Dagnabbit!) Today, I was That Guy. I was entering an intersection, perfectly legal, the light was green and I wasn't shooting off any firearms (much) or anything, when a car on the street I was merging into ran the red light and barreled right through where, but for a second or two, my car would have been. And I pulled up behind him or her and just stuck my horn. I didn't like being That Guy, but I didn't like being almost killed either.
    I hope (not very optimistically, I'll grant) that it will make the moron in question think a little more the next time the situation comes up. Or maybe get that red-green color blindness checked out, or possibly that up-down direction blindness. (Even if you're colorblind, you can tell the red light's on top and the green one is on the bottom.) Once we had merged onto still another street, the moron in question slowed to a crawl and stayed that way even after I had gone around and driven away. She or he may have thought I was some kind of dangerous psychopath but the worst he or she got out of it was the mouthing of "moron" as I went by. Maybe it was just a fabulously interesting cell phone conversation. I didn't see a cell phone, but neither was I looking that close. I mostly pay attention to the road. That's where I stay This Guy.

Jack Sprat

    OK, so I'm STILL an idiot. So! While adding two cans of coconut milk to Lowcountry shrimp boil results in an undoubtedly delightful dish, that there is a lot of fat. I've been feeling awful lately at the start of the week, but then better as the week wore on. Eventually, I worked out that this correlated pretty strongly with the start of putting coconut milk in my shrimp boil. It's just too much fat for my body to digest.
    However, it's a GREAT dish, assuming you only have one smallish bowl, and a lot of salad or other vegetables to go with. Sort of a Thai shrimp bisque; too rich to live on, but wonderful in small quantities. I could still open a restaurant on this; I just can't eat it three days running. I'm trying again today with one can (instead of two) of light (instead of regular) coconut milk. Won't be as good, probably, but ought to be a lot more digestible.
    I wonder if there's an actual condition (besides a rare one which really is called something like Jack Sprat Syndrome) where you have a particular difficulty digesting fats. Because my mom, though anything but thin, had the same thing: eat anything greasy, and run straight to the bathroom. I appreciate that we have miles (OK, feet, but the other way was more impressive) of intestines and the stuff I eat now isn't flushing out of my body ten minutes later. But it seems like the guts want to clear the decks to make ready for the greasy stuff. Or something. I guess it's what they call irritable bowel, but this has always seemed to me to be more like a description than a diagnosis. I'll just cut back on the fats and oils and not worry about it too much.

Must be the radio

    OK, my brilliant stratagem of sleeping better by playing the radio at a level that is audible but not comprehensible fell through due to actually sort of wanting to hear the show. I was listening to the Art Bell rerun last night (which, in the usual Bain/Premiere Networks very, very poor taste was, on the night of Neil Armstrong's death, an interview with an idiot from Britain doubting the moon landings) and so the subsequent current day Coast to Coast was audible to sleeping me.
    Or must have been, because even I don't usually get the POLITICALLY crazy dreams. In this one, all our oil is running out in 2014. EXCEPT new vast reserves have been found in Somalia. So once we get all the Somalis out, we'll have oil for another ten years. Now I'll grant that I have some pretty crazy dreams, but that sounds more like a caller on Coast to Coast AM. (Also, in the dream it sounded like someone talking rather than anything I was coming up with.) I got up and without waiting to see if they were really talking about oil in Somalia switched off the radio and went back to sleep.
    Subsequent dreams were more tolerably odd. I seemed to be running a drive-in movie and was friendly with a guy who ran a hardware distributorship. (What's a hardware distributorship? Dunno; I'll have to go back to sleep and then maybe I can find out and explain it.) I was trying to figure out promotional tie-ins between drive-in movies and hardware. This is probably how I would handle such a situation in real life, actually. Even in my sleep, it seemed pretty funny, though.

Salma's movie

    All I can say is I continue to hope that crazy dreams mean you're sane. This time, I was called to the jail. The jail didn't look much like a jail but rather like a fairly airy office suite. There were two staffers, a man and a woman. The woman was the nice but honesty-impaired technician from Dad's dialysis facility. I was there, not due to any crime, but because Salma Hayak was casting a movie. She chose me, presumably for my astonishing charisma. (Hey, it's a dream!)
    She and the director gave me a ride home in a convertible. I was thinking of borrowing her shoes, but then noticed that I already had mine on. Home in this instance was a multi-story mansion. Somehow I could see the finished basement from the outside. (OK, they picked me for my charisma and my superpowers.) I was telling my dad, my mom and my brother William about being in the movie, distracted a lot by the eighty or so people milling around.
    Then I was in a skyscraper, trying to get to the basement. Apparently. I was now a subway's ride away from Hollywood, and the subway was in the basement. I was also trying to reach the director by cell phone, but even in my sleep I worked out that that isn't too workable inside a skyscraper. There were many attractive women coming from offices and I considered that they ought to just shoot the movie here.
    Tragically, I never found the basement. Presumably, I'm still there.