Two Part Dream

Last night I had a little dream. In this dream there was a lovely young woman who played the flute. That's all I remember about that. This morning I am taking a nap. I only got six hours last night which is not quite enough, so this morning I take a nap. My sleep for the last three nights has been miserable, a couple hours of sleep followed by two or three hours of being awake followed by a couple more hours of maybe sleep or maybe just lying still with my eyes closed. Wretched in any case. But last night six hours! And then a nap! Life is glorious! Anyway, back to my story. While I am napping I have a dream. In this dream I go into a shop and get a dish of ice cream. I like this ice cream so much that I go back the next day, but this time I ask for a single scoop of ice cream and half a dozen cupcakes. Once again we have a lovely young woman who looks suspiciously like the flute player from last night. When I ask her is she plays the flute she dismissively denies it, so I ask if maybe she has a sister who plays the flute and, surprised, she exclaims that she does. Ah sleep, perchance to dream.

Breakfast

Kitchenette

This is the kitchenette in our basement. My wife and I used this for a year while the main floor was being remodeled. Now it serves me breakfast, snacks, and popcorn in the evenings for my wife. We picked up the microwave at Fred Meyers a couple of years ago for something like $100. I bought the toaster from Amazon for $25 three years ago. The food scale has been around forever. You can buy something similar from Amazon for $25. The glass pitcher to the right of the sink is an old hot pot that quit working. I use it to refill my coffee maker and our hot water pot. Next to the pitcher is a hot air popcorn popper. I have no idea how old it is.

At the other end of the counter is our first refrigerator we bought sometime in the late 1980s, 86 maybe? It's still going strong.

What else is on the counter?

• bottle of ginger ale for when I am feeling poorly. Pour a couple-three ounces in a cup and fill it with hot water. Good for what ails thee.
• Small bottle of Dawn dish soap that gets used like once a week.
• Scrubber sponge and brush for cleaning.
• Coffee cup used to support popcorn bowl so the popper doesn't spew popcorn hither and yon.

The coffee maker is not here because there just isn't enough power or room for it. It's around the corner in the workroom, which means I get another few dozen steps in every day just going to get coffee.

Breakfast

This is my typical breakfast. I have this more days than not. 620 Calories. Costs $4 and I can prepare it in five minutes in my kitchen. I mix two eggs with a splash of milk in a Corning Ware bowl and microwave for two minutes. The precooked bacon gets 15 seconds in the microwave. The red on the eggs is Heinz Ketchup.

Breakfast				Total	4.04
Item	Package Price	Items/Ounces per package	Cost per item	Items/Ounces per serving	Cost per serving
Bacon	14.79	50	0.30	2.0	0.59
Butter	3.99	8	0.50	0.1	0.05
Catsup	4.99	32	0.16	0.2	0.03
Coffee	43.98	100	0.44	2.0	0.88
Eggs	6.89	12	0.57	2.0	1.15
Mandarin Oranges	5.49	48	0.11	4.0	0.46
Milk	4.02	64	0.06	6.0	0.38
Toast	8.00	16	0.50	1.0	0.50

The Corning Ware gets very hot in the microwave. This has the advantage of keeping your food hot for a bit. Microwave safe dishes that don't get hot start sucking the heat out of your food as soon as it starts getting warm.

Update a few minutes later fixed error in spreadsheet.

Shag

Elvira

An old incident popped into my head at lunch today. Is it worth relating? Maybe yeah, maybe nay. We shall see.

Mobile Home Tractor

This was around 1970. I caught a ride with Shag and his old lady back to Newark, possibly from Columbus. Shag was a biker, as in motorcycles. He wasn't a big guy and he wasn't much older than me in years, but he was infinitely older in terms of experience. I have no idea how I was allowed in the same vehicle with him, much less seated next to his woman.

Shag made his living delivering mobile homes, and we were riding in his truck that he use for hauling these mobile homes. Anyway, we're cruising along and we see a car on fire off the other side of the road. Shag stops, grabs his fire extinguisher. runs across the road and attempts to quench the fire. It was basically hopeless, the fire was too far advanced and the fire extinguisher was too small.

We're watching Shag fight the fire and his girl steps on the gas and the engine revs up and starts roaring. This brings Shag running back, where upon the two of them have words. Shag was upset that she could be damaging his truck, the girl (I cannot remember her name) did not want him getting hurt. First time I encountered that kind of behavior.

As I remember her, Shag's girl looked a lot like Elvira (above). Her appearance, whenever I saw her, was always pitch perfect. She worked selling movie tickets at the Granville Opera House. I don't think I ever exchanged more than a couple of words with her. With that makeup and hair she was on another level.

Granville Opera House / Movie Theater

The Opera House was managed by Bob, a pothead in a tweed jacket. He kept a water pipe filled with whiskey in his office. I never understood how this place stayed in business. Maybe the college kids from Denison filled it up on the weekends.

Cataracts?

Car Headlights

I drove to the hospital Tuesday morning at o'dark thirty and a couple of cars I encountered looked like this. I suspect I may be getting cataracts, I am getting old, so it's a possibility. But then again, maybe it's just the stupid headlamps on new cars. I was kind of surprised because I don't go out much at night. And how would you get a picture like this? I suspect your typical phone-camera is just going to show a couple of bright spots, it won't fill your whole field of view with starbursts.

Hip Joint Replacement Surgery

My Hand, Festooned With A Needle and an Electronic Doo-Dad

Left the house at 5AM yesterday morning and got home around 7PM with a new hip joint. Dr. Elizabeth Lieberman from the Orthopedic and Fracture Specialists performed the operation at St. Vincent's Hospital in Beaverton. While I was there I was almost entirely under the care of women. I think I only had two guys dealing with me. Let's see how many I remember:

• the receptionist greeted me, collected $455, and started putting data in the computer,
• the nurse who guided me to the surgery preparation room
• Rosh prepared me, which seemed mostly to making sure she had the right person and the right operation, i.e. lots of typing on the computer
• a vampire to stick the needle in my hand so they could pump me full of drugs
• Dr. Li, the anesthesiologist came by and introduced herself,
• her assistant, a man, came by and talked to me,
• I think Rosh wheeled me and my stretcher to the operating room. I can't be sure it was her, but then lying flat on my back I couldn't see who was pushing my stretcher.
• Did Dr. Lieberman's surgery nurse come by before I got to the O. R? Probably, but once I was in the O. R. she got me on the operating table (carefully covered with a sheet) and got me in position so the anesthetists could stick c spinal tap needle in my back.
• And that is all I remember before I woke up in recovery, where another man checked my vital signs and entered more data in the computer. I was still pretty out of it, I don't recall anything else about that, I wasn't there long.
• Then it was off to Short Surgery Care Center / Unit (?) where I spent several hours sleeping and occasionally eating Kellogg graham crackers. That was a high point. I've been working on losing weight for a while and cookies are pretty much verboten. When you have been deprived of cookies for a while, even graham crackers are a treat. I ate at least six.
• Kathleen was my primary nurse in the SSC. Rosh also came by. She got to insert a catheter into my urethra to drain 560cc of urine out of my bladder. I had no sensation down there. Not draining the bladder could cause big problems.
• Around 3 or 4PM Jerri, the Physical Therapist came by and ran me through various exercises for the feeble, like getting out of bed, walking across the hall to the restroom where I was able to urinate by myself (only 250cc this time), walking down the hall with a walker, and climbing the world's shortest staircase (3 steps). She seemed to think I should remember all the rules from last time as it was only three years ago that I got my right hip joint replaced. I vaguely remembered going through the motions, but the rules? Not a clue. The big one is 'if in doubt, knees out'.
• While we were out of my room (number 7), someone came by and stole my stretcher, so they had to activate the movers, a crew of, I dunno, half a dozen lovely young women to pull a bed out of another room and wheel it into mine. I suppose there is some difference between a 'bed' and a 'stretcher' but the only difference I noticed was that the safety rails were chrome steel tubes on the stretcher and plastic panels on the bed,
• Next was the Occupational Therapist. I think the big deal here was getting dressed.
• Now I get one more nurse to go over my rules for when I get home. Fortunately my wife was there to absorb all that so all I had to do was smile and nod.
• Lastly, a cute young woman (a CNN maybe?) got me in the wheelchair and wheeled me to the Phil and Wife Nike Entrance where my wife was waiting with the car. She gave me a little help getting my feet in the car.

Every time I met a new person I had to tell them my name, birthday and why I was there. Then they collected my vital signs (pulse, blood pressure and temperature) and entered it into the computer.

That's all for now.

ADHD

The thought process of people with ADHD can look like a messy mind map. More than struggles with focus, the map could indicate a very curious mind, one researcher suggests. - Drafter123/Getty Images

The boss sent me some notes about ADHD - Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Sounds just like me.

What Hyperfocus Really Is

Hyperfocus isn't great concentration.

It's attention that gets stuck.

Time disappears.

The world fades.

Stopping feels almost painful.

Hyperfocus in ADHD (Why We Can Focus for 8 Hours... or Not at All)

If you can focus too much - and not at all this is ADHD.

You Can't Choose Hyperfocus

This part matters.

You cannot decide to hyperfocus on:

• emails
• cleaning
• boring work
• admin

But you can accidentally hyperfocus on:

• research
• ideas
• creative work
• games
• conversations

It's not discipline. It's chemistry

Why Hyperfocus Happens

ADHD brains run low on dopamine.

When something is:

• interesting
• novel
• emotional
• urgent
• meaningful

dopamine spikes - and the brain grabs on hard.

ADHD Isn't a Lack of Focus

ADHD isn't "can't focus.

It's can't regulate focus.

Attention is either:

scattered

or

locked in place

Very little in between.

Hyperfocus Isn't a Superpower

It can be useful. It can also be destructive.

Hyperfocus is a coping mechanism -your brain clinging to stimulation to feel regulated.

Why People Get Confused

Others see hyperfocus and say: "If you can do this... why not everything?"

Because ADHD focus is interest-based, not effort-based.

Gamescom 2025

Stolen entire from Eunoia:

Held in Cologne, the world's largest computer game show had even more visitors this year. Like 357,000 so see photo below of the crowds. That`s 22,000 more than last year. There were 1568 companies showing their wares (including resellers) I'm told, so I didn`t get to see all of the games, let alone play any. 

On the downside, statistics show that on average teenagers are spending each weekday 142 minutes indoors playing computer games, rising to 171 minutes daily at weekends. Time that might be better spent playing (sports?) outside instead of sitting hunchbacked indoors. Are games too addictive?

Tickets were 30 € on sunday, which I found overpriced. No pensioner rebates, in fact I might have been the only over-30 there ;-) It was mostly teens and twens.

I am sure that there are some amazing computer games, but I only play stupid, free solitaire games on the net. I suspect it's because I am cheap (and some of these games are downright expensive), and I don't have the patience to learn a bunch of arcane rules. Same reason I haven't mastered any computer aided design programs. I spent years learning arcane rules for building and programming computers and now my brain is full.

I try to keep my game playing down to maybe an hour a day, it is calming. My worst fault is watching YouTube short videos. I might spend an hour a day doing that. This blog, my family and my house consume most of my time.

Floppies

Floppies

Back in the early 1980's, at one my first computer jobs, I took on the task of configuring the Intel's iRMX86 Operating System for a custom Multibus computer system.

Intel Blue Box

We were using Intel Blue Boxes which we were renting from Intel for the princely sum of a thousand dollars a month. These machines had (3) eight inch floppy drives. Generating a version of the operating system entailed firing up a program and then loading a series of floppies and letting the program run. This took hours and inevitably there would be something wrong and the newly generated OS would not work, so I would change something and go through the process again.

Figure 2-7. Multibus Data Line Use

This went of for days. Finally we got an Intel consultant (Bruce Warmbrod) to pay us a visit. When we sat down to debug the problem, we discovered that one the of boards in the system, probably our own custom memory board, was not following Intel's Multibus byte-swapping protocol. That was both a Eureka moment and a Mount Vesuvius moment. What spawn of the devil had designed this memory board? Turned out we had stolen the design from the cheapest memory board we could find. Learned a lot about the computer business that day.

R. I. A. R.

The machine [from the movie Contact]
gvg908

I was talking earlier about how stuff accumulates and how it is a constant battle to keep from getting buried by all your stuff.

Now we come to my Dad's papers. We lived in Seattle up until I was in the 6th grade. Dad was an aerospace engineer working Boeing. He worked on inertial guidance systems, which made use of gyroscopes. Gyroscopes bothered my Dad, it really bugged him the way a gyro could apparently defy gravity by only being supported on one end. It bugged him so much that he convinced himself you ought to be able to make a machine that could completely defy gravity, if you just did the right things with some rotating weights. 

He called the machine RIAR for Radial Impulse something something. The basic idea was that you could swing a weight on a long radius in an overhead arc and that would generate an impulse in the upward direction, and then at the end of the arc, the radius would become very much shorter so it would return upward much quicker than the first arc, so the downward impulse would be much shorter. Since the upward arc was longer than the downward arc, the upward force would be larger and if would lift itself into the air, i.e. you would fly. 

Problem is that while shorter radius means quicker turnaround is also means more centrifugal force. So depending on how you looked at the problem, and how you finessed the trajectory of the weight, you could convince yourself that it should work. Or you could be stuck in the Newtonian physics box and conclude that it wouldn't work. My Dad built one model, and while it did move, it didn't fly and wasn't convincing. I bought some materials like 40 years ago with the intention of building my own model, but I never got a round toit. It wouldn't be too tough, all it would take is a bottle git-it-done.

Anyway, my Dad left behind a couple of boxes of papers covered with diagrams, drawings, equations and notes. I've sort of been meaning to sit down and look through them, but it would take getting my head in the right space to deal with it. I feel like I should at least look through the papers, see if there is anything that looks like it is worth preserving. I suspect most of it is just chicken scratches, notes made while he was thinking. And it has the potential to suck me in and I'll end up spending days going through them. Gaah! Meanwhile the two boxes are riding around in the trunk of my car. We are full up inside.

Thunderpig

SOLD: 1968 Chrysler Newport Town & Country Station Wagon California
Spoke Motors

I made several friends when I went to school in Bexley, Ohio. Sometime in the late 1960s, one of my friend's dad bought a brand new Chrysler station wagon. This group of friends was into tiny European sports cars. American cars, to this group of friends, were too big and too clumsy. They had no finesse. So this purchase was derided by this group, and my friend Phil Hathaway christened his dad's wagon Thunderpig. It had a honking big V8 engine and cruise control and Phil had his driver's license. Somebody had set the cruise control to highway speeds. Phil got it the car, started it, and pressed the RESUME button on the cruise control The analog cruise control obeyed, opened the throttle wide and the car took off like a greased pig, tires squealing and smoking. Great fun for 16 year old boys.

And that's why the cruise control on your car is crippled.

1969 Vinyl LPs

Steppenwolf - Magic Carpet Ride (Version 1969)
DiscoBar80

Hoo boy, ain't heard this one in a while. I was a senior in high school when this came out. From Wikipedia:

Steppenwolf were a Canadian-American rock band formed in Los Angeles in 1967. The group was founded by singer/rhythm guitarist John Kay, keyboardist Goldy McJohn and drummer Jerry Edmonton, all formerly of the Canadian band the Sparrows. Guitarist Michael Monarch and bassist Rushton Moreve were recruited via notices placed in Los Angeles–area record and musical instrument stores.

Steppenwolf sold over 25 million records worldwide, released seven gold albums and one platinum album, and had 13 Billboard Hot 100 singles, of which seven were Top 40 hits, including three top 10 successes: "Born to Be Wild", "Magic Carpet Ride" and "Rock Me". Steppenwolf enjoyed worldwide success from 1968 to 1972, but clashing personalities led to the end of the core lineup. From 1980 to 2018, John Kay was the only original member involved, having been the lead singer since 1967. The band was called John Kay & Steppenwolf from 1980 to 2018. In Canada, they had four top 10 songs, 12 top 40 and 14 in the top 100.

LP Storage

Reminds me that a friend of mine and I went to visit another friend. We were in a room and along one wall were cabinets full of vinyl records. It was maybe half as tall as the cabinet in the picture, but is was at least as long, maybe longer. Whatever, it was big. I don't think I have ever seen such a large collection all concentrated in one place. I don't think there was any purpose to our visit. We were just stopping by to say hello. It didn't occur to me till much later, like ten years ago, that that pile of records represented a small fortune. Say there's 30 disks in each cube, times six cubes long by four cubes high by $4 per disk is like $700. And this was back when gold was $35 an ounce and used car cost $100. Scale that $700 up to today's value and it comes to $70 grand. I suspect that the reason I didn't attach any significance to this is that such a large concentration of money was an alien concept (beware! here there be monsters!).  I didn't attach any significance to it at the time, but I squirreled that memory away and kept it, and 50 years later I pulled it out and realized what it was.

Via The Village Hemorrhoid

Update a week later. Corrected the price of an LP.

Fun with Numbers

Math puzzle – Can YOU find the area?
Math Queen

In my cave, this qualifies as fun. Looking over the videos on display on YouTube, I noticed this one. It looks like a fun little problem, and it was. When I am tired, usually from not getting enough sleep, I'm looking for some mindless entertainment. One of the games listed in the sidebar are my usual choice, but simple geometric / algebra problems can also amuse me for a few minutes. This one didn't take long, but, as usual, I can't tell you how long because once I started working on it time stopped. Below is a shot of my paper with my work. The answer to the problem (why would you care?) is 2.5 pi.

Motivation

I don't understand why I do, or don't do, things. A couple of weeks ago I got a big, fat credit card bill. My standard practice is to compare my receipts with the charges posted on my bill. The bill is always accurate, I think I found a bogus charge once, but correct procedure is to at least take a look at the charges and make sure that Bubba hasn't gotten a hold of your number and started  using it to order truckloads of caviar and champagne, so I try and do that.

When I'm done checking the bill, I like to pay it immediately. I don't want to have to remember to pay it later. I have screwed up a couple of times and it ends up costing me a chunk of change in late payment charges and interest. I hate having to pay those.

I also like to have a block of time where I am not going to be disturbed. I will use any little thing as an excuse to avoid dealing with bills, so I need a long block of time to settle down and prepare my mind to deal with this super annoying bullshit.

Anyway, I got this bill and then I got busy and a couple of weeks went by and then I finally got time to get my mind right and take a look at the bill and my bank account and I realized I didn't have enough cash on hand to pay the whole thing, so I need to get some money from my piggy bank. That takes a couple of days, then I need to deposit that money in my checking account, and that takes a couple of days, so basically a week goes by before I have enough cash on hand to pay the bill. Eventually all those things happened and I paid the bill.

Monday I worked at St. Johns, but the next three days I didn't do jack shit. Yesterday I got a haircut. Also yesterday St. John asked me to come help him work on his garage. So all of a sudden I am motivated to get stuff done.

Was it because my wife was overjoyed that I got a haircut? Was it because St. John asked for help? Or was it because I finally got that accursed credit card bill paid?

Fun with doctors and plumbing

Yesterday morning I went to see Dr. Schmidt, the urologist. Mom went with me. He listens to my tale of woe and prescribes Oxybutinin. I'm already taking Tamsulosin to cope with an enlarged prostate gland. When the prostate gets enlarged it becomes more difficult for it to relax enough to let urine flow, so the bladder, a muscular organ, has to work harder to push the urine out. The Tamsulosin lets the prostate relax so the bladder doesn't have to work so hard. Near as I can tell, after a long period of having to deal with the recalcitrant prostate, the bladder gets to be in a state of constant tension. So now I've got Oxybutinin which is supposed to relax the bladder. I took this once before, about a year ago, for a month, and it helped, but now the same problems have returned, so it looks like I will be adding one more drug to the handful of pills I take every day.

Get done with all that and doc asks me if I want a prostate exam, cancer screening you know, and mom says yes. I'm pretty sure I had one of these a year ago, but with the two of them ganging up on me I submit. It's annoying and unpleasant, but it only takes a few seconds and I should be good for a couple of years. I suspect the doc offered to do it because he knows that medicare will pay him $25 for the exam and it will only take a minute. $25 for a minute works out to $1500 an hour, which is pretty good pay in anybody's book.

After 30 years the stopper in the sink in the upstairs hall bathroom bit the big one. Found one on Amazon for $5 and had it delivered. In the drawing above, note how the Pivot rod goes through a little ring at the bottom of the stopper. The ring had broken loose from the stopper but was still on the Pivot rod. The Pivot rod goes through a hole in the side of the drain pipe and is held in place with a nut. Unscrewing the nut allows the Pivot rod to be removed, but when you do that the ring is going to fall off into the P-trap. If might get flushed down the pipe and out the sewer, but it might just hang around there collecting other bits of trash and eventually block the trap. 

P-trap

Best to get it out. Normally, the P-trap can be easily removed, but because our custom cabinets have drawers underneath, there is a shelf directly under the P-trap, so in order to remove it I had to unscrew the down pipe that contained the Pivot rod access hole, which slid into the P-trap and allowed me to pull the whole thing out. Of course water pours out when you open the P-trap, but my brain was operating so I had an old towel on hand to mop up the spill. The back of the shelf had water stains that appeared to come from the shut off valves, but the valves were dry, so I just put everything back together. 

I'm working blind getting the Pivot rod into the hole in the new stopper, but must have I got it right  one because it's working.

This morning we drove out to North Plains to let the shutter man into our old neighbor's new house. They decamped for Palm Desert, and the shutters hadn't yet made it to shutter man, so we got to be the good neighbors. The shutter man got the worst of it. We had a ten minute drive from our house, but he had an hour and a half drive from Oregon City. Morning rush hour through some of the most congested highways. Normally that drive would take half that time.

We stopped at McDonalds and got a couple of breakfast burritos and coffees and it cost like $10. You order from a big flat-panel touch screen. Tap, tap, tap, tappity tap, tap, tap. Every item takes at least 3 taps, and final check out takes several more. It seemed a bit ridiculous, but we got through it. The only people we saw was one person behind the counter, one person mopping the floor and the person who delivered our order to our table. I don't know if I like this, but the food was fine and the price was excellent.

Now we head over to Providence Hospital on the east side where the striking nurses are out in full force. The parking garage was fuller than usual today. We parked on level F and took the elevator down. Sign by the elevator says level D for the skybridge, level C for walkway to main entrance. Get down to level C and find we have to take the stairs down one more level to get to the street level.

Mom gets checked in and the fire alarm goes off. Very loud and very obnoxious and everyone has to leave the building. Me, fearing the worst, suggests we start walking. I mean, who knows how long we are going to be stuck outside, and it's freezing. Maybe we can find a coffee shop. We walk two blocks and indeed we find a Starbucks where we order a couple cups of coffee and a couple of the smallest scones in the world for $15. Meanwhile, mom gets a message from her doctor in the same building, so she calls her back and finds that the fire drill is over and we can go back inside. Seems that was the third fire drill this morning, and it's only ten o'clock. If we hadn't gone to Starbucks we would still be standing outside, freezing, because god hates us.

The dexascan reports that mom's bone density has gone up, which is good. It looks like that her expensive personal training regimen is paying off.

I stop in the bathroom on our way out. I'm sitting on the toilet thinking I ought to send a note Providence to compliment the janitor for keeping the restroom so clean. Then I lean over, the toliet flushes and squirts me in the butt. Dang it! Apparently I leaned over far enough to trigger the automatic flush trigger. Bah. 

Wash my hands (at the sink) and reach for a towel. There is an automatic, wave-at-me towel dispenser. It  rolls out six inches of paper towel. Wave again and I now I have two pieces of paper towel, each six inches long, barely enough to qualify as one sheet. Try the other dispenser. It rolls out a nice long sheet, at least fifteen inches. So not all automatic gadgets are junk.

Back home we head to Walgreens to pick up my drugs. It looks like there are half a dozen spaces in the parking lot, but they're all allocated for special people. There is the requisite handicapped double spot, a spot to pick up online orders and two spots to charge your electric car. Is there an ordinary empty parking spot? Oh yes, there is! One. Bueno.

We go inside, I go to the pharmacy to pick up my drugs. They have some, but not the whole order. Serrrano tells me that the rest will be here this afternoon. I know his name is Serrano because he has it written in big letters on his forearm and when I asked him about it he told me.

I'm done and go look for mom. She's waiting in line to buy toothpaste. The only reason we're buying toothpaste here is because because Medicare or our health insurance gives us $25 a month to spend on stuff, presumably health related. Shoot, if you're gonna give me money, I'll take it. You'd have to be in pretty bad shape to need money for toothpaste, but I imagine there are scads of people who have been driven into the ground by effing Biden and his commie cohorts. The line is long, and I'm gonna have to come back anyway, so we head home, eat tuna salad for lunch and write this story.

Loot

Assumption Abbey Fruitcake

A couple of weeks ago someone in the family was soliciting Christmas wish lists. I usually have a hard time with such requests, being as I don't need anything, or I want something unobtainable, like a rocketship. I don't know why but this year I didn't have a problem, fruitcake was at the top of my list, and my family delivered. It's delicious. Nobody else in my family likes them, or maybe they've never had the opportunity to try one. Am I willing to share? Hmmm. I dunno, maybe no one will ask for a piece. Kind of a problem since I am trying to lose weight, but if I hold it down to one slice a week I should be okay.

These cakes are made in the Ozark mountains in southern Missouri. The monks have a page about their operation but it is a bit spare. Looking for more info, I found a wonderful story on Feast. Therein the author mentions one Jean-Pierre Augé who:

"was teaching cooking classes in St. Louis and working as the chef for Mark Twain Bank."

Mark Twain Bank

Why does a bank need a chef? And where did they get the name? Did Mark Twain eventually become a banker? What the heck? Turns out the Mark Twain Bank operated from 1976 to 1997 when it merged with a bigger bank. Near as I can tell there is no real connection to Mark Twain the man.

MODCONS - Microwave Oven Timer

Emerson Microwave Oven

MODCONS - Modern Conveniences. Real Estate jargon. I've got a microwave oven I use for basically all my 'cooking'. The only thing I really cook in it is scrambled eggs - 2 eggs, a splash on milk, whip with a fork for a minute and then 2 minutes in the microwave. If I put in a bit too much milk the bottom of the eggs is still wet, which is better than when I put in too little and the egg gets cooked all the way through but sticks to the bowl, and cooked egg is the devil to get off. Scotch Brite scrubber and elbow grease does the trick. I keep thinking I should get some anti-stick spray or something but it hasn't happened yet.

Anyway, the timer that runs the microwave oven. If you want to heat something for 2 minutes, simply shut the door and press 2. If you want less than a minute, or anytime that is not exact number of minutes, you need to press TIME, and then the digits of the number of seconds (and minutes) you want, like 3, 0 and then you press START. If you really want the oven to be a modern convenience it should have something like a 5X or 10x button. Press the 10x button and 3 and you get 30 seconds. To do minutes and seconds maybe a + (Plus) button. Press +, the number of minutes, then press 10x and a number and off you go. Of course it adds two more buttons to the control panel, but there are already a bunch of buttons on there I don't use so they could go away. Until I need them.

New Things

I'm Nervous About This One - Massey Clutch Rebuild - Instant Reverse Part 2
Watch Wes Work

I'm posting this because of the comments Wes makes in the first minute. He likes doing new things, not doing the same thing over and over again. Looking back I have to say I am very similar. As to whether other people enjoy doing the same thing over and over again, I can't say. It's an alien concept. Oh, I can do repetitive work, but only if there is a goal in sight. It might be months away, but as long as there is an end point I can apply myself. Or maybe I just never found a repetitive job that engaged me enough to keep after it. Trouble shooting computer systems kept me engaged for ten years or so, but it was hardly repetitive. Every problem was new. I would have kept on but I was never able to connect with anyone who wanted my particular skills.

I enjoy watching his videos, not sure why. Maybe because they are comforting. I used to do mechanical work before I got into computers. I'm certainly not going to try and tackle any of the projects he takes on.

Sidewalk Dream

I'm walking up the street on the sidewalk. The street slopes slightly downhill towards the river. I am on the left side because there is no sidewalk on the right side. I want to cross to the right side of the street as I am facing uphill. I get to a traffic light but it's a complicated intersection and the lights don't give you enough time to cross the street. People in cars going downhill sometimes unintentionally get in the left lane but they want to go straight so they switch lanes in the middle of the intersection which is unnerving if you're in the middle of the crosswalk.

While this dream was going on, I was sure I knew where this street was. I was so sure of this that when I woke up I pulled up Google Maps to see if I could locate any such place in Portland, because I was likewise sure it was in Portland. But the more I looked and the more I thought about it I couldn't think of any such place.

Kind of strange that I had three vivid dreams within 24 hours. I was feeling kind of puny the last couple of days so that may have something to do with it. But I wasn't running a fever, least ways not enough to notice. I don't know what it was, but it seems to happen periodically.

Walking the Dog

Dog Water?

I have upped my walking to 30 minutes. It's been a year since I got my new artificial hip joint installed and while I could walk comfortably since shortly after the operation, walking for a few minutes would cause the joint to start aching. After a while I was able to walk around the block (ten minutes), but this summer I have started tackling longer distances, like three or four miles. Great achievement, but it left me so wiped out I would need a couple of days to recover. Sad, very sad, as the great and benevolent Donald likes to say. But now I've been doing 30 minute walks every morning and all is well.

I go early in the morning, before breakfast and before I've taken a shower because if I wait till those two chores are done, life takes over and a walk takes the back burner which means it doesn't happen. While I am out, I will usually see about a dozen people, some are working (roofers and landscapers mostly), some are just out walking and about half of these are walking their dogs.

Today I noticed this little puddle adjacent to a paved walking path. Been by here every day for a week and today was the first time I noticed it. It looks like someone deliberately made this hole for drinking water for dogs, but it has a definite brown tinge from the adjacent asphalt paving. Doesn't seem like a good idea, but if it was really bad I suspect dog's wouldn't drink out of it.

Talking to Jack about his dog Ruthy yesterday. It seems like Ruthy likes to eat cherry pits she finds on the ground. Jack's neighbor has a cherry tree that hangs over the fence, and there's a cherry tree at a nearby school where they go for walks. So what's the big deal? Dogs eat all kinds of garbage, that's how they get that wonderful dog breath. Well, seems cherry pits are full of cyanide. If you just swallow them whole it's not a big deal, but if you crunch them up it doesn't take more than a dozen to send you to your maker. The crunch is the key, but dogs like crunchy things, so, yeah, you wanna take precautions.

Wasn't there a tune called Walking the Dog? Yes, yes there was:

Rufus Thomas - Walking The Dog (1964)
Reelblack One

Happy Birthday to Me

Faucet Aerator Thread Gauge

Wednesday July 3 went to Cafe Nell for lunch. Had an order of huevos rancheros, my favorite dish there. It's kind of a foo-foo place, but I've gotten old and slow so I enjoy it. Stopped at older son's compartment and his kitchen faucet had gotten kind of wonky, so we walked half a mile over to Ace Hardware where they had a rack of about hundred different aerators. They also had a thread sizing gauge very similar to the one shown above. I swear every one of those threads was something demented. One was like 55/64" by 27 threads per inch. The Amazon blurb reads: "Identify thread pitch & diameter for 20 of the most common aerator sizes from 1/4-18 to 15/16-27". I think ours ended up being something like 15/16" by 23. It took a while to sort through the selection but we eventually found one. $10. I cracked wise that back in the day they probably cost 15 cents, and it turns out I was about right:

Curent Price of Gold	$2,300.00
Price in 1970	$35.00
Ratio	65.71
Price of Aerator	$10.00
Equivalent 1970 price	$0.15

So I had a nice meal, went for a walk, explored the arcane world of kitchen faucet threads, fixed something and got to complain about the gummint. All in all a pretty nice day.