Bad chair. Bad.

To accompany the previous entry's rant on incompatible spectacles, I'll mention computer chairs.  It's only fair.

My old computer chair was getting a little long in the tooth, loosing wheels and such.  As I sat lopsided on a half-wheeled chair, I thought 'Might be time for a new chair.'  So I went to the office place and sampled many chairs, some comfortable, some painful.  I picked a chair only to find, once assembled, it didn't quite work for me.  See, most of the time I perch here cross-legged.  It's just the most comfortable way for me.  That only works if you don't have pointy chair arms digging into your thighs.  I got bruised!  So I took it back and got a nice, comfy leather chair with plenty of sitting-space.  Except that one was too wide to fit under the desk so I had to lean forward to type, and that's just not gonna work.  So I got a third chair, which is kinda hard and small, but it fits under the desk and allows me to cross-leg it.  Except the tilt tension is so tight that even at it's lowest setting, it's very hard to recline.  Nothing's easy!

Had a heating and air guy here the other day giving me an estimate on some damaged crawlspace ductwork (don't know how, but a duct had come loose of the floor and has been air conditioning the basement for god knows how long).  So anyway, while he's looking around for a place to put some additional intake vent space, he looks inside my understair closet.  In the rear wall of that closet (which is about ten feet deep), I have a very heavy chain bolted and hanging down (above an old bath mat for comfort, aren't I nice?).  It's impossible to miss.  He was silent for long moments while looking in the closet, but he didn't say a word.  Good for him.

Aah my eyes!

It's a Monday.

I went to eye glasses place in the mall to see about some new glasses.  My current ones are about seven years old and have gotten mightily scuffed over the years.   For some reason, they won't sell you glasses unless you have a current perscription, so I had to have an eye test, too.   Well, I got that done then wandered through eyeglass place for an hour, trying to make a decision.  The problem with glasses these days is that they keep getting smaller and smaller.  I need glasses to see, see, and if I only have a narrow strip of vision and the rest is blurred, it doesn't do me all that much good.  Pretty soon glasses will probably consist of quarter inch wide strip.. "It's fashion!" they'll say, as they walk straight into walls, bushes, low-flying birds.

So anyway, it's hard to find a pair that have reasonable coverage without being massive black plastic, square-lens, nerd frames.. the kind my father wore in the 50's through the 70's.  At last I found some which I thought suitable, along with some sunglasses for driving, because they're cool and who doesn't wanna be cool?  Got them on (wow, everything's so clear!), went home, and found I couldn't wear them for more than 15 minutes without a splitting headache.  Maybe they're calibrated wrong or something.  Took two hours to sleep off the headache and my eyes still feel bushed.  I'll have to try to take them back tomorrow.  Prolly have to end up with little strip glasses in spite of it all.

I was poking around in my leaky storeroom yesterday, thinking that I ought to get rid of some of the stuff just to open up some space.  Could stand to get a new shed, but that's an expense that can wait.  There's some stuff in there that could go to Goodwill, like a pair of lamps that are excessively lemon yellow--yellow to the point of being aggressive.  I have no idea where those came from.  I looked inside a vase and saw a brown recluse at the bottom staring back at me.  Now I'm scared to go back in there.

I also used 120 pounds of dirt to fill in a stumphole.  Yes, I have a stumphole, and now it's filled.  Sounds kinda naughty.

Steamy Doldrums

It's been hot.  Really hot.  There's hardly been a drop of rain for a month, and it's been in the 100's and super humid much of that time.  Downright unhospitable.  I've had to scamper around the yard moving the sprinkler around every day.  Finally, at the end of the August, the weather seems to be about to turn.  There's even a few leaves starting to fall, foreshadowing the crunch goodness of 13 oak trees dumping their leaves on the lawn. 

I had a weird dream.  I was in a Chinese restaurant and trying to pay a check.  I had an appetizer but had ordered the rest to go.  The appetizer had been a bowl of soup, called in some places on the menu as "Cursed Cabbage Soup" and other places as "Dammit Cabbage Soup" (and reading that name "Dammit!  Cabbage soup!" just made me laugh and spray cola all over the place and then sit here blinking in surprise for a bit).  Anyway, I couldn't get anyone's attention in order to pay the bill.  Time went by and I got more and more frustrated.  After maybe thirty minutes of wandering around the place, I didn't even want the food anymore.. though I did bump into the Japanese prime minister and shook his hand.  Some mobster-lookin guys came and I got nervous for some reason and took off out the back door. 

I ran up a steep hill on a well-worn dirt path that was bordered by tall, thick grass.  It was night.  Somebody followed me and caught up with me, he had really skinny arms and legs.  He took me to a place with a bunch of old human bones sticking out of the ground, and I knew he meant me no good.  There was a big pile of large, rotting pumpkins nearby, so I shoved him down onto the pointy bones and started throwing the pumpkins at him.  He threw a few back at me, but I eventually buried him.

Then I was looking through a hole in the bottom of my basement door.  I noticed a bug I thought might be a hornet laying eggs in a nest by the opening, above a pile of old cans.  Every time I looked back, the bug got bigger until it was a foot long, and there were a few others, too.  I was trying to figure out how I was going to get rid of the darn nest when one of the bugs fell on the cans beneath the nest, and the can started spraying green gas.. it was a bug bomb.  I thought that was a good solution, but it didn't appear to bothering the bugs too much.  Then I realized that the bugs were actually really ugly, inbred cats, and I got concerned the gas would hurt them.  Most of the cats were hairless except for their heads and the tips of their tails, and they started talking, but I can't recall what about.  One came out of the basement.. it was a short black cat with its paws on sideways.  Despite its paws, it was quite friendly.  It chirped like a bird when petted.  The other cats started talking, but I can't remember what about, cause I woke up.  Weird.

Bridge

A bridge collapsed into a wide, muddy river in Minnesota.  Remember that dream I had a few days ago?  It looked an awful lot like that in my dream.  Weird.

Mosquitos and Earthquakes

I dreamed I had dozed off in my car on a long two lane bridge across a mud-colored river somewhere in the woods of Arkansas.   I think I had been out there to watch fireworks.  I woke in the dream to a slight swaying motion and realized there had been an earthquake.   I drove to the other end of the bridge to find some of it had crumbled away.  Nothing below but swirling, brown currents.  Then the bridge started to crumble away.. I slammed into reverse and tried to get back to the other end before the whole bridge crumbled beneath me.  The collapsing bridge was faster than I was, and the asphalt was falling out from underneath my wheels, and I knew I wouldn't make it.   My car finally fell into the water and I (somehow) jumped out, hoping I wasn't too far from the shore to swim.  I did make it, but as I crawled onto the shore, I remember thinking that this was too improbable (and unfortunate) to be real, so it must be a dream and ordered myself to wake up.  That always works.. but not this time, so I worked hard on adjusting to the idea that this really must have happened.  Then, a while later after some other strange events happened, I woke up.. relieved to find my car hadn't plunged into a brown river.

I hate muddy rivers in my dreams... always overgrown, weedy shores, overcast skies, a humid feel, mud banks and deadfalls.. never pleasant.  No idea where that imagery comes from, but it never bodes well.

I went out earlier toda to spray this deadly stuff on the poison ivy that's spreading out back.  The mosquitoes swarmed me and chased me back inside.  I had to restrain myself from scratching.  You're not supposed to scratch, they say, but it's oh so satisfying.

To cap off my exciting Saturday evening, I scrubbed the bathroom and nearly gassed myself with caustic cleaner fumes.

I think a day like that deserves a little vodka at the close.

June Turtles and Jaguars

It's good to have a Internet connection.  The other day, out of the blue, my connection speed dropped from about 2500 kbps to around 9 kbps.   That's slow.  That's really quite slow.  I tried to fix it myself with some modem shaking and router rearranging, but it was beyond me.  After an hour and half phone call to customer service (first to India, then to Missouri) during which I was told things like 'That shouldn't be happening,' they scheduled someone to come check my lines the next day.  Later that day, the discovered some outtage somewhere, and everything went back to normal.  Coulda saved myself a long phone call, if I'd just gone to bed.  Let that be a lesson to you.  About what, I'm not exactly sure.

In other news, I finally got that old 59 Jaguar sold.  It's been sitting there, unmoving, for about 5 years now.  Thanks to someone who knew someone who spends lots of money collecting old cars, it's now gone.  Had to push it out of the driveway and onto a flatbed thingie, breaking the flatbed thingie and leaving a nifty gouge in the street, but it's gone.  Looks kinda weird to have an empty driveway again.  It was a cool old car, but I don't have enough of a collector's zeal to go to the effort and money of fixing it up right. 

Yesterday, I saw another micro-turtle, trundling down the sidewalk beside my house.  A little guy, barely filling the palm of my hand.  Here he is, placed artfully atop a leaf for your viewing pleasure:

May tears

Today I've been moving books to and fro;  crumbly, centuries old books.  I'm covered with book dust.  So, I tried the extension ladder thing, but it didn't work.  It was just too long.  I went Home Depot, but all they had were more of the same.  So I had to order ladder online to be able to access the higher shelves.

I also looked at google satellite maps today.  It's neat to be able to see my house--even my car parked in the driveway--from space, and to trace my walking path through the streets and woods.  I also looked up my grandparents' old lakehouse in Hot Springs, looking at where I used to play in the water 25 years ago. 

Currently, I'm a little drunk, and I'm crying a lot.  But I'm not crying out of sadness.  Rather, it's tears of regret/compassion for the whole, damned human race.  For all the evil we do, and all the evil we've done, maybe all that's left in the end is our love, and what we've meant to the ones we've loved in return.  Maybe that's all we mean, in the end. 

Maybe that's enough.