Post  #2697.   Our day.  Did you know this thing saves drafts? Yes. All of those posts you started and abandoned for various reasons. This one was pretty funny, I thought. Seems it was just after a Christmas, years ago.

   A little departure for this blog - a trip inside the real world. Brother and I got up at the usual time and had breakfast, but from then on the day was completely different from our usual. I am only just now getting to the computer for the first time - 10:45 at night. We opened a portion of the loot, then sister-in-law came over. She has many stops to make on Eve and Day, but she ends up spending the remainder with us, or at least she has for the past thirty years or so. Brother pointed out that today was the 41st Christmas in this house, for him anyway.

Tons of cool stuff. I spent like a drunken sailor and was glad to do it. From here on out, any Xmas could be the last. Besides, I used a credit card. One little story I have to tell you about.

I opened a package that smelled a little. As more and more paper came off and the item came closer to my nose, the unmistakeable Puer la Chine began to make me dizzy. Yes indeed, an item of clothing from China. I held it up at a distance and was surprised, no flabbbergasted, to behold a Size 14 Petite pair of leather/suede ladies' jeans. There was much more to do, so the solving of this mystery would have to wait until later. Questions continued to bob in and out of my mind. Why did brother give me a pair of ladies suede jeans? Jeans that were too small. How do the Chinese make suede out of recycled tires? Would Brother really just wrap something like that without wondering where it came from? (That one answered itself. He would.)

The investigation. It was brief and, as it fairly typical in these cases, a complete waste of time. A rigorous interview with Brother and a long telephone conversation with the by then home and having wine Sister-in-law proved inconclusive. The receipts went out of course, but the trash hasn't been picked up yet. I have until Thursday to go out there and dig for them or simply let it go. My nature would generally compel me to make a half-assed attempt to get the stink-to-high-heaven jeans back to the person or store they they belong to, ASSUMING I didn't pay for them. They aren't on the AX bill which contained the other items bought that day. Those two can't even remember what stores they went to, however. See, Brother gets a little woozy when he gets taken out for shopping and lunch with Sister-in-law, and she, well, she is a bit off all of the time.

Any advice would be appreciated, of course, but I'm leaning toward re-gifting them to a certain relative (she's about a petite-14 as it happens) once some time has gone by. Rick Macherat Rick M. In the day.
posted by Rick at 1:11 PM

Post  #2696.   Some fun.  Want to do something fun? Have "Alexa" or use some other means to play Surfin' Bird by the Trashmen (1963) and get an idea of what your grandparents were up to and the general level of sophistication of the times.Rick Macherat Rick M. In the day.
posted by Rick at 12:52 PM

Post  #2695.   What happens out west.    See, because we're behind and you folks up east, in the center of the Universe, you never hear the news from out here. For instance, on a Saturday night through Sunday morning this happened:

The dump truck was carrying a 80,000-pound load of clay and gravel when it crossed the I-5 median Saturday, plowing into oncoming traffic that was stopped while police investigated an earlier fatal shooting, authorities said.

Twenty-eight vehicles were involved in the collision, and traffic backed up for miles as lanes were closed for hours in both directions.

"It was bumper-to-bumper traffic, and then ... it was like the semi just flew over the whole median and there was dirt everywhere. So much dirt, it was like a sand storm. It was astonishing," witness Bobby Grace observed.

Incidentally, the shooting involved the killing of two people in a car by a passing vehicle, according to the passenger who leaped from the back seat into the front to stop the car.

As is the case pretty much everywhere, what really matters is the traffic. Here's JeanAnne with that ..Rick Macherat Rick M. In the day.
posted by Rick at 1:12 PM

Post  #2694.   Our modern cushy keen world.     It's especially keen that we make so much money and everything is so cheap. The reason for that is that we search the world over for the poorest, most desperate people to build, make, put together and, increasingly, grow all of our stuff. We never give them a thought.

One of the better things about this arrangement which, by the way, history will not look kindly upon, is that very high quality is maintained with all of these products because the workers are honored to have the opportunity to make life keen for us, the people who select the items, put them in our carts, take them home and, in about a year, throw them out because they were even too crap for the yard sale.

Buy that?

I didn't think so. Because you are probably one of the sad slobs who has had a finger or two ripped off, had an eye gouged out, been electrocuted or endured the worse eleven days of explosive diarrhea of anybody who lived anyway. Yeah, they're honored all right.Rick Macherat Rick M. In the day.
posted by Rick at 11:57 PM

posted by Rick at 2:21 PM

Post  #2692.   BlogSpot Trouble.  I don't know if something broke or someone got

into the Blog and messed with it. The latter would depend on that someone Finding the blog, some thing which hasn't happened in years. As you can see, this place is thoroughly messed up tonight.

So, if I never come back, I didn't die after all. Rick Macherat Rick M. In the day.
posted by Rick at 1:01 AM

Post  #2692.   VP of what?    An article in the paper today about a Google Vice President of "search products and user experience" got me thinking about the world of work in general. And why I am so glad not to be remotely involved with it anymore. The business channel was running stock footage of employees in cubicles while voicing a report on some business thing. Just think about it: millions upon millions of people sitting in those things, typing away, with maybe a stuffed animal and some family pictures nearby to give some illusion of life to the experience. Each day that passes means fewer people like me who think this is all unnatural and more people like them who are quite comfortable with it. Just this weekend I was telling someone, a young someone, about traveling to the airport in the day. You know, how you drove up, parked at the curb, walked out to the gate, greeted your arrivee, picked up bags and left. Elapsed time: maybe 40 minutes, of course that included a stop for a drink at the bar where you could watch the planes for a bit. Oh, and everyone was well-dressed and not the least bit hurried or stressed, even though their chances of ending the day in a flaming plunge from six miles high was about 1,000 times more likely than it is today.

But we do have cable. And cell phones. Oh, and don't forget porno, plenty of porn 24/7, so there's that. Rick Macherat
posted by Rick at 12:35 AM

Post  #2691.   Hot.     My day involved a few phone calls, some messing around and generally fighting the heat. Are you going to complain about the heat all summer long again this year? Why yes, I had planned to. Why? No reason. [My imaginary person actually sighed.] Of course I have to complain about the heat, for three reasons: 1) I live in a heat-containing house; 2) I have that special heat disease; 3) Seattle has a peculiar kind of heat, recognized for the evil that it is by only a few of us with 2).

So how hot was it today? [yawn] Glad you asked. It was 87° in Seattle, and despite the extreme measures that I take during the hot season and which won't be delved into here because of credibility and mental stability issues, it is still 82° in the living room where I'm sitting. Note for those considering air conditioning: when they tell you that floor ducts work just fine as long as you get a really BIG unit and a really BIG fan, well, they're right - so long as you don't stand up.

A funny thing about Seattle. People went AFN today, what with the sailing and the sunbathing, the skipping work and mainly just the sitting out and soaking up. Almost none of those people thought ahead to the fact that tomorrow morning will be one of the crabbiest on record. Why? Since this is the first day of it, few people remember, but approximately 45 seconds after they lay down to to try and sleep, they will. Friends in Seattle, take this from an old timer: it is pointless even to go to bed because it will just get hotter and hotter and sweatier and angrier every second you stay there tonight. Your bedmate will seem like a yule log, and you might get to where you contemplate tossing him/her/it right out the window. Best thing to do is run water in the tub and sleep in there. Yeah, you might die, but along about 4:30AM even that won't seem so bad.

The sister-in-law, who is Completely Immune to Heat by the way, went for her annual physical yesterday. What I'm going to tell you about next is the reason why she won't be getting my URL [I have to live with her, so to speak.] Sister is distressed over the fact that she is in perfect health and doesn't have anything while it seems like everyone else our age is having operations, getting chemo, dying .. like crazy. A couple of weeks ago, brother and I were discussing how we were going to get this awkwardly weighted and sized oven upstairs. So, she comes over, sizes up the task, semi-not-so-silently whispers something like Oh forgodssakes and lifts and carries the blasted thing up two flights of stairs to the kitchen. The rest of the visit was spent talking about how Doctor doesn't understand about her bad back.

So, they have her down for an Isotope [Nuclear] Stress Test. How could I resist, huh, when she asked me what I knew about it? First I went the silly route and told her they set off a tiny nuclear device and see how fast you can run to escape it. In truth, the test is so gawdawful that I would sooner take the nuke-and-run. NFW I would consider it, no matter how badly I wanted to have something. So, I explained that they inject you with stuff which alternatively constricts and dilates various arteries and veins while starving the heart and basically getting you as close to being dead as they possibly can without outright killing you, all the while watching what this radioactive "dye" does as it courses through your poor heart and circulatory system.

She took all of that like she usually does - like I hadn't uttered a word - and said she planned to look the procedure up on the Internet. Then I mentioned, just as an aside, that they use Thallium. Thallium? You mean .. Yes. But, there isn't anything to worry about, of course, because the medical profession always has the well-being of the patient first and foremost and they certainly wouldn't schedule you for something which wasn't Completely Safe, even considering the fact that she has been like The Creature That Won't Die to them for about twenty years. Rick Macherat Rick M. In the day.
posted by Rick at 2:19 AM

Post  #2690.   John Wick kills.  I'm not violent, but I like violent movies. John Wick satisfies anyone so-inclined. I wondered, "Has anyone counted?" Of course they have. This is the Internet, and everything that has ever been imagined is already there.

Count 'emRick Macherat Rick M. In the day.
posted by Rick at 1:25 PM