Click images for desktop size: "Irises" by Vincent Van Gogh Woke up in screaming pain from my shoulder. Very bad.
I see the doc's today at 3:30. I hope they have some sort of miracle pill to calm this thing down.
I'm far from impressed with the miracle of Lantus insulin. I thought it was starting to kick in. I got hypoglycemic trembles. Had to eat the glucose tablets to get them to stop, but it appears it was more from me not eating anything for 12 hours than the drugs.
Here's to today.

Football last night. It was good for me. It wasn't good in general but it was far from the worst session I've ever been involved in. The organizers' hearts are in the right place they just don't have the skills to pull it off.
The Equipment Manager and the Team Manager are stellar.
Saw 118 kids yesterday. No stud athletes. That's no big deal. They were kids. Some showed potential. Potential is all that they need right now. In general the kids seemed eager to learn, eager to play they just have no clue as to how.
I ran the agility section with the 6 inch agility hurdles. This is one of my and a lot of other coaches favorite sets of drills. We used to run these drills with "step over bags" which were about the same height as the hurdles and about six inches broad. One of the evolutions in sports science is how even this small thing has changed.
Originally the step over bags were about 12 inches high. The point then was getting the players to get their knees high, like stepping over arm tackles and flying bodies. Gradually it dawned on us that getting the knees high slowed the player down, it was not efficient use of kinetic energy. The step over bags got shorter and shorter. Virginia Tech was then using one inch plywood, eight inches wide and five feet long, as step over bags, getting the placement of the player's feet and legs while letting their knees and feet stay low and
Click images for desktop size: "Indomitable" by Unknown flowing to the motion instead of chopping against the motion. And now we accomplish the same thing with little plastic hurdles.
Part of me resists the change over. There are certain elements I think need the five foot long bags to properly implement. Since they don't have any step over bags and as raw as these kids are my normal concerns about finding a replacement drill aren't needed here.
I started with the "Bunny Hop". Six hurdles, 1 yard apart. The kids are supposed to keep their feet together and hop over each hurdle, one hop per hurdle. I had intended this as just a warm up and not part of the evaluation. Two thirds of the kids could not keep their feet together at all. One third could not clear each hurdle with one hop per hurdle. About 10% faded out and couldn't complete the drill.
They wanted to grade three drills. The single step, where the kids run through the hurdles taking one step to clear each one, come to the end, turn left, explode forward five yards turn left again and run through a second set of hurtles.
Then there was the side step, same drill basically.
The final drill were the in and outs. Just a weave going forward, side step, then backwards. What I look for are eyes, good football stance and good arm motion.
In West Texas and California high school ball 95% of the kids would have been given a 1. I gave most of them 3's. I only graded three kids as 1's and 4 kids as 4's. No 5's. I figured I should use a bell curve and not a rigid standard.

Click images for desktop size: "Gloria Swanson" Even the experienced kids kept their eyes on the ground trying to watch their feet, had no arm movement and no sense of precision. I tried to give them visualizations of what they were doing and why. They liked that. I gave the 4's more based on effort than skill. I like effort.
My friend ended up not working with me. She had to start and do the 10 yard time on the 40's. During a water break I glanced at her sheet. I was impressed I saw a few 5's and several 4's! Kids hitting 4 seconds in the 40's make my heart glow. Until I realized I was looking at the wrong column and the 4's and 5's were the 20 yard times!
Watching a few of them run it was apparent they all needed just some fundamental work. With times like that I can get some massive miraculous seeming improvement. I think the kids will work hard enough to accomplish that.
Since most of you know that my coaching technique involves trotting along the athlete and encouraging and exhorting I realized I trotted about two miles yesterday! I was pretty shattered
Click images for desktop size: "Hug Me Forever" by Jana Jelovac after practice. But it felt good.
We have to go again on Thursday. I'm going to push to take over my friends job and run the 40's. The kids clearly need some coaching there. That was my biggest surprise. I didn't hear any coaching, just instructions.
Oh, after practice we stopped and bought whistles! Just regular whistles. I still like loopy ones but that could terrify the parents.
That was the oddest part of the day for me, the 200 or so parents who just sat in lawn chairs on the side lines. I still don't quite know what to make of that.

New foster dog has decided he likes us. He spent much less time humping foster dog and more time hanging out with me and my friend. Yesterday he had no accidents in the house.
He was crated for about 4 hours while we were at practice. I hung out outside for 10 minutes before we left. There was no evidence of the bad behavior his previous fosters experienced.
New foster is a good little dog. He wants to be loved. Boy, does he not know anything! I think as he gets a bit calmer, he'll learn.
Foster dog has two more applications! No word on whether they are acceptable. Foster dog is pretty special. He's struggling to learn, struggling to find out how to fit in. He's a pretty great guy.
I took the Original Trio, gentle dog, my puppy and giant dog, on a walk with just the three of us. They needed the reassurance. My puppy not so much. She;s been through all these fostering things before. She stays steady. Gentle dog needed reassurance that he's still special the most, even more than giant dog who is is very insecure and jealous.
My friend bought me a new hard drive! A 500 gig Western Digital.
I'm not looking forward to installing it. The iMac case is NOT user friendly. There's so much tape and putty etc that it can get pretty overwhelming. Too many tight gentle windings to break, too many glues to distort.

Click images for desktop size: "Ella Fitzgerald" by Bernardine I did it before. I'm going to check around and see if I can get someone to instal the drive for 50 bucks or so. I figure 50 is about how much my fear is worth.
I feel oddly reluctant to let the computer out of my hands.
No issues from the "lost" files. I'm hoping it was just cache files or something.
I'm worried that I've loaded all these responsibilities on my friend, football practice, vets and doctors when she got hit with some ridiculous deadlines at work yesterday. I have to think of something reasonable so she can get her business and recreation done while I handle myself better.
I mowed half the yard yesterday. Not much of a contribution to her ease of mind.

Posted by David at 4:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Her Blue Eyes" by Unknown Pain in my shoulder woke me at 4, again. Last night I updated some of the Apple software. The QuickTime update required a reboot. I hate rebooting. Now I can hate it with even more purpose.
The restart began and then the computer turned itself off. Did that twice more.
I rebooted in single user mode (command line stuff) and ran a disk repair (fsck). The disk was unrepairable. The binary tree catalog had become corrupt. That's the entire file system . . .
I'd gotten lazy and hadn't done a full back up since Sunday. I was able to boot from my back up. 2 and 1/2 hours later DiskWarrior was able to repair the problem. At least for now.
I guess I'm going to have to start doing twice daily back-ups until I can find a replacement drive I can afford. DiskWarrior reported that I've lost 36 folders and 18 files . . . I don't know what they were. A quick visual scan doesn't show anything terrible. Maybe I got lucky and it was some cache files or something.
I replaced the drive in the iMac almost 3 years ago. A Seagate Barracuda. It was a terrible job. One I'm not looking forward to attempting again. What choice do I have? Last time I broke the DVD drive. Maybe I can fix that or replace it.
Working on the iMac is worse than working on a notebook.
If I suddenly cyber-vanish, well, you know why.
I remain grateful for IMAP. No fear of losing any emails, at least. Even when I don't answer them I like to have them.

Yesterday was strangely busy. Five dogs had a lot to do with that. Five dogs and thunderstorms.
My friend got to come home early, she got to work from home. Her MacBook running Parallels is doing studly duty, I think.

Click images for desktop size: "Modern Woman" by Unknown We had a good discussion about the football tryouts this evening. I was just pulling out of my zombie state, where I'm resisting passing out. I hate naps.
My friend sometimes resists discussions. I think she sees them as arguments and with my propensity for going ballistic I worry that I engendered that. She was at one of the meetings about the tryouts.
At the meeting I heard, "The coaches won't do anything but observe and evaluate the players."
She heard, "The coaches will be assigned drills to run so best come prepared to work."
Pretty contrary.
Somewhere in there she said, "You don't approve of any coaches except the ones you trained." I could immediately think of at least a half dozen coaches I worked for who I liked and also thought were pretty good, better than me in most ways.
The end result of the conversation was positive for me. It reminded me of a truism that I have always held but in the middle of the volunteer coaches I know it is easy to forget.
The main point of sport at this age and this level is to help the athletes to be better people not just on the field but in society, in their neighborhoods.
No person is really capable of teaching that sort of skill. But it can be taught. A coaches job is to train the athlete to be the best that he can be. The real beauty of football is that its teaches more than
Click images for desktop size: "Doris Day" I ever could.
My aphorism has always been, "I teach them how to play the game. The game teaches them about life."
All men are, by instinct, competitive. For me to be successful as a coach, and I think I have been successful, it is important I rise above my animal instincts and not get sucked into who's better, best.
Working with pros I never had an issue knowing that. Amateurs, volunteers who are giving freely and deserve love and respect for their efforts made me forget that, if only just a little bit.
Remembering that changes my attitude greatly. Remembering my place in the great scheme of my goals is important. Even though I made my friend uncomfortable the conversation was important to me for that and several other reasons.

The five dogs . . . oh boy. New foster and foster dog are tight buddies. Even if it involves a lot of humping. They are both doing better and better each day. New foster still gets too nervous but he's starting to laugh and smile. When my friend or I upset him he now goes to look for one of us to protect him from the other!
He's not housebroken and had another accident, urinating in the exact same spot! I need to buy a
Click images for desktop size: "Geisha Dream" by TitusBoy newspaper so I can cover that spot.
We had another small incident. Giant dog is incredibly jealous, He attacked, not viciously, the new foster. The little guy ran and hid under a chair but let my friend coax him out. Just too many dogs and giant dog doesn't like us talking so much to the new guys.
Foster dog has had some intrest from forever homes. One was rejected out right. They'd adopted and returned two animals previously. The other two are lets wait and see right now. The new foster has a woman willing to wait for him until we can see how he really is.
My friend points out that with 5 dogs we cannot do a proper assessment as to how he'd do on his own with just him and a person.

I watched a terrible movie yesterday. A BBC documentary. In this country we have a strange idea of the BBC. I've disliked them and continue you do so. The doc was "The Rock and Roll Singer."
It claimed to be an impressionistic view of a rock & roll tour from 1969. It was impressionistic becasue it had no point of view, no story to tell, and no skill in resolving it.
Still the 45 minute film was fantastic becasue the rock & roll singer was Gene Vincent. It was his tour with The Wild Angels" as his back up band.
Even inept filmmaking couldn't conceal the man's genius, his talent as a musicain as he rehearsed with the band. His insanity and his charm.
Although he was 34 at the time of the tour he looked well over fifty. He'd be dead in two years, dead from excess. There are five live numbers in the film, shot with a static single camera. That;s all he needed. When Vincent sang he collapsed the world in on itself.
The only effective filmmaking was a couple of pointless moments of Vincent walking around London, dragging his crippled leg around his corpulent body looking sadly at the world. Then there were the
Click images for desktop size: "Advocation" by Unknown moments after the show where he had to fret over getting paid. He was worried about himself but there was also the worry about getting the band paid that seemed pre-emminent.
Even when they attempted to provoke and in each spontaneous moment there was no scandal, nothing to uglify, all there was is a drunken, sad man who still held close to the idea of being a Southern Gentleman in all things.
Gene Vincent. Even talentless hacks can make art when you have a demi-god to point your camera at, a demi-god who was also so very mortal and so little different from you or me.

Posted by David at 8:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Experiments Gone Wild" by Unknown Five dogs is too many dogs!
At least it seems that way today. Chances are that after a week or so it might very well change.
The new foster is a pathetic story. His story bears constant repeating. He's three years old; has no training whatsoever, not even housebroken. His front teeth have been knocked out. I've no concept of why or the method used. He has worms and it appears to be long term and never treated previously.
He lived with another dog. The owner of the pair went to court and was told to get rid of the dogs or face jail time. (We're not allowed to know what he was arrested and tried for. I understand that even scum must be protected even when it frustrates me.) He took the dogs to the pound and gave them instructions to kill them. They
Click images for desktop size: "Keith Richards" were on 24 hour death watch when they were rescued.
The new foster was with another experienced foster family and for some reason he was destructive there. They couldn't cope with him. So he ended up here.
At first he was pretty crazy.
He's been recently neutered but still tried to hump every dog in the place. Our three told him off pretty quickly, since he's about half the size of the smallest here the new foster had enough sense to back off. Except that foster dog, also recently neutered, doesn't seem at all concerned. New foster humps him constantly. Foster dog just goes about his business with this little dog humping whatever part of him he can latch on to.
Its a bit annoying but oddly seems to have calmed both fosters down immeasurably! Strangely my memories from adolescence don't consider dry humping as much of a relief . . . It works for them.
New foster has had two "accidents" in the house. I think they weren't accidents. I think he did it on purpose. He defecated within the first 20 minutes in the house. Last night he urinated by the book case.

Click images for desktop size: "Elements-Fire" by LawnElf He's been very good other than that. He's accepted being crated at night. My friend thinks he's a Pariah dog mixed with Basenji. There's no reason to dispute this, although I think the breed name is unfortunate. He certainly vocalizes like a Basenji, no barking but lots of odd little vocalizations.
He won't let his picture be taken. Dog myth about his soul being stolen? He eats more than the giant dog!
Today is going to be stormy. Beau coup thunder and lightening. We'll see how it goes.
He's a cute dog ad incredibly good natured. Stubborn about his dislikes but no real problems.
Today I have to schedule an appointment with the vet for both foster dogs. Foster dog for booster vaccines and heart worm meds. The new foster for worming (fecal sample!! yuk . . . )
They both need baths. I'm not sure if I have the strength for that.
My arms are killing me. I find it monotonous. On Saturday I was making the bed and flipped the duvet. It locked my arm up. I couldn't move it for twenty minutes.
A couple of years ago I accepted the new pains and took some pride in being able to survive and assimilate them. But now the hurt just makes me weary. My doctor appointment is on Weds. I'm hoping that there is some sort of reasonably quick treatment available.
I'm getting better at suddenly becoming left handed but if I lose my concentration and use my right hand for almost anything I pay too severe a price.
I have other fears about the doctor this trip. I don't think the Lantus (insulin) is working. I think that they're going to try me on a different type of insulin.
Two hours after eating a kiwi my blood sugars were 15.8! I had nothing else to eat after that and my blood sugars were down to 9.1. This is not good.
This morning they were at 8.3. They should be around 4. I was getting very similar results with just the pills. I'm up to 27 units of insulin. Starting to push the envelope. When they started me on metformin I had to get up to the maximum allowable dosage before I started to see results.
I've finally adjusted to the side effects of the Lantus. The trembling in the morning is gone, as is
Click images for desktop size: "Fallout 3" by Unknown most of the nausea and the extra hand cramping. Its a bit discouraging to have to imagine going to another type of insulin and additional side effects.
For some reason, maybe medical, I had it in my head that player tryouts were on Saturday. They're tomorrow and Thursday. Over 350 kids to look at and evaluate. At least I'm primarily an observer and won't have to run any of the drills or do much instructing. I have to get together the pad so my assistant (actually my friend) will know what I want and need recorded. I'll probably keep my little scraps of paper going to insure that I get all the data I can.
A lot of the drills will be worthless, I'm certain. For some reason my fellow coaches want to make sure that there are "fun" drills in the package. I think they underestimate the young athletes. The fun they'll have is in testing their limits, comparing themselves to their teammates, not doing "fun" drills that accomplish little for them or in terms of evaluation.
From what I've seen I expect that some of the drills will be run incorrectly which will also make them rubbish. I worry about being judgmental but then I remember that six of the coaches I trained went on to coach professionally. One in the Div III championship game. I think I've paid the price to believe I have a glimmer of what things should be done.
I don't want to be judgmental. These guys aren't professional coaches. I suspect I'm the only one with a degree in physical education. For some of their swagger its also obvious that I've had more experience and success than the rest of the coaches combined. I admire that they're willing to work with the kids, that they have the drive and willingness to do the job. I know the rewards that come from coaching. They're huge. But they are not the sort of rewards that appeal to just anyone.
They deserve respect and have earned the right to be proud of what they're doing. I'll remember that even if I think they're being dumb.
Most of you know that I am capable of a dumbness greater and more profound that it is reserved only for the well meaning and the oblivious.
I'm going to wrap my shoulder and arm, maybe even wear some sort of sling. I don't think me rolling on the ground cursing in unintelligible grunts and groans will do much for my image with the kids.

Posted by David at 7:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Division" by Robert Randtoul I was feeling somewhat better. Up at 4:00. Just over 3 hours of sleep but no where as bad as I've been feeling until . . .
I set my pills out. One of them started to roll off the table. Without thinking I caught it. Wish I hadn't. The quick move made me see black. Vision back in just a few seconds but the pain doubled me up for nearly 15 minutes. Still feel it 40 minutes later.
The deep nausea is much better this morning. Maybe I'm getting used to the insulin. Its not doing me much good as far as I can see. The injections still hurt. It makes me feel edgy right afterwards. I went to sleep with a good blood sugar count of 7.0 and woke up with a 12.4! Stupid body. Stupid pain.

Were getting a new foster dog today. An emergency placement. The dog was surrendered by the owner with another dog. It was one of those things, "Surrender the dogs or face jail time". So you can tell the guy has had a nice three years so far. He was going to be put down. Clearly fair. His abusive owner avoids jail time but the dog gets the death penalty. That's justice. Clearly being victimized was the dogs fault.
His front teeth have been knocked out. He's not housebroken. He's not crate trained. He has bad separation anxiety. I don't see much there that justifies the death penalty. Five dogs in a tiny house bothers me just a little. My flailing health and dealing with two fosters bothers me just a little bit more.
Looking ahead next weekend we'll be gone most of the day. My football teams "evaluation". I hope that a week with us will get the new foster enough time to know he's safe here and that we can be gone without him panicking.


Click images for desktop size: "Elegance" by Richard Mohler I am totally bugged by Obama. With all of the rhetoric he's going totally 19th century when it comes to consumer rights. And he's showing a deep hatred for the handicapped. I thought he was avoiding the sickening presence of lobbyists? It was one of his big promises, wasn't it?
There's the International Copyright Treaty convention going on. The Obama administration has presented an opposition to the treaty. He opposes books for the blind and for the handicapped. You know, people with no arms, people paralyzed from the neck down. Obama is sickened that these slackers have been getting a free ride at the expense of poor down trodden publishers. You know those poor publisher guys who need to park their Escalades in the Handicapped parking spaces at the grocery store.
The RIAA, MPAA and the publishing lobbyists are recorded as having open access to Obama. They decided that the Handicapped have had it their own way too long. No more free books in braille, no more handmade books on tape. The handicapped, according to Obama, have got to start pulling their own weight around here. I guess he figures they're handicapped, what right do the handicapped have to be informed or educated. They should just stay inside in the dark and out of sight.
This is the most repellant thing imaginable. The only reason for their opposition, at least the argument they presented to the conference was the verbatim page from the copyright lobbyists website, so you know Obama is watching out for us and not being unduly influenced.
Revolting.
More revolting is that come election day no one will remember this gross cruelty. No one cares much now. Its only the lost, the powerless, the disenfranchised. And that we will allow them to be exploited and forced into the shadows, deprived of basic human rights is revolting. It's not a country I can be proud of.

Posted by David at 7:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Click images for desktop size: "Californian Farm Sunset" by 0videoman I don't think its a good sign that I'm waking up feeling worse than when I went to sleep. It all feels so contrarian. Like a nap should cure a head ache or an upset stomach. Shouldn't it.
I'm feeling rotten. Worse than I've felt in years. No where near as bad as the first chemo but remarkably bad all the same. Hands all cramped up, stomach twirling, eyes struggling to focus through the head ache and my skin feels hot and clammy at the same time.
What a mess I've become.
Most of this was predicted as side effects to starting insulin. They're supposed to go away. I'm up to 25 units a day now with no stabilization in the offing. It bothers me that I was getting similar blood sugar numbers with just the pills and vigorous exercise. To have the expense and the discomfort as well as the psychological numbness from having to do the injections and not see any radical bim bam improvement is disheartening. This wretched feeling only adds to the malaise.
I've been using hot moist heat on my shoulders and elbow. It doesn't do anything to relieve the neuropathic pain but it does loosen up the other muscles that were clenched tight. It provides minimal relieve but minimal seems like a lot right now.
I looked it up and 25 units of insulin is equal to about one third of a milligram. I'm clearly astonished that I carry around a big old gland like a pancreas and all it does for all the care I give it is to produce about one third of a milligram of insulin a day. Its even more distressing to accept that I'm so vulnerable that a drug about the size and weight of a snow flake or half the size of a mosquito should have this devastating effect on me.
My friend is home from her conference. I opened the gate for her to drive into the yard and she ran over this big rock we keep by the gate for propping the gate open. The rock is about 10 inches in diameter. It didn't hurt the car but it did bounce the rock into my foot. My big toe is all blackened. It
Click images for desktop size: "Silent Passage" by Unknown shows how bad off I am that I barely notice the pain from a traumatic injury.
I was glad to see my friend. I struggled hard not to pass out. By the time I'd sorted through that she'd fallen asleep! She slept for nearly 14 hours. Poor thing, she must have needed the rest.
She went into work today because she's the only management person who'll be accessible today. She took the giant dog and the gentle dog with her! That will be interesting for her and for her co-workers!
I'm going to miss them but I'm glad they're getting a break.
There was an upsetting incident with the foster dog yesterday. We took about an hour walk and been home about 15 minutes when I heard a bad bit of snarling and whining.
The foster dog had pressed the gentle dog into a corner and was snarling and biting at his neck. Gentle dog was not resisting but was clearly suffering. I pulled the foster dog off. He made no act or aggressive motion towards me.
The gentle dog was rattled but not physically harmed. He was upset but the one who was the most upset was the giant dog. He was trembling and stuck close to me for the next few hours. He was far more upset than the gentle dog.
The foster dog is subject to aggressive play. He initiates every play period and will not relent until the dogs play with him. After the attack they refused to deal with him for a couple of hours, all except my puppy who will only play with him if he plays her games.
Most of this is just a dog trying to figure out his place in the pack. Clearly he is not going to challenge me as the alpha dog and he's not interested in challenging my female puppy but he's using the
Click images for desktop size: "Count Basie" aggressive play to attempt to dominate the two males.
The only solution I have is to watch them carefully and when the foster begins to play and the playing is not reciprocated and continues to press he'll have to go to a time out.
The aggressive play indicates a lot of things. Breaking him of that bad habit may open him up to concentrating more clearly and being less stressed.
Its a saga.
One thing I might have known but didn't realize is that gentle dog was neutered late in life. This is odd to me because he is so gentle and happy, not in the way I associate with late neutered males. He was actually being used as a stud in the puppy mill he was rescued from which makes his gentleness and lack of aggression even more moving.
He still likes to bite me though . . .

For some reason I found myself thinking about Irvin Kershner. He's a film director there's no reason
Click images for desktop size: "The Call of the Wild" by Cole Phillips for anyone to know about except that for some incomprehensible reason he was picked to direct the "Star Wars" sequel, "The Empire Strikes Back". As I consider that to be the only watchable episode of "Star Wars" I find it interesting Lucas picked Kershner, a man whose career, up till then, had been defined by good but not remarkable gentle movies about people. There was never any hard edged cataclysms in Kershner;s movies. In "A Fine Madness" the hero, Sean Connery, is a poet who gets a lobotomy as a by product to trying to avoid jail for late alimony payments. in "The Flim Flam Man", George C Scott plays a con man who prowls the rural south. Scott is old, self aware, charming and sad without any bitterness.
Kershner's movies tended to be enjoyable, reasonably successful. How this translated out to working on a cash cow and making that cash cow the most interesting of the series is something worth contemplating.
Today figures to be much like tomorrow, with me trying to hold on. Friday is my friends "TV night". I've got the roomba running in the living room. I like to get everything nice so she can just veg out and enjoy the only show she watches. I'm still a believer in the Spartan aesthetic, and part of the asthetic is cleanliness. Even if she doesn't notice it makes me feel good getting it together for her.
I've learned how to move so as not to create any enormous pain for myself. I sort of had to. The sun has finally come out after 4 days! So it might be a better day.
There's no reason it shouldn't be. No reason it couldn't be.

Posted by David at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Click images for desktop size: "Business Lady" by Unknown One odd thing that bothers me; when I dance and prance around to the music playing either in my head or on the iPod I used to feel liquid and elegant, now I feel stiff, jerky and unbalanced. Of course, that's just the way I feel. Maybe someone watching me sees me as smooth and swirling as I used to be (and yeah, I practiced my dancing in front of mirrors). Maybe everyone else always saw me as stiff, jerky and unbalanced. Everyone has their right to an opinion on my dancing. Naturally if you feel that way I'll have to fight you and my puppy would help me.

I'm not doing well.
I'm even gladder that the diabetic nurse called me. For some reason its better feeling miserable knowing that this is just normal adjustment of my body to the insulin than a new stage of misery unfolding before my life. Pain is not an enjoyable view of the future.
Yesterday was a loss. After the blood letting at the lab I got home loaded with ambition. They day turned out to me passing out for 45 minutes at a stretch then recovering then struggling to stay awake for more than a few hours.
When I went to bed for certain I woke up every 45 minutes, awakened by the pain. I'd keep trying to go back to sleep but at 3:30 I just gave up.
Now, three hours later, after all my meds and two cups of coffee I've managed to get past the nausea, my hands still feel cramped and my concept of arthritic. I've managed to hold my arms so that they and my shoulder are quiescent. The pain is just an easy endurable 2 on the chart, no worse than a bad headache.
I know I'm feeling better. My puppy has stopped her vigil, watching over me, and gone to sleep on the bed. I'm glad that she nor any of the dogs, don't see me as a god like master, but as another member of the pack that they love. My puppy loves me dearly. Sometimes I'm astonished at just
Click images for desktop size: "Dark Tower" by Marvel Comics how much she loves me. The same way I'm astonished at how much the gentle dog and the giant dog love my friend.
The foster dog isn't sure who he loves he just knows he desperately wants to love someone.
As much as I miss my friend I'm glad she's not here to see me like this. Its easier to suffer and throw myself around when there's no witnesses. I wonder what it is inside me that makes me refuse to show this much weakness even to people I trust.
Last night they kept my friend at her conference until stupid late. She had to rush to get to the concert she's had tickets for for nearly two months. They got to hear six songs . . . I like numbers so I figure that between the two of them they spent 15 bucks a tune! She doesn't mention whether they were good songs.

I'm going to try and accomplish something today. I need to for my own sanity and self respect. Its still a grim looking day. I'm going to take the dogs out for a walk. Maybe we'll meet some new people and new dogs. Then some household chores. I'll try and avoid the nap fever.
I keep thinking that at the doc's on Wednesday they'll give me some pill that will like instantly knock out the terrible pain. I was even looking for the terrible mood elevator pills that they don't ever give as a mood elevator because it stinks at the job it was designed for. They use it for neuropathic pain almost exclusively. I hate the pill because it makes me feel like I'm hung over for a few days after taking just one.
I'm already feeling badly hungover so . . . the pills were expired for
Click images for desktop size: "Janis Joplin" two years. I feel better about that. I still have a knee jerk reaction to depending on pills. To relying on something outside of myself.

I'm up to 23 units of insulin. I discovered that the SoloStar, the "pen" I use to inject the insulin, locks down at the amount of insulin it still contains. The last dose in it was 14 units, which meant that I had to inject myself twice. Not too surprisingly the second injection was much more painful and annoying. I resisted the temptation to re-use the same needle to boot. I used a fresh one but it still hurt.
It was annoying having to use a fresh needle. they're relatively precious. I'm relying on the free samples the diabetic nurse gave me. It seems that since the doctor didn't prescribe them I have to pay a serious price for them. He has to write a script for needles then they're a lot cheaper. I'm asking him for one when he gives me the script for the pain pill they decide on.
My blood sugars are still all over the place. Its annoying. My diet is good. Last night before the
Click images for desktop size: "Buffalo Hunt" by Charles Russell injections they were acceptable 8.1. Six hours of fasting later they are at 10.8! I still have to take all the pills I had to take before, the metformin and the glyburide (metformin makes my body more sensitive to insulin while glyburide squeezes what ever insulin there can still be left in my pancreas) the blood sugars are at 11.6! They should be in the 4 to 5 range.
I don't know what to make of it. I'll just keep doing the routine and see what comes off.

I was curious to see if anyone had been listening to the RIAA free music on the jukebox. I was a bit lost as it looks like no one has even taken a look at it. Maybe the feeling is that if the RIAA isn't willing to sue you for listening to it the music isn't very good. I disagree with that. There's some stuff there that I think is better than most of what's out there. I guess you have to like guitar music.

My puppy just came in to check on me. She's laid down beside me and is checking me intently. I'm going to feed her now and then we'll take off for our walk, she, I and the other three. I always feel lucky when I look at them all. I wonder what good things I ever did in life to deserve such affection, trust and friendship. I wonder that always. Funny, I never wonder what I'd done to deserve all the hell.
My puppy just got up and stopped the foster dog from coming in to jump on me (bad habit we're still working on). My puppy, my nurse and care giver.
To the day. To this day and to all the other days to come.

Posted by David at 7:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Click images for desktop size: "Red Umbrella" by Marta DahligModestly bad news on the health front. (My health has plenty to be modest about.)
Last night my blood sugars were at 12.7. I injected 18 units of Lantus (insulin). I was awakened at 4:30 by barking dogs and our guys wanting to go out and bark fight with them. I took my blood pressure and it was 150 over 80! My blood sugars were at 16.4. The blood sugars haven't been that high in years (?).
Three hours later the blood reports 10.5.
I feel frustrated.
I have to wrap my arms in elastic bandages just to move. It makes me feel like a Frankenstein monster in swaddling clothes. The bandage compression doesn't help the diabetic inspired neuropathic pain, but it suppresses the severe pain and cramping in the other muscles.
I haven't been able to stretch for months. Not even the old fashioned yawn-ey stretch in the morning thing, so that the muscles around the affected areas have started to knot up from the tension. I mean really know up. At first I thought I'd developed a series of tumors! I try and work them out with out much success.
(To understand how pain just below the shoulder point of the right arm and the elbow of the left has trashed my shoulder, neck, and clavicle I always use the story of Dizzy Dean. Dean was a hot shot Hall of Famer for the St Louis Cardinals. He broke a toe on his left foot. It annoyed him but it was just a small hurt, The Cardinals needed him. He needed the money so he figured he could easily pitch through the little pain. He pitched two games before he injured his arm and was out of baseball for good. His left foot was his pivot foot and the little pain forced an unnoticeable change in his delivery. His body compensated to avoid the pain and this produced enough torque in his elbow to tear the ligaments. They didn't have the
Click image: "Kessel Energy Spider" by Dragon Winter surgical techniques to repair it back then so a stubbed toe ended the career of one of the best pitchers in baseball.)
I'm starting to get angry about it.
The foster dog had a mild blow too. The perspective parents abruptly backed out. They claimed a family emergency that will necessitate them being in India for several months. I suspect if we had approved them and let them take the foster dog home they'd have called us in a couple of weeks and asked us to take him back. This is a pretty evil thing to do to a dog or a person. The timing is at least good for him.
I like to kid myself that I'm perceptive enough to have realized that these would have been the sort of people who would not see a dog as family, Any family emergency would, in my little world, have included the puppy.
Poor guy, but it could have been worse. He's a good pup. He'll find a home.
My goal with foster dogs isn't to move them out and sell them. I'm not involved in high turn over. I'm kind of known for making people jump through hoops. I want the dog and the people to all be happy together and to face life together. Love should not die.
The porch painting is progressing nicely. My friend is still having fun. That's the important thing. I don't care how long its taking so long as she has fun.
As the worst painter in any group I always get the cruddy job. Ceiling painting. It was hard because I had to extend my arms over head. It went alright though. The bandages got me through it.
It is finally looking like something. The color was supposed to be
Click images for desktop size: "Judy Garland" sand and look like stone and gravel. Its sort of a yellowish brown in execution. Nothing wrong with the color, just not what my friend expected. (To me it still looks like the inside of a translucent mushroom.)
Painting the ceiling I managed to drip paint on everything. My hair, my iPod even the giant dog has a couple of interesting splotches on him. They add personality . . . the last thing giant dog needs is more personality. I kept throwing him off the porch but the sight of me cursing and shouting in pain while standing on a ladder is just too appealing. Even my puppy comes and peeks at me. She walks away shaking her head.
Today I start of the floor. Being a porch I get to use the hose on it. For some unknown reason I'm looking forward to that. Sweeping it down and then spraying it with the hose. I wish we had one of those high pressure "thousand pounds of pressure hoses". That would be cool and potentially destructive!

Click images for desktop size: "Ricardo Del Cuore" by Titus BoyI still love the idea of potential destruction.
I also realized that I have a coaches meeting on Monday. This meeting slightly baffles me. Its to discuss drills to be done in player evaluation.
I'm confused because this is silly stuff and doesn't fit the pretty slick image they've presented to me. There are a core of drills. Watching a kid run them, watching him step over bags, watching him run, watching him strive to compete tells me all I need to know. It shows his heart and his present ability level. It shows his attitude.
When kids get psyched and say stuff like "I need to get the pads on. When I'm out there hitting people then I can really show them what I've got!"
The kids are wrong on that. I can tell what you've got by the way you plant your foot on a post corner cut drill. I can see how well you'll mix it up by the way your eyes follow me as you do the step over drills. I can tell if you've got the heart to be unbeatable by the way you check others heights on the vertical jump. I can tell how hard you can hit by your distance on the broad jump. Most importantly, how you do on that tell me what I have to teach you and what we need to do together to shape your body into what you want it to be.
I always note coaches who want full contact drills. I was asked to coach an All Star team in Europe. I and the other American coaches were google eyed when we saw one of the European coaches running "nutcrackers". Nutcrackers were punishment drills, made to "toughen you up" is some jerk of a coach thought you were slacking.
You give the kid a ball and set him out to run into three defenders with no protection. The defenders are about five yards off from the kid. The kid is guaranteed to get hammered. Some jerk college coaches use nutcrackers to get kids to quit the team and give up their scholarships.
We asked the European coach what he was doing. He was seeing if the kids were tough enough and really wanted to play. Since this was an All Star trial I sort of figured that had been answered.
That coach never beat any of our teams.
I'm afraid how many of my fellow coaches in this meeting will want to run full contact drills to see the obvious stuff that they should be able to see on their own.
Their argument will be that the kids love the contact. Some of them, most of them hopefully, love the contact. I like to keep the kids hungry for it.

Click images for desktop size: "Picture Book" by Robert F Blum Maybe I'll be surprised and the meeting will be to discuss some new drills that some crazy scientist has devised that safely and intelligently give even more diagnostic proof. Maybe.
My friend is going to have to end her vacation by going to this meeting with me. She's going to become my statistician! I need her to follow me around and record all the trials. Most of you have seen me on my own with my little scraps of paper with dozens of numbers rapidly scrawled all over them. Some of you have even given me nice little notebooks which, in a matter of hours, I have reduced to little scraps of paper that fall out of my pockets all over the field.
I figure she might enjoy the meeting and might get an idea of the information she'll be recording. She'll enjoy that. even organizing it into spreadsheets!
Time to feed the dogs and start on todays porch project!

Posted by David at 8:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "La Gutin" by Pavel Last night I went to sleep with my blood sugar at 5.4. That's pretty good. I injected 17 units of Lantus (insulin) and this morning my blood sugars were 6.4 which is on the bright side of  acceptable.
I'm eating lunch in a few minutes - cheap-o ramen. So in a couple of hours the verdict will be in on whether the insulin has finally kicked in and become a part of my body chemistry..

Click images for desktop size: "Bob Dylan"
People say I complain a lot, even about things I agree with and am happy about. I don't know about that. I think its a part of my constant consideration. Part of it is that I know there are too few golden chances in life. I don't want to miss one. Same part is that there are many traps, most of which we set for ourselves. I try and avoid those. Another part is that I think you have to consider all sides of a problem and an issue. I tend to do that in the front brain and sometimes it comes out aloud.
I'm also generally described as self deprecating. I had to look that one up. I don't think I ma at all. I just have a tendency to think about other things than myself first. I do have a huge ego. My only issue with self esteem is that I don't think others have enough of it.

Click images for desktop size: "Pin Up" by Earl Moran I also have a natural cynicism and stoicism that makes me seem crabby . . . okay, I am crabby.
This is all thinking about stuff when pain in my arms woke me up. Three times last night. Once so badly I woke everyone else.
I guess I don't know how to age gracefully. Aside from having a total jerk of a step-father my young life was gold. Southern California; I was a good, sometimes great surfer, stud athlete, played guitar in a band that made "rekkids". My teen memories are flooded with images of girls sidling up to me and whispering outrageous things into my ears.
Now I was heartened when the diabetic nurse looked at my records and said, "oh, I never would have thought you were that old!" My hamstrings are so tight I have to stoop to pick something off the ground. I can't put the dog food back in the fridge without grunting. I've got my arm wrapped in elastic bandage so I can nearly raise it over my head. I had 6 teeth pulled, which makes 9 I'm missing altogether. The psychological damage of the cosmetics hurt more than the novocaine needles.
I never imagined getting older would mean being less than what I always knew I was.
Somehow through all this I still know I can coach kids and teach them to be winners. I can still make enemies and I can still make friends. I can still not care what people think about me. I can still think highly enough of myself to stay true to myself. I can still be happy.
Happy thanks to my friend and my puppies.

It never rained at all last night. It is a golden day today. Might reach 80!! Too warm. I re-cleared the stuff from the porch so that the painting can continue today.
I needed the day off. A lot of the pain has recessed. I like the way the big project is looking. I like it better that my friend is still on vacation and finally starting to relax a bit. (She had to log into her work account yesterday. I don't really understand why. She just had to.
The puppies are doing well. Foster dog got a bit crazy yesterday. The kid next door is an ass. He was teasing the dog. I don't think he started out with malicious intent, but after I asked him to stop and he continued I got irked. With kids this came out as, "Please stop aggravating my dog. Thank you!" That stopped him as best as it could.
My friend thinks maybe the kid was abused or something. I've worked with enough abused kids to think the kid is just a bored ass.

Yesterday I mentioned my puppy's aunt. I mentioned her cat which is doing well in her struggle to survive. I wrote the cat was now 50. Okay. This was a typo. The cat is 15!
I think that counts as a retraction. Okay?

Posted by David at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Click images for desktop size: "Nature" by Celso Junior Good news. Last night my blood sugars were 8.0 which is just a bit bad. This morning my blood sugars were 5.4 which is pretty good.
I had a breakfast of eggs, frijoles, kiwi and potatoes. Two hours later my blood sugars were . . . (testing) 12.3 . . . That's not too good. Should have been between 7 and 10.
I'm up to 16 units of Lantus (insulin) so it will be 17 units tonight.
At least there's some sort of reaction.

The perspective foster dog parents didn't come yesterday. They'll come to meet him on Friday or Saturday. He could care less. He's found his place in the pack. Now he just has to face his place in the house hold.
The only thing wrong with him is that he is the world's sloppiest drinker. He drinks savagely and leaves at least half of what he takes out dripping from his mouth. I've watched him gulp up a pint of water, turn his head and let it all fall out on the floor. Fortunately I don't mind mopping a lot.
Yesterday, while cleaning up the painting for the day, the giant dog and the gentle dog found a real funny joke. I left the front door open because it was nice. The pair of them came up on the porch and whined and wiggled to get me to open the door for them so they could go into the house. They plowed in and two 20 seconds later they were back up on the porch begging to get into the house . . . I looked at them with one of my looks and let them in.
Twenty seconds later they RAN onto the porch, giant dog was wiggling and laughing so hard he could barely shine so gentle dog scratched at the door to get in.
I let them in. Five seconds later they were both stumbling onto the porch shaking with laughter and collapsing on each other going to the door. I laughed too. This was a signal to attack me and try and
Click images for desktop size: "Peacock Phoenix" by Unknown lick me. I hate being licked which, to them, made this all the funnier.
I have to remember I like dogs.
While I see painting as something that needs to be done I knew my friend enjoys it. I underestimated how much she would enjoy it. She said she was having fun. She looked forward to it.
This held even though she discovered that the paint wasn't exactly the color she had envisioned.
We got the paint at the Salvation Army! Recycled paint. It was cheaper but not a steal. Still it looks cleaner. The old paint looked like the product of a drunken hippy pipe dream. Not real hippies but like those old guys who have dreams of hooking up with a space cadet hard body chick. The chick had dreams of going to design school or being a fashionista.
She was with the old guy only because she had nothing else to do and no money to do it with. She probably needed a place to crash that night. After a couple of drinks and a joint she was probably wrinkling her nose at the state of the place and came up with this whacked design scheme. Since this was a way to get the chick to hang out the old guy readily agreed and the end result was . . . this?
She probably left as soon as it was finished, probably with the guy behind the counter at the liquor store.
Now the porch will look like the inside of a mushroom on a sunny day . . . Which is still better.
All week long there was an 80% chance of rain last night and today. So last night I spent about an hour hauling all the stuff I'd taken off the porch back onto the porch. There's a lot. The porch is more a summer room that a porch (two chaise lounges and three tables sort of things as well as an incalculable amount of lamps. My friend had fallen asleep so I had to do it myself. Hurt myself early and often.
Today its mid sixties and there's only a 30% chance of rain tonight . . . I couldn't have worked anyway. Even taped my shoulders are both killing me, add in all the dings and I'm close to worthless.
Still a vacation day is a vacation day.
I did watch two movies last evening. Back in the 80's Dolph Lundgren was the next big thing. There was this xeroxed magazine you couldn't afford to miss by the Hollywood Kids. It was six pages of
Click images for desktop size: "No Peeking" by Peter Dribben the nastiest cattiest fawning gossip in LA.
When Lundgren was cast in "He Man and the Masters of the Universe" opposite Frank Langella as Skeltor they went ballistic to the point of sneaking into the Lundgren's costume fitting. They reported he was more imposing and gorgeous in real life even if he did have pimples on his butt.
I figure that's the mark of real adoring fame. Either when someone takes the time to notice the pimples on your butt or loves you despite them.
Of course then then movie came out and Lundgren wasn't hot anymore. It was really bad. Langella survived because he got to wear a mask through the whole movie. Lundgren did a lot of junk movies after that. He became irrelevant.
He had that one interesting flash with "Big SHowdown in Little Tokyo" but everyone put that off to the burgeoning star power of Brandon Lee. Then he sort of faded to direct to video.
I somehow got a hold of a copy of a movie called "Missionary Man" when I saw it starred Lundgren I left it on but proceeded to do chores while it played. It wasn't great but it was good and Lundgren directed himself in a way I guess he really wanted to be. Chaste, huge, dangerous with an leaning towards finer feelings that he and his character knew he would never fully grasp.
I liked it. Made me see his next (or maybe previous) direct to DVD thing called "Diamond Dogs". It really sucked.
But yesterday I watched the 1989 Lundgren "The Punisher". While
Click images for desktop size: "Ray Charles" not a gruesome as the latest Punisher flic its surprisingly good. Lundgren is very effective as the deranged revenge fueled anti-hero. Marvel Comics wasn't the power house production company it is now so this is just a cheapie (even though Stan Lee still grabbed a production credit).
It actually made me feel warmly for Dolph Lundgren, and the cheap but stylish sets and his lumbering presence made for a cool enough 90 minutes.
After that I watched a strange movie, "Method Man". Nothing to do with the rapper/movie star. Its a seventies kung fu flic. This may be the worst movie ever made but and this is a shock the action choreography and the fighters are superb! It makes no sense. But when the fighters are mixing it up it reaches level similar to Liu Chia Lang's glorious choreography of Philip Kwok in the Chang Cheh flics that followed it. The fighters fly around and perform astonishing purely physical feats that dazzle and delight then we get back to the dreadful story which makes little sense even by cheapie 70's kung fu standards.

Click images for desktop size: "One Puff" by Monogamez Today is my puppy's aunt's birthday. To celebrate her 50 year old cat, (CAT!) is still hanging on. Perhaps just to spite me and my puppy. I can live with that. This is one of those cats with the sense to wish she were a dog.
My puppy's aunt other celebration was that their flat panel TV blew up! An over priced Sony. But even then there's a birthday miracle. They got the extended warranty so they get a brand new, current model FREE!
I've never heard of one of those extended warranties ever working out for anyone before. Sounds like a good, no make that an excellent happy birthday to me. Well, it should be.

Posted by David at 1:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Click images for desktop size: "Hot Robot" by Lavakillu When I went to bed my blood sugars were 6.8. Acceptable. When I woke up this morning they were 11.6! It used to be the reverse of that. 11.6 is not good.
I'm up to 15 units of insulin. I have no idea how long before everything stabilizes.
Early Saturday morning I woke up with the worst headache of my life and I'm a guy who fractured his skull and had 3 concussions. It felt like a cheap description of a migraine. They warned me that headaches might be an early side effect to the insulin. I never imagined it would be like that.

We started the vacation project. Scrapped the entire porch and got the front porch 80% primered. It already looks better.
I tried wrapping my shoulder in an elastic bandage. It help considerably. I had a few twinges but only one drop me to my knees killer hurt. I worked through it. As everyone knows I'm stupid that way. It gentled up to an ache after a half hour.
I got whacked with overwhelming fatigue twice. There's no doubt that the fatigue from the insulin is a lot easier to push through than the leukemia fatigue. I'm pretty happy with how much work I got done. I expected to get more done than I did but, well, who wouldn't.
First coat today then will primer the back porch, there should be time to do that. Then have to bring everything back onto the porches. It is supposed to rain late tonight. I think the rain will come late enough to not mess up the paint.
If it rains all day tomorrow then we'll get to go to the Chinese Buffet!!
That will please the dogs no end. They deserve pleasing. They were very good through all the activity. Foster dog has settled in just in time to get adopted! There's been an application to adopt him and it has all checked out. They'll do the home visit this week. The potential adopters might
Click images for desktop size: "Korean Girl" by Unknown come today to meet the foster and to be harshly judged by my friend and me.
Harshly judged in that we want what's best for the dog and for them. The important thing is everyone be happy. I'm always predisposed to anyone who wants to have a good dog in their life. The foster is a pretty good dog. Not as great as my dogs but pretty great for all that.
One thing about all the painting is got to spend a lot of time with the iPod. Anything would have been better than the sound of paint scrappers on wood.
I like the new Green Day album "21st Century Breakdown". There's nothing as grabbing as "American Idiot", "Basket Case", or even "Geek Stink Breath" but its alright. I'm pretty disappointed with the new Queensryche, "American Soldier". I've been disappointed with Queensryche since "Empire", but one always has hope.
I'm surprised that my favorite album so far this year has been Offspring's "Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace". Weird. Since I only knew them from "Pretty Fly for a White Guy" it is shocking to discover that a novelty band could com out with a nice crunchy set of pop anthems. I particularly like "Stuff is Messed Up".
I've been trying to get my RIAA-Free jukebox up on the site. Its a complicated affair. One of those things I thought would be dead easy but is turning into a chore. It has mostly to do with permissions (unix file permissions) and folder structure than anything else. I'll keep on it. It will be a cool way to display music that needs hearing.
I wish I liked Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead more than I do. They're two bands who get it. They understand the world has changed and refuse to stick with the stupidity that is epitomized by the RIAA and the MPAA.
Got to be brief. Life is catching up to me and I don't want to miss any of the show.

Posted by David at 6:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Gunslinger Girl" by VM Before my injection my blood sugar was 6.8, just inside the target. This morning the count was 5.9, which is okay.
It bugs me that a couple of months ago I was getting better numbers just from the pills. For all the stigma and grief from the injections I was expecting something more dramatic from the insulin.
I have gotten a bit better at doing it. My stomach is sore from it. The hardest part is, well the whole thing is hard and tricky; holding the needle dead steady while it hurts is hard then pushing in the little plunger is tricky and uncomfortable but the part I got wired is holding the needle inside of me for a count of 20. It makes me cringe now, even thinking about it.
The reason is that if you pull the needle out too soon the insulin seeps out . . . Crazy.
The insulin is not improving the pain in my shoulders yet. Its still excruciating and stops me from doing things like putting on my jacket. and combing my hair.
I mowed the rest of the yard yesterday. It rained in the morning but then the sun came out and there was enough of a wind to dry out the grass. My left handed falling pull start still worked. I was able to grimace through getting the mower over and around all the hills and stumps and things.
I was concerned because I felt more exhausted than I should. Its a side effect that should level out. Quickly I hope. Getting fatigued stirs negative memories.

Today is a big day. An important day. It is my puppy's fourth birthday.

Click images for desktop size: "Kurbatova" by Playboy Four years old and in all that time we've only been apart about 15 weeks. Twelve weeks while she was being weaned from her mother. Three weeks when we moved. The three weeks were hard on both of us for exactly the same reason and with pretty much the same intensity and longing.
She may not be the perfect dog to anyone else but she and I are perfect together.
She remembers things I tell her and will do things to please me. She gets defiant and demanding. She gets angry. She gets loving and protective. She plays jokes and tricks on me. We bicker and fight. We play games that are meaningless to everyone but her and me.
Together we are a boy and a dog.
I never much liked the show "Cheers", knowing a couple of the writers didn't help, but I heard a part of one episode where one of the characters said he was writing a novel about a man and his dog wandering the corn fields and drinking beer. I could read a novel like that and picture my puppy as the dog.
The entire world would be a scary bad place if by some cosmic mishap she and I had never met.
I feel pretty much the same way about my friend.

This is my friend's last day of work. Vacation time.
Only a week but it will be nice for and for me. Except someone stupid, probably me, decided that the vacation should be spent painting the porch . . . how dull. I mean why ruin a vacation just because the house needs the work?
So it will improve our lives, what reason is that to ignore frivolous self gratification.
I hate painting. It will be fine. We might even laugh while we're suffering through the arduous chore.

We managed to get tickets for the Jack White tour. The one he's doing with that other side band of his, Dead something or other. I like Jack White and still think he's the guitarist of the 21st Century.
Click images for desktop size: "Punk" by Unknownk His shows don't disappoint. He's an entertainer. Of course on this tour he's playing the drums . . .
I always viewed the White Stripes as pretty much a solo act. I can imagine White dragging along his ex-wife as support. You just don't do solo acts with just an electric guitar. White showed you could.
Meg was a pretty poor drummer. She'd lose the beat a lot but White keep a more driving steady beat in his head. His work on the guitar still astounds me.
Its interesting seeing him not be the soloist with the Raconteurs, to lose a part of himself within a real band. Some of the work is excellent, none of it less than good but it felt like White was losing some part of himself, like he was being too deferential to his band mates. I would have been more interested if it had been "Jack White & The Raconteurs" instead of a true band. It would have been awesome seeing White's manic intensity with a back up band. The Raconteurs are a collaboration.
I've only seen YouTube Videos of the Raconteurs live. The stage show looks like the same sort of democratic sharing thing until White does "Bang Bang" the crazy Nancy Sinatra number. Its worth seeking out. It shows what White could do as the frontman.
This will b interesting. Jack White as a drummer. Yow! He can keep a beat so we'll see if it catches fire.

I saw "Zatoichi 17: Zatoichi Challenged".
Peter Welling's defined an auteur as a director who was able to work within established genres and stay within the strict conventions demanded while still managing to express his own voice. Zatoichi movies are almost a genre unto themselves. Formally they are
Click image: "Growing Love" by Frida Lind Chambara (sword fighting) and jidai-geki (period piece).
Within this definition it still astonishes me that Kenjiro Misumi is not recognized as one of the greatest directors in the world.
Zatoichi's movie's follow a path, a path that Misumi defined. I wonder if most of his brilliant story telling innovations have been lost as they have comprised the bedrock of Japanese chambara films in the sixties and seventies.
This entry in the Zatoichi saga is fascinating on its own, touching and startling, moving with an economy and sparseness that recalls zen. It stands on its own as well as laying the groundwork for Misumi's later works and themes.
Worth renting for sure.

The foster dog is starting to fit in to the pack better with each moment. Now we're off to the closed down dog park to see what there might be to see on this birthday day.

Posted by David at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Fun Fair" by Unknown Last night my blood sugar count was 12.1, a little high. The insulin injection was no less painful and still left me with an annoying sort of tingling throughout my body. I slept pretty solid for 4 hours. I was tired from no sleep and a pretty busy day. On wakening my blood pressure was 128 over 78, within target and my blood sugars were 8.8, still too high.
This means that tonight I have to give my self 12 units. I'm
Click images for desktop size: "The Monkees" supposed to increase it by 1 unit a day until the readings are right. There was some confusion this morning as my friend thought it was 1 unit every other day. I called and checked and I was right! I'm not sure if that's a winning thing or not.
I also found out that I have to replace my blood meter pretty soon. That sucks. The meter is about 50 bucks, but the test strips run about a hundred. There's the little plastic strips that have to feed into the machine to collect the blood. Each strip is coded and they don't work on different machines . . . Seems that the machines start declining in accuracy after 1 year. Planned obsolescence?
I think there's something wrong with America in that you can only stay alive if you can afford it. I was lucky before. There was a town where the government thought all of its citizens were precious
Click images for desktop size: "Four Mounted Indians" by Charles Russell and there were doctors willing to donate their time. In Texas I could only afford my medication every other month or not at all.
When I was in grad school I drove a taxi cab at night. Held the job for 6 months or so. I had to give it up. Teaching and in school all day and working all night was kind of stupid. I'd fall asleep at odd times. When I was driving around LA about 4 am and suddenly it was 4:40 and I had no idea of where I was or how I'd gotten there. I'd been driving asleep for 40 minutes. Time to quit.
Driving a cab was unique. I made a lot of money. Meet a lot of people. Drag queen, drunks, hookers wanting to trade sex for the fare, gay guys telling me how they wanted a man like me, celebrities and sometimes people I knew. I thought they were all interesting except the wannabee pimps. I didn't like them much at all.
The cops used to flag me to pull over. While I was trying to figure what I'd done to attract the cop's attention they'd open the door and start piling in women, hookers. They'd throw a ten or a twenty dollar bill at me and tell me not to let the hookers out of the car and drive them west till I crossed the County Line. In LA the city cops run everything up to Crescent Heights and then its run by the Sheriff's Department.
The girls complained about how the cops had stolen all their money. The first time I figured it was just hooker talk. The fourth time I had to believe them. The girls always piled out of the cab at the first stop light. I had no intention of even trying to stop them. That would have felt to creepy, like kidnapping. I was a grad student driving a cab, not a cop.
Once a cop pulled me over and dumped a girl in the cab. She'd been stabbed. The cop told me to drive her to Queen of Angels. He didn't want to call an ambulance and fill in papers for street trash at the end of his shift.
She was bleeding but not terribly. We got to the hospital and there were a couple of orderlies and a
Click images for desktop size: "Panda" woman. They wouldn't let the woman out of the cab. She had no insurance, a credit card or $2,000 in cash. She was bleeding worse. I had to drive her to General Hospital (famous in bad TV series). Its the only charity hospital in LA.
Once I got flagged by a couple of guys in West Hollywood. One of the guys had been shot. Cedars Sinai was only two blocks away. I drove him there in less than a minute.
They went inside. I was in the back washing the blood off the seat when they came back. The one guy was still dragging his shot friend who was looking worse. Cedars wouldn't take his friend as a patient, not enough credit on his card and no insurance. The ambulance service wanted $125 in cash to take them to UCLA Med Center. The cab ride would be about 20 bucks.
(Even the Fire Department charges for ambulance service, but not in advance. They bill you. Same for Paramedic treatment. They used to not go crazy trying to collect, at least they didn't used to.)
So I know and I've seen that if you don't have enough money to live "they" are just as happy to see you die. And they can do it without mercy or fear. Killer world.

I mowed the lawn yesterday. It hurt. I got the mower started by grabbing that rope thing with my left hand, holding my arm stiff and then sort of falling backwards. Took three times but it ran.
I could only do about 40% of the yard. The vibrations and bucking the machine over the hills and valleys created too much pain.

Click images for desktop size: "Che" I was able to wear the iPod. The new cable is not as efficient as the old one, the silky wires one. It tangled a couple of times but not as badly as the Entymotics would tangle. I still don't have a solid feel for whether the sonic improvements and the probability that these cable won't need replacement are worth giving up the easy functionality of the silky ones. I still love the Ultimate Ears.
The foster dog is settling in. The gentle dog is very serious in hating him. The giant dog loves playing with him but hates him when he comes close to my friend. My puppy ignores him unless he plays one of the games he likes.
Situation normal.
My friend actually enjoyed her field trip. She got to hike through some untrammeled woods. She even got a cool walking stick from a dead tree. She bought it home for my puppy! Foster dog an my puppy played with it until the newcomer broke it in half. My puppy was indignant!

Posted by David at 11:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Fabrique de statues sur isle de Bali" by ebajart Before I went to bed my blood sugars were 8.1. My target is between 4 and 7, so it was high, just not terribly high. The nurse/diabetes expert said that most diabetics who start insulin after being on pills are looking at numbers around 25! She thought it was cool I was aware enough to catch it so soon. It spoke well of me following my dietary restrictions.
I did the insulin injection. Forget the propaganda about the needle in the belly not hurting. It hurt like a son of a gun! It burned,
Click image: "Lena Horn and Dean Martin" was sore afterwards and left a mark like a bug bite. It could have been worse I suppose. I'll probably get used to it, like I've gotten used to pricking my fingers two or three times a day.
Even though I've got a high tolerance for pain I've never been big on self inflicted pain. Way back in high school there was a fad amongst some of the more vapid football players. Two guys would sit opposite each other and rest their forearms against each other's. Then they'd drop a burning cigarette between their forearms. The first guy to flinch was called chicken.
I thought it was cool to watch but I thought it was pretty stupid too. I noticed that it was only me and the other surfers who never got involved in it. Some guys forearms were a huge mass of burn scars, many of them running about the full length of a cigarette. I don't know if the surfers had more sense or just figured that our sports banged us up enough. Maybe we wanted to show self respect, maybe we didn't have to prove anything to anybody, maybe we were chicken. Who knows? I don't like inflicting pain on myself.
Click images for desktop size: "Full Moon" by Luis Royo Plenty of people to do that for you, if your so inclined.
I didn't sleep well. It was predicted. Tossed and turned, tremors and head achey.
I had to take my blood readings immediately on wakening. Surprised me that I went to bed at 8.1, injected myself and woke up with an 11.8! I guess this proves that my liver is working fine at making all them sugars all night. It also means I have to increase the dosage by 1 unit this evening.
I took the kidney medicine this morning. Its side effect, which is viewed as positive is that it also lowers the blood pressure. I do note that when the tooth pain was finally gone my blood pressure dropped to well within my safety parameters. It can still afford to be lower.
I notice that the prescription bottle forbids driving. I can expect to stand up and fall down a couple of times.
My friend had to get out of bed 2 hours earlier than usual. Her job is taking the entire region on a field trip . . . to let them see what all their efforts are accomplishing. The field trip is making them all take a bus. Reminds me of grammar school.
Not only did she have to get up two hours earlier than usual to catch the bus but the first person on the bus is her old boss whom she doesn't quite get along with. The old boss is still a VP. The VP is showing a hunting video . . . This is a conservation group. Somehow, I don't think its an anti-hunting video.
I dislike hunting. I've tried it. Shooting something alive doesn't seem like much of a sport. I've never been able to do it especially after watching guys who weren't as good a shot (on the range) as I was, maim and harm animals who didn't fall.
Also hunting is pretty boring. Hunting with a bow and arrow is just as boring to me and even lacks the thrill of worrying about your companion shooting you in the face or the back on accident.
I would find it especially distressing to watch a video of this "sport". All blood sports seem vapid to me anyway. But watching them? Watching 200 yard drives in a TV golf match would be more exciting.
The foster dog is coming along. His surgery has healed up enough to let him roam with the pack. He's still annoyingly stressed but willing o make some strides.

Click images for desktop size: "The Tradition" by Unknown My friend and I disagree a bit on what his history was that bought him to this state in his life and his personality. Nothing serious. More importantly we agree on what his future will be. He's a good dog.
The giant dog loves to run and play with him outside. Inside he wants to kill the foster especially when the foster comes anywhere near my friend or me. Jealous guy. Shows the silliness of being jealous at all.
My puppy thinks that playing is great but not with the foster. She'll make light dalliances but if he doesn't respond in her prescribed fashion she ignores him. He's smart enough to ignore her right back.
But he won't ignore the gentle dog who seems to really hate him. Gentle dog is always growling at him when the foster dog breaks gentle dog's "circle of influence". (An old aikido term I really like).
This is all pretty normal. They'll shift soon enough as the foster calms down and begins to accept his place in the pack.
I worked last night with his aggressive play nature. Its not a good thing when a dog initiates play constantly. I felt heartless about stopping a dog from playing but it worked. He started to calm down and then spent the final two hours of the evening wrapped around my legs as I sat in the office.
Today was going to be the first lawn mowing day of the year. I have no idea if it is but it seems to me that it should be a day worth celebrating. When I tried to start the lawnmower I nearly killed the bad arm. The right one not the bad left one . . . It dropped me to one knee.
Part of my pain chart goes like this: 2=headache, 6=slamming your hand in a car door, 8=tearing cartilage in your knee.
At rest my right arm is a constant 2, when I try to work it out with proper exercises it often reaches 6. When I forget and make a quick movement like stretching or reaching for a jar on a high shelf it goes to 8 for about 3 minutes then takes about 10 minutes to calm down and get back to 2.
The good news (?) is that its almost definitely neuropathic. There's a chance that getting the blood sugars correct will reduce the pain somewhat. Makes the pain of the injections (a 1 which equals a pin prick or a paper cut) seem worthwhile.
I'll probably need another pill for the pain when it settles.
I ant to mow the lawn today, at least a part of it. I want to listen to the iPod. I've been using the new cable for the Ultimate Ears long enough to have an opinion. I love the UE's, not least because they were a present from my friend. One of the things I loved about them was the silk like wire. They've stopped making that thin and super flexible
Click images for desktop size: "Factory" by Clarence Carter stuff. he new cables are heavier and stiffer, though not as heavy by far as the wiring on the Entymotics. The UE's are still capable of being light enough and non-obtrusive enough to sometimes make the music from the iPod seem like the music that often plays in my head on its own. I rather like that.
One advantage of the heavier gauge, other than it shouldn't need replacing like the silky ones is a noticeable increase in midrange performance. At about 2,000 hertz its more detailed, coming closer to but not exceeding or meeting the clarity of the Entymotics.
I'm on a fence whether the sonic improvement makes up for the lightness of the silky wire. I hoped the lawn mowing would make that clearer.

Posted by David at 9:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "D'Amour" by Douleur I'm re-reading Raymond Chandler's and Robert Parker's "Poodle Springs". That's the book that was supposedly based on notes and pages Chandler was working on when he died. I've heard its anywhere from 5 pages of manuscript to 100.
Anyway, somebody hired Robert Parker to finish the book up.
When I first heard of this I rushed and got it right away. Got it in hard cover. I mean this is literature. Raymond Chandler. When you
Click images for desktop size: "Hope and Crosby"live in pop culture land as much as I do literature that you can actually enjoy, that isn't some arduous task that will some how make you into a mythic better person, you have to jump on it. Buying it in hard cover made it mean something, made it permanent and real.
I was pretty excited and really sort of sad that it more than a little bit sucked.
Robert Parker isn't anywhere near the writer Chandler was. Chandler was about the scene, the characters, and the poetry. Parker is about the plot, about the mystery and the crime.
Because of Chandler I've read a lot of mystery stuff. Don't care for most of it.
Part of the problem is that its hard to figure which is Chandler and what is Parker imitating Chandler. Like there's a scene where Marlowe helps out a gambling cheat who's also a bigamist. He helps him avoid getting arrested for murder because he saw the guy with his first wife and thought they looked sweet together. That's not totally inconsistent with Marlowe, but it's a bit too sentimental to be taken seriously. You wonder how much did Chandler intend to keep and how much was just taking a look at it.

Click images for desktop size: "Conquering the World" by Unknown At this stage of his life Chandler did all of his writing into a tape recorder then had it all transcribed. He would then ruthlessly edit the typewritten pages.
Its easy to imagine the meticulousness that he approached his editing. When he submitted his first short story he went through and typed it by himself. Because the cheap pulp magazines used justified margins Chandler went through and typed his manuscript with the same justified margins! This wasn't mousing over a button and clicking it, he counted letters and spaces and figured it all out.
So even though he typed things out there's no guarantee that he would have left it in the final story. We all know that Marlowe could get sappy, but he never acted sappy and he never saw killers as friends no matter how much he liked them before they became killers, no matter how sympathetic he might be.
In the book Marlowe is married to the multi-millionairess Linda Loring nee' Potter from "The Long Goodbye". Parker has them constantly squabbling about how Marlowe has to be his own man. Chandler never squabbled. You get the impression that Parker had so many great squabble lines that he decided he needed to use them all. Instead of condensing them all down to a bare element he scatters them throughout the story so they become tedious instead of whip smart. After the first squabble you know this marriage is doomed. Chandler would have let us see that love is always present but the people are just too wrong for each other. All the bickering just makes us dislike both of the people and feel relieved when they're apart.
I even wonder about the title. "Poodle Springs" as a nom de plume for Palm Springs is a little weird. Chandler didn't like dogs so perhaps he'd have kept it to show his contempt for the desert resort. But the same way he let Faun Lake stand in for Big Bear I don't think he'd have let his roman de clef predominate the story. It was the location, the air of the scene not the feelings for the place that overwhelmed.
Back in the life where I cared about such things I wrote an adaptation of Chandler's last original unproduced screenplay. I wrote it so I could make the movie with my friends, shoot it on 8mm stock with sound than transfer it to video for a sale to VHS. It was a good plan and I managed to strip the story down to free to use locations (borrowing from all my friends, their homes and their clubs, restaurants and offices). We even shot a few scenes before the contact I had at the video distributorship told me the cost the Chandler Estate agents wanted for my adaptation. The WGA said that my script contained about 35% of
Click images for desktop size: "Hannabai" by Kurkosawa Chandler's so I had to play ball. Forced me to abandon that little dream.
In rewriting his screenplay and bringing it into contemporary LA, a stripped down LA, I was inadvertently following Chandler's big advice for how to learn to write. He always preached that you had to read something you liked then sit down and rewrite it in your own words. Not copy it but try to recreate the impact of the scene or the characters.
The by product of this is that I learned more about how Chandler constructed his scenes, what appealed to me and also how different Chandler's and my view of the world actually is.
In understanding it I grew to appreciate the differences as much as the similarities. I was able to see more clearly his concepts of the world and of LA. It served me well in understanding people, and having compassion for those who are different and those who I think are just wrong.
I guess "Poodle Springs" as flawed and poor as it is still serves some purpose in that it forces me to remember the the LA that Chandler created so that I can recall more vividly the LA I lived in.

It rained all weekend. My friend had to work all weekend. Not the best of times. Done now.
My friend meets her new boss today, on the telephone. Conference call thing. Seems odd to me but at least they didn't ask her to make the 2 hour drive to meet him.
My arms have become ridiculous. I'm bored with the agony. Tomorrow, if I get my bike running today, I get my Doctorate in self Injectology. I'm holding out the wispy hope that insulin might go some way to relieving this grief. So bad that muscles around the pain have turned into walnuts. If I was of the paranoid bent I'd decided the knots are masticized tumors.
The foster dog is amazing. He has to live in his crate with the stupid cone head collar on but he remains joyous. Sometimes a little bit more than required. I've only ever had one foster dog who arrived calm. Charles. an old cocker> He was very much about his business and even more so about his pace. Otherwise every foster has arrived full of life, a complete ignorance of most things human, and an inbred compulsion to play with everything.
I think that's right.

Posted by David at 10:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "African Autumn" by Miss Yucki The foster dog is doing well. A bit of extra work and I still the body that resents extra work.
He has to stay in the crate. Which is hard on him and me. I was enjoying letting him sit quiet behind the gate to his room but he quickly discovered he could jump the gate with no trouble. He escaped out into the yard and ran around full speed play attacking everybody. After I had to catch him I checked his stitches. They were a bit fiery but not broken. The giant dog in particular was over joyed to have his play buddy back.
This morning foster dog started to worry the stitches with his mouth. I had to put the Elizabethan collar on him . . . he hates me. The other three are all impressed with the cone head looking dog. They all barked at him. I had him on lead while he did nothing but hop around excited and happy.
He's one of the least fearful happiest dogs I've ever seen. Regrettably
Click image: "Sigourney Weaver and Friend"this isn't the best attitude for recovering from surgery but I prefer it. Easier to calm him down than to cheer someone else up.
I'd be very surprised if we had this foster very long at all. I hope long enough to train him just a little. I think he'd like to learn stuff.

I noticed this morning that my thumbs have improved. Their pain is slight. It only took 3 months to get there.
My left elbow is responding to the exercises. This morning it hurt terribly but I was able to lift up the kettle for coffee without fear of dropping. As I work it the pain subsides.
My right shoulder is getting worse. It responds to working but not for any significant amount of time. Its peculiar too in that there seem to be too many ways to start the agony. I'm more familiar with this neuropathic pain only killing me if I do a couple of different moves or from moving too quickly and hard.
This shoulder has that but it also seems to go berserk from almost anything. The pain is so bad that
Click images for desktop size: "After Magritte's Lovers" by Unknown it hurts almost constantly, never really calming down. Just sitting and then shifting my position can set it off. Its waking me up several times a night.
It still responds to exercise. I use a therapy rubber band and move it under tension when I feel the first twinge of pain I hold it for a count of 20 then repeat until the twinges stop. Doing this has at least let me localize the pain to an area about 1 inch beneath the shoulder point on the arm.
I might have to see the doctor about it. I hate spending the money. I hate hurting all the time. Funny I never get used to it. I seem to be hurting all the time anyway.

This weekend will be spent getting ready for Tuesday. On Tuesday I have to get to the doc's office to get training on how to inject myself with insulin (and the doc won't look at the shoulder - requires a separate visit and a separate charge) , then I have to go about two miles further down the road to drop off the lantus and Avrio script. Get home and finalize my speech to the parents meeting that evening.
I'm going to spend the weekend getting the dreaded e-bike back in running order. All the walking would take about 3 hours. I figure I can e-bike it in a about an hour! Just have to spring maintenance it and be set to go terrorize.
Meeting the parents of the team members is not an odious task. I figure that all the other coaches will babel on and on. Amateur coaches seem to either talk to much or be taciturn. My experience is that 3 pointed minutes will get the points I want across and be memorable. (Its my same logic that forces me to find songs over 3 minutes tedious).
I'm going to need assistant coaches. Most of them will come from the parents. I can make a lot of my points by asking for coaches and lining out what I expect and demand from a coach: No berating the players; correct, instruct and encourage only. The Understanding that no coach ever won a game and no player ever lost one. The willingness to learn from me about turning the young people into athletes who play this sport. That's about it.
I've reached that age where my resume is impressive on its own.
Then today I'm playing burly housewife. The joint is dog heaven but a bit too messy and dirt for human habitation. And the foster dog needs to go out for a bit.

Posted by David at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Warriors" by Unknown The only fallout from putting my mobile phone through the washer and dryer seems to be the battery life. I have to recharge it every other day now. I'm impressed with Samsung.

The foster dog came home from the vet yesterday. When we picked him up he was groggy from the anesthesia. Had to lift him into the car sort of groggy.
When we got him home he urinated for about three minutes. Then defecated an astonishing amount, which pretty much confirmed my concerns about the vet's office not having a readily available exercise area.
All they did was neuter him. They didn't remove the double dew claws. It was relayed to us that the dew claws weren't particularly dangerous and removing them would cause him more grief than benefit.
I guess.
He got an odd reception from the other dogs. Giant dog who was adamant in his hostility before the vet was now seriously concerned for foster dog. Foster dog has to be segregated and kept still. Giant dog lay in an unusual position for him so he could look after foster dog through the grate.
Gentle dog, who previously had simply ignored the foster dog now expressed out right hostility. When my friend bought hi m in from a walk foster dog slipped his leash and made a bound for me, in a friendly way. Gentle dog stood up and unleashed a fierce snarl. I'd never heard gentle dog make a noise like that before.
I was pleased by his response. If he'd react that vocally to protect me, who he barely tolerates, I felt more secure about his ability to protect my friend, whom he adores, should the need ever arise.
Of course my puppy just continued to ignore him. She's consistent like that.
Foster dog is doing well.


Click images for desktop size: "Dog" by S4W Apparently I need to be clearer about the details of medical care in the USA. I lived a long time in the UK and had to use the National Health Service (NHS) which provides "free" medical care. Free via a payroll deduction similar but larger than the Medicare deduction taken in the US.
In Texas i was unemployed, broke, and starting a new job in 3 days when I got tonsillitis. I guessed that's what it was. I didn't know. There was no place to go to find out.
When my temperature neared 105 and the pain had kept me awake for two days I walked two miles plus to the nearest hospital emergency room. I waited in the waiting room for a couple hours then got sent to an examination room where I sat for a few more hours. A nurse came in looked at my throat and told me, "Wait here." That was all she said to me.
A bout an hour later some guy came in told me to drop my pants. He gave me shot and left.
I sat there for about another hour when a different nurse came in asked, "What are you doing here?" I croaked I didn't know. I was waiting to be told what to do. She closed the door and came back ten minutes later and told me I could go. I asked what was wrong with me. Finally she told me I had tonsillitis and the doctor had given me an antibiotic.
I left. Two days later I got a bill for about $1,800. Since I was already paying my Bells Palsy bill off from a different hospital at $25 bucks a week I was a little shook.
Now in England doctor's don't become wealthy only rich. You have to stop practicing medicine and become a consultant to get wealthy. In slow new seasons The Sun, England's biggest paper, will run an
Click images for desktop size: "Marilyn Monroe" expose of consultants making a million pounds a year by billing the NHS for 200 hours a week sixty one weeks a year. Everyone grumbles for a few minutes and then business continues as usual. In the UK you don't seriously mess with the wealthy.
Because of this there aren't quite enough doctors to go around. If you need one you have to register with a clinic. Your restricted to the clinics in your neighborhood and then restricted by whether the doctor has enough time to take you on as a patient. The doc's are limited by law as to how many they can take on to insure decent care.
I got stuck with a real croaker. An obscenely obese snob of a man who hated me for my accent. I hated him for hating me for my accent. It was a fine relationship.
I rarely saw him except for annual physicals. I never had to pay him anything. Then I started to feel a huge amount of fatigue and this creepy but not quite debilitating pain in my bones. It got to the point where it took a superhuman effort to get out of bed and dress. I just wanted to sit and stare. I
Click images for desktop size: "Tibal Girl" by Evgeney managed to never miss work. My friend (and boss) said I should see my doctor. I did. They ran some tests and the fat croaker told me I was just getting older. He gave me a script for some vitamins and told me to take paracetamol.
Filling the script cost me nothing too. I had to pay for the paracetamol because he didn't write me a script for it.
I didn't get better.
I had to take a business trip back to LA. I went and saw my old doctor. He wasn't in the same office anymore. He tagged up with one of those Medical Corporations. They ran the same tests. Word came back that I had leukemia,
We talked about treatments. They didn't tell me that it was close to a certainty that the chemo they wanted me to try would give me diabetes. He might have mentioned some damage to my kidneys. You'd have to be tougher than I am to pay real close attention to those sort of details.
When asked the only question I could think of was the same one that we all know about, "Will I lose my hair?"
He said, maybe not and that it almost always grows back. He never mentioned the fact that I'd have to look n the mirror everyday and see myself dying. It was during that time that for the first time in my life I wished I was only just getting older. I never imagined being old.
Its the stuff the doc's don't tell you that can kill you.
I guess they've stopped doing it. Chemo used to have support groups built into the treatment. Probably the insurance companies put a stop to them. Can't have people comparing notes about costs and they were expensive. I can see Blue Cross saying, We have to keep them alive. We don't have to make them happy," and canceling approval for the support groups. With the ay your going broke paying for your share of the chmo talking about it doesn't make sense to take on as an out of pocket expense.
I learned more from the other patients then I ever did from the shrink in charge of it anyway.
I've been through four chemo's. All the doctors made it a point that I had to do this NOW! The only
Click images for desktop size: "Unforgettable Autumn" by Unknown way to make a decision was from what they did or didn't tell you. Like I had six teeth pulled recently. It was most likely caused by the second trial (chemo word for an experimental cutting edge treatment that looks like it might work). Its a known side effect. They might not have even known that at the exact time. Even if they had they may or may not have told me about it. The doc's like to give you a 5,000 word pamphlet and let you discover this stuff for yourself but give your consent now.
The only doctor who treated me like a person and not a patient object was the volunteer doc, my last one. He could have been off getting rich but he felt the need to give back to his community. I still think of him as a friend first and a doc second. He explained a lot of my past and present situation to me. Th medical junk. He even took the time to try and get me to understand. And because he was free of charge he was a lot busier than the guys charging a hundred and fifty buck minimum for an office visit, but he still took the time.
I just think we all need a chance to understand what they're doing to us so we can see and make a better decision than we do when getting our car repaired.

Now I have to take care of my foster dog and the dynamic duo. Gentle dog got to go to work with my friend. He was ecstatic. Giant dog is so jealous. He's so put upon.

Posted by David at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Steve Argyle Yesterday was filled with nothing else but dogs. Giant dog has decided that the foster dog is okay so long as he is playing with him and not with giant dog's toys.
Foster dog would bring toys to me to throw and drop them in my lap. I would reach for them and discover that giant dog, who was sitting next to me, had deftly removed them. He was holding them angrily between his paws. Foster dog just went and got new ones. At one stage giant dog was holding three toys between his paws. He glared at me in case I had any funny ideas.
Even my puppy got slightly less disdainful. She initiated play. Of course the play was her game and could only be played by her rules.
When giant dog would play bound at foster dog gentle dog would join in by attacking giant dog! And then foster dog had to go to the vet.
If ever a dog needed a trip to the vet . . . doesn't make it easier. He was a pain. There was an unfixed female beagle at the vet's office. He was uncontrollable. I took him outside. This is the rescue service's vet so we had no choice, but I soon saw that there was no exercise area. No grass at all except the little patch we were standing on, and that little patch was next to the highway. Cars went by too fast for me to be comfortable.
I wouldn't have left my dog there.
Foster dog is going to be fixed, shot up and the have his dew claws removed. He has the ugliest dew claws I've ever seen on a dog. I'm amazed that he hasn't hurt himself before this. They have to be removed. The healing process is long. Three weeks minimum. He'll have to be crated and carried around some.
Poor guy. He's still one of the happiest dogs I've ever seen. His life has been pretty miserable but he keeps playing and laughing. He keeps the world shaped in his image. I admire that. I hope he keeps his attitude after all this surgery.

Click images for desktop size: "The Last Supper" by Da Vinci This surgery will make his life better but I always wonder if it will be worth it if he loses that gift of changing the world to his own joyous view.
Its one of the reason I go on so much about my health issues.
When the doctor's tell you some bad news, you got this or that brand of cancer for example, and then detail the available cures they always seem to do it in a rush. When you ask for details they get brusque, especially about the side effects.
Something like, "You've got lympho ballistic leukemia. No big deal its curable."
In my case it took over seven years to cure. I've been cured, or at least in remission for nearly two years. I've often felt like giving up, even recently. But I don't regret still being alive. No matter how low I've fallen or how despair filled things have often seemed. When it comes to doctor's and scuzzy insurance companies sucking up my money (This policy cover 100% of all costs of normal and average acceptable fees as decided by us you will be responsible for any additional charges as decided by your service provider.
Its been worth it to me. I have my puppy and I have my friend. I like the world well enough, I stubborn enough to enjoy things like music and songs and stories.
Its been worth it to me but it might not be worth it to someone else. When the doctor says, "I won't lie to you," or "I'm not going to sugar coat it," its safe to assume that he's going to enjoy being brutal, he won't discuss things so you can have a clear idea of what's in front of you, and that he's been pretty much misleading you in things up till then.
Most people will be empathetic at first but they don't know how to act. Most of us don't much like confronting mortality. I sure don't. I
Click images for desktop size: "The Bride of Frankenstein" always planned to be immortal, spitting into microphones, running down fields while opponents tripped over their own feet trying to catch me with all the dogs who've ever lived with me cheering me on from the stands or the mosh pit.
When they find out your ill people shut it out of their front brain and work hard to drive it out of their back brain too. The light we see blinds us to all but itself.
They get dismissive or they avoid you. Or worse, they suck it up so every meeting becomes more a confrontation than a casual conversation. Your mind's not working great either. You can't ignore the moments of self pity where you won't like yourself very much either.
I was kind of lucky and people really couldn't notice. I'm pretty dour anyway. In almost any relationship there would come a point would someone would look at me a bit amazed and say, "I never realized it before, your really a pretty funny guy, like you tell a lot of jokes. I never knew you were joking!"
The only difference for me is that they stopped saying that.
I think, no, I know that people need to know what's in front of them. They don't need to know the
Click images for desktop size: "Taoist Immortals" by Fûgai Honko future but they have to know enough to make a decision they can live with, not live happily maybe but they have to see some joy out there at the end of it all.
Steve McQueen went through it all, even ended up in Mexico swallowing extract of peach pit (Laetrile) while two people I know killed themselves. One by driving head on into a fire truck that was enroute to a fire.
I miss them all but there's no choice but to respect their decisions even if you regret their choices.
That's all.

I've listened to the new Bob Dylan, "Together for Life" and the New Neil Young, "Fork in the Road".
I like Neil Young. Everybody has had to sit through my Neil Young story. (Maybe that should be Neil Young Story - keep it capitalized so it enters myth). Me and my buddies hid on a hill at Point Dume and watched them build Bob Dylan's house and got a rush when we saw Roger McQuinn, even ran down the hill to talk to him.
I still listen to their stuff, their old stuff.
Because I loved their old stuff so much I probably took it harder and more personally that I think this new tuff absolutely sucks. Too old, too used to a life of riches and wealth. Young at least seems to try and understand what's going on in the world. He even has feeling for it but its not there in the music.
Dylan has lived in the legend cocoon so long that he's forgotten what it means to be human, to be angry and sad. He writes about heartburn like it was heartbreak.
It makes me sad.
What cheered me was re-watching "Hustle and Flow" as I did the usual household chores. An old movie but still the best film ever about creating music. It works from points of extremity and hyperbole. Music does. What I keep finding touching is the fact that the people here are all dreaming and reaching for that dream and in struggling for it they regain the humanity that the world has sought to pull out of them. All the other movies that tried to tell this story forgot about the human part, they wasted my time telling me about being an inhuman legend.
Time to take the dogs for their walk.
Next week I have to meet the parents of the players of my team. I have to prepare a three minute speech about what to expect from me and what I want from them so that we can build their children into something the children can be proud of. And I have to do this while I'm laughing at the latest dog jokes. Then I have to get ready for poor foster dog to come back to his home.

Posted by David at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Click images for desktop size: "Sky 1" by Ausencia This weekend was as busy as I figured. My body is still in rebellion. Lots of pain from the usual suspects.
Sometimes I wish I got a little sympathy for the hurting. I'd probably resent that too. You can't win with me, or, as I prefer, I can't lose.

Saturday started too early. My friend and I arrived at the football equipment locker. We weren't the very first ones there.
My friend got to sit at a table and do all the paperwork, registering the new kids. A rough enough job that I was glad to avoid.

Click images for desktop size: "Snow Fun" by NFL Films I got stuck doing shoulder pads and fitting game jerseys. That devolved as some guys showed up late or not at all. Normal stuff. They got a couple of players to fit shoulder pads. I fit jerseys and double checked the shoulder pad fittings. I only had to swap out a half dozen sets of pads so the kids did alright.
Fitting game jerseys is a real pain. Game jerseys are ultra tight. Lot of reasons for this; being tight the help compress the shoulder pads increasing protection slightly and also enabling the player to hit with more impact. Tight jerseys make it easier for referee's to see holding. The jerseys are so tight that if a ref sees a player's jersey being pulled its obvious that this is far from incidental contact. It also helps protect the player from actually being held and unfairly impeded.
And tight jerseys look great.
My method of getting on a jersey is to put them on the pads first and then put the jerseys and pads on as a unit.
That's too pokey for this sort of deal. There was only one jersey of each size. The new jerseys would be ordered based on my measurements. That means I had to put the jersey on each kid and then
Click images for desktop size: "Sinister" by Yasushi Nirasawa take it off.
The quickest way was to roll the jersey up from the bottom, have the kid slip his arms through, up to the elbow. I soon learned to tell ALL the kids to put their arms through the arm holes and not the neck hole. With the jersey on the arms the kid has to raise his head and arms to get his head through. Then I reach around behind them and pull the jersey over the pads and down.
I nearly choked out half a dozen kids . . . I'd then straighten the jersey and check it. The real grief was when I'd eye balled the wrong size and had to re-fit the kid twice (once it required 3 fittings, and one took four).
I also learned to tell the kids to stand strong when I was pulling the jersey, I still dragged about a dozen of them to their knees.
Getting the jersey off is worse. I have the kids pull one of their arms free then I pull the jersey loose from the pads then have them pull the jersey from the side over their noggins. The jersey then just falls off the other arm.
I didn't keep track but I probably fitted close to 200 kids.
I was on my feet for 8 solid hours doing this. If I was getting paid $7.50 an hour I'd have quit after the first hour and demanded my check. For twenty an hour I'd not have ever gone back and I'd have complained bitterly about no coffee breaks. For free I didn't mind it. My friend felt the same way.
I tore four of my weak nails. My hands didn't start cramping badly until 6 hours into it. I think its interesting that my hands cramp up after 15 or 20 minutes playing guitar. So logic says that guitar playing is 24 times harder than pulling kit around on kids.
I liked meeting the kids and having my brief chats with them and the parents. I felt there was a slightly higher percentage of parents who were in this for the right reasons, slightly higher than usual. Not at the cost of the parents into it for the wrong reason. There seemed to be fewer indifferent ones though. That's a nice positive.
Another nice positive was that they provided pizza for lunch. Eat on your feet thing. I asked them if they could order from this one pizza joint because they have a gluten free pizza that my friend could have. I was originally told no, they had reasons for that, acceptable reasons. Then they ordered from the same pizza joint I asked for because my request was more important to them than the reasons. EXCEPT they forgot the reason was to get a gluten
Click images for desktop size: "Evening Chant" by Unknown free pizza for my friend. Amusing unless you're my friend who got no pizza!
There were 5 coaches I noted who scarfed down free pizza but never seemed to work with any kids . . . made the note to not let them near any of the kids on my team.
As soon as I'd sent the last kid out the door my friend and I hoped in the car to go pick up the foster dog.
He was being held by this really sweet couple. New dog is a big happy goof, totally bewildered by everything that's happened to him he embraces his confusion by laughing and playing until the scary parts go away.
Its pretty obvious that he lived for a while where he was loved but badly cared for. He's not neutered, his dew claws are dangerously long. He sort of knows a few commands. I think the family abandoned him. He was found wandering in the woods. Kept in a dog pound for a couple of months. Put on death's row, then thrown into a car and driven away, then another car, then a home for a few hours and finally ends up here.
He's smart, scared, confused and happy. The food they gave us for him is too rich after dog pound grub - diarrhea and vomiting. Because he's not neutered giant dog hates him, my puppy has made it clear he's not to invade her personal space and gentle dog endures him because gentle dog is gentle dog.
All he wants is to play and be told its all okay.
His trip continues tonight when he has to go to the vet to get neutered, dew claws removed and all other vetting. It irks me no end that the pound couldn't do even these simple things to make his life easier. The idea of its wasted money on a dog they had slated to die doesn't cut it. Would you deprive a cancer victim of pain killers?
He's going to make someone a fine dog. He'll make them laugh. He's learning simple commands but still has a hard time concentrating. He'll be fine.
Sunday was the eagerly anticipated dog walk.
It was a bust. Highly disappointing. All the more so because there's no one to blame. I'd really have liked someone to blame.

Click images for desktop size: "Surf" by Unknown The dog walk is normally at this gorgeous hotel grounds. Some guest must have seen that there was to be a dog walk and thrown a fit about loose dogs ruining her holiday.
This was last second. To the hotels credit they did not forbid use of their grounds. They have something like 300 acres. They just set up a different trail for the walk but THEY INSISTED ALL DOGS BE LEASHED!
In today's economy I can understand them not telling the rich guest to go to hell. The trail they set up was horrid. Dirty, hot. We had to walk through about a half mile of loose dirt and wood chips stepping in the tractor tread marks and depressions.
It would have been okay if the dogs were running loose and making friends. This was just a walk that we could have done better at any of a dozen places.

The dogs still enjoyed it.
My friend's assistant from work bought her dog along. He was great. I was sad that the great adventure we had promised her had devolved into something bland.
She and her dog came home with us and new dog and assistant dog played incredibly hard and rough. It almost made the shambolic day worthwhile, for me at least.
My friend and I were both fatigued. I think she was as glad I was there as I was glad she was there.
Things seem to work out better that way.

Posted by David at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Love Like This" by Lavakillu This weekend suddenly got busy. In a nice way.
Saturday I have eight hours of kit fitting for kids 13 and under. I volunteered my friend to do registration (paperwork) for the kids. The foster puppy will arrive in the area on Saturday morning.
Lots of logistics, kennels to set up, food dishes to shift about. Then the decision on whether the new comer will be up to doing the dog walk on Sunday.
Not a bad time at all unless they stick me on 8 hours of fitting kids for helmets . . . shoulder pads are a lot easier and quicker. Pants and girdles are the easiest. I've got a feeling I'll be doing a lot of helmets . . .

My friend says I was pretty upset Monday about the doctor. She also thinks she understands the doc thinking I was going to slug him.
I didn't feel upset. A little bit down probably. I thought I was being as gentle with the doc as I could be.
Maybe I hide this kind of stuff from myself but not from her. Possible.
One thing that does upset me is Joe Biden appearing at the MPAA dinner. Biden went as the Vice President. He got a standing ovation for calling kids who download music and movies from the internet "thieves".
This is just another step towards Obama's campaign to criminalize kids sharing music.
Criminalizing downloading will save the RIAA and the MPAA serious money. They won't have to hire scum bag PI firms to hack innocent people's computers searching for "illegal" stuff. They'll have the FBI do it for them. I doubt that the FBI will even have to get a warrant to do this. In the UK they're already forcing the ISP's to keep all the logs of everything anyone does on the internet. So do we.
Click images for desktop size: "London Streets 1888" by TitusBoy Bush's lie was that it was to root out all those millions of terrorists. Nothing political about it they claim. Nobody would ever misuse all this data.
Obviously the FBI has done such a stellar job of removing crime that they have plenty of excess time to go trolling for 14 year olds scarfing down the top 40.
Then the rich jerks would save even more money. They wouldn't have to hire sleazy ambulance chaser lawyers, the US Attorney's office will prosecute the kids. Obama's hired the scummiest of them to train the rest in being even a purer distilled kind of scum. They'll get the kids jail time, probation time. Those services are all standing empty. The US Attorney has locked away all the rapists, child abusers etc and the prisons must be standing empty because everyone has been rehabilitated. Probation officers must be facing being laid off. (Of course America leads the world in having the largest percentage of its population in prison, we must be trying to beat our own record).
And then the RIAA and MPAA can then ask the judge to award them money for the serious damage these children have done to their business. At twenty bucks a track times a billion or some other wretched formula. Obama himself puts the damage at $350,000 a track. Rah!
When Obama gets his law passed criminalizing the kids I'll boycott every rich musician who doesn't sign off of the RIAA. Like rich guys like Tony Bennett who shockingly claims he isn't rich enough and wants to squeeze even more money out of people who just want to
Click images for desktop size: "La Liseuse" by Fragonard listen to music.
This really bugs me. If I buy a car and loan it to a friend for the weekend this logic would make me a criminal.
According to the RIAA and the MPAA when I lay down my twenty bucks I haven't bought anything. I don't own the CD or the DVD they do. I can't tape it or make a digital copy of it or let my friends hear it, play it at parties. Blockbuster can charge me to borrow it but I can't loan it for free. I don't know why. Neither do they. They just want all the money for the least amount of money.
They claim that me loaning my CD to a friend costs them thousands of dollars. They're losing money! Well, not losing money just making a bit less but they want it all: No Compromise. Sales aren't dropping becasue we're churning out cruddy product its becasue I think I own something I paid them for.
Silliness that they've spent billions during the last 60 years to turn into law. Unfairness. The rich bullying the poor.
I wish I'd voted for McCain. Not that he'd have been any better but I figure he'd been inept at getting
Click images for desktop size: "Los in a Bad World" by Unknown this stuff done. He wouldn't have the same deadly proficency that Obama has.
McCain would have hacked off our allies, like Canada, with the same stupidity and ignorance but he'd have been laughed at more than seen as real and threatening.
The comfort of incompetence.

There is something going on out there. I saw this video that I think everyone else in the world has already seen. Its just a little music thing. You can click here to see the YouTube version of this bunch of guys all over the world doing "Stand By Me".
Its exciting and unexpected. It reminds me of why I wanted to play music. Getting rich would have been nice but mainly I wanted to make a joyful noise. I wanted to make people dance. I wanted to be heard. It looks like these guys have the same idea. Its a great mammouth effort. I'm buying the CD becasue the RIAA has nothing to do with them and the music is sweet.

Posted by David at 10:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Grand Central Station" by Ian Foster Yesterday was bright and sunny. It reached 80.
Today it is 57 and pouring ice cold rain.

I took the dogs out for a shortish walk. Every person who was walking a dog got an advert from me telling them about the wonderful dog walk on Sunday. I started the pitch with the off the wall info that this place is so beautiful that they charge a hundred grand to have a wedding there!
I wonder if anyone of them will show. Their dogs would love it.
I walked the 5 miles to the doctor's office in 43 minutes. It would not have been as fast if I had the dogs with me but it would have been more memorable.
Click images for desktop size: "The Jolie Family"
It was hot and I was sweaty. From the reaction and movement of the other waiting patients they must have figured I had swine flu. Anyway it got me into an examination room in record time.
While I waited for the doc I had time to read an entire book! It was "Diabetes for Dummies". Interesting franchise. They seem determined to provide instruction for everything.
The doc came in in a rush. He was nervous about something. The man has no chin. Where his chin would have been was quivering. He asked a couple of unimportant although mildly pertinent questions, clearly to calm himself down. He was so nervous I tried to be relaxing.
He sucked it up and then just plunged into it. He pulled up my blood tests. He explained them so fast I couldn't follow anything he said. When I asked for clarification he didn't get much calmer.
The hardest part for him was that my diabetes was out of control. The pills (metformin) that sensitizes my body to insulin was still working fine but the pill that forces my pancreas to produce more insulin was not. My pancreas was producing almost no insulin. Time for me to go on the needle.
He flinched when he said it. As if he was afraid I was going to slug him. I still had the dark glasses
Click images for desktop size: "In Like Flint" by JW McGinnis on and I was certain that I had my normal blank poker face on so he must have been reacting to something deep inside himself. "I'm afraid you're going to have to start doing injections. It's only one a night. The needles are so thin they don't really hurt. Honest." He said it all in a rush then rared back in his chair pulling as far away from me as he could.
While pulled back he continued, "And there's albumen in your urine. The chemo damage to your kidneys is degenerating. You'll have to take some pills for that. Apropo, no, Avisio for them. To protect them more than anything."
I pulled my chair closer so I could see his computer screen more clearly.
"Boy, my bad cholesterol is super low, isn't it. Sixty really good isn't it?"
"Yes, but your good cholesterol is far too low. The proportion is bad. You seem awfully calm about all this?"
"I kind of knew this was coming. One day. Not happy about it but . . . It will it be Lantus? Is that the insulin injection?"
"Yes. Lantus. I'm putting you on 100 units a day. Increasing it by 10 units a day until the blood sugars get under control. The Lantus could cause further damage to your kidneys."
"I got my dialysis in my future?"
He fumbled before he said, "Most people don't need dialysis even after years of Lantus. You can't promise anything though."
All I could do was nod. He took my blood pressure while he went on to explain all the new procedures and things I'd have to fit into my new daily routine. And all the arcane cabalic rituals I'd have to undertake before I could fill my new prescriptions. One of them is I have to meet with the staff pharmacist. Not to fill the scripts but to have the rules explained to me and to show me how to inject myself. A pharmacist?
My blood pressure was 120 over 60. I was expecting it to be through the roof but it was the best its been in six weeks. I have not the slightest idea what that signifies. The doc ignored my question about it.
So after I start taking the injections I have to check my blood sugars 3 to 5 times a day. That means bleeding 3 to 5 times a day. Two weeks after I start I have to do another blood panel. Two weeks after that I have to go back in and see the doc.
The money for all this worries me the most.
I don't know how I feel about all this. Not happy. Not too upset. Just the grim inevitability of it all. Not even paranoid.

Click images for desktop size: "2009 USC Football" More pills, plus injections plus more blood work is a pretty worst case scenario but at least I ain't dead. I figure bad news here means I'm owed some good luck over there.
I walked home. A lot slower. I passed some youngish girls walking dogs. I figured that a sweaty man wearing shades and ear buds might not come across right so I didn't tell them about the dog walk on Sunday. I wanted to.
On the way home I stopped at the bakery to get some of the cheaper but superior bread and some Halvarti with Jalapeno cheese. The bakery was uncomfortably warm. There was an irate guy there holding a screaming baby. He was shouting at the little old ladies who work there. It seems he ordered some rolls that he was supposed to pick up on Sunday. He didn't. They sold them to someone else. He had it in his head that once he ordered them they belonged to him and they should have held on to them. He hadn't called and told them this. He hadn't paid them anything.
He kept getting louder. The baby kept getting louder and the little old ladies looked warm, uncomfortable and frightened.
I was pretty calm and suggested he go outside for a minute and let the baby cool down. He spun on me. I had about five inches on him and I wasn't holding a baby. He took my well meaning advice.
The little old lady thanked me. I said, "For what?"
She said, "I wish Mr Giant Dog had been here! Hem must be so comforting to you."
I explained that the dogs were at home. I never thought of Giant Dog as being comforting, at least not in the way she meant.
At home my friend and I watched another Doris Day movie, "It Happened to Jane". It wasn't very good. The situation was too real to be silly. Jack Lemmon had a good monologue and Kippy's dad Ernie Kovacs, was pretty much wasted. First totally duff Doris Day movie we've watched together. Next up will be "A Touch of Mink" with Day and Cary Grant. Rah!
My friend was beat after her day but she still offered up a lot of sympathy and support. I don't think she appreciated that I'd rather think about the dog walk and kitting up the kids on Saturday.
No problem is so big it can't be ignored.

Posted by David at 10:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Carp" by Unknown It was a pretty unexciting Sunday. But pleasant. I'd forgotten that time can sometimes just be a pleasant thing to just see pass. There aren't ever enough of these moments. I often forget to treasure them. Times where life is just content. It will be short lived and can't be sensibly ignored or taken for granted.
After the bad storms the clouds passed and the sun came out. We drove to the Indian Reservation, did some more light grocery shopping and went to Taco Bell. My friend loves their hard shell vegetarian tacos. I got a bean burrito and a "Beefy Cheesy Melt". Since everything else was vegetarian someone took it upon themselves to make my Melt Beefy-less. It was fine, They made up for the lack of meat by using extra rice. Rice was what I was craving anyway.
When we got back home it was nice enough to sit outside with the dogs. The dogs love me but my friend is "The Mom". Her being outside set them into joyous doggie paroxysms. Like me dogs seldom express joy by sitting still in quiet contentment.
My puppy played with her Kong and pressed it against my friends leg. My friend didn't understand that this meant you were supposed to try and steal it from my puppy. The giant dog bought out one of his squeaky toys and just drove us nuts with that. The gentle dog was the happiest and most active of the bunch. His way of expressing his joy is to bite me. Not painfully, he likes to grab hold of my wrist and just hang on. For whatever canine reason this puts him into a state approaching nirvana.
Clearly no side effects to Saturday's vet visit.
That evening we watched the Doris Day, Clark Gable movie "Teacher's Pet". I discovered that my
Click images for desktop size: "Midnight Worries" by Unknown friend is a budding Doris Day fan. She even knows facts about her! I'd never seen more than bits and pieces of the movie before and was surprised at just how good it was. Plenty of surprises and plenty of laughs with just a tinge of bathos, just enough to make you think you were seeing something more worthwhile than an entertainment.
Good movie.
We watched an episode of "Kung Fu". We'd fallen off the ritual. I hold that it was because the last few had been so dire. This one was good. For one thing it had the genius that is Keye Luke in it for even the briefest spell. Even a small amount of Keye Luke is enough to make anything taste better. The episode was "The Arrogant Dragon". Carradine was very effective even though his fighting skill still stinks, his acting ability was clicking at a high level. High enough to hide some bad plot holes and some uncomfortable sexual tension. And my old buddy Jimmy Hong got to play a rat!
What I liked most was the careful acknowledgment of Chinese history. It was surprising and welcome even if scant. Basically they acknowledged the birth of the Tongs as being a result of the Manchu's burning of the Shaolin Temple.
Today I've got my doctor's appointment. I called this morning and they've got my blood test results. I'm out of excuses. I have to get my home test results diary into a readable-by-others shape. This morning my blood pressure was 140 over 90. About ten points higher than is considered safe and about 20 points higher than sis safe for first thing in the morning.
I'm hoping that this can be addressed just through diet. I don't want
Click images for desktop size: "Stevie Wonder" to take any more pills. I want no more pills worse than I want to be able to stop restricting my diet any further. My fat intake is already restricted to 45 grams per day, no sugar, no pork etc. I guess coffee and salt are next on the list.
My blood sugars have been running on the high side of acceptable. Within the parameters. There's a chance I might have to deal with that. I get amazed that my diet has to be so restrictive. I know an older diabetic here, on insulin injections, and I had breakfast with him. He had bacon and eggs! BACON! Sometimes its hard to remember that my diet is restricted as much by the chemo's and their after effects as they are by the diabetes. As much as I don't want more pills I want injections even less. So it goes, Diet, More Pills, Injections in my order of preferences. And I really want none of them.
Next Saturday I have to spend 8 hours kitting out kids. I roped my friend in for 4 hours of registering the kids. Paperwork . . . I'm still pleased she'll be there for part of the day.

Click images for desktop size: "Hot Air Balloons" by Unknown Then on Sunday will be the spring dog walk!!
There is little on the appointment calendar that is as much fun as the dog walk, for me and the dogs. This will be the packs third one!

Even though the door is open to the pretty day my puppy has chosen to spend this time inside wrapped around my feet.
I love my puppy. Its nice that its reciprocated. Nicer to know she's not mad about the diet. I've cut all her food in half. She seems no hungrier than usual and she's always hungry.

Congrats to the Men of Troy. Eleven players taken in the NFL draft and 3 of them in the first round! Then Tony Dungy saying that a kid would be crazy not to attend USC becasue SOuthern California is the school that gives you the best chance to succeed!! YOW!

Posted by David at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Dolphin" by AdaptD Took the dogs to the vet yesterday. Everything was fine, except the charges.
I was proud of all three dogs. My puppy did her sterling best to endure what she sees as a horrible torture. They drew blood. No heart worm, no lyme disease etc.
The only negative was that she's still overweight. Not obscenely so but enough to be concerned. I don't want her to die early or to be in terrible pain when she's older because she's fat. I don't quite now what to do. She's on a perpetual diet, she gets tons of exercise, 1-2 hour walk every weekday, she runs herself ragged in the yard, but she's overweight and I have to do something. I'll figure it out.
My puppy has now been microchipped. She thinks this means she is now bionic.
The gentle dog was sort of amazing. When the vet was drawing blood he rested his head on my fiends lap and smiled up at her so bravely. When it was time for his stomach to be palpitated he put his feet up on the bench to make it easier for the vet.
And then the giant dog . . . at first he wouldn't get on the scale. Soon discovered why. He weighs nearly 100 pounds!! He's still thin. This is still too large to be a lap dog, which is what he thinks he
Click images for desktop size: "Girl's Day" by Vii Lid is. When I consider how many times I've had to lift him up to move him from where he wanted to be to where I wanted him to be the deadly pain in my shoulder makes sense.
When the vet drew his blood for his test he nearly fainted . . . He endured the rest of the needles and poking with fear but since I was prepared for him to come bursting through the wall leaving one of those Wile E. Coyote silhouettes behind him I'm even prouder of him trying to be so brave.
We discovered that giant dog actually has a designation within his breed. He's a Royal Standard . . . Since my puppy demands she is Queen of all she surveys the air now seems rife for regal conspiracies, coups and intrigues.
We got a preview of our life to come. To celebrate the good behaviour of the entire pack we took them to get ice cream! I also figured this would be my puppies last treat for a long time.
While waiting for my friend to bring out the ice cream we stood in front and ended up chatting with a few people who were fascinated by the three dogs.
My friend bought out the three cups of 2 buck ice cream. She gave my puppy her cup first because that's just the way its done. My puppy gave her ice cream a lick, to claim it obviously and then went over to steal the giant dogs cup! She was laughing and clearly thought this was just the first step to showing who the Royalty was in this house.
When we got home everyone was calm and easy. We went out and did some light grocery shopping. We've finally sworn off the mega
Click images for desktop size: "Gary Cooper" chain grocery store. Not only is the store one of the most oppressive atmospheres I've ever encountered, all mega clean sweat shop and greenish fluorescent lights hung from too high but they've stopped carrying the final product we could only get from them.
We got home in time for some incredible winds. I watched some of the trees bend 45 degrees beneath it. Then came the thunder, the lightening and the rain. Surprisingly the lights and electricity never died. I was anticipating it.
Gentle dog was unhappy about this. HE was on his love seat lying rigid with fear, his eyes wide open. He followed me trying to merely survive in a fear induced zombie trance.
My friend gave him some of that natural tension releaser med. I don't think it cut much through gentle dog's fear. He was locked into this scary rigor for a few hours. What snapped him out of it was the stupid cat.
I'd left the door open. It was warm. My friend said the terrible storm was because it had gotten so warm too quickly . . . This may be accurate and true but is still the dumbest thing I've ever heard. How can it possibly get warm TOO quickly!
For some reason the stupid cat decided to come into the house. She was dry! Gentle dog saw her and took off after her, chasing her right out of the house! He calmed down immediately after that
Click images for desktop size: "From the Age of Fables" by Giovanni Caselli which proves something I guess. At least it shows that for animals hatred is greater than fear.
My friend bought the stupid cat inside and gentle dog ignored her, he'd proven his point. He went back to his quiet gentle animosity and decided he could tackle the world and went back to normal!
I fell asleep on the sofa watching a John Liu movie (bad movie but Liu is still probably the greatest leg fighter ever). Woke up at midnight when my shoulder jolted me out of sleep. Found giant dog was sleeping on top of me. Went to bed about midnight. Combination of snuffling dogs and my shoulder woke me at 4 A.M. I let the dogs out. They stayed out for half an hour. Shoulder aching so decided to stay up.
Doctor tomorrow. I'm going to mention the shoulder even though I know all he'll do is either prescribe a neuropathic pain killer, that I won't take, or refer me to a specialist that I can't afford.

Posted by David at 6:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Colorful Variants" by Unknown The meeting last night was fine. Meeting the other coaches was interesting. For the most part it was pretty boring. Not boring to the point of me falling asleep or even to attempting to balance my pen on my nose. Those are things I've done at most meetings. I won't delineate the things I've done that I got away with. I've been in too many of these meetings. Even if they are essential - too many.
From what I saw all the coaches are in it for pretty much the right reasons, for the kids and not to be "the boss". I didn't pick up on any of them having the calling to coaching. They seemed to be in it for the fun, which is possibly the best reason of all.
There were a couple who seemed to have that militaristic thing going but I doubt if its too deeply ingrained. I also doubt that they're into it to the point of berating players for their own shortcomings.
The only scary part came because of of question I asked before the meeting. The question was taken as a suggestion that was seized upon. It had to do with terminology.
Football is loaded with jargon. Middle linebackers are called mike backs or just mike, outside linebackers have become sam bakers and willie backs. Sam after s which stands for strong side (the
Click image: "Castle and Diana" by DC and Marvel Comics side the tight end lines up on) and W for weak side linebacker. And those are the more sensible bits of jargon.
All I wanted to do was get on the same page as the the team on the next level. Use the same jargon, the same passing tree and teach the same base package.
The passing tree is just a stick drawing based on a single long line, which represents the fly route-go long- with little branches shooting off representing the different passing routes. They're usually pretty much the same but they can get different names and/or numbers.
The base package are your bread and butter plays. Almost always they start off with the belly plays, the fullback dive up the middle and grows from there. You teach the kids the base package so they learn the fundamentals of execution and then you build your offense around and from them. It possible to go through a season and never actually run any of your base plays. I use them for education primarily.
Taking these elements from the next level gives the kids an edge when they move along. If I called the linebackers bodacious backs when they graduated to the next level they'd stand on the field bewildered when their new coach asked them play willie back instead of just getting into position.
I forgot the level of coaches I was dealing with. Their was an argument about numbering the holes (right are numbered odd, left numbered even or vice versa) and the passing routes (even in routes odd for out routes). We never got to even discussing base
Click image: "Fashion, Sex and Politics" by S4W packages.
Even though there was an argument it wasn't as violent as a lot I've had to sit on. I had nothing to say. There was no place in that sort of discussion for me to even have an opinion.
It went on from there. The most salient point for me was that I'd have to come up with my own assistants. I need a Defensive Coordinator. All I know about defense is that they always seem to get in the way of my carefully crafted offense!
I've always had top ranked defenses mainly because I've had great DC's and I am glad to stay out of their way. I can coach Defense but I'm not the best at it. I'll still make the occasional suggestion, usually based on what a D will do that really annoys me i.e. it proves to be very effective.
The other great bit is that they told me what I'd get in my coaches kit bag. An agility ladder!! My most favorite tool. Agility hurdles! The rest is pretty bog standard stuff. I have to buy my own whistles. They don't understand that is dangerous. I like to present a front that the kids expect and feel confident in, after that I like to use goofy whistles, bird whistles loopy whistles, things that be heard but get a laugh. I copped the idea from Preston Sturges and his idea of always directing films while wearing a silly hat.

Click images for desktop size: "Landscape" by Del Sil I have to go help the kids kit on May 2nd. EIGHT HOURS! I've already specified I won't do eight hours of helmet fittings. I think they've plenty of guys who can do it as well if not better than I can. Its the most tedious job though and takes time so everybody tries to sidestep it as much as possible. They figure to kit out about 300 kids over the weekend!
Still, I'm looking forward to meeting the kids and looking forward to the day.

It looks like we will have our foster dog on Saturday! Saturday will be a manic day. Our dogs go to the vet at 10 and then we have to buy dog food, a major undertaking.
This will be a different dog then the one we were originally going to home. Its my only complaint, this constant shifting around. Going from one dog to another. Its a minor quibble. I've tried to put myself in the dog coordinators place and while I can't quite get there I'm sure there's a lot of pressure trying to figure out what dogs can be saved (all of them) and in which dog the dogs can flourish and have the best shot at finding a forever home.
Yeah, mines an incredibly minor quibble.
Last night, when I went to the coaches meeting, the dogs were pretty chilled about it. This morning my friend had to go out of town for one of her money earning meetings - her job - when I went out to open the gate for her the dogs started a horrible pathetic howling and crying. I guess we're only allowed to abandon them once in a 24 hour period. They were pretty happy when I walked back in.
Its rough to figure out how the pack is going to respond to a new number. As individual dogs I don't see any personal issues, but as a group its a hard read.
The breeds seem to include the same no problem status. Especially since there's little question that they perceive me as the leader. They'll accept a newcomer if I do.
Giant dog will be the most difficult. He already thinks the other two take more than there share of the love, love that should all belong to him!
He'll settle in well enough. He always does.
So the only real issue will be how the new guy relates to belonging here. We have to take him to the vet on Wednesday. The break will do a lot to sort out issues in his mind. He'll come back overjoyed.

Posted by David at 9:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "A Day in the Park" by George Serault It's been a pretty eventual set of days. Shape shifting days. All for the good, I think.
The biopsy came back. It was negative.
That's pretty good. Pretty good. That puts my remission at just shy of 21 months. That's the longest remission I've ever had. I guess that makes me a record holder.
After the trek to the oral surgeon and that bit of news my friend dropped me at the blood lab. I was feeling light headed from the fast and absolute lack of coffee. They took 6 little tubes and one big one. Then the creepy urine sample.
I was talking to the blood taker. She was slick and professional but
Click images for desktop size: "Buck Owens" seemed a touch preoccupied. She's being tested for Hodgkins Disease.
Not a pleasant future, Hodgkins Disease. I said a few consoling words but cut myself short when I flashed at how I felt about "comforting words".
She made a point of saying goodbye to me so I guess its alright.
After giving up the blood I broke the fast with a cup of coffee. Made me feel better, at least I felt that I could make the walk home.
On the walk I ran into a guy. About my first day in town I ran into him before. He was out walking his dog and slipped. Busted his head open pretty good. That day I would have walked past because he was already surrounded with sympathetic types at least one who appeared to know what he was doing, or at least he was doing pretty much what I would have done.
I only got involved because he had this little dog, a beagle mix, maybe a pure bred. My friend and I
Click images for desktop size: "Aquatic Beauty" by TitusBoy hashed out his address and took the scared little thing home.
The guy had no real memory of me but he remembered that day. We walked and chatted about dogs a bit before he turned to go home. The dog jumped on my leg for a pet then waddled away.
On Saturday I went to the "Equipment Fitting Seminar". It was as dull as I expected. The people attending were interesting. There were even a few players who were there to act as mannequins. I liked the people I met.
There was one thing I'd never seen before. A new helmet strapping configuration for little kids.
Its not more simple, its actually a pretty complicated system. I can't see how it would protect the kids any better but then I can't understand the different types of plastic they use in little kid helmets either.
After the equipment fitting we went to the animal shelter. We walked in fine but when I asked to see a dog they said that we were too early! It was after 10.
So we went to a restaurant for breakfast. The place was an old favorites of my friend, even though it had been years since she'd been there she glowed in hungry anticipation.
Her food was excellent. We watched it as they accidentally sent it on a tour of all three floors of the restaurant. Even then it was still warmer than mine.
Hers was excellent. I managed to pry a couple of mouthfuls from her. Mine was horrible. Cold yet somehow over cooked in some places and undercooked in others. Even her fruit salad was better! She got all sorts of different fruit while I got one piece of papaya and 3 hunks of flavorless melon!
I figure they remembered her ad disliked me for keeping her away for so long . . .
Finally we got to see a dog. We took a big Burmese cross out for a walk. The dog was fascinating. As overjoyed as she was to be outside of the kennel she was still constantly aware of us. It appeared that she was merely ignoring us but when my friend walked to a garbage can the dog froze and watched and did not move until my friend returned.

Click images for desktop size: "Surf" by Unknown I tried an experiment. I went and walked around a full pine tree so I'd be out of sight. Sure enough the dog froze. She sat right in front of my friend and stared at her as if to say, "Now's our chance! We can escape from him!" It was that sort of day for me.
Sunday was brighter, although not so warm and furry.
The coordinator from the Rescue Group came for our interview. Our dogs were incredibly well behaved. I was proud of them. She stayed for well over two hours. We'll have out first foster next Saturday or Sunday.
I couldn't be happier.
Or so I thought.
Just after the coordinator left I got the call from the football team. I'm the new Head Coach for the 12 year old squad.
I really didn't want to be an HC but it will make some things easier while adding a lot more work. On Wednesday is the coaches meeting where they'll lay out the schedule. I'll find out about equipment and if I can get a couple of bodies to run stop watches and to be eyes.
My friend has volunteered to be my clip board. Some of you know how I like to walk around and bark down observations. Its better to bark them out then to squiggle them on a pad. Mainly because 10 minutes after practice my notes are suddenly indecipherable.
I've already started mapping out the first practice so I can make a definitive list of equipment I can ask about.
I plan to tell them about "STAR" (Strength, Tenacity, Agility, Remembering) while they're running.
My goals for the team in the first season will be: 1) To have fun 2) To learn more about football 3) To learn what it means to be part of a team 4) Win the Championship and in that order. If we do the first three well the fourth will automatically happen.
My friend was awake all night working on her Qtr end stuff. I'm not happy about that but I guess better up all night at home than at the office.
She's been using the MacBook with Parallels to do the Citrix stuff. So far its been working pretty well, except this morning Windows XP crashed! It didn't even take down Parallels, just your basic stupid Windows crash.
The decent part was that it crashed in the middle of a save. The nights work was able to be recovered.
She went into the office. I'm worried about anyone being up all night and then being in an office on a rainy day.
My computer continues to limp along, now the console is throwing up wird kernel missed interrupt errors . . .

Posted by David at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Princess of the Day" by Unknown Yesterday it was warm enough to leave the house door open. The gentle dog went to work with my friend, that meant the giant dog and my puppy were here and able to come from outside to inside at their whim.
Odd side effect; I started to notice that ever ten to twelve minutes my puppy would come inside, look at me and then trot back outside.
It didn't matter what she was doing always she came back inside to see if I was still there. Maybe she just wanted to see if I was
Click images for desktop size: "Elizabeth Taylor" passing out pork chops or bacon. I don't know.She could have been bird watching, bark fighting or just running around tormenting the giant dog but she'd just stop and come rushing inside, look at me and then run back outside.
Considering the day started out with her following my friend and gentle dog to the car, jumping into the car (she hates cars) and then refusing to leave, determined to go for the ride, I don't know what to make of it at all.
There's a new wrinkle to the foster dog quest. The chow/shepherd mix we were going to take in is pregnant!
She's nine months old. I get a pretty grim image of her young life. There's no certification but it seems to me she'd have had to get pregnant during her first heat. General attitude is that its best for a female dog to be spayed before her first heat. This greatly reduces the possibility and probability of several fatal diseases including some cancers.
The people who had this dog, who shortly thereafter gave the dog away on a website classified site
Click images for desktop size: "Pin Up" by Suzanne Meunier either intentionally bred the too young dog or else they were so neglectful they left the girl in a position to be bred.
I feel the same way about this as I did when I saw a twelve year old girl pushing a pram on a London estate. I asked her if she was watching her brother and she informed me that the baby in the pram was her son. I was well known on that estate and the next day the little girl's mother came to see me about her child joining my sports club. The mother of the mother was closer to twenty-five than to thirty. She dressed to meet me. She'd seen me on TV or something so she dressed in her best. Even though it was ten in the morning she was kited out in her best all night rave gear. (The little girl mom became a gifted high jumper.)
I feel sad for the chow/shepherd mix. We're willing to take her in and keep her until she and her puppies are adopted. Not without serious reservations and heart skipping and a tiny bit of sly joy at being surrounded with puppies. The people who fostering her now are willing to keep her until the puppies are weaned. They also note that the people who surrendered the girl to the kill shelter reported a lot of bad behaviour. They've had the girl longer than they did and they see not an inkling of the reported behaviours.
Since they're willing to give the girl a home it seems better for her to not have her moving around. A poor young dog about to give birth, lost in confusion and not having any place to go to understand needs some stability, I think. It just seems better for her not to have to readjust to a new home.
I'm disappointed slightly, for me, but think its best for her.
In the meanwhile the foster dog coordinator will be here on Sunday. We'll get clear on the fact that we're willing to foster the most at risk dogs so long as they don't try to savage our guys forever and ever.

Click images for desktop size: "Unknown" by Unknown Tomorrow is my first coaches meeting. Looking forward to it. Hopefully they'll be a bit closer to my role. I don't mind being a head coach but I'd prefer working a position.
I've been running through first day practices both ways in my head. Most often in the shower. I'd like to get things firmed down so I can move beyond first day! Practice starts on April 22nd for the summer league.
I figure the first day will be in getting some measurables; forty times and such. If I've got linemen then we'll also get standing high jump numbers. Kids like prove of improvement. So do adults.
Then some group SAQ drills so I can assess the kids and see where they need improvement. That should about run them to death. Then some helmet only football drills mainly for assessments to lay out a plan and to see what sort of scheme the kids might be able to learn and implement.
I chatter at them during drills and its from the chatter that I start to form my psychological assessment. Not only to see who can be relied on in crunch time but how they're going to cope with life on and off the field.
Maybe not the best way but its the only way I know how.
Right now I don't even know if I'll let them call me by name or ask them to call me coach. It always depends.

My friend is home sick now. I have a hare brained theory that the pressures of her Qtr end and other work related things are what cause her to breakdown. She can handle a lot. (Hey, she can cope with me and that ain't easy).
I have to bumble on with prep for the weekend (coaching, visiting animal shelter, getting some hardware to repair some fences, foster coordinator and doggie playtime) and to do my best to be an inept nurse.

I do note with sadness that the guys from the Pirate Bay have been found guilty. This is not shocking. Freedom has to be fought for. They're fighting. But the RIAA and MPAA's wins are just bad for consumers and the world. Another step toward corporate take over of our lives.
I never cared much for the Pirate Bay. Never used it but I liked that it existed and will continue to exist.
The ridiculous sentence did not include ordering the site shut down.
I also note that for every loss their is a victory. Time Warner has abruptly backed off on the insane pricing plans. They haven't given up but have seemed to want to wait till October before going ahead. Probably figure they need to buy off a few more senators.

Posted by David at 9:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Click images for desktop size: "Mourning Her Warrior Dead" by Charles Marion Russell Its seems I was mistaken about the dog shelters here. Blind man and the elephant thing.
The two shelters I've been to were non-kill shelters ergo I decided they're all non-kill. They're not.
The dogs we're fostering come from the kill shelter.
I begrudgingly concede that there might be a place in the world for kill shelters. Some dogs have been so cruelly tormented, usually by humans, that the end of life is the only way to end the poor creature's anguish.
I thoroughly believe that every animal and every person can become an important and necessary part of this world if they're
Click images for desktop size: "Winning Hand" by Unknown only given a chance.
I have to concede that not everyone is capable of giving people and animals that second chance. Some of us have to work so hard to protect ourselves that its near impossible to drop the armour long enough to let an alien thing into our hearts. Understanding takes a toll too, even though I know the rewards are great so is the risk.
One of my fosters, Jack, was at death's door. He'd been fostered and even they couldn't cope with him. So he ended up with me. I never knew what the problem was. It was a lot of little things. Nothing that meant anything. He was fine. The only thing we couldn't cope with that he was worse than my puppy. When we went on walks the two of them were of the school of getting there fastest and getting back home even faster, and if they had to drag me along to do it so be it. He got better but that's just the way he is. He calmed down a lot, got curious about stuff and learned it was okay to love people.
That this is a kill shelter makes the decision about what pups to foster a lot easier. My urge is to
Click images for desktop size: "Market Scene by Candle Ligh" by Schendel van Petrus say, "Just give us all of them scheduled to die tomorrow," which isn't fair to them or to the dogs living with me now.
It looks like the pup we'll take will be a 9 month old chow/shepherd mix. YOW! Big girl. She was a surrender. The people who gave her up got her for free via one of those CraigsList permutations that runs locally. So they put about fifty cents worth of gas into her and gave her nearly a week to fit in.
She's head shy, afraid of children, afraid of other dogs. If you'd had three homes and a shelter in your life you'd feel pretty shy and scared too. She's being judged for temperament now. The only thing that worries me about a new dog is that it not be cruel to the dogs that live with me now. No vicious attacks. Yelling at them, nipping at them I understand and deal with but snarling ripping attacks are out.
I have a commitment to my family. The dogs who are my family members will help a foster and be fine. They deserve most of my consideration at first. They deserve to feel safe in their home. If it seems hypocritical to place one animal's safety in front of another's I can live with being a hypocrite. The dogs and I have struggled to learn to live together and to be happy together. They are family and they deserve my protection as we welcome another family member into our lives.
We'll see how it plays out. I'm excited.

Yesterday was a pretty wasted mess. Too tired. Too cold.
I got the minimum done which is good enough most days.
I watched another episode of "The Mute Samurai". Mainly to see Misumi's direction. Misumi's episode was different in tone and effect than the rest of the series. Clearly personal. It was called, "The Girl with Blue Eyes" and was about a blonde gajin girl who washed ashore in the arms of her dead mother. The little girl is adopted by a kindly grandfather type. The rest of the village was prepared to let the infant to simply die. Even
Click images for desktop size: "Anime" by Unknown now with the girl only five years old they spit on her, revile her for being a foreigner.
The little girl is lonely. She spends her days wetting her hair and praying to the goddess of the stream that her fiery red hair will miraculously turn black.
A wanted outlaw comes into the area. He breaks into the grandpa's house and forces them to give him food. He does not harm them. He talks to the little girl, roughly and harshly but without prejudice. Then he leaves.
The next day the little girl is playing at the beach. There's commotion at the village bulletin board. They are all looking at the wanted poster for "Sabu", the outlaw who broke into her house. She goes to hear what they're saying and the adult women push her aside, calling her dirty and disgraceful.
The little girl goes home and begins making rice cakes and tea. She packs them into bamboo containers and heads off. She goes to the mountains and walks along a desolate path shouting the outlaw's name.
Sabu comes out and grabs her. She tells him she figured he must be hungry and offers him the rice cakes and tea. He eats them greedily.
They're by a stream. As the little girl tells him what is happening in town she goes about her odd ritual of wetting her hair from the stream. She tells Sabu of her prayers to have black hair.
Sabu tells her he will turn her hair black if she brings him food everyday. She eagerly agrees and they continue talking.
Sabu uses her to deliver messages and to bring him food. She takes him to a deep cave, a better place to hide that only she knows about.
Finally Kiichi Hogan comes into the story. Kiichi is here for the reward. This time we see the subtle differences between Misumi's Ito Ogami, Lone Wolf, and Hogan. Ogami walks the path of hell but he is a complete, ruthless but sane, man. Kiichi Hogan is obsessive, loaded with rage and hate that his silence forces him to hold all inside of him. He's insane but has the saving grace of being a good man at his core.
In Misumi's episodes Hogan is not even allowed the ecstasy of voice over. He is just a massive unhinged killer who's innate goodness prohibits him from taking the easy way out.
Surprisingly this episode has almost no sword play, very little action at all. Hogan finds Sabu but at the little girl's entreaties he does not fight him and capture him. He leaves.
Other bounty hunters don't have his morals. They figure out the little girl is Sabu's contact. They grab her, hold her and without her help find Sabu's hiding place.
They're afraid to go into the deep cave and ferret him out so they tie the little girl to a tree and start to beat her with sticks, yelling into the cave that they'll stop beating the girl if Sabu comes out
Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Unknown to be killed.
Sabu does. The little girl yells, "I never told them anything!"
Sabu replies, "I know that."
The bounty hunters and gang surround Sabu. They forget the beaten little girl. With no announcement Hogan comes up behind her. He cuts her ropes, freeing her. She looks at him and then runs to Sabu.
With little flash Hogan kills the bad guys. That's it for action.
The episode ends with Sabu about to go to prison. He turns to the little girl and promises to take care of her when he is released. He also apologizes to her for lying that he could turn her golden hair black. The cop then tells the little girl she should be proud of her differences. She made a black soul like Sabu's white due to her differences. She is a gift from the gods.

Posted by David at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Click images for desktop size: "The Long and the Tall" by Unknown The giant dog woke me. Simple method; barked in my face till I got up.
He was only the emissary. The other two dogs were agitated and waiting for me to get up and open the door. There was something in the yard.
I let them out. Typical non-event. And little barking.
They're all asleep now. My friends asleep. The whole house is silent except for me.
Headphones on. Staring at LCD screens and thinking. Always thinking even when the thoughts are just about white noise and guitar strings.
My puppy stayed in the office with me for a while. I was boring. She left.
She did her job. She reminded me that no matter how dark the night I'm not alone, never alone. Free? As free as I can be I guess. Freedom in exchange for never being alone seems a fair deal. Never alone against no responsibility, no love, just me and my pills and my pain.
Maybe the deal is too much in my favour.
Some good news yesterday. Very good news.
It started when the Animal Rescue service called. We're going to get to be foster dog parents.
Very cool.
All that's left is the house visit. Which just means some house cleaning. There's little question this is a home built for dogs.
My friend wants me to find out about us getting a shelter license. Where we could have as many dogs as we saw fit (and could afford). I still have a strong distaste for dealing with governments but the pay off would be kind of astonishingly great.
Both my friend and I are experienced fosters. I love having the dogs come in. Its a positive for everyone. Our dogs get to meet and adapt to another personality, the foster gets out of the shelter.
Click images for desktop size: "Marvel Comics Presents" Even the nice shelters are pretty hellish, at least to me.
My last foster was in an area that still believed in kill shelters. There the fostering had a more poignant edge. The poor dogs had either me or death. This never stopped any of them from making my life pleasantly miserable. One foster ate a wall, I've lost countless frozen pizzas off of kitchen counters. One foster I loved had this incredible ability to dig a three foot hole in under 5 seconds!
My puppy would argue with them, play with them. My puppy used to like to lay out her stuffed toys in the sun light. She would spend an amazing amount of time laying them out and arranging them, then she would just lie down and stare at them. I guess she was feeling wealthy.
All of the fosters respected her little arrangements, until her back was turned. then they'd steal her toys and actually play with them like a dog is intended to.
Here they don't have any kill shelters. It sort of puts the lie to the myth that kill shelters provide any sort of service. Even though the pups aren't facing unjust execution their lives are still sadly miserable.
The shelters here are nice. The shelters in LA are a disgrace. Visiting any of them is tantamount to seeing the undiscussed circle of hell. Here they're clean. Each dog has a room, not a cage, but its still prison. No dog is happy until someone stops to talk at them, and when the person leaves they sink back into their lonely misery.
One thing this agency does that is different from any past
Click images for desktop size: "Marty Robbins" experience; they let you pick which dog to foster.
I'm not sure how I feel about that. My experience is that the coordinator calls me and says that if I don't take this or that puppy they'll die tomorrow.
Its an unfair pressure I don't mind.
Here we had to go through the web site and pick one.
Considering that both my friend and I are prone to the "oh, hell, just give me all of them" syndrome and "we'll figure out how to deal with it as things come up" affliction, this is dangerous.
We picked two dogs for more info on. Both are Belgian mix breeds. In the pictures both dogs look terrified and terribly sad.
The female is a terv mix, about 18 months old. She was picked up on the street. No one ever claimed her. This makes me figure she was abandoned. Driven someplace and kicked out of the car to "wander lost and lonely like a cloud".
The male has a face too much like my puppy's. He's about 6 months. A surrender. That means that some one decided that his black fur didn't coordinate well with the new carpet, or his toes clicking on the linoleum grated on their nerves.
That's harsh. There are probably several good reasons for taking someone into your life and then cruelly dumping them. I can't think of any. At least its better than abandoning them to their own
Click images for desktop size: "I Feel You" by Jose Manchado devices. I don't really think so but it sounds like it should be better.
We'll know this weekend when we get the home inspection. I'll take the cowardly way out and let my friend make the final pick. I figure let both of them stay here, even though I know I could never cope with two new scared dogs, but I guess I'd figure it out.
I also love the idea of meeting the perspective adopting people. Its nothing but a warm experience.
The other nice news is that the football club apparently wants me to coach. They haven't figured out the assignments yet but they want me attend the "fitting" clinic this Saturday.
This is the clinic where they show coaches the right way to wear shoulder pads and the proper sizing and strapping for helmets.
Its been a lot of years since I had to attend something like this. I expect to be pleasantly bored.
I used to keep up with this stuff by listening to the salesman. Eastman, Riddle, Air etc were always making alterations to their equipment, innovations maybe. Th salesman would demonstrate and point out any differences in how the gear should be worn.
I'll be most interested in meeting my fellow coaches. I hope there aren't any militaristic win-at-all-costs types. Most of the time you can't recognize the type until game day. They've learned to disguise it.
If that weren't enough my computer worked all day. Its still going.
My friend is learning to love her MacBook. She using Parallels along with gr to do her job and keep it all on her Mac.
The only slight negative is that yesterday was the last day of her four days off. This is the start of her Quarter End which means I probably not really see her until this weekend.
Its a bearable absence.

Posted by David at 5:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Rossetti and Dunton" by Dunn Not feeling well today. Whatever I think is wrong I've decided is wrong inside of me.
I'm to see the doctor on April 20th. Have to bring along all my numbers, my health diary.
Its obvious somethings wrong. After doing the lite exercise of working out the pain in my shoulder, Stretch it to the point where the pain just is about to start, then hold it for a count of 10 - repeat; trotting around the yard my blood pressure was 195 over 108. At the oral surgeons on Tuesday it was 180 over 90. Waking up its around 155 over 90.

Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Unknown A year or so ago it never got above 130 over 70.
A year seems rapid to me. A rapid change.
I'm trying to resist self treatment. Diet is easy and obvious. Cut out sodium etc. I get twitched because I keep remembering the oncology team saying that it was important that I keep my blood pressure low, like my opthamologist was always telling me my eyes would do better if I kept my sugars at near hyperglycemic levels. Truths we hold to be self evident stuff.
My blood sugars are okay but not near the low levels I was keeping them at. Sometimes I think I'd do better if I would just get overwhelmed. Let panic take me someplace.
At least I can still laugh and think.
The giant dog has gone to work with my friend. The crazy thing jumped about four feet up in the air on his way to the car, he was so excited.
Inside my puppy let loose the saddest coyote/wolf howl I've ever heard from her. Its what prompted
Click images for desktop size: "Emotion Machine" by Unknown my trotting around the yard with her and gentle dog. My puppy gets the Kong. I chase her. Gentle dog latches on to my wrist and tries to keep me from catching her.
It must be a great game to them. They want to play it all the time.
It will be funny walking the two sane dogs. Easier on me but the giant dog's intent insanity sure makes every one of our expeditions a memorable adventure!
My mind may be wrapped up in morbidity but I can still think.
I've been watching a TV series. A Japanese TV series: The Mute Samurai. The first episode was entitled "The Man Who Lost The Ability to Sing" which is pretty RAH when you think about it.
What attracted me to it was the star, Tomisaburo Wakayama, of "Lone Wolf and Cub". Wakayama's brother Shintaro Katsu, Zatoichi, makes appearances. Hideo Gosha wrote the story! When I saw that a few episodes were directed by Misumi Kenji, it became must see stuff.
I'm watching them in order. They're pretty standard TV fair. I'm not keen on the pacing. The plot is that Kiichi's father was an honest judge in Nagasaki. He refused to turn a blind eye to the foreigners illegal drug smuggling so the foreigners killed him, his wife and slashed Kiichi's throat and left him to die so he could watch the foreigner's rape his fiancee.
Lots of reason for hopeless rage there.
Kiichi spends the show as a bounty hunter. He lives off the money but mainly is searching for criminals who can lead him to the foreigners. When the show picks up he's been on the quest for 18 years!!
He's become a deadly swordsman who's only fear is that the foreigners might have left Japan before he can kill them!
The humour of the stories comes from Kiichi's discovery that he only gets half as much money for bringing in the criminals dead. That and people making fun of the strong samurai that cannot speak. This is a tough show. In the first five minutes there's a graphic decapitation.
Misumi directs the third episode. It fit in to the series canon but because it's Misumi it takes an odder slant.
There are ideas that flow through all of Misumi's films. That's one of the requirements to be considered an "auteur". One of the most telling is his depiction of society and its relationship to his swordsmen. Society becomes a dense but single character in his films.
In this short film (which is what most of these TV episodes come across as) his concept of society gets clearer than ever before.

Click images for desktop size: "John Kennedy" Society and the people in it are vile, frightened contemptible things. Why shouldn't they be. Any hint of heroism from one of its part leads it to being rejected and destroyed by the society that protects itself above all else. Self preservation rules the vast majority. It is all they have.
And due to the low cruel lives they are forced into it is the superior man's instinctual need to love these people. To protect them and enable them to perhaps grow into something more than the miserable thing they are condemned to be.
And the superior man does this while not living amongst them, not ever letting them touch him lest they contaminate the purity of his love with their sodden reality.
Society's only touch of humanity comes from the women who maybe just as rough as their men but they have samurai's strength in their hearts. They are not afraid to show gratitude and realize their is pride in humility.
It would seem that this grim view of the world is essential to the power of Misumi's imagery. It forces him to construct his "fleur de mal" images of gore and beauty.
A world where the only thing worth loving is contemptible and represents dirt that you would never allow to taint your own soul is a tough place to live. That Misumi's heroes thrive in this world without regret and that they never let their love for their common man become infused with pity presents an image unlike any I've encountered in classical or existentialist literature. I guess it only works if you've got a heavy sword and the emotional where with all to calmly slay dozens at a pitch.
I'm going to take my pair of dogs out to explore a world that's not tinged with madness. I like walking all three of them. I always figure people see us and point while thinking to themselves, "There goes the luckiest man in the world."

Posted by David at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Clothes Make the Man" by Unknown There are four inches of snow on the ground. The temperature is 27. Easter weekend is this weekend.
Yesterday my friend left for work. The giant puppy has strange issues. Whenever we or she leave he starts a pathetic crying. My puppy will often join in with a mournful howl.
Normally this all ends as soon as I step back in the house. I have to go out with my friend to open and close the gate behind her. Yesterday when I came back inside the giant dog's tears didn't stop.
Before I could start to comfort him the phone rang. My friend was
Click image: "Charmed to Meet You" by Unknown coming home. The snow was too bad for her to go into work.
I think the giant dog is taking credit for bringing her back to him.
As we settled in, her to work and me to annoy her and the dogs, I felt something odd. My gums had been swollen since the tooth extractions but they started to throb in a way that worried me.
I called the oral surgeon and got an emergency appointment.
The guy who pulled my teeth is on vacation. I liked his stand in far better. He said I had the start of an infection and I was healing much slower than usual.
Leukemia and chemo-patients are extremely susceptible to infection. Diabetics are slow healers.
It bugged me that this was in all my medical history. Before the extraction I even called and asked if I could pick up the script for the antibiotics before hand. I was told of course not.
I wonder if my call rankled them enough to not prescribe any antibiotics out of some sort of professional spite or in a vain attempt to not pay that much attention to my own health - let the
Click images for desktop size: "Esther" by Benouville MD's handle it all, Just be compliant and shut up.
I figure the latter.
So the stand in doc gave me a script for Amoxicillin, a pretty non-specific anti-biotic.
I was so amazed and relieved that there was no charge for the visit that it wasn't till some time later that I started to wonder why I wasn't charged.
I spent the idle moments waiting around asking anyone who was foolish enough to listen what they thought about the weather. No one seemed as upset about the snow and cold as I did. Much to my chagrin they all seemed to accept it pretty much as the way things work "around these parts".
Other than that relatively complicated ploy of mine to annoy my friend and the dogs we settled in.
It was pleasantly dull. I didn't even have much time for my usual pondering of what is going to snatch my simple comfort away from me.
We watched a Japanese movie: "Suspect X". It was surprisingly good and entertaining. It started with a crazy cool "Mister Wizard" style explanation and demonstration on how to make a super particle accelerator from things you can find around the house, if you happen to live in a medical tech supply factory anyway.
The film is based on a successful Japanese TV series so I wasn't all prepared for what was to come. A murder mystery that became a struggle between a genius physicist and a super genius mathematician.
And somehow it became a tale of enduring and effective heartbreak, loneliness and profound sadness. Its smart enough in its story telling to lay out some red herrings as to the character and motives of the characters, allowing you to gleefully jump to some conclusions that will intertwine your own guilt with the guilt of the leads and the distaste for the mere cops who slave away to solve the crime.
At one point the "villain", the mathematician, asks the physicist to not solve the crime; "It will bring no one happiness."
The ending is searing, simple with an elegance that speak to the truth of the lost.
A warmly recommended movie. Not great but terribly cool entertainment.
I've already had the dogs out in the bad weather. They love it. They knocked me down once. Unintentional this time. My puppy and the gentle dog saw something and went after it while giant
Click images for desktop size: "DC Comics" dog saw the same thing and decided to back away from it, probably to consider joining in on the attack. I was doing pretty well until giant dog decided that whatever was out there was small enough to make it safe for him to join in on the attack. He moved too fast for me so I went over. To the pups disgust I kept a hold on all three leashes.
One of my kids (former players) likes to send me the UK top 40 three or four times a year. I think I once muttered something about being afraid of loosing touch. For some reason he sends me the POP top 40. And once again I'm amazed that there are as many of those tracks that I sort of like and there are tracks I down right hate (keyboards and drum machines are often but not always the progeny of hate).

Posted by David at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Autumn Maple" by Kamisaka Sekka Yesterday was pretty nice. Temperature's up around 50, felt warmer in the sun. The dogs were happy.
It was nice, like a pleasant autumn day.
This morning there was about an inch of snow on the ground and the threat of about 8 inches to come. Aggravatingly no one but me thinks this is peculiar and slightly disheartening.
The dogs are still happy.
It was a mildly interesting weekend. On Saturday we met my friend's parents at the Chinese buffet for their birthday lunch. We were surprised at how
Click images for desktop size: "Bath Time" by Unknown busy it was.
This impacted my doggie bag purloining. While I doubt if they care about me snatching tidbits to take home for the dogs it makes the experience much more fulfilling if its a clandestine operation I barely get away with. Not certain how much I'd be able to eat I went loaded for bear, both the inner and out pockets of my sweater/fleece were lined with plastic.
The crowd was so heavy and there was so much wait personnel that I only got 2 pockets filled. Fortunately their Saturday lunch is more of a brunch thing. There was bacon and pork sausage.
There was also an omelet chef. This was new and novel. My friend had a cheese and mushroom
Click images for desktop size: "Beethoven" by Unknown omelet that she thought was pretty good. Except it was too large for her. This probably saved them a fortune in sprig rolls and veggies.
I had no big problems eating. I got sick afterwards but I put that off to living on nothing but over cooked rice, pudding and other non-chewables.
Real food felt weird in my mouth. The only problem I really had was with the calamari. Too chewy to disintegrate it properly for swallowing. I sampled a little bit of everything. Everything felt odd in my near toothless mouth but there was no problem and no bleeding.
The table conversation perplexed me. My friends family is larger than I ever imagined. Every time she talks with her parents I seem to find out about another sibling. I'm an only child so its perplexing to me. I guess my ideas about extended families don't have much basis in reality. I always figured that they were closer, chatting daily. I thought they were more apart of life.
I don't like how everyone looks at me like I was retarded when I ask, "who is that?"
(I suddenly remembered I'm not actually an only child. My step-father had three kids from a previous marriage. I guess I met them once when I was about 7. Never had any contact or heard about them until my step-fathers funeral. They sent some flowers. I was bored and I asked my mother who some of the flower senders were. She gave me that same "how retarded are you" look and explained, slowly, that those people were my brother and sisters.

Click images for desktop size: "Nude" by Unknown I thought it was pretty chintzy to only get one bunch of flowers from 3 people but then realized that since they'd never seen the guy in at least 20 years probably one of them thought to send something and just signed all three names. Fair enough and probably more than my step-father warranted. I lived with him and wasn't too thrilled to be there I can't imagine how his three other kids must have felt hearing he was gone. Heck of a legacy. They got mentioned in his obituary. I didn't. Suited me fine.
After lunch my friend and I headed to the Animal Shelter. There are plenty of reasons we should stick with having only three dogs, mainly economic and the lack of canine sleeping space. But there were two dogs there that seemed to need us more than we might need them.
I was surprised when her parents met us at the shelter. They'd never been there before. I liked them showing up like that. Its the only pleasant surprise I recall from them. My friend seemed pleased which made it all the better.
Inside was not so great. The one dog, Rufus, was gone. He'd found a new home. The other little dog Jackson had an application for him pending.
Jackson is one of those dogs that really irk me. Not the dog but the people who were entrusted to him. He is at least 9 years old and they just abandoned him. The notes on him indicated severe neglect. He was intact. (Polite dog words for not fixed, which is slightly less polite for uncastrated).
This is a non-kill shelter and they're fairly fussy about who takes their dogs so we decided to give him a break and pull him out of the kennel. He was a little frantic and really wanted out. Understandable. Except the shelter was closing! We weren't allowed to spring him. I was looking forward to it.
It cast a pall over what had been a nice day. My friend's mother was surprised there were so few dogs there. I thought that was good news.
Our spirits were elevated a little bit when on Sunday we got an email explaining that we are still being considered as foster parents. Dog foster parents.
I like the idea of being fosters. Meet a slew of nice dogs and a bigger slew of some excellent people (for the most part).
My friend bought up another subject on Sunday. She's been corresponding with an old high school chum. It appears that woman is going through some strive. Her husband's girl friend was calling him constantly while their son was getting an operation. I also gathered that the boob husband was taking the calls. Yow!

Click images for desktop size: "Mermen" by Maxfield Parrish My friend has invited her to stay with us if things get too crazy for her. (Crazier than that?) Now my friend is worried that her high school mate isn't very much like us.
We also had to deal with the stupid cat. When we came back from a little errand the stupid cat was standing in the neighbor's yard yowling its head off. My friend had to go into the yard but then couldn't find the thing. It had left the yard it was acting like it was imprisoned in. My friend caught the cat up and bought her into the yard where upon the cat demanded to be set down. Since the fence is separated from our neighbors by a quarter inch wire link fence we spent 10 minutes moving it a quarter inch.
There's someone who might like to take the stupid cat into their home. As much as I dislike the stupid cat, I mean I like skanky cat, the feral free loader, more than I do her, I still have a strong knee jerk reaction about moving an 8 year old animal out of the environment its used to.
My feelings aren't very important here so we'll see what happens.
Finally my iMac is holding on. Barely. I think the Hard Drive is only part of the problem. I think the HD Controller and possibly even the CPU might be in trouble s well. I'm still doing daily back-ups, which are a pain.
I looked at the Pystar Hackintosh. Pystar is being sued by Apple for making and selling machines that run OSX. There's even talk, probably true, that the next version of OSX will have DRM in it to prohibit it from running on anything but Apple taxed machines. Still . . .
Even though its about 25% the cost of a MacPro and about six hundred less than the sexier non boxed iMac its still too expensive for us.
I think I could replace all the parts. Its scary working with such tiny screws on something so fragile but how else do you learn?

Posted by David at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Click images for desktop size: "Water Sprite" by Unknown Passed out at ten p.m., which is early for me.
Woke up at 3:00 a.m. in the midst of a dream.
Like most of my dreams this one had a plot. I was back in LA as old as I am but looking like when I was 22. I was on the Hollywood Freeway, driving like a maniac through rush hour traffic, gunning up to a hundred in the fire lane and scuttering through traffic, not running away from anything but rushing to downtown.
I was driving my old junker red and white Ford Falcon station wagon, my sleeper. Some of you might remember it. Ran on airplane fuel. Looked like hell but tipped out at 145 in the quarter mile. The only real problem was that the carb kept catching on fire if it had to idle too long.
I hit downtown. The LAVA art exhibition was still going on. I tried to park by the Contemporary Art Museum but no luck. I ended up having to park deep in the nickel. I figured as much. Even in a dream you don't drive a decent car down to the Nickel.
I made a careful note of where I was parked. Put the keys in my pocket and started to run to my appointment. I was meeting my friend. We'd been separated for too long. She had managed to reconnect with her first love and they were living a very happy life together. It was her first time in LA and she'd been thoughtful enough to call me.
We were going to one of the grind houses. The last surviving one. Every town needs a movie theater where the bums can crash for a dollar. They were showing the double bill of Jean Luc Godard's "Masculin Feminine" and "Hong Kong Cat" which is actually not that weird a double bill for the old
Click images for desktop size: "State of Being" by Blatte grind houses. We scheduled our meeting to see those two and intended to leave before the other two flics, some gore schlock I'd normally have been interested in.
As we went to our seats I commented on how I was not a big fan of Godard's but "Hong Kong Cat" was a crazy cool mess of a movie.
We watched the flics, not even holding hands. Her lover, Rodney, had left us alone. He wanted to go see the Dodgers play the Angels at Chavez Ravine.
When the movies ended we left the theater. It had become inky and dangerous dark. My friend and I walked and talked. We talked like old lovers who never should have parted, with pain and lightness. We passed an SRO where a boom box with a blown speaker blared a salsa version of the Ramones' "Sitting in my Room". We were on Figueroa. There were lights and people. It was where she was supposed to meet Rodney. I left her in front of the old boarded up penny arcade where a bunch of cps loitered, drinking coffee and eyeing the gang bangers. It felt safe enough. She wanted to walk me to my car but I knew the area I'd parked in. It wasn't safe. I told her it was too far away and we might not get back in time for her to meet Rodney.

Click images for desktop size: "Reading Desk" by Leighton We parted with an aerial hug. I tossed her up in the air and enjoyed looking at her flushed near laughing face against the blue black sky and the crossing wires.
She called after me but I pretended not to hear. My heart was tearing.
Then I realized I couldn't remember exactly how to get to my car. I wandered downtown LA lost in thought, the kind of fervid thought that comes when your heart takes over from your brain and you get lost in the way things might have been and forget the reasons why things are as they are.
I watched the drunks, the bums, the hopeless and the fearful. Around the corner from Sneaky Pete's Liquors there was a building being renovated. A group were stealing the scaffolding. Two guys ran off with a pair of acetylene tanks.
I watched them run off and watched a patrol car, its bubble gum machine strobing blue drive by slowly. The cops watched the stealing but never stopped.
I woke up.
I have no idea what it means or why this dream affected me to the point of memory.

Click images for desktop size: "A Dirty Job" by NFl Films
I'm doing better. The worst pain left is where they cut out the section for the biopsy. Yesterday I was practicing smiling in the mirror. Trying to smile so that I don't look like a hillbilly caricature. I noticed that the wound where they cut is keloiding. I hope it flattens out but I don't know if it makes any difference.
I went to meet the guys about coaching. I was shocked by how much kit and gear they had. Very well run team. I was a bit perplexed by that. Even in high school ball I would have been more responsible for a lot more day to day stuff. Here I'd just coach. I'm not sure if that's a positive or a negative.
I think we properly impressed each other. Now its just a matter of waiting a couple days. They start practice in a couple weeks.
My friend sat in on the interview, at my invitation. She didn't volunteer for anything and seemed mildly irked that I didn't volunteer her! We'll see what happens.
After the interview we stopped at the Animal Shelter. Too many cats and far too many beautiful dogs. Te only good sign was that two of the most special ones were spoken for. There's was one little guy, so thin, they said he was 6 or 7. I wouldn't be surprised if he were 9 or 10. They didn't tell the whole story about how he ended up in the shelter but he was terribly matted and had to be painstakingly shaved down. I liked him but couldn't figure how he'd handle our three maniacs.
When we got home our dogs went typically berserk with pleasure on seeing us. When I went to bed my puppy scrunched close to me, even resting her head on my chest, until some dog outside barked and she had to go defend our honor.
Tomorrow we're meeting my friends parents to celebrate their birthdays. We're going to the Chinese buffet. This pleases the dogs no end. It will be my first attempt at eating real food.
The computer keeps stuttering but I managed to do a full back up. I'm going to try and tweak things and keep it surviving. Its not four years old yet. I replaced the HD once already. This is irksome.

Posted by David at 6:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Scarf, Girl and New Friend" by Leah Felecity It's snowing . . .

My puppy has always loved her Kong, a red hard rubber conical toy. But she's very specific about it being her Kong.
When Jack, our foster dog, got adopted I included a Kong with his going away package. I made a mistake and gave my puppies Kong to Jack and kept his. This was a bigger mistake than I thought. My puppy who spent every minute outside with the Kong in her mouth refused to touch "Jack;s" Kong. She had no interest in it. Instead she
Click images for desktop size: "Fess Parker" spent a good portion of every day searching for her Kong.
After nearly a year she started to play with "Jack's" Kong. Soon she was as enamored with it as always. By enamored I mean chasing it, teasing me with it and wanting me to chase her to steal it from her.
After our move she lost the Kong in a snow drift. I'd been looking as hard as I can. She'd scuttle along beside me desperate and frustrated.
Her aunt sent her a new Kong for her birthday last year. My puppy studiously ignored it until yesterday.
She finds it vital to have her Kong and to torment me with it. I don't know why but it seems to be some sort of lifeline between us.

I spent the weekend lightly suffering. I wonder if tomorrow's oral surgery, six teeth gone, is preying that heavily on me. I also wonder if the debilitating effect of the pain in my mouth is starting to affect the rest of my health. I'm constantly weary. My right shoulder is hurting em terribly. I can't put on a jacket with out grunting in pain. The exercises seem to keep the worst of the pain away.
My left elbow has stated to throb and weaken. I have a hard time holding the coffee pot. My thumbs continue to ache and stay weak.

Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by A Brito My left ankle feels tweaked and burning. My right knee burns and gives out when I try to stand.
My blood sugar levels have been haywire. And every day my blood pressure seems to be rising, particularly the diastolic (the littler number).
Maybe its holistic. Could the pain in my mouth be branching out and affecting the rest of my body? Or could it be a matter of will? Keeping the pain in my mouth in check has permitted the rest of my body's aches and pains to resurface.
It will be interesting to see after tomorrow afternoon when my life will be mainly saliva, blood and a numb tongue.

I did watch three movies this weekend.
The first was a surprise in that it didn't totally suck; "Marley and Me". How did this Owen guy get to be a star? Alan Arkin was in it and he was reliably funny.
For a while it seemed almost that the filmmakers had swiped a page from the Japanese. The Japanese style of dog movie making is to realize that the dogs are not merely an object to cutify but a separate character that has a value within the dramatic dynamic.
That wasn't quite so. It turned out that the film was mainly just a biography of this newspaper writer. At least the dog was in it a lot and was used, slightly, as a device to elucidate the character and miasma of the human characters.
I expected it to be terrible. It wasn't.
The Korean film, "The Divine Weapon" was something of a throwback. It was definitely made to cash in on the popularity of "Red Cliff", that monstrously huge John Woo epic detailing how China came to be.
This film details how Jaesong broke free of China to become its own tiny and proud country. Being Korean the epic part is incidental to the drama and relationships of the people.
There's been a trend, lately, in Korean films, to have these period pieces reflect modern times - rapping monks, ancient caps made to resemble backwards baseball caps. That sort of thing. I find it disconcerting and not a little bit stupid.
"The Divine Weapon" doesn't mess with that. Instead it paints a lovely picture of people in the 15th century trying to survive and make a new and better life.

Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by 3D The odd thing that keeps this from being incredible is that the film's agenda is to push patriotism and freedom. Freedom can only be accomplished via creating weapons of mass destruction.
The movie details the Korean invention (or perfection) of the Flaming Arrow, or exploding arrows, including rockets, the first weapon capable of killing people over a mile away.
For me its hard to cheer 100 people killing 100,000 by using a weapon no one other than the inventors had even conceived.
The battles are epic and have a rough beauty but what was thrilling was the love story between the female creator of the divine weapon and the former noble, now a merchant, who helps her build the missiles. One scene in particular choked me up. It was intensely beautiful, simple and direct.
Earlier in the film the woman gives herself a pep talk; "Are you sad? No, you cannot afford to be sad! Even if I'm lonely I can't feel lonely. I can't ever admit how scared I am."
Later on she has been betrayed and ordered to be turned over to the Ming government for execution. The merchant fights and will surely die or kill his best friend but she stops him and surrenders herself. He yells after her, "Are you sad?"
"No!" she barks back.
"Are you sad?" he yells.
"No!", she exclaims as she walks to the prison cart.
"Are you lonely?"
"No!" and she turns, "I have you!"
He's speechless and watches silently as she is taken away. Its more powerful than anything but a movie could show.
Finally I got to see the long anticipated "Ong Bak 2".
I was nervous about the film ever since its was announced. I think Tony Jaa's "Tom Yum Gum" is one of the 10 greatest movies ever made. Mixing bone breaking martial arts with human feelings, love of creatures not human, gripping your heart and your adrenal gland is no small task.
"Chocolate proved that director Pikanew's talent is deadly real. But for some reason Tony Jaa decided to direct his third movie himself. The announcement made me flinch. I thought of Bruce Willis . . . (Have you seen "The Adventures of Hudson Hawke"?)
I was calmed only slightly when I saw the trailer, on line, for "Ong Bak 2". Then I read a really disparaging review. The review savaged the film. It was clear the writer had little knowledge of international cinema and no knowledge or interest in martial arts movies.
So I was excited and nervous about being disappointed.

Click images for desktop size: "The Salute of the Robe Trade" by Charles Russell Any film with Tony Jaa is going to get 4 stars out of 5 from me. The man moves with a sensuous grace and ease that is totally unworldly. He moves how an angel or an ancient god would move as if gravity and the earth around him were mere incidentals that can't even distract him. The man has two pet elephants! Of course he is quick to correct, the elephants aren't pets. They are family. RAH!
"Ong Bak 2" starts with a simple title, "It was the Buddhist year 1974. In the Christian calendar it was 1491."
This was a surprise. Tony Jaa the ultimate 21st Century hero was doing an ancient?

I need to stop. My concentration is fragmenting. This is already long. I'll continue after my oral surgery tomorrow.
As my friend says, I find it impossible to stay quiet for too long.
How does she put up with me? Normally with good grace and humour.

Posted by David at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Pin Up Art" by JW McGinnis I used to be one of those balanced people. I mean that I hated as many things as I loved and with pretty equal intensity.
Maybe its just age and fatigue. I still love things with the same intensity, passion but I hate fewer and fewer things. And with less a feeling of rage, more like a feeling of contemptuous realization that these things will always be there: child molesters, rapists, the greedy oppressors who use democracy as a tool to repress and subjugate. No one is going to care enough to destroy them, eradicate them. I know that these vile types are manufactured and survive only because of our ignorance and they thrive because we all have a hard time looking past ourselves.
A scant few get busted and we feel smug for glancing at the headlines and the rest give thanks to the unlucky busted one because it means they can get about their evil for a little while longer, probably forever.
I don't have the rage anymore. Its a lot easier to love than to hate. Hate gets you killed, hate gets your friends killed and your allies killed. Doesn't matter if its killed for the right reasons or the
Click images for desktop size: "Mary Magdalene" by di Cosmio wrong. Dead is dead.
I'm bored and tired with death. Tired of fighting the hateful.
I'm just tired.

I fell asleep at 9:30 last night. Too exhausted to move.
Maybe it was the extra long walk. The dogs and I just meandered about the neighborhood. My puppy and the giant dog are leery of new things. Our byzantine path only slightly expanded their known world so they were happy about it.
My puppy will suck it up and continue forward in her belligerent straight ahead way but the giant dog will refuse like an open horse refusing a water jump. He trusts me so eventually he'll continue ahead.
Only the gentle dog is too wrapped up in new smells to care where we are or where we're going.
When we got home I gave the gentle dog a bath. He's the easiest of them. He stands quiet even though he insists that his head stay as far out side the tub as possible. He'll allow me to push his head over the tub and the water for shampooing and rinsing but immediately stretches his neck as far over the edge as possible.
I spent the rest of the day doing exercises. My right shoulder neuropathic pain is back. It bunches the muscles up and the pain gets electric. I'm glad it responds to the old exercises. Just stretches and flexes. They hurt but not as bad as reaching up reflexively for the dog shampoo.
My hands aren't responding. That's annoying. The weakness in the thumbs frustrates me. When I struggle to hold the pan under the faucet, filling it with water for lunch it feels like a melancholy piano
Click images for desktop size: "Alice 19th Secret" by Panga sonata should be playing on my personal soundtrack. Its survivable. Doesn't make me happy. And yet I remain happy. Go figure.
Its a good thing I went to sleep so early. Normally I take the dogs out for the last time each night at 10:30. I go out with them. We patrol the yard in the dark. It involves a lot of running, jumping and attacking me. We have to check certain trees for cats and squirrels,
They didn't want to go out with my friend. The only negative is that at 4:30 they came to me in bed. The giant dog woofed at me. My puppy whined at me. They had to go out badly.
I did the math in my head and decided to stay awake. They're all sleeping in their normal night time spots. They'll be up soon. Breakfast time.

My blood pressure is still high. Not dangerous going to die high but higher than it should be. Warning high.

Click images for desktop size: "Grand Central Station" by Ian Foster Same with the blood sugars. Funny. I still think the huge amount of ibuprofen I'm taking might be contributing to both things. I've no proof but since when did we need proof to believe things.

I've been getting comments and emails from people about how much they enjoy the art work and the whacky movie posters.
I'm glad that people like them and enjoy them. I still don't find them whacky. For me the words just frame the pictures and the posters and pic's are all the story. I always think that they more perfectly illustrate exactly how I feel.
I look at them and can always see what it is I'm feeling, what I felt.
I've got a few thousand desktop pictures (wallpapers for the Windows crowd) and I have them rotate on my desktop every fifteen minutes. I g through them and pick out the one that fits my mood. Sometimes its spot on and sometimes its just an allusion.
I've got over 10,000 movie posters. I do the same with them. I think movie posters are high art. People work hard on them. They want them to sell the movie but that's someone else's job. The guys who made them only wanted to make something beautiful with movie stars. Sometimes they totally succeed.
I'm not above sometimes making the references sort of obscure. Maybe to protect myself and probably sometimes just out of laziness.
When I duplicate a poster its generally because I've gotten a higher quality image. Or I just screwed up. Always one or the other.

I forgot to mention that one of the reasons I'm enjoying "Daredevils of the Red Circle" is that the team has a great dog; an Australian Shepherd called Tuffie. He even gets screen credit!
Tuffie doesn't really do anything heroic. He's the most doggish dog I've yet seen in a movie. He just does dog things and they always turn out to be incredibly heroic! And that, to me, is the way dogs really are.

Its time to feed the dogs. They're good dogs. And they claim to be very heroic too.

Posted by David at 7:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "In Bones We Trust" by Unknown When I dream, or at least remember my dreams, they are always very heavily plotted stories. They're seen like movies, complete with retakes and cutaway shoots with insets and over the shoulder close-ups. Otherwise my dreams are just fleeting images, like wayward film frames.
Lately I've been dreaming about pain. I feel the pain in my dream. I wake up and sure enough I'm in pain. Prophesy fulfilled.
Since dreams are important, they tell me, I wonder what these strange overly constructed dreams of mine mean. Dreams are the way the subconscious mind helps us deal with the issues of the day, the reconstruction of events filed into memories, trauma and events forgotten. ( At least thats what they taught me in the classes I had to take to deal with victims of child abuse) My dreams often consist of shot after shot of a key being removed from a dresser. Different angles, different lighting, until I get the correct shot and the dream continues.
A lot has happened. Nothing earth shattering or even important to anyone but me.

Click images for desktop size: "Gloucester Harbor" by Edward Hopper I went to the Doctor's on Friday, the GP. He gave me some chores. On Saturday my friend and I got the prescriptions filled. We got the Blood Pressure machine and more diabetic testing strips.
My blood pressure is high. Not scary so but high. 150 over 86 one morning! I'm putting it off to the pain and the tension about even using the blood pressure machine.
I haven't been checking my blood sugars as well as I normally should. The strips cost like eighty bucks for a months supply, so I got into the habit of only checking it when I felt weird or wanted to eat something on the "unapproved" list.
There's nothing to justify this. My blood sugars have been a bit on the high side. As the diabetes at this stage could lead to blindness or to losing a limb I'll have to go back to being paranoid checking them even after I finish the doc's medical stats diary.
Diabetes is a degenerative disease. It only gets worse. Its like a car, as much as you pray a knock in the car isn't going to go away until it breaks down or you get it fixed. I'll have to keep a tighter rein on everything.
Today becomes the first day of my extended walking exercise program. Its hard to figure. I can walk 2 miles in less than a half hour by myself. When I walk the dogs the same walk takes about 90 minutes. Some of that extra time is due to weird little doggie detours and stopping to smell the lamp posts of life.
I also have to figure where we're going to walk to. My puppy and the giant dog don't like going to too many new places so I need to double our walking time while staying relatively close to their comfort zone and working my body a bit.
I think that means walking around in circles.
On Saturday we too of on a mini shopping spree. The main goal was this decent second hand book store.
We also made a run for Gluten Free Ice Cream Cones for my friend. The place where she used to go for them was closed. HAd the sign up: "Under New Ownership Opening Soon".
Every time I see that I wince. The Oriental Theater on Sunset had that sign on their marquee for 4 years until it finally reopened; not as a movie house but as "The Guitar Center".
We went to 4 other health food joints on a vain quest for the elusive ice cream cone.
My friend got three vegan cookbooks she'd been coveting. Not second hand. She's been working like
Click images for desktop size: "Favorite Poet" by Alma Tadema a lost slave for the past couple months. I was pleased she'd gotten something that mad her eyes light up.
We stopped for lunch at some sea food place. Eating out was hard on me. I could barely chew. I had a "Cajun" Poor boy sandwich that I ate with a knife and fork. I never learn to not order cajun food except in Louisiana. It was okay for all that. It felt alien to be sitting in a restaurant with just my friend. I liked it. I still have this habit of always looking around for someone I might know.
We finally got to the bookstore and they had a sale on cookbooks! 35% off. RAH! My friend got 11! I found three of my Destroyer books, all three of them ghosted by my friend Will.
We drove home. The car did fine and we felt happy.
Sunday was just a lounging around day. Need those periodically. Monday my friend took the day off. We had some light plans but it turned into another lounging around day.
I'd enjoyed "King of the Texas Rangers" so much I decided to check out some more serials. I was disappointed, not in the serials themselves but in the discs. The Columbia serials (which tend to have better actors but less excitement and poorer special effects) looked like they'd been mastered from beat to death VHS tapes. There's was tearing at the bottom and occasional rolling!
The Republic serial, "Dick Tracy" looked like it was a CAM but not recorded from a screen but from an old sheet hung in a windy barn!
"Daredevils of the Red Circle" suffered from the same flaws but was,
Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Soa Lee so far, at least watchable. Its pretty cool. The heroes are circus daredevils! The youngest is an escape artist, the middle (Herman Brix) a strong man, and the eldest an Olympic High Diver and Rhodes Scholar, or something similar.
Its been decent so far but its still hard to understand how Brix can stop crooks from fleeing by lifting up the rear end of their car but is lousy in the fights!
I also watched "The Yakuza". An old movie I first became aware of when I was a kid. The whole town was talking it up. Paul Schrader had managed to get the studios into a major bidding contest. Martin Scorsese was begging to make the movie. Sadly Sidney Pollack, he of "Tootsie" fame got the deal. If you'd ask me who would be the least competent director to make a big budget yakuza flic Pollack would have been near the top of the list.
It was cool that they had the brains to get a still fit and exceptional Ken Takura to play the lead. Even cooler they got sleepy eyed Robert Mitchum to play the American in Japan.
It was interesting to see how Pollack destroyed a great story. Takura and Mitchum wiping out a yakuza gang should have been classic but it was just boring. The only other time I saw it was when it first came out. I thought it was boring then. Sad that my kid instincts were justified by the crusty old man reality of today.
I can't help but thinking about how cool it could have been.
Dog baths today. The world quakes.

Posted by David at 10:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Click images for desktop size: "Gunfighter" by Gerald Brom The dogs were crazy yesterday. I like them crazy when they're crazy happy.
Last night my puppy was sitting in front of me and I was overwhelmed with a feeling of contentment and love.
I'm reminded everyday that I'm still capable of that sort of depth of feeling. It was just slightly surprising to feel it for my puppy.
I like what she is and what she's become.
In all of the hullaballoo of illness and all I think I forgot to report that the dogs and I are heroes. On the day the gentle dog went to work with my friend Giant dog and my puppy were walking around the park (to avoid the flooding) and a little white dog, sort of a Maltese Yorkie mix kind of thing came up and tried to play with my dogs.
It was having a world of fun bounding at them and wiggling its butt at
Click images for desktop size: "Japanese Poems" by Eisen them. I took the leash off of my puppy and, after three attempts, managed to snag the little girl. She had a tag on her and she was lucky I knew the address or at least where to look for the address.
I was worried about walking with my puppy without a leash. She seemed to understand and walked in a perfect heel the entire way.
We found the apartment building and a passing woman recognized the dog. She gave us the apartment number as she hustled away.
We knocked. The little white dog was getting agitated. A woman in her late 70's or early 80's answered. She was scared. I forgot that tall men in shades and leather might not be the most comforting thing to see at your door. She was in a walker. I noticed, in retrospect that she had the walker jammed in such a way that I couldn't have pressed in to her home too easily.
When she saw the little white dog she let out a screech. The little dog, clearly with lots of practice
Click images for desktop size: "Girl and Parrot" by Unknown scaled the walker and into her arms. She started to tremble and cry. I was worried she'd have a stroke or something. Between sobs she told me that the little dog had been lost for almost 3 days. He grand daughter took her for a walk on Sunday and she escaped (the dog, not the grand daughter . . . I think). She'd been calling the shelter. I saw a stack of about a hundred fliers with the little dogs picture xeroxed in it. She was going to put them up today. She complained about how her son-in-law wouldn't come help her.
She offered us a reward. I declined. I'm stupid that way. My puppy and the giant dog both pointed out that they were the real heroes and extorted a couple of milk bones from the old lady.
We walked home happy.
This reminds me of how many things go in the day that I forget, that I don't record and that I'll have no place left to find those memories again.
My friend is still sick. Now she's added vomiting during the night to her cough and general achiness. Without much hassle I convinced her to go to the doctor. He wasn't much help. Gave her prescription for an antibiotic, more as a preventive against a lung infection and some sort of inhaler.
Its no miracle cure but I feel better that something might be getting done to heal her. Her spirits are better.
I wonder how much of this is due to stress and conflict with her new temporary boss. Her old boss, who retired, was a nationally recognized figure in Conservation and Wild Life preservation. The two of them got along very very well.
The new boss is a national VP who has taken on some extra duties and seems committed to rising
Click images for desktop size: "Alice 19th" by Abstract Anime up the corporate ladder (at least whatever ladder there is in a not for profit). Her background is banking.
My friend reports her saying a number of "slogans" that I attribute to MBA's who are out of their depth. The new boss also has few social skills. I've dealt with so many people with poor social skills a lot of her responses are almost text book.
It frustrates me as all I can do is be supportive and try to give some insight. The insight is to never openly defy such a person, no matter how stupid their demands are. They can't handle that. Most people can't cope well with open defiance but for this type its enough to send them into a paroxysm. Stick to your guns (which I don't even need to vocalize to my friend - she's like that) and so long as the MBA isn't threatened and can see your correctness in such a way that she can take credit you'll eventually win. Its a painful process.
It slowly seems to be working. I just hope my friend can survive it.
I've been all twisted up with sickness too. More of a general malaise then anything. I'm pretty certain its not "empathy" sickness. I'm not that sort of empathetic person.
That reminds me of this kid who came to play for my team. He lived about two hours away by train! He never missed a practice. He just wanted to be a great athlete. He wasn't very good but he had heart and sometimes that's enough.
As a coach your main job is to see the potential. If you can't see it its the coaches fault, not the kids. This kid wanted to be a linebacker. He didn't have the size, speed or strength to play linebacker. I tried him at strong safety, which was a better fit. We were working on his speed and footwork as well as training him in reading formations.
During practice he was off with some kids while I was working a passing tree with the RB's, slot backs, and tight ends. Suddenly I heard a horrible screech. The kid was on his knees crying, holding his left arm. I've got my Red Cross first aid certificate and a St Johns certificate and one of my coaches day job was as a paramedic so I felt confident enough to cut his pads from him. He had the worst dislocated shoulder I have ever seen!
I'm serious when I say that a dislocated shoulder is the worst pain I've ever felt. But when you pop it back in its almost like nothing that bad had ever happened. I've been seeing black from dislocated shoulders and did crazy stuff like wedging my arms between fence posts to pop it back in the socket. It hurts bad.
This kids shoulder was, no exaggeration, sticking about 5 inches above his clavicle. I'm so
Click images for desktop size: "Japanese Print" by Unknown empathetic to the pain of others that I thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen. Jocks have the tendency of being fascinated with the injuries of others. There was no way we were going to attempt to pop this in on our own. It took three kids to carry him to the car. Two making a cradle and one just supporting his arm.
I took him to hospital and the doctors were also horrified. They had a machine they'd never had to use that winched his arm out so they could line it up and pop it into the socket. They were excited about getting to use this piece of shiny gear . . .and my empathy reached so far as to remember to not grin or laugh about the severity of the energy. Of course I was worried and concerned but underneath those layers was the, "Have you ever seen anything so cool!" I'd have ignored it if the two doctors weren't so excited about getting to use that new piece of gear.
So I don't think that my unwellness has anything to do with empathy with my friends illness. No history to justify that.
I'm just feeling beaten up. Not that big a deal. My teeth are killing me. I can barely wait for the dentist on Tuesday. The pain has gotten to the point where the right side of my face is numb. That always brings up scary memories of the bout with Bells Palsy.
I can still laugh.

Posted by David at 11:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Oasis" by Michael Parkes The gentle dog went to work with my friend. My puppy, surprisingly misses him. I figure they had some adventure penciled into their schedule.
It always feels odd, now, having only two dogs. I know I liked it best when I had four. Having only two is like looking at the dregs in the bottle.
I'm going to put the giant dog on the corner. With his new haircut
Click images for desktop size: "The Beatles" and all I'll turn him into a "working dog". Get him to approach cars and people, 10 minutes of pets for a nickel. My puppy will be his "business manager". If we can avoid the vice cops we should make a few dollars.
It works out well though. The two remaining enjoy the extra attention, the extra room. Its easier to walk two dogs than three but three requires almost no effort. Getting pulled down on ice requires no effort at all, at least from me. I can fall down with almost no assistance at all.
Bad pain day. This is still a house filled with love and germs.
My friend coughed badly all night. She was feeling better but relapsed. I'm in what should be the final bad day of the germ. Tomorrow I should be recovering and I should be fine by Thursday night.
Last night I fell asleep watching a movie. It was an interesting one too.
This Hong Kong based company has set itself a lofty goal; they're releasing every Shaw Brothers film ever made on DVD. Remastering them, cleaning up the soundtracks and trying to present them
Click images for desktop size: "Unknown" as classics. Guys like me appreciate that. (Quentin Tarentino does to. I have to admit it irks me that he's cadged the Shaw Brothers opening logo to open his movies. It seems some how disrespectful . . . if its possible to disrespect a movie studio, a money making operation).
Shaw Brothers always had the rep for making the best, slickest looking movies in Asia. Decent film stock, wonderfully detailed sets and a host of the best directors and a stable of Asian Superstars. They reworked the old Hollywood studio system, keeping their top talent working almost non-stop.
After Shaw Brothers broke the king fu movie at Cannes in the 70's they became an international force. Golden Harvest, who vacillated between making some of the best and the worst movies going - but they had Bruce Lee - benefited greatly from the superior product coming from their rivals.
What's cool is that Celestial has finally gotten into the movies that Shaw Brothers was making before they broke the genre world wide. This is the first time that these films have been able to be seen outside of China or your local China Town movie theater.
(I've always liked the theaters in China town and Little Tokyo. The Japanese theaters were always SOA but the Chinese theaters were always grim affairs with projection bulbs that were somehow always old and close to death. Its like the mystery of how some guys always managed to have 3 days growth of beard, never four and never clean shaven. Chinese Movie Houses (at least in LA) always had a dim bulb that would finally burn out in 10 hours. And of course the snacks for sale in the lobby were . . . interesting. Dried fish, strange crackers and popcorn you'd have to be fool hardy or at least braver than me to try.)
The new/old movies Celestial is bringing out are at least interesting and sometimes exquisite. The level of kung fu in the movies is far below what we've come to expect. For some reason every genre of Shaw Brothers films seems to require at least two kung fu battles. I'm not complaining.
So far I've been able to see "The Impostor" a sort of whacky story about David Chiang being this heavy duty altruist who is also a master of disguise. He's bored, rich and nosey, so he solves crimes . . . Its very amenable.
"The Delightful Forest" (The movie I fell asleep during last night) is a part of "The Water Margin" (The classic ultimate Chinese novel about freedom and brotherhood). Its got Lung Ti, an actor who's
Click images for desktop size: "St Catherine" by Carlo Dolci career has easily spanned five decades! Lung Ti is this incredibly moral guy who also happens to be a devastating fighter. He' thrown in prison, a prison he could easily escape but choses not to as that would be wrong. The Delightful Forest of the title is a town of gambling casinos and brothels . . . what I saw was entertaining.
I've got about four more to see and more promised. These movies all hold enough potential that I keep thinking that there's going to be a mind blasting movie coming up any second. Maybe not but the search and expectations are a lot of fun.
Of the four I have seen none of them were disastrous or boring and that's saying something.
I might have gotten he dishwasher fixed. I tried not to tear it apart but to just fix most of it in place. The water here must be pretty hard. Mainly I had to pick out chunks of lime and calcium! It was hampering the spray of water.
Did a full load last night. I'm afraid to look at the dishes. If they're not clean it means I have to take the whole thing apart again. I usually enjoy that sort of thing. For some reason the dishwasher falls outside my list of things I like to take apart.
I only have six episodes of "King of the Rangers". I really hope I can get the last six. Its very enjoyable on its own level. I admit that part of the enjoyment is watching "Slingin'" Sammy Baugh attempt to act. They give him few lines, fortunately. He recites them like a six year old trying to remember a piece for his first assembly.
The only draw back is that Duncan Renaldo is so great its a shame that he keeps being limited to being the side kick, the guy who screws up and gets slugged so the bad guys can escape. Its still a potent good time serial.
I've set a deadline of this weekend to finish up a new little movie for my puppy's blog. The kids are starting to write and bug HER to get something new posted. I wish I had simpler ideas . . .

Posted by David at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Pin Up Art" by JW McGinnis Just like in books movies have scenes, moments mainly, that stay fresh and alive in our minds forever. Since the genius of the scenes in books are always open to our personal interpretation, (I always imagine the hero as looking like me . . . sort of thing) and the moments in movies are plastic concrete, universal and indisputable, I prefer movies.
No surprise there.
The dogs woke me at 1:30 this morning. I still have no idea why, although I expect it has something to do with two new dogs who moved into the area, even though they're about 200 yards away at the closest point to our yard, our dogs take great umbrage to their presence.
I woke up in pain. After letting the dogs out I took some ibuprofen and meditated about some of the great moments in movies. It helped get me to sleep in a nice way.
Somehow think about movies almost always starts with John Wayne. I don't know why, it just does. I guess I'm still surprised that he was a lineman at USC.
Wayne had a few great moments; indelible scenes that stay with you forever. Whenever things get hopeless I always have a flash of Wayne as Ringo in "Stagecoach", falling forward into the dust as he takes on three bad guys with only a winchester and 3 bullets. And that moment in "True Grit" when Wayne confronts Robert Duvall and Duvall's gang in the natural arena. After Duvall points out the obvious truth that Wayne is old, fat, one eyed and tired Wayne shouts, "Fill your hands you sonsabitches!" Put his horse's reins in his mouth and rides at the gang firing wildly.
A lot of movies have moments like that, moments that help us survive what our own imaginations
Click images for desktop size: "Kitchen" by Unknown might not let us survive. That's one of the reasons for art.
I wasn't thinking about those moments I was thinking about the moments that codify a movie so well that it burns and illuminates not only our lives but the lives of others, enabling to let us see things we perhaps never even sensed.
Like for me the greatest moment for Wayne came in "The Searchers". Its a movie loaded with great moments, like the crazy teenaged girls who've escaped the Apaches, or the moment when Wayne scoops up Natalie Wood as though she were no more significant than a doll, a wisp an image. But moment that fits my definition is when Wayne returns Natalie Woods to her family. He stands in the doorway a hero, but a hero ignored, Jeff Chandler pushes past him and we know that because of Wayne's efforts all will be better for the world, the people in that house whose life he has touched and improved will leave a version of happily ever after. But Wayne just stands in the doorway, gripping his own right arm with his left hand, while the Sons of the Pioneers acting like some bumpkin Greek chorus exhort him to ride away, ride way.
The house looks so dark, cool and inviting. We know it is filled with celebration and happiness, while the world beyond the doorway is bright, harsh and unrelenting. (The technology required to get that shot are remarkable considering 1957 film stock and lenses.) And Wayne turns away and does that John Wayne walk to his horse while invisible hands slam the door shut, locking him forever outside.
What makes this great is that in 45 seconds without being lectured or told we understand so many things; the nature of heroes, the way some men are meant to only be alone, how single decisions can unhinge and change the trajectory of a life, decisions fueled not with logic but with emotion.

Click images for desktop size: "The Monkees" I'm glad they never made a sequel to "The Searchers". It would have destroyed that perfect moment.
Who doesn't remember Steve McQueen in "The Great Escape"? When he's sitting on his motorcycle looking at the miles long barbed wired fence that is the only impediment to his freedom. The German army closing in on him, surrounding him. And that moment when he revs the bike up, spins it around and makes that unforgettable leap. A fails.
What propels the scene from cool to the frisson I'm talking about is that while McQueen lies tangled in the wire that this is not a failure, its just a set back. He'll escape and if needed he'll escape again. Freedom is our nature and it doesn't take greatness or even great determination for all of us to be seeking freedom until we finally succeed.
There is a difference between totally cool and the frisson that impacts and makes fact of the swirl of thoughts and emotions that circulate around us everyday. Clint Eastwood's "The Unforgiven" offers up the best example of this. Everyone remembers the final scene in the bar where Eastwood blows everything apart and there's that great confrontation between Eastwood and Gene Hackman where Eastwood hisses out the line, "I've killed women and children, just about everything that's lived or crawled and now I'm going to kill you."
That scene is just cool entertainment but the scene proceeding, the
Click images for desktop size: "New Ponies" by Unknown bit that sets all this up is the powerful one that cuts to the quick of our humanity.
The whole film has shown Eastwood to be extremely strong, strong enough to change his life for a woman he loves and after she passes away his strength carries him through to continue for the sake of his two children. The biggest change has been for him to avoid liquor at all costs. Eastwood listens to the girl who brings them their money. He listens to the atrocities Little Bill has perpetuated against Eastwood's only friend.
Against a silver streaked black and gray sky he listens and in his shock and pain he gets week. He takes a bottle of whiskey and in between his horrified questions he pours the whiskey down his throat. The camera takes a low angle as if to frame him heroically against dramatic sky. Eastwood's aged face and cracking voice destroy any illusion of heroism, it simply denies us the ease of assuming he's transforming into a mere beast.
And its in that moment that so much is revealed about ourselves. The little kid cheerleader who sees the whiskey as Eastwood's spinach. We know as he drinks he's turing into an indomitable killer.
Click images for desktop size: "Life Is A Stage" by WallColl Then there's the profound sadness. We see a man so overcome with grief at losing his friend that he destroys himself the only way he knows will work. Eastwood gives up the sobriety and humanity he has struggled to maintain for nearly a many years as he was a mad outlaw. He gives up what he has fought to become out of rage, loneliness and a love for another that is greater than the love he has for himself.
"A Man Who Was Superman" is a movie I hold in high regard. I seem to be pretty much alone in this. Its okay. I can always wait for the rest of the world to catch up.
"A Man Who Was Superman" has a lot of those cool moments. But it also has an explosive scene that plays so simply and elegantly that it speaks not only of talent but fortuitous happenstance.
The movie is about this guy who is stark raving bonkers. He dresses in bright Hawaiian shirts and chinos. This is his "Superman" outfit. Most of the time he is deliriously happy. He spends his days helping people, saving kids, catching purse snatchers, doing what he can to save the planet. He always smiles, remembers people and adores his life.
He has bad moments. He can't always fly because Lex Luthor has exposed him to kryptonite. And he has psychotic breaks. He lives in a condemned building. One morning the wreckers show up. He sees the bulldozers as carnivorous monsters. He fights them.
This fight lands him back in the mental hospital. They treat him. He's heals. The medicate him to at least hold his level of healing. Everyone is certain they are doing the best for him.
"Superman" becomes Mon Suk. Mon Suk shuffles through life. Not happy. Not sad, He simply is. He remembers the trauma that drove him to madness but it is a distant memory that he cannot touch. The drugs see to that.
In his madness Mon Suk was tracking down a beast that lived in the sewers. It turns out the beast was actually a patch of explosive methane gas. It blows.
Mon Suk is a witness to the explosion. Many people are hurt, house and cars catch a fire. The fire engines rushing to the scene get caught up in the explosion. There is no more help coming.
For every person injured there are ten spectators who watch.
Mon Suk watches too and sees that a little five year old girl who was "Superman's" friend is trapped in the fire, trapped on the third floor. And the drugs that keep him calm, that keep him in twilight
Click images for desktop size: "Monkey" by WallColl allow him to simply watch.
Helpless he turns and walks away, doing that drug induced shuffle, holding his briefcase to his chest. He walks away.
A friend goes to look for him and she finds Mon Suk at a garden hose. He's dousing his head and his clothes. At first she thinks he's gone mad again but then she realizes that he's planning to go into the fire and rescue the girl. I guess you can't kill Superman.
In that moment you realize that sanity does not always mean happiness and that sometimes it takes insanity to save the world. It rushes at you and forces you to identify with Mon Suk. It makes you realize we can all be something more than the rest of the world thinks we can be. Its beautiful and its frightening.

Meditating on movies always brings something out of me. Something I feel is good. Even bad movies can sometimes have that fleeting movement where happenstance has more art than the guys behind or in front of the camera. Moments that encapsulate life and meaning.
I love the movies.

Its been raining for 18 hours now. Hard rain. All the snow has melted and the ground feels like primordial ooze. The dogs all had groomer baths . . . gentle dog and giant dog also got haircuts. My puppy got her nails trimmed. They seem to enjoy ruining the clean look playing in the muck. They make me laugh and it will all wash off eventually.
I'm pretty much over the cold. One odd side effect. I seem to have expended so much energy fighting the cold that I'm irretrievably fatigued. It takes a huge amount of energy just to move.
It's nowhere near the fatigue from leukemia. I just don't like it. I don't like the feeling of wanting to just curl up in a ball and forget the world. The rain and mud makes me not want to take a walk with the dogs. I may have to anyway. Cold rain and mud are better than this feeling.
My friend's cold is still lingering! This worries me more than I'm worried about myself.
She basically had two days off. She had to drive an hour to a meeting (GO GO LITTLE NEW CAR!) and then we had a lot of errands to run but I would have hoped that it would have been a gentle enough time for her to recover more fully.
We picked up our new glasses. Just lenses, used old frames. They help me a lot. Even through the cataract. I have to wear them a couple of weeks to see if my eyes are stable enough to invest in the tinted bifocals I'm supposed to wear outside.

Posted by David at 11:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Eclipse of Saturn" by Unknown We were going to get the dogs groomed this weekend but changed plans; we've decided to groom ourselves.
I've re-evaluated my stand on the five dollar haircut. I've decided to go as high as SEVEN DOLLARS! You can't put a price on good grooming. Well, I guess you can and that price is seven bucks.
Women's haircuts cost more. I reckon its because they have so much more hair. But I realize its probably not sold by weight or volume. They must charge more because women are notoriously fussy about their looks. I figure my friend's haircut will probably go ten maybe even twelve dollars.
I just hope there's no riot of hair dressers clamouring for our custom when they find out the excessive amount we're willing to spend.
We both went to the eye doctor yesterday. It could have been worse.
The doctor was pretty good. Just looking at the photo's and without reading any medical history could see the effects of chemo and diabetes.
My vision has not degraded as much in the past year as I feared. There's some degradation but not as much as my ailments would normally cause, so I'm doing okay on that score.
There were two hemorrhaged blood vessels in the right eye and four in the left. None of them were major veins or killing hemorrhages.
The cataract in my right eye, the one from a football trauma, is still just there. No real problem. The cataract in my left eye, the one caused and common to chemo is growing. Its gotten so bad that
Click images for desktop size: "El Capitan" by Matt Mosher the photo of my eye was close to worthless. It blurred the image as badly going in as it did coming out.
I had to get my eyes dilated anyway but now I had to use something "extra" so the doc could get a clear view in my eye for a closer inspection.
Right now the cataract is growing but not yet to the point of surgery. The doc said that these sort of cataracts can change rapidly. I have to keep "an eye" on it . . . Doctors have dog like senses of humour.
She said that I might not ever need the cataract surgery. The implication being that I might not live long enough to need it. The doc got a touch nervous while she tried to rephrase the statement. Explained she's not an oncologist and asked permission to send the info to my regular doctor.
I appreciate sensitivity, especially when its directed towards me . . . or anyone really.
The only real negative of the whole experience was that my friend had her eye exam first. This gave me the chance to try on every frame they had in the little adjunct optometrist shop.
In those mirrors I was startled at how bad I looked. Homeless, scruffy. I looked haggard, tired but still
Click images: "Fashion And Politics" by S4W remarkably sexy. It was the main reason I decided to raise my offer for a haircut.
The mirror used to be my best friend.

My friends new car is working out well. She looks cute in it. She looks cute anyway but the new car enhances it better than cosmetic surgery, I think.
Two problems with it. When we got it home from the car lot there was smoke billowing from the left rear wheel! It smelled like terrible. I assumed it was a brake pad burning up, or worse, a wheel bearing. Its hasn't happened since but there's now a bad squeaking coming from the same axle.
The second issue is that the car was advertised as having cruise control. According to the manual cruise control is standard equipment. But there's no cruise control.
I called the car lot. We've got 7 months of warranty. Once again they startled me in a positive way.
I was all armed with my meg adult voice. The one constantly tinged with a hint of disapproval and just three tics left of anger. I meet nothing but pleasantness. They said we could bring it in and they'd even give us a loaner!!

Click images for desktop size: "Emily Dolphin" by Unknown Since my friends assistant has a 3 month old brand new Hundayi that had a strange freezing issue and they didn't offer a loaner, this was a big surprise. To take it even further they said we could take it to our own mechanic and if it were a smaller repair he could do it and they'd pay for it!
We took it to our mechanic to pick up the cash from junking the old car. That was sad. My friend had the car from the day it was born and had had i for ten years. He went and looked at the new car, tested it and said it was safe enough for now but to pay attention. (Boy, we sure have a lot of stuff to pay attention to.)

The dogs are fine. They don't even seem upset about not getting baths this weekend . . . They also approve of the new car. More room for lying down they say. Only my puppy is unsure, but she always hates anything new.
My friend had to go the "The Big City" about 100 miles away for a retirement dinner/business meeting. (The car did fine, even coped well with her getting lost and driving the wrong way down a one way street) While I was outside opening the gate for her the dogs started a terrible racket, with my puppy putting up a terrible heart wrenching howl.
When I went in (I was invited to the free food fest!) she clung close to me while the other two ran outside to inspect the gate, certain my friend would realize that my friend had forgotten to take a dog with her. My puppy wouldn't go out with them.
I fell asleep sitting up on the sofa and woke up twenty minutes later with my puppy pressed hard against me, her head resting on my stomach while the giant dog was on the other side with his head on my shoulder. There was no more room on the sofa so gentle dog was wrapped around my feet.
I have no idea why they decided I might abandon them.

Posted by David at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Vampi" by Frank Frazetta I need a haircut.
A good five buck haircut. I know they exist.

When I was a little kid my mother and I would go visit people. Invariably, when it got late, we'd stay the night. This meant I had to sleep on the floor. I liked it. It felt like being someplace special. I never got to sleep on the floor at home so this was an adventure.
The best times were when my uncle would stumble out in the middle of the night and trip over me. My aunt would yell at him and my cousins would all come out to watch the trouble. I craved excitement then the way only a five year old who dreamed of talking helicopters would.
I no longer like sleeping on the floor. Its still exciting. If you find
Click image: "The End of Romance" by Unknown dogs leaning over you at odd hours of the early morning exciting, anyway.
They like to snuffle me and check on what I'm doing and maybe see if I'm interested in a quick game of catch. Now that my friend is back home they don't insist on sleeping with me, they sort themselves out as usual, but they feel a canine duty to rotate checking up on me. Except my puppy. She comes, looks and then goes to pick out the prime sleeping spot.
My backs getting better, sleeping on the floor does help. My friend, in a simpatico move, tried to sleep on the floor with me one night.
That didn't work out. Especially when I discovered this meant I got about 20% of my pallet and NO covers! It was sweet but I prefer suffering and twisting around in private.
Today the pain is less but more enduring. I figure it was always feeling this way but I didn't notice due to the constant spikes of pain.
I've added two aspirins to my regular meds to, hopefully bring the inflammation down. I don't know if its helping.
The moist heat pad is doing something, I mean more than burning me. It loosens things up enough
Click images for desktop size: "Eternal Love" by Anonymous to do my exercises. (Mainly squats, lunges, undulating pushups, and crunches.)
I also tried the glucosamine sulfate. I figured it had worked so well on the dogs that it would help, maybe at least reduce the pain in my hands. It seem I should have done more research. In my case that means looking past page 1 on the google searches. You know, after all the adverts.
Seems that people with osteoporosis or people who've gone through chemo-therapy and diabetics should consult with a physician before taking . . .
The only negative side effect I seem to have had was a loosening of my teeth. That doesn't seem to be a normal side effect but was seen in less than 2% of those studied. Sometimes I take being unique too far.
Today will be spent doing laundry, doing my exercises and taking the dogs for a walk. Won't accomplish much more than that.
Yesterday we took the dogs for a walk. Its coming close to 60! Which mean everything is wet and ugly. There are also great patches of ice in the shade and on packed snow driveways and the like.
There never were any ice storms. I figure ice rain is one of those jokes the locals like to pull on tourists and new comers.
The dogs didn't knock me down at all! My friend was with me. They were behaving so well so that she'll be a witness for them at the trial after they murder me. "I'm sure the dogs weren't responsible. They're so well behaved. Look, they heel so beautifully and never ever pull on the leash!"
Its a sad day when dogs become as devious as cats.
My friend went to work today. Her assistant came and picked her up. I think that was very nice. Her assistant bought her puppy along. He'd just been fixed and had his dew claws removed. Being a puppy he was still cranked and excited. I liked him immensely. When she goes to Aruba we may get to take care of him. I only hope my dogs don't infect him with their murderous intents towards me.

Spam has become a problem again. Blocking the IP's seems to be the only quick solution. The email spam just bugs me. My puppy's email address seems to be the focus of dating sites! I get all the viagra ads and fake watch spam.

Click images for desktop size: "Tracks" by Sarrongbom The comment spam is effectively blocks by Movable Type.
The junk that comes here is just silly. The stuff that comes to my puppy's site is discouraging and horrifying. Bestiality and one Child Porn spam. The Child Porn one I forwarded to all the cops I could think of. (I used to be a Pete Townshend fan until he got busted with a computer full of child porn. This was about the same time Gary Glitter and Jonathan King were in court for the same thing. Glitter and King went to prison. Townshend's story was that he was doing research on a book . . . never heard another thing about Townshend. Glitter and King; you got to sell more albums, I guess. I don't listen to Townshend anymore.)
One thing I'm considering is a robot.txt file to stop some of the bots that crawl the site. It would stop google , yahoo and the legitimate ones easily enough. It would have to be pretty strict to stop the spam bots, and then would have minimal effect and none at all on the more aggressive ones.
I don't have advertising so search engine visitors are pretty meaningless to me. Most of them I don't know. They just come to "harvest" the graphics. I don't care about that. I'm glad that people appreciate them. I hope as much as I do.
But google still sometimes lets old friends find the site. And like, there was the David Drake book I was agonizing over because I couldn't remember the title. Some nice fellow left a comment telling me the title was most likely "Killer" and he left a link so I could read more about the book. I liked that.
More problematic is my puppies site. I really get sick at the idea of some kid clicking on a link for one of those porn sites. Movable Type has not ever let one through. Small comfort.
90% of the kids who visit her site come from hospitals and about 20% of that from grammar
Click images for desktop size: "Spider" by WallpaperMania schools. But a number of kids still come to the site by doing a search. Popular searches are "Shelby and Blue", "silly dog Shelby", "the great black dog", even, "Shelby and Ben" and my latest favorite, "Shelby the dog who is smarter than David".
Even if they are only 10% or less of the traffic I fret that these kids may be the most in need of looking at pictures of silly dogs.
I guess my internet time today will be spent trying to figure out how to write a proper robot.txt file that might accomplish what I need.

That should leave me enough time to worry about the economy and wonder why Obama thinks the Republicans are interested in bipartisanship. He better get hip.
They and most of the democrats just want to stay rich and get richer. They're all going to take care of their buddies a long time before they worry about us.

Posted by David at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Spirit of the Summit" by Charles Leighton I made a dumb mistake Thursday night. My friend got home safely so I was feeling buoyant. I decided to sleep in bed instead of the floor.
A mistake. Woke up Friday and my back was worse that before. Had to take a 90 minute drive with my friend which aggravated it some. No more rental car after that trip so I enjoyed the ride and enjoyed being with my friend, then paid a small price.
I did discover something interesting. For the first time I felt cold. Like some people can only think about one thing at a time it appears I can only ignore one thing at a time. I could keep my back under control enough to not walk like a freak but to do that I had to let my
"In the Wake of the Buffalo Hunters" by Charles Russell body feel the cold. Interesting, at least to me.
Slept on the floor last night. The giant dog was ecstatic that mr friend had returned home so he stayed with her through the night with only four trips off the bed to snuffle my face. I guess he was worried I might do something interesting and he'd miss it.
My puppy stayed close to me. I think she figured I'd do something stupid. She finally settled on a position where she could keep an eye both on the bedroom and on me. Why this was important when all she did was fall asleep probably has some deep dog logic that I'll never be privy to.
The gentle dog was pretty angry that my friend had gone away and not taken him with her. After his
Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Steve Argyle initial enthusiastic greeting her spent the rest of the time pointedly ignoring her. Sometimes he would have to go over and nudge her just so that she would see that she was being ignored. No point in ignoring someone you love unless they know they're being ignored.

I spoke to the car lot and explained the situation. I was as honest as you can be with strangers. I was surprised that they had no problem holding the car for the two weeks! Better yet they were going to start doing all the certification the same as if we had the money in hand.
Amazing amount of trust from them, I think. And no word from the bank at all. Bank silence just added somewhat to my tension over this.
Next week my friends assistant is going to give her rides back and forth from work. I worry that the assistant doesn't know what she's gotten into. If she already knows the time and distance then you have to be even more grateful. At least I do.
I'm not considering what ulterior motives any of this could portend. No reason to think like that.

No football this weekend.
The pro bowl hardly counts.

I've stopped using the "Google Search Box" app. The third alpha is a significant improvement but it still doesn't do all I want. Unlike Quicksilver it still doesn't remember the last app you used. Quicksilver was able to remember the weird abbreviations I used to call up apps and functions, like hb calls Handbrake and ps calls Photoshop.

Click images for desktop size: "Star Ball" by Unknown The "Google Search Box" still requires I type in most of the name, which is time consuming as "photo" calls up a half dozen apps with Photoshop buried in the middle somewhere. The app does learn that "photo" means I want Photoshop but PS only gives me the option to do an on-line search!
Also the "Google" thing doesn't do append and edit calls like Quicksilver. At least not yet. I'm used to editing with Quicksilver so that I could call up an html doc and at the same time open Smultron or Komodo to edit it, while using Quicksilver to append at second document to the first.
Very quick and very easy.
The final thing I dislike about all Google apps is it insistence on installing spyware disguised as Updaters. I'm used to deleting that stuff but its tedious. I'm always nervous when an app insists on a root password to install itself. That's a Windows thing and its stupid. They should give me the option. I resent an application transmitting info without asking me if I want it to. I also see no sense in an app checking hourly to see if it (or its brother apps) can be updated.
All google apps do this. I use as few of them as I can.
I still plan to keep trying out new build of the search box. Its got potential, for sure.
I watched a great old movie. WC Field's "It's A Gift". Its not the best Field's movie by far but it is funny. I laughed out loud a half dozen times. The movie only lasts 65 minutes so it never gets a chance to flag, nor do any of the scenes ever feel rushed.
Its not as awesome as "The Bank Dick" nor as insane as "Never Give a Sucker an Even Break", but it was memorable and leaves you chuckling hours later.

It is supposed to be 40 today with promises of icey rain . . . whoever heard of such a thing? Ice rain? It promises to make this world a very gross, muddy flooded place. All this snow starting to melt and rain and ice . . . I prefer the cold if this is the way they announce spring around here.
So I'm going to the store. Tempting fate, seeing if I can get there and back before the ice torrents fall.
Its what passes for dare deviltry with me now.
I'm taking my puppy. She needs a thrill too.

Posted by David at 9:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Legs" by Unknown Its snowing. The drought is over.
Looking forward to shoveling and scooping and having dogs in my way while I do it.

My friend is going to work at home for the rest of the week. She found out yesterday that she has to go out of town for three days next week. The good part is that the company (a not for profit) will pay for the rental car.
Yesterday I made tuna melts on gluten free rye bread for her lunch, (plain ol' tuna salad for me) and then shrimp taco's with chipolite
Click images for desktop size: "The Waterhole" by Unknownpeppers for dinner. They were too hot but I liked them.
Today I have no idea for meals . . . The extent of my menu's usually runs only to days. My normal lunch is stuff she can't or won't eat; popcorn, cereal, macaroni and cheese . . . Now I'll have to think. Not my strongest suit.
Last night we saw the best American dog movie I've seen in a while: "Hotel for Dogs". There's a lot wrong with it. Mainly the script is pure Sid Fields.
Sid fields was a not very successful screenplay writer who needed money so he wrote a book on how to write a screenplay. I don't remember the exact title. The main part of the book that is still dogging the industry was his breakdown of pages - it's like, 1-2 grabber, 3-4 introduction of characters and plot, 80 low point, 85 resolution etc.

Click images for desktop size: "Lenbach" by Franz Von Hirtenknabe An alarming number of producers in the 80's and 90's kept a copy of that breakdown in their desk or pocket. They'd run through a screenplay and order changes based on Field's breakdown. Their logic was movies A, B and C were the top three grossers that year and they all followed the Field's breakdown slavishly ergo if their movie did the same it would also have a shot.
A lot of people unfairly trash Hollywood movies. Field's breakdown actually gives them some footing for their arguments. When computers eventually begin to write the outlines for movies it will probably be Field's breakdown that forms the infrastructure and then they really will all look the same.
Anyway, "Hotel for Dogs" is a kids movie. A brother and sister are orphans living with Kevin Dillon. They're inept foster parents #10, funny and cruel without meaning to be.
The younger brother is something of a Rube Goldberg genius. They have a dog, "Friday" (as usual I can't remember any of the characters names, just the dogs' names). He creates an elevator so the dog, who they're hiding from the foster parents, can get out of their 3rd floor apartment and back into it on its own volition. Its a crazy cool device using a power drill and a paw activated button. You can tell the props department had a lot of fun building this and the other gadgets.
Through a series of misadventures the kids end up with 6 stray dogs. Fortunately they have also discovered an abandoned hotel. They stash the dogs there. Eventually they have to figure out how to feed and care for the dogs while they are at school. The kid starts to build some incredible devices that automatically feed, bathe, exercise and amuse the dogs. All the devices are doggie activated and they are cooler than the gizmo's Tim Burton dreamt up for "Pee Wee's Big Adventure". Most of the joy of the movie is in seeing these marvelous constructions work. Its tempting to say, "You gotta see the . . . " I won't. If I did there's not much left towards the joy of discovery.
The brother and sister are next joined by the empathetic cute boy, the pudgy girl and the smart alec fat kid who decide to work together and save every stray dog in the city from the villainous dog catchers. (You need a villain but the dog catchers aren't very upsetting, more or less just city employees doing a job they don't much care about, which is chillingly accurate).
The kids end up with about 60 dogs and the devices get even more astounding. Eventually they are discovered. The dogs are all taken to the pound and the bother and sister are sent to different orphanages. (The low point)

Click images for desktop size: "Fashion Sex & Food" by Unknown On the eve of their execution (odd Chidiock Tichbone reference) Friday escaped from the pound. Using that good common sense that only movie dogs are blessed with he reunites the cute boy and the sister, they rescue the younger brother and get pudgy girl and fat smart alec kid together and form a rather credible plan to rescue the dogs! (resolution).
Its pretty amusing stuff actually.
The conclusion of the film could have been, should have been trite. Don Cheadle plays the Social WOrker who saves the day.
If you've seen "Taken" you know that its just a pretty mediocre action/thriller except they have Liam Neeson as the lead. Neeson takes the part seriously and gives the silly tale a weight that most action stars bring through physicality. As in he can't bring the joy or believability of seeing Donnie Yen fly through a glass liquor cabinet but he can make the grim faced father stalking the killers real. While Clint Eastwood made his avengers compelling blankness that tunneled through to faded memories of hard earned happiness Neeson makes his avenging father a deeply etched creature of despair finding solace in duty.
In a similar vein Cheadle brings gravitas to his final resolution. He gives his enunciation a touching genuiness as real as his scenes in "Hotel Rawanda". It works and end the film on a proud note.
The dogs are all pretty wonderful and, for the most part, act like genuine dogs. They're delightful to watch and joyous in their approach to their new lives.
An odd film for me to warmly recommend.

Click images for desktop size: "Morning Enough" by Blurburger After the movie my friend made a comment that she didn't think my puppy much liked her. My puppy's breed characteristics tend towards aloofness mixed with goofiness, a strange reserve. They tend to show love and loyalty to one person and to care fervently for their pack, or their herd or their family.
My puppy loves my friend. She doesn't like many people. She loves kids but even then she has to size them up first.
When she was working as a therapy dog part of her rounds were to go from room to room and see if the occupant could benefit from petting a dog. Some people she simply would ignore. On her own property she dislikes strangers until she decides they are alright. She won't be trifled with.
I watched her viscously get in the face of a handyman on the property because he moved to fast towards me. She didn't bite but she made it clear she would if he got any closer. And this fellow liked dogs!
Unless you have a treat for her. She'll take treats from anyone.
The glucosamine seems to have had a rather rapid effect on the dogs. Gentle dogs limp is hardly apparent. I have to stare at him intently to notice any hint of it. The giant dog is running like a maniac when he's outside, clearly feeling good all over. I'm amazed that this happened so quickly. My hope is that the injury to gentle dog was so minor it didn't take much to correct.
My puppy shows no effect whatsoever . . . she just keeps on being she.
Oh, I've had to clamp down on the images again due to hot linking. Now they'll only appear directly on this site. Somebody linked to a full sized one not even just a thumbnail, on some bulletin board. It used to allow you to put the url to the image in your browser to see it. They used that technique to get around the normal policy. Band width is flying through the roof. I've had to stop that until the bulleting board page moves on.

Posted by David at 9:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Jazz" by Unknown No football this weekend. None.
Why bother with weekends if there's not a feeling of football.
It gives me time to think. Who needs time to think? What I think about is life and guilt.
Every time there's a tragedy there's a pretty human response to feel like some how you've failed. Like you could have done or didn't do the one thing that could have made things different. Somehow different always feels better.
Maybe its not a human thing. Maybe its a catholic thing, this guilt.

Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by HK Pepnx II But like when the little blind dog died I spent weeks thinking what I could have done to give him more time. When the car died I still keep rolling through my mind what I could have done differently, what I should have done. Even when I conclude that we did what we could there's another possibility.
This doesn't detract from addressing issues. It doesn't bog you down. Maybe Catholics are trained to feel and deal with guilt.
We have found a place that sells cars at a reasonable cost. With a couple that look pretty possible. Used cars but . . .
When you remember that my first 3 cars each cost less than fifty bucks . . . I even got one car that ran until I sold it for a game ball used cars costing over 10 grand kind of freak me.
Some of these cars still have warranty time left so we'll check it out.
For various reasons that reminds me of stupid errands I did with my second car (the first car, a green 52 Pontiac with the amber indian head for a hood ornament [yes, older even than me] the one where I shoe polished the leather upholstery - the car still ran great, especially with my specially
Click images for desktop size: "Indians Hunting Buffalo" by Charles Marion designed coat hanger choke, but the smell of the shoe polish got you super sick after about 10 minutes).
I was writing songs so I thought I should check out some poetry. I was driving back from the beach when I saw this book store I'd heard of on the wrong side of the street. I did a you turn and went into Papa Bach's. It was a weird hippie joint. They burned incense which still makes me queasy. They had all these small press books and this line called new directions.
They had this book by William Borroughs. "Naked Lunch". I thought it was "Naked Came a Stranger" which was like this porno book I'd read about in the LA Times. It was supposed to be an "erotic" novel that was written by a different author in each chapter. Being a kid I was most stunned that women had written some of it. I was still convinced that women hated sex and only endured it with a huge amount of cajoling and pleading. The idea of women writing porn was jaw dropping.
I figured in this hippie shop they'd sell porn even to a grossly underaged kid. So I grabbed "Naked Lunch" (thinking it was "Naked Came a Stranger", how many books could there be with naked in the title anyway) grabbed a mess of small press poetry and New Directions books (to conceal my real intention was the purpose) and stood there, a fifteen year old surfer in baggies ready to make my purchase.
I went to school that day and spent the whole day reading "Naked Lunch" in class. I didn't care if it was the wrong book. It had plenty of porn, but all the wrong sort. It was the fact I found it funny, mystifying and well, at that time my world consisted of the beach, football, clubs, school and avoiding my step father.
"Naked Lunch" was about places I never imagined could be, about people I didn't seriously think existed. I thought it was great.
After reading it through twice in a day I loaned it to my friend Tom. He thought it was crazy but liked some of the funny bits. We began having conversations straight from the book, talking in that weird broken metier of drug addicts and William Burroughs. Our favorite joke became, "I am the Great Slashtubitch and I can tell you fake the orgasm by the way you wiggle your big toe!" I have no idea why we thought it was funny except in some sort of Bevis and Butthead way.
Pretty soon we'd infected the entire football team with the book. About 80 high school kids roaming the halls reciting chunks of "Naked Lunch" to each other was not something I figure the Board of Education would have approved of.

Click images for desktop size: "Anime" by Unknown There was an Assistant Principal at school. He was in charge of discipline. That meant he was the guy who gave you detention and called your parents if you were absent or parked your car in the wrong spot or if your muffler was too loud. He carried a hunk of celluloid in his pocket so he could measure your hair to make sure it didn't cover more than 1 and 1/2 inches of your collar . . . Catholic School.
Thing is, he dug the job, the power we guessed.
His name was close enough to one of the "Naked Lunch" characters, the Sollibees, that we all took to calling him Mr Sollibee (The sollibees were creatures who lived underneath tavern bars, they poked their heads out through holes in the bar to "service" customers while they drank. The name fit our attitude towards him perfectly. Soon the whole school was calling him Mr Sollibee. I don't think he ever twigged as to why we were all suddenly mispronouncing his name. None of the other teachers did either. At least we never caught any of them laughing.
Because that book was such a hit I checked out the other things I'd picked up that day. I was amazed. Kenneth Patchen, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso. Beat poets.
None of them helped me write any songs but they led me to believe that poets were the next Superman. I read how Corso used to read his poetry to a simple bongo accompaniment, which still sounds totally cool to me. And Kenneth Patchen explained the movies in his head and made them sound cooler than "The Great Escape" and "A Fistful of Dollars" combined.
I rally thought these were the guys who had powers "far beyond those of mortal men". I doubt if they helped me write better lyrics . . . (look for me babe but I ain't there; could hardly stand improvement . . . ) but I felt these guys understood parts of the world that I sensed were out there but had never seen. I thought that they had the map to something important. Something important to me and to the world and that it was a power they had, power louder than my Fender amp. I liked them, adored them and didn't want to be
Click images for desktop size: "Jeanne D'Arc" by Michael Parkes like them but I wanted to know what they knew even while I thought it was impossible.
Their effect on me was that I lead the conference in yards and touchdowns that season.
For the first time in my life I wanted to go someplace that wasn't in California.

Its been cold here. But we seem to be in the middle of a snow drought. There's enough snow on the ground to keep everything pretty and the constant snow means the dogs and I have got solid paths wending through the yard. Great paths that lead no where but are easy to follow.
The giant dog has suddenly decided he won't go outside without me. I have no idea why. His attitude hasn't changed and when we go out together he gets full on dog play crazy. Bears watching.
A couple of weeks ago the gentle dog went to work with my friend. He got so excited he leapt in the air and landed, slipping on the ice. Lately we've noticed that he starts to limp every time he first gets up from sleeping or just lying around. Its not a bad limp and it vanished pretty quickly. He has no tenderness in his legs and no change in his attitude. Walking him is still like walking a kite. So I worry. Today started to give each of them 500 mg of Glucosamine to lubricate their joints. Reports as events warrant.
Of course my puppy still loves me and I love her.

Posted by David at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Five O'Clock in Orksland" by Mathias Kollros I've been so obsessed with the Great Car Trauma of 2009 and my friends difficult time at work (no problems, just excessive work) that I've lost sight of the other things I've been doing.
I made dog treats.
They finally decided that they love dehydrated sweet potato. My puppy loves dried apple. No surprise there, she love plain apple and will beg fiercely when I'm eating one. The gentle dog and the giant dog are more reserved about the dried apple. They only want it when my puppy is still happily eating hers. That figures. They are dogs as well as being my friends and family.
I like making things for the dogs. Not just out of love but because I am always worried about commercial dog food.
Today the Chinese government announced they had sentenced three
Click images for desktop size: "Dogs" by S4W people to death for the use of melamine in baby formula that led directly to an undisclosed mount of infant deaths.
I just hope that its the right three people. I'm opposed to the death penalty but I guess murdering a few hundred kids justifies it as much as Ted Bundy's death.
I just hope its the right three people and not just 3 schmoes who were following orders from some highly placed party official or some rich businessman. They may have learned that from capitalism, protect the rich who kill for negligent profit.
Because all the American food producers used melamine (a deadly plastic additive that increases the measured protein level of foods when mixed in) to save about 10 cents a bag on their over priced premium food and then suffered no legal penalties for cheating us and killing animals. They made them take the poison food back . . . if it were unopened.

Click images for desktop size: "American Flag" by Unknown Can't feel too badly about that, after all we also cleared Union Carbide for killing nearly 4,000 in India because it Union Carbide was too cheap to install required safety equipment. Poison gas clouds or saving 10,000 bucks. To the corporate guys theirs no value to human lives, but 10,000 bucks that like a good months wage.
Its an old story which is why I'm nervous about prepared foods. I used a small factory to make my puppy's food to spec. Here the pet shop makes their own special blend. I feel slightly more secure.
Making my/their own dog treats makes me feel safer. So, its a selfish thing, because, trust me, the dogs don't much care.
My thumbs have gotten worse. Last night I had to figure out how to open the door with my elbows. Perseverance pays. Took me about 5 minutes. I can't open most jars.
Odd thing is that this morning my right thumb feels much better and the left feels much worse than the right one ever did. This just goes to confirm my self diagnoses of more neuropathic damage. Livable no that I'm certain what it is.
The pain in my thumbs has one benefit. I don't like living on pain killers even if the only ones I'll take are ibuprofen. I usually wait to long to take them only succumbing when the pain gets unendurable. Oddly I can never time it to figure out when to take them to avoid those episodes.
The thumbs start to hurt about half an hour before the big pain comes. So if I take the pills when the thumbs start to ache (and its a very endurable pain) I avoid those blind flashes. It is almost worth it.
The only real problem is in guitar playing. I use my left thumb to mute strings when I play certain chords. This makes that kind of impossible. It just means that I have to execute my right hand with a lot more accuracy. Since I've always been a pretty sloppy player in that sense (Mess and finesse) its energy that exercises new muscles.
My left hand is getting stronger and more precise. I'm pleased by that. I was afraid that the muscles wouldn't respond to exercise and would just atrophy. Its coming along fine. My biggest problems seem to be some of the more extravagant minor chords (which I adore) and some of the crazed 7ths (which I can play around by leaving out a couple of string. Who'd notice?)
I've also been rearranging the living room. Not so much rearranging it as tacking down wires and trying to hide them as well as I can. Its hard hammering.

Click images for desktop size: "Joan of Ark (Orleans)" by Yasushi Nirasawa I do get to move all the furniture and unleash the roomba of dirt war upon it. The roomba still fascinates me. If I'm not careful I end up staring at it while it does its work, which sort of defeats the purpose of a vacuuming robot. I'm glad I'm not the only one who this happens to; a lot people comment on it.
So there's just a light dusty snow this morning. None since I shoveled out the driveway so no forced interaction with jerk neighbors. That's a good thing.
No luck on finding the ideal car. (Affordable) My friend just wants her old car back. Maybe that will be the way to go. She commented on the fact that the rental is causing her some pain in her arms.
The cat has not defecated in the house for a couple of days. This is another good thing.
My friend has decided that the cat is afraid of me. I could only wish. This morning it came and sat on my foot and yelled at me to let her out. Stupid cat.
Haven't seen any decent movies. The Oscar nominations are boring as hell. Even the foreign flics are dull. Danny Boyle getting nominated makes me want to weep. He stinks and "Slum Dog Millionaire" was dull silliness to me.
I always thought Aronofsky's movies were pretentious tripe. "The Wrestler" came off like a low budget less ambitoius "Raging Bull". Mickey Rourke was pretty outstanding. I thought Marisa Tomei was incredible and pretty nice to look at. . .
I did find a copy of a film I haven't seen since it first came out "Truffaut's" La Nuit Americaine". I'm semi-afraid to watch it. This movie, as much as Cocteau and Steve McQueen probably made me go for the grad degree in Cinema. I mean, I remember watching this movie about making a movie and thinking, "This is what I need to do!" instead of taking a career I could make a living at . . . I'm afraid the movie will rightly stink and I'll stare at it and wonder about my own level of sanity then and now. Like running into an old girlfriend on the street it exposes you
Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Luis Royoto more risk of ridicule than pleasure. I'll probably still watch it.
Also it seems we're in one of those fallow periods where there seems to be no new music to interest me. Bruce Springsteen doesn't interest me at all. Which at least gives me the chance to justifylistening to my old stuff.
I like that fine.
ecto, the app I use to layout this site, has sort of stagnated since the developer guy sold it to the big software company. Its still buggy but does what it does well enough to justify hassling with it. I was having a huge problem with it. It was just like taking forever to load. Figured out it was the attachment.plst file. Because there's so many attachments that file had grown for about 8k to 14 megs. The app insisted on writing and reading that file each time it was loaded and each time I added a picture. I just dumped the file. No ill effects after three days and it runs nice and smoothly again.
A bug I don't expect to see fixed.
Most people who use Mac's know about Quicksilver. A nifty little app for launching apps, docs, editing, its kind of remarkable. And its free!
The guy who developed Quicksilver has dumped the project. He's made it open source but thus far no one seems to have taken it up.
He left Quicksilver for a paying gig with Google. I'm glad he's making money. He's developing a Quicksilver replacement for them called "Google Search Box". It works pretty well and its also free. Well, free only in the sense you don't have to pay for it.
The search box is dead ugly. Disappointing after the several elegant interfaces you could pick and chose with Quicksilver. Here you can only chose the color of the box. Not any color you want but select from 4. And you have to look at the stupid google logo.
One of its "benefits" is that it searches not only your hard drive but checks the internet as well, mostly launching the browser and the google search. It also launches the app associated with the document when you pull one of those up.
Its buggy, although the 2nd alpha fixes the most annoying things. Its got a long way to go. I'm trying to ignore Quicksilver and use it. Its hard as Quicksilver require no thought from me. Its an app that learns from you as you work so it is always snappy. Google Search Box isn't there yet at all, but maybe.
And that is all. Time to take my fit dogs for their fit walk.

Posted by David at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Backyard Fashions" by Unknown I've decided that the pain in my thumbs is neuropathic.
The only logic I have for this is that the pain has metamorphosed into some of the past neuropathic pains I've had. It reminds me most of the left shoulder.
The left shoulder started in a similar way, annoying pain that slowly became excruciating and managed to hide its intent.
I remember that I was driving and raised my arm to wave to someone on the sidewalk. I nearly plowed into an over pass buttress because I was suddenly convulsed with black vision pain.
Click image: "9 Dragon Wall at Datong" by Unknown I really don't know how close I came to the buttress. I couldn't see it.
After wards I noticed that if I raised my arm at more than a 90 degree angle from my body the pain was intense and blinding. That was my first discovery of neuropathic pain. Its one of the side effects they don't really explain to some of the chemo-therapies. Weird thing is that the pain is based in the nerve damage but its so pervasive it effects the muscles as well.
I went on a self prescribed physical therapy. Later at a regular doctor's appointment they prescribed the same exercises I was already doing but added a couple of new ones so it didn't feel like a wasted time.
It took about a year for me to get completely rid of the pain, or at least bring it to a low enough level to ignore it.
I think the thumb is worse. For one thing its the first time I've not had the pain on my left side. But even though the pain is localized to a much smaller part of my body it was relatively easy to sort of remember not to suddenly raise my left arm over my shoulder. Its hard to remember not to use my right hand to open doors, answer phones and stuff.

Click images for desktop size: "Horror" by Poze Horor I'm going to try and figure out a series of exercises to bring the pain down.
Oddly, except for occasional stabs of pain, the guitar playing is going well . . . I keep working on new songs. Have even taken some tunes and put new words to them. I like that, even if the only "audience" reaction has been, "I've never heard that one before" and "That's not how it goes, is it?" At least they're listening.
Its been very cold here these past few days. It semi-worries me that I can ignore cold so well. The dogs and I went out for an hour or so yesterday. No ill effects at all.
The only worry about this is that I might ignore something that's doing me damage. I've done it in the past. Just another thing to be careful about.
In the intense cold I'm a little bit concerned that I haven't seen the skanky cat for three days. With the light snow it would have been easy to see its footprints. I hope its okay and hasn't frozen to death or something.
I really hope I never see skanky cat again but I don't want it dead or hurt someplace. I want it to be with someone who thinks its beautiful and not skanky at all, who feeds and strokes it and keeps it warm and save.
Maybe I'll see it run across the street or something and it will be all sleek and fat and will probably ignore me. Cats are like that.
My puppy's aunt has suggested that the stupid cat is defecating in the house because its ill.
I don't think so. It's stool is very healthy. I've certainly had to examine enough of it.
We have to keep the cats food and litter box behind a gate to keep the dogs from rooting around. Now all three dogs really hate the stupid cat. Which is odd because the other cat, who died, they never had a problem with at all, not even when it would come and stand on my shoulder to steal some popcorn. They'd even let the other cat sleep against them with no real
Click images for desktop size: "Sex And Fashion" by S4W reaction. Nor did they freak out when the other cat would butt in and start eating their food. But they hate the stupid cat.
I've watched enough to see that it provokes them quite a bit, sometimes harmlessly but sometimes pretty maliciously. Which is another justification for calling it the stupid cat.
The giant dog in particular takes offense to the stupid cat. When he sees it he'll follow it. He also likes to lie in front of the gate that protects its food and litter box. I'd suspect that the stupid cat doesn't see the need for using the litter box and just goes where its convenient for it. I've watched it swat the giant dog and leap over it to get to its food. I'd figure it doesn't see any sense to use that sort of effort to use the toilet.
The latest version of Handbrake, the app I use to back-up DVD's, has a new pre-set for AppleTV. Its based on CRF (Constant Quality) instead of being based on bit rate. It works extremely well, producing better looking files at up to 60% the size! The only drawback to it is that it takes about 30% longer to do so.
Like a two pass H264 encode at 2500 average bit rate with 5.1 sound and ACC stereo would come in at about 2.5 gigs and take about 3 and a half hours to encode.
With the new preset the same movie comes in at about 1.5 gig but took about 6 hours to encode. The smaller file looked BETTER than the larger file. Highly impressive.
I don't have a video iPod but I'd suspect similar results.
Oh, last night there was a huge crash boom bam. Startled me and got the dogs excited. Seems the neighbor backed his trailer into his house! My friend thought that was pretty funny. Since there was not any real damage, thinking about it, she's right; it was.
For the first time he didn't block us out of our house! Probably serendipity and not courtesy. Still, for whatever reason it made me feel better.
In LA there were always some weird guys who kept three revolving cars: The one they drove, the one they were working on and the one they were trying to sell . . . I have no idea why this guy has 5 vehicles for himself. If he were a regular guy I'd ask. It might be educational. Since they have a total value of about $1,400 bucks maybe its 401k hedge . . .
Which is unfair and nasty to think but the rest of today will be spent figuring out the best approach to bureaucrats who have more in common with stupid cats than they do with human beings and coping with my cold. I woke up with the cold at its worst stages. I've got Vitamin C and throat lozenges. So I'm entitled.

Posted by David at 11:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Conference At Night" by Edward Hopper Its cold today. Minus 14! In Centigrade that's a scary sounding -26!
Its not that bad.
I was in in minus 17 once. In Chicago. Back there for my grandmothers funeral years ago. Cold might be lucky for me.
We had a rental car. Some kind of Ford. I was zipping along some side street avoiding traffic on the Dan Ryan. I was wondering why nobody else was using the street. I was zipping along at a nice 50! When suddenly there was no more road. There were no signs or anything just suddenly no street, just air.
I don't know how far I flew but I landed in the middle of an empty construction site. The car kept running so
Click image: "DC Comics" I managed to find an exit. In the rear view mirror I saw that there was about a six foot drop. There should at least been a "DIP" sign, I thought.
Astonishingly the car had no damage, not even a shimmy. I turned the car back to the agency and said nothing. I decided American made cars were alright for some things.
But the bigger bit of unbelievable luck was that we decided to change our flight plans and stay a few more days.
The flight we originally had reservations on was the one the American Airlines plane that crashed at the end of the runway, killing all aboard. It was strange. I never was that close to a tragedy that large.
It hit in a different way. Prior to that the big tragedies were always distant. Like my friend Jake who went to a party and sat with his girlfriend on his lap, took out a gun and shot himself in the head. No one knew why. I wasn't there. It was only a story like on TV.
Or when my friend Terry and I were out at Manhattan Beach Pier. It was 12 foot and started to look makable. He jumped off the pier with his board (a way of avoiding the nasty swim through the breakers and foamy white water) and I never saw him again. I dived in after him but couldn't find a
Click images for desktop size: "Audrey Hepburn" by Unknown trace of him. Not even his board.
The breakers pushed me to shore and I ran and managed to flag down a lifeguard truck. They found Terry's body three days later. For three days I thought he'd show up at school and laugh at me for chasing after him. I figured he'd only pretended to jump in and had swung under the pier in some way and was enjoying my panic.
I'd rather be the butt of one of his pranks. I was 14.
Watching the news story spaced me in a way I couldn't grasp. Terry was a tragedy that scars. This was monumental. Two hundred people dead and we'd have been there if someone hadn't asked us to stay two more days to see a show. If American had charged a fee for changing flight plans we probably wouldn't have paid it. And we'd have taken that short flight.
The enormity of it made me think only of my own welfare. That's the way those big things go. We have to bring it down to just us our the mind explodes imaging the shattered bodies and the shattered lives of the families.
Which is why I sort of understand why George Bush's greatest disappointment isn't the thousands of young American lives lost in the war but his disappointment was in not landing his plane in New Orleans. How could you live thinking you'd had a hand in killing all those thousands of people. It nearly killed Abraham Lincoln before John Wilkes Booth did it for him.
So I can understand how Bush can block it out of his mind. Its what I would do.
How stupid are we as a country that we allowed a guy who is no better than me to boss us.
How hard is it to say, "My deepest regret of my time in office is the American men and women who died in defense of our country, who died protecting liberty around the world, who sacrificed all they
Click images for desktop size: "Banana At Rest" by Blurburger had so that we could live free."
It wouldn't have been hard unless he and all of his dozens of staff really didn't care in the slightest. Don't even care enough about our dead to have the decency to lie and pretend to care.
I think its fine that I don't have the depth to consider things like, "If only I'd turned right instead of left I could have avoided hitting that school bus." Cool for me, but not for any responsible person. Used to be the president was the most responsible guy on earth.
I still like the cold. The dogs are invigorated. We're going to take a walk today and see how long we can stand it.

Still the same issues with the neighbors. I was taking the garbage out and saw him. I said, in my most pleasantly neutral voice, "Hey. How you doing?" And he flat out blanked me.
Maybe he's deaf. Maybe he has aspergers syndrome ( a mild form of autism) or most likely he's a stone jerk.
Its a good thing we're not in LA. As most of you know a guy blanking you like that all these times usually means you have to blank him back and, oh yeah, carry a gun as he surely means you harm.
This isn't LA and I don't like the idea of prison is what I was thinking as I watched him use his snow blower to blow snow over the fence into our yard and driveway. When I watched him park his truck and block our driveway I decided that we'll buy a "DO NOT BLOCK DRIVEWAY" sign. That'll show him I mean business.
I still like their dog. I still miss our old neighbor and her dogs. Ditto for our dogs.
Forgetting the jerky new neighbors I hope the old neighbors are doing well.

The dogs are now eating the dehydrated sweet potatoes and apples and enjoying them. I'm pleased. But now I'll have to make more. Which is better than them eating cat feces. The stupid cat has decided that its litter box is not sufficient and has at 8 years of age decided to use various boxes and corners around the house . . .

A few enquiries asking about the "Lone Wolf and Cub" saga. The story that reads like a legend but started as a comic book. Maybe I'll detail more about it.

Posted by David at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Song of the Angels" by BouguereauWe have a thermometer that reads in both Fahrenheit and Centigrade. I don't like the metric system much. My fault. Not the systems.
With metric I spend all my time calculating and converting distances in my head. Since its my head I often end up with some pretty odd results, like the back yard would be two miles long.
But I think I like centigrade although I think it woefully imprecise. I do like it to explain how cold it is. Minus fifteen is much closer to how cold it feels to me. Five degrees sounds like I'm complaining
Click image for desktop size: "Sparkle Girl" by Evegeny about nothing. But minus fifteen! Well, that makes it sound manly even to dare to venture outside!
Perception is always better than reality.

I am now the official master of dishwasher repair. We've done six loads and while the dishwasher doesn't work any better than it did before it stopped cleaning the dishes it certainly doesn't do them worse. More to the point there's no weird grinding or explosions or leaks.
I feel I deserve the right to call myself the master. This means that I can go to your house and if your having problems with your dishwasher you have to endure hours of pointless elliptical advice. And if you're foolish enough to attempt a repair in my presence that means I have the right to lean over your shoulder and spout instructions that have little to do with the situation and when its all finished I get to take credit for its success and get to say, "well, if you'd done it like I told you it
Click images for desktop size: "Supergirl" by DC Comics would have been fine!"
Just one of the infinite pleasures of being a guy.

The guitar playing is going well. No one seems to appreciate it but me. Its frustrating because I'm not playing with anything like my old style and speed. I did a good version of "Your So Young and Beautiful" for my friends birthday and I was happy with my articulate playing.
What's odd is that my left hand is hurting far less than I anticipated. Its stiff and strength is slow in coming. But its my right hand that's giving me fits. It feels like my right thumb is dislocated. Yesterday I even had a hard time grasping the door knob to get back in the house. Finally had to do it left handed.
It makes keeping the baseline going on some of the fingerpicking numbers excruciating. Double picking is impossible as are glissandos. But the odd thing is I can do a near perfect rondo.
Rondo's are those strums that most people know from flamenco music. Its the strum where you lead with your index finger and then follow with the other fingers. It makes a sweet full sound and gives a sort of malicious arpeggio when used in pop stuff. (Super cool on electric guitars.) What's odd is that my rondos are better now then when I was playing near full time. Some sort of body compensation for having no thumb?

I heard from a good friend in London yesterday. That always pleases me. What makes it worth mentioning is that out of nowhere he is suddenly writing to me in text speak! In Europe text messaging is much more prevalent than it is here. Doctor's confirm appointments via text messages! (Stupid that I know so much about doctor's office). Aside from the kids texting each other non-stop like it was a private twitter account business use them constantly.

Click image: "The City of a Thousand Minarets" by Waelsaad What made this notable was that my friend started his message with "glad to read u are". U? Instead of you? U?
This is the way civilization crumbles.

We got through the day okay. I must have missed my friend more than I admitted to myself. After the dogs finished trying to kill me on our long walk (ninety minutes, would have been longer but the three of them were too excited to behave. The gentle dog spent over an hour biting me and flying around at shoulder height. The giant dog kept bounding at me and trying to fly at my head height. While my puppy spent the entire walk in her military posture: the task is to get there and then go home!) my puppy stared at me for a while and then went to get a toy that she pressed hard against my leg.
We played some. Her entire play mode reminded me of something. I just got an email that reminded me of what.
There's nothing more tragic to me than the death of a child. One of my puppy's "patients" succumbed to leukemia after Christmas. He was 12 years old.
His mother sent me a pained but charming note thanking my puppy for the brief happiness she bought to her son. She remembered how desolate the kid felt in the hospital and she recalled in vivid detail how my puppy did her therapy dog rounds, how she poked her head into her son's room and doctored him with a lick on the nose.
The kid didn't come out and play with my puppy and the other kids very often but his mom recalls how my puppy would always make it a point to come in with whatever toy she was playing with, often a roll of toilet paper and press it into his hand, poking him until he played with her.
The kid followed her web site. He often got exasperated with her but he always wrote to her explaining his exasperation.
I'm proud of my little puppy. As proud of her that she was able to figure out something was wrong and felt like trying to do something about it.
It saddens me for a kid to die. It makes me wonder why I've been spared when a child was not.

Posted by David at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Lost in the Fun" by Unknown Today is my friends birthday. I think she celebrated it a day early by staying in bed the whole day and reading a mystery suspense thriller book from a series she's interested in. Michael Connelly, I think.
She also made Tomato Rice Soup from scratch. Rah.
For her I think that is a perfect day.
Today their are chores. One of them ugly in a nice way. Emissions check on her car then down to the DMV to renew her license plates for 2009. We also have to pick up some odds and ends for the growing list of house repairs.
Yesterday the side fence blew over!

Click image: "Blue Fountain" by Maxfield Parrish The giant dog, of course for it is he that has the ultimate hold on gooniness in this world, escaped. We called the gentle dog and my puppy in. They came with no problem and calmly went about their business. We wondered where the giant dog was and then heard him crying.
He figured out how to escape and was upset that we hadn't come to rescue him as he had no clue how to return the same way he left.
So he was officially rescued and I had to do an emergency repair on the fence. I used to 4 inch logs as struts, logs from an old busted up "primitive" wood bench and the arms from an another outdoor chair for braces. It held well enough.
When I went to check it last night the struts had sunk about an inch into the ground. Their were 30 mph winds and their constant buffeting was more effective them my manly hammering at setting the things.
I need to add more braces today and set the already installed ones. I'm thinking about adding a metal connector between the two fence posts. (They abut as the damage was done at an
Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Marek Okon unused and forgotten gate). I need to check the soundness of the wood as I fear the heavy winds, which I guess aren't uncommon here, will just rip out the screws and do more damage instead of securing it. There were a lot of limbs blown down and two roof tiles so the damage wasn't too bad. The giant dog was fine after his trauma. I'm still a little bit concerned as to why the other two didn't make a fuss to let us know that the giant dog was in trouble.
Then there's the start/completion of the dishwasher repair. My instincts say that the repair were doing is necessary but isn't the final solution.
We'll have to see.
I watched two interesting movies last night. One is a semi-guilty pleasure - The final installment of the Chambara, "Sleepy Eyes of Death". Sleepy Eyes is a ronin who was conceived during a black mass! His mother was a victim, not a willing participant and she was raped by a Dutch devil worshipper. After giving birth she kills herself, not via seppuku or hari kari but with the scary method of stabbing herself in the throat.
Sleepy Eyes, half caste and bitter is the most cynical ronin in movies. A deadly swordsman he hates everything and almost everyone. Almost because he doesn't really think of anyone but himself. He does not practice bushido he lives by his own moral code.
This final episode is very much worth seeing. Light gory entertainment with some decent samurai sword fights and surprisingly touching denouements.
The other film is a real oddity. A Vietnamese flic called "The Rebel". It stars Johnny Nyguen. He was the lead fighter bad guy in "Tom Yum Gum". In "The Rebel" he stars, wrote , produces and does the
Click images for desktop size: "Mac Tag Girl" by Lumac fight choreography. His brother directs and other family members are all over the place.
I've seen a few Vietnamese films and wasn't very impressed. This one has excellent cinematography, a decent score and good acting. The fights are impressive enough.
Vietnamese fighting techniques are very brutal. They were meant to win and not to impress. They function by whittling your opponent down to size by breaking a finger and then a wrist and then an arm etc. They toned down some of the brutality but still made a nice high flying balletic style of its more cinematic techniques.
The film was int