Simple Gifts in Honor Of Walter Cronkite

Walter Cronkite Dies Today

This may be the last serious broadcast journalist. It was at the end of his on air career that networks started demanding that the news had to make money. No longer would we get the news we needed to know, now we would get the news we wanted to know.

It's Too Damn Hot

An hour ago it was 123 degrees in the sun on my porch. The temperature in the house is holding at 83, but to me that's starting to feel hot. There isn't a bit of moisture in the air. So the swamp-cooler is doing it's job, but barely. I've just resorted to turning on the outside water, waiting the couple of minutes it takes to flush out the hot water from the hose and soaking the swamp-cooler pads to get a little extra cool moist air in the house. But damn, it's hot. 99 in the shade at 4 PM. It will be this way for weeks at least. Could be this way a month or more. I guess this is payback for that long, cool, wet Spring.

But now, it's just to damn hot for anything.

Morning's Not For Me

I wake up like a person who needs to know how to do everything again for the first time. Like walk. I stagger and weave in the morning as I make my way to the crapper. My brain doesn't work and usually actually hurts. My eyes won't focus. I've tried to write a brief answer to a comment on the blog before I've been up at least an hour and my fingers just do not work. Like little clubs with no memory of the keyboard. I hate mornings. I always have.

My mother claimed I was born a night person. She was always a morning person, so this was just one more way in which I was defective. But her assertion that fresh out of the womb I wanted to sleep in and stay up all night rings very true. I've had jobs that required 5 AM call times. The best thing for me to do was sleep most of the prior day, then just wake up in the late evening and then my call time would be at a reasonable hour, still part of the night.

I was an assistant to the fashion coordinator at Nordstrom in Salt Lake and Nordstrom likes to have very early morning meetings for management. I can remember driving down Emigration canyon road at 6 AM and not gaining consciousness until pulling into the parking garage. I call this sleep driving. I was completely on autopilot during all those early morning drives down that narrow, steep, winding canyon road. I know I drove the road asleep and speeding.

Now some jackass is calling me every morning at 8:01. This would be great if I really needed a wake-up call, but it's torture since I stayed up till 3 Am the night before. That is my normal bedtime. I know it's wrong to the rest of you that I have the luxury of living my life according to my own biorhythms, but that's the only good thing about being disabled--that and Medicare coverage.

So today I plan to make some phone calls. I will reregister with the Do Not Call Registry. That won't stop this asshole, but it's a start. I'm getting too many solicitations everyday and it isn't all that much fun fucking with the poor schmucks who need that work. The Diabetes Association has stopped calling me, but the person who is calling me is, I'm pretty sure the person who first called me for the Diabetes Association and got the angry bear that is me in the morning and decided it was fun to wake me up. Now I'll start disconnecting my phone at night.