Bad Air Equals Big Money In Utah

Salt Lake City is infamous for it's bad air in the winter.  It happens every winter and it seems to me that it gets worse every year, but I'm probably getting more sensitive to it as I get older.  For at least a week, probably more like two weeks we've had RED AIR ALERTS every day. This means our air is toxic to breathe.  The Red Air Alert is a warning to stay indoors unless absolutely necessary.  I almost always think about the poor Mail Carrier trudging through this crude with weeping red eyes and a dry hacking cough as he/she worries about slipping on ice that no amount of ice melt will melt.  Day time temperatures haven't been higher than the 20s in all this time, and the combination of trapped stinking air pollution also keeps the sun from reaching the ground.  It's probably crystal clear and 20 degrees warmer at the ski resorts where I (when I was still skiing or living up Emigration Canyon) could look down on the Salt Lake Valley and see nothing but a bowl of thick taupe air that looked like a dingy blanket and wished I didn't ever have to breathe it again.  The local news media euphemistically calls this crud "fog."  I call bullshit on that.

We are governed by Mormon businessmen whose only goal is to get rich and richer and stay that way, by any means possible.  The only exception to that rule is the occasional Democratic Mayor who spends all his time (sad to say Salt Lake hasn't elected a Liberal Democratic female mayor in my lifetime -Didi Coridini doesn't count) battling the Legislature and Governor trying to improve air quality standards and put in place fines for polluters.  But we are now in the very big business of courting other countries toxic and radioactive waste, and I'd bet every penny I own that we're cutting corners on safety to make money for the dickhead politicians and their business cronies who are getting very rich in this business.  Our motto isn't "Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses yearning to be free," or something nice like that.  Oh no, our motto is: "Give us the most dangerous toxic waste no one in the rest of the world feels safe living next to and we'll dump it near our biggest city, because we don't give a  shit about anything but money and the end days are near anyway, so get it while you can."  The company doing this is Energy Solutions and the guy running that operation is now on the staff of our new Senator, the very awful, very corrupt, Mike Lee.  I hear he also has a lobbyist for Blackwater/Xi on his staff.  This guy makes Orrin Hatch look like a saint.

Dead Birds Fall From Sky AGAIN In Louisiana, 300 Miles From Arkansas Incident Days Earlier

The Redwing Blackbird story just gets worse

Blackbirds Falling From the Sky

The story about Blackbirds falling dead from the sky by the thousands over Beebe, Arkansas makes me very sad.  Killed by trauma in mid-air.  What trauma?  Breathing the air over Beebe, Arkansas?  Why the huge fish kill in Arkansas?

Arkansas was the biggest producer of poultry in the US when I spent a year there living in Fayetteville, not all that far from the Tyson Chicken processing plants, surrounded with all the poultry farms that fed that enormous processing plant.  Maybe the Blackbirds were dying of grief at what we're doing to another breed of bird or they died from flying through the fumes of chicken shit that hover over all those factory farms, producing nothing but chickens and eggs and unbreathable air.  Probably produce some pretty toxic ground water as well. 

Texas TeaParty Socialist-Free Purity Pledge

(This was given to me by my doctor on my last visit.  Shocking to many will be the idea that a doctor might not be a GOPer.  Live and learn).

I____________, do solemnly swear to uphold the principles of a socialism-free society and heretofore pledge my word that I shall strictly adhere to the following:

I will complain about the destruction of the 1st Amendment Rights in this country, while I am duly being allowed to exercise my 1st Amendment Rights.

I will complain about the destruction of my 2nd Amendment Rights in this country, while I am duly being allowed to exercise my 2nd Amendment Rights by legally, but brazenly, brandishing unconcealed firearms in public.

I will forswear the time-honored principles of fairness, decency, and respect by screaming unintelligible platitudes regarding tyranny, Nazi-ism, and socialism at public town halls.  Also:

I pledge to eliminate all government intervention in my life.  I will abstain from the use of and participation in any socialist goods and services including but not limited to the following:

*     Social Security
*     Medicare/Medicaid
*     State Children's Health Insurance Programs (SCHIP)
*     US Postal Service
*     Roads and Highways
*     Air Travel (regulated by the socialist FAA)
*     The US Railway System
*     Public Subways and Metro Systems
*     Public Bus and Light-rail Systems
*    Rest Areas on Highways
*    All Government-Funded Local/State Projects (e.g. see Iowa 2009 federal senate appropriations--  http//grassley.senate.gov/issues/upload/Master-Approps-73109.pdf) Public Water and Sewer Services (goodbye socialist toilet, shower, dishwasher, kitchen sink, outdoor hose!)

*     Public and State Universities and Colleges
*     Public Primary and Secondary Schools
*     Sesame Street
*     Publicly Funded Anti-Drug Use Education for Children
*     Public Museums
*     Libraries
*     Public Parks and Beaches
*     State and National Parks
*     Public Zoos
*     Unemployment Insurance
*     Municipal Garbage and Recycling Services
*     Treatment at Any Hospital or Clinic That Ever Received Funding From Local, State or Federal
      Government (pretty much all of them)
*     Medical Services and Medications That Were Created or Derived From Any Government Grant
      or Research Funding (again, pretty much all of them)
*    Socialist Byproducts of Government Investment Such as Duct Tape and Velcro (Nazi-NASA
      Inventions)
*     Use of the Internets, email, and networked computers, as the DoD's ARPENET was the basis for
       subsequent computer networking.
*     Foodstuffs, Meats, Produce, and Crops that were grown with, fed with, raised with, or that
       contain inputs from crops grown with Government Subsidies.
*     Clothing made from Crops (e.g. Cotton) that were grown with or that contain inputs from
       Government Subsidies.
 *   If a veteran of the government-run socialist US military, I will forgo my VA benefits and insist
     on  paying for my own medical care

I will not tour socialist government buildings like the Capital in Washington, D.C,

I pledge to never take myself, my family, or my children on a tour of the following types of socialist locations, including but not limited to:

*   Smithsonian Museums such as the Air and Space Museum or Museum of American History
*   The socialist Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson Monuments.
*   The government operated Statue of Liberty
*   The Grand Canyon
*   The socialist World War II and Vietnam Veterans Memorials'
*   The government-run socialist-propaganda location know as Arlington National Cemetery
*   All other public-funded socialist sites, whether in my state or in Washington, D.C.

I will urge my Member of Congress and Senators to forgo their government salary and government-provided healthcare.

I will oppose and condemn the government-funded, and therefore, socialist military of the United States of America.

I will boycott the products of socialist defense contractors such as GE, Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Humana, FedEx, General Motors, Honeywell, and hundreds of other that are paid by our socialist government to produce goods for our socialist army.

I will protest socialist security departments such as the Pentagon, FBI, CIA, Department of Homeland Security, TSA, Department of Justice and their socialist employees.

Upon reaching eligible retirement age, I will tear up my socialist Social Security checks.

Upon reaching age 65, I will forgo Medicare and pay for my own private health insurance until I die.

SWORN ON A BIBLE AND SIGNED THIS DAY OF______________ IN THE YEAR______.

____________________                                __________________________
Signed                                                             Printed Name/Town and State

Things Have Changed

I'll tell you all about it later, but for now, Happy New Year, drive carefully, and don't drive drunk!

Turns Out George Orwell and Aldous Huxley Were Both Right

I'm a news junky. And I ran across four pieces of news that grabbed me by the throat and haven't let go.  I'm going to post links to them and hope a few of you will read, or watch, and feel like commenting.  I know I've lost most of you with this long period of neglect, but today I'm going to try to remedy that neglect.  This might be a little overwhelming; it has been for me, but this is the crux of the problem we're all facing.  If you can't digest this all at once, come back and read it bit by horrifying bit.

The first story to catch my attention is this one: Trauma: how we've created a nation addicted to shopping, work, drugs, and sex

The second story is: America in Decline: Why Germans Think We're Insane

The third is: 2011; A Brave New Dystopia

The fourth is a video clip of Chris Hedges : Death of the Liberal Class:

Ezra Klein Gave This To Me...

...and everybody else on twitter:



Happy Holidays, darlings.
Love,
Peggy

This May Be the End Of My Blog As We Know It; But I'll Use this Real Estate for Something

This is as close as I can come to Holiday Spirit:

Listen and Learn

This Is a Negotiation?

I have been so angry I think I nearly had the big one yesterday.  My head hurt so bad I thought it was a migraine, but the pain shifted around and the muscles at the top of my spine were like throbbing concrete. So it was not a migraine.

I had a hissy fit at the Smiths Superstore.  I made my girlfriend very uncomfortable.  Could be I'm having strokes. I blame it on the obstructionist Republican who hold us all hostage to their greed...  And a President willing to give away the revenue we'll need to keep the whole thing from collapsing because the GOPers are bluffing a bad hand.  Call it.  Don't fold! Why the top 2%?  Why not compromise with a cool $ million?  Why two years?  Why not one?  My inclination is to say, "fuck em'"but that's one of many reasons I'm not a politician.

I'm reacting badly (slight understatement) to the news that we're going to give another two years of Bush tax cuts to the top 2% because the Republicans believe nothing is more stimulative to the economy than billionaires increasing their stock portfolios and buying another villa in Tuscany.  This is not stimulative to the economy yet, seemingly,  despite every evidence to the contrary we just have to toss truth aside and eat that shit!?!.  Republicans are willing to shut down the government to get their way.  Please President Obama, let them do it!  Let's go back to the tax rates of the Clinton Years.  Then veto every single sop to billionaires that crosses your desk.  You made promises.  We expect you to keep them.  Do not negotiate with thugs and bullies.  Let's let the country actually watch them have a tantrum and try to legislate for the top 2%, for the corporatist blood suckers and bankers.  Don't we all just love the bankers these days?

Please President Obama, take a quick course is the art of the negotiation.  When the polls are with us, why do the opposite?  Bid low for billionaires and high for poor people and the middle class.  We're Democrats, remember?  We voted for change. We need jobs and they don't creat them.  So bring it.  I know you think you got a lot in return for us, but there is so much more you didn't.  You didn't get unemployment benefits for the 99ers. Bush Tax Cuts expire for everyone, we go back to Clinton tax rates when we were at our best.  I realize these are not the same economic conditions.  We've lived with unfunded tax cuts for the uber-rich and two unfunded wars.  The Defense Department is bloated.  Afghanistan is a sink hole into which we will eventually be swallowed.  It might already be too late but change course.  Please, Mr President. Turn left!

My internist says there is an empathy gene.  If someone is a plutocrat more than likely they're missing it.  There is no room for anyone else at their table. The rest of us are merely here to serve them.  They don't create jobs, they make them vanish. They get richer off your misery and loss.  You lose your house?  Goody goody for them.  More cheap real estate for them to turn into shit like derivatives and credit default swaps or other kinds of Ponzi schemes to fuck you over again and again.  First goes the job, then your house, then the car, and you'll be damn lucky to have a relative to take you in.  Otherwise you're homeless without a safety net.  Is this the country you want to live in?

The Reading Life

The BBC predicts that most people have only read 6 of the following books. You bold the books you have read and put those you started but did not finish in italics. Then tag me and other people as usual for these things...

Samantha

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown 
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo- Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom 
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole (I thought this book was total shit, but read it anyway).
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I can't seem to count this evening.  I get started and Marley does something naughty and I get distracted.  I can only say I've been a voracious reader.  But for roughly the past four years I haven't been able to read a single book.  I think cataracts might have been the problem.  I have just had one eye fixed and I'm getting ready to schedule the other. My request has been to be able to read without reading glasses.

Dear Sharon Davis

You wrote this powerful letter to the Salt Lake Tribune:

 You didn't get mad:
>when the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount and appointed a President:
>when Vice President Dick Cheney let energy companies dictate energy policy:
>when a CIA operative got outed:
>when we illegally invaded a country that posed no threat to us:
>when we spent $800 billion on said illegal war:
>when we tortured people:
>when the government illegally wiretapped Americans:
>when Bush rang up $5 trillion in debt:
>when we gave the filthy rich half a trillion dollars in tax breaks:
>when we had the worst eight years of job creation in decades:
>when 200,000 Americans died because they had no health insurance:
>when poor oversight caused Americans to lose $12 trillion in investments, retirement, and home values:


You finally got mad as hell when a black President decided that Americans deserve the right to see a doctor.
Yes, illegal wars, lies, corruption, torture, millions of job losses, stealing tax dollars to make the rich richer, and the worst economic disaster since 1929 were all OK, but helping fellow Americans to stay healthy ...oh hell no!


Thank you Sharon Davis

Mavis Staples: Hard Times Come Again No More

Hard Times, Come Again No More.

Left Eye Is Done

Honey I'm home.  The anesthesiologist was so stingy with the versed, so no buzzy nap for me.  But I love the new glasses.  I'll schedule the second eye in a week or two.  So, how do I look?  Remember, I'd had a shower cap on at the hospital and I haven't combed my hair since they took it off.  But check out these glasses.  I think they're a keeper.

Sight

I'm getting ready for cataract surgery Tuesday. This photo of me is how I see the world now.  Everything is muted, pale, slightly blurry even with my glasses on.  My cataracts have gotten so bad I can no longer read normal sized print.  I can no longer drive at sunset or at night.  Glare makes me blind.  I can no longer walk in the late afternoon because at some point I'll have to walk west and the glare of sun hitting my eyes will blind me.  I wear glasses that turn darker as the light gets brighter and corrects the maximum for cataracts, but I haven't been able to read a book in two or three years.  I used to read at least one book a day, at most, three or four.  Now I just can't see well enough to read at all. Things have lost their color, their vividness.  The world is a paler place for me. 

It's time for me to put my house in order and start spending less time watching news.  This winter I will read more and work on my own writing.  I will keep order in my own tiny house and worry less about the House of Representatives.  We lost the house; I just assume we'll get nothing done until after the 2012 presidential election.  I have lost so many things in the tiny black hole that seems to exist somewhere inside my lovely little cottage.  I have to empty one space after another until I've organized things so that I can put my hands on everything I need at any given moment.  I need to bring my life back into focus. If I can accomplish these things I'll probably be happier, less angry, less anxious.  So, I'm making these resolutions on the brink of regaining sight.

These Are a Few of My Favorite Writers

I've been asked by one of my favorite women, the writer, Kathleen Maher, to list my fifteen or twenty five favorite writers.  That's a hard one for me, since I've been reading gluttonously for a very long time and I tend to have categories of writers I love, so though all the writers I love in a single category might not be my favorites, I'm not able to discard them as "lesser writers."  There are writers I love who are long out of print, so will seem very obscure.  There are writers I love who are loathed by others for the brutality of their honesty, which isn't always pretty, but I prefer emotional truth to pretty or popular, though popular isn't necessarily a disqualifier.  I also have favorite writers who didn't write novels.  But that's another post.

For some reason the first writer to pop into my head is one of the Russians, and one of those who changed the course of the novel:  Dostoyevsky is my favorite of the Russians, and my favorite of his books are Crime and Punishment, The Idiot. The rest of his body of work position him as the leading edge of a group of writers to follow.  They aren't an easy read, but they're worth it.  Many of you would no doubt argue with me concerning my linking Dostoyevsky to this particular group of writers: James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Violette LeDuc, Andre Gide... I could go on and on with this list.  And to make matters worse I'm not sure I can tell you exactly why I see this grouping of writers related. I've left out a lot of writers in this group and some of them are poets.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez led me to Mikhail Bulgakov, then Isabelle Allende.  Can you see how this goes?  Is it starting to make sense to you?  I could give the groups a name but they have a beginning much earlier and they have influenced so many others.  And I leave out so many other clues as to the logic of my groupings.  Or if not the logic, the emotion.

I love Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (as it was translated when I read it in the 70s) and Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy for the same reasons, though they wrote in different eras and come from very different cultures and religious traditions.  I also love Gustave Flaubert for one book: Madame Bovery, perhaps the perfect novel and ground breaking in its sensitive and brutally honest examination of a woman of spirit and beauty caught in the narrow grip of her bad marriage and the constraints of her time. This is one of many books I've read over and over.  The writing is perfection.

I loved Thomas Hardy. And its hard to mention Hardy without including the Bronte sisters. Great reading for a broody adolescent girl.

I love Colette much more than Anais Nin.   I loved Henry Miller.  I think I read everything he ever wrote and found him perhaps the greatest of his generation.  He was a marvelous painter as well.  I have a small set of numbered prints.

I  have a love/hate relationship with Vladimir Nabokov.  If you've read my memoir/fiction you will understand.  I believe Lolita is "The Great American Novel,"  and the only really great book he wrote. but that's all it takes to make a writer a great writer.  I'm sure there are those who would argue with that...

I've read all the great Southern Writers and love them all, but these are some of the women who all seem to have something in common and part of it is their emotional honesty, their sense of history, their beautiful use of language, the ground breaking nature of their work: Carson McCullers (mostly for Ballad of the Sad Cafe), Eudora Welty, Harper Lee, who only wrote one novel, but what a novel, she, the childhood friend of Truman Capote... There are so many more.

So far I think we're up to 20 or so.  It's a start.

That brings my list up to the 1950s. And though it seems I might be something of a modern classicist, I assure you I'm not.  But I read very little that isn't considered literature.  My only literary vice is the occasional fondness for the good detective novel.  But even there, I have my standards.  So before you recommend Stephen King, he represents everything I hate about the horror genre. I'm not a fan of Romance, or SciFi, either, though I have read a good sampling.  I did like Ray Bradbury when I was a kid.  I also liked Somerset Maugham when I was a kid.  I read whatever was around.



I've barely scratched the surface and barely made it in to the middle of the last century.  So, to be continued...

Oh Bummer!

Yesterday I got the news about my gas heater out here in the little house. It's died and can't be resuscitated.

It doesn't take much to heat this room, and since the beginning I've had more heater than  I needed.  First it was an Army camp stove.  I got up early, stoked the fire and got back in bed.  I didn't have a kitchen then so cooking was done on the flat surface of the camp stove.  I could make coffee.  I kept milk, butter, eggs in a cooler on the front steps.  I had a chopping block and cut kindling, morning and night.  I was working at Nordstrom as the manager of the Personal Shoppers.  I had to look like I was a walking ad for Nordstrom at all times.  If only they could have seen me in my down parka with my jammies tucked into well worn Wellingtons out chopping wood in the dark of early morning before I started the morning transformation from winter camper to fashion maven.  I drove to work in a '67 Chevy short bed pickup with an extra heavy transmission with no syncromesh so I had to double clutch in and out of every gear.  It was cherry.  Teen aged boys always wanted to buy it.  They were dismayed by the incongruity of me in it.  I loved that truck.

The second incarnation in heat was a bulky oblong brown metal box with a tall silver chimney that vents at the edge of the ceiling.   I'll be happy to have the silver pipe gone since it completely ruins the look of the longest wall in the house.  It is the only ugly element.  Good riddance.  And the cheap brown metal box with a grill on top and a grill in the front occupies primo real estate on that one long wall.  I'll be glad it's gone.  But the getting it out, and the place it stood repaired and repainted, is another thing.  I'll have to go shopping for concrete paint.  I'll probably have to repaint the wall and that particular triangle of ceiling.  This will begin early Monday morning and take all day. And in the end I'll have a smaller quieter wall mounted gas heater.  And my bank account will be greatly depleted.

We know where all this cleaning and painting leads, don't we?  And now I have no one to help me paint the whole place.  Bummer.  That's what happens when you offend and alienate all the men in your life.  If you're a youngish woman and you're reading this, take heed.  Men have their place in your life.  Male friends are good to keep.  Otherwise learn how to do all this shit and have the proper tools. Last time Tom was asked to paint my ceiling he turned his face on the pillow and said, "Where's your scaffolding?"  Tom was the best painter I ever knew.  I didn't think he was terribly funny though.  I hear his eldest son is a master painter as well.  Both men are musicians.

This weekend I will be moving furniture around again.  It wasn't more than a month ago I moved it all for the first time in three years.  But until the new heater is in, I'll have no idea what to do with the arrangement in the room.  For now I need to move things away from the most crowed wall. Paintings stacked in a safe corner.  My two favorite bookcases are against that wall. They are heavy and packed.  I will have to unload them to muscle them into another position.  Everything will have to be draped and protected.  I just got my computer back.

It's supposed to start raining tomorrow and turn to snow Monday.  We'll have a freezing night and I'll need to make sure the Eastern Boys get their swamp cooler winterized from the inside out.  This involves making a trip to Lowes.  Bummer.  Better get a new hammer and a few filters for the boys furnace while I'm there getting a strip of insulation for the swamp cooler.  See how easily costs multiply? 

And just to crowd time a bit more, I have to empty and store hoses, turn off outside water and bring all houseplants inside.  Today's the day for that because the weather's taking a sharp turn toward winter.  Even if I felt full of cheerful energy this would be a lot of work.  But I woke up tired.  And I can't perk up. Time to quit whining and muscle through it.

I just got the property tax bill. Shorter days, longer nights. Value down, taxes up. Has to be paid by the end of November.  Merry Xmas.

Shit Happens

I think it all began with my computer slowing down.  Then it started acting wonky in other ways.  And this seemed to coincide with my body going wonky as well.  I had gut pain.  I can't remember exactly when this all started but I imagine it began just after that horrible hospitalization for an abscess in my colon.  I don't really think the abscess was half so bad as the actual hospital stay.  I'm now hospital phobic.  Thanks Salt Lake Regional Medical Center. Your dreadful care has made me prefer death to another visit to your ER.

I lose time.  So does my computer.  I have gut pain and my computer freezes up.  This panics me so I finally schedule a colonoscopy and the prep nearly kills me.  I ruin clothes with that horrible purge.  No one warms you that you'll shit the bed, so fast comes the liquefied contents of your colon.  I strip and deposit my clothing into a hefty bag and then the trash.  Oddly enough, the photo of my colon looks like a pink and perfect babies butt.  And for a week after the colonoscopy my bowel seems paralyzed.  This worries me.  My computer seizes up.  I have to force quit every time I try to tweet.  Why is my computer mimicking my body?

Next comes an episode of violent illness that scares me into scheduling a complete physical that is happening in stages, so thorough is it.  This illness stricks in the middle of the night.  I awaken from a sound sleep at roughly 3:00 AM.  It is the shits.  Not to gross you out, but so violent is this bout of liquified shit that I ruin two more sets of newish jammies.  And as soon as I plop myself down on the toilet I strip the fouled clothing off my body and then the vomiting starts.  There is no time to find a better place to vomit since I'm still emptying my gut into the toilet, so I lean over the tub and barf.  This puking and shitting goes on for eleven hours.  For three days I can keep nothing down.  My neighbor thinks I should go to the ER.  Fat fucking chance!  No way in hell!  I'd rather die at home.

And as soon as I think those thoughts my computer dies.  Has my Imac become a modern day Hal?  I dither about what to do.  Phillip, the wonderful Sitenoise, runs some diagnostic tests and at first it seems to say that there is hope.  But still my computer doesn't work.  It seems to be saying, "I prefer not." like my favorite Melville character, Bartleby, the Scrivener.  I seem to have a too close relationship with my computer.  My own projections are infecting it.  How odd.

So, now I'm starting to feel better but my computer seems to have died in my place.  Could death been stalking me and the computer was generous enough to go in my place?  I'm about ready to believe anything.  Phillip and I have consulted over my options.  Seems I will have to take my big honking Imac to the Mac Store in the Gateway Mall.  I have been to that Mall three times since it opened and it was one man or another that force marched me into that hell hole.  I swore I'd never return.  Seems that's the only authorized Mac Store.  Motherfucker!

I procrastinate.  To be continued with less references to shit.  And I have a new wardrobe.  Happy Ending (if shopping is your idea of a happy ending).

My Computer is broke!

Peggy seems to have worn the thing out. Damn iMac just couldn't take the beating. It needs to go to the shop, which is a major chore in itself, before final diagnosis and decisions are made: fix it or get a new one. Just so ya'll know. Could be a couple days or a couple weeks before we get her back online.