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2005 October 1st Saturday 13:22PDT - damp autumn days
Sofie told a funny joke to Colleen, and Colleen passed it along to me:
Shamus and Murphy fancied a pint or two but didn't have a lot of money between them. They could only raise the staggering sum of 50 pence. Murphy said "Hang on, I have an idea." He went next door to the
butcher's shop and came out with one large sausage.
Shamus said "Are you crazy? Now we don't have any money left at all!"
Murphy replied, "Don't worry-- just follow me." He went into the pub where he immediately ordered two pints of Guinness and two glasses of Jamieson Whisky.
Shamus said "Now you've lost it. Do you know how much trouble we will be in? We haven't got any money!"
Murphy replied with a smile, "Don't worry, I have a plan. Cheers!" They downed their drinks. Murphy said, "OK, I'll stick the sausage through my zipper and you go on your knees and put it in your mouth." The barman noticed them, went berserk, and threw them out.
They continued this, pub after pub, getting more and more drunk, all for free. At the tenth pub Shamus said "Murphy-- I don't think I can do any more o' this. I'm drunk and me knees are killin' me!"
Murphy said, "How do you think I feel? I lost the sausage in the third pub."
Sunday afternoon i took a shower, dressed, and went out shopping. First i telephoned Xing's Panda Palace and ordered a variety of delicious Szechuan dishes. I borrowed Tony's truck and drove along North Forest Street; a sea-plane was coming in for a landing and passed very low overhead as it descended toward the Bay. When i arrived at Panda Palace, the friendly owner Jade Luu was serving the dinner crowd while i waited for my order to be ready. She had a free moment and stopped to chat with me, as she's always very outgoing. She asked me if i had been practising speaking the Mandarin words used in the game of MahJong, and i impressed her by demonstrating that i could now count from one to ten, could name the four directions of the wind, and could say the three names of the extra honours. As she wrote the ideographs on the back of a menu, i was able to identify each. I asked her about the "Dragon and Phoenix" combination platter which i had ordered (it's General Tso's Chicken on one side with Shrimp in Chili Sauce on the other). "Is this 'Lung Fang'?" i inquired.
"Yes! You got it right... 'Lung Fang Pa' is the Dragon/Phoenix/combination," she confirmed. She taught me how to correctly pronounce Szechuan (it's sort of like "sit-tswann") because i often order her Spicy Sesame Szechuan dumplings. I promised to continue practising Mandarin, so hopefully i could do more than play MahJong, greet her with "Hay No Ma", order lunch, and thank her with "Xie xie" when i departed.
Next i went over to the Fred Meyer supermarket on Lakeway Drive and purchased some items on my shopping list, plus i found a few nice things on sale such as Strawberry Rhubarb Pie, fresh eggs, and frozen juice. After putting my sacks of groceries in the truck, i walked across Lincoln Street; this can be very difficult because it's always busy with traffic, and is not properly marked with crosswalks at intersections, so i had to wait a long time for an opportunity to dash over while no vehicles were coming. On the other side, i went into the CostCutter supermarket to find a few more items on my list, and they also had some sale items such as bagels and Gala apples.
When i was back at the edge of Lincoln Street waiting for a chance to cross, a couple panhandlers approached me with their sob-story and asked if i would help give them money, to which i always reply "no". After i made it across the street toward Fred Meyer and headed around the parking lot back toward the truck, these two men also happened to cross my path again, and pursued me further. "I'm still the same person who said 'no' two minutes ago," i said crossly as i loaded my groceries into the truck. Ordinarily i feel very neutral towards beggers, because i know that people can honestly have difficulties in their lives, but i also know that there are far more appropriate ways to get help rather than to harangue bystanders who are minding their own business. When they get aggressive, i get peevish. I don't give a fuck if people think i'm "uncharitable"-- if somebody truly needs financial help, begging for money on the street is not a solution.
If i saw somebody in trouble, like maybe they got hit by a car, or they slipped on some ice, or there were some such actual emergency, then obviously i would try to do whatever i could to help them immediately, and call for assistance. But when grown adults-- total strangers-- walk up to me out of the blue and ask me to hand them my money, that makes no sense to me. It would make no sense if i walked around town asking total strangers to give me their stuff ("Excuse me, madame, could i please have your dog? Pardon me, buddy, could i please have your ice cream cone? Hey lady, would you care to give me your purse?") so i don't appreciate it when that happens to me.
I came home and made several trips up the stairs with the groceries as Tony helped put everything away. Then we heated our egg rolls, rice, Szechuan Sesame Dumplings, some Dragon And Phoenix, and some House Special Duck for a fabulous dinner. We put the leftovers from Panda Palace into the refrigerator, then we each had a slice of strawberry rhubarb pie and a cup of tea. After our meal, i was extremely tired, and i happened to fall asleep on Tony's bed while i was hanging out in his room. I awoke five or six hours later, took my handful of medications, and found him in my room lying on my bed watching my television quietly. I got into my bed with him and told him about bits of some dreams i'd been having:
My grandfather Doug Tobin has been in a wheelchair since he had polio as a teenager, and in this dream he has part of the leg/foot-support apparatus adjusted so that one foot is lifted up and extended outward while the other is resting in its usual downward position. I don't know why he has adjusted it this way, but i notice that some apple pie has spilled on him. There is a little blob of gelatinous pie filling on his pants-leg. Doug is talking to another man, and that guy is named "Mr Wright". He makes a point of mentioning that his last name is spelled with a "W". Grandpa Tobin is discussing how he is interested in purchasing Mr Wright's business. There are a lawyer and an accountant present, and the lawyer mentions "due diligence". Mr Wright tells Doug that people are familiar with the Wright brand-name, and brand-names have a certain value. I am listening to their discussion and i see the accountant making notes in a ledger. It seems like this scene must be taking place twenty years in the past, because Doug looks like he is only in his sixties; whereas in real life, he's actually in his eighties.
As Tony watched TV, i fell asleep again for another eight or nine hours. When i awoke around noon on Monday, i remembered some more bits of a dream. I'm looking at animated maps. These maps show two types of data. The first type indicates human population across regions of North America, the Caribbean, and Central America. Some of the large cities have black circular graphics which seem to make sweeping motions similar to the hands of a clock, representing some sort of information in a pie-chart format. I notice that there are errors: for example, the population of the state of New York is incorrectly listed as 55Million instead of 18Million; the population of Guatemala is listed as being greater than the population of Mexico City; but i know these facts are wrong. The second type of data is meteorological data. There are animated graphics which show weather systems, air masses, frontal boundaries, depictions of satellite and radar imagery to indicate precipitation forecasts, and a few numbers that must be temperatures. I am confused as the temperature data is mingled with the population data, and i think there must be some special trick to reading these maps, maybe i'm not doing it correctly.
I got up and made coffee while Tony continued to sleep for a few more hours. Once again, i had to reboot my iMac because the Lookupd Daemon subroutine was going out of control; this has happened repeatedly in the past few weeks, and it really frustrates me. Unlike many processes which can simply be terminated and restarted, Lookupd can't be mended without completely rebooting the computer. I have visited Apple's Support pages for information about this issue, but they offer no simple solution. Tony and i have both written them some nasty feedback about this irritation. We never used to have this problem during previous iterations of Mac OS X, and it has only been occurring since we "upgraded" to version 10.3.9. Personally, i feel like 10.3.9 is actually a downgrade because it has so many more bugs than the previous flavors of OS X. Many months ago, when we were using 10.3.5 thru 10.3.7, i believe our iMacs reached their optimal levels of nearly error-free performance, compared to all the previous operating systems which had been installed on them over the years. I've used everything from 7.5.2 thru 8.6 on my first Performa 603e; 9.0 thru 9.2.2, and 10.1.1 thru 10.3.9 on the G3 iMac which is now on Tony's desk; and 10.2.1 thru 10.3.9 on this iMac G4 on my desk. I feel a bit disappointed that Apple offers no upgrade pricing for those of us who just paid $120 for OS X 10.1 three years ago, OS X 10.2 on a new iMac two and a half years ago, and $200 for the OS X 10.3 multi-user license last year. I've also paid them full price for each incremental version of QuickTime, and other software titles; and i've paid $100 every year for my Dot-Mac subscription. So i feel like they should offer some sort of discount to those of us who are interested in OS X 10.4 when we've recently forked over so much cash already. But there is no such offer, so i say "Screw 'em! I don't want to pay for another damn OS X this year". I'll put up with the stupid bugs and irritating reboots; and as long as my three-year AppleCare Service Plan still hasn't expired, they are going to put up with an earful of negative feedback from me.
Tony woke up and had coffee too, and we watched the three videotaped episodes of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart from last week. Stewart's program won a couple more Emmy Awards again, and as usual he seemed to provide some of the only actual news and analysis on television while making us laugh. Then we listened to the two most recent podcasts of Fox and the City. Marinol gave me the munchies, so i ate the last leftover roast beef sandwich from our weekend trip to Arby's, and more strawberry rhubarb pie. We watched our videotape of The Simpsons, Family Guy, and American Dad. I still had the munchies, so we reheated all of our leftovers from Panda Palace and finished the House Special Duck, Dragon And Phoenix, and white rice. I also had a bagel, a Kit Kat candy bar, and then we had the rest of the pie. Drugs work!
In the evening i downloaded a couple hours of fantastic live music which had been posted on Dub-Beautiful-Collective's net.label page. These performances by Adham Shaikh with Shankar, Ishq, and Nalepa are among some of the sweetest ambient chillout sessions from the San Francisco Bay Area. The night was cool and clear, and i could see quite a few stars; then a bit of fog began to form. A large fishing ship with a variety of colored lights slowly headed into Squalicum Harbor. I was awake rather late because i was horny and felt like masturbating a couple times, then i was able to sleep until about noon.
I got up and made coffee, and called Respiratory Therapy to confirm i would be in on time for my appointment, then they would have the Pentamadine ready for my afternoon arrival. I used my electric clippers to go over my head again, leaving the "mohawk" strip over the top. Then i showered and dressed, chatted with Tony, took out the rubbish, fetched the snail-mail, and borrowed his truck. I drove to Saint Joseph's Hospital and spent a half hour inhaling the antibiotics through the nebulizer (sshhhhkkisshhh... sshhkkoosshh... sshhhhkkisshhh... sshhkkoosshh...). While i was sitting there i read a couple more chapters of Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut, but then i felt slightly dizzy and closed my book. After i finished at the medical center, i drove down the street to Sunset Square and did some shopping at the Dollar Store and the Rite-Aid pharmacy. Then i brought my purchases home, took some Marinol, got the munchies, and had dinner with Tony.
Previously, he had dredged slices of polenta in egg and cornmeal then fried them in bacon fat; he fried potato slices in vegetable oil; and he simmered a tomato sauce with ground beef, peas, carrots, onion, garlic, cracked pepper and herbs. In a glass casserole dish he layered the polenta and potatoes with mozzarella, parmesan, the sauce, and then dusted the top with more corn meal, paprika, parsley and cayenne pepper. This had all been baked and made a beautiful dinner on a prior evening, with lots of leftovers. So we had some of these leftovers on Tuesday, along with some other Italian food. From the freezer we took breaded raviolis filled with cheeses, baked these in a very hot oven, and served them with marinara sauce alongside the polenta casserole. We had caramel-fudge pop-tarts for dessert, then watched the sunset. Someone was rowing a boat near the shore, passing the seals who were sitting on the logs and swimming in the Bay, poking their heads out of the water here and there. A few vehicles came and went at the international pier near where the Alliance and the Legacy were moored. The high pressure weather system which had been sitting on Whatcom County and the Georgia Strait was causing the air and the sea to be extremely calm, thus the smog from Vancouver was visibly accumulating to the north and west. The sun went behind the horizon near the southern end of the peninsula of the Lummi Nation, and i knew it would soon be disappearing behind the San Juan Islands to the southwest in another week or two. The duration of the day from sunrise to sunset was now less than twelve hours. Tony slipped into his usual post-carb-intake diabetic coma, snoring on the bed behind me as i sat at my computer.
I played MahJong in the Lion's Lair and enjoyed seeing some of my buddies who are always at the 5Faan tables. Then Tony and i had some peach pie and tea. The Dream Factory stream from HBR1.com played lovely chillout mixes as i tuned in for a few hours. Then we slept until about noon on Wednesday. There were some bits of dreams which i remembered:
On a vacation with my family, we are outdoors and there is a path over some hills and rocks, through trees and near cliffs, and i see something like a huge cow which is nursing its calves. But as i get closer, i look through the trees and see that it is actually a buffalo. I back off, hoping to avoid being detected, because i am a little bit afraid of the huge animals. I head back to a cottage or motel of some kind, where my family is staying. Their pet cats and dog are also at this place, and it is time for me to feed the animals. I look through all the cupboards until i find the sealed foil pouches of moist catfood. I am putting the food in bowls for the animals, but i can't find anything for the dog, so i give him my sandwich. Tyler is one of our family's yellow and white cats who comes running up the hill and into the cottage, eager for his meal. The pets are all excited and running around me, apparently very hungry.
In another scene, i am floating through the corridors of a school. I feel like i am being pursued, trying to avoid something which is chasing me. I am able to fly and drift through the air, levitating and trying not to hit my head on the ceiling as i navigate these hallways. I fly into an athletic gymnasium which has a large swimming pool, and its pumps are churning the water; i smell the chlorine as the pool is frothing and burbling. There are other students with me, and we don't want to be caught by some kind of dark pursuer.
Tony brewed a pot of coffee with some vanilla, and i added Pasano's chocolate mint syrup to mine. The afternoon was cloudy and gray, and a few small vessels traversed the Bay. I listened to Etherbeat.com while i was at my iMac, and updated my Yahoo profiles. There were a few gentle rain showers, and i saw tugboats come and go from the Whatcom Waterway. Tony went out to Great Northern Books to rent a couple videos, then to Rumors Cabaret for some hard cider. When he came home in the early evening he made a tossed salad for dinner. I helped make a vinaigrette dressing, we added some turkey to the salad, and we had some cookies and pop-tarts for dessert afterwards. The rain became slightly heavier during the night.
When i awoke at noon, i'd been having some dreams, but i could only remember a few fragments: being in school and feeling pressured to complete some assignment, a test or a written project, and my paper is sort of purple or lavender, with typewritten comments, and it is tattered, there are little holes in it, and i am embarrassed when i hand it to a teacher, i think i will fail. A different scene takes place at my grandparents' house in Underhill, Vermont, where i will be a guest and i think i will stay in one of the extra bedrooms upstairs where i used to sleep many times when i visited as a child. Some friend of mine is already there, he's in the bed. I'm putting something away in the drawers of the bureau along the wall at his side of the bed. Someone else is going to spy on him, they have drilled a hole in the wall over the headboard of the bed, and i feel that they could be watching us. Then i am sneaking into some cupboard where there are boxes of chocolate candy samplers, each in its individual wrapping or crinkled brown wax-paper holder; i am taking a couple of these candies and eating them, they are so chewy, they almost seem to have the texture of chewing gum, but they are so much sweeter.
I got out of bed and saw that the rain and winds were blowing across the Bay, and the colorful leaves were being stripped from the branches of the trees as gusts tossed them along the street and lawns. Streams of water flowed downhill parallel to the sidewalks as the precipitation grew even heavier. The mist limited my view to a few miles around the edges of the Bay, and the weather sort of put me in a good mood, as i love these damp autumn days. Although September was ending, the grass was still verdant and many of the neighbors' flowers were still very bright and cheerful; this feels a bit different from the decades i spent living in Vermont. I brewed a pot of Arabica coffee and added vanilla, cinnamon, cloves, allspice, ginger, nutmeg, and mace. I turned on the TV and VCR to make sure i had enough videotape to record Jon Stewart's program; then i flipped through the channels for a few minutes. I watched some Flow Yoga and Fusion Fare on Channel-M from Vancouver; these are English-language shows on the "Multi-vision" channel which mostly carries foreign-language content. Fusion Fare often shows very appetizing recipes blending ingredients and techniques from around the world, which is appropriate given the extremely cosmopolitan nature of Vancouver. Flow Yoga is a show i sometimes watch; although i don't intend to imitate most of their extreme stretching and breathing exercises (i have plenty of my own!) i just love to see the gorgeous host and his Asian buddies as they flex and bend their tremendously sexy bodies.
Tony woke up and joined me for coffee, and we watched the birds, insects, boats, and neighbors as they came and went in the rain. The Garth Foss tugboat pulled up to the pier for a little while, then it left the Bay again, followed by its sister tug, the Lindsay Foss. I was in the mood to listen to Underworld on Thursday afternoon, so i cued up several hours of their music in an iTunes playlist and enjoyed their moody songs whose styles varied from ambient to electro to trance. Tony and i ate the rest of the peach pie with our coffee. I felt somewhat well-rested, and decided to try to be productive in the early evening.
After i showered and dressed, i drove downtown and returned the video rentals to Great Northern Books (the adult store). Despite my silly haircut, i was not the person with the most unusual appearance-- the two staff members and their buddies all had a variety of piercings, tattoos, and distinctive hair colors. Then i went to the Community Food Co-op and purchased some groceries. I was not the most noticeable person there, either; several people had brightly colored hair, clothing with flashy patterns, piercings in prominent places, and so forth. I don't feel particularly self-conscious about my own appearance, but on some level i suppose it's nice to find plenty of other local characters who are far more eye-catching, because i do not crave attention. Then i drove to Sehome Village and stopped at the Haggen supermarket to pick up a few more items for dinner; there were so many delicious college guys shopping and working there, as that location is on the edge of the WWU campus. I drove home through the University back to South Hill, put everything away, and had dinner with Tony.
I took a couple Marinol and became extremely hungry. We finished the leftover polenta casserole with some more baked raviolis. I had acquired tuna nigiri sushi with wasabi horseradish and shoyu; spring rolls with mango, chicken, spinach, rice noodles and other vegetables; and spring rolls with barbecue pork, peanut satay sauce, rice noodles, and carrots. For dessert we had some cookies and pop-tarts. We watched our videotape of the "live" season premiere of Will & Grace, then lied around in front of the television for hours. The rains gradually ceased while we slept for more than nine hours altogether, and i finally arose at 13:14PDT on Friday afternoon.
I couldn't remember any of my dreams when i got out of bed. I brewed a pot of coffee with almond extract and a pinch of cloves in the grounds. Then i wrote a cheque for the next month's rent and went over the bills, while listening to sweeping ambient melodies on the broadband stream from Dub Beautiful Collective. I dressed and went down to the apartment complex office to drop off the rent, said "hello" to Shelly, and fetched the snail-mail. When i was using my iMac Friday afternoon, the stupid Lookupd daemon kept going haywire and i had to reboot three times during a period of just a couple hours. I get very angry when i think of the many hundreds of dollars i've spent on Apple software in the past few years, as the quality of their products often seems just as poor as their competitors'. But i try to remind myself how nice it is to have any sort of computer at all, to have an Internet connection, and to have the leisure time to spend on activities which i enjoy; this tempers my frustration with the software irritations. I listened to the ninety-ninth and one hundredth podcasts of Fox and the City, and subscribed to the new Eat Bird podcast by Ragan Fox and Rachel Kann. At sunset there were nearly twenty seals sitting along the breakwater.
We baked the rest of the breaded raviolis, and i cut up some stalks of celery and slathered them with peanut butter or hummus. For dessert i made shakes in the blender with frozen bananas, Nancy's whole milk honey yogurt, light cran-raspberry juice, and vanilla soy beverage. We watched our videotape with two episodes of Malcolm in the Middle and the previous four nights of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. We fell asleep, and at some point i was startled awake from a dream; i went back to sleep and stayed in bed until almost noon on Saturday.
The malfunctioning Lookupd daemon caused my computer to need another reboot. I grumbled angrily about the lousy software as i was brewing a pot of coffee with vanilla and hazelnut flavoring. Tony told me that his iMac had completely messed up its Energy Saver settings and had been going to "sleep" at inappropriate times, plus his Finder kept going out of control when asked to perform simple operations such as "Rename Files". But after a rebooting, our iMacs seemed to work properly again. I said, "Maybe i should tell Apple Support that i want to buy OS X 10.4-- but only if they refund me the $200 for 10.3 first!" Of course such a thing would never happen. I sipped my coffee and took my pills, then counted out the next week's allotments into the compartments of my planner. The afternoon was mostly sunny and there were a few sailboats on the Bay.
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