Happy 4/20 to those who partake

I’m old, but I’m not stupid. I know what 4/20 is about. I even used to listen to Cheech and Chong albums. And let me just say that pot should be legal and available over the counter, because it’s less harmful than ethanol. I can go down to the local grocery and get beer or wine, about a mile away. But the closest legal pot is next town over, because while recreational pot is still illegal in TX, it’s a legal pain reliever for people with chronic pain and other conditions. I guess I should be paying more attention even if I can’t partake because of my TBI (I get the worst headache even if I just smell pot smoke, like if someone kicked me right in the face).

In other news I shaved Thursday and got a haircut and no longer have my 6″ white beard or hair over my collar. And now we had a cold front come through and the house is really cold to me. The forecast is for the high of the day to be 63°F at midnight and the temperature to drop until about 1400 when it will reach 53°F, warm up a bit, and then drop to 50° at midnight.

Meanwhile, I’m getting a new shaver because I need something to remove my whiskers but not chunks out of my face, not that I had a problem with that this time but I have had problems in the past. Unfortunately electric shavers and I don’t have a good track record: they die on me, usually at the worst time possible. The last batch were advertised as wet-or-dry when they were dry only, and I went through 3 of them before Amazon refused to honor the warrantee claiming using as the ad copy said was “abuse”. But there are other brands on the jungle site as Robot Cantina calls it. So I hope to find something

I saw this in the comments on Patreon

Dave, Duke of Fridges said

“Oh no. Ohhh no. Straight vodka gives the WORST hangovers.

That’s why it’s reccomended to buy vodka from a queer distillery and get gay vodka.”

I still haven’t found any Gay vodka, but I will be doing product searches on Google until I do find Gay vodka, or LGBTQ vodka. Representation is important.

In other news, I dropped my TV service from my bundle with Spectrum after the bundle bill went over $300/month. Just internet and land-line service is $113, a savings of $189. What tipped the balance was I could get all the channels important to my wife on streaming services I was already paying for, and there was a $30/month charge for local broadcast channels that I get for free with a $19 antenna.

Happy Trans Day Of Visibility, and Easter if that’s your thing

OK I am aware of the kerfluffle with the people who want to cancel everything that isn’t Easter on Easter, and who are saying that Biden recognizing TDoV is somehow “cancelling” Easter. I know it’s not, they are just both happening on the same day this year because Easter is the week after Passover on the Jewish liturgical calendar, which happens to fall on 3/31 which is the TDoV.

For me this is basically Chocolate Rabbit Day. My celebrations of Spring are either before or after Easter, either the day of the Equinox, or the day I shave my beard and most of my hair to let my head be cooler. I’m still (extremely) fuzzy right now, so the shedding of my winter fur is still to come because I’m trying to move the inevitable cold snap that seems to be either the day of or no more than 2 days after be less bitter than previous years. One year we did the shedding on the same day as the Equinox celebration at church, and we had a blizzard by Texas standards and a couple of inches of snow and high winds. But moving the shedding of the fur a few weeks should prevent that. But if there’s an April Blizzard in N TX this year, you’ll at least know who to blame for it.

I did something worth writing about again

Yesterday I went to an orthopedist about my knee that felt like the kneecap was popping in and out of track and hurting like I got kicked in the knees.

Well after x-rays and manipulating the joint he decided what I was feeling was my knee cap’s wear surface is full of cracks, divots and broken cartilage, and either the femur or tibia was getting caught in and popping out of these imperfections of the surface. As you might imagine this does not feel good at a minimum, and is excruciating at worst. And there isn’t much he can do for the situation except shoot my knee every few weeks with a cortisone/novacaine mix that has a slow release novacaine that reduces pain for days. Well he said days, but I started getting twinges last night, but still way less than I usually get after spending that much time on my feet.

And I also got the utilities paid and a massage from my favorite massage tech, the one that’s sweet on me and had to go back to China for a while for some reason but she’s back in the US now. She does a number on my neck and makes it feel really good for the whole day/evening. Also she shared some Chinese salty snacks from her private stash that you can’t get in the US because they don’t keep well, which is also why she was sharing because they either had to be eaten or thrown away soon. And like I wrote she’s kinda sweet on me. But to be fair all the techs at Angel Massage are good to excellent, I have never had a bad tech, just that some are better than others and Sophie is one of the best.

Also I’m out of diet/sugar free soft drinks and this morning my blood sugars were through the roof high, a 200 reading on my meter which usually reads a touch high but not this high. Seriously, on my meter the high range of normal is 105 where the lab test reading for the high end is 100. And the reason I’m out of sugar-free/diet drinks is my local grocery is out of them in the store brand which is less than half the price of the national brands, $1.29 a 2-liter bottle regular price compared to $2.50- $3.00 for the national brands. So, I’m at an impasse here, either my health or my wallet takes the hit, and TBH my health takes a hit if I get the HFC drinks or don’t drink anything, because I need to flood my kidneys to prevent stones and the local water is so hard I get the stones anyway almost like drinking milk for hydration. Seriously, we have some very hard water here.

Happy Pi day

I ordered a delivery from a local bakery via DoorDash and got slices of Lemon Icebox Pie from Gran’s Kitchen.

Also, sorry about going silent on y’all, but I just didn’t have anything to say worth making a blog post about.

I have a unique problem

Well not 100% unique to me but rare enough that not many people have the same problem.

I’m sure if you read this blog for a while you know I’m a creative person and I like to make things. On another level I need to make things. It’s like something inside me needs to get out, or as I told my therapist 40 years ago (more or less) finishing writing something gives me the same feeling as a large bowel movement. It’s literally something I need to get out.

Well I’m having another creative urge that needs to get filled (or emptied), only I don’t have the spoons or the finances to get it done. It’s one of those things that I need 4 things to happen at the same time for it to work. And those 4 things seldom happen at the same time. I need the money to buy raw stock, I need the inspiration to do the thing, I need my hands to work to do the thing, and I need the energy (spoons) to do the thing. The most critical parts are inspiration and spoons with spoons being the most important. I can stockpile parts and raw stock, if I’m inspired I can force my hands to work if I have the energy to do it. If I have the energy I can force the inspiration, or basically stockpile inspiration to use when I have the energy. Inspiration is easier to come by than spoons. Or basically, spoons make inspiration, which combined with raw stock and parts and working hands makes [$THING]. Or to some extent inspiration is almost always there, and when there are enough spoons and parts and raw stock [$THING] comes out. And that’s the flowchart for my creative process these days.

Have you flowcharted your creative process? Is it similar to mine or wildly different? Enquiring minds want to know. Leave a comment.

Still thinking, but it’s safe to come out now

Now I’m not talking about your social situation and coming out, I can’t say one way or the other if you’re coming out in that way. I’m just saying that nothing I have been thinking about is hazardous to humans. That has not always been the case, particularly when I was contemplating nuclear pipe bombs (yes those are A Thing), but my current line of thought has been only a hazard to my health and well-being.

One of the things I have been thinking about is cooking, and how I can manage it with my physical and mental health challenges. My knife skills have deteriorated to the point that chopping veggies is a hazard to (my) life and limb. The other problem I’m having with cooking is keeping up mentally with the workflow of a meal, and also just, doing the cooking. I know I want to cook, I know I want to eat and I want to give my wife food so she can eat. It’s just that doing things I want and need to do that have too many steps between the concept of wanting something, and actually having something I want, something gets short-circuited along the way, particularly if it involves skills I either never acquired, or lost via brain damage or lack of use or both. An example of too many steps is making soup. I can heat the soup in a can where you open the can, dump the contents in a pan and heat on the stove, just about every day. The kind where you have to add a can of water or milk before heating is a most times but never every time situation. There are days when my brain just shuts down at the extra step of adding a can of water to the pan and figuratively runs around screaming inside my skull with its figurative hair on fire. Other days no problem, but the actual difficulty is I never know what kind of day it’s going to be before I start trying to do things.

Another example is building the Mini or Micro Sprint-T. I never know if my hands are going to work, or if my brain is going to work, and I kinda need them both online when I try any of the things I need to do to build either one, the Mini or the Micro. No not kinda, I most definitely need them both online to not destroy things or injure myself.

Another example familiar to my readers is the very blog you are reading at this moment. Back in the first decade of this century, once I had a working place to post with software that didn’t lock up on me when the character count on a post got too high or I had too many links (which was actually the big problem even when I didn’t have MySpace censoring my posts) I would post at least once a day every day. Now even when I have a topic, I may not be able to write anything because I can’t navigate the workflow of writing, my mind just doesn’t want to go there.

To get back to the original topic, cooking. I need to every day. Some days I can’t. Then I have to figure out how everybody needs to get fed when I can’t cook.

This should be a real thing…

I’m archive binging Questionable Content again, and I don’t remember this comic from 2018.Having stoned people in soft focus would make dealing with them so much easier.

And searching the tags for this post reminded me about when I was in “Least I Could Do” around the same date as the comic. I’m sure y’all remember that one from the week after Valentine’s Day 2018. I was worried about the prostitute character we hadn’t seen in-comic for a few years, and this was her sign-off from the comic.

What I’ve been working on to give me something to write about

In a nutshell I have been making a Micro Sprint-T from a Hot Wheels T-bucket. I’m modifying a set of Gasser wheels and tires to model the ones used on the A-Mod SCCA SOLO-2 version of the car, which is basically the widest set of slicks that will still work for the weight of the car. I remembered to take pictures as I was working this time, so I have something to show for the work until I get the $$ and spoons to make something else. That’s not something that happens much nowadays, having both at the same time.

Money that isn’t already spent does not happen very often around here, like almost never. And having spoons to do something that isn’t taking care of Mrs. the Poet or myself is also something that doesn’t happen very often, and is getting less frequent over time.

Anywho what I did was buy 2 sets of Gasser Wheels and tires to get 4 tires of close to the right size with 4 wheels of the correct style, then buff the treads off the tires to get realistic-looking slicks. I discovered that each tire needs a new emery board and about 4 hours to complete after spending more than 14 hours on the first tire with a used emery board and still not getting it done.

This is done, more or less. This took about 4 hours and destroyed a brand-new emery board.

The left tire is almost done after many hours of work and the right tire is getting there after the same amount of work with a used emery board and nail buff. I will use the nail buff to finish the other tires but it’s pretty useless for removing the majority of the tread depth. In scale those treads started about 2″ tall and are about ¹/₂” tall on the left tire now. They’re a little taller on the right tire.

The left tire is unmodified, the right tire has about 3 hours of work with a fresh emery board.

I’ll buff the rest of the tread off with a nail buff to get a perfect “used slick” appearance. Basically showing the various stages of completion from raw “as received” to waiting the final buff.

I thought you should see close to what I envisioned for the wheels on all the versions. I actually wanted oval port Ansens, but those aren’t made any more. These are close enough for ¹/₆₄ scale.

It has been a while, and I had a bicycle dream last night

OK why I was gone for a while, as you may have heard it got stupid cold here in N TX last week and over the weekend, like in the teens for highs and down into the high single digits for lows (official low was 10°F, but colder here in the suburbs). My computer desk is next to a window, that leaks air, and sitting down and writing was a no-go. I had to read my web comics on my phone because it was too cold to get out from under the blankets and even that was hard because my hands got painfully cold. I wore sweat pants and a long-sleeve T to bed because I ran out of blankets. Basically all I got out of bed for was cooking and eating, and trips to the bathroom to use the toilet. The bathroom was the warmest room in the house because it didn’t have any outside walls or windows and it did have heat. The heat pump ran basically over 48 hours straight because of the crappy windows we have leaking cold air into the house. It was below freezing here about 60 hours straight, an hour or two longer than at the official recording station over in Dallas at Love Field airport which is surrounded by the urban heat island.

I had some strange dreams about riding an upwrong bike in the cold with a group and one ride I remember was a 300km ride in the cold to qualify for a RUSA medal for riding 300 km or more with a high temp less than 1°C. I don’t remember what the name of the medal was, something like “Ice Butt” and I don’t know if that was a real medal or just something I dreamed about. Anyway, it was a long dream and people’s clothes kept changing colors and I don’t know if they were shedding and adding layers or if random dream coloring effects because dream logic, but it was interesting to dream about. I think I was dreaming about it because of the cold, but it was nice to dream about bike riding again. Even if it was on the wrong kind of bike. Back when I could still get on a bike I rode recumbent and crank forward bikes exclusively. Now if I want to ride I need to get a tadpole trike that I can just back up to and clip in and ride. I guess I really miss riding.

Anywho, in case you didn’t hear we set 2 new record lows for the dates, one 11°F and the other 10°F. It was colder here in the suburbs, but that didn’t count because we are miles away from the official recording station, and I had strange dreams because of the cold. I’ll catch you later.