Category: Musings

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This Just In!

An article appearing in Energies declares that 1 Billion people will die due to climate change over the next 100 years!

The Article is here

Doom on you all!

The article may well be correct. There’s a lot of verbiage that seems to be future casting based on previous articles and publications.

Given the human reproductive decline in China, Russia, Japan, The United States, and other westernized countries. The fear mongering may be a moot point.

Will 1 Billion people die in addition to those never being born or is that figure the sum total?

100 years is a long time. Just look at what’s happened in the past 70 years. Look at the accelerations in technology. It was entirely likely that humans would apply their technological prowess and found solutions…

I say WAS with purpose.

I’ve run across some articles and been sent other articles that lead me to believe scientific rigor and the search for truth and understanding of the universe around us has become corrupted by dogma.

Here is an article describing one scholar’s approach to getting funding and maintaining his job in academia. This article is about climate change too, and the author describes omitting information to get the piece published in a peer reviewed journal. The author even says this isn’t science anymore.

Apparently, your article must reflect the current dogma.
You mustn’t ask or answer questions that run counter to prevailing dogma.

We’ve seen this in all aspects of scientific inquiry. In recent years this protective approach to prevailing dogma has been particularly focused in the areas of Climate Change, and Medicine.

What questions may you not ask? What facts must you not present? If you think about it you can easily extrapolate the chilling effect this attitude will have on scientific inquiry.

The same drivers exist in all scientific publications to a greater or lessor extent. This is driven in part due to funding and in part due to fettering brilliant minds with illogic in the name of political correctness.

We’ve seen this before…

Galileo Galilei, arguably the father of modern science, was put on trial by the church because he discovered that the Earth and all the planets revolved around the Sun. Church dogma placed Earth at the center of the universe. Galileo was eventually forced to recant his belief and discovery. He was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life.

Ringing any bells???

Let me help, MDs being stripped of their licenses to practice medicine because they spoke about and tried alternate treatments to COVID? Their unforgivable SIN was that those treatments worked!

Here’s an example that I’ve still not gotten an answer about.

In Biology there’s a classification system for all life on the planet. This system seeks to provide order, and some information about the evolutionary pathway of all organisms.

With the advent of modern DNA studies and sequencing, this classification system has undergone some revisions. We’ve found that certain organisms are not related as closely to others as their appearance, and niche in the ecosystem would have suggested.

These discoveries have caused some organisms to be relocated from one branch to another branch of the classification system.

Many organisms are further sub-classified based on their color, habits, and evolutionary adaptations.

A notable exception is an animal called Human.

Why? Why are we special? Clearly all humans derive from the same basic body plan. So do Gorillas, and Chimpanzees. All humans function pretty much the same ways, our reproductive habits are the same. There are clear genetic differences otherwise we’d all look the same, but we don’t . There are diseases which afflict certain variations of humans and not others. Surely, these obvious core differences deserve the same scientific rigor. However human sub-classification stops at Homo sapiens sapiens which is redundant.

This is nothing less than scientific rigor stopping, because to go further would imply racism. Politically and societally racism is bad and therefore must never be reenforced in any way. So, the rigor and truth of scientific inquiry gets tossed right out the window.

You’d think there would be at least 6 subspecies of Human based on the occupied continents and variations that the environment of each continent induced.

You sure have to declare your subspecies on government forms and job applications! So apparently, racism is perfectly fine if it provides a financial advantage.

I cite the Human issue because it’s to my mind one of the most glaring. If we can’t look at hard truths bravely and clear eyed we will inevitably miss critical information that would lead us in new directions.

It appears that’s where we are as a species.

We got really smart, but we peaked probably in the mid ’90s. Instead of continuing to face uncomfortable truths we closed our eyes and put our fingers in our ears.

Look at our youth, Safe Spaces? Censoring Classical Literature? Math is Racist? How can we move forward if those who are supposed to create new advances can’t handle conflict, dare to dream, or being wrong?

Science… Especially Science, is about trying and failing. One need only look at the history of flight.

How many of those early inventors failed again and again, got up and dusted themselves off and tried again?

Even the Wright Brothers didn’t get it right on the first try.

Think what life would be like if those pioneers of flight had failed, gotten their feelings hurt and ran to their safe spaces, never to try again.

We’d be flying, but with balloons and blimps. The Montgolfier brothers, Joseph and Étienne achieved human flight with a hot air balloon in 1783. The pilot of the ballon was Pilâtre de Rozier.

120 years, from a hot air balloon to powered fixed wing flight.

66 years later we have 747 passenger planes and in the same year landed on the moon.

That’s the power of unfettered thinking. That’s what happens when you’re free to speak, to question, and to explore the edges of the unknown. That’s what happens when the truth of science is seen and not feared or discounted because it doesn’t fit some arbitrary world view.

747-8 In-flight Artwork K64146

And yes… because I know these things, that is why I hate people like Dr. Fauci, and the purveyors of dogma around Climate and Medicine.

Establishment scientists who silence truth are no better than the church in Galileo’s time.

They retard human advancement and the dim the human spirit. They dull brilliant minds by making scientists and amateurs alike, afraid to speak or discover.

We know where this leads too. If everything must be iterative and done the same as we’ve always done it due to dogma, then stagnation isn’t far off.

Give it a hundred years and our Doctors will be dancing around us casting out evil spirits.

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Hmmm… That’s interesting and perhaps problematic.

Years ago, after our house burned and losing our substantial DVD/BluRay & CD / Vinyl collection we decided that we didn’t want to suffer that kind of loss again. There are still CDs and DVDs that we hadn’t replaced because they’ve been out of print (so to speak) for years.

As an alternative, you could perhaps back up a DVD by making a copy and storing the original someplace else. BUT YOU COULDN’T… The anti piracy encoding made that an imperfect solution.

Oh sure, you could buy programs that would “Crack the encryption” those programs would even mostly work but the image quality they produced was hit or miss. Mostly miss!

Why settle for a crappy dvd copy that was barely 480 with a mono sound track, when you had a 1080p or 4k Television and slamming surround sound?

In other words, the solution didn’t work well enough to be called a solution. Oh and that “Cracker” program you purchased… Money right in the pocket of some shitty hacker who’d then happily sell your name and credit card number to the highest bidder.

You could perhaps move a “bit for bit” disk image to network attached storage, some of the storage devices even had applications specifically for the purpose. That solution was slow and often disrupted by the anti piracy shit built into the DVD. You’d get the whole movie, but if you played it back from the network storage you’d find the chapters were all scrambled.

So our choice was to get high speed internet and we’d stream movies or TV shows from a service like Apple, Amazon, Netflix, or Hulu. You could “Buy” movies on Apple, Amazon, or UltraViolet. Supposedly, the movies you purchased would be in your personal library forever (OR until the terms and conditions changed…)

UltraViolet was a really terrible service that worked on every device except the 65″ TV in the living room. To use that nice panel, I needed to connect a computer to it, or some other device. Okay, fine for me. The other half had a bit of a problem with complex technology and keeping track of HDMI inputs, and then routing the audio through the sound system or the TV speakers etc, etc, etc.

He could play Flight of the Bumblebee, Mozart’s Requiem Mass, or Wagner’s Ring Cycle, flawlessly on several different instruments, but the remote control for watching a movie or TV show? There were too many buttons to remember.

Go Figure!

I’d come home from work after the house rebuild and find him reading a book in front of a large screen displaying “No Signal”. Sometimes there would be FM static whispering through the surround sound system, because he’d switched to the radio but couldn’t find a station in range.

I felt responsible, terrible, and guilty. I knew that all he wanted to do was watch some opera performance, or listen to a piece of music that I probably wouldn’t like while I wasn’t home. (I hate Opera only slightly less than I hate Rap.) Oh and Shostakovich… Right the hell out of here! If I happened to be a spy captured by Russians during the Cold War… 3 Hours of Shostakovich and I’d have told the Russians our launch codes and given them the President’s Mistress address and phone number!

He knew that. He liked Shostakovich pieces. So he’d enjoy those pieces when I wasn’t around. Much the same as me enjoying Nine Inch Nails, Linkin Park, and Korn. He enjoyed those groups just as much as I enjoyed Shostakovich. So I listened to those groups on the way to work in the car, or at home when he was off playing church services or a gig.

Honestly… I think the problem was complexity added by the the sound system. When you added the TV, and a connection device to the internal network. Then having to choose which service you wanted to stream from, the Network Storage, or the internet, and which TV you wanted to watch the video on, did you want stereo, or surround sound? On and On, just to play a show or movie.

Writing it just now, and I knew it then, it was a lot of work. It’s a hell of a lot easier to plunk a DVD in a tray or slot and press “play”.

Although as I wrote that, I couldn’t help but think of trying to find a specific item on the internet these days. You’ll get a page or two of loosely related items but not the item, then when you click on the item that most closely approximates what you were looking for, you’ll get annoying cookie notification shit, (Weren’t cookies going away????) Then at least one full screen pop up asking for your email address in exchange for some “Special” discount, then another pop up asking if you need help from a chatbot and all the while, you still haven’t been able to see if the item is what you wanted, or read its description or price.

It’s like the damn gas pumps! No, I don’t want a car wash. No, I don’t want to join your club. Yes, I want a receipt. No, I don’t want a discount on beef jerky inside. Please! I just want fucking GAS!

The ONE question aside from wanting a receipt I’m going to answer “Yes” to, is “Do you want me to turn off the screaming advertising screen?”

Unfortunately, that question is never asked. I suppose that’s why my blood pressure is so dang low when I”m driving across country. I take a lot of back roads, and in those little country towns… A Gas Pump is just a Gas Pump…

Apparently my other half wasn’t the only person who had trouble. Most modern surround systems, and TVs are smart enough that with the right cables, all you have to turn on is the actual device you want to use. The system if properly configured, will see an HDMI input and make certain assumptions about it. Video Game – Connect TV and surround system turn on TV. CD player – Sound system only.

The cool thing is that you don’t have to fiddle with 5 different remote controls (All of which work differently. Some of which have volume controls that do nothing). All you have to do is turn on one device.

I’d been planning to update our equipment to the new standards. I was going to make it a Christmas present to us both this year. I don’t think I’ll be doing that now. He’s gone and I can reconfigure what I have to work until I decide what’s next in my life. But there is a temptation to update everything anyway… It all can be put in moving boxes, right?

In an effort to make things as simple as possible, over the years, I’d made a couple of decisions. Those decisions may come back to haunt me now.

We settled on a single streaming device. We went with the Apple TV in part because this is an Apple household. No, not in the religious sense.

For decades Apple devices, while expensive, worked as advertised, and had long term support. Non Apple devices… Not so much. “Blackberry? Paging Blackberry… Blackberry?” ZUME? PalmPilot? Compaq iPaq? Compaq Computers? The list goes on and is quite long!

This is not to say that Apple didn’t lay some eggs in their time, but Apple supported these devices for a time after they stopped selling them. My Newton Messagepad was a nifty device, ahead of its time, and woefully misunderstood by the blockheads in the media who sealed its demise with horrific articles damning something they didn’t understand, in favor of the Palm Pilot.

Apple though, is getting long in the tooth. They’re beginning to take on the lassie faire attitude that defined Non Apple corporations for years.

That attitude is, “The customer will buy it even if “it” doesn’t quite work.” We’re seeing this in Apple Software, and to some extent, in their hardware. The butterfly keyboard issue is only the latest example of Apple failing to pay attention to quality indicators.

With the Apple TV, the other half could turn on one device, and then have a menu that allowed him to pick what he wanted to see or hear. When we added the HomePod speakers things got a lot simpler One button, one remote. Then it was just a matter of making sure that all the music was available in the cloud. The same was true of Television shows and Movies.

Soon our collection of movies and music was all in iTunes. If the other half had a problem with the system, I could often walk him through corrective steps or just log on to the iCloud account to figure out what was wrong. Simplicity reigned, and I no longer came home to a screen displaying “No Signal”

In hindsight, our collection being completely in iTunes may not have been the best idea. We have a lot of movies. We also tended to buy TV series that we liked. The number of movies would be a problem if they had to be physically stored. They might even be a problem if I were to download each one to the network storage. I could always increase the network storage size, or add bookshelves.

The Apple Movies all have encryption. They can be played from network storage with a computer as long as the computer can verify with the internet that you have the rights to play the video. The Apple TV flat out refuses to see the movies exist on local network storage. Since the purpose was to have the movies on the big screen I haven’t kept up with downloading them since the AppleTV wouldn’t play them from downloads anyway.

One concern I have is that movies are being changed to accommodate the Woke overly sensitive crowd. There’s a bigger problem with some of the TV series I’ve purchased over the years. A current example is the series Archer.

This morning I happened to be looking at purchasing the season pass for season 14 of the show. I noticed with some surprise that seasons 1-8 were available for purchase, as was season 14. What happened to seasons 9 through 13?

I immediately checked my library and found that seasons 9-13 were still available because I’d already purchased them. This begs the question, why is there a gap at all? Seasons 3-5 of The Boys from Amazon are not available on iTunes. I purchased Seasons 1 & 2, on iTunes thinking that I’d be able to complete the series in time.

That seems questionable now. The Expanse is a series that I own except the last two seasons. I suppose I should purchase those before they’re unavailable. I also just checked on “Strike Back” and found that ONLY the two seasons I own are available, the remaining 5 or 6 seasons are completely missing. Just a few months ago all the seasons were available, they were expensive, but available. I suspect I could get a boxed set at Best Buy come Christmas time.

This makes me wonder if digital collections are worth it. If I can’t have a guarantee that I’ll be able to purchase all of a series or have the option to purchase a digital un-woke version of Gone with the Wind, or Looney Tunes then perhaps I need to go back to physical copies.

I still can’t purchase Young Frankenstein on iTunes. But I was able to get a copy of Blazing Saddles.

Then there’s the issue of some of the albums that I’ve had in my collection disappearing and not being available for re-download. Thankfully I have a friend that has a massive collection of music and If I really need to have one of those albums, I have no issues asking him for a high quality copy.

My attitude about this is simple. If I paid for the damn album in digital format and lost the copy of that album due to a drive failure I should be able to redownload it. If you’re not going to let me do that, then my other option is to “Pirate” a copy for my own use.

I have no desire to start selling pirated copies of my music or videos, I just want to the able to play them hassle free.

Unfortunately, I think that ability is going to require buying physical copies of everything again. I don’t look forward to repurchasing DVDs or CDs to recreate my library again. To my way of thinking I shouldn’t have to. Then again, I don’t think like everyone else.

If I were to commit to going all physical copies of everything again… It would be a great excuse to do a complete sound system/entertainment system refresh. That would give a friend and I a great shopping day in the audiophile stores he haunts. I might even go so far as to buy a turntable and get back to vinyl.

I’m not sure I want to go with tubes in an amp. I know my friend will strongly suggest that I do. I think I’d rather put the bulk of cash in really fine speakers.

We’ll see…

In the mean time, I’m going to experiment with some DRM removal software to see if I can download and save my collection to my Network Storage and avoid replacement altogether.

It’s interesting, I think we’re all going to be looking at doing things the “Old Way” because the “New Way” has become so corrupted. I can think of a couple of recordings of live shows from comedians I owned. Those shows / recordings would never pass the censorship the “Woke” crowd seeks to impose.

The Newest Call of Duty game is going to be live censoring any trash talking between players. That’s half the fun! When I played COD with my coworkers, we called each other names all the time over the communication channels. Where else do you get to call your boss a “dumb ass” to his face and have everyone laugh? But along comes the WOKE, they’re going to use an AI to censor “Hate or hurtful speech” in online gaming, and the AI will flush your sorry ass from the game if it doesn’t like what you say.

I’m not sure I’m willing to pony up $70 to have an AI tell me I can’t trash talk my friends during a game. I really enjoyed the creative swearing and trash talk directed at me when I screwed up. Then again, I was playing with retired guys from the Navy, Army, and Marines.

I wonder how the gaming community will respond? If no-one buys the new game, and only plays the old non-AI enhanced versions do you think they’ll get the message?

That’s fantasy! The young kids will keep the games alive and they’ll accept censorship in all its forms because they don’t know any better. Stalin said something about educating the children… I can’t remember offhand the exact saying.

I’m heading to Best Buy later today, maybe I’ll check out the selection of physical copies of music and games.

Have a great one!

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Ahh Bread and Circuses!

What a stupid mess!

I’m so sick of Trump, and of the Democrats & Republicans.

I weep for the state of justice in this country and fully expect, any time now, for assassination to become the de facto method used to settle election irregularities.

One thing that the Democrats can be very proud of, is they’ve silenced everyone with fear and law fare.

Remember, “If you see something, Say something.” Now that the IRS whistleblowers are looking at possible arrest and criminal charges BECAUSE they blew the whistle on the Hunter Biden investigation. It pretty much means that no more whistleblowers will come forward.

I guess the phrase now is “See Something, Say NOTHING!”

In other words, the corruption will be allowed to grow and will do so without opposition.

Lawyers who are in many cases useless, will now be even MORE useless because they’ll be afraid of the government using RICO statues and insurrection charges.

We’re going backwards. With just a few more iterations of corrupt law fare. We won’t have a presidential election. We’ll have WarLords being “Elected” via a Thunderdome process.

That would be interesting… No debates, just a fight to the death to determine who leads. Go ahead, laugh. It sounds outlandish, but lately the most outlandish theories often turn out to happen.

Remember when Ivermectin was a dangerous Horse Dewormer? (That assertion was an outright LIE!) Well guess what? Ivermectin is back in the WHO list of wonder medications for humans, and there’s also a recent peer reviewed study that says flat out Ivermectin is also an effective treatment for COVID.

As recently as 1 year ago saying something like the paragraph above would be shouted down as a DANGEROUS CONSPIRACY THEORY. I’d have been banned from Twitter & Facebook. I’d have been canceled and written off as a lunatic nut job.

Well bucko what are you going to say now? Still going to cancel me? Do you still feel the need to silence the freaking truth? A truth I might add that a very few courageous Doctors fought to bring to the public’s attention during the pandemic. A truth that in some cases cost them their careers?

Where is the outrage about that? When will we see conspirators in THIS LIE, appearing for booking at jails?

Oh and you jackasses in Sacramento… I haven’t forgotten that you were trying to pass laws that would strip a Doctor of their license to practice medicine if they had the temerity to speak out against the politically controlled narrative. You know, if they spoke about real science instead of manufactured bullshit designed to make a few people extremely rich, while terrorizing the general population.

Doctors, don’t think I’m defending you in general. I have a bone to pick with a bunch of doctors at a particular hospital. But those bastards and their incompetence are protected by law.

It’s another one of those situations where Right and The Law do not, and never will intersect.

I’ll never trust a doctor again. I’m even of half a mind to never let someone put me under a general anesthetic again. I want to be able to check the surgeons work. Just a reminder, if a doctor can not explain their diagnosis, and proposed course of treatment, in plain simple English, find another doctor! Because the SOB you’re dealing with, buries his mistakes, probably often.

I’m jumping around because the circus going on Georgia is part of the same bullshit. It’s the same show trial as the Jan 6th committee, the same as the impeachments, the same as Hunter Biden’s laptop is Russian disinformation, the COVID vaccination will prevent you from getting COVID… Oh wait, the COVID vaccination will make COVID less severe, Oh wait… It’s the same circus that had President Biden threatening the American people with “get a vaccination OR ELSE! “

I’ve had enough of this endless stream of runny bullshit. I know that I’m not alone in having reached my maximum.

Much as I hate to think of voting anymore in California. I’m so angry and disgusted I’d vote for a clone of Hitler at this point.

The thing about all this bread and circus shit is that I am personally embarrassed for my country. This is humiliating on the world stage and all these shitty politicians have no shame whatsoever. They should! I’d be all for bringing back Stocks in the public square.

Unfortunately I don’t think there’s enough rotten fruits and vegetables to pelt our feckless politicians, and lifelong bureaucrats.

I’m tired of TV and Movies with few exceptions. I think I’ll get back into video gaming. At least the puzzles and stories are entertaining and mentally stimulating. Maybe I’ll pick up a PS5 bundle I saw at Costco. It’s pricy but all the game consoles are pricy. I think the Costco bundle includes some additional and useful items.

How weird is that? I’m in my 60s and I’ve been reading a lot more, trying to avoid the news, not too interested in TV or current movies. Hulu is useful for me to sample movies and TV, I usually don’t make it though more than 15 mins of anything new. Here I am, contemplating a new game console. My Xbox 360 is pretty tired and the games I’ve enjoyed most on Xbox are from independent studios who also produce their games for PlayStation. The only Xbox game I’ll miss is Halo.

There is an advantage in the PlayStation. It’s Apple TV streaming capable, has a BluRay drive and therefore could serve as an “All In one” solution if I end up in an apartment for a while. I’ll have to do something interesting for a sound system. But that’s a bridge I’ll burn when I get there.

I’m still batting the issue around.

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I was going to start this with the old…

… This is your brain on drugs photo. If you’re old enough, you’d remember the eggs in the frying pan.

As I was looking for an easy image to pull, (because I don’t feel like fried eggs for breakfast,) I ran across a lot of images of brains, and brain related memes.

Ironically more than a few of those “informative” images, were suspect or had typos.

This one for example, has both concerns. I think the average human brain is perhaps 1/3 larger than the image asserts and there’s the old To, Too, Two, bugaboo. I’m going to ignore capitalization and sentence structure.

According to a quick internet search, (we all know how accurate that’s likely to be,) The average human brain weighs in, at about 3 lbs. It has a volume of 1260 cm3. Another interesting thing to note is that the human brain contains approximately 40% fat.

I suppose that means I shouldn’t have been offended when someone called me a fathead.

All of this about brains started because as I’ve moved through the grieving process, I’ve noticed things that disturb the hell out of me. I can’t remember SHIT! I write stuff down, or I put it into my phone and then forget to check my list.

I didn’t used to have this problem. I remembered everything, and found the act of writing things down to be a waste of time because I remembered everything I needed to do.

Now, I can’t stay focused, or on task. Everything is monumentally difficult, even the things I like doing. I’ve also noticed that I feel like I’ve lost myself, and am lost. I don’t “Feel” like myself right now. I’m easily bored and far too easily annoyed by the simplest of things.

People have said that this will pass. I can feel the truth of that statement. Simultaneously, I sense another truth as well. The hurt will diminish, (and has,) but I will never be the same person I was. I will be irrevocably changed. Things that I used to enjoy, I may leave behind because those things remind me of who I was with my other half, and it is too painful.

It’s in your other half’s absence that you are confronted with constant reminders of how much you were loved. You also have to confront how much you took that love and care for granted. There’s an element of guilt in that last bit. I don’t think guilt is the right emotion because if the roles were reversed, the feelings would be the same.

Moving on is hard. I haven’t done as good a job at it as I thought I would. I feel ashamed about that. I’ve been told not to beat myself up over it. I try not to, but I still feel ashamed.

I thought I was prepared. I thought it would be a quick searing pain and then it would be done. I was wrong. The pain lingers on. I think that’s a lyric from Pink Floyd’s The Wall. I don’t remember the exact track.

I understand now why many societies have a minimum period for the grieving process. None of these societies have the process written in stone but many have social constructs that determine appropriateness of various behavior during this time.

As an intelligent species with millennia of lived experience behind us, various social fabrics have been woven to accommodate and protect those of us wounded by loss. Make no mistake, it’s a gaping festering emotional wound. It may be a wound that scars over but is always felt. My thinking along these lines allowed me to feel a connectedness that is very human, and was strangely comforting.

July and August have been very hard months for me. I’ve burned a lot of energy trying to process why. His birthday, my Birthday, my Father’s Birthday, the anniversary of my Father’s death, this was typically the time that my other half and I would do things together because he was off work. Which meant he wasn’t running from thing to thing 7 days a week.

In years past we’d take short trips, go to museums, wine tasting, or if it was really hot, we’d content ourselves to walk the dog or dogs here in the mountains where it was cool and beautiful.

In really good years, I’d have sucked enough cock and kissed enough ass at my employer that I could actually take my paltry week of vacation. Most of the time though, “Business Needs” prevented me having anything but weekends off. (Business needs usually meant that the boss was taking 3 weeks off in Cancun with his family or mistress and fuck everyone else!)

School would have started by now and my other half would be getting into the swing of the school year plus preparing for the holiday services at the church and temple.

This hit me like a ton of bricks yesterday while I was making a meatloaf. Laugh if you wish, it is funny. I think it’s the mundane nature of what I was doing.

For a few minutes I forgot he was gone. I looked at the clock on the stove and thought, “I’ll get this cooked and walk the dog before he gets home then make a nice summer salad and sweet corn for dinner, the weather is nice enough that we could perhaps eat on the deck tonight,”

Then I saw his car in the driveway where I’d parked it, and it all crashed in on me again, he’s gone and he’s not coming back.

I think the dog is getting tired of comforting me…

Perhaps not, he doesn’t seem to care as long I cuddle him back. Then he does the only thing he knows as a “Fixes Everything,” he’ll keep bringing me balls until I pick one to throw for him. Apparently fetching a ball is the puppy cure-all that ails you.

It actually works. I think it’s his tenacity, he’ll bring each ball in, drop it at my feet or in my lap and wait for a response. The response he’s looking for is a smile, or for me to grab the ball. At that point his tail starts wagging and he heads for the door. All is well again…

The point of this rambling train of thought is;
Life is Change
Change is sometimes painful
Love is beautiful, terrible, painful, and joyous. Above all, those we love and who love us back are never forgotten, because they’ve literally gotten into our head.
The pain we feel when grieving is real, and I think caused by suddenly finding familiar pathways in our heads non-functional.

Hell, it could even be endorphin withdrawal. When we see a loved one we get a hit and when we don’t see them anymore we have to go cold turkey.

There are probably thousands of too tightly wrapped Phds, MDs, and whatever else the educational system has turned out that will vehemently disagree with my assessment. Go ahead! I never claimed I was an expert, I’d bet however that I’m a damn sight closer to being an expert than any of those so called “Experts” because I’m living through this time, it’s my lived experience. (See what I mean? I’m almost as edgy and easily pissed off as Biden, or my Mom these days.)

I need an endorphin hit. Maybe I’ll go buy myself a birthday present or two. I think I’ll try the built-in method of getting that endorphin hit before I go out and spend money. I suspect however that I’m going to be shopping in the next day or two.

Maybe it’s time for a haircut, a massage, and some time spent caring for myself and saying the hell with responsible behavior (within limits…)

Yeah, I’m working through a lot of shit that I am ill equipped to handle.

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Grooming day!

Oh boy!

Today I get to load up the dog for a trip to the groomer. He’ll be happy I’ll just be tired! The groomer in question likes Jesse and he seems to like her. His grooming appointments are more expensive than mine, and that’s saying something!

Well… if I have a massage As part of my monthly grooming I still have him beat.

I’m not going to know what to do with myself while he’s getting bathed, trimmed, fluffed and made ready for his close up.

Due to distances, this is going to take a huge chunk of the day. 1 hour or so just in transport to and from the appointment. He’ll be indisposed for about 3 hours.

It’s okay, I haven’t been taking him on a monthly basis. Mainly because the cost is prohibitive. I miss being able to take him to local folks who knew him. But the local folks have retired or moved elsewhere and the remaining “Locals” can’t keep an appointment.

The last local person I tried canceled 3 appointments in a row. Jesse and I never met her and I decided that she obviously didn’t want the business. She also was about as expensive as what I’m doing now, going to one of the big box groomers.

Previously, other locals, provided great services at reduced prices because they liked having regular business. We tended to book monthly appointments regular as clockwork. 60.00 for two well behaved dogs versus 80.00 for one.

Candy was the best. She let my retrievers run around, out of the holding cages (on nice days out in her yard,) until after their baths. Then they’d be in the cages for blow drying and out again. Those two retrievers were protective of each other and Candy figured out that working on them was easier if they could hold each other’s paws. They also liked her and she them. My boys knew how to wrap a person around their little fingers.

Jesse is excellent at wrapping people around his fingers, he’s not so good at doing what you’ve asked him to do. He’s getting better about it, every so slowly.

Well it’s time for me to get cleaned up and get this show on the road. I think a nap this afternoon will be in order.

On the plus side, this will mark the second day in a row that I’ve left the neighborhood. That’s a good thing because I’ve gotten to the point that leaving the house is an ordeal. I just hate dealing with people in general.

I like select individuals but the majority of folks… I can’t stand. I didn’t used to have this problem this bad, but isolation during COVID and isolation over the past 7 months has made me really antisocial.

Little excursions seem to help as long as I can avoid asshole drivers. I ran into a gentleman at Costco yesterday that said he’d noticed an increasing rudeness and even had people hit him with their carts as if he wasn’t there, or wasn’t human, or wasn’t worthy of courtesy.

We entered into this conversation right after a lady had run into me for a second time in the same aisle and… well I sort of let her have it.

There are reasons people like me don’t like people in general.

A lot of people have ZERO standards of behavior in public. I can’t educate everyone but I sure as hell don’t have to put up with them.