Summer

The outside temperature got up to about 90°F today. Regardless of what the calendar says, when I have to run the a/c – that’s the beginning of my summer. Today, I ran the a/c for the first time this year. I really prefer to have a window open over running the a/c, but when the inside temperature hits 80° I’m ready to make the switch.

My neighbor Sally called me around noon. She was in an auto accident this morning. She said her car was jolted like it was struck from behind, and then the car started spinning. She said she spun completely around at least three times, striking the median divider on each spin. In morning rush-hour traffic, no one hit her car while it was spinning out of control. A witness to the accident said an 18-wheeler hit her. A trooper came along and gave her a ticket for reckless driving and failing to keep the car under control. The cop wanted her to get into an ambulance and go to a hospital for a checkout. But Sally works in a hospital and that was the last place she wanted to be. So she didn’t go.

A friend who lives up the street got double-pneumonia in February and had to go to the E.R., barely able to breathe. They admitted him and he spent 10 days in the hospital. After he got back home, the medical bills starting arriving. The hospital bill was $89,000 – a problem because he doesn’t have health insurance. He said the doctor bills are still arriving. I know what he’s talking about. A few years ago I was in the hospital without health insurance and the medical bills arrived at my mailbox for weeks, for months. My friend casually mentioned that he’ll probably have to declare bankruptcy. Medical bills are the number one cause of personal bankruptcy.

Not that those last two items have anything to do with summer. But then, it’s not really summer in the northern hemisphere until the summer solstice occurs, and that will happen this year on June 21 at 1:04 A.M. (EDT). Maybe then I’ll write some summer tales.

The Vegan Experiment

I weigh 40 to 50 pounds more than I would like to weigh. You wouldn’t know it by looking at me, because I carry my extra weight on the inside. But I know it’s there.

Yesterday I decided to go on a vegan diet (pronounced vee-gen), because I’ve read so much about how healthy it is, and how Bill Clinton is a vegan, and so many Hollywood celebrities tout its benefits. In case you don’t know, vegans eat a plant-based diet.

So for breakfast, I added almonds to my usual eggs and sausage. Almond nuts are plant-based, the very thing vegans eat. Now that I’m a vegan I plan to eat more almonds.

For lunch, I ate tuna salad on 100% whole wheat bread. 100%!  That has to be vegan. Whole wheat bread is mostly plant-based, plus whatever else they put in bread nowadays. I was going to read the list of ingredients in the bread, but the list was so long, and the print was so tiny, it made my eyes hurt.

For dinner, I ate stir-fry beef over rice. Rice!  Rice is a plant, and there were veggies in the beef stir-fry as well. I hope I’m not overdoing this vegan thing.

Still don’t think I’m a vegan? Well, get this: at some point during the day, I drank a glass of V8 juice. That’s 8 vegetables. 8!  I’m getting good at this vegan thing. It’s a lot easier than I thought it would be.

Also, I drank a glass of milk. Milk comes from cows and cows eat grass. The way I see it, milk is basically plant-based.

That was yesterday. This morning I weighed myself and was dismayed to see I haven’t lost any weight. I had such high hopes for the vegan diet, but now I see it’s just another over-hyped fad.

Now I have to decide which fad diet to try tomorrow. I hope that, whatever it is, it works better than this vegan thing.

This Is How Monday Began

It is o-dark-hundred as I lie in bed slumbering and dreaming. I dream a bully is threatening my brothers. In real life I don’t have brothers. Well, there’s the one, but he does his best to pretend I don’t exist, so I’m not sure he counts. But in my dream I’m trying to defend my dream-brothers so I haul off and kick the bully as hard as I can. Back in real life, my sleeping body mimics my dream body, and I kick out with my right leg just as hard as I can. Unfortunately, a cast-iron, hot-water radiator a foot from my bed stops my foot. My second toe, the one next to my big toe, bears the brunt of the encounter. I am awake instantly. My toe hurts like hell. I’m afraid to even look at it. Hours later it still hurts, and it hurts even worse when I walk. Maybe it’s broken.

This isn’t the first time I’ve hurt myself while dreaming, nor is it the first time I’ve blogged about hurting myself while dreaming. Quoting a blog I posted last December 24:

“In the wee hours of Christmas Eve, I lie in bed, dreaming. In my dream I reach up with my right arm to grasp something. The situation is dire, lives are in danger, and I almost jump off the ground as I reach up over my head. At the same time, my actual right arm mimics my dream arm and my hand hits the headboard forcefully enough to awaken me.”

It’s probably just as well I sleep alone. I hope my sleep-punching and sleep-kicking don’t progress to sleep-driving. “Your Honor, I dreamed I was driving on the Interstate highway when suddenly I woke up and …” That would be bad.

About 10:30 AM I decide to drive to the grocery store. As I’m headed to the door my cell phone rings. It’s a female friend and we have just begun talking when “beep beep beep”, the signal drops out. That happens often when I use my phone inside my house. I can’t call her back because she’s calling from a PBX so the number appearing on my phone isn’t her number. In fact, she doesn’t have a number. I have to wait for her to call me back. A few minutes later my phone tells me I have a voicemail message. The phone never rang; the call went straight to voicemail, and that happens much too often. I play the message: it is my friend, the one my phone just dropped, and she says, “Don’t ever hang up in my face again.” That’s it. End of message.

I’m still intent on going to the store, so I go out to my garage, get in my Jeep, and begin backing out. Something feels wrong. It feels like the parking brake is on. I check: the parking brake is off. Then it hits me. Flat tire. I get out and walk around the car. Sure enough, the right front tire is totally flat. '”How is totally flat different from flat?” you ask. If you let the air out of a tire, it’s flat. If you then drive the car a few feet so that the tire starts coming off the rim, it’s totally flat. But I can’t fix it inside my garage, there’s no room to work, so I back it out.

I scratch my head for a few seconds while my brain formulates a plan. I’ll jack up the Jeep, remove the flat tire, install the spare tire, drive the flat tire to the auto shop two blocks away, get them to fix the flat and install the wheel back on the Jeep, and drive home. Good plan.

I have a hydraulic jack in the garage. I put it under the frame and jack up the front right side of the Jeep. The lug nuts, which were probably tightened with an air-powered impact wrench, are a bear to get off but I manage to do it. I get the wheel off the hub. I get out the spare tire and discover that the Jeep is not jacked high enough to put the inflated spare on the wheel hub. Unfortunately, the jack is at its upper limit. I won’t be driving anywhere. I call the repair shop and ask if they will come to my house and pick up the tire and take it to the shop and fix it. The lady says they can’t. “Insurance reasons,” she says.

“I’m two blocks away. You can’t come by and pick up a tire that is sitting at the curb?”

“Sorry,” she says.

I call my neighbor and ask him if he can take me and my flat tire to the repair shop. He says he can. So we drive to the shop, they fix the tire (nail hole), and we drive back.

But now I can’t get the repaired tire on the wheel hub. It’s the same problem I had with the spare – the Jeep isn’t jacked high enough and the jack is at its limit. But I can’t move the jack to a better location because there’s no wheel on that corner of the vehicle; the jack has to stay where it is.

I have another jack in the Jeep. It’s the jack that came with the Jeep. It’s shaped like a bottle jack but I don’t think it’s hydraulic. I don’t know how it works. It says “Patent Pending” on its side, so I suppose it’s some clever mechanical device. I put it under (I’m going to get technical here) the thingy that the wheel hub is attached to and I insert the long crank-rod and begin cranking the jack up. It lifts the wheel hub higher. I put the repaired tire back on the hub, and I install and tighten the lug nuts. The next step is to lower and remove the bottle jack so that the wheel is on the ground, then lower the hydraulic jack. But: slight problem. I can’t lower the bottle jack because the newly installed tire is in the way. Change of plans: I lower the hydraulic jack, move it to the front of the Jeep, put a piece of 2x4 board between it and the Jeep to give me a wee bit more height, and I jack up the vehicle high enough to remove the bottle jack. Then I lower the hydraulic jack. Two hours after I started, the Jeep has four wheels on the ground once again. Throughout this ordeal, the humidity has been at 90% and I’m sweating like the proverbial pig. I waste no time hitting the shower.

So how was your Monday morning?

Visitor

I was in my living room. The time was just after midday. I kept hearing a loud, insistent “chirp”. For a while I ignored it.

Chirp ... (Long pause) … Chirp … (Long pause) … Chirp.

I looked through my front window thinking a bird was under the awning. There was no bird.

Chirp.

Finally I had enough of the chirping so I went to the front door and opened it. There stood a bird, inside my front porch alcove – almost standing on the doormat, facing the front door and looking up at me, as though he had been expecting me and was now wondering what took me so long to open the door. I got my camera and took his picture through the glass in the storm door.

When the flash went off he became a bit disconcerted, and he turned and walked away to the edge of the alcove. As he turned to take one last look back at me, I snapped another photo through the glass. The flash didn’t bother him, but when I pushed open the door he decided he had visited with me long enough, and he launched himself into the air and flew away. A bird can’t be too careful, you know.

A New Low

Last year I wrote a weather app which I named WeatherX. It sits on my computer screen and tells me the outside temperature, which it gets from the National Weather Service. It can save temperature readings to a log file at five minute intervals and then later it can plot those temperature readings. Below is a screenshot with WeatherX running (red arrow). It’s not much bigger than a screen icon. At this moment it’s telling me the temperature outside is 52°F.

So what did temperatures do overnight? I can open the log file and read the numbers or I can tell WeatherX to plot the readings. Here are the last 12 hours of readings (click image to enlarge).

The temperature hit 36°F overnight. The record for this date was 40°, so it appears we’ve set a new low for this date. I wonder what happened to the apple and peach orchards in the Shenandoah Valley, where temperatures had been expected to go even lower. But heat is on the way. Tomorrow’s high is forecast to be 87°.

The lowest temperature ever recorded in Virginia was -30°F (-34°C) recorded on Jan. 22, 1985, at Mountain Lake (elevation 3,870 feet). The name Mountain Lake refers to a lake in southwest Virginia, as well as to Mountain Lake Lodge, a resort hotel at that lake. Most of the movie Dirty Dancing was filmed at Mountain Lake Lodge and surroundings. (The story was set in New York's Catskill Mountains, but that’s not where the movie was shot.) I recall going to Mountain Lake Lodge one December evening to have dinner with friends. Temperatures were well below freezing and everything at the Lodge was glazed with a thin coat of ice. Trees appeared ghostly and surreal. At one end of the dining room, a fire crackled in a large stone fireplace. The warmth it gave off was comforting. I’ve been to Mountain Lake in summer, too, and walked Magnolia-lined trails around the lake. Ah, but that was another lifetime.

Pomeranian Frustration

C’mon … just give the dog the damn sausage!

Cardio

This was my morning: first, I went to my cardiologist. His nurse, a nice woman from Ghana, administered an EKG. After a few minutes the doctor, a nice man from India, came into the room and said my heart was fine. He counseled me to quit alcohol completely, to eat low fat, low cholesterol foods, to add more fruits and veggies to my diet, and to walk two kilometers per day. Next, I went to the ABC store and bought alcohol. Then I went to Walmart to pick up the fruits and veggies, but got distracted by an array of submarine sandwiches in the deli and ended up bringing home a couple of Italian Hero subs and a little bottle of submarine dressing. Oh, well, I tried. But now it’s time for a nap.