The Workaround

WordPress was acting pretty weird on Chrome, which is my default browser and thus it is my fault. I jumped over to Firefox and hey, it works. Hopefully it works as well for whoever finds this post in their browser.

What’s up? We just got back from a series of small but excruciating trips out of town for Carjo’s medical issues. Nothing life-changing, just “getting old” type things that have to be handled in Minot and Bismarck. These runs shake up our routine though not in a good way. It’s just exhausting travel rather than exhilarating travel. The hope is that we’ll get in more of the later this summer and almost none of the former. In another week or two we’ll make a pilgrimage to a local greenhouse in Minot to begin the spring flower/garden building. And I’ll be working my saggy flabby ass off outside.

It is most definitely spring this week. Temps are finally back to the 60s after today and they’ll stick there. For the second time in a week and a half we have gotten a significant amount of rain. In fact, there is still a little mist out there, pissing off our cats and keeping me from mowing the lawn and moving out the deck furniture. All that changes tomorrow.

The photo above is a recent photo of my beautiful wife and myself. OK, I’m fibbing. That’s just the way I feel when we’re out together. She looks put together and I look like an eighty-year-old with slightly more hair but a bigger gut. We’re knuckling down again on the whole healthy diet thing and it appears to be taking with less pain than I thought it would. Despite having a flu/cold bug for the first time since I quit driving bus, I feel…good. Lighter, more balanced (been doing balances exercise as well).

This is being written on my ancient laptop which is also under a new wellness routine. I’ve done several cleanup tricks on it and despite a rough winter, it is now behaving like its old self, albeit a little slower. Again, another mirror image of its user.

Anyhow, I will close now and get to work on something progressive. I’ll be back and it won’t take three months.

Suddenly Mobile

I’ll get to the photo in a moment. Regular readers may be able to see this one coming.

In early October, I developed a pain in the top of my right foot. After examining it, I found that it was noticeably swollen, especially compared to my left foot. So I went to my wife’s NP and got it looked at. The NP said I had tendonitis and advised that I give it some rest. Foot elevated and stay off the treadmill for a while.

This was followed by a couple other structural old man difficulties. My back spasms returned for a winter visit and really restricted my general ability to do anything. My frozen right shoulder required exercises and wouldn’t you know it, some of those stretches would stir up the rhomboids on my back. Twice I ended up taking ‘roids to get them under control. My hips were perpetually aching, which I think is arthritis. All of this has made me a crabby old man from October until now.

Two weeks ago the foot was still paining me and I went back to the clinic. They took X-rays and found (other than an old fracture that I don’t remember) nothing, just inflammation. I went on a Prednisone regimen that drove me nuts: massive headaches, constant thirst, etc. Did it reduce the inflamed footsie? Oh, hell no. Back still twinging, hips still aching. WTF.

I started icing the foot and quit the ‘roids the Saturday before last. I started icing the foot, holding the ice pack in place with a headband. And…it worked. Right now my foot is just a little sore but I’ll ice it today and again tonight. The hips have ceased paining me. Even the back has gone quiet. Was it a cumulative effect of all the steroids or had these issues just ran their course. I have no idea. But it does give me a certain exhilaration. And I don’t know where to begin now.

I had a long list of things I wanted to get done in the basement this winter. A list that had gone dormant. So I can get back to that now. I’ll start with short sessions on the treadmill, with cold/hot treatment afterwards. I can do my shoulder exercises and even go back to working on my core. By the time the spring weather kicks in (which is May around here), I’ll be able to get back up to my two miles plus. OR I’ll take spins on that semi-fancy bike that’s sitting in the garage. Either way I feel I can begin to get active and get my fat ass in gear.

Other updates: My neighbor collected that black Les Paul Custom he lent me. So I’m back to my unwieldly Humming Bird and my thick-necked Strat. Neither are the most comfortable guitars for me to use but I’ll make do until I can do an upgrade. Either way, my playing is progressing by baby steps, which is better than the one step forward and two steps back that happened when tendinitis was raging through my hands. I am diligently working through a number of bad habits I picked up during that period and it’s a bitch eliminating them. Nonetheless, it’s working. I’m a better player than I was last fall, if only by increments.

In checking the stats on this blog, I see that once again posts with Tricia Helfer in the title are still getting hits. Seriously? I wrote that post about her butt years ago and it still brings in traffic. Traffic to a post that eviscerates a bad SyFy series, which must be confusing to those who stumble upon it hoping for a series on Ms. Helfer’s buns. Makes me ponder if I should pen a piece on Jeri Ryan next. Regardless, Tricia gets the photo at the top of the post again. And I’ll get back to playing with these girls.

A Death in the Family

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Falling into the Holidays

Happy Holidays to all who celebrate!

It’s been a while. It’s not that I have nothing to say. I just wonder if anyone reads blogs anymore. What is the use of keeping up at it. That shouldn’t matter. The nature of these things has always been just sounding off into the void and readership shouldn’t matter. Writing is often just for self-gratification or catharsis. Just like posting on social media.

I do a fair amount of social media. We live in a very rural area and we’re isolated from most friends and family. Social media keeps us in touch. Well, not Twitter. Especially now. I’ve vacated that shitshow. Every now and then I go there, do a few likes on either a baseball post or Flickertail Times, just to keep my account active. That way, if the Musk Creature decides that inactive accounts can be repurposed for his Nazi followers, my name won’t get swept up in the apocalypse. Now I use Threads or Bluesky for any Twitter-like media. I also use Facebook and Instagram quite a bit, because that’s where the aforementioned friends and family are.

So, on to an update. We are preparing for Christmas. The gifts are under the tree, house decorated, exterior lighting done, and food is purchased. We’ve been blowing through all the classic holiday movies: It Happened on 5th Ave, White Christmas, Last Christmas, Love Actually, various iterations of Christmas Carol, and Christmas in Connecticut. There will still be more to come.

Health-wise, most of our issues remain…structural. Carjo had a couple surgeries on her hands this fall, I’ve been battling the usual back issues. I have this nasty tendinitis in the top of my right foot, which is keeping me off the treadmill and spending too much time with my foot elevated. But my hands are in decent shape so I am able to play guitar and that’s a victory right there. Given that we have no worse internal issues at our age, we have a lot to be thankful for.

It has been a relatively mild winter. We will have nothing but 30s all the way through Christmas and the long range forecast is that El Nino will keep winter warm and dry. Then we’ll hit March/April and hell will be unleashed. Regardless, we’ll live through it. We pretty much sit tight anyway other than running out of town for supplies. COVID, flu, and RSV rage around us. We will continue to be careful and we’ll make it through. Were we back in the Twin Cities, I might be more inclined to live less like a hermit. So it is just as well that we are stuck here in West Bumfuck. There are more negatives than positives to being out here in the Wild Frontier. One positive is that we can get by being hermits and limit our exposure. Thus again, the value of social media, or even posting on a blog to an audience I can’t see.

Happy Holidays to whoever you are and wherever you may be.

Fall on Me

October has begun and fall is definitely here. It was a moderate summer and September proved to be mostly in the 70s. I went for a walk this AM and it was foggy/misty. I walked with my hood up and worked up a sweat on the damp pavement. This little old town was mostly quiet, already drawing inside. I used to see others walking in the summer but there was no one about today other than a few slack-jawed yokels in giant diesel pickups they could barely afford.

The photo above was taken from our backyard, looking over the garage towards the neighbor to the east. Our fall foliage is not as varied as you see in other parts of the country. Though you can find exceptions if you look hard enough. See the photo at the bottom for an example.

Our August/September was busy. A wedding, a reunion of old friends, birthdays for my two remaining aunts, other smaller affairs/road trips. After the last birthday, my wife said, “that’s it, I’m done leaving the house.” It pretty much is. We’ve got some medical stuff to deal with and hope to go to a Christmas Market in November but those are well ahead. Right now, we need to buckle up for the long dark days to come.

I’ve strung Halloween lights on the shrubs in the front yard and on the steps by the driveway. All I have to do is add green and red in November and we have what we need for holiday lighting. My wife has pumpkins and gourds on display with a half-size skeleton. I am slowly collecting and storing all our outdoor stuff: chairs, statues and tchotchkes, the day bed we set up for a cat paradise on the deck, hoses, fencing, and on and on. I picked all the remaining squash, a few tomatoes, and all the Haralson apples. The Honeycrisp should be ready this week.

Now comes the season for me gritting my teeth through a steady onslaught of horror movies curated by my wife. She loves horror more that anything and I could do without it. I enjoy the classic Universal monster movies, Hammer horror films with Cushing and Lee, or subtle ghost stories. But my beloved has no such filter and will watch it all until the end of days. We had an argument that her ideal movie is either a hopeless dystopia or someone having the worst day of their life. Give me a mystery or something with spaceships or swords. I went through a pandemic and had a soulless grifter for a president. I have seen dystopia and I don’t like it.

My writing and guitar playing have been a lot of start/stop/start all summer. Too many distractions and too much strain on my hands. But all the work that strains my tendinitis is at bay and so are the distractions. I’m still playing that Gibson and it has led to a couple epiphanies regarding my mechanics and lack of mastery of fundamentals. I’m working on that. And when I get done working through those things I crank up the distortion and just make some fucking noise as a reward. And it makes a beautiful noise.

Sometime this week or the next we’ll get the next round of flu shots/RSV/Covid. It’ll be sore arms and side effects but we haven’t been sick since I quit bus driving. I’ll take some discomfort to be free of worry. And when the snow comes we will lock down and watch it fall. We’ve got plenty to keep us busy. And I’ll be back here more often.

New Kid in Town

A couple weeks ago I returned a bike tire pump to a neighbor of mine. This is also the same gentleman that has loaned me guitars in the past. The pump had been in my garage for the winter and we had both forgotten about it. I couldn’t even remember who it belonged to. So when I returned it, I joked that I was exchanging it for another guitar. It was a joke. He doubled down on that.

What you see here, to the right of my beloved Fender Stratocaster, is Gibson Les Paul Custom, over 20 years old. It has three humbucker pickups and a Bigsby tremolo arm. Oh mercy. This beast is worth a lot of money and with my skills, I am definitely not worthy of such a monster.

Monster is a good description. It’s a heavy mother. Les Paul’s are notoriously heavy and these Customs even more so. But I got it tuned up, turned that bar to where it is below the strings, and set the volume/tone controls to what I call The Jimmy Page Setting. Thus when I toggle between the neck and bridge pickup, it goes from a whisper to a ROAR.

The scale of this guitar is a big deal for me. Scale length refers to the distance between a guitar’s nut and its bridge. Gibson uses a scale of 24.75″, while Fender prefers the standard 25.5″. Yes, that’s only three quarters of an inch. And when you are trying to stretch small hands for a power chord, that miniscule difference is enormous. My Epiphone acoustic had the same scale as the Gibson and I have noticed the difference when going from the acoustic to the Fender. So I am excited to play an electric with that neck length.

Gibson has had, until the last couple years, big quality issues. This one comes from their old Custom shop and it is absolutely perfect. A little worn, but perfect. Shortly after getting this Black Beauty in my house, the mother of two old friends died. It was a big weekend as a lot of old friends came by. By chance, the son-in-law of the deceased was the guy that set up and restrung this guitar for my neighbor. He confirmed that it was indeed one of those Gibsons that is just fantastic, one of the best he’s played.

My neighbor said “enjoy it, play it”. I intend to. My hands are doing really, really well this summer. I had been optimistic in March but then we started work on the bathrooms and the pain returned. Now the tendinitis finally seems to be on the back burner for good now. I still get occasional pain but it’s nowhere near what I used to put up with. This makes me both extremely relieved and downright joyous.

Because it has been over a year since I have been able to play consistently my paltry skills atrophied. Chord changes that had been simple were a struggle, riffs that I had learned were clumsy at best and totally lost at worst. I was almost ready to call it a day until a month ago when my hands said, “um, yeah, good to go here, even if you did just mow the lawn”.

Yesterday I sat in front of my PC, playing along with a Fender Play video. The session was a good 45 minutes. My limit for playing used to be ten minutes. The future is wide open and I have zero excuses to not “enjoy it, play it.”

In Recovery from Renovation

Excuse me, but I’ve been busy.

From April into June we demolished and rebuilt our two bedrooms. By we, I mean our contractor/carpenter friend Son of a Preacher Man, a couple plumbers, two electricians, and myself.

The bathrooms had not seen any work since wallpaper in the 70s and a replaced sink. The toilets were constantly running, getting clogged, or needing surgery in order to flush. The tiles in one room were just plastic and in the other they were falling out of the wall in the shower and breaking up on the floor. Neither room had functioning electricity. And it had been in that state for years. Thanks mom.

My brother, the co-owner of the house and administrator of the family trust did most of the ordering of supplies and because it was my brother, the process was slow and convoluted. It was maddening in fact. He had more than enough on his plate but wanted control so we were often waiting for a decision, only to hear it was my decision but no, wait, it’s his decision and…you get the picture.

Another problem was that the plumbers took everything out except one toilet and it was WEEKS before we had a functioning shower or tub. WEEKS. We were basically sponging off from the kitchen sink. There was even a nightmarish 36 hours when we were without a toilet. We did have a small portable camping toilet and let me tell you, there’s an experience in humility. I’ll spare you the details.

Both bathrooms were stripped down to the studs. A closet was taken out to make room for a bigger shower, with panels instead of tiles. The panels were shipped from CA and showed up with a couple of them cracked, delaying everything even further. We had to have new sheetrock, it had to be taped and textured, there was a fiasco getting flooring and another delay, I had to put a couple coats of primer over the textured sheetrock and then paint. A lot of paint. The tendinitis in my hands, which had just about receded, came screaming back. Carjo wanted to paint but after seeing her barely keeping her balance on the ladder, she got benched. So it was up to me. Then there was the joy of moving a 300 pound Costco vanity. Twice. I was applying Salon Pas twice a day. And still not showering.

By the last week of June we were pretty much finished. I still need the electricians to come back to install one light fixture and put in outlets in the hallway of the house. But it’s all done and gleaming and I shower with joy in my heart every night.

There is a chance that we will move in the foreseeable future. And I will tell you one thing. The house we end up in better have up-to-date bathrooms.

Fighting Our Way Forward, Again

Last April, we got blizzards on three consecutive weekends and I spent three consecutive weekends blowing snow out of the driveway. Then of course, the entire basement flooded, which meant more work to do. I documented this back then but it set off a long period where the tendinitis in my hands really limited my guitar practice. Almost to the point where I packed it in.

This winter I expected that after I gave up plowing snow on my own, I’d be back on track. And for a couple months, I was. Then came the trip to the Twin Cities, following by numerous drives to the vet, a trip to Minot to take care of some issues for my aunt, and a couple runs to other neighboring towns set me way way back. I again considered packing it in.

Today was the first time I had picked up the acoustic guitar in over a month. First of all, I was shocked that I could play without pain for more than a few minutes. I even experimented with sliding my basic power chords up and down the neck. I have trouble with power chords. I have small hands and any strength I had in my two little fingers has atrophied. The acoustic guitar has a short scale (which means the next is about 3/4 of an inch shorter than on my electric) and while a power chord sounds like ASS on an acoustic guitar, it does ring true. I remembered eventually that it was easier if I dropped my thumb behind the neck and damn, my little fingers worked better. I realized “I can do this”.

So now I am feeling a little more confident. The yard work that I do only affects my tendinitis for a short time, particularly if I am aggressive in icing up soon after mowing the lawn or wielding the hedge trimmer. So whatever I do when spring finally gets here won’t stop me from playing guitar for more than a day. It used to be, back in my bus-driving nightmare days, that it would screw me up for days and then I’d have to mow again.

I am relearning a lot of things this time around, taking baby steps as I really bear down on fundamentals. I know that with enough repetition, muscle memory does indeed kick in and it can reawaken. I found that out when I just slowed down on my shuffle rhythm and forced myself to keep at it for longer than a few minutes. And you know, a slow shuffle on an acoustic or electric guitar still sounds funky.

We had a horrible end to our winter. The loss of a beloved pet, a somewhat ugly trip to the Twin Cities, the final failure of my treadmill, and a very hostile winter that went on forever. But right now, it just feels a little brighter days might be coming. We may actually get some work done on the house this spring. My guitar practice shows promise. The temperatures are rising into the 40s next week, which means I can finally start walking outside. And if those rising temperatures cause a flood downstairs, I have the basement ready to minimize damage. Baseball is underway and the Twins are over .500. And my writing…feels good.

I still have to deal with a broken spouse and that will take an extraordinary amount of time. There will undoubtably be setbacks in the remodeling we want to do. The Twins have a really strenuous schedule for the rest of April. On those occasions where Carjo can see beyond the darkness, we are in agreement on how we shall move forward. We are in one accord of how the season of renewal and rebirth will be undertaken and enjoyed. We got this.

RIP to the First of His Name

Two weeks ago we had to say goodbye to another pet. Our beloved Joffrey was put down after a brief but nasty battle with pneumonia. One lung was no longer moving air and the other was failing. We tried antibiotics but as the vet said, “we just can’t get ahead of this one”. It was time to end his suffering.

He came to us from a big box pet store in Bismarck ND. At the time he was about three months old and miserable to be in a glass kennel. My wife declared that she would set him free and begged the store manager to let her have him, forgoing their usual waiting period. And thus, in a few hours, he was in the car making the long trip to a new home.

It was an unforgettable trip. The vomiting began somewhere near Wilton ND and went on for about 20 miles. Then came a steaming package of semi-solid shit that made the interior of our Mercury Land Yacht smell like the Fifth Level of Hell. We dumped that dump in a vacant lot in the hamlet of Cole Harbor ND. After that, the exhausted kitten slept.

We were naming cats after Game of Thrones characters back then (almost ten years ago). We already had Sansa and Arya. Though she despised the character, my wife decided that this new kitten should be named Joffrey, after Joffrey Baratheon, the First of his Name, King of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men Lord of the Seven Kingdoms Protector of the Realm Lord of Storm’s End. You know, the sonovabitch everyone waited for four seasons to die a horrible death.

Joffrey was full of piss and vinegar but he had none of his namesake’s bad qualities. He was a loving fellow that liked nothing more than getting some “sugar” from his humans. He was skittish, probably from his time spent in that glass cell at the big box store. He never let anyone else near him, just us. I have a couple cats that are gregarious, particularly Sansa, but Joff had no use for anyone other than Carjo and I. We have had people stay in this house for days and barely get a glimpse of him. But if I sat on the couch, he’d appear, ready to climb on my chest, demanding his nightly supplement of sugar. At night he’d spend time with each of us, reassuring us that we were “his” and nothing would come between us.

Now he’s gone. Next week the weather will likely be in the 50s and he would be on the deck, basking in the sun, soaking its warmth into his long orange tabby body. He was a big boy and it gave him a certain swagger, a confidence that the world was his to explore and enjoy. So while I deeply mourn his passing, I take comfort in that he lived the life he wanted to the fullest. Carjo is beyond despondent, torn by his sudden passing and the senselessness of it all. She never takes the loss of any member of the family well. This time is especially hard and it breaks me to see her so anguished. But we will go on, our live made better by spending the time we had with him. It just seems so empty without him.

 

A Trip to E St

This past week we went to the Twin Cities. Our Family Truckster had been making a noise all summer and I just knew it was one of those things that was going to bite me in my fat white ass if it wasn’t resolved. I also had Springsteen tickets. Sorry to bury the lede.

We had also planned on going to a college baseball tournament with our bestest friends, The Pharma Couple. But they woke up feeling terrible the day before and of course, ended up testing positive for COVID. So there was no baseball. They did get on Paxlovid and are on the mend. That’s the important thing.

The Family Truckster needed some medical intervention as well. The water pump had sustained some damage (probably due to ND roads) and a piece of metal was flapping around. It was also cutting into the timing belt. The owner of the garage said, “you guys wouldn’t have made it back to North Dakota, and likely would have ruined the engine when the timing belt failed.” So there was our best bit of luck for the weekend.

My brother had gotten our seats upgraded for Springsteen and we ended up a row behind “the pit”. That’s about 35 feet from the stage. My back was weak and my ankles were failing (due to getting hammered from running up and down the stairs at my brother’s place) so I took a few breaks to sit down during the show. But the other 18000+ in the audience pretty much stood all the way through the show.

Was it a good one? Well, the local paper said it was the best Springsteen show the Twin Cities has seen in this century so yeah, I think the old man had a good night. We got a couple songs not performed yet on this tour. “Pay Me My Money Down” was particularly well received. The forty minute “encore” was a blitz of several big hits, plus we got “Rosalita”. He’s not sliding across the stage on his knees or leaping off the piano anymore but sheesh, his energy was unfailing. The audience was utterly insane, to the point that Bruce had to point out to us in his thank you before closing the show “You are a MOTHERFUCKER”. Indeed we were. If this is the last Springsteen show of my life, and I’ve seen a few, this was the one to go out on. Just a relentless night of rock and soul.

It wouldn’t be a trip back to Minnesota without an update to the beer fridge. Small breweries are booming in western North Dakota but the selection in liquor stores has gotten progressively worse. I was down to my last six brews so it was time to indulge. Here’s hoping that I can make this stretch out a few months.

I’ve been drinking dark brews for most of the winter so it was time to get back to brews more bitter than an ex-wife. I think this group will do the trick.

Now we’re home. The cats have lost their minds, state basketball tournaments have begun, and a monster blizzard is coming our way. I think I’ll ride this out with beer, basketball, and Bruce.