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Heaven help me,,,,,,the thing that I feared has come upon me. Old Blogger, Good old Blogger, dear old Blogger. readable and legible old Blogger has been executed and some wretched upstart is being forced upon us. Or perhaps I should say "me", because I may be the only lone holdout and the rest of you have probably been coasting along for months.
Well.........I don't care......I still hate the new format and I suspect it will put a crimp in my ability to blog, but I guess I must at least try. Bah, humbug. I am not a happy camper and besides all the above I have a backache which is causing the most dreadful sounds and words to pour forth from my ruby lips. My beloved Chiropractor just administered a fix, but it has not had its full effect yet....groan.
Maybe tomorrow will be better.......... sigh.
I still love ya all, I think......but other issues are clouding my weak and weary mind so check back in later and perhaps the Good Lo will have returned from wherever they have put her.
I don't know about you folks, but I decided years ago that I would give up my computer printer and go back to using smoke signals rather than pay the insane, obscene prices they charge for ink cartridges. Naturally, I sent away for a refill kit and have been refilling my own cartridges ever since, but, needless to say, there have been a few "oopses" and a few lessons learned but actually only a few failures. I figure I must have saved enough money to heavily reduce the national debt if I had only not squandered it away on frivolity......well, no, I wouldn't call necessities like a cordless mouse frivolity actually. Anyway.....the time has come once again so I had better get ready.
The truth is, I do not really strip naked any more before starting this process. It seems to me that in years past the inks were much less removable from one's person and garments than they are now. I think they are making the inks washable which is why, when you set your coffee cup or water glass or ?libation down on your newly printed sheet the ink runs all over the effing document but at least you dont have to go around being the Monster with the Bluer Cuticles for the next 2 weeks. So what that means is that I no longer take off my garment to refill the ink cartridges, but I sometimes do long for the old wilder days.
Anyway.......they are making it harder asnd harder to do this refill process, those money grubbing bastards. Especially with the color cartridges. Once upon a time I could drill three neat holes in the top and happily access Cyan, Magenta and Yellow. I do not know quite how they have changed the innards or whether I simply managed to pierce the walls separating the 3 colors when I went in with the hypodermic needle.......lately I have not managed so well with the color refills, but the black ones, godblessem, are still working for me and I manage to fool the printer into accepting them even though, occasionally I will be coldly informed that my black cartridge is devoid of ink.......heh, heh, but the machine dutifully prints away anyway and I thereby save $25 or $35........hooray..
Today I was only 50% successful........blew the color one. but decided to reinstall it anyway even though it now contained a weird mix of blue, red and yellow.......mainly a yucky blue. I mostly print documents so the color cartridge is superfluous anyway. I guess I will have to break down and order one in case I need to print a photo sometime. Once a miser always a miser, I guess, though I actually prefer to think of it as being frugal and wisely prudent, so there.
In all seriousness, I have learned to spend money freely in my old age, when the occasion calls for it. I just bought myself a lovely gift. Since my vision and my clumsy, dyslectic fingers make it really hard for me to type without making a gazillion mistakes which have to be corrected of course, (I was tempted by the lure of the Dragon Something or Other which is a program you load and install (at great effort and with much screeching and foul language) but which allows you to dictate into a microphone and see you words instantly appear on the screen as if by magic. In my usual penurious fashion I found that version 12 had just been released and Amazon was selling version 11.5 for a pittance so I found the deal irresistible......I figured that if 11.5 works at all well I will spring for version 12 after I learn how to use it. Well, by Gum. it arrived yesterday and today after I washed up from the cartridge refill project I decided I would take courage and at least open the box. Apparently I had a speck of courage hidden away somewhere, because 5 or 8 hours later I found myself going through the Tutorial for the 16th time after successfully installing the damned program. The Tutorial works amazingly well and causes you to utter all sorts of exclamations, but, of course, they prompt you at every turn about what to do an how to do it. I find that even with the little cheat sheet they advise you to print out, when you are on your own it ain'g quite as easy, but i am determined to conquer it because otherwise I may find it harder nd harder to blog and write emails,. so I will persevere. I promise to report on how I do in case you may be interested in trying this out. I have to say I am really impressed with the program.....with my own intelligence and ability to learn,,,,,,not so much. That may be where being a stubborn mule may help me. All I can say is that when I commanded my computer to "start listening" and it responded "listening" a little thrill went up my spine. To almost everything else I said it responded "what was that?" but still.......it was a sort of a conversation.......and it also obeyed me when I screamed "undo, undo".
Now, if I can only figure out why sometimes, when I say "undo" it undoes........and other times when I shout "undo, undo" it dutifully types "undo, undo". Sigh.
And now, I say to you as I say to my computer, You may "stop listening"..whereupon it advises me it is sleeping. As for all of you, you may doze off too or do whatever you please. I for one, am satisfied with my vast achievements today.........I hope you are the same.
In the middle of the night I sat bolt upright in bed and performed the old fashioned head slap when I realized that I had forgotten to include one of the most knee punishing activities of life.......Gardening.............gawd ......how could I? The endless hours of dig, plant, weed, dig, plant, weed. And that activity, once begun in life, never ends till they plant YOU.
The percentage of time spent on my knees during this lifetime just went up to nearly 50%.
And, while sitting bolt upright in bed, I thought that I really should have explained that, in my current enfeebled condition, getting up from being on my knees is no small feat. In fact, were it not for the beloved Yoga Downward Dog position in which you are on hands and knees, then curl your toes under to get a bit of purchase, hoist the fanny straight up in the air to form a human triangle between toes and hands and push off with the hands to rise to a standing position, I would probably have spent the past two years in a permanent kneeling state. For some reason, getting down on hands and knees, while not beautiful, is possible, but getting up therefrom is another story.
If none of this makes any sense to you, it probably means you didn't read my last blog. Shame on you. Go back at once and all will become perfectly clear.
This week I just raised my aching bod up from my knees for the for the 40skillionth time during my long life and it occurred to me that I may well have spent a goodly percentage of my lifetime on my knees........no.....not praying and not for lewd pursuits or any other weird things either.....I just realized how many supposedly simply tasks end up requiring one to crawl around on the floor on ones hands and knees like a gimpy spider.
We can skip the obvious like the crawling stages of infancy, but not long past that time it begins........subtle at first with games....blocks, marbles, pick-up-sticks (anyone remember that one?), jacks, tiddly-winks. Ah, but those young knees hardly even noticed any punishment, even though they were usually bloody or scabby from falling down during other games like baseball, rollerskating, Dodge ball and almost anything that required upright bodily movement. For me anyway.......even my Grandma had to agree that I was a Klutz..... ........ Sigh.
The next extended use of the kneeling position came, for me, when I began pursuing the development of my artistic skills and, at some point, every application of some media onto paper required matting and sometimes framing. This was done on the kitchen floor, using a large wooden plywood drawing board, a steel T-square, ruler, utility knife and endless hours on the knees..........how else?????
Next came the time in my young starving artist life when I realized that I had to choose between eating or covering my nakedness with some garment and I undertook to make all my own clothes using just $3.87 worth of fabric and supplies....... except for shoes......I never quite got the knack of making those.. Naturally, since I possessed no cutting table ( not to mention no dining table) the cardboard cutting board would be unfolded on the dining room floor (where the dining table would be if I could have afforded one......(.I later built one out of a beautiful discarded solid core walnut door which had one damaged side......perfectly fine for the underside of a dining table). There was always a great deal of scrabbling around on hands and knees positioning the fabric, the pattern pieces, the pin cushion and the scissors, the tailors' chalk and the glass of bourbon.........
Knees aging but still willing, we enter the era of Hi-Fi and Stereo. No cigarette pack size thingy in a pocket with ear buds for us. To properly hear music required a pre-amp, amplifier/tuner, 3 speed turntable, tape player and at least 2 very large speakers. This stuff also required some furniture to hold it all and the totality necessitated about 3 1/2 weeks of scuttling around on the floor on said knees connecting thousands of wires from one device to the next. Oy.
And just about the time when even my knees were getting too old for such shenanigans some nerd had to invent the desk top home computer which required infinite connections of unmentionable numbers of units to one another and to the surge protector multi-plugs which greatly expanded the old 2 plug wall units and resided under the desk requiring.....you guessed it......days, weeks, months, milleniums (millenia ?) spent on one's knees under the desk, (flashlight in mouth because at least 4 hands were required for most connections) while clutching the easy-assembly sheets in at least one of them.
Oh, well.......laptops took care of all that, didn't they? Hmmmm.....then what the hell was I doing on Wednesday of this very week crawling around on my knees on the floor with a flashlight in one hand and a magnifying glass in the other? Apparently, even in the most modern of times it is still necessary to obtain from the Modem which, in my house, lives on the lowest shelf of the bookcase, the network type and serial number in order to add a new laptop to one's personal network of computers. And how did it happen that, at my advanced age, I should be found yet once more on those poor knees? Yes, I do have help these days which should be assigned to such crawlings around, but sadly, nothing can be substituted for experience when confronted with an appliance containing a mind-boggling assortment of different types of number combinations all discretely placed in the most inaccessible spots on the damned Modem thingy. Florence was overwhelmed. So who else was there?
Well here's how it is, folks.........whatever the next world changing gadget may come along......if it requires any kneeling of any kind, I think I'll just pass. Not that I am too old to accept change you understand.......it's just the damned knees.
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You are all probably wondering if I ever came back down to earth after my last post which seemed suspiciously like a drug induced flight of fancy. I assure you that it was not in the slightest way drug induced and my feet never for a moment left terra firma regardless of what pain medications may have been stingily doled out to me during the worst of my recent experiences with practitioners of the finer tortures of the Spanish Inquisition. All ideas presented in my last blog were the result of various epiphanies and none were inspired by medications or magic mushrooms. I wouldn't mind trying a magic mushroom, but I haven't a clue what they look like and it would be just my luck to pick some poisonous variety.....
Happily I can report that my groin and thigh have had their staples removed and the thigh has returned nearly to normal size and color and no longer causes me to scream or even say "ouch" more than 10 or 12 times a day. However, between the mended but still achy left hip, the totally broken down left knee (which never got replaced) and now the still tender and achy right thigh I have had to sadly give up all hope of ever being invited to star in the Ice Capades. Thank heaven I gave up that ambition many years ago when I realized that even though I managed to skate forward without falling down more than 3 or 4 times an hour, I would never be any good at all at skating backwards except on my fanny. I gave away the blue velvet skating skirt with the red satin lining years ago.
Anyway, my main motive in writing this blog is to reassure you that I am returning to what might be considered normal (for Me). Also, after watching 3 football games and going to bed dazed and cross eyed at 9 pm. I found myself unable to fall asleep and not even the act of raiding the cupboard and devouring 4 fig newtons slathered with peanut butter gave me any assurance that, if I went back to bed and tried to sleep, I would do anything but berate myself for ,my low class gobbling, so I decided to dash off a few lines while waiting for the Sandman to show up.
Naturally, I have no exciting news to report since I am still recovering my joie d' vivre (or however the hell that term is spelled) but my spirits are improving and perhaps I will come up with some bizarrre adventure to report one of these days. Looking at my empty calendar I suspect I may have to make something up. We will just have to wait and see, won't we?
When you are worn out from screaming and hollering with pain, not overtly but inside your head, you finally shut up and just pant a little.......that is when it gets blissfully quiet inside and you get a chance to meet your soul. At least that is what happened to me during these recent stays in the hospital. While crawling around inside trying to find a place to hide I stumbled on a little niche just under my rib cage sheltering a small blue unwavering flame and I knew that was the essence of me. We did not converse, but I took great comfort from the encounter.
This really confirmed my suspicion that the image I see in the mirror while brushing my teeth is just a robot creature......a construction intended to provide protection, mobility and a comfortable residence for that awesome, remarkable blue flame to enable it to accomplish something.....I wish I knew what.
I imagined what it may have been like before "the Beginning". Just whirling chaos, and the Super Intelligence takes a look around and sees an infinity of immense power but no mechanism to put it to work. So what is needed is a container with attributes.........something solid but resilient and mobile.....a couple of legs and arms and oh yeah, some hands with opposable thumbs, some plumbing, some heating, a pump/motor a small computer brain to enable thoughts, ideas, creativity and, most importantly, a safe niche to cradle and protect the blue flame of source energy. Yeah.....that oughta do it. Now all of that sacred energy can be put to work to accomplish.....well, something.
Sadly, it is my opinion that at this point a grave mistake was made. (yes, I admit my arrogance, but that is how it appears to me). Instead of simply cloning a bunch of the creatures and letting them have at it and seeing how it all worked, they were ordered to, "Go forth and multiply" and once sex was allowed to enter the equation it was all for naught........because obviously no good deeds or brilliant projects, no matter how finely wrought, can compete with the sex drive.....and so here we are and that is my interpretation of how we got into this mess and I contend that my idea is as good as anybody's.
Needless to say, I haven't the slightest idea of how we are supposed to get out of the mess we are in..... But the one thing that was clear to me during my communing with my source is that, at some point the trusty robot creature will break down, wear out and cease to function and can be abandoned by the roadside to be recycled into something useful. No tears are necessary or appropriate. The blue flame will simply fly back to join the group hug in the vast lake of its source. Nothing is lost and nothing is wasted.
Beyond all this, I still know nothing.
P.S Lest you fear that the Lo you know has completely morphed into a madwoman, I swear that I believe I have never been saner. And for more good news, my right thigh, which once resembled the Smithfield ham that eclipsed Manhattan, has retreated in size and tenderness and is now very near its old, flabby, fatty self. And that is a GOOD thing.
And now, back to Football.............
I know, I know, not a decent peep out of me since I came home from the hospital. Well, the truth is the creature I brought home in this box labelled "Lois" is nearly unrecognizable and she even scares me sometimes. Bitter, disgusted, disgruntled, angry and perhaps dangerous.
I am fed up to the teeth with these misshapen monsters whom I find it impossible to avoid.....Mutt (not a typo) Romney, Paul Ryan, Sarah Palin.........ugly people spouting idiocies and blasphemies.........I am having trouble finding a reason to go on living and that's the truth and I feel like taking a few of the worst offenders with me when I depart.
I had a lot of marvelous insights and adventures during my 2 weeks of pain and torture and I will do my best to reveal them to you soon, but not in this blog. This blog is for bitching and complaining.
Imagine me standing on the peak of the highest mountain screaming my mantra, "SHITPISSFUCK" alternating with a piercing but plaintive "what the hell is it all about?". I am in a state of befuddlement about this life we lead. Is there really a purpose amid all this madness?
The other Lois, if she reappears, will be back at this spot shortly uttering saner thoughts. Or not. You gotta take your chances folks.
Fed
