Attention, Everyone:
My head measures 21 and 7/8ths inches around, which means I wear a 7 M sized hat, according to the Hats In the Belfry website.
That is all.
UPDATE: That is not all. Furthermore…
Although I would never wear one, I really love these hats.
You’ll have to pardon me – this is on of those posts that’s just making notes for myself to refer back to later. Last night I planted in the front flowerbeds:
1 purple lavender
1 orange symphony
1 summertime pink charma
2 Dianthus – Confetti Deep Red
2 Dianthus – Spangled Star
A seed packet of Butterfly Flowers
2 Broadway Lights Daisies
3 Shasta Daisies
2 Coreopsis – Rising Sun
2 Pensteman – X Mexicali
1 Delphinium – Summer Blue
1 Delphinium – Blue Mirror
4 Delosperma – Cooperi Yellow
Over the weekend, we planted lettuce, cucumbers, radishes, sugar snap peas, rhubarb, and green onions. Still to plant are seed packets of Columbines and more Blue Mirror Delphiniums. I also plan to buy and plant hostas and Pachysandras in the back corner of the house near the deck to fill in the space and reduce mowing in that awkward corner. Clematis will go next to the deck to climb up the trellis. Additionally, I need to set up the copper pipe trellis from the garage and start some Clematis growing on it at the side of the house. I still need to finish weeding the side bed and get some small fencing around the vegetables to keep the bunnies out. After all this work, I’ll need to arrange for garden rubbish disposal in Auckland to keep everything neat and tidy.
At the end of June, Stephanie and I are going to take her new Beetle, Phoebe, on the annual road trip caravan to Roswell, New Mexico – Roswell 2k. This year there’s a Route 66 version of the trip, which we’ll be joining in Chicago, along with several of Stephanie’s Beetle-owning friends. So we’ll drive with around 30 other Beetles, all the way out to California on Route 66 (the Mother Road, Main Street of America, the Great Diagonal Way), with a few days in Roswell for the car show, and a trip to the Grand Canyon along the way. Should be an amazing trip, and I plan to photo/blog the whole thing. It appears that Stephanie’s friend Lisa, who webcam documented entire previous trips, will have the live cams up and running again this year. Should be a blast.
What’s cool is that in 1998, almost 10 years ago now, I helped a couple friends move out to Arizona, and we traveled part of Route 66 then. The photo below is of that trip. The U-Drop Inn in Shamrock, Texas has since been renovated and is open as some sort of attraction; when we were there it was closed and boarded up.
We’re doing some reading to prepare for the trip; we’ve got a few books here and there, and I picked up a DVD from the library at lunch. I also bought a copy of Kerouac’s On The Road for the trip; I figured that would be appropriate reading. I think I’ll pass on reading the Grapes of Wrath, though.
I’m also putting together a Route 66 Music Mix for the trip, too.
Our Route 66 Itinerary [Google Mapped]
Yes, I’m specializing in getting diseases (Diverticulitis, Pleurisy) that sound like things your great-grandma suffered from back in the 1800s.
I plan on getting consumption next, followed by typhoid. Then I’ll start talking about my Sciatica. This is ridiculous.
I spent the night in the hospital; Stephanie took me there after work because I had severe abdominal pain. I was sure it was a kidney stone, but was also afraid it was related to my heart cath. Neither, it turned out. They kept me to put me on an IV drip with antibiotics.
Unfortunately, some of the stuff we’ve been doing to eat more healthily probably caused this infection – we’ve been eating tons of high fiber, nuts and berries, strawberries with seeds, whole grain cereals, raw foods, stuff that gets stuck in my colon that I can’t process.
I used to think you were funny, irony, but now I’m going to kick your ass.
My cardiac catheterization went really well today. We found out that my arteries are clear and functioning great, and my heart’s in good shape. I have high blood pressure, which I will now be taking medication for. And we were already planning a heart-healthy nutrition and exercise program, so we’re already doing the right thing.
My bouts with pleurisy are still a mystery. But ruling out my heart as the source was a major relief. I see an allergist on Monday to hopefully narrow down the suspects further. In all, I’m very, very happy with the results of today.
Posted today for your amusement/irritation, to be updated as necessary on future occasions.
People who walk up escalators
…especially when they ask you to move out of the way. Seriously – go take the fracking stairs, Sporty. I’m using the escalator for a reason. I don’t come over to your treadmill at the gym and hit the stop button. Don’t pester me to move on the escalator.
Passive Aggressive Bloggers
I’ve already written at length about this.
When someone paints over wallpaper
I’m invariably on the wrong end of this phenomenon – the “trying to take the paper off the wall later” end. It blows. Just buck up and remove the wallpaper first, lazybutt, for the good of humanity. Yeah, I’m talking to former house residents.
Sci-fi or Fantasy fiction novelists who deliberately don’t wrap up major plot points so they have a built in sequel(s)
There’s nothing more irritating than a deliberately unfinished story. Like I’m going to give you more cash for keeping me waiting. Just because every other writer in the genre writes a trilogy that turns into 10 volumes doesn’t mean you have to. Especially if, like Robert Jordan, they might die before they finish the series.
This is connected to another pet peeve – that practically all fantasy fiction is formulaic (farm boy turns hero, meets wizard, goes on long journey to dark mysterious mountains, defeats evil, discovers he’s really an orphan king, blah, blah, blah, Joseph Campbell, blah. Snooze).
The euphemisms “in the closet” and “outing”
I’ve written about this at length, too.
When a person uses a picture for their social networking profile that has more than one person in it.
I can’t tell if they’re trying to obscure who they are, if they’re trying to prove they have friends, or if they seriously don’t know how to crop a photo in this day and age. None of these potential explanations speaks well of them.
People who get shitty when I call my girlfriend on the cell phone from the store
Oh, I know, you’re probably one of those folks who’ve blogged about how irritating this is, so I’m probably just poking a stick right in you eye with this one, but I don’t give a shit. Get the hell over it. If there’s one time I absolutely need to call my girlfriend other than in an emergency, it’s in the damned grocery store. She’s standing next to the fridge and can tell me if we already have mustard or not. Please stop bitching about this; it’s the reason why cell phones were invented. God knows, we don’t need extra jars of mustard in our house, and although I’ve done due diligence and made a list, there’s always something I didn’t think of. I’m trying to be energy efficient in avoiding a return drive to the store.
Seriously, I don’t know what the effing problem with this is. If my girlfriend were with me in the store, I’d turn around and ask her if we needed mustard. Would you object to this, too? You just don’t like to hear people talking in the store? And if that doesn’t bother you, why does it make a difference if I’m calling her instead of talking to her next to me? You just don’t like me having a conversation with a person invisible to you?
One common bitch about this seems to be “people just aren’t present anymore; they’re preoccupied with something going on somewhere else.” Sorry to burst your bubble, Narcissus, but before cellphones, my mind wasn’t present with you when I was shopping, anyway. I was probably daydreaming about riding a unicorn in Narnia, actually. What kills me is that we have this same conversation with every new piece of technology. People said shit like this back when they invented the telegraph: “oh, woe, people just don’t write letters to one another anymore.” Try and keep up, grandpa.
Yeah, I actually considered closing the comments on this post. I might still do it, so don’t be a jackass.
The other day, I wrote about my recent stress test, commenting at the conclusion: “It was all very interesting. I should know my results in a few days, but I’m optimistic.” Well, I spoke a bit too soon on that one. The results of the stress test were rather perplexing to my cardiologist. It seems as though some areas of my heart aren’t getting enough circulation, which doesn’t make any sense to him; I’m not a candidate for narrowed arteries at this stage of the game. My blood pressure isn’t high; my cholesterol isn’t high; I’m way too young. So I’m going to have an outpatient procedure to see what’s going on, and potentially fix any problems – Cardiac Catheterization. I go in to do this on Friday and will be in the hospital most of the day. I’ll have the weekend for the 2 day recovery period.
I found all this out last week, but I had to tell my parents before I blogged about it, so they wouldn’t read about it here first and get pissed at me. I was pretty freaked out about it, but I’m calmer now; there’s not a whole lot I can do other than what I’ve already been doing – eating tons of vegetables and healthy stuff, and exercising my ass off.
The absolute worst-case scenario is that I would have to go back in and have another open-heart procedure. I survived that already; it doesn’t scare me now.
Ooo – I haven’t done a real blog post (as opposed to link posts) in quite some time. Well, let me remedy that. As part of the “ruling things out” process when it comes to my reoccurring bouts with pleurisy, my pulmonologist asked me to go back to my cardiologist and rule out my heart as a cause. I went in a week or so ago and had an echocardiogram and saw Dr. Trippi, and he said he thinks my valve repair seemed to be just fine. He had me do a blood test that confirmed it. The one last piece of the puzzle was having me do a stress test to rule out heart disease and heart attacks as the cause; I did that yesterday. The test takes about 3.5 – 4 hours to do, so I took a personal day for it.
By the way, during my personal day, I discovered a cozy cafe near the medical center, and I also passed by a CBD dispensary like the stiiizy dispensary, adding a unique touch to my day. If you’re searching for CBD and THCA products online that can help relieve your stress, you may visit the website of indacloud. Kratom Earth also offers natural kratom products that provides numerous health benefits.
This test was different than the stress echo that I took in the past, where they had me run on a treadmill and then looked at my heart with the ultrasound. Did you know that stress can also contribute to infertility in both genders? The good thing is, product like Clomid 25 is a pill that is often used to treat specific types of infertility in women and men.
In this test, I had a radioactive liquid (Cardiolyte) injected via an IV, then climbed into a machine that looked like and MRI, but was actually a giant Geiger counter. I had to lie there for 16 minutes while the cameras moved around me recording the flow of blood to my heart. Then I ran on a treadmill until my heart got to 150 beats per minute, had another injection of the Cardiolyte, and got scanned again to tell the difference between my resting and active heart. It was all very interesting. I should know my results in a few days, but I’m optimistic.
What was scary was talking to the other patients in the waiting room. I happened to be sitting next to one of those people who likes to chat with strangers – a woman who was clearly terrified of the procedure (understandably, considering why she was there). She started talking to me and to a couple sitting on our little area; the man was there because he was getting his heart looked at; he declined to say what was wrong, but she asked if he was just getting a check-up or if he was having problems, and he said because he was having problems. He was 52 (she was asking our ages) and he had had four heart attacks – the first at age 39. That certainly gave me pause. The chatty woman told us that she was there because she had an ongoing arrhythmia, and her family finally made her come in, because although she was in denial, her sister had died of a heart attack as well as both of her parents, and two of her brothers had them. It’s too bad none of her family was there, she was obviously scared as hell and just chatting up a storm because of it.
Anyway, the whole thing has made me think quite a bit. I’ve been eating a lot better lately, but I can up the ante on that. I’m eliminating sodas from my diet almost entirely and red meat, too. We’re using more olive oil (good fats) and I’m eating handfuls of walnuts as snacks. I’m going to try for fish three times a week, and more vegetables. I’m in the process of reading “You: The Owner’s Manual” and “You: On a Diet.” From what I can tell the diet is similar to exactly the same as that of a book I read several years ago – The Okinawa Program, which was a study of the incredibly long-lived people of the Island of Okinawa, and why they are so remarkably healthy into their old age.
Stephanie put a deposit down on this car the other day. (Yep, she picked the yellow and black.) She should get one sometime next year…
