Monday Meanderings - 2.27.2012

Okay folks. I am simply not ready to deal with this!

Fortunately, exactly 24 hours later things looked much better!

There's no icon or symbol on the weather app to show how windy it was Friday, but it was blowing. We came out of Wal Mart with our purchase and the wind scooped up a full-size bed pillow and two or three unused shopping bags and blew them across the parking lot. A good Samaritan stopped the pillow and I finally chased down the bags. About that time a cart with (I hope) an empty cardboard box in it went whizzing by, on its way to South Texas.

And speaking of shopping, our IKEA store, which is already so large you need to stop halfway through and eat Swedish meatballs in order to build up your strength to continue, is expanding. Another 54,000 square feet of store space is being added to the current 252,000 square feet. Maybe they will provide motorized carts, or at least a shuttle bus.

The hotel and lodging industry in Austin is very, very happy about the Formula 1 races coming next November. Piece in the Statesman revealed that the rack rate for a room during that week is 4 or 5 times higher than the week before, and the week after. That's if you can still find a room.

Not uncommon to see street-side vendors selling paintings,  or rugs or tapestries, or sometimes bonsai trees. We passed a guy setting out - according to the sign - 800 count 6-piece bedding sets. I remarked that I found that an unusual item to sell on a street corner. Barb said it all depended on what you had heisted earlier.

And Barb wants one of these banners to hang in the kitchen:

 

Enjoy your week.

No sugar tonight - in my coffee

No sugar tonight - in my tea.
No sugar to stand beside me
No sugar to run with me

Or so the lyrics go to a  favorite Golden Oldey song by The Guess Who. And it's literally so; in order to make the necessary life changes to continue on my weight loss, sugar has to go.

If you know me at all, you know I love me some coffee. Coffee on the patio to start my day, coffee of an evening to top off a most excellent day. Sometimes coffee in mid-afternoon just because. No foo-foo frilly barista-type drinks - just coffee. Good, plain coffee. With lots of sugar. Uh-oh.

I became a coffee drinker fairly late in life, but not as late as my parents. They took up coffee drinking well after they retired. Oh, I tried it in college, but mostly it was incentive to stay awake while studying. If I got sleepy, I had to drink some of the wretched stuff. Somewhere along the line I found out what good coffee tasted like. Especially good, sweetened coffee.

Barb does not drink coffee, so I'm left to my own devices. I'm a prime candidate for a Keurig machine, but they will have to get way cheaper. In the meantime, I know to the drop how much water and to the ground how much coffee is needed to make my two cups in the morning and two cups in the evening. And to the granule how much sugar to add. No cream, thank you.

Sugar. That's the problem. Nothing else tastes like sugar in hot coffee. Iced tea? Give me a couple of packets of the pink stuff. Works great in iced drinks. Pink stuff in coffee? Bleeaahh. Same for the yellow stuff, and the green stuff and the Stevia, and everything else artificial I have tried.  Sigh.

Sugar; a class of edible crystalline carbohydrates, mainly sucrose, lactose, and fructose; responsible for the formation of colonies, perpetuation of slavery, transition to indentured labor, migration and abuse of people, wars between 19th century sugar trade controlling nations, ethnic composition and political structure of the new world, according to Wikipedia. And sweetness in my coffee cup no more.

By the way, according to Randy Bachman, who penned the first half of the song, the inspiration for the lyrics came after an incident when he heard a woman in a car shouting at a nearby man; as she was driving away she said: "And one more thing, you're getting no sugar tonight".


Neither am I.

We have a problem, people!

I knew it! I knew it!

I told you last Wednesday that our health-care appliances, such as hearing aids, CPAP machines and the such were invading our privacy and keeping detailed records about our activities and our life styles. Well, it's even worse than I thought! Now the devices are turning on us! This past week the the FDA issued a consumer update with regard to those battery-powered Spinbrushes that are all the rage. While these brushes may seem innocent, healthy, and, with their cutesy slogans and vibrant colors, good for kids,etc., they are not to be trusted. Avoid being alone with them in closed quarters, like your bathroom!

It turns out the devices have caused injuries ranging from chipped or broken teeth to mouth and gum cuts and injuries to the face and eyes from poking people in the eye and in the cheek. They've cut lips, burned people with their batteries, and lodged their bristles in tonsils. Could this be the result of angry dentists, reacting to secret tooth brush snooping? Remember, I cautioned you about this. What's next? Hearing aids planting subliminal, self-destructive messages in our ears? CPAP machines silently shutting off the flow to our oxygen-starved brains? Oh, it gets worse, people...

Last week, in another visit to the Audiologist, I kept hearing terrible, retching noises from the adjacent office. I found this very puzzling, and somewhat upsetting, but the Audiologist just ignored the sounds. Finally, I asked her what was going on, and she said, "It's nothing - just a balance test." I pressed her for more, and she finally admitted that they were torturing some poor soul afflicted with vertigo by upsetting their "balance" - in other words, they were making this person so dizzy, by alternating warm and cold air in the ears, that the subject was leaving breakfast and some of last night's $20 sirloin in the porcelain convenience!

Subliminal messages, I'm telling you! "You must come to my office and let me make you sick as a dog! I'll teach you not to wear your hearing aids!" I demand a government investigation into the devices!

Wait! What if it's a government conspiracy? Folks, it may be time to hightail it to Montana or the Australian Outback. Remember, you heard it here first!

Monday Meanderings - 2.20.2012

You gotta hate it when you are working on this year's taxes, comparing them to last year's return, and something just doesn't look right - in last year's return! Can you say 1040X?

I have good news and bad news. Leslie, Austin's most iconic street person, is departing for greener pastures. He says he "feels like Austin has forgotten him, and left him behind." He plans to move to Oak Creek, a small town northwest of Denver where he once lived. Where, he said, "I'm loved and respected." Only one problem; he's having trouble buying a train ticket since nowadays they require a photo id.

Over Valentines, I heard radio stations featuring "love songs." Now, just how "loving" the song was depended in part on the genre of music that the station played. There was a distinct difference in the overall messages delivered by the radio station that played Mantovani and the station that featured Merl Haggard. Nevertheless, it got me wondering how many songs were out there with the phrase "Baby, Baby" in the lyrics. Would someone with a 4S iPhone ask Siri for a list of those and share it? Thanks.

 SXSW Interactive starts soon and I'm still waiting on my invitation to address the unlearned in how to become a blogging zen-master. Must be lost in the mail.

Strange week. There was snow on Sunday (well, sort of) and it reached 80 degrees Wednesday. My reverie during my normally peaceful afternoon patio-sitting was interrupted by my neighbor mowing his lawn!

Took my wife out for a movie and dinner on Valentines day. Awwww. Actually, we got invited by some friends to meet them for a movie we were all mutually interested in (we're all fans of the book series this was based on), then Barb and stopped at Paneras for a bite. Hey! That counts! The movie was PG-13; correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't PG stand for Parental Guidance, as in you are supposed to discuss these things with your impressionable young children. Things like, "Mamma, what does *&%-*$%& mean?" Or,  "Dad, get a load of the &%$#@s on that babe!" No wonder we don't go to movies much. Too much explaining to do.

And speaking of Parental Guidance, did you know that if you subscribe to the print issue of Sports Illustrated, you get an e-version on your iPad? And that version comes with extra photos, movies and closeups? Just saying.

Old timey radios - stories for my grandchildren

If you are of a certain age, and that would certainly be older than my children and grandchildren, you may recognize that the item in the picture above is (part of) an old crystal radio. This particular radio was made by my father when he was a boy. I'm estimating that this set is more than 90 years old. I'm not sure where it has been all this time, but it turned up out at the Lake Cabin and I claimed it, since I am a sucker for nostalgic memorabilia. I really feel sorry for my children, but that's a different blog story.

Crystal radios were just about the only kind of radio available during the era that this set was made. You could make them out of a cardboard tube (oatmeal boxes were favorites), some wire and a crystal diode. Actually, you didn't even need the diode; my father showed me how to make a similar radio using a razor blade and the lead out of a pencil as the detector! Attach the set to an antenna stretched from the house to a nearby tree and with careful manipulation of the "cat's whisker" contact on the galena crystal, you were assured of picking up a strong station or two in the headphones!Certainly, this set tuned in WFAA and KRLD when it was first used.

My immediate response when I saw this radio was to restore it to working condition. There are some parts missing - the crystal and the cat whisker, and the contact that slid across the coil of wire to tune the station(s). In the good old days, you ordered a galena crystal from the Johnson Smith and Company catalog, at a very low cost. Interestingly, Johnson Smith and Company is still in business, but alas, they don't sell crystals anymore. I did find a company that sells the entire component - crystal and cat whisker - for $25.00 plus shipping and handling. Sort of defeats the purpose, doesn't it?

 

In this picture, the crystal is in the little round "pot" on the left. The cat whisker is the tiny wire touching it.

Crystal radio kits are still popular, and plans for making the sets used to be published in Scout Manuals. Perhaps they still are. But the "modern" crystal radio uses a little glass-enclosed diode that requires no adjustment. Sort of takes the fun out of it.