Small Talk: The Welcome Mat

[Netfoot]

I cooked a pot of soup yesterday and had some for lunch and some for dinner. There were at least three more servings in that pot, maybe four.  After dinner I left the pot on the stove, covered, to cool so it could go in the fridge.

When I went to heat up a bowl for lunch, I found the pot had been left out overnight (16+ hours) and had gone bad. That is hard news. We have other groceries but the loss of 1½-2 days of food will be felt.

I wanted to confirm the price I had been given ($171) for the tires. I called several times on Thursday and got no answer. Then I discovered that Thursday was a bank holiday. Thursday felt so much like a Friday that I assumed the next day was a Saturday and since the tire company are Closed Brethren, I did not call. I only realized it was Friday after 5:00 PM. Then Saturday was Saturday... so I didn't get to talk to someone down there until today.

The price of the tires is $166.03  and not the $171 I was expecting. I could buy two tires, but that would leave me with only 71¢ in the bank.

I( get a welfare cheque on Friday 16th of this month. 

My next pharmacy day at QEH can't be before the  10th May, but that is a Saturday. I will either go the day before of the following Monday. The tire place is not far from QEH. I could pop down there and buy a tire (or two?) on QEH day! Two birds with one stone.

[Netfoot]

Listening to Ladies Of The Road by King Crimson. Contemporaries of Pink Floyd, the Crimheads were very influential in the rise of progrock in the 70s. (As was Floyd). They have some smashing albums but there is much to criticize as well. I have probably a dozen of their albums which is prolly most of them. Hard to say which is my favourite but their debut (Court Of The Crimson King) is hard to beat.

The loss of the soup still bothers me. Not that I was so struck with it's taste. It tasted fine, but it was not ambrosia! But now I will have to buy groceries sooner. And money is still tight. 

Mo is around somewhere. He was alternatively cuddling and then kangaroo-kicking me just a few minutes ago. He will be back for sure. We have completed our Garden Patrol and I've had my post-prandial mug of tea. With one less sugar than usual, which I've been doing these last few days. I usually test my blood sugar on a three day schedule. Three days is not set in concrete but I try to stick to it. Routine helps me remember to do it. But these last few days I've tested every morning and it has been in the red every day except the day after I had one bowl of ramen for the whole day. Tomorrow would be a normal test day. If it is still in the red I must consider consulting Dr. Kristi.

Which I am loth to do. I think very highly of her but I think she is tired of me seeking medical advice I can't pay for. She is not pleased to see me these days. Or so it seems. Maybe it is because this year for the first time ever I was not able to give her the traditional Valentine's gift of Kisses. (Hershey's Kisses, of course.)

But if I do consult her I can also ask about the reflux, the burping/gas and the foamy phlegm that seems to collect in my throat in the wee hours of the morning these last few weeks.

Might even get a chance to talk to her about the still-missing biopsy and the 10-month delay between the change in MG medication and a chance to review the results of that action. Not that she can do anything about it, but I like her to know all what is going on with me, health wise. 

Approaching eleven. Will shower and read. Now listening to Winter by Tori Amos. Heard or read somewhere that she once said "It's not easy to be a grandmother and a hot piece of ass at the same time." No doubt she was right about that. I just wish I could find some reference that confirms or denies this. I like her. I remember how pleased I was to recognize her in that unexpected cameo in Mona Lisa Smile.

Shower! Book! Sleep 

Battery is at 3% so I guess this is a good place to stop!

Edited May 6 by Netfoot

[Netfoot]

Sometimes you have a little accident. You stump your toe. Bang your knee. Drop something in your foot. You go "Ow!" and two minutes you have completely forgotten the incident. 

I went out shopping with Mo today. More later. On the way back my foot started to hurt. From the instep down towards the toes, it aches and it hurts to put weight on it. It isn't bad but it is uncomfortable. Thing is, I have no idea what caused it. Nothing happened immediately prior to the start of the pains. Could I have banged it or dropped something on it earlier, forgotten about it so completely that when it begins hurting later, it doesn't come to mind?

Took Mo shopping. Only two tea bags remained at home. While out, I went looking for meat scraps. Popular don't sell them. The store that does sometimes have them is too expensive for general shopping. But hoping there might be scraps, I went there. None available. I bought bread, milk and some decaf tea bags. The bread & milk are price controlled so the price is no higher than Popular or anywhere else. I looked for pak choy but they had none. They only had some horrible crap named "kale". Bought pumpkin instead.

While down there, I put a gill of gas in the van. Then on to Popular. Potatoes, onions, rice, spaghetti, cheese, bully, tuna, sugar, lentils, garlic & onion powder. Sugar. Tinned corn. Can't remember everything. Then headed home. 

It was while driving home my foot started hurting and was quite painful by time I got the van into the garage.

I normally track what is in the bank and have a small spreadsheet with the current balance at the top, and below that expected income (pension, welfare cheques, etc) along with upcoming expenses (utilities, rent, etc). When I have returned home after a shopping trip, I check the bank balance using Internet Banking and update my spreadsheet. 

According to the bank, I started the morning with $973 58, spent $206.21 leaving a total of..... $529.93 in the account. Now, my arithmetic is not great. But 900 and a lot minus 200 and a little does not give a total of 500 and anything. But that, according to my bank, is how it went. 900-200=500.  And there are no transactions other than the purchases I made today. How do you keep track of your pathetic finances and fight to make ends meet when the bank just disappears $200+ out of your account?

Cheese sandwiches for lunch. Mo had chow... and cheese sandwiches. Cheese & tuna sandwiches for dinner. Mo had chow and... cheese & tuna sandwiches. 

Anyway, I am trying to keep my foot quiet I the hope that the mysterious pains vanish away as mysteriously as they came. Hobbled through Garden Patrol, taking longer than usual. The grass was not easy to walk on with the hobbley foot. But Garden Patrol doesn't usually take long. I mean, we walk around the front of the house, down to the end near the house and back up again near the wall. I shine my torch around, all over the place, to see everything that might turn up out there. Anything from a crapaud or s beed nest to some household item previously purloined by kleptopup. Back around the front of the house, and in again. There may be a delay if Mo finds an interesting leaf to investigate or a bush that needs burrowing into.

Mirrorball by Everything By The Girl. EBTG is a duet from Leeds. Tracey Thorn is the vocalist and occasional guitarist and Ben Watt plays the majority of the instruments and is their producer. (He also married Thorn later.) Thorn has a sweet voice. And this is a great track. It's off Walking Wounded, the first album of theirs I bought and is still my favourite. 

Back inside now, considering a mug of tea. Blood sugar this morning: 6.1 mmol/L. Better than the last few days, but still marginally high.

Yes, a shower, a mug of tea and bed. Possibly with some reading, but probably not much. 

Edited May 7 by Netfoot

[andidante]

4 minutes ago, Netfoot said:

Sometimes you have a little accident. You stump your toe. Bang your knee. Drop something in your foot. You go "Ow!" and two minutes you have completely forgotten the incident. 

I went out shopping with Mo today. More later. On the way back my foot started to hurt. From the instep down towards the toes, it aches and it hurts to put weight on it. It isn't bad but it is uncomfortable. Thing is, I have no idea what caused it. Nothing happened immediately prior to the start of the pains. Could I have banged it or dropped something on it earlier, forgotten about it so completely that when it begins hurting later, it doesn't come to mind?

Took Mo shopping. Only two tea bags remained at home. While out, I went looking for meat scraps. Popular don't sell them. The store that does sometimes have them is too expensive for general shopping. But hoping there might be scraps, I went there. None available. I bought bread, milk and tea bags. The bread & milk are price controlled so the price is no higher than Popular or anywhere else. I looked for pak choy but they had none. They only had some horrible crap named "kale". Bought pumpkin instead.

While down there, I put a gill of gas in the van. Then on to Popular. Potatoes, onions, rice, spaghetti, cheese, bully, tuna, sugar, lentils, garlic & onion powder. Sugar. Tinned corn. Can't remember everything. Then headed home. 

It was while driving home my foot started hurting and was quite painful by time I got the van into the garage.

I normally track what is in the bank and have a small spreadsheet with the current balance at the top, and below that expected income (pension, welfare cheques, etc) along with upcoming expenses (utilities, rent, etc). When I have returned home after a shopping trip, I check the bank balance using Internet Banking and update my spreadsheet. 

According to the bank, I started the morning with $973 58, spent $206.21 leaving a total of..... $529.93 in the account. Now, my arithmetic is not great. But 900 and a lot minus 200 and a little does not give a total of 500 and anything. But that, according to my bank, is how it went. 900-200=500.  And there are no transactions other than the purchases I made today. How do you keep track of your pathetic finances and fight to make ends meet when the bank just disappears $200+ out of your account?

Cheese sandwiches for lunch. Mo had chow... and cheese sandwiches. Cheese & tuna sandwiches for dinner. Mo had chow and... cheese & tuna sandwiches. 

Anyway, I am trying to keep my foot quiet I the hope that the mysterious pains vanish away as mysteriously as they candy. Hobbled through Garden Patrol, taking longer than usual. The grass was not easy to walk on with the hobbley foot. But Garden Patrol doesn't usually take long. I mean, we walk around the front of the house, down to the end near the house and back up again near the wall. I shine my torch around, all over the place, to see everything that might turn up out there. Anything from a crapaud or s beed nest to some household item previously purloined by kleptopup. Back around the front of the house, and in again. There may be a delay if Mo finds an interesting leaf to investigate or a bush that needs burrowing into.

Mirrorball by Everything By The Girl. EBTG is a duet from Leeds. Tracey Thorn is the vocalist and occasional guitarist and Ben Watt plays the majority of the instruments and is their producer. (He also married Thorn later.) Thorn has a sweet voice. And this is a great track. It's off Walking Wounded, the first album of theirs I bought and is still my favourite. 

Back inside now, considering a mug of tea. Blood sugar this morning: 6.1 mmol/L. Better than the last few days, but still marginally high.

Yes, a shower, a mug of tea and bed. Possibly with some reading, but probably not much. 

I hope your foot gets better! You should call your bank and see what is up with that. I don't know if you use a debit card to pay for things, but you want to make sure someone didn't somehow use it and steal some money. I hope they can figure it out and get you your money back. Unless one of your bills just came out?

[Netfoot]

7 hours ago, andidante said:

I don't know if you use a debit card to pay for things, but you want to make sure someone didn't somehow use it and steal some money.

I do use a debit card. But I have transaction notification turned on. Every time something is charged against the debit card, I get a "Transaction Alert" e-mail which arrives literally within 2-3 minutes. There have been no mysterious charges.

Also, when I go on internet banking, I see a list of transactions, giving the date, the vendor, and the amount. All transactions are listed. Not just debit card ones. With each completed transaction listed there is a running balance. Uncompleted (pending) transactions are listed but have no running balance. 

So, with yesterday's shopping, I could see everything right up to the day before with a running balance. Then comes the three transactions I did that morning: Gas station, Massy Stores, BJ's Value (Popular). It is easy to get the latest running balance ($973 58) and then apply the three "pending" transactions (-$25.00, -55.74, -125.47) to get a new balance of $767.37 total. But look at the top of the page and it says $529.93 is the account balance.

To make matters worse, I just went on internet banking again. And three new transactions have popped up, dated yesterday, that were not shown yesterday when I checked. Looking closely at them I can see that one of them is the kettle ($37.31), one is a bag of chow I bought for Mo ($28.25), and one is some groceries ($51.88). But I didn't make those purchases yesterday. I made them on the 2nd and I have . Also on the 2nd, I deposited a welfare cheque and paid the electric and telephone bills. These showed up as dated the 2nd and were accounted for in the running balance from yesterday.

Anyway, now the declared balance on the account is $649.93 which is UP from yesterday's balance, despite there being $117.44 in additional debits and no new deposits!

The new balance is $649.93 and appears to be correct. It is $120 higher than it was yesterday despite showing $117.44 more charges! $120 is coincidentally the same amount as a welfare cheque, but the last welfare cheque was processed on the 2nd and was included in the running total shown by internet banking yesterday. Nice coincidence, though.....

So according to my spreadsheet, if I set aside $180 to make up the pension to pay rent next month, refill my spare gas cylinder for the stove, earmark $166.03 for a tire and $250 for the bandsaw refurbishment and leave a $10 minimum balance in the account so they don't start refusing to pay out, I now have 40¢ available funds.

All based upon data coming out of the bank which is questionable.

[Mr. Sparkle]

9 hours ago, Netfoot said:

They only had some horrible crap named "kale".

I like almost every vegetable, but kale is just awful. Like spinach's ugly, bitter brother. 

Edited May 7 by Mr. Sparkle

[andidante]

56 minutes ago, Netfoot said:

I do use a debit card. But I have transaction notification turned on. Every time something is charged against the debit card, I get a "Transaction Alert" e-mail which arrives literally within 2-3 minutes. There have been no mysterious charges.

Also, when I go on internet banking, I see a list of transactions, giving the date, the vendor, and the amount. All transactions are listed. Not just debit card ones. With each completed transaction listed there is a running balance. Uncompleted (pending) transactions are listed but have no running balance. 

So, with yesterday's shopping, I could see everything right up to the day before with a running balance. Then comes the three transactions I did that morning: Gas station, Massy Stores, BJ's Value (Popular). It is easy to get the latest running balance ($973 58) and then apply the three "pending" transactions (-$25.00, -55.74, -125.47) to get a new balance of $767.37 total. But look at the top of the page and it says $529.93 is the account balance.

To make matters worse, I just went on internet banking again. And three new transactions have popped up, dated yesterday, that were not shown yesterday when I checked. Looking closely at them I can see that one of them is the kettle ($37.31), one is a bag of chow I bought for Mo ($28.25), and one is some groceries ($51.88). But I didn't make those purchases yesterday. I made them on the 2nd and I have . Also on the 2nd, I deposited a welfare cheque and paid the electric and telephone bills. These showed up as dated the 2nd and were accounted for in the running balance from yesterday.

Anyway, now the declared balance on the account is $649.93 which is UP from yesterday's balance, despite there being $117.44 in additional debits and no new deposits!

The new balance is $649.93 and appears to be correct. It is $120 higher than it was yesterday despite showing $117.44 more charges! $120 is coincidentally the same amount as a welfare cheque, but the last welfare cheque was processed on the 2nd and was included in the running total shown by internet banking yesterday. Nice coincidence, though.....

So according to my spreadsheet, if I set aside $180 to make up the pension to pay rent next month, refill my spare gas cylinder for the stove, earmark $166.03 for a tire and $250 for the bandsaw refurbishment and leave a $10 minimum balance in the account so they don't start refusing to pay out, I now have 40¢ available funds.

All based upon data coming out of the bank which is questionable.

That would drive me mad, but I am glad it seems to have straightened itself out for now. 

[Netfoot]

Got up this morning and decided to write a "plasmoid" for my desktop. (A plasmoids is a "widget" for the KDE Plasma desktop - a little program that attaches to your desktop.) I wanted a small desktop clock and couldn't find one I liked. Never written one before. Took most of the morning (because I didn't know what I was doing) but finally got it to work.

I must learn more about coding in QML which is the preferred language for developing graphical interfaces with the Qt toolkit. I'm guessing QML stands for "Qt Meta Language". I'm on the phone but later I might post a picture of the extremely simple plasmoid/widget I created.

Cooked white rice for dinner. Except I have the family allergy to white rice, so I added some cubed pumpkin. On the top of the rice I put a sauce of corned beef & cabbage with onion and tomato sauce. This worked well and was a pleasant change from the usual cook-up rice with everything in one pot. But it didn't work so well for Mo who ate the sauce off the top and left the drive rice behind. Some of the sauce had drained down into the rice underneath, so he soon returned and ate some more sauce-stained rice. He walked away again but returned to eat some rice with less sauce on it. And so it went until most of the rice was gone. Note to self: don't put Mo's on top. Mix it all up together.

My phone had has been rebooting itself. It has happened about 8-10 times a day this last week. I guess it won't last much longer, now. Like everything else I own, it's on the way out.

Hope to finish my book tonight. Not sure if I can stay awake. But we will see. Had our Garden Patrol and I drank a mug of tea.

Blood sugar this morning was good! 5.1 mmol/L with 5.0 considered perfect. I prefer if it is lower, but I will take 5.1, thanks!  But can I keep it down? I am testing daily now, rather than the 2/week Dr. Kristi told me to go with. So we will see if the "white" pumpkin rice and sauce will push that back up come morning.

While cooking I realized how nice it was to have a kettle handy. Obviously it helps with tea-making and reduces the risk of a boiled-dry pot on the stove. But it is more than that. When I'm cooking I have a tendency to turn on the kettle.

You need an ounce of water for the sauce? The kettle is full of hot water which is so much better for the job than cold water from the tap! Cooking eggs and want to steam the tops? A teaspoon of hot water in the pan and cover. In seconds the eggs are steamed. Cold water does not work as well.

When I go in the kitchen to cook, the kettle goes on! Now that I've got a kettle.....

And after dinner, when a cuppa seems like a good idea, the kettle is still pretty hot and comes quickly to the boil for tea-making. 

Anyway, I am teaching myself more about QML via an online tutorial and will do a couple chapters of that before showering and turning to my book.

Edited May 8 by Netfoot

[Netfoot]

Here is my new clock widget:

(The muddy background colour is because my wallpaper is a sunrise sunset and this just happens to be the colour of the top/left corner of the screen.)  The image is two screen-grabs in one. On the left the clock as it normally appears. On the right the same clock with mouse-hover.

That's it. Small and simple. This image makes it look bigger than it is.  And I want to make is smaller vertically if I can. Also thinking about adding a calendar that pops up if I click on the clock. One that has an easily visible highlight on the current day. But I can't do any of that until I figure out how. 

So some QML tutorials, then a shower then my book then sleep. And as you can see, the witching hour rapidly approaches.

Edited May 8 by Netfoot

[Netfoot]

Fiddled with my widget clock a little today. Forced it to pop up the daye date on hover but to the left. 

This allows me to position the clock closer to the top/right corner and still get a clearly visible date when needed. Also added the "th" to "8th". Changed the clock's colour from #FFFFFF (white) to #80FF80 (light green)  just for fun.

What I would really like to do is set the height of the clock down. There is far more black above and below those green digits than we really need. But every effort to set the height of the widget to something smaller than what you see here results in this exact same height of clock. Obviously, something I am unaware of is constraining the minimum height of this widget. 

Wouldn't mind losing that fat, white border, either!

Edited May 9 by Netfoot

[andidante]

21 minutes ago, Netfoot said:

Fiddled with my widget clock a little today. Forced it to pop up the daye on hover but to the left. 

This allows me to position the clock closer to the top/right corner and still get a clearly visible date when needed. Also added the "th" to "8th". Changed the clock's colour from #FFFFFF (white) to #80FF80 (light green)  just for fun.

What I would really like to do is set the height of the clock down. There is far more black above and below those green digits than we really need. But every effort to set the height of the widget to something smaller than what you see here results in this exact same height of clock. Obviously, something I am unaware of is constraining the minimum height of this widget. 

Wouldn't mind losing that fat, white border, either!

I am very impressed! I have to ask my son to help me do anything technical on the computer! I could not even begin to do this.

[Netfoot]

Blood sugar up again. 

Back up to 6.7 mmol/L this morning. The square point in the green was the morning after the day where I had a bowl of ramen for lunch and nothing for dinner. No obvious explanation for the other green. On the latter part of this graph I switched from testing every 3 days to daily testing. I am worried about this. It was almost all in the green right up until recently.

Did not quite get to the end of my book last night so I will try again tonight. 

Mo ate up his lunch today but was picky over his dinner. He is an adult dog (although I think of him as my baby; my puppy) and most adult dogs get fed once per day. I feed Mo twice, and I wonder if I should simply feed him once a day? Then come tomorrow, he will be hungry when he gets his next meal and won't be picky. 

Apparently a nuclear war is about to break out. Will it be a fuse which ignites similar conflicts elsewhere around the globe? 

54 minutes ago, andidante said:

I could not even begin to do this.

I studied computing & cybernetics as a youngster, back in the 70s and worked with computers my entire professional career. New concepts and technological developments occur all the time and it is really impossible to stay abreast of them all. I have been self-educating for 50 years. I have to learn new technology (like QML for generating cross-platform applets) if I want to try it. Anyone could learn it, including you. But I have a 50 year foundation of experience to stand on so I would probably find it easier than most.

The grammar of QML is new to me but it is similar in several respects to a dozen other languages that I've looked at before. This makes it easier and faster for me to pick up.

Mo lies on the tiles beside the bed. He was quite snuggly last night. He does not spend all night in bed with me. He moves around. From the foot of the bed to the passage and then curled up between my shoulder blades. When the lights go out he almost immediately (within a minute) joins me. But if I wake later in the night he might be looking out the window, using my feet as a pillow, or on the floor somewhere. But several times I will discover that he is cuddling. He is very affectionate. 

I'm open the door for him early (first light) and he is usually outside barking at the world when I wake again later. But he will come running in, jump into my lap and overpower me with kisses and cuddles. I just have to be careful because he is so exuberant he can and frequently does head-butt me in the face. And he has a noggin made of granite!

Just gone eleven. I need a shower. I've had my left arm in bandages these last few days. I've had some scrapes and scratches on my arm that I have issues with. I scratch them in my sleep and sometimes even during the day when I'm distracted. So they don't heal. The bandage protects them and promotes healing. But winding it on is a PITA and it makes shower impossible. But it will come off so I can shower and get wound back on. Because a shower is not an option tonight.

Been feeling lethargic these last few days. Will see if I can find something to do tomorrow. And with the weekend coming up I got to look at the larder.

Got veggies and bully and tuna. Rice, potatoes and pasta. Teabags, sugar and milk. Don't think I need to buy any groceries. Will confirm in the morning. Gotta scroll back and see when I last replaced the gas cylinder, too. 

Ok, shower time. 

[Netfoot]

Wow.  4.7 mmol/L this morning.

And I did nothing special. I never "game" the test. That would be tricking myself. Yesterday I ate carbs with lunch (bread) and dinner was potatoes, carrots, pumpkin, cabbage, onion, corn and bully. Mostly potatoes, so carby. 

ETA: Got four tins of corned beef, six tins of tuna, two tins of corn, one tin of black beans, 1+ bags each of rice, potatoes and onions, six spaghetti and four short pasta, a little pumpkin, a cucumber and a half, a small piece of cabbage, a couple broccoli florettes and three carrots. Two liters of milk, 1+ bags of sugar and 70+ decaf teabags. And a packet of ramen noodles. And 7-8 portions of chow for Mo. 

No need to shop prior to the weekend, which is a good thing, because I don't want to spend money if I want to buy a tire (or tires) on Monday.

Woke up and hovered the mouse over my widget to check the date. Thursday, 8th.  Wait, what? What did I do?!??

Examined the code.  Oh, I see. I'm fetching the date on startup and using that same date from then until the end of time.  (Or until I restart my desktop.) Now, that was really stupid logic. I am ashamed.

Revised the code to fetch the date each time the tooltip is displayed. Possibly multiple times a day if I check the date more than once. Inefficient, but the time fetch only takes fractions of a second and I won't be doing it thousands of times a day!  Anyway, how else can I guarantee that the date displayed at 00:00:01 is the day after the date displayed at 23:59:59?

Well, I could fetch the date on startup, initiate a repeating Timer{} event with an interval that takes it to midnight, or a few seconds past. The timer would fire a routine that updates the tooltip with the new date and then sets the interval to 86,400,000.  Milliseconds in a day.  A solar day. A sidereal day is 86,164,100 milliseconds. 

But I won't mess about with another Timer{}. I will just put up with a few microseconds delay when I hover the mouse, before I get my tooltip date. I call that a reasonable compromise. (My college lecturers used to call it laziness.)

Edited May 9 by Netfoot

[Netfoot]

Did very little all day other than tweaking my computer. Been very lazy this past week. Or more. 

Made a sweet rice for lunch but Mo was not interested. Later, he came and ate some. He got the remainder for his dinner and I had spaghetti. Tossed with tuna and fried onions. Mo eventually are the remainder of his lunch.

The surprisingly low blood sugar reading this morning was encouraging. But will it be up again tomorrow? The spaghetti probably won't help. Nor the lack of green vegetables to go with it. Broccoli, cabbage and cucumber is good but also expes$ive. 

As you know, Mo and I make a Garden Patrol every night. It started on the first day he came home. It just gave him an opportunity to do a peenapoo before bed. He doesn't need that any more. But we have not missed a single day, no matter how foul the weather. Rain, wind, no matter. But do we need to carry on? Mo is approaching four years old, now.

I like that we have that little routine. When I pick up the torch, Mo comes to attention. And when I start out towards the door, I have to be careful not to get in his way because he bulldozes his way to the front. And he may be a little boy, but he can push you off your feet and be gone out of sight before your butt hits the floor!

Finished my book last night. I didn't know if I would be able to but it turned out that there were only 2½ pages to go. The other pages I thought were at least one more chapter turned out to be appendices. I read them any way. 

Today I watched a grand old classic sci-fi from 1950. Destination: Moon with a screenplay contributed to by RAH. A classic story of the first rocket to the moon. The ship looked very V2 rocket. The movie was made only 5 years after WW-II, after all. But I was surprised how similar the rocket looked to the one in the Tintin cartoon by Hergé also called Destination Moon. Tintin's rocket was red & white whereas the one in the movie was silvery/metallic. Otherwise it was very similar. Even the landing legs on the bottom of the fins were identical. 

Of course as one of the earliest sci-fi movies to explore the concept and the engineering issues involved in inter-planetary travel, the storyline was pretty simplistic. And the special effects were on the basic side as well. Weightlessness with plenty of wires and starscapes beautifully painted on glass. Good stuff!

Currently watching Young Guns, a 1988 western about William "Billy the Kid" Bonney and featuring incredibly young versions of Kiefer Sutherland, Lou Diamond Phillips and Charlie Sheen, plus others. And Jack Palance too but not the young version. 🤣

Anyway, I am going to boil the kettle and while it heats up we will do our Garden Patrol. Then I will unwind this bandage and have a quick shower while the tea draws. 

No book to read, so I guess I will watch a couple YT videos as I drink it.

Then snores!

[Netfoot]

Found these clinging to the back of my knee upon return from Garden Patrol.

Painful.

Put on my shoes (Mo: Ready!) picked up the torch (Mo: Set!) and turned the torch on (Mo: Go!!!). Sonic boom as he barges past and exits with smoke trailing from his feet.

Listening to Haven't Got Time For The Pain by Carly Simon. Not my favourite artist but she definitely showed talent. I only have one album of hers and it's a Best-Of. I usually avoid Best-Of/Greatest-Hits albums because if I like the artist I will buy the original albums rather than BO. The originals almost always have excellent tracks that never made it into the BO. But sometimes, if I'm not really all that interested in the artist, I will settle. But note: there is at least one band that I started with their BO and then found myself buying 14 of their original studio albums.....

Still not chosen a book. Spent the day working on a recalcitrant program and still no success. You click a link in the browser that requires a special "handler" program. Example, you click a "mailto:" link and your e-mail program should start automatically.  There are all sort of handlers for all sort of occasions. But for some reason one type of link stopped working and after six hours I still have not got it working again.  I think the issue is my Chrome browser, because the links still work in the Firefox and SeaMonkey browsers. However I like Chrome and don't want to switch browsers.

Cooked rice for lunch. And a separate pot of corned beef stew. It tasted good but Mo only ate half. I did remember to mix the stew in with his rice rather than just ladle it on top.

For dinner I cooked cavatappi and ladled more bully stew over the top. Mo's cavatappi got mixed in with his leftover rice and got more stew stirred in as well. He ate ¾ of it. Hopefully he will finish the leftovers during the night or early tomorrow.

Watched Ava, a Jessica Chastain movie in which she is an assassin who is targeted by the heads of the organization that employed her. Not high art but it passed the time between Garden Patrol and sleep-time. Which is now, so I'm going for a shower (my 2nd today) and then lights-out. 

Unless I decide upon a book in my way to the shower. Or on the way back.

[andidante]

Happy Mother's day to all the moms on here! ❤️

[Netfoot]

Had a nap this afternoon. Five hours plus. But I have a excuse!

Got to sleep last night no problem but after about 45 minutes I awoke to find myself struggling to breathe with the back of my throat full of foamy phlegm. Ugh!  Ten minutes of spitting and gagging before I could breathe comfortably. I sat up for the remainder of the night. Essentially no sleep last night. So, yes. A long nap this afternoon.

Was going to cook chips for lunch and put the last of my corned beef stew over it. But Mo came in and insisted on lunch immediately so I gave him chow and poured a ladle of the stew over the top and stirred it all up. He was really pleased with his lunch and I went on to make a bowl of chips for myself and the last of the stew went over that. 

Then came the nap.

I was having a problem with my BitTorrent downloader. I have been using Ktorrent for years. It works well and is feature-filled but it is a bit bloated. I've been considering a switch to Transmission. This software uses a background daemon process to do the work. It is small and light weight and very efficient. It has a web interface so I can monitor and control it from a tab on my browser rather than have a GUI app running all the time. (There is a GUI app that is an alternative to the daemon, if you insist.) And there is a simple command line program that fetches status information and issues commands to the daemon. Useful for automated control. 

I wrote a handler script to intercept the link clicks from Chrome and start the downloads. It worked fine providing the daemon was already running in the background. But if it had not been started yet, it would fail. 

My handler was using pgrep -f to test if the daemon was running and it would start it if it were not, before submitting the link to it. But it was not working properly and never started the daemon. It took me a while reading documentation but in the end the solution was simple.  

-f causes pgrep to search through the process table and match against the entire command line of each process in the table, looking for the process name of the daemon. If found, the daemon would not need to be started because it is already running. Right?

But when pgrep is run to test for the daemon, pgrep itself becomes a process with an entry in the process table. With the name of the daemon it is searching for as part of the command line. The name of the daemon is transmission-daemon so pgrep starts a process with a command of pgrep -f transmission-daemon... to search for any processes with transmission-daemon anywhere in the command line. It very conveniently always finds itself, so it assumes the daemon process is running and never starts it. Gotcha!

I eventually figured it out and replaced the -f with -x which limits the search to just the process name. One charscter changed, problem solved, handler working perfectly and boy, do I feel dumb for taking so long to figure it out.

But you gotta admit it is a neat bug. You are searching the process table for a string but the search command adds itself to the process table thereby putting the string you are looking for into the process table, so you always find  what you are looking for!

I also did some completely unnecessary work on a program I wrote earlier called Med-Three. This program lists my medication and shows what needs to be taken and when. I usually check three days ahead (but the program will accept --days 6 and list six days instead. Or what ever number you put.) My changes were cosmetic and entirely unnecessary but it sure looks purty! I will try and post a before and after photo later, so you can see what I'm talking about. It was a tediously fiddly job, though.

But that reminds me that I have to go to QEH/Edgar Cochrane tomorrow. And I must remember to get more blood sugar test strips. It was up in the air again this morning, but maybe because I was not properly "rested", having got little or no sleep last night.

Anyhow, it's nearly 10:30 and I don't want a lazy puppy to think he can shirk his Garden Patrol duties. So boil kettle, Garden Patrol, shower, brew up, watch a movie (or memes on YT) and sleep, hopefully without breathing issues. I could eat but there is little in the larder that would not require a lengthy session in the kitchen to prepare.

Oh, wait! There is a packet of ramen noodles! So I will settle for that and a mug of tea and call that dinner. 

[Netfoot]

Here is a section of the output from my Med-Three program, as it was:

It lists each medication and shows for the next three days, how many to take for breakfast, lunch & dinner. It also shows how many of each med in total will be needed for the next three days, how many are on hand, and how many days are left before I run out. Notice Spirolon is highlighted becuse the number of days left is low (less than a week's supply).

You can also see that I take 1½ Prednsolone on Tuesday but none on Monday or wednesday. I take it every other day. 

No, here is the same program run afte about 2½ hours of annoyingly fiddly work:
Ain't that purdy?

But I retained the option to use classic line-drawing as an option (by running Med-Three --classic) if needed.

If it seems I have a lot of some meds in hand it is because when the doctors reduce the dosage I might have leftovers. I don't throw them out because if the doctors later increase the dosage again, I will have shortages which the previous leftovers help fill. 

[Netfoot]

I had the ramen very last night late. They come with a little "flavour packet" which I duly applied to the pot as it boiled. It turned out to be quite spicy.  We eat a lot of pepper in this region, and I didn't find it too hot to eat. But I couldn't get the spoon up to my face without the vapour rising into my eyes and completely blinding me. Eventually, I gave up on the broth and ate the noodles with chopsticks. (I used to be quite adept with chopsticks when I was a student, but I can hardly pick up a thing, now.)

Despite the late hour at which I ate, the blood glucose level was 5.1 mmol/L at 6:58 this morning.

It's been wet. A light but persistent rain with a strong, cold breeze. I've been opening & closing the window all morning. The rain has stopped now but could return at any moment. 

Mo demanded breakfast before 8:00 but wouldn't eat it when I gave it to him. I had rice for lunch, with tuna, broccoli, cabbage, onion and channa. Tasted great. My son is currently zoned out next to me here, on his back with all four legs in the air and his bizzness exposé! I periodically put my hand on his tummy and give him a few minutes of gentle stroking to which he responds only by spreading his limbs wider to make it easier for me to administer the tummy-rubs. He doesn't even bother to wake up!

I had planned to go to QEH & Edgar Cochrane today but late last night I had a thought. It's over four months since I saw Neuro and the prescription they gave me then was only for four months. When I checked, I saw that my prescription had no more repeats. The earliest I can get a new prescription is tomorrow. Neuro only opens on a Tuesday and only after 1:00 PM. So I will go down there and try to get a new prescription tomorrow afternoon. I am pretty sure it will be too late by then to do QEH and Edgar Cochrane so I will probably have to go back again Wednesday, or Thursday. No later because I take my last Spirolon on Thursday and the Digoxin only lasts two days more. 

Tweaking my computer again. You might ask when the tweaking will stop. Answer: never. I'm always fiddling and tweaking to make my system better. What "better" means varies from day to day.

Worked on the BitTorrent downloader and weird things were happening. Downloads slowed to a halt and I couldn't figure out why.  But I quickly noticed something about my home directortly..  Allocated: 238.08 GBytes. Free: 0 Bytes. Remember, I recently replaced a 2,000 GByte drive with a 500 GBytes one. I had to shut down most processes, shuffle a number of files around and delete a bunch of junk to make space available where needed. Restarted my daemon and file downloading resumed with alacrity! Next thing I knew The Boat That Rocked was available for viewing. It's a fun show about Radio Rock, a pirate radio station broadcasting from a ship at sea to Britain in the 60s. Think Caroline. Ensemble cast with the likes of Bill Nighy, Philip Seymour-Hoffman, Rhys Ifans and many more. I bet the soundtrack album is pretty special!

Mo has just woken up, flapped his ears vigorously and repositioned himself at the foot of the bed. I will go brew up a mug and enjoy it while I tinker with my computer some more. 

I keep dreaming about building the ultimate computer for use here at home.  I think a machine for direct use but with minimal disk space and a separate machine running headless as a NAS server. I wonder what such a machine would be cost?

ETA: something just said in the "Radio Rock" ship:  I've never had sex in a hammock!

Edited May 12 by Netfoot

[Netfoot]

The Boat That Rocked was a lot of fun. At the end of it while they ran the credits, they displayed a montage of album covers. This was a testament to the success enjoyed by rock music since the pirate stations were under pressure in the 60s. They displayed 74 album covers. I would list the 74 albums but I don't anyone would be interested in the detailed list. But I am happy to say that I own 44 of those 74 albums. That is nearly 60%!

Some of the 30 albums I do not own were by artists who I own other albums from. Some from artists I've never been interested in. 

I have always bought albums on the cheap! I have several I bought for 50¢ new, and many I paid 99¢ for.  So many of the ones in the list I don't own, I would own if ever I saw them for sale for a buck or less.

I had a great bowl of rice for lunch.  And a mug of tea for dinner. Mo had chow for both meals. 

Something strange happened tonight.  Some background info: my pension comes from the National Insurance Department (NIS). Just before my pension drops every month, I get a notification email from them. It contains nothing but a PDF document which tells me what type of benefit it is (Old Age Contributory Pension), start and end date of the period it is to cover, and the amount that is to be paid. The file says "The benefits payable have been submitted to your financial institution."

The next day or the day after, the pension appears in my bank account. I got the last of these on April 29th and was to cover the period from 5th May to 1st June. Pension routinely drops 4 days before it is officially due. 

Welfare cheques are actual cheques that come in the mail. I get two at a time and they are dated 2 weeks apart. The next one is dated on the 16th (Friday). They have been saying for years they want to switch to a direct deposit system similar to what NIS uses for pension but I called and asked a few weeks back and I was told that the switch to such a system is a long way off.

Tonight, I got a NIS notification PDF in the mail, just like for pension. But my next pension drop is not expected until the 29th. It says the benefit type is Old Age Contributory Pension. It covers a period from 12th May to 16th May. The amount in question is $300. As of 5 minutes ago, the funds have not dropped in my bank account. 

WTF is this? An unexpected $300 benefit for a random 5-day period? Called "pension"? A period that overlaps with the middle of my current pension period? An amount that does not match with current pension or welfare payments? No explanation?

Don't get me wrong.  An unexpected $300 is very welcome!  But I have no idea what it is all about. Has my pension been increased?  If so, why not just increase the amount in my next payment?  Why say it's to cover a random 5-day period? Is it a mistake? Will they wait for me to spend it and then demand I give it back? Last time they increased my pension the amount simply got increased for my next payment. No extra payment. And the increase was like $55, not $300!

Dunno what to make of it at all! 

So, Neuro at Enmore, across the road from QEH tomorrow afternoon, to grab a prescription. And then Wednesday becomes my QEH/Edgar Cochrane day. Gotta remember to get more test strips at Edgar Cochrane. I get 50 free every three months. Since I normally test every three days they last for five months. But I'm testing every day these days so I will run out if I'm not careful. 

I feel like I'm going to have another mug of tea and I will shower while the water is boiling.

Earlier, I listened to the entire album Parallel Lines by Blondie. It was one of those 74 album covers displayed at the end of the movie!

Edited May 13 by Netfoot

[Netfoot]

Heidi knows everything.

NIS issued a one-time $300 bonus to every pensioner. (Nobody knows why. Is there a general election coming up?)

Of course, one half of the population thinks the other half didn't deserve it and their bonus should be taken away and given to the first half. 

The world is full of assholes who think they should do nothing for a living and get to live an exciting, adventurous life for free and have it all paid for by someone else!

But I definitely have a use for the $300!

It's another damp day and Mo is curled up next to me.

ETA: 😆😂🤣 He just rolled over for tummy-rubs but he was too close to the edge, so he fell off! I tried to catch him but couldn't. Now he is miffed and has crawled under the bed. 

Edited May 13 by Netfoot

[Netfoot]

So, most of my medication is prescribed by Dr. Kristi. Her prescriptions are good at every pharmacy in the land, except the QEH pharmacy.

But two meds are prescribed by Dr. Jacinto. Her prescriptons are good at the QEH pharmacy. One of the meds prescribed by Dr. J is free at the QEH pharmacy. It is also available at other pharmacies but it is not often stocked and it costs $313 and change, or the same as two tires for the van.

When I saw the team at Neuro at the end of November, they gave me a prescription for four months of meds and told me they would call with an appointment date for four months later (presumably end of April). They never called so I went down end of March and told them they needed to give me a date.  Early September was what they gave me. But end of November to start of September is 9+ months.  And my prescription had only been for 4 months. So, I told them they had to give me a prescription.  They refused.  Come back another day!

Well, the Neuro clinic is open every Tuesday, after 1:00 PM.  So I went down there to get the prescription that theytold me to "come back later" for. Shut. No doctors. Just a clerical worker who can't write prescriptions. "Come another day!," she said. That's what they told me last time! Which is why I'm, here today!

Well, I actually have enough Mestinon/Pyridostigmine to get me to next Tuesday.  So I will come back next Tuesday, and... "No. The clinic is not going to be open next Tuesday either!"  Well, what about  Tuesday after?  "I don't know. But I think you will be OK if you come in the middle og June." And what am I to do for meds until then? "Well, you could get your personal doctor to write the prescription instead..." 

But Dr. Kristi can not write a prescription on the only pharmacy in the country where I can guarantee to get the Mestinon/Pyridostigmine (QEH). And even if I do find another pharmacy that has it in stock, it will cost me $300+. 

[andidante]

11 hours ago, Netfoot said:

Heidi knows everything.

NIS issued a one-time $300 bonus to every pensioner. (Nobody knows why. Is there a general election coming up?)

Of course, one half of the population thinks the other half didn't deserve it and their bonus should be taken away and given to the first half. 

The world is full of assholes who think they should do nothing for a living and get to live an exciting, adventurous life for free and have it all paid for by someone else!

But I definitely have a use for the $300!

It's another damp day and Mo is curled up next to me.

ETA: 😆😂🤣 He just rolled over for tummy-rubs but he was too close to the edge, so he fell off! I tried to catch him but couldn't. Now he is miffed and has crawled under the bed. 

Extra money is always welcome! Very happy for you!

[andidante]

3 hours ago, Netfoot said:

So, most of my medication is prescribed by Dr. Kristi. Her prescriptions are good at every pharmacy in the land, except the QEH pharmacy.

But two meds are prescribed by Dr. Jacinto. Her prescriptons are good at the QEH pharmacy. One of the meds prescribed by Dr. J is free at the QEH pharmacy. It is also available at other pharmacies but it is not often stocked and it costs $313 and change, or the same as two tires for the van.

When I saw the team at Neuro at the end of November, they gave me a prescription for four months of meds and told me they would call with an appointment date for four months later (presumably end of April). They never called so I went down end of March and told them they needed to give me a date.  Early September was what they gave me. But end of November to start of September is 9+ months.  And my prescription had only been for 4 months. So, I told them they had to give me a prescription.  They refused.  Come back another day!

Well, the Neuro clinic is open every Tuesday, after 1:00 PM.  So I went down there to get the prescription that theytold me to "come back later" for. Shut. No doctors. Just a clerical worker who can't write prescriptions. "Come another day!," she said. That's what they told me last time! Which is why I'm, here today!

Well, I actually have enough Mestinon/Pyridostigmine to get me to next Tuesday.  So I will come back next Tuesday, and... "No. The clinic is not going to be open next Tuesday either!"  Well, what about  Tuesday after?  "I don't know. But I think you will be OK if you come in the middle og June." And what am I to do for meds until then? "Well, you could get your personal doctor to write the prescription instead..." 

But Dr. Kristi can not write a prescription on the only pharmacy in the country where I can guarantee to get the Mestinon/Pyridostigmine (QEH). And even if I do find another pharmacy that has it in stock, it will cost me $300+. 

I am sorry you get the run around so much! I hope this gets fixed somehow.

[Netfoot]

48 minutes ago, andidante said:

I am sorry you get the run around so much! I hope this gets fixed somehow.

I spoke to a pharmacist. Pyridostigmine is on the formulary (free) for people over 65, which I am.

However, Mestinon (which is the most common brand of pyridostigmine on the market around here), is not on the formulary.  So I have to find a pharmacy that has a supply of generic pyridostigmine (not Mestinon). If I can, Dr. Kristi could write me the prescription for it.

[Netfoot]

If any of you folks ever need to get in touch with me privately, well, you knpw my handle and you can always try GMail.....

Got up to go on Garden Patrol and instantly a thunderous downpour began, complete with crashing peals of thunder and eye-sintering flashes of lightning. One strike was like it landed on the road between my house and the mall!  It probably wasn't, but it sounded and felt like it was.  

Mo is curled up on the floor, literally between by feet. He never exhibits any fear for thunder & lightning, but when it gets bad, he always sticks close, in case I need his protection.

So tommorrow, for the third day in a row, I will seek to obtain medication. Hopefully Edgar Cochrane has - or can get - a supply of generic pyridostigmine, and if so I will see if I can ask Dr. Kristi to write a suitable prescription. She hasn't been too keen to see me in recent months, and that makes me unhappy, but maybe she will agree to do this for me. Sice she is not treating me for MG there is no guarantee she will prescribe MG medication, but she has done similar before, and given that Dr. Jacinto has gone walkabout, perhaps she will.

Anyway, if I son't see you guys again, know that I will be missing you because it is nice to have good people to bounce silly stream-of-conciousness posts off of, and who generally don't object to even the silliest of them.  

Just watched the 2008 version of Journey To The Center Of The Earth with Brendan Fraser, Josh Hutcherson and the relatively unknown (to me at least) Aníta Briem as the Icelandic mountain guide. It was quite good. There was another version from 1959 that is also good, but it's about 40 minutes longer.

Sliced my right index finger-tip quite badly on the mandolin, tonight.  And no, I wasn't slicing something and messed up. I was merely moving the mandolin from point A to point B, it slipped from my hands and in the process..... And of course, I couldn't find the medical tape, so electrician's tape is doing the job.

In the mean time, here are links to photo albums for my three boys, Dotcom, Budweiser and Molasses.  I add photos to the third when I can. 

Edited May 14 by Netfoot

[Netfoot]

Oh, I forgot to mention - Mia's gift was deposited today. I could buy three tires now... but that would eliminate any chance of me getting the band saw working again.

[luv2lurk]

What is Mia's gift?

 

 

 

 

[Netfoot]

35 minutes ago, luv2lurk said:

What is Mia's gift?

 

 

 

 

Mia is our prime minister. The unexpected pension bonus of $300 comes from her and her administration. Hence, Mia's gift.

[luv2lurk]

ok got it I say stick with two tires and food, hugs

 

[Netfoot]

Can I still post? We will see.

At Edgar Cochrane. Got a prescription from Dr. Kristi and came here to get all my meds. But not pyrodstigamine because they don't have it. 

I have #65 and they're serving #55 so hopefully not too long.

Yesterday on my way to Enmore I git stuck on Wildey triangle. It took me 40 minutes to get from Gary Sobers to the first has station, where I turned around and found another route. It turns out part of the triangle was closed by the authorities because all the rain had damaged part of the road.

Had to take a different route to Edgar Cochrane this morning and have to remember to turn right rather than left when I leave, to avoid being trapped on the triangle again. 

The triangle is a two-lane, one-way road about  7/10ths of a mile around. The portion I was trapped on yesterday was 4/10ths of a mile because it includes the lead-in road from the roundabout. You can't do a Uie there because of the  median barriers.

[Netfoot]

Ok, off to Oistins!

[Netfoot]

11:00 @.  Randal Phillips polyclinic, Oistins. Never been here before; much asking of directions to find the place. My number is #95, currently serving #87.

There is a small war going on. I approached the last empty seat but a young man rushed over and claimed it. Another man, older than the first but younger than me, got up and offered me his seat. I told him I was not so old I had to take his seat and that I could stand, but he insisted. 

Now the two men are in a battle about whether a man "like he" should even be allowed to have a seat, far less given one, or whether they should be reserved for people "like we". Frankly, "he" would have preferred to remained standing rather than instigate even a minor war between "we".

11:10 and still on #87. Moving slowly.....

[Netfoot]

The number at Oistins polyclinic stayed at #87 for over half an hour and then went to #95 in about three minutes. 

I love Dr. K and I am going to marry her. As soon as she dumps her great husband and abandons her 8 kids! Rather than give me a prescription for a month to hold me until I can catch up with Dr. Jacinto, she wrote it for the next five months! I have accumulated enough prednisolone to get me through until my next appointment at Neuro and a prescription for the Pyrostig-stuff, I don't need to go to QEH at all for the next 5 months. And if I take my next prescription for the other stuff to Oistins, I will just have to go to the one pharmacy each month. 

Mo and I are back home and we are eating out lunch. Well, I have finished my cheese sandwiches and I'm waiting for my tea to cool down a bit. Mo still has chow in his bowl. It is the last of the last bag I bought. I bought a 5Kg bag of Neutra-Pet s couple days ago for $39.95 and it is a brand I know Mo likes. But the stuff he has in his bowl right now.l is Purina One which he is also known to like.

I will drink my tea now and contemplate my 7.9 mmol/L blood sugar reading this morning... ☹️

[Mr. Sparkle]

I'll say yay! for the prescriptions and boo! for the blood sugar. 

[Netfoot]

Specs broke.

Went for a shower and when I returned I noticed they were like this. It is not a case of the screw just fallen out - the metal piece that carries the screw-hole is broken off.

I guess I will have to skip the tire and but a new pair of reading glasses for $40-$50 or what ever they cost these days. 

Convinced Mo had nothing to do with it. He never messes with my specs. They were lying on the bed so maybe I sat on them earlier or something?

Urgent need for funds always expands to match spare cash. Always.

Phone: 2%.

[andidante]

4 hours ago, Mr. Sparkle said:

I'll say yay! for the prescriptions and boo! for the blood sugar. 

I second that! Dr. Kristi for the win!! 

[b4pjoe]

19 minutes ago, Netfoot said:

I guess I will have to skip the tire and but a new pair of reading glasses for $40-$50 or what ever they cost these days.

Holy Smokes...$40 to $50 for reading glasses? Are they made of gold?

[Netfoot]

4 hours ago, b4pjoe said:

Holy Smokes...$40 to $50 for reading glasses? Are they made of gold?

😄. No. Apparently they are made of gingerbread. Or something just as fragile.  The broken pair which I bought at the end of '23 cost me $39.95 and I'm willing to bet they cost more now. 

Mo and I just came back from Garden Patrol. Me hobbling from a Croc full of spikey burrs, and Mo greener than The Grinch, covered from head to foot in sweethearts.

This picture is misleading.  They are yen to twenty times more dense in other spots. I laboriously picked them off but he doesn't like that because in removing them I have to pull his fur. I am as gentle and I can be but he still doesn't like it. 

And as usual, he views the removal of his sweethearts as theft. As soon as I was done, he leapt up, ate the little pile of removed sweethearts and ran out again.  I'll prolly have to do it all over again when he comes back in. 

Watched Unbreakable, a 2000 movie starring Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson. It is about SLJ's theory that there are genuine superheros in the world and his search for them, eventually turning up BW. I believe there was at least one sequel (possibly more) but I've never seen it/them. 

It's damned inconvenient not being able to see to read (or write) and constantly reaching for non-existent spectacles to cope.

Had a shower earlier, but feel like I might want to take another. Now drinking a mug and contemplating whether to look for a book. I have a small pile of things I was contemplating and there are more books scattered all around the house. Except I just realized picking a book is not a sensible thing to do right now. 

Ok I will finish this mug and consider going straight off to sleep. It's after eleven, so ....

And I have to go see if I can find reading glasses I can afford in the morning and hope to burn minimum gas in the process.

Green-face will be back soon. Not looking forward to sleeping with him. 

[Netfoot]

$34.95 which is actually a fin cheaper than the last pair!

Not exactly pretty but I guess that wouldn't go with my face in any case!

[Netfoot]

Just noticed that the clock on my phone and that of the desktop PC did not agree.

From the days of the original IBM PC 44 years ago, the PC clock has been renowned for being inaccurae. It could be set and would then easily gain (or lose) time every day. Easily as much as ∓ 30 seonds a day.  

The phone gets and maintains it's time by tracking the service provider who (if they have any brains - which I admit is questionable) keep their clock accurate by syning with one or more time servers on the net.

My PC should also be running a cron-job at 4:40 AM to synchronize with a series of time servers.....  

Oh, yeah.  New system installed.  Have to recreate a script:

#!/bin/bash

/usr/bin/ntpdate -t 10 \
        time.google.com \
        amazon.pool.ntp.org \
        time.cloudflare.com

save it as /etc/cron.daily/ntpdate and make it exectable. Now, at 4:40 every morning the cron daemon runs ntpdate (and incidentally, anything else that is set executable in /etc/cron.daily/) and my PC clock gets reset.

I ran it manually:

# /usr/bin/ntpdate -t 60 \
    time.google.com \
    amazon.pool.ntp.org \
    time.cloudflare.com

15 May 13:20:57 ntpdate[18708]:
    step time server 216.239.35.12 offset +28.392316 sec

It checked with the three servers, confirmed that they all agreed what the time was, and adjusted the clock on my PC to suit. It found that my system clock was nearly 28½ seconds out and corrected it. Now the PC and the phone are within 1½ seconds of each other.

I could get better results by starting the NTP daemon (ntpd) automatically at boot-up. the daemon would not simply reset the time once a day but would periodically alter the time during the day. But that would require a lot more effort on my part to set up the configuration file (/etc/ntp.conf) and tune it for best performance.  So I will settle for the cron-job for now.

 

Edited May 16 by Netfoot

[Netfoot]

It was dry all day but it started raining as night fell. We went on our Garden Patrol with a persistent rain falling and a cold, cutting breeze blowing. Very splishy-splashy indeed.  Mo obviously didn't want to leave the shelter of the garage so I told him he could wait there and I would do the wet part of the Patrol withoiut him. I can't really blame him.  Imagine if you had to walk around the garden on all-fours with soaking wet, burr & sweetheart laden bush right up to your nose... and you were naked! But I wasn't halfway to the end of the garden before he caught up and we finished the Patrol together. Rapidly!

Returning to the kitchen to make tea, I had to contend with a kitchen that was just as splishy-splashy as the yard! When I finished dishing out the dinner I had the tap running full bore to fill the pot to soak. I tossed the ladle into the sink and naturally it landed bowl up, diretly under the stream from the tab. Striking one side of the bowl, the stream made a U-turn and came racing back up out of the ladle and over the edge onto the floor. I'd estimate that no less than 1,000 gallons of water made it onto the floor before I could get close enough to move the ladle and turn off the tap. 

I made spaghetti for lunch with a sauce of minced beef, onion tomato and spices. Mo had some over his chow. We both thought it was great. Mo ate every scrap and polished the bowl. With the lunch going down so well and half the sauce remaining, I made the same thing for dinner. Once again, so good. Glucose in the morning prolly won't be great, tho.

The new spectacles are working out OK. Heidi tells me DollarWise used to sell reading glasses for arounf $5 but that they were cheap, nasty, uncomfortable, and quickly fell apart. But five bucks! She says it's been a while so perhaps they don't sell them any more.

I am concluding I have something wrong inside. (Pause while I get my entire face comprehensively bathed.) Yes. Down inside. It could be digestive or breathing  but to tell the truth, I think it's both at once. My stomach is filling up and so are my lungs. Always out of breath because my lungs are full of something. Probably the foamy stuff that keeps coming up. And my stomach can't hold what it could a month ago.  For real. I have a large lump inside that Dr. K. tells me is benign but I think it is moving around with time and it may be pressing on my stomach and not allowing me to hold much. I eat something and drink a glass of water and there is no room for the water.

After setting up the daily cron-job which runs ntpdate to update my computer clock, I went back and looked at the ntp daemon (ntpd) which gives better results. Setup was much simpler than I remember so... I set it up and disabled ntpdate again.

Now that I have glasses again, it's time for me to pick out my next book. But not tonight.

I could use a shower. Had one earlier but another would be good. Except it's damp and a cold breeze is in the winsow and a puppy is bogarting all five pillows and the top-sheet. So maybe I will shower in the morning. Now, I will curl up a the foot of the bed and try to get some sleep.

[Netfoot]

Welfare day.  No Welfare cheques as of this time (8:45). And I was going to buy tires today, too! 

Blood sugar this morning: 8.6 mmol/L !!! That's what 2x spaghetti meals with no green veggies will get you, apparently.

[Netfoot]

Here is the finger, recently cut by the mandolin.  Seems to be healing well. Unusual tick-shaped cut.  Small but it bled like blazes!

This is my primary mousing finger so with the bandage I put on it, mousing was problematic for a while!

[andidante]

42 minutes ago, Netfoot said:

Here is the finger, recently cut by the mandolin.  Seems to be healing well. Unusual tick-shaped cut.  Small but it bled like blazes!

This is my primary mousing finger so with the bandage I put on it, mousing was problematic for a while!

I've heard those mandolins are wicked! I have thought about getting one in the past, but I know I would cut my fingers to ribbons. 

[Netfoot]

27 minutes ago, andidante said:

I've heard those mandolins are wicked!

The danger with a mandolin os that it's very fast.  You start sllicing a carrot with your fingers five inches away from the blace, and you go zip, zip, zip, zip... slicing away and it goes so fast that in three seconds your finders are only an sixteenth  of an inch from the blade! One more zip and you are bleeding.

You have to carefully watch how close your fingers get to the blade and slow down as you get close.  Sacrifice speed for safety as the carrot disppears into the bowl and twhat remains gets shorted and shorted bringing your fingers closer and closet to disaster.

But in this instance, I was not cutting veggies. I just picked it up to move it aside on the counter. It slipped from my wet fingers and sliced me as it fell!

[andidante]

24 minutes ago, Netfoot said:

The danger with a mandolin os that it's very fast.  You start sllicing a carrot with your fingers five inches away from the blace, and you go zip, zip, zip, zip... slicing away and it goes so fast that in three seconds your finders are only an sixteenth  of an inch from the blade! One more zip and you are bleeding.

You have to carefully watch how close your fingers get to the blade and slow down as you get close.  Sacrifice speed for safety as the carrot disppears into the bowl and twhat remains gets shorted and shorted bringing your fingers closer and closet to disaster.

But in this instance, I was not cutting veggies. I just picked it up to move it aside on the counter. It slipped from my wet fingers and sliced me as it fell!

That is scary! If I ever get one I will let you know! I think I will stick with my knives for now. LOL

[Quilt Fairy]

On 5/15/2025 at 9:50 PM, Netfoot said:

The new spectacles are working out OK. Heidi tells me DollarWise used to sell reading glasses for arounf $5 but that they were cheap, nasty, uncomfortable, and quickly fell apart. But five bucks! She says it's been a while so perhaps they don't sell them any more.

I was going to suggest this, but I didn't know if it was an option where you live.  I get my reading glasses at Dollar Tree for $1.50 a pair.  I buy 3-4 pairs at a time so I can have a pair handy anywhere I read or do close work.  They are 100% plastic, except for the metal screws and fittings, and they 100% do the job.  If I roll over a pair in bed and break them, well, they're only $1.50.  I think the men's styles are actually a bit sturdier than the women's which I think are going more for fashionable or cute.  I wear either, depending on what I can find in my Rx.  The pair I'm using right now in bed are probably men's and are super comfortable, since I wake up wearing them most mornings. 

 

On 5/15/2025 at 9:50 PM, Netfoot said:

When I finished dishing out the dinner I had the tap running full bore to fill the pot to soak. I tossed the ladle into the sink and naturally it landed bowl up, diretly under the stream from the tab. Striking one side of the bowl, the stream made a U-turn and came racing back up out of the ladle and over the edge onto the floor. I'd estimate that no less than 1,000 gallons of water made it onto the floor before I could get close enough to move the ladle and turn off the tap. 

I had a similar disaster in the bathroom a few years ago.  I have a detachable shower head and I was using the spray to help clean the bathtub (I was outside the bathtub at the time, fully dressed).  I put the shower head down on my bath chair for just a moment, but somehow must have accidentally nudged it just enough to suddenly get it straight in the face.  Trying to get over the shock of have a stream of water come right at me, I'm trying to scramble over the side of the tub to turn the water off.  It took longer than I would have wished.  The shower head, meanwhile, decided to go for an Olympic record in how far a spray of water could go.  It took out one of the 3 light bulbs I have in the ceiling and also went a good 10 feet to the opposite wall of the bathroom and hit the electrical outlets, so all the remaining lights went out.  Clothes were drenched, curses were uttered.  Eventually order was restored, and I left the outlet to dry out for the day, and it suffered no harm. 

[Netfoot]

5 hours ago, Quilt Fairy said:

I get my reading glasses at Dollar Tree for $1.50 a pair.

Next time I'm over there I will check to see if DollarWise does still sell reading glasses and if so, for what price.  If they do I will probably be madder than hell!

5 hours ago, Quilt Fairy said:

I put the shower head down on my bath chair for just a moment...

I'm sorry to report that I laughed aloud at your story. Funny how from time to time life not only gets us, but hunts us down relentlesly in order to do so!

[Netfoot]

A very respectable 4.4 mmol/L this morning, but then I had very little to eat yesterday. Today I had rice with tuna, black beans, broccoli, cucumber and diced raw tomato on top after it was plated. Same for lunch and dinner. Want to see what the reading is tomorrow. Hopefully the green veggies will help keep the blood sugar low. 

When I was at Edgar Cochrane earlier in the week, I forgot to tell them I need another box of test strips. I'm only allowed a box once every 3 months so it isn't automatic. I forgot last month and I forgot again this week. I'll have to go in a day in the week coming and get that. 

Just watched a movie called Warfare. It is about a group of soldiers trapped in a building in enemy territory and fighting off enemy attacks while waiting for a relief force to come to their aid. I have heard from many sources that military personnel who were in theater all claim it is extremely realistic.

Garden Patrol, followed by shower as my tea drew. The moment we stepped out onto the grass Mo was immediately covered in sweetheart and I detected a burr in my shoe.

Who would have thought that this vegetation was intelligent enough to be selective about targets?

While I refer to them as sweethearts, they are not the real sweethearts that were common in Trinidad when I was a boy. Those were flat and distinctly bean-shaped or slightly heart-shaped and l was told that they cling to you like your sweetheart would. But the term applied to all varieties, not just the heart-shaped ones that originated the name.

We see these round ones here much more commonly. I do occasionally see the "real" sweethearts here, but not often.

Mo just joined me and is curled up behind my back. He is not leaning on me but rather cleaning his feet. Oh, he has just departed again.

With the end of S37 I feel the urge to see more TAR so I think I may watch some of the early seasons, starting with S1.  I don't off-hand recall much about S1 other than that the show used yellow & white as race colours (and still do when visiting Vietnam, IIRC). And I recall that racers were not greeted on the mat by Phil, but rather by the leg greeter alone. 

Of course, I remember some of the racers and their antics. Kevin & Drew, Nancy & Emily, Rob & Brennan, Frank & Margarita and of course Joe & Bill, informed in Alaska that the 1st and 2nd placed teams had already complete the race in NYC, giving title to The Guido, being eliminated in the field without reaching the mat. 

I also remember how much the antics of the Guidos incensed me at the time, despite being particularly mild when compared to the type of behaviour we have observed since then. 

Mo has returned and is lying on the foot of the bed. I am rubbing his back gently with my foot. It's nearly midnight and I am yawning, although I have not started dropping the phone yet.

Anyway, showered and powdered, with a tummy full of tea and a cool breeze in the window, I think it's time I killed the lights and got some sleep. The  bush in the garden is tall enough (and backed with sweethearts and burrsl and I think the landlord might come and cut it all back in the morning. So I might get an early wakeup from a weedwhacker. But maybe not because I've been getting up early recently.

Mo has gone...  no, he's back and looking out the window.