Exhausted. Maybe I am anemic after all. I don’t know what’s wrong with me but I feel like I’ve been eaten by a wolf and s**t over a cliff. My late friend Betti should have copyrighted that saying. The big ol’ redheaded nut. I sure miss her.
Taylor grew up in Vidor, Texas, across the Neches River from where I live here in Beaumont, where he was a seriously underweight linebacker in high school football, and claims he was the slowest player in his whole district. He took drama in high school thinking it would be an easy class but met a teacher who was serious about the subject. Taylor apparently had a great teacher in Adonia Placette, who now is theater director at local Lamar University. Good story about a teacher making a difference in someone’s life.
It really seemed at work today like it was 1995 all over again even though I was doing something else during the last government shutdown.
We received a second e-mail in as many days from the cabinet secretary. I’ll leave you guessing which one. The e-mail was kind of an “Idiot’s Guide to the Government Shutdown.” If appropriations fail to exist for the government at 12:01 a.m. Saturday, it seems we will still have to go to work our next scheduled workday for a four-hour “orderly” shutdown. That means we have to make sure everything is where it should be and where it ain’t it is. Got that? What happens if we call in sick?
I guess I am fortunate to work only part-time for Unc Sugar. That way I get screwed only part of the time and not all of the time.
The looming shutdown, if it happens I might add, was so prevalent today that it was hard to get things done but somehow we always do. I am off tomorrow and have an hour’s teleconference on Monday, so I suppose, shutdown or not. So I can only imagine the angst of federal workers on the job tomorrow. I will be following the news and the Internet closely, although I would bet I would have to stay up until midnight tomorrow evening to find out whether or not there is a shutdown.
I am both somewhat depressed and more than just a little pissed off. Depressedoff or maybe Pisspression. It isn’t just the possibility of a shutdown — actually I would rather have a shutdown than another continuing resolution — it’s the fact that the stupidity of the possible shutdown plus the added fact that I ache and hurt and I was reminded today that I can’t go for the hour-long walks around my neighborhood I once made.
Driving home from work I spotted one of the local crazies whom I hadn’t seen in a long while. It reminded me I have this pain like someone stuck me down the right side of my lower back and on inside my hip when I stand or walk too long. I don’t write this for pity, rather it’s because of a longing for walking that I can’t do these days because of whatever is wrong with my lower back. It’s a longing like when I was in college and miss those first snippets of Spring when the girls started coming out of their dorms with their bikinis and their tan-free bodies. This was before tanning beds, kids. It’s longing for those days I could actually go jogging, when I took it up it was on the beaches of Southern California. That wasn’t bad at all. The present is a longing for the time I didn’t carry all this weight around and a knowledge that I’ve just got to get rid of those added pounds for no other reason than it makes me feel very, very uncomfortable.
My medical practitioners at the Department of Veterans Affairs, a brethren agency which hopefully won’t be hit badly if we get shutdown, need to do something, try something. What physical therapy I’ve tried isn’t working. What a surprise, it never does. Docs say surgery won’t help. What about the pain clinic, try shooting me with steroids or some miracle drug. Hey, the shots I got in my knee are still working.
I wish I could be more upbeat and write something inspiring or at least not in such a foul (fowl, cluck it) state of mind.
Congress and the Prez coming together on a budget would make me feel a little better. Having an absence of lower back pain would do even more.
I have been temporarily disabled by a fried computer. It won’t run and since its warranty won’t run either — it expired a month before — I’ve said to hell with it and ordered a new computer since the damage is more than I want to pay. It’s an HP laptop. I’ve had good luck with their products and satisfactory service. That is more than I can say for Dell. I will be back on as frequently as possible until my new computer arrives.
A bargained-price book caught my eye the other day at Barnes & Noble. I bought the book called “The World’s Worst Cars.” Perhaps it was the “Amphicar,” a German-made half-car, half-boat, described by the author as not being good at either, that caught my eye.
The 2005 stumpy, picture-table book by British auto writer Craig Cheetham, has all the famous flops as well as many obscure one. Perhaps it is the British eye that makes me part ways with Cheetham on some of his conclusions.
This might be a good place for the Amphicar. The 1960s German half das wagen and half das boot was really neither.
Not so with the Ford Pinto. The writer notes the early Pinto’s tendency to burst into flames when struck from the rear due to a lack of gas tank protection which was well-known. It was also well-known to me as a 72 Pinto was my first car. I can’t remember whether it was the 1.6-liter version or the 2-liter. The metric system was completely foreign to me as a high school graduate and were it not for the Internet it would still pretty much be that way today.
But my Pinto got me from East Texas to the Mississippi Gulf Coast and back at least once a month for about a year while I was in the service. And even though Cheetham’s top-speed listing for the Pinto is 82 mph, I used to drive I-12 and I-10 and Texas 87 at a pretty steady 70 mph with no problem. Of course, I was 19 and nuts.
Several years later I would see my first “roast,” a black-humor firefighter term for someone burned to death, in the back seat of a Pinto. The corpse was the first I ever handled and I will never forget the smell, the texture, the ash and the unworldly countenance of the young man whose name I have written down somewhere. As taught in fire rookie school, I wrote down all the details of what I found upon the scene if I ever was required to testify in a court case. I wasn’t. I thought sure this man’s family would sue Ford. If they did, I never heard of it.
The experience left me with bad dreams for awhile and a thankfulness my Pinto, which I traded in for a new Toyota Corolla in 1975, was never rear-ended with me inside it.
I have owned 11 automobiles: 7 2 Pinto, 75 Corolla, 79 Corolla, 84 Datsun/Nissan Sentra, 82 Toyota pickup, 80 Ford Granada, 72 BMW 2002, 89 Jeep Comanche pickup, 92 Nissan pickup, 96 Toyota pickup and 98 Toyota Tacoma. Yes, they are in chronological order, unfortunately, but sometimes desperate times called for desperate measures. As far as I know, however, none of these autos are on Mr. Cheetham’s worst car list excepting my first. That I still drive — though not to work because the air conditioning went out — a 98 Tacoma with at 163,000 miles is a testament to the road-worthiness of the vehicle. My friend Keith, who lives in Arlington, has what? 300,000 miles on his “Taco?” I don’t know, but he has a bunch.
All of this car madness surfaced after reading Cheetham’s entertaining book. I don’t agree with everything he concludes. I have to guess sometimes what he is talking about because this is written in Brit, not English as we know it. Sorry, I know that sounds so ethnocentric, but that’s show biz.
I am hoping soon that my mechanical mastermind friend Rick will replace my air conditioning compressor and accessories while leaving me financially with both my arms and legs in tact. We are in negotiations right now. It’s nice having friends who are competent. And Rick’s also a registered nurse. The dude can change your oil and give you a transfusion, at the same time I’m not certain.
In the meantime, I was given authorization to get a rental car for work until I can get my A/C fixed. But, I was told it had to be a compact. Unfortunately, the car rental place didn’t have a compact handy so I had to settle for a 2010 Dodge Challenger SE.
The SE carries a V-6, 250-horse, 3.5-liter, high output, single overhead camshaft (SOHC). What the hell all that means, I am not sure. But I know this is not quite or not very close to, say the Challengers of old. You hear numbers like 318 (cubic inch) and mechanical idiot that I am, I know this was a very reliable engine used by Chrysler. My Dad had a 72 Dodge pickup with the 318. My friend Waldo had the 318 in his 73 Plymouth Duster.
One thing about my rental that I will say, it’s a damned pretty car, solid black and has the lines of the older muscle car. I have noticed a few people staring at me with envious looks today. It is kind of a nice feeling, no matter how reliable your old * “hoopie” may be.
*”Hoopie” is what my Dad called an old car. The term is known in some places as “hooptie” or “hoopty.” I have seen hoopie used to describe something like a box van. So hoopie may be a regional term or it might be a contraction for “hooptie,” if so, that’s pretty damned lazy. Then again, it might just be one of the odd words and sayings my Dad used to come up with like, “a whole flock of bird dogs flew over.” Who knows?
Nothing is quite so disconcerting than noticing after awhile that the bottom has split out of your pants.
I am trying to remember, did it it happen before I went to dinner at Baytown Seafood or after? Luckily, it is after normal hours at my office and no one much is around. I did see a very attractive woman walk out of the building just as I walked in. A near miss, miss, er, missus.
