I have bought myself a half pint of Pinnacle for four dollars, at the Chinawoman’s, from Numbah Two Son.
I hope this will not leave me where the half pint of Smirnoffs left me three or four days ago, with an impossibly agonizing headache on the left side, that would yield to neither aspirin nor caffeine. (In the early 00’s I found that codeine and pseudoephedrine together were a foolproof specific, but I have no codeine these days.)
I have tried to sleep half the time lately, mainly listening to Grover Gardner reciting Shelby Foote’s The Civil War. I may still be exhausted from the last few weeks of nruns. But why? Why? Well I think it’s because I wasn’t in such good shape then. We’ll see when work heats up again in a month. Regarding which, I’ve had the inevitable sneaking worry that nruns is going to shelve me. Why? Because bottom-line analysis says half the paid part-timers have to go, and I’ll be in there. So instead of getting my $200-$800 per month, I have nothing.
I’m washing dishes in the sink, and will bring the houseboys up to fix the electricity by and by. I ordered some under-counter battery-operated lights the other day. We’ll see how they work. I’m getting by.
Odd things on my mind lately:
Moki’s USAA debit card. In Spring and Summer last year he’d always send me out to get him a sandwich or vodka (seldom both in the same errand). So I kept the card in the back of my mini-purse, along with the punch-card from the deli counter that gave you your tenth sammich free.
But then he’d go out to the Chinawoman’s for a liter. A liter of that nasty Vesica stuff with the metal top that often refused to open. And he didn’t have his card. Because I had it. This also happened when he went to Morton Williams, the grocery we usually called Norton Simon. In the case of the Chinawoman she’d let him write a check (if he had his checkbook); for Morton Williams I once went up myself and retrieved his bag of groceries. Somewhere along the line, possibly in June, I forgot I was using his card at Morton Williams. Entered my own PIN number three times, after which USAA blocked the card. It took some weeks before we got a new one, reactivated.
After Moki took to his bed permanently (this would be around August, though I managed to pull him out once or twice to show the newly cleaned kitchen floor, or a newly caught but not at all dead mouse), the card became a moot point. I continued to use it for a couple of weeks after he died—for vodka, for Verizon, for groceries—until USAA got the Veterans notice of death and deep-sixed it. I think it was December 8 that I got back home from the gym to return a phone call offering sympathy, but also the news that his accounts were now cut off. I’d written myself a check, which went through, but a later one did not, and I found when trying to pay for a pizza and salad at Mangia that this USAA debit card would be forever declined. I was ready for that.
Scaring Tom Wolfe. I don’t know when this was, exactly, sometime between 2006 and 2010 would be my guess, but I had some kind of appointment in the Grand Central area. The quickest way to get there is to cut across 56th or 55th St to Park, then parade down. On this afternoon, however, I was furious with my track coach or my husband or some family member, and was reading them all the riot act. Except I bumped into Mr. Wolfe who no doubt thought I was reading him the riot act. I remember the setting. It was that building on Park around 54th St. with the square pillars. Mr. Wolfe was resplendently dressed as Tom Wolfe. Anyway, I was colossally embarrassed, just as TW was alarmed.
Victor Faralli. For many years an orthopedic surgeon in Lebanon, PA. I found this out years ago and now he is semi-retired. He stands and talks exactly the same as when he was eleven. When I first discovered Vic was in Lebanon—many years ago, as I say—I thought, Holy Smokes! But I’ve since familiarized myself with the place, thanks to Colin. And that’s exactly where I’d like to go, or hide out. Fastnachts for everyone. And if I had ended up in medical school, I think orthopedics would be one ethically safe place to be. Why didn’t I go to medical school? Too complicated.
BUT TODAY I spent the morning sorting out Moki’s books. Pacific War books on one shelf, rivers and water policy on another, literature on another, banking debacles on another. Everything bball goes on bottom shelves.
I resurrected my Garmin 410, which seemed a bad purchase back in 2012, but today at least worked far better than the 235. With the chest strap it gave me my HR, which was perpetually elevated, from 61 to 159, as I moped about reshelving books, and then going for a walk/shuffle/jog/run of perhaps 5.5 miles up the bridle path and around the Reservoir. Picayune, but more than I’ve done in maybe years. Afterwards I tried using the watch on a walk down to StP’s for mass, but again I can’t figure it out. The Garmin 410 had a short life, was soon discontinued, and I was most happy (late 2015, early 2016?) to move on the the 235.
Something else I did today was clean up start-up tasks on the old MacAir 13. The Monoprice usb wifi dongle no longer functions because I threw out a working driver. I am writing this on the crippled AirPort wifi, which was never fixed in October 2014 after I spilled soup on the computer.
