Pudding-Tat “does this fur make me look fat” got an extra helping of her favorite for Xmas dinner. Crunchy-wunchy pelletoids. Now that Wallace is gone my own diet has gotten skimpy. I have no incentive to cook anything but snacks. While we both like grilled cheese sandwiches, who wants to break out the fry pan to make just one Or when I run out of potatoes. With no Wallace, it can take a week getting around to buying more. But nothing stops my Xmas bicycle trip. My record is 28 miles (I think, hey, by this stage of the game you can look these things up yourself). The twin of my bicycle, the one I gave to JP, has made a mild reappearance. For the record, both bikes needed some work, as in brake cables. Turns out after a few years, JP lent it to one of his brothers. Who proceeded to put the requisite $40 into it. JP isn’t getting it back until he ponies up which won’t be this Xmas or next. Meanwhile, the bicycle is “somewhere in the Keys”.
Did I just sleep until noon? Is that 15 pounds of chocolate cake in my fridge? That was Alaine on the phone and I believe I’ve underestimated the popularity of the Xmas video. It’s a huge hit and except for finding the correct inputs on the HDTV, I get 100% of the credit. Joe, one of the brothers, has video editing equipment. Good. Wait for my copy.
By late afternoon I thought I’d try to find a coffee shop. Not Denny’s, they’ve changed their from great to middle-class with the $10 breakfast advertised for $4.99. Driving 25 miles didn’t help, nothing was open. I thought of seeing a movie, but reading the reviews cured that. I read a newspaper. Hmm, it says here, somebody has finally cracked the WPA system (a wireless security feature). I drove around for the sake of it. Have not done that in years.
I was listening to an audiobook, “The Language of Cannibals”. Something like that. Starring Mongo, a PhD.-wielding circus midget with a black belt turned private investigator who’s on a first name basis with every known Tom Clancey character. I’m at the part where Mongo’s finished beating up some Viet vets and is having brunch with the reformed head of the American communist party.
As if that isn’t exciting enough, I installed Rosetta Stone during the lengthy commercials of a James Bond movie. Who was it that gave me this software? Ah yes, it was Bob, one of my former students. I don’t know how complicated Portuguese is, but it took ten minutes to install the module. The app requires a headset which I have not unpacked since I last used Dragon. That’s enough language for today, anyway.
I can’t place this Bond movie. The lady is not so blonde, placating the housewife faction. Something about diamonds in Iceland. All the tank parks from the former Soviet Union have been teleported into North Korea. That explains the famine. There isn’t room left over to grow any food. I like a good spy movie. We hope the next stop for those Korean army uniforms is Pluto. I liked Bond even more when I was young enough to suppose there was some difference between a raving maniac and a federal government owning all the gold.
The trivia for today is O’Rourke’s definition of New Age: Belief in anything except the facts. Remind me to call the Hippie.
