One year ago today: May 26, 2025, it happened to me.
Five years ago today: May 26, 2021, list of characteristics.
Nine years ago today: May 26, 2017, the road leaving town.
Random years ago today: May 26, 2009, scratch that diet!
Another recovery day, which means a lot of time on coffee, the shed, and tinkering. See this picture? That used to be my kitchen. It’s always this way until the new guitar player decides he should rehearse on his own time. There will always be a path to the coffee maker and fridge, but meanwhile this is the view unti further notice.
Where is my box of Arduinos? It is actually a protective sealed trunk, but were did I put it for safekeeping? It will turn up, but I’m saying the process of getting one of those running is more complicated and delicate-fussy than the how-to offerings tell you. That’s why I leave it until last, mostly. You need to have the correct IDE downloaded and installed on a compatible computer. The programming can take hair-pulling hours unless you copy one of their useless examples, which is suspect means 95% of all users. Then it has to be downloaded via an obsolete cable to a properly wired circuit. And that’s if everything goes right.
I was fine until mid-morning, now I’m crawling back in the sack and the rules say I must get this in writing. I awoke fine but began to feel a paralysis tingling in my left hand and several sharp jabs in the “neurological” areas, namely my left outer thigh and across the chest area both sides of the incision. These are familiar pains that are part of the healing process so you don’t hate them. But numbness in my left hand is never welcome. I’ll explain this laser ad in a moment.
By happenstance, May is the best month I’ve kept records for in over 50 years. There are gaps but overall May wins—although much of the material is not blogged. This is the month I broke up with my first “big city” girlfriend. A doctor’s daughter who I intended to marry when I was 28 and finished university. In those days, degree means something and was a near-guarantee of success. But there were things I didn’t understand. Top of that list is I was unaware that good-looking rich girls didn’t just go out and marry anybody they pleased at any time in their lives.
She was 21 at that time and got married three months later, maybe four. I did not meet my promise to contact her on her 50th birthday, but I sincerely tried. It’s a loose end I should probably tend to. At 21, I was still in shell shock from exposure to a world that was hellishly different from what I’d been told. If I think of any good life lesson I learned before that age, I’ll tell you about it.
Birch plywood model.
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Later, I scraped up energy to build the circuit. It’s not tested yet, the wiring has to be triple-checked before power is connected. The time-waster on this project was a 0.05µF capacitor. You’d think by now they’d color-code them or something, or get rid of than nano-pico system, but no. That’s it. Festus Tuesday and we could not find a shoot-em-up. Just a drama about a bronc buster who gets kicked in the head. I won’t list around ten small chores, I just kept busy. Turns out my neighbor knew a girl who was dragged by a horse and never rode one again.
Not counting the tumult of intensive care, I now sleep five hours, wake up, and then get another three later in the day. This wrecks most plans I have between 11:00AM and 3:00PM. I hoped this would not become permanent, but it has been 100 days. I’m making deliberate plans tomorrow to see if I can break this one and get back a productive part of my day.
The Bolt slices through leather and wood. One idea I’d like to try is etching wood grain onto cheaper cuts of lumber. Once more, Billie-Bill, I did not say I invented this idea, only that it was independently derived.
ADDENDUM
Just when you think Tampa radio could not sink any lower, they step up to the plate. It’s that morning show with the queer, who like most, fancies his innuendo as clever. Last week he was an hour over filling a hole in his wall, “I’ve never filled one so big before”, saying he was afraid. Well, now they have this talk show where they have callers go on about their falling apart situationships. It solves nothing because they can never get the one side to tell the truth.
It’s the only radio station that isn’t religion or sports that survived the Biden purge. Even the now defunct Armed Forces radio was superior to this crap, not made any better by that DJ who nobody asked for but who never have their own radio stations. As the saying goes, they don’t want their own bicycle.
