Video Thursday

While in Chicago, my brother in-law took me for a ride in his Corvette.
Even though I tried to convince him that blind guys can drive pretty
good, he said he'd drive. This is how it started.

No I did not need a change of underwear. It was fun.

Chicago Vacation 2009 (part two)

I picked the July fourth weekend to visit Chicago because somebody in my family always had a big party on that day, and I figured I could knock out a lot of family visits in one quick stab. What I didn't figure in, was the fact that it is probably the most crowded and congested weekend in Chicago. First there was the 'Taste of Chicago'. An annual celebration of food, where people fight huge crowds so that they can stand around in the dirt, eating over priced samples of restaurant food, in close proximity to open trash receptacles. This is one of Mark's favorite Chicago happenings, and although he nagged me for days to accompany him on this food safari from hell, I held firm and spent the afternoon napping at the hotel.

After getting away with not traipsing through food hell with Mark, it was much harder to get out of being dragged to the second event of the day, fireworks at Navy Pier. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of people downtown for the 'Taste' as it is commonly referred to, about a million more pushed their way down to the lakefront to watch the annual fireworks display. Many had planned ahead and had staked out their viewing area earlier that morning. Our last minute decision to go down and watch the fireworks meant that we could only get a partial view, about a mile north and off to the side of where they were actually happening. So, wedged between a million other excited people, I did my patriotic Fourth of July duty, and oohed and ahhhed along with the crowd for twenty minutes. Yes, twenty minutes. That was the great Chicago fireworks display of 2009. Nineteen minutes of rather mundane and routine showers of colored sparks, followed by one minute of the 'Finale', meaning extra spark showers and explosions. I found it amazing that a million people would drag their asses downtown just to watch twenty minutes of fireworks. Even more amazing, is that Mark had talked me into it, and I was now being swept along with the rest of the rabble, like rats, as they swarmed away.

Chicago Vacation 2009 (part one)

I am sitting in Hartsfield-Atlanta Airport, and the lady in the seat next to me has been on the phone for the last hour. She is speaking a language that I am totally unfamiliar with, and to my ears it is nothing but rapid fire gibberish. “Daba doo, dee daa doe, doo doo daba daba doo.” It’s not that I mind it, in fact the rhythm of it is quite soothing. I’m sure if it were in English, it would be one more in a long line of loud, inane, cell phone conversations that I have been subjected to today. This time we are traveling on an airline called airTran. It is run by incompetent boobs who canceled our original flight and put us on an earlier one. That cancellation has caused us to endure this four hour layover that has now ballooned to five hours because our connecting flight is late. To add to my misery, they have changed our gate for the second time. Each time they’ve done that, Mark and I have had to schlep our pile of crap from terminal C, to D, and then back to C. At least the folks on our route can enjoy the show as we bicker our way to and from each terminal. That’s the other problem. The frustration has caused Mark and me to basically go crazy, and we are taking it out on each other. Unlike Mark, when I go crazy, my voice doesn’t rise two octaves and carry across the entire terminal. Just a little while ago, Mark loudly told the airTran supervisor, that she looked like she should be working at McDonalds. It is times like these that I walk away and pretend that I don't know that skinny, black, madman, and hope that the airline doesn't take it out on me by kicking us off the flight.

Catholic Schmatholic

I have a deviated septum. I’m pretty sure I got it when I was walking home from St. George Catholic school almost fifty years ago. There was a kid from Bert Fulton public school walking past me in the opposite direction and when he went by he said “Catholic Schmatholic”. I have no idea what that means, then or now, but I did know he meant it as an insult. So I did what any eight year old would do, I turned around and yelled back “public schmublic”. Once again, I have no idea what it meant but it proved that I was a master of the witty comeback. We kept moving further apart, walking backwards, yelling equally pithy insults about our respective religions at each other. At the time I didn’t know that the kids who went to public school weren’t members of the ‘Public’ religion. I figured each religion had its own school, Catholics, Lutherans,Methodists, and Publics. It made sense to an eight year old. When we were almost a block apart and the insults were nothing more than faint, distant, nonsensical gibberish, I felt it was safe to turn around and go on my way. Having stood up for the religion my parents had chosen for me, I was sure God and Jesus were proud of me. As I turned around, a tree that I apparently had been walking backwards towards, met my nose and face with a force that knocked me on my ass. With blood and snot gushing from my nose I made my way home realizing that God and Jesus really didn’t give a crap if somebody made fun of the Catholic Church.

In those days parents didn’t coddle children and rush them to the emergency room for every little bump and scrape. To my mom the fact that blood was squirting out of my nose, and I had the perfect imprint of a tree trunk from my chin to my forehead, didn’t seem to bother her. She put some mercurochrome on my face and told me to “walk it off”. That is why to this day, even though it’s not apparent looking at me, inside my nose the septum actually does a right turn. This causes me to have a very hard time breathing at night. To rectify this I started using Breathe Right nasal strips when I go to bed. These are the strips that you stick on the outside of your nose and they pull your nostrils open for better air flow. They work so well, and stick so tightly that yesterday, when I pulled it off in the morning, the skin came with it. This has resulted in giving me a really nasty appearance and it caused quite a bit of pain. But I'll be alright,I'll just walk it off.

I Do Declare!

IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.

For the entire text, go to: http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/index.htm

Video Thursday

Mark made some chocolate chip cookies from Nestle' cookie dough. The next day, after I had eaten all of them, Mark was making a video of Chandler when this news item came on the television.

Bang!!

Once again Independence Day has rolled around, and in this neck of the woods that means crazy people with explosive devices. When I was a kid, one of my friends had only one hand because he thought it would be fun to hold on to some large industrial strength fireworks, and light them with his other hand. I always thought he was kind of stupid for doing it, but I never actually told him so. Here in the South, having one extremity missing isn't considered a sign that you've done something stupid, just that you are now a likely candidate for a job at the carnival.

This is the second Fourth of July since Molly, my dog, died. She used to be terrified at all the explosions, and could hear a ladyfinger pop a mile away. She would spend almost an entire week hiding by my bed, quivering in fear. Not so, Mr. Chandler. He is not phased by anything, not fireworks, thunder, or large trucks. I can take him out and all hell can be breaking loose, all he cares about is taking a pee, and smelling somebody else's. There is one thing that he has yet to figure out, the box fan that I use in my bedroom scares him. For some reason he thinks it is going to get him, and he steers clear of it. It's the one tool I can use to keep him in line. Preventing him from coming into a room is easy, I just have to put the fan in the door. To get him to move out of a room, all I have to do is bring the fan around. It works really well. lately I've been experimenting with various things on Mark to achieve the same effect. So far the only thing that I do to keep him out of a room, is to sit and pay the bills. It's like magic.