Yesterday (Friday 16 August) started off in an odd way for me. Going out the front door to get the morning paper, the first thing I saw was an apparently dead rat. It wasn't long deceased, as when I poked its tail with my cane it was still flexible. OTOH I decided to not meddle with it - maybe it died of some new sort of Mouse Pox? I'm a modest person and have no desire to distinguish myself by becoming Patient Zero for some new disease. (Immediately afterwards I was startled by a shrill remark from an angry squirrel concealed in the Big Ash Tree. Thanks, Nutkin, just what I needed.) Returning to the house with the newspaper, I next considered taking a photo of it, which is posted here in Scraps for your delight.

Having done so, it suddenly occurred to me - wasn't it lying on its left side when I first saw it? As I stood there looking at it, Ratty gave a shrug, thus proving that news of its decease was probably premature. Well, this was different: what does one do with a semi-dead rat? I finally decided to continue my non-meddling program, and left to go about my usual business (health club, post office and grocery store), noting on my way past that Ratty was lying on its left side again. While at the health club I collected some paper towels with the vague idea of spreading it over Ratty, to keep the sun off at least until he was done. Upon coming home, I approached the front door, got the towels out and ... what? Ratty was gone!

I have hardly any idea what was happening here. Perhaps Ratty was picked up by a marauding hawk and carelessly dropped unharmed - there was no clear sign of any injuries. As to where it went, I examined the flower bed I found it in and discovered no sign of it, so I suppose it finally just left, having been sufficiently annoyed by my presence.

The paper towels went to the kitchen, to be used for the usual paper towel things.

The local public library has an active book store right inside the front door, with additional shelves for less expensive books in the lobby, and often a rolling cart for free books located outside. In this last place, last year, I found a copy of Richard Halliburton's Royal Road to Romance, published in 1925 (the same year my father was born), in excellent condition. Having heard of it before, I took it home and began reading it in the bathroom. I left it there overnight, with disastrous results - after almost a century of safely knocking around, it was attacked by cockroaches! Their vandalizing mandibles spoiled the book's spine, so that I had to make a paper book cover for it. This seems to be a common problem with other books from the early part of the past century - I have a 1930 Encyclopedia Britannica that suffered a similar fate. Needless to say I totally bugbombed the house soon afterwards.

The book itself wasn't so great. The author comes across as a self-centered assoul, there was nothing particularly romantic about his adventures across the Asian continent. He was quick to exploit the hospitality of white people he met, and his treatment of non-whites was astonishing even to me - your average Woke progressive would be foaming like a rapid beast. But that was all right, he had just graduated from Hahvahd University with a degree in economics or something useless.

A scan of the violated spine appears in my Scraps section (https://www.furaffinity.net/view/56174797/).

Has it really been a year since my last post here? Among other things, I have one successful event to report - my last cataract surgery took place late last year and now I can see without glasses - or at least everything beyond a couple of feet is clear; I need "readers" for anything closer.

About a month ago I had a peculiar experience. Going out the back door with some stuff to put in the compost barrel, as I was opening the metal screen door, I discovered a tokay gecko dangling halfway out of a hole in the frame. How it got there I have no idea, but it was clearly not going away. Thinking it was dead, I started to pull it out, only to find it was very much alive and very much opposed to my meddling. How dare you, sirrah! Unhand me! It even tried to bite me. Using the plastic bag I had compost material in, I managed to withdraw it the rest of the way out, where upon it immediately fled across the back porch to take shelter in some rocks, scurrying in a serpentine manner. Its subsequent career is unknown to me. The reason for it being stuck like that, I suppose, was that while it was able to pull itself out to a certain point with its front legs, it was unable to get any leverage from its back legs. Ah, well ...

This time it's six months. HOW CAN THIS BE??? IT'S A MIRACLE!!!

Basically it's the result of an endless series of medical problems, accompanied by a sense of chronic tiredness and the realization that writing about such things would turn this into an outstanding pile of complaint and boredom. We don't want that, do we? I don't.

Anyhow, with any luck this year will see some of the medical stuff dealt with so that they're no longer hanging over my head. And perhaps drawing some more - as it is I go for days and weeks with even a single scribble.

As I write this I see from the front window a buzzard slowly circling, not overhead yet but it's trending this way.

I really need to get to work on this. Over the past several months, I don't suppose I drew more than a few sketches, mostly for my Rowrbrazzle tribs. Physically I seem to be getting myself together, even though I sometimes appear to resemble an orangutang, with a swollen gut that refuses to suck in. Meanwhile the number of medical adventures I'm looking forward to (?) has been reduced to two - right eye cataracts, and the lower right wisdom tooth - on top of which is the question of what to do about MEDICARE, which swooping down upon me even as I type this mess. Ah, well ...

... and all I got were these little scars on my belly that seem to be fading as I watch. Not that I'm complaining - when my father had his colonectomy a quarter of a century ago he came home with one large startling scar across his abdomen. Keyhole surgery is the way to go.

I'm still dealing with the various after effects that undergoing such an operation usually results in: physically, my gizzard pretty much forgot how to do its work properly, so that I had to stay pretty close to the bathroom for a long time. It didn't help that the doctors pumped me up with CO2 gas so that they could see what they were doing in there - I don't mind that, but waking up and not being to see my legs due to this vast world globe of flesh was a bit off-putting. It eventually cleared itself out, luckily.

Mentally ... I dunno. I'm sitting here, surrounded on all sides by a lifetime collection of comics and looking around I could give a damn about most of it. I have been slowly approaching this attitude towards accumulating STUFF, and with this current medical adventure still in effect, I have to consider what would happen when, not if, I die. Neither of my sisters know or care about it, and I suspect they would most likely present it to the local comics shop (Bedrock City Comics). As quite a lot of it consists of furry self-pubs and small press zines ... well.

I'm tempted to start parting it out now, while I'm still around to make the appropriate decisions - all the comics I haven't read in years and probably never will again can go now, I think, all the series, such as Fred Perry's Gold Digger (first three volumes), Genus, Furrlough, Liberty Meadows , that I lost interest in and stopped collecting ... clear 'em out so other folks can read or at least collect the things instead. Maybe even make a little money, though I doubt I'd get anything back from the huge amount of money I put into it over the years. Anyhow ...

The weather's been pretty nice for the past week or so and the weather forecast promises more of the same for the next week - clear skies and bright sunshine. I can live with this.

... and I feel, I guess OK?

Operation Polyps B Gone takes place towards the end of next month. What a way to start the new year, but I started the present year in an even more grisly way (description blocked for the benefit of anyone who might read this). I'm tired of this Continuing Crisis, one medical adventure after another, year after year of it, and probably the Gentle Reader is tired of it too, with the difference that the GR has only to stop reading.

As a way to distract myself from this nonsense, I find myself attempting to find a way to print off my trib to the next issue of ROWRBRAZZLE (#152). For the longest time I used an ancient but still well-running Hewlet-Packard 6P Laserjet (I have two, in fact) for all my inhouse printing; until fairly recently I had no problem getting replacement toner cartridges, though a couple of outfits came up empty-handed over the past few years. Over the past two months, I have found this to be the situation with pretty much every online toner source that Mr Google can dig up for me - the most recent company's webpage says it's "in stock," and the fellow I spoke with on the phone admitted to their having one (1) cartridge on hand, but he had to go check. I have not heard back since, and fear the worst.

I suppose I'll have to bite the big one and get a newer printer - the 6P came out about a quarter of a century ago, after all - but my last experience with a new printer was a Samsung that ran very fast, too fast in fact resulting in repeated jams, and so hot that I feared it would catch on fire. The 6P at least is a sedate dignified printer, and watching the pages come out one at a time has a gently hypnotic effect that I would sadly miss in any newfangled replacement.

Meanwhile, the weather outside seems to be following the New World Climate, with highs in the 80s (F).

Having a family history of colon cancer, I was supposed to get a colonoscopy starting at age 50; what with one thing or another, I wound up delaying it until the month before my 64th birthday, yesterday in fact. The cleaning out process, well, to spare the Reader's sensitivities, let's just say I haven't had such an experience since I made the error of dining at the Star of India restaurant in San Diego, and that only lasted about 3/4 of an hour, while this time I was impersonating a fire hose right up until it was time to leave the house. Skipping ahead, I came home with a two page report informing me (with color photos) that they found two polyps and an internal hemorrhoid. I probably won't post the photos here, lucky you. No apparent sign of any cancers, lucky me.

My brother-in-law kept delaying his own 'scopy, and when he finally got it they found a frisky cancer busily chewing its way through the wall of his colon. They caught the bastard right in time. Whew! Another reason for me to undergo this ordeal.

Anyhow, even if you don't have a history for such things, maybe you should get checked out once you get to that certain age when Bad Mutha Nature is starting to say, "What, are you still here? I thought I got rid of you already!"

OK

My last entry was ten months ago? Talk about doin' the time warp...

The cataract operation on my left eye took place on May 5th and wasn't a lot of fun TBH, but wasn't horrifying either. That was the part dealing with the multitude of bills that came pouring down afterwards, even with my alleged medical insurance covering some of it. Well, that's all settled, and now it's time to schedule my right eye for the same ... and finally, to get some new glasses, as the current ones (dating from 2017) don't work very well with my eyes now. In fact I see better without, mostly. A visit with the eye doctor last Thursday showed that Lefty is doing pretty well.

Continuing on a medical line, a while back one of my sisters sent me an email inquiring about some old medical records from our childhood, concerning the various shots and boosters we had to take back then. Unfortunately, our old doctor died years ago, and the doctor who took over his practice managed to lose our records, a fact I did not discover until I was about to enter college and needed proof of immunization. Not surprisingly he wound up in prison on a tax dodge scam.

Anyhow, while searching in the attic I found various other things, including a box of "old records" that turned out to be mostly bank statements from the late 90s-early 00s for accounts that had long since been closed and forgotten. In opening the box, the first thing I saw was the name "Colin Upton" peeking through the celophane window in the topmost envelope. Yes, back then the banks returned your checks, and I thus had a quantity of checks signed by various persons from whom I was then still purchasing self-pubs and artwork. Going through the mass, I wound up with a mixed lot of these things, not all signed but handstamped (mostly publishers like Antarctic Press, though Elin Winkler signed some as well), and many signed with a scribble, Some of the most readable ones were Richard Chandler, Michael Curtis, Joshua Kennedy, Chuck Melville and Diana Sprinkle.

Curiously enough, I found an earlier collection of this sort dating 1991-94, which marked the early part of my connection with the fandom, just as the current group of checks marked the beginning of my gradual withdrawal.

I imagined at one time that that one could create a secondary collection consisting of checks made out to, and signed by, various favored artists, but around 2003 the banks stopped returning cancelled checks, so that was that. Which is not to say one shouldn't do it anyway, as a form of feudal tribute if nothing else.

One puzzling thing that came up after the first operation was that a couple of days later I happen to notice that my right eye seemed to be getting out of alignment with my left. By the third day it was clear that it was apparently sliding down my face, so that when I placed my forefinger in line with my left eye, my right one was definitely and entirely below my finger. It doesn't seem to have moved downward any further after that, and after I went in and had the Prokera removed and was able to give it a good rub, it suddenly returned to its usual place. When my left eye was operated on, the same thing happened there as well. It was no joke to look in the mirror, having removed the taped-on pad in the evening, to see a character from an HP Lovecraft story looking back - "Cool Air," for example, or "The Thing On The Doorstep." I have no idea...

Last Saturday (Sept 12) I went out to get the morning paper, which involves going out the front door, wandering down a walkway that runs alongside the garage (which is set in front of the house), and then turning left to the driveway and a straight run(?) down to the street to the mailbox to see what the occasional mailman left there yesterda, and then overy where the delivery man usually leaves the paper on the front lawn. On that day, as I made my left turn I heard a sudden SCREECH! SCREECH! from my left. Not being able to see that way, I turned and immediately saw a young squirrel clinging to the front of the garage in a considerable state of alarm. Somehow I had come along so quietly that it had no idea that it was about to be confronted by a huge shambling Lovecraftian Horror - and how often does a wild squirrel in a suburban area come this close to a human? It couldn't go one way due to a tangled mass of bushes, or the other way as the garbage cans blocked it; going down would put it close to my trampling feet, and it couldn't turn around to go up as the section of bricks it was clinging to was too narrow. Seeing how things were, I turned and waddled away to retrieve some junk mail from the mail box, and the newspaper; returning to the house I was not surprised to see that Li'l Skwerl was no longer in sight. Ah, well...

Oh, yes, I couldn't see to my left because I had a pad over my left eye, which leads to -

An update of the Paring of the Eyes.

Last Friday (the day before my meeting with Li'l Skwerl) I went in to have Dr V give my left eye the same treatment as the right one. I might mention why I was having this curious operation done: over the years, my right eye had developed a condition where the outer part of the cornea become covered with striations that (according to my then eye doctor, Dr B) were harmless, even as my sight through that eye deteriorated. About three years ago he finally admitted that the two things were definitely connected and he referred me to a cornea specialist, Dr V. After a couple of years of watching, it was decided to have the operation done (now the left eye was affected), a decision made necessary by the fact that I now had cataracts, and the corneas had to be dealt with first before anything could be done about them.

I had made the mistake of driving into town for the first operation and almost didn't make it home - I fully expected to wind up in the evening news, MASSIVE PILEUP ON THE SOUTH LOOP, MILES OF FLAMING WRECKAGE. This time around I arranged to have a taxi pick me up at home and drive me in, and afterwards to drive me home (I wound up with the same driver each way). Rather expensive, but worth it; coming home I spent the trip with both eyes quietly closed, traveling in style instead of clutching the steering wheel and gnashing my teeth as I lost track of which lane I was in again and again.

The operation was much the same as before, except the first time they put numbing gel in my eye twice beforehand, and the second time they, I guess, forgot, and I only got some afterwards, once. I also noticed a different result - my right eye, which had been my "bad" eye for so long, was now my good eye - while waiting for Dr V, I passed the time reading some rather small text on a nearby computer screen (mostly tech data about the computer, CPU, memory size etc), which I couldn't have done before. A brief exam by a nurse showed I was seeing 20/40. OTOH, my left eye seems to be out of sorts somehow - focus is seriously off, almost like my right eye was for so long. I hope this is only temporary.

One rather unhappy discovery - as Dr V was preparing to release me into the wild, he began talking about some eyedrops he had prescribed for me, which left me confused. Not long after returning home from the first operation I had started getting messages from some pharmacy I'd never heard of about Dr V sending a prescription of some sort; after erasing several of them, I finally called them up, and ended by asking them to cancel the prescription as I already had some eyedrops, which I got at my usual pharmacy close by. Anyhow, Dr V began talking about brown-top and pink-top bottles, which puzzled me sorely, but not as much as when I said I had the green-top (Walgreens) bottle. Gazing me as he absorbed this new form of senility he was being confronted with, he patiently explained that what I had was artificial tears, and what he had prescribed was ophthalmic gel, which is not at all the same thing, and which I should have been using all along. He found a couple of sample bottles, about the size of the last joint of my forefinger, and having cleared that up, we parted on reasonably good terms.

Moral: ASK QUESTIONS.

Starting in two weeks - The CATARACTS.

The actual procedure wasn't as exciting as my posted art made it out to be; here is a website that describes it pretty well, including a squirmworthy video:

https://webeye.ophth.uiowa.edu/eyef.....eratectomy.htm

Not that I saw or felt much (thanks to the numbing gel they used beforehand). It was basically an outpatient operation, with me sitting in the examination chair, my masked face placed in the framework ordinarily used for checking the interior of dilated eyes; Dr V placed a gadget that held my eyelids open and my eyeball in place, and then he carefully removed the cornea of of right eye. I briefly looked through my cornea-less eye and noticed how completely out of focus everything was, and then Dr V placed a Prokera over the former site, removed the frame, and taped a folded pad over my eye. Prokera is a curious item, consisting of a small quantity of placenta contained within a ring; the placenta (donated by a new mother who certainly had no further use for it, bless her) helps the healing process, leaving me marveling at the wonders of modern medicine.

Driving home afterwards was no fun, I'm not even sure how I managed it as my left eye began acting up; it wasn't helped by the fact that I live almost in Galveston County, and Dr V's office is right in the middle of town in the Texas Medical Center, and due to extensive road work several parts of the freeway didn't seem to have any lane markers.

Then followed a seemingly endless week of Itchy Eye, which I dared not touch. Over time it faded somewhat and I found that by closing both eyes and keeping them still the Itchy went away. Somewhat. Finally, one week after, I returned and Dr V removed the Prokera, had a good look at his work and declared it good, and it seems he was right. I could at any rate see more clearly with my right eye than before, or at least I didn't two or three of everything. Another week, and going in today my right eye was more thoroughly checked out and the cornea was found to have grown back more smoothly than before, though due to growth patterns it supposedly has some clouding which isn't noticeable to me.

After some discussion we decided to do the left eye next, and I'm going in Friday next week, and I'm not driving; when I left the building I saw a Yellow Cab patiently waiting for its passenger, which I take to be a Sign from on High.

One thing that kept me on my toes during all this was the fact that I know all sorts of folks who have undergone cataract surgery, and they all say its nothing, I know no one who has a Superficial Keratectomy. Now I know one, anyhow.

When I start in on my cataracts, I luckily won't have to go all the way into town, as my regular eye doctor, Dr M, has his office just down the road from here, and he can handle it there.

Ah, well...

When you start seeing three of everything, you know it's way past time to get serious about your eyesight. I'd sooner lose both legs than one eye, and here's both in peril. I may well spend the rest of the year having one op after another, but we'll see. Pun unintended.

I could have sworn I posted something here sooner than five months ago. Maybe I didn't.

In the words of that late great philosopher, Jack Benny, ".....Well!" Has it really been seven or eight months since I last posted anything here? I'm not sure what to think of that ... so, I won't. Anyhow.

Not a lot going on here aside from a program for reducing my tonnage and circumference to somewhat lesser amounts, though after some progress - dropping from 275 to 260 lbs - I seem to have backslid to 275 again. The fact that none of the scales used to measure this seem to be calibrated correctly doesn't help. It's just a question of input/output - eating versus exercise - or so I'm told. Of course my progress, such as it is, has been in the form of "two steps forward, one step back," which is to say, I lose weight (fat) and gain weight (meat) at the same time. Meanwhile I sigh with regret as I gaze back to the days of my youth (before 1999) when I weighed 185 lbs. I find all this health stuff tiresome, to be honest, and imagine anyone who might read this feels the same.

I am continuing to improve in regards with actually walking about without a cane. My balance needs work, though.

Hmm, what else? I'm still drawing, but nothing to post here for some reason. I should do something about that, perhaps. Writing and drawing for Rowrbrazzle seems to have precedence at present.

There was a big blow out at the Johnson Space Center last Saturday (20th) in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo XI moon landing, which was nice but ... I didn't go. I did listen to the fireworks that night. They were like any other fireworks.

Tuesday the 23rd the Houston Chronic reported the death of Chris Kraft, NASA's first flight director the previous day. He lived just long enough to see a half century pass and watch all that he and his associates had done evaporate like a drop of water on the hot skillet of national indifference. Then he died.

President Eisenhower had a definite scientific interest in space, aside from the mandatory sense of competition with those darn Russkies. His successors, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, being fu'ball junkies, turned what had been a scientific program in The Big Game that we had to WIN. None of them had the slightest idea, or interest, in what came after the first moon landing. We won! What more do you want?

During the Great Race to the moon, NASA absorbed 4.5% of the national budget; since then, it has gone down to 0.1% and there are those who think that's too much.

NASA's gone through too many bosses who did not seem to really want to see the US in space. One special case was Sean O'Hare, under whose administration it was common for a project to reach 90, 94, 95, 98% completion and be almost ready to go online, only for the project to be cancelled, the drawings shredded, the machinery scrapped and the personnel laid off or transferred to some other project. This may help in figuring out why, when the space shuttle was shut down, we had nothing to replace it with.

I dunno, I don't think it's because I'm never going into space myself, I never had any idea of doing it anyhow, but I am seriously doubtful about humanity being able to do so.

It's almost no longer March, actually, but whatever.

The past almost two months has been filled with activity, but no real action. So far the weather hasn't been particularly bad, unlike some previous years. The "new" (2016) car I'm now tooling around in these days still has some surprising tricks; I'm still getting used to something with wheels set at its corners - it has a sharp turning radius - and a shorter wheel base with hardly anything sticking out in front or back. The trunk is strangely small, which is a result of the latter design. It's mileage is notable - I drove from Baton Rouge LA to Houston TX on half a tank of gas; the old car would use that much just going into town and back. It's pretty low to the ground, and for someone who recalls the glory days when he sat in the Throne of Saturn (driving a van), this isn't so great. OTOH I don't miss the gas bills associated with driving a van, so there's that too. Ah, well ...

No sooner had I sent in the previous post but a norther swept in and the temps dropped from the 70s to the 40s. I'm not sure why I should be surprised at this, though it's not exactly an ice storm (which we don't need, thank you).

While folks up north are "enjoying" their cool weather, when I go out in the morning to get the paper it feels like I'm walking right into Clifford the Big Red Dog's hot wet tongue. This is way too early in the year for this sort of thing and I expect we'll get an ice storm or two before the Hot finally settles in.

Meanwhile I'm way overdue for a meeting with the Steel Eel - as I have a family history of colon cancer (my father and his first cousin both had it, and probably some others I don't know), a colonoscopy lies in my near future. I am aware that other, less intrusive means of checking out my gizzard exits, but ...

Still drawing but mostly just stuff. I go days and even a week or so without doing anything and that's no way to become a Great Arteest.

"Nature red in tooth and claw..." - we've all pretty much heard this phrase, but sometimes we need to be reminded what it means.

One day last week, when I went out front to check the mail, I noticed a rather odd and unpleasant mess on the driveway, consisting of a flat roundish fleshy object about 1 1/2" across containing what appeared to be a number of peanuts, to which was attached a long string-like fiber stretched out straight for about two feet, all being of a blue-black color. Neither knowing what it could be, nor wanting to touch the thing, I left it for the fire ants (who had a large nest quite close by) to deal with it for me. In any case, there was a heavy rain that night and the next morning all that was left was the "string."

Yesterday (Sunday, 25th), I went out to get the the morning paper, only to be confronted on the front walkway by the gnarled remnants of a squirrel, the back end, of which the tail was pretty much the only intact part left. It had been dead for some time, according to my nose; I can only assume it had been killed by a hawk (we have a good many, mainly red-tailed), partly eaten and the leftovers stuck in the tree branches overhead until dislodged by a later bout of high winds. The object mentioned in the previous paragraph, I now realized, was part of the squirrel's stomach and intestines, containing his last meal.

Alas, Squirrel Nutkin! I knew him well, gracefully running across the street before my car as I hurriedly put on the brakes, building his cleverly-designed nests in my tree only to have a strong wind send them tumbling to the ground, and planting acorns and pecans in the flower beds and in the middle of the yard, only to forget (or die), leaving them to grow up into oaks and pecan trees, and what's that scurrying sound from the attic?

Well, well, I guess hawks gotta eat too.

I ended up getting a shovel out and removing the remains from the walkway and - instead of tossing it into the garbage can, as was my first thought - I tossed it into the flowerbed around the big tree, with its oaks and pecans growing up around the big Arizona ash in the middle. May Nutkin make his contribution to the health of the big tree he so loved to scamper about in.

Afternote: I did consider saving the tail as a memorial, but the scent of decay was already too strong and I have no particular notion of what needs to be done to preserve such a thing. The "string" was too baked into the pavement for me to get it up with the shovel, so there it remains.

It's been five months?! OK, not much of anything worth posting about here, to be honest. I am currently in the process of getting my general health into better shape, which was provoked mainly by my stepping on a scale and seeing the number "270" appear before my horrified eyes. One main part of this program is a series of exercise sessions at the hands of the trainers at the health club I have been going to for years.* So far so good, I'm down to 267 now, with a long way to go.

*Health club history - since moving to this part of Houstopolis, I have been going to Bally Health Club, Blast HC, and now Fitness Connection, without (aside from Blast's brief detour to a small place across from Baybrook Mall, after Hurricane Harvey) leaving the old President's & First lady's Club building on the Gulf Freeway.

The Flies are gone, it's mostly Gnatzies buzzing me like I'm King Kong.

The insect life of this part of the country is fairly notorious for its variety and habit of year-round presence, considering its semi-tropical position in the northern hemisphere. About a month ago I came to appreciate this fact when I came under siege by FLIES. Large red-eyed beasts that seemingly came out of nowhere.

At first, when I had just one, almost a quarter of an inch long, buzzing aimlessly about I was amused, and I would engage it in staring contests (I always won), and I managed to catch and release it outside at least three times before it occurred to me to wonder where they were coming from.

Then they began to attack me, like Gnatzi Stukas, one even striking me in the eye as I sat reading in the living room. I then began a different response - KILL - which seemed to work at first until they began to appear again, almost like characters in a video game that regenerate when killed. This became more serious when they began to appear in pairs, and then in threes - towards the end it was not too unusual to see two crouched on a lampshade while a third made passes at my face.

Late last year I had gone to Home Despot to purchase a quantity of bug bombs, not due to flies but on account of the cockroach infestation, but had never quite gotten around to using them - until now. Setting the bombs up around the house and made myself scarce for the two hours according to the directions on the cans.

Returning home, I went about opening windows and doors, in the course of which I came to understand what my great-granduncle underwent during WWI when he got caught in a German gas attack. That was NASTY stuff. To shorten this a bit, the stuff worked to a considerable extent (I still have cockroaches, but not so much as before); oddly enough, later that day I found two flies on the inside of the back screen door, which I let out, while a third made a final strafing run past my face a little later. And none since then, knock wood (thumps self on head).

Has it been that long since I posted anything here? Not that we haven't had anything interesting happening, what with the Deep Freeze and yet another trip - by commercial air - to visit relatives in Louisiana.

It was during a geological field trip to central Texas that I first met the cactus that was to be my companion for so many years. We had stopped after crossing the San Saba River (not a bridge, just a cement-lined shallow ford where the water was a couple of inches deep ordinarily), and while walking about I spotted a small cactus that had fallen from a patch located on an elevated section alongside the road. Carefully, I gathered up some local dirt and planted it in a styrofoam cup; it proved to be a feisty li'l thing, for no sooner had I brought it inside the bus but it promptly speared me a posteriori through my jeans. In any case, I took it home and it proceeded to follow me about from one place to another, usually taking on the role of an inside plant, though it did not seem to be growing to any extant. Twice it set out a huge purple flower, but after that it did not repeat the experiment. At some point I decided to return it to being an outside plant, and it promptly began to sprout additional arms until it resembled some dire alien sex implement. This past winter perhaps was too much for the cactus, as the temperature dropped below freezing and stayed there not for hours (which happens down here on the Mud Flats), but for days at a time. As a possible result, the arms began to look like partially-deflated balloons. Last Thursday, during a nice-weather afternoon during which I went about trimming back dead stuff and looking for signs of life, I decided to clip off one of the more obviously ruined arms, whereupon my nose was assaulted by a vile aroma, and my eyes by the sight of what can only be described as green mucous. I ended by trimming all six arms with the same results, hoping the core was still intact. ALAS, such was not the case, and last Sunday I wound up tipping the entire contents of the flower pot into the compost to join the arms already sent there.

The Spirit of San Saba (1988-2018) - you had a good run, and for half of my life (30 years) you were a faithful friend. Rest in peace. ;____;

I thought I had an earlier photo of San Saba posted here but apparently not. Here is a more recent one: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/25241561/

Two months past, not due to nothing much happening, nor to too much for that matter. Here in Houstopolis we're still wallowing in the aftermath of having about 43 trillion gallons of water suddenly dropped on our heads over the course of five days; meanwhile, our street finally got a visit from the Heavy Trash Fairies, i.e., last Tuesday around 3 PM I heard a roaring sounds outside and going to investigate I found a large trash-grabbing machine parked in front of our house. Apparently my sad little contribution - two bundles of sticks and a quantity of heavier branches, all that was left after my simply stuffing as much sticks into the garbage can each time for the past three garbage days - it was enough to finish fillingl up the dump truck being used to haul our junk away, so everyone was stuck for almost half an hour until this dinky little TxDOT dump truck came scurrying back to be filled up again. Actually we were lucky to get this much, all things considered.

and it's pretty toasty around here, a fact that I find useless to complain about as it's always like that this time of the year, and will remain so for a long time yet, possibly up into December, which seems to becoming the new rule down here on the Mudflats.

The Clearances are continuing, every Tuesday I drive over to EPO with yet another load of assorted junk, this last being two boxes of old hard drives (one small IDEs of 2-4-8 Gb size, the other being a number of SCSI drives), along with a beast of a nine-drive server array built of solid steel that weighed about as much as I do. I never got to start up the server array but from hearing what a single SCSI drive makes, I can only imagine something like a group of F16 fighters parked in the room with me. Anyhow, this marks the last of the really heavy stuff, the rest being mainly dozens of CD drives, and 5 1/4" and 3 1/2" floppy drives, a horde of motherboards and boxes of cables of every possible variety, internal and external. Not to mention all the empty computer cases in the garage, and boxes of various cards. And that big box of Bernouli drives and cartridges (would anyone be interested in that???) and Zip drives and 100 and 250 Mb cartridges and etc. And boxes and boxes of software, including one xerox paper box full of 5 1/4" floppies.

I still have a 1996 Apple All-In-One with a Sonnet CPU upgrade that runs OS X (10.2) quite nicely, or did until it stopped booting up. ;__;

The front room of the house has long served as a storage room for the quantities of old computer debris that I have accumulated over the years. Starting yesterday morning I set in motion a clearance program, loading about a ton of ancient (mid-90s) Apple computers - the majority actually fully functional and running OS 7, 8 or 9, and none of which I have finally been forced to confess being of any use to me - into the small car I buzz around in these days, and hauling them down to the local computer store (EPO) which I recently discovered has a recycling program of its own. This load also included a massive CRT monitor that originally cost $1000 when new in 1997, for which I paid $50 about 10 years ago at a HAUG (Houston Apple Users Group) meet, and which EPO gets for free; the Beast weighs almost as much as I do, according to my lower back, and I never really got around to actually using it - it was too heavy for me to lift up onto a table, and thus it spent its time in my company lying face-down on the carpeted floor. Needless to say, this was only the first of who knows how many trips I will have to make before the front room is usable again.

It doesn't help that I came back with two stereo/video receivers, a Harman-Kardon AVR30 and an Onkyo TX-SV535 - according to a quick search on Google, the former is God's gift to mankind, while the latter should be left on the curb. Or something like that. According to someone at EPO one works and the other "needs some repairs," but I forgot which was which. I'll find out soon enough, I suppose.

Anyhow... later.