I've gotten so I hardly ever come by here anymore, and as for posting stuff on my journal, I don't really have much of anything to post about. My health is still dodgy and not likely to get better, but at the same time it's more annoying than dangerous, so there's not much point in going on about that subject. Especially as there's always someone who's gone through worse.

I've been mostly concerned with trying to get things into some sort of order around here. Among other things, there's the fact that I now have no less than three lawn mowers that don't work, and the grass in our front yard is growing like crazy. The Neighborhood Association will soon be sending me li'l notes about it, and I don't need that.

Lately we've been having drive-by visits by tree trimming crews who seem to find the appearance of our house rather attractive, with the big tree laying its branches on the roof in such a lewd fashion.

I finally cleared the Mexican petunias out of the back yard, or at least the above-ground parts, because the roots are still there, and are even now starting to re-sprout in areas they formerly lorded over.

And so forth. There's lots of other stuff I have to see about, all of which (like the above) require the expenditure of money I don't have, leaving zip for anything else. Clearly I'm "doin' it wrong" as the song goes.

Something I can do that doesn't require money outlay - clearing out some of the junk I have here. I look at the piles of "perfectly good" computer parts and equipment and it's starting to get through to me that not only am I never going to use any of it but neither is anyone else. Before I haul it off to teh recycle center, I may try running it up at eBay to see if anyone salutes.

Four months, and so much fun and excitement ... well, no, mainly just getting by for the most part. For that matter, I don't think I've been here in about a month, which is curious. Hmm, what can I say?

OK, I have a Kenwood KD-2055 "marble bottom" turntable that I found someplace years ago, and a couple of weeks ago I finally took it to a local record shop (run by retired people, so it's only open from time to time) and got a new needle cartridge and new drive belt. Next I need to get a ... wtf is that word? I keep wanting to say "recorder" but it's actually the box you plug a turntable and some speakers into so you can actually hear the music. This is starting to really bug me - when I was talking to the guy at the shop I totally lost the word "turntable" and I had one right there in my hands.

Anyhow, I also have a Yamaha FB-01 synthesizer that has been sitting around here about the same number of years, and I'm finally getting around to thinking about getting a synth controller to see what happens. We shall see.

It's spring already, has been for about the last couple of months, and hardly much more than a couple of weeks could possibly have passed for winter or at least autumn. Climate change deniers can go ... Well, anyway I've been in my summer clothes and pajamas during nearly all of this past "winter" and I am looking ahead to summer with unholy dread.

... we're getting Xmas ads already! It's enough to turn Santa Claus into a Secular Grinchist.

Elections are over, and as I expected, no one is happy with the results, and no one can really be said to have won - the loser's supporters will see to that. Meanwhile the rest of the world is getting on with their own business, and our recently acquired habit of diving headlong up our own rear exit only leaves us further behind than ever before. (Was that a pun? Sorry.)

Wow, I'm really not keeping up with FA these days. For years I used to come by every Wednesday, prowl around my fave artists' postings, saving probably too much of their art & stuff as I did so, posting a few comments here & there and leaving a number of drawings on my own area for others to look at. Then in pretty rapid succession the HDs on three of my main computers went tits up, though to be exact only two of them actually went bad.

Fit the First: An old Dell Optiplex running Win98, which I used for nearly all of my main work - writing, art clean up, printing, etc - started acting up, so that attempts to access files on first the second HD and then the main one became tricky. Finally I lost all access, though not before I managed to get most of my important stuff off (and a lot more was rescued, thanks to a local computer shop, EPO in Webster TX). OTOH I lost, probably for good, several years' worth of downloads from FA. I had been intending to back everything up on DVDs but found that I was unable to do so with whatever software I had available, and so ... pfft. I have since replaced the HD with another, reloaded Win98 and all the other various software I need, and it seems to be working pretty well ... but I no longer quite trust the Optiplex, so I keep copies of my work on an external drive. Just in case.

Fit the Second: My internet machine, a much more up-to-date box running Ubuntu Studio 16.04, suddenly started acting up, and presently its HD also went phooey, again with my being able to rescue my bookmarks, emails and other stuff. Needing to get back online quickly, I stopped by EPO above mentioned to see if they had any of their refurb Win7 machines on hand ($149), which they did. Taking it home, I at first attempted to install US 16, but failed. Thereafter, I decided to give Win7 a whirl and found it to be an interesting experience, which is to say I was faced with a different set of annoying problems from the sort of annoying problems I had from Linux. After being importuned to upgrade to Win10 for free, I did so, and found even more things to be annoyed with, such as having to restart the machine every week or sometimes oftener. OTOH, I find myself now able to do certain things such as listen to online music and watch videos, something the good folks behind Linux decided that I did not have to be able to do. "When one door closes, another door opens" or something like that.

Fit the Third: The third victim here was another Ubuntu Studio machine (13.04) that I use mainly for scanning things, listening to music and watching downloaded videos, though this last was somewhat qualified by the fact that the machine's video card has only 32Mb memory, which is way too little these days for such things. After the two above events occurred, I got my wind up about the situation with this machine - a main HD that was used mainly for OS and programs, and two secondary HDs, both almost totally full, to store things on (a 250MB for graphics and text, and a 120Mb for music files). The latter HD was successfully completely backed up to DVDs, and I got nearly all of the former as well, but there remained three rather enormous graphics and video directories, two 50Gb and one 12Gb in size, that were still to be done. I decided to remove the two secondaries and access them on another machine (another Win7 box from the same place as the other, which I use chiefly for scanning the enormous quantities of family photos) as external drives. The 250Gb HD had been set as a slave drive, so I reset it (or so I thought) as a master drive, but as I did so I found that for some odd reason the manufacturer had an extra option - to cut the size down to 32GB, that being the size limit for Win98 systems. WHY WOULD ANYONE BUY A 250GB DRIVE IN ORDER TO TURN IT INTO SUCH A SMALLER SIZED ONE? Can anyone guess what happened? 250 does not go easily into 32, so the system deleted ~218Gb of files, quite a lot of which I had already backed up, but even more of which were not. Luckily I had some DVD backups from around 2012-13, so I was able to do some repairs, but still ... yikes ... someone once said computers enable us to make more and bigger mistakes than all the whiskey and shotguns together can manage. Meanwhile the main HD (40Gb) is still buzzing along.

All of these drives are ATA/IDE drives, BTW, and I am preparing to making a teetering lunatic step into more recent hardware as soon as I have enough money and fewer emergencies to spend it on.

For more fun & games, about a month ago I wound up taking a ride in an ambulance, my first since I destroyed my left knee at John Wayne Airport in LA on my way back from ConFurence 20 years ago. Heat exhaustion as the final verdict, though other things (stroke, heart attack and other amusements) were considered. I wound up spending several hours watching one Spongebob Squarepants cartoon after another, with the sound off thank goodness. The day wasn't even all that hot, or so I thought when I went out to cut up a tree branch that had come down in the front yard earlier, preventing me from cutting the grass (which i did manage to do a couple of days later). The bills are coming in now, and when I look at them and recall that a 12-pack of Gatorade is only $4 and change ...

Change and decay all about I see...

After thirty years, the family refrigerator finally began to slowly swoon into the arm,s of entropy, i.e., a slow freon leak was causing its contents to rot and go bad. Fixing the leak involved replacing a lot of parts (est total $927) due to it using a type of freon no longer produced. So a new one was ordered and it arrived this afternoon some time before I expected it, resulting in a rush to remove the remaining items from the old fridge. I must say the ice maker was still heroically churning them out right to the end, which is more than the ice maker in the new fridge (according to the manual, we won't get any for 24 hours, and according to the delivery guy, we'll have o throw the first batch out due to stuff. So...)

On a more serious note, the machine I used to access the intarwebz went tits up last Thursday, at least the HD did. I managed to get some stuff off before it went blooey, but not everything. I now have three IDE HDs in this disagreeable state, and in the meantime what to do about my internet stuff? Simple, stroll over to the local computer place to see if they have any $149 refurbs on hand (they had one) running Win7 (I already got one for scanning family pictures and was surprised to see how well it ran). I had the idea of loading a version of Linux on it but it stubbornly refused to load, so I decided to just run W7 and see how long that goes. So far so good - even better, I can listen to Hearts of Space and Thistle & Shamrock, two radio shows forbidden to me since 2011 by Linux and our local NPR affiliate. And so it goes,

... and what a greeting. At first I couldn't log in for no apparent reason (reading the notice at the top of the page would have been helpful), but now here I am again. I was vaguely aware that FA was having some problems, and hopefully they'll be over for now.

A number of different things, none individually very serious, came together at once a few months ago, resulting in among other things my abdicating from the post of Official Editor of Rowrbrazzle in favor of EDD VICK - who I always thought should have been OE in the first place. R is already showing signs of new growth with #129. Floriat Eddvickius!

Another matter, more concerning my occasional visits to FA, was the rather sudden failure of two hard drives on a computer that I use for much of my work, one of which contained several years of material saved from places such as this. This drive was last backed up in Dec 2012; though I had been increasingly worried for some time by some eccentric behavior, I never got around to doing anything about it. Anyhow, that's about 3 1/2 years of stuff saved off of FA and do I want to go back and do it all over again? These were the work of some of my favorite Art Gods and friends, but still ...

The weather suddenly became so warm that everything started bustin' out all over, the Big Ash Tree rushed through its pollen stage and is now entirely covered with little green leaves, and meanwhile I started to put away my winter clothes and blankets. And then the temperature dropped to 45 F by 9 PM tonight and I have the heat on, and have my winter pajamas on again. Ah, well...

Since the start of the year I became once more a member of the workforce! as far as someone with part-time temp job can be said to have one. Anyhow, it's a change.

Being invited over to Baton Rouge to spend the holidays with relatives, I usually just drive over there. This time around someone had the idea that I should fly! but unfortunately there isn't a direct flight from the nearest airport here (there is from B_sh Intercontinental, but that's about 60 miles across town or thereabouts). So off I went to Dallas/Fort Worth Airport, and then back down to BR through some ominously rough weather. The visit was nice enough, and I scored some useful swag, tins of tea, a new can opener, a very small frying pan, and such like items. The cats remembered me from previous visits. The weather in BR was warm and sweaty, and Xistmas Day itself never got below 80 F.

The day of departure (Sunday 27th) came, and I idly read of tornadoes in North Texas somehow without comprehending that I might actually have to deal with them on my way home. The flight back to D/FW was fairly rough as might be expected, but then I hit a snag - my booked flight to Houston was delayed, then delayed some more, then cancelled so that I had to re-book for another flight - which in turn was delayed and finally cancelled around midnight. One final re-book gave me a flight - back to BR - as by the time I got around to seeing about this, everyone else trying to get there had taken up every seat on every plane in that direction. Having cleverly packed my cell phone in my checked luggage, I was obliged to borrow someone else's phone to call back to BR to warn them of my impending return.

Back in '75 my family made a Xistmas trip to England, and upon returning via JFK Airport found our connecting flight back to Houston had been redirected to Quebec with a burned-out capacitor or whatever it was, with the result that we spent about 14 hours trapped there. We survived, though, and the fact that I was finding myself in this same situation again 40 years later was interesting but not something I wanted to repeat.

An airport terminal, as no doubt any number of any possible readers can testify to, is not really set up for housing, though I noted quite a number of people sleeping on folding metal cots. Some of the more experienced travelers had blankets to sleep under; unfortunately I wasn't one of them, and even more unfortunately someone had left the door open so that a brisk cold wind came whistling down the corridors. I managed to find a place full of chairs and spent the rest of the night there - I almost said I slept but that didn't really happen.

After the usual shuffling around, my return to BR took place - my first arrival took place in darkness, but this time as we crossed the Mississippi I could see the place where Ole Miss is preparing to bust through into the Atchafalaya. There was of course no question of my making another attempt at flying home, so my brother-in-law drove me home, making quite good time.

My checked luggage got to Houston long before I did.

Ah, well...

A third of the way through even. Well...

September was the Big Pantsnatch Caper, so what should I do to surpass that but to have one of my back teeth go #CRUNCH#. Another crown to go with the one I already have from a previous misadventure. The new crown proved to be a bit higher than the original surface, so since it's arrival I've had a prison riot in my mouth, or whatever is closest to one. It seems to be quieting down now, though the tooth that immediately contacts the crown'd one has suddenly become sensitive to cold for some reason. Always something.

An update on the Great Pants Snatch*: a couple of days ago I got an email from a sister in Louisiana informing me that she heard from the health club that they found my STUFF - why did the call her? Her phone number was on a card in my wallet. Why not call me? My number was on a card in the wallet but when they tried to call me my phone was busted so ... jeez.

Weirdest part is that everything was still in the pockets of my pants. EVERYTHING. UNTOUCHED. Apparently the thief was interrupted in the act so he stuffed it into a stray gym bag and shoved it behind a toilet in the men's locker room where it was eventually discovered. Weirder if it had been found in the _women's_ locker room.

Anyhow, after all the alarums & excursions, and outrageous expenses I'm very far from being able to afford of the past month, I'm pretty much back at the start. I did need to replace the old rotting wallet anyhow.

* I wouldn't be surprised if someone came up with a Rule 34 of this. Knock yerself out.

Last year my birthday present was to wind up on an operating table having my lumbar vertebrae chipped open to rescue my spinal cord. This time, some assoul broke into my locker at the health club and grabbed my pants with my wallet, keys and cell phone in its pockets. I don't suppose very much of what he took was of much value, aside from some change, pocket knife and my pants, but so far I'm out almost $500 replacing everything taken; much of this went to various locksmiths whose handiwork was less than impressive and will require additional work to undo their mess. Among other things, I had my Social Security card in my wallet, for no apparently good reason, and which required a visit to the local SS office. My new card will go someplace more secure in the future. My cell phone? I forgot to keep money in my account, which ran out back in July, and so it's useless. And so on. My telephone service took the occasion to go tits up on me as this was going on, though I did continue to have internet service until suddenly I didn't; and then both came back about 1:30 AM.

Meanwhile the weather took an oddly cool turn, with highs in the 80s, though it's returning to the new Global Warming normal. The elderly widow across the street had a second stroke, one that left her paralyzed down one side, and that's it for her living alone in her house. Did I say something? Ignore the first paragraph above.

Not that I haven't doing much drawing, and there have been days at a time when I don't draw at all, but I do keep my pencils busy from time to time. Most of what results is too experimental in nature to use anywhere. Recently I've been going through the bales of stuff I've put aside over the years, and finding some old artwork have found that my style has improved quite a bit without being significantly different in general appearance. I may add that the image that my icon here is made from was originally drawn c1995, which should indicate something.

My ability to get around improves, my walker is gathering dust and when walking about outside the house I find myself no longer leaning on my cane. Inside the house I don't use it at all - not that I actually ever did do so. The first anniversary of my operation comes up next month. Yay.

The past six months have not been without their events, chiefly matters of little interest to anyone who may be reading this, but the results have been accumulating and they seem to be of a positive nature. This past Monday was my last physical therapy session, during the course of which series I went from a score of 16 out of 28 (high risk of falling) to 25 out of 28 (low risk of falling) ... which is not quite the same as zero risk of falling. My remaining limitations, which included not being about to stand on my right foot without a support due to the continued weakness in my ankle, were checked, and I am now to continue a series of strengthening exercises. Actually I have three sets of exercises - the ones from my surgeon's office following my operation last September, the set from the physical therapy place aforementioned, and a set from my regular doctor from my spraining my right ankle on Monday the 13th April (and I still have his prescription for an ankle brace, which I may eventually have to get). Things seem to be settling down now, and hopefully my medical adventures will be at an end; in any case, my warbling about them here and elsewhere will be finished as I am myself bored enough with them, so what can they be like to my savage readers?

OK

Things continue to progress - I haven't used my walker in almost a month, and someone at the health club I go to observed that it looked like I was no longer depending on my cane so much, that I was using it mainly just for balance. I still get twinges in my lower back to remind me that some serious business took place there not long ago. I'm even starting to get sensation back in my toes, mostly on my left foot but some on the right as well. I'm already being pressed by various family members to start looking for a job, which I will have to do eventually. Ah, well...

Starting this past Monday I've started going to my health club, taking it easy for now; first I did 1 mile on a stationery bike at level 6 (usually I would do 3 miles at 7), followed by another mile on a treadmill at 2.0, which was my usual rate. Today I went into the pool and made about 10 round trips walking from one end to the other and back - not swimming, as the water was somewhat chemically off for some reason. I'm still having some problems with my right foot being turned out when I walk.

and I am now (confirmed by a call to the doctor's office this morning) allowed to lift items up to 10 pounds, twice what I could before, and even better I CAN DRIVE. Which I did, cautiously, stopping by the post office to pick up my POBox mail saved from the past 2 weeks, and the local grocery store for some things that had run out. Coming out of the store I was lightly rained on, which was kind of nifty.

For the next month my body will still be going through the process of readjusting to changes in the lumbar vertebrae and I still have to handle myself with some care, but otherwise things go on pretty much as before. I am starting to notice some rather slight changes, with regards to apparent returning sensation in my feet, but this came on over several years and I don't have any great expectations for the short term. Ask me this time next year.

Today being One Week After, and tomorrow the eighth day (when I can start removing the strips covering the incision and finally take a proper bath, possibly doing both at once), I thought I'd drop a few words here.to show that I'm still up & around. I'm already showing some signs of improvement, what with sensation returning slowly to my toes and the decreasing of that annoying sensation of a thumb being jabbed into my right hip. It's still another week before I can drive, and from that date my rehab program starts in earnest.

But really there are folks in worse condition. Much worse. While awaiting a wheelchair to take me to the patients pickup area, I saw one guy roll past with a cast on his left leg that went all the way up. I was actually able to walk by then but not the great distance required to make my escape. Ah, well...

OK

To make a medical story short, I went, I was carved and sewed up (actually glued together) and after staying overnight under observation I came home again. My lowr\er back hurts of course and the muscles that hold my gizzard in place around front aren't working properly though doing better. I can't tell that I'm better from all this, but as this condition had been coming on for a good many years I don't expect a rapid result. We shall see.

Well, here it is September. I remember as kid looking forward to this month, not only because it meant our weather would eventually turn cooler but my birthday also occurred . Nowadays it seems that the cooler weather comes later and later as time goes by, on into October and November and early December.

This September has a additional date, one that I don't much like but will have to face one week from now - an operation on my lower back, removing bone and tissue growth in the lumbar vertebra to relieve pressure on my spinal cord (a laminectomy) so that I may some day walk the Earth without the assistance of a walker or cane.

Last week I had my pre-op clearance exams and the chest x-rays showed that my aorta was "unwinding", the ECG found some abnormal T waves, my cholesterol and trigyceride counts were wildly high etc etc, but I was apparently all right for a "non-cardiac" operation.

Any alarm & despondency I might feel about all this is somewhat tempered by the fact that quite a few people I know have been more severely handled by medical problems, some losing their lives in the process. Anyhow, I have left the care and feeding of Rowrbrazzle in Steve Scharff's capable hands for the duration, while I scratch up a trib for the next issue.

OK

Now that the weather has more or less returned to normal around here (hot and sticky)...

This past week, I noticed something about Stephen Pastis' Pearls Before Swine comic strip ... "That's odd," I thought, "Some of these panels look like they were drawn by Bill Watterson!" But then I read about it in Slashdot, of all places, late Sunday night and wound up going through the recycle stack for the past week's newspaper comic sections. An account of this curious event can be read here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/.....-gems/?hpid=z1

From the sublime to the annoying - for several weeks I have been confronted by large, not quite dead cockroaches in every room of the house. These are those enormous tree roaches that have been known to take off and fly on occasion. Several were lively enough to right themselves and sulkily crawl under the furniture when I attempted to get them up on a piece of cardboard, though they almost always seemed to wind up deceased the next time I saw them. Lately they haven't been anywhere near dead, like the one I found promenading on the kitchen counter the other night. I have a six-pack of bug bombs (fumigators) but as they have been sitting on a shelf here since 2009 I'm not sure how good they may be.

Four months later and we're still getting nipped, even down here on the Mud Flats. I can't believe this winter.

Having recently added a walker to my means of travel, I find myself getting around in public rather better, though having old ladies open doors for me does tend to have a slightly demoralizing effect. OTOH I seem to be doing better than I was this time last year - a couple of weeks ago I took one turn with my cane around the track at the health club I go to (10 rounds @ mile), without falling down or having anything else untoward occurring, and this past week I brought the aforementioned walker, which is awkward to maneuver among the weight machines, and did off four rounds without any difficulty - and the last visit I did five - a half mile - so maybe there's hope yet. If I'd ever gotten into a course of physical therapy a year ago I'd be so much further ahead - but I didn't so that's that.

Anyhow.

It looks like spring is trying to get its foot in the door, the pecan trees are starting to bud, a clear sign that winter is over according to my Grandmother, so maybe we can move on to new things.

So I managed to slide through October without much to-do, aside from posting some stuff here and getting out another issue of Rowrbrazzle - #119 - further news for those who care, I seem to be getting better as far as my prior health difficulties enumerated here and elsewhere. Or at least not getting worse, whichever. The weather has taken a sinister turn, the past week or so the temperature has been significantly lower than has been usual for the past good many years. Just now I went out to check the mailbox and retrieve the garbage can, and the sensation of the cold wind wafting about my chassis was something sweet and strange to me indeed.

and once more another year closer to the grave (my 56th occurs in less than three weeks). The Continuing Crisis regarding my numb toes and crunched sciatic nerve seems to be abating and not a moment too soon. This course of cortisone seems to be doing the trick, and I'm starting to walk almost normally at intervals again. Yay for me.

After a long interval of idleness here I've posted a half dozen or so stray pieces in my Gallery and Scraps sections here. One perhaps noticeable thing about them is that several were scanned, not on my crusty old HP scanner, but on a Lexmark all-in-one scanner-printer which seems to have a distinctly different style. The old HP showed every smudge and erased mark; the Lexmark shows gray and black as light blue, which meant I had to do some tinkering in Corel PhotoPaint before they could be ready for showtime. I would have used the HP for all of them but the Linux box it's attached to is being a butthead , i.e., the cursor has started a habit of suddenly darting down to the lower left corner of the screen, usually when I'm attempting to do something that requires its presence elsewhere. Annoying, to say the least. Ah, well, someday Linux will be just as good as Windows 98 and there will be great rejoicing.

The Continuing Crisis continues, though various tests (CAT and sonogram) have shown that I have a benign cyst on my right kidney, my liver has a cyst and chunks of fat though not seriously so, tests of both show they are functioning properly, a CAT scan of my braaains has shown no obvious problems, and I'm HIV negative - the CDC has been pushing for the doctors to test for this last. I keep forgetting to ask what my blood type is, though I seem to recall someone telling me it's O+. Anyhow, aside from the stoopid nonsense my right leg has been putting me through I'm actually in pretty good shape. Falling down twice this past Monday has thrown a scare into me that I'm going to wind up in the same mental state I was in during the first three months of this year, overcome with the Fear that I was in much worse shape than I really was and could only expect to get worse. As MFM is coming up around the end of the month, this can be something of a problem.

In other news, I'm seriously thinking of thinning out my art here, on the grounds that I'm not satisfied with quite a lot of it - some of it makes me wonder what I was thinking to post them here.

The year's almost half done and what I chiefly seem to have to show for is that I've managed to relearn how to walk all over again, which is no joke when you are your own teacher and student at the same time. Today I put my cane in the car with me as I went forth on my various activities, and never touched it until I got home and took it back inside where it will probably remain after this. Until my next misadventure.

A few weeks ago I decided the Car needed cleaning; we had several heavy rains but all they seem to do was make it dirtier. Anyhow, the driveway has an expansion joint right down the middle and some time ago some fire ants had decided this was a Good Place to set up housekeeping. I disagreed as the last time I let them camp out there they attempted a takeover of the Car - I accidentally found the passenger side door frame and hinges had become an enormous fire ant nest. So, while I was hosing and scrubbing the car I gave the ant nests a little hydraulic attention, cleaning the joints out entirely. The fire ants were naturally disgruntled by this and somehow a large number of them climbed upon the hose and ran up to address their complaints to me in person. The first thing I knew of this was when I happened to look down and found my hand almost completely covered with them. My feet were not neglected either. What followed next could best be described as a re-enactment of a native Fire Dance. My hands and feet looked like they had measles, and I wound up spending the rest of the day in bed recovering from my adventure in the great outdoors. Well, the stings have pretty much cleared up now and the nests are still gone ... but today while visiting the local grocery store, I found a fire ant going for a stroll on my left arm. I flicked it off into the frozen shrimp. @__@