Bluebird Singing in the Dead of Night

In San Jose…yawn.

We had a great sushi dinner, and then just decided to mail it in to the hotel.

San Jose is very funky. It can’t decide what part of California it belongs to, exactly. Is it palm trees or crunchy tees? Is it sushi or salsa? High tech or blue collar? Yin or yang?

Hey, I did do a momentous thing on this trip…I used an ATM card!

But enough of the highlights.

The hotel is very nice, too. Very dead, but very nice. San Jose is like Tacoma…just kind of screwed by proximity to a more famous cousin. All of its urban problems look 10-times worse than they are, frankly, because they have to do it all in a fishbowl. But the downtowns are about the same, the restaurants are about the same for variety and quality, etc.

But…and I say this frankly, downtown San Jose has one thing Tacoma, and until recently Seattle, do not have…GREAT SUPERMARKET at its heart. This sucker is kick ass world class in the worst part of downtown, and I loved it.

A friend of mine came up with an answer to the basic question in this post: Who was relevant in 1939 and 1974 musically?

A Washington native in Bing Crosby is a good answer with “Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy” with David Bowie in 1977 (link takes you to Wikipedia’s entry about it. YouTube it yourself).

The other one suggested was Frank Sinatra and Duets…but I don’t buy that one. Sinatra was early 1940s. He was just a little beyond 1939…he didn’t record his first song until early that year and didn’t sign with Jimmy Dorsey until January 1940.

But the Bing Crosby idea is a good one.

…if I have any real chance of winning money in the office March Madness basketball pool, my Villanova pick has to pull an upset and win it all. Period. They are my only hope. And even then, I might not win the whole thing, just win some second- or third-place money.

The funny part is that my other bracket is currently eight higher in third place, but it is doomed, because so many people picked all the things I did for the most part. But out of all the people, I am the ONLY one that picked Villanova to win it all on one of my two brackets. If Louisville had won, I’d have way, WAY more outs to win this thing, but alas…

But what’s interesting…I kind of still like ‘Nova. I am not second-guessing, at all. They are the only reason I did two brackets and bet against myself (in theory). I have NEVER done that before. A hunch paid off, even if I don’t win ANY money!

So, changing the subject…

Weather today…sunny and 55 degrees. More cold and rain for tomorrow. And colder.

Changing one more time since this is now an unofficial ramble…

Bruce is Wednesday night in San Jose. I have accomplished my goal of knowing words to the standards, and knowing which songs on the two new albums he is doing from the intros and enough of the chorus I can get through them. I actually like the new albums in their quirky, badly mixed and poor-quality ways. It’s like a Phil Spector-wanna be recorded and mixed in a home studio. I like what they were trying, I like the lyrics, I just think the quality is garage band.

I’m not expecting a great conceert, by any means. This is kind of a stay-close-to-home-and-work-out-the-kinks thing. I get that. On the other hand, they have been known to try working out the kinks by doing a marathon on the first night to start the tweak for the long-haul of an entire tour. So, frankly, I have low expectations and I am not sure what to expect.

Ramble conclusion…P got me my first debit card since I was a freshman in college. That is nearly 20 years. How pathetic is that? I have travelled four continents since then for business and pleasure and I have never had an ATM card. Hmmm…I suppose I need to get into the new world order with these things. My general thing was always to have enough cash in your pocket and just deal with that. In an emergency, use a credit card with no balance.

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It’s snowing again. Granted, it’s not really sticking, except on the grass…but what the hell! When is the (*^%(&$^%@(&$%^(@$%^@(#%^@(#%Y)(!*% winter going to be over?

Really…this has just gotton creepy.

(EDIT: I was joking about it a couple of hours ago…but now more than the grass is white and it’s still coming down. Hard. We’re with Scout’s reaction on her face when we let her out: UN-BE-LEEEVING-FREAK-ABLE. I mean, it’s no Midwest blizzard or something, but it’s still pretty weird.)

I bought a very cheap old 1922 slot machine silver dollar on eBay. It’s not average because it has good provenance and I know exactly which casino in Las Vegas by which it was taken from circulation.

But I think what makes me giddy is that it is beat to hell like the slot machine dollars I remember as a kid in the mid-1970s when we would visit my cousins in Reno. Granted, most of those were Eisenhower dollars, but every once in a while a 1920s or earlier coin would pop out and it fascinated me with the dings and bumps and warps and bruises.

Ah…the old days of slot machines.

So…one of my meds changed dosage and I knew it. Si I went to the pharmacy, had it refilled and they asked, “Have you taken this before?”

“Yes.”

“Have a good day.”

But what they didn’t say was that they gave me pills I was suppose to chop in half to get the right dose. Granted, it says it on the bottle, but I have been filling things up for the same script at the same place for years. I didn’t think twice about it. And then after a few days…something just didn’t feel right.

Now, technically, what I put in my own body is my own fault, but I could make an argument that my pharmacy person should have seen that this was a different set up from what I have been taking for half a decade and explicitly pointed it out to me. Instead, I just got the container and went on my merry way with the simple question of “Have you taken this before?”

I mean, my God, that should have been a clue something a skeward beyong a rocket scientist’s deduction…she didn’t know with all those records?

But it did get me thinking…who is suppose to be figuring out what to tell me and when.

So I called my Dr. office and said I was having problems with a pharmacy. Before I gave my name or anything, she said, I swear, “Let me guess, so-and-so on so-and-so street?”

“Ummm, yeah.”

“What’s your problem?”

OK, I am officially signed up for Facebook and Twitter.

Here are my basic problems with each:

I’m really not interested in getting bugged by people on Facebook.

And Twitter is just too much information to be of any use.

I am stuck in the caveman past. I get how they both work like Yark might know how to make fire, but realizes he’s not interested in arson. (That was horrible. Let me try again.)

I am scared of the technology even though I understand it because I don’t want to take the time to control it, and at some point, it starts controlling you. It’s like finding flame and then burning your own house down because you have no source of water.

So I lurk around, but mostly I stick to e-mails and the  non-political blogs of people I like or know well (how’s that for a subtle difference). but I do understand how to get the ignition started. I understand them, I just don’t have the interest in managing them or spending more time on the computer than I do already.

You can always IM; I do that also, sometimes, when I’m online…but even with that I am a little picky.

I never understood what all the big deal was about when I had to spend the night in the hospital, get scans, etc.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/03/26/head.injury.emergency/index.html

I think I have had five time I new I was either knocked out completely cold or ended up with a gigantic bump on my head that I just solved with ice, etc. I have a complete different perspective on it now reading this story of this little girl.

And I am not even counting the times I had my bell rung. All in different sports experiences, some with a helemut and some not.

I once had a collision head-to-head, for instance, on a ski slope and I sat in the snow for a while after coming to, and then just kind of got up and plowed to the bottom to sit in the lodge. Only to find out I was a half-hour late for a rendevouz and I could not remember what happened until the medics came to the lodge and asked me a bunch of questions. Apparently, the other person couldn’t remember either!

i have also been on the non-receiving end when I was playing a rec-league softball game in the ninth grade, and my over-swing clobbered a kid in the back of the head with my bat. Incredible, massive amounts of blood ensued and the kid ended up in intensive care for three days. But the first paramdeic arrived, and I will never forget this, he said, “The fact he is bleeding so much might be good. He had a fractured skull. He recovered just fine.

But it’s funny after playing sports and stuff so much in life, I forget it about these incidents until I realize that I was SUPER DUPER lucky in all instances.

I was trying to explain a concussion to someone who had never had one after the Richardson death on the ski slopes. You hear ringing and see blue spots. At least that’s the way it was for me all the time. Oh, and numb lips…and I have no idea why that stands out to me along with a metallic taste in my mouth several times.

The point of this is…you really have to watch head injuries and take no risks. Now, years later, I really understand all the nights in the hospital and my surgeries and blah blah blah, when I felt like I should just get back out there. I actually remember after one of my worst clobberings getting pissed off at the fact the nurses were waking me up every single hour to run the same tests. When I was 15, I was perturbed, to say the least, and I was embrassed that everyone was making such a big deal out of a bump on the noggin.

But here is the thing…and I have written about this before…I knew I was really, really scared because I saw the spots, tasted the metal, felt the numb lips, etc. To this day, my head has some interesting tissues in places.

Now, I would never go as far as some people to say the concussions changed my personality, but I bet a lot of people would disagree. But that’s a story for another time.

Wear a helmet.

I am so into Legos right now with Big A it would shock you. We even have been doing mini-contests before bedtime to play with them. The final shipment arrived this afternoon. I was giddy. This just a complete bulk of blocks. Excellent.

UGH! I hate meetings where I know there is going to be crap and I just realize the smart thing to do is sit of my hands for two hours. It drives me bonkers. I have one of those on Monday.

WWJD is something I learned from a Unitarian minister. What would Jesus do? His whole point was that Jesus was really good at just shutting the hell up most of the time. From a very academic standpoint, this was his major gift…be quiet. Speak when spoken to and generally don’t get involved much unless it really seems an injustice is being committed.

This is my biggest problem…I boil fast and I don’t simmer well. But with age I’ve gotten MUCH MUCH better. I can dribble in place with the best of them. It’s not easy, but I do it. My biggest problem is the sin of “knowing I’m right.” It’s not in a vain vein, it’s more a of logical vein. It’s my Achilles heel that never seems to fully heal.