Fast Fiction

First of all, I have to state that I like McDonald’s. For certain things anyway. I know, some of my dear readers think that I’m a Prius-driving, vegetarian, whale-hugging econut. That’s not exactly true.

Sure, I like natural fibers and I drive an efficient car. I like to buy fair trade products. But I also like egg mcmuffins (no meat though).

I’ve also enjoyed thousands of cups of McDonald’s coffee over the years. I like their coffee. It’s a little weak, but it’s cheap and as long as you go during peak hours it’s always freshly brewed. I’m not a coffee snob. And I don’t drink “coffee drinks” (the occasional latte, but never flavored or whipped or anything).

Now McDonald’s is offering Premium Roast (in selected areas). And you know what? It’s good. No, really.

First, they’ve changed the cups. McDonald’s used to offer coffee in styro cups, which on top of being noisy always made things taste a little plasticky. They’ve gone to paper cups (and little protective sleeves for delicate fingers). They also abandoned the white plastic lids where you had to open them for sipping. They’ve gone to the standard black grown-up sippy-cup top.

Next, they put good coffee in. I don’t know what they’ve changed, but it’s definitely a stronger brew, with a good full taste to it, not too bitter or burnt. I’ve never really cared for Starbucks. It’s consistent to be sure, but has always tasted like brewed pencil shavings to me. This McDonalds brew tastes the like smell of coffee, which is what I always like. The smell of fresh brewed coffee and the taste to back it up.

My morning cup will still be the stuff I get from the cafe on the lot here, branded Mocha Kiss (Coffee to the Stars!), mostly because of the consistency and convenience. But this is a great plus to my weekly McMuffin (no meat). Not only that, but they’ve got a special going right now, free 12 oz cup with any breakfast sandwich. I usually get a value meal for $3.39 (and don’t eat the hash browns) because it’s cheaper than buying a cup of coffee and sandwich. Now I’m only spending $2.25 and getting EXACTLY what I want. Really, it is a good value.

Over on Flickr I noticed one of my “buddies” has a cool photo set from the production of a film.

Ever wonder how they get thousands of people in the stands as background for sports scene? Sometimes they don’t, they rent blow up dolls that they dress up and place in the seats. Then they put real people in strategic places to make it look like they’re real people.

Kinda cool, eh? Click on the photo to see 7-how-7’s whole gallery.

Flickr has delivered on their promise to do better for their users since they were purchased by Yahoo!.

It didn’t take long, they’ve upped the free account monthly throughput from 10 megs to 20 megs and the basic storage to 200 photos. All of my old photos that had fallen off my browse have returned.

If you’re interested in a pro account, they’ve dropped the price to $24.99 a year and doubled the monthly throughput to 2Gigs. I don’t think even I can do 2Gigs unless I upload them wihtout resizing.

I saw that they’ve found text from the Greeks that might fill in some of the gaps in the known works of Sophocles, Euripides and Hesiod.

I can’t wait!

Link.

I’m not sure this is a good move for consumers in the graphics/web field or not.

Adobe is poised to buy Macromedia.

Now I’m keen on both companies. I own Macromedia’s Contribute and Adobe’s suite of programs like Photoshop, an early version of InDesign and of course Acrobat. I’d sure like flash to be more closely integrated with photoshop, so maybe this is a good move. Or maybe not. I hope that prices for Macromedia products don’t go up. I’ve found them to be a bit more affordable thus far.

It’s only April but this is not a good year for marine mammals.

About 80 rough-toothed dolphins beached themselves in Florida, and though these are sometimes through natural causes like disease, this one seems suspiciously timed following naval sonar testing. Of the 80 that beached 26 were rescued and taken to the local Marine Mammal Conservancy. Of those 26, only 11 have survived.

Of course there’s been widespread coverage of the return of the baby seal hunt in Canada. Now check me on this, but when most wildlife experts talk about hunting they approve (or at least go along with) hunting the large “trophy” males. Same goes for fishing. No one says, “hey, we’ve got too many catfish, let’s start taking fry!” So how is it that this particular hunt to reduce the numbers of these seals is specifically aimed at the small ones? Because it’s about their pelts, plain and simple.

Japan is not only still whaling under the guise of scientific study, but today I saw this article that they’re planning on doubling the number of minke whales they take and adding two new species. Now I understand that the International Whaling Commission is just a formality. Japan doesn’t need to belong to it, they can just do whatever they want. And they’ve slowly been adding to their quotas. And threatening to abandon the IWC altogether and resume factory whaling. The added species would be Humback Whales and Fin Whales. Fin whales are the second largest whale species (just a smidge smaller than the Blue Whale) and of course Humbacks are the songbirds of the sea and commonly seen here in the Santa Barbara Channel (I’m going on a trip next month to see them in the summer feeding grounds).

On another note, go visit the IWC website. The splash page is great and shows the majesty of these great mammals and none of the slaughter. Of course when you go to a beef website it doesn’t show you the slaughterhouse either.

I started a new blog.

I was at a wedding over the weekend and someone asked me about my blog and I told them about fast fiction. We talked about my philosophy of goals and I said that I was on my way to writing a fifth novel this year, did the marathon, blah, blah. They asked what other goals I had.

I said I want to go to the ALL CANDY EXPO in Chicago someday. There are only three ways to get in. Be a candy manufacturer. Be a candy buyer (wholesale). Be a journalist.

The closest I’m going to get to that is journalist and at the moment I’ve decided to become THE candy blogger. That’s right. I’ve got a blog of candy.

Check it out. I’m still working on the template, but I’ve already got some solid content.

Yum!

So I reached my 100th photo on Flickr last week.

I didn’t realize it at first but then noticed that some of my most favorite (and most favorited) photos dropped off. Okay, it was only two of them, I haven’t uploaded anything since. I was debating what to do.

Here’s the thing. I have my own site and hosting (no, I’ve not moved this blog yet, but I will one these days). So I have no problem with file storage. I like the community and want to stay a part of it.

But I don’t want to lose the ability to find and share those photos. There are always new groups to share with. I didn’t even find the ultra cool squared circle until someone commented on one of my photos last week.

So I figured a couple of workarounds (I hesitate to call them hacks) for the 100 visible files and 3 set limit.

Flickr allows anyone to create a group. There are three different kinds of groups.

Private - only members can see it and the only way to become a member is to be invited.

Public invitation only - everyone can see it but only those invited and approved by the admin can join.

Public - anyone can see, everyone can join.

You can use these groups, specifically the private and public/invitation groups to create either an archive or additional sets. If you use the private function, only you can use it, but it’s still plenty handy. You can go into this group after you’ve shared files with it and access all the functions there, like sharing it with another group or adding new tags.

What I’ve done is created a group for myself (Pubic-invitation) and put my 10 oldest photos (so far) in there. I’ve taken a thumbnail of one of the photos and placed it in my profile on Flickr and linked to that group as my archive set.

You can do the same by creating groups where you share in specific set oriented photos and then doing the same thumbnail linking in your profile. May as well create thumbnails for your basic offered sets and it’ll look seamless.

I’m sure someone else has thought of this before, but I was pretty proud of myself and wanted to share it with everyone else.

No, not the cars.

These newly described and named beetles are Slime-Mold Beetles. The entymologists at Cornell decided to give them peppy names. Names honoring such folks as President George Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

I wish their rationale was tongue-in-cheek:

“The decision to name three slime-mold beetles after Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, however, didn’t have anything to do with physical features, says Quentin Wheeler, a professor of entomology and of plant biology at Cornell for 24 years until last October, but to pay homage to the U.S. leaders. “We admire these leaders as fellow citizens who have the courage of their convictions and are willing to do the very difficult and unpopular work of living up to principles of freedom and democracy rather than accepting the expedient or popular,” says Wheeler, who named the beetles and wrote the recently published monograph describing the new slime-mold beetle species while a professor at Cornell.”

Intended or not, there are now species of beetles out there bearing these fellows’ names eating the scum of the earth.

Found via Science Blog.

I had a strange dream on Monday night.

I don’t usually mention them here, but I figure this one is odd enough.

First, I was in some industrial area, and we were watching the Sun. There was a strange eclipse (though not full). Then, as we were looking up in the sky we saw a jetliner that was flying low and was on fire. The fire was coming from the cockpit and a lot of the back end of the fuselage was missing, like it was a convertible or something.

The plane was obviously in distress, but was coming in for a landing to the train yard below us (I think we were up on a wide rail trestle). It would be a bumpy landing, but I guess they could put their front wheel down in the middle of the tracks.

The alarm went off, so I don’t know if the plane made it down or if anyone else on the plane made it.

I know where the plane stuff came from, as Crispin had just left on a red-eye to Pittsburgh that night. What I didn’t know at the time was the upcoming hybrid eclipse tomorrow. I hope none of this means anything, that it’s just regular old stuff being worked through by my subconscious brain.

Crispin told me this story was bloggable.

On Tuesday night I got home and the power was out. After about an hour of sitting around, I decided to make some dinner. No biggie, we’ve got a gas stove.

I took the flashlight and looked through the pantry and found some chicken soup with wild rice. I then went to the stove and got a pot and searched all the drawers for a can opener. I couldn’t find it. No, I found one, but that one is an electric can opener.

I later abandoned the soup idea and made some macaroni and cheese from an easy to open box (though I used scissors to open the cheezy packet).

After the lights came on a bit later I went to do the dishes and was dismayed to see that the can of soup HAD A PULL TOP!

I had dreams of adding a tally on the left nav area of my sightings for the year, but I never got around to it.

I’d say I saw about 20 whales this year. No real good up-close looks though. But I guess that will keep me coming back. There was a good article in the LA Times today about gray whales and the threats to their birthing lagoons in Baja. Click on the flash photo gallery - it’s pretty amazing.

Voyager II - January 30th out of Redondo Beach - lots of dolphins (my best shots of the year).

Whale Watch, um, no Dolphin Watch - my first trip of the year on January 17th. We saw bottlenose dolphins. YaY!

Long Beach Sportfishing - Saturday - February 3 (trip was on the 5th) this post features my only real shot of a gray whale I got this year.

The Seldom Seen Side of Catalina - I already cross-posted this. The trip was on March 12th and was awesome.

The best part of the year absolutely was the dolphins. If they could just take out boats and go looking for dolphins year-round, I’d do that.

The Redondo Sportfishing group is going to keep running their whale-watch daily until April 3rd and then they switch to a last weekend of the 9th & 10th. So I might not be done yet! There might be a whale out there ready to show his face and flukes to me in the next few weeks.

I can’t remember how many times I’ve been whale watching this year. That’s the coolest part, I think. It’s a habit now.

Not much to report, no dolphins. A zig-zagging whale. Lots of wind and choppy water.

I tried fixi+g my keyboard this eve+i+g. I thought I discovered the difficulty - a fleck of +ougat u+der there. But alas, all the dog hair removal has +ot helped.

I’m +ot sure what to do +ow. The computer is out of its warra+ty period. The problem seems so slight, +ot somethi+g I would pay more tha+ $25 to resolve.

Perhaps I should just use this as a+ oppportu+ity to alter my vocabulary to excise the difficult letter. This’ll be hard. Yes, very hard.

First, an update on my keys. My N is still misbehaving. So, if you notice one missing someplace, it’s because I was typing too fast to hit the key eight times. (There were other choices for numbers that were more accurate, but they required the dreaded letter.)

On Monday morning as I was going into the house through the side door I saw a tan Volvo come around the curve in front of my house, pass closely by a blue Lexus and give it a glancing blow, shearing off the side view mirror.

The Volvo barely made a course correction upon striking the Lexus. The Lexus shuddered and the mirror and its control wires dangled down against the door and the housing flipped towards the front of the car.

This is probably not so uncommon, and that the car didn’t stop is little surprise. I suspect that the Volvo lives on the street, but I don’t remember everyone’s car. For the record, the Lexus was parked on the wrong side of the street. Well, I call it the wrong side of the street, but someone removed the signs years ago when they built that new house. Most of us still understand that they shouldn’t park there, not really because someone might hit you, but mostly because there’s no room for two way traffic if people park on both sides and no one likes backing up around a curve when you come nose to nose there.

I left a note on the Lexus’ windshield as I left for the work with a brief account of what I witnessed and my contact info.

Here’s why I mention it.

I haven’t heard a thing.

I don’t know quite what to think, I mean, I don’t know what to expect with such things. A few weeks ago an ATM gave me more money than I requested. I returned it, though I wasn’t sure if the money belonged to the credit union or some user of the ATM. I guess I’m asking for closure. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I’m a writer or that I watch too much TV where things are always tied up in neat little packages.

Of course this post is ending much the same way, with no real conclusion.

Last spring I went to Catalina for the first time. I did the tourista trip, Catalina Express to Avalon for the day. Yesterday I had a completely different experience with the island, starting with the fact that I never stepped foot on it but fell in love with it from afar. I took a trip set up by the American Cetacean Society called “Around Catalina with John Olguin.”

We departed from Long Beach along with 500 other people on the Catalina Countess - a huge three story boat that gave us a smooth crossing. It was hazy and overcast but the visibility was pretty good. Shortly after rounding the Palos Verdes Peninsula we spotted two gray whales heading north. We slowed and circled, and caught sight of them once from a distance before we sped off to our destination, the far side of Catalina. During the crossing we had special guest lecturers, including John Olguin giving his amazing recreation of the sounds that whales make (memorized from a record he had), which included the buzzing lawnmower like sounds of pilot whales to the booming thumps of sperm whales to the mournful songs of humpbacks.

As we approached the west end, the first thing evident is that the heavy rains have made Catalina vividly green and lush looking. Even with the heavy clouds, the color was striking. The sun was poking through the cloud wrapped hilltops and illuminating the valleys. Next thing we saw close into shore was a pod of dolphins—make that a megapod—there were thousands, at least two miles long and a half a mile across. The long-beaked common dolphins came out to meet the boat and delighted everyone by riding both in our bow wake and surfing behind in the boat’s wake for about ten minutes.

We headed around the western tip and kept a keen eye out for Gray Whales. Though they usually hug the coast on their southern migration, their north migration usually takes advantage of the currents and they skirt along the western side of the island. But we didn’t spot them right away, instead it was a small pod of Bottlenose Dolphins speeding off, probably to feed on nearby squid. Their course paralleled ours for about 10 minutes. Within minutes we spotted some telltale, heart-shaped blows off our starboard and came about to catch up, finding four whales traveling in a loose group. We followed them for close to ten minutes as we watched the megapod of common dolphins we saw from the other side of the island streaming out in a long dark line several miles long towards San Nicolas Island. The same direction we saw the bottlenose heading a half hour earlier.

After that burst of activity we settled in to watch the backside of Catalina, with fishing boats anchored close to shore and our geologist guide gave us a wonderful primer on the history of the island and pointed out relevant features. During part of that lecture a Bald Eagle was spotted in the air as it was harassed by some seagulls. Up on the little coves and rocky outcroppings were sea lions and harbor seals hauled out to sun (well, not much sun) themselves in complete seclusion.

Far out to sea we saw more blows from other groups of gray whales - too far for us to catch as they were going north and we had to continue south. Rounding the east side of the island brought us back within sight of civilization as we passed the quarry where most of the seawalls in Los Angeles got their rocks. Shortly after rounding the bend we came upon the reverse-osmosis desalination plant for the island residents and then the town of Avalon. Off in the distance were more dolphins throwing themselves out of the water and spinning. The boat had already spent so much time with the whales and other common dolphins that it was time to head back to the dock in Long Beach. As we got closer the clouds cleared and the water turned from turquoise to prussian blue. Getting off the boat, I wanted to relive the day and look at all my photos.

The gray whalewatch season ends in a few weeks, but we’re already making plans to go see the Humpback whales in the Santa Barbara Channel in May and Blue Whales in July.

(cross-posted at blogging.la with more photos)

I was reading through my regular science blogs this morning and found a link to the ESA site where they’ve captured some shots of volcanic activity in Russia.

That’s a photo of the Kliuchevskoi and Sheveluch volcanoes erupting at the same time on the lonely Kamchatka Peninsula (which most of us know from playing Risk).

The European Space Agency site has been following the activity for a while.

The more southerly 4835-metre-high Kliuchevskoi volcano began its latest eruption on 17 January 2005. By 7 March its consequent lava flow had reached the Erman glacier and started to melt it, causing a threat of potential mudslides. The hot volcanic material in contact with the surrounding ice and snow caused secondary explosions, hurling material as far as eight kilometres into the air. 

Above it is Kamchatka’s most northerly active volcano Shiveluch ñ also known as Sheveluch. It is 3283 metres high and started its latest eruption on 27 February 2005. The erupting material covers an area over 700 kilometres across with a layer of ash about 150 kilometres wide and eight centimetres thick, extending westward to the Okhotsk Sea. A ten-km-wide lava flow destroyed the Shiveluch seismological station, located about eight km from the volcano.

If there’s one other thing that this photo shows me, it’s that it looks damn cold in Kamchatka right now.

As blogged yesterday, The Man and I went to Whole Foods yesterday morning.

We picked out our Sunday evening meal which was to be a baked chicken with root vegetables (parsnips, potatoes and carrots).

After returning from the marathon The Man set to prep the chicken and opened the 7-pound, free-range, organic bird. It smelled like a garbage dumpster on a hot day. We’d gone right from the grocery store to home and put it in the fridge right away - that bird was bad when we brought it home, that’s the only explanation.

We immediately put into several plastic bags to cloak the smell, dug out the receipt and I trucked back up to Whole Foods - at the exact time that I loathe shopping, 5 PM. The place was mobbed, but I got up to the service desk and returned my chicken. The fellow kind of glowered at me, as if I’d some something wrong and I said I was concerned and that they should check their entire inventory because there was definitely something not right with that bird.

He nodded and gave me a merchandise credit. I’d presented my receipt and the original packaging and he was giving me a merchandise credit? He said I could redeem it for cash at any of the checkstands - and I glanced around to the Sunday pre-dinner lines and sighed. I was there to get a replacement dinner anyway (we were going to now have leftovers and a big salad so we needed some greens and tomatoes).

I fetched my new food and got in line, cashed out and thought to myself that when I’m paying $18 for a chicken, I should get much better treatment when they sell me a spoiled bird. Starting with an apology.

I was booked to go out on the 10AM boat from Redondo Sportfishing, but their boat is in the shop.

So no boat this week.

There are very few opportunities left before the end of the season. Even though the migration (next week begins the “turnaround time” where we’ll see as many southbound whales as northbound) lasts through the end of April, the whale watch boats stop going out (except for charters) at the end of March.

Next weekend, The Man and I are going on a naturalist trip that goes around Catalina Island - it’s a whole day boat with the founder of the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium founder, John M. Olguin. I have this image of all the whales and dolphins native to this area just hiding on the other side of the island. That we’d pass around the west side of the island and they’ll just be popping out of the water over there on the mysterious far side of the island.

The big question is what shall I do with my now free Sunday morning? So far I’ve done a load of laundry. Later a trip out to Whole Foods and Petco.

And of course my afternoon is booked today with a very important activity. I’m crashing the Marathon. Will has already completed the bike tour and started the Marathon about 20 minutes ago. I’ll join him somewhere around mile 20 to boost him with a little turkey jerky and M&Ms. I’ll try to walk with him for a couple of miles. The trick is figuring how to meet up with him - but he’s moblogging as he goes along so we’ll always know where he is.

I’ve got a slight problem with my laptop keyboard.

My N key doesn’t seem to be functioning consistently.

That is, sometimes, well, most times I press it, it doesn’t work. Which means that a lot of the time when I’m typing, I have to go back and fill in my Ns.

I took the key off tonight ad cleaned the dog hair and dust out from under it, hoping that would help, but it doesn’t seem to have done any good.

My eventual plan for this computer is to make it my desktop and give it an external firewire hard drive for extra storage. Good thing about this plan is that I’d probably hook up an external keyboard, so this N problem would be a thing of the past.

How is it, do you think, that the N key has given out before any of the others.

I think I might have to go back and check over my novels and do a letter occurrence chart.

Sean at Blogging.la has this way of making me sign up for new web services (he sends me an invite). So over the past year or so I’ve signed up for a variety of sites, including Buzznet.com, Tribe.net, Meetup.com, and now Flickr.com.

I’ve resisted Flickr because I already have a photoblogging site, I have my own site (typetive.com - nothing there yet) and The Man and I are about to launch our own photo gallery site. My other problem with them is the fact that they dropped the E in flicker. Dunno, just bothers me. 

But I have to say, I like Flickr quite a bit. It’s similar to buzznet in that it’s a community and you can leave comments and have friends and syndicate content. What it has that buzznet doesn’t have is the ability to show high quality photos. Buzznet can’t show anything bigger than 400x400. Though Flickr’s default is a little smaller than that, if you see a photo you like, you can see it in its full scale size if you want. Buzznet lets you hop right into content though - when you go to someone’s home page you see their little recent gallery, their most recent image with all the comments. Flickr makes you click on an image before seeing that stuff, which I think makes the community part of browsing other people’s photos just a little tougher.

Flickr is new enough that they don’t have a lot of advertising yet, and some of buzznet’s banner ads on their site bug the crap out of me. I can’t stand animated banner ads and I loathe ones with sound to the point that I do not keep the sound on with my laptop at home and I will leave a site that has any advertising with sound if I’m at the office and not go back until the next day when I figure they’ve rotated to a less intrusive ad.

So, for the moment I have both services in my left column. Buzznet’s Marc Brown graciously gave me unlimited uploads when I signed up and I’m really fond of the easy to use service and of course I’ve made friends there. Flickr has an upload limit of 10 megs per month, which is quite a bit (and I expertly maxed it out last night!). At the moment I’m duplicating my content on both streams. Flickr is offering their “daily zeitgeist” animated badge that you see over there. (Will also has one on his site.) Anyone have any thoughts on which they like better? Or should I just go back to hand coding whatever images I want to have their and forget this syndicated stream stuff?

Since it looks like the weather is clearing, the whale watch boats are poised to re-enter the seas.

I’m planning on going out on Friday from Redondo Beach with my mother to see what’s out there.

I’m not going to be working the boat, I haven’t been able to get booked on a boat for a while since I’ve been sick. That’s okay, since I won’t be docenting, I’ll be able to take up space at the front of the boat and get some fantabulous shots and give a personal narrative about whale biology to my mom.

Well, one of the things about being sick is that I have watched more movies on TV in the past three days than I think I have in three years.

Here’s a little rundown and some recommendations:

The Lady Eve - Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda. Directed and written by Preston Sturges. Great comedy caper where Barbara is from a family of card sharps and she fleeces Henry Fonda on a cruise ship and then goes back again to break his heart. Surprisingly sexy for 1941.

The Man Who Knew Too Much - James Stewart and Doris Day. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. A classic. James & Doris are traveling in Northern Africa when they are mistaken for spies and their son is kidnapped. They chase the kidnappers to London where they try to piece together why their son is being held. Nicely crafted and intimate, more lighthearted than most other Hitchcock movies.

Lover Come Back - Doris Day, Rock Hudson and Tony Randall. Directed by Delbert Mann. Screwball farce. Doris & Rock work for rival ad agencies. Rock attempts to seduce Doris in order to keep her from getting a spurious advertising client. Doris displays a collection of impossibly ugly hats in this movie but the interplay between them all is marvelous.

The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer - Cary Grant, Myrna Loy and Shirley Temple. Directed by Irving G. Reis. Teenaged Shirley gets a crush on a painter, Cary, and Myrna, a judge, sentences him to date her until she looses interest. Not terribly inspired. But I love Cary Grant.

Gambit - Michael Caine and Shirley McClaine. Directed by Ronald Neame. Michael hires Shirley to help him gain access to a rich art collectors apartment as she looks exactly like the collector’s dead wife. It’s an interesting caper, but the relationship part of it fell a little flat.

Midnight Lace - Rex Harrison, Doris Day and Myrna Loy. Directed by David Miller. Doris is an American married to a British businessman when she starts getting threatening phone calls and everyone thinks she’s making it up to get attention from her husband. Nice twists. Doris screams and is off her rocker most of the movie, kind of helpless and all that, but I found it nicely done.

Mrs. Dalloway - Vanessa Redgrave, Natscha McElhone, Michael Kitchen and Alan Cox. Adaptation of Virgina Woolf novel directed by Marleen Gorris. Nicely done though a little ponderous tale of Mrs. Dalloway throwing a party. I saw The Hours when it came out and like it as well.

Of all of these, I’ve only seen The Lady Eve before and The Man Who Knew Too Much. I’m glad that TCM was so cooperative to put on good movies to distract me for a few days.

I’m going to try to go to the office tomorrow. My mother arrives tomorrow evening for a 10 day stay.

Gah! I’m sick as a dog.

It started on Friday night with a sore throat.

Saturday I woke up with a tight chest and cough. But we carried on throughout the day with our plans. A visit to Orange County to have lunch with the in-laws. A stop at the mall to finally use a gift certificate from Christmas. Then a little time at home and some dinner. Later we stepped out to a local bar to for a little blogger get-together.

Later that night I had a slight fever and by morning it was a sure fever. Good that my doctor has Sunday morning hours so I went off to see here. A course of antibiotics, a new inhaler for my asthma, some cough suppressant and I was off to get better.

Fevers persisted Sunday and Monday with brief respites from some ibuprofen. Today I’m doing a bit better, but still a low grade fever. And of course there’s the cough. I’ve been trying my best not to, since I tore those intercostals last year with the same bronchitis difficulty. So I just feel like I’m drowning all the time.

Hopefully I caught early enough and it’ll just be one course of antibiotics this time.

Still, no going to work tomorrow since I’m still running a fever. Mom had a rule, no going out for 24 hours after a fever breaks.

Just in case anyone was wondering about Becky, she’s doing great. We’ve got her on vitamin K for her clotting problem (whatever the cause) and a little med for her thyroid. I have her the last of the steroids this morning so I’m hoping by the end of the weekend she’ll stop being so damn food obsessed.

We’re off to the vet again on Tuesday for another checkup, but she seems well on the way, if not already recovered.

I went through all the trouble of getting rid of about 25 gmail invites earlier this week only to find out that I have 50 more.

I’m not sure what my compulsion is to give them away. I think I feel that way about all useful things that I have no use for.

I wonder if gmail tracks these things - who gives away how many invites and who they give them to? And if you looked at it it would be a huge radiating graphy thing (I don’t know what that’d be called, that shape where each point would have lines radiating and the ends of those would radiate further). Like the transmission graph of some veneral disease or something.

Anyway, not that I’ve compared gmail to vd, do you want one?

I don’t know if you’re old enough to remember the ad campaign that Lifesavers had back in the eighties. “Lifesavers, a part of living.”

Lifesavers and their ad campaigns have changed. I don’t know what their current advertising is, but I’ll tell you their product is bugging me.

They changed the five flavor roll. Okay, maybe that’s old news. I don’t buy them that often.

The current five flavor roll contains the following flavors:

Cherry
Raspberry
Watermelon
Blackberry
Pineapple

The old flavors were:

Cherry
Lemon
Lime
Orange
Pineapple

If I could design my own roll, it would contain the following:

Tangy Tangerine (found in the tangy fruits)
Pineapple (classic flavor)
Lemon (classic flavor)
Pina Colada (tropical fruits)
Banana (tropical fruits)

But I guess change is part of life. They always mess with things that are perfectly fine. They did it with froot loops. Used to be you could go into a store and buy a piece of furniture and then five years later go in there again and buy the same thing again. Now everything changes with the times. What is the world coming to that we can’t just be happy with lemon lifesavers?

Late last fall a few bits of my one published play came out in two anthologies. I still haven’t been paid for this (note to self - send note to publisher). But I digress.

On Friday I got a fan note.

Really.

Here’s the best part:

Just wanted to drop a note because I was looking for monologues and found one of yours in the 2004 Best Men’s Stage Monologues.

Your writing is amazing.  You know, you go through these monologue books and the pieces just don’t seem to stand up on there own but yours…it sucked me in! I studied acting some 16 years ago and haven’t worked on the stage for about 8 years.  I wanted to get back to the craft and am currently taking a monologue audition class.  So anyway, I’ve been going crazy trying to find a monologue that I can connect with…then I read Stewart from Redeemer…powerful, so many levels of emotion in one speech (his confession about the accident).

-Michael

Whee! I have to remember to write more fan letters. I imagine everyone needs to hear stuff like that on a regular basis.