What Happened When my Computer Died.

It's a perfectly gorgeous spring day. Trees are flowering and budding and some are starting to leaf out. And it's starting to look like a state park again. Woodpeckers, muskrats and the feral cats are exploring under bushes on the banks of the lake. I took some sun this morning out front and a woman named Cindy made it a point to introduce herself and make sure I remembered her floor and room number. A high floor. She said I ought to come up tonight and gaze at the view with her. She is a champion bungee jumper. My mother told me to be careful around women like this. I will have my rope and safety harness with me.

When my computer died I took it to a fix-it place. It took them two weeks to tell me they had made a check of my system and it would be folly to put new money into an old box like mine without any guarantees. Whatever was on my hard drive was also unrecoverable so I took the thing home, removed the hard drive and trashed it (there was stuff on there my Mother wouldn’t approve of) and donated the remainder to a worthy cause. I didn't look for a new unit for awhile because I'm personally reluctant to jump in right away and burn up the energy it takes to start a new project. I used the computer at the public library to pay bills and check my e-mail, I missed that. I also found that I didn't like not having the morning news at my fingertips with my first cup of coffee. That got quickly replaced with a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories, and the morning paper my neighbor across the hall left for me. There was no news anyway. Libya was in crisis and the congress of the United States would have done more good there than here. I wasn't bored. And I finally got around to getting a new box, a refurbished Dell with a guarantee, and all the attachments including a big flat screen for a little under $200. Now I have to hook it up to the Internet so I can cruise for pipes, tobacco, used CD's (The Doors Light My Fire to be specific) and carry on my international correspondence.

What I missed: My e-mail; morning news from the source; buying the odd thing online (possibly pipes from Germany or Poland...?) Other than that I didn't miss it much. I must spend less time cruising the net than I thought.

Since the computer died I fell on the ice once and got the wind knocked out of me, and a second time at a filling station and broke two ribs while knocking the wind out of me. During that time winter stayed around for awhile, then things warmed up a bit. The Canada geese returned (Big Rats with wings and a lot of noise...).

I think I am Russian Orthodox. I told the girls one night at the evening get-together that I never discussed my religion or my politics as I had found that was the fastest way to get into a good fight. A lot of the women here are highly committed rock-root Baptists and believe you can be saved only in a certain fashion. One wanted to know if I believed in Jesus Christ as my personal savior and I told her 'yes' but didn't tell her who all else I believed in, in case any of them were asleep up there. Then a fellow named Tom (We have a lot of Toms here...) saw the Coptic cross I was wearing around my neck (a present from a fireman buddy in Russia) and said 'I know! You're Orthodox!' 'You never can tell' I told him. The girls think I'm Orthodox and that they have cracked my secret. Most of them don't know what an Orthodox is, but they are convinced that I am one. One or two are waiting and salivating and brushing a shine on their Bibles and knowing they will catch me out some day with The Truth.

Tom Bomb, the inveterate liar and preacher, and my neighbor, was talking about stocks and bonds on his cell phone in front of us the other day --- and the phone rang! We rolled back and forth on the hallway carpet laughing out loud and Tom kept talking. He has so many schemes to try to impress people that he doesn't rmember what they all are.

Kroger's has stopped delivering day-old donuts and specialty bread on Mondays because too many fat women were fighting over them. One gal waddled into the truck before it was even unloaded and started stuffing chocolate items into a Lillian Vernon shopping bag. I'm sorry to see this, it was more free entertainment than a Bob Hope show. The fat girls will have to eat red meat and finishing nails now for breakfast in order to stay fighting fit.

I will be asking some of you for e-mail and U S Mail addresses because some of that, unfortunately, was on the hard drive which got thrown in the trash. Yes, I had all the important stuff backed up on disks but didn't plan for total shutdown so there we are. Now I am going to listen to some more Rammstein. Idon't understand German but they do some very fine hard rock! Ta!

Of Bombs and Bugs

Tom Bomb lives next door to me.  If you think that’s his real name you’re crazy.  He’s in impeccable physical shape for what his age must be.  I think he does one hundred pushups every morning with one arm.  He is always well groomed and affable and has a serious Jesus streak that comes out in preaching and other conversation.  He runs a Bible study class a couple times a week and has two students out of four hundred possible learners. 

I sat down this morning with him in the front lobby to talk for a bit.  He told me about the Big Three (Russia, China and the US having a big fight over something and soon) and then told me that Arizona is about to blow up, so is Maryland and be sure to watch Michigan.  I think he was talking about The Rapture, not football.  Tom is such a good deceiver that he believes most of what he lies about. On Monday his mother is Russian (Tom is black) and on Tuesday she’s Mexican.

He’s fun to be with in the music room with a piano (he and I) and a couple ladies with guitars jamming on Southern gospel music – which has more guts and drive than any songs I ever heard out of the mainline churches.  He and others help a lot of people, singing and playing music in hospitals and nursing homes and the occasional church where they don’t know him real well.  He visits sick people.  He is an ok neighbor, there are worse.

A lady asked me the other day, if you put a strip of sticky tape on the floor under your entrance door, would it stop bedbugs from coming in, or was it an old wives tale.  Now as far as old wives are concerned, I always wanted one who went pretty much her own way.  The companionship just isn’t the same if you sit on the balcony and smoke your pipe with your favorite cat.  Besides cats cost five hundred dollars here.

Of course sticky tape will stop bedbugs.  Kind of like those mouse and roach traps.  The bugs get their feet stuck on the tape and can’t move them.  But if the resident is playing music, rock and roll is best, they sway back and forth from left to right.  This is the origin of the Bug Dance which you can watch right below here.

It is very cold here and there’s a big hole in the ice in the middle of the lake with footprints leading to it.  I imagine somebody threw a big rock in.  Ta!

Rose died for awhile.

I just found out from one of the older residents that the limestone that the old Montgomery County court house, downtown, is built of came from the quarry under ‘my’ lake back in the 1800’s.

Rose is in the hospital and everybody has a story.  I’m confining my information to what I know is true.  She lives around the corner from me in 206 and borrowed a postage stamp from me a couple weeks ago.

She has been depressed since her sister died in the spring.  She recently was diagnosed with some kind of cancer and won’t take her medicine because it makes her sick.  She wants to die. She has had some less lucid moments in the past week where she believes that she and her family were going to be burned at the stake on December 30^th.  She has also taken to strolling behind her walker in the snow, in the median of Wilmington Avenue which is a large arterial thoroughfare.

Yesterday at 5.30 pm Rose jumped into the path of a moving car around the corner on Patterson Road and was killed.  She was clinically dead when the medics arrived.  They brought her back in some fashion after she was loaded and she’s now in Miami Valley Hospital with three serious fractures of something or other, head trauma, two severe concussions and extensive everything else..  When she is conscious she vows that she will do it right the next time.  She likely will.

The woman driving the car, who was not cited, has been left with nights of terrifying dreams and some kind of early meltdown from all this.  So would I.  Rose can have visitors if we lie about being family and then only for 5 minutes at a time.  She is 72 years old and a tall girl.

Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve and I am going to try to pry a trashy 20-year-old free for an evening of fudge and hors d’ oeuvres with the old ladies and gentlemen here.  Maybe the music will drown out the shriek of brakes.  Ta!

Smell That ??

It’s a couple days after Christmas and they tell me it’s going to warm up for New Years.  These are the same weather people who told me that Christmas was coming in on the heels of a gigantic winter storm.  New York was fooled right?  We will see. 

There are prints of human shoes on the lake ice, walking and skidding.  I think that’s ok if you trust the ice over 80 feet of water.  That’s an old quarry pit down there.  If  somebody dives in, I will have a front row seat to watch Emergency Services roar in and haul them out.  I will take pictures, my right knee limits my ability to rescue people these days.

I watched the nightly news this evening while I was eating supper.  I only watch it for something to do while I’m scarfing down the dish of the day.  It’s on a tray on my lap and I can’t really do a good book and eat at the same time.  But I think I am going to get a music stand to put the book on anyway.  The commercial news features lots of video and talking heads which are supremely useless to me because I can still remember how to make up my own mind about things.  The PBS news stations seem to grind down a 10-year rut of apologizing for Islamic people and their culture and religion.  I probably could get more intelligent programming watching The Simpsons. 

Payday is soon and I will be stocking up on some Estleman books and some Arnaldur Indridasson – fine bloody murder items and excellent reading for a good night’s sleep.  Also a bottle of Tabac by Maurer and Wirtz of Germany because the current bottle is just fumes, and fumes don’t create pheremones, don’t you know.  Prada would be better but that will have to wait until I win the lottery.  And some of the girls I run around with now and then still respond to diesel oil so there.  They are cheap dates too and live in trailers.  Ta!

Competition

On Monday mornings a truck from the Kroger Company delivers several trays of day-old specialty breads, rolls, English muffins and a large box of donuts and pastries to this place where I live.  The driver puts all this on the big table in the library and leaves.  And the fighting spirits from eleven floors of humanity gouge their way to their fair share.  There is one woman from the seventh floor who looks like a butchy prison guard and wears her muscular fatness behind a wide black leather belt.  We call her The Prison Guard.  And there is a guy who is the head of the Lakewoods Senior Citizens Club who is bipolar and doesn’t like to take his medicine on donut days.. 

There are several other fighting spirits and they all go for the donut box at once without a word, elbowing each other in the ribs and the nose and left breasts.  If you look at the remains of the donut box after they’re gone you see fragments of icing and broken corners of Long Johns and you know that forty people at once have been digging for their favorite sweeties.  One morning at 7 a.m. when I was going out, I met a grossly obese woman from Texas sagging over the sides of her electric go cart and asked her if she were waiting that early for the donut delivery.  “Yes,” she said, “I sure as hell don’t want any of those other bitches getting my donuts.”

Fortunately my sole interest is specialty breads which are ignored and mostly untouched and  I get a couple loaves of multi-grain Home and Hearth, or a couple dainty batards full of sunflower seeds each week and I haven’t bought any bread since I’ve been here.  I was remarking to a friend that many older people have refined their tolerance of others to a great degree as they’ve aged.  I don’t think any of them are at the big table in the Library on Monday mornings. Two friends and I are attending with cameras next week.  Ta!

No Wheels for Cats.

Tonight I watched an episode of CSI.  A man was killed by a parrot trying to escape from a cat (man fell and banged his head in the shower); a woman was killed by the parrot (surprised by bird, fell on her butcher knife);  There were at least two logical suspects (not the parrot or the bird)  and everybody went back to their original safe venues. Except the dead people. Totally new and catchy but it made me wonder if TV viewers are so jaded by commercial television that they need the occasional red herring, locked-room goodie to keep them watching.

It was the Full Moon last night and I took a picture of it just to make sure it didn’t get away.

And I can have a pet while I’m here.  It’s a fairly simple process.  I provide management with $500 and do everything they say.  Get a small pet. (So much for my Pit Bulldog…)  Make sure it doesn’t damage anything.  Take it out to do it’s business on a regular basis.  Oh, and carry it out and back to my apartment.  Animals aren’t allowed to walk on the floors in here, except for service dogs. They must be carried unless they have wheels.  Everybody can have wheels in here.  Wheeled walkers, chairs, shopping carts, roller skates, I guess.  Do they make cats with wheels?  Perhaps I could get a Pit and call it my Anxiety Dog?

I came in from shopping yesterday and there were three Police cruisers parked out front.  Turned out there was a death on 3, a death on 7 and a couple old duffers going at it on 10.  One of them is bipolar and doesn’t like to take his medicine.  They provide everything here, even the excitement.

Now I am going to have some more coffee and think about all this.  Ta!

Three Pickup Truck Loads

I moved on Saturday October 2nd.  And on the 3rd.  And on the 4th.  And then a little on the following Wednesday and Thursday.  We were supposed to have nine people to help with this and it should have taken about 4 or 5 hours and three pickup truck loads.  However some were sick, some just forgot and we wound up with self (no good for anything but supervising) three old guys like me and a lady who had to leave at 3 the first day.  Sorry, two ladies.  Once I figured out the probable logistics, I went into an anxiety mode that lasted three days.  

On about the fourth of the month the landlord called to say that I was taking too long to become absent and he had pro-rated the days since the 2nd and I owed him $137.  I sent him  a letter about the time I paid full rent while he dallied about fixing a gutter on the back of the building, which caused rain to come into the bedroom and onto my head while I was sleeping.  I also told him that I couldn't afford any more of his pro-rates so he would have to remove anything I left behind.  And you can be damn sure I left a mess for him:  junk, boxes, a useless clothes dryer...about three pickup trucks worth.  And then I told him  what he could do with his pro-rate.  I haven't heard a word since.

He used to live in the apartment before I moved in and back at that time he was using drugs and beating his wife thoroughly a couple or three times a week.  He doesn't pick up anymore and the lady stuck with him.  Since I sent him the letter I haven't heard a word from him.  I didn't expect any rainbow of feelings about this moving business and I was pretty startled by it all.  I figured..you just move from one place to another and there it is.  I was scared and anxious during the move, lonely and sad for the first couple weeks here.  Now that I've been here a month I've been slowly feeling better and better and now pretty good.  When I return to the apartment about suppertime it feels like home.  Things are pretty normal now, I am almost arranged in here and, oops!, I'm late for the evening hen party with the 70-year-olds!  Ta!

Honey I'm Home !!

This is not a pretty building.  It reminds me of a 1953 Tupperware that got hit several times by a low-flying missile. It would fit more suitably in Miami Beach.   

The inside is much nicer.  The apartments are nice, the kitchens are small but have twice the storage space I’m used to.  There is a lake in the back and you aren’t allowed to feed the dux, so that they don’t become dependent on people and leave presents all over the sidewalk.  You are not allowed to shoot them either but you can pull bass out of the lake night and day if you want to.

There are mostly women living here and they are mostly old and a couple seem a little loopy.  Maybe a couple to the 10^th power.  But if you can take care of yourself you can loop around all day long with the approval of the management.  The women are not all named Amanda, Amber, Courtney or Brittany.  They have real names that you can remember like Faye, Maizie, Mabel, the ubiquitous Mary, Geraldine and Rosie.  On days they can’t remember their names, they come over to my place and I remember for them.  I am also very handy at opening vials and bottles of medicine for the shaky girls.

What they don’t tell you when you sign up:

The women like to match-make.  I am obviously here to find the love of my life and they keep introducing me to likely possibles.  Their choice is not necessarily mine.  I think I would rather have three of the ones they haven’t thought of, including the 60-year-old who used to work for the CIA.  And who has marvelous and impossible stories.

Awhile back there was a spate of outsiders entering the building at night, getting into apartments and stealing money and other valuables.  This was because several of the girls ‘hid’ their apartment keys in a safe place,  under the taxus bushes out front.  Thieves knew just where to look for a dandy assortment and residents were leaving so fast vacancies were created, which is why I wasn’t on any kind of waiting list.  Management got together with the police and the old ladies and did something with locks and new keys and some entrances permanently locked from the outside and the problem is resolved.  If they find my key under the bushes now, it will cost me $50 and supper for 8. Donna, down the hall has a 10 millimeter handgun and if she tries to shoot me she will surely hit you.  She used to prowl the corridors after midnight, locked and loaded and I believe a couple shadows got dead with 10 out of 10. I am grateful for the locks.

Sorry for leaving you but it’s almost 2 and I have to take my place at the 2^nd floor women’s Hen Party.  Amazing the things you find out!  Ta!

Next time:  Moving and Paranoia.

Duck Issues

I have a resentment against ducks and geese.  They settle in a place for the winter, now that the winters are warmer around here, and they leave stuff.  Months of stuff.  Sometimes year-round of stuff.  In Mt Vernon, Ohio there is a beautiful reflecting pool at the state hospital surrounded by a concrete sidewalk.  Guess why most people don’t go to the reflecting pool? 

Softball diamonds around here work the same way just as soon as a low spot and winter puddles develop.  Then when you rip and grade it with a tractor in the spring, it’s hard to breathe.  Also during rainstorms.  Makes me want to quit enjoying driving tractors. 

If I were King I would get a good Savage .22 with some long rifle ammunition and…….well.  It would be a lot more fun to shoot them out of the sky.  They’re flying along and  there’s a kind of spasm and then they drop straight down like rocks!  Trouble is they’re too damn greasy to eat.

Pigeons belong in this category too.  Besides having an IQ of 4 they try to nest on my upstairs front porch in the winter.  I do shoot them.  With a pellet gun.  Enough is enough!

No I won’t shoot your deer.  But I have to admit that venison is very tasty and very (low fat) healthy.  Especially makes totally awsome chili!  Yo Bambi!  Ta!

Older !

I am playing poker with a deck of insurance cards.  Having reached the magic age of almost-65 they are descending on me like rain.  Up until last month I had an Anthem medical card and an Anthem dental card.  Then I was told I had to sign up – again – with the government (how many times in my life have I done this for one reason or another?  If my file is thick imagine what the Mayor’s file looks like…) 

Now I have a Medicare card; a Humana medical card; a something-or-other eye care card and a dental card – still Anthem.  Oh, and a prescription card from some outfit called Express Scripts.  Almost enough to play a good game of Euchre with. 

In addition I have received at least twenty pounds of advertising from everybody from Gecko to AARP wanting me to sign up for their supplemental insurance programs.  While trying to convince me that all the cards that I now have certainly aren’t going to cover everything.  (They won’t.  That’s the nature of insurance recruitment, sales and deception.)

And I am getting ready to move.  A big life change for me, I’ve lived happily here for 16 years.  And I am going to live happily elsewhere with significantly less possessions and for about three hundred dollars less a month then where I am at now.  At a place on a lake where I can look down in the morning and watch the ducks shitting on the shore.  Sorry, I have a resentment against ducks.

The big change is that everybody in this place is fifty-seven or older.  Nobody is 21.  There are no young girls or guys.  I will hardly know how to behave (until one of those old gals invites me over for supper….).  My life is a lot older.  I don’t see this place as the last stop before I die and I intend to frolic happily there for a long time.

But time passes.  In spite of me.  I am corresponding with an elegant lady from my grade school days who is the same age as I am.  The last time I saw her was in 7^th grade and I think I was in love with her, until I was able to buy my next bag of marbles.  Attention is so fleeting!  Thinking back that far is almost going back to World War Two and I’m not sure all of my own kids know what that was exactly.  It truly does take my breath away, that was so long ago.

I take pills in the morning and walk around the block for exercise, instead of getting up at the crack of dawn and going to work to get trim and tanned and make money doing it.  If my warts and blemishes keep growing I will look someday like Franklin Roosevelt.

But I take life a day at a time.  Most of it has been rewarding.  Some of it was the pits.  It has all been interesting.  I am not guaranteed a tomorrow, could get hit by a bus.  But I have today and, creaky or not, I will frolic in the sun on my gimpy right leg for my todays until it’s time to shut it down.

And I have changed the color of this blog to Virginia Tobacco just because I can!  Ta!