3/30/07

Hairman:
Yesterday (Thursday, March 29, 2007) was a visit to the venerable Hairman; where, to give the bluster-boy something to foam about (cover your monitor, Bubby!), I got the entire treatment befitting an elderly (and therefore more mature) person: permanent, beard-trim, blue-rinse, the whole stinkin’ kabosh.
Most fearsome about this visit was asking about his wife, who has cancer.
“Well, she’s gone back to work (at a nearby high-school); you’ll see her shortly.”
Apparently they’re putting up a good front, or her cancer has been beaten back.
An operation in Boston (hopefully not in an abandoned mini mall) removed the cancer, and now she’s on radiation locally.
She looked and sounded normal when she appeared.
We moved on to other topics.
-Hairman’s back is bothering him; mainly because his grandson wants to be picked up.
“Ya gotta use your legs,” I told him.
He also had to drive a snowblower, and his wife can’t help, due to her cancer.
He’s almost 66.
-The motherboard apparently lunched in Hairman’s PC.
Hairman is as enthusiastical and ‘pyooter-literate as I am.
“That’s almost worth getting a new ‘pyooter,” I said. “A motherboard lunched on me once, but I was planning to buy a new rig anyway.”
“I coulda done that,” he said. “But it woulda meant completely reconfiguring the new ‘pyooter to be like my old one, so we just fixed the old one.”
“Found a new motherboard on the Internet for $66.”

Sabrina:
After Hairman I went to the Honeoye Falls Veterinary Hospital, which like Hairman is also in Honeoye Falls.
Sabrina’s cremains (ashes) were back, and I needed to pick them up.
They were in a small can in a small cardboard-box.
“Oh, I recognize that box,” a lady said as she was opening the back of her black Cherokee.
“One of the neatest dogs we ever had,” I said.
“Well, this one’s next,” she said, pointing inside her Cherokee.
I walked over and looked inside.
“Oh, a cat,” I said. The cat was meowing plaintively in a crate.
I felt bad. Obviously my ability to say the right thing was being compromised by my stroke.
The poor lady looked at me as if I were some kind of weirdo. If she only knew.
“And so it goes,” I said after a long, difficult pause.
My compromised communication was destroying my intent.
I figured I might as well leave. Like Iraq, there was no worthwhile exit.
-No doubt, people are wondering how I could be so attached to a dog — after all, she was just a dog.
Sabrina was a very classy dog — also “my dog.” (Killian is Linda’s dog; although he thinks of me as “the Master” — and is thrilled when I walk him.)
Despite 89 bazilyun things wrong with her, and the fact I can’t render much attention to a dog (because of the stroke); she never gave up, and always enthusiastically served me.
If it was me walking her, she pranced and danced. If she fell — and her back-end was weak — she’d get right back up.
There were two staircases at the so-called elitist country-club she’d march right up.
Toward the end it got so she hated dog-food of any kind, and preferred the Milk-Bone diet.
It lead to various Mexican-standoffs, wherein I’d point to her supper-dish and loudly declare “No Milk-Bones unless you eat that supper.”
She’d give up and go lay down. “If this is what the Master wants, so be it.”
And yet she’d prance-and-dance at the park. “Yippee; the Boss is taking me hunting. That deer-bone is over here; I remember it. Let’s go over here, Boss.”
Even the day we put her to sleep she was determined to jump up into our van on her own; no matter how weak she was.
Thankfully, she never got invalid (like Tracy, which depressed her mightily: “I’m letting the Boss down”). The morning Sabrina crashed (she crashed in the afternoon), she had a wonderful time at the park: prancing-and-dancing.

Web-cam follies:
The Web-cam at the mighty Curve has been zoomed out (see pik) such that it’s still aimed at the south leg, but now it gets the tunnels under the fill — which zoomed in it didn’t get before.

The mighty MAC.

Since I generally fire it up every day (it’s my Netscape home-page) I’ve noticed a few things:
A) Quite often the web-cam has auto-focused on the housing, which puts the railroad way out of focus.
Apparently someone has to notice and override it and focus it on the tracks.
B) There is a toggle-button to get it to double the size of the feed (the pik is double-sized).
With my old Netscape 7.0, clicking that toggle would freeze the stream, and then after about 10 seconds the stream would go back to active double-size. That’s what I would monitor in the background. “Double-size” is apparently not a web-address; I can’t bookmark it. Double-sizing seems to be an Altoony function.
My new Netscape 7.2 doesn’t freeze the feed when changing to double-size.
C) Often the stream will freeze, and what I get is what was happening minutes ago — e.g. a passing coal-train frozen.
Last night I noticed it had frozen during dusk, but it was pitch-dark outside. If the stream had been active, the picture rendered would have been pitch-black.
Usually a “refresh” puts the stream back on.
I even leave it on after dark, because the headlights of passing trains will illuminate the trees.
D) Sometimes the web-cam doesn’t work (like now, 8:16 p.m., 3/30/07). Despite the utterly predictable and tiresome blustering from Boston, I doubt it’s a MAC-issue; not when Linda can’t get it either on her PC, and we get other sites.

“The bluster-boy” is my all-knowing macho younger brother in Boston, who bad-mouths everything I do or say — like my MAC ‘pyooter.

I had a stroke 10/26/93.

“Linda” is my wife.

“The so-called elitist country-club” is nearby Boughton Park; called that long ago by an editor at the Canandaigua Daily Messenger newspaper where I once worked because it would only allow citizens of the three towns that own it to use it.

Altoona, Pa. (Altoony) is the location of Horseshoe Curve (“the mighty Curve”), by far the BEST railfan spot on the entire planet.

My brother’s colonoscopy, in the vaunted Boston healthcare system, was done in “an abandoned mini mall.”