• Pain, pain, and more pain

    There is one reader that may feel me on this one. Before I get ahead of myself, let me lay it out for you.

    I’m in my office (no not now… I’m laying out the scene from earlier today), which isn’t normally such a bad thing… but I’d been away from it under the direst of circumstances: the dreaded sinus infection (with just a pinch of bronchitis for flavor). Due to various allergies and sensitivities, I’m down to one class of antibiotics in the bacterial sinus infection arsenal – and it tends to make me a little sick to my stomach. So I’m in my office, work piled up to my inferior nasal conchae (which of course begs the obvious question: “which is plural, ‘conchae’ or ‘concha?’”), I’m a little sick to my stomach, the air conditioning is out in my building, the morning sun (with an assist going to the heat running a full bore inferno) is heating things to a balmy 87 degrees (the way our buddy Dan would have measured them), and my sinuses are doing their impression Stomp.

    That’s the lay of the land.

    That’s when I got a call from a friend asking me if I wanted to go to a hockey game tonight. (Which is going to a frigging shoot-out as I type!)

    I don’t know about you, but I tend to make this long humming sound when my mind and my mouth don’t agree on a thing to say. Call it “mind to mouth feedback” if you will, or not… I really don’t care one way or the other. Anyway, I did a lot of humming before I came to an answer.

    I said no.

    There is no sane reason why this decision should have been hard. I should be sleeping right now, content that I made the right call. Instead I’m wide awake in a dark room, hunched over a computer, clicking the refresh button on my browser because I don’t have a stinking AM radio and the live stream peetered out on my ^&%%$#! internet connection; not to mention the @^%**&! game wasn’t on TV.

    Other than that I feel great.

    I see that the Lightning won it in the shootout, so that’s something I guess.

  • Sacred cows

    For better or worse, right or wrong, there are two institutions I associated with Florida as a growing lad: Publix and Sonny’s Real Pit Bar-B-Q. When I moved with my family to Florida in 1979, there were was one developed corner of what is now a major intersection – and on that lonely corner of incadecent and neon lights sat our neighborhood Sonny’s. With my mother’s unexpected conversion to veganism, we didn’t get to go to Sonny’s all that often – but it was always there, pumping the eye watering smell of the pit into the surrounding air.

    When I moved away from home to go to college, we still had a Sonny’s and a Publix. When I moved to Orlando after college, we still had a Publix and a Sonny’s.

    Well friends, we don’t have a Sonny’s around these parts anymore. I drove by this afternoon as was shocked to see a pile of rubble where Sonny’s once stood.

    I feel like I should send someone flowers, or make a contribution to Sonny’s favorite charity; something to deal with my grief.

  • They do call me the expert for nothing

    I’ve been toying with Firefox lately, but for all the wrong reasons. If you know enough about computers and the internet to be looking at this page, you probably know what Firefox is; but just in case you somehow slipped through the net… Firefox is another kind of web browser. That’s right kids, all you folks looking at the web through the Micro$oft window-shade (better known as Internet Explorer) have another option.

    Listen to me, putting down the Windows folks when this entry is really about my failings. I’m fast becoming a psychologist’s dream (patient).

    There was one reason I was using Firefox: it corrects your spelling as you type text in web forms. There are several reasons why this is handy. For one thing, word processors recognize text that some web based applications do not. I can type up an entry in Word, run a spell check, then cut and paste the entry to a web form; but some of the text from Word won’t play nice (like “educated” quotes). With Firefox I can bypass the word processor altogether and type directly on the web form, and not have to worry about text that won’t translate between the two applications – and still have decent spelling, via the Firefox spell check option.

    The only problem here is that I rather like Safari (the Apple web browser). Well it turns out the Firefox affair was all for not… Safari is capable of spell checking on the fly too (as are any other applications that take advantage of the built-in dictionary on Mac OS X). It’s not even particularly well hidden… it’s right there in the Edit menu, where it appears in almost every other application.

    It’s bad enough I’ve coughed up everything but my colon these last two weeks (the cold may be common, but it’s a yearly scourge on the head of this household). Did I have to find this out now, while my reserves are down?