Old Farts

For the past three months, I've had a shoulder/neck pain in the right shoulder. This is actually a pain I've had for over 25 years. I've been to a chiropractor and family doctor but to no avail. Thing is, the pain does not limit my mobility, and while I can point to the area because it feels hot and inflamed, no amount of drugs or massaging gets rid of it. It is a deep deep embedded pain that flares up during stressful periods or when I've been really really bad with my diet. I think this bout was triggered by really really bad eating and poor sleeping a few months ago. It feels like a torn muscle or really bad bruise.

So last week, The Man complained of a similar pain in his left shoulder.

A few night ago, The Man bought some Absorbine Jr. At bedtime, we rubbed the reeky stuff on each other. He lay on his side of the bed, me on mine, far far away from each other because we both stank. The rub provided some temporary relieve so that I heard The Boy get ready for bed but fell asleep before he finished. Don't know what happened to The Man.

I have envisioned evenings spent with The Man reading - him in his chair, me in my corner. I have imagined evenings of us going to dinner then going for a walk. I would like us to spend an evening listening to music and making a meal. But I have never imagined us spending an evening rubbing Absorbine Jr. on each other and not knowing when my son went to bed. Has this become my life?

Technology Circus

I get comments on my posts sometimes. I delete most of them. I don't think they are from real people. The comments carry generic messages like:

Hey great job on your blog. I'll definately be back. Meanwhile, check out my site ....

The link goes to site that want to sell you stuff. I guess there is no privacy in the blog world. But I feel so violated by this kind of spamming. How do they do that? Do they use a program to search weblog.com or technorati, come up with key words and automatcially pop in generic messages into blogs? Is commerce the motivation for invading people's blogs? Is there a blog spam protection software I can use?

Service providers come up with a technology that enables one activity, only to have people come up with a tertiary technology that abuses the primary activity, which necessitates the creation of a new technology to stop the abuse. Sure, necessity is the mother of invention. But this is like mother gone bad. Or are we all just part of a technology circus?

Down With Rain

I try to be a good citizen. I know that parts of our country has been in a drought for the whole growing season this year. Our part of the country has been baking in an oven for almost two months. Air conditioners rage in every house in the city. Hydro regulators have asked us to reduce electricity use to avoid over-burdening the system.

I do my part to reduce energy consumption because the production of electricy causes pollution and the use of electricity is expensive. So I do us a favour by limiting our use of electricity and saving us some money. For the past two months, I've done two main things: 1) I gauge the temperature outside and set our air conditioner just a few degrees lower so that the AC takes the edge off the humidity without making the house cold. 2) I don't use the dryer at all. I've had a clothes line in the backyard for two years now. I've only hung the white laundry out because the colours discolour in the sun. This summer, I moved the clothes line to a shady spot under the tree. Now I can hang up all my laundry outside to dry.

But you can never quite count on Mother Nature to do her part to get your laundry dried though. I hung up two loads of washing today. Wouldn't you know that by mid-morning, it started raining. I'm cool with that, I said to our cousin visiting from Australia, What's the worst that can happen? So my clothes get wet, but they will dry again. I'm good with that.

Later, the sun came back out, the clothes started to dry again. It's evening now. I am looking out the window. It's pouring rain. My laundry is still out on the lines.

Right now, there's a part of me saying, I do my part to conserve energy and protect the environment. Why isn't Mother Nature being more cooperative in getting my laundry dry? Damn, do I have to re-wash the laundry and put them in the dryer? What the hell is this?