Ethel decided, after moving in, that she didn’t like the fireplace. So now, we’re going to get rid of the tile, and replace it with natural stone.
But first, they had to take out the mantle.
So now we have no mantle. I have no idea when the new stuff is coming in; until then, we have a blank, empty wall.
We’re still watching movies. I find it interesting how some movies that we used to like, we just don’t like anymore. I wonder if my brain is just too slow now, or not flexible enough. For instance – Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. We tried to watch that a month or so back. I remember that it used to be funny.
But, now, it’s not funny – it’s just British.
And today, we pulled Buckaroo Banzai out of the player and put it back into the box. I just couldn’t seem to follow the story, and while I found this or that amusing, I never actually laughed. I must be getting old – physically and mentally.
But some things are still wonderful. When she pulled out BB, she put in Magnificent Seven – and I don’t mean the remake. That movie is a great – and I use the term sparingly – Western. It is so very well done. I sort of felt privileged to be allowed to watch it.
Fitness new – no good fitness news. Every week, I’m in worse shape than I was the week before. Today I saw the cardiac PA for the first followup after my ablation. Turns out that the ablation doesn’t work right away – it takes up to 90 days for the scar tissue that prevents the fibrillation to form. So things aren’t going to get better any time soon. Fitness is bad. I keep finding new lows.
Skiing ain’t here yet. There’s talk of some snow starting Sunday, but not sure that I believe it. I’m sure, however, that eventually skiing will happen.I’m holding on until then.
Can’t lose any weight. I’m taking one of the GLP-1 meds that worked so well for others that I know, but it’s having no effect whatsoever.
So I can’t get fit, can’t lose weight, can’t ski, and can’t even laugh right* 🙂
*not entirely true. I still can’t help but laugh when Steve McQueen says “Look at that chucklehead, out there in all that dust and heat” and Yul Brynner says “Yeah. Not smart, like us” 🙂
Well, the other day, I was talking about how I didn’t have anyone here to do anything with. But then, on Friday, I went climbing with a couple of guys.
We went to the Big Meadows crag, in the San Juans, and play with gear on rocks.
It had been five years since I had laid hand to stone, and I was definitely stiff and rusty. But I wasn’t as stiff as the climbing rope that I brought with me – it had been in the bag for at least those five years, and it was too stiff to bend enough to go through the belay device. So we wound up using a different rope. (My friend John, who has done more mountaineering than I have done living, told me to take it home, run it through a cycle in the washing machine, and to throw in a half bottle of Downy. Now I need some Downy 🙂
But I had a great time. I’ve never been sure if I love the mountains because I can ski and climb in them, or if I love skiing and climbing because they get me in the mountains – but it’s all a win, either way.
However, it showed me – even more – what terrible shape I’m in. Yesterday I did a full 2:15 aerobic ride, but today I didn’t even try to do my one hour run/ellip. I see the cardio PA on Wednesday; I’ll as her if this is normal, or should I apply for medical euthanasia.
Tomorrow, I am going to to pool, again to start over; I haven’t been for four weeks. They were closed starting 20 October for cleaning, and the next week was the surgical trip, and then I wasn’t allowed to submerse my body….I am going to the pool even though I probably won’t want to do so. I have to do something. Don’t I?
They have me taking a calcium channel blocker to keep my AFib from doing any damage, but one problem is that it keeps my heart rate down – so I can’t work hard, and if I try, I get exhausted, because my heart can’t pump hard enough to feed my body. I started to skip that pill this morning, but I remembered that I’m not supposed to stop taking it on my own device; if I stopped taking it, and then had a stroke, I would be getting an earful from Ethel. So I’m still taking it.
Now I’m going to go get in my recliner. That’s what you do, when you feel like me.
But we’ve already made arrangements to climb again next Friday 🙂
It’s Guy Fawkes day, which means that it’s time for us to watch V again.
Surprisingly, I did a little Googling the other day, and guess what? It seems like a lot of people have taken to the tradition of watching this every year on this day. That just seems strange to me, because usually what I do is on the fringes 🙂 Now look – I’m almost mainstream!
Now, a bit of humble pie – I was sure that, at some point, I had published this picture – or one like it – on or near November 5th of some year. So I searched Fat Charlies Diary, and – nope, it ain’t there. It might have been in the old, pre-2012 days; I lost eight years of my blog then.
But what did show up was a post from November 6th of 2020, saying that we had watched the movie the night before. But something else in that post really bothered me – I said that I had just mastered “Total Eclipse”, and was taking another run at Piano Man.
Now, here it is five years later, and I’m trying to relearn Total Eclipse – and I still haven’t mastered Piano Man.
I suspect that this has something to do with my having not had a piano lesson since Panama, and so I lost everything. I am so tired of starting over. But I’m going to go ahead and keep going, because I don’t really know how not to do that.
And another thing – I had Clementi’s Sonatina down, except for the second half of the Vivace. Well, dang it, I still have Clementi’s Sonatina down, except for the second half of the Vivace. I can’t play it as fast as the folks on the Internet, but I can play it fairly cleanly. But the second half of the Vivace does some weird fingering, and it just ain’t coming.
Today I did my first “workout” since the surgery – which was just an hour’s aerobic ride. I did Pettit, which is something I used to do all the time. But today, it felt harder than I think it should. I do hope that I haven’t done myself too much damage, or lost too much. The old Second Law – when you drop the rubber ball, it never bounces up as high as it dropped.
This morning, I woke up in regrets – regrets about all the decisions that I have made that have led me to the place in my life where I am now. That’s not very grateful, but I’m just telling it like Peter wrote it on the rock. I think about the fact that I paid more than I ever expected to pay, for a lot less house than I expected to get, and that I can’t play golf here in Pagosa because they raised the membership fees way too high, and that I don’t have any local friends. I had friends to do stuff with in Whitefish and Bozeman and Park City and Phoenix and Park City and Vermont and Tucson – which takes us back to 1995 – but not here. Here, I’m not one of the cool kids, and I don’t even know anybody who does the things that I do. So, I had regrets. I did Step 10, which allowed me at least to function for the day. But this is my diary, so I reckon I ought to put stuff like this in it.
I should go back over to the piano and try again, but I’m not going to do so. I’m gonna go sit in my recliner and pout. And wait for Ethel to start the movie.
UPDATE – Later – Wow. That movie is still a wow. And what might be an even bigger wow is the fact that we’ve been watching it once a year for something on the order of two decades, and it’s still a wow. Wow.
I’m finally getting a deer guard on my Nissan Frontier.
That’s not my truck – that’s a stock photo of a Frontier with this model deer guard on it.
I’ve been waffling on this, but it seems that deer in this area are only getting more and more numerous. Now, I drive to Durango fairly often, and that’s just a long corridor where deer love to jump in front of trucks – but, even here in my neighborhood, they’re everywhere.
And these aren’t those little white tails that my son hunts in Alabama – these are big, honkin’ mule deer that can weigh up to 300 lbs.
As Kim pointed out this morning, here in Colorado, a deer guard is a good idea, because it will protect the truck and knock the deer out of the way. However, back in Park City, a deer guard is just a device that will pick the moose up and redirect it into your windshield – not a great idea.
I’m going to Durango next Wednesday, and that’s when I’ll get this thing installed. This will be my first followup appointment after surgery; I’m hoping that they say good things. I’d really, really like to get off of the meds that they have me on – the one that makes me bleed easily (to prevent blod clots) and the one that keeps my heart rate down (I think that’s to prevent my AFib from causing a stroke). I want to run. Now, my running days may be over. But at least I have to try.
I am going to Bayfield today for the dentist – they’re finishing up the second root canal that happened as a result of some abscess in my jaw. Hope I don’t hit any deer.
I’m just in from taking Juneau for another long walk over in Coyote Hill. It’s amazing, how walking a couple of miles leaves me rather tired. I am probably through doing that, because starting tomorrow, I’m allowed to actually start working out again. Wednesday is a swim day for me, but the cardio nurse has asked me to not submerge these puncture sites yet, so I’ll just do an aerobic bike ride, then try to do my normal Thursday working the next day.
I hope I can do that. I hope things haven’t gone too far downhill.
Okay, I’m going to go stare at Ethel until she makes me some breakfast 🙂
Yesterday I mentioned that Ethel felt bad, and that we might not go to church. Well, we didn’t. In fact, we didn’t do anything at all.
I did take the dog out to Coyote Hill for a walk of a mile or so, but other than that, we didn’t actually accomplish anything – well, I worked out some of the fingering for “Total Eclipse”, but that’s about it.
Except for watching movies.
We started with this one – we own it, but hadn’t seen it in a long, long time. Well, apparently I have changed over the last two decades or so, because I was simply blown away by the movie. Now, let’s be serious here – this movie is completely implausible. But that’s not important, because, to my way of thinking, it’s not a story – it’s a fable. And, as such, it’s amazing.
As we have done a lot during this activity of catching up on all of the movies in our library that we haven’t seen in a long time, we just sat there after it was over saying “Why haven’t we watched this? It’s an amazing movie!”
The next one was wonderful, as well, but it was no surprise – “Gran Torino” is just Clint Eastwood being Clint Eastwood in a different setting. This time, he’s a retired widower in Detroit, wondering why his neighborhood has filled up with Hmong refugees. But, he’s Clint Eastwood, so he does the right thing, and the bad guys lose.
Our third movie surprised me – I would have thought that we’d seen it recently, but apparently Ethel started tracking this stuff a couple of years ago. Anyway, it was “Driving Miss Daisy”. If you haven’t seen this movie, stop reading this now and go watch it.
Was Morgan Freeman born 70 years old?
Today is another day. I talked to the nurse in Colorado Springs about my post-op issues; she told me that everything is fine, and that I can have my life back on Wednesday. But not before then. So all I did this morning was some chores around the house and took Juneau out for a hike.
Beauty is where you find it. Colorado in early November is beautiful, even though we seem to be in a La Nina weather pattern, so we have no snow. But it’s late autumn, and the watery sun and the dimming colors are just amazing.
Beauty where you find it – on the way out to Coyote Hill to walk the dog, my phone served up Primitive Radio Gods’ “Standing Outside A Broken Phone Booth With Money In My Hand”. I have no idea what this song is about. And I never think “I’m going to listen to Primitive Radio Gods”.
But, whenever this song comes on, I listen, spellbound – and then, before it’s over, I press Rewind to hear it again.
After that, the phone followed up with the Moody Blues’ “Gemini Dream”. Now, this song is pure Moody Blues. Again, I have no idea what it’s about – but I’ve always nurtured the notion that it’s about the Twin Paradox. That’s not impossible – a lot of Moody Blues tunes are either science fictional or metaphysical. But I’ve never actually researched “what is this song about” because I like my idea, and don’t want to see it get demolished 🙂
I was going to work on an assignment for our church, but apparently I can’t figure out which of the classes I’m supposed to take, and Ethel has gone out to run errands. So, I’m typing this, and then I’ll get back on the piano and work on Clementi and Total Eclipse.
(or maybe not – the way that Juneau is whining means that Momma must be back from her errands 🙂
Just the other day, I decided to re-learn Total Eclipse of the Heart on the piano. It turns out, it’s not like riding a bicycle – I’m having to re-teach my fingers and brain what to do. And it’s non-trivial.
The first time I learned this, I was using HDPiano’s teaching method, which involved visually seeing the note being pressed on the keyboard – with this cool technique of showing which notes were coming (hard to describe, but anybody can see it on YouTube). But now HDPiano has dropped this song from its repertoire, and I can’t find the same arrangement anywhere else other than in the sheet music, so – here we go, the hard way.
It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve heard from my new (possibly) piano teacher – last I heard, she was going to check her schedule and get back to me. It may be that she doesn’t want to add a student, or maybe she doesn’t want to add another adult student.
Or, maybe, she just doesn’t want to teach me. The simple fact is, quite a few people dislike me – some grow into it, but some folks don’t like me right away. And that’s none of my business.
So, until I hear from her, or happen to run into another possible teacher, I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing – which isn’t much. Since the ablation, I haven’t done much at all. Not being able to work out, or do yoga, leaves me feeling bored and tired. You’d think that not working out would give me more energy – but, contrary to popular opinion, it turns out that folks who work out tend to have more energy. Another case of, as Mr. Heinlein said, “…if ‘everybody knows’ such-and-such, then it ain’t so, by at least a thousand to one.”
Kim Puckett is feeling bad today. She woke up with a headache, and went back to bed – got back up a half hour or so later, and the headache had subsided, but she still felt awful. So she’s in the bathtub,. That’s her place of retreat.
We’ve got church in another ninety minutes; I don’t know if I will go without her. Probably, just because I need more discipline in my life, not less. (Note what I said above re: “the hard way”). While the idea behind the ablation was that I’d hopefully be able to do more afterwards, I’m starting to fear that maybe I won’t be able to do anything at all. Heck, it’s been four days since the procedure, and I could just sit in my recliner and read Bosch novels.
Now, what happens if I am now a couch potato? How does one live in Colorado, as a couch potato? …sure, I see folks doing it. But it just seems wrong, somehow. Moving to Colorado and not skiing/hiking/climbing is like moving to Las Vegas and joining the Baptist church – you can do it, but you’re kinda missing the point of the whole thing.
But, since Ethel says that we have to live here, then that’s what I’d do. The only place that I would go back to is Panama, and she has….reservations. She doesn’t want to go back there. I can’t make sense out of it, when she talks about it, because she just loved it when we were there, and then – suddenly – she had to leave. And, when something like that happens, one tends to generate reasons for the actions that one’s instincts are taking. And she did. So we can’t go back there.
So I may just sit here in my recliner, and get older and fatter and stupider, and – every so often – go back into the music room and try, one more time, to play Total Eclipse of the Heart. As Cool Hand Luke said, “It’ll be something to do.”
I’ve been asked to lead a Traditions study – or, at least, the first few of them – and, whenever I think about that, I run into the obvious problem of packaging.
This is what I saw, not long after I got my first Big Book. It’s a fairly bland cover – it sort of looks like there are twelve of one thing, and twelve of the other, and that they have the same treatment and importance.
Now, were I to have named this publication, I would have given it a name to sort of tell what the contents were – something like:
A View of How the 12 Steps Were Re-Interpreted by a Single Member of AA, Fifteen Years After We All Agreed On The Big Book, Somewhere Around The Time That That Single Member Also Thought That Niacin, Or LSD, Might Also Help Recovery, On Which The Rest of Us Never Had Any Input
AND
Articles Defining the 12 Traditions As Presented To The AA Fellowship for Ratification at the 1950 Conference.
That sort of sounds a little different, doesn’t it?
Why do I care? It’s because the Steps, as addressed in the 12&12, are often given entirely different implementations from the words of the Big Book – different, and often contradictory. And, if one doesn’t actually study the literature, one would never know how greatly different they are.
A bunch of AAs thought, apparently, that the Big Book wasn’t smart enough, and Bill had depression problems, so they figured that we needed a wiser Big Book. And, as far as I can tell, nobody reined Bill in at all; they just let him “have his head”, as they say.
So – as an example – the Big Book says that all of our problems are caused by “selfishness – self-centerednss”. That statement is made flatly and without qualification. And it never tells us anything about self that is good – Self Bad. Get rid of self. In short, Self is the Devil, Bobby Bouchet. Simple. No intellect needed. And it further tells us that the idea that we’ll be able to manage things well and be happy and satisfied is a delusion.
But, in the 12&12, we’re told that the actual problem isn’t bad old self, which needs to go away – instead, the problem is our instincts, which aren’t bad, but were given by God and that they are good – and that, instead of trying to get rid of self, we’re supposed to manage our instincts to keep them in balance. We just need to manage things better. Forget that whole Page 61 stuff – just keep your thumb on the pulse of your instincts, and trust your brain and your management ability.
So, for me, the front half of the 12&12 is just one guy’s notions – somebody who, BTW, apparently isn’t a Big Book Thumper (even though he is the member that actually typed the Big Book, although the verbiage went back and forth between New York and Akron, so he didn’t get to write the things that he wanted. For futher illustration, I suggest “The Book That Started It All” – I would include a link, but there are many different places to buy this).
But the back half is composed of articles that were published in the Grapevine, and were presented to the Fellowship before we voted to adopt the Traditions at the 1950 General Service Conference. So, for me, the back half has authority.
I wish that there were two different books, so that I could buy the second one, without financing the first one 🙂
In other news – recovery is proceeding well from my Pulse Field Ablation*. I’ve got a big “bruise” sort of thing beneath my left femoral vein. I still am not doing anything at all that could be considered “exercise” – in fact, I’m avoiding using the stairs. I’m planning on going for a walk today with Juneau, so that she can get exercise while I’m just strolling; this is because Ethel will be on the bike today, and I’m not allowed to do that.
The idea is that eventually I’ll be able to work out without concerning myself with AFib. But I won’t know that for a while; they won’t even let me drop my prescriptions yet.
Today is a bye Saturday for Alabama, which means that Ethel isn’t cooking mojo. We’ll be watching football, and – of course – looking for the Vanderbilt Pimp. It’s going to be a relaxed day, with nothing more structured than tonight’s 5:30 meeting,
Tomorrow, though, on Zoom, we’ll be studying the “Twelve” 🙂
UPDATE – Actually, it turns out that Ethel didn’t ask me to lead this Traditions study – she’s doing it. I was mistaken. So, in the words of Emily Latilla, “….never mind!”
*turns out that that is the way that the procedure is referenced elsewhere.
Fat Charlie's Diary 