And He Not Busy Being Born

 The Tingle Brothers gathered at the storage area containing Joan and WB's last material possessions.  I had never seen the area before. 

 

Brother Dave said, Be Prepared! when he opened the door.

 Oh my God!

We were worried about what to do with the two heavily motorized wheel chairs Joan and WB had in  their last days.  The batteries were long dead.  And we didn't know who would take them even as trash.  We thought about illegal action.  But about two a fellow drove by in his Suburban Truck and asked what we were going to do with them.  We said, Sir!  You can have them (please) if you want them,  He said his church could use them.  So we set to moving the things. 

 

 Note the powerful muscles in my arm!

 Heave Ho! On Three!

 

 We contemplate our handiwork.

Posted by Nick Tingle at 03:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I tried to post an entry to my blog, perhaps, yesterday.  I forget.  In any case, the entry wouldn’t post.  I kept getting this mysterious message instead:

“Couldn’t load blog; perhaps you have not upgraded your MT database?—Loading data failed with SQL error.  Can’t open file: ‘mt_blog.MYI (errno:145)”

You are a better man than I if you can figure what that means.  And what’s this chummy little and “perhaps you have not upgraded your MT database?”

So I do what I always do in such a situation.  The same thing over and over and over again—I hit the button to open the file and over and over and over again I got the same error message.  Really frustrating—the best parallel I can think of is calling the same number over and over and getting no reply because, as the Brits say, the line is engaged.

Funny, they say the line is engaged and we say the line is busy.  I like engaged better.

Anyway, the analogy is not too bad because the problem was a failure of communication between Yahoo Small Business, the host for my blog, and Movable Type, advertised as the most powerful blog software system now available for the purposes of blogging. So I am able to get the host interface but I cannot get the host interface to interface with the MT interface.

I went on idiotically in a state of high anxiety trying to figure out what I could do before I finally tried to contact somebody.  I tried to contact Yahoo and I actually stayed on hold FOR OVER AN HOUR till I got this guy whose name was Nick, just like mine, located in the Yahoo call center in a small town outside Portland, Oregon.  This was strange because Carol and I watched a movie just the other night called, “The Big Nothing,” that was a comedy about people working in a call center in a small town outside Portland, Oregon.  So I asked Nick if he had seen that movie and he said he had but that he didn’t work for a call center; he worked for Yahoo.  OK.

He wasn’t able to fix anything and sent off an email to Movable Type to see if they had any help.  I figured if he could do that, so could I, though doing so was not nearly as simple as it might seem.  In any case, I got through to MT via email and they got back to me really quickly.  The MT person, Stacy, wrote that my MT system had become corrupted.

This made me feel really bad.  I don’t know what the hell my MT had been doing to get itself corrupted, maybe drinking a lot, or hanging out with the wrong crowd, or whatever the hell a database does to get corrupted.  I felt as if I had been a bad father to my database and somehow it was my fault it had got itself corrupted.

Bad database!  Bad!

But Stacy gave me some directions to uncorrupt my MT.  Unfortunately I got these at 9 PM, after Carol and I got back from seeing Hellboy 2 in an actual movie theatre.  I don’t remember the last time we did that.  But I decided we should do it so I would be cut off from my computer and not spend the whole evening compulsively trying to fix it.  So instead, I woke up way too early because I was anxious to see if Stacy’s directions for the de-corruption of my MT would work or not.

Apparently they did.

Now I have to write Stacy and asked what I can do to keep my MT database from getting all corrupted again.

Bad database!  Bad!

Oh, Hellboy 2 was pretty OK.

Still to come: Carol, Brother Dan and I fly down to San Diego where along with Brothers Dave and Steve and Sister-in-Law Teresa we will empty the storage area containing the last of Joan and Bill’s material possessions.

Knock on wood.

Posted by Nick Tingle at 08:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I am trying to stop smoking.

It’s really depressing.  I have tried to stop I don’t know how many times.  I won’t go into that.  It’s a pretty pathetic story.

I am at a spot in the process I know all too well.  It’s the I-Am-Stuck spot.  I have cut back for several days to 1 cigarette one day, then 2.5 the next, then back to 2, and I can’t seem to get over that final hump.

Meanwhile the withdrawal is killing me.  I can’t concentrate on anything.  I can’t read. I can’t write.  If I try to watch a movie, the damn thing irritates me so much I want to throw things.

I ache all over.  My face hurts!

I saw my psychiatrist Friday, for one of my thrice annual visits; I told him what I was doing and so we decided to up the Wellbutrin from a mere 75 milligrams per day to 150.  So far that has made no difference.

Well, maybe it did because last night I tried to go sleep but had this ringing or more like high pitched screaming in my left ear. Tinnitus, I guess.  So I couldn’t get to sleep.  I got up and walked around and jumped up and down and hit myself up aside the head and opened my mouth as far as I could and squirted liquid in my ear, and still the noise wouldn’t go away.  So I got maybe 5 hours sleep.  Not nearly enough—by about half.

This morning, thank god, it’s still there but much, much reduced from last night.

But now I feel anxious that I am going deaf…maybe that noise was the last squeal of a dying ear nerve or something.

And anxiety is really not good when one is trying to stop smoking.  I have plenty of that anyway without having to worry about going deaf.

I need to clean my ears more because I lot of ugly stuff came out when I squirted water up there with a little plastic squirter.

Posted by Nick Tingle at 11:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We had the deck outback reinforced (for the jacuzzi), also sanded and resurfaced:We had to take all the stuff off the deck to have it resurfaced and when we put all the stuff back I decided to document it as follows: For years in the 80's we lived in an apartment building at 221 West Alamar in downtown SB; when we left I took took some ferns that were out back.  This is the offshoot of one. WB gave me this succulent that I've kept alive since the early 90's.  A friend gave us this succulent as a house warming gift.  So we have had it since 1992.  I think that's the year we moved into the condo. This is the most important plant.  It's a descendent of the geranium that I planted over the grave of Amelia the Cat back at 221 West Alamar.  She got cancer and died before her time.  I buried her out behind the apartment and marked the spot with the geranium from which the one above is descended. This is Amelia The Cat's Plant: part 2.  It is descended from the one above.  The one above is not the original plant either.  But grew from a cutting of the original plant, now long deceased. 

Posted by Nick Tingle at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We were watching a pretty good documentary on the 628 assassination attempts made on Castro when—bingo—out goes the juice for the second time yesterday.  So it’s nearly 8, not enough light to read what with the dank skies, and I am about ready to explode.  At about 9 the juice comes back on.

This morning we meet some friends who have come into town for a funeral at a little, nearby restaurant and we talk for a while and start figuring our plans for the day and—bingo—the juice goes off.  End of all plans.  My friend wanted to go to the UCSB library, but is it open?  Carol wanted to go work out, but is the club open?  Me, who the hell knows what I wanted to do—but probably it involved the use of electricity.

This juice stuff has been going on for a week now and it’s more than an irritation now; it’s pretty much a painful aggravation.

I started talking about the PDA’s people have—like the Blackberry—that allow you to go online and watch movies if you want on your telephone, and thought maybe they should design one with a tiny pull out grill so that in case of juice outage you could fry up like a miniaturized burger or something.  But that would of course require that they build in a miniature refrigerator.  So I sat there trying to imagine a PDA with a built in grill and refrigerator….

You open up the tiny door to the tiny refrigerator to see if the milk is still good.

We are the only people sitting in the dark little restaurant.  I ask if it’s OK if we sit there and they say it is.  The owner starts putting out little candles. But when I go to get coffee I see they are not really little candles at all but little things that look like candles but are power not by fire but by batteries.

We get back to the condo to find this tall guy with tattoos all over his body pulling up the planks of our deck out back.   This is our carpenter’s son.  I am glad to see him because he was over in Iraq and I was afraid he would get killed.  He is pulling up the planks because Carol wants to get our own jacuzzi, but before that we need to get the deck fixed up (it looked pretty ugly) and also get supports under where the two tons of jacuzzi will go.

I am not in favor of this jacuzzi for numerous rational reasons—oh, well, this is not the place to go into that….And I should wrap this up before the juice goes off again…

Posted by Nick Tingle at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Outside—grim today.  At first, fog.  That was good because it helps to cool things down.  Now the sun is out and it’s still grim, from remains of smoke in the air.

Soot and ash all over everything.  Cars, bushes, driveways, rooftops.  I saw a kid skate boarding with little plumes of dust rising up from his rear wheels.

Also are the outages out?  Hard to tell.  I thought they were over yesterday morning, but we had half dozen outages for briefer and longer stretches from around 1 PM to 6 yesterday afternoon.

The fire in official speak was at first called an event.  Since the event started, they would say, or the event seems to be going this way or that.  Later the fire was downgraded from an event to an “incident.”  The “incident” seems to have started when the Feds moved in and took over the “event” management.  That’s what the top Fed dog called it: an “incident.”  Personally, I think it’s neither an event nor an incident but a fire.

This afternoon they will have another news briefing about the “incident.”

It’s just like it in the movies.  The locals never like it when the Feds move in.  The woman who had headed up the locals mispronounced the name of the new Fed boss.  Clearly she did not like turning over the reins to the Feds.

Early on, on the second day maybe, I had the TV on without the sound.  I began to hate this woman who was talking even though I didn’t know what she was saying.  I told Carol, this is an awful person.  She is full of bullshit.  So I turned on the sound to see if I was right and sure enough I was.

She was a spokesperson for the Chamber of Commerce.  Make no mistake, she kept saying, Santa Barbara is still open for business.  Meaning of course, open for tourism.  Just like in Jaws.  The locals want to keep quiet about the shark so the tourists won’t get scared off. 

Like come on up, SB is open for business. Bring your asthmatic children and elderly and you can stay in a motel room with no air conditioning because the electricity keeps going off.  Amazing.

Really, if I had a BS meter tuned to local TV and radio reports on the “incident,” formerly none as an “event,” the thing would be measuring off scale.

If I hear once again about how “the community is coming together” I will puke.

Posted by Nick Tingle at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

 Yester eve for the first time since the fire started, the juice did not go off.

The fire appears to be moving away from us and was this morning 28% contained.  Mandatory evacuation orders for some areas have been removed and people are able to get back to their homes.

Fire Warnings for other areas have also been removed. Still the fire could continue to burn, at considerable distance from us, for a week or more up towards the north (away from us) and to the west.

Yesterday for the first time since the start of the fire we walked out to the bluffs.  Properly attired.

This morning we walked out again and got a call from Cousin Janet while sitting on the beach.  Very good to hear from her.  Thanks for the call, Janet.

We are very lucky with our local beach. No access road runs to it; one has to walk.  Given the aversion of many Americans to any form of exercise, the beach remains relatively people free.  Surfers hang out.  An occasional jogger passes, and people walk by with their dogs.

One cure for the obesity crisis might be to give every American family a large dog, one of the types that require at least 1 30 minute walk a day.

Perhaps I am returning to my normal aggravated state since I now seem to have the energy to have crabby thoughts about my fellow Americans.

 

 Properly attired.

Posted by Nick Tingle at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)