Happy Birthday
Derek

Yeah, I'm a day early.

Okay, everybody, tomorrow is Derek's twenty-ninth
birthday. Scoot on over there and leave him a nice greeting, please.

Eye Zap Results

It has been a month and a half since they zapped my left eye with the laser to seal off some leaking blood vessels. Today they took a look to see what they managed to accomplish.

First the gross results: the pressure in both eyeballs is down, reducing the danger of glaucoma, and my vision in my left eye has improved.

When the bright light was shined into my eye to illuminate my retina, I could see a cluster of small black spots, the only indication I've ever had of a change resulting from the laser job. The doctor says that the blood vessel has been cauterized successfully, reducing danger to my vision. I only have to keep my blood sugars under control and return in four months.

Breakdown? Or Censorship?

I was beginning to wonder

Yesterday I had a long entry in which I used the word "casino" several times. When I hit "Submit" on my Linux system, Xanga hung up on my system. I was unable to recover it. While it was a long entry for me, Derek has made several entries that were much larger. Why was mine rejected? Was Xanga having problems? Or was I being censored for my frequent use of a forbidden word, or perhaps for my link to a casino site, which might also be forbidden.

To test for the cause of the problem, I waited a few hours, then moved to the Windows machine that has the cable connection. First I made a short entry to make sure Xanga was responding. That entry was accepted. Then I attempted to duplicate my earlier work, first saving it to a text file, then hitting the "Submit" button. My system hung up.

Okay, censorship seemed likely. I waited until this afternoon to try again. Restoring my entry from where I had saved it, I once more tried to submit it. Wonder of wonders, this time Xanga posted my submission, including the link to the casino Web page. Not only that, attempting to check my spelling would hang my system, another symptom of Xanga malfunction.

I'm glad it turned out not to be a case of censorship ... this time.

Pala Brunch

The business of casinos is to allow you to donate your money through machines and games that offer the pretense of opportunity to win a fortune. Their business is not food. Offering food, especially good food at reasonable prices brings in customers, hopefully willing to be fooled into donating their money.

Las Vegas has been the West Coast gambling center. But the Indians of California, particularly of San Diego, are starting to steal their thunder ... and business. Casinos continue to sprout up here, getting bigger and better.

Last Thursday's Union-Tribune entertainment supplement had a list of all Sunday brunches in San Diego county. Several were at local casinos, most of which are concentrated in an area just east of the city. One stood out by being much farther away, Pala. According to the map generated on our computer, Pala was 54 miles away from our house, up Interstate 15, the last five miles being along Highway 76 (as in trombones), a winding two lane road through fairly wild dry mountainous country. The computer said the driving time was 1:06. With Cathy driving, it took considerably less time than that.

The weather was clear and hot. There was less traffic than I expected, perhaps because of the championship games, but those who were out were somewhat unskilled or impaired. When we turned onto Highway 76, we saw nobody else going our way for the first four miles, although there were plenty going the other way, some of whom had problems staying on the road. Nearing the casino, we caught up with a bunch of idiots who couldn't decide what to do. Entering Pala, one has the choice of a gas station, a large parking lot or a multilevel parking structure. The people ahead of us stopped in the approach, trying to decide what to do, blocking our entrance. Then, unfortunately, most of them decided to enter the parking structure.

The speed limit inside the parking structure was five MPH. The jerks ahead of us rarely reached two in the rare moments they were moving as they grabbed up every available parking space on the upward spiral. Cathy wasn't the only one who was feeling frustrated. Then we spotted someone leaving the perfect spot on the other side of the structure on the second floor. We hastened there at almost the speed limit and found ourselves parked right in front of the elevators.

As is appropriate for the last San Diego casino on the way to Las Vegas (or the first coming the other way), Pala was bigger than Viejas, the only other San Diego casino I have visited. It also seems brighter, livelier and friendlier. As in most casinos, the first thing you will notice is the strong smell of cigarette smoke. However, Pala has several no smoking casino areas, separated by glass walls and glass doors from the main casino, where the air is maintained fresh and clean. The air in the eight restaurants is kept clean, too, and you can always eat outside if you want to breathe pure mountain air.

The brunch cost $11.99 each. There was a long line to get in and people were slow to give up their tables. We had left home at 12:00; we were seated at about 13:00. There is one large island for desserts. That is where they seated us, at a table in the middle of the seating area, right next to the desserts.

The main buffet runs along two walls. Going from left to right, there were Mexican breakfast things, a burger and fries area with a live grill, Oriental specialties, an omelet station, traditional prefab breakfast goodies, seafoods, a long, complex selection of salads, soups, pizzas, dinner meats and veggies, a carving station for turkey and ham, and more meats and veggies.

I started with a breakfast burrito, a prefab cheese omelet, bacon, sausage, Oriental shrimp and ginger beef. Then I had a cup of egg drop soup.

Almost any restaurant can produce an adequate egg drop soup, though some manage to produce an inferior product. Few manage to produce a superior product, full of superior ingredients, especially when they are providing it in large volumes for long periods of time. Pala managed to produce a superior version of something so humble as simple egg drop soup.

Was everything perfectly prepared? No. The lamb chops were overcooked and didn't taste much like lamb. I'm particularly fond of lamb, so that bothered me. I didn't bother trying stuff like the pizza, hamburgers or French fries, not when there was so much good stuff available. What I did try ranged from good to superior but was mostly plain, hearty fare rather than anything fancy.

The coffee was good ... but hot. I couldn't wait for it to cool, so I added cream. Cathy said it tasted watered down with the cream in it, but I found it good enough. Cathy had both coffee and iced tea. I had an orange juice (I had asked for tomato juice but they don't serve that).

I walked around the dessert island to observe their offerings, which were many and varied, but I was too full to consider sampling anything. Cathy tried a custard thing she thought might be a creme brulle but which turned out to be flan instead. She said it was richer than it appeared.

Pala is a nice quiet, relaxing place. A river runs by it, with ducks and geese in the river ... and motorcycles on the other side were raising clouds of dust and a soft roar.

They are building a ten story hotel there. It is scheduled to open in summer of 2003.

Xanga Eats Another Entry

A while ago I made a big, long entry. When I hit "Submit" I kept getting timeout messages. Then I couldn't connect at all. I tried to save to a file but my stuff vanished anyway.

No, I Don't Sing It

Unlike Some Others in My Family

Spot the Cat has asked us why we write these Weblog things. She is collecting our answers in what she calls the Opera:

I've placed a copy of her logo and link at the left, for those who later show curiosity.

More years ago than I care to remember I started to write a novel. I posted it on the Internet, hoping to get some feedback. Almost nobody found it. Nobody left any useful comments.

Then I started to get messages from what later turned out to be a fictional character, Bianca, as she traveled through Italy. I could follow her fictional journey and the comments of her large gullible following. The volume of comments led me to believe I might be able to get people to examine my own fiction and produce some useful commentary.

It didn't work that way. Almost nobody was interested in my writing, particularly my novels, and those who showed some interest had nothing useful to say about them.

On the other hand, I have met many interesting people, people whose entries I enjoy reading and sometimes comment on. I consider them my anonymous friends ... and I rather enjoy the fact that they are anonymous. I don't particularly care to meet any of them face to face.

Why not, you might ask. For the same reason I would rather read a book than see the movie made from that book -- I tend to become much more emotionally involved in the movie, and it hurts.

Anyway, I started out looking for publicity and help for my writing and continue because I enjoy communicating with my friends.

That's the Brakes

I got a call Wednesday afternoon that the correct part had arrived from Detroit and the seat on my car had been fixed. I rushed over to pick the car up so I could drop it off at the dealer for an oil change and check-up. I was concerned about several things, one being a clicking noise I get when I apply the brakes gently at low speed.

They found nothing related to the clicking noise I reported, but the lining on the front brakes is down to less than 20% and nearing the end of its useful lifetime and the master brake cylinder is leaking. There are other problems, some of which I will take care of and others of which I will postpone for another time, but bad brakes on a vehicle worry me.

I told them to go ahead and do the brake work and some minor transmission work. The car has given us good service now that we have been taking better care of it than the previous owner did.

The big weakness of the Beretta of the late 1980 era is that whenever anything went wrong the computer would die and when the computer died nothing would work. The car became a hazard. And using cheap after-market parts, especially those made in the Orient, would kill the computer very quickly.

That's just one of the reasons I take it to a dealer instead of to my friendly neighborhood mechanic, no matter how skilled he may seem to be.

Cheese and Oil Fondues

Cathy didn't appreciate my jest. She had brought home a DVD to watch, and I called it "Elementary School Arithmetic Phobia" or "Fear of All Sums" for "Sum of All Fears". It was a good enough movie but, apparently, a deficient joke. It got ignored, anyway. That was last night ... or the night before. It all runs together.

Anyway, today I had to pick up some medicine at Costco. I decided to answer some email first. I didn't think much time had passed, but when I checked the clock it was 15:00. By the time I was ready to go, it was 15:45. My medicine was ready ... and expensive, being the new year renewals, before the deductible is paid on the insurance. While I was getting my stuff, Cathy wandered around the store, picking up a few necessities for dinner. We had a box of shrimp I had received free when I purchased something else but it needed to be deep fried. She wanted to do it in her fondue thingie.

Her set is versatile. It has a glass insert for melting cheese and a stainless steel bowl for hot oil, both of which can be used in succession. So, between Costco and Sam's Club, we got five kinds of bread to go with the cheese she already had and some raw shrimp to go with the breaded shrimp I already had.

To call it melted cheese is an oversimplification. It is a mixture of Swiss cheeses, fruit brandy and a bunch of other stuff, designed to melt at a fairly low temperature. I carved the bread into roughly cubical chunks about an inch each way, we stabbed them with long two-pronged forks and dipped them in the melted cheese. Very rich, but it requires frequent lubrication (we used Pinot Grigio). There was still plenty of bread (French, roasted garlic, dark rye, tough multi-grain and sourdough), plenty of cheese and plenty of wine when we pulled the glass insert and switched to the hot oil.

The oil was of grape seed flavored with basil and lemon. It turned out to be a particularly good combination for the raw shrimp and good for the breaded shrimp. Each breaded shrimp cooked up in under a minute; each raw shrimp took only seconds. We also had some breaded cubes of cheese. I only hazarded one because, rich as it was, I am lactose intolerant and had already overloaded on cheese. Cathy, who had several, was perplexed at my apparent dislike of the fried cheese, which really was tasty.

Such a meal cannot be rushed. Even with two of the long forks each, it took a while for each piece of food to cook, cool and be consumed. My fingers were burned repeatedly, but not my lips or tongue. Eating slowly allowed us to talk as we ate. We spoke of nothing important, but just chatting was the important thing. And a calm meal aids digestion.

It Seems Like More Than a Day

I'm hard pressed to tell you what I did today. I had curry for breakfast. I sat in front of a keyboard, staring at a monitor, for hours ... I'm not sure why. I had some cold corn muffins for lunch. I took a nap. I sat in front of the computer again. I came upstairs, ate a can of menudo and stared at the television set.

Cathy said the menudo smelled like hot rubber. I told her she was being kind. I thought it smelled like road kill. But it tasted good.

The doctor said Cathy's ribs aren't broken. Apparently he said nothing more. She has gone off to rent some movies that I don't particularly care to see.

Which reminds me: we went to see "LOTR: The Two Towers" last night. I would have enjoyed it tremendously but the sound was messed up, giving us bursts of silence up to a second long. This time I have a good idea what was cut from the picture and I'm looking forward to the expanded version on CD-ROM.

Farscape is back.

Another Day

Is Today Thursday?

It Seems Longer, Somehow

I didn't get much sleep last night. I tried to do something that should have been simple: format a CD-RW. The format seemed to be running, so I went off to supper. It was still running when I got back, not a good sign. I tried CTRL-ALT-DEL and killed the running task, which hung the system. After booting I decided to download an updated version of the CD writer program, mis-named Easy-CD Writer.

It was late, but the program wasn't that big. I entered my user information and started the download. The screen said it would take an hour and four minutes. It lied! It took just under three hours. I didn't bother trying the updated program out; it was after 2:00, so I called it a night.

This morning came early. I rushed, didn't finish my coffee, got to my doctor's appointment on time -- and walked into a madhouse. There was new hired help, including a new nurse practitioner, and they were trying to update all of their patient records. All of the seats were taken, five people were standing in the waiting room, a couple were standing in the hall outside the office and all of the examining rooms were occupied. According to other patients, they were running about two hours behind schedule. After providing the requested information (unchanged from before), they took me to the closet for screening and vitals (failing to get blood on two tries), then returned me to the waiting room to stand and wait for my turn.

There was nothing really remarkable about the examination by the NP except that I was told to stop eating rice, potatoes, pasta and other carbohydrates and to eat more veggies. I had to explain that I couldn't eat veggies because of my intestinal problems. Well, all that is left is meat.

They finally tapped my good vein and got the blood they needed.

I got my prescriptions updated -- but the pharmacy refused to fill them because dosage information wasn't included. Doh! I have to measure my blood sugar, then look the dosage up in a table. But the insurance company wants a dosage on the label before they will pay. I'll let the pharmacist, doctor and insurance rep fight it out -- I'll come back later when and if the prescriptions are ready.

I got my free meal from Home Town Buffet. When I sat down, I noticed that everybody else in the place seemed grim. It remained that way for about half an hour, until what appeared to be a Church group came waltzing in (almost literally). All of the ladies were dressed in fine white outfits, all of the men in dark suits -- and all were happy, all forty or so of them. Pretty soon everybody in the place was smiling.

Then I went to the airport and got Delia's scissors. There were two agents attending the counter, one girl who seemed totally uninterested in serving anybody and one big man (my size) with a smile on his face and a twinkle in his eyes. I was almost unable to explain my errand before he ran off to check in the office and he reappeared at a jog with the scissors, asked me for picture identification, then gave me the package. Then he asked me about my shirt, a Haband zippered Guayabera. I told him where on the Internet he could get ordering information. He asked if they were expensive and I was happy to reply in the negative.

We were both happy when I left. If that doesn't sound right, think about if for a while.

When I got home, Cathy was trying to make curry. She asked me to chop three onions for her, the first onion having given her problems. I chop onions and garlic really well; it is sort of my specialty now. Anyway, when it was all cooking away, she said she had to run off to her chiropractor and asked me to stir in the curry brick after fifteen minutes, a task that should take just five minutes, by which time she should be back. Well, I stirred for fifteen and she isn't back yet. It's good that I'm not hungry.