Category: FWIW

Posted on

Sharing Through the Generations

Something that interested me when I was a young lad, sitting and, yeh, staring at my maternal great grandmother (she was OLD, I tell ya! *heh*), particularly as she sharpened her pen knife and used it to trim her fingernails VERY short: onychorrhexis. Nah, I didn’t know what to call it as a six-or seven-year-old lad, but that’s one of the things that interested me: the ridges on her fingernails. *huh* Same as on my maternal grandfather’s hands, and. . . mine, now. (I have one sib I have noted who has the same issue: ridged nails that split easily.) So: trimming my fingernails (yeh, and toenails, now) very short has become a thing for me. Recently, however, I’ve had a really handy tool added to the task: a nail trimming device (a small, rechargeable rotary grinding tool) soundly rejected by the dog. Works for me, though.

Oh, med resources list a lot of different causes for the issue, but only three of them seem to apply to me: heredity, aging, and arthritis. *shrugs* If I can live with joint pain, I can live with this, especially since I have naproxen sodium for the one and this neat lil grinding tool for the other.

Posted on

Things Tend to Work Out. . .

. . .or not.

For example, as I walk, my left-right strides are about equal, despite the fact that my left leg is longer than my right leg. It kinda works out, cos my left foot is shorter–missing part of the heel, as a result of the same incident that caused my left leg to be a bit longer than my right leg.

It just kinda worked out that way. Cool.

Posted on

Annoyingly Stupid Expression #4,736 Used by Writers with NO Imagination Whatsoever

“[he, she, they] turned on [his, her, their] heel[s]” Sometimes “spun” (or even more stupidly, “span“) is subbed in for “turned,” as if that makes the expression any less abysmally stupid.

THIMK!

#gagamaggot NO THEY DID NOT. NONE OF THE CHARACTERS THESE WRITERS HAVE “TURNING” ON THEIR “HEELS” ARE GINGER ROGERS, FRED ASTAIRE, OR GENE KELLY! Heck even searching for those masters of popular terpsichorean displays trying to turn up even ONE instance of any of them doing it was too tedious a task to complete, although there are youboob videos demonstrating in excruciating detail how difficult the maneuver is for even accomplished dancers. For example:

And even then, it’s no singleton action. *smh* I file this with all the other annoyingly stupid laziness writers abuse to break suspension of disbelief. So, wee lil tip to lazy writers: unless your target audience has been playing with autolobotomy kits, don’t have your characters “turn on their heels” unless they are accomplished ballroom dancers, mmmK?

Posted on

Side Effect or Par for the Course?

The second, I am quite sure. *smh* Oh, what am I talking about? Old injuries–30, 40, 50, and even 60 years old: long healed. But. Nowadays, the slightest lil thing can seem to evoke reminders of broken bones, interesting wounds, torn ligaments, etc., making minor missteps into weeks long re-recoveries, at times.

*sigh* It’s not a side effect of age but simply my body “remembering” old insults far, far better than I would prefer. *heh* As long as the 59-year-old old skull fracture doesn’t start issuing updates, methinks I can weather the littler things like the lesson on watching my feet around horses. . . ?

Posted on

Amazon Shipping

The new (to America’s Third World County™) Amazon shipping/delivery service is pretty cool in some ways, but the only person making deliveries that I have met ain’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. I very much like the tracking map. When I saw I was next up, and that the delivery person’s location was on the street just above us (no houses between us and the street, clear view), I stepped out and saw the driver just sitting there, facing the wrong direction, apparently trying to locate our street, then drive off north, away from our location. Five minutes later, here they came. (Must have been relying on Google Maps, which is remarkably inaccurate around here.) Okay! Finally found us! Then, picked up small package from seat of pickup truck and started hunting around for the second package due in today (which the tracking app said was on the truck). Six minutes this time. Apparently, Amazon offers no training on prganizing a loadout for delivery. *shrugs*

Still, it was a pleasant experience, and the delivery was quicker than Prime deliveries in the past recent months.

Posted on

Filed Under “Weird and Weirder”

Woke up yesterday (Saturday) with pain on a scale of 1-10 coming in about 9 on my left foot. Ball of foot and great toe could not even take a sock w/o pain lancing up my leg from there. Swollen and red. Close examination revealed a small hair–looked like an eyelash–embedded on the side of the ball of my left foot. Pulled it out w/tweezers. Yep. The epicenter of the pain located right there. How it became embedded in my foot I cannot say.

Lotsa heat therapy and swelling and pain abated enough to sit comfortably (well, moderately, as long as nothing touched my toe/ball of foot). Was able to rest last night and swelling abated along with pain, and toe/ball of coot almost normal size. A little walking around in stocking feet fixed that, though, and although the pain is still less, swelling has rebounded a little.

I’ll just have to see how it goes, I guess.

Just weird.

Posted on

It’s the Little Things #5,392

Of no real significance, I offer a wee quirk, FWIW:

Some things I do in sixes (or fractions/multiples of six), some in eights (or fractions/multiples), some in nines (etc.). Some things “require” I do them in sevens, and a very few in thirteens (no multiples, just thirteen, period). There are also certain “calming” patterns I trace–with a pen/pencil on paper, on my right or left thumbnails, or simply between my ears. These always involve nines and are drawn in one continuous line, with no trace-overs. (Patterns derived from these can be found, at times, in my private “Non Compos Mentis Coloring Book”–a collection of doodles made during boring lectures in grad school.)

These, along with visualizing numbers as having places in 3D space and colors associated with different number “families,” are just things I have done since childhood, for the most part.

Posted on

“Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for Western civilization as it commits suicide.” ~ James Burnham

Burnham wrote that back in 1964, IIRC. . . and I do. See: Suicide of the West, James Burnham

Some folks are finally awaking to that reality:

“A Recipe for Cultural Suicide”—Peter Boghossian on Woke Ideology and the Case for Defunding Universities”

Bug *DUH* quote from a soi disant “liberal” who has FINALLY recognized the clue bat beating him about the head and shoulders

“We can’t just keep funding people who are playing in make-believe-land, cranking out information to inform public policy that’s completely divorced from reality. It’s a recipe for cultural suicide,” says Peter Boghossian, assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University. . . “

Oh, “we” can indeed keep funding them, but it is cultural, societal, and national suicide to do so. That probably isn’t enough to stop funding the toxic waste production, though. And when we reap TEOTWAWKI, as woke dumbasses seem to desire, the woke dumbasses will just have to suffer the results of their stupidity (and our lack of will) along with the rest of us, because we have allowed far more mob rule (democracy) than the Founders in their wisdom specified, and

“In a democracy (‘rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history will be the majority and will dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance.” — third world county™’s corollary to Santayana’s Axiom

Posted on

Little Joys

It’s been a little over two years since lil rescue kitty became “Pixel,” and the scarring from a rather horrible wound from the right side of her mouth up to her right ear is almost indiscernible, now, and she has recently started allowing–even “requesting” (demanding, more like *heh*) petting along that side of her face as well.

Her “cooing” is still as much fun to hear, and she sometimes now does so proactively, to lure in some more “pets”–walks up “cooing” and “assumes the position.” 😉