#IWSG - JANUARY 2019 - CHECK IN - A NEW ME??? I CERTAINLY HOPE SO!

Here we are at the start of a new year. 2019 and I certainly hope it is better than the last three. Well hell, for me, I'd like it to be better than the last thirteen, but I really can't quibble. I'm no longer married to the guy who got the gf when I was hospitalized, so there's that. I have a roof over my head and food on the table and will apparently, have slightly more of it this coming year.

Now, if I can just start remembering things; like, days of the week, where I'm supposed to be and where I've laid certain paperwork that just MUST be filled out right away! Trying to set and keep these goals also involves trying to set and keep goals for writing. I've been writing some of the things I've remembered for a dear, dear friend about the Roman Empire during the Imperial Age - fact-checking all the way, to make sure I remember names and dates - and this has been a lot of fun. She's enjoyed the stories and it's fun to do.

I'm going to continue in this vein, but am going to expand and write more fiction this year, too, Juneta, look out! Anyway, I want to wish every one a very happy and prosperous and productive 2019. Happy #IWSG'ing! 

#ROW80 1ST QTR 2016 – POST1 – GOALS

This is gonna be one of those “goals, schmoals” kinda posts, because Jim died last May, and other than playing in the symphony, practicing and playing lots and lots of Runescape and making sure I have a viable clan (we will be eleven years old this month), I just really haven't felt like doing a whole hell of a lot of anything. I know that grieving takes time and that we all grieve in our own way, but this is a bit different.

Jim was not the love of my life, nor had we been together all that long, but he was a dear and cherished friend; someone I met when I was homeless and we took damned good care of one another. We recognized the humanity in one another, although we were worlds apart. He came from a very bucolic and rough background; worked all his life and could barely read, but he had common sense and compassion. A rarity seen in this world. He had been treated very badly by his spouse and ended up in a place he never belonged and had no way to cope with it. He was healthy enough when I met him, but there was a deep sadness there, we all could see. All I could do was mitigate it for him and make his final days, days of fun and laughter and let him know that he had friends around him who did love him.

When someone close to you dies, I don't think you can't help but reflect on all the other losses in your life and there have been so many in mine. I am alone, and there are times when I think I cannot bear the loss of one more friend, one more acquaintance, see the name of someone I may have known tangentially without completely losing it, but I'm not built that way, just as I am not built to knuckle under to any kind of force, or sickness, or malaise or illness of the mind. I am so much like my mother, but on steroids, in that sense. I possess strengths I didn't even know I had; but, I am alone. As was my mother. So, I guess it is how we are made and our destiny. The fault lies in our stars.

For my part? I was treated horribly, as has been discussed in this blog by an ex-husband, when I was at the very least, at my most vulnerable. Screaming at me to "get a goddamned job!" when I was totally blind, with congestive heart failure, I had to endure his horrendous insults, making no secret of the fact that he had a girl friend and accusing me of murdering a sick and dying feline. This is just the tip of that ice berg. I fled the home, knowing that I would have to in all likelihood take a lesser settlement. I still cannot see well enough to drive and although I can play, I cannot play as much as I would like to, because I cannot drive. I have a motor disorder, likely exacerbated by his treatment, akin to PTSD and my life is diminished due to his greed and his need to stick his dick in any old thing. The irony is that Bill Nunnally works in a Social Worker-type environment for Teri Saunders at HeartlandforChildren.org, yet he will have little to do with the “clients”. When he was interning, I did much of the running around to see the young girls when they were released. You forgot about that, didn't you, Lithia?

I have no agenda in releasing all of this information other than setting the record straight. I had my faults as well. I drank too much. Who wouldn't. That shit ended, when I left the homestead, but I never pretended to be something I wasn't. But this post isn't about that; it's about goals.

Right now, I'm not sure, where I am. I have been editing the original posts that I wrote for “Homeless Chronicles in Tampa” when I created the blog and I would like to publish those as an e-book. I've thought about dabbling in some fiction, but that is hard for me, and I'm not really creative enough to come up with some of these great plots, like Alex Cavanaugh, orJemima Pett or Damyanti G. So, I'm not sure where I'm going with this. I do know that I need to write more, as I did in the early days of #ROW80, when Andi-Roo first suggested I get into this, so I'm going to go back to what works.

Write a post a day, see what happens. It can't help but sharpen my writing craft and maybe along the way, I'll come up with some ideas for flash fiction or something. Who knows? 

#IWSG (and ROW80) 1ST QUARTER 2015 - POST 2 – HACK JOB

Now that the Christmas trees have been dragged to the curb (or kerb for proper English spellers) and all the fireworks – well, mostly here on Nebraska Avenue, 33605 – are well and truly lit and exploded, although we shall be celebrating the beginning of 2015, well into March, unless that's the sound of AK-47s I hear in the distance, it's time to go back review some of the major craziness that once again, passes for just another day here in da 'hood.

I'm proud to say that THIS year, I didn't contribute to it for a change; at least, not in a way that caused anyone to bleed, or run screaming from the grocery store, although that one would-be mugger doesn't count and he had it coming to him, anyway. Alex still doesn't know what I did to him, and I'll never tell. It had to do with some of my more serious crazy ju-ju that I am able to summon at a whim, in a manner befitting Johnny Storm of Marvel's “Fantastic Four”; a sort of Flash-on, Flash-off thing that dowses itself when I'm no longer in harm's way, or like "woge-ing" if you're a Wesen in NBC's "Grimm". By that time, said wanna-be mugger was two blocks down the road.

courtesy: Grimm Wiki                                               

A fully-woged "Klaustreich", scars and all.

No, this past year just saw everything from the Sharpie Lady to my Fairy Opera Singer Neighbor, who truly cannot help herself. Sharpie Lady has a particular derangement, which lurks just below the surface of a cheerful countenance and it's difficult for me to really tell if she's delusional or just plain cheap. This is partly due to the fact that her English is worse than my Spanish, and she sells things out of her house, that are mostly junk with the most outrageous prices attached to them. Once, she showed me a bag full of children's beads, the kind that have both a male and female end, in different colors. You push them together and make bracelets and necklaces for kids out of these things. I played with them for about 5 minutes once. I was a crappy girl-child and was much more interested in blowing things up with my boy cousins.

These are about the most boring toys on earth, I think.

Anyway, she had these beads mixed in with a lot of junk and costume jewelry that wouldn't have looked good on a 2-dollar whore, which we have plenty of around here, and were probably the source of her collection. The Tampa Police Department have a habit of chasing the prostitutes north on Nebraska Avenue, past, say Hillsborough Avenue, or Fowler, and they'll stay up there for a while, until the local businesses complain, and then, the TPD, will run them south down past MLK, Junior. Boulevard. They'll migrate back down here, for 4 or 6 months. When I lived in the homeless shelter, there were three of us, who used to sit out back in the driveway in lawn chairs and watch the police run stings and take bets on which john would get popped. It was better than tee vee. The only thing better, were the Friday Night Fights in the mens' house. We bet on who would bleed and cry first; I could've taken them down. Good times, good times!

But, I digress. Sharpie Lady wanted like seventy-five dollars for this entire bag of junk and I thought, “No way. No one knows where it's been, and most of it's in a tangled ball of cheap metal, tears and regret. No thanks.” I didn't think all that poetic stuff; I just made that up. I'm trying with middling success here to be a writer and failing, because now, I'm just being self-aware. Gah!

I love Sharpie pens, I just don't think they're for drawing on your face, when sober.

So, on to my neighbor, who is really, well, different. She is beyond sweet and wouldn't hurt anyone, or take advantage of a soul. She herself on the other hand, has been damaged and taken badly advantage of in her much younger life and it harmed her brain and her body. She was brutally gang-raped and beaten horribly, and left for dead. She somehow managed to survive, crawl to a house, where she was given help. She really remembers nothing of her past life and pretty much lives in the here-and-now. She's about 64, and has been taken in and been cared for by Bernardo, our handy-man. He has watched over her for years. When he's off working, she somehow gravitated to me, originally, and she'll just come in the house, unannounced, now and then. She's always welcome.

She fancies herself an Opera singer, but has had no formal training, but she knows I am a professional musician; she hears me practice and she likes that. I make a HUGE fuss over her when she sings: “BRAVA! ENCORE!” and ask for another aria, even if I don't understand it. She's getting her sing out, and expressing herself and that's good. She's one of the several good, harmed souls that lives in this area. But, we all have a certain feyness, or oddity. I think because of my vision and my essential tremor, and now, lack of sensory perception, I “feel” things that may not be there - although, my mother always abjured me to try and keep at least one foot in this world. I've “seen” things in this old house for years, and not out of the corners of my eyes. I've completely lost my sense of smell, which was great this summer, when something or heaven forbid, someone died under the house. The police couldn't find anything, but I am told the smell was horrific. Thank God, I only had to hear about it.

Anyway, I digress once again; my Fairy Opera Princess showed up one day in my “computer lab” here in my house, recently to ask about ghosts. I was trying to type a string of code, that was being particularly stubborn, and then I looked at her, and. . . bear in mind, she's a tiny gnome of a woman; I myself am only 5' 4” tall, and she is probably 4' 7”. She has long, brown hair, streaked with some gray, as she is 64 years old. She was wearing some white dress, with a filmy, transparent, gauzy sheath over it, that was trimmed, like a feather boa. She had on a flamboyant hat with many colorful flowers, interwoven into the brim – she has many, many hats that she spiffs up this way and adds flowers and spangles and tinsel to, to brighten them up – and she was, of course, holding a fairy wand that she had made, a shiny metal, sparkly wand, that she had glued a pink, puffy ball to the end of it. Because, naturally, all Fairy Princesses should have Fairy Wands. I have one, too, but it's a different kind of Fairy Wand. It keeps me from falling into the street and on uneven sidewalk.

courtesy: fanpop.com

I don't remember if my Fairy Princess had wings; I don't believe she did. But, she did have a beautiful hat. She always, always has hats!

I looked at her for a moment very seriously and I totally Scoobied this and asked, “Are they the shouting kind, or the whispering kind?” She kind of chewed the inside of one cheek for a minute, thought and said, “The whispering kind, but there has been shouting. . . and that was the neighbor upstairs.” We both rolled our eyes, because we both knew who she meant. She does have some grasp on reality. I said, “Well, for the whispering kind, they tend to hang out more near the windows. What I would suggest is putting a dish with some table salt, if you don't have Sea or Kosher, down on the floor, by each window. Not a lot, just a little. That should do it. If that DOESN'T work, try putting dishes of water down by the windows. But, give the salt a try, and try it for a few days, okay?”

I was looking directly at her and she at me, as I said this. I took it as seriously as she asked it. She nodded her head, and said she would try it, and off she went. Sometimes, what people really want is just validation, that their existence has some kind of meaning to someone outside of themselves. She knows she has problems, she knows her man sometimes loses patience with her, but by and large, Bernardo is kind, kind, kind to her and she will come over sometime, just for a hug. Really, it's that simple. Anyway, her whispering ghosts have left for the nonce. They may return and bring friends, around here, who knows?

I have been carted out of here a few times in an ambulance (twice, I don't even remember; this was during my psychotic break of the famous “Let's Celebrate Mental Illness Month of March 2012”, of which there will be NO encores!) and twice for essential tremor-related heart things (prior to diagnosis and treatment) and she has come out and “sung me off” every time. Embarrassing, until you remember, that the EMT, Police and the Fire Department are all cheering her on. So, you have to love it, and her. Thankfully, since I began treatment in June of 2013, I am healthier and stronger every day. It just took 10 years of self-medicating, then searching, discarding, running up blind alleys, dealing with complete shits and morons before finally finding the very right doctors who completely understand what I'm about and it turns out, I'm not all that unique.

Anyway, there is a kind of mania that exists around here; witness the dude who thought his Hogwart's Cloak of Invisibility would keep the SWAT team from finding him two blocks south of me, a few months back. That wasn't a really special day around here. No more so than the drunk that James at Family Dollar and I played some kind of nightmare Tag (I'm it! Run!) with in the Parking Lot as the drunken fool first lunged for James than myself, as we attempted to keep him busy until the TPD arrived. It takes a special kinda drunk and stupid to run after a partially-sighted woman, with a cane and miss her every time he lunges at her. James and I had a good laugh over that. Another dumbass. Or maybe, he was the same dumbass who got tagged by the SWAT team a few days later, who knows. It's hard to keep up with the stupid around here, sometimes.

But, I myself am either STILL prone to the madness that prevails at the corner of Dumbass Boulevard and Batshit Insane Avenue, or my own brand of insanity has HARMONIZED with it. I hate split ends; hate 'em with a passion. I used to have a really good hairdresser that I could walk to, but she left over a year ago, and I have just kind of put up with the mess on my head, courtesy of lots of mousse, #8 super strength hair spray and clips. My hair grows pretty fast, and after the last round of medications and when I had my marathon stay in the hospital in 2010, I had completely whacked it off, so that it was very short. It had grown out again, and then I found this hair-stylist, who was very good. I could take 3 buses to “Fantastic Sam's” but that's such a pain in the ass for just a haircut. I tried the haircutter's across the street from my psychiatrist's office, but the Hondurans there, practically pulled every hair in my head out and I didn't like the way they cut my hair. It fell in steps and I thought it was horrible. 

courtesy: bajiroo.com                

Okay, so it didn't look THIS bad, but is was pretty awful; at least to me. Then, there were those darned split ends to consider. . . 

So, I took the desperate measure of consulting the innerwebz; a life-hack or a DIY. Being the careful sort that I am, when it comes to my hair, I grabbed the first thing that came up, when I Googled “cutting your own hair, DIY” and hastily skimmed the contents. I didn't have an “elastic band”, whatever that is, so I took some twine and doubled it over a few times, and made a knot in it, so I had a loop. I “dampened” my hair, per instructions, under my bathroom sink, but my head didn't really fit, so I kinda combed and brushed all the water through my hair, and then put the twine on it, and looked in the mirror. I looked like some kind of hellish gnome, gone wrong; red hat, rather than green, or a conehead, only minus the flesh.

Another quick skim of the DIY page: “sharp, barber shears, or scissors”. Rummage in junk drawer and find “scissors” part of that description, only “blunt-ended”, like for kids' paper scissors and Dollar-Store. Okay! Good to go.

There was something something about cutting “into” the mass, or lump of hair you had on the other side of the twine, but this was clearly not working. I think the correct term would be “sawing” and after 30 minutes of this, with the twin slipping and becoming uneven and sore wrists, I had one of the shittiest mullets that was ever seen in 1986. Unfortunately, this is 2014. The short part kind of ended somewhere around where my skull ended and where my vertebrae began and I was thinking of rummaging around in that junk drawer to see if maybe there was an ax in there somewhere , so that I could separate the two, but I decided to wait a few days. Three days later, I hacked off the longer 4 inches so that it doesn't look quite so mullet-y, and it will grow out, but I fear there is a gouge somewhere back there amongst all the curls. That's fine, because I do have curly hair and it hides a lot of sins; usually the venal kind. I'm afraid this is a mortal sin, but I still have my go-to mousse, #8 Suave Industrial Strength Hair Spray and Hair Clips in Black for those concerts that are coming up. Thank God my hair grows fast. Around here? I fit in; I look just like everyone else and that is fine with me! Happy New Year's!

My Goals this quarter and for this year are to stay sane and try to write more, just to get my writing "chops" back in shape. I fear I am in for a tough year, not for me physically, but emotionally, and I must stay creative and stay engaged to stay strong. Now, I sound like Lance Armstrong; ick. But you know what I mean. I am also coming up on 100k views of this here blog, which will be a milestone. I turn 60 at the end of 2015, which is another milestone, and I am going to begin planning my traveling itinerary for the next two years. It's time for me to put some mileage on these feet. 

#ROW80 3RD QTR 2014 – POST 1 – STUPID COMPUTER TRICKS, NOTES FROM DA 'HOOD, COMMITMENT

I was working on a really nasty trojan infestation at the time of my last post. What I thought was going to be a quick fix, turned out to be a giant hairy mess, with cooties. On an HP laptop, dual core, Windows 7 Premium, that my neighbor had bought for 200.00. Her niece had borrowed it and done some OOvOO and Skype and the usual kid stuff, WITHOUT benefit of the new Microsoft Security Essentials package (which right off the bat, has me asking a million damn questions, such as, doesn't MS already HAVE its own Defender and Firewall for Windows? If so, then why do they need this add-on? They do, don't they, but they don't work worth a SHIT, so MS came up with an app that is like malwarebytes or AVG, or Norton, or MacAfee). A note here, I know I'm in for a laff riot, when a user hands me a laptop with all of that installed and running, or trying to run. Pick two and stick with them, preferably malwarebytes (the free version is just fine) and AVG – BUY the licensed version. MacAfee and Norton are terrible and Norton is so horrible, I used to call it back in the day when it was “Disc Doctor”, “Kevorkian Disk Doctor” it's that horrid. It was known to cause instant suicide if even placed in the proximity of hard drives. MacAfee uses a weak algorithm; stay away from it.

Now that I'm through ripping on all the hideousnesss for a minute, let me tell you what you need to know if you come up with this little gem: f5f5dc.com. Find the nearest cliff and jump off. Just kidding. If you run a pingback on that bastard, it's going to take you to a 404 error screen, along with your quickly evaporating store of patience, so GOOGLE this bastard: "f5f5dc.com" for this:

Bad juju. Anything east of the Iron Curtain is pretty much bad juju. Don't get me wrong. I do a lot of work with the Russians on SAT@home and they are my second largest readership, but for some reason, the majority of trojans and malware come from east of the ole' Iron Curtain. Anyway, this nasty little booger snuck in with our old friend JAVA, on my friend's laptop and is called an “exploit” because JAVA is designed to be “exploitable”. You can read that article here. JAVA is evil and should be killed, buried and drawn-and-quartered ASAP.

This guy helpfully supplied an ENTIRE copy of his what his O/S was trying to do and I isolated the 27 instances of the call commands to HOST or devices/servers outside of his laptop. I had more than 50 such instances on the laptop I was working on and by that time, very little space for any operations by the PC itself. Maddening.

All that aside, trying to run Restore after running malwarebytes on my friend's laptop didn't fix the problem, because the site, or non-site f5f5dc.com is set up to download a little number called tesch.b9 (a true reiterative trojan-high level threat), which causes that laptop to “call” or to try and open numerous browsers via ports, only it truncates that operation and never goes any farther than launching the svchost.dll32 file. Not once, not twice, but as many iterations as the computer will allow until the system is so bogged down, you cannot do anything. At. All. Needless to say, this threw me; I'd never seen it, and when I looked in Task Manager under “Processes” I saw 50 of these svchost.dll32 files and had not yet opened a browser although I was connected to the internet.

I rebooted into Safe Mode without the Internet and saw the various programs, which I removed via Control Program; Adobe Reader, Java, SpyWareBlaster(?), OovOO, but left Skype. I restarted and tried to start a normal session and got the same nonsense. Shit. I was left with nothing but the System Repair, as if the computer had just left the factory to fix it. I found this information from a website called “Tech Support Guy”, found here.

For John Holton, and a few others out there who asked, if you run the malware bytes and the system is behaving properly, but calling for new browser sessions, the best instructions in the world are to be found here and make tons of sense. For everyone else, if you're on a PC, and even if you have itunes, or whatever, you need to seriously reconsider whether you want to keep running JAVA. I haven't run JAVA since 2011, and I have 4 systems, and have not had to reload anything. But, it really sucks if you lose all of your data files, especially your pictures and your videos. Do yourself a huge favor and check out Dropbox and Synch; they're free for the first 5 gigs and you can safely store your LOLcats, recipes for onion dip and pictures of little Johnny dropping Gampy's dentures in the toilet.

I'm still batting .1000 for fixes, but the trojans get nastier and meaner and I can only do so much after the fact. Someone needs to bring me a nice relational database problem, or something; this living on the edge has got to stop!

Speaking of living on the edge, Alex and I rode the bus recently; actually we ride it all the time, but every so often, you get lucky and something, or somebody note-worthy happens along. It was a Friday morning and already in the 90s and muggy. We were sitting in the bus shelter, on Nebraska Ave., 33605, waiting to ride uptown to some of the stores, when this gentleman appeared, and I use that term the way in which it was intended. This was a gentle soul. He had on sandals, nondescript pants and shirt and a cane. His long, flowing hair was blond and his eyes were blue. He had a long, long, well-kept beard; it was a patriarchal beard. His gaze appeared fixed on some other world. Alex was sitting across from me, and this gentlemen stood between us and a bit to the rear of the bus shelter, so that I could see Alex's eyes. He caught mine, and quickly looked at our gentle soul and said “Hallelujah!” just about the time I noticed that our gentleman was carrying, besides his cane, some kind of wooden stake with a point on the end.

Buddy Jesus wasn't riding the bus that day. I can just hear my  Ma; "You are SO going to Hell, Mary Louise!" and I can hear my Daddy laughing; I was the one who told the Episcopal Priest, who had been invited to Sunday Dinner in a fit of ecumenicism by my mother, "Hmmm, Catholic Lite, All the Ritual, Only Half the Guilt." That's not even my line, but I'd heard it somewhere; my mother spent that lunch with a hideous fixed grin on her face, but it didn't stop her from inviting starving protestant Pastors, Rabbis and various leaders of other faiths over for Sunday dinner. We probably had a snake-charmer or a Warlock, in the crowd somewhere.

I turned my head away from our gentle soul and hissed “I am so going to beat the shit out of you, Alex!” and spent the next seven minutes until the bus arrived trying not to look at anyone or anything. When the bus finally DID arrive, forty-three eternities later, Alex and I kindly let the gentle soul get on first. I burst out, “What is wrong with you? You were making fun of “Jesus, the Vampire Killer! I can't take you anywhere!” The last part of this was drowned out by the 'hood, which decided to drive by and share its music with us, at that precise moment. Yo! BOOM BOOM! Cracklezzz! Yo! BOOM BOOM! Cracklezzz! Yo! BOOM BOOM! Cracklezzz! Yo! BOOM BOOM! Cracklezzz! (The cracklezzz being the part of the sub-woofers that ripped itself in two and died a few years ago, I guess, back when our 'banger was livin' large.) All of this happenin' sound is crammed into a crappy little Toyota Corolla, the car of choice for 'bangers on the go, complete with doors and hood in different colors than the body. The rear sags on one end and the car is belching some ferocious smoke. The driver is either so short, all you can see is the top of his head, or the springs all broke in his driver's seat, OR, he's got the bitch leaned back in a nearly-prone position; he is the personification of phat. The traveling rap show leaves us, just as we get on the bus. Well, my day has just been made.

Everything else around here has been the ole' same-o same-o, minus the knife fights. We still have to pick Señor Cerveza up out of the street now and then, but he's a fixture; at least we know where he is. There's a new restaurant opening up, just to the west of us. At least I assume it's a restaurant; they're moving in tables for four and chairs to match. I can't tell from the décor what the cuisine will be; just so long as they're not serving cat. Just kidding.

Mama, doing the second-best thing that cats do. The first thing is eating.

This is enough of a “debut” for me on what is the eve of #ROW80 3RD QTR 2014. I am committing myself to posting EVERY DAY as I once did when I started #ROW80. I do love to write and getting back into the harness, I know, will make me a better writer and I hope, better equipped to dealing with editing “Music of the Spheres”. I've been trying this whole editing thing, and as one who has always slapped words down onto a page and STET, I don't have this whole patience thing down, nor do I have much of a filter; too much second-guessing.

I took a bit of time off from any social media, which I hope has not hurt me too much. It can be overwhelming, and dealing with home stuff has taken priority; JC's heart attack was a huge wake-up call for him and everything was thrown off-kilter. His health has been much better of late, but I am also a “lone-wolf” in the sense that I get burnt out on people; even online. Blame my Asperger and bipolar, but I always feel I get lost in the shuffle and that is more habitual thinking on my part, and I've been practicing self-affirmation, and asserting oneself. I did a lot of that when I was in the homeless shelter, but that's a whole other skill set, one in which you NEVER back down, even if, as von Clausewitz stated, “war is (or becomes) the continuation of politics”. Obviously, this is much different and besides, I have always been comfortable being alone. But, too much of it is not healthy; I don't want to end up like the weirdo cat-lady.

At any rate, I feel renewed and ready to join in the fun, conversation and camaraderie with other writers, and especially my pals at #ROW80. There's also #NaNoWriMo looming, and I have to figure out what in the hell I'm going to write for this; I hope I'm not a one-trick pony.

#ROW80 1ST QTR 2014 – POST 5 – SUNDAY CHECK IN – A REALLY EARLY CHECK IN

I thought I'd just scribble down a few words here before I go to bed for my Sunday check in. You see, it's 5:00 a.m. on the east coast of the United States, and here I am, the infernal bat, unable to sleep. I haven't written much about my Parkinsonism, or my e.t. or essential tremor or “Parkinson's Lite” as I call it, because the disease doesn't have me, I have it, and by the throat if you will. It does not define me. It does however, have its moments of just pure meanness. It won't kill me, although before Primodone, there were times when I wished it would and in haste.

What it doesn't do is let me sleep well. I have never been a restful sleeper and I have never been a cheerful morning day-type person. My mother was. 5:30 in the goddamned A of M, she'd be up, perking coffee and singing with the birds and I wanted to go out and practice my non-existent skill of skeet-shooting on her and her little feathered friends. So, we differed in that particular behavior.

I've always been a night owl and as I grew to adulthood, music, besides being the love of my life, was a great career, seeing as how the industry, such as it is, had the decency to never start a rehearsal before 10 a.m. Concerts were always in the evenings, or afternoons in the Opera, and when I worked in IT, I usually worked late afternoon shifts. It's been decades since I've had to live by an alarm clock, and thank the Christ, the few times I've actually had to get up for something, it was usually an operation or some medical test, that was going to render me comatose, so I wouldn't care how miserable I felt until 3:00 p.m.

I like to tell people, “Yeah, I get up at the crack o' noon,” but sometimes, it's as late as 3:00 or 4:00. When I first started taking Primodone for my Parkinsonism, I was sleeping almost around the clock. I thought, “Gee, this is terrific! No more tremors, but then how would I know? I'm not awake enough to figure out if they're there or not.”

As my body adjusted to the drug, I began to sleep more like a normal person, or at least I was hibernating less. I'm not sure what it was. But, I found that as I did more and more, I still needed that 8 to 10 hours of sleep; that helps tremendously in keeping the tremors at bay. The “inner core” tremor is the most horrible feeling in the world, and when I'm tired or anxious, it comes back. Sleeping, and eating, walking and exercising help all of that. I still have no sense of smell, which on Nebraska Avenue, may be a good thing, when we have one of our ferocious rains and the sewers back up. I really didn't miss that lovely aroma over the summer.

As I walk and continue to get stronger, I amaze myself. I am not supposed to be able to walk briskly for three blocks carrying 19 pounds of crap from the Dollar Store, but I did just that very thing today. Because I have COPD, and have had the lung function tests and was told that I had a lung capacity of 43%, I thought, well, shit, some day I am going to be on oxygen, but now, I wonder.

I stopped smoking over 3 years ago, and I take Spiriva religiously. Because of our stupid health care system in Florida and the United States, even though the State of Florida and Hillsborough County spent upwards of 500,000.00 dollars getting me back on my feet and walking in 2010, when I was awarded my SSDI, I had to wait 2 years to get anything resembling health care coverage, and I was unable to have anything done about my COPD, so left untreated, it worsened. Thank you, Rick Scott, you prick.

Well, now, I find, that after nearly a year of treatment for my COPD, my lung capacity has increased to the point where I run out of my Spiriva inhalant before I run out of lung capacity, which means my lung capacity has INCREASED, which I do not think is supposed to happen. But, there are lots of things that have happened to me, that were not supposed to have happened; per my physical therapist at TGH, it was unlikely that I would walk again. I'm all over the place now and stronger than I have been in decades. I think it's reverse psychology. DON'T tell me I cannot do something, because I will prove you wrong every goddamned time. I'm not a quitter; I have the capacity to think strategically and think about things and stick with something for the long haul. It's the persistence of persevering over time.

I find it to be the same thing with writing. Crappy passage? Go back to it later. If something is not working, I think for me, I need to leave it alone and go to another well for inspiration and come back to whatever my particular roadblock is later. If I continue to frustrate myself, it just gets worse and I lose my voice. With that in mind, I've found that it makes the editing process a little easier, but messier, as I am not the most organized person in the world.

So, that's my check in. It wasn't the best week, but I got something done. I hope everyone had a good week. It was freezing cold here in Tampa, and astonishingly enough, it made me yearn for the frozen tundra of Michigan and Lake Superior with my Daddy. Ah, he was something else.

#ROW80 1ST QTR 2014 – #IWSG 1ST WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 2014 - POST 2 & 3 FLASHBACK TO THE EIGHTIES, NINETIES, AUGHTS AND BEYOND

Tonight, while running around on Runescape, which has been a tremendous amount of fun, since the release of Runescape 3 and the EOC, or Evolution of Combat, I’ve re-discovered that part of the contemporary music landscape that was so spectacular in the early Eighties. From about 1982 to about 1988 or 1989, there was a rich variety of popular styles that were cutting edge and fun. It was an eye-opener for me, because once I began college and started playing the viola in earnest, I pretty much had turned off every other form of music, except what would be termed Classical, i.e., music written from the late 1600s to the 20^th century, but for symphonies, or chamber music, or smaller groups, and also, solo work for the viola.

 

So, it was fun to discover and hear music from such talent as Talking Heads, U2, and The Police. Over the course of my working life, I’ve played just about every genre there is, including hip-hop, so I am fully aware and appreciative of the talent and the art form as it has developed, apart from the mainstream, and it is formidable in the way musical groups have developed tonal, harmonic, and rhythmic works that are organic and sonically pure; thus, they have pushed the envelope forward and the melding with more conventional instruments gives them the ability to express themselves with more depth.

I think I began to realize this when I first played with the Moody Blues and of course, this was a dream come true, as I had listened to “Days of Future Passed,” as a kid growing up in Los Angeles, California. When I toured with them in the summer of 1993, in between semesters of school when I discovered that my second husband really didn’t want to be married to another violist and that I needed another career, I also discovered that I was exploring for the first time a whole new realm of musical expression. “Knights in White Satin” aside, it was a bigger sonic high to rock ‘n’ roll my way through “Ride My See Saw,” orchestrated by the awesome conductor/orchestrator Larry Greene then I could ever imagine. That was a hell of a summer and I found I enjoyed road work. I would play for Larry Greene off and on for over 3 decades.

I would have more opportunities for this when I made the move from Detroit to Florida; and another dream was realized as well. I worked for IBM, puzzling through problems and mazes in what eventually became a 3^rd level IT position. I was bestowed the calls with cooties; the calls Tiers 1 and 2 could not fix, either OS/2 calls, or WORDPRO or Ami Pro calls. From the earliest of times, we had odd programs like, XYWrite and the ever-present Word Perfect 5.1, a hit with legal offices everywhere, and the most complicated text-oriented word-processing program I’ve ever run across. Corel finally bought the rights to that and it disappeared into obscurity, as did WORDPRO, a Lotus product that was built off of Ami Pro, which was purchased by IBM and added to its LOTUS Suite package as an answer to Microsoft Office.  Although still around, and still superior in my humble opinion, WORDPRO jumped the shark with its contextual-driven menus and features that would be much more at home in an old-style front-end type-setting business than part of a small home-office suite. Most of the Lotus products, such as Notes bear the same foibles.

 This is better and more reliable than anything Microsoft, JAVA or GOOGLE does. I'm going back to UBUNTU and Chromium. This post is being written in Fire Fox, because dumbass Chrome wants me to login to insert a picture from my "online storage". This is not the first time this idiot program has mistaken me for someone who cared enough about my pictures to save them in "online storage" or for anyone else. The last time we went round and round, none of their stupid fixes worked and I ended up with the Kluge From Hell. It worked and I will share it for millions of dollars, because Google sure as hell doesn't know how to fix "Your Profile Could Not Be Opened. . ." but I do, and YOU, Google, YOU don't! Get your shit together and fix your crap. So there!

Well, this started out as a blast from the past about music and ended up with a comparison of old software packages, maybe appropriately enough. At least it is timely; today is the day I want to post my goals, whatever they may be for this minute only, for #ROW80 and #IWSG. I’m actually writing this in Word 2010, and am not wild about the program. I like Open Office 4.0 and think I will continue to write in that. . . Today, was “errand” day, never a joy. Public transportation is a chore and even though we have Express buses, you have to wait and there are the usual, ahem, interesting denizens of Nebraska Avenue. They were fairly chill today, as it has been ass-numbingly cold here in Tampa.

People loom in the murk of the bus like so many badly-dressed yetis; wool scarves with “Go Beavers!” tied on heads, or some other equally inane phrase. “Be An Asset, Not An Ass!” is screaming on a lime-green scarf sported by one of the meth-heads, skinny as a rail, with ill-fitting, ratty jacket, scorching-yellow hospital footie-socks and purple clogs. The guy is 6’8” and looks to weigh 125 lbs. I can’t see any eyes, because the “Be An Asset. . .” scarf is met around eye-level by a hat with a pom-pom and earflaps in some kind of dung-brown color.

We all recognize this, because we’ve all gotten this crap from the same outfitters: Metropolitan Ministries, The Hillsborough County Jail, or Homeless Recovery and it’s all been swapped back and forth a billion times. Some of it is so threadbare, as to be nearly transparent. Or, if we’re getting checks, we sport Dollar Store apparel. A step up, but it’s all the same thing. This year, it’s leopard or cheetah print. Last year it was zebra. By 2016, we should have the whole Zoo collection of Dollar Store wear and accessories to match. Since I’m approaching crazy-old-bat-shit insane cat-collector age, it’s appropriate. I can pull off the Edith Prickley collection pretty well. All I lack is the leopard/cheetah turban, matching cat-eyed glasses, and bright-red lipstick.

I could totally pull this off; with my dark glasses, which are rather retro anyway. It'll give the 'bangers another reason to cross the street when they see me coming. They already know I'm shit-house insane!

No one would bat an eye anyway, out here on Nebraska Avenue. Here is a guy with spit-curls, only he has what looks to be aluminum foil wrapped tightly to his scalp. It’s stunning, all right. “A lightning waitin’ to happen,” as Alex says. There’s my friend from FSJ, going to Gasparilla in her. . . pajamas. Why the hell not? Pink flannel with footies and teddy bears on them. That’s okay, because the same friend gave me a glamorous black wrap-around thing with a belt. I proudly wore it all over town, until someone said, “Mary, why in the hell are you wearing your bathrobe?” I looked at the someone blankly and said, “I’m. . . cold?” At least it was a step up from the hospital blanket I had been wearing about town as a “cape” which I never thought to call it such, until a bus driver helpfully pointed out that it was laying in the bus aisle, as I was getting off the bus to go to the Mental Health Clinic, seeing as how I needed some. “Hey, lady! You dropped your. . . (slight hesitation) cape.” I grabbed my blanket and flung it Zorro-style around my neck and proclaimed, “I’ll. . . Be Back!” in my best Ahnold Schwarzenegger imitation, which is pretty lousey, especially for a musician.

So, my goals are the same; keep editing “Music of the Spheres” and adding to the “B” story, which is thin. Polish all the essays from my original posts in “Homeless Chronicles in Tampa” to set for an e-book publishing and write here for #ROW80 every day (as much as possible) and for #IWSG. As lots of questions when I really start to tear into the novel, because I have not clue one as to how I’m doing. Having no inclination to subject myself to anyone I do not know in person, without a prior introduction, I will be trying to participate in writing workshops and the like. My health has been good. I feel better than I have felt in decades and I’m ready to move on. So, I’m getting’ my show on the road.

#ROW80 1ST QTR 2014 – POST 1 – AHEAD OF THE CURVE?

Well, for once, I may have actually gotten a jump on something. Being a violist, we are proverbially late, clueless and short of the mark. We supposedly aren’t good enough to play violin, so we switched to viola and slithered into orchestras by nefarious means. Horse feathers. Unfortunately, I can play the violin, and apparently, well enough to fool stupid people into giving me money to play it, although my preference has always been for the viola, and who wouldn’t want to play viola when you own such a viola as I do. My violins were never nearly as good as my viola. The only kinship they shared is that they were all made of wood, and there the similarities stopped. The violins I owned were mere peons; my viola is a member of the Italian aristocracy, and is eager to let everyone know at every opportunity.

At one point, when I was hired for my first violin “gig” I didn’t own a violin, and rented one. A student model, as I recall with metal strings, tuners and tape on the fingerboard for the people unfortunate enough to have been trained in the “Suzuki” method, wherein everything is by rote, and you can have an ear made of the finest tin; intonation not required. Nor is interpretation, passion, or finding your own “voice”. Thus, we have armies of automatons on the violin, playing the same way, same out-of-tuneness, same vibrato, and just. . . gah!

My god, I can almost smell the pancake makeup from here. This must be "Elvis: The Staid Years"

I played that bastard loud and proud for some kind of Elvis tour, wherein all of Elvis’ old sidemen were present and Elvis was up on a screen. I played 1^st violin and sat between the Concertmaster, an old colleague from Michigan and an old friend from the Concertgebouw who had a non-cordial hate for one another. I guess I was the de-militarized zone of the first violin section. All of the old muscle memory in place and it was as if reading in soprano clef had never left. Every time the two antagonists would seem to want to have a go at bows-at-20-paces during “Aint’ Nothin’ But a Hound Dog,” I took that as my cue to fling my hair around and emote wildly. There was a cameraman recording this whole hallucinatory event; the three of us were on-air more than Eblis was. Egad!

And then there were the “admirer-impersonators”, to be found at every stop we made; from whole families decked out in silver and gold lamé jumpsuits, with flared legs, Beatle boots, or “cockroach killer” shoes and pompadours, teased, combed and sprayed with what looked like flat black paint for outdoor metal furniture, alá Rustoleum, complete with black, eyebrow-pencil mutton-chop sideburns. They all seemed to think we were holding auditions, as we were regaled with everything from impressions of “Thaank yuu, vury mushhh…” to warbling out-of-tune a capella renditions of “Jailhouse Rock”. My personal favorite was the guy from Brazil, who came trotting up to me as I was getting into my car and leaving Sunrise, Florida for Jacksonville, for our next sold-out performance.

I guess everybody's gotta have a hobby. Most of the impersonators who traipsed after us were horrid, and they usually had embarrassed families in tow. Still, they were harmless enough, and picturesque to say the least!

He asked me if I was one of the “dancers”, which was a good one, as there were no dancers,  either in the 40-foot high hologram of Elvis or on stage. I turned around to get a look at this cat, as he had caught me putting my crappy rental violin in the back seat of my Cougar, and I almost started laughing. First off, he was my height, 5' 4" and I was wearing flats. He had the whole Eblis thing going on, but he was also wearing sunglasses at 11 pm and he had on a tiny red cape, like some junior Count Dracula, or Superman. His flared legs on his silver lamé jumpsuit were too short and I could see his white socks, peeking out over the tops of his Beatle boots. The suit was also too small for him and he had this little man-cameltoe-nutsack thing going on, although I had to sneak surreptitious glances, as I didn't want this guy to think I was interested. Well, I was, but not in THAT way. 

As best I could and keeping a straight face, I pointed to a bus in the very back of the parking lot, that had brought in a batch of Q-tipped old bats from the Old Folks' Home and said that was where the “dancers” were. Off he went. This was one of my more memorable tours, playing fiddle, or  violin, but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

When word got out that I had a passing acquaintance with the violin, although when I picked up and played the rental fiddle, it had been over 30 years since I had played one, more idiots decided I should earn some money playing the violin. If there were no viola spots available, as in the case of “West Side Story,” or “Cats,” I played violin and ran gibbering and capering off into the night with my ill-earned lucre, until the next gig came along.

So, what does all this blathering have to do with the first post of #ROW80, 2014. Well, for one thing, I have a, uh, “finished” manuscript of a novel that I pretty much created out of whole cloth as I went along during NaMoWriMo 2013, which I “won” by finishing, prior to the deadline of November 30^th, 2013, with some 50,967 words. I’m used to writing rhetorical things and posing arguments and swiftly cutting people off at the knees when they are being 50 Shades of Ass in written form. This was a whole different arena and it was an enlightening one, as well as a confusing one. I shall not trot out the cliché of “humbling” because I didn’t feel that. What I mostly felt was a whole lot of confusion and at one point, panic, when I thought I had cut-and-pasted over some huge passage that was working, or seemed to at the time.

I had backups stashed everywhere and I had a format laid out that I immediately abandoned, because I naïvely thought that I would adhere to a strict schedule, as I did when I blogged every day. I quickly found that this is an entirely different process, at least for me. I know that different things work for different people and cannot even begin to guess at how people like Stephen King or Colin Falconer have managed the prodigious output in the span of their lifetimes. Admittedly, I came late to the rodeo, so maybe this will all become clearer later on. I have gone back and looked at just the stuff I’ve written for my various blogs, and for the span of time I have devoted to writing, it is in the sort-of small to medium range; nowhere near to prodigious.

I had fun with the computer systems at IBM, but the people at Verizon were much more random than the computers. Go figure. I can make Boolean logic look emo.

The old adage applies, perseverance over time. Practice, practice, practice, whether it’s the viola, or my other career; IT. I held a 4.0 GPA in Mathematics which was astonishing because I totally sucked at it in high school. As some of you may know, my 2^nd husband, a violist, was very disappointed when the Zither Fairy did not appear after we were wed, although we met on a gig playing violas. I'm not sure which of us was the stupider one. Probably me, because I married the schnook. I won the gig with the Moody Blues and he did not, so he pouted. Jesus; men. So, I went back to school and picked a subject I thought radically different than music; computer science. Seeing as how I was so *meh* in math in high school, I really dug in, because studying higher maths become intense: calculus and trigonometry, differentials, matrices, and complex numbers were worked and re-worked. I used the same discipline that I used when I was in Music School. I don’t believe that I have a natural ability with numbers, but I studied 8 hours a day every day and I knew I was smart enough to “get it” if I applied myself.

Music is something I was born to do, and come hell or high water, I will again. Practicing, tremor-free, is a joy, but slow going. I expected this, but I feel better than I have felt in decades. Computers I will always have and with 4 in the house now – JC and Alex bought me a Quadcore to run alongside my Dualcore – I can build virtual machines and do more consulting work. When I worked from home for 3 years prior to losing my 2^nd house because the Rent to Buy people went bankrupt and the banks would not turn the house over to me, I was ill and tired. I had to leave my job. But recently, my old boss has gotten wind of the fact that just maybe, I might be available to do some special projects for him. That would be awesome.

For another thing, I wrote this post a DAY early, which is also been unlike me of late; I need to get my groove back, so, my goals this round are to go back to what I did when I first joined #ROW80; I plan on posting something on this blog, every day, even if it is something I am using as a writing prompt, something humorous, or something that has outraged me and I am just venting. I am going to make sure that I join in on #IWSG, the first Wednesday of every month. I am also going to continue on my editing of the “hot mess” that is “Music of the Spheres,” with Commander Skip Bombardier and the “Alien Undead Underground Railroad,” or the “Undead Alien Underground Railroad,” which has a much better ring to it, I think. Will the Commander, along with the Captains of the Air Force, Glenn Miller and Glenn Wallace be able to save the day with the Lost Boys and Gurlz of SoulZ and the confused, meandering, albeit good-hearted aid of some very clueless violists who thought they were going to Comic-Con, but ended up at the Annual NSA Spy vs Spy convention and got more than they bargained for? We shall see.

In the meantime, I have a lot of heavy lifting to do. Write what you know and research the hell out of the rest. Better yet, run it through some folks who may have actually done whatever it is you’re asking your readers to buy into. I’ll give it a shot!