Notes from last night and today.
There’s Celtic music playing in the Dance hall and muddy mostly unintelligible verbal directions as the caller tries to teach the beginners class. The aroma of cheap, Hershey/Mars chocolate emanating from the plastic pumpkin about 1/3 meters to my right-front. The pumpkin is filled with miniature candy bars put there to be eaten by the dancers.
I like dark chocolate, high cocoa content food that has the intoxicating flavor burst when you first bite down on it. I rarely eat it. In the past two years I have used more chocolate for cooking, flavoring sauces, more than I have eaten. So resisting the pail of chocolate is relatively easy.
We had steady slow winter-like rain Thursday and Friday. Sunlight began to appear about noon today. The prediction for tonight’s low temperature calls for 32°F. I have a supposed thermostatic plug in use for the filter shed lamps. I tested it last week with a positive result in the 35°-37° range. If it works tonight I’ll be more comfortable using it.
This is the Halloween dance. The gamut of costumes is fairly wide, including a cardboard box labeled as a porta-pot.
I’m at least another 45 days from any possibility of a cortisone injection to either shoulder. I put on quite a lot of lidocaine topical ointment tonight, hoping that I might be able to dance with Gloria. But both shoulders feel like someone hit them with a hammer and chisel. The thought of beginning a dance and then having to dropout is rather discouraging. That seems to me to be discourteous.
I’m sitting here watching the battery drain down. I’m reminded of the WWII submarine war in the Pacific game that I had when a 386 processor was the upper limit of personal hardware. It, quite realistically, required that the player keep a close eye on the battery charge levels. Those diesel-electric boats lived or died by their effective use of batteries.
Tour guide questions tonight: Where is there a gas station? Where is there a restaurant? Are these (the candy) for anyone? Where is the bathroom – female? Where is the bathroom – male? What time does the dance start? Is there a dance tonight? How much is it to get in – looking at the fee schedule on the table in front of them? And, of course, the ever popular " Is my wife/husband/boy friend/ girl friend/date/neighbor/son/daughter/cousin here yet?"
There was an ambush in Kabul yesterday that resulted in the deaths of at least 13 U.S. troops. It is quite probable that the explosive used in Kabul came across the border from Pakistan, where the Pakistani military is engaged in exacting revenge upon the U.S. for making them look inept when we killed bin Laden. It is time we end our involvement in Afghanistan and bring our troops home quickly. The Afghani government is likely to fall to the Taliban, but they will do that whether we leave tomorrow morning or prop it up for another century.
While my weather station recorded a low temperature of 33.22°F, there was ice on the deck and frost on the ground this morning. The thermostatic controller did not turn the filter shack lamps on. When I checked the interior temperature with an IR sensor this morning I was greeted by two mice of rather large size. They are most likely the front-runners of a populace that hopes to winter in the filter shed.
In checking the lamp cords for integrity, I managed to encounter the mice again. After leaving several packages of d-con to deter them from gnawing on lamp cord insulation, I chased at least one of them out of the shed – only temporary I’m sure.
Today is sunny, bright, and calm. I’m fixing pork chops with mushrooms for dinner.
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