Every day I sit in my easy chair watching “Happy Days” or “Dragnet” or whatever and I see out of the corner of my eye this Snoopy writing desk setup which I just plain adore:
It also reminds me, as the only writer in-house, to occasionally write something for this blog.
All I can think about right now is weather, health and work. So let us address them in no particular order:
Weather. It enrages me. And it shouldn’t. But it does. It’s something over which I have absolutely zero control. But it makes me furious in a way few things do. It’s one of the many mental flaws that have kept me from being a normal human being.
Take this last weekend, f’rinstance. I should be concentrating on the grand time my friend and I had at the Chicago concert, the first real rock and roll concert I have attended in three years. It was great! But we were planning to spend Saturday tooling around Rapid doing stuff, and weather sunk our plans. It very nearly sunk my friend Dave’s car, and there were about three different moments where I was slightly concerned we might end up as human popsicles, lodged firmly in a ditch at the side of the road. But Dave was a stellar driver and navigator.
So we saw the concert, got home safely, one might say we just barely eked out a win. But I have weather rage. The weather ruined our plans. I have a firm inventory of past meteorological offenses like this, including missing the chance to claim an award for my production work at an awards banquet due to a snowstorm, and–due to a thunderstorm– having to do a really cruddy indoor version of an amazing station event that, if done outside as planned, would have been just amazingly cool. The fact is, Nebraska weather will #$%^ you up every chance it gets, every month, every week, every day. If it’s not snow, it’s ice. Or wind. Or rain. Or dust. Or thunder. Or lightning. Or tornado.
Honestly, is it wrong that I have fantasies of picking out three random employees of The Weather Channel and throwing them off the overpass? Well, yes. Yes, that is wrong. But I can’t help it. I have weather rage. I’m supposed to go to Walt DIsney World in two weeks and I’m dreading it, DREADING IT, because God only knows what variety of delightful ways that miserable battle-ax Mother Nature will foul it up.
Having then spewed forth my pointless anger at weather, let’s move on to my health.
Health. It’s lousy. As I write this I am going to see my doctor tomorrow and I’ve got a marvelous array of horrors to share with him. My right ear is twerpy (highly medical term, basically I’ve felt like I just stepped off a 6-hour plane flight for the last 2 weeks). I’m moving up on two weeks with a rotten cold that refuses to die. (I took an at-home COVID test and it showed negative. If that means anything.) And I’m experiencing headaches and balance issues that make me think it’s time to get an MRI and check on that long-dormant friend, and subject of 47 different blog posts in 2019 and 2020, the Chiari Malformation.
My hope is that the cold is actually something more elevated than a cold–like bronchitis or some such, because that might explain the ear stuff and maybe even the other things. But I’m not going to suggest that to my doc–I’m just going to put everything on the table and see what he thinks.
I’m more than a little nervous about all of this but I’m genuinely looking forward to seeing my doctor. Something has to be done here. I can’t keep sludging through work with all this stuff.
Work. Speaking of work, KCOW-AM’s transmitter is down. This seems like the 7th sign of the apocalypse. AM radio transmitters are like old Zenith TV sets. My Mom and Dad had the same Zenith TV set for like 35 years. You turned it on, you got TV. You turned it off, TV go bye-bye. But it always came back.
The power outages seemingly caused the transmitter to die. Engineers are en route. Oh, and the power outages? No doubt caused by…wait for it…the weather.
#$%^ing weather.