New Permanent First Post on My Blog

Multnomah County 911 Operator: “What type of emergency do you have? Police, Rescue, or Fire?”

Caller: “I am not sure. I am calling about a person in Portland named David Rochester. I think he needs aid.”

Operator: “May I get your name, sir, to begin with?”

Caller: “No I can’t give you my name. Just consider me a random bystander. Anyway, I am not sure which type of aid David needs. The trouble is I think he is beginning to get a life.”

Operator: “That sounds good. What is the problem?”

Random: “Well, he has never had one, you see. It is very painful process to start having a life if you’ve never had one. For example, do you have a life?”

Operator: “Well, yes, I do believe I have a life.”

Random: “I am sure you are very well trained to deal with a variety of emergency situations, but in David’s case, it may be difficult for you to understand how distressing and dismaying this all is.

“In any case, I can see how all three options might apply. First, he might want to be put out of his misery. In this case, he would need you to send the most trigger-happy officer in the Portland Police Force.

“However, his life is very tenuous at the moment. So it might be best to send the best rescue paramedic crew you have in the Portland Metropolitan area.

“Finally, David has a relationship going with a very special person. At the moment, they seem to have a very steamy affair under way. You might need to send four or five fire department pumper units to hose them down and cool them off a bit.”

“No, now that I think of it, I suggest you send a SWAT team, an AID car, an ambulance, and all the trucks from the largest fire station in Multnomah County. While you are at it, send some smoke jumpers as well. And the Humane Society. They may have difficulty dealing with his cats, especially the one known as “Little Liu.”

Operator: “Sir, please stay on the line. We are going to send an AID unit to you. We are trying to trace your location at the moment…it seems to be coming from another state…please stay on the line…

Click.

Damn, we almost had him, too. I believe this is the serial whack job who keeps making prank calls to bother 911 operators. We think he is on an island somewhere. Let’s talk to the Coast Guard. We’ll tell them it’s a matter of Homeland Security…

 

 

 

If David is getting a life, should I continue to send him a $5 a month shareware payment at

“David Rochester”
4803 SE Woodstock, #202
Portland OR 97206

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How can this post be both new and permanent? Isn’t that an oxymoron? Wasn’t the last post supposed to be new and permanent?

 

I am now home with a new eye, right in the middle of my forehead.

Actually, it is where my old right eye used to be. It is sore and bloodshot, but otherwise working better than the old eye used to.

The doctor warned me there may be hidden flaws because of my high blood pressure, but only time will tell. The old left eye is sulking because it wants to be a new eye also, and it has to wait. While they struggle for control of my brain, I see double a bit and I am a little dizzy.

More later.

RG Returns from Chicago

Last night my daughter called. Random Granddaugher and her mommies took a trip to Chicago to visit RG’s co-dads. She reported that they had a wonderful time.

Dad is sort of a mover and shaker in Chicago, something involving non-profits, though nobody seems to be able to explain to me exactly what he does. My daughter was rather taken with Chicago. Perhaps it is something to do with genetics, as I was born in Chicago; although as I left when I was four years old, I don’t remember much about it.

When not traveling half way across the country, RG has been attending “day camp” at the School for Very Bright Children, a school where Mommy (birth mother) teaches. RG starts kindergarten at this school in September. Apparently she has been loving day camp. Mama (my daughter) reports at the end of day camp each day RG is so excited she is overwrought, and begs not to have to leave and go home.

My daughter has just about finished with her job. She has about a week of final clean up to do. In September, she starts graduate school. She will be studying “Medical Genetics.”

As we live in a world that is seriously sick, my daughter has a big job ahead of her.

Why Are You Pointing That Knife at my Eye?

This morning I head into the city (conveyed by my wife in our little truck) for cataract surgery on my right eye.

A Call from My Other Brother

 

My sister-in-law sent an instant message telling me it was my brother’s birthday. This is my youngest brother, who survived a heart attack and is mentally ill and lives in Missouri.

Earlier, I had remembered my other brother’s birthday (June 2) and asked Random Granddaughter (the great artist) to paint him a birthday card. I had remembered my sister’s birthday (March 27) but too late to send her an RG card. I apologized and asked if she would like an early card or a late card. She said that as a grandmother herself, she was relaxed on the matter. As RG has been commissioned to prepare a card for Woo, I will not burden RG with more than one assignment at a time.

I tried to call my brother (after getting his phone number, which I had lost, by email). His telephone said it would not accept phone calls from phones which block their numbers. I don’t remember telling my phone to hide its number, but it probably interpreted us choosing an unlisted number as an instruction to hide its number from Caller-ID capable phones. [Update: Pete's *82 trick works. Thank you, Pete. Also, the tayberries are just turnin color, so they should be ripe in a couple of days or so. Again, thank you.]

The next day (yesterday, Sunday, June 28…I carefully made a note that it is my youngest brother’s birthday) I received a call from my brother. I do not like to talk to him because he sounds like an android that has not learned how to imitate a human being very well. Although I am a earlier model android, I imitate humans better than my youngest brother , the android model android, and youngest sister, the narcissistic model android, who lives in California and belongs to a fundamentalist church filled with Hispanic people and Vietnamese people. (I do not know if they are androids, but I suspect the just keep my sister as a pet android.)

I talked awkwardly with my brother. He asked me if I knew that he had a dog now. (As I seldom talk to my brother I did not know this.) He told me he has a silky terrier. My family has always been cat people, but my brother evidently married into a dog family. I guess if an android marries into a human family, it might as well marry into a dog human family as well.

He also said that he is served by a small local telephone company, and they may have blocked my telephone call by mistake. I said, I am also served by a small independent telephone company. [Problem since then solved.]

After a few minutes of awkward, strained conversation, he asked me if I wanted to talk to K, his wife.

I like his wife, so I agreed (with what I hope is not too much obvious eagerness). His wife and I talked to each other for a while. She was a grade school art teacher when I first met her (at a family reunion). As her school district (like almost all school districts) is shedding jobs, she had to transfer to a high school art teacher position to keep her job. She said the principal (whom she obviously dislikes) dumps all the difficult students into her art classes, though maybe art students are naturally difficult. (Woo? Comment about artists?)

She said that my brother is no longer considered bi-polar (not because he is cured, but because he might have been misdiagnosed). She said, “Maybe he is depressed. Anyway, they took him off lithium, which made him very subdued and withdrawn and lacking in emotion.” (I thought, an android does not need a drug which makes him more robotic).

My brother was first hospitalized when he left home and was found walking the streets in a daze by the police. Since then he has repeated this behavior two more times. On the third time, her aunt was the one who spotted him walking the streets and called his wife at school. His wife left her teaching job at school and rushed to pick up my brother and take him to the hospital, sparing the police the trouble. I have a feeling her relatives say “helpful” and “constructive” things to her about her marriage, but I don’t know this for a fact.

She told me that when he first became mentally ill she had been unable to convince his doctors to pay attention to his problems. One day she noticed him having a long conversation with himself in their back yard. A long, long conversation. Later, when he was in the hospital, a couple of nurses noticed him having long conversations with himself and convinced the doctors that they needed to pay more attention to him.

She also said that he has not been able to hold a job for a long time. She did get him a job at the school where she works, but eventually the school fired my brother. This may have something to do with why she does not like her principal that much.

Unlike my family, who are cat people, her family are dog people. When she adopted a silky terrier, my brother was not enthusiastic about the dog, but now he is very attached to it. Silky terriers, according to this web page, seem like “high maintenance” dogs. I suspect my brother is a “high maintenance” spouse, so perhaps they help maintain each other.

After telling me that my brother is not bi-polar and maybe depressed, she said (admitted?) maybe he has schizophrenia. So I guess he is the schizophrenic model android. I have been a depressed model android, and I have worked with a bi-polar model android who scared all the women in my department before he was fired and who caused my employer to start locking all the outside doors except the one where the receptionist could see everyone coming into the building. [I suppose my brother might be a "DID" model android, and I might have to fly David out to Missouri to talk to him, but I doubt it.]

I think there is a quality control problem at the android factory, also known as my family. It may be a good thing that there is no genetic connection between me and Random Granddaughter. On the other hand, I haven’t told you about Mommy’s brother, who was once found wandering the streets and institutionalized for a while. (However, he is now happily married, with a young daughter. Also, he may be the adopted brother…)

Next, Aunt Henriette joins the android party.

 

 

Family Values. On Sale This Week

I received an instant message this week from the wife of my bi-polar brother, telling me that today is his birthday. I felt as if I should call him, but could not find their phone number. I do not like to talk to him, because he seems too much like me, except worse. So I guess I must be half-polar?

I got her to send me the phone number and reluctantly tried to call. Their phone said, “We won’t take a phone call from you.” Evidently our phone blocks caller-ID and their phone won’t talk to such phones. Not only is my brother bi-polar, but his phone is as well.

I sent my sister-in-law an email describing the problem.

One of the great themes of conservatives in America is “Family Values.” Family values seem to have trouble with getting lost. People start out walking the Appalachian Trail and end up in Argentina. In the case of my siblings, we live as far away from each other as we can. One brother lives in Maine. One sister lives in Vermont. (That seems close, but they are separated by a continental divide.) My bi-polar brother lives in Missouri. This is known as the “heartland”; appropriate, as my brother had a heart attack years ago.

The final sister lives in California, where she belongs to a fundamentalist church full of Hispanic and Vietnamese people. As they probably cannot understand what she is saying, they probably smile at her and nod a lot. As her only way of “conversing” is an endless monologue, this probably works out.

My barely extended family is rather extended this week. My granddaughter took her mommies to Chicago to see her dad. Her dad’s mom lives in Oregon. Her co-dad’s stepfather is a Methodist minister in Connecticut but will retire to Colorado. When my daughter visited their Colorado vacation home in the mountains, she became ill with altitude sickness. Random Granddaughter’s mom’s parents are divorced and live with new spouses in Virginia. My wife and I live on an island because we are hermits.

RG seems to be a young genius. If she is, it is because the wiring diagram in her mind where she keeps track of her family values is so complicated she would need to understand calculus to make sense of it all. Her family values are probably so valuable I should set up a Swiss bank account for her as a birthday present for her when she turns six next year.

How My Wife to Be Threw Herself Out of Her Mother’s House.

A while back, at David’s request, I told the story of how I met my wife, hugely embarrassing as the story is. I promised to tell the story of how she threw herself out of her house when she turned 18 and didn’t speak to her mother for a year.

After I had been going out with my wife to be, she told me that she was going to San Francisco to spend time with her favorite older brother, a bohemian artist whom she idolized at the time. (In the long run, things did not go especially well for him, but that’s another story.)

I think she was not sure she wanted to see me any more, so she left the impression she might not be coming back to Los Angeles. However, I sometimes drove “accidentally” across the route I knew she walked to and from high school, and sure enough I one day saw her walking home from high school and stopped to talk to her, telling her I had accidentally driven that way. I learned that without telling me, she had returned home from San Francisco.

I convinced her to go out with me again.

I began to spend time at her house with my wife to be and her mother. I worked diligently at sucking up to her mother. It was not easy to do for two reasons:

1. Her mother was a very difficult and insecure person.

2. My wife to be, now in adolescence, had begun the difficult process of finding and expressing her own individuality as a person.

Her mother had many admirable qualities. After her divorce, working as a secretary, she had, by herself raised and supported five children. She was a splendid cook and mistress of many other household skills, which she taught to my wife.

However, her mother was full of resentments and grievances. Just as I am the oldest of my parents’ five children, my wife is the youngest of her parents’ five children.

Each of my wife’s siblings had left the nest already, not always on the friendliest of terms, leaving their mother feeling angry, unappreciated, and lonely. As my wife had been a very obedient and unchallenging child, her mother had come to depend on her, the youngest of the five children, for a feeling of security and success as a parent.

Also, her mother had a bit of a drinking problem. I don’t think she was an alcoholic, but she tended to drink more than she should and usually became more and more angry as she became intoxicated.

Often I would have dinner with my wife to be and her mother. Her mother was a splendid cook, and tended to interpret people eating and appreciating her food as appreciating her, so she would offer me more and more food.

At these dinners, my wife to be would offer some innocent opinion and her mother would take serious exception and they would bicker and snarl at each other as I sat in uncomfortable silence.

A focus point of these arguments became my wife to be’s black pants. These events occurred before the word “hippie” came into wide usage, so her mother used the word “beatnik” to describe depraved children rebelling against their parents’ values. The black pants symbolized in her mind how her daughter was rejecting her values, much as children today reject their parents’ values with piercings and tattoos.

(Random Granddaughter gets to wear transfer tattoos that wash off after a few days. I don’t know if this little indulgence by the mommies is meant to inoculate her against getting real tattoos when she gets a little older. I don’t know if Anne Elise will reject them or end up with her body covered over every square inch of skin with real tattoos by the time she is 15.

On the other hand, I don’t know if there is a similar way the mommies can let her have “pretend” piercings in her nose or such now.)

As my future wife neared the age of 18, I helped her buy a Citroen (the cars my family adopted at the time following the lead of my eccentric uncle Donald), and began teaching her to drive. I don’t remember the exact sequence of circumstances that precipitated the crisis. It involved her getting a “learners’ permit” to prepare for taking her drivers’ test. She did not have auto insurance yet. Her mother refused to let her get a learner’s permit.

Up until that point, I had been a quiet and polite observer to many scenes of bickering and argument, desperately trying not to alienate her mother. As this disagreement escalated into hysterics, I lost it. I told her mother what I thought of her. Finally, we stormed out of her mother’s house. At that time, I was still living at home with my mother.

(I had flunked out of college at the University of California at Berkeley a couple of years earlier and was attending a community college in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles to restart my college career in the college equivalent of kindergarten. Also, my father had died recently, so I was the “head” of my broken and incoherent family.)

With no other place to go, I took my wife to be to my mother’s house. I explained the situation to my mother and asked if my wife to be could stay at our place until the situation was sorted out. My mother, always complaisant agreed.

We were sitting around awkwardly a couple of hours later, when there was a furious pounding on my door. I opened it to see Mrs. Random’s mother and one of her brothers, L. L had just left the navy. He was always the “responsible” one in her family, eventually becoming a corporate lawyer.

At this time her mother demanded that Mrs. Random come home. She refused. At this point her brother seized her and began dragging her out of the house kicking and screaming. I remember thinking (in a absurd and ridiculous fashion) This is just like a scene from an overwrought Italian movie.

 

Medical Update

I had a “senior moment” and left a faucet running and flooded the kitchen floor, almost destroying our house.

I went to vist my doctor afterwards for my medical checkup at at the age of 65.

My doctor said, “You are in good shape for 65 years of age, except you have the prostate of a 70-year-old and you are “pre-diabetic.”

“Am I coming down with Alzheimer’s Disease?” I asked him. This is not a rhetorical question. My genetics are bad in this regard. My mother died of Alzheimer’s and my father’s oldest sister is institutionalized with it.

He gave me a quick test. He asked me a few questions. He said, “This sounds like a dumb test, but I have had good results with it in screening people for signs of dementia. You seem to be doing fine. My advice is to get lots of physical exercise nd spend a lot of time solving puzzles and exercising your brain.”

Our old treadmill became obsolete and the motor can not be replaced. This makes me furious. We bought a new treadmill. It is something of a science fiction treadmill. Using a chest monitor (which is creepy to put on because it feels ice cold), I can now set the treadmill to adjust itself (by incline and speed) to keep my heart rate in the training zone for my age and to calculate how many calories I am losing as I stride while listening to the good news about Iran and North Korea. I now feel like Dr. Spock on a workout or Captain Kirk working to save the universe from the bridge of his star ship.

I have set a date to have sugery on my cataracts. Yesterday, I went in to have my eyes measured.

First I had to sign a consent form. The eye sugeon’s assistant (who was very friendly and positive) explained ten or so terrible things that might happen to my eyes, such as glaucoma, nerve damage, etc. After explaining each danger, she said, “I haven’t seen that happen to anybody for years, though.”

I said, “I will try not to break your string of success.”

The eye surgeon’s assistant did three tests on my eyes. The first test was very simple. I now forget what it measured. The second test was more complicated. It measured the curvature of my eyes.

The assistant said, “We now have more modern tests than the one I am using, but the doctors don’t trust them, so we are sticking with the same test we have been using for years.”

The third test was very challenging. I had to lay back in a chair so I looked at the the ceiling while the assistant bathed my eyes in fluid under little cups and used sound to measure the depth of my eyes. The assistant said, “This is a very modern test. It has changed six times since I began using it.”

“We used to just guess about the depth of eyes, but now we measure it it very precisely. There are 12 different lenses the doctor can use as replacements. He uses an algebraic computation to choose the the best ones to use for your eyes.”

When Random Granddaughter starts studying algebra, I will tell her to pay careful attention if her careet goals have changed from being an artist to being an eye doctor. When I was in school, I passed algebra, but I seldom use it now.

I have to ask my doctor what I am supposed to do to keep from being pre-diabetic to being fully the real thing.

Once a Great White Gets its Eyes on You, You Will Never Sleep Easily Again

I recently wrote about a surfer who survived a “close encounter” with a great white shark. I recently learned that the great shark followed him home and ate him.

As this scientific study explains, great white sharks stalk their victims like serial killers.

2009 Garden Report

Peonies

Half Ripe Strawberries

A lurker to my blog site asked how our garden is doing. We have peonies. We have strawberries. What more does one need?