I CERNtainly Know What You Are Saying

I go into the local diner slash bar that serves my wonderful grilled chicken sandwich with bacon. One of the cooks comes out to chat with me. We had not seen each other in several weeks. We chat physics alot.

The following lines were the very beginning of our conversation and we both knew what the other person was talking about, three words each.

Cook: smiling, "They found it!"

Me: "Yes, I heard."

What?!?!?

Higgs Boson, sub-atomic particles, Large Hadron Collider, CERN, Switzerland; just your typical tiny Texas town diner dinner conversation content.

And to think we could have had a super collider in Texas a long time ago, but it got voted down.

Here is a cartoon #89 that I drew as part of my series "TINY PICTURES FROM My BRAIN". I think this was from about twenty years ago.

 

Link to "Tiny Pictures From My Brain"

Where Here When Now

The right half of my head hurts with a self inflicted gum shot wound.

I bite my tongue way too often, mainly on the right side.

I was awake way too many hours last night.

Mainly because I ate one too many suppers.

The second very late supper was on the road and unfamiliar things. Hurtful things.

Yesterday was a good day in one aspect that I got to hear my son's voice very far away while he "gets" paid for camping in the cold outdoors. I miss his laughter. He didn't do any laughing yesterday with me.

I need to get moving. My stomach now hurts several hours later the opposite way, it is hungry.

I am debating when to eat my diner based grilled chicken sandwich. They are closed tomorrow, Sunday. I am hungry for it right now, but if I eat it now, say 1:30 PM on Saturday, that will make it be a longer time period before I could have another on Monday, AND due to someone else's plans for me it will be later on Monday, unless I decide to have one for breakfast. Decisions, decisions. Grilled Chicken Sandwich Delay Angst.

I was a good boy and helped someone maintain their secret identity. I can't tell you anymore than that, other than to say that I later jokingly attempted to blackmail that person for $1,000 to keep quiet. Hahahahehehehohoho-y, I am such a silly silly boy sometimes!

I have just been reading blogs and listening to the fan in my room. No news, no wikipedia, no enlightenment.

Oh, I just remembered that I am getting Shrimp and Crawfish Etouffee on Monday, never mind about the Grilled Chicken Sandwich of The Future, that will be more than enough to fill me up for the entire day, a huge portion of Cajun in Amarillo.

I have a sudden fascination with raccoons. I blame PBS for this.

How to get rich being a doctor: I read yesterday how an Englishman helped an African king heal from a stab wound. The grateful king gave him a coastal piece of property of 3,000 square miles.

I would like to stab the oral surgeon who messed up my mouth twenty years ago. I don't have 3,000 square miles of property to give away to hire an assassin. I am also not a king so I probably couldn't get away with it. It also probably violates my basic code of attempting to be the nicest person in the universe.

Now rotating my body 90 degrees to attain verticality and movement and nourishment. The dog just sneezed. He is now awake and will soon demand something soon. I need a pet raccoon that will feed itself. Or better yet, grill me a chicken sandwich. But I am not sure how well raccoons share food. That is probably not a likely scenario for at least another thousand to ten thousand years to have a docile raccoon who speaks sign language and is handy in the kitchen. It would probably be easier to achieve with a gorilla. I need a pet gorilla with grilling skills.

I suddenly realized and remembered two very important things: I will have to learn sign language AND raccoons do not have opposable thumbs.

Groundhog Day After

At a few minutes after midnight during the day February 3rd (just now) I found out that I missed Groundhog Day!!!

Earlier at the groc store people kept telling me that it smelled like it was going to rain. I am not so sure what that smells like. We missed so much rain last year, so ANY rain is eXciting. So its now at midnight just after its been raining, even heard some thunder. Cooper got wet. He went outside. Twice. Then he came inside and decided to shake off his eXcess rain water onto ME.

Whoa! I just accidentally paid attention to a teleBision commercial and discovered a breakfast cereal called Kellogg's Cru_nc_hy N_ut. So I will go to the store later today and find some. I will give you my opinion later.

Link to Kellogg's Crunchy Nut

BUT their advertising slogan is, "So delicious, you won't want to wait until morning"

I notice things. The most recent thing I noticed is there seems to be a defect in the SuperDoppler radar system on Channel 10. There is a storm passing through Claude TX right now and there is a strange very straight very narrow diagonal line near just southwest of that city that doesn't seem to be getting any severe weather as a storm passes through. But I could be wrong. Maybe its just a magical place of NO severe weather! I want to move there.

There was a very good stand up comedian on teleBision a few minutes ago. I will try to find his name. I missed it, sorry. [His name is Mark Forward]

I have a sudden desire to take karate lessons. Not this very moment, but later.

Oh-Oh-Oh!!! I just figured out something great for my dog. He likes it when I use his body for a percussion instrument, and sometimes I tap on him rhymically to the music. The commercial a few minutes ago was for a local home manufacturer, so the jingle goes "A-1 is number one" which I changed to "Coo-per is num-ber one!" so now when he hears the commercial he will think they are singing about him.

I have decided that I am going to start training for the teleBision show, "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?"

The A-1 commercial came on again, so I sang the jingle with his name instead of A-1, but he was busy this time on the floor working on a chew bone, so he didn't care, as evidenced that he didn't wag his tail.

Wooooo, tornado warning with that earlier storm now by the city of Canadian. (its several minutes later while I am writing this initially AND watching teleBision.

I just noticed that there was a commercial for a medicine that used very similar music that I originally heard in an internet provider commercial! I wonder if I just uncovered a musical crime?!?!?

Okay, its a few more minutes and there is no longer a tornado warning.

NOW, its time to play the Quiz Show Game, "What Is Today?"

The answer is, its Grilled Chicken Sandwich Day, mainly cause I didn't have one yesterday. So in approximately 10 hours I will be hopefully eating my favorite sandwich.

BUT more important than that, well, almost as important as a chicken sandwich, I hope to get to visit my friend Teresa who moved back to town. She was one of my most favorite people to chat with at my former job, and I saw her briefly at my favorite chicken sandwich restaurant two days ago. Yea!!!! I think we have been friends for twenty plus years.

It is almost 2 AM and I was hoping to be asleep by now. Nope. Not e-v-e-n close.

Update at 9:44 AM - I wake up after the most amazing dream almosta ever. I reaLLy want to go back to sleep. It is almost as amazingly vivid as the one where I was married to two out of three of the Dixie Chicks. I just noticed that I wrote "It is" at the beginning of that last sentence instead of "It was". I want to leave my dream in the present tense and not the past.

I found a good reason to be aWake: the first of a buncha buds on my orchid plant began to open up today! I am having tremendously good luck with this plant, I have lost track how long I have had it or how many bloom sessions. I s'ppose I could wander back through old photo directories and see some dates. We have lived in this house for about three and a half years, so a little less than that would be my first guess.

I think I have figured out the best way to re-pot an orchid plant: Don't do it! The one time I tried it with this plant it almost died. So from now on I am just going to add a little bit of new orchid bedding mix on top of the old and recycle dead branches and fallen blooms.

Forty minutes. It is now forty minutes until eleven o'clock, so that means sandwich time very very soon. I also plan to go walking in the rain or semi-non rain aftermath at the park. For now it is quiet time with puppy, coffee, and you.

Update: 10:15 PM - There was confirmed damage from that tornado, info from the newscast just now.

The Battle of the Bulge of My Router

I finally convinced my Internet Service Provider (ISP) that something was wrong with my 3G-4G hot spot mobile router. I couldn't get it to reset with the reset button inside the battery compartment or the front panel button to work reliably. At one point the device finally worked after supposedly reaching 66% charged but then an hour later it wouldn't work with a message that it was shutting down due to a discharged battery. AND the device is ALWAYS plugged into a power source.

Today's effort at putting the cover back on the router seemed unusually difficult, so I looked at the battery and it was definitely bulged in the middle. So this may account for the difficulty of the battery trying to maintain contact with the device, or even being sound in the nitty-gritty of its internal mechanical integrity. The ISP is sending a new battery and so I'll be able to do some measurements and see if that was part of the problem. The entire device has always acted a bit unreliable, even brand new.

Today was a return trip to Amarillo. My special-needs sister-in-law had to go back home suddenly because her handlers had not sent enough medicine. I thought it was strange on Wed when they handed me a small paper sack of meds that was stapled with about a dozen staples. Next time I am forcing them to examine the contents of the bag to verify the correct contents. As you might imagine, this isn't the first time they have messed up, and always in a short manner, too. So my sister-in-law didn't even get to spend two complete days with her family over the holiday weekend, and just considering the price of fuel alone, her vacation was pretty eXpensive per hour.  AND she does need time away from her "n0r^maL" environment into a normal environment. Hold it, did I just call OUR home normal? Hah ...

I don't understand how gasoline and diesel could have moved so far apart in price. Aren't people paying attention to supply and demand issues and how you run an oil refinery? Today it was common to see the price difference be 80 cents a gallon, so diesel was way more than 20% higher than gasoline. AND gasoline has been falling in price while diesel has been climbing! I do realize that the feedstock fraction for diesel competes with use as heating oil product, and winter is coming. It will be nice when Libya gets back in full production.

I did get to go driving in my truck today so that was nice, but I was sick with flu type symptoms so that took part of the fun away, and the rain and wind tried to take the other half. It was a rare Not One Single Bad Driver Day, and considering it was Black Friday, tell me, how on earth did that happen for me? Now I don't feel like eating any supper. Lunch was really good at Jason's Deli, eXcept about 10 percent of the meat in my Southwestern Chicken Chili looked burned and hard as a rock. I accidentally got a piece in my mouth and it was horrible and didn't stay too long. Typically Jason's Deli is my Meal Mecca, my taste buds favorite place in the universe (well, Amarillo Texas) for at-noon-food. My sandwich is their Chicken Club Wrappini. I thunk I spilled thut werd currectly.

I rushed around but places were closed today - twice. I had to meet a deadline for returning my s-i-law to her place by lunch time, so I had several things to get squeezed into the morning before leaving town. I needed to get my used motor oil to the city recycling place, but when I got there the place was closed, obviously for a four day holiday weekend, so then I had to store the collection vessel in my garage, and it made a slight oil mess in the pickup bed I had to clean up. I thought I was doing really well on meeting my schedule then suddenly realized that being sick earlier in the week had made me forget the supplies for the hair salon where people rent from me. I was being a bad landlord! So I rushed around and got their critical toilet paper and bleach. BUT when I got to the shop it appeared that no one was working today, and the schedule for at least one of them, the normally busiest lady, was X'd out for the weekend as well. Plus there was no real critical shortage of paper product after all even though I was already a week late with my delivery.

A couple paragraphs later the need for supper suddenly manifestivals itself. So ... location location location ... I am ending my day at my favorite local diner having hopefully the best grilled chicken sandwich in my town. It hasn't quite arrived yet, but I eXpect the "ready bell" to ding shortly. And more importantly I have finally got my personal jug of BBQ sauce returned to the diner. Its absence was interfering with eating here properly! (Yes, here is actually here in the picture, typing away, courtesy of my iPad. Thanks, again Steve J.)

The brand of BBQ sauce is really 'Head Country' - it's my favorite! I just take the bottle home from the diner when it gets close to empty, clean it, and refill it from my gallon jug. The drink is Dr Pepper, of course, and the wait staff always keeps it full. That is about as empty as it ever gets.

Update 2011.12.02 - I got my new battery, so hopefully it works much better. The tiny battery arrived in a huge box filled with inflated cushion. EXCEPT the battery was not secured to the cushion, it was just free inside the box, right up against the outside wall of the box when I opened it. No bulge, it fits nicely in the router.