A Stick in the Eye, HAL Goes Bersek, and Fay Bears Down

Yea, yea, it's been awhile since the last post, but believe me, I've had issues, which provides plenty of post fodder, so I guess it's six of one, half-dozen of another.....

The worst I have to report as of now is that our stewardship of our adopted Ms Sadie Mae, the black cat, was tragically short lived. I am sure that I am entirely to blame for what happened, and it weighs heavy on my heart. I had taken the cat out of the arms of THE Wife in bed before retiring, placing her next to the food bowl in the kitchen. What I didn't realized (thank my ever-increasing forgetfulness as I age) was that I had left the back door open for Shiloh to come back in from his last pee-break of the night. Naturally, being brand new to the household, Sadie Mae took the opportunity to escape into the night, as any cat would, and has not been seen since. I scoured the neighborhood the next day, even printing up flyers and distributing them in hopes that someone had seen her, to no avail. Two days later, we came across a road-kill casualty about a mile away on the main road, but I was not able to judge with certainty that the dead cat was our Sadie Mae. At the very least, I think my personal Karma has gone from perhaps in the green zone to severely overdrawn, even if her escape was due to an innocent oversight on my part. Needless to say THE Wife was heart-broken, as am I. I am so sorry, Sadie Mae.....please forgive me.

I finally was able to see the eye doctor, and the consensus is that I am NOT suffering from a chronic state of dry-eye, instead, have an issue with an oil gland beneath my eyelid that has gotten clogged up, resulting in tiny "stones" being formed with the gland, which has reduced the vital oils required by my tears, and causing the sensation of having a stick in my eye, which has robbed me of hours of sleep over the past several weeks. He has shown me how to use very hot compresses to attempt to "melt" the stones and move them down the glands and out of the passages, and barring that, has me scheduled for minor surgery to have the stones removed. He has assured me that it is a very simple procedure which will not be painful and should solve my problem altogether. You could not possibly understand the relief this has promised me, as I am suffering a severe deficit in sleep! Ever try to sleep through the night when closing your eyes induces a sensation of having a stick poking you in the eye? You don't want to know, believe me........Without the miracle of lots of artificial tears and Ambien, I would be wearing a straight-jacket by now.

The off-site Twin, her Hubby, and our Grandson paid us a visit for our combination Twin birthdays/our Wedding Anniversary extravaganza. THE Wife and I have been married just long enough to have trouble keeping track of exactly how long we have been married, but we think it's been 16 years now. Not that it matters all that much, since it seems we've been together forever. THE grandson is doing very well and is now a towering 5'10" in height.

THEN, it seems that the annual hurricane season has not forgotten us here in the North East corner of Florida after a couple of unusually calm years. Hurricane Fay is winding her merry way thru the Florida Straights, having messed with Cuba, and promising to pay us a visit after kicking around Tampa and Orlando a bit. At least the storm track seems to indicate as such. All we can do here at Pendragon Hold is batten down the hatches, put away all the wind bait scattered about the property, and hope that the storm has pretty much been worn down by the time it reaches us, as has been the experience in past near-misses. If Fay decides to skirt the landmass and approach us from over the energy-rich warm waters of the Gulf, things could get REAL dicey around here. We have our fingers crossed. Send us your best wishes and we promise to use them for all their worth!

On top of all this excitement, the iMac, my gateway to the internet and all you fine folks out there in blog land, decided to start acting weird, then refusing to boot up altogether. I attempted to boot up from the software disk, even running my hardware test utility that came with the computer, all to no avail. The hard drive refused to mount, and the test disk assured me that everything was hunky-dory with the hardware. Well, the Catholic church assured me once that Priests could be trusted, and we all know what THAT amounted to, so I decided to tear out the hard drive and install the original unit that came with the computer to see if that was what the problem was. The resulting performance was confusing, as it seemed to work but didn't really, right before the computer warned me to back everything up immediately as impending hard drive failure was right around the corner.........huh?

Well, having nothing left to lose short of having to haul the entire computer across the St Johns River, a good forty miles to the "local" Apple Store for a costly diagnostic and possible major repair, I purchased another 500 gig internal hard drive and installed it. Then, using Apple's "Time Machine" backup utility, I formated the disk and crossed my fingers. It took awhile, but it worked beautifully, restoring all my data to it's former glory, not losing one bit of information in the process! It seems that the entire malfunction was based on the hard drive going South on me. It could have been worse, based on the age of this hardy and hard working machine. Hopefully, I will have the funds saved up in a year to replace this machine with the newest model before she finally decides to give up the ghost for good. Here's a hint if you guys ever decide to go for the gold and get your own iMac or other Apple computer, now the fastest growing computer brand in the world. Get a refurbished model from the Apple store online. It will save you 2 to 3 hundred bucks and you will get a machine that's already had any problems fixed. Both of my iMacs were refurbs, and they served me very well for a very long time.

On the international scene, well, we all know that the Russian Bear is getting restless again, not having learned it's lesson the first go around that no, you cannot dominate the world. I told you from day one that Putin is following the time-honored Russian tradition of using external threats, mostly manufactured (sound familiar?) to attain dictatorial powers, and now wants to bring back the "glory" of the Soviet "Union" and all that entails. That would be very much like America invading Canada and Mexico occasionally on the pretext that we have citizens there in peril. Of course, we now know that thanks to our esteemed Commander- in- Cheek, George DUBYA Bush, there's not much we can accuse the Russians of doing that we haven't been doing a lot of lately, namely sticking our noses in places it doesn't belong. Now I'm pissed, having to take back the assertion that I and my comrades in arms actually "won" the war we were involved in, namely the "Cold War". It feels pretty chilly to me right now.

I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Perils of Pendragon Hold, and will return to us soon to find out if Fay, the big bad hurricane, simply clears out the deadwood in the trees our clears us out, period. Me, I'm hoping for option one.