I Have a Pull Chain in my Head

But am I done? Tried acupuncture for the first time to deal with my stiff neck and shoulders. It certainly seemed to be doing something, getting those muscles moving and generating some localized warmth. I'll give it a few days to to see how I feel, but I'm hopeful.

Update for the morning after (June 23rd): guess I should have taken some aspirin before going to bed. The acupuncturist warned me that my shoulders would ache as if I'd done a workout, but I guess I didn't realize it would feel like a major workout! Anyway. A little tossing... A little turning... A little 'who set the alarm so early'....

And now an Update for the 24th: My shoulders have felt like two, great slabs of rubber and my arms have felt heavy. Most of the aches from the original condition are gone, as are the aches from the treatment...but I can't honestly say whether all of that tension left due to the acupuncture or due to the 3 days since I was last scraping the paint on the side of my house. I can only assume the great rubbery feeling is coming from the relaxing effects of the acupuncture. At least that allows me to rationalize spending 85 bucks for 'ancient Chinese remedy'. Guess I'm not sure what I think about acupuncture.

Becky and I pondered what to do about a Bridal Registry. Both of us have been kicking around the old sod long enough to have collected all the appliances and linens and knick knacks we could ever need. We also know our house is rather small, and while we like it that way, it means that there isn't a lot of room for more general stuff...no matter how well intended. So, we've opted for the following method:

We've picked out a dining room set.

You can see it at Sweetheart Gallery. Go down the page until you see 'Gift/Bridal Registry' on the left hand side. Give that a click and then type in 'Dean' or 'Becky' or 'Barwick' or 'Derby' and that will bring you to the exact piece. What we'll be asking folks to do is put what they can towards the price of it and we'll be picking up the remainder. At the moment we haven't placed the order, so you can't start paying on it yet, but take a gander. We think it's pretty cool.

Becky! 

I proposed to her last January, upon bent knee at her folk's dinner table. And we're planning our wedding for this coming March!

Work Face 

And I think it's from holding this happy face up for 12 hours. I'm sure my co-workers would tell you that it slips down often, but it's tiring to keep this thing up all the time.

Here I am with all the space I care to handle and nothing to say. Writer's block! Perhaps I should do what the writers of the early 20th century did and drink a lot of bourbon. Neat. No ice. Or I could just pull the chain in my head and come up with...refrigerator poetry?!
Well, I do have a fridge covered in the stuff. Just your basic set of word magnets mixed with two people who have far too much time on their hands. So, having pulled the chain...here's a selection of 'Refrigerator Poetry'.

"I trudge through delicate eternity with sweaty feet."

-or perhaps-

"Rusted visions of goddess gardens
recalled the love of Bitter Cool."

-or even-

"Death drives fast in an enormous black car
with his milk white arm all easy out the window."

-and one I like a lot, though not really poetry-

"Egg wax the mother ship."

At the moment all of these are up, plus 8 or so others, made from a single set of word magnets. Why are you looking at me like that? Oh. Yeah, I probably should get out a little more, but it makes the neighbors nervous.

Muffin 

I've been playing around with the basic template offered by Blogspot and have managed to add the categories of "What I'm Reading Now" and "My Latest Aural Addiction" to the sidebar. Today I've also made those 'Reading' and 'Aural Addiction' headings into links of their own. (Links related to, but different from, the links on the pictures themselves.)

Today's Quote: (from The Book of the SubGenius)
"I don't practice what I preach because I'm not the kind of person I'm preaching to."

I bought the complete National Geographic dvd set some time ago and decided to start reading it with the year I was born ... 1959. It's startling to see what was new then and realize it's so passe or commonplace now that no one even thinks to talk about these things. In the Geographics of 1959, they mention:

- The nuclear submarine, Nautilus, made the very first passage of the Arctic Ocean (December 1958).
- The brand new St. Lawrence Seaway opens to sea-going vessels for the first time.
- They welcome Alaska as the 49th state in the July issue (Alaska ratified back in August of '58).
- Hawaii has been a state for an even shorter time, though they don't mention dates.
- The hi-tech goodies of the day in the adverts are slide projectors.
- Ike is finishing up his last year as president.

I could mention all the things that weren't there, but where to begin? The list would be huge and I don't need to feel any older. (Which will sound silly to my parents, whom I've just invited to view this Blog. Perhaps I'll pull up a few tidbits from their birth years to add more gradations to the scale.)

This is taken from an episode of Ruby the Galactic Gumshoe, one of the many great, modern radio plays put out by ZBS Productions (also linked in my sidebar). Specifically, it's a line spoken by the character Rodent ("No! That's Ro-DANT!") Kapoor as part of a conversation he's having with his own brain. ..which was just what I was doing in my own head, trying to figure out a name for this blog.

Now my fiance, who's wise-acre radar is finely-tuned to detect any moment in which my wits are at their thickest, chose to read me a humorous internet tidbit that I was, well, a little slow to get. And at the moment my 'light of understanding' finally went on, she offered, "Do you have a pull chain in your head?" And then the 'light' went on a second time and I knew what to call my blog. (Riveting, isn't it?)

Big Plug: if you like well-crafted stories of adventure, each filled with great tableaus of sound and imagination, then I highly recommend ZBS Productions. My personal faves are the Jack Flanders and the Ruby stories, but those are only two stars among the many they offer.

Ahhh... to spread my nubbish wings and let my flights take dream into the vast, virtual ether of Web logging. At a minimum, to expose my general ignorance of all things webby for the virtual world to see. Either way you look at it the upshot is...

...I got me a Blog.

And for any of you old enough to remember, or for those young-uns out there with a high enough pain threshold to sit through hours of the 'These-Shows-Stunted-Your-Parents-So-You-Should-Watch-Them-Too' Rerun Channel, the tag to this post is from the Andy Griffith Show and is a take on the little tune sung by the town drunk, Ernest T. Bass. Why this has imbedded itself so firmly into my psyche that it's the first thing I can think of to type ... frightens the hell out of me. But I do remember that Ernest T. just loved throwing bricks through windows and - in this day and age of Microsoftiness - I kinda like that about him.