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November 09, 2019
220.6 lbs
November 09, 2019 114 Block Island, RI
November 09, 2019 084 Block Island, RI
November 09, 2019 083 Block Island, RI
November 09, 2019 070 Block Island, RI
1:51 PM - Block Island Public Library
... slept better last night, weather better, not windy, not freezing, sky almost cloudless, good walk from Pane's Dock into town and back, lots of pictures... Chas continues to be episode free... pizza with M and her friends tonight, was going to make gizzard stew, will have to wait until tomorrow... not feeling that well, cold has landed, not bad, so far... i have come to library two days running and two days running, a few minutes after i get here, a man comes in huffing and puffing and sits down at a computer terminal near me, plays music videos, through headphones, but i still hear them, continues huffing and puffing, smoker i am thinking, my back turned towards him, i imagine he is watching porn and jerking off, which he is not, just what he sounds like, will have to sit somewhere else tomorrow... funny taste in my mouth, must be the cold... discovered some little blue flowers in the yard this morning, seems late for flowers...
November 08, 2019
No Weigh In
November 08, 2019 204 Block Island, RI
November 08, 2019 171 Block Island, RI
November 08, 2019 158 Block Island, RI
5:33 AM - The Cottage, BI
... awake at 3:00 AM, go to the bathroom, lay down, sort of sleep until 4:00, Chas whining, get up, look at FB, Instagram, Tublr, not much doing, dress, take Chas out, make coffee, unpack the kitchen, put things away, set up H’s soda stream, retrieve camera from car, load pictures onto the iPad, edit, try to post, internet horribly slow, i loose patience...
4:33 PM - The Cottage, BI
... getting diner ready, M and H for diner tonight, butternut squash, bacon, sage risotto, an unusual recipe not calling for any cheese or butter to finish... cold, windy today, hard to stay outside for long, will have to upgrade my layers of clothing to stay with my walks... Chas doing well, no pain episodes, fingers crossed... endless news, H unable to look away from the train wreck, do my best to ignore it, process photos, put headphones on... winds have died down, sun setting, clouds, what will the weather be tomorrow?... a commercial about metastatic breast cancer, cancer that has spread to other parts of the body, depressing commercial, medication that is supposed to prolong life, increasingly, commercials seem to tell me my age, targeted to things diseases i can expect because i am older... cold coming on, dry throat last night, sore most of the day, not feeling 100%, haven’t been sleeping well, the Chas situation, unable to sleep upstairs, with H, waking up in middle of night, bathroom, then hard to get back to sleep...
November 07, 2019
No Weigh In
November 07, 2019 142 Block Island, RI
November 07, 2019 141 Block Island, RI
November 07, 2019 137 Block Island, RI
... travel to Block Island day, organize, pack, load the car, 5 hours of steady work, then drive, 3 1/2 hours, then wait for the boat 1 hour, then ride the boat, 1 hour, the entire day devoted to getting to BI, another day at the other end, but seven days in between... blustery, fall into winter kind of weather, rain... we arrive in the dark, another hour of unpacking and moving provisions into the cottage, take care of animals, cat extremely relieved to get to litter box, have something to eat, leash up the dog and walk over to M’s house, dinner, salmon, mashed potatoes, mixed vegetables, caper sauce on salmon and potatoes, unusual extra effort for M... back to cottage, watch tv, fall asleep on couch, H wakes me up to go to bed, i am tired, very irritable, H tries my patience as she is slow to move upstairs, i am unkind, i will stay downstairs with Chas who still can’t climb stairs, well, he can, we shouldn’t let him, so i sleep downstairs on the couch so he has someone to be with, i am looking forward to not having to do that...
November 06, 2019
219.4 lbs
November 06, 2019 027 Beacon, NY
November 06, 2019 010 Beacon, NY
November 06, 2019 001 Beacon, NY
8:32 AM - Ella's Bellas
... good news for Democrats in elections yesterday, signs the red wall may be too short for the tidal wave that is hopefully heading towards it... 2:30 AM wake time again, this time Chas, restless, whining a little, wanting to go out, tried to stay in bed, made it to 3:15 AM, oh well... connection with B and D this morning as encouraged to do, B wrote back, still waiting for D... NYT submittal today, before we leave for BI, also, quince preserves, before leaving, don’t want quinces to go bad, they were expensive... cut up and froze two large turkeys yesterday, we have turkey meat to last the winter if we can stand it... continued to learn the anatomy of gizzards, turns out it's easy to remove stone sack in one piece, at least in case of turkey gizzard, am guessing similar will be true of duck and chicken gizzards, on my way to becoming a gizzard expert... sunny, cold, November... looking up gizzard pie and stew, a Portuguese stew from Food 52 catches my eye, recipe downloaded, will give it a try...
November 05, 2019
220.6 lbs
November 05, 2019 036 Beacon, NY - 41°30'8.033" N 73°57'44.698" W
November 05, 2019 029 Beacon, NY - 41°29'57.846" N 73°57'48.234" W
November 05, 2019 001 Beacon, NY - 41°30'17.496" N 73°58'25.842" W
8:33 AM - Big Mouth Coffee Roasters
... something like a routine morning, except for getting up very early part, 2:30 AM, out of bed at 3:30 AM, not sure why... no Chas episode in the last 24 hrs... impeachment process trundles on, roller coaster, are we at the top of a big climb, or already careening down?... the music in here kind of moody, secret agent like... this brings up a memory of making a crystal radio set when i was a boy, the first thing i heard through the earphones, Secret Agent Man, Johny Rivers, 1966“
There's a man who leads a life of danger
To everyone he meets he stays a stranger
With every move he makes another chance he takes
Odds are he won't live to see tomorrow…
... strange how memories are there, buried, until something comes along and pulls them to the surface, along with a train of related memories, connective tissue of self, we lived in Illinois, soon we would move to NJ, where i stayed until i went to college... we are all secret agents just trying to make it to tomorrow without becoming collateral damage, sneaking through the back alleys of our lives, almost everyone we meet stays a stranger... i open E. M. Cioran to read again what i read, but couldn’t take in yesterday, and this: So long as man is protected by madness, he functions and flourishes; but when he frees himself from the fruitful tyranny of fixed ideas, he is lost, ruined.* ... we apparently need a scaffolding of prejudice to keep ourselves from collapsing, maintain the madness, freedom is an unmooring that few of us can tolerate... every now and then the universe sends a message in a bottle...
*E. M. Cioran - A Short History of Time
November 04, 2019
221.0 lbs
7:35 AM - Big Mouth Coffee Roasters
… Chas pain episode last night, H in despair, went on for an hour and a half, no pained yelping so hard to say if it was among the worst episodes, longer than most, not as painful as some, upsetting, thinking we will cancel BI trip, maybe we wait and see, could be a minor hiccup in an otherwise positive trend… have to get a handle on my weight, it’s up around three pounds… Chas situation so disruptive, struggling to make the work consistently, daily, unable to dive deeper because routine is so undone… distracted today, i try to concentrate, but can not, i try to be brilliant, and we all know how it goes when you try… trying to read Cioran, unable to focus, make out his message, something about fixed ideas, when we abandon them, they turn to mush, or blur, as he puts it, but fixed ideas lead to a lack of flexibility, perhaps flexible, expandable/contractable ideas are needed, some core universal ideas that establish boundaries, but the boundaries are flexible, adjusting to vicissitudes of time, place, contact with the immutable cosmos which tic tic tics along… can something be part of an overall immutable and still be mutable locally?, perhaps… H with unhelpful attitude to Chas situation, frustrated, angry with herself for having forgotten a med, not at all clear that the episode and med failure are connected… she is angry, with herself, with the whole situation… wondering if we will have to do a CT scan… i need encouragement, some kind of good faith effort from the cosmos, a sign that better days are ahead, or perhaps those signs come in tandem with the bad news but we, being creatures acutely sensitive to bad news, any possible loss of ground in battle to live, prosper, bad news is all we see…
November 03, 2019
221.0 lbs
November 03, 2019 021 Beacon, NY
November 03, 2019 005 Beacon, NY
November 03, 2019 002 Beacon, NY
8:30 AM - Big Mouth Coffee Roasters
... feeling chastened this morning, pulled over by a state trooper last night, forgot to signal a turn, put through the DUI routine, i passed, but after i was on my way realized i never got my license back, which has left me with a foreboding feeling, did i really pass?, will it resurrect from the dead and become something?, probably not, but we tend to worry about the worst things happening... harvesting turkeys today, there is foreboding about that too, though i am getting used to it, killing is not as fraught as it used to be, i continue to believe it is the honorable way to approach eating meat, kill some of what you eat, know what that is about, be grateful that you are at the top of this particular food chain... allowed Chas to come down the stairs on his own this morning, no problems, we are gradually allowing more freedom, he continues to be symptom free, hoping we will be able to go out to Block Island this week as... barista women up front jiving to the music, which sounds a little old school, probably is, but i don’t recognize it... ran into A on Main Street, he pulled me into conversation, told me about the property he bought in Marlborough, sounds dilapidated, it will need a lot of work, not occupied since a long time ago, near train tracks, not clear if trains still run... K came for a visit, we had lamb rib chops with poached quinces, balsamic reduction sauce, potato galette (one of my more successful ones) roasted Brussels Sprouts, Carrots, Parsnips, poached quinces and vanilla ice cream for desert and wine, the latter being the possible issue with the trooper, but not... existence twists and turns, sometimes on a dime, it would have been bad if my license got suspended and all the knock on effects from that, H doesn’t drive, we can exist without driving, but it would circumscribe our lives quite a bit... Man is the dogmatic being par excellence; and his dogmas are all the deeper when he does not formulate them, when he is unaware of them, and when he follows them.*...
*E M Cioran, A Short History of Decay*