Wave Without A Shore

They’ve been hit again by a terrible, massive tornado.

Jane and I were in OKC for the 1999 outbreak, and this one followed almost the identical track, except that it missed Tinker. This is a terrible mess.

Thinking of you, friends and relations in OKlahoma.

This is one of the prettiest seasons…the front yard is irises, lots of irises….we’re going to be digging up large yellow and purple clumps and setting them out on the roadside with Free on them so we have room to plant some of our other colors as they multiply.

And the red and white tree peonies have done their thing and are shedding petals, and now the pink tree peony is blooming, with the bush peonies coming close behind…

Azaleas and rhodies are in bloom: we have sunset colors, plus one red, and one pink… The magnolias have done their bloom, but the dogwood is out, such as it is: a very young tree.

Not forgetting the red hawthorne, which stand about 20 feet tall and arches over our fence: this is how it blooms.

Our own is doing right well.

Weird animals

I don’t need quite the workhorse Jane does, because mine doesn’t do graphics so often, and words ARE mostly what I do. But the one thing I MUST have above any other consideration is my trackpoint mouse, that little button that sits between GH and B, and with which I can perform anything anybody can do with a mouse except scroll. It’s so automatic, so -keystroke- oriented that were I to lose it, I’d been months learning how to cope with a mouse or touchpad; and alas, since childhood I’ve had a tremor in my right hand that increases in measure as I attempt to fine down a point. Curiously enough I fence and do archery righthanded and have no trouble aiming; I can shoot righthanded or with both hands (shotgun). I do righthanded cursive. And I can model clay or any such thing. It’s purely targeting a mouse that drives me bananas.

I suspect its a neurological defect matched to the neurological problem with my right eye’s tracking—same side, same issue: my world curves like a space station when I look to the far edge, if I don’t struggle to control it. And the right hand does exactly the same thing: it goes where it thinks the target is, but my personal space warps visually, and the hand shakes. Ptui. It’s a bi-otch. I had one surgery, aged 10, trying to sort it out, but it didn’t correct the problem. I’m used to it. But no way in hades do I want to change pointing devices and cope with that problem every time I use a mouse, because the company decided to phase out the trackpoint.

Its usage has been getting sparser at Dell, and Dell and IBM are the only two that offer same. I’ve been with Dell over 15 years, and know how to get good service out of them if it comes to that.

So…I’ll have another Latitude, a machine that’s the son of the current model, only with twice the hard drive (500 gig: Jane calls that scarily small)—ha! not for me!, an Intel i5 instead of 2, and enough room for memory to exceed 4 gig if I someday need to; with the usual stuff, a decent 15.5 screen, a keyboard I’m way used to, in my sleep, plus an HDMI jack so Jane and I can both display on the big screen and discuss stuff. This can come in handy.

It’ll arrive end-of-May-ish. And then I’ll have to bite the bullet and install 10,000 programs. The good news is—we have Carbonite backup, so data movement is not going to be that bad. And this current machine is still working, which will let me take it where I don’t want to take the other. Won’t look any different…except I may splurge and get a ‘skin’ for it, something anime and outrageous.

Yep. Just minding my business in the Home Depot parking lot and walking toward the greenhouse…when this very elderly gentleman, out for a shopping trip with his wife, threw ‘er into reverse and fortunately didn’t gun it too hard, and didn’t mistakenly hit the gas when I flung my hand (armed with a fistful of keys) against his hatchback’s rear window and scared him out of a year’s growth…

I waved at the pair and walked on. I don’t think he even yet figured out he’d hit me. And he was real, real old and with his wife and it was Mother’s Day so I didn’t explain, I just walked on to the store.

But then my neck and shoulders began stiffening up, so the jolt was worse than I thought. So we came home, I took two Aleve and spent the better part of an hour with an icepack between my shoulder blades. Amazing how a little vector change can rearrange your back…