Hiatuses

Trilliums at Wild Iris Ridge park last week

I think I was emotionally ready to abandon this blog. But of course that's not gonna happen. Long hiatus. And perhaps this is a lone entry between two hiatuses. I just looked up hiati and the internet told me that was incorrect. Semi-related: it's trilliums, not trillia.

The thing is: I don't really have anything I want to write about. I'll have to sneak my way in. Tomorrow will be eight months since we started living in our new house. It's gradually feeling more normal! It's our first spring here. Mrs. Random has been documenting the flowers and plants that are springing into action around the house. That's definitely her department. I admire but she seeks knowledge.

I just peeked at my last blog entry, which was in early February—Groundhog Day actually. I stopped keeping track of books I've been reading, but I don't think I've read very many. Just finished what I believe is the third reading of Simon Reynolds' book about post-punk music (1978-85), Rip It Up and Start Again. Obviously it's a favorite. I'm in season 4 of my fifth binge-through of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., probably my favorite TV series, although Max Headroom and Star Trek: Voyager are up there, too. Psych as well. I've been spending time on Kanopy watching documentaries. There's some pretty interesting stuff there. If I'd known I'd be getting back to blogging, I'd have kept track, logged what I've been watching (and reading). I wish Kanopy had a watch history feature.

I started a big project a few weeks ago: dubbing my massive pile of VHS tapes to digital. I bought a second VCR and two little video recorders that save MP4 files to MicroSD cards. It's going to be a long and somewhat tedious process, but I want to save a lot of the programming that I recorded in the late 80s and 90s. With two VCRs and accompanying digital dubbers, I can get through 2-4 tapes per day. I archive the files to three hard drives and then toss out the tapes. Ultimately I'll be liberating a substantial bit of volume in the Bunker, making room for more desk space, more area to do art and music.

I was all excited about my Freewrites last year (Alpha, Traveler, Smart Typewriter), but as it often happens, the new gadgets lost their luster and started sitting for longer and longer unused. One reason I'm blogging today is to put some words onto one of those gadgets. I'm writing this on the Alpha. And I started a journal entry on the Smarty. That's good.

Can recommend

Howdy gentle readers. And speaking of reading, here's what I've finished since the previous blog post:

The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City by Kevin Baker (2024)
City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s by Otto Friedrich (1986)
We Solve Murders by Richard Osman (2024)
Good Bones: Glorious Relics from the Age of Reading by Brooke Allen (2025)
Gun, with Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem (1994)

I can recommend all of the above. The first two are histories chock full of details. The Osman is a fun mystery written by an Englishman, first in a planned series. Good Bones is a collection of essays on mostly forgotten but significant-in-their-time writers. The Lethem novel is his debut, hard-boiled and humorous dystopian noir science fiction.

Also since last blogging, I've started taking three different drugs: for diabetes, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure. I'm also supposed to be getting a topical ointment (cream?) for a toenail fungal infection, but there's currently a tussle over whether my insurance will pay for it. Colonoscopy, check! They found and completely removed three polyps, none of which had abnormalities. Re-do in five years. Later this week I'll get my first eye exam since 2022, and quite possibly new prescriptions for eyeglasses and contacts.

The blood pressure medicine works eerily fast. I took the first pill in the evening, and by noon the next day, my systolic number was down 20 points.

Our gas fireplace inserts got ordered two weeks ago, and now we're just waiting. We're hoping installation will happen within a month. Our kitties can't wait!

We've had a couple movie nights over the last two weekends, and we watched all-time faves Desperately Seeking Susan and Napoleon Dynamite.

Maybe that's enough for now. Thank you for reading.

Still feels wild

When will Mr. Random the Daily Blogger return? Unknown. But here's his occasional version, today.

Five months ago we were in the middle of moving stuff to the new house. Today might even be five months to the day that I woke up from a nap in the old bedroom and noticed in horror the nasty decades-in-the-making discoloration on the wall at the head of our bed. "We need a headboard," I exclaimed to Mrs. Random. Of course, she was way ahead of me, just waiting for the nudge or realization on my part. We hopped in the car and headed downtown to visit a couple furniture stores, found a satisfactory bed-frame-headboard-mattress set, and ordered it. Then we drove north to "California", which is what we call north Eugene on Coburg Rd., and shopped for a spinny chair for our new living room. We didn't find exactly what we wanted in stock, but we got enough information to place an order a couple weeks later.

The time between getting the keys (Aug. 7) and actually starting to live here (Aug. 21) was a total whirlwind of activity, which I believe I documented fairly well here in this blog as it heppened. It still feels wild to be on this end of things, all moved in and living our lives in this completely different location and environment. Last year ranks as one of the most change-oriented time periods in our lives together.

We do have one more significant change, or two, depending on how you count it/them. Today we're getting a visit from a Midgley's Stove & Fireplace Center technician to check out our house layout and make a plan for installing two gas fireplace inserts (upstairs and down) that we ordered last week. So, within a month to six weeks, we'll have brand new glowing warm units that make us and the cats even happier here. Exciting!

Yesterday I had my first medical appointment in nearly five years. My old doc retired in '21 and then the medical group he was part of went downhill, having been purchased the year before by an evil corporation. Many staff quit or were laid off, and thousands of local people lost their primary care providers. It's been a shit show at Oregon Medical Group (Optum) ever since, basically. There's a newish group in town called Praxis, and they were accepting new patients when I called a couple weeks ago. My new PCP is an FNP (Family Nurse Practitioner) and I immediately liked her. It was a "getting to know you" visit, as they called it, with me basically answering a bunch of questions, them taking my vitals, and me giving blood and urine samples. Also, I got referrals for a colonoscopy that I'm due for, and a podiatrist for a toe issue. Anyway, I'm feeling a bit more like a responsible adult now that I'm not playing the avoidance game with my health anymore. Next: eye doc and possibly new glasses and updated contact lens prescription.

I've been doing a fair bit of live broadcasting on my fake pirate radio station, and having a fair bit of fun with that. In addition to my usual morning DJing, I've started playing old KWVA shows in the evenings. Why not? I've got hundreds of hours stored on hard drives, of my shows and former fellow DJs' shows. It's a plethora of time-capsuled material, late-90s through 2007.

Reading.... Two weeks in, I'm still abiding by my New Year's decision to stop multi-tasking i.e. reading multiple books simultaneously—i.e. focus on reading one book at a time. In January I've finished: Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, and Adam Bede by George Eliot. And, after switching from a hundred-and-eleven-year-old translation of Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky to a modern one, I've gone from slogging to sailing through that book, now at 61% and counting.

I found the film adaptation of Catch-22 (1970) free on Kanopy and watched it. Star-studded cast, and a valiant effort, mostly successful, to translate a 500-page novel into a 2-hour film. I also watched Jean-Luc Godard's Hail Mary, a 1985 modern retelling or recasting or something of the story of Mary, Joseph & Jesus. Very weird but very beautiful and evocative, i.e. standard-issue Godard (in my experience).

Okay, that's it for today. RIP Bob Weir.

I hope to reduce my in-progress list

I don't make New Year's resolutions, but this year I have some things I want to do and some things I want not to do. The last vow I made was to make no more vows. So these are "decisions" or "goals" I suppose. I'm not going to list them here. But one of them follows on my last blog entry. I have decided to finish a book before starting or switching to another book. That way I hope to reduce my in-progress list down to a very small number from the ridiculous size it is right now.

Last night I finished Joseph Heller's Catch-22. It was much longer than I thought it would be. Reading on an e-reader obscures a book's true length, which can be both good and bad. Some books' massiveness can be daunting, so it's psychologically easier to read the e-version, and it's also physically easier: a 1000-page tome is big and bulky! Catch-22 isn't that big, but it's substantial at around 500 pages. And it's a doozy of an absurdist early postmodern character-driven crazy-quilt masterpiece, perhaps the first novel to capture the ridiculous double-binds and arbitrary tragi-comedies of life during wartime (WW2 in this case) for American soldiers. I'm glad I read it and I'm chagrined it took me this long to do it.

Now I'm reading Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn, a Solstice e-gift from a friend, and I am thoroughly enjoying the author's gift for creating lifelike characters and entertaining situations, as well as his witty and poetic way with words. I'm so happy to encounter Lethem, who's been publishing novels since the mid 90's—way off my radar until I read his 2017 collection of essays, More Alive and Less Lonely: On Books and Writers.

I'm continuing to enjoy my Freewrite devices—writing this on the Smart Typewriter. Job descriptions, or division of labor, if you will: Alpha for daily journal writing, often several times a day; Traveler for quiet writing (I envision it for coffee house writing); Smart Typewriter for working on my nonsense novel or when I want a premium clicky typing experience with a front-lit e-ink screen. They are all getting used.