I went to my doctor last Thursday, and he said that I looked so good that I probably would live to be 70. I told him: "I'm already there." He replied: "See, I told you so."

Sorry, I made that up, but this was my skin doctor and he told me I didn't need to come back to see him for a whole year. Good news.

I had asked him about the white things growing on my arms and hands. They look like barnacles. (Remember the old song: "I'm Barnacle Bill, the sailor"?) He assured me that I was not turning into a humpback whale. He said that eventually everybody gets them, usually around the age of 60. See what you have to look forward to.

Enough about me, let's go on to more interesting things, I hope.

01. Mr. Mind? SHAZAM!: This week, Elaine and I came face to face with the dreaded tomato horn-worm. (Actually five of them.) These are large green caterpillars with thin white stripes and horns. They are very hard to see because they are the same color as the foliage they love to eat. They are voracious eaters. You can tell where they are by looking for devastated areas on your plants. If you don't get rid of them, they will completely devour your tomato plants.

We couldn't figure out how these worms could get to our plants, which are 15 feet off the ground on our deck. We later learned that they are propagated by a generous moth that lands on your plants and lays eggs which later turn into the worms.

The worms grow big and strong very quickly and sometimes get to be 6 inches long and very plump. At some point, they feel that their tummies are full enough for them to quit being a worm and weave themselves into cocoons and go to sleep until they wake as giant colorful moths, some as big as humming birds. Then the cycle continues.

To break the cycle, you must rid yourself of these worms when you find them. I threw some down a toilet and it got clogged up, so I don't recommend that. I put some through the disposal. That worked ok, but I then felt like a murderer. Finally, I followed some advice and cut them in half with a knife... yes, I didn't like doing it, but what was the alternative?

There is one humane way to handle them. A certain type of wasp climbs on the backs of these worms and deposits hundreds of eggs which become larvae that feeds on the worm. After a short time, these parasites kill the worm. So, if your tomato horm worm shows white things on its back, it will be going to worm heaven shortly and you can leave it alone.

http://organicgardensite.com/bugs-harmful/tomato-horn-worms/

02. The ultimate solution? I heard on the radio yesterday that a Southern Christian church is scheduling a "Koran Burning Day." Will they soon be recommending the rounding up of all Moslems for concentration camps?

03. Carat juice: Years ago, aristocrats liked to drink liquid gold; they thought that it was helpful. It probably killed them. Recently, gold residue has been found in dug-up ancient remains. You rich folks, don't try it.

Recently, one of my organizations that publishes a book with a gold-lettered title on the cover, received a bill for hundreds of dollars, just for the gold-lettering. When we opted for a silver-lettered title, the price went down considerably.

04. HUH? The Baltimore Sun reports that 15% of teens are going deaf because of the music coming through their ear buds. Music? I'm sorry, but the sounds that appeal to some of our teen-agers would make my poor old ears cry "Uncle!" But then, I am an old dude who would rather listen to Mozart... once in a while I like to hear works by Gustav Mahler which could be considered by some classical musical buffs to be a little loud at times. (By the way, give yourself a treat, teen-agers, plug into Mahler's Lied von der Erde.. both the music and the lyrics/poems.. I think you would like it.)

http://www.mahlerarchives.net/DLvDE/DLvDE.htm

05. Writer's idea: Walk through a cemetery and find an interesting tombstone. Do some research on that person.. who they were.. who their ancestors were. Then, armed with those facts, build a story around them, perhaps change their names and write the story for publication.

I have always wanted to do this. In Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, near my family's gravesites, there are tombstones for the Snow family. The family intrigues me. There is a Captain Snow, with a carving of his ship on the stone. There are lots of other Snow's nearby, including one person named Ivory Snow. These were all people who lived in the 18th and 19th centuries and probably many of them were whalers out of New Bedford. I'll bet there are interesting stories there ...and I would like to get them down on paper someday when I have time. (Space here for an emoticon representing someone laughing their head off.)

I wonder if Captain Snow is the same guy whose house is now an inn on Cape Cod?

http://www.stonelioncapecod.com/inn.html

06. Even the rich have to: I just learned that Hetty Green, New Bedford born richest woman in the world at one time, was not quite the mean person she was made out to be. I'll talk more about her and a biography of her life in a later blog entry. For now, I want to mention something I think I heard on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me: her son, called Colonel Green, owned a diamond-encrusted chamber pot. Speaking of things scatalogic, his mother had an automobile that contained a working toilet. The car is now on display at an automobile museum in Princeton, Massachusetts.

07. Up, Up and Away: The Baltimore Sun mentions a theater in Lansdowne, Pennsylvania, that shows old ugly movies. The audience is encouraged to boo, hiss and heckle. Sounds like a lot of fun. One of the old movies being shown is Gamera.. about a kind of ugly monster that flies through the air by farting fire.

http://godzilla.wikia.com/wiki/Gamera


08. Another writer's idea: Take a deceased person and develop a facebook style story with them and others of the same time frame. In other words, for instance, set up Thomas Jefferson on a dummy Facebook, with "friends" like John Adams, George Washington, etc. Plug in entries.. about events in their lives.. with pictures of oil paintings as "photo" spots.. but not like Twitter entries, although that might be worked out.

09. Girls night out: I read somewhere that people in Bogota, Colombia observed a "night without men".. and reported that crime for that night was down by 25%.

10. Exciting stuff: Folks can now canoe or kayak over the 18 foot high Ohiopyle Falls on Pennsylvania's Youghiogheny River. When I worked at the Social Security Administration in Baltimore, trips down the Youghiogheny River were fairly common. However, I can't imagine how any of these folks, in their reportedly drunken condition, could have made it over a waterfall without leaving this world.

http://www.fay-west.com/ohiopyle/

11. Fish in disguise? Inside my facial cheeks, I have what seem to be vestigial gills. Nobody else I know has them. They never have helped me get oxygen through my cheeks and "what can be the use of them is more than I can see".. they do get kind of chewed up sometimes... haven't you ever bit the inside of your cheek? Can anybody out there.. and believe it or not, there are a few people out there .. help me in this regard? But please don't get me embroiled in the anti-evolution argument.

12. A Teenage Hero: In item 07 above, I mention that there is a theater where lousy movies are shown. One of those mentioned is Hercules, starring Steve Reeves. The movie came out in 1958, just after Steve had achieved a body-building status unmatched until "Big Arnie" appeared on the scene.

I was heavy into weight-lifting and body-building in the 1950's, 1960's and 1970's, and Steve was one of my "heroes". This was a guy that I could never look like.. he was about 7 feet tall, with massive, but well-formed muscles from his little toe to the top of his hairdo. He was "a man's man" who did not use steroids and liked women... who went crazy over him.

Unfortunately, he was not a very good actor. I believe he did a lot of Italian movies where his voice was dubbed in a perfect Roman accent.

At one time, I had a 5 minute movie of Steve flexing his muscles. I had that movie mixed in with other 8 mm movie film of family events. One of my co-workers combined all of these films into a long reel.. however, Steve's movie didn't get edited out.. so, as you looked at the family at Christmas in 1966, this was immediately followed by Steve flexing, followed immediately by the family in Easter 1967. Interesting.

http://www.stevereeves.com/

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Laptop, jokes, birds and other stuff..

I had a nice long 2 hour talk with some Indian guys working for Dell. They had me take my laptop apart a bit and do some tests. Unfortunately, nothing was determined, so they have arranged for FED EX to pick up my laptop and send it to DELL for fixing. At least I now know that the problem is not with the hard drive. Luckily, I am still within the warranty period.

This is the first PC that I have had that I could not fix myself.

Elaine and I were telling jokes this morning. I remembered my first joke: Question: Why does a cat walk across the street with its tail up in the air? Answer: So the cars can see its license plate.

(I know, its not great, but what do you expect from an eight-year old?)

Elaine made up a new joke: Question: "Why did the chicken cross the road?" Answer: " She forgot her cell phone."

Uggg!

Elaine and I like to watch the birds outside of our bowed window, here in Maryland. Once a week, I fill five bird feeders and one finch feeder, and a suet holder. Usually, it takes a complete week for the birds to empty the feeders. However, this week, everything has gone in four days! Why?

We like to watch yellow finches eat thistle seed. I had thought that yellow finches were only here for two weeks and then went on to Maine. Apparently I was wrong because they have lingered here for a couple of months. Beautiful birds that are a delight to watch.

Other birds we have seen this week: Red wing blackbirds.. which we thought only populated marsh lands. Well, here they are.

Also, mocking birds, sparrows, starlings, woodpeckers, crows, house finches, mourning doves, etc. Apparenty, next to the side of the house, under some bushes, baby sparrows have come into existence. It is fun to watch them take their first flights, prodded by their mama. If their flights are not as long as she feels necessary, she butts them in the rear end to get them to take off again.

The heavy rains of a month ago washed away the mulch along the sides of our house. In this environment, residents are not supposed to move mulch or do weeding. We are supposed to write up "pink slips" to trigger maintenance to work. However, in our bad economy, some maintenance activity has been curtailed. But.. since our monthly fee has gone up this month, I feel that we should not be losing out on our perks. The Village has a large surplus held for "a Rainy Day".. hey! Isn't this a rainy day??

The Market had been going up for a few weeks, but now it has taken a down-turn again. Who knows what tomorrow may bring. Let's hope that the recession has bottomed out.

It looks like medical problems will keep us from visiting New Bedford this year. It took years for my leg wounds to heal, and now Elaine has foot wounds that are not healing properly. We will be visiting doctors every day this week.

Our garden is going well.. in fact, one of the zucchinis seems to grow a few inches every day. We also have about 30 green tomatoes growing on the vines. Every morning I deliver 5 gallons of water to the plants!

Am I a great farmer or not?!

Lucky and our first Zuke

My laptop stopped working and the only thing that is working quickly on my desktop is blogspot.com, so I will do another blog, Today I will talk about my Tuxedo Cat, Lucky (alias Luciano, Houdini, de Tuxedo) and also about our first Zuke.

I think that it is Larry the Cable Guy who tells about his dog that has only three legs, is blind and deaf. His name is "Lucky".

Well, my cat "Lucky" is also not so lucky right now. He has hyperthyroidism and is pulling out all of his fur. He looks like he has male pattern baldness. Some parts of his body have no fur and Lucky walks around with fur hanging out of his mouth.

When he was diagnosed with hyperthyroidism, the vet gave us a liquid to give to the cat. Lucky did not like that and after he chewed up my arm pretty badly we gave up on the liquid. The vet gave us some pills instead and Elaine found a wonderful thing in her effects.. its called a "pill popper". I grab Lucky and hold his paws while Elaine "pops" a pill down his gullet. It works.

Every morning I get out the vacuum cleaner and suck up the black fur deposited all over the house. Some of it embeds itself in the cheap wall-to-wall rug that we mis-ordered before we moved in.

Did I tell you about the derivation of Lucky's names? (All my cats have been named Lucky as far as I'm concerned even if other people in the house have given them other names. My late spouse called my prior cat "damn cat!" Elaine calls this cat "Kitty Kitty".)

I used "Luciano" because when I got him, his crying sounded like Pavarotti. I used "Houdini" because he learned to open locked doors. "De Tuxedo" is of course a name given to all black and white cats that look like they are preparing to go to a wedding.

Lucky has a companion: Su-Zee. I'm sure I have talked about this Siamese fireball before.

Yesterday, we picked our first zucchini from our balcony garden. It was about 5 inches long and we cut it up and mixed it into scrambled egg, as a mini-melange. Elaine ate some slices raw beforehand and said that it was the best she had ever tasted. The melange was delicious and we are looking forward to more zukes. There certainly are plenty of flowers on the plants. Elaine's daughter, Emily, says that you can fry up the blossoms. We'll have to try that.

Our tomato plants are all starting to burst forth with little tomatoes.. even our hanging tomato plant holder has a few flowers. For some reason, we are not having as good luck with the hanging holder as some of our neighbors. I look at their holders and I see large amounts of greenery hanging down. We have a few light green twiggs with brown leaves. Maybe I will pull the thing apart and put in a new plant, if I can find one now that tomato plants are being pulled because of the "blight."

Next year, Elaine wants to ask the Village for a small plot of land on which to plant some corn. So, in my old age I will become a farmer again. What about that "old rocking chair" time?