Adopting Henry

If you read last week’s post, you know little Henry is a Jack Russell terrier owned by Mrs. Greene. There have been further developments.

Deadly Mexico

Alex and I are prepping for Mexico. I’m renewing my Spanish (again) with online lessons at Mango. It’s a free, online language tutoring site I hooked up with through the library. But in the meantime, I’ve been haunting forums and the web to find out about traveling in Mexico.

Traveling with Bruno

It’s been an interesting week traveling around with Bruno. He’s a wonderful companion, but there is a downside.

I know some dogs get the ‘vomits’ when they ride around in the car, but Bruno is fine with it. The first 10 minutes or so, he wants to stick his noggin out the window, but then he settles down. Unfortunately for me, my windows aren’t electric — bad choice on my part. So, whenever we pull out onto the expressway, and Bruno is done with the wind in his face bit, I’m left trying to reach past him to roll up the window. Not the safest thing to do at seventy miles an hour.

Getting Ready For India

You would think that travelling with a doctor would make health care issues easier. Dr. Wattles, however, is/was a pediatrician, so I guess he isn’t up on vaccinations you need to get for travel to India. The difficulty for us is that we should have been vaccinated last week instead of this week. We won’t have full immunity.

Flying to Australia

Thai International Airlines will get you from London to Sydney – eventually. They run out of Heathrow airport with a 747. It takes about 6 hours to get to Bangkok, where there’s a sit-about for a couple hours until you board the next plane for the real trip…

Summer Cold – the Rhinovirus

What a nasty little package the rhinovirus is! It’s small, very efficient and impossible to guard against. (Can you tell I’ve got a cold?)

How small? Take a look at one of your hairs. Pretty thin. You can fit about 25 red blood cells side by side across the width of a human hair. On each of these blood cells (and now you really have to squint to see this part) you could line up a hundred little rhinoviruses. In fact, no one even saw a virus until the invention of the electron microscope. We knew they must be there, because they passed through filters with holes small enough to trap bacteria, but they remained unseen.

hello world

I’m looking at the default title here at wordpress – hello world – and it strikes me as particularly appropriate.

Back in the day, when you wrote your first program in any particular computer language, the program displayed that message on the screen. It was a sign of life. It told you your program was alive and working. That’s just how I feel. Alive. Working.

It also works in another sense. A sort of, “HERE I AM” sense. It’s the thing you do when you shout from the tippy top of the mountain peak you just climbed. You yell out, announcing your own existence. That’s what I intend for this blog. A shout out, anonymous but honest, a ‘hello world’ of my own.

The honest part is important. I want to keep a record I can visit when the now me is faded into the past and the future me doesn’t recall what now me knows. I know this happens because I’m 30. And the thirty me doesn’t remember what the twenty me knew. All my memories are skewed by what I know and care about now. I don’t trust them. I wish I had a diary from back then, and further back, and back…

So, now I have a diary/travelogue. I intend to keep it honest. Why lie to future me? Future me should at least remember this much about now me. That I was honest.

Tomorrow I leave this place, this town, this life in the apartment. And find a different life. And I’ll write when I can, what I can.