Lucky

I may have mentioned before that I have lived in a lot of different places. I don’t know if this is a cause or an effect but I have also been around when several natural disasters have occurred.

Three of the most powerful earthquakes to happen in the last twenty years have happened where I was. I’ll be more specific:

October 18th 1989 I lived in Hayward (East side San Francisco Bay) and worked in San Francisco. I finished work early that day, crossed the Bay Bridge and headed south on Hwy 880. I got home just in time to open a beer turn on the TV in my room and watch the end of the Pre-Game show for the first game of the World Series. At about 5:oopm it hit. The world started rolling like tug boat in a gale causing a small tsunami in my water bed which tossed me to the floor where I was just in time to catch the (Thankfully Small) TV as it fell off it’s stand. That was pretty much it for my personal part of the excitement. I got the heck out of town as soon as possible.

January 17th 1994 4:31 in the morning I was living in Los Angeles when the same waterbed had another tsunami. This one hit at a different angle and I didn’t fall out of bed, but I did have to jump up to deal with a couple of terrified Shar Peis who had no clue what was going on. A lot of stuff was broken, again, time to move on.

February 28th 2001 10:30 or so. I was living in a Town House in Kent, Washington (Just south of Seattle) when that same old feeling hit me again. It was a gentler rolling this time but it seemed to keep going for a much longer time. It gave me a lot of time to contemplate where I was and what was happening. I was on a "Down Week" from Bell Labs which is why I was at home instead of off some where working. I had just got out of the shower and was standing in the hallway between the bath and the bedroom holding a towel and nothing else. This time I was just looking at the waterbed with the waves crashing back and forth across it. I couldn’t leave town for a while, my wife was very ill and her doctors were there.

Now the Loma Prieta (San Francisco) quake was a 6.9, the Northridge (Los Angeles) a 6.7 and the Nisqually (Seattle) quake a 6.9 although at the time they told us it was a 9.1

The cost of these three quakes was over 52 billion dollars.

OK, So, Here is the question… If I take this story to the Governor of Alabama and offer to move away from the state for some as yet undisclosed sum of money, would this constitute an attempt at extortion?

Uncle Dave

Grumbling

Here I am staring at the blank page again. I wonder what will come out of my need to communicate with the outside world today?

I don’t get out much these days. This is partly because I’m dealing with a couple of debilitating diseases and partly because I am living on very little money. Actually there’s a third element that kind of puts the last nail in the coffin. Gas is almost three dollars a gallon. So even though it is true that there is always stuff I can do that costs nothing, none of these things are close enough to get to on foot. These circumstances produce a very effective combination that precludes my going out and doing stuff. This month is also tighter than normal because I am paying off a trip I took to California in February and the fact that I bailed out my younger brother from one of his little scrapes with the law. A truly thankless job in all respects, but he is family.

I have an important project to complete/or at least keep going in the month of May. I have tried to get my disability declared service connected by the VA such that I can keep getting my medical problems treated by them. They turned me down about a year ago and I have about a month left to dispute their findings. So far my detective work has been pretty much fruitless in that I haven’t been able to find official records that show I was ever in Viet Nam. I do have a couple of people who were there with me who can state that we were there but the official record says otherwise and there are people pretty high up in the military who don’t want this boat rocked. This sounds a lot more cloak-and-dagger than it really is, but as mundane as the reasons are, the effect is the same… I’m screwed. I am told by people who should know that what I need here is tenacity. If I stick to it and keep on trying I will eventually win. It doesn’t feel like it to me, but I’ve been wrong before and it’s not like I have a lot of choices, this is literally Do-or-Die.

Oh well, I’ll let you know how it is going,

Uncle Dave

Food and Congratulations

Well here we are. I have no idea what I am going to write about today.

I just had a great Sunday dinner, maybe I could talk about that.

First, I got a frozen chicken breast out and set it to thaw in my frying pan. After an hour it had just a little section in the middle that was still hard so I dried it off with paper towels and set aside on the cutting board. After cleaning the water out of the pan, I turned on the heat and put some butter in to melt. I next seasoned the chicken with coarse black pepper, garlic powder and Old Bay seasoning (both sides of course.) When the butter was sizzling I turned the heat down to just below half speed and put in the chicken. Two minutes on the first side and four on the second side. While it was cooking I scrubbed a small sweet potato and nuked it for four and a half minutes. When the chicken was done I let it rest for a few minutes then cut it up into bite sized pieces. When the sweet potato was done I cut it in half lengthwise and put in a generous amount of butter. To drink with my meal I had a 32-oz. glass of water. I salted nothing although there was some salt in the butter and in the garlic powder. I am now looking at the plate with only a sweet potato skin and a little melted butter on it and remembering how much I enjoyed eating it.

You might deduce from my description that food safety is not a high priority in my life. You would be correct. More specifically, I don’t fear food. Primarily, I think that a judicious application of high heat will kill most of the things in a piece of chicken that might hurt me and I do wash my hands a lot as well as clean my cutting board ever time it touches raw meat.

Later I plan to have a can of spinach, dried heated and mixed with a little béchamel sauce. Also a can of smoked oysters. Heck of a supper!

J. Edgar gets dry dog food. Not exactly exciting but healthy and as that’s all he ever gets, he doesn’t know to complain or ask for something else.

My sister Marlene is graduating from college this Friday. She will have a bachelor’s degree in Electronics Technology. I am very proud of her; she is the first and only family member of my generation to get a degree. She has worked hard and sacrificed much to get to where she is.

"WELL DONE!"

I have to end this now, the Dogg wants to check his e-mail.

Uncle Dave