Sunday 14 January 2001

Pic of the day: That's ice on the water. I guess we have a winter of sorts. Today I saw people skating, far away in the distance. Yep, winter.

Fluff

OK, this is so fluffy. This is so not deep and mystic. The pendulum swings. Be back when work starts and see if there won't be grey pages again. :)

I took not one, but two walks today. Though they were not all that long each, together it made some distance. I remember a few years ago, I used to take these walks of an hour or two. But last year I only walked around the neighborhood or to work, things like that, telling y'all how enough that really was. I may or may not be scaling up again - we'll have to wait and see, I guess.

The weather was certainly good enough, and I have almost a dozen pictures queued up. I'll try to slip them in during the month, or at least some of them.

***

I ran out of yoghurt early in the morning, since I had planned yesterday to go to the other shop and get more yoghurt. I was also out of chocolate. What a day! Not even cookies! At least there was cheese in the house, so I could make spaghetti and cheese. For some reason I had also bought a liter of milk.

A couple years ago (and decades back from there) I used to drink about a liter of "light" (low-fat) milk each day, sometimes more. Mostly with chocolate powder in it, of course. MEEP! Chocolate milk and the word "meep" were made to go together. Anyway, this past year there has been less milk and more yoghurt. I think it is healthier, too. It's certainly better for the digestion.

Speaking of yoghurt, last fall I bought some new throat lozenges with zinc. I thought that was a good idea, because as you may know, zinc is one of those metals we tend to get a little bit short on. It's supposed to be good for the immune system, in moderate quantities of course. It's not like I recommend you go licking zinc-coated nails - the metal is very commonly used on nails because it is resistent to rust. Nails as in hammer & nails, not as in fingernails. Fingernails don't rust. Though they can burn, sort of. Happened to one of mine recently. I had been burning a candle and as I put it out, a piece of glowing wicker settled on my nail. What a stink. This would presumably not have happened if it was covered with zinc, but then again other strange things probably would.

Oh yes, the yoghurt. Sorry. You see, one day I found that the yoghurt tasted bad. Rotten. Disgusting. I put it away and opened another box, from a batch I had enjoyed the day before. Same taste, less filling, because I did not eat it. A couple days later all was back to normal, and I forgot about it. Until later that fall when I was at my brother's farm on the west coast. One day the yoghurt tasted rotten. Just like the boxes earlier that autumn. I knew it had been fine the day before. And I knew that I had bought another box of zinc-flavored lozenges. Hmm! It turns out that for some obscure reason, something in the lozenges make yoghurt taste bad even the next day. So today, being out of yoghurt, I licked another of those. But just a little.

***

I tentatively covered up the deep red spots on my back. You can't imagine how fat the skin on my back is! It's no great lie to say you could run a knife across my back and butter your bread. (OK, it is a lie, but less so than it should be.) I know some people are plagued with oily hair, which grows oily again within a couple days or less. I don't know how they manage that. But I know that I have an oily back. Now that is disgusting, huh? Eeeww!

But for some obscure reason, I don't have navel lint. Yes, yes, I know you didn't need to know that. You love me for my mind, and all that. Still, it's a good thing that I don't have both an oily back and a linted navel!

OK, I guess this wouldn't be a great "personal" ad anyway. So let me end this as fluffy as I started it - or perhaps not - with a quote from "Jungle Tales of Tarzan" by Edgar Rice Burroughs, a rare piece of jungle teen angst:

"For all the beasts and the birds of the jungle is there a mate. Only for Tarzan of the apes is there none. Taug is an ape. Teeka is an ape. Go back to Teeka. Tarzan is a man. He will go alone."