Rants

Went to a matinee of “Minority Report” today. I love Sci-Fi films and Donna usually humors me, of course having Tom Cruise in it helped. Unfortunately the graphic eyeball transplant sequence caused me to have to promise to take her one Julia Roberts movie *and* one Sandra Bullock movie before I will get to pick another movie for us to see. All in all it was a very good movie. Interesting concept that was well executed, up until the very end. At the point where the credits should have rolled, it gave us not one, but two answers to questions that we didn’t ask and really didn’t need to know. I guess the film makers or the studio felt we had to have a warm and fuzzy feeling as we left the theater instead of just the satisfaction of a mystery solved.

Who does she work for? Braves – Red Sox have been playing a weekend series and I’ve been lucky enough to catch some of the games on TV. TBS has televised Friday and Sunday while Fox did the Saturday game. I vastly prefer the TBS versions even thought they are more Braves-centric over Foz’s usually overdone graphics and announcers. On TBS they used to just read off the scores of other ongoing games, but now for some reason feel the need to break away periodically to a blonde, tan, pearly white toothed Erin Andrews for updates. Each time we break away there is a flashy EA Sports (a game console game maker) logo video animation, Erin introduces of clip of some ball player smacking a home run, she tells us the score, we get the EA Sports thing again and we are back to the Braves game. Does Erin work for TBS or EA Sports? Hard to tell.

Went out to dinner this evening after running the Miata Club newsletter through the postage meter at Rader. Damon’s is right across the street and we love ribs, so over we went. It was early, the place was pretty empty so when we and asked for a booth in the No Smoking section, we figured that would be no problem. When the hostess turned right instead of the usual left we questioned her. She said, “This is no smoking.” We said, “But it is right near the bar/smoking section. Could we sit over there instead?” She said, “That section is closed, besides there isn’t any one here yet, so…” That is when we stopped listening, turned around and left. There is a Tony Roma’s a couple of miles away. We have been in too many, there is no one here situations before. Invariably just as we are eating our salads, everyone in the booth on the other side of the little wall will light up. No thanks, there are just too many places to eat out to have to gamble on having our meal spoiled by the stench of cigarettes.

5 or so years ago when color copiers started to make their way into the copy & printing places it cost a dollar to make one 8-1/2 x 11 color copy. I have never wanted the services of a color copier until now. I print out the Master’s Miata Club newsletter at work. Always used the laser printer in my area for it, until a year ago. They company bought a color laser printer. I started doing the newsletter on it after hours. I didn’t think the folks at the company minded me running 25 or newsletters off a month, after all the Miata Club is a non-profit organization, so it is kinda like a community service. Well fast forward to now. Business is bad, sales are down, production is down, etc. I’m starting to feel a little like they might not take kindly to me “stealing” there paper, toner, time anymore. For the heck of it I called my friends at the Mail Boxes Etc. and asked how much for a color copy. 99?. Big price drop!?! I guess no one else has made enough copies to bring the price down any, huh? I now print 50 newsletters with just the front page in color. I would need 100 copies, fortunately there is price break at 100, times 78? equals $78. Some how I don’t think the club will want to spend that much on printing every month. August I go back to black & white.

Today was a nothing day, but I still feel the need to write something here, so this is it. Please deal with it kindly, ’cause I can’t.

For those of you keeping track today was my big stress/echo test. In a quest to figure out why my BP went way high (for me) and is now pretty much in line from medication. Well as expected I passed with flying colors, at least preliminarily. The Cardiologist is in the room when you are actually taking the test and he looked at the various EKG readouts and watched my sonogram and said, “Looks OK so far.” Worst part of it was them sandpapering my skin to remove any dead stuff, quickly followed by an alcohol wipe to remove any oils!

I seem like a perfectly healthy person, but once every 3 or 4 days my body freaks or something and I get that hazy feeling and warm and I bet my pressure and pulse rate go up. It happened this afternoon while waiting for the doctor, I was hooked up too the electrodes and I could see my heart rate hit like 90 for a few seconds. Next up is a 24 hour urine sample test to check for something the doctor called “exotic” abnormalities, AKA hormonal imbalances. Don’t know what that entails just yet, I have to go pick my kit at the lab tomorrow….