In a dream late last night I found myself walking outside of a rather large hotel, descending down the large front steps onto a beach; think the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, Michigan (it’s, like, big, people) if there was a beach in front of it.

I was passed by an older-middle aged man who, as he walked by, commented to me that “I am a lineman for the county.” This prompted me to loudly sing the rest of the first verse of “Wichita Lineman” to him as he sprinted off to do his lineman duties down on the sand.

Glen Campbell is invading my dreams. Maybe if I stopped playing that song everytime I sign off at midnight he would cease the attack.

There are no words.

Last night I heard our upstairs neighbor’s’ dryer shut down perfectly in time to my laptop’s screen fading to black in order to save power. After mulling the coincidence for a few seconds, I swiped the touchpad to light up the screen…and the dryer kicked back on right as the laptop went bright.  Hmm.

Earlier today at work I pressed a random button on the console (output selector to remote source) that had absolutely nothing to do with anything that was currently in use. At that exact moment, the audio from the Rams Radio Network suddenly turned very tinny, and remained so until the next break.

My apologies for anyone listening to the Rams pregame today who thought Steve Savard was interviewing Scott Linehan from the bottom of a tin can. My fault.

I haven’t been. I’ve been right here. But how would you know that?

We’ve been in Litchfield for a month-and-a-half now, or something close enough to that. I know I’ve paid rent twice and there’s another one coming us, so it can’t be too far off.

I’ve resolved myself to write something on here at least every other day. We’ll see how well that works. Leaving comments always encourages more posting.

• Since I last bothered to blab on here I (finally) got Digital Route 66 relaunched with a better design, bigger pictures and more content. So a minor victory on the Web front there. As I mentioned, Emily and I now serve as the Montgomery County representatives of the Route 66 Association of Illinois (though I wonder if their website will ever show this to be true) and this week I have to (finally) see about a couple of town festivals for us to hang out at this summer to pimp the Association as well as shirts (and maybe signs) for us to wear (the shirts, not the signs).

It was warm today.

There was baseball - high def baseball - on my television.

It didn’t snow.  For once.

The Cardinals won.

I went outside.  In short-sleeves.  Without a jacket.

This is nice.

The Tylenol capsule fell out of my hand, onto the floor, bouncing off of the hardwood safely onto my foot, only to roll back down…

…into the heating grate.

The last Tylenol capsule.

At least I still had the one before it.

On another note, you know The Office is good when you find yourself yelling out loud “Don’t do it, Michael!” well before it becomes apparent he is, well, going to do it.

*author walks into dining room*

Father: (standing, staring at his cellphone) Someone has the…

*ten seconds of silence*

Me: I agree.

*author leaves room*

With NaNoWriMo fast approaching, and a desire to actually, I don’t know, complete it for once, I decided to clean up my work area, to make it more writer-friendly. For example, re-install the old under-the-counter rolling keyboard tray that puts my hands at a better level to quickly type. It was just a matter of finding the bloody thing.

Maybe it’s in my closet. *peers inside* Oh, shit. Everything’s in my closet.

Cleanup time!

I did not find my tray in my closet; it was in the basement. What I did find:

• The box - and CD and manual - for Norton Antivirus 4.0. From the naming scheme, so old it apparently predated time.

• Print Shop for Apple IIe. Anyone planning to hold a yard sale circa 1986?

• Trio Plus, a word processor/spreadsheet/database program for the Apple IIe and her clones (like our Laser 128.) It was basically a lesser productivity program for those too lazy and/or cheap to buy AppleWorks. Think “Microsoft Works.”

• Manuals for both the aforementioned Laser 128 as well as the Apple IIe; my father took the latter from the radio station. This was in the late 80’s that we purchased this machine and cribbed the unused Apple manual from the station; in an interesting twist, the Laser would later be sold to WHCO years later. By “years” I mean “in like 1999, cause they didn’t have PCs until about 2000.” Heh, you think I’m kidding. You haven’t read much, have you.

• Tiny baseball helmets! Back in the early 90’s the little toy machines outside of Wal-Mart would have the little inch-and-a-half mini helmets for a quarter or so, and I got every. damn. one., plus a lot of repeats. They come in very handy:

What was that noise? Oh, wait, it was just your total jealousy.

• TV Guides. Lots of them. I used to save them - for some reason - and there are boxes more in the basement untouched. The pack rat in me sees a bit of logic in keeping some of these; it was neat to stumble upon the 1999 Fall Preview issue and read their first word on The West Wing (they loved it - duh.) Still…totally not worth the room they take up. And the weight.

Suckers are heavy!

• An old Andres Galarraga clock. The first baseman stopped off in St. Louis for one year (1992,) spent half the season on the DL, then split for Colorado for their inaugural season. For whatever reason I was drawn to him, and was briefly both a Cards and Rockies fan until 1996 came and liberated Redbird Nation from the horror (read: Joe Torre. And to a lesser extent Todd Zeile.)

Anyway, my mother was doing crafts at the time, and at the shop in Pinckneyville where she had a booth another lady had sports clocks where she would take magazine covers and baseball cards and embed them into the shiny surface. My mother had one custom made for me for Christmas one year, and I treasured it for several years afterward.

After finding it amongst my myriad baseball cards, I threw it in the garbage bag, thought for about two seconds, then yanked it right back out. It’s not going anywhere.

The holes in a fly swatter minimise the air current which warns the fly of being hit, whilst reducing air resistance and increasing speed of the swat.

-Wikipedia

Thank the Lord for this.

Friday I came home from work to find two things: Emily and a house full of flies. My parents had warned me about a housefly infestation on Thursday evening, but when I left Friday morning there was nary an insect in sight.

That night they buzzed around me at a dizzying rate of speed and number. I pulled Emily away from her nachos and Sabado Gigante to get her thoughts twenty-four hours after the massacre:

It was nothing I had ever seen in a house before. It was more like my barn when we had fourteen cows…or calves, rather. I thought it was interesting how they were racing around the kitchen in what seemed like circles. *makes circle motions* I mean, you told me there were going to be a lot, but I didn’t expect half that many. It was just ridiculous. I just don’t think I’ve ever seen that many flies where it didn’t have a stench hanging around.

So Emily thinks my house doesn’t stink. I am so in.

The massacre: it was not pretty. Scared the crap out of Gilbert the Fish, needless to say. Armed with two fly-swatters, twelve clear sticky fly traps and four hanging fly strips we went to work. Over about a half-an-hour, we destroyed the lives of just under fifty flies, with more caught in the various traps overnight. By morning, the house had returned to a much more livable state. Now there are a few still buzzing their way around the homestead, but nothing close to the air traffic control disaster that was my Friday night. The ones that remain seem more lethargic, barely running from my swatter swats. Losers.

The flies shouldn’t return; the trash has been emptied, and no food sits out unguarded. Emily and I, merciless insect killers, triumph again. Nachos for all!

I went to Chicago, and all I got was this lousy cold.

Actually, colds don’t bother me much. Late in the first day a sore throat develops, then the next day the nose is attacked. Maybe a minor headache, some woozies, etc. It starts to fade by day three, and then soon enough it’s just a sad memory.

Unless, of course, Vicks changes the formula to Dayquil.

I suck down the orangeness of Dayquil down like crazy during my colds. Unable to sleep without clearing my nasal passage, I turn to the magic elixir for support. Every six hours I pound the formula, granting some level of comfort as I wait for my white blood cells to hang a “Mission Accomplished” banner across the aircraft carrier in my spleen.

That is, when I can find it.

Tuesday morning I headed to Schnucks in Carbondale only to find them out of Dayquil formula, so I bought the gelcaps instead. This was my first mistake, since I can’t swallow pills (my gag reflex is legendary,) and these things taste like death when you crack them open. So it was off to Kroger’s West (old and busted,) where the same dearth of orange magic greeted me. I opted for Nyquil, which I took when I got home; this was mistake number two, as I had never digested the grape version of the Quil family and did not realize that it is merely a watered down form of a lethal injection.

I woke up a fortnight later.

Emily and I ran to the store later that day, and Kroger’s East (new hotness) was strike three for Dayquil. Walgreen’s, however, offered me a man who, in the midst of completing his planagram, had explanations:

Oh, they changed the formula. We have the new stuff right here.

Except that the new formula is cough relief only, with none of the pain relief or nasal decongestant the modern Peter-on-the-go requires. I need the daytime, sniffling, sneezing, aching, coughing, stuffy-head, fever, so I can blog medicine, and all I get is cough drops in liquid form. Nuts to this.

On the way out, for some reason their overstock catches my eye, and what do I behold but three bottles of the old formula.

I bought two of them.

Half of me wanted to roam Jackson County rounding up all the Good Nyquil bottles and hoarding them, a la Elaine Benes, but given the reason they changed the formula is that the medicine was a popular ingredient in meth production, I didn’t want the state police pounding on my door at one in the morning just so I can watch King of the Hill without sniffling.

The best part of this story has little to do with my minor illness or chasing meth ingredients around Carbondale, but with Wikipedia’s impressive wit. Often a page that needs cleaned up has a warning at the top; witness this atop the entry for Nyquil:

To meet Wikipedia’s quality standards, this article or section may, ironically, require decongestion.

Clap. Clap.