Happy Thursday, and welcome to part four of my March 2019 trip around Arizona! (To start at part one, click here.) This week’s installment is the grand finale, the one place in Arizona where all of the world’s tourists want to go: The Grand Canyon! … Continue reading Arizona, part four (March 2019)
There is no carpet in my house. All my floors are either hardwood or tile. I have a Great Pyrenees – a giant fluffy dog whose hair collects pine needles, leaves, and various other detritus from the yard, then deposits it all on the floor once he comes inside. And of course, there’s the hair itself – shedding. For these reasons, I make it a point to sweep the entire house (with a broom) once a week. Recently, I bought an electric leaf blower. It’s a low-end model, so it’s not very powerful. So…today I tried using the leaf blower for my weekly house sweeping!
The results were not as I had hoped. But they were also not as I had feared. I had been afraid I might end up blowing a bunch of papers off desks and tables, or that garbage might get blown out of the bins. None of that happened. What I had hoped for was to “push” a pile of leaves and dog hair to the front door and blow it out of the house. Instead, the dog hair and leaves AND a copious amount of dust went airborne. With the exception of a few larger objects (twigs and pine cones), the hair and detritus refused to be corralled. On the plus side, I was able to easily get dust/hair bunnies out of some normally-hard-to-reach places. And I made it through the whole house in much less time than it usually takes with a broom. But I’m going back to the broom next week.
Welcome to another exciting edition of ThrowBack Thursday! This week, we are “throwing back” a whopping THREE YEARS! Last week, we visited the super cool town of Jerome, followed by the tourist-clogged town of Sedona. Now it was time for something completely different: a volcano … Continue reading Arizona, part three (March 2019)
I mentioned a month ago that I was trying Yet Another Drug for insomnia, and that I would reserve comment until I had been on it for awhile, since previous treatments had worked initially but not in the long term. Well, I think the long term has arrived, so I can confidently say this one works! Mostly. The drug in question is Mirtazapine. My Parkinson’s specialist told me to take half a tablet each night, and to increase to a whole tablet if the half tablet wasn’t working after about a week. It wasn’t, so I did. After a week at the increased dosage, it still wasn’t helping. So the doc told me to increase it again – to a pill and a half. Since then, I’ve been getting between five and seven hours of sleep almost every night. Five hours is not ideal, but it’s a definite improvement! However, I still have the occasional night where I wake up shortly after midnight and can’t get back to sleep. Such nights are happening no more than once a week now, and I can handle them at that frequency.
Throwback Thursday this week will be part three of the Arizona trip I took a few years ago., with the conclusion coming a week later. There will be no Throwback Thursday for the two weeks after that. Instead of writing about trips from the past, I will once again be excreting near-realtime Trip Reports. This time, I will be road-trippin’ to the South Carolina coast, mostly in the vicinity of Charleston.
In other news, I’m considering moving again. House prices are going berserk here in the Charlotte area, and I have been receiving unsolicited offers for far more than I paid when I bought my home just a year and a half ago. The obvious problem is, I would have to pay an equally inflated amount to get another house in the area. So, I’m back to where I was when I quit working a couple years ago…pondering a move to Somewhere Else. I saw in the news recently that Mankato, Kansas is offering financial incentives to folks who want to move into their fine city. But “Mankato” sounds suspiciously like “Mansquito” so I’ll probably have to pass.
Continued from part one… After an overnight stay at Sedona (which would have been the name of my firstborn child, had my marriage to Madonna not been childless), my next voyage was a ride on the Verde Canyon Railroad. This was an enjoyable trip, but … Continue reading Arizona, part two (March 2019)
I’m torn. I feel like I still haven’t settled on a format / premise / style for this blog. After months of addressing Parkinson’s symptoms and attempts at treatment, I spent about a month doing purely creative writing, before doing the Texas trip. Now the blog is nearly six months old and I still haven’t got a decent “About” page. I have Grand Plans for the About page, and have built outlines of what all to address, but actually writing it all up may take quite awhile. But right now, I feel like I should work on my true creativity and get back into my old train-of-thought approach. Alternatively, I sometimes feel like just posting some of my old creative writing from high school or college.
Anywho (except Cindy Lu), my back hurts. I’m going to stop writing now.
Hey! It’s that time of the week! Throwback Thursday – when I finally get around to sharing photos from not-too-recent trips. This week: part one of my March 2019 trip across Arizona. This state has a wealth of amazing scenery! It was definitely one of … Continue reading Arizona, part one (March 2019)
I’ve been having a couple of vision issues lately that I’d like to type about. One is definitely Parkinson’s-related hallucinations. The other may be Parkinson’s-related, but I really don’t know. Let’s start with the stuff that I’m certain is caused by Parkinson’s Disease (PD).
As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve had testicular tactile hallucinations, but not the visual type. Well, that’s changed now. It started several weeks ago, and so far, it’s been pretty subtle. I don’t get, for example, visions of Godzilla popping up right in front of my face. It’s always something in my peripheral vision, and it usually starts as an object(s) that is actually there. For example, when I’m sitting at my computer desk, I can see the side of my entertainment center out of the corner of my eye. That entertainment center will slowly morph into the shape of a human being. Regardless of what the object actually is, the hallucination that it becomes is always a person. These imaginary people never move, and they never say anything. Sometimes they appear to be staring at me; other times, they’re looking elsewhere. And I always know there’s nobody there, but I turn to look, anyway – I just have to. This happened very frequently throughout the day when I was at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. It actually seems to have stopped happening now (at least for the last week).
As for the other visual weirdness, I’m not sure if it’s a PD-related hallucination for two reasons:
Imagine you have printed out a page of text. Why? That’s not important; stay focused, DAMMIT! Now imagine you have a serving tray that you stole from your neighborhood Burger King, and the tray has a thin layer of water in it. You take the printout and cut out each individual word, one by one. As you cut them out, you float each slip of paper in its place on the water in the tray. You end up with all the words in the correct order, and you can read the text with no difficulty. It’s just that each word is slowly floating around in its place, occasionally bumping into and bouncing off of another word. That’s what I see when I read text on a computer monitor – the words are individually MOVING. But not to the point of interfering with my ability to read them. Sometimes, some of the words appear to be throbbing – like someone keeps clicking the Bold button, or making small changes to the font and/or size. This has been going on with computer monitors for a few years, but on that day in the Houston Museum of Natural Science, I experienced this phenomenon with the printed text that’s posted next to the items on display. There was one exception. On one of the placards, the words weren’t moving individually nor were they throbbing. Rather, the entire placard appeared to be moving away from me.
This reminds me. I heard recently that there has been talk about trying psilocybin (the hallucinogen found in “magic mushrooms”) to treat PD. Seriously…psilocybin, LSD, and of course, THC. I doubt the federal government would decriminalize these things even if there ended up being positive medical results, so I’m not getting my hopes up.
Day 8 was slated to be all about Padre Island National Seashore. When I got there, I decided to throw down the cash to get the annual interagency pass – this is a card that gets you into all of the National Parks in the … Continue reading Texas Trip Report (the last two days)
Hey! Here I am on the road, and I haven’t ridden any roller coasters in the last FOUR days. Time to do something about that! But first, breakfast…or maybe not. When I went downstairs for the breakfast that’s included in the price of my room at Holiday Inn Express, I was greeted by a handwritten sign declaring the kitchen to be closed. The gentleman at the front desk explained that their oven was on the fritz – it just refused to turn on. I thought about the breakfast I’d had there the previous morning, when the oven was still among the living. They had (among other things) Froot Loops®, orange juice, fresh fruit, and pre-packaged Otis Spunkmeyer® muffins. I was about to ask him why they needed a working oven to serve these particular delicacies, when he suddenly launched into a glowing endorsement of a (relatively) nearby restaurant called Snooze A. M. Eatery. It sounded better than a Holiday Inn Express breakfast, so rather than harangue the hotel staff, I drove to Snooze. I did not lose. There’s a section of the menu devoted to variations of Eggs Benedict. I did a half-and-half order, with their Habanero Pork Belly and Pork Chili Verde benedicts. They was both yummy!
Next, I made my way to the Kemah Boardwalk, home of the Boardwalk Bullet. The Bullet was under construction when I was working in the area 15 years ago. Even unfinished, it looked awesome! This bad boy is the twistiest of twisters – the track passes in and out of the support structure, over and under itself, more than any other woody in the world with a total of 42 crossovers. To pull this off, the ride repeatedly “hops” from side to side – so when I finally got to experience it today, I found it reminded me of Dollywood’s Thunderhead and ValleyFair’s Renegade. But both of those coasters do their hopping over a large amount of land, whereas the Bullet packs its 42 crossovers into a MUCH smaller footprint. So most of this coaster is inside itself – you are completely surrounded by the ride’s own structural timbers, which makes it feel even faster than it really is. And at 51 MPH, it’s way fast for a woody! This is definitely in my Top Ten wooden roller coasters – maybe Top Five.
With my coaster lust satisfied, it was time for a leisurely four-hour drive from Kemah (southeast of Houston) to Corpus Christi. This drive was uneventful, apart from a few fights with my GPS navigation app. But I’ve gotten used to those.
Voyages with Parkinson's 