Click images for desktop size: "Slag Heap" by Clarence Carter Yesterday I made a root beer float. I made it in self defense.
It bought back a lot of memories. Ancient memories.
In our neighborhood a root beer float was called a brown cow. A float with Coke we called a black cow. I have no idea why. That was also the extent of our names and color palette.
When I was a kid one of my best friends was Pete. Pete was trouble, great trouble. As much fun as we had was always trouble.
The kind of fun we had was in our games like "War". We all had wrist rockets. Tom and Pete and I would climb onto our garage roofs and shoot brads and bent nails at each other. It was exciting and dangerous. We always wore protection: green plastic army helmets.
After a salvo we'd climb down to score (and gather up more ammo). We had a complicated scoring system. Getting both ends of a brad to stick was worth two points, getting one to stick in the helmet was worth a half point. Getting a nail to go through the helmet deep enough to bleed was worth a full point etc.
Tom and I had a game that always appeals to 7 year old boys; stealing girl's dolls. We would replace the dolls heads with plastic dinosaur heads or earthworms, or pretty much anything that would make girls shriek and threaten to tell our parents on us. They never ratted us out, in fact at least three of those girls proposed marriage.
While we were involved in this Pete came up on his bike. He'd been to the beach (he was a good surfer, even had his own board). Pete was all excited. The Starlight Theater was starting Saturday matinees. Ten cartoons, three Three Stooges shorts and a cheap horror movie. Fifty cents admission!
We were stoked.

Click images for desktop size: "Second Story Sunlight" by Edward Hopper The premiere show was "Teenaged Frankenstein", a movie that was already on TV but this was a chance to see it on a big screen with a few hundred of your buddies.
During the boring cartoons and during the slow parts of the movies we all prowled the aisles. The air was thick with tossed popcorn, popcorn boxes, soda cups, the occasional nerd's jacket. The air was so thick with thrown stuff it was often hard to see the screen. That was cool by us. Everything got dead quiet during the Curly Stooges and whenever the monster was on the screen.
Those Kid's Matinees were the lynch pin of our weeks for a long time. No experience came close to it for exuberance and fun in the dark until we discovered underground surf films with live bands.
I always had a dollar for the matinees. After admission I had fifty cents left. My special treat was to buy an Eskimo Pie from the vending machine for a quarter and then a soda from another vending machine. A soda in a paper cup.
I'd sit in my seat and meticulously pick off the chocolate coating from the Eskimo pie, i'd pick it off with my teeth, then when I had a glob of melting ice cream, free of chocolate, I'd plunge the ice cream into the cup of soda and have a fancy float. (it was important to get every bit of chocolate off the Pie. I somehow had it in my head that chocolate, ice cream and soda would be poisonous. Pretty much the same way I decided that the top level of jelly or any jelly that had been touched by peanut butter was poisonous.)
That's what I thought about when I ate/drank my brown cow yesterday. I remembered that and remembered how great it is to be alive.
Yesterday I spoke to the dentist. I thought we were setting up an appointment to get my teeth pulled. They're not pulling the teeth. The oral surgeon saw my x-rays and sort of freaked.

Click images for desktop size: "Underwater Shark" by Unknown Normally people who've gone through chemo or who are in remission have the bone loss in a localized area, it then sort of grows from there. My bone loss is scattered throughout my mouth which is more common to people in the midst of full blown leukemia.
That kind of threw me.
What they want to do is pull one of the teeth and have it biopsyed.
It took a root beer float to ground me enough to decide that they were being over cautious. I've been through 4 different chemo trials. Been in remission all four times. Three times I came out of remission.
Calming down I was able to examine my body. I don't feel anything like the three times prior. No soul crushing fatigue. No deep set agony in my skeleton. There's just the normal pain I'm sort of used to.
The greatest grief is from my teeth which do hurt pretty terribly. I'm tired but its because of weeks of bad sleep because of the pain in my mouth.
Last night I went to bed with a head that feels like it had been over inflated with a rusty bicycle pump. I got out of bed with the same feeling. I've been dealing with leukemia long enough to know that's
Click images for desktop size: "Still Life" by Huillot not one of the symptoms.
Unscientifically I've decided that the scattered necrotic bone is more a result of the 3 chemo's and the long term oral chemo that really does seem to have worked.
I've decided they're just being overly cautious. Can't blame anyone for that especially when its me they're being overly cautious with!
I need to get these teeth extracted. They are hurting fiercely.

My friend survived her long excursion for her business meeting. She claims she was so tired she has little idea if the meeting was any good or worthwhile at all. She has a sense it was okay but can't recall any details!
But her new MacBook arrived! I had to call UPS and roast them a little to get it delivered. They
Click images for desktop size: "New Hampshire Hills" by Maxfield Parrish expedited it so that it wouldn't have to sit 10 miles away.
Its a beautiful machine. The glossy screen seems like it might be a hassle in some instances but to look at it is gloriously pleasant.
I was able to partition the drive, to set it up for dual booting into Windows with no problem at all. The machine is super quick.
I'm having a lot more grief trying to use the "Migration Assistant" to move all of her data from the PowerBook to the MacBook. It sees every computer but then just grinds away doing nothing!
Irksome.
I plan to have it done today, one way or another. The "Migration Assistant" would be the easiest way to move over keychains, apps and preference files but I can do it manually if I have to.
I remember when all Apple products just worked . . .