the awakening

     I guess everyone has a few moments in their life when the light goes on and they remember the moment. One of my most important moments happened when I was a teenager and it was one of those watershed moments that literally transformed my outlook on life.

The transformation happened while reading Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky. I was child of the cold war and grew up being continually told how the evil Russians were subhumans and a major threat to my life and happiness. Being a normal young guy, I didn't give it much thought. If that was  what they wanted me to believe, so be it. I had sports to play and vandalism to commit, questioning authority wouldn't make me run faster or throw a stone further.

My parents always told me to read books and reading books made my life easier. Spend an hour a day reading and not get  hassled, seemed like a fair deal to me. When I started reading Crime and Punishment the thing that stuck out to me was that the evil Russians were just like us. They had commerce, private property and the sons of guns could even read and ponder life's great mysteries, just like us.

This was when I figured out that the authorities were full of shit. It was a propaganda war and we were being fed a bunch of bullshit about the Russians and if they were feeding us bullshit about the Russians, there was good chance that most of the other stuff we were taught was also bullshit. For some funny reason I fell in love with Dostoevsky and took it upon myself to read any books of his that could lay my hands upon. And just like Deadwood, I would read them several times. In the past year I've re-read Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot. I just plain old like Dostoevsky's style.

Then another watershed moment hit me a few years ago. While browsing dvd's at the public library I stumbled upon The Last Station. Aside from falling in love with Helen Miren, I also grew curious about Tolstoy. Like most people, I had read War and Peace and it was a long tough read. Somewhat of an endurance test where the goal was to finish the book rather than enjoy it so Tolstoy was relegated to the dormant part of my mind for about 40 years. I've read several of his books in last few years and I'm just finishing "Resurrection". It's a great book.

I'm finding that Tolstoy is basically a kinder and gentler version of Dostoevsky.  I still consider old Fyodor Dostoevsky to be my soul mate and Prince Leo Myshkin remains my hero. Both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were highly critical of the Russian system and the  injustice suffered by the peasants. Being a dissident in 19th century Russia was a risky proposition. Poor old Fyodor was sent to prison in Siberia and sentenced to death but like myself, someone up there liked him and he was given a reprieve. So it goes.

Give it a try, you might just fall in love with Leo.

Billy still loves you sons of bitches.

games!

finally, life is good again in the pond.

one of my big beefs with windows 10 is they took away the classic games and put in some shiny new games. but the new games came with a price, unless you subscribed to their premium package of games, you couldn't play any of their so-called free games unless you watched a few commercials. have i ever mentioned that i hate windows 10?

the new shiny games are kinda cool but those fucking commercials were driving me crazy, not to mention the fact that microsoft was monitoring me every time i played a game and deciding what commercials to blast me with after monitoring everything else  i had been doing and reading all my hotmail messages. and that brings up another annoyance with windows 10, it reconfigured my hotmail account and i couldn't read my fucking mail!!!  the inbox would say 10 new messages but there was nothing there! if i went to my sent file and then back to the inbox, i might just get lucky and find my messages but it was hit and miss. after some monkeying around i discovered that outlook/hotmail had activated some "focus" tool that took it upon itself to hide my messages.

i had told my kids about these problems but they didn't share my sense of urgency. dear old dad not getting old classic microsoft games and his free email acting up didn't register on their urgency index. i had to fix these problems myself and fix them i did. i found and turned off the focus bullshit and then installed the old games from windows 7.  the fruit of my loins are in for a surprise next time they request funding from the rosewater foundation.

for some funny reason i have absolutely no problem with google looking over my shoulder and invading my privacy. google answers all my questions and provides me with excellent directions whenever i need to find an address.  and i'm now using google "sheets" rather than microsoft's excel. i have excel on the old computer but have to access microsoft's cloud to use it on the new toy. so far google sheets fit my needs very well. and i haven't used facebook for a nanosecond on the new toy.

in summation:

google     - good
microsoft - bad
facebook - bad

billy says he love you sons of bitches.

soup

I made a truly outstanding pot of bean soup yesterday. Firstly, I had a surplus of carrots so I grated 4 good sized carrots whereas I usually use 2 carrots. Then I tossed in some beef soup flavoring rather than the french onion flavoring. The usual suspects such as barley, beans, garlic, onions and beef remained the same.

After the soup was finished I tossed in some spaghetti sauce that was left over and son of a bitch, I had some soup that the boys in Valhalla would be proud of. Now I have a shit load of soup in the fridge, probably enough to last for the next 3 days. I'll have soup for lunch and dinner each day with a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast. This is my health kick that I'll do about twice a month until spring arrives. There will be lots of farting in the bat cave.

Yesterday panic set in, I lost a debit card. I have about 5 of the stupid things and the only one that I ever use was nowhere to be found,  it's for my mother's account. After an hour of frustration, I decided to hop on the bike and ride up to the credit union. I'm not crazy about credit unions but I leave some money in there because my father liked the place. Typically, there was a large line-up for service. Have I ever mentioned how much I hate line-ups?

An elderly asian man was standing behind me and he was very close which was annoying. Then the asshole belched right in my ear. I came very close to throttling the rude little nine iron but with age comes wisdom, so I just gave him the dirtiest stare I could muster and stood in that fucking line-up with the old blood pressure skyrocketing.

But the baseball playoffs have started and the grocery store has some fresh apples that are beyond compare. It's just too bad that I have to use a paring knife to eat them since I have zero confidence in my front teeth.

And the Deadwood marathon has begun!

Billy says he loves you sons of bitches.