Back to the ol’ salt lick

I apologize for the truncation on the blog last week; I had a dandy entry lined up for Thursday’s Silent Movie Spotlight, and because I wasn’t able to produce an entry in TDOY’s weekly examination of the Crime Does Not Pay series, this means that blog godmother S.Z. (World O’Crap alumnus) probably went out and hit up a couple of liquor stores.  (That’s a little Facebook joke, son.)

About a week or so back, I had an appointment with the endocrinologist…and he told me he thought it was kosher to start taking Metformin for my diabetes (he was certain they wouldn’t mess with my kidneys or anything).  Which was a most encouraging thing to hear, because insulin is not cheap.  They ease you into taking the Metformin; you down a pill a day for four days, then increase it to two a day for another four days…and then eventually take three pills a day.  I was two days into the three-pill regimen when I woke up one morning and just didn’t feel right.  I had nausea fit to beat the band, and a lot of light-headed dizziness.

I suspected right off this was due to the Metformin (I did a little research into the side effects…only I had to do this online because my copy of Stacia’s Big Scary Medical Book was apparently repossessed during the 2016 election) but I was also a little concerned because my symptoms eerily mirrored those that occurred during my little misadventure in 2010.  I gave the endocrinologist’s a ring to explain the situation…and they advised me to stop taking the pills immediately, necessitating a return to the insulin.  (An expense I need, by the way, like a moose needs a hat rack.)

So I took a little mini vacation to get the “poison” out of my system, and as such it’s B.A.U. here at the Thrilling Days of Yesteryear blog.  Again, mea culpa for taking so long to give you the heads-up.

Rain delay

My mad scheme was to have up on Monday and Tuesday reviews of two movies that I recently watched off my Hopper (Dish’s cute nick for their DVR…though the one in my room is technically a “Joey”) …and then that plan quickly went south.  I’m still trying to tame the dusty Thrilling Days of Yesteryear archives (I seem to have accumulated a lot of DVDs over the years) by cataloging my holdings (every time I do this, I find a movie or two I missed previously) and because I set Sunday aside to do that, my Monday post never materialized.  Monday, I spent three hours of my life that I’ll never get back journeying to the doc’s for an appointment (I wouldn’t mind the wait so much but the chairs in the endocrinologist’s waiting room appear to be leftover furniture from The Flintstones) and then after lunch, I agreed to go with Mom to Kroger Nation to get some things she needed.  For reasons that I can only attribute to my stupidity, I lifted a few cases of water from one section of the store to my cart (the water was in the area where you walk in, and I didn’t want to set off any alarms in the store since I had already placed items in the cart), then picked them up to put them in the trunk of the car…and then picked them up to set down on the carport.  That left me kind of stove-up, and I decided to just continue with Operation DVD Reorganization.

Artist's depiction of the waiting room at NAED.

Because I have committed to the current Classic Movie Blog Association blogathon, there will be an “Overlooked Films” entry tomorrow (that’s the blogathon theme), and (knock wood) normal posting will resume on Thursday and Friday (Crime Does Not Pay!).  (I splurged on a metric butt-ton of DVDs from Oldies.com since I had a little jingle in my pocket, and I’ll be reviewing some of my acquisitions in the coming month and June.)

Gilder-Shreve’s Bad Day

As days go…I’ve experienced better.  It started last night, when I had just finished putting the finishing touches on this blog post excuse.  The indispensable Internets stopped working for your humble narrator, and he quickly surmised—due to the inclement weather (not that I’m complaining—we need the rain)—that Windstream was apparently experiencing an outage.  (For those of you who reside in a rural area where your Internet needs depend on Windstream…you have my unceasing empathy.  They really are terrible.)

I couldn’t immediately see to the problem upon rising early this morning because I had an appointment to see my endocrinologist and that necessitated getting out the door before 7am.  (My appointment was at 8:15, and Mumsie is a stickler for being early.)  The good news is that the doctor was effusive in his praise for my progress on the diabetes front; my A1C level was waaaaay down, and overall, I’m managing it like a bitch.  (There was no celebratory donut, sadly enough.)  Having returned from the docs (and a side trip to Kroger Nation for a case of water and a bag of ice), I fired up the laptop…and learned to my disappointment the outage was still raging on.

I would rather cut off a pinky finger than deal with the Windstream people.  For starters, you must negotiate one of those automated customer service deals…and this one is a real hoot, because the voice informs you: “I understand complete sentences, so speak to me like a real person.”  Unfortunately, they leave out the “stupid” between “real” and “person”; I had to repeat my phone number three times before Mr. Automated Service Rep acknowledged my existence.  Then, after going through that charade, you get to speak to a real person who makes the automated guy look like a member of MENSA.  Now, I’m very sympathetic to the fact that the real people are only making $7-8 an hour to read from a manual…but I knew the trouble had to be on their end, and this jadrool kept telling me it was on mine.  He tells me that someone from “Internal” will call me back, and that could take anywhere from 24-48 hours.

I actually resorted to cleaning up my room while waiting for the Internet to return. My mother was delighted.

After lunch—about 12:30 my time—I decided to call Windstream again because I was growing more and more agitated.  (We give these people an arm-and-a-leg for shitty service—the least they could do is make sure the lights stay on.)  I danced the Automated Polka again, and this time there’s a message informing me that, yes, there is an outage in my area.  “Who’s the nut case now, Ray?  Who’s the nut case now?”  They said it would be up and running at 2pm (it was more like 2:45), which now brings everyone up-to-date.  Without further ado, the “my dog ate my homework” post:

In retrospect, I was certain that the first regular Thrilling Days of Yesteryear feature to bite the dust would B-Western Wednesdays.

I had every intention of getting a book read this week.  I really did.  I did not anticipate, however, that I would spend a good deal of the time I normally set aside for this purpose on other pursuits.  For example, I am in the process of trying to whip a movie database into shape.  I own a lot of movies, and I like to keep track of what I have because…well, there’s been a time or two where I have made DVD purchases and then learned to my chagrin I already have a copy in the dusty TDOY archives.  I don’t do this too often (otherwise I would start to wonder if I should see my doctor about the early onslaught of senile dementia) …but if I had a nickel for every time I’ve burned a DVR’d movie to disc that I already own—or by that same token, didn’t DVR a movie because I thought I already owned it—I would be the proud owner of many nickels.  I’ve also got some Radio Spirits and ClassicFlix assignments in my inbox that will need to be completed before the ‘rents and I get away for a little R&R over the holidays.

The book that I planned to crack open—Hold That Joan, by my Facebook chum Ben Ohmart—never received the crack-opening it was due.  As the deadline to have a book read and the post completed got nearer and nearer, I considered calling an audible: I bought—on an impulse buy—a cute little Kindle book entitled F in Exams: The Very Best Totally Wrong Test Answers and I devoured that in the time it takes my father to go once around the DISH channel lineup looking for a show about cops arresting people.  I cannot emphasize enough the word “cute” when describing this book, put together by Richard Benson.  In a nutshell, it’s a tome that lists questions that originally appeared on tests and the hi-larious responses from the test takers who, because they did not know the answer, did what I did on so many examinations in my high school and college days—baffle them with bovine excrement as opposed to dazzling them with brilliance.  The problem with the content in F in Exams is that none of these answers are really all that funny; oftentimes one is left with the impression that someone had a copy of Joe Miller’s joke book in their back pocket during the test.

Here’s an example:

I remember a broadcast of The Jack Benny Program where Jack tells announcer Don Wilson that he has an agreement with Abbott & Costello: “We leave them alone, and they leave us alone.”  So, I decided to scrap a review of F in Exams…which necessitated deciding between continuing to read books and writing about them on the blog…or just spending that time continuing to watch and write about movies.

To no one’s surprise, throwing the book review feature under the bus didn’t require a great deal of soul-searching.  (I really enjoy watching movies more.)

I will say this: I have not completely abandoned the book review feature of this blog.  It’s just that it will not be appearing with the regularity as the other fine features you’ve come to know and love here at TDOY.  If I’m reading a book and decide to do a little write-up in a blog post, fine.  If I’m reading a book and I decide it’s not worth mentioning, also fine.  If I just don’t feel like reading…well, that’s okay as well.  (To be honest, while I’m not in the habit of giving out tips…if it were my money, I’d bet on this last one.)

What will replace the book review feature, I hear people asking?  Well, at this point I haven’t really decided.  There are movies I watch that I’d like to write about…except they really don’t fit into the admittedly narrow parameters here on the blog, and as such, I’m thinking about allotting Mondays to give them a fair hearing.  Andrew “Grover” Leal has been pestering the dickens out of me to resurrect Doris Day(s), so there’s another option.  Which reminds me that it’s been a while since I did anything TV-related on the blog (one of the reasons I made a concerted effort to participate in the recent Classic TV Blog Association Blogathon—that, and because I thought it would be tremendous fun).  Whatever I ultimately decide, I hope the relegation of book reports to semi-regular status doesn’t disappoint too many of you among the TDOY faithful.  Tomorrow, I’ll resume with the regular blog content and Overlooked Films on Tuesdays.  (I just hope there’s not another rain delay.)

Book Review: Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America

We had a total of nine trick-or-treaters ring the doorbell at Rancho Yesteryear this year.  Nine.  We had enough candy for nine hundred, of course; my mother has this habit of looking at the amount of candy she’s purchased each Halloween, and saying ruefully: “I don’t think this is going to be enough.”  This October 31, she actually ventured out that afternoon to get more candy…just to be on the safe side.  Suffice it to say, we were safe.  Very safe.

Now, in past years—this glut of Halloween candy would not have been a problem…because I would have made certain it did not go to waste.  If you’re a regular member of the TDOY faithful, though, you know that any future trips to Candyland for yours truly were nipped in the bud back in July when my doctor motioned for me to come a little bit closer in order to say “Psst…just between you, me, and the lamppost—you’re diabetic.”  (Let me just take this moment to thank everyone who bestowed well-wishes and empathies upon me at that time…particularly those who refrained from remarking “No sh*t, Sherlock.”)  So, we had this ginormous basket of candy sitting around Castle Yesteryear, and two of its subjects unable to enjoy the basket’s contents.  (The other member of the household, mi madre, doesn’t have much of a sweet tooth…but when the fever does hit her, she now buys the kind of candy I don’t like.)

So, as I was tossing a bit o’trash into the kitchen receptacle last week…my eyes laid witness to the saddest sight I have ever seen.  Mom had thrown away all the leftover candy.  The M&M’s (peanut and plain), the Snickers (regular and the peanut butter ones), the Butterfingers…murdered.  I was devastated.  I wept quietly, and gathered up the trash bag to take out to the bin on the carport, where I presided over a small Mass.  I’m saddened to report that the turnout for the funeral was not what I was hoping for; a couple of the neighborhood dogs ambled by (attracted to the candy corpses, no doubt), and I saw one of the kids on our street pedaling a bicycle in the distance.  Requiems can be a bummer.

The untimely demise of the Halloween candy prompted me to sit down with an e-book (another $1.99 bargain from BookBub) I bought back in June of 2015.  It’s called Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America, and it was written by an appropriately-named gentleman named Steve Almond (his other books include My Life in Heavy Metal and Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book By and For the Fanatics Among Us), an author and rock music critic.  First published in 2002, Candyfreak is an ode to one man’s mania for candy.  Almond has eaten a piece of candy every single day of his entire life, and is so obsessed he hoards 3-7 lbs. of the sweet stuff in his domicile at all times.  I knew Steve wasn’t just exaggerating about this in the opening pages of the book, where he says a silent prayer for the Marathon bar, “which stormed the racks in 1974, enjoyed a meteoric rise, died young, and left a beautiful corpse.”

The Marathon: a rope of caramel covered in chocolate, not even a solid piece that is, half air holes, an obvious rip-off to anyone who has mastered the basic Piagetian stages, but we couldn’t resist the gimmick.  And then, as if we weren’t bamboozled enough, there was the sleek red package, which included a ruler on the back and thereby affirmed the First Rule of Male Adolescence:  If you give a teenage boy a candy bar with a ruler on the back of the package, he will measure his dick.”

There are not enough words in my admittedly longwinded vocabulary to describe how much I loved—and miss to this very day—Marathon bars.  (I’m told that Curly Wurlys are similar…but I’ll guess I’ll never know.)  In Candyfreak, Almond channels his inner Roald Dahl and makes arrangements to visit the factories of those candies still being produced locally: Valomilk Bars in Merriam, Kansas; Idaho Spuds in Boise; Twin Bings in Sioux City, Iowa (the Palmer Candies company); Lake Champlain candies in Vermont; and Goo Goo Clusters in Nashville.  (The only one of these I have sampled is the last one; I’ve been told that there are Cracker Barrels that carry Valomilks but I’ve not come across one yet.)  Almond also drops in at the Annabelle Candy Company in Hayward, CA (not far from Steve’s original stomping grounds), makers of Big Hunk and Abba-Zaba bars (you might be familiar with this last one if you’ve ever watched Half Baked). 

Did Almond get a tour of the Big Three (Nestlé, Hershey, Mars)?  No, because all that chocolate espionage you saw in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (the 1971 original, natch) wasn’t just a fictional plot device; candy makers really do keep closely-guarded secrets.  (He was denied a tour at Boston’s Cambridge Brands—makers of Junior Mints, Sugar Babies, and Charleston Chews [Mom’s favorite when she indulges]—because Tootsie Roll Industries, which owns Cambridge, said “nothin’ doin’.”)

I’m sure you’re asking yourself right now: why on Earth would a guy who’s had to eliminate his sweets intake read a book about such forbidden fruit?  Well, I never said I was sane (and I have witnesses to back this up).  Candyfreak is such a wonderful read, and it brought back a flood of memories of those halcyon days of indulging in chocolate and candy fantasies.  Remember those mammoth candy counters inside the Sears Department Stores?  The one my mother always patronized had that section planted right where you walked in the front door!

“At about age ten, during a late summer visit to Sears to buy school clothes, I became aware of the concept of candy by the pound.  This was revolutionary.  Here were entire stalls of candy, naked as the day they were born, piled up two feet high and God knows how deep, glittering behind glass windows.  You might have thought I was staring at tropical fish in an aquarium.  Or you might have been the poor clerk forced to sit inside the Sears candy stand on one of the many ensuing Saturdays, which meant you faced an odd decision: whether or not to call security on the little, bubble-eyed goon circling your station, which was me.”

“Candy is the Dow Jones of the kid economy,” Almond asserts, as he reminisces with a trip in the WABAC when the Bubble Yum craze took over in 1975.  And, since it was the death rattle of that Halloween candy Mom chucked out in le garbage that nudged me toward reading this book, I identified strongly with this passage:

“Now: I’m a great lover of visual art and I will happily discuss the color and texture of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, or the way in which the eye is led into Goya’s The Third of May 1808, and even though I don’t really know what I’m talking about, I can get myself awfully worked up, just as a fine sentence or paragraph (say, the opening salvo of Henderson the Rain King) can send me into shivery rapture.  But I can think of nothing on earth so beautiful as the final haul on Halloween night, which, for me, was ten to fifteen pounds of candy, a riot of colored wrappers and hopeful fonts, snub-nosed chocolate bars and SweeTARTS, the seductive rattle of Jujyfruits and Good & Plenty and lollipop sticks all akimbo, the foil ends of mini LifeSavers packs twinkling like dimes, and a thick sugary perfume rising up from the pillowcase.”

My sister Kat can’t stand red velvet cake.  Which is odd, because I don’t have a problem with it…but I have noticed that due to the current sugar smackdown (the only consolation I have made is strawberry preserves on an occasional PB&J…because that sugar-free jam is abominable) I’m not quite as discriminating as I once was.  Kat posted on Facebook that red velvet cake is the disappointment of the dessert world, which led to a lot of jokes along the lines of “Circus peanuts are the red velvet cake of the candy world.”  So I was tickled when I read Almond’s declarations about MWM (Mistakes Were Made) candy, the top two examples being Twizzlers (“Twizzlers bears roughly the same chemical relationship to strawberry as the Vienna Sausage does to filet mignon…which is to say: none”) and Jujubes (“if one were to set Jujubes beside pencil erasers in a blind taste test, it would be tough to make a distinction, except that pencil erasers have more natural fruit flavor”).  Here are some others:

Marshmallow Peeps: A candy that encourages the notion that it is acceptable to eat child offspring.  Composed of marshmallow dyed piss yellow and sprinkled with sugar.

Circus Peanuts: Again, a marshmallow pretending to be something else, this time a legume.  An affront to elephants everywhere.

Boston Baked Beans: If you are an actual peanut, why are you not covered in chocolate?  Why are you covered, instead, in some kind of burnt-tasting brick red shell?  Is the idea that you resemble a baked bean supposed to make you more alluring?

Jordan Almonds: Who chose the color scheme, Zsa Zsa Gabor?

Chuckles: A fruit jelly the consistency of cartilage.  Explain.

Sixlets: Those of us over the age of, say, three can usually differentiate between chocolate and brown wax.

White jelly beans: I defy you to tell me what flavor white is supposed to signify.  Pineapple?  Coconut?  Isopropyl?

Lime LifeSavers: The LifeSavers people haven’t figured out by now that no one likes this flavor?  (Ivan’s note: I like Lime LifeSavers.  Or I used to, anyway.)

Author Almond also confesses a prejudice towards coconut—which makes for some giggly moments whenever he must sample candy bars containing his bête noire during his factory journeys.  “Oddly, it isn’t the flavor of coconut that troubles me, but the texture, and specifically that stringy residue utterly impervious to the normal processes of digestion.  In short, I feel as if I’m chewing on a sweetened cuticle.  Anyone who’s eaten a Mounds knows what I’m talking about.”  (I didn’t care for coconut when I was a kid…but I gradually warmed up to it as I started marching toward my dotage.)  Steve’s not a white chocolate fan, either; “When I was eight or nine years old I flew from California to New York with my twin brother, Mike.  We were unchaperoned and therefore doted on by the stewardesses, who snuck us each a special dessert from first class: a white chocolate lollipop.  I wolfed mine down and, shortly thereafter, got violently ill.  This was mortifying at the time.  In retrospect, I’m sort of proud of myself.”

“A few years ago, my friends began urging me to write a book about candy,” Almond explains at the beginning of Candyfreak.  “Their reasoning ran as follows: Maybe if Steve writes about candy, he will shut up about candy.”  Me, I’m glad he wrote about candy—because even though my intake is now limited to nocturnal flights of fancy, I tremendously enjoyed reading a book about one man’s confectionery passion.

Midnight at the oasis

Friday morning of last week found me keeping my appointment with the cataract specialist…and yes, I do have some small cataracts but the doc says it’s nothing to set anyone’s hair on fire about just yet.  He’s going to monitor both those and my Fuchs’ dystrophy (he concurred with the retina guy…but apparently it’s not full-blown serious yet either), and in the meantime, he has prescribed for me a stronger pair of eyeglasses to deal with my vision problem.  (Yes, I know that was my initial diagnosis…but I am not a medical professional…though I did play one on the short-lived sitcom Where’s That Scalpel?)

Despite the arid desert that is the DISH austerity program (and for what I had to shell out for these eyeglasses, the program will likely continue in perpetuity) I’ve been fortunate to find the occasional oasis in our scaled-back programming.  One of the channels we have is something called HDNet Movies, which shows an array of movies old and new (mostly new) and this month of August they have a number of Hitchcock movies scheduled, including TDOY favorites like Saboteur, Rear Window and Vertigo.  The problem is that you also have to wade through drek like The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl; yesterday, my father was entranced by a little offering entitled Space Chimps.  (I swear I’m not making that up.)  What perplexes me is that when we had our former DISH package…HDNet Movies was MIA among the channel line-up.  It’s like it’s offered up as a sop to those folks who have to nickel-and-dime the packaging.

To back up this radical theory, DISH has bestowed upon us a “freeview” of MGM HD and FXM for the month of August. (I’m not kidding—I think they feel sorry for me.)  I got a gander at MGM HD when we had the U-Verse; the movies are shown unedited (and often letterboxed, which I heartily endorse) and except for an “intermission” in the middle (they take time to show you promos and coming attractions) they’re mostly uncut.  They’ve got some good stuff on the schedule; I recorded ClassicBecky fave Richard III (the 1995 version with Ian McKellen) and there’ll be some vintage offerings like The Monster That Challenged the World, Chicago Confidential, and Die, Monster, Die!  FXM’s morning schedule (which they call “FXM Retro”) does show their movies commercial-free; I availed myself of the opportunity to see Seven Thieves again the other day, and it was a most enjoyable experience.  (Sure—it’s no TCM…but you don’t turn down a glass of water when you’re dying of thirst.)

While I’m on the subject of movies, I’d kind of like to take a brief moment to plug a couple of current crowd-funding projects to restore some silent classics.  My Facebook amigo Eric “Dr. Film” Grayson is spearheading a Kickstarter effort to restore the 1918 feature Little Orphant Annie—an early film starring silent cinema legend Colleen Moore and based on the famous poem by James Whitcomb Riley.  (In fact, Riley himself makes a brief appearance in the film—at the beginning and end, and it’s believed that this is the only extant footage of ol’ J.W.)  The Library of Congress is providing their prints for this project, and their material is far superior to the current ones now in circulation.  There are a number of contribution levels on this one: if you can afford the $25 kick-in, you’ll get a DVD of the finished restoration…thirty simolians will get you a Blu-ray.

Sadly, the household budget dictated that I could only contribute to one project (I’ve not had any problems with Kickstarter, so I went with Annie)—the other is one that his Filmship is also involved in; a GoFundMe effort to restore the surviving print of the 1927 feature Little Mickey Grogan.  In many ways, this is even a more important project; it’s a rarity from the FBO studios (later absorbed into R-K-O) and the last silent feature from actress Lassie Lou Ahern—she, along with Diana Serra Cary (a.k.a. “Baby Peggy”), is one of the few surviving performers from that era.  I really regret being too tapped out to kick in for this one (fingers crossed that there’ll be some money at the end of this month and the project will still be taking donations) but maybe a few of you out in Yesteryearland have some spare change rattling around in that sofa.  I thank you.

The doctor will see you now…

With enough butterflies in my stomach to attract a lepidopterist, I arrived at my appointment Thursday morning to see my newly-acquired family physician…and was not entirely optimistic.  (It’s just a personal philosophy I’ve adopted over the years—if pressed, I was probably influenced by Hope for the Best, Expect the Worst from Mel Brooks’ The Twelve Chairs.)  As I had feared, the retake on the bloodwork didn’t add anything new to the equation; the doc explained to me that in the five stages of kidney functions, I was in the middle at Stage 3—my kidneys are sluggish and not expelling wastes the way they should.  (Stage 5 is dialysis.  We don’t want that.)

The reason for the lethargic kidneys is that I am diabetic.  But here’s the rub: because my kidneys aren’t doing well on their performance evaluations, I can’t take something like the Metformin pill because that’ll do an even worse number on your kidneys.  So I will have to take insulin, and for someone who isn’t exactly leaping into large piles of money like Scrooge McDuck this will take somewhat of a financial toll.  Ask me how I know this.  Well, my father takes insulin (he, too, is diabetic) and even though he’s on Medicare a substantial amount of wherewithal is required to keep him supplied with that medication.  (There was a time when my sister Kat was in charge of a camp that catered to diabetic kids and whatever insulin was left over—since they were required to chuck it out anyway—she’d bring home for Dad.  But those days have come and gone.)

I’ll also have to make major changes to my diet, which won’t be too much of a struggle, but just as I was adjusting to this news I take a stroll down to our mailbox and I find an invoice for all that lab work.  Modesty prevents me from revealing the amount owed in the bill…but I have often joked in the past, it was big enough to be a William.  I was able to get in touch with the lab’s customer service department and negotiate a payment plan…but that doesn’t even take in what I’ll owe for the “retakes.”  Then there’s the appointment with the endocrinologist to figure out how I’m going to tackle this medical setback.  (When it rains…it pours.)

So activity on the blog will be sparse for the rest of the week—I’ve got a pair of assignments to finish up, and I can’t take on any TDOY activity until I empty out that inbox.  I do want to profusely thank everyone in both Yesteryearland and Classic Movie Bloggerland for the swell well wishes you sent my way when I first broke the news on my medical complaints.  We’ll get together here back on the blog real soon.

Keeping my hand in

In the comments section of the most recent Thrilling Days of Yesteryear blog post, I gave Jacqueline of Another Old Movie Blog fame a heads-up that there would be more prize swag to be given away this week.  I fully intended to make good on this promise…and then I got THE PHONE CALL this past Friday from the doctor’s office.  They got the results back from my blood work, and…well, long story short—I’ll be going back in tomorrow to have more of my blood suctioned because my kidney levels didn’t look too promising.  It may be that I wasn’t properly hydrated when they took my precious bodily fluids…so they want to do retakes to make sure.  Then I have another appointment for Thursday, because they want a chinwag about why some of the other tests were hinky.  To say I’m a little stressed out by all of this would be an understatement because as a rule…doctors scare the piss out of me sometimes.  I’m pretty sure this stretches back to my childhood, when going to the pediatrician usually meant I’d be taking a shot in the arm of some sort.  (Oddly enough, drawing blood or getting an injection doesn’t bother me much anymore…but I still get a sinking pit feeling every time I’m seated in a waiting room.)

I’m sure everything will come out in the wash…so in the meantime, let’s keep our fingers crossed for longtime TDOY compadre Bill “Kids! Off! Lawn! Now!” Crider.  He’s been diagnosed with, in his words, “a very aggressive form of carcinoma” and the prognosis is not particularly rosy—next stop: the M.D. Anderson Center.  He’s been one of the most fervent champions of my behavior in this scrap of the blogosphere, and it’s just not right that something this evil should happen to the definition of a very swell guy.  If you’re friends with him on Facebook, let him know you’re in his corner…if not, stop by and leave him a comment at Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine.

A day late…but winning all the same!

My initial plan in concluding Thrilling Days of Yesteryear’s Suspense at Work giveaway yesterday was to inform the lucky winners early in the a.m…and then write up that information later in the day.  The first part of this went swimmingly; the winners of our contest were OTR historian Craig W. (a big fan of “radio’s outstanding theatre of thrills”) and longtime TDOY reader/supporter Roger S.  A copy of the Radio Spirits Suspense at Work collection (valued at $39.98) will be sent to both of these good people, and I only wish I had been able to do the same for everyone who entered (it’s an excellent set; one which I had a lot of fun writing).

The delay in making the announcement centered around the fact that I had a doctor’s appointment scheduled for that same day.  Back in May, I started to develop some blurriness with my vision…and because it had been some time since I had my eyes checked, I made arrangements with a local America’s Best for an appointment.  I thought perhaps I just needed a new prescription, but instead I was informed by the optometrist that my hinky vision problems might be a sign of diabetes…and he suggested I make an appointment with my “family physician” tor a physical checkup and some bloodwork.  I do not have a “family physician”; so my Mom made an appointment with her and my Dad’s doctor…and yesterday was the earliest I could see him.

I’m still waiting on the results from the bloodwork, but the vision problem was kind of concerning for my doc…so he was able to pull some strings and get me in to see in a retina specialist that same day.  (This, by the way, is the reason why our healthcare system will never have to go door-to-door begging for change—physicians make money sending patients to other physicians.)  The specialist was most reassuring in that I did not have any detached retinas (if you have that, you’re pretty much boned as far as vision is concerned) but he suspects my problem may be Fuchs’ dystrophy—“the disease usually affects both eyes and causes a gradual decline in vision due to corneal edema (swelling) and clouding.”  (Yes, I’ve been reading Stacia’s Big Scary Medical Book again.)  I have an appointment to see another optometrist in two weeks (this guy will also do a cataract evaluation, since I am apparently developing some of those as well).

By the time I got home yesterday, it was close to 4pm…and because I had to have my pupils dilated so the doc could get a better look at the problem I was pretty much a member of the “can’t see for sh*t” fraternity for the rest of the day.  My eyes are a lot better this morning (I’m able to type on the tablet provided I take my glasses off first), and I was able to whip this up for the blog.  So profuse apologies to all of you who were waiting on tenterhooks to find out who won in the giveaway. 

Number Twelve Looks Just Like You

It’s that time again, cartooners—when we roll a big honkin’ blogiversary cake out on the trolley so that every member-in-good-standing of the Thrilling Days of Yesteryear faithful can have a slice while I wax nostalgic (which seems fitting, since this is a blog devoted to nostalgia) about what a long, strange trip it’s been in the many years since some sharpie at Salon Blogs sweet-talked me into signing a four-year lease back on November 4, 2003.  (“You have to move?  Oh, you can store that stuff over there—this place will never be torn down!”)

You know the origins story by heart, of course.  One of my dearest Internet chums, The Baby, mused out loud in a chat room one night that I should get me one of them newfangled blogs and I told her that I would as soon as I found out what the heck they were.  Though Baby planted the seed, it was migrant workers S.Z. and Scott C. at World O’Crap who really cultivated the soil of the entire blog project (this was a time when they were working for $1.10 an hour, waiting for sales of their hilarious book Better Living Through Bad Movies to make them filthy, stinking rich beyond their wildest dreams)—honest to my grandma, when I first began reading WO’C and said to myself: “How hard could this be?”  As it turned out, quite a lot—the first blog I authored crashed, burned, and vaporized itself in scattered smithereenies all over the Internet…prompting a second effort, which worked like a charm.  (All three individuals present at the birth of TDOY belong to my true Facebook friendage, by the way—they are among my oldest online compadres, and I cherish each and every one of them…as well as the many followers, fans and other devotees who have encouraged my behavior over these many years.)

Buy the book...so that they might continue to do the Lord's work.

This year’s blogiversary celebration is sort of clouded with a touch of solemnity…because while I had concocted all sorts of mahd schemes to beef up the content this year, I have fallen far, far short of my expressed goals.  (This will make the thirty-sixth post I’ve written in 2015.  I am a human dynamo.)  For example, I was particularly gung-ho about getting more of the old Salon Blogs material up at the Best (and Worst) of Thrilling Days of Yesteryear website…a project that quickly fell by the wayside once I was distracted by a shiny object.  I am thoroughly shamed, and at the risk of coming up with lame excuses as to why this is the case, I need to share with you some information that’s usually filed under “Personal stuff.”

You’ll remember back in July that the ‘rents and I were forced out of our Athens digs a month earlier by an evil landlord heckbent on screwing us over because he could, and that we wound up in nearby Pixley Winterville, a.k.a. “City of Marigolds.”  (I need to mention here that while our mailing address is Winterville, we’re actually situated out of that burg to an unincorporated area in nearby Oglethorpe County—which is why I never stop with the Green Acres references.)  The move took quite a bit out of us, due to the fact that Mom and Dad are no spring chickens and my rock-solid abs have the consistency of Cool Whip.  With the help of sisters Kat and Debbie, we were able to successfully complete the relocation…but the repositioning was not without its perils.

Mom started experiencing a bit of back trouble once the move was completed.  Then she started experiencing a lot of back trouble.  It would come and go, particularly since there would be days when I would order her to sit down and rest (what is it about old people that makes them so goddamn stubborn, anyway?)—she’d be okay for a day or two, and then she’d overdo and be right back where she was.  One Saturday morning, she went out to do a bunch of errands…and that was what buried the camel in a big straw stack.  She was experiencing shooting pains in both her legs, and suffering from downright agony in her back.

As stubborn as she was about not overdoing…she was downright bull-headed about seeking medical attention.  This kept up for several days, until I finally laid down the law: either she would allow Dad and I to take her to the emergency room, or I would call 911 for an ambulance and save Dad some driving.  She vehemently argued with me about this, and we agreed to a compromise—she would call her doctor in the morning for an appointment.  (I wasn’t very happy about the compromise, to be honest—the healthcare system in this country is a farce, and I knew it would be several days before she would be able to see him.)

The day of the appointment, the doc runs some tests—including an MRI.  The results reveal that Mom has been suffering from scoliosis; Doc says from the looks of things she’s had it most of her life.  (Mom is still bamfoozled that it took so long to diagnose this, seeing as how she unloaded trucks when she worked at Springmaid-Wamsutta and it never bothered her then.)  He then referred her to a specialist, where further examination reveals that there’s been slippage in her third and fourth vertebrae that’s brought about painful arthritis.  The nerves in the vertebrae area look like someone went at a circuit board with a pair of pinking shears; he had hoped physical therapy might alleviate the problem but it now looks as if surgery is the only way out.

So Mom shifts back into Stubborn Mode (though it’s really more like Denial).  She’s scared sh*tless about the surgery, which is understandable, but the only other alternative is how she’s getting around now: with a walker and a grimace of pain every time she overexerts herself (and as you’ve already guessed, it’s always too much).  We had a long talk about the surgery, and she gave me a glimpse into why she doesn’t want to hop up on the table; my mother has this complex where she’s convinced she’s the only one who can take care of my father.  “You don’t even know what pills he has to take each day,” she wailed.

“Look…I didn’t go to the best schools…but the one I did attend learned me pretty good about reading.  I think I could dope out what meds he needs,” was my reply.  As irony would have it, she’s at the doctor’s right now while you’re reading this and I hope they’re able to reach a quick decision as to when she’ll have this done.  Nothing hurts me more than seeing my mother hurt, and even though one of the doctors suggested she try to do a few things around the house to prevent from getting “stove up,” I don’t like seeing her in pain.  What really angers me is that she got so upset back in March of 2010 when I was at death’s door (well, not really—I was just helping the Girl Scouts move some cookies and I wandered into the wrong neighborhood) because I originally dismissed it as just a case of the flu.  (In case you’ve joined us in progress, it turned out to be a life-threatening calcium build-up…plus I had to have surgery to remove some too-mahs.)

With Mom out for most of this season, it fell upon me to answer the ad as chief cook and bottle washer; I’ve been preparing about 85% of the meals as well as running the dishwasher and tending to the laundry.  (We have cleaning people who come in every other week, thanks to Kat and Debbie…so that’s one chore off my plate.)  I also have had to do most of the errand-running, and that includes doing the weekly grocery shopping.  My friends—I do not exaggerate when I confess that I would rather chew off an arm and/or a leg than step foot inside a grocery store.  I hate it with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns.  But hey—sometimes all good men have to come to the aid of the party, if I learned nothing else from typing class.

Mom spends most of her time in her recliner—she’s unable to lie down in her bed, so she watches a good deal of late-night TV while snoozing off-and-on throughout the day.  As her only son, I feel it’s imperative I spend some time with her so I arrange for us to have some Mom-and-Ivan outings in the evenings; this past October I entertained her with many of the Universal horror movies I’ve collected over the years (if you recall from yesterday’s Dementia review).

So this is why the blog postings have been spotty of late—very spotty, to be frank.  In addition to TDOY and the reviews I write for ClassicFlix, I’m also in charge of the Radio Spirits blog…so you can imagine all of this eats up a lot of my free time.  I’m not complaining; I just felt you good people were entitled to know why the blog resembles a barren wasteland, and why the Doris Day(s) and Serial Saturdays features kind of came to a grinding halt—I just don’t have the available spare time to work on those as I would like.  I even missed out on writing a post about my natal anniversary in September—and I had the perfect title, “Fifty-two Pickup.”  (Crickets)

I wish I could say we’ve turned a corner here at the new Rancho Yesteryear…but for now, we’re continuing to take one day at a time.  I’m going to make a concerted effort to do some landscaping here in the meantime, with a goal of getting something up once a week…twice, if I’m feeling crazy.  In closing, I want to thank everyone for their patience and continued support of Thrilling Days of Yesteryear.  I’m having too much fun here to quit anytime soon.