I recently listened to a podcast and the interviewee was talking about one of his early mentors who was a doctor working with leprosy patients in India. He commented on how leprosy, the oldest recorded disease, is also one of the most feared because it robs the body of pain. Those patients lack the body's basic alarm system that tells them not to touch something hot or, even worse, that tiny impulse that makes them involuntarily blink every few seconds. Without that, their eyes dry out and millions of leprosy patients go blind because of it. The doctor said that [……]

Five years ago today I walked out of the Markey Cancer Center after my final radiation treatment. It was strangely bittersweet.  I was certainly glad to be at the end of that journey and to get on with the business of healing, especially given the state my mouth was in at the time. I could see a light at the end of that cancer tunnel and that was encouraging. But there was another side of that coin.

Every day for six weeks I had been going through this routine and I had grown accustomed to it. I had subjected myself to [……]

• I've searched in dictionaries for years — big dictionaries with small print — but I've yet to find a definition for "pompatus."

• The classic vision of Frankenstein's monster has big bolts sticking out of its neck. I guess those are there to hold its head on. That's just proof that the good doctor was a hack and didn't know what he was doing. Those bolts are either way too long or aren't tightened down all the way. And any true craftsman would have used Torx screws and countersunk the heads.

• If Sam Smith ever gets happy, his music career is basically over.

• Just how would

You have to take risks. We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.
— Paulo Coelho

Sometimes the most scenic roads in life are the detours you didn't mean to take.
— Angela N. Blount - "Once Upon an Ever After"

But maybe someday, my weird will be somebody else's perfect. And it will be absolutely amazing!
— phydeaux - "The Pursuit of Happiness"

A lot of the time, life is kind of predictable and gives you exactly what you expect. Sometimes…… not so much.

Occasionally, you're just walking along, minding your own business, and notice something out of [……]

The morning
        stretches
and crawls its way over
        the hilltops

spilling over

illuminating
        a sea of dock and heather

each bud and petal
        each delicate leaf
basking
        in the promise of
                a new day

Something is happening...
          I don't exactly know what it is yet…

Stay tuned

Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love.
— Charlie Brown (Charles M. Schulz)

Recently I've been watching old TV shows from my youth on various streaming services just for the nostalgia.  The latest is Taxi which takes me back to my junior high and high school days.  It was a fairly middle-of-the-road show with a couple very memorable characters and, like most shows of the era, some of it holds up over time and some is very dated. Watching it all back-to-back, you notice things that you never did before because either (a) the intervening time between [……]

I have noticed that the people who are late are often so much jollier than the people who have to wait for them.
— E. V. Lucas

After three false starts, one complete rewrite, a global pandemic, a lot of procrastination, some technical issues, and a medical shlebobble which will be named later, I have finally gotten the blog rebuilt (again) and relaunched.  The false starts and the rewrite all eventually got thrown away because I just wasn't happy with the direction they were going and really wanted to spend my development time working on added features instead of the base engine. [……]

Person 1: Look! There in the distance! Something's... [wipes eyes in disbelief] ...um, something's moving!!

Person 2: What is it?!?

Person 1: I don't know. You -- you don't suppose...

Person 2: Oh no! Not that! God help us all.

Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.
Mark Twain

Hip hip hello again, everyone! (OK — that was stupid.)

So here's what's been keeping me from posting on a regular basis. When I jumped back into writing a blog, there was a lot going on and my life was kind of a mish-mash of emotions and questions and uncertainty. I needed to get it out of my head and that gave me a lot to write about. And that drove the design and function of the blog platform that I created. It is very much built [……]