Excuses, Excuses (No Show This Week)

(Image from here.)

Ugh, I feel so bad about this.  The short bit of news is that I just don't think I'll have the time & energy to put together Self Help Radio this week.  I will be gone most of today helping out with a remote broadcast & much of that involved sitting in the sun while live bands played nearby & everyone had to yell to speak to one another.  Five hours of that will really wear you down.

Do you want to hear more excuses?  I've been feeling run-down this week & even had a fever the other night, although what it's from is a little confusing - I don't have a cold & I haven't otherwise had any symptoms of sickness.

& this morning we took our cat Boone for a follow-up visit to the vet to try to figure out why he's so thin & is coughing.  The steroids he was given to possibly treat for asthma have not resulted in a diminishing of his coughing fits.  Now he's being treated for possible parasites.

Again, I remind myself that this wouldn't happen if I could do the show live.  The whole process of editing the audio takes much more time than a live "performance."  So if I had a show on the air, I would not be skipping it this week.

But I also must remind myself all this work I'm doing is to make sure that I will one day be back on the air.

Please accept my apologies - I apologize to my collaborators too! - the show with the theme "all day & all night" will happen next Friday at noon.

Preface To All Day & All Night: The Perils Of Holiday Radio/The Perils Of Podcasting

(Image from here.)

Here's a warning: Self Help Radio may not be "on time" this week.  I want to help out at a radio station here & they are broadcasting live from a festival & I'll be on site to announce stuff  between acts, & that's happening both Thursday & Friday, & it's probably no surprise those are the days I work on the show.  A huge swath of time I normally spend on the show has not been taken doing something else.

This has become a habit, I'm sorry.  I promise, I am working as hard as possible without being an unbearable pest to get Self Help Radio on the air in Portland.  But as long as the podcast can be released whenever, I have the option to postpone & reschedule.

Have a happy fourth & I'll try to get the show done by noon on Saturday.  I'll try.  I'll try.

Do You Ever Sleep All Night?

It's July 2.  Let's pretend it's July 1.  For the sake of argument.

Summertime is a good time to sleep all night.  Nights are shorter.  The goal is within reach.

The sun rose on July 1 at 5:26am in Portland.  It set the night before at 9:03pm.  That means there was about eight & a half hours of night to sleep all the way through.

That night I went to bed at around midnight.  I wasn't feeling well, I thought I might have a fever.  I tossed & turned & occasionally had to move to different parts of the bed because the animals in the bed had shifted positions.  I woke around seven to take the dogs for their morning walk.

You might generously give me seven hours of sleep, but I certainly didn't sleep all night.  I hardly ever if ever sleep all night.  I don't go to bed at 9pm (the animals get fed at 9:30pm) nor do I wake at 5:30am (unless it's for a radio show or something like that).  So I arguably will never sleep all night.

Conversely, in the wintertime, there'll be far less day than night.  Could I possibly sleep all day?

On January 1 in Portland, the sun rose at 7:41 am.  It set the night before at 4:38pm.  Holy shit.  That's less than nine hours of daylight.  Holy fucking shit.  Okay, I hadn't thought about that before.  All right.  Deep breaths.  Deep breaths.

There's no way I'm going to sleep all day if all day is less than nine hours long!  That's fifteen hours of night.  Where do I live now, the arctic?

What was I talking about?  Oh man, I can't believe - the sun rose on January 1 in Dallas at 7:30 & it set at 5:30 & that I know is just one hour more but for some reason it's just not as frightening.  Okay.  Okay.

Look, I need to make some preparations for a scary winter.  Forget all day & all night, I may want to sleep all winter long.

The Cat Seems A Little Lean

Happy July!  It's been a lovely summer so far in Portland, I hope it keeps being lovely.

Many years ago, in Kentucky, I got my cat Beatrice into the bad habit of eating on my desk.  She actually ate on this pull-out section just to my right, & every once in a while, when I was moving my mouse (I'm right-handed), if she were there, she'd take that as provocation & swat at me.

This situation continued in Texas but I slowly put a stop to it, especially after Beatrice died.  The cats had specific places they ate, usually on the dining room table, away from snoopy hounds who couldn't understand why they weren't eating as fast as dogs do.

But if you saw my desk right now, you'd say: hey, Gary, are there cats eating on your desk?  & I'd say, yes.  Yes, there are.  Well, one.  Boone.

Boone has been mentioned on this blog before, as well as in recent posts during the move.  He didn't enjoy the four-day drive to Portland.  & we noticed something a couple of weeks into our stay here: he seemed to be losing weight.

There could be many reasons, & we fixated on one: he's always had a weird cough.  We thought he maybe couldn't pass hairballs, so we gave him this goop (he did not enjoy getting this goop squirted into his mouth) which supposedly facilitated that.  But the intermittent coughing continued.  We decided to visit a vet - we're going to need to find a vet - to see what might be the case.

The tentative diagnosis?  Asthma.  Our cat Bronte has asthma, so we're familiar.  The initial treatment: steroids.  Which has made Boone hungry.  & I will feed him whenever he wants, so, once again, a cat is eating on my desk.

Do you smell this brand of cat food when you read the blog?  That's what I'm feeding him!  The wet stuff!  It's so gross!

He hasn't stopped coughing, but he has put on weight.  The wife is not convinced of the vet's diagnostic skills.  For now, I'm just glad he's eating.