Cancer

Over the centuries, sycophants have learned how to keep children out of earshot of the emperor, especially when the emperor is swindling himself. Alternately, the ancient precursor to the fable.

Since I am officially retired now, I have abandoned my version of that quest.

You survive in your disaster dreams? Wow. I never did, which is why I started working on not remembering them starting about age 6.

What happens in the storm? Well, that's what apocalypso music is about.

Love Friday-before-game fanblog snark.

Nobody respects underground comics. Sigh.

But, since it went nowhere, no work was done.

No Waffle Houses out towards the Left Coast (they only get as far west as Phoenix), where IHOP and Denny's hold down that business niche. But after spending a decade in Texas and Indiana, I know about the Waffle House. I think I last ate at one in early 1988 in Little Rock when I got there 6 hours later than I'd planned because a snowstorm more or less blocked all the highways. The legendary Waffle House fight in Austin postdates my stay there. My 24-hour eatery while in Austin was the Nighthawk, now long gone.

Nevertheless, he drew more tiger than clothes.

I have not been following this massive fiasco, but I'm really hoping this happens. I am not a fan of either of those two institutions, but the mindless moneygrubbing avarice that led the rest of the conference to cut out in unseemly haste -- and my near-lifetime hate for intercollegiate athletics as a university faculty member in a real academic discipline -- wants the other scumbuckets to lose everything.

Aaah, the first pathological family dynamic flare-up of the holiday season. And it's not even either of our families. It's enough to give my eyeballs motion sickness.

Side effects.

Another factor in my hanging on into last summer was ... it made inordinate sense to stay double-covered on health insurance.

Hey, lots of us like pitchers' duels.

My decision to wait to retire until I turned 67 meant I had more pieces of paper needed to affirm that yes, I had not just slacked off on doing the paperwork (or more correctly, I had slacked off on doing it, but in a way that was explicitly permitted.)

Well, now that summer is gone, I change my answer from the other times I was asked that. (Back then, my retirement felt a lot like my non-retirement, since I wasn't teaching most summers.) However, one thing remains true: my attention is dominated by unwelcome things unrelated to any job or retirement state. Still (considering the annoying inconsistency of the local NFL franchise) it is pleasant not to have to grade papers -- especially labs -- which I often did with football on TV to provide distraction from my ineffectiveness as a teacher. A passing annoyance is ... dealing with Medicare for the first time. Not helped by my being the first of my circle of friends to reach retirement, so I am walking point through that jungle. Social Security was a snap, once I was told all the forms I had to fill out (and I was told them one at a time, so I ended up doing them serially rather than in parallel); happily the physical SSA office is a ten minute walk from my house so needing to go there was not a problem at all, and almost uniquely in this town, that office has air conditioning, a real plus in August when the highs were in the 90s.

Second Jim Lee, Cary Bates, Erik Larsen.

When I did get it, we did succeed in having the other two people in the house NOT get it, which is something. My cross-section for catching it now is much diminished, since with retirement I no longer am in rooms with dozens of other people -- mostly young adults -- for multiple hours a day, five days a week.

Next time create your own language and write in that. Hey, it worked for JRRT.