May 8, 2024.
Sometimes my life stinks!
Nevertheless, here we go, diving in. I love it when things rhyme, though I had to have the machine tell me how to spell it, rhyme, that is. Thank goodness for Siri too. She’s quite good at spelling and definitions, at least when she understands what I’m asking. However, she never leaves the answer up quite long enough!
Lately, last two months, probably, I’ve been playing WORDLE, though the machine didn’t like the spelling and changed it to WORDLESS the first time. As I say, I’ve been playing it every night for a few months now. I wish I could say I was good at it, but I value truth too much to lie about it. For those of you who don’t know, the player gets 6 tries to find the five letter word of the day. If you get the right letter in the right place, the letter turns green. If you get the right letter in the wrong place, the letter turns yellow. If the letter is not in the word, the letter turns gray or black. And you have to use real words. I probably average four out of six correct per game, which shows up in my gmail each day around 5 p.m. Three or four times I have gotten the answer on the second try. Woo hoo! Hot doggie!
Call the local newspaper! Unfortunately, five or six times I have failed to get the answer in six tries. 0/6! Talk about feeling stupid! I wanted to say shitty, probably because I watch too many Coen brothers movies and the language in their movies tends to be, at times, unimaginative. The Big Lebowski, for example, though the spelling looks a bit off. The Dude, however, is a fine character, regardless of his language. Even the Sam Elliot “narrator” mentions the excessive cussing to him, to no apparent avail though.
Back to the game. Several of my losses, three,I think, were to the “ears” line. The last time I lost the game the final choice was between “hears” and “wears.” Something kept whispering “wears.” I, of course, ignored the intuition and chose “hears.” Then the little white screen at the top drops down to say something that feels like, “hey stupid, the word was “wears.” Once the word was “fears” and I almost peed my catheter for I hadn’t even noticed “fears.” Of course, peeing my catheter isn’t saying much, given the way the damn thing works. Consider: bears, dears, gears, fears, hears, pears, rears, sears, tears, wears, and years. Now you have four choices or sometimes only three. It begins to Erik me, Erik me?, I thought I had written “irk,” though I may have started with an e as in “Erik.” You know, sometimes it is not easy being almost 84. Technology has developed somewhat, to speak candidly . In college and later, I wrote all my first drafts in cursive (cursive?) and then rewrote the next draft, very carefully, on my Olympia typewriter, a Christmas gift from my parents when I was about 19 and an English major at Heidelberg in Tiffin, Ohio, not Germany. However, if the student majored in German, he or she might be eligible for a junior year abroad. I minored in Spanish and spent six weeks, before my senior year, in Mexico City at Mexico City College, 6 education credits through Ohio State University. Go buckeyes! The typewriter lacked spellcheck. Go computers!
Well, that’s all for today though I should probably have described my two hour appointment with the eye doctor (I know there’s a name for them) yesterday; the problem is I’m still recovering. “What’s the lowest line you can read?” I see one on the floor! “Which is clearer, the red or the green?” I saw red and yellow, and it was usually the yellow though I played along and said “green.” Two hours later I couldn’t even hold my head up. “Now we just need to dilate your pupils for a more accurate glaucoma test. Put your chin in the little cup and your forehead on the ceiling…”
May 11, 2024. After supper. Meds taken.
Before I opened this page, I had a great deal to say; yet now I sit here, having forgotten whatever it was. I remember it had something to do with supper and eating and the fact that I have to use utensils made for the differently abled (the imp changed “abled” to “baked.” Well, why not. I’m feeling a little “differently baked” tonight. I tried to send an email a few minutes ago, but I couldn’t get the keyboard to appear, magically or otherwise. Technology! My typewriter never refused to let me use its keyboard. But then I had to ask Siri how to spell “utensils” a moment ago, and my typewriter was never willing to indulge me that way.). My writing gets more like Tristram Shandy’s every day.
I‘ll try again. I’m definitely “differently abled” after about 40 years of peripheral (thanks Siri!) neuropathy, severe, combined recently with rheumatoid arthritis. My body doesn’t know whether just to disappear into nervelessness or rock all my joints. In any case I need utensils for the HANDICAPPED, he shouted. These utensils (I can spell it without help now) have large black rubber or plastic (I have no idea, having never really felt one) grips for spoon, fork, and a knife that couldn’t cut hot wax, let alone butter or a tender piece of chicken. My wife brought down a nice plate of barbecued pulled pork, an open-faced sandwich on wheat bread with provolone, the bread nicely sliced in half, along with a serving of a potato with butter that tasted as though it were trying to return to its aboriginal state: but good, honey, quite good! The potatoes were like a small mountain range between the two halves of the sandwich. I aso was given an orange cut up into bite-size pieces, also very tasty.
I should hasten to explain that I eat everything with a utensil. I like gummy bears from Germany made in Maryland, but I have to eat them with a fork, for when I use my fingers to pick up anything small, whatever it is, if I am trying to get it to my mouth, the odds are very good that it will disappear half way there. I drop things frequently and with great regularity. By the end of the week my hospital gown looks like a colorful buffet, even though I hold a paper plate under my chin to catch the droppings. The lift chair where I spend much of my life is quite large so that it could accommodate me and a dog. My dog is gone (though the house now contains four small dogs), I miss him greatly, Simon, a dachshund. In any case, I have used the chair so long that the seat has pulled away from the sides. The inside of the chair probably looks like a grocery-hardware superstore by now—which brings me to the reason for this brief outburst.
Did I mention that my short term memory is not too good? Probably not, but I have mostly forgotten (thank you Siri). In any case my lap board is a tad tilted. Things roll if I am not careful. Tonight I put the fork down, forgot to secure it because of a momentary distraction. Shoot, I said, or some such close relative. I looked around, moved the lap board, and found the fork on my hospital gown. I swore an oath then and there to be more careful, pulled the lap board back into place, set the fork down and picked up the spoon to deal with the potatoes. Thinking to use the fork to attack the pork, I put the spoon down only to discover that the damned thing was gone again! I felt around on the chair and my lap to no avail, of course. This time the chair was quicker than my hand and eye and undoubtedly swallowed my fork.
Well, I feel like a character in a Coen brothers’ film, probably The Big Lebowski. I dug another fork out of my ceramic utensil holder and went back at it. This time I treated the entire utensil-eating experience like reciting the Rosary: keep your eye on the fork, keep your eye on the fork, keep your eye on the fork, where’s the damn spoon?
Now that I have described my evening, I hear the clock striking 10, time to make it to the bathroom with its “differently abled” toilet, where I sit to take care of the nightly chores: which involve taking my nightly dose of lactulose to offset the binding drugs I also take throughout the day, then brushing my teeth, trying not to drop anything, like a toothbrush or a bottle cap (each has happened once), then end my evening with a brief bidet spray, just in case!
May 13, 2024. Before supper. Meds not taken.
I thought I was through recounting my mystical experiences, but then WORDLE was a challenge yesterday with an interesting outcome. I put the word “raise” into the first of the empty boxes. The “r” and the “i” were highlighted yellow; the letter “e” was highlighted green. Wow, I thought, 3 out of 5. The problem was that the word could not begin with “r,” have “I” in the middle, and had to end with “e.” From wow very quickly to whoa. I sat and looked and tried to think of a word with those letters that would fit. My mind was blanker than usual. Humbled once again by a game and a puzzle I could not solve, I opened my word finder and filled in the appropriate slots: r and i in the middle, ends in e, exclude a and s. 5 letters; only common words! I hit “find it.” The finder gave me two columns of words, 20 to 30 I guess. The problem was that as far as I could see, all their words had the i in the middle, like “tribe,” “bribe,” “pride,” etc. every word in the two columns fell to that pattern. Then I looked more closely and found only one that was different: “eerie.” Surely not, but I could not think of another possibility, so I returned to the puzzle, typed in “eerie,” and hit enter. All the letters turned green and began jumping up and down as they do when you find the right word. 3 e’s: I remember I went 0/6 once when I first started playing because it didn’t occur to me that you might have to double a letter to find the answer. “Eerie,” I wouldn’t have thought of that before the next ice age. However, yesterday = 2/6! And now it’s time to play today.
Back two minutes later. I entered “raise” again; 3 vowels and it keeps working. This time “s” and “a” came up yellow. I decided to try “shall” because that was essentially all my weak brain could think of, and it was five letters. I entered “shall” and 4 of the letters turned green. I had to lean close to the screen to make certain both “l’s” were green. Wow! I letter off. I typed in “stall”; everything turned green and began jumping up and down; the white sign descended telling me that I had solved it in 3 tries but could probably do better. As Bugs Bunny would say, “ What a maroon!” Anyway, for five days since my first description, I am 3/6, 4/6, 3/6, 2/6, 3/6. It almost looks like I know what I’m doing now, which, of course, is seldom the case with anything any more, or ever.
