It's been a warm day, but the humidity hasn't been so bad. I went over to the strip mall to walk on the wide sidewalks in front of the stores. As usual I employed a counting system to focus my breath on what I was doing. For the last week or so I've been practicing letting my belly drop to create a vacuum in my solar practice in order to pull the air in my lungs through relaxing rather than sucking the air in through sucking. I guess i walked about a mile or so practicing letting my belly drop, and it's getting easier and requires less attention for it to happen.
I'm taking a considerable amount of exercise these days besides walking at the mall. I bought a rowing type exercise machine called a Cardio-Glider that works the whole body. I try to get on it and do at least one repetition for each birthday, so I end up doing seventy repetitions on it most days. My hands and wrists are feeling so much better from the methotrexate and maybe some relief from the new prescription my new rheumatologist at the VA in Durham wrote me. I'm taking two a day. He stated that this new medicine works over the long haul. He also ordered me a bunch of prednisone that I'll be taking until my next scheduled appointment. That in addition to the prednisone my regular doctor had prescribed me. I'm not sure they see what the other has prescribed. I may attempt to get my regular care clinic changed to the Durham VA so they'll at least be on the same computer system.
My youngest brother came over and without trying made me feel kind of stupid. He came over out of the goodness of his heart to share the good fortune he figured out in getting his over-the-air TV antenna setup to
work better and bring in more stations. I was polite, but didn't believe anything he had done would help be get better reception. He talked about hooking up a signal amplifier to the input cable from his outside antenna so
enthusiastically, I finally said, "Well, I have a signal amplifier I bought, but it don't work nearly as well as what you're describing, tale a look at my setup and see if you can improve my reception."
We had been sitting outside on my second-floor deck at the top of outside stairs having this conversation, so it only took a minute for him to walk inside, take a look at the amplifier in question, and ask, "Why isn't it hooked up?"
"Whaaaaa..."
"Yeah, don't you think it might work a little better if you actually hooked the signal amplifier to the input cable from the outside antenna, and then hook it up to your new TV set?", he said as he laughed in ridicule at my lack of technical competency.
"Here, do it this way, dummy..." and he proceed to show me how to get 36 stations instead of 5. I asked him if he had any coffee at his house? He said, "Yes, why?" "So you can go the hell home to your sweet, loving wife, and leave me alone to my disgraceful humiliation... and 30 additional TV stations... that's why. Thanks, Bro!
☆☆☆☆☆
I didn't really feel all that humiliated. I had tried to hook the amplifier up before. Why else would I buy it? It worked at first when I was using the converter box with the old outside antenna I got from my parents house before the airport authority forced it's being moved. The antenna has a rotating device, but it's so old the insulation on the wires had rotted off. It may still work. All it would cost me would be some flat four-wire cable to check it out. Manana. In any case, the only over-the-air stations I'm gonna get are the four commercial networks and PBS, I'm getting them pretty good now on one or the other of the new stations, why bother?
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
