Songs in my head

It has never taken me a lot to get a song stuck in my head. Yesterday it was "The Doctor is Dying," by Chameleon Circuit. We were moving, and I suddenly looked at my brother-in-law taking a shelf off the wall and thought, "I don't want to go..."

That did it, and the song was in my head for the rest of the day.

Of course, it didn't help that I left the YouTube window open on the laptop and C. found the song first thing when he woke up (at two in the afternoon) and played it nonstop for the rest of the day. He even posted it a couple of times on his Facebook wall if you really want to listen to it.

Today's song is one I picked up from VH1 a couple of days ago. I don't know who sings it but I was able to describe the singer in the car to Robin yesterday. She is small, athletically built and wears the same outfit every time I see her - basically a white tank top and black workout pants. That, and she has long blond hair with a flip in it like Gwen Stefani.

And now the song is gone, replaced by Chameleon Circuit's "Mr. Pond."

Living with your parents...

I had this brief lucid moment this morning where I thought I was in my room from high school, and it was shattered when Robin came through the door. (In high school, I lived in my parents' basement, and the door was at the top of the stairs.)

We're about to move to my parents' house in Lawrenceburg for the summer (different house - this new one doesn't have a basement). I realized my blood sugar must be low.

Which is good, because that means I get an Ale8 slushie, but it also made me realize - we're moving at least twenty minutes away from the nearest Ale8 slushie.

I told Robin, "I just realized, we're moving at least twenty minutes away from the nearest Ale8 slushie."

"As opposed to two and a half hours away?" she replied.

We decided to move in with my parents for the summer and build up cash so we can move to Bowling Green in the fall for Robin to start grad school at Western.

I feel like I should pause here for a moment and talk about Ale8 slushies. First of all, it's my favorite drink. I became hooked on them when I worked at Amazon doing returns. I could go to the Marathon station on Buckhorn, grab a 32 oz slushie, go to work, leave it in the car while I was inside, and I could finish it with my lunch.

By the time I went to work at Manchester Center, I was hooked on the Ale8 slushie. I mentioned it to my coworker, Dave and he was like, "Ale8? And a slushie? Where?"

Up to that point, I only knew of two places in Lexington to find one and both were in my neighborhood, which was nowhere near Manchester Center.

Dave and another one of our coworkers (I forget her name so I'll call her "Camille") found a BP that sold them at the corner of Versailles Road and Industry, which to this day is the farthest west I've ever found an Ale8 slushie.

If anyone is reading this outside of Kentucky I feel as if I should explain. Ale8-1 (or "a late one," according to the package) is a regional soft drink bottled in Winchester, Kentucky. It gets harder to find the further one gets from Winchester.

When my parents lived north of Frankfort, I was in town for the 127 yard sale and wanted to start my morning with an Ale8. I had to drive all the way through Frankfort to Wal-Mart on the south side of town before I found Ale8 in a bottle and I had to pay a premium price. I think it was $1.79 a bottle, as opposed to the fifty cents a bottle costs at Kroger in Lexington.

So in Lawrenceburg the closest place I know to get a bottled Ale8 is Frankfort, and I would have to pay through the nose for it.

And I don't know of anywhere to get an Ale8 slushie that's closer than Lexington.

The Ghost Trap - part 1

A few years ago, I wanted to right a book about ghosts and ghost hunters, so I went to a local convention called ScareFest. It was a horror and paranormal convention, run by local ghost hunter Patti Starr.

She was a bit of a kook, but she got me in the door for free so I figured I owed her a story out of it.

This was the first time I had been to any sort of convention of any sort (not counting a small comic book convention I had my parents drop me off at as a teenager) and I wasn't sure what to expect. It was a lot of D-list celebrities for B-horror movies of which I had never heard.

And way to many small children dressed like Michael Myers from the Halloween movies. Nothing is quite as creepy as miniature Michael Myers, especially when they have a plastic butcher's knife and there seems to be one around every corner.

My brother came down to the Lexington Civic Center to see a Bigfoot expert who's blog he followed give a lecture. Basically the media had been in an uproar about a Bigfoot hoax that had occurred earlier in the year. As I remember it, a group of hunters claimed they had a Sasquatch body in their freezer but it turned out to be a rubber store-bought Bigfoot costume stuffed full of frozen meat.

He claimed that it was the people on his website who caught the hoax, who recognized the Bigfoot costume, but when someone from the audience asked him why he hadn't spoken up louder and sooner, he sort of stared off into space and mumbled an excuse.

I felt sorry for the man. He admitted that the hoax had meant record traffic to his site and he had been quoted as a Sasquatch expert in several national news articles and now he was cornered about why he hadn't done enough to debunk it.

My brother bought a signed copy of his book and I chatted with him for a little bit. I wore my wife's MP3 player around my neck for the entire weekend. When it was set to "record" and the switch was locked it looked like it was turned off.

I wasn't concerned about the duplicitness of it - I had a reporters notebook and made constant notes. I just couldn't write fast enough to capture the natural flow of conversation. They should have known I was quoting them.

Puffalumps of DOOM!!!!!!

As I sit here on the couch, eating my breakfast of cheese ravioli from a can and waiting for Robin to get out of the bathroom, I'm pondering my addiction to Chef Boyardee.

Those of you who have lived with me or spent any amount of time around me will likely be surprised to hear, I didn't grow up eating Chef Boyardee. When I was 10 or 11, they ran a promotion wherein a person could send X number of labels and receive a Puffalump in the mail.

The funny thing was, I forgot why I was collecting the labels. When my cousin Michael asked me about it at my grandparents' house I honestly couldn't remember. I told him it was a "skateboard or something."

I honestly couldn't remember for what I was saving labels.

For those of you who don't remember, Puffalumps were one of those toys from the 1980s. They were basically stuffed animals made from nylon, and they didn't age well. Basically they were a girls toy, and not at all something a boy should want.

When I do find one at a yard sale or a flea market, they tend to be yellowed and have rust spots on them or someone washed them and the stuffing all went to one end. So far, I think I've only found on in salvageable condition, and it was a dinosaur that grunted when you squeezed it. I think I gave it to my daughter.

Anyway, the point was, I was talking about canned pasta and my canned pasta addiction.

My parents had always bought me Franco-American Spaghettios with Meatballs, so they were a little annoyed but not resistant to the idea of buying Chef Boyardee pasta for me.

As I moved out on my own and started buying my own groceries, I kept buying canned pasta. When Christian was starting out on solid food (he liked green beans A LOT) we bought a can of ravioli for him and it stained everything, his skin, the white plastic of his high chair... Everything.

So we banned canned pasta from the house for a while, especially Chef Boyardee ravioli. And I stopped eating it myself. I figured if it stained plastic that horribly it couldn't possibly be doing my insides any good.

I went years without eating it. Then I started again.

I was like a junkie, hiding my pasta habit from my wife. The label said each can of pasta had at least 100% of the recommended daily sodium allowance. Seriously, the food is not healthy at all. Each can has hundreds of milligrams of sodium inside. The next time you buy a can look at the label. You will be shocked.

And if you get in a hurry and eat it straight out of the can without cooking it, you will have diarrhea. My wife and I use to call this "The Cold Pasta S****."

As in, "Why are you still on the toilet?"

Then I would shout, "It's the Cold Pasta S****."

And she would answer back, "Well, I keep telling you to cook it."

But I never would. I just couldn't spare the one and a half minutes it would take to microwave it. Or there wasn't a clean bowl. Or I was just being lazy.

Canned pasta became my comfort food, replacing Spaghettios. (After a steam bubble popped on the stove top while I was cooking them in a sauce pan, and I dropped to my knees and said, "My childhood comfort food has betrayed me," I never went back.)

After the doctor diagnosed me with hypertension and my wife and I started having problems, I maybe should have backed of the ravioli. But no, I didn't and I swear that it was one of the (many) contributing factors to my stroke.

Ready for a Miracle?

I walked today, a short distance and without a cane.

I had the idea in my head since I saw Leap of Faith last week (the Steve Martin faith-healing movie) and I decided to try it this morning in the hallway. It felt good to stand upright. I popped my back also, which also felt good. (I had been giving serious thought to finding a chiropractor.)

In a week that's been filled with setbacks, it was good to find a bright spot.