A Day with Coke Zero

I am sorry for the very late entry today. After I finished my four mile walk this AM I took up my saw and worked ferociously to break up the remnants of a very large tree limb that fell in our yard, so that it could be moved from the back yard to the curb for yard refuse day. Projects like this don’t come up very often…or we could also say that I don’t go searching them out, either. I was using an old hand saw that last saw action on Sherman’s March to the Sea in 1864. By the time I finished in the heat, I had probably broken a lot of rules about dehydration and electrolytes, but I will say that Coke Zero in sufficient quantities does seem to make standing a possibility again.

This afternoon I knocked off a list of errands which included getting fitted for new eye glasses. I was blaming the rigors of typing the blog everyday for wearing out my eyesight, but the optometrist at Costco looked up my records and I had not had a new pair of glasses since 2010. I emphasized that I really wanted glasses to help me read better, so in seven to ten days I will find out if this prescription will do that. The pricing of glasses always makes me laugh: I picked out a $59 pair, but after you throw in the cost of progressives, hardening, solar ray protection, and a few other enhancements, the actual cost is five or six times the base price. Which reminds me, another task on my list today was buying ink cartridges for my wife’s printer. You can buy a decent printer for under $100, but a pack of extra-large cartridges costs close to that, and how many times in the life of the printer will you have to do that?

My final stop was at the neighborhood grocery store, and I stopped at the free blood pressure machine. Hmmm. The last time I saw a pressure that low was the night the Jimmy Smits character died on NYPD Blue. The mechanical girl’s voice in the machine was ecstatic at how good the numbers were—and balloons floated across the TV monitor. I thought maybe they had confused me for a rhino sleeping in the sun. Who am I to argue with a public store monitor? I know that after a few more Coke Zeros when I got home I felt strong enough to hike up to the loft and get something on the terminal here.

I have a theory about blog sites: the successful ones I have seen are always alive. In some ways blogs are like radios. When I was a kid I always knew that the Buffalo Bisons baseball team would be on the radio every day or night from April to September, and even if the team was losing 18-2 in the sixth inning, the announcers would tell funny stories from the old days or read baseball news on the ticker, and I never felt alone. Strange thing is, in this age of thousands of cable TV stations, I don’t feel anywhere near the connectedness I did (and sometimes still do) with radio.

I have come to accept that every day is not going to be steak on this site, at any rate. One of the hardest days to write the blog, by the way, is Monday, because frankly it is hard to write about liturgy. This week I am subscribing to Worship Magazine in the hope it will provide us with some cutting edge food for thought, and I also added Jurist to the blog’s resources, Catholic University’s biannual publication on Catholic Church Law. Jurist will be particular fascinating in its analysis of the Synod on the Family.

That said, I am going to cut short our entry for today and after supper return to Xavier Rynne’s classic on Vatican II, which I believe will create an interesting series of entries in the weeks to come. Right now I feel like another Coke Zero.