Happy Birthday tomorrow, America!

Just a reminder that here in the Land of the Free™©® you can be straight-up executed by the government for holding a mobile phone and trying to assist your fellow Americans when they require aid from being shoved to the ground by those who are supposed to be protecting us. Then the president will accuse you of being a domestic terrorist because you had a firearm on your person that you were legally allowed to carry (as guaranteed by the Second Amendment), even though it remained holstered. Then the government will tell lies about you having drawn your weapon and announce that you deserved to die even though video footage exists, and the only thing you were holding was your phone. Then the government agents responsible for murdering you in broad daylight will get put on "administrative leave." But, woo-hoo, fireworks or what the fuck ever.

Instead of attending some tacky, unattended, bloated, partisan, for-profit event that's a drain on American taxpayers for America's 250th, I'll be celebrating American heroes who embody the best ideals of what our country could be. Like a 37-year-old intensive care nurse working to help our veterans who put himself between a woman who had been attacked... and the federal agents who shoved her to the ground. At which time he was pepper-sprayed then executed by the government as he tried to help her. Then he was vilified and branded a terrorist by the head of the government, despite the fact that he had done nothing illegal or wrong.

He was just an American trying to enjoy the freedoms which were at the heart of the entire reason this country was built in the first place. And he was a helper...

This country was better with you in it, Alex Pretti.

My eye is still feeling a bit bruised after surgery, but that's not the problem.

The problem is that it's like I've been punched in the eye. Not from pain, but from swelling on my lower lid... even though there's no swelling. Instead it's more like a haze along the bottom (because the tear was at the top and things get reversed in your eye... our brains switch things right-side up).

Eventually my brain will be able to eliminate the haze at the bottom from the top and the chunk floating at the top from the bottom. At least I hope so.

It's tiring having to concentrate all day long to see... though, oddly enough, it's difficult to actually fall asleep. And so I've been falling asleep to my Disney movie collection each night. Last night was The Rescuers and tonight I'm watching The Emperor's New Groove...

This is a criminally underrated movie.

Especially since it features Eartha Kitt's delightful villain, Yzma, who steals the film at every turn...

The rumor is that the big coaster in "Villains Land" has been re-imagined to be an Yzma coaster. I sure hope that's true, because I can't imagine a better source material for an attraction.

Why is good American cheese such an expensive commodity?

I can get Colby-Jack, Swiss, Provolone, Havarti, Muenster, Pepper Jack, and a variety of Cheddars (along with many others) at ridiculously low prices for slices. I got an 8oz. Package on sale for $1.79 not too long ago, and don't think I've ever paid over $2.50. But if I want American Cheese of an equal quality (none of the individually-wrapped crap that's not real cheese and tastes like plastic), it's $4.50 to get 8oz. of Kraft American Deluxe... or even $6.00 to get 8oz. of more premium brands...

And I don't get it.

American cheese that's real cheese is just a blend of cheeses mixed with sodium citrate to make it creamier. So why is it double the price? It seems absurd. But American cheese is the best-melting stuff you can buy for a burger, so I end up paying the price because nothing else quite compares.

And the Big Cheese Cartel knows that, so they are able to charge big money knowing people will pay it.

I should probably switch to Cheddar or Colby-Jack to save my hard-earned cash.

My eye felt... bruised? I guess? today. But was otherwise pain-free. The only problem I faced was my eye feeling tired. And moving my eyes made it tired faster, so I tried to look straight ahead and move my head around to where I needed to see.

Last night when I would close my eyes to try and sleep, my lasered eye would display a light show of red lines which looked something like this...

This morning I was surprised to find that the lines were still there whenever I closed my eye... even if it was just a blink. Distracting and annoying. But it was gone after a few hours, so no harm no foul, I guess.

I thought I would probably take my pills and go to bed at 7pm, but it's almost 8pm and I'm going to see if I can make it until 9pm so that my sleep schedule (such as it is) won't be wildly disrupted.

In the meanwhile, I am trying to adjust to a huge blurry spot in my vision and hope that I can either get used to it or it will diminish in time.

Last Wednesday I woke up and had a massive spot in my vision. After years of stuff like this, I didn't panic. I thought perhaps it was a new floater, and eventually my brain would learn to disregard it just as it had a dozen times before.

But this time it was different.

Then it disappeared. Kinda. But it left a massive blurry spot behind, which caused a doozy of a headache. So I visited my awesome optometrist who took photos of my eye. She was concerned that her equipment (which is mostly built for prescribing glasses and contacts and monitoring general eye health) wasn't extensive enough to see what's going on, so she made me an urgent appointment at the ophthalmologist.

And today was the day.

The took new photo scans of my eyes... including some a machine I had never seen before.

Turns out there's a tear on my retina...

It's that nasty green thing at the top...

Dumb luck worked in my favor, because a surgeon happened to be walking by as he was leaving for the day and saw my pictures. He walked into the room to take a look in my eye for himself and said that I should have surgery to put a scar around the tear so it doesn't get any bigger and detach my retina. That sounded scary, so I asked how soon I could get on the schedule to have it done.

"I'm going to do it right now."

Next thing I know, I'm staring into a laser gun with a lens stuck to my eye as my amazing surgeon starts blasting hundreds of flashes of light at my retina... damaging the tissue so it will scar over and make a barrier to keep my tear from spreading and causing serious problems.

I was told it might hurt and feel like a dull ache in my eye. I felt it, but it didn't hurt.

When I left the clinic, it was empty. Which made me realize how lucky I was to have a doctor care so much about protecting my vision that he stayed late to take care of it.

I was able to drive home with two pairs of sunglasses on my face and was fine. For about an hour. Then the dull ache pain thing started happening, so I took an overdose of Advil with a Benadryl chaser and went to bed. And once the pain drifted away, so did I.

I slept for 9-1/2 hours, which is more sleep than I've gotten in decades. And now I'm sitting in bed with my cats trying to pull out of my sleep-haze so I can get to work.

Which is sure to be fun because the blurry spot is still there, and I'm told it could be six months before my brain can make it go away enough so I don't notice it.

Don't get old, folks... there's nothing good that comes of it. One day things are fine, the next day your eyeball is falling apart.

   
• Greed Hike! After record-breaking financial quarters worth billions upon billions of dollars in profit, Tim Cook announced that price hikes for Apple devices are "unavoidable," and they arrived this week. It's been noted that last year alone Apple raked in $112 billion and spent $310 billion on stock buybacks. Which is to say that Tim Cook is full of shit. His company has more money than some countries, and the idea that they can't absorb the RAM price increases THAT APPLE FUCKING CONTRIBUTED TO WITH THEIR AI BULLSHIT, well... forgive me for laughing. And for hanging on to my existing Apple products for a good, long, while.

   
• Don't Get Grifted! The insanity just keeps piling up...

People are entirely too easy to manipulate when it comes to their health. And I have no idea how we got here.

   
• Feral Hogs! This may seem funny... but my friend Doug and I were chased by feral hogs in Kauai, and it was terrifying. They are horrific. Which, if you've seen the movie Hannibal, you already know...

You would not want to meet a feral hog in a dark alley. Or anywhere else, I'm guessing.

   
• She's Super! The hate being lobbed at Milly Alcock because she dared to accept an acting job as Supergirl in a movie is repugnant. Snyder fan-bros aren't just content to say "I am not going to watch the movie because I don't like the direction of the James Gunn universe"... oh no. They have to attack Milly's looks and anything else they can think of to make it personal, despite the fact that she's getting rave reviews by people who don't care for the movie that much...

On every post where Supergirl is even mentioned, Snyder-bros are unloading with hate and adding things like "FLOP!" and "Sasha Calle is the ONLY Supergirl!" and whatever. And here's the thing. These same people didn't even turn out for Saha Calle's only appearance as Supergirl in The Flash, which is widely regarded as one of the biggest box office flops of all time. The projection here is insane.

   
• Cut-Proof? It's genuinely jaw dropping how the fact that an abundance of evidence exists to disprove the non-stop lies, but people are still choosing to believe them all...

Counting to 45,000 isn't difficult at all when you don't fucking count in the first place.

   
• Receipts! Megyn Kelly unleashed a disgusting viral video against Haitians who arrived here with a temporary protection status. It was horrific enough that people are coming forward with viral comments of their own to hit back. And, if they are even half-true, they're damning enough that they should ruin her. But we all know how that works. People like this get a pass for some reason. I can't fathom how Amy Coney Barrett will explain voting to strip TPS protections from endangered Haitians when two of her adopted children are from Haiti and this will likely result in some... or many... of them losing their life.

   
• Watson is on the Case! There's a practice at Apple whereas some company comes out with a very good app for their various devices which has killer features... at which point Apple will put those same features into their own apps or operating systems, essentially destroying the app which had the idea first. Way back in 2001 an app named Watson was released by a small developer which added a lot of useful tools to Apple's Sherlock search utility. Soon after, Apple released an updated Sherlock which could do all the things Watson could do... and it was game over. After this kept happening, the term "Sherlocking" was popularized to describe the process. Fast forward to now and Apple's new Siri-enabled Calendar app allows you to add appointments and such just by talking or typing to it with natural language commands. This was the hallmark feature of a competing calendar app called Fantastical, which I purchased back in the day. And I still use it, even though the developer switched to the dreaded "subscription model" which I do not pay for because my old license allows the basic functions to still be used. So now the question becomes... will I ditch Fantastical in favor of Calendar? And the answer is yes, probably. I'd rather not have additional apps installed to worry about, and odds are Apple's built-in app will work fine for me. Not that Fantastical's developer will care, because they're not getting any money off of me anyway. On one hand I'm sad that another developer has been Sherlocked. It's bad for the platform. But, on the other hand, I hate subscription models so much that I won't be losing any sleep over it either.

   
And now back to my recovery.

My cats are weird in the best ways.

A couple days ago I was giving Jenny belly rubs when she suddenly flopped over and trapped my hand. Just when I accepted the fact that I wouldn't be able to go to work, Jake swooped in and licked her head as a distraction and I was able to escape when she twisted around to give him a better licking angle...

Then Jake decided to use his sister's butt as a pillow, which thrilled her to no end, as you can imagine...

But it was either that or Jenny would have to find a way to earn money so she can live the excessive lifestyle that she's become accustomed to.

Though today is a double 626 day because it's 62626 this year.

The chaotic alien from the animated masterpiece Lilo & Stitch is "Experiment 626," but he's better known as "Stitch." And, as somebody who absolutely loves this brilliant Chris Sanders character, it's a day I celebrate. Usually by buying something new for my collection of Stitch crap.

Last year for 626 I purchased a print from my trip to Disney's Aulani resort...

This year I bought a couple of Lilo & Stitch picture discs to frame...

They'll look pretty cool hanging in my guest bathroom with my other Stitch stuff once I get them framed.

"It don't mean a thang if it ain't got that twang!"
                                        —Duke Ellington (maybe)

I have a longstanding love affair with mayonnaise. It's far and away my favorite condiment. Then I discovered Dutch mayonnaise and things got taken to the next level. Then I started trying to eat more vegan and switched to making my own egg-free mayo. But it never even comes close to what I love about the stuff.

So while I eat considerably less real mayo now-a-days, I do still eat it.

The Dutch mayo I obsess over has gotten very expensive, so I went back to Best Foods (AKA Hellmann's East of the Rocky Mountains). But then one day Duke's mayonnaise somehow showed up at the grocery story. It was on an introductory sale cheaper than Best Food's and so I gave it a shot.

When I got home, I saw that the jar said It's Got Twang! on the lid.

And, sure enough, it does. Duke's doesn't have any sugar and includes a hit of apple cider vinegar, and that's where the "twang" comes from.

I was not a fan.

At least not immediately.

The "twang" was competing with the other flavors on my sandwich or burger. So I decided to use up the jar in potato salad where I could adjust the ingredients to offset it. Problem solved.

But then... I ended up using it in other places from time to time until I started... enjoying it?

And now it's my go-to mayo. Unless it's not on sale and Best Food's is cheaper. Because given the INSANELY FUCKING HIGH PRICE OF GROCERIES, the only thing that tastes better than "twang" is savings.

I don't own a mobile phone with a camera on it. I own a pocket camera which just happens to be able to make phone calls. And a lot of other stuff.

It wasn't always this way. I started with a Canon SLR film camera which I got for my birthday. And while I took it a lot of places, it was as inconspicuous and unobtrusive as a boat anchor. So I didn't take it everywhere, much as I wish I could. All too many times I would be somewhere and see something cool that I'd like to capture for one reason or another. Maybe it would end up being a good reference for a future project. Maybe I liked the way the colors played and thought I might need to use a combination like that one day. Maybe it was something I thought I could cut out and use in a photo collage. Maybe it was a hundred reasons or no reason at all. I just like collecting stuff.

And my iPhone makes it possible to do just that.

Too easy, actually.

I thought about that this afternoon as I was walking to the post office and passed this...

I may ignore it for the rest of my life. Or perhaps I'll be working on something and it will come in handy.

In the meanwhile, it can be blog fodder.