“Don’t sort your socks,” suggests Donna:

Keep them in a huge mess in your sock drawer. It becomes a little early morning puzzle to find two that match … and the emptier the drawer becomes, the more rewarding it is when you do finally find two that match.

In the early morning — by which I mean “anything before ten-thirty” — I am quite incapable of making judgment calls on sock colors, and among the ten pairs in the drawer (as of the completion of weekend laundry) there are really only four and a half distinct colors. (The really dark blue and the really faded black are hard to tell apart under a CFL bulb that won’t warm up for several minutes yet.)

And there’s one possible drawback:

I often look like early Cyndi Lauper because I give up rather easily … but it’s still a fun challenge.

I am quite fond of Cyndi Lauper, but I have no urge to look like her at any age.

Hardly anyone bothers to ask “What’s the deal with the bird on the sidebar?” anymore; this particular feathered friend has been here more or less continuously since 2002, and there was great outcry when I attempted to substitute a different picture, even of the same species. (There was a bird even before 2002, but it probably wasn’t the same species.)

If you’re still curious, it’s answered in the OAQ, and let me assure you, this bird was not selected for sheer brilliance:

One male goldfinch, yesterday, in particular, was amusing to watch. The tube feeder has four perches with ports: two midway down the tube, two at the bottom. But the attachment point for the hanger up at the top also looks kind of like a perch. So this bird was hanging upside down from that top bit — and he kept pecking at the tube. I guess he could SEE the seed inside it, and having no experience with clear plastic, he assumed that the seed should be accessible, since he could see it. But he kept pecking … even after several minutes’ worth of lack-of-success.

I actually felt kind of bad for him, but at one point said aloud, “Bless your heart, you’re just not very BRIGHT, are you?” (I think he eventually figured it out and went down to the usual seed port).

As though I needed further justification.

You might remember this:

[I]nevitably I came to “driver’s license,” and, hmmm, when does it expire? “July ‘07,” I said to myself.

Came back a voice from nowhere: “Are you sure?”

This voice from nowhere, apparently, does not come from Arizona:

[M]y son got his driver’s license today, and it expires in the year 2059. I kid you not — get your license at 16 and there are no more renewals until you are 65 years old.

Which doesn’t mean you don’t have to talk to the Motor Vehicle Division for half a century, however. From the official manual [pdf]:

Arizona issues an “extended” driver license that does not expire until age 65. However, your photo and vision screening will need to be updated every 12 years. Drivers age 60 and over will receive a 5-year license.

Still, this doesn’t strike me as exactly arduous. And the fee is a mere $25, which drops if you’re 40 or older at initial issue.

Jeffro was in town yesterday, and otherwise might have dropped by, but the powers that be were still discouraging travel, probably because they hadn’t cleared all the wreckage resulting from Friday’s blizzard, so we had to confine ourselves to swapping stories over the phone. Fortunately, the man tells some good stories, and I’m not so bad at it myself, and next time maybe the roads will be some semblance of passable. We can hope, anyway.

As we had been warned, the insurance carrier for 42nd and Treadmill’s CFI Care (not its real initials) will be changing on the first of January, and we sat through the usual enrollment meeting yesterday.

I am pleased to report, however, that a trace of transparency is creeping into the proceedings: alongside the usual handouts was a list detailing the actual price as charged last year, the price that would have to be paid for renewal (which was a third higher), and the price quoted us for the new package. I hadn’t had access to these figures, but my ballpark estimates were well within the foul lines. And to my knowledge, they’d never divulged this sort of thing before.

Full family coverage, if you’re curious, would have gone up to $14,172 a year. There are two options for the new year: same coverages, one has a larger network. The more expensive of the two will run $12,141. (There are add-on packages for vision and dental, which didn’t go up very much by comparison.) As a single person, I get charged $3761; the dental runs an additional $273. (Had they renewed with the previous carrier, I’d be looking at just over $6000.) Last year’s claims, mostly for drugs plus one CT scan, were in the $1800 range.

I say “I get charged” because that’s the actual cost of the policy. I pay nothing toward it in the way of premia, having served X number of years; 42nd and Treadmill picks up the tab. The coverages will be changing only slightly with the new carrier: office visits will be standardized at $30 instead of a lower tier for the family M.D. (or D.O., in my case) and a higher one for specialists. Prescriptions, I suspect, will be just about a wash, assuming I can somehow sidestep the stultified “step therapy” business on my antihypertensives.

Or perennial juniors, maybe. Testing on the ever-popular fruit fly has produced this youthful-sounding premise:

Researchers from the newly founded Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing in Cologne have studied whether health benefit stem from a reduction in specific nutrients or calorie intake in general by manipulating the diet of female fruit flies. The fruit flies were fed a diet of yeast, sugar and water, but with differing amounts of key nutrients, such as vitamins, lipids and amino acids. The scientists were able to show that longevity and fertility are affected by a combination of the type and amount of amino acids; whilst varying the amount of the other nutrients had little or no effect. Furthermore, the researchers found out in previous studies that levels of a particular amino acid — methionine — were crucial to increasing lifespan without decreasing fertility. By carefully manipulating the balance of amino acids, both lifespan and fertility were maximised. For the first time, this indicates that it is possible to extend lifespan without wholesale dietary restriction and without lowering reproductive capacity.

Citation:
Richard C. Grandison, Matthew D. W. Piper & Linda Partridge
Amino-acid imbalance explains extension of lifespan by dietary restriction in Drosophila
Nature, December 3, 2009, doi:10.1038/nature08619

It might be better to think of this, though, as just a start:

I suspect that continuing research will show that this is still too simple, that manipulating methionine levels is a blunt instrument, and that the issue is balance among the various nutrients rather than the amounts. My expectations — perhaps bias — comes from experience as a grower. It is often the case that better growth and more healthful produce comes from getting the nutrient balances in tune with one another in a context of nutrient availability rather than from broad manipulation of total nutrients or even targeted provision of selected nutrients.

Half the battle, I presume, will be finding out exactly where those balances are.

Still, this seems encouraging, given the similarities, in structure if not in scale, between Drosophila’s genome and ours.

Well, not just any port, I suppose:

I sound like I’m coughing up a lung. I’ve probably got the swine.

So tonight I’m trying a new strategy: port wine.

I’ve had two glasses — so far — and it seems to be working. And if it doesn’t, well, who cares?

Probably less expensive than NyQuil, too.

I’ve kvetched before about my less-than-solid financial state, and while I’m not headed for Chapter 7 — yet — I’m getting to the point where I just can’t take it anymore.

After too many months of running a deficit, I went to El Jefe and groveled a bit, and wangled enough of an advance to pay off the car note ten months early, with enough left over to replace the ripped weatherstripping around the driver’s door. Which additional sum, unfortunately, got spent on replacing the battery.

So I dipped into the MasterCard to take care of the rubber repair and an oil change. Okay, fine. That’s easy to clear up. But while inspecting the wee beastie, the techs noticed a lack of continuity in the CV boots; the phrase “slinging grease” was used. About $600, which I didn’t have. I’ve hung around FWD cars long enough to be able to tell when things are getting bad, so I opted to blow it off for the moment; perhaps I can take care of this in the summer, I reasoned.

Then on the way home today, she threw a code. Never in the time I have owned this car has clearing a malfunction of this sort run me less than $700. And the timing was even better than you’re thinking: I got one right after 90,000 miles, and this one right after 120,000 miles. Everyone I know who works on these things assures me that this isn’t programmed into the machine, that there’s no “Okay, you have X number of miles, now you must get service.”

I’m not going to ask why this crap always happens to me, because, well, what possible answer could make the slightest bit of difference?

And no, I’m not even thinking about buying a new car: that would defeat the whole purpose of paying this one off early. Even $2000 worth of repairs — which is what I’d expect between now and next summer — is still better than another installment loan. But now I’m going to have to see if someone will lend me enough Rogaine to grow enough hair to tear out in frustration.

The question: is that a noun with a descriptive adjective, or a verb with a subject?

From a conversation between Francis W. Porretto and Duyen Ky:

[T]his is the way our minds work: we remember our past, we hope for our future, but we squeeze all our actual living in between them. A healthy person does all three, with emphasis on the present. The people to beware are the part-people, the ones who get so stuck on the past or are so anxious about the future that they simply can’t live in the now. They have a lot in common with any other kind of fanatic you might name: one dimensional lives, obsessive personalities, immunity to reason and reassurance, a resistance to love and joy.

I’m not quite one-dimensional, but lately I feel as though I have a lot more width than I do length or depth.

I think I’m dwelling less on the past than I used to, though I’m inclined to attribute this less to the getting of wisdom than to simple distance: the past seems farther away than it used to. (Then again, I’ve never been this old before.) The phrase that trips me up, though, is “immunity to reassurance”; if you tell me everything’s going to be all right, there’s almost no chance I’m going to believe you. Whatever is going on, I must see it through.

So maybe I’m not living in the now, but in the fifteen minutes ago. I suppose this is all right, so long as I don’t catch a glimpse of Andy Warhol out of the corner of my eye. Unfortunately, my peripheral vision is indifferent at best.

You may remember this from six months ago. Let’s see what they’ve done to me this time around:

• Liability (injury): up $1.90.
• Liability (property): up $10.30.
• Uninsured motorists: up $0.90.
• Comprehensive: up $6.20.
• Collision: up $15.90.
• Road service: unchanged.
• Rental reimbursement: up $1.30.

For a change, this isn’t the fault of those unblinkered, Philistine uninsured motorists.

And this isn’t quite final either: after the bill was issued, they discovered a couple more factors that had changed in the last few days. For one, I now carry three different policies from these folks, which fact will erase most of these increases; for another, there’s no longer a lienholder, which may or may not matter. Given the implied increase in parts prices, I am loath to drop collision coverage, even though the car is now paid for.

As always, mind the fine print.

(Seen here.)

As is usually not the case when buying a used car, I knew exactly how old a battery I was dealing with: it was installed the day I bought it, as a condition of sale, inasmuch as the one that had been in there proved to be deader than Lindsay Lohan’s Oscar chances at the time of the test drive.

And it lasted right up until 4:33 this afternoon, when I turned the key and was greeted with a Bronx cheer from the relay box, but no actual starting. Trini offered me a jump — her battery is in the trunk, which made for some stares from passersby — and Gwendolyn roared to life, just long enough for me to hit the heater button.

Click.

So there was a second jump, and an anxiety-ridden trip up to the dealership. The truly weird aspect of this is that I was going to the dealership anyway, to arrange for a spa day and order a part. Of course, it being Monday, things were manic, but they got me in and out in 35 minutes flat.

Mental note: Do not reset the radio presets in the dark on 122nd Street when it’s drizzling out.

I am not quite old enough to remember the 1811-1812 earthquakes centered on New Madrid, Missouri, though I do know this much: there have been literally thousands of smaller quakes within the New Madrid Seismic Zone, and “Madrid” is pronounced with the accent on the first syllable: “MAD-rihd.” (Yes, I have offspring living in Missouri. Why do you ask?)

What I did not even suspect, though, is that those recent rumblings may be aftershocks from The Big Ones:

The small earthquakes that sporadically rattle the central United States may actually be aftershocks from a few extremely large quakes that occurred in the region almost 200 years ago, according to a new study.

Seismically speaking, this sounds awfully slow. And yet:

For one thing, “there’s no motion across the fault now, so nothing’s going on, but yet there are still small earthquakes there,” said Seth Stein, the study’s lead author and a professor of geological sciences at Northwestern University. The small quakes also occur on the same fault plane that researchers believe is responsible for the big quakes. Furthermore, the present-day temblors are getting smaller with time, which is a characteristic of aftershocks, Stein said. And when larger quakes do occur, they happen at the corners of the fault section that scientists think broke during the 19th century earthquakes, a pattern that suggests these are aftershocks, Stein told LiveScience.

A comparison to The Other Big One works out this way:

[T]he San Andreas Fault in California, which moves at the relatively fast speed of about 1.5 inches (3.8 cm) per year, will only have aftershocks for about 10 years after a large quake, Stein said. The fast motion essentially “reloads” the fault, wiping out the effects of a previous earthquake and suppressing aftershocks.

On the other hand, the New Madrid faults, known as the “Reelfoot Rift,” move more than 100 times more slowly than the San Andreas fault, allowing the aftershocks to last much longer. The researchers found a similar pattern in faults around the world.

The most recent quake reported in Oklahoma was Monday afternoon. The epicenter was located west of Okemah; the quake’s estimated magnitude was 2.7.

Daylight Saving is over at last, saints be praised: the old VCR dug out of the catacombs, the one that spent the summer futilely blinking “12:00,” is now futilely blinking “11:00″ instead.

One thing that doesn’t adjust itself, however, is WordPress. Under Settings/General/Timezone you find this:

Unfortunately, you have to manually update this for Daylight Savings Time. Lame, we know, but will be fixed in the future.

Since this text has been there as long as I can remember (14 months, in this case), I conclude that they’re waiting for the same thing I am: for the government to recover from its rectal-cranial inversion and put an end to this semi-annual clock-blocking.

The count was twenty-six this year, down from thirty last year, perhaps partially due to a Porch Light Fail: the little gizmo that sets the On time was unwilling to do more than a couple of minutes at a time. Fortunately, it wasn’t completely dark when I noticed this, and in a couple of seconds I came up with a less-than-epic quickie fix: I mounted a couple of sparkleballs along the front walk, which drew attention from the street, if only to see what was going on.

The bad news: not only is the light fixture screwy, but I have approximately half of my 5.9 lb of candy stock ($20 worth) left.

As do many people around this age, I suffer from bouts of insomnia, some more severe than others but none of them the slightest bit welcome.

I was changing the linens yesterday — none of which are actually linen, but work with me here — and I wondered: “Do the sheets make any difference?” I have a few oddball sheets here and there, but mostly I have three rotating sets, wildly disparate in appearance and composition. The ones coming off to be washed were 100-percent cotton in a sort of coral color; the fresh ones are some nondescript cotton-polyester hybrid in off-white. (Remaining in the drawer for the moment: a set of JCPenney SmoothTough^® percale florals, fergoshsakes.)

I’d like to test out this premise, but there are so many variables at work here that I wouldn’t know how to isolate just the one. I am hesitant to attribute too much to thread counts, which vary from somewhere around 180 (in use now) to an alleged 300 (the coral cotton). I don’t know about the Penneys sheets, which are the oldest ones I have, but it’s my understanding that you need at least 200 to qualify as percale. And for all I know, my sheet-changing cycle might correspond to some sort of emotional cycle: I am not one to place much faith in biorhythms, which to me sounds like phrenology with a printer driver, but I don’t know anyone whose temperament is perfectly even.

I was shopping for stamps on the Postal Service’s Web site, and for a brief moment I was taken aback by the image at right: this is, yes, the First-Class “Forever” Stamp, and the word FOREVER has a line drawn through it, as though to say “We really don’t mean this.”

And then I looked at some other First-Class stamps, and all of them have their face values marked over in similar fashion. So what I’m seeing, apparently, is a low-level anti-counterfeiting measure: copying the picture and making photocopies thereof is a fairly trivial task, but it’s going to be a pain in the neck for a would-be counterfeiter to haul out Photoshop and clean up that line across the digits.

What kind of day was yesterday? The kind where a visit to the tire shop is followed by a trip to the dentist.

While I was getting a tire deReznorized — two nails, total length approximately nine inches — a question popped into my head, which I duly passed on to the owner of the joint. I have this one pencil-type tire gauge which was acquired some time before 1985, and that seemed awfully old for a semi-precision (at best) instrument. He said that if it’s undamaged, it should still work just fine, and offered to test it against the shop’s calibration equipment. No way am I going to turn down a deal like that. He took the device out to the garage, and brought it back about two minutes later. “Spot on,” he said. “Of course, if you don’t hit the contact point just right, you’re liable to get all kinds of errors.”

Well, not this kind. I was relating some sort of inane story to the dental hygienist, a serious hottie in a restrained sort of way, and happened to mention my advanced age. “I’m right behind you,” she said, and disclosed a number that induced an actual coughing fit, not something to be desired with sharp stuff in close proximity to one’s face. I suppose it’s just as well we don’t have gauges for such things.

I mean, it’s got those big metal teeth, and the noise makes me think some Japanese Lovecraft fan has finally assembled Mecha-Cthulhu.

Yet somehow it’s fragile:

I laughed when my daughter told me that you couldn’t put a leaf of lettuce down the disposal. But when the plumber came to fix the thing, he showed me how the thing had met its match dealing with a piece of lemon. The plumber told me more stuff you can’t put in the disposal, among them rice.

The plumber told me that the disposal is a delicate, exquisitely calibrated mechanism and gave me a list of things you can’t put in it. Everything I mentioned was forbidden. I was starting to think that the only food congenial to the disposal was homemade chicken soup, maybe. If you strain it.

Sheesh. The thing will swallow a teaspoon if you give it the slightest opportunity, but it chokes on citrus?

(Maybe it’s a function of age. I bought a new one three years ago, mainly because the old one had deteriorated to such an extent that water was weeping through its base.)

Entirely too many such belonged to the snake which descended from the ceiling and dropped into the far corner of the office while I wasn’t looking.

And then, of course, I was looking, which did nothing for my sense of well-being.

Our snake wranglers, such as they are, were pressed into service, and they removed the reptile by conking it on the head and then dropping it into a bucket. Inelegant, I suppose, but with neither Ceiling Cat nor Samuel L. Jackson at hand, one must make do.

I comment at several places where Gravatars are in use, and recently you may have seen a photograph of someone vaguely resembling me, only with actual hair, affixed to my name.

This is, or more precisely was, yours truly, circa 1978, and it’s there for a couple of reasons:

• WordPress parent Automattic has acquired Gravatar, and they keep pushing for people to use the darn thing.
• One common complaint in various social media is that profile pictures are outdated. I defy anyone to come up with one more outdated than that without having to resort to kid shots.

This is, incidentally, likely one of the few times you’ll ever see me in a tie.

But for now, this will have to do.

U2 may be going through something like this:

You know that song by U2, “Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”? Yes. Well. It’s true for me. Certainly is. Moreso as I age and I’m now in my second half of life. Although people tell me I act like a 20-something butthead, and I certainly feel like one, emotionally, a lot of the time, and my favorite-best age group for just hanging out with is and has always been guys in their 20s, 30s — a “gang” — and I don’t HAVE that now and I miss it — the fact is I am nearly constantly thinking about how much time I have “left,” and what I have failed to achieve, and I still feel like I haven’t FOUND whatever it is I’m really supposed to do in life and of course I assume I’m supposed to do something quite cool and even grand-ish. If this is a “midlife crisis,” then WTF was that shit I had in my 40s? I don’t buy it. I’ve ALWAYS been this way.

Cue Peggy Lee: “Is that all there is?”

Anyone else feel that way? And I don’t mean occasionally feel that way. I mean pretty much a fucking constant nagging dissatisfaction and rumination. Something not done. “The” big thing — NOT DONE. And the despair, or tiredness, comes from thinking and thinking and ending up with “Apparently I’ll never find it. Oh shit.” So yeah, there’s depression around it. I keep trying to find it and I don’t, or can’t. (And no, it’s not some gaping hole in my life because I don’t have kids — not at all. I still don’t want kids, despite my joking here lately about BEH-BEY ISLANDS. That really IS a joke. I’ve known I didn’t want ‘em since I was a kid myself. No one believed me. “Oh you’ll change your mind.” Hasn’t happened.) So it’s gotta be something ELSE. Career-ish? Creativity-wise. Something. Else. Making a mark. Sort of? Somehow. Not necessarily “fame,” no. I need to invent the cotton gin, so to speak. Gosh that sounds exciting.

Hey, it got Eli Whitney into the history books, back when we actually had history books. And he still gets the occasional mention on Jeopardy! Still, that’s all anyone, Alex Trebek or otherwise, ever mentions: “Eli Whitney? Cotton gin.” End of story. The fact that he was an enthusiastic promoter of the mostly-hitherto-unpracticed art of interchangeable mechanical parts is never brought up, perhaps because he never quite managed to translate that idea into successful manufacturing techniques.

Still: “cotton gin.” Everybody above the age of [a bit younger than I am] knows this. The youngest folks probably think it’s a drink made with Tanqueray and Q-tips.

Which leads me to well, me. I’m arguably a step or two closer to six feet under. I was never, however, quite so ambitious: I figured if I didn’t off myself by sheer heinous stupidity, and if my offspring managed to turn out to be Solid Citizens, I was probably ahead of the game. I’ve had, I suspect, most of my allotted 15 minutes of fame, and if I’m not exactly living the life of Riley, well, Riley may not be doing so hot himself. Somebody else can climb the highest mountain or run through the fields. I promise not to make a fuss about it.

(Seen here.)

(Found at Boston.com, and designated for a Fark Photoshop contest.)

Donna keeps running into that number:

I am thinking about applying for a concealed weapon’s permit. The problem is it costs 46.00. Everything costs about 46.00. 15 gallons of gas? About 46.00. Two pizzas and a salad? About 46.00. Groceries for the week? About 46.00. Dry Cleaning for 3 dresses and 1 pair of slacks? About 46.00 (Luckily I had a 40% discount coupon).

Apparently the price for CCW permits varies by county in that state, though $46 seems to be typical for the plastic version, and there’s a three-day waiting period.

Although there’s a lot to be said for planning ahead:

The thing is I need to get into spending freeze mode and I am not sure if I should spend another 46.00 on something. Especially when I don’t own a gun. But the thing is right now I have the time to go to the courthouse and fill out the paperwork and do whatever else is needed. Maybe I should just do it because I can?

Well, it’s a shall-issue state, so surely they can’t turn her down for not actually having a weapon to conceal.

As for the mystical number itself, I figure it’s probably twice as bad as 23.

Inasmuch as my only bid for Rule 5 coverage this week was a grainy scan of a photo of America’s Hottest Soon-To-Be-Ex-Governor as a teenager, and inasmuch as I’ve been keeping this on my desktop for entirely too long, here’s a not-necessarily-gratuitous shot of Emily and Zooey Deschanel:

(Click to embiggen.) This apparently originally appeared in the Sunday New York Times, which gives me one less reason to cheer at their financial discomfiture.

A bullet goes undodged: it’s reunion time at the old (well, actually the new) high school.

Forty. Four zero. Two score. Calls of “None so fine as sixty-nine.”

Fortunately, it’s in October, and it’s a thousand miles away, which means I’ll have to take a week off to go, right in the middle of the fall crunch, which will annoy El Jefe and his minions.

Unfortunately, the official contact person is someone I actually remember, so I have no excuse not to respond.

Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: “This model uses its own special motor, not used by any other air conditioner in the line, or for that matter in the industry.”

(Sorry I couldn’t be Whittier.)

At least now I have a benchmark:

The Pew Research Center reveals that American perceptions on growing older differ from the reality, particularly in just when old age begins (most say 68, but there are various milestones to signify the passage, including sexual/genitalial failure and lack of a Twitter account).

Which, I suppose, stands to reason: should it come to pass that, in Gordon Lightfoot’s phrase, “my pony won’t go,” I can’t imagine any motivation for tweeting about it.

Still, I tend to think of myself as old, based on this observation by the late H. Allen Smith:

If we accept seventy as the allotted span, and if we divide life into youth and middle age and old age, then we divide seventy by three and arrive at a fraction over twenty-three. Just to give everybody a break, let’s make it an even twenty-four. So, we are young up to the age of twenty-four, at which point middle age sets in. Middle age lasts until we are forty-eight. Anything after that is old and that’s where I am.

Not that I expect any 24-year-olds to buy this premise.