Thursday morning stuff

I’m sitting at my (new) usual table at the Seattle Grind Cafe listening to Bob Dylan’s “Black Diamond Bay” from his “Desire” album and marveling at the insanely clever lyrics and rhyming schemes. I’m also impressed with Emmylou Harris’s background vocal work. It only took me one album to decide she’s sadly boring by herself, but she’s dynamite on background work.

I have a few things left on my plate today. I’ve already shipped a book to an Amazon.com customer via U.S. Mail and, in the process, picked up our mail which included my new DeWalt DPG59-220C Reinforcer Rx-Bifocal 2.0 Smoke Lens High Performance Protective Safety Glasses with Rubber Temples and Protective Eyeglass Sleeve. The bifocal power is spot-on and they do a splendid job of keeping the wind off of my contact lenses while riding my bike. The rubber temples will surely last longer than the flimsy plastic temples on the Dr. Dean Edell bifocal sunglasses that I bought last month. So far, the only downside I can find is that the wiggly temples are a hassle to thread over my ears when I have my helmet on. I suspect there may be a technique that I haven’t discovered yet. Considering that they only cost $12.56, I can’t complain much.

I also got a pair of stick-on bifocal lenses that I plan to try on my clear Gargoyles and my Ray Ban shades. More on that later.

I downloaded and installed a free iPhone/iPod app called Wi-Fi Finder that accesses a large, user-supplemented database of free and pay Wifi hot spots. It has a few hot spots around Jonesboro that I didn’t know about but doesn’t have Seattle Grind or Books-A-Million. I’m submitting both for inclusion in the database. (Seattle Grind is free with a purchase – the password is on your receipt. The password has been “redwolves” for the last month or so. They also have fabulous tiramisu. It is made of cake dipped in coffee, layered with a whipped mixture of egg yolks and mascarpone, and flavored with liquor and cocoa. BAM is a pay Wifi hotspot. You can pay by the day or join their Millionaire discount club with an annual membership fee of about $25. The club membership also gets you a discount on everything you buy there.)

Garmin sent me an email yesterday announcing a recall on several GPS units because of potential problems with overheating batteries. Turns out my 2-year-old 200W is on the list, so I printed out the free UPS shipping label, boxed it up and will drop it off at the Office Depot UPS desk down the street when I finish here. They promise to install a new battery and ship it back in a couple of weeks. Happily, the Garmin 205W we gave Maria’s parents for Christmas last year is not on the recall list.

I also had my third back-cracking session with a chiropractor. Turns out that I have severe arthritis in my neck – a few vertebrae have fused – and my spine is out of alignment. The neck issue isn’t painful, but I have limited range of motion which can be a hassle when it comes to looking far left and far right at angled intersections. The X-rays show I lean to the right. But then we already knew that, didn’t we?

So I have a quarter-inch lift in the heel of my right boot and am going in four days a week for the snap, crackle, pop treatment. It’s not particularly painful, just startling when it happens.

My chiropractor is also a BMW motorcycle rider. She has a 1997 R1100RT with a sidecar.