How Many More?

Today I became sixty seven years old. I have been sixty seven for at least six months now, because I round up on age, but today it is irrevocable. To celebrate I had one of my favorite breakfasts after 23 miles on the trainer in the garage; the weather was so typically Seattle that riding a bike outside at my age could have been life-threatening; the breakfast was Eggs Benedict and a Bloody Mary (two bloodies, actually). For the recipes go to HTTP://www.noelmckeehan.com/foodx.html

Anyway, after wolfing down the eggs, bacon and Hollandaise, I was washing the dishes that are not appropriate for the dishwasher. As usually happens when I am washing dishes I began to build up a head of emotional steam resisting the need for or even the existence of the process in which I was, up to my forearms-in-water involved.

"How many more of these (dish washing incidents) do I have in me?" I heard somebody say. When I had recognized the voice as my own, it caused a degree of introspection. It cause introspection because I have been hearing my voice saying that really often recently.

There were the DTRs from Comcast. Earlier in the year when I was trying to install a replacement, higher speed, router for my home network I had had to call Comcast to re-discover the exact order of events that needed to occur between me and my cable modem to allow the new router to access the internet. I knew what I had to do; I just couldn't remember what the order of events needed to be. In the process of that fairly painless encounter the nice lady at Comcast had asked me how many TVs I had installed. I couldn't remember, but I offered what seemed to me a plausible number. She said that in the near future Comcast was going to vastly improve their service by doing something that would eliminate my access to any channels above channel 30, and that if I wanted to continue to have access to any channels above channel 30 I would need to install some devices that Comcast would be glad to provide.

The devices – two of them – arrived and sat on the dining room table for several months. I looked at the directions a couple of times and heard the voice saying, "how many …."

And then one day, having reached the masochistic need to see what the answer to that question might be, I opened the boxes, installed the devices, called Comcast and did whatever it was that I needed to do to activate them – that process is long lost in the mists of the recent past – and on the two sets that are their host, I have access to channels above channel 30. Since I seldom go beyond the Lehrer News Hour on channel 9, I am unsure why I did that, but it is done.

Recently the voice has sounded forth related to an all-in-one HP printer, a USB turntable, a Vista 64 bit ThinkPad a new web site (I had one in the 90's for which I had to teach myself HTML before anybody had a web site, but it stirred up so much disinterest and personal expense that I abandoned it after several years) and two blogs; this is one of them. In every case I had fairly quick and successful resolve of the process. In the case of 64 bit Vista, I had trouble with the network because Microsoft apparently decided that they wanted to return to making network access easy rather than impossible as they had made it in 32 bit Vista. As I struggled with the newly provided straight forward simplicity I managed to re-name my "Desktop" "Everyone", but I ultimately lurched into having my new machine on the network.

Maybe the answer to the question, "how many more of these do I have in me?" is answered in chapter 25 of Screen Saver.