Today, June 30, for the first time in quite a while, I managed to not drink, walked a lap around the path, and got 20 reps each of my core workout routine.

The goal for tomorrow is the same, two laps around, add one rep to each routine every day, and hit the gym. Then continue until I'm healthy again.

I know it's only one day, but I have to do this, work through the Parkinsons, and stay alive!

Wish me well...

Update, July 1, met my goals! 21 reps each routine, two laps, and got back to the gym. And no booze one drink in the evening.

I figured out something, that I could either be killing myself with alcohol, before Parkinsons takes me out, or get my body in shape to fight it. I guess I'm choosing the latter...

A funny thing happened while I was walking a lap {1 mile) with Daniel. I told him he should hit the gym, then he smacked me hard on the shoulder and said I just did! :-)

Update, July 2, 22 reps, 3 laps, gym.

Update, July 3, 23 reps, 1 lap, gym.

Update, July 5, 24 reps, 4 laps, light gym, dry.

How about Hillary?

How about Trump?

How about Trump wearing sunglasses holding a teddybear?

And of course, Nancy.

Ok, Kamala here...

One more, OldManJim:

I used to love listening to Rush Limbaugh on the radio at 10:00, but he died last year. Now my new favorite 10:00 thing to do is watch The View. God I love those ladies, especially Whoopi, what a stupid woman she is!

And then there's Joe!

I created these pictures with a new AI powered image generator called DALL-E. You type in a phrase and it generates a bunch of interpretations.

Above: "Whoopi Goldburg as the devil", "Joe Biden as the devil".

And here's "Chipmunk bird":

How about Hillary?

How about Trump?

How about Trump wearing sunglasses holding a teddybear?

And of course, Nancy.

Ok, Kamala here...

One more, OldManJim:

I used to love listening to Rush Limbaugh on the radio at 10:00, but he died last year. Now my new favorite 10:00 thing to do is watch The View. God I love those ladies, especially Whoopee, what a stupid thing she is!

Facetiousness drips from my fingers as I write this. Sorry, I know I haven't posted anything lately, because most of the shit in my life is negative. There's nothing worth writing about, and I'm tired of being a pissy old man here.

So, this post is just to let the few people that care about me, and drop by my blog to check on me, know that I'm still fighting and kicking, and glad to be alive.

Parkinson’s disease is finally catching up with me. Several relatives on my dads side had it, and the last time I saw my brother (about 5 years ago) he was in bad shape from it. I've had the internal tremors for years now, but it's finally reached my right hand. As I was eating lunch in my truck today, I had a hard time keeping food on my fork.

I had my phone on the steering wheel so I googled it and saw that it usually begins to rear it's ugly head with a tremor in the hand. Other symptoms are feeling light-headed, losing your balance and trouble walking. I have all those issues going on. Then another bit of my lunch dropped to the plate as my hand visibly shook, and the reality sunk in.

Stumbling, staggering, afraid l will pass out with each step. I want to venture out on a road trip, but I question my ability to pull it off.

Weird shit is going on. I feel like I'm losing myself. The end is closer than it's ever been.

And I have no idea how to fix it...

Spending my fathers day with my neighbor Daniel, rocking out to country music on my big screen, getting drunk. He gave me a box to hold my truck tools, and cut out portions I didn't need with a cool hand held saw.

It's a trip having a mechanical genius for a neighbor, and friend. He broke one of my table flat things last night, from a cup slamming contest, and copped to it this morning. We hugged, shook hands, and moved on.

He's heading off shortly for a dinner with his wife and kids, but I got me a fathers day text from my boy. Not sure what happens next...

What happened to the in shape dude from last summer? Down the drain! God help me...

I had a great talk with my boy Riley the other day, and he and his family are doing great! His two man auto body shop is booming, their home and property are increasing nicely in value, and they have consolidated their debt.

They shop at Costco and the shelves are not empty yet. He writes off gas prices in the Seattle area as a cost of doing business. He finally has a beautiful daughter, to share with his lovely wife.

He's a good man, and I am extremely proud of everything he has achieved. Happy first Fathers Day son!

Unfortunately, his dad is not doing well. I'm drinking too much, falling down a lot, and I have weird bumps and dark spots popping up all over my body. Quite frankly, I'm a fucking mess. Think I'll bop into the clinic on Monday and see if they have a test of some sort to figure out what's going on.

I'm also looking at options that could get me to Seattle shortly to meet the baby. I have a flight booked to there in mid-September, but damn, what if I don't make it through the summer?

Sorry for the doom and gloom, just trying to be honest with myself, and the world.

Meanwhile, here's my planter these days, loving the daily watering and cleanup:

Man my adrenaline is still pumping! About 1115 this morning I turned on the highway that our little street connects to and spotted a bad accident that had just happened. One car was in the middle of the southbound lane while another car was across the street, in the ditch.

Two women exited the car in the street. One was carrying a baby and she walked across the highway, the other was walking towards me. I walked into the middle of the highway waving my arms to slow down the northbound traffic, which runs about 50mph to get up the hill. I stopped the traffic, and then went to the women and asked if I could help her.

Her face was banged up and she was sobbing. She asked me to take her to her boyfriends house up off the old highway. I threw the stuff on my seat in the back and got her inside. As we were driving there I asked if she didn't want to go to the hospital, and she said no. I asked if her boyfriend had a vehicle, she said yes.

Turns out he didn't. So he climbed in with the girl on his lap and the three of headed along the back roads to the motel near Walmart. What a sight we must been, two shirt less guys with a girl in the middle of my little cab.

I knew the main road was going to jam up and many sirens were blaring in the direction of that wreck. The poor girl never stopped crying and I trust that whatever family member was working in the office of that hotel could help them.

Then I drove the back roads to the tobacco store and walked down and took these shots. The southbound traffic was stopped completely but finally began moving, and the scene was pretty much cleaned up. Wow!

Adam Osborne invented the first portable computer, called the Osborne 1, back in 1981. The guy was English, drove an old vintage car, and I met him at an outdoor party in Oakland, CA.

It was an oyster feast, fresh seafood cooked over three grills, at a house up in the hills. There were about a hundred people there and we stuffed ourselves with barbecued oysters.

At one point we ran out of ice, and Adam and I drove to town to get some, in his vintage auto, and we talked computer shit the whole trip.

I keep saying what an amazing life I've lived, and this was just one more chapter...

A place in Asheville, North Carolina has just won the James Beard award for best restaurant in America. It's called Chai Pani, and serves Indian street food. The menu looks amazing, prices are reasonable, and it's only 372 miles from my house. That's a six hour road trip.

You have to wonder though, after winning this award, if you could even get a seat at the table. Oh well, it's going to be a long hot summer before I fly to Seattle in the middle of September, anything could happen!

I hardly ever eat fast food, but today I pulled into a Burger King down in Leoma (or Loretto, they all look the same) and ordered a fish sandwich and a cup of water.

I pulled up to the window and saw the sandwich presented to a cute young girl while she was just chatting away with someone and putting my water together.

Finally she opened the window and said it would be $5.80. I held out a twenty, which she finally took, and handed me my stuff.

I then drove off and started eating my sandwich, heading home. About 10 miles down the road I thought about my change. Woops! Oh well, hopefully she considered it a tip and put it in her cute little Tennessee girl pocket.

I really am spacing out a lot lately. Don't know if it's the aging process, Covid vaccinations, drinking, or all of the above.

Daily living is a challenge, but at least I'm independent with a roof over my head. In the meantime, I've made some good friends, who like to come over for breakfast:

God it feels good to help people! I'm telling this story, not for you to be impressed with what a great guy I am (cause I'm not), but to inspire you to pay it forward whenever you are blessed with the opportunity.

I was hanging out at the park today, shirt less and in shorts, trying to stay cool in this heat wave, when a rattley vehicle pulled up behind me. The voices sounded young and in distress so I got out and said what's the problem?

It was three teenage kids, two skinny little white girls and a boy with an afro. The driver of the little car, with the hood up, said her radiator was cracked and she was pouring radiator fluid into it.

We chatted for a bit while the car cooled off, and they said they were local kids, with no money, and they needed gas. They were really nice and I immediately decide to help them out.

I told them that when they get the car cooled off, go down to the Taz Mart, right next to Crockett Shoals Tubing, and tell them that Jim bought them some gas. I know the couple that run the place pretty well as I drove the bus for CST a couple of summers age.

The kids were very grateful, I drove to Taz Mart, explained the situation to the guy, and left $20. As I was walking back to my truck I was overwhelmed with a felling I can only describe as fulfilling.

Pay it forward my friends, it feels damn good! I could die tomorrow, and if I could be known by the people I've helped, as opposed to the people I've hurt, I would move on in peace...

Just garbage...

I've been hanging out with Daniel this evening, and he showed me a photo of his dog Sasha hanging out with their cat Gabriel.

Just thought I would share it here.

One of my favorite actors when I was kid, was James Dean. He often used the famous quote: Live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse, to describe his life.

He died in 1955 at the age of 24, when his Porsche 550 Spyder crashed head-on with a pickup truck on a California highway. Unfortunately, he didn't fulfill the later part of that quote.

I have since tweaked the expression for myself to: Live slow, die old, and carry your battle scars to your grave.

And I added a few more scars to the mix yesterday. I was out hiking around in the woods, when I fell, twice, I think. Then an interesting thing happened.

My watch sent out an SOS, in the form of a text message, to Steph that said SOS! My watch detected that I've fallen and I'm not responding. Wow, a few takeaways from that!

I didn't know my watch had that capability, I didn't realize that Steph was my emergency contact, and I hadn't realized that at some point, I was out cold.

The watch also sent a link to her with a Goggle map of my location. I made it back to my truck and as I drove home, it continued to send out updates of my current location.

I ended up with a cut over my right eye, a scrape on the lower part of my right arm, a big scrape on my lower right leg, a jammed middle finger on my right hand, and a sore butt bone. But hey, I survived to make it home, and tell the story!

Daniel came over right after I got back, said what the hell? and asked if I had looked in the mirror. I hadn't. Today I took the last Hydrocodone I had in the cabinet...

I don't know what I'm doing anymore. I pulled up to the highway from the side road, ready to make my quick jaunt over to my home street, when I spotted this lady walking along the road with her thumb stuck out.

I pulled over and asked her if she needed help, she said yes and she was tired, and then climbed in to my truck. I then drove home, made her a sandwich, gave her a cup of water and said sleep in the bed of my truck as long as you need.

She is now gone. Ok, good luck to you...

I took an amazing number of great shots at the Paris, TN parade recently, and trimmed them down to 392. This is overkill for even my diehard viewers, I get it. Well I decided to use the Roku Flickr app on my big 65 inch TV, and I was surprised to see them showing up as smaller images in the middle of the screen.

I shot these with my Sony 6500 with the zoom lens, taking multiple shots if possible, at different zoom levels. They were all taken in high resolution (4840 x 2832) with a size on average of 450mb. These are big juicy photos full of detail and clarity, but I had to reduce them down to 1024 x 768 to make them suitable for my blog, thus the small size on my TV.

So, I got the idea to create a new Flickr album and upload the full size images to it, in sequence from the beginning of the parade, to the end. It took me a couple of hours last night to upload all 392 photos.

Then I brought them up on my big TV and they filled the screen wonderfully, vividly, colorful, and wow! I watched the sideshow from beginning to end this morning, each photo up for about four seconds, and the whole thing ran for about twenty minutes. It was just like being there, standing on the sidelines, with the benefit of zoom.

I've created a link to the Flickr Sideshow Page, and if you have an unlimited data plan and a laptop or bigger, it's great. Click the third button over from the top left to start the show. I'm going to give it a shot on my phone, we'll see what happens.

btw: Flickr is one of the oldest photo sharing sites on the web, and I've been with them from the begining, paying a yearly fee to be a pro memeber, with unlimited uploads. That rate is now just under eighty bucks, which I just paid. So, I'm trying to get my moneys worth :-) and my current photo count with them is now 13,082.

And they are all referenced between my two blogs in some manner. From BusDriverJim (Jun, 2011 thru Sep, 2018) to OldManJim (Sep, 2018 to right now). I actually have thousands more photos stored on the server for both blogs, that never made it to Flickr...

1024 x 768 on my TV:

4840 x 2832 on my TV: (edge to edge, top to bottom, full!)

Actually, there is a little vertical truncation on the big image, it could handle a larger screen then 65 easily!

Imagine sitting back in a comphy chair watching all of these photos rolling across your eyes, it really is like being there. I know, because I was there. Hey, if you're near my house in Lawrenceburg, TN, drop by, I would love to show you this.

I opened the door this morning and the first thing I checked was to see if Daniels work truck was gone. (It was thank god, no early morning drink parties like yesterday!) Then I saw the feathers on the porch.

My little feeding station is getting pretty popular, and the squirrels have been raiding my hanging feeder so bad I had to take it down. But the bird feathers indicate a fight of some sort occurred last night. I hope the bird survived.

Then I spent the afternoon with an old friend. It was great to catch up!

I was sitting around the house today, telling Daniel about a life event that occurred back in the late seventies. I had just wrapped up a huge contract with Interocean Steamship in San Francisco. Actually it was my second with them, I wrote the code that ran their business, on IBM Sys 3 Models Ten and then the Fifteen.

They were a big shipping company with offices in Seattle and Long Beach and the system I created for them allowed their 150 employees to enter shipping data and have it communicated in real-time to the remote locations. Waaay before the Internet! They bought a one gigabyte drive from IBM that cost $50,000, was bigger than my living room chair, and we thought we were in data heaven.

I turned the whole thing over to a lady they had hired to be their Data Processing Manager. I then moved on to my next project, training two beautiful smart women, how to do what I do.

The three of us were at the IBM Data Center when I got the call from their DP manager. She was in tears, sobbing hysterically over the phone, said she fucked up and lost the code. Everything, gone. System down. Company paralyzed!

Well, thank god I had violated our agreement, and had printed out every line of code into a six inch high stack of computer paper, one late night, and took it home on the Bart Train.

The ladies and I retrieved that printout and showed up at their Christmas party, on the tenth floor of the California building in downtown San Francisco. It was like walking into a funeral! Their business was about to go under, and 150 jobs lost.

We told them that they needed to bring in as many people as possible, right now, to transcribe the printed code. Over Christmas, pay whatever they want, just get it done.

A year later I walked in on them. They were thriving, and grateful. There was this one little blond girl that I always used to hit on, to no avail. She walked up to me and kissed me on the mouth. Payment accepted.

I had a pretty bird eating at my feeding board this morning. Daniel said it's a dove, he's a local boy so I will accept that. He also said that eating doves brains right out of their head with a spoon is a southern tradition. I think he's full of shit, and dove's brains.

No animals around here harmed on my watch! Even if he has two AR-15's and enough ammo to blow up the neighborhood...

Update: Daniel said he was talking about Squirrel brains, not Dove brains. Ok, that makes it all good...

I know that I piss and moan about my life a lot, and I am an idiot to do so. I have a great little place, warm in the winter, cool in the summer, and it provides most of my needs. A hot tub would be nice, but I could buy one from Amazon if I wanted to.

I've been thinking a lot about the time I was homeless back in Kent, WA. I was down to zero, living in a borrowed tent from my friends Dave and Sue, in the middle of a field that eventually became a Target store. I was walking through the parking lot of a local grocery store, looking for change to survive.

I had led the life of a brilliant computer programmer, money out the ass, totally fucking up relationships, and here I landed. My boy Riley was nearby and he kept me going.

And then it took an injury to fix everything. The kids in Rileys apartment asked me to climb up on a carport to retrieve toys that had landed there. I did, and instead of climbing back down, I jumped into the playground with sandals on. Crushed my left ankle, and ended up having major surgery at the local hospital.

Bear in mind, I didn't have a penny to my name, so they put me on welfare to recover their costs. Suddenly, I was on crutches, with a little bit of welfare money to survive.

Finally, when my ankle recovered, I got a job at a downtown Kent motel, as a bellman. Hauling luggage and washing dishes, for $4.50 an hour. I called up my social worker and told him to take me off of welfare, he was happy.

I did that for about three years, worked my way up to $7 an hour, finally I applied for a bus driving job with Hopelink in Bellevue, and got it. By this time I had a little apartment across the street from Riley's high school and was actively involved in his life.

I went on to become the top supervisor for the largest paratransit bus company on the west coast. I eventually met Steph, moved to Idaho, and left that world behind.

Thanks for reading...

Breathe. Let go. And remind yourself that this very moment is the only one you know you have for sure. – Oprah

Be who you are and say how you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind. – Dr. Seuss

A cool closeup video of one of my squirrels enjoying some treats.

Captured some nice footage of my little friend, mister C Monk.

Some shots from my porch:

Ahh, the audacity of my little chipmunk friends! I feed them daily, they give me photo ops, and then shit on the table that fed them. Is this a message, or an accidental discharge? I suspect the former, for some unknown reason they are saying screw you, give me more food. Wow...

I see more and more people walking around with colored hair, what an interesting statement to the world, and I like it!

They're saying that they want to be different in this bland world of look-alikes. They don't give a flying fuck what people think, and some folks will curl their lips up and smile broadly, while some will look down and shake their head.

With me, I've got a long ol goatee to go with the side hair on my head. What color to chose? Purple, orange, yellow? Flaming red? Can I do it myself or should I go to a salon?

I don't do tattoos, ain't my style, but this intrigues me. I think I might be ready...

On another note, the pills my local clinic doctor prescribed seem to be working just fine, the chigger bites and the itching are fading away, haven't bothered me all day. Yay!

And Shelby may be able to join Brian and I in Seattle in September, fingers crossed, and extended in the middle...

I've got two squirrel couples hanging out in my front yard, and I love um. I also have two chipmunk couples here and a variety of birds.

Unfortunately, the squirrels have been just raiding the bird feeder bad, so I had to fix it today. I lowered it from it's perch, set it outward from the tree and put a pan between the feeder and the tree.

It's a down home hick solution to an age old problem, but I think it will work, we'll see...

I was hiking through the woods of Florence Alabama last weekend, down past the Wilson Dam, and picked up a batch of Chiggers. These tiny little bitches are the parasitic larval stage of mites. They pierce the skin with their sharp mouthparts, inject a digestive enzyme, and then feed on you. I thought they burrowed all the way in, but it's just their head, then the resulting sore forms around them.

You carry them home unwittingly and they end up infesting your bed when you go to sleep. I've now got some major bites all over me. So this morning I hit the clinic up and got some drugs, along with a steroid shot in my hip, then took my bedding over to the Wishy Washy.

Stuff arriving from Amazon tomorrow to disinfect my bed, at which point I'll put fresh sheets down. Meanwhile I'm sleeping in my truck tonight, out under the carport.

I asked my friend the laundry lady if they managed to rescue that bird that was stuck behind the window a couple weeks back, and she said yea, the owner trapped it with a broom and grabbed it. Very good!

Update: The drugs are wurkening, not itcheng, qhat the hell...