5/31/06
An hour into work, the pain starts up again much to my dismay.

Motherfucker, I don't know what's causing this other than stress. At lunch on Monday, since there was only a half hour lunch instead of working through an hour, I went to Denny's and had buffalo chicken strips but they didn't bother me at all. It can't be an ulcer. It's not a hernia. What the motherfuck is going on?

Maybe one day at work, I'll vomit blood and say, "I believe I have an ulcer" then pass out. I refuse to take antacids because most medicines fuck things up far more than they actually help things. This is independent of any of raddidge's crackpot theories, no matter how cromulent they may be.

Seriously, I wish I could do a day at work where I'm just futzing around processing an application every six minutes just like the other folks. The days I end up being slow never end up that way.

raddidge had an extended journey out to the compound over Memorial Day weekend. According to her, she saw a brown bear near a beaver pond. On Monday night she and her mother thought they heard a mountain lion outside the camper. This makes me a bit wary about camping in a tent but not prohibitively wary.

Here's a snippet from our conversation.
You ask, "How did you think it was a mountain lion?"
You ask, "Was the creature muttering "mountainlionmountainlionmountainlion"?"
raddidge says, "No, first we heard a low meow (just like you'd imagine a mountain lion sounding if it was meowing to someone close such as a kitten) then, later in the night we heard some kind of growling."
raddidge says, "We checked for tracks this morning but we only saw some kind of small dog-like track."

I'm not afraid of coyotes or bears but mountain lions just strike me as being plain old ornery. Fortunately there have only been about sixteen human deaths at the hands of mountain lions in the last hundred years and a little more than a hundred attacks on humans by mountain lions.