That’s Bartonella, folks.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Sometime I want to be the one responsibe for creating one of those witty bon mots that get so overused that they become abused and nearly invisible in the spoken and written language. Anyhow, here we go with another “different day, but same old entry” entry.

On a purely theoretical level, the computer desk gets taken apart and my new one reassembled this evening. This may be the last update for a day or two. Considering the consistency with which I’ve been doing updates recently, I strongly suspect I could fail to mention I’d be away a day or two from my computer and no one would notice my absence.

As The Socialist and I play more and more Cribbage, a consistency is beginning to develop. I lose and he wins. It’s frustrating, but it just makes me want to play more. I don’t see how he does it. Granted, I’m still screwing up when I have to count up my scores, but he helps me with it, and I’m not losing any points there. My hands are nearly as good as his. But he always out-pegs me. And losing because you’ve been outpegged is exasperating. Losing big because you’ve been out-pegged is absolutely maddening. I will get the hang of this though, if it kills both of us.

My moonflowers are finally starting to bloom in earnest, and they’re gorgeous. The morning glory vines have taken over the fence and many are now several feet longer than the fence is tall. They’re flopping over and heading back towards the ground, and I’m taking advantage of this to train them into the emply areas of the fence. By summer’s end, the fence will be entirely covered. I am well pleased.

We played an episode from the second-to-last disc from season two Babylon 5 set last night, “Confessions and Lamentations.” We encountered a problem with this disc we’d never had before. About halfway through the disc, the DVD player started pausing for a second, and then continuing. This continued throughout the last half of the episode, with the pauses getting more frequent. Finally, the DVD stopped playing altogether. A similar phenomenon occurred when the Socialist played the DVD on his computer, although the pauses were more infrequent there. Again, the episode hung up though, this time during the final scene. The rest of the episodes play fine on the disc. I’m not entirely sure what to do next. Is it a fault of the player, that it can’t buffer the data fast enough? Is it a fault on the disc? Do I return the set and hope that it doesn’t happen on the replacement? Should I find a more modern DVD player and try the disc on that first? Color me an aggravated shade of perplexed.

On the food front, I have discovered Jolly Time popcorn’s Kettle Corn. My culinary life is complete. I should be able to put some weight back on now. That stuff is addictive.

Finally, from the “Nobody gives a flying fig except for me” file, I checked out the hits to my diary from search engines for the past few days, and found the following will all lead to my diary:

bartenella (X 3)

“kitten, shots” (X 2)

under the influence of ambien

purse fetish

rx frisbee golf disc

The Salamander’s Heart

outback Remoulade recipe (which proves that even the comments are on search engines)

taking care of baby birds

“get me stuck” (what were they thinking?????)

turtle tanks

the gravesite of jim thorpe

bye bye blackbird lyrics parody

“the amazing mr ripley”

I notice, to my dismay, that I’ve misspelled “Bartonella” in my diary entry, leading some poor persistent soul astray on three separate search engines. I shall have to amend that, I suppose.