Usually I write these stream of consciousness entries on Friday afternoon and schedule them for 3:30 in the morning. I don’t know what got into me yesterday, I just didn’t feel up to doing this. Finally, it was bedtime and I was tired and not in the best mood. The night before last, I woke up and felt like I had gone 15 rounds with Muhammad Ali in his prime, and I guess I was still tired from that. Thus, you’re seeing this later than usual.

Procrastination is one of the things I’m particularly good at. It’s not necessarily something to be proud of, but sometimes it can have its advantages. One of them is you don’t do a lot of work on something that ends up getting canceled. On more than one occasion, I’ve gotten halfway through a project only to be told that the clients decided to take things in a different direction and that everything I had done for them should be backed up and held onto. After a year or so, I felt that I could get rid of it all. And I was usually right.

I set myself a goal of October 1 to finish a writing project that I’ve been procrastinating on for several years, and I may have to let that slip. So if I get a little quiet around here, you’ll understand. I’ll still post every day, but I might have to let replying to comments and reading blogs slip a little. Just fair warning…

Stream of Consciousness Saturday is brought to you each week by Linda Hill and this station. Now a word about Roach Motel by Black Flag. Roaches check in, but they don’t check out! Ha ha ha …

Of all the cats we had over the years, only two of them ever willingly wore collars, both of whom were my special buddies, Willie and Toby. In Willie’s case, he only started wearing his collar after he got out of the house and was missing for several days. We had him microchipped and the collar he wore had the identity tag from the microchipping on it. Despite Willie’s propensity for charging out the door if we weren’t careful, he didn’t move much at all otherwise, so he was fine with it. When unfortunately we had to send Willie to The Bridge, I took his collar and put it in my pocket. After a while, I went to pull it out of the pocket and it wasn’t there. Lost forever.

Toby was a very sweet cat, and I bought several collars from a friend of mine at a craft fair. I picked one for my buddy and he just seemed thrilled to wear it. It was made of webbing with cloth on the outside, which he managed to scratch off, but he kept the collar on until the day he joined Willie. I have it pinned to the bulletin board in my office. I’m not going to lose that one.

We tried a collar with one other, Lucy. She was less than pleased, and we were always picking it up off the floor and putting it back on her. Finally she managed to slip out of it and make it disappear. She’s been gone for almost ten years now, and we still haven’t find it.

Stream of Consciousness Saturday is brought to you each week by Linda Hill and this station. Now a word from Wisk laundry detergent. Wisk beats "ring around the collar" every time!

You just knew I’d use that one, right?

A friend of mine and I were at a restaurant once, and he was struggling with his cutlery. As I remember, he was trying to cut a steak with a dull knife. The next time the server came to our table, he said "can I have another knife? This one’s so dull you couldn’t cut a fart with it." Needless to say, I had a mouthful of water when he said it, and I ended up irrigating my sinuses with it.

In music, a sharp (that number sign thing above) raises the pitch of a note by a half step. On a piano, the note is the key to the immediate right of the natural note, which is normally a black key. So F♯ is the black key between F and G. A flat lowers the pitch by a half step, and is the (usually) black key immediately to the left of the natural note. So G♭ is also the black key between F and G. F♯ and G♭ are enharmonic, which means they make the same sound but have two different names.

There’s no black key between B and C, or E and F, incidentally, so B♯ is C and C♭ is B, E♯ is F and F♭ is E. Kind of. They explain why in music theory courses.

I had a question last week about what B Dorian mode is. The Dorian scale is the major scale, but starting and ending with the second note of the scale. B Dorian is the A major scale (A B C♯ D E F♯ G♯ A) starting and ending with the B (B C♯ D E F♯ G♯ A B). Again, they talk about this a lot in music theory classes, though there is a pretty good article on Wikipedia.

Sharp Corporation is based in Japan and they make all kinds of electronic doodads. They were one of the first manufacturers of pocket calculators. I worked with a guy back in college who had one, and one day I asked if I could borrow it. He gave it to me and said "that there’s a Sharp calculator!" Sharp, of course, is a synonym for attractive, like in the ZZ Top song…

Stream of Consciousness Saturday is brought to you each week by Linda Hill and this station. Now a word about Recital by L’Oreal. You’re worth it!

Until my stroke in 2007, I had played guitar, on and off, since I was 11, so close to 40 years. Over that period of time, I must’ve used at least a hundred picks, not to mention lending them out to people who never returned them, one person in particular… Anyway, whenever I would hear of a new type of pick, I would want to get a dozen of them just to see how well they played, how well they fit in my hand, how the guitar sounded when I used each one. Why a dozen? Because even if every pick is the same style and weight, some are more flexible than others, and some just feel more right than others. I can’t explain it, that’s just the way it is.

Since having to give up the guitar, they’re all sitting in a plastic school box (the modern day equivalent of a cigar box) in a drawer. I must have upward of 200 in there, not exactly collecting dust because they’re in a plastic school box which is sealed against the elements. Occasionally I’ll pull the box out and take a couple of them out, hoping against all hope that maybe I can grip the pick well enough to attempt playing the guitar again. You know when you wake up in the middle of the night and start thinking about all the things you screwed up? My thing is all the stuff I should have done after my stroke, and figuring out a way to play the guitar despite my disability. Woulda, coulda, shoulda, right?

Stream of Consciousness Saturday is brought to you each week by Linda Hill and this station. Now a word about Ariel laundry detergent. Washes a whole lot cleaner because it’s biological!