Marvel Comics, DC Comics & more!

I retired on May 31, 2016, not because I wanted to retire (I didn’t!) but because my main income was from my home inspection business, and my knees and shoulders just didn’t like crawling under houses and up in attics anymore, a necessary part of a home inspection.

I officially retired on December 31, 2016. I kept hoping that I would be able to continue my home inspection business, but the knees and shoulders said no. So when I did not renew my Errors & Omissions insurance for my home inspection company, I knew that I officially was retired.

It took me four months looking for activities to fill these 24-hour days, and I finally chose delivering packages for Amazon and people for Uber. I thought it would be pretty neat to drive all over San Diego County, and it was, but both companies sucked. I started Amazon in October 2016 and Uber in January 2017. I tried to give them a year, but I quit both of them in June 2017.

I didn’t do much after June 2017 other than gardening and watching TV series and movies. When Stan Lee died in November 2018, I decided to watch all of the movies and TV series based on Marvel Comics. Although I liked all of the Marvel stuff, I especially enjoyed Spider-Man, Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, Wolverine, Captain Marvel, and Deadpool.

Now that I watched all of Marvel, I have moved on to DC Comics. I already had seen all of the Superman movies and TV series, having gotten addicted to them in the ’60s and ’70s. Same with Batman. I just finished watching The Flash and Arrow. Those two, especially The Flash, rocketed to the top of my favorites list. Grant Gustin, who plays Flash, now is one of my favorite actors. I’m in the process of watching everything in his actor catalog. Stephen Amell, who plays Arrow, also now is one of my favorite actors. Once I finished Gustin’s film catalog, I shall explore Amell’s works.

After finishing Arrow, I watched Krystal, a 2017 movie in which Grant Gustin has a support role. He’s very good, and I thought the movie was very good.

Gustin was in several episodes of Glee, which I had never started watching. Glee has a lot of singing, beautiful covers of songs I’m quite familiar with, and several episodes also featuring Damian McGinty of Celtic Thunder, one of my favorite non-rock/pop music ensembles, so I’m now watching Glee. With 121 episodes of about 48 minutes each, I suspect Glee will keep me occupied for a month or so. I watched the first three episodes of Season 1 this morning. On to S1E4!

As an aside, if you like male eye candy, there is lots in Glee and DC Comics, not as much in Marvel Comics.

6/24/19—Catless

On this date last year, Jim and I were catless.

Zoey the Cool Cat crossed the rainbow bridge on 6/23/19, animal shelters are closed on Mondays, and we got Little Queen Olivia on 6/25/19.

Zoey the Cool Cat

Little Queen Olivia

The picture of Zoey the Cool Cat was taken a few hours after she joined our household in September 2007. Her name when we adopted her was Zoey, but after taking this picture, I added “the Cool Cat” to her name.

Little Queen Olivia’s name when we adopted here was Olivia. She was born on November 21, 2017. At 18 months old, she weighed only 7.6 pounds. The vet thought she was only a couple of months old because of her size. Nope. She’s just a small cat. She eats wet food and dry food whenever she wants it and she only got up to 8.6 pounds. She has settled in at 8.3 pounds. She’s Little, and after just a few days of her playing in her new surroundings, it was obvious that she was royalty, so I added “Little Queen” to her name.

We miss Zoey the Cool Cat dearly, but we’re extraordinarily lucky to have had Little Queen Olivia in our lives for the past year.

Raindrops on…. roses?

Whenever it rains overnight, I like to take my Canon 760D and Tamron 90mm macro lens out into the gardens to see what additional beauty the raindrops have causes.

Here are twelve pictures from the morning of Sunday, June 7.

Protest, destruction, beautification

I went to a Vietnam War protest during my senior year in high school in Kingsville, Texas. That was 1973. That was the last one I went to because there were several injuries and an out-of-control crowd. I’m all for peaceful protest, but when the peaceful protests last for several years, perhaps even decades, and no one listens, perhaps it’s time for something other than peaceful protests.

I remember studying how the South protested when they lost the privilege to own black people.

Then, of course, there was the Boston Tea Party which happened because the King of England would not listen to the people’s concerns.

The city of La Mesa, California, where Jim and I lived for eight years, had a riot on Saturday, May 30. It started very peacefully, but when the marchers wanted to enter the on-ramp to Interstate 8, the police turned them back towards downtown. That’s when the rioting started.

I had heard about the riots but did not see any pictures, notwithstanding so many posts saying that the press was glorifying the violence.

Yesterday I read about many arts associations traveling to downtown La Mesa to paint positive messages on the plywood and particle board covering both broken and unbroken windows. I immediately ventured to La Mesa to see for myself. The destruction was like nothing I had ever seen, but I’ll take this destruction over that of the Philadelphia Eagles fans any day of the week. And when the powers that be refuse to listen to the concerns of their communities, seen as way too willing to reign in police brutality, well, something’s going to happen. It’s gone on for too long. There also are way too many reports of police brutality continuing during the protests….

One man lost an eye after being shot in the face by a “rubber bullet,” which are not bullets by any stretch of the imagination. They are huge projectiles.

A 75-year-old many was pushed to the ground by two police officers and left there to bleed. A grandmother died after being shot with rubber bullets. Lots of videos of police beating protesters peaceably assembled.

Due to my age and underlying health conditions, I’m in no physical or mental condition to even go out whenever I want during this pandemic. Add in protests, and it’s perilous for me. I did get some ugly stares yesterday from some in downtown La Mesa, and every time I got one of those ugly stares, I gave the artists a monetary donation to help pay for the supplies they were using to make the plywood less ugly.

La Mesa has always been a peaceful city, even during their acclaimed Oktoberfest, so I was quite shocked at the destruction. However, I also found out that although the death of George Floyd prompted protests nationwide, an incident of police brutality in La Mesa—captured on video by a bystander, of course—is what led to this protest starting at the City Hall/Police Station complex. A black person was caught smoking a cigarette at the San Diego Trolley station in La Mesa. Smoking is not allowed, yet even my Excel spreadsheet doesn’t have enough cells to tell you the number of times I have seen white people smoking at the Trolley stations and on the Trolley. The police had been seeking to press charges against the person who captured the brutality on video, but they announced yesterday that they would not do so. I think that’s a good thing.

I also got a chance yesterday to use the camera on my new Samsung S20 Ultra 5G phone. So here are all the pictures I took yesterday, with no comment other than the picture of Randall Lamp, which was a historic building; the other pictures of burned out buildings are of Chase Bank and Union Bank.

Dr. Russel (6/4/20)

QUARANTINE WEIGHT LOSS TIP

Only buy and cook food that you hate.

If you don’t like it, you won’t eat it.

You’re welcome!
—Dr. Russel

When the side effects are awesome!

This post is a follow up to my post about what appears to be my final episode of biting my fingernails. Only took a little over 65 years. See my first post here: Another 48 margaritas and I should  be good to go

I got a pain relief shot in the butt at Urgent Care on April 19. Oh the irony of getting a painful injection in the butt in order to relieve pain elsewhere. Is this where the expression pain in the butt came from?

Nonetheless….

I also got a prescription for a pain-relief drug, Cephalexin, which is generic for Keflex. The prescription was for 28 pills, one ever six hours until used up… so seven days. I took the first pill on April 20 at noon.

Amazing things happened, none of which were expected to happen.

1. I have been a polyphasic sleeper all my life — 65 years — never sleeping for more than four hours, and that was only in college when I was passed out drunk. I’m still a polyphasic sleeper, but since April 20 I have had several periods of sleep lasting from five to eight hours.
2. I had never had a dream because I never reached R.E.M. sleep. That changed on April 20. I probably have had 65 dreams since then. Most of them would be considered nightmares by normal people, but can Stephen King fans be called normal? As Tears for Fears sang in Mad World, “The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had.”
   
3. For the past twenty or so years, I have had a hacking cough… 24/7. It was the worst immediately upon lying down and immediately after getting up. A hacking cough in today’s COVID-19 world can be problematic out in public. Fortunately, I was able to control it by taking Guafenesin (generic for Mucinex), but it took about an hour for the full effects to kick in. That changed on April 20. After the very first Cephalexin pill, no 24/7 hacking cough. Still to this day, over a month later.
4. For the past five or so years, I have not been able to breathe through my nose. I went to my regular doctor as well as an allergist and and ENT. The only thing anyone said was the ENT. She stuck a camera through my nose and down into my throat. The only thing she found was a deviated septum (crooked nose). She asked me when I broke my nose but to the best of my knowledge, I never did. She wants to do a CT scan of my upper respiratory system and then schedule surgery to correct my crooked nose. That all changed on April 20. After the very first Cephalexin pill, I was back to breathing through my nose. Still to this day, over a month later.

I have been in dozens of medical research studies throughout my life, so I know that not every side effect reported during studies gets listed as side effects. The number of people reporting a side effect has to be statistically significant for the number of people in the study. So if there are 100 people in the study, and only one person reports a specific side effect, the researchers won’t list it, instead chalking it up to something the research subject forgot to tell us.

In some cases, when the side effect is very pronounced and widely distributed, new research studies are done to see if the side effect can be made useful. Rogaine comes immediately to mind. Rogaine is a brand name for minoxidil, which originally was being studied for hypertension. Unexpected male hair growth was a statistically significant side effect, leading to further research studies and — bam! — Rogaine!

I talked to both my doctor and the ENT. Neither of them believed that there was a cause and effect from the Cephalexin. Continued research on my part found that Cephalexin also is used for upper respiratory illnesses. It’s only good for bacteria, though, not viruses like the flu and COVID-19.

With that knowledge, I wondered if I have had an upper respiratory bacterial infection for the last twenty years.

I called the Urgent Care doctor to ask him about the side effects since he was the one who prescribed Cephalexin. He was amazed but also thought that there wasn’t a cause and effect.

Oh, well.

If my cough and breathing difficulties ever come back, I shall bite my fingernails until they bleed, down to the quick, and then stick them in a bucket of dirty water until they get infected. Then I shall go get another prescription for Cephalexin….

Still sad

For the past 17 days, every morning when I get up I check on my mommy mourning dove on her nest. Sadly, yesterday morning this is what I saw:

I have been a birder for 60 years, so I know that there is a Great Horned Owl out here in the East San Diego County boondocks. It lives in the bushes and trees about a 100 yards north of me. Been there for 2 years and 10 months.

When I was outside to pull weeds yesterday morning, I heard Mr. G. H. Owl calling to me from about 50 yards to the south. Who? Who? Who? I think I know WHO got my mourning dove babies.

I am completely powerless against police brutality, racism, the Twitler Crime Family, et al., but I really thought I could help mommy mourning dove safely raise her young.

Still sad.