The Legend of The Throwing of the Pickles

I have a pickle problem.

This is a cautionary tale, an entertainment, and a distraction from more depressing issues.

Notably, I love dill pickles and will eat them as snacks, and apparently do not terribly mind eating too many pickle spears. This has resulted in me getting occasional gifts of pickles from catered events at work. Usually it's a bowl with maybe 20 or 30 spears in it and we'll have it last a few days thanks to our refrigerator.

This last time, it was a bit more. It was a catering tray from Jason's Deli with probably five or six pounds of pickles in it.

I started cracking in at it and had killed maybe five or six in the first ten minutes at which point I proclaimed I needed to slow down. Over the next three or four hours, I think I must have had at least 24 or 25 pickle spears. The tray was noticeably diminished in gravity by the time I had run out of energy and needed to head home.

Side note: I was three weeks out from major neck surgery. Still well within the length of time I have been instructed to "begin trying to look left and right more each day."

The pickles needed to go.

Our refrigerators are both mini fridges, more appropriate for a dorm room than an office. They work great for keeping sandwich parts ready, but aren't going to take a full catering tray of leftovers. We also don't have reusable containers around for excess pickles (though, apparently, that may be something we need to add to the list), so to the trash they went. That's fine, they'd been open and out of the cold all day and were starting to get soggy and discolored. I loaded up my stuff and grabbed the pickle tray and headed out the door.

I made it about two thirds of the way down the stairs and my heel caught the landing.

I am fine. I was fine. Somehow, for the first time in my life, my instincts of self-preservation kicked in and I caught myself with both arms on the handrails. I knew I needed to not fall down stairs while I still had glue on my incision.

The pickles took flight.

Flash forward: I collected my thoughts and went to the hallway phone. The one intended for people having problems in classrooms to use for getting help. It didn't work. A ringtone, it takes key inputs, but no ring. So I fished my phone out of my pocket, still with tinge of pickle juice on my fingers, and called up stairs. "Hey. Yeah. Hey can you meet me downstairs by the dean's office with two rolls of paper towels? .... Yeah, the pickles. .... I fell down the stairs. ... yeah I'm okay."

I didn't just drop the tray, I threw it forward and away from me.

It made sense, I needed to get my left arm out to the side to catch the railing before I fell far enough that the nerve damage I had at the time kept me from being able to reach high enough to grab it.

Correspondingly, there were pickles, pickle juice, and seeds <em>everywhere</em> on the last five steps of the flight and within about a six foot radius of the bottom. We got it cleaned up pretty well; the stairwell vaguely smelled of pickles that afternoon and the next morning, but it was fine by the next afternoon. The pickles all hit the floor. There were no survivors.

Personally, I learned a lesson: never look a gift tray of pickles in the mouth, or anywhere. Don't accept gift trays of pickles. Make sure they're in jars.

Cleaned out

I lost nearly 300 posts to dead links and broken photos, but I think I'm good to go forward now. Like I mentioned last post, I will try to revisit my Lightroom library and post some random shots from over the years, and I might also consider rolling phone photography into that just for comparison of "I wanted to take photos" and "I needed to document this with a picture!" They're different mindsets for me, for the most part... or at least they used to be, when phone cameras were garbage.

Also, a fun exercise in how my life's changed or not: I have apparently had problems sleeping for years. As far back as the beginning of this experiment, I'd have timestamps of between midnight and 4am on a pretty regular basis. I also have gotten a lot out of the time I spent in therapy, as I don't get mad at nothing anymore.

A return to the written word

After two and a half years of no activity on this platform*, I've decided I'm going to try to start writing again with some regularity and purpose. During the intervening months, I have neglected comment moderation, content production, and purpose of blog. I also have lost track of the photography aspect of this blog, which means most of the old pictures I've taken and posted over the years are lost to whatever hosting they had previously lived on; I'll end up deleting those posts, which will take me a while to sort through. That's a bit of a bummer, but it does create a neat opportunity to start revisiting the last 13 years of digital photo archives and occasionally posting a look back and giving me the opportunity to ruminate on the circumstances of individual photos in ways I would not have otherwise done.

Blessings in disguise and all that.

So what's ahead? 

First, I have to post the diagnostics and analysis I did for my Ampeg SVT-III Pro (1995 model, hence III instead of 3) and what I ended up doing to repair it. I need to post some thoughts on the 5F1 "clone" I made. I have to talk about the repairs I did on the Tektronix 317 oscilloscope I repaired back in 2018, and the Tek 465 I got and refurbished before that. I will probably have a little bit to talk about the Tek 2336 I had for a while, because it was fun and because I had to commission some 3D printed latch parts to get it to stay closed.

I also have had a LOT of health experience and can write your eyes out with thoughts about dealing with thyroid cancer for six nonstop years.

I'm going to largely stay away from politics, but I may have to write some things on current events involving people who look like me doing reprehensible, racist things.

I may have thoughts and observations about biology. I probably will have thoughts about climate. I love some of the biodiversity we have around here and will be sad to see it go when climate change comes to reclaim the earth from us. I really do like spending time outside and watching the butterflies and moths, and then it's on when it's millipede season here.

Finally, you may also end up getting some thoughts on music, music production, and my limited understanding of music theory. It's what I end up doing a lot of ongoing learning about, so here we are: an outlet.

You may be wondering "why?" if you're reading this. I am currently dealing with a complication from surgery that's left me without much of a voice. It's not as bad as it was when this last happened in 2013, but I still find myself yearning to produce "new" thought and information. Hopefully, a keyboard will work to scratch that itch, as posting to blogger is a lot cheaper than buying a ton of music hardware and writing music nobody will listen to because most people seem to dislike tracks without lyrics. I'm sure not in a place I can sing right now, so saving money it is. So, with that, I'm back.

* - There's a reason I called this place "the content vortex" and it has everything to do with my personal history of forgetting to update it or pay attention to it for months at a time. I just usually do better than two and a half years.