North City

Friday evening at Hot Wire while D plays chess at SCC. Jessica Star Rocker is playing to a small audience tonight. Nice acoustic act with good voice. Some of her own songs and some wonderful covers of others, including a really great quieter version of Girls Just Want to Have Fun.

Retrieved my car this morning from the shop, after they fixed all the seals and oil leaks that weren't done right during our holiday jaunt to East Wenatchee. It's true that I hadn't put much money into the car for the first 140,000 miles. But, boy, gettting to 145,000 has been awfully expensive. Won't seem bad if the car goes 100,000 miles without further mishap - though I'll spend the whole time wondering if the head gaskets were really done right - especially on those long nighttime drives across US 50 in Nevada that I fantasize about, but haven't actually done in two decades. What a warped sense of nostalgia.

The car's not the only thing suffering from too many miles. I've seen more doctors in the last two months than in my entire life - plastic surgeons, anesthesiologists, surgeons, dermatologists, oncologists - not to mention all their elves. I now have one less mole and one fewer lymph nodes than I began the year with - but it looks like it hadn't spread. Cancer is a powerful word - though always best when applied in the past tense.

Out of boredom, I'm violating one of my principles and am posting a blog without a photo, but short of taking a crummy picture with my cellphone of the reflection of the neon North City LOUNGE sign in the wet pavement of 15th Avenue Northeast, offering up a picture of the recent needlework on my forearm, or pulling some unrelated photo out of the archives, that's all I can do tonight.