Merry Christmas

 I am still on a break from writing the blog, but how can I not write about my Nativity?

As always, we have the Big Three, as the Holy Family is called here. But we also have another family present, along the back: the Bat family, Nightwing, Batgirl and Bugs Bunny as Batman. These were all gifts. We had Batgirl as children, well, my sister did. She (Batgirl) did not have hands that lent themselves to our favorite game with the Mego superheroes: sliding them down fishing line from a second story window over a tub of mud and trying to dislodge them into the mud. Sadly, this is probably why none of our toys made it to adulthood in good shape. But now I have her, in 12-inch form no less. Since there are three, it seems a good plan to make them the stand-ins for the Kings, even if one of them is more likely a queen than a king.

I am a sucker for Green Lantern. I think it is mainly because he can make anything he has the willpower for. He also has a great rhyme. I figure this figure, which I got from my brother-in-law, will be the angel.

There is Buffy, of course, at far right. Last year, one of my nieces got married and asked me for some Nativity figures. I did not really think that she wanted my awesome type of Nativity.  However, I could not avoid getting her a similar Buffy. You can always use a slayer to fight off “the forces of darkness; to stop the spread of their evil and the swell of their numbers.”

Sports card wise it was also a pretty good year. My brother gave me a Boog Powell card, knowing my love for the orioles, and Rickey Henderson rookie card. But my favorite card, or my favorite baseball card, is this Mickey Rivers from my collection. I would just like to state for the record that I hate the Yankees and always will. But this was the best card I have of Mickey, and he said one of the best things I have ever read: “Ain't no sense worrying: If you have no control over something, ain't no sense worrying about it -you have no control over it anyway. If you do have control, why worry? So either way, there ain't no sense worrying." I also got one of my older nieces to autograph a card from when she was playing hockey. Her team had been inducted into the town Hall of Fame.

Greedo makes an appearance mostly because he is much maligned, undeservedly in my mind. He was a petty thug, not a killer.

And finally there is the cowboy writing riding an ostrich from the island of Misfit Toys. Santa wraps things up.

Merry Christmas

From baseball back to superheroes (mostly). It is not that I got no baseball collectibles this year, but the 2024 Orioles that I did buy were nothing to be celebrated.

We'll start with Lucy and Charlie Brown from A Charlie Brown Christmas, a quality Christmas special if there ever was one. It just makes you feel good. 

Behind the Big Three is the Spectre. He is the spirit of God’s vengeance. There were plenty of people in biblical times for him to feast on so he's gonna have at it. 

The Muppets return with a California Raisin to play music for the Nativity. I’m thinking like when people come to pay their respects, like the Three Kings, they could play walk-up music. 

There is also a Shogun warrior up in the back by the window, just keeping an eye on things ready to pounce if needed.

Then there's Buffy ready to go. It's just not a nativity without Buffy.  In fact, one of my nieces got married last year and she asked me for some nativity figures. I think she wanted real figures not superheroes, so I provided them … although I did give her a Buffy because she makes everything better.

I was watching the movie Red One recently, and Santa Claus in that movie has a bodyguard. In the movie, it's the Rock, but I don't have a Rock figure so the bodyguard of my dinner is another PlayMobil figure, a knight from when I would little.

Finally, there is Shazam. I never had a lot of Shazam comics back when I collected them, but he has always been a favorite. It might have been because my grandmother had a Smithsonian collection of old comics and he featured in it. It actually had a lot of weird comics that I didn't care for like war comics and little Lulu, so maybe I just liked Shazam because he was what you're supposed to read in comics. The movies are pretty fun, too, especially the first. All this even though he's kind of a amalgam, with powers related to Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles, and Mercury). So a Jewish King, several Greek gods, a Greek myth hero, and a Roman god. Nevertheless, still fun

Merry Christmas.

Very disabled

 It is fairly easy to forget I am disabled at work. I do a good job and am well thought of by my co-workers and bosses. Years ago one of my boss's said to another one in my presence something like, the problem with Matt is everybody likes him. 

But then something inevitably smacks me square in the face that I am monstrously disabled. 

That inevitable something came the last couple days. I had to get a new computer so I told the IT folks what programs I needed on my computer. They were just four. 

I do not know whether I had to log in myself for anything to be installed, but none of my programs were put on in advance. The operating system not up to date, either. So I spent two and a half hours at the office with an IT person I barely understood and who barely understood me working on my machine. They installed three of the programs allegedly. They told me they could not install the fourth one. So I left with my new machine. 

It got worse. 

When I logged in and started working on the new machine, it quickly became apparent that it was not set up for someone with mobility issues. There is a feature on Windows machines called filter keys that tells the computer to ignore accidental keystrokes. I set this up, but it didn’t not work very well for some reason. So I sent an email to the IT person and copied my boss and her boss explaining the situation. I thought I would get attention because almost every letter was repeated at least once. I also asked them to install to basic programs that they had left off. 

For some reason, when they contacted me, they seemed not to care about the filter keys and instead only worried about installing the  missing programs. 

This was even made worse because their voice was not one I am used to hearing and therefore I had no clue what they were saying often. Making matters even worse, once they were on my machine, they minimized the chat screen that had the captioning that I needed to understand them. 

Then I realized that one of the three needed programs was not  installed.

I finally got a setting of the filter keys that was okay, not wonderful by any means.

I guess I will see what the next day brings to this disabled person. (It mostly brought working filter keys.)

The song

 Once, when we were both closer to college age, my sister told me about a song by a band she liked. 

In the song, the singer, a woman, talks to her brother and says she will help him always. Even when he has lost his strength and he is too tired to go on, she will be there. 

It is a song that even now makes me feel happy and sad, loved and teary all at the same time. 

On Tuesday night, I was having some problems. It started with my realization that except for a Gatorade sports bag when I was in North Carolina at my first job, I have not ever one anything any kind of lottery. 

I did, of course, win, or lose, the genetic lottery by getting Friedreich's ataxia. I was thinking how random it is for me and my brother to have Friedreich's.  I forget my probability studies, but as I understand it each of us had a a one in four chance of getting FA. We both did. No one else in my family has it. 

My feelings kind of devolved from there. On the verge of tears, I decided to listen to that song. It helped, knowing that I am loved as the singer clearly loves her brother. 

The next night, laughing told my sister that I wasn't sure I should tell her what I was listening to the night before. I did, of course. Her response was that I should never listen that song not be allowed to. 

I suspect the brother in the song dies, and that's the reason for her strong stance against me listening to it. 

Despite her thinking, I will still listen to that song when I am sad probably mostly. I am sure that it will make me sad and make me cry. But it will also remind me how much I am loved and that is always worth a few tears.



Stop

On my walk today, I was crossing the street between two trails, in a crosswalk, with other people crossing the other way. There was one car just starting on the road, and there was another car the other way several hundred feet off. But apparently it was not for enough off for one of the joggers going the other way. 

This jogger had on an Army T-shirt and she stopped in the middle of the intersection, put her hands on her hips and just stared at the car. 

Maybe they they had just purchased the T-shirt because it looked cool and not because they were veteran, but regardless I would have stopped. That stare was something else.

I, of course, have no proof that she did it because there was a wheelchair user in the intersection, but at the same time I saw no reason for it except maybe to protect me.