So yesterday  Helen face times me in a hot toot to sign some on line tax papers,  "Down load and print and sign them and i-phone picture them back to me ASAP so we don't go to jail," she says. Well, cheap ass that I am, I never bought a home  printer and call me psycho-paranoid but I'll be damned if I'm going to download all my financial info onto an unsecure clinic computer just to use the clinic printer. What to do? What we have here is your basic garden variety dilema: on the one hand risking finacial ruin at the hands of some pasty white, cheetos crumbed, stinky, bearded fat hacker dude living in the his mother's nasty dank basement in Moldova or back to jail again to share a 10 x 20 foot cell with, who would immediately become my new main man,  Leroy "Big Willie" Brown (dibs on the top bunk Willie)   But hold on..... I'm not your average idiot.  In fact, if my last blog is to believed, I am a shoe in for a Nobel Prize for MacGyver stuff.  So  I bring up the signature page on my lap top and with a felt tip pen sign on the computer screen over the signature box on the e-form.  Snap....Snap with my i-phone camera and  bada-bing bada-boom send the pics off to Helen.  Seriously folks sometimes I even amaze myself.  Now for a quick wipe of the screen with a damp cloth to remove the.......hmmmm..... Let me see that pen again ....."Alexa...What does indelible mean?" ....Oh.....  Hey, I bet some nail polish remover would work but shoot!~ I forgot, I'm a rough and tumble football watchen beer drinken beef eaten gas passen manly man who would  rather root for the Patriots to win the super bowl while jumping up and down doing the chearleader in close clap wearing butter cup yellow skin tight designer jeans than be caught with nail polish and ergo nail polish remover.  There must be something around here that would take off.....wait for it...wait for it.....does my epiphany light hurt your eyes?  I reach into the pantry and pull out the super special bottle of gin I bought down by Wanaka in a snooty little distillery right next to a 1/2 mile long bra fence (another story for another blog) So glug, glug, glug an ounce or so into a glass and dip dip in the glass with a paper and wipe wipe ....and I smugly sip the rest of the gin as I sit at my spotless computer and book my tickets to Stockholm

Things have sure been lonely since my main man Fergal left 3 weeks ago.  I do have to admit my morning headaches and shakes are better but the voices are starting to come back so what's up with that?  And last week my other main man Steve took off for a week of R&R on some South Pacific tropical paradise.  Finding a bit of gold now and then helps a little but things got so bad that I frequently found myself wandering the empty evening streets of Greymouth, stopping in front of the sports store and gazing longingly at the volley ball in the window. "Willllsonnn;" I'd whisper making sure he could read my lips and then quetly turn my collar to the cold and damp and doing a classic Bogart, disappear into the night fog moving softly in on little cat feet. Ok, I am saying it straight up:  anybody who doesn't think the ending of "Casablanca"  is the best movie ending ever is a damn communist or at the very  least a leftist symapthizer and to all of you I say a pox on Bernie Sanders.

To make matters worse the wheather around here has been abysmal.  It's rained every day for three weeks straight .   And windy and cold? Oy vey!  But lemons into lemonaide - the other day I was cooking so, as usual, I opened the front door and the big glass slider doors to the back deck hoping to get a little cross breeze to keep the smoke alarm from going off. To get the full picture you have to understand that I live in a shoe box with a one parking space sized (and no not an oversized  handicapped spot either )"great" room with combined kitchen, dining and living areas with two tiny bedrooms and a Lou down the hall   Well as I said it's been pretty windy around here so instead of a nice gentle smoke clearing breeze I got an everything less than 20 pound... oops...I mean 9.0909090909..... Kg clearing  typhoon of biblical proportions.  Disaster?  Perhaps to the untrained eye but I noticed that most of what blew out the door were things that Helen would have waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat night mares about... I'm talking about your trophy sized, dust bunnies, your odd bits of incriminating evidence of previous indiscretions, last week's shopping list, your museum quality fossilized left overs sitting on the counter from God knows when and the occasional  pair of unredeemable undies lying on the floor to  name a just few.  Well I  know a good thing when I see one so now whenever  there is a nice brisk northerly wind I do a bit of tidying up........  It's nice when things just seem to work out for the best.

Saving the best for last I was back in the states last month to seee my number one main man Benjamin my absolute favorite grandchild.  He is the bomb.  During the week I was there I could see that he was getting stronger and more alert every day.  While we are  all stuned and relieved that Rachel and Bryan are turning out to be such great parents I am concerned that they are not spoiling the little guy enough.  I guess I am going to have to step up to the plate myself on that.  Also while face timing with me the other day Rachel was whining about how much a nanny will cost when she goes back to work in Sept. So I started thinking.  Why not rig up the phone so Ben is always on face time or better yet a bunch of super high def phones like the "Trumen Show?"  That way Helen and Margaret can take turns or more likely fight over who gets to gaze lovingly at him remotely hour after hour.  And if they see a problem?  Easy peasy quick phone Rachel who,  just a few steps away in her home office, could in a flash put some random multibillion dollar international bank merger deal on hold and quick like a buny run to change a diaper or someting.  And when he goes mobile?  What you never heard of go pro?  So what if both Helen and Margaret are too busy with something to watch the Ben meister?.....Like that would ever happen. .....  Just out source the job to some tech support dude in some third world country........I ask you;  In what universe do I not deserve a Nobel Prize?  I mean really! Elon Musk watch and learn!