March 3 - 6, 2014 (Monday-Thursday)
''Week in Review''

After relieving me from work on Monday (Mar. 3), Gracie kept insisting on ignoring my advice to meet with the on-site nurse before any talk about going to hospital for her ailment, which she wanted my mother to do for her the next day. Ultimately, she did take my advice later in her workshift, and she later called one of the other co-workers to ask him if he'd be willing to come in an relieve her early, taking a cab back to her apartment after he'd arrived.

Gracie had already arranged for my mother to take her out to the hospital Tuesday (Mar. 4), which she had been insistent on despite the fact that I tried to explain to the both of them that in order to use her insurance she would have to pay a visit to someone in her  ''physician's network''  (my mother erroneously believing that with the insurance purchased through the  ''ObamaCare''  exchanges we could simply go to any physician or clinic). Yet, when Tuesday arrived, Gracie decided against going to get checked out and instead opted for paying her rent. But in a twist, I was by that time beginning to have issues of my own: I was already still dealing with bouts of vertigo, but now it was being complicated with a headache and intestinal issues, and the on-site supervisor wanted someone to come in for him the next day to relieve him early so he could take his wife to the doctor, and Gracie had already informed him that she would not be up to the task: I informed him that I was questioning my own ability to do so, but that I would call him by time he arrived for his workshift to confirm one way or another if I was feeling well enough to take over for half the shift.

Even though I really wasn't feeling up to it, I came in to the job site Wednesday (Mar. 5), but had arrived an hour earlier than he'd expected. So rather than him leaving an hour earlier, I had to find a way to rest-off my misery for that amount of time, and I did not want to ride back to the house, so I decided to check on Gracie and rest on her living room floor there until about ten minutes prior to my clock-in time: the extra rest actually doing much to benefit me to the point to where I could operate more comfortably and more alert. (She even said that she was beginning to feel well enough to be able to return to work the following day.)

After filling-in for the remaining three hours of that work shift, I rode to the nearby ''Kroger'' mainly to get my motorcycle fueled, but also took the opportunity to buy Gracie a package of toilet tissue, since she said she hadn't had anything when I'd asked her for something during my rest stop earlier and she instead gave me a menstrual pad to spit in: I also got her a bulk pack of ramen, some frozen spinach, and some crusted fish fillets, along with a few items for myself. I tried to deliver the groceries to her apartment but she had gone out (she said she'd tried to see about qualifying for food stamps), so I brought the items back to the house, then took them back out to her later that night, along with a couple more DVDs I'd removed from my collection to make room for all the new stuff that's beginning to take up space. Once there, I decided to take another rest break before continuing on to check my post office box, so we laid on her ''living room'' floor (since she's still mortified by any prospects of my ever witnessing the disastrous condition of her bedroom) wrapped in her comforter for about an hour or so, diddling each other occasionally.

After retrieving my mail, I decided to take advantage of the location and take some photographs of the ''Downtown'' area with the new camera and continue to learn how to work some of the controls and to see how well it performed in ''night-time'' situations, much of which I was fairly impressed with. It was during this time that I'd also learned that the art museum has ''free admission'' every Thursday night (I would've loved to have gone the next night, but again I was feeling too ''up-&-down'' and trying to focus attention on too much other stuff for me to care about any of that at this point).

I also had to order another camera case Thursday night (Mar. 6) to replace the current one whose cheap ''plastic'' zipper broke (wut-evur-da-fuk happened to  ''metal''  zippers?); I'd also made the decision to place an order for a bona fide camera tripod, finally. My left nostril, which had been fine for the past couple of days, also decided to start acting back up around this time.

March 7 - 9, 2014 (Friday-Sunday)
''Weekend in Review''

Gracie and I were still battling illnesses... she having gotten over her throat & chest issues by Saturday (Mar. 8) only to succumb to cramping, vomiting and diarrhea, whereas I'd then gotten over my headache-&-intestinal issues and vertigo only to develop throat & sinus issues of my own, the latter of which lasted through the remainder of the weekend. It was this ''sick weekend'' factor which had initially interfered with what I was hoping would be a chance to escape to New Jersey to visit my Dad in the middle of the week, since the weather seemed to be giving indication of somewhat reasonable cooperation, until it was realized that the forecasts were calling for rain in our area and renewed snowfall in the northeast.

March 10 -14, 2014 (Monday-Thursday)
''Week in Review''

Went to the post office before going in to work Monday (Mar. 10) where I retrieved my replacement camera case which arrived far earlier than I would have expected, along with a notice that the tripod I'd ordered had also arrived but which I was unable to leave with because it would not fit inside any of the parcel boxes and the customer service lobby was not open at the time, so my plan was to claim the tripod the next day.

As I would discover the next day (Tue., Mar. 11), even though my ''Amazon'' order history claimed that the camera case I'd originally ordered from them was the same as the one I'd ordered as a replacement, the newer one had an ever so slightly different appearance design but was noticeably ''roomier'' to where I could fit the  ''Canon''  inside comfortably and still have space for the extra little accessories, whereas to fit the same camera into the previous case required a considerable bit of ''stuffing.'' Part way through the same day my mother was gracious enough to drive me by the post office to retrieve my tripod, which I'd tested out that same afternoon and later that evening by taking a few snapshots of the moon in maximum telephoto mode, and though not anywhere near the best pictures ever of the subject matter, I was still very impressed with what it could accomplish with just a few manual tweaks.

After Martha had dropped me back off at the house after the post office run, I decided to call my Dad. In completely using the 40 ''bonus minutes'' I'd qualified for at the end of last month, he had mentioned among other things that he'd been ''in and out of the hospital'' (which I interpreted as ''doctor's visits'') in relation to his blood pressure.

Wednesday (Mar. 12) did not seem as though it was going to bring its forecasted rain despite the darkened skies. The weather was so pleasant that I'd started getting myself set up to was the motorcycle, but delayed it to aid my mother in trying to snake-out the kitchen sink drain pipe using a snipped-off and modified length of the chicken-wire fencing she keeps in the garage. If wasn't long afterward that the rain finally came in a passing squall which was enough to discourage me altogether. I'd also used this time as a opportunity to relocate the bird bath which had fallen over last week, due to loss of stability which resulted from the eroding & weakening dirt foundation.

Also placed an order for some ''Hawaiiana'' that included a tin of ''lychee black tea'' which I could hardly even find in Hawaii, let alone trying to find it outside of the state, and a multi-pack of  ''Hawaiian Host''  chocolate-covered macadamias.

My mother had informed me Thursday (Mar. 13) that one of the buildings at the apartments block where we'd first gotten established after we'd left New Jersey when I was about 12 or 13 years-old had experienced a fire the previous night that had displaced dozens of people and injured a small number of residents when a woman admitted that the source traced back to her when she was trying to cook ''tater tots.'' In researching the story, I kept trying to uncover evidence that I'm not crazy in believing that the apartment row that was being identified in the news and rental guides as ''Valley View Village'' was previously named, when we had lived there, ''Rutgers Square.''

This week I'd also managed to work myself down to two small boxes, consisting mostly of old and new receipts and some miscellaneous items I've yet to figure out how to sort them and where to store them.

March 14, 2014 (Friday)
20:30, Eastern Daylight Time

Finally managed to get that  ''HealthCare.gov''  website up and recognizing, after having messed around with it off and on since Tuesday or Wednesday (Mar. 11/12), including deleting my applications about three or four times during the last couple of days. Now, with everything that's been said and done, even with the tax credit applied, the plan in my is still costing me $40/mo. (my mother, who is receiving  ''Medicaid''  thinks that's quite the deal and said that she's paying somewhere in the neighborhood of $200+/mo. for a service that I'd always believed was ''free'' (like ''Single Payer'') or at least heavily subsidized, so I'm encouraging her to check out this ''ObamaCare'' thing to see if signing up for that might at all have any sort of an impact on how much she pays, because being charged that much (at all?) for Medicaid really does not sound kosher. Somewhat related to this, she's still insisting on talking about planning for her ''expiration date'' (which she's been bringing up occasionally for about the past week and a half) as though that were anything I wanted to hear her talking about, saying that she's in discussions with a local mortuary to arrange for her a ''locked-in'' cremation package.

Gracie had come over earlier today, and after mentioning that I'm still weather-watching with a mind of riding up to Jersey next week, she took that as her motivation (against all recommendation not to) to cancel a gyno appointment she had arranged in order to ''accompany'' me on a trip which I kept telling her emphatically that nothing was definite or would be definite until I had some insight on what the weather was going to be: one would've thought that she would use that as her opportunity to get off of those goofy  ''Who?Tube''  videos long enough to check the weather forecasts on her own before deciding to take such an impulsive leap of faith. As I shared this with my mother later in the evening, she proposed the idea of having all of us accompany her to Jersey at the end of the month, where she would be going anyway to pick up one of her North Carolina relatives to bring back south, but to do so we would both have to request a day off from work, which I said I'd be okay with.

March 17 - 20, 2014 (Monday-Thursday)
''Week in Review''

My computer systems continue to interfere with my efforts in every way possible: at the house on Monday (Mar. 17) I thought I'd be able to work on my desktop computer to circumvent all of the hassles the video editing programs on my laptop were causing me in their further attempts to hinder my progress on working on my video projects, but the exact same hang-ups the programs on the laptop were assaulting me with were now being experienced on the desktop, despite the fact that I was trying to do my work within two separate operating systems -- eventually, later in the evening, I was able to finish a video project based on an extemporaneous audio commentary I'd recorded very early in the pre-dawn morning and get it uploaded onto ''Dailymotion,'' but I'd have to wait an extra day before I'd get around to embedding it onto my ''Anti-YouTube'' homepage and uploading the announcement on ''Who?Tube.''

Gracie had also called me to ask if she could be able to spend the night on Wednesday, and when I answered in the negative she somehow took it upon herself to interpret that as meaning that she could just show-up out of the blue Tuesday evening (Mar. 18) with soap, towel and washcloth in hand. I allowed her to lie in bed for awhile as I continued to clean the room, then told her that I'd give her a ride back to her apartment after taking my own shower; when asked why I wouldn't allow her to stay over, I told her that apart from the fact that her presence would be a constant distraction that there were a couple of places I had to ride out to and that I wanted to get it all out of the way before the forecasted rain arrived, also that I was concerned about giving her any new illness as I had still not gotten completely over mine. Even though I did run the errands I said I'd be making, the truth is that I'd have never even gone out at all had she not tried to impose upon my space.

March 21 - 23, 2014 (Friday-Sunday)
''Weekend in Review''

Called my Dad in Friday morning (Mar. 21), after not having received a return call from him after I'd left a message on his answering machine the previous afternoon, to tell him about our plans regarding coming to New Jersey for a couple of days and to see if he'd be willing to let me stay over at his house for a night or two, but he said he wanted to wait until he'd gotten more information regarding a doctor's appointment he was expecting to be scheduled for, which he thought might be set-up on one of the visitation days in question. Shortly after ending the call, my mother informed me that she was leaving to visit my Grandmother, who is now being cared for ''at home'' (actually in the home of my Aunt Kitty-- one of numerous family members whom I'd still not seen since my return to this part of the country), having been taken out of the nursing home when the money began reaching critical levels (of course), and I told her that I'd like to accompany her.

Called my Dad again from the jobsite on Sunday (Mar. 23) after again not receiving any follow-up from him, this time to tell him that due to all of the reports of impending wintry weather all along the eastern shore states stretching from the Mid-Atlantic during the early and mid-parts of the week that I'd decided against making the trip out to him as planned: it had annoyed me that yet again he thought not to follow-up on informing me of his scheduled medical appointment, especially since he had confirmation that it would indeed be on one of the pre-planned ''visitation'' days.

During that same time, just before I called my Dad, Gracie has also decided to discuss her ''sexual health'' related issues, saying that she's beginning to experience severe menstrual crampings again, and she believes that there's some connection between these and her lack of sexual activity, which of course she's still trying to reactivate by talking about plans to make her gynocologist appointment so that she can get back on a birth control pill regimen (an appointment she now complained about missing because she decided to ''reschedule'' after I'd mentioned how I'd wanted to ride out to Jersey, even after I'd kept trying to dissuade her from such actions in light of the fact that I could not predict weather conditions so far in advance that it would not be wise of her to decide on something ''definite'' when even I could not place full faith in the future... so I'm hoping-- without holding my breath --that this would be a ''learning moment'' for her).

March 24 - 27, 2014 (Monday-Thursday)
''Week in Review''

My mother drove me out to the post office right after she'd picked me up from work Tuesday (Mar 25), since I had asked her to be my transportation on account of the weather reports, and my documentation regarding my health care plan had arrived. I had intended on mailing in my payment as I was running about town on Wednesday (Mar. 26) gathering my tax return documents, impulsively borrowing a few DVD movies from one of the libraries, and shopping for a few unnecessary grocery items, but I couldn't figure if the document they'd sent me was an actual invoice that had to be sent back to them or what, so I tried scouting about for a public telephone from which to call them, only to learn that this city seems absolutely devoid of phone booths, but then I figured that even though I'd still rather mail payments in via personal check I should opt for credit card payments for no other reason than to rack up the ''cash back rewards.''

Also Wednesday morning (pre-dawn) I'd canceled my latest ''Amazon'' order so I could switch out one of the DVDs from one I really didn't want (''Inception'') to one I didn't think I'd want (due to the many dismissive or outright negative reviews) until I'd finished watching it online (''The Pact'').

Gracie had also tried again to spend the night Wednesday, then tried to negotiate for Thursday night after I'd advised against it; she then began fishing for reasons as to why I seemed to be drawing away from her, speculating that it may have just been about her cleanliness issues, but later she had to be confronted again with yet another factor of her personality which puts a rift between us, that one being her incessant need to interject into a conversation which often involves drawing presumptive conclusions which go into an alternate direction away from the main point.

March 31 - April 3, 2014 (Monday-Thursday)
''Week in Review''

Because of not being able to contact my father over the weekend, I informed my mother on Monday (Mar. 31) that I'd decided against riding out with her to New Jersey as she'd planned, which she later said after I'd bowed out that she had only planned as a ''make-up day'' for our not being able to make the trip the previous week. I was also not really feeling all that enthusiastic about going anyway, as I had a number of things on my mind and on the table, in particular making sure I'd gotten my initial health care payment submitted on Tuesday's (Apr. 1) deadline (...and as a side note, I'm still extremely &@%#!ng resentful of the fact that my site supervisor at work, for all of his blustering about how much he hated President Obama and his national health care law, managed to qualify for  ''Medicaid''  for his household, which includes a wife with a history of health problems that he'd always whined about not having been able to afford medical care for in the past -- stinking  ''Fox News''  propaganda-swallowing puppets).

Speaking of health care issues, I've been monitoring severe pain and cramping in and around my shoulders which began earlier in the previous week, but I'm uncertain of the seriousness of it even though it does seem to be progressively subsiding for the most part.

On Wednesday (Apr. 2) the weather was finally nice enough that I'd decided I wanted to get out and ride around in the fresh air while running a few errands, and I stopped by Gracie's apartment to see if she would like to tag along, but since no one responded to my announcement I'd assumed that she still must have been at the gym where she'd purchased her membership a month or so earlier. As I'd arrived at ''Towers Shopping Center'' the (last?) city bus was also pulling in, and since I did not know where the new bus stop had been relocated (which was an issue of controversy that gave rise to bitter indignation when I'd first read about it back in mid-February) I followed behind the vehicle until it led me to where it was, and I called out to her just as she was preparing to embark with the group of others.

After refueling the motorcycle before leaving the shopping center, I stopped by the post office to claim my latest (and probably last for a long while) package from ''Amazon,'' then rode out to the ''Williamson Road'' branch public library to return the last of the DVD movies I'd borrowed from there the previous week (I'd already returned the other pair and renewed that last one at the ''Gainsboro'' branch on Monday evening), and borrowed a few more movies, one of which was on Gracie's recommendation which we watched together on my desktop system back at the house.

While en route back to the house I stopped by the new Vietnamese ''Pho'' restaurant at ''Hershberger and Ferncliff'' but the people inside said they were closed, so I left with a copy of their menu: upon reviewing their menu items later, it became clear that it would not be very likely that I will ever give them a chance, seeing how just about every single one of their dishes incorporates  pork  in it... kind of like that restaurant at the corner of ''Orange Ave. and Cove Road'' that seems to sell nothing but sandwich-type items but insists on putting  mayonnaise  on every single one of them as a ''standard'' ingredient.

Gracie again tried to push for sleeping over, but not only am I still sticking with my ''No-Sleepovers'' policy, but even if that had not been the case, I couldn't tolerate the strong smell she was emitting.

Late afternoon / early evening Thursday (Apr. 3), inspired by some of the sights I'd observed about Town as I was riding around with Gracie, I decided to go out again and snap a few local pictures for memories and future video projects; afterwards, I went hog-wild crazy swiping my credit card for a number of costly items at a couple of Vietnamese and a halal Mediterranean / South Asian grocery markets -- the latter being the most costly trip, with the most expensive item purchased being a tin of baklava that I shelled out an insane $31 for!

April 11 - 13, 2014 (Friday-Sunday)
''Weekend in Review''

Gracie came by the house Friday morning (Apr. 11), wanting to continue the conversation which got her geared into another episode of emotional overload earlier in the week when the discussion again turned into why I was not envisioning myself becoming involved in a permanent partnership or even ''casual intimate'' partners after I'd informed her that her announcement that she was wanting to set up another appointment to get back on birth control pills would be a waste of time and money as I'd no intentions of continuing to engage in casual sexual intercourse with her... and of course, in her attempt to do so, she had to do the one thing I'd emphatically castigated her for before: trying to rouse me from when I'm trying to get my sleep -- especially since I'd turned in very late and I was trying to get sufficiently rested for my upcoming work shift.

Prior to leaving for work Saturday (Apr. 12), I was inspired by my mother's fiddling around with the riding lawn mower, trying to dislodge a spark plug and having no compatible tools to do the job, that I'd finally decided to do an air pressure check on my motorcycle tires, but in my attempts to bend the foot-peddle lever back into place I wound up breaking one of the holding rivets out of it, but still managed, with considerable difficulty, to get continued use out of the device so that I can still avoid having to ''pay at the pump'' for what should be a ''gratis'' service.

Upon leaving for work, I'd not set aside any time to prepare a meal for myself, so I'd planned on taking a quick detour to the cheap ''Chinese restaurant'' across from ''Hood Lion,'' but did ended up doing so only as a follow-through after I'd instead decided to make a last-minute diversion to try out the now reopened  ''Jamaican''  restaurant I always ride past along the way to work. The ''black woman'' behind the counter was quite pretty and very visually appealing, but devastatingly treated me with the worst case of ''customer service disinterest'' since that ''Long John Silver's'' incident in Martinsville. Not only that, but she also claimed that she was unable to locate the main entree ingredient of the dish I'd ordered. She said that the new owner was just across the street making a delivery and asked me if I wanted to wait for him to return to check his stock, but I told her that I was pressed for time, and because of this (which was partially the truth, but which of course was not my primary reason) couldn't wait around and that I'd rather be refunded my cash than to order a different dish from their menu.

At the jobsite, Gracie kept talking my ears off about some supposed run-in she'd had with a couple of pit bull terriers and how she kept trying to connect with ''animal control'' and kept getting handed off to ''Salem City Police'' and some other nonsense, stubbornly refusing any & every suggestion to attempt walking up to her apartment from the opposite (not to mention more direct and less steep) end of the street.

April 14 - 17, 2014 (Monday-Thursday)
''Week in Review''

Monday at work (Apr. 14) I began feeling sick, but didn't think much of it until around the time for me to be relieved of my shift: I told the incoming site supervisor that I did not believe I'd be able to come back in for my next shift, but to stand by and expect my call if I felt for certain I was not going to be able to make it in. A few hours later, I decided to have my mother call Gracie to ask her if she'd be able to come in my stead, even though I surmised that I just might be well-enough by that time to carry out my duties anyway: part of me truly wanted to take the time off to rest, but I figured I could lose the time and it would help Gracie's bottom line a bit since she'd been going on & on about wanting to take out a loan because she'd allowed herself to fall behind on her expenses. Word got back to me later that Gracie opted not to work in my place, and somehow got the notion that this meant I was going to be in the house all night, which gave her the idea of spending the night in bed with me -- as she attempted to do so, I told her in no uncertain terms that I did not want to be bothered so as to allow me to get as much undisturbed rest as possible before going in to the job: I had to explain to her that since she had not agreed to cover for me then I'd have to go in anyway, since no one else had been called to be on standby, which then caused her to reconsider and finally agree to work on my behalf and had enlisted my mother drive her to her apartment to get prepared and then dropped off at the job site.

Feeling somewhat better I swung by the worksite later in the following day (Tue., Apr. 15) to retrieve the food container and some other food items I'd inadvertently left at the jobsite the previous day, and to give Gracie my  ''Star Wars''  DVD now that I'd replaced it with one containing the  original theatrical version  of the movie. During our brief encounter, she informed me that she notified both our on-site supervisor and the owner of the company we directly work for that the co-worker she had relieved in my place when she went in to work on Monday had kept threatening me with physical harm (does not exactly meet the definition of a ''smart'' individual, does it?): I told her that she'd done the proper thing by notifying the head guys in charge and thanked her for the heads-up, then I proceeded on with the rest of my itinerary which was mainly to check the post office box and then go to the supermarket for what was only supposed to have been juice (to get rehydrated) and milk for cereal, all of which kept being delayed because of my getting inspired to take a number of snapshots around the city along the way.

Martha had been saying for the past few days that she might decide to spend the night in North Carolina since I'd decided earlier in the previous week that I would not likely be attending  ''Ohana Wednesday''  at the ''Golden Trough'' -- so thinking that I'd be having the house all to myself for the entire time with nothing and no one to distract me from trying to get everything caught-up somewhat, I decided to place a couple of signs in the main doors early Wednesday morning (Apr. 16) to alert Gracie that I intended to have the entire day to myself... but as fate would have it, I had gone from feeling better to feeling worse again and wound up remaining in bed throughout the majority of the day and night. It was during my first up-&-about period that I'd learned that Martha had also chosen not to attend the gathering, as no one else was committing as well.

April 28 - May 4, 2014 (Monday-Sunday)
''Full-Week in Review''

I rode with my mother to retrieve Gracie from the fitness center at ''Towers Shopping Center'' Monday (Apr. 28) so I would not have to ride in the rain to check my post office box and to mail in my state tax payment before the deadline before continuing on to the jobsite (they said that this year I owed them $4, instead of the refund I typically expect to receive). Among the stack of new mail, none of which I was expecting, was included a notice from the city saying that they wanted my money as well -- taxing me on my motorcycle, which mainly pissed me off because of their referring to it as a  ''personal property tax,''  as though they were ''penalizing'' us each year for having the audacity to buy something for our own personal use and enjoyment! (Nobody can ever literally  ''own''  $#!T outright in this coc#$uc#ing world!)

Throughout the rest of the week I was committed to finally trying to structure the establishment of  ''Windows [fudge-dick-eating] 7''  on my primary desktop computer, and trying my best to consistently match & synchronize all of my files & programs, eventually to discover that for whatever reason I cannot get the ''Japanese language'' input keyboard to activate or even appear out in the open on the laptop. But much of my time, even during my days off from work, were spent indoors, frequently in bed.

Gracie had called me while I was at work Sunday (May 4) and asked if I might be able to ride her out to some ''paycheck advance'' place on Friday (May 9), finally confessing to me that she had already taken out that usury-assaulting loan  before  she had even asked for my input on the whole idea (...why does she so insist on doing such totally disregarding crap as this???) -- and when I'd asked her how much of a ''premium'' she was going to be required to pay back just for the sake of convenience, she told me that she had to pay them an astounding $70 extra! I never bothered to ask how much she had received as her original loan, but being how she was saying she was wanting to pay them back ''in full,'' she could not have been loaned very much, considering what her typical paychecks look like.

May 22, 2014 (Thursday)
22:30, Eastern Daylight Time

I had already planned since the previous afternoon (as I'd partially explained to Gracie when she was making it evident that she was attempting to spend the night with me, even though she had to be at work the next day) on taking a trip out to the ''Booker T Washington National Monument'' early in the morning, but I'd asked my mother after she'd woken-up and come downstairs if she had had any plans of her own for the day -- and if not, to inquire about having her drive us out there to spend the day, rather than just me going alone on the motorcycle, and to see if we could later swing by to visit some of the ohana in Rocky Mount before returning to town, after which I'd intended on catching a concert performance at the ''Taubman Art Museum.'' She agreed to the idea and we wound up remaining on the site until after 16:00, which did not leave any time to visit ohana in the area because I wanted to catch the concert at the art museum which would begin at 17:00. Rather than returning to the house so I could pick-up my motorcycle to ride back out downtown, she chose to accompany me at the museum, where the local band-- who called themselves  ''The Ministers of Soul''  --sang almost exclusively classic Soul, Blues, and R&B: after the concert I'd purchased a couple of their music CDs that they had placed on display for sale, to go along with my ''BTW-monument" purchase of W.E.B. DuBois's  ''The Souls of Black Folk''  and a couple of replicas of ''CSA'' (rebellious "Confederate States" of the Civil War) minted coinage.

(My original intent had been to ride out to the town of Staunton to view the live glassblowing demonstration at one of their shops and then journey back to Roanoke via the ''Blue Ridge Parkway,'' but later deciding that I would've been too tired from having been down in the dumps over the past several of days to commit to the plan or have the appropriate energy or enthusiasm to make the trip worthwhile.)

May 23, 2014 (Friday)
18:00, Eastern Daylight Time

After another instance of fussing with it, and after having uncovered additional adjustment options in the desktop's color management environment, I've FINALLY managed to calibrate the display colors on the desktop and laptop to where they match just close enough that to try to perfect the process any further may result in having to start the long tedious & stressful routine all over again.

May 25 - 31, 2014 (Sunday-Saturday)
''Full Week in Review''

Gracie kept me over at the work site Sunday (May 25) asking me to help her fill out a money order with which to pay back a portion of the loan she took out from one of those  ''legalized loan sharks''  of whom she kept whining that she absolutely had to slip something under their door no later than Monday (despite it being a national holiday) or else they were going to proceed with a court action against her, and I spent an hour practically begging her not to do that but to instead wait until Tuesday morning to fill the thing out in person and to get a receipt from the people once she handed over her payment because the extra day-- especially after the holiday --was not going to make any major difference, but she insisted on doing it her way which would've involved not only no guarantees on the loan shark's part but would also take an additional $10 hit out of her pocket because of what my mother was going to charge her for the ride out to the place (which she wanted to increase, I later learned, by trying to offer my mother a milkshake).

Gracie also tried again to spend a couple of nights over (Mon., May 26 and Wed., May 28), each time I insisted she go back to her apartment. Before leaving on Monday she started up her ''not-a-guilt-trip'' guilt trip about how I was not being considerate of her needs & situation because I'd refused to allow her to take a box of my frozen shrimp scampi back with her to her apartment -- the idea being that with the refusal she would be forced to be shocked into ''survival mode'' and really begin applying herself to pulling in the reigns on her expenses: but she again showed that she's refusing to take any recommendations that are for her benefit when she refused my suggestion that she try to get a few groceries at the food bank. So in ''some'' response, I brought by a bag of about $20 worth of groceries to her apartment after I'd left work Tuesday (May 27).

For much of the week I was again trying to tweak the color balances on my computer monitors, finally switching over to the  ''Windows 7''  environment in the desktop system to try to figure out how to make that work.

I also learned late in the week that yet again ''Dailymotion'' is not going to be a viable option for me as an alternative to ''Who?Tube'' when I found out that my German ''Chromium-based'' browser would not play my most recently uploaded project, but I'd learn after some time that this was mainly the fault of that particular browser build alone and that others expressed having similar problems with it. But another thing I would learn was that the visual quality of the videos ''DayMo'' displayed was so sloppy that I'd decided that there was no way out of using ''Who?Tube'' as the standard (even my attempts to use ''Vimeo'' proved to be a major waste of time), despite ''Who?Tube's'' penchant for ''choppy'' playback, especially from the beginning of video playback.

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