Better than the previous post

University Drive corn, since cut down.
I've gotten quite a lot of negative feedback about the last post on skin ailments. Sorry, but thanks for all your suggestions! My rash is less severe on the whole and I think and hope I can rule out scabies. It may be I've got "contact dermatitis" from brushing up against some foliage or being bitten by bugs while painting our house.



I won't post any photos of my feet other than this one in which I inadvertently caught them while focusing on these Hampshire College Farm vegetables on the way to the broiler.


It's that wonderful time of year just before the leaves turn color and it starts getting cold.


Snapped this pic of a beaver swimming in the pond off the Norwottuck bike trail a few evenings ago.


So this is the beginning of a planned time-lapse presentation of my hair growing gray. I'm not going to dye it anymore or at least that's my current plan. Probably won't be doing any more Sarah Palin imitations. I guess I finally got sick of her, anyway, after the "death panels" debacle.
As I'm turning 52 in a couple of days, I thought I'd re-read my 2007 series of posts on reaching 50. I wrote about "time going by inexplicably fast" and wanting to take "a long vacation to some dusty place that time has forgotten." Well, I kind of did that after I got laid off in May and went to Thailand to take a certificate course in Teaching English as a Foreign Language. We stayed at the British International School, where alcohol and cigarettes were forbidden on campus. In a sense, it was a throwback in time.


Sometimes when I was in Thailand I really did feel like the character from the Paul Simon song "You can call me Al" I started to identify with as I approached 50. He's walking down a strange street in a strange country where he doesn't know know the language and has "no currency." He's got some unlikely role model who ducks back down an alley and he asks himself, "What if I die here?" He looks up a little while later, though, and notices there are "angels in the architecture." That song never gets old.



What with my hair, my high cholesterol, occasional dizziness and rash, I feel like I'm stuck together with paper clips and chewing gum , sometimes. Other times, I feel -- FANTASTIC.