1 Foot in the Grave

Just the way I had spent most of my days the last 3 years, in early May, 2009, I was holed up in my cave of an apartment waiting to die. I was told I had end-stage Emphysema and not a lot of time left.

But that day last May was the beginning of something that changed the way I felt about my life and what I wanted to do with at least part of what I had left of it. The credit goes to David Bromstad, interior designer and host of Color Splash (more…)

In response to so many letters to the editor of Feather Publishing newspapers…

Can we finish up with the complaints about our local California Highway Patrol real soon, please? It’s getting tiresome and some of you are sounding like whiners. Really. Because there have been so few cheering for the CHP, allow me.

I’ve been driving the roads of Plumas County most of my adult life. That totals around 12 (more…)

I can’t believe I let this website nearly die. It has been over a year since my last post and I am still kickin’. I am doing better than this blog. My apologies to all of you thinking you shoulda never added it to your favorites or bookmarks. To show you my sincerity, I have finally given the site its own favicon – the little graphic you should see just in front of the address in your browser (browsers are weird – you may not see it yet, but you will when your browser gets around to it). It looks like a smaller version of the graphic you see over there on the left upper corner of this post.

My health has deteriorated, as is expected with a disease that is chronic and has no cure. But they adjust my medication levels and (more…)

Not a whole lotta real pleasures in my life these days. I really love spending most of my time on this computer, building websites, working with graphics. I also enjoy a few television programs and occasionally I will watch Late Night with David Letterman. He has an irreverent sense of humor and usually gives me a good laugh or three. But the music has never been all that great for me. I don’t know who picks these groups, but some of them are down right repulsive. Whata ya gonna do but change the channel. (more…)

“The Mad Modder” was a tag I picked up sometime in 2003. I was known as “Grump” for a long time – not an undeserved nick-name – and in ‘03, I was hanging out a lot in case modding forums. I built the computer you see in the picture (click it to see a larger version) and it impressed someone at CPU Magazine and it was featured in the October 2003 issue and I became the first “Mad Reader Mod.” Of course, the title was derived from my nick-name and a few people in the modding circles began calling me “the mad modder.” I even got the domain name, TheMadModder.com, which at one time had a pretty nice forum – another one of those things I had to give up when I got sick. (more…)