Highlights of the last several days:

• I ate one of my last Ann Arbor meals Saturday lunchtime at Chinese Buffet II out past U.S. 23 toward Ypsilanti. Not good. But cheap. In fact, that may be their motto. Plus, it was about 2:30 p.m. and I'd moved my life into either my car and storage or just my car (as the case may be) in the previous 24 hours. So it was needed. But it'll be a long time before I go back to any restaurant that's a sequel.
• I watched the second of two cinematic train-wrecks I've seen so far in May on Saturday night at the Thorsley residence before leaving town. Pterodactyl, starring Coolio, follows a bunch of people who are inexplicably at the Turkish-Armenian border, who are eaten (or who narrowly escape being eaten) by pterodactyls, whose inexplicable existence is inexplicably unquestioned by any of said people. Still, it made about 10 times as much sense as Spike's current favorite Steven Seagal opus, Today You Die.
• I drove home through rural Ohio on U.S. 250, which reminded me of all the things I do and don't like about dipshit small-town America, that description hopefully suggesting which list was longer.
• I arrived home to find my folks at my aunt's house, eating leftovers from the funeral of my elderly great aunt who passed away early last week, and got reacquainted with extended family members I'd forgotten about or never known about. None of that is too bad, but it's not my scene, and certainly not after 6.5 hours in the car.
• Yesterday I mowed a large portion of my parents' lawn, some of which was a surprise inspection and three pieces of paper away from being declared a federal wetland. But somehow the little mower that could persevered; that machine deserves a medal.
• I also made the wise move of buying a temporary membership at a local gym so that I can work out while I'm home, and so that I have an excuse to leave the house for at least two hours every day.
• Today I took my dad into Washington (PA) for his final chemotherapy session, and picked him up 5 hours later. At the end I got to watch him work his magic on a bunch of nurses in the large doctors' office. He's been telling them about this alternative therapy elixir shit he's been taking to lose weight--never mind the fact that the real reasons he's lost weight are that cancer has kept him away from his travelling-salesman eating habits, and sapped his appetite to boot. But according to him, it's this elixir that he's "selling"--which in the multi-level marketing game means mostly "buying," of course. Still, he managed to sell the nurses 7 bottles, which is a minor miracle. Of course, he's also selling it at cost to try to drum up business and potential distributors. Because every successful business is based on creating your own competition, of course. My dad could sell a refrigerator to an Eskimo--but only if the refrigerator company were screwing him out of the profits, the refrigerator company claimed its products ran on magic beans found somewhere in the Orient, and refrigerators weren't a particularly lucrative business to begin with. Also, he would try to convince the Eskimos why they should also be selling them to other Eskimos, and letting him skim profits without actually doing any selling.
• The good news is that I wouldn't be bitching about dad if his health didn't seem substantially improved since I last saw him.