The Melancholy Of The Grapes Of Wrath On An Unsettling Day

Yesterday the view you see in the picture had returned to blue sky. Today it has returned to what you see in today's picture. It appears to be building to something. I see a lightning strike in my future. Hopefully not a direct hit to my head. Though at this point in time, that might come as relief.

I'd not realized I'd not blogged today til I got an email from my therapist, Dr. L.C., who asked, "Are you okay?" She asked the same thing last night when she saw I was up late, she seemed to be concerned that I might not be conscious whilst email, and was instead sleepwalking and emailing.

This morning I lost an hour or 3 fixing a weird link woe that I discovered when this bit.ly thing I use to shorten URLs for Twitter came up with a No URL Found Error. I was trying to make a link to the webpage I'd made about the Riverwind Casino, up by Norman in Oklahoma. But somehow the pathline of that URL was wrong, with the folder that held the Riverwind Casino files named "Riverwind Casino." But the pathline in the URL changed to "riverwind casino," with no capitalized first initial, hence the No URL Found Error.

I soon found the error was repeated on every page with that link, except the main index page and the sitemap.txt file that gets sent to Google. So, ironically, the webpage was indexed correctly, it was just mucked up on my website. How this occured, I have no idea. It is very perplexing.

You'd think such a thing would be easy to fix. You would be wrong.

Then this morning I learned that one of my favorite people's dad has cancer bad. I was already feeling melancholy. Then somehow my little sister got me remembering the day she was born. More melancholy. Not a sad melancholy, more a melancholy of realizing happy days, long ago, that never will be again.

I'd been being melancholy since 2 nights ago when I watched Grapes of Wrath. I'd watched Grapes of Wrath before, but not when America was going through the worst economic crisis since the era of Grapes of Wrath.

Maybe I'll muster enough non-melancholy energy to blog about the Grapes of Wrath. I have a personal connection to that era that I find interesting.

Befuddled In Texas By Oklahoma Casinos

So far today, this second Friday of this year's July, things have not gone well. Up to the point where I tried to go up to Oklahoma to a couple casinos, those being the WinStar World Casino and the Riverwind Casino, I was having me a good day.

I was in the pool early, the water about the same temperature as the air. I just remembered, the bad Friday started off bad way before the pool. I must have temporarily blocked the trauma from my memory.

I got up, made coffee and about 5 minutes later was sitting in front of the computer monitor. I took a sip of coffee and something other than coffee floated into my mouth. I spit it out. I could not find whatever it was. My worst case scenario is it was a cockroach. But I found no evidence.

So, a couple hours after possibly having a cockroach in my mouth, I decided to make some webpages about Oklahoma casinos. I make these things for purely non-altruistic reasons. Usually I whip them out, slap ads on them and am done with it. But it was one screw up after another. Like the Riverwind Casino. A couple weeks ago I'd made a webpage about Riverbend in Oklahoma. I kept changing Riverwind to Riverbend. You would think this is no big deal, but after you've slapped the wrong name on multiple pages, it is a big deal.

And then, somehow I put the Riverwind info on the WinStar page, and vice versa. That also sounds like no big deal, but trust me, it was very befuddling.

I made a map for the Riverwind one. After it had uploaded I saw I'd turned it into Riverbend. This involved re-doing the map in a photo program. Sounds like no big deal, and it did only take about a minute, but it's just the making the same mistake over and over again thing is annoying. Very annoying.

I have not been up to the WinStar since its name change from plain ol' WinStar to WinStar World Casino. I knew they had expanded the thing, but I had no idea it is now the world's 5th biggest casino. I really have trouble believing that. I have been in some pretty big casinos.

I'd not been in the WinStar since several years ago when Chris, then living in Ada, met me there to go to the buffet. At that point in time the WinStar building was a tent-like building. It looked very cheap. Now it looks like real buildings. And is huge. Themed, with 6 of the 10 casino plazas making like you are in a foreign city. You can walk from Vienna to Rome to Madrid to Paris, then cross the channel to London, before you take a long flight to Beijing.

The new WinStar sounds sorta fun. But I know I'd be disappointed and regret it later. I always am and I always do. Usually. I think maybe I'll go hike the Tandy Hills and see if that improves me foul mood.

The WinStar is not far from my location. About an hour and a half drive, a mile across the Red River and the Oklahoma border. Below is a video that takes you on a virtual tour of the WinStar World Casino. Who wants to meet me there for lunch?