Come with Me to the Casbah

My 4 a.m. cellphone alarm roused me overnight; and although still sleepy enough, I was also fairly keen on getting up for an outing to my financial institution's nearest ATM nigh a mile away. I would be making a $300 withdrawal.

I wasted little time readying, for it still becomes day remarkably early, and my damaged right leg would be slowing me down. It may have been no later than 4:20 a.m. by the time I was locking up and leaving.

My wife rose to use the bathroom while I was still readying in my bedroom, but she never deigned to connect with me.

The night air had a desirable cool element to it, and there were lots of clouds. But even then, the eastern sky was losing its darkness.

I got the withdrawal accomplished without incident; and by the time I was back at the elementary school playground ─ the  very young kids' playground, for the equipment where the older kids played had all been removed early this month ─ it was only slightly gloomy out. Dawn was essentially arrived.

The equipment was perfectly dry, so I had no excuse not to exercise, but it becomes a strain when engaged on a daily basis. It always feels as if the affected joints, muscles, tendons, ligaments ─ whatever are involved ─ are overtrained, but this seems the way of it for me as a 75-year-old. I never feel fresh and limber anymore.

So with the usual 30-count between sets, I opened with two sets of pull-ups (seven and two repetitions); then two sets of chin-ups (three and two repetitions), and finished with two sets of pull-ups between a pair of stationary half-rings (two repetitions in each set).

Then back at the bar I used for the regular pull-ups and chin-ups, I held a dead hang for an 80-count with my lower legs curled to keep my feet from contacting the too-near ground I had been standing on. Had I not been burdened with having to keep my legs crooked like that, I would have lasted longer in the hang.

I finished up with eight slow, full-range, decline push-ups on a ramp. 

Back home, I then watered the front yard garden plants ere coming upstairs to my bedroom where I passed time here at my bedside computer until finally returning to bed ─ by then it was after 7 a.m.

I believe that I later heard my younger brother emerge from his bedroom and go downstairs to watch the news and drink coffee.

I didn't want to get out of bed ─ I felt as if I needed to be there. Even when I checked the time ─ perhaps around 8:15 a.m. ─ I still lay there in needful enjoyment for some while.

Again becoming involved here at my computer, it was maybe 9:15 a.m. before finally I went downstairs to join him. By then my wife had risen and already preceded me, having passed by my open bedroom without a word, but greeting my brother as she went down the stairs.

I do not know if she had to work this morning or not. She left around 10:15 or 10:20 a.m. with just a quiet "Bye" that I was unsure I had even heard, only realizing that it must have been so when she opened the front door to depart.

That was the totality of my contact with her this morning. She did, however, come into the living room while my brother and I were watching T.V. ─ she watered one or two of the plants while alerting my brother that a pot of soup she had prepared was not at all spicy, so he could safely partake of it. And he did.

The morning ─ just as yesterday morning ─ was solidly overcast. But today as I type these words at 2:40 p.m., the clearing is nowhere near complete. The sky was blue when I began sunning yesterday at 2:30 p.m.

And now at 2:42 p.m. my brother has just bade farewell to Bev as he leaves afoot for a bus to commence his daily social drinking.

Perhaps I will break from this post and risk some time out in the backyard sunning.

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Basically I sunned from 3:03 p.m. until 4:16 p.m. The first third of that time did have a lot of shadowy or screened sunlight exposure, but it was all good, of course.

But back to the morning and T.V. with my brother; upon getting his invitation to start operating our Android TV Box, I led things off with a 39-minute (39:51) video published earlier today at Rumble's USAFrontlineDoctors channel: JESSE WATTERS PRIMETIME (July 18, 2025) Full Episode.

The video concerned itself with a half dozen or more different stories I am not going to bother myself trying to identify, since its own description did not do that.

I then attempted for us to watch an episode of an old British T.V. series from the earlier 1960s, but I failed to get a decent link that offered the video without any buffering, so I have since downloaded the episode ─ we'll get around to watching it in a month or two, so I will cite it then.

The only other thing we watched was the bulk of the movie remaining from the nine or 10 minutes we had watched yesterday morning before my brother broke for his midday bed rest.

The movie was 1938's Algiers.

Since I was a pre-teen in the earliest 1960s ─ if not even back into the late 1950s ─ I have been aware of the French-accented spoken phrase, "Come with me to the Casbah." And so throughout this movie I was on the alert for it.

But I never heard it spoken.

And now I realize that ─ as that Wikipedia's section "In popular culture" explains ─ it is an apocryphal quote, for Charles Boyer never spake it.

Beautiful Hedy Lamarr has been known to me since at least the latter 1960s when I read much of a tabloid's serialization of Ecstasy and Me. But the movie also included a very beautiful actress entirely unknown to me named Sigrid Gurie who was at least as beautiful as Hedy.

I feel moved to watch as many movies of both of these women as I can ... in time; my viewing list in dreadfully enormous, and can never be realized in the lifespan remaining to me.

Anyway, should you be interested in watching this movie, my source was Rumble's Classic Movies channel: Algiers (1938) | Directed by John Cromwell - Full Movie.

The time is now 6:02 p.m. and I have had some exercise in my wife's vacant bedroom, but I want to take a longer break that will likely commence with a movie here on my bedside computer and at least one can of Cariboo Malt (7.9% alcohol).

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I tuned in a Christmas movie ─ 2018's Rent-an-Elf. Although it was weak, I found it tolerable until possibly halfway through the movie when the Black male character Liam's wife returned to him and their young son Nathan. From that point Liam was an utter block-headed ass who made me despise having to sit through the remainder of the movie, but I felt committed.

All I can imagine is that Liam must have had some perverse thing for White blondes, and that was why he first 'fell in love' with the freak that was his wife ─ who had run off a year earlier to Nepal because she couldn't stand the routine of being a mother.

This prick Liam was insufferably stupid ─ I don't even want to talk any more about the crappy plot. Let's just leave it at dreadful.

The lead female character was another White blonde, incidentally ─ thus my conjecture on Liam's possible predilection for them. I'm unfamiliar with actress Kim Shaw, but her character Ava was likeable enough. And that was certainly so for her friend and business partner Sahara, as played by Rachel Grate.

If you think you have the endurance to watch this once in a lifetime film ─ in other words, I intend never to watch it again ─ my source was this uFLIX.to link.

Because I ate my supper early into the meal, I was able to hold myself to one beer.

It was too early for bed when all was done ─ and my brother had still not returned ─ so I tuned in Crisis. This time it was episode three ("What Was Done to You") of the only season.

It was engrossing, helping erase some of the distaste the Christmas movie had left me with. But I want to start seeing 'bad guys' get taken out ─ and I badly want the ring leader toasted.

I watched the episode at this GOOJARA.to link, and had my evening's second can of beer during it.

Once the episode was finished, I peeked downstairs and saw that my brother was home, passed out in the living room in his favourite T.V. chair.

I have no plans to be getting up ahead of 6 a.m., for I only expect to be doing some local grocery shopping, and the store doesn't open until 8 a.m.

Right now it is 10:08 p.m., so I am calling this post for today complete.