We’re going to take Henry to the groomer and get him some eyeballs.
Economics 101
Remember the Health Care issue? I don’t think it has been solved yet. I could solve it though. Check this out. I see three parts to it: Health care providers, insurance companies, and people. Are they all necessary? What if we got rid of the providers? Can’t do that, then nothing would happen when people got sick. The people pay for everything, either directly or indirectly, so we can’t get rid of them. What if we cut out the insurance company factor? The process could still work. What does the insurance company do, anyway? They take your money, pay a whole bunch of people, make some profit, then pass the rest along to the health care providers. Let’s just take less money from the people and give it directly to the doctors and hospitals. We just cut the cost of health care in half. Health care crisis solved! What did I just do, put a few hundred thousand insurance company employees out of work. Oops. There goes the economy.
St Vrain River Greenway
I wonder
I wonder if some things we don’t think of as related really are. As I get older, plaque accumulates on my teeth more than it used to. I accumulate plaque in the arteries of my heart. I wonder if those two kinds of plaque are related, or if the proclivity to form one kind inclines a person to accumulate the other as well. I’m told I have Small Vessel Disease in my heart. It’s not so much a clogging of the small blood vessels, but a constriction. Sometimes the small blood vessels constrict and restrict flow when they should be doing the opposite. Years ago, while flyfishing, I discovered that my fingers are over-sensitive to cold. In response to cold, my body doesn’t pump more blood through my fingers to warm them, it over-reacts the other direction and completely shuts off blood flow, so my fingers first go numb, then turn pallid (fish-belly white), then turn blue-black. It looks like I’ve lost them to frostbite, and it’s disturbing, but when I re-warm them, the normal color returns. It’s called Raynaud’s Syndrome. I wonder if the small vessel conditions in my hands and heart are related. Have you ever watched a field of sunflowers? The flower heads turn to follow the sun. By evening they are all pointed west. On Saturday morning we went birding and drove past a field of sunflowers before the sun had hit it yet. All the flower heads were pointed east. So I wonder: Do sunflowers anticipate? When the day is done and they’re all pointed west, do they remember that the sun is going to come up in the east the next morning, so turn themselves overnight to be ready for it? Or do they spend the night pointed west, then discover at sunrise the next day that the sun is in the east and they need to turn to meet it? I wonder.
When it’s time to turn around
I always want to walk to the next bend in the trail, or top of the next hill, to see what I didn’t hike to. Know what? There’s an app for that!
With the My Tracks app, I can see without going there. There is a map of where I am and where I’ve been.
There are stats for how far I’ve walked and how long I’ve been out.
There is even a plot of speed versus altitude.
Of course, I still hike to the top of the next hill before I turn around, but sometimes I get to pick out things on the map that I didn’t know were there and adjust my hike. If there is ever a question about which way to go to get back to where I started(not that that would ever happen), it’s right there. I love this app!