Author: Steve

The two pictures kind of look the same.

Except in one she has a sling and is a little loopier, and in less pain, than in the other.

We’re having a comfortable evening and today’s anesthesia is gradually wearing off.  The story might be a little different tomorrow as the implanted painkillers wear off too.  The surgeon did a lot.  The cuff was torn in two pieces.  He sewed them back together, then gave them two new attachment points on the bone.  He fixed an inflamed bursa and tendon.  He cleaned up some arthritis.  He removed a bone spur.  He excised a lipoma.  Originally, he thought the lump on top of her shoulder might be a lipoma, but it didn’t show up as a lipoma on the MRI, so he had to conclude it must be something else; but when he got inside it just looked like a lipoma so he took it out.  He thought a biceps tendon might need repairing or cutting, but it didn’t because it was already gone.  It must have been clipped off in a previous surgery.  It’s one of those situations where you have two different tendons doing the same thing and you only really need one.  Just like John Elway.  We thought it was a catastrophe when, in the middle of his career, he blew a tendon in his throwing arm, but it was the same tendon as this.  They never repaired it and it had no effect on his throwing motion, so from that lesson we can expect that Judy’s throwing motion won’t change at all.

It started with forests.  Forests, specifically healthy old-growth forests, appear static.  Trees grow.  Trees fall.  New ones take their place.  The undergrowth ebbs and flows with the seasons.  Fire might damage some sections, but over time, the damage heals and the forest regenerates.  Forests are living breathing things, but on the human scale of time, it seems to us they don’t change.  The overall composition stays the same.

But on a broader scale, forests do change.  Over centuries or millennia, the make-up of the forest might change; the mix of species can evolve.  The entire forest might migrate upslope or down, north or south on a grand scale with changes in climate.  It’s just a matter of perspective.  Everything that seems like it never changes actually does, if we consider a wider time-scale than we’re used to.  Mountains rise and fall in a hundred million years.  Rivers flow and canyons grow.  Forests, plants, and animals march their way across the planet.  Look at our understanding of the evolution of humans.  They didn’t start equally all over the planet.  So far as we know now, our most ancient ancestors appeared in Africa.  They migrated north.  They retreated.  They migrated again.  From these waves of migrations, new species evolved independently in southern Europe and Asia that had never been to Africa.  The migrations continued and modern humans eventually made it across oceans to major islands, and all the way to North America, then south through the Americas until they could go no further.  This happened in fits and starts, in ebbs and flows, over a hundred thousand years.  To any individual observer, at any time in essentially all of human history, it might appear that the status quo, the climate, the mix of plants and animals in the environment, the range of human habitation, never changed; but over a broader scale the change never let up.

Everything we know migrates and colonizes.  Plants and animals.  Civilizations.  People and tribes migrated, invaded, withdrew, and returned.  Languages spread and evolved.  Religions spread and evolved.  If we had been present in our current incarnation, observing all these changes over all our history, could we have stopped any of it at any point?  Could we have looked at the world as it was at a moment of time and said “This is just right.  This is the way it should be and should always be.”?

So here we are today.   We’ve drawn a line and called it our border.  We stand with arms outstretched, determined to arrest the assault of shifting tectonic plates; the advancement of mountain ranges, rivers, and canyons; the slow-motion migrations of forests, plants, and animals; the movement of any other human, religion, or language.  We are determined.  They shall not pass.

Just saying…

Just because I like this picture.

It’s a willow over a pond, viewed from a deck.  Close to our house.

It looked like things had gone terribly wrong for the little car; it crashed.

There is was, up against the guardrail at a totally wrong attitude, at the edge of the bridge, waiting to get towed away.  (We don’t know who it was that crashed; this is just a situation I came upon while out for a walk.)

Later, from a different angle, it became clear that as bad as the situation seemed at first look, the crashed car would have had it much worse if the guardrail had not given its all to protect it from a much worse fate.

A white duck with a dark head.

We don’t know any white ducks with dark heads, so we looked closer.

It’s a bird grooming.  He’s rolled over to scratch his belly like a sea otter.

And flap his wings when he’s right-side-up.

It’s a common loon.

Our first of the year.