Still thinking… All that extra money for drugs in the U.S. is probably not going to the government. It’s going to the drug companies. They charge different prices in different countries. Is it a voluntary thing for them to price differently in different countries? Are they making value judgments and only charging what they think each country can afford? Or are they making value judgments and charging the *most* they think each country can afford? Or are the different prices the result of government intervention? Are governments stepping into the otherwise unrestrained free market and establishing limits on what the drug companies can charge, and our government steps in less than most?
We have a backup plan
We’re ready for anything. Hurricane coming? We jump in the motorhome and drive farther from the coast. Y2K coming? We parked the rig on December 31st with full tanks of water, fuel, and propane. With food in the cabinet and a generator for electricity, we were good for weeks if we needed to be. Company coming? We set the motorhome up as a guest cottage. Air conditioner in the house goes on the fritz? We fire up the coach and live in the cool air there until the house is habitable again. Problem. Our air conditioner in the house went on the fritz yesterday afternoon. It never came on all night long. Even with all the windows open, the bedroom never got below 84 degrees. The bus is nowhere in sight. It’s 50 miles away in Harlingen getting painted. We lost our backup plan. It was in the 90s in our house by the time the air conditioning guy got here this afternoon. With cooling restored, we should be completely comfortable again by tomorrow morning. I remember growing up in California without air conditioning. Nobody had air conditioning then. That means during heat waves, when it was 100 degrees, it was 100 degrees in the house too. I don’t remember it being that hot. We love this hot humid weather here, but it turns out we love it more when we can escape to the cool anytime we choose!
I have a question
It costs $30 for a tube of Voltaren gel, an arthritis pain reliever, at any pharmacy in the United States. If we walk across the border to Mexico, the same tube of Voltaren gel costs $8. It’s the same product from the same manufacturer, in the same packaging. Why can we walk a few blocks south and buy it for less than 1/3 the U.S. price? If we were talking about gasoline for our car, we could attribute the difference to state and federal taxes. We know taxes are a significant part of the price of fuel, and presumably they are used to maintain roads, bridges, and tunnels. If we were talking about cigarettes it would be the same thing. The price of ingredients is a small part of the total price. Cigarettes are taxed up to $5 a pack. So where does this price difference for drugs go? Does it go to the government or the drug company?
One more thought about Lake Wohlford
In my reminiscence a few weeks back, I neglected an important detail. There was a castle on a hill overlooking the lake. It wasn’t really a castle of course, but that description fit our imaginations. It was an old hand quarried stone foundation of what was to be a great house for Earl and Ava, the owners of the Lake Wolford Resort. I added it to the map of the area I sent out earlier. It was an easy walk and climb from our trailer. It was already an abandoned project by the time we were there as kids in the 1950s. Lake Wohlford map (We were there for the bulldozing of the mountain top to make an airport. The story was he just went up and bulldozed out a runway and was bummed when he found out he needed to get permits, and had to wait way too long (like maybe two years) for the dirt to settle before he could pave it to complete the project.) Having remembered Earl and Ava’s names, I googled Lake Wohlford again and found this article from a San Diego paper: http://hiddensandiego.net/lake-wohlford-lookout.php And this one from the Los Angeles Times: http://articles.latimes.com/1992-12-16/sports/sp-1874_1_lake-wohlford-cafe Turning the remains of the foundation into a castle may be the stuff of childhood fantasies, but apparently Earl Losch never outgrew his childhood illusions and was not dissuaded by the challenges of an impossible task. (These are not my photos. I scrounged them from the web.)
Black-tailed gnatcatcher
This is what blue-gray gnatcatchers looks like
They have black tails with white on the edges.
They’re common here in the Valley all winter. When we were in Arizona this year, we got to see *black-tailed* gnatcatchers too.
That’s a much less common bird for us.
It’s funny, but the most distinctive distinguishing feature about a black-tailed gnatcatcher is not that they have a black tail, it’s that black-tailed gnatcatchers have a black cap.
They have black tails with white on the edges. They’re common here in the Valley all winter. When we were in Arizona this year, we got to see *black-tailed* gnatcatchers too. That’s a much less common bird for us. It’s funny, but the most distinctive distinguishing feature about a black-tailed gnatcatcher is not that they have a black tail, it’s that black-tailed gnatcatchers have a black cap.