We had an appointment for Judy to get her knee looked at by the Ortho. My appointment to get my shoulder looked at was not until next week, but they squeezed me in while we were there just to be nice. We didn’t get what we expected with Judy’s knee. She has arthritis in the joint and it will need to be replaced at some point. Right now though, they think most of the pain is coming from out-of-control tendonitis. They’ll try to calm the knee down with a heavy-duty dose of oral steroids, ice, and physical therapy. Once that happens, we can re-assess. For me, all signs point to a blown rotator-cuff. I got x-rayed. We both got appointments for more imaging; an MRI for Judy, and a CT Scan for me. Initially they were going to MRI me as well, but there is some question about the composition of the metal in my heart stents. I can understand their concern about suddenly pulling the stents out of my chest with the MRI machine and making a mess. Three hours to get there, three hours at the orthopedist, an hour at Snoopy’s and a three hour drive home. I think the day is done.
Truckers
Sometimes, early in the morning when we’re traveling, we pull into (or drive past) rest areas that are totally clogged with long-haul truckers that stopped there for the night before. As we drive past trucks pulled over on the shoulder on the ramp before they even get all the way in to the rest area we have to wonder: “How did the truckers on the inbound ramp know that the whole back part of the rest area was already full?” If they drove down to look at the big diagonally striped truck parking area and found no room, they would already be screwed. It would be a long loop on the freeway to go around and come in again. They would have to just drive on to the next rest area. Does someone get on the radio and serve as truck stop monitor to warn truckers not to come all the way in? Meanwhile, tomorrow is a big day. A trip to Corpus for Judy’s appointment with the orthopedic surgeon. We’re thinking total knee replacement. We’re hoping he’s thinking the same and we get on his surgical schedule.
An easier solution
We don’t need to control heating and cooling with alternate thermostats in different rooms, switching back and forth between them. There is a digital solution already out there! There is such a thing as a “wireless thermostat”. Mount the base unit in place of the old thermostat. Carry the wireless thermostat anywhere you want in the house. The heating and cooling system will respond to the temperature in the room where the wireless thermostat is; the living room in the evening, the bedroom at night, the office during the day. If we want, we can close floor vents in rooms we’re not using in different parts of the day without screwing up the balance of the whole system. That will even save energy; directing flow to where we need it when we need it. Simple. I can hardly wait. Thanks for all the help getting me pointed the right direction.
The (almost) perfect solution
The golf cart batteries tend to go dead when we leave them alone for months at a time. This time though, we got smart. We disconnected the negative terminal while we were gone so there could be no electrical draw; no drain. Doing that worked great, except that in the intervening months, we forgot we had disconnected the batteries, so when we got home we thought the batteries were dead. We tried charging them to no avail. Finally, one of us remembered that one of us had disconnected the batteries. Reconnecting the batteries brought us full circle to the perfect solution, except for that part in the middle about forgetting what we had done. Happy to be back in South Texas. Ready to grill and smoke some real food. Now, if only we can figure out what we did with the instant-read thermometer and the remote temperature sensors for the smoker. Been looking since yesterday. We must have done something really clever with them…
“We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Pogo. The war on drugs. A trillion dollars. Has it eliminated, or even reduced, drug use in our country? I don’t think so. The war on immingration. Has it reduced the number of illegals crossing our borders to work? Yeah. Probably. But is that a good thing? Is that what we really want? In each of these cases, it’s not people forcing anything on us, it’s people supplying what we demand. It’s not the mean (and they *are* mean) drug cartels forcing us to use drugs. They’re responding to our demand for them. Is it the bad Mexicans and South Americans forcing us to employ them? No. They’re responding to our demand for low-wage workers. What’s the common denominator? Us! We’re the ones creating the demand. We can’t solve an economic problem by focusing all our attention on the suppliers. We need to look to the source of the demand. What the next logical step then? Go after the ones causing the problem. Withdraw from the war on drugs and the war on immigrants. It’s time for a war on us!