Well, really, it's a hornet. It's a bit scary to be in the pool and have him dive bombing about while he works ...
... then eventually he settled down to the business of digging his hole to bury his spoils.
I have to tell you once he stopped flying I was hard pressed to stop watching his work. Fascinating.
I wear contacts, and about a month ago, when two lenses unexpectedly and inexplicably tore within a day of first using them, I realized I was down to my last pair. As it’s been a little over 2 years since my last eye exam, I knew that 1-800-Contacts was not going to send me any more lenses without a new prescription. Earlier this year I’d tried to make an appointment with the optometrist who’s examined my eyes regularly since I first needed reading glasses, about 15 years ago, but I gave up going back to her when, in response to my requesting that the office schedule enough time for me to be fitted with two different types of lenses, as they’ve done previously, I was told I’d have to make two separate appointments. This is the same office that overcharged me a couple of years ago when Chris was still on my insurance and both he and I had eye exams within a week of each other. At the time, I thought I was paying too much, but the receptionist insisted that was what I owed, so I didn’t argue. I learned I’d been overcharged over a year later, when I went in for another eye exam, and a different receptionist cheerfully told me I had a $150+ credit on my account. I like the doc, but because her idea of extended hours is to remain open until 6:00 one night a week, and because their policy of requiring two separate appointments to be fitted with two different types of lenses means I’d have to take two afternoons off work or telecommute for two days to have an eye exam and be fitted for contacts, I decided it was time to find a new doc. Also, because I'm 58 and because my oldest brother has glaucoma, and one of my sisters has a serious eye disorder in one eye, I decided to see an ophthalmologist instead of an optometrist. Looking through providers on my insurance plan, I found a board-certified ophthalmologist with real extended hours (Saturdays!) and an office a couple of miles from my house. I went to see her this week.
I didn’t like her staff any better than the staff in the optometrist’s office. After a long wait, I had a brief vision test with my contacts in place, then I removed them and we repeated the test, after which a twenty-something asked me to follow her through the maze of the waiting room to a long, narrow room in the back of the office. The room was like a narrow bowling alley, lined with chairs on either side, half of which were occupied by patients avidly watching Court TV, which was blasting from a television set at the end of the room. “Sit there,” the twenty-something said, indicating a chair next to a rather elaborate machine, “and tilt your head back!” She came toward me with a bottle of drops. I knew she was going to put them in my eyes, but I couldn’t resist asking, “What are those?” “Numbing drops,” she said, sounding incredibly bored as she squeezed them into my eyes. Uh-huh. They stung like crazy for a moment before they worked their magic. She then proceeded to clean the tip of a wand-like instrument that appeared to have a needle at the end of it…at least that’s what it looked like to me, because without my contacts in, although I can see across a room just fine, everything up close is a blur…and I was rather alarmed when she brought this needle-like object toward my eyes. “Don’t move,” she commanded. Ha! No danger of my moving with that thing directly in front of my eyes. One eye at a time, she touched it to both my eyes and/or eyelids, with everything numb and unable to focus, I couldn’t tell which. To my relief, it didn’t hurt. “What does that do?” I asked, when she was done. “It measures your pressure,” she said. After that, she dilated my eyes and I sat with all the other patients, watching Court TV and waiting to be examined.
Eventually, it was my turn, and I went into yet another room where I met the ophthalmologist. In spite of the wait and the impersonal attitude of her staff, I liked the doc immediately. She introduced herself using her name rather than her title, and was very matter of fact and down to earth. She examined my right eye first, and then, as she examined my left eye with the ophthalmoscope, she asked how long since my last eye exam (a little over 2 years), whether my eyes were dilated then (yes). She said, “Your left optic nerve is a lot bigger than the right, did you know that?” “No…what?” I asked. She said, “There’s a deepening of the cup, with a widening of the cup-to-disc ratio, in your left optic nerve…” When I got home and googled it, I learned that the textbook term is “glaucomatous changes in the optic nerve”. She tried to reassure me. She told me not to be alarmed, that my pressures were normal (20 in my right eye, 19 in my left...normal range is 10-21)…she didn’t tell me that there’s a kind of glaucoma called “normal tension glaucoma”. She did say that because pressures tend to fluctuate in accordance with circadian rhythms, she wanted me back in a week or so to measure my pressure first thing in the morning, and also to do a couple of hours of visual field tests, etc.
Uh-huh. We made the appointment then and there. At work the next day, I told my boss and said I’d need to go back for another exam. She said fine, but I couldn’t miss a meeting she’d scheduled…of course, it conflicted with the time of the appointment, so I called to reschedule and learned the next available is in a month. I took that, and come hell or high water, I’ve blocked out the time on the office calendar and I’ll be there.
Changes in the optic nerve…shoot. Best case scenario is that I don’t yet have glaucoma; next best is that we’ve caught it early, and that with regular monitoring and meds, we can slow down the changes and keep them from progressing. And that said…I’m grateful it’s one eye, not both. I’m grateful that this didn’t happen when I was younger (there are children, even babies, born with glaucoma). And I’m grateful to live in a time when there are ways to slow down and maybe even prevent the vision loss that used to be inevitable with glaucoma.
Old Hallowell Days, Hallowell, Maine, July 19, 2008
Happy Friday Folks. May you all enjoy a wonderful weekend!
This has been kicking around for awhile, but I’ve had trouble bringing all the threads together. I’ve a got a picture. Now if I can just fit it in a frame.
Harking back to my entries on canning and stuff. It was work, but it wasn’t. There was time between batches to kick back, read a little, harass a little sister (or be harassed), pull a weed or three, to just be. That’s how I was raised. That’s what families do; or did. And that’s what they did for generations. What really bugs me is that when the work gets entered in the balance sheet for gross national product, all that ends up in the final total is the cost of the materials. There’s no line in GNP for the creation of the ties between friends and families.
The work was done within the family or with friends. Think back on all those stories of barn raisings and quilting bees. The work got done, but no money changed hands. More than likely everybody went home with tired bodies, full stomachs, the satisfaction of a job well done and enough juicy gossip to keep tongues wagging until the next get together.
No income was recorded. No taxes paid. Well, in our case, dad got paid by Pope and Talbot for managing one of their cutting crews, but that information got put on a different line on the balance sheet.
I’m sure it wasn’t some sinister conspiracy, but somehow we’ve been convinced that it’s more productive for both parents to work outside the home and pay someone else to provide the things we did for ourselves. Or try to squeeze all that “unpaid” work in around the edges.
And no, we didn’t do it all. No family could ever provide everything they needed from within the family. They always had to fill in with what they couldn’t do themselves. And no, I don’t want to live in a country where the only job for woman is in the home. I like having the choices.
But, I get the feeling it’s a giant shell game. The same work gets done. But, now the national economy recognizes the value of the work because a dollar value can be attached to it and taxes get paid. And somehow the parent that stays home is seen as being less productive than if they were in the paid job market.
And I guess you need to push to have both parents in the job market while the pressure keeps building to turn pre-school into kindergarten and kindergarten into the first grade. Can’t have those pesky children taking too much time to become employable for the jobs we’ve decided are worth paying for. There’s very little room anymore for clowns, dreamers, contemplatives or other square pegs.
I truly believe we’ve lost even more. There’s a knowledge that comes from having to manage things. You don’t learn that in a class room. There’s a knowledge that comes from knowing you won’t always get what you want the way you want it. You just might have to settle for something else. You may have to wait awhile. And you just might find out that what you get is so much more than you expected.
And in reference to Lisa's earlier entries today. You can't say this often enough. If you have to explain the joke, it probably wasn't funny in the first place. Humor can be, and often is, a thinly veiled excuse for hostility. How many of us have found ourselves laughing at a joke while thanking whoever runs the universe that the joke wasn't directed at us. When you call the "joker" on his/her bad taste they can try turn it back on you. You're just not sophisticated enough to get the joke. Puhleez. Perhaps we're caught off guard with no snappy comeback. I've had those deer in the headlights moments more than once. Or maybe we're just too polite to tell someone he's the south end of a north bound Missouri mule.
I just finished reading an editorial in Sunday’s paper, written by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. In which she suggested that, in the wake of the New Yorker cartoon going over like a fart in church, the Obama campaign needed to get a sense of humor. Her last “zinger” in the piece was something to the effect that “…if Obama gets elected, it won’t be the economy that’s depressed…it will be the rest of us.”
Oh, now there’s a mature point of view.
Apparently, it is a requirement in 21st century America that our leaders entertain as well as govern us.
Did it ever occur to Dowd that some things simply are not funny? Should not be funny?
Oh, yes…a ponderous load of satirical humor has been aimed at the Bush Administration over the last eight years. That was because if we didn’t find a way to laugh at the preposterous performance of Bush and his cronies, we were going to start crying and never stop.
Maybe it’s a good thing that Barack Obama’s earnestness, and, yes, his blackness, are going to make it difficult to inject the kind of mean-spirited humor into Campaign 2008 that has been a hallmark of the past several campaigns. Maybe it’s time America realized that the position in which we find ourselves, after the eight-year run of “Mr. Bush Destroys Washington,” is decidedly unfunny.
Up until a few weeks ago, I was so submersed in the café and all its multiple layers of challenges that I had no time to write. And if I did have a minute or two to call my own, my brain was too fried to craft anything worthwhile. Forget about creativity…legibility would have been a stretch. I was to the point where I could barely speak without screaming, growling or sobbing. I had no desire to try to write from that place.
All it took was a few successful (at least for now) hires to scoop me out of there and lift me to the plateau upon which I now find myself. After successfully completing what passed for a vacation—a week in which I only had to work 1 ½ days—my chronic exhaustion began to abate. In the two weeks since, I have been able to wangle two—count them, TWO—days off in every seven. I’m almost beginning to feel human again. Unfortunately, my ever-churning mind cannot seem to take advantage of the opportunity to switch off for awhile. Sans the overload of café issues that have been swirling around in it for the past many moons, it has begun sucking in new topics. Or perhaps it is simply letting in the stuff that would have been there, had it not been running over with entrepreneurial backflow.
First and foremost, there is the national political scene to worry about. I can’t help but notice that the whole election process appears so much less snarky than it was four years ago. With the exception of that horrid cartoon on The New Yorker, I’ve hardly seen or heard anything that has made me want to scream at the television or hide my head under a cardboard box until the election is over. I don’t know if this is because the Karl Roves of the world have been excluded from the process this time, or if the candidates are aware of the average American’s increasing disgust with the divisiveness, or if the media have for some reason changed their focus from creating sensation to responsible reporting (this seems doubtful…) Or maybe John McCain and Barack Obama are just un-sensational men. Well, that can’t be it. Who could possibly be more un-sensational than George W. Bush?
And then there is the economy.
I wrote a prophetic little blurb in my other journal back in March. Rather than link to it, I’ll just copy it verbatim here (it’s short….):
Gas Prices Rise to New National Record
Watch for prices of just about everything to reach a bone-crunching crescendo as the Bush Administration grabs for every dollar it can for its Big Energy puppet masters, before it goes down into the tarpits at the end of this year...
Can they accomplish this without laying complete waste to the nation's economy? Probably not.
Do they care what happens to the nation's economy? Obviously not.
Their solution: Go borrow a bunch of money from China, throw a few bucks at the general population as you bow out, stuffing your pockets all the way, and let the next administration worry about cleaning up the mess.
Surprised?
Not really...
The soulless avarice of the Bush Administration is without peer, at least in modern memory. This administration has existed for one purpose and for one purpose only: To advance the political and financial aspirations of Big Energy, particularly Big Oil. I do not believe there is anything they would not do, anyone they would not kill, any society they would not destroy, any war they would not start, in order to establish and maintain their place as the richest and most powerful men in the world. They would do anything to tighten their grip on a few more billion dollars. And have no doubt, money does equal power. The Texas Junta has demonstrated this so flagrantly that one would have to be the equivalent of an animated potato to have missed it.
I further predict that gas prices and the economy will miraculously heal themselves almost immediately upon George W. Bush’s exit from the White House. It is to be hoped that we can all dig in our fingernails and hang on until that time…
I’ve never seemed to hear the music that most other people hear. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve actually felt the presence of God (whoever or however you define “God”) inside the walls of a human built sanctuary. My spiritual search sometimes feels like I’m hiking towards that glow on the horizon with a herkin’ great pebble in my shoe and no matter how many times I shake out that shoe the pebble won’t come out. The darn thing moves around. Its size and shape seems to change with every step. So I keep marching along; stopping every now and then to shake out the pebble that magically finds its way back before I have time to take the next step.
I have a shelf of books on various flavors of Christianity, neo-paganism, pagan reconstructionism, Wicca, shamanism…..you name it; I’ve at least looked it up on the internet. There will be one or two pieces that speak to me and the rest leaves me cold.
And then I find this:
My Lord God
I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really understand myself.
And the fact that I think I am following
Your will does not mean I am actually doing so.
But I believe that the desire to please you
Does in fact please you.
And I hope I have the desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.
And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the
right road though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore will I trust you always though I may
seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.
I will not fear for you are ever with me and
you will never leave me to face my troubles alone.
by Thomas Merton
And then I think that maybe someone else heard the music I hear.
Yes, I know it's not Friday (again.) I guess I consider it an accomplishment if I post a photo a week. At some point, I might even get the day right.
And anyway, I didn't get these pictures until this morning. It was a gorgeous summer day here in the Pacific Northwest, and my husband, my sister and brother-in-law and I went out for brunch.
Here:
It is the Rutherglen Mansion, perched on a hill above scenic (not) Longview, WA. The building is lovely, the view is spectacular (if you ignore the mill at the bottom of the hill) and the food is really very good. Not to mention the bottomless mimosas...
That last entry triggered some other memories of summers gone by. And it sort of grew like Topsy. This one sort of looks like the first chapter of War and Peace but, there was no good place to break it up.
Dad worked for Pope and Talbot as a logger and mom ran the house. Part of running the house meant ensuring that there was food in the pantry during the winter. My folks bought two things right after they got married. One was a sewing machine and the other was a pressure cooker. We still have the pressure cooker and it still works.
In a small logging town, actually any small town of the times, that meant keeping track of the garden, canning the produce and keeping an eye on the toddler (me) while you were doing it. Later, as sisters got added to the mix I got drafted into toddler watching duty along with mom. But it wasn’t all work. There was time to read. There was time to check out the dry creek bed down the street. When we moved to another place there was a culvert that ran under the rail road tracks across the street that just beckoned the imagination. There were also plenty of trips to the park at the other end of town on those hot summer afternoons. Oh, and television. Yeah, we had TV. Two channels, black and white, and if it blew a tube between paychecks it might not get replaced for a week or three. Imagine the horror these days. LOL
What we didn’t grow ourselves meant a drive into Eugene/Springfield and trips to the local orchards. The usual shopping list included corn, cabbage, cucumbers, apples, cherries, peaches and pears. The really good thing is that these don’t come on all at once. Cherries first, then peaches and pears, and apples anytime from August to November.
Funny, now that I think of it, they go in order of ease of processing. All you have to do is stem and wash the cherries. And they are canned pits and all. Peaches are scald, slice, pit and can. Pears are the hardest. Those little beggers are slippery. Apples will keep a couple of months if you keep them in a cool place. Oh, and fruit you can just do a half hour in a hot water bath. Pressure peaches and you get sauce. It still can behot and steamy work even if you aren’t keeping a weather eye on the pressure gauge.
And the corn, oh the corn. That was a trip. You blanch the corn in boiling water and then you cut it off the cob, pack it with a little salt and process it. We finally got smart and just moved the whole operation out into the driveway. We took the cutting operation outside because it’s a lot easier to hose down a driveway than get all those little corny bits out from under the cupboards. Corn flies.
The cabbage went for sauerkraut. That was usually the last up because the gal we bought the cabbage from wouldn’t sell kraut cabbage until after the first cold snap. Claimed the cabbage made better kraut that way. And who were we to argue. We may still have the kraut cutter. It looks like a washboard with blades.
The cukes went for pickles. I used a fork to poke holes in more cucumbers than I want to think about.
And did I mention that the garden in Oakridge included strawberries, raspberries and boysenberries. They all went into the freezer or the jars. The neighbor kids were welcome to sample as long as they ate the ripe ones and didn’t mess with the green ones. About ninety percent of the time the kids went along with it. That’s good odds anytime. And there was always someplace around the edge of town where you could pick blackberries. With luck more berries went into the buckets than into us. They went into the larder, too.
There was a method to our madness. Once word got round in the family that we made good kraut, pickles, jams etc. guess what got passed around at Christmas? If all else fails, give goodies.
Some years when times were good in the summer the folks would order a quarter of beef. That’s literally one quarter of a steer folks. There isn’t a lot of steak on a quarter of beef but I don’t remember eating a lot of hamburger when we were kids. I think the tough cuts ended up being trimmed, cubed and canned.
You want tedious? Try nursemaiding a canner full of meat. Two hours at ten pounds pressure for each batch. It’s not like you have to watch it like a hawk just make sure it stays above ten pounds. Worth the trouble at the time though. It was fully cooked and ready to use; just open the jar. And most important, it was there in the winter when the budget was usually pretty tight.
Dad had coworkers who’d go to the coast in season and come home with a limit of salmon or other fish. Into the jars it went.
Oh, and the freezer was a full size <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Kenmore chest style freezer from Sears. Now that I think about it, just about every appliance came from Sears. That monstrosity was about three years younger than me and it was huge. It was really something when I could finally get into the darn thing without having to use a chair, much less get at the stuff on the bottom without standing on my head.. It was big, clunky, and defrosting it was an all day operation.
Not that you spent all day on that job. We chipped, pried, wiped and dried between doing other things. I was in my mid forties before that sucker gave up the ghost. Something necessary finally crapped out and we couldn’t get parts for it. Heck, by then my sisters were married, raising their own families and we didn’t need something that big anyway. But, for heavens’ sake never give up on something while it’s still running.
I don’t want to make things sound better than they were. We didn’t get a dryer until Roberta (middle sister) was nearly out of diapers. That means the laundry got hung out winter or summer, sunshine or clouds. If it wasn’t quite dry, it got hung over chair backs and the like until was. If it was too wet it got hung on a laundry rack by the stove. Try drying heavy duty work jeans on a laundry rack. It takes awhile. I think we finally replaced the wringer washer when we moved back to Springfield when I graduated from high school.
There were times when dad’s clothes were so muddy mom had to hang them on the line and wash them down with hose before she could wash them. A fun job in the middle of winter.
Logging is not a life for a man going into middle age. It’s a life that wears you out, and it does it fast. If and when there were discussions about tight finances or fears for the future; and I know there were; they didn’t happen where we could hear them. Nature finally took any decisions or fears out of our hands when one of his knees went out. We moved back to Springfield, dad ended up on disability and mom ended up cooking for other peoples’ kids in a dorm kitchen at the U of O. I’m sure there were times when my sisters’ weren’t sure if I was their big sister or a substitute mom. Somehow we managed to get through it all. We weren’t always smiling about it, but we did manage.
It isn’t and wasn’t a perfect life. It was just…..life. And it has never been boring. And if you were bored? You didn’t say anything where mom could hear you. She had sure fire cures for boredom. LOL Now that I think about it, she still has cures for boredom.
Hey everyone...
I don't know where the last couple of weeks have gone. I've been around....kinda. I've been aware that I was missing everything that was going on here but I haven't been able to gather the concentration to read much of anything online. I know this is a manifestation of the depression I'm currently wrestling with. I have tons to do and I'm getting the most important things done. But everything that is "discretionary" is lost in a fog.
I have one standout experience to share from the past weekend. We attended The Great South Bay Music Festival here on Long Island. It's a bit of a hippie fest...lots of jam music and tie dye. We heard a lot of terrific music...many bands covering Grateful Dead favorites. It was a dancing crowd.
I took some photos of the headline act...Mickey Hart (Grateful Dead drummer) with Steve Kimmock. It was an awesome show. Kimmock has toured with both The Dead and (my favorite) Bruce Hornsby. It was just one of those magic "take me away" perfomances.
I had reasonable success shooting during the show considering I couldn't get NEAR the stage and most of the crowd was on it's feet. I kept having to dodge swaying heads and arms. Kimmock made it challenging wearing that hat. His face was almost always in shadow. This is probably the best of the batch.
OK...now it's time for me to get caught up on everything I've been missing here.
