It has occurred to me that one advantage of having prescriptions labels generated by computer is that the bottles now come with my name spelled right.
Back when labels were being hand-made with a typewriter, my drugs almost always said they were for Robert Cough. Habit and/or muscle memory made it nearly impossible for physicians or pharmacists to write C-o-u without the next letter being a g.
As I mentioned back on April 25th, I listed our pool pump and filter for sale on Craigslist, and the results were so frustrating that I pulled the ad.
After taking a week or so to restore my sanity, I reposted the ad May 13th. I had one email asking if I still had the filter for sale, then nothing at all until yesterday afternoon.
That’s when a lady phoned to see if it was still available. When I told her yes, she said let me call my husband, and we’ll get back to you. I hardly had time to think Well, that was another waste of time before he called saying that he was on his way.
It turned out to be a fine example of serendipity – truly a match made in heaven – they desperately needed what I was trying to sell.
They are a young couple, with a 10-rear-old son, who recently bought a house with a pool and then discovered that the housing on the pool filter had an non-repairable crack. He was happy to get the pump, but I think he would have paid my asking price just to get a working filter. After a few minutes showing him the filter and explaining maintenance, etc., he handed me the cash and we loaded it up.
Then I started hauling out pool stuff we didn’t need anymore – PVC fittings, vacuum heads and hose, an almost full bucket of 3” chlorine tabs, and another with about 10 lbs of chlorine granules, and an extension pole, etc.
By the time I was through, my garage was almost clean, the back of his truck was full, and he was grinning like a kid on Christmas morning.
I’m still trying to sell the old 8-N tractor, and the responses I’m getting are still driving me nuts (the subject for at least one more separate post) but this gives me new hope. Sometimes, things really do work out best for all concerned.
There have been lots of doom and gloom stories in the media about the melting of the polar ice caps.
They predict everything from the submersion of Miami to massive fish kills brought about by changes in the ocean’s salinity. Some of the claims are patently outrageous, but at least some of their predictions are possible- maybe even likely, and the moral is it is all our fault.
Hey! Not so fast there, Buddy!
Is the ice actually melting?
Yes it is, but the latest scientific evidence proves that it has been in a melting trend since the last ice age. Working in the Antarctic, scientists determined that the shrinkage of the vast ice sheet accelerated during eight distinct episodes over the past 20,000 years, each causing rapid sea level rise.
"Conventional thinking is that the Antarctic ice sheet has been relatively stable since the last ice age, that it began to melt relatively late and that its decline was slow and steady until it reached its present size," said lead author Michael Weber, a scientist from University of Cologne in Germany.
"The sediment record suggests a different pattern - one that is more episodic and suggests that parts of the ice sheet repeatedly became unstable during the last deglaciation,"
These cycles have been going on for at least the last 20,000 years, with a big meltdown about 14,500 years ago. At that time, the sea level on a global basis rose about 50 feet in just 350 years - or about 20 times faster than sea level rise over the last century," according to Peter Clark, an Oregon State University paleoclimatologist. "We do not yet know what triggered these eight episodes or pulses, but it appears that once the melting of the ice sheet began it was amplified by physical processes."
Hmmmmn…. Wonder what kind of S-U-Vs those evil humans were driving back then.
A recently released study by Michael Emerson of Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research compared Houston and Copenhagen. He found that both residents of Houston, the nation’s most automobile-dependent city, and Copenhagen, the Green Capitol of Europe, agreed that traffic was their city’s biggest problem.
The difference came in how they define traffic:
“In Houston, an area almost completely dependent on cars for mobility, people think there are too many cars for the number and size of roads, and more lanes are needed to improve the traffic flow,” Emerson said. “This was starkly different from what Copenhagen-area residents regarded as ’traffic problems.’ To them, traffic meant too many cars causing pollution and a lower quality of life, and too many people not using the alternative forms of transportation.”
Emerson said that nearly half of Copenhagen residents – 46 percent – use public transit, compared with only 4 percent of Houstonians.
I have never seen the point in making my bed each morning - never saw the point in tucking in corners and arranging pillow shams that would be coming right back off in just a few hours. In my mind, that’s why the bedroom came with a door.
Now I learn that, according to Admiral William McRaven, that has been the source of all my shortcomings.
In this year’s commencement address at the University of Texas, McRaven says the most important lesson he learned in Navy SEAL training was to make your bed.
You can see the entire 19 minute speech HERE, but the part about making beds was
“Every morning in basic SEAL training, my instructors, who at the time were all Viet Nam veterans, would show up in my barracks room and the first thing they would inspect was your bed.
If you did it right, the corners would be square, the covers pulled tight, the pillow centered just under the headboard and the extra blanket folded neatly at the foot of the rack—rack—that's Navy talk for bed.
It was a simple task—mundane at best. But every morning we were required to make our bed to perfection. It seemed a little ridiculous at the time, particularly in light of the fact that were aspiring to be real warriors, tough battle hardened SEALs—but the wisdom of this simple act has been proven to me many times over.
If you make your bed every morning you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another.
By the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed. Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that little things in life matter.
If you can't do the little things right, you will never do the big things right.
And, if by chance you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made—that you made—and a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better.
If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed.”
We met our friends the Sheltons for dinner yesterday, and on the way home I got a check engine light on the truck.
There is a diagnostic trick on a Dodge – without starting the engine, turn the key on and off three times and then leave it on – that will display the OBD-II code(s). I did that when we got home and the code displayed was P1740.
That code indicates that engine rpm did not drop fast enough to satisfy the on-board computer when shifting to a higher gear. It could be something as simple as a poor connection, or as complicated and expensive as a bad torque converter.
It is a fairly common code, and often shows up after a transmission has been serviced. Ours was, but it was several thousand miles ago.
The consensus on the Dodge Truck forums is that if everything else seems normal, you should just reset it and see if it comes back.
I’m going to try that, but with the way my luck has been running lately……
The old Boggy Thicket has been invaded by flies.
We haven’t been inundated by huge swarms of them, but when one is too many, a few still qualifies as an invasion.
The insects in question are Green Bottle Flies, a big, fat critter about twice the size of your average housefly. They are a brilliant iridescent green, and if their habits weren’t so disgusting, they might even be considered attractive. Well, that may be going a bit too far, but they are a pretty color.
According to the Orkin Pest Control website, Green Bottle Flies are common around farms. The adults lay their eggs in feces, or in dead or wounded animals. They seem to be particularly fond of dog crap. They are also common around privies, and the vault toilets found in national forests and parks.
Their only saving grace is that their maggots are being used successfully in hospitals to treat necrotic wounds.
The ones we’ve seen so far have confined themselves to our bathrooms, but I’m not sure why – we do have running water, and we can and do flush our toilets.
We have no idea where they are coming from or how they’re getting in, but none of them have made it out alive. So far, I’ve killed two in the bathroom off the hall, and Honey has become a fly-killing ACE, having zapped six of them in the bath off the master bedroom.
These flies are definitely green – not blue – but since the first one appeared a week or so ago, I keep catching myself humming Jimmy Crack Corn.
