Part one 1/14/25
Hi,
Hope your blood draw was easy.
Needles can be challenging - I have veins that roll, and are hard to find, and I used to be freaked out by having blood taken. I ended up with a lot of hematomas. The trouble was that I would tell the vampires (blood draw techs) and I think it threw them off their game.
Then Benny was diagnosed with diabetes and had to start injecting
insulin. He used to be afraid of needles. Not anymore. Watching him I thought,
who am I to be afraid of needles?
So for some reason I stopped telling vampires about my rolling,
hard to find veins. Miraculously, blood draws became easier, and the vampires
were successful almost every time.
There was that one time my veins defeated several nurses in the
hospital phlebotomy clinic.
Blood draws are part of life, because I must have my A1C tested, among other things. So I am a lot more blasé about blood draws now. Benny now wears an insulin pump that constantly monitors his blood sugar and puts insulin into his blood as needed. We live in an age of miracles. At least for diabetics.
So I hope your blood draw went well.
While driving to Tacoma and back, I was listening to NPR,
and the news was full of the LA fires. They are reporting more on the
emotional, mental, and financial wounds people have suffered now, as well as
the fires. The grief.
And they did say repeatedly that the Santa Ana winds would be
starting up again.
Finding a place to live now is easier if you have money than it is for the less financially well endowed, the working people. And the homeless.
Landlords are price-gouging renters. Well, of
course. We're talking about human beings here.
Sad, though.
I wonder what efforts it will take to clean the air, and how long it will take.
When I lived there (55 years ago) the smog was at its
worst. One fourth of July weekend, when I was driving up north to
observe the holiday with my family, I was crawling along through the San
Fernando Valley on 101 with all the other people getting out of town, I
looked up and in the sky above the mountains it looked like there was a solid dirt island in the sky. A big one.
Sometime in the last few years I was listening to a program about
air pollution, perhaps specifically about LA, and doggone - that exact date was
mentioned as the day of the worst smog recorded in the Los Angeles basin, and
how clean up actions began after that.
You'd think that having to tell people not to let their children
play outside because of the poor air quality would have been a tip-off that something
needed to be done, but oh well, it takes what it takes.
Geez. Of course, he matters, you morons.
Jimmy Carter, who has lately been praised to the skies for his decency,
was disdained as "the worst president we ever had" in the past.
People badmouthed him something awful. My take was that he was too decent and
honest, a good guy who walked the Christian talk (you know, love, forgiveness,
compassion, working for the greater good), and that's why he had to go. All it
took was a little treason and Ronald Reagan.
Carter was vilified. I think the rabbit incident did him a lot of harm - what kind of president was scared of "a harmless bunny rabbit?" Hah. If you never lived with rabbits, or never saw "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," you might not know that bunny rabbits can be vicious. Yes, some are lovely pets, but some are like Marvel villains with blood on their claws and teeth. Your blood.
I watched a documentary last night about
immigrants who succeeded in America: Albert Einstein, Henry Kissinger, a guy
from Iran who supplies most of NASA's hardware (or something - made him rich,
anyway), Hedy Lamarr who has been dead for decades but is now getting credit
for a system she designed during WW2 to confuse torpedoes. Not that the Navy
was smart enough to use it. They weren't and they didn't. Now that system is the basis of the internet, cell phones, and computers. So Hedy Lamarr is
now getting credit for her work. In her lifetime she did not get credit, or
money. Not that she needs money wherever she is now.
More immigrants: a Ukrainian woman who is now in Congress, a Chinese
woman who lived through Mao's cultural revolution (which set China back a few
centuries) and doesn't want to see it happen here, a man who was an economic
adviser to Republican presidents from Nixon on.
And so on. All immigrants who came here a long time ago (Nixon was 50 years ago😐), and whose
hard work paid off for them.
Over and over again, the immigrants said that America is the
greatest country in the world, that the freedom here attracts people trying to
make better lives for themselves, and in America anyone who works hard can succeed
(i.e., become rich).
It sure sounded like the kind of thing I was taught in the 50s -
greatest country, hard work will take you anywhere you want to go, etc. You might
remember.
The stories of the people they highlighted were interesting, but
the rah rah propaganda element made me uncomfortable. At the end, I read
in the credits that the narrator was Newt Gingrich.
Oh, PBS, I thought. You are going to the dark side.
I should not be surprised. We have seen the erosion of our stated
morality in so many ways, and it's all part of whitewashing Trumpism - making
it sound like it's okay, and patriotic, and normal.
It is none of those things. Just my opinion.
The LA fire tragedy is ongoing, and no less tragic for the fact that the news cycle is moving on. "Deadly car crash in San Benito."
Gawd. We have the attention span of gnats.
Fortunately, I am not in the position of being responsible for
changing all the things that I see as wrong. I know I'd make a (bigger) mess
and fail. But this being America, the greatest country in the world, I am
allowed to gripe.
So there.
love
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