We end with a tale, and a picture, of a new kind of Christmas tree for those getting too old for the real things but don’t want to mess with huge fake ones.
Pic of the Day
With Jo-Ann, It’s Really Personal
A dog chasing squirrels is nothing new on this planet. Indeed these rodents seem made for just such a chase and I daresay, they seem to enjoy taunting the canine.
This past week, however, something intriguing happen during the normal chase of the squirrel-rodents.
Unlike husband, who has a slightly cruel streak, I give the squirrel-rodents a little head start before letting the dog loose upon them. For they are often sitting on the deck railing, munching in a most entitled fashion, on bird seed put out for the, ahem, BIRDS, often out of a SQUIRREL-RODENT PROOF feeder (there is no such thing, never believe the hype). The squirrel-rodents get so involved in the joy of their stolen repast that without a warning they’d likely be looking at an angry Belgian Shepherd before they knew what hit them.
Thus I knock on the glass on our sliding glass door entry to the deck and the thieving squirrel-rodents take off across the back yard straightaway.
Only sometimes they’re a little slow on the uptake.
The other day, to Jo-Ann’s complete surprise, she actually CAUGHT one of the bushy-railed rodents!
Well she didn’t actually catch the squirrel-rodent. What happened is that Jo-Ann caught up to the critter and before she knew it the squirrel-rodent was down between her legs trying desperately to get the hell out of its dog-leg cage.
It was a right funny sight, I must say. The dog was running, the squirrel-rodent was running, they were both running along at what had to be approximately the same speed. The squirrel probably thought it done died and went to squirrel hell for surely being trapped under four legs of a running, angry dog is what bad squirrels must endure for all of eternity in squirrel hell.
Eventually the squirrel-rodent got free of his hellish, running prison. For her part, Jo-Ann didn’t know on earth to do with this creature running in tandem with her, indeed between her own canine legs.
Maybe you hadda be there.
A Most Wonderful and Perfectly Prepared McDonald’s Meal
I’ve never been much of a McDonald’s person although in a pinch I’ll take a quarter-pounder with cheese. I’ve never understood the allure of a Big Mac with its bitter lettuce and messy sauce.
Granddaughter, however, as is the corporate plan to insure customers in the future, adores McDonald’s, not so much for the food goodness she’s no five-year old food critic. Kaitlyn Mae is quite fond of the so-called “happy meals” and in our case, the local “play” McDonalds which has sliding boards, climbing things and plenty of other kids to share the fun.
As Kaitlyn played excitedly at this play McDonald’s I often sit with a magazine and eat a quarter pounder or whatever else I purchased that I might find palatable. This past week I had a most delicious, albeit rather “light” lunch.
They’re called “Chicken Selects” and they are genuine pieces of actual chicken breast, breaded and fried to a perfect crispness.
McDonalds’ “chicken nuggets” consists of “reconstituted” chicken meat all rolled into a ball, dipped in coating and fried to a blandness that kids like. Reconstituted chicken is chicken bits and pieces shredded together that can be made into…well Chicken McNuggets for one thing.
McDonalds’ Chicken Selects are quite obviously aimed towards an adult eater, one with more of a discriminating palate. Which is not to say that these things are gourmet but by me they’re right up there with the best fried chicken strips I’ve tasted anywhere.
WaWa stores have the second best but that’s for another day.
I also had an “apple and walnut” salad, which was not a salad at all. However, combined with those fine chicken strips, this concoction was a perfect accompaniment.
This “salad” consisted of a container with separate compartments. One compartment held apples and one held walnuts, as the entrée name would indicate, naturally. One container held some yogurt and hey, this was perfect for dipping of the apples and every once in a while, to pop a walnut in yon mouth.
I’m betting this entire meal wasn’t more than 500 calories and it seemed at least somewhat healthy. Most important of all, it tasted very good.
Imagine that.
Dick Cheney’s Final Hurrah
Popular sentiment is that if you like Dick Cheney then you will love his last interview on Fox News Sunday on 12/21/08. If you hate the man, you’ll despise this interview.
Bullshit.
Dick Cheney answered all questions posed to him by the Fox News Sunday host, Chris Wallace, honestly and in an engaging and straightforward manner.
I understand that this is a personal perception but liberals as a rule are mean, hateful and unhappy people. Hey, it’s my Blog and I can say it if I want. I never met a liberal happy with his or her life.
So liberals, the major pool of Cheney despisers, would naturally think a personable, honest interview to be a hateful one because their lives are clouded and colored by the hate inside of them.
It’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Dick Cheney answered that indeed he did tell Senator Leaky Lahey to do something to himself that is impossible save for the double-jointed.
Imagine that, no spin, no lies, just the truth, just like it came down.
I’m not saying that the original suggestion by Cheney was proper or the best way to handle whatever situation caused the outburst. I do enjoy the fact that Cheney didn’t lie, flinch or spin his way out of it.
Liberals hate the truth, it gets in the way of their world view.
I do agree with Cheney’s political views and I’ll allow that this makes me regard him more kindly than hateful liberals see the man.
So let the liberals hate me. Live your life filled with hate, it’s a great way to waste God’s most wonderful gift.
As for Dick Cheney, I salute you man and I praise your dedication to this country. Someday Dick Cheney will be appreciated for the great patriot he is.
Unless a hate-filled liberal writes the text books, which is too often the case in this day and age. Way I figure Blogs like this one will tell the truth as will be read in the future by normal people not filled with ugly hate.
No More REAL Christmas Trees For Us
Every year of the past twenty Christmases husband and I have purchased, wrestled with, cut to fit and decorated a genuine, real fir tree to see us through the holidays.
This year that was not going to be.
First, there’s that bit about husband being in hospitals all up and down the Delaware coast. In fact, the purchase of a Christmas tree, along with the wrestling of same into the Jeep, the cutting and cropping to fit tree into the stand on through to the final “TADA” as the thing is lifted in the living room to be cherished by the cats and decorated by me, has been husband’s job all these years.
There was no way that I, complete with heart bypass scar and restrictions on lifting, was going to assume that task.
And while we’d both agreed to a quiet, understated Christmas this year given our circumstances, we had to have some sort of tree.
I decided a trip to Walmart was in order. If any business would have a choice of artificial trees it would be Walmart.
The problem here was that most artificial trees of any size come in huge boxes that will require complicated assembly at home. After the holiday it would then be required to disassemble the thing and store it high in the overhead storage in our garage where we normally store Christmas frou-frou.
There were plenty of little trees that are made to stand on table tops but this adaptation didn’t suit me. First we didn’t have an appropriate table for such a thing save our actual dining table. Second I could see the cats toppling such a thing over quite handily. Third I was reminded of Happy Days’ Fonzie and his pathetic table top tree and while husband and I wanted understated this year, I didn’t want our Christmas to be one big pathetic sob sight.
The tree I finally purchased was a gem, the stuff of genius.
It’s actually an OUTSIDE decoration. It comes in a box about two feet by two feet square. It’s six feet tall and this is nice, not a table top thing that brings tears instead of smiles. You just pull the thing out of the box and it’s designed as a spiral type of thing. A yellow star is already atop the thing. A quick tug and the spirals unwind and a quick hook at the top and boom, the tree’s up! It even has a string of lights already pre-wired on the metal spirals!
I added a string of fancy colored lights that do all sorts of things including “racing”, slow light, quick blink…that type of thing.
The spirals are reinforced by what looks like nylon fishing wire at four places along the vertical and so far it’s been a stable device and has survived an assault by the most determined of our cats. It comes with a package of little ball things that can fit over the pre-strung lights but in two days the cat had every one of these decorative things off and was batting them all about. I gathered them all and put them back in their storage bag. We might have to do without these things.
Husband and I are both delighted with our new Christmas tree. I gave our heavy and expensive tree stand to daughter, who has a child and who will likely spend many years wrestling with a real tree.
As for husband and myself, this Christmas tree, coming in at twenty, count ‘em, twenty bucks, will be our tree for the rest of our Christmas seasons.
Picture below.
Government Bureaucrats With a Heart?
I love to poke fun at bureaucrats. This is mostly because I have ascertained through the years that government bureaucrats are people with little to no imagination who must find employment via the only employer who will likely hire them.
They then work like lackluster drones through the years, their only reward being 200 sick days a year along with their five weeks of vacation. Oh, and they get to give ordinary folks like myself a hard time for not putting an “x” here, not getting a required paper there, not dotting all my I’s or crossing all my T’s.
It’s a power of a sort and gives them a sort of perverted joy.
So this past month I had two interactions with government bureaucrats and in both cases I was treated most wonderfully.
Hey, giving credit where credit’s due here. Let the record show. Write this down.
One was my application for social security benefits. I had my heart re-plumbed this past May. I am 58 years old. According to my SS benefit statements, I paid in over $68,000 to the SS fund in my many years of employment. Which means, with an employer match, $136,000 has been paid into the social security fund on my behalf.
I was told upon application that it would take four to six months to get a response as to whether I’d get any of this money at this time. First, why all this time to process what is a fairly simple claim? Had I saved this money on my own I’d have immediate access to it without begging government bureaucrats for my own damn money.
At my age and with this history of a heart operation, no employer with health insurance is going to hire me full time. So while I might be able to shovel elephant shit at a circus, my chances of getting a job like I used to have, at the salary I was paid, were slim to none.
It did only take four months to get my answer and, in fact, I was retroactively awarded the money. A message of same was put on my voice mail, the money deposited directly into my account, and boom, as I see it the whole process was handled very efficiently.
A few days ago I went to Delaware’s MVA to obtain a temporary disability placard for husband. Husband has a brain infection and his gait’s been wobbly. We only wanted a temporary disability pass as with hope and prayer we hope he’ll regain full use of his limbs that he had before some nasty bug got into his brain.
All I had were some papers given to me by husband’s case manager at the Rehab center. I was told that this would be sufficient to get a temporary, 90 day disability pass for him and that all required medical signatures were affixed.
“Where’s the front page,” the MVA bureaucrat asked me. Well damn this packet of papers already had five or six papers in it. I assumed the first page was there cause why would the case manager leave it out?
I buried my head in my hands. Because somebody didn’t do their job and because this bureaucrat offered no reprieve I’d be denied a temporary disability pass for parking that husband, as much as anyone on this planet, deserved.
“Just get her to fill out the first page herself,” another MVA employee shouted out. I hope the drama of my visible despair on what was, after all, Christmas eve, prompted this bit of kindness.
It turns out I was missing several other required pieces of information that required more MVA bureaucrat confabs. My husband didn’t sign the thing but I’d deliberately left it unsigned. The notion was that husband’s brain infection left him unable to sign documents. I’d already signed every damn legal document possible on his behalf so I figured I’d sign it right in front of the MVA as it seemed the prudent thing to do.
There was no reason checked off as to why husband needed this temporary disability parking pass. I gave the reason.
Hey, a doctor DID sign the thing but beyond this that case manager left a lot of empty holes in that application. I don’t know why.
“It’s only temporary,” another MVA bureaucrat said.
Which was true. It wasn’t as if brain-infected husband was going to take over all of Delaware’s handicapped parking spaces for the rest of his living days to cause the rest of Delaware’s handicapped citizens to walk miles to do their business.
Common sense.
And an obvious observation that I was not some charlatan trying to obtain illegal disability parking passes. If I was doing this why wouldn’t I go after a PERMANENT parking pass?
So the bureaucrats at Delaware’s MVA gave me that temporary disability pass and hey, I’m impressed.
A Salute to the Nurses of the World
I once worked at a hospital that had a nurses’ union, yes I did.
For the most part nurses don’t belong to unions. Which is a good thing as I see as there’s something about unions that sucks the soul out of loyal, dedicated employees.
What with all the medical stuff going on in the life of husband and I, we’ve come to know, work with and be cared for by a wide breadth of nurses.
After all this exposure, I now conclude that there’s something special about one who chooses to become a nurse. I’d go so far that those who choose to enter the nursing profession have something extraordinarily special about them.
Nurses have to deal with people when they are at their weakest, often behaving at their worst, as they are frequently at their most defensive and helpless. People in this position do not always follow rules of social etiquette.
And yet I’ve never been with a nurse, or has my husband, who was short-tempered, inpatient, cruel or uncaring. Nurses manage, against at times all odds, to keep a sweet caring way about them.
I ponder that nurses too have husbands who cheat on them, kids that have problems at school, loved ones that have too fallen ill. Yet they must put all this aside and care for the patient at hand as if he or she were the only human being on the planet.
I would never have willingly chosen to be a nurse when I was a young pup deciding my future. Nurses must work holidays, all sorts of hours, they must trudge to work during snow storms. They are by no means overpaid.
The way I see it, those who chose the nursing profession have something deep inside them that is very special, very different than most of us more venal humans.
Which is not to say that nurses are all perfect or that all do a wonderful job. ALL or EVERYONE never happens in any scenario. But I’m willing to stake my instinct on it…nurses are very special people and will always be, in my mind, angels sent to earth to care for the infirm amongst us.
A Brain Infection?
A Medical Odyssey to a Quadruple Heart Bypass
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