Us on Thanksgiving Day, 2012 from the deck looking SE. What a difference a year makes! The old kid has hair! Actually he's doing okay. Still hassling with lungs in re allergies, or a virus, or dirty air, or box elder bugs, or whatever. My last trip to the doc got me an antibiotic. While that may have helped, it has not rid me of a continuing cough. Of course, they (docs) all say this is the worst year they have known in our area, what with forest fire smoke most of the summer, and few storms to clear the air. We are now verging on our winter pattern which is to say, inversions, which are essentially trapped particles of the PM2.5 and PM10 micron size, all of which are like smoking a pack a day if you are forced to breathe them. We long for snow which has the effect of clearing away the inversion. We got one dandy a couple weeks ago but have had nothing since. You can see from the picture that our ground is bare.
Still also hassling the arthritis/neuropathy stuff which makes walking interesting. Very important that I do my stretching and strengthening daily. All of the foregoing is livable in the absence of the big C for the time being.
Our usual Thanksgiving Day with Dan Cornell down from Jackson WY and Lisa up from SLC, this year joined by Jerry and Sue Fuhriman. The food turned out well. Our family tradition is to barbecue the turkey which inevitably causes great worry but is always done perfectly in about 90 minutes. I'm thankful that went well. Dan helped me get on the snow plow which, I'll bet, sees little use this winter.
Really just two weeks to get everything done--concerts, port flush, meetings, and the like--until we are on the road to AZ for 6 weeks. Still looking forward to that.
Hope you all are as well as we are--better even. I'll stay in touch, natch.
I had to come home and get off the road before I did damage to someone or myself. Here is how it started. My family convinced me to head back to Instacare because I have had a couple big coughing fits and my hacking doesn't seem to be going away. But then neither are my hay fever symptoms. So I dutifully went this morning.
I was greeted with the comment that the intake might take longer than usual since their computers were down. But everything did not really take much longer than usual. I told the doc I was wheezy several times a day and that my daughter had been diagnosed last week with whooping cough (pertussis). Yes, I had been in contact with her. (They all donned masks.) So it was into X-ray for a chest scan (negative) along with apologies because the computers were down. Then back to the examining room to get a swab from my sinuses and to await the doc. She decided to proceed with an antibiotic without awaiting the cultured swab (2 days). Her reasoning: That way we take care of any other bug--if there is one--that is causing this and if it is pertussis we're after it. Result: 2 scripts--one for Zitheromax (sp?) and one for an inhaler. Gadzooks: Images of my father popped up in my head as he spent most of his adult life sucking on inhalers. Anyway, I was assured, the meds would be at Walgreen's before I could get there.
Well, I have been quickly to Walgreen's in the past and been told they needed 15 more minutes, so I decided to drive to Smithfield and our local branch of the credit union to fill in the time. I needed to transfer $ from them to the bank (also conveniently in Smithfield) to begin the annual property tax payment and to care for the monthly VISA bill. Sorry, they said, we cannot process a transaction in this amount since our computers are down. How soon will they be back up? Oh, we expect them to be up momentarily. Okay, back to Walgreen's where they tell me they haven't heard from Instacare. So I decide to kill more time by driving farther into Logan to visit the Credit Union branch this is downtown. Inside, they inform me that the computers are still down and they don't know when they will be back up.
It was noon. So I decided I would put a bunch of time into the waiting process by getting a Jimmy Johns sub, eating it, reading my Kindle (Salman Rushdie's Joseph Anton) and approaching Walgreen's again thereafter. I did. Walgreen's said: "You aren't going to like this." I say, "What?" They say we can't connect to our insurance billing program because the computer is down. I say, something must be happening nationally that is really bad and I'm going home. He promised to call. Yeah, yeah.
So I got home without killing anyone, or even seriously pissing anyone off. Preternaturally calm was I. I'm still hacking, I am unmedicated for it, and by God I am going to take a nap. Maybe magically the computers will be up later on.
