Friday, October 21, 2011

Don't want to know the answer? Then don't ask the question

Real Life ... (embellished a little, but not much): Phone call from One Good Old Boy, out of the blue, right in the middle of doing something important he says: "Hi! How ya doin' ?"

Well, here's how I was the day I got that call ... a little snarky:
"What a week!  Anxiety Level (AxL) UP: Had a note from SONY that our BRAVIA could burst into flame, so had a Tech visit us and take the whole flat panel apart, test the innards and tell us ours was not one that would do that ... (AxL) DOWN;

... maket went up  AxL DOWN ... But for how long? AxL UP ... then drove to remote work site for two days of 8 hr-per-day training on a new EHRS (electronic health records system) ... AxL UP;

... market went down ... AxL UP ... then they killed "Al Gathafi,  AxL DOWN, variously rendered as "Al Qaddafi," "Algathafi," and "Al-Gathafi." ("variously rendered" in this case referred to the spelling, not what the rebels did to him). To make it worse there is the ironically-named "Al-Gaddafi International Prize for Human Rights." and we wondered more about the spelling;

... then the market went up (sort of) AxL UP ("Will it keep going up, or will it drop?") ... Note: And for the Libyan leader, that's just his surname. Variations on his given name include Muammar, Moammar, Mu'ammar, and Moamar, and many others.  Once you've settled on how to spell his first and last names, you then have to decide whether you want to add the Arabic prefix "al-" before his last name. Which can also be spelled "el-." And then you have o decide whether the prefix should be capitalized

... then the market ... well, you know ... and AxL went UP and DOWN and UP again ...

...This is the point where most media editors would give up on Kud-Off-ie and run a story on Justin Bieber (sp? Beiber, Beeber, Beaber) instead, but this was big enough to get reported with all the name variations, probably just to make sure he was really the properly "named one" who was dispatched ... that dispatchment leading to AxL DOWN;

... then I got home from worksite, which took 4 1/2 hours instead of the usual 2 1/2 (due to work in the Bay Bridge causing one-lane traffic hold-ups) AxL UP;

... got to bed at 11:30 PM, awakened at 1:30 AM when wife got sick (minor illness, but we were both awake), then finally got back to sleep at 5:30 AM or so, awakened at 8:45 AM and called the cardiology office to tell them we were not going to be there in 45 minutes to keep her appointment ... AxL still UP, but dropping as wife's self-limited illness improved ...

... then found out that overall we were up $4,500+ in the market for the week! AxL way DOWN;

So, all-in-all, it was quite a week.  I am going to the wet bar in the kitchen now and believe I will just drink until Sunday night and hope for a better week coming up ... because we KNOW that AxL will have to be UP!  (and then DOWN and then ... well, you get the picture) ... "
------------------------------------------------------------------
Somewhere during my response to such and innocent question, "How ya doin'?"  some might apologize for calling ... others might express their anger at my going off on them.  To that I say:
"If you don't want to know the answer, don't ask the question."

So, "How ya doin'?"
-------------------------------------------------------------------
PS: The truth: What I really said was ... what we all say:  "Hey! I'm doin' fine!  I'm glad you called." 
The bulk of the above tirade was, of course, purely internal, purely mental, what some refer to as What is Going On Under the Floor.  Think about it the next time you call a friend.  Listen carefully.  Try to feel what might be going on under their floor.

Question: "How're ya doin' ?" Answer ...

... (embellished a little, but not much):

... there's always someone who just has to know "How you're doin'?"

What a week!  Had a note from SONY that our BRAVIA flat-panel TV could spontaneously burst into flame, so we had a Tech visit us and take the whole thing apart, test the innards and tell us ours was not one that would do that

... maket went up ... then drove to remote work site for two days of 8 hr-per-day training on a new EHRS (electronic health records system)

... market went down ... then they killed "Al Gathafi," variously rendered as "Al Qaddafi," "Algathafi," and "Al-Gathafi." ("variously rendered" in this case referring to the spelling of his name, not what the rebels did to him). To make it worse ther is the ironically-named "Al-Gaddafi International Prize for Human Rights" and we wondered more about the spelling

... then the market went up (sort of) ... Note: And that's just his surname. Variations on his given name include Muammar, Moammar, Mu'ammar, and Moamar, and many others. Once you've settled on how to spell his first and last names, you then have to decide whether you want to add the Arabic prefix "al-" before his last name. Which can also be spelled "el-." And then, as the Editor of the story,  you have to decide whether the prefix should be capitalized ... or not

... then the market ... well, you know

... This is the point where most editors would give up on him and run a story on Justin Bieber instead (sp? Beiber, Beeber, Beaber ... at least we know it doesn't require the prefix El- or el-, capitalized or not), but his assassination was big enough to get reported with all the name variations, probably just to make sure he was really the properly "named one" who was dispatched

... then I got home from worksite, which took 4 1/2 hours instead of the usual 2 1/2 (due to work on the Bay Bridge causing one-lane traffic hold-ups)

... got to bed at 11:30 PM, awakened at 1:30 AM when wife got sick (minor illness, but we were both awake), then finally got back to sleep at 5:30 AM or so, awakened at 8:45 AM and called the cardiology office to tell them we were not going to be there in 45 minutes to keep her appointment

... then found out that overall we were up $4,500+ in the market for the week!

So, all-in-all, it was quite a week.  I am going to the wet bar in the kitchen now and believe I will just drink until Sunday night and hope for a better week coming up.

All of which proves: "If you don't want to know the answer, don't ask the question."

"So, how are YOU doin'?"

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Hurricane, Pet Shelter and Falling Trees


Waiting (and waiting and waiting) for the hurricane to pass.  

Think: helpless, anxious, helpless, sleepless, helpless, unable to take any kind of action which, if we could have done it, would have included loading our whole house on a flat-bed trailer and hot-footing it out to south-central Virginia.  Short of doing that, one is left with the Helpless-Waiting Syndrome.

In past years we have done our waiting by staying here at home.  This year the fact that the track showed Sandbridge taking a direct hit from Irene made us consider leaving.  The clincher was the Mandatory Evacuation notice and the announcement that the City was going to shut down the sewer system at 12 noon on Friday -> no water flow, no sewer function until 12 noon on Sunday.  (VB has a vacuum sewer system and they didn't want all that sand and sea water sucked in to the system.)

We have been at Sandbridge, in this house, since 1976, so one of the hardest things about the hurricane was packing up and leaving it all sitting here, three streets west of the ocean.  That, for the animal lovers among us, was complicated by the No-Win situation with our tabby cat, named Doug.  When we tried (very gently) to get him into his cat carrier he bolted, ran upstairs and displayed dilated pupils about the size of small dinner plates. We call that his Shredder Look ... come too close and get all your uncovered skin, face, arms, hands shredded in a flash.  

With the radar storm track running right smack over Sandbridge our options were: 
1.  Both of us stay home with Doug (too hard to decide; reject that idea); 
2. Fran stays with Doug ... (I'm not even going to finish that statement (too easy to decide; reject that idea); 
3. Acquiesce to Doug's wishes to let him stay home, discuss our first failure to get him in to the carrier and admit that, if we tried again, our medical bills for the ER and a couple of hundred cat-claw-induced sutures would be very high; (too easy to decide neither one of us wanted to think about the cost-per-stitch);
4. Try to convince ourselves that "he would be OK" if we leave him.  We didn't convince ourselves, but it was a Mandatory Evac order.

After stewing around for the better part of a day, we decided to give him the run of the house and we left him to do as he pleased.  As it turns out, he was fine when we got back, had not even eaten all the dry food we left in the dishes, and he undoubtedly got far more good, sound sleep than we did.  He slept.  We worried.

About the sleeplessness: Personally, I really didn't sleep for 2.5 days while we were away from the house, not knowing if it would be there when we got back.  I have never been one to tolerate sleep-deprivation and the last couple of days the suspense of not knowing the outcome just cleaned my clock.  With 8-10 hours of sleep a night in our own bed I'll probably be back to normal (whatever that is) by this Friday, but our nerves are about as frayed as they have ever been.  Lying awake in friend's guest bed you can learn lots of things:  e.g., I now know that there are 11,087 (plus/minus 3% sampling error) holes of various sizes in each ceiling sound tile.  (We over-nighted at the home of a former colleague, whose house is 25 miles west of the ocean front).  

After 2.5 days locked out, they opened the road to residents-only with ID.  In the Believe-It-Or-Not category: at home we had no external or internal wind or water damage; there was a very brief water-spout which became a tornado and hit five blocks south of us ... (we are in the 2800s and the spout hit 3300 block), it wiped the roofs off five houses and then picked up and dissolved into the windy / cloudy / rainy sky.  

In our yard two branches fell off a couple of pear trees in our back yard = no problem at all compared to the total destruction of those houses ... of course, the spout had to hit the huge 3-story houses (some of them very new, very expensive, built for rentals) right on the beach.  

Speaking of branches falling off trees: in the backyard a 10-to-12 foot limb came down (from about 40 feet up) and landed parallel to the rear wall of his house and made a thump that made us all jump.  Across his back fence, in the neighbor's yard an old, 60-to-70-foot tree came out of the ground, root-ball-and-all and made a whopper of a noise when it hit the neighbor’s yard.  We estimated the root ball was 10-12 feet across.  Fortunately, nothing hit either house.

Our garages (at home) are at ground level and face west away from the ocean. With really heavy rain storms we might get some water leaking under the doors, but with the hurricane blowing in from the east we didn't get a drop in either garage.

I think the 30-foot-high bank of trees along the canal in our back yard (that would be on the ocean-side, blocking the wind as it came on shore) were part of our salvation.  They are almost like a green wall and undoubtedly slowed the wind as it battered the neighborhood.  Never thought that a bunch of pear and pine trees would be that valuable.  Another positive result of the 85 - 115 MPH winds: a lot of the high-calorie tallow berries were blown off the Chinese Tallow Berry trees ... the birds are flocking around the yard having a pre-Winter feast.

Side-light news item (film at 11): pear tree leaves are not very strong.  When they blow off the trees they kind of "shatter" like glass.  So the east-facing wall of the house looked like it had green paint splatter all over it.  Actually made us laugh when we saw it (nothing says post-hurricane residual high-anxiety like two goof-balls laughing a leaf particles stuck to a wall).

Since we have Internet phone, cable TV and internet email etc and they have all been out until about an hour ago, so we missed some calls and are answering them today.  As fate would have it, I canceled the VERIZON Wireless card for my laptop about three weeks ago so we didn't have that cellular connection either.  

Anyway, we are home, the A/C works (thank Heaven, because the temp is still 80 and the humidity is even higher than that), we have hot water and cold drinks and none of the food thawed.  

Folks around here have been referring to these days as the two weeks from Hell ... first shoe to drop was the earthquake (epicenter between Charlottesville and Richmond), the second shoe to drop was the  hurricane, with the packing to get away from it and re-packing to return to the beach ... now we are hoping that Mother Nature is not a three-legged giant with another shoe to drop on us.  I am betting we are out of the woods for a while ... but hurricane season is not over yet ... so we are not taking the plywood off the windows in the glassed-in sun room on the east-facing ocean-side of the house yet ... maybe after Thanksgiving (*), but we'll need turkey and oyster dressing and cranberry sauce and figgy pudding to fortify us first ... then when we wake up from our nap we can decide about the plywood.

 (*)  [I wonder to whom the Detroit Lions will lose this year?] (*) (*) 

(*) (*) [ Wasn't that good?  I didn't say "I wonder who the Detroit Lions will lose to ..." and leave my participle dangling.  I mean, given the damage a hurricane could have done, I'm just glad to HAVE a participle, so I certainly am not going to leave it dangling.]

Saturday, August 20, 2011

Health Insurance Required - not like auto insurance?

Question:  ... If there are 29,000 starving children in Africa and 10s of thousands of adults out there in the arid, sandy countryside, and the NGOs save them all, where are the going to get the food to sustain all those lives over the long-term?

[Note: I'm just sayin' ...
Starting off on a project without a specified objective is like 
going on a coast-to-coast trip through unfamiliar territory 
without a map.]

Want to play a little game now?  OK, when was the following excerpt written and by whom? (see answer below)

"Everywhere we look, we see poverty and large families going hand in hand. We see hordes of children whose parents cannot feed, clothe, or educate even one half of the number born to them. We see sick, harassed, broken mothers whose health and nerves cannot bear the strain of further child-bearing. We see fathers growing despondent and desperate, because their labor cannot bring the necessary wage to keep their growing families. We see that those parents who are least fit to reproduce the race are having the largest number of children; while people of wealth, leisure, and education are having small families."
 
"It is generally conceded by sociologists and scientists that a nation cannot go on indefinitely multiplying without eventually reaching the point when population presses upon means of subsistence."  More ...



Answer:
(*) This is a quote from a Margaret Sanger article which she wrote 94 years ago.  Her insights into population growth and control vis-a-vis the ability to care for any excess of children, over two per family, were first published in the Woman Citizen, Vol. 8, February 23, 1924, pages 17-18. 


Related observation:
Famous Alvin Toffler Quotation
Alvin Toffler (born October 3, 1928) is an American writer and futurist, known for his works discussing the digital revolution, communications revolution, corporate revolution and technological singularity.  A former associate editor of Fortune magazine, his early work focused on technology and its impact (through effects like information overload). Then he moved to examining the reaction of and changes in society.

"If we do not learn from history, we shall be compelled to relive it.  True.  But if we do not change the future, we shall be compelled to endure it. And that could be worse. "














Wednesday, August 10, 2011

I may be wrong but ...

Question:  ... If there are 29,000 starving children in Somalia-Kenya, and 10s of thousands of adults out there in the arid, sandy countryside, and the NGOs save them all, where are the going to get the food to sustain all those lives over the long-term?

[Note: I'm just sayin' ...
Starting off on a project without a specified objective is like 
going on a coast-to-coast trip through unfamiliar territory 
without a map.]

Want to play a little game now?  OK, when was the following excerpt written and by whom? (see answer below)

"Everywhere we look, we see poverty and large families going hand in hand. We see hordes of children whose parents cannot feed, clothe, or educate even one half of the number born to them. We see sick, harassed, broken mothers whose health and nerves cannot bear the strain of further child-bearing. We see fathers growing despondent and desperate, because their labor cannot bring the necessary wage to keep their growing families. We see that those parents who are least fit to reproduce the race are having the largest number of children; while people of wealth, leisure, and education are having small families."
 
"It is generally conceded by sociologists and scientists that a nation cannot go on indefinitely multiplying without eventually reaching the point when population presses upon means of subsistence."  More ...



===========================
Answer:
(*) This is a quote from a Margaret Sanger article which she wrote 84 years ago.  Her insights into population growth and control vis-a-vis the ability to care for any excess of children, over two per family, were first published in the Woman Citizen, Vol. 8, February 23, 1924, pages 17-18. 


Related observation:
Famous Alvin Toffler Quotation
Alvin Toffler (born October 3, 1928) is an American writer and futurist, known for his works discussing the digital revolution, communications revolution, corporate revolution and technological singularity.  A former associate editor of Fortune magazine, his early work focused on technology and its impact (through effects like information overload). Then he moved to examining the reaction of and changes in society.

"If we do not learn from history, we shall be compelled to relive it.  True.  But if we do not change the future, we shall be compelled to endure it. And that could be worse. "














Sunday, August 7, 2011

The Trouble with "Been there, done that"

After all these years, I seem to have no deep yearnings.
What I have left are only superficial desires.

The "Indian-Giver" & "Itty-Bitty" Laws

The Indian-Giver Law
When administering medication via any route (i.e., oral pills or tablets, injection, suppository, patch, other) always remember: "Once a medication has been given to the patient, it is difficult (if not impossible) to get it back."

The Itty-Bitty Law
Therefore, one should always be guided by the Itty-Bitty Law:
"Always start with an itty-bitty dose, especially of any new medication, because you can always give more, but (see Indian-Giver Law above)."

Corollary of the Itty-Bitty Law
"Just because they make a specific dose size (e.g., a 25- or 50- or 100-mg pill), doesn't mean you have to give that much to a patient."

(see "Appropriate Dose" posting on this blog; see Also: "That's Why God Gave Us Pill Cutters"