14 Wonderful Years

That’s right!  14 wonderful years with the love of my life.  September 7th was our anniversary and we decided to celebrate the event with our puppy dog, Tigger, in Gatlinburg, TN.  It was my first time there and it was a lot of fun.  Of course having Tigger with us was a bit limiting as to which shops we could visit or what restaurants we could eat at. But we did have luck in find restaurants we could sit on the patio along with Tigger.  As for shops, we did actually find several shops that allowed to bring Tigger inside.  One them was a high end furniture store—an Amish store.  Incredible craftsmanship on super nice products and they didn’t hesitate to invite us in.

So the first day we were up there we decided to go hiking (waddling for me) and it was fun.  We drove into the North Carolina side of the Smoky Foothills.  We hiked 3.3 miles along a creek in complete shade into the town of Cherokee.  Once there we found ourselves a Dairy Queen with a patio and sat outside in the incredibly pleasant weather and had lunch.  As a bonus, we had lunchtime entertainment.  Two members of the Cherokee Nation were there performing native dances while of them played on the drum.  Of course they didn’t do any sacred dances out of respect for their ancestors.  However, they have many dances that were intended to be performed in front of other tribes.  It was a lot of fun.  After lunch we walked the 3.3 miles back to the homestead and the trail head.  Here is a picture of the placeThere’s just something about the homestead that piqued my interest.  I can see myself living on a homestead like this during that time period.   It was incredible to see!  I don’t know when it was built, but it was sometime ago.  It was actually a challenge to get this shot with no people or automobiles visible in it.  The entire homestead is fenced off, has 5 outbuildings, and a fenced off garden within the fence that outlined the property.  Just seeing this was worth our trip into North Carolina.

Our 2nd day there, as I mentioned earlier, was spent entirely in Gatlinburg walking up and down the strip.  We walked about 4 miles total that day and a good share of it was in the direct sunshine.  When we got back to the hotel, .8 miles from the strip, we stopped on the grass out in back of the hotel to let Tigger do his thing.  Of course he took one look at that creek, walked out into the water and promptly laid himself down in the water.  The water was deep enough that it was flowing up and over his rump.  He’s never done that before and we’ve had him since he was 10 weeks old.  This little 4.4 mile walk through Gatlinburg took us the better part of 5 hours.  Tigger was so good during the trip among all the people.  It was shocking how much attention he attracted from people of all ages.  There were 3 little kids, a boy and 2 girls, and they sat down on the ground to play with Tigger.  Tigger loved it.  They also had some brilliant suggestions on how to take care of Tigger.  lol.  They were so cute and so very sincere. 

Well the trip was a blast.  Gatlinburg is only 5 1/2 hours away from our current home so it wasn’t a miserable drive.  Oh yeah, you should have seen the crowds in Pigeon Forge.  It was horribly crowded.  We only had to traverse about 3 miles of the city, but it took us nearly 20 minutes to do it.  Though I hate, hate, hate crowds, this didn’t bother me.  Our whole reason for going on this trip was to go hiking and be out and away from all the people.  On the trail we hiked we only passed about 15 people total.  That’s my idea of a vacation.  I hope everyone could have such a relaxing vacation as what we had.

Included here is a picture of our little hairy son.  He is 10 yrs 8 months old.  Like i said earlier, we’ve had him since he was 10 weeks old.  Of course you can really see his age when you look at his muzzle.  He’s gone from a mostly pure black muzzle to a muzzle that is almost completely white.  It is saddening to actually see his age and know that he is not a little puppy anymore.  Here is a picture of my little boy at the trail head before our hike.

That’s about it for this post.  I know I’ve promised this in the past, but I will try to post more often.  This would be a great place to continue my journal which I used to be really good at keeping current.  Well, we’ll see how it works out.

Bye for now.

LG Ally

As a getting out of the hospital gift to ourselves, girl and I got new cell phones.  I really didn’t need one as I loved my old cell phone.  It was a Palm Centro, a smart  phone.  It did everything I thought I needed in a phone.  But when we were at the Verizon store they told me that I was eligible for an upgrade and that they had a buy one get on free special going on.  So to humor the salesman I checked out his little phone he was offering.  It was an LG Ally and boy was it was sharp.  I fell in love.  Before I knew it, we were both walking out of the phone with a new LG phone.

So far we have had it for just over 2 weeks and I love it.  If you’re a fan of Star Trek you’ll appreciate this analogy: For all intents and purposes, it’s a tricorder.  While I’m sure there’s some things it can’t do, I’ve yet to find them.  I have spent 3 hours going through the free apps and I still haven’t found the end of the list.  Of course a lot of them I’ll never even consider downloading, but I have found about a dozen that now take up space on my phone.  And with 32 gb of SD card to fill up, I have plenty of room to do anything I want.  My only complaint is that with all the apps that this thing can run in the background, the battery doesn’t last nearly as long as it did in my Palm.  On the Palm I had about 8 days of standby, 5 days if I talked on the phone for about 20 minutes a day.  With the LG the battery lasts about 2.5 days.  Of course there are things I can do/set to make the battery last longer, and I use them, but that limits some of the functions of the phone. 

Long story short, if you’re looking for a new phone, check out the LG Ally.  It really is a nice phone.  And the slide out keyboard is a perfect companion to the large touch screen.  I do have one thing I would change—I would make it, if possible, set so the ringer on the calendar events would sound until some sort of input was entered by the person to shut them off.  As it is the ringer sounds once and then leaves a notification on the screen.  Minor, I know, but annoying.  However, with that in mind, I still love the phone. 

HOSPITAL

OK, here’s the deal.  I had been feeling pretty crummy for the last couple of weeks.  I was getting more and more nauseous for seemingly no good reason.  I didn’t understand what was going on.  But everything came to head last Tuesday (10 days ago) when I started puking my guts up.  It was not cool.  After about an hour or two of that I decided it was time to go the ER.  By then it was 12:30 a.m. Wednesday morning.  So we packed our bags because I knew they were going to keep me.  I was right.  First thing they wanted to do (because of my history) was do a CT scan with contrast.  So they loaded me up onto the machine and did a pre-scan and then the fun began.  With the pre-scan complete they turned to do the actual exam.  The CT machine injects a contrast dye into the IV with a lot of pressure.  It turns out that it was too much pressure.  The injector blew my vein.  So they tried to start a new IV.  No luck.  In fact, 3 needles were bent just trying to pierce my skin to start the IV.  They were amazed.  It gave a whole new meaning to ‘man of steel”. 

Well  eventually, 7 sticks later, they were able to get an IV started and it seemed good until they injected the contrast when it blew.  They got permission to do the test without contrast and everything went well after that.  It was still another 6 hours before they put me in my room—my home for the next 7 days.

Now IV trouble didn’t stop just because I was given a room.  During my stay in the hospital no IV lasted more than 22 hours and no IV was started on the first try.  Finally after 3 days of poking and prodding they decided to put in a picc line.  It was smooth sailing from that point on.  They could administer drugs and draw blood without having to poke m any more.  But that only happened after I had been stuck 25 times.  Bummer.

Even with all this to consider, my hospital stay was very helpful.  The hospital staff, especially the nurses, were phenomenal in the care and consideration they provided.  They actually gave the genuine impression that they were concerned with my comfort and well being.  I could not have asked for a better staff to care for me.  Actually, some of them almost seemed disappointed that I had done some tasks without their assistance.  They wanted to be there for me. 

But all good things come to an end…as well as bad things.  Once they were able to administer drugs without worrying about blowing my veins, things went much better and I improved quickly.  And though they were sad to see me go, I was thrilled that I was able to eat solid food and was on my way out the door.  I want to do something, anything, even it’s just writing a letter of praise to their supervisor, to show my appreciation for how easy they made this hospital stay. 

So that’s what I’ve been up to lately.  I hope all of you got your August off to a better start than me. 

99.9% Complete

Yippee!  Our house is complete minus some minor straightening up of the kitchen.  That’s a tough one.  We have stuff on the counters that doesn’t have a home and the real estate agent says it’s best to have the bare minimum exposed to sight.  So with very little work left we’ll have the kitchen completed and I can call the agent and tell her we’re ready.  We worked on the outside today and it was disappointing to say the least.  The pressure washing of the vinyl went great, but cleaning the bottom of the house where mud has splattered onto the outer walls was where the results were less than stellar.  It’s like the mud dyed the walls a funky shade of reddish-brown.  But they are as clean as they’re going to be so we’re just going to have to suck it up and drive on (to put it in Army terms). 

This is it.  This is our house that is for sale.  Yes, we’re on a bit of a hill, but it’s not bad.  I enjoy it.  See the brownish stain on the bottom of the wall underneath the stairs/front porch?  That’s the part that didn’t come off.  It’s a good house.  If it were possible to take this house with us out west, I would.  Almost the entire bottom floor is garage and work space.  On a plus note, anyone who buys this house is going to have lots of wild blackberries.  They are super yummy!  So if you don’t want to purchase this property for the house, do it for the blackberries. Buy it, buy it, buy it, buy it………  Listen to that little voice in your head. 

Unbelievable

Peggy West, an elected official in Milwaukee county, Wisconsin said in an interview earlier this week about the Arizona law SB1070 that if we were talking about Texas and they had passed an immigration law similar to Arizona’s law, that she would have to look twice at it because Texas shares a border with Mexico.  But Arizona, she states, is a state a ways removed from the Mexico border.  I’m not making this up.  Thankfully a fellow councilmember who obviously paid attention in geography in school informed her that Arizona does in deed share a border with Mexico.  Even Jon Kyl of Arizona got wind of this and sent her a letter and a map to prove to her she was oh so wrong.  So in West’s own words, I guess she needs to think twice about this law in Arizona—SB1070. 

That’s a huge part of the problem with all the dems supporting boycotts of Arizona.  Most of them don’t have a damn clue what they are talking about.  Most of them haven’t read the bill for themselves.  I have read it and I can tell you that the Arizona law is more restrictive on law enforcement officials than the federal law on the same issue.  Not only that, but 35 years ago, the Supreme Court decided that it is within states rights to impose their own laws regarding immigration so long as the state law does not try to remove power for the federal law.  And in this case it doesn’t.  In fact, this law strengthens the federal law.  Why are we so afraid to enforce our own laws regarding immigration?  You keep hearing that our immigration system is broken.  How so?  The only thing that is broken is that we don’t do anything to enforce the laws once we find illegal immigrants on our soil.  I have a dozen friends or more from Mexico and Spain that are here legally which proves that our immigration system works.  Open your eyes people!  I’m not saying we shouldn’t let immigrants in.  We need them in our country.  That’s what makes our country great.  But it needs to be done in accordance with the laws that are already on the books. 

If you have a beef with Arizona’s law SB1070, please take the time to sit down and read it.  I promise you’ll be surprised that all this commotion was raised by such a mundane law.  It takes about 10-20 minutes to read, depending on how fast you read.  19 pages on most websites.  You can do and should do it if you are going to speak out against it. 

And what’s with Obama planning on suing the state?  What a fool.  It’s not the place of the federal government to tell states what laws they can or can’t pass.  Not only that, but once again the president finds himself at odds with the American people since all polls show that a whopping 70% of the people in this country approve of this new law in Arizona. 

No Love Lost

Everyone who knows anything about me knows that I have no love for Obama.  However I feel the need to stick up for him a little bit concerning this current oil spill in the gulf.  The same way Bush was not responsible for the hurricane that slammed New Orleans, Obama had nothing to do with this oil spill.  It is BP’s fault and BP’s fault along.  What do you expect?  Do you think Obama is supposed to don a scuba tank and go down and plug the hole himself?   That’s a little absurd.  Don’t get me wrong, though.  He is responsible for not pressing BP to get their butt in gear and use every resource available to them to clean up the oil before it reached the shore.  But that’s it.

As for BP being criminally liable, I don’t think so.  This is hurting them immensely and they are losing untold millions of dollars.  Boycotting BP isn’t going to help the situation at all.  The individual citizens that own BP franchises are the only ones that will be hurt by a boycott and that’s not fair to them.  BP is going to pay dearly for this oil spill and we should just leave it at that.  The more fines and financial losses they experience, the less money they’ll have to clean up the mess in the gulf.  What we should do, is find a way to communicate to BP and the president how important it is to use every technique available to clean up the oil.  There are hundreds of great ideas out there that they can be taking advantage of but for whatever reason have chosen to ignore.

So let’s be a little slower to judge when it comes to the oil spill.  I know a lot of you aren’t going to agree with me and that’s ok.  We are allowed to have differing opinions.  That’s what makes friendships unique and worthwhile.  I do welcome and encourage your thoughts. 

To the Dentist

Today I went to the dentist after a full night of horrid nightmares concerning them.  It was a rough night.  The visit went pretty well.  The doc prescribed a mild sedative to calm my nerves and the fillings went pretty well.  Unfortunately he found 2 teeth that need root canals.  I go to an endodontist (I’ve never been to one of those) next week for both root canals.  They don’t offer valium there, but they do use nitrous oxide.  I’m very pleased about that.  I’ve only ever had one root canal in my life and it was a rough experience. 

Now you may be wondering why my teeth are so bad.  It’s not from lack of brushing.  In fact, every time I go for a cleaning the hygienist comments on how clean and white my are.  However, I take pain killers on a regular basis so any minor tooth problem is completely masked.  I don’t feel the pain so I don’t know to go to the dentist to get things fixed until the problem is major.  So I have 2 root canals and 5 crowns scheduled.  Thank God for good dental insurance. 

Another note—I have been told by 3 dentists now that I brush my teeth too much.  I’m sort of OCD when it comes to a clean mouth.  Brushing so frequently has weakened my enamel allowing for easier formation of cavities.  So between the pain meds and the excessive brushing, all the problems are my own fault.