Another mixed grill.

Nothing much to report today, so let’s get into the huh-that’s-interesting-but-not-very file and see what falls out.

Last year sometime I picked up my film camera again, loaded it with Tri-X, and pushed it to 1600 ASA. Why? I have no idea. It took a while to use up the roll, and most of it was shit, but here are two I liked. The Blue Angels flyover was a Hail Mary; we were down by the lake waiting for them, and I thought they’d come down over the water, but they were about 100 yards inland, and traveling so fast I didn’t have a second to get ready; I heard them, turned, raised the camera and pressed the shutter. Bingo:

A friend and I went bike riding past a long-closed bar in Delray – one of those cursed, over-polluted neighborhoods in southwest Detroit – and found the front door standing open. We stopped and stuck our heads in and found the owner there, hanging. He was a very, very chatty fellow and maybe a little tetched. This is the back of the building, taken from the Rouge River on another day. I like the dog keeping watch:

Some days I can deeply identify with this raccoon:

If you don’t want to click, cooking oil did the trick to unstick the raccoon.

June 3 was a few days back, but this isn’t time-dependent: An old writing lesson by Tommy Tomlinson, on what storytellers can learn from “Ode to Billie Joe.”

With that, I gotta pop in my contacts and do another Zoom workout. Good weekend, all.

Posted at 8:43 am in Same ol' same ol' |
 

46 responses to “Another mixed grill.”

  1. basset said on June 11, 2021 at 9:07 am

    1600? brings back memories of processing rock concert pics with Acufine in a basement mop sink. Still have my old Canon FTb, worn down to bare metal on the corners.
    Saw the Blue Angels at a distance in Pensacola last week, they practice over the bay on Tuesday mornings.

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  2. Dorothy said on June 11, 2021 at 9:57 am

    Where’d you find TriX film? Or any film? I’m guessing it could be mail ordered. My dad was an amateur photographer. He always kept his rolls of film in the freezer. He had a dark room in our basement at our first house to develop film. Does anyone do that anymore these days?

    Your pictures are terrific.

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  3. basset said on June 11, 2021 at 11:27 am

    I suppose a few still do their own processing, some recent advancements make it a lot easier, particularly in temperature control.
    I have processed a bunch of TriX in my time, also other stocks (anyone else remember GAF 500?) and 16mm cine film, not since about 1979 though. The rare Tri-X I use now gets sent out.

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  4. Julie Robinson said on June 11, 2021 at 11:49 am

    Those pics are tremendous! I love real B&W photography, and the prints last, unlike color.

    My Dad always had a darkroom too, but the police department had a better enlarger, so he would swap out making prints for them in exchange for making prints for him.

    I see a high school friend has just retired and will be running an upscale resale store to raise money for a foundation she founded. Just wondering, has anyone every seen a downscale resale store? A lot of times it seems hard to find the upscale aspect of the items.

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  5. alex said on June 11, 2021 at 12:38 pm

    I still have old rolls of undeveloped film from 20-30 years ago stashed away in a closet. I’ve held onto them thinking it might be fun to get them developed some day but haven’t gotten around to it.

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  6. Dorothy said on June 11, 2021 at 2:11 pm

    Oh Alex I admire your restraint! The suspense would be killing me to know what was on those rolls of film! Don’t wait too long – the technology needed to develop them might be gone forever in a short period of time.

    One time when we went to the beach in the late 80’s or early 90’s, I had gotten up before sunrise to go take some pictures. I know there were dolphins jumping and some really good chances of wonderful images from that. I mailed away all those rolls, and that one roll was lost. I’m still pissed about that all these years later.

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  7. Peter said on June 11, 2021 at 2:39 pm

    I’m sorry to go off topic here, but just one more of a million examples of how far we’ve sunk: Commenting on the news reports that Trump’s DOJ were investigating members of Congress, their staff, and families, Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, the guy who green lit torture techniques at Gitmo, fired several U.S. Attorneys who wouldn’t prosecute political enemies, and resigned in disgrace, said he would never do what Barr did and that it is a real disgrace to the Justice Department, and he’s either being disengenius, or that’s how bad it is….

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  8. Deborah said on June 11, 2021 at 3:31 pm

    Stochastic terrorism is disgusting and obviously dangerous. Reading the Reuters piece about death threats and harassment of election officials and workers is extremely scary. Intimidation and propaganda works unfortunately. There has already been physical violence and it will probably get worse. This is so depressing.

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  9. Deborah said on June 11, 2021 at 3:50 pm

    The Pulitzer Prizes have been announced, in poetry one of our Abiquiu neighbors Mei-mei Berssenbrugge was a finalist, she didn’t win, but close. Her latest book “A Treatise on Stars” was the almost winning piece. Maybe got inspired by incredible starry nights in Abiquiu.

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  10. Deborah said on June 11, 2021 at 6:09 pm

    Has anyone watched “In the Heights” Yet? I watched the 8 minute beginning that you can get on You Tube and it looks pretty good. We don’t have HBO Max and I’m not ready for the movie theater where it’s playing in Santa Fe, so I guess I’ll have to wait.

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  11. Mike Berry said on June 11, 2021 at 7:14 pm

    I did a terrified double-take when you mentioned you “found the owner there, hanging.” Yikes!

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  12. Dorothy said on June 11, 2021 at 7:50 pm

    Deborah we’re going to go see In The Heights in a few weeks when my daughter comes to visit for a long weekend. Just the girls – me, Laura and Meg, my daughter-in-law who is a high school Spanish teacher. She’s especially excited to see it. I’ve seen the stage show twice. The first one was much better than the second one.

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  13. Julie Robinson said on June 11, 2021 at 8:43 pm

    Deborah, I’m sorry to say that I did not love In The Heights, but I don’t want that to spoil it for anyone else. I’m a huge fan of the stage show, and I loved the big dance numbers as well as the addition of the Dreamer subplot. All the other changes were detrimental, in my opinion. And it’s too damn long.

    My mom watched with me and couldn’t keep the plot straight, and also couldn’t read the subtitles when they used Spanish. Maybe she could have in a movie theater, maybe not.

    It’s getting great reviews. I’ll just go sit in the corner by myself.

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  14. alex said on June 11, 2021 at 8:54 pm

    The owner “hanging” threw me for a loop for a second too.

    Delray was my dad’s first destination after he got off the boat at Ellis Island after WWII. He and his few surviving family members lived above a storefront. He, a brother and a cousin got scholarships at some shitty colleges, made the best of it and went to some good grad schools and had decent lives afterward. They toiled in the Fisher body plant and Swift meat packing plant on their summer breaks for extra cash and decided that busting hump at school was definitely the better way to go.

    I’ve always felt like an abject failure compared to my dad. Never mastered any foreign language while he was fluent in several, and learned English on the fly as an undergraduate and made law journal in law school because he was a better writer than most of his native English-speaking classmates. And then he had a career to beat the hell out of anything I’ve ever done. And now, sadly, I’m seeing after him as he declines into senescence knowing that I have no children who will do the same for me.

    In the Aesop’s fable, it was never explained how a grasshopper like me managed to be born into an ant colony.

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  15. Deborah said on June 11, 2021 at 9:16 pm

    That’s funny Alex, my husband and I always considered ourselves grasshoppers, we’ve talked about that a lot. We don’t live like other people do, most people would be aghast at the way we live, in tiny little places with few possessions. High rises, a cabin with no electricity or running water etc, wearing basically “uniforms” day after day. We spend our money on things people probably think are frivolous and wasteful. But we like what we like and who cares if other people think it’s weird.

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  16. alex said on June 11, 2021 at 10:05 pm

    And to cap off an otherwise sucky day, I just came in after falling into the lake with a pontoon bench I was carrying down the dock to load onto the boat to get it out of the garage to make room for a ShopSmith woodworking unit I bought for my hubby today at an estate sale. I’m so ready to just junk the pontoon furniture and use nesting plastic chairs. That stuff’s crappy.

    As for the woodworking stuff, we were going to build just a shed for tractors but now I think it needs to include a wood shop. In the meantime I think I’m going to sell our frivolous convertible to make room in the garage.

    My bathwater’s running because I need a deep soak after my brackish encounter by the dock.

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  17. LAMary said on June 11, 2021 at 10:56 pm

    First day of work. Meh. Found out about ten minutes in that they are moving to another location in three weeks. About thirty miles of very congested freeway from my home. Fuck that. I also got assigned 22 jobs to fill in those three weeks, 8 of them psychiatrists. Um. Probably not happening. So my resume’s out there and I intend to have a word with Robert Half about placing me in this job and not telling me that the location is about to change. To get to the place that office is moving to would be at least a three hour commute each way.

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  18. Julie Robinson said on June 12, 2021 at 12:58 am

    In 15 days you’re expected to make 22 job placements? That sounds downright impossible. I know there’s a shortage of psychiatrists from my SIL, who is both a psych nurse and searching for a new doc for herself. In her university town of 85,000, there is not one single practitioner.

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  19. Dexter Friend said on June 12, 2021 at 1:19 am

    My daughter Lori, of Las Vegas, Nevada, is nearly finished with schooling to become a psychiatrist. She works full time as a nurse practitioner but after seeing so much death and also having Covid19 herself, she wants to get off the hospital floor and be done with emergency room surprises. She’s not quite finished with all the classes and OJT. And the stress of the long hours and schooling and running her household have caused perhaps some long-haul Covid19 issues, as the three surgeries she had from virus complications left her with weakened systems and she needs more surgery, again. Covid19 affected her bowels. It was awful. She’s nearly 53 now. Time to get this Covid19 behind her, behind all of us.

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  20. LAMary said on June 12, 2021 at 1:30 am

    MDs in general are a real pain in the ass to recruit. It’s so much about the money it gets depressing for the recruiter, or at least it did for me. Not all specialties. But ER docs, cardiac docs, it’s bad. “Hello, I’m looking for an ER doc for a hospital (name some nice place, not some shithole) for a contract position. Are you interested in hearing more about this position? Reply: I’m making (some obscene amount) per hour now. Can you beat that? This is why I avoid MD recruiting. I start hating doctors. Whenever I’d hear someone saying docs are being hurt by ACA I’d tell them to take a stroll through the doctors’ parking lot. Bentleys, Jaguars, Lamborghinis. Not all docs. Just some. The ones you need to search for.

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  21. David C said on June 12, 2021 at 7:04 am

    My PCP drives a ’92 Toyota pickup and changes his own oil. I don’t know if it makes him a better doctor but I like him better for it.

    Shopsmiths are the bomb, Alex. Unlike most things that pretend to multitask and really do maybe one thing well and the others mediocre to poor, Shopsmiths do most everything pretty well and they’re great space savers.

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  22. alex said on June 12, 2021 at 8:43 am

    David C, we were aware this ShopSmith was coming up for sale and made sure to pounce on it. We took down a big black walnut tree last year and we’ve been letting it season and we plan to use the lathe to cut some nice boards out of it. Planning to do some customizing around the house and then maybe sell the rest.

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  23. robert said on June 12, 2021 at 10:00 am

    Tri-X?!? That was one old roll of film. In my youth I shot so much Tri-X that I got a bulk-loader — brought the cost down to about a penny a shot. Used Microdol X 3:1 for developing or Edwal FG7 when pushing. My favorite film was Panatomic-X (ASA 32). My current project is digitizing my slides and negatives dating back to the 70s. Wish I hadn’t tossed the negatives that I had shot with trusty Kodak Instamatic 400.
    Nice photos, Nancy – nice grain on the jet flyover.

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  24. Deborah said on June 12, 2021 at 11:39 am

    We have a shitload of slides stored down in our storage space in our building in Chicago. They’re mostly my husband’s from his architecture projects. I have no idea if they are worth keeping and S doesn’t want to take the time to deal with them.

    The electrician was supposed to be here at 8 this morning so I got up at 6 so I could get showered, have my coffee etc. You guessed it, at 9 I texted him asking if he was coming. He responded that he had an emergency job in Albuquerque and would be here at 3 or 4. I want to tell him to forget it and we’ll find someone else but S wants to play it out for a while. Maddening.

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  25. Mark P said on June 12, 2021 at 12:30 pm

    My father shot thousands of slides, and I ended up with them. I have been sporadically going through them. Most are very nice landscapes, but I have no idea where. Most go into the trash. I know he would be disappointed, but what am I supposed to do? I could digitize all of them and let my nephews throw the files away, or just save them the bother.

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  26. LAMary said on June 12, 2021 at 12:34 pm

    Primary care docs and pediatricians aren’t as likely to be jerks in my experience. Jerks don’t go into those specialties.

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  27. Deborah said on June 12, 2021 at 1:07 pm

    Both my husband and I have the same PCP and we love her. She takes the train in from Evanston so I have no idea what kind of car she has. Since she’s been our Dr she’s had 3 kids and her husband is also a Dr.

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  28. Deborah said on June 12, 2021 at 1:30 pm

    My right wing sister has a cabin in MN near where Jane Fonda is protesting. Of course my sister is pro oil so she thinks pipelines are safer than trucks hauling oil, although she really doesn’t think that (or not, doesn’t matter to her), she’s just bloviating the party line. She has not a care in the world for Native American interests as is typical of right wingers. Her husband has a nephew who works on pipelines in Alaska and thinks those are just fine too. My one word response to her email was “renewalbles”.

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  29. Deborah said on June 12, 2021 at 2:12 pm

    It pains me to say this because I have so enjoyed gardening at the Santa Fe condo, but we can’t use plants anymore for a while and maybe never again to make interesting and livable outdoor spaces. The serious, serious drought in the southwest is just too obvious and critical. Our neighbors have cut down trees and cleared out greenery which is devastating but maybe in the long run, that is best. Our trees on our property are very spindley and sad looking after the dry, dry winter. I had high hopes that things would change but after all the reading I’m doing it doesn’t seem like that’s going to be possible, in the short term anyway. So if we want shade to lessen temps inside of the units we’re going to have to get very creative with tensile shade structures, or pergolas or something. Interesting places are going to have to be made with rocks or sculptural elements. Sad but true. This goes even more so in Abiquiu where there’s normally much less rainfall than Santa Fe. Any hopes we had of having a garden out there are gone. Damn.

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  30. Icarus said on June 12, 2021 at 2:14 pm

    Alex @ 16: congrats. Used Shopsmiths are rare to find. During my woodworking phase, I thought I’d get one. Someone pointed out that they do take longer than 90 seconds to switch modes (as advertised) so you really have to plan out your cuts, routes, sanding, etc. Is it a Mark V or 7, or older?

    Deborah: if you haven’t looked at those slides by now, do yourself a favor and dispose of them as eco-friendly as possible.

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  31. alex said on June 12, 2021 at 2:52 pm

    Icarus, it’s a Mark V. I love how the components are all fairly simple to detach. I took my screw gun this morning and didn’t need to use it for anything other than to dismount a custom-made accessory rack from the wall (yes, it came with a lot of extra goodies).

    At the moment cleaning the garage which will be its temporary home. Sorting piles of combustibles (fire pit) versus disposables (dump) and questionables (gotta ask hubster). Got stood up by a friend who said he’d help me unload the bench from the bed of my pickup, but maybe that’s not a bad thing since I need to clear a better place for it yet. My partner is such a hoarder when it comes to building materials, etc., that it’s really hard to make judgment calls on some of this stuff, and he’s out of town on business for another week.

    And it’s in the 90s outside, so I keep coming in and sitting down with tall glasses of ice water. Managed to push the frivolous convertible (with a dead battery) outside and I’m going to put it on a charger so that I can put up the windows and top because outside is where it’s going to stay until I can unload it. I have an acquaintance who owns a used car business. Maybe he’ll take it off my hands. Might help pay for the outbuilding we’re gonna need.

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  32. Deborah said on June 12, 2021 at 5:48 pm

    Wonders will never cease, the electrician actually showed up at 3 as he said. I almost made a bet with S that he wouldn’t show up.

    I don’t have wifi now because he has shut down the electricity in the whole unit to do whatever he’s doing. Hopefully it will all turn back on again. Not sure I trust him after yesterday. In all fairness though the electricity in this building has been worked on, in the past by mostly unlicensed handymen so it’s no wonder things are messed up. The outside backyard sensor light is on the same circuit as LB’s bedroom, so we’ve been paying for that for 9 years, even though it’s supposed to be on the condo assoc’s bill. It comes on a lot when skunks and raccoon waddle around back there. Also, the light in our garage is wired to our neighbor’s circuit, but they don’t know that. We rarely use the garage light so it’s no big deal.

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  33. Deborah said on June 12, 2021 at 5:56 pm

    Alex, I would get rid of those slides in a heartbeat but my husband says he’ll get to them eventually. I doubt that will never happen though and they’re so old I don’t know what good they would do him. None of his potential clients would be interested in seeing projects he designed 25-30 years ago or so. And besides he’s mostly retired. It’s just nostalgic at this point I guess. All of his project photos since are digital on a drive and the cloud now.

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  34. Deborah said on June 12, 2021 at 10:54 pm

    I should have responded to Icarus on that comment about the slides. Sorry.

    So the electrician came back at 3 and worked quite a while basically redoing the whole fuse box. I can say it was a mess from lots of poor work done before. It cost $350 today, much more than the $175 he said before but he and his son were there for a long time and they either fucked it up royally which we will find out sometime soon or they fixed it. I sure hope so.

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  35. Dexter Friend said on June 12, 2021 at 10:55 pm

    Ha. I got my first visit from Q-Anon in the form of a response I posted on a friend’s Facebook page, about the way Mister Gong of San Luis Obispo was driven from his job in county elections because he was charged with being an agent of “Communist Red China”. Gong is a third generation American originally from Modesto. When SLO voted 88% for Joe, the wackos flipped out. So this Q moron posted a quote about socialism being an evil thing. Of course I blocked the fucker. I learned of all this from Rachel Maddow’s show.

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  36. beb said on June 13, 2021 at 2:22 am

    Someone in the neighborhood set off a flash-bang last night. We assume it was a flash-bang grenade because there was a brief flash of light before the loudest bang I’ve ever heard. I’m not really sre I’ve ever heard an M-80 go off, but this was so intense it nearly gave us all heart attacks. Is it even legal to own a flash-bang?

    Garland fails to impress me as the attorney general. He’s continuing to support Barr’s contention that insulting a person is part of a president’s official duties, which seems insane to me. And Garland seems not terrible upset that the Trump DOJ was investigating reporters and members of Congress. That and the whole need to presecute Trump for every crime he committed in the White House. Obama’s administration’s biggest failure was not going after the Bankers who tanked the economy in 2008. We can’t repeat that with Trump.

    Today we visited friends for the first time in three years. Last year was the pandemic. The year before that the father of our host had just died and he wasn’t in the mood to be hosting a party. Our friends have become vegetarians so we took some marinated portobello mushrooms and our friends supplies some meatless “hamburger” and “chicken” patties. Both were surprisingly tasty and mimicked the texture of the meats as well. We spent the day talking and would have stayed there well into the night but Denice’s back started hurting so it was time to come home. We were all vaccinated so we could party maskless. That in itself was such a pleasure. Denice expressed interest in The Heights so going to a movie might be our next adventure.

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  37. LAMary said on June 13, 2021 at 1:01 pm

    The BS with this job has not helped my insomnia. Coupled with the fact that I am not using my usual CBD dose to take the edge off my wrist and fore arm pain because CBD can show up in a drug test, which most hospitals require for new hires my sleep is fragmented
    into 90 minute to two hour chunks adding up to maybe 5 or6 hours. Tylenol pm is marginally useful.

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  38. Julie Robinson said on June 13, 2021 at 1:38 pm

    Last night was a new record for me; up six times to pee. We worked at the storage unit all morning and I got severely dehydrated sweating in the high heat and humidity. Then I guzzled down everything liquid the rest of the day, and had to excrete it all night. Ugh.

    But we’re done there now, and had a wonderful experience giving away about 35 big plastic bins through freecycle. They are going to a group with a community garden in the inner city who are making worm compost bins. It was very encouraging talking to the woman who picked them up. All the produce is given away and they encourage participation but don’t require it. They also run a free daycare where they are teaching the kids gardening, harvesting, and cooking.

    It made me so happy, I gave her a big old sweaty hug when we said goodbye. She had already told me she was fully vaccinated but I was wearing a mask. There are so many good people making a difference in the world. Not enough, but many.

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  39. Colleen said on June 13, 2021 at 6:55 pm

    True story…I did 3 semesters in surg tech school before determining I didn’t like surgeons. I don’t have the personality to work with their egos. It caused so much anxiety I had to quit. But it’s ok….I switched programs and ended up someplace so much better.

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  40. Deborah said on June 13, 2021 at 7:09 pm

    I watched “Inside” today, I really enjoyed it. I’m going to watch it again with LB, I think she’ll like it a lot. She went camping on our land in Abiquiu with her good friend that she’s known since kindergarten who moved to Albuquerque. I spent most of the day moving stuff around in our garage because we’re letting our next door neighbor use about 2/3 of it because he’s having to move out of his artist’s studio of nearly 30 years, it’s being turned into high end condos. We usually park our Jeep in it, but we can help him out for a while with an interim space for him to store stuff until he finds a new studio. He’s very appreciative. I’ve linked to his website here before so I won’t do it again. He has some cool stuff and we’ve really enjoyed having him and his illustrator wife as close neighbor’s.

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  41. LAMary said on June 13, 2021 at 7:09 pm

    Colleen, I saw two surgeons arguing in the corridor outside the SICU once. It got physical. A fist fight between two surgeons that appeared to be about who was the “go to guy.” I went into the ICU and asked the unit secretary to call security.

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  42. Deborah said on June 13, 2021 at 7:27 pm

    The Netfix show “Lapin” started season 2 on Friday, I got hooked on season 1, partly because it’s French and takes place in Paris, so I’ll be bingeing that the next few days.

    My face is slowly healing, nobody else can probably tell, but I can.

    Highs are in the low 90s here, lows in the upper 50s, this is the hottest, driest part of the year. We had hoped the monsoon season had started a bit earlier a week or so ago because it was raining nearly every afternoon. But no, that didn’t last. The severe drought continues. But this is the desert Southwest, so what did we expect? It will get worse from here on out unless drastic changes are made. Obviously that’s not going to happen anytime soon.

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  43. LAMary said on June 13, 2021 at 7:48 pm

    Deborah, in the 40 years I’ve been in CA and the 5 I spent in CO I saw long droughts but there were breaks. I can recall at least three years here when it rained nearly every day in the winter. Remember the superbloom of wildflowers a couple of years ago? That was the result of a very rainy winter. Same in CO. Dry winter and no monsoons in the summer and then next year I was shoveling my car out every other morning it seemed and it rained like clockwork every afternoon at 4 o’clock in the summer. So don’t totally despair. You’ll get a few green years from time to time. I know it’s not going to turn around. I had to have my huge Deodar Cedar taken down two years ago. Five years of drought had killed a tree that was probably 70 years old. Just saying there will be glimpses of how it used to be once in a while.

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  44. Deborah said on June 13, 2021 at 11:06 pm

    We had a bad drought that lasted 7 years, and then about 3 or 4 years ago, the heavens opened up and it rained and rained. We saw wild flowers and grasses we had never seen before on our Mesa, it was magical. But I’ve been reading about what’s going on in the mountain forests it is really scary. This is serious, serious stuff. We have a political crisis, threats of violence, the end of democracy as we know it and our climate is changing fast. This is all so depressing.

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  45. Dexter Friend said on June 13, 2021 at 11:54 pm

    Some may not be aware that not only kids were drafted in military service, so were doctors and dentists. This is about a rude dentist. I was in advanced training in San Antonio when a dental issue arose. I was told to wait outside an office until the dentist got there. It was early winter and it was raining hard. I had a poncho on but still was drenched. After 90 minutes, the hungover dentist arrived and began cussing me out, asked me what I was doing out there in the rain, then ordered me into his chair. I began to slip out of the poncho, which infuriated him, as he screamed he didn’t have time for this bullshit and ordered me to leave the poncho on. He settled down some and fixed the tooth and I was ever so glad to be out of there. I also, while in Vietnam, served alongside several MDs who were drafted. Most were not egotistic over there and they treated us like equals in day-to-day work settings. When needed, they took charge of course. One doctor threatened to have me court-martialed because I medicated a patient as his orders were written, and that poor patient had to be flown to the hospital from an overdose. I grabbed the orders and Doc ripped them out of my hands and took them outside and burned them immediately. He was going to make me be the fall guy. Well…nothing came of it at all… The Brass over there had bigger fish to fry.
    Sunday I was sitting in a drive-thru lane when a van driver got discombobulated and put his vehicle into reverse and hit the gas and must have panicked and he hit my van sorta hard. His bumper was a bit bruised but I only saw superficial little scratches on my van. My van is new only to me. It’s 15 years old. I saw no need to do anything. All forgotten, forgiven, a big nothing. But…I can see where that kind of little mistake could get someone killed today. The videos of airline fights at 37,000 feet are horrifying. Lots of these attacks have been going on. And mass shootings Friday and Saturday in Savannah, Cleveland, Austin, and other places.

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  46. Suzanne said on June 14, 2021 at 9:14 am

    I don’t have a lot of insomnia, but lately, I wake up more often than I like in the middle of the night and start to freak out at all the crap in our house that needs to go. A friend had a garage sale last week and let me put some stuff in it but after I did, I woke up at night thinking of all the stuff I should have added. My husband has some hoarding tendencies, so it is best to get rid of stuff while he is gone, which he usually isn’t. If he’s there, I get a lot of “Don’t you want to keep that? Why do you want to get rid of that?” type questions. He generally backs down and doesn’t insist, but it gets annoying. He simply doesn’t seem to see the junk. There is an old coat of his hanging in our mud room. I asked him yesterday if he ever wears it anymore. His answer was no, that he hadn’t worn it in years. So why in the world it’s still hanging there is a mystery.

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