Another way to say the same thing

 

It’s hard to believe….

the last time I posted on this blog, we hadn’t even re-(s)elected Bush. I think I got really depressed after that election, and had a hard time caring about anything. At any rate, I’ve migrated this blog over here from Live Journal, because I can’t figure out how to do anything over there. I really like the dashboard over here.

So what’s happened since then?

1. Well, I’m taking Celebrex. And deciding whether at this point it is worth the premium co-pay to keep taking it. My osteoarthritis has progressed to the point where it seems nothing helps except staying off my feet.

2. I’ve gotten my SSDI, and now I get to play with Medicare and Medicare D(isaster). I had great fun spending the lump sum I got, (known around these parts as “crazy money”), but now I’m back to genteel poverty.

3. Friday, my service dog, is still around, but almost as arthritic as I am these days.

4. Epona, the scooter works, but she needs new batteries. That’s going to hit my pocketbook. Since I didn’t get her from Medicare or Medicaid, I am responsible for her maintenance.

5. I’m still pretty much of an insomniac.

6. I’ve given up on politics for the moment. The Democratic primary race is driving me nuts.

7. The Boyo is still around. Thank heavens.

 

Lammas

Today we had our annual Lammas ritual at CUUPS. I would put the local link, but it has turned into a cobweb for reasons I can’t go into. Michael made the Lammas Man, and a couple of new people came to the ritual.
We are slowly rebuilding after almost dying at the end of last year. We seem to have just been about six months ahead of the rest of the Pagan community around here. Several “leaders” are bowing out, and leaving some really big gaps to be filled. Oh well, time is a cycle, and all things change. The Boyo is here now for the night, and I am looking forward to our dawn rites in the morning.

 

The headline caught my eye…

In the latest edition of Real Change. Real Change is the local homeless newpaper, and so the headline “I wouldn’t feed that to a dog” was intriguing since I had posted elsewhere about the lousy food the homeless get. No such luck. I guess maybe since the author is still homeless, he maybe didn’t want to piss anybody that he might be dependent on a meal for off. So I sent them an email, thus:
Hello there,
If you are going to have a headline like that, I would like to find something of substance behind it. David Trotter’s article was ever so nicey-nice. The worst thing he can say is the UGM aren’t Christlike because if you don’t listen to their bull….. er, I mean sermon, they want you to plunk down $3. If you had $3, you would go to McDonalds. I agree with him, but if that’s the worst example he can come up with, you should have changed the headline.
From my experience of homelessness, (and I was in a nice, cushy transitional housing situation, not on the street) there is plenty of things to justify the headline. He should have gone to eat at the Aloha Inn.
Now, Flo Beauman and her staff do excellent work considering the ever-decreasing amounts of money they get, and I am ever so grateful I landed there. However, with that said, despite great efforts, the food was often despicable. And I am sure any food program that relies on donations from food banks is the same. You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. There was the batch of some noodle dish I am sure was donated by some restaurant because it had been vastly oversalted. But poor, homeless people could choke it down. You were wise to check the bread for mold and the milk for souring before you proceeded too far as we got them when they were outdated. A lot of times the produce for the salads was mushy. We got it when it was old, too. There was the totally tasteless white salmon nobody would eat, and some kind of fish with a million bones. And then there were the grilled cheese sandwiches made with cinnamon bread.Then there were the “heart attack nights” when every thing was deep fried. These are but a few of the memorable meals we en….dured.
We got supper, usually for sure, but a couple of times, the kitchen never did open. You were really out of luck if that happened, and you didn’t have any money or transportation to go get something to eat. If there were leftovers, they might be put out for lunch, but you couldn’t count on it. Depends how good the supper was the night before. We had breakfast most Sundays, and supper. Bonus. You could get a packed lunch if you worked or went to school, but sometimes it had really weird stuff in it. Mushy, pulpy apples come to mind.
Not every meal was bad, some were downright delicious. Once we even got a catered supper from a classy restaurant. The holidays were always great, Flo would bust loose some money to make sure we had good meals. But for the most part, they had to make do with what came in from donations.
Trotter also missed the point about all the sweets that are out there. Grocery stores pull that stuff very quickly, usually the next day, and so it comes to food banks. Food banks are awash in it. We drowned in it at the Aloha. Sometimes it was all there was to eat for breakfast and lunch. This high fat, high cholesterol, high sugar diet tends to have people gaining weight. Flo has often threatened to make “gained tonnage” one of her annual statistics. Yes, it has little or no nutritional value, and I not sure which is worse, hunger or reactive hypoglycemia. Some doctors have even put their patients at the Aloha on prenatal vitamins, (and some of them were elderly men.) Just because you weigh 250 lbs doesn’t mean you aren’t hungry and malnourished. And yes, I wouldn’t feed some of that stuff to my dog, but then again, she eats better than I do a lot of the time.
I know, I know, I’m not living in a cardboard box at the dump in some Mexican city, but I don’t think THEY should have to eat garbage, and neither should I.

 

What a busy weekend….

I don’t know who was responsible for this one, but I bet the Seattle Police hopes they don’t do it again. First, there was the National Governors Conference downtown at the Westin, which required blocking off the hotel with barriers on four sides. Which made the buses reroute. But it made a nice playground for protestors like ADAPT. Lots of police presence there. Then there was the Bite of Seattle. This used to be a festival at Seattle Center where you could taste “bites” of the food at fancy restaurants for $2. The bites, however, kept getting smaller and smaller. The cost of the bites went up to $5, you can’t buy a drink there for less than $2. And this year there wasn’t even many fine restaurants represented, mostly it was the same old festival food you get at Folklife and Bumbershoot. Last year they added music, and this year it might as well have been another music festival. Living three blocks from Seattle Center, IMHO, we don’t need another music festival with its attendant parking problems, traffic, and drunks yelling at 3am. Big police presence there, too. The Boyo and I had to have our ritual strawberry shortcake anyway. I am sure the Bite committee is pleased, there were more people there than in years past. The third big deal in town was the Seafair Pow Wow out at Discovery Park. The Boyo and I went out there Sunday after our morning rites to Pan and Aphrodite. We enjoy watching all the Indian Fancy-Dancers. I don’t know if I like the jingle dancers or the feather dancers better. The food was cheaper at the Pow Wow, if not much better. Of course, I couldn’t afford the salmon bake at $10, and as late as I ate, I was lucky to get a cremated burger. No danger of E-coli there. But what do you want from a food booth staffed by volunteers. Police presence? Two Native American cops. But then the Pow Wow is clean and sober. Something I can’t say for the other two events.

 

Last night I was watching….

Charlie Rose interview Peter G. Peterson of the Blackstone Group about his book “Running on Empty:
How the Democratic and Republican Parties are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It”. Peterson brings up some very salient points about the coming crisis in Social Security and Medicare. The baby-boomers, of which I am one, are coming. Will we have enough money in these programs? The answer is probably not, especially with people like me trying to get on SSDI. He also brings up some salient points about how we spend our health care dollars. He stated in the United States most of the people in ICU’s are in their eighties, which is not true in other industrialized countries with universal health care. This strikes close to home, as my 85-year old father has spent the last six weeks in and out of ICU’s, hospitals, and nursing homes. He seems to be recovering at the moment, but what a lot of money has been expended for what should have been a very simple laparoscopic surgery. Of course, it would have helped if his doctors had entertained the notion that he was suffering from gallbladder disease before it was necrotic. So he suffered in pain for a month, (OK, so they kept sending him home and telling him to take Percocet) until my brother and sister insisted he have a gallbladder ultrasound since I kept saying on the phone “It sounds like gallbladder to me.”
Working as a nurse, I have seen many healthcare dollars wasted, such as giving blood repeatedly to a ninety-something cancer patient who was obviously near death. A waste in more than one way, what if your 16-year old son needed that blood after a car crash? We will have to start making some hard decisions.
One of the hardest decisions we will have to make is whether or not to continue tube feeding people in comas or persistent vegitative states. Ethicist Peter Singer states in his 1995 book Rethinking Life and Death that what makes us human is consciousness, and these “people”, having less consciousness than a newborn baby or any of our close primate relatives, are perhaps no longer “human”, although born to our species. How long can we afford to keep these people “alive” for years and years while 43 million Americans are without health insurance? You are paying for this, 99% of these people are being cared for on Medicaid to the tune of $100, 000 a year or more. This question is especially pertinent in light of the story Bill Moyers is doing tonight on NOW about how Mississippi is cutting Medicaid funds, and more people may have to start choosing between eating and medications. This in light of a recent study that showed that people who take their meds as prescribed live longer and have less hospitalizations. Meds are cheap, folks, compared to hospitalization. That is why Medicare is upside-down. You should have free doctor’s visits and meds, and hospitalization should be a last resort.
Speaking of Medicare, it seems that now they are going to treat obesity. Yes, I have heard all the scare tactics. I just think this is a ploy for weight loss surgeons and the new ultrasound fat busterto make more money. Not to mention the pharmaceutical companies. I wonder what Paul Campos has to say about this.