New Food Item, the Lake, Fund Raising and PBMs

Hola!  How are things?  Things are still warm, but are way less hot than they were.  The air conditioning is not running today, which is good.  I can not wait to see the next electric bill, it should be stunning.

I have a new food item to share with you.  As I have previously mentioned, I'm not a great cook because it just does not interest me.  If I could buy a 50 pound bag of people chow, and just add water, I'd be all over it.  I've mentioned the Kevin line of dinners, and their visually unappealing sous vide chicken.  They're good, though.  They've started selling the sauce package separately.  Now we can use our own chicken.

It's Paleo, for those of you who partake.

Also, it's July 24 - why are they hauling out Pumpkin Spice and the Fall Blend.  Why is Lowes bringing out the Halloween stuff.  Could we just get through summer?

We rode today, it was good.  We did not have to get up so dang early.  There were a bunch of people from some sort of social services domain down by the lake.  I was eavesdropping on the conversations, there was a lot of institutional jargon being bandied about.  However, they were out there, unloading a ton of kayaks so they could take a bunch of kids out on the water.  Good on them, it's good to have people who will give the time.  They had a trailer that will hold 40 kayaks.

Congress and the FTC is looking in to the business practices of Pharmacy Benefit Managers and Group Purchasing Operations.  Fundamentally, the GPOs operate as drug rebate aggregators.  Rebates are sent to the GPOs, they then send the money to the PBMs, and the PBMs keep it.  PBMs are generating money for themselves.  Here is an article that explains it better than I can. The PBM business model is part of why we in the US pay more for drugs than anyone else. Updated:  From twitter a recap of testimony given in Congress is here.  Or go here and learn how CVS inflates prices for the consumer. Go here to hear James Comer (yes! Comer!) talk about the terrible effects of PBMs on prices.

VP Harris continues to raise money.  This came out today.  Unfortunately, this is not true.  Bummer.

I am hopeful that this will bring out the young people to vote for VP Harris. 

VP Harris - Day One of the Campaign

Well, I am less depressed than I was.  I'm still bristling at the way the big money people treated President Biden, but that's done now.  Perhaps he's feeling some relief, there are six months to go in his term and the Supreme Court has given him immunity for any official acts he commits.  Perhaps he should test out how much can be done via Executive Orders.  

So this happened today.

That's impressive.  Hopefully the enthusiasm will not wane, people will keep donating money, and knocking on doors.  It's still unfortunate the the big newspapers will not cover what's in Project 2025.

And so, we will stand by to be amazed at the crap that the republicans will start slinging at her.

Chick in the Well, Biden Stepped Down

This is a quail chick in the window well.  It's amazing how fast those little guys can run and how much noise they can make.  I was downstairs and could hear him hollering for help.  The parents were in the area, making anxious noises.  Unmute, if it's muted.  He'll be running right to left, you may have to play it a couple of times to pick up the movement.

As you all know by now, Biden stepped down from the presidential race.  The rat bastard billionaire donors forced him out by withholding money.  Mike Johnson, the evangelical taliban Speaker of the House, is on record as saying they're not going to allow ballot changes, and thus the orange menace will run unopposed.  So, young women, I say to you, stock up on Plan B today.

I am so depressed I can't see straight.

The Day of the Big Outage and Project 2025

Apparently, Crowd Strike, some sort of computing security entity, pushed an update all over the world, to Windows servers and laptops/desktops.  This has resulted in the dreaded BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH.  Airlines have had to institute ground stops, 22,000 flights are cancelled world wide, hospitals are affected, point of sale terminals are not working, people are having to revert to cash.  South West Airlines is still operating because they're slow to update their systems.  As you no doubt recall, in December 2022, South West had a huge work stoppage due to antiquated systems that could not locate pilots and get them where they were needed.  They took a huge amount of criticism for being behind on technology.  Who is laughing now?  

I just read this on twitter: Apparently all the republicans are stuck in Milwaukee and can't get home due to all the cancelled flights due to the CloudStrike issues.  Ha, ha, double hah!

This is from twitter, its satire, but it's funny.

This is why it's so terrible.  The fix is to reboot to safe mode, find one particular file somewhere, and delete it.  Most people at work are not allowed to do this, and don't know how to do it, anyway.

And then there is this.

Apparently the acceptance speech of the orange menace did not go so well.  The first twenty minutes were ok, he stayed on the topic of unity.  Then he went off piste and launched into attacks on Nancy Pelosi, building the wall, he can end wars with a phone call, he defeated ISIS and etc. etc.  Still no information has been made on the shooter, extent of the injuries, nothing; it's like it never happened to him.

Task and Purpose, a military oriented website has done an excellent piece on what the far right wants to do to the military.  They want the Navy to grow from 292 to 355 ships.  They want more F35s. 60 to 80 more per month, actually. One does have to wonder where all the money for this is going to come from given the tax cuts they are pushing. They're going down to the level of Marine infantry squads and specifying who should lead them.  All transgendered people are out day one.  There will be no more paid travel for women to get reproductive health care of any kind. It's an amazing document, ginned up by a bunch of pointy heads in a think tank somewhere.  You can read the article here.

We did ride yesterday.  We were on the bikes at 8:40 am.  Not bad for us.  There is a drive to the trail head to that takes time.  The mill foil is in bloom.  There is a sign up saying they're going to poison the lake, I guess to try to kill it. 

When we got back from the optometrist yesterday, we saw this deer and two babies.  The babies ran off, but she looked at us for a while.  The babies are past the white spot stage.

Other than whining about the heat, I have not too much to say about things.

Hot, Sick Trees and The Ear

Greetings Earthlings!  How are things in your neck of the woods.  They're hot in our neck.  This is what Weather Underground is showing in their forecast.  Our red maple is dropping leaves.  It is not happy with these temperatures.  I can't believe it's going to hit 108F (42.2C) on Sunday.  There will be no riding for us.

We did ride Monday.  It was warm, but not brutal.  First time in almost a month, and we could tell we had been off the bikes for awhile.  It was pleasant by the lake.  There is a new camp host with a large US flag, with its own solar light so he can leave it out at night.  I don't get why people feel compelled to show the flag all the time, especially the guys in the pick up trucks with the flag poles stuck in the stake pockets. 

This guy was heading out to fish.  He had a gallon of water for him, a bucket of water for the fish, fishing gear and a chair.  That's a person powered vehicle.

Winter of 2022-2023 there was a cold snap of epic proportions.  It was zero or less for about a week.  Several of the neighbors lost mature bushes.  Our neighbor the arborist suspects that the Rose of Sharon plants were damaged in that cold period.  They are only marginally hardy in this climate, so it's not surprising.  These are terrible pictures, but if you look closely, you can see some leaves, and then other branches with no leaves.

This is the other one.  It's looking very sad.

There is new growth at the bottom of the plant.  Maybe there is hope for these things.  I'm not going to dig them up just yet.

I've been running a slow hose on them for an hour every day, trying to breathe some life into them.  This is another plant I don't understand why people plant them here.

We had the yearly home owners' meeting recently.  The Firewise guy came to talk about urban fire danger.  One of the things they're stressing is think about what you choose to plant near your house; things like arborvitae, junipers and firs are a bad idea.  They go up like torches.  We put a juniper in the front yard in 2022, never occurred to me that it was a bad idea.  It has since grown like a weed.  We're on the fence about taking it out.  The surviving arborvitae in the back yard would have to be dug up by people we pay, they're old, have giant root balls, and they're too big for the elderly to remove.  It's always something.

The hydrangeas are a bright spot in the yard.

Here is the republican candidate yesterday at the RNC convention.  What do you notice?

Later he came out with a bandage on his boo-boo.  Today Eric Trump said that his father required no stitches what so ever.  Grazed by a bullet my dying ass.  Local police have said that all bullets have been recovered, and that the orange menace was hit by flying glass. 

Apparently the MAGA people have discovered that JD Vance is married to an immigrant from India, and they're fairly shocked and dismayed.  Nick Fuentes is quite upset about this, he feels that white people are currently under attack, and mixed marriages are one of the ways white people are being replaced.  Such lovely people.  Video is here if you want to watch him discuss this.

On the medical front, here is an amazing article.  I did not know this, leukemia can now be treated with immunotherapy.  Glioblastoma, a hard tumor that is invariably fatal, has been treated in three people in a new study.  Basically they remove T cells from your blood, gene edit them to go kill the tumor and inject them into your head.  It's not ready for prime time, and won't be for some time, but it's a technical miracle that any progress has been made on this front.  It's a long read, but it's written in regular English and is very interesting.

That's it, that's all I have to say.

July 13, 2024 Shooting

Well, the print press, TV media and twitter are all going crazy about the attempt on the life of the orange menace.  Current consensus seems to be that his ear was not hit by a bullet, but rather by glass from the teleprompter being shattered.  I have no facts or data, but that makes sense to me.  Seems like a bullet fired from an AR15 would have done more damage.  But what do I know.  Sadly, there was a death by gun fire in the audience.

What is interesting is the response of the secret service.  Since I can't figure out how to imbed video from twitter, you'll have to CLICK THIS LINK to watch the footage of how Secret Service acted after the shooting of Ronald Reagan.  He later said that he thought SS had broken his ribs after they pushed him to the ground.

Compare and contrast that response to this, CLICK THIS LINK to play what happened yesterday.  You can hear him saying "wait wait" so he can position himself with the fist bump, followed by a straight arm salute.  Oddly enough, his shoes were left on the stage.  

From twitter we see the following.

Also weird is that roof tops with a clear line of sight to the stage were uncontrolled.  People in the audience saw the shooter, and told the police and Secret Service that there was a guy on the roof with a gun.  There was no response to that.

Here is the damaged ear in question. 

Predictably, the media puts its own weird spin on the event.

This did not need to be said, especially by a DEI expert.  Really people.

Finally, the New York Times did something right.

Republicans are calling for the prosecution of President Biden for "causing" the shooter to act, others are actually saying Biden ordered the hit.  They never miss an opportunity to be stupid and wrong.

Dead and Dying Plants and Other Stuff

It continues to be unseasonably warm in Spokane.  The weeds apparently love it, because they continue on their quest for world domination.  Just before we left for Tucson, I noticed that another arborvitae was looking a little yellow.  This is what we saw upon our return.  This took three weeks to go from slightly yellowish to death.  This is such a pain in the butt. If we cut it down, we can never plant there.  If we dig it up, there is an excellent chance that we'll damage the surrounding trees' roots.   If you look closely, there is still a green stalk in the tree.  We're thinking that maybe we'll cut out the brown part and see what happens.  I don't know why people plant these trees.

We have two Rose of Sharon plants.  Something is wrong with them.  The symptoms are the same for each tree.  They leafed out, and then the leaves quit growing.  What the heck?  Why are they doing this to me?  I do not want to take out any more trees!!!!  The bigger of the two serves as a visual block of the fireplace exhaust, so I would really like it to survive.  Ellen, any thoughts?

The last item on my list of death is my agave, that I brought up from Tucson.  This started last winter while we were in Tucson, and continues to worsen.  It almost looks fungal to me.

So that's it, that's the last house plant I will ever own.  There are several of these in the front yard of the new house, two of them are pupping, so I guess they're happy.

CDC has finally posted infection data.  It's not good.  It's unfortunate that they don't break it out by state.  During the early days, they drilled down to the county level.  At long last, they have re-issued guidance that one should mask in crowded places.   Handwashing is not getting it done, it's airborne.

If you have Amazon Prime and you watch their videos, here are two that we recently watched.  "Downwinders" was astonishing.  It details the open air nuclear weapons testing done in White Sands, New Mexico.  Nine hundred twenty eight bombs were set off on the desert.  Nuclear fall out headed out with the prevailing winds.  Then there was an almost equal number of tests underground, which was supposed to be safer, except, of course, for the off gassing to the outside.  Anyway, it was a fascinating look at the military and their desire to explode nuclear weapons.  The other program  watched was "Inside Job."  Also extremely well done.  It explains in detail how the 2008 collapse of the global economy happened.  I always thought Hank Paulson was a good guy, he was not.  There was a lot of stuff I did not know, it's really well done. 

Other than my exasperation with people who should know better that are calling for Biden to step down, I have not too much to add.  Thus far, the "step down" people never follow up with a plan.  Can you imagine a brokered convention, all the money Biden has collected is not transferable to anyone but Kamala Harris.  The networks of campaign offices are not transferable, either.   Nobody seems to be even considering her.  I did cancel my subscription to New York Times, they pissed me off one too many times.  Washington Post may be next.  Where is the coverage of the 900 page Project 2025?  Ok, my BP is rising, I will stop now.

Butte, Montana to Spokane, Washington

We are back.  It is 103F (39.4C), with more humidity than Tucson.  It's so uncomfortable.  Because we did not anticipate this weather, we left for Tucson with the air conditioning turned off.   The house is just heat soaked.  It's been running all day, and the thermostat is still showing 83F.  I have my little fan pointed at my feet.

Today was Butte, MT to Spokane.  We are not that fond of Butte, we think.  As I previously posted, we are done with the Best Western motel chain.  We are also not fond of crossing the Bitteroot mountains.  There is much up down, and twisty roads.  It seemed like the entire stretch of road in Montana had construction going on.  In places, they had the old road completely torn out, down to dirt, so I suspect the project may take awhile.

Visually, it was nicer than yesterday.  I have a few photos.  Unfortunately, I have no idea where they were taken.

In the time we were gone, the yard has sprouted giant weeds.  We have thistles!  We've never seen those before.  So, in the morning, before it is hot, there will be sitting on the ground with weed stickers uprooting the little devils.  My mandevilla has put out foliage, but quit blooming.  My double blossom impatiens is scorched, and that pot is also full of weeds.  I think there will be at least one eviction.  So, back to normal now, we will get back on the bikes and live a healthier life style.

Spanish Fork, Utah to Butte, Montana

Today's journey started in Spanish Fork, UT and ended in Butte, MT.  It was a long drive, but not terrible.  We hit morning rush hour in Salt Lake City, but they have a transit lane for cars with 2 or more people.  Apparently people in Salt Lake don't like to car pool, there were few people in the lane.  Most of the way through the megalopolis, we were cruising at 80.  That was good.  

The route goes through northern Utah, southern Idaho, and into Montana.  Parts of Montana are pretty.  Southern Idaho is not lovely.  Here are some pictures of the route.  The first photo is what we were looking at most of the day.

We are at the Best Western in Butte.  This is absolutely positively the LAST time we will be staying in a Best Western.  The one we were in two nights ago was bad, this is also bad.  Internet is really slow, it's about 40 seconds to load a photo.  Without going into a lot of detail, I will just say we hate this hotel, we're never coming back, and Best Westerns in general are off the table.

Tomorrow we're back in Spokane, where it is a hundred degrees.

Boulder City, NV to Spanish Fork, Utah

Today we drove Boulder City, NV to Spanish Fork, Utah.  Spanish Fork is nine miles south of Provo, proper, and is part of the Provo-Orem megalopolis.  We spent the day on I15, which is a good road.  It's cooler here, when we arrived it was in the 90's and it felt cool to us.

First there was Las Vegas to transit.  Henderson, a bedroom community to Las Vegas, is growing exponentially.  So is the number of distribution centers.  It's amazing to me how many new houses we saw.  Here is a not great photo of coming in to the city, the windshield is covered in dead bugs.  I was trying to portray the vastness of the sprawl out from the strip, but it's too poor of a photo.

We were going to stop at the Beaver, UT Subway, but it was packed.  So, we went to the Port of Subs in Fillmore, which was not great.  The phone did not mention that there was another Subway at exit 188 in Nephi, which would have been geographically good.  If we drive this route again, please make a note of this Subway.

We went through the Virgin River Gorge.  It's a beautiful, but bugs on the wind shield and harsh sunlight conspired against my photography.

Further up the road, there was some red rock showing.

But after awhile, there was a lot of not too much to look at.

Driving into Spanish Fork from the south was shocking.  The amount of new housing devouring agricultural land is shocking.  Entire neighborhoods of identical ugly houses have been built.  Spanish Fork itself seems to be a center for retail.  There's not much else other than Big 5, Joanne Fabrics, Walmart, Costco and etc.  The west has become all retail all the time. 

We're at the Provo-Spanish Fork Hampton Inn and Suites.  It's a nice hotel, it's new, like much of Spanish Fork.  The bathroom has multiple levels of horizontal surface, which makes putting out all of our stuff easier.  The air conditioner does have a thermostat and is quiet.

This is the view from the room.  We're facing away from the freeway, which is very good. 

Tomorrow is the really long day, hotel to hotel is 468 miles.  That's far.  We need to rethink the lengths of our drive segments.  Of course, there is often nothing where a person would like to stop.

Tucson, AZ to Boulder City, NV

Greetings Mellow Humans.  I write to you from beautiful downtown Boulder City, NV where it is currently 116F (46.6C).  The last summer we were in Tucson, we had 110 degrees, this is noticeably worse.  The air on my face feels like a blow dryer.  The plan had been to drive over to Albertson's and get a rotisserie chicken and a bag of salad for dinner, but we have a parking spot in the shade, so we're ordering pizza.  There is a case of whiskey in the car and we're hoping for it not to get cooked in the heat.

Today's route was up through Phoenix, then on to US60 to US93 to Kingman.  We departed the carport at 0800 hours, which for us is an early start.  Traffic through Phoenix, Wickenburg and Kingman was very light in our direction.  The portion of US60 from Surprise to just south of Wickenburg had an abysmal road surface.  Once again, we did not take US93 after Kingman, we crossed over to US95 which is a better road surface and less traffic.

There is a road project planned for Kingman which you can read about here.  Some projects are just stupid, they make a person want to pull their hair out and rend their clothing.  This is a good project.  Currently when exiting I40, you have to get on surface streets to get to US93.  This is the route from Las Vegas to Phoenix.  There is a stop light at Beale Street involved in this path, and this is what it does to traffic, especially on a Sunday afternoon when people have to go home so they can get up and go to work on Monday.  This went on for miles.  I feel so bad for those people, especially if they were low on gas, or needed to pee.

I drove a bunch today, so there are not a lot of photos, and most of them weren't great because of the dead bugs on the wind shield.

This is heading toward Laughlin.  One climbs up and over the pass way out there.  It's not bad in a car.

This is the fan I used for rowing and general cooling.  It's from Target, it's a great little fan.  It ran non-stop while we were in the park model packing up.  Now it's sitting on the bed advancing cool air from the air conditioning unit in the wall to the back of the room.  Good fan.

At about 4:45 pm, this tour bus rolled in and discharged its passengers.  This bus is full, it's a double decker and every seat was full.  I think it was a nature break, they were not here long.  One wonders if they knew it was going to be this hot.

We were in Boulder City in October 2018.  It was an excellent visit, with one caveat.  The day we wanted to walk around Boulder City and enjoy its cuteness there was an Art in the Park event.  There was not one single empty parking place available.  Today, of course, it's too stinking hot.  

We're in an old Best Western Hotel.  It has the doors that open directly on to the outside, and not onto a hall.  I like that kind of room because it shortens your exposure to other people.  It's ok, they've done some updating, the floors appear to be some sort of vinyl plank, the lighting is good, pillows are ok, my mattress is a little on the firm side, but tolerable.  The bathroom has adequate counter space for all of our stuff.   Just took a shower, getting the water temperature set was difficult; too hot, or too cold.  It's sweltering in the bathroom, the A/C unit which is not great, and which is very noisy, is not cooling the bathroom or that side of the room.  It's too hot to blow dry my hair, it can just do what it wants.  I would give this hotel a definite maybe on returning.  Update to post:  Nope!  Never coming back here.  There is no thermostat on the A/C, it appears to run forever, even after it reaches a temperature lower than what was set.  Fan speed settings make no difference to the fan speed.  Bathroom is still an inferno.  There are not enough outlets in the room.

It's 116 here, and 122 in Needles, CA.  I'm glad we're here and not there.  Here is hot enough.

Tomorrow we are up and out to Provo.  From here to Spokane, it's an all freeway drive, so we should make better time than we did today.