Settling In and Other Stuff

Greetings mellow humans.  I think the great settling in to the house has completed.  There was the veeerry  expensive trip to Costco and a less expensive trip to Safeway.  Yesterday we finally cleaned the floors.  Dust here is different than other dust, I should get a photo of it.  Anyway, I have a bagless vacuum cleaner with HEPA filters which has to be field stripped and washed every time it's used for any length of time.  I'm giving serious thought to getting something else.  So, to mitigate that, there is a dust mop.  It's good, it gets up a lot of fuzz and dust prior to vacuuming, so there is less field stripping.  We also changed the furnace filters yesterday.  Next time, we're going to try it with only one ladder.  Getting the eight footer in the house is too hard.  Since the vacuum created by the running air conditioner will hold up a filter, two people don't have to be involved in this.

So, we are now clean and the larder is full.

The trichocereus surprised us by blooming again.  We saw it in June and did not expect to see it again.  And yet, here is it.  This was yesterday in full sun.

This morning, with me providing shade so it's not so washed out.

We finally got a decent ride in this morning.  It's so demoralizing how fast one loses fitness!  Jim has been off the bike since early September because of the leg pain, I was riding and rowing downstairs, but it's not the same.  Anyway, we did hill repeats and now we are tired.

The two worthless PAs in Spokane we saw for the leg pain, were worthless.  Neither of them ordered images of the spine.  New xrays ordered by the AZ GP reveal there is an age indeterminate compressed fracture at L1 with 25% anterior height loss..  Hopefully this will not require a full on spinal fusion (90 day recovery) and can be fixed with Kyphoplasty, for which hopefully Medicare will provide coverage.

Kyphoplasty is a variation of a vertebroplasty which attempts to restore the height and angle of kyphosis of a fractured vertebra (of certain types), followed by its stabilization using injected bone cement. The procedure typically includes the use of a small balloon that is inflated in the vertebral body to create a void within the cancellous bone prior to cement delivery. Once the void is created, the procedure continues in a similar manner as a vertebroplasty, but the bone cement is typically delivered directly into the newly created void. 

I can only think about this for short periods of time, it just weirds me out too much. 

Go here, and listen to Mark Cuban talk about how bad the Pharmacy Benefit Manager system is.  It's very bad. 

47 was asked if he would need a declaration of war to continue bombing small boats in the Caribbean Sea, or eventually to invade Venezuela.  This is what he said.  “I don't think we're gonna ask for a declaration of war. I think we're just gonna kill people. Okay? We're gonna kill them. They're gonna be, like, dead.”  Always the erudite speaker, he is.

The East Wing of the White House is now completely destroyed.  The cost estimates continue to increase at $50M a leap.   

The back yard a few days ago.

 So, that's what's happening here.

OK, here is what's happening in the Inland Empire.