Jim is Out of Surgery

Jim’s surgery went well today.  The physical therapist walked him up and down the hall this afternoon.  Jim reports that the shooting pain down the back of his leg is gone.  There is significant pain at the surgical site, but they are giving him significant pain meds.

The Valley Medical Center Spine Center is just wonderful.  In 2006 Jim broke his pelvis and was taken to Harborview Hospital.  It’s a level one trauma center in a really blighted part of Seattle.  One of Jim’s room mates was a drug dealer!  If I’m lying I’m dying.  That night I would not leave the hospital until they moved that guy out because Jim was helpless and I was afraid.  They moved him (the drug dealer) to a room with a patient with a very large extended family who never left.  Anyway, the Spine Center has private rooms, and it is so quiet.  When the door to the room is closed you can’t hear anything.  So much better.  Is this not palatial?  Plus, they do not do broadcast messages over the intercom.




There is the patient waving at us.



He’ll be home on Friday.

The Vuelta and a Ring Around the Sun

One of the (many) things that just irritates the living snot out of me is the fact that NBCSN is only televising the Tour de France.  Of the three grand tours, it is by FAR the most boring.  Sky racing and their big fat budget gets a lead, controls the pace and it becomes a parade.  I think the Vuelta a Espana is the best race.  Anyway, we had to sign up for live and on demand coverage streaming on NBCSN.  Forty dollars for a year.  Phil and Paul are not narrating, it’s a couple of Australians and they’re about as exciting as a bucket of warm spit. Sound quality is really terrible, it’s up and down, and the Aussies have a habit of swallowing their words. Even the camera work is bad.  OK, enough complaining.

I have to laugh at us.  Roku, Chromecast, Firestick or Fire whatever are meaningless words to us.  So, I called my friend Kim and asked her to tell me, speaking slowly, using words of one syllable, how do I get what’s on the laptop on to the television.  HDMI cable!  Since we’re on DSL until we leave here, we don’t have to worry about exceeding our data caps with Verizon.

We’ve made ourselves a major trip hazard, but at least we can both see it at the same time without huddling around the laptop.



Today we did a short ride out in the Carnation Valley.  It’s a safe place to ride, so we’ve been going there instead of riding with the cars.  Jim does not need to crash at this stage of things.  There was a pretty good ring around the sun.



Here is Jim, at our turn around point.



Tomorrow we will have to use our pin hole eclipse viewer.  We were unable to procure the glasses, so we bought a giant box of corn flakes to make the viewer.  I will stand by to be amazed if this actually shows us anything.

The Past Few Days

Greetings Earthlings!  Life proceeds in the GPNW.  The weather has improved, we’ve gotten some things crossed off the too do list.

Safelite came out to replace the wind shield.  The truck is a 2011 and the glass had deteriorated over the years.  It’s gradual, and the eye does not register the many slight scratches that occur.  Having the new glass in is very nice, we can see!  The person who did it was very professional, cleaned up everything and took the debris away.  It took about an hour.  I think we’re done going to a glass shop, it’s better when they come to you.

Tuesday Jim was having a decent leg day, so we decided to go downtown and walk around for a bit.

Pike Place was full of people.  They were everywhere!  When you go to the market, the easiest way to transit is by walking in the street.  The sidewalks are just jammed.

Look in the middle of the photo behind the stadium.  That’s Mt. Rainier in the background.  The mountain was almost out.

The building continues at a furious pace in the city core.  I read somewhere that very few condos are being built.  Seattle requires that condos last four years before they begin requiring repairs.  The developers are building apartments instead.

Yesterday we rode with the COs and did the loop out in Carnation Valley.  This is the always lovely Sikes Lake.  The clouds make it difficult to see the water.  I was hoping for more reflected trees.  It was nice to be there.

Today we did a shorter version of the loop.  We’re beginning to see ears on the corn. It was a lovely day, blue skies and white puffy clouds.

Tomorrow we’re having the bus washed.  It’s really streaked and just looks bad.  It’s a good thing to outsource.  Other than that, I have nothing to report.

The Air is Better Now

Yesterday the wind direction changed and the smoke moved out.  Happy we are about that.  It rained a little last night, so the air is now nice.  Except of course, for the RV park.  Our neighbor on the driver’s side of the bus has a smoker.  I’ve never seen a smoker that puts out quite that much smoke.  Since there is virtually no wind today, it’s settling in the space defined by our two RVs and the guy behind us.  Even with all windows and doors closed, we can smell it.  We are not happy campers about this.

Jim got his bike out of the truck in Carnation Valley yesterday only to find he had a flat.  It was the rear tire.  Of course!  It’s always the rear tire.  Anyway, this is the new pump.  Jim’s frame pump died some time ago, and given the new frame geometries, his pump can not be replaced.  I’m probably the last person on the planet to have a pump peg for my pump, which is still working. 

It’s a Lezyne pump.  Apparently they’re now quite the thing in pump technology.  I had never heard of them until a friend of ours mentioned their wonderfulness.  There is a tube inside that connects the pump to the valve on the tube.  It’s much easier than attaching the pump directly to the valve.  It will work for presta and Schrader valves.  It attaches to the water bottle cage with a mounting bracket.  It’s pretty cool.

While we were in Portland, we were shopping at WinCo.  They’re an employee owned grocery store.  They don’t take credit cards and they don’t bag your groceries.  They sell MREs (military Meals Ready to Eat).  I have no idea why, but they have giant bins of them.  Jim just had to buy one to try it.  You may not be able to read the print, but there are 780 mgs of sodium in that thing.

If they hadn’t over salted it, it would not be bad.  As it is, it made our mouths burn.  It’s only 230 calories, so you’d have to eat more than one of them on a back packing trip.  That would be mass salt!

Other than this paltry offering, I have not much to say.  I mainly wanted to get the Nazis post off the top of the list.  Those people offend me greatly.

Day 205: Nazis in Virginia

Well, I never expected to see this in Charlottesville.  Hillary won the area by 80%.  There is a college there.  It’s just not a place associated with the alt-right.  But now it is.

Didn’t we fight a war against this flag?  Why would anyone bring it back?



Friday night they had a torch light parade.  Twitter enjoyed making fun of their Tiki torches, one description was “Pier One Nazis.”  Other people wondered exactly what it is they want.  Who oppresses white guys in the US?  There was chanting of “blood and soil” and “white lives matter” as well as anti Semitic crap.



Poor oppressed citizens.



This is a telling photo.  Look behind the officer’s right shoulder.  That’s KKK regalia.



On Saturday, the president made the effort to condemn hatred, bigotry and violence from “all sides, many sides” after violence broke out.  He would not name the White Supremacists, implying that the violence came from all quarters.  Apparently even that limp condemnation was too much for ex-leader of the KKK, David Duke.



This is from Daily Stormer, a white supremacist newspaper.



Later, someone drove their vehicle into a crowd of people protesting the alt-right’s hate speach.  One killed, many injured.  The police believe it was premeditated.



How did we get here?  This is how we got here.  This is from a WAPO editorial.

That was your crowd down there in Old Virginia, Donald Trump.
They were speaking your language, vomiting your sentiments, acting out what animates you from within.
Don’t act as though you don’t know them. They believe and expect you are working to “take back America” for them, because you are of them, just as just they know — as do you — that they gave their all for you.
So why are any of us the least bit surprised that Trump’s devoted clan of white nationalists would be so emboldened as to brazenly emulate their klan forbears and take it to the streets? One of their own reached the White House, with their help. It’s enough to make an old Confederate proud, and a present-day white nationalist as arrogant, reckless and dangerous as can be.

Doing Time in the GPNW

Greetings Earthlings!  So far so good, no nukes have been lobbed.  Perhaps humanity will survive.  If not, cockroaches and tardigrades will have dominion over the Earth.  I wonder how tardigrades would evolve if exposed to radiation.  Godzilla comes to mind, perhaps we’ll have five story tardigrades roaming the earth. 

Anyway……..  It’s still hot and still smokey (update to post:  it's actually smoky.  Smoky is an adjective, smokey is a noun.  Who knew?).  The setting sun remains bright red.  Allegedly it cools off tomorrow and possibly there will be showers on Sunday.  We need an on shore flow to flush this out to the east.  But then it will be bad for the people east of us.

Here is a nature photo for you.  The GPNW is full of Canadian geese.   They’ve stopped migrating.  Winters are not that cold, there is stuff to eat, and so they stay put.  This is an apple tree in Issaquah that is dropping fruit on the ground.  I did not know that geese like apples.



Here we are out in Carnation Valley.  This is a body of water covered in something green.  At first I thought it was Duckweed, but I’m not sure what it is.  Could be green slime.  There are ducks in the water, and there is also a heron on a log.  They’re too far away to see.



We spent today doing laundry.  Then we had to empty one of the bays under the bus so we could get at the spare TV.  If Jim’s convalescence is tortuous, it will be good to have a TV in the bedroom.  I had to laugh at us, we couldn’t remember how to hook it up (use the red/yellow/white wires, set input to AV2).  Eventually we found the notes I’d taken when it was installed, they were in an unlabeled file folder.  Of course!  Why would I put it behind the TV tab in the motorhome file?
Other than complaining about the weather, I have nothing much to report from the GPNW.