Wild Life and Corruption

We have had more wildlife in the back yard.  The other day, we woke up to this on the back patio.

The irrigation system runs early in the morning.  A critter had bitten into a drip line.  Apparently there is pretty good flow in that particular drip line.  The bitten part is circled.  Fortunately we have plugs, were able to get it to stop.  We don't water anything there, so it's no big deal that it's now no longer in service.

Later, we had deer trucking down the street.  They're wary of people, but they're ok with grazing on the orange trees.  They're Mule deer.  They're called that because of their large ears.  Frequently they're referred to as Mulies.

This is a cactus flower bud.  There are several on the plant.

It would be nice if they would open while we're still here.

More bougainvillea beauty.

This is an agave, which bloomed, and is now dead.  They put so much in to flowering, that they die.  It's not really a good reproductive strategy.  This is a difficult photo to take, too much sun.  The reflection on my cell phone screen is such that I don't know what will be in the photo.  I think this was the third trip up the hill to try to get all of it in one frame.  Previous attempts would have the top but not the bottom.

View of Golden Gate from the back yard.  Our neighbor has had her lemon trees covered since we got here.  I don't know if she's protecting them from deer or potential freezing temperatures. 

So, the orange menace will be inaugurated on the 20th.  Flags will be at half-staff to honor President Jimmy Carter.  Guess who has his panties in a bunch over this.  Yes, it's the orange one.  He thinks he's being singled out.  He's not, when Richard Nixon, another famous crook, was inaugurated, the flags were still lowered for Harry Truman.  

One of the republican goals is privatization of Medicare, in the form of Medicare Advantage.  The New Republic did an excellent article on why this is a bad idea.  It costs more than standard Medicare, and they with hold treatment when it suits them.

Perhaps that’s because, as the Journal’s investigations found, Medicare Advantage insurers routinely pad their government reimbursement requests with spurious diagnoses. For example, an astounding 66,000 Medicare Advantage patients were diagnosed with diabetic cataracts even after these patients had surgery to correct them, making that diagnosis, in the Journal’s words, “anatomically impossible.” In other instances, patients whom Medicare Advantage insurers reported as HIV positive received none of the recommended treatments. If a doctor failed to furnish a desired diagnosis, insurers dispatched a nurse to the patient’s home to find one. Medicare Advantage insurers also conned veterans into enrolling in the program even though they were already covered adequately by the Veterans Administration health system, which has repeatedly been demonstrated to be superior to private hospital care (something else the public is reluctant to believe).

I, personally, do not want to be on Medicare Advantage.

Ann Telnaes has written a sub-stack on why she quit the Washington Post.  She had been there since 2008 as a political cartoonist.  Her cartoon about billionaires taking a knee to the orange menace was pulled. by her editor at Bezos' instruction.  So she quit.   Open the article, you can see the offending cartoon.  She was right, that's what they're doing.  The numbers do not lie.

That's it!  I'm done.

Many Photographs

Today I have mass quantities of photos.  I do have things to say, but I am still thinking about them.

More art has arrived.  The three small canvases on the right are new.  They are at that particular height because they're covering up holes left by the previous owner.  I would have centered them on the vertical height of the niche, but then the holes would have been visible.  Probability is low that we will ever paint this wall.

These are the individual canvases.  This one is grainy, which I expected, since the original was cropped way down.  It's an agave we used to have at the other house before the guys doing the pavers hit it with a front loader, repeatedly.

Blooming agave down the street from the old house.

This one surprises me in its lack of crispness.  It was not cropped, and had lots of pixels.  I got them from Easycanvasprints dot com.  I've ordered one more from them.  If they don't do better, I will not use them again. 

The dressers are looking less like hotel furniture and more like some where people live.  Yesterday we went to a restaurant supply store for some small bowls to sit in a tray that used to have plant pots in it, so that I have some place to put my watch, the wedding rings and etc.  Then we got frames at Walmart.  Amazon frames get pretty bad reviews.  The Walmarts aren't bad, and we did curbside pickup so I did not have to go in there.

See?  People live here.

I love the middle bowl.  It was the only one left, or I would have bought three.

All of my people pictures are backed up on a hard drive in Spokane.  So I went with the prints I brought with me.

The sunset is from the Ten Star house. 

This is Beau.  His owner got him four years ago on Boxing Day from a foster home.  He's a cool dog. Very placid.  He reminds me of Olga.  We see them walking in the neighborhood a lot.

Our citrus trees are making food.  This is a pink grapefruit - it has really thick skin.  The oranges are also ready to eat.  Lemons, not so much.

Former President Jimmy Carter has died, at 100 years old.  He was a remarkable man, both as a president and post presidency.  It's unfortunate that all of the people claiming to be christian couldn't be more like him.  He left the Southern Baptist Convention because of their position that wives had to obey their husbands.  For him, that was a big deal.  Flags will be at half staff for 30 days, including the day during which the orange mango will be inaugurated. 

Happy New Year to you all.  It's nice not being in the RV park where we spent so many years.  The nearby residents of the neighborhoods were seemingly unaware of the laws of gravity when they would shoot guns in the air.  Really, they did that.

That's it!  That's all I have to say.

It Was Always That Way

If the title of this post makes no sense, go back and read yesterday.

We walked out to see if the rock fall was new or old.  It's old.  Some of the saguaros between the big rock and the one that calved off are 50 to 100 or so years old.  That's when arms develop.  There is an arrow pointing at the rock in question.

The sun was brutal today, photography was difficult.

Here is a cheerful bougainvillea.

So, there you go.

Boxing Day

First, apologies to the people I just found embargoed in spam.  Why does it do that?  Some comments come through, others don't.  Really, I am making an effort to check more often, but with a memory like a sieve, I forget.  Mea culpa.

Yesterday was a gorgeous day.  We were out for a hike.  Here is a group of cactus we saw.

Have you ever looked at something at thought, was it always like that?  We would do that a lot in downtown Seattle, when a building would go missing.  Was that always an empty lot?  Generally no, they had torn something down to put up something newer and more boring.  There is a rock formation that we see when we ride the trail across the desert.  I've just noticed that part of it seems to have fallen off.  Was it always like that?  We're going to have to walk over there and look at the surrounding dirt to determine if it's a new rock fall, or an old one.  Look at the big lump sort of in the center, and then off to the left, is the fragment in question.

Today we changed the furnace filters.  The HVAC is in the ceiling of the garage.  It's not ideal, but it does free up floor space in our tiny garage.  One always wonders why they built such tiny garages in the land of giant pickup trucks.  Anyway, the filters are in the hall ceiling.  A grate swings down and the filters fall out.  When we closed on the house, Frank the realtor, told us to have the system running to prevent that.  We did not believe him, that there was enough negative pressure to hold two filters up.  We were wrong.  After fiddling with the filters and the grate and trying to get it all back in, we turned on the heat.  Like magic, the filters went up, stuck to the frame, the grate closed and all was well.  So, please make a note of this for the next filter change.  We made that way harder than it needed to be.

I screen scraped this off twitter.  I have no idea what this person is talking about.

Clearly I am losing touch with my culture.

Recently in the news:

The orange menace wants to take back the Panama Canal, buy Greenland, and annex Mexico and Canada to be new states in the US.  What's next, the Suez Canal?

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are now saying the US needs to issue more H1B visas for tech workers.  Essentially their argument is that US citizens aren't smart enough to write the code for their projects.  More likely is the fact that someone here on an H1B visa can't change jobs.  So, they are advocating to create a strata of people with no leverage to negotiate higher salaries or more time off or anything.  Indentured servant comes to mind.  Apparently there is some discussion in the republican party, and push back against the two DOGE members.

Putin has shot down another commercial airliner.  Communication cables are being damaged in the Baltic Sea.  There is a rumor that NATO is contemplating closing the sea to Russia.

He hasn't even been inaugurated yet, and the world seems to be running off the rails.

That's it.  That's all I have to say.

Christmas Day

Happy Christmas to you all.  Here's hoping for better days.  Where ever you are, how ever you acknowledge the day, have a good one.

 

 

Hike and 39 Years

Today was another picture postcard day.  As nice as the weather is, we're concerned about the amount of dead and dying cactus we're seeing out in the desert.  It really does need to rain.  However, not in the forecast.

Today was a hike day.  We're trying to get more weight bearing exercise, biking is of no use in bone maintenance.  It was a difficult hike.  I had forgotten how bad parts of it are.  Now I recall, my thigh muscles are also recalling this.  Here is Jim, slogging up the portion of the trail that we call the stair master.  This is actually from a few years ago.  It's a screen scrape of a previous post.  It's interesting to me that he's wearing the same blue hiking shirt.

That dip in the ridge line is where we used to hike to, but we're older now, and it's too far.  Today was enough.  Getting down the hill is brutal on the feet.

This cactus has experienced some trauma, I think. 

Coming back, we lost the trail.  I think we got too far to the right.  Anyway, we went through a wash, and realized we were not where we were supposed to be.  However, Golden Gate Mountain loomed over us and the trail that goes up to the saddle, so we went that way.  It was not all bad, it made the return a little shorter that it would have been on the planned route.  My feet were screaming by the time we were done.

This is an agave in the neighbor's yard.  Look at the size of that.  I didn't know they get that tall.

The bedrooms used to have carpet, most of the houses built in this time frame did.   Our old house in the neighborhood also had carpet in the living room, which I miss because it cuts down on noise.  Anyway, at some point it was replaced by laminate planks.  I think the installer was impaired that day, they did a terrible job.  They filled the gap between the ends of the planks and the threshold with plastic wood.  Over time it had cracked and started to come out.  So we dug it out today after receiving our backer rod from Amazon.  We got the quarter inch rod today, but the planks do not end in a straight line, so tomorrow the 3/8 inch should arrive for the short plank.  Then we will caulk the whole thing.  I hate caulking, it's very stressful.  That dark line is the gap that needs to be filled.

If I were not concerned about losing Social Security I would consider having the laminate floors replaced, and something done with the grout that has cracked between the floor and the wall in the primary bathroom.  If we're still here in four years and that man is gone, maybe then.

Happy Winter Solstice, the days start getting longer tomorrow.  Today was our 39th wedding anniversary.  I put a reminder on my phone, so we both remembered it.  We have been known to forget.