07:56 – Barbara and I had dinner last night, and then settled in to watch a British mystery on Netflix streaming. About 8:30, someone from the nursing home called to say they’d just gotten lab results on Barbara’s dad. His BUN and creatinine levels were very high, suggesting acute renal failure. The nursing home recommended transporting Dutch to the emergency room, which Barbara approved. She drove down there to meet her sister and mom. When she finally returned home in the middle of the night, she said they’d scheduled a meeting at 8:30 at the hospital to discuss options. Given Dutch’s age and other health problems, I can’t imagine that they’ll recommend dialysis, so my guess is that they’ll recommend either moving Dutch to Hospice or keeping him there under their palliative-care group.
11:08 – Barbara just called to update me on the results of their meeting. Apparently, Dutch is terminal but not critical. That is, there’s nothing that can be done to fix the underlying renal failure and congestive heart failure, but Dutch is not in any immediate danger. Although the doctor said that obviously Dutch could die at any moment if something else happens, she doesn’t think it’s necessarily imminent. They’re rehydrating him and plan to keep him in the hospital for a couple days before transferring him back to Brian Center. The doctor is going to contact Hospice about getting Dutch in their palliative care program while he’s still at Brian Center. They’ll consult with the family and nursing home staff and help manage Dutch’s treatment to keep him as comfortable as possible. When the time comes, they’ll probably suggest transporting him to the hospice facility to care for him there during his last few days.
Renal failure; if memory serves, which it often does not these days, wasn’t that what finally got Mel Tappan all those years ago?
74 this morning in Retroville, overcast, with drizzle. Glad we got a bunch of the outside work done yesterday. Mrs. OFD is off selling the mental health first aid program for youth to the state’s health department, which years ago, when I worked for the state, ran OpenVMS in its data center down in Burlap. Not sure if that’s still the case, but I could not, for love nor money, get a job in there; the few positions were locked up by lifers, and probably ex-DECoids like me. DEC used to have a presence up here, now long gone. And Big Blue seems to be working hard at getting itself out of here, too; a few thousand more jobs to be lost. Network firewall support, for example, has already been outsourced to Mexico, and the people who waltz through every year for their security audits are all foreigners with ESL. And the hands-and-feet stuff that used to be done by a team of four is now evidently being done by an army of one. I should email the dude and find out how that’s working out.
The New Economy, indeed.
I think it was. Although he tried very hard not to let his reading public know, Mel was confined to a wheelchair, and I seem to remember that he had more than one serious health problem.
Yes, I remember the wheelchair situation and also, again, if memory serves, he had mentioned working on the considerations involved with the use of firearms from a wheelchair. I wonder if anyone has done anything with that since, especially with an aging population, many of whom have had some familiarity with firearms already in their lives.
Back in the US and at home.
Back in Sugar Land and at work. Flew through Denver from Helena with TSA goons pulling people at random at the airplane gate and searching bags. Did not see what happened if people said no. My Dad thinks that all TSA blue shirts will be armed soon.
I got tagged in Oslo for the extreme search of everything. I should have asked them to complete the process and give me a prostate exam and save the doctor visit. Don’t know what triggers the search. They just pick people at random. This was not the US TSA (Thieves Stealing Anything) but the Norway people. More polite but just as annoying.
TSA currently has no legal power to arrest anyone. If there is an issue they have to get the police involved. TSA is strictly search, seizure and annoy at this point. Most of the people working at TSA are not smart enough to take an oath let alone fire a gun pointing the proper end at their target.
TSA is taking the opinion that if you are inside the airport, they have a legal right to search you at any time without a warrant. They are expanding this to the streets of America so that they can expand beyond their current 120,000 people and massive budget.
One of my fellow fishermen was a 76 year old guy with an artificial hip. They gave him the extreme pat down including his junk every time.
The USA is rapidly becoming a police state. All we need now is a Dictator for life. But we were born free!
I had a TSA search once about 10 years ago where the guy pulled a baton on me. After asking me to put anything metal or electric in a container, he had asked if I had a belt on. I had completely forgotten about the belt, and stood up from the chair I was seated in to take it off. He pulled the baton and told me he had not given me instructions to stand and if I did not sit immediately, he would whack me.
Like I say, GW Shrub is a total laugh when he says ‘they attack us because they hate freedom.’ What freedom is that, pray tell?
I take the opinion that if one does not really need to fly anywhere, then don’t. Avoid it if at all possible. If necessary, then prep yourself for the Nazi train station treatment. Or fly so frigging often that the Testicle/Tit Squeezing Authority leaves you alone and gives you a pass, like Mrs. OFD. Hell, she could navigate the routes for the pilots now.
Also, record all mistreatment if possible and send it to: 1.) congressmen/women and senators. 2.) upload to all media, make it go viral
And seek legal counsel for possible suits.
Geez. All these stories are making me afraid to visit the US.
Geez. All these stories are making me afraid to visit the US.
As long as you are a compliant sheep then you are OK. My problem is that I am not always compliant.
But the USA Constitution says that you do not have to be compliant.
I’ve become a cranky old geezer over the last 10 years. I was safe (or lucky) in 2003, but would probably get the full treatment if I visited now, especially with all my weird acquaintances on this board.
“But the USA Constitution says that you do not have to be compliant.”
You mean that sheet of birdcage liner that has been suchlike since at least the Great Eliminator invaded our Southern states? (actually since the secret proceedings of the Convention in 1787). Along with our, excuse me while I guffaw heartily, Bill of Rights? The one where libruls crap all over the Second Amendment and “conservatives” do so all over the First and Fourth? Where the Tenth has been utterly ignored since it was enacted? That Constitution???
“…would probably get the full treatment if I visited now, especially with all my weird acquaintances on this board.”
No doubt. The full treatment and an immediate arrest warrant. Like I say, don’t fly through here if you don’t have to. Wanna visit Europe and the UK again? Go around the other way. Maybe by then the mobs will have rousted the criminal scum and gaulieters in Brussels and hung them from lamposts.
gaulieters
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauleiter
Interesting. I learned something today.
I learn something from this board regularly; glad I can once in a blue moon contribute something, usually of a literary nature, if possible.
The Soviet equivalent would have been “commissars” and we have no shortage in the West of wannabes for that category, either. Always somebody around who gets a charge out of having his or her boot on your neck.
Told Mrs. OFD just now about the TSA incident described earlier where use of a baton was threatened; said I’d shove that baton where the sun don’t shine and snap his neck like a pencil and I guess, go to prison. Which is one reason I avoid airport terminals. She allowed as to how that would not be the proper course of action.
I guess the thing is to somehow work it so you can film this kinda stuff on your cell and have it stream simultaneously to your home or office machine/s for later viral uploading; I’d certainly wanna include the “officer’s” name, rank, serial number, hometown, and vehicle info. Also what shift they work! Hey, I’m on a roll here! But then you have that same baton descending again on your phone and destroying it (thus the streaming capability).
Thoughts, ponderings, ideas??
Google Glasses.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Glass
Commissars. That was the word that I was looking for earlier, not TSA comrades. TSA commissars. They will multiply like roaches here in the USA unless we are strong enough to stomp them out.
It seems as though one ought to be able to spray for them. I’ll talk to Mary, who used to work in the Dow Biocides group. (I frequently annoyed her by commenting that the name of her group was redundant, because if it wasn’t a bio one couldn’t cide it.)
OK, the Google glasses will work, looks like, but they’ll have to come down considerably in the price for me and also fix it one way or the other so my bifocal prescription works, too. (correcting for myopia and astigmatism and all the mutated eyeball cells and synapses that got fried from over a hundred LSD trips over forty years ago).
Commissars and gauleiters imply some kind of supervisory rank, of sorts, ranging from the NCO level on up, and I suspect that most peoples’ contact with the TSA drones is with their equivalents of privates and corporals in the airline terminals. If a situation escalates, then Sgt. Nimrod gets called over or something.
There would be so many grateful travelers if a spray could be developed; I assume the name Dow is the same company that did the Agent Orange stuff? And does Mary speak Chinese:
http://www.dow.com/greaterchina/en/products/chemical/design/biocides.htm
I don’t think Mary speaks Chinese. She did run across China six years or so ago as one of the Blue Planet Run team.
Did she run along the Great Wall? Or all the way across the country; it’s huge!
OFD is gonna run down the stairs right now, run out to the cah, and then run out to get us a pizza and run right back here again. He is one shameless piece of work.
Six years???!!! It was that long ago? It can’t be. I’m much too young to have read that as you blogged it six years ago.
Oh, wait. I’m an old fart. Never mind.
(Six years? Really? Or did you blog about some other run of hers more recently?)
I’ve been coming here for 13 years now. I came via Dr. Pournelle’s Chaos Manor and never left.
The running teams were supposed to be four or five members each. Each runner ran 10 miles a day for four days out of every five. I seem to remember that the BPR team crossed China pretty quickly from Mongolia to Japan. More than half the team got deathly ill from food poisoning in China, as in needing IV fluids and antibiotics. To this day, Mary won’t go to a Chinese restaurant. But even with 11 or 12 of the 21 runners out of action, they didn’t slack off on the schedule. ISTR that one of the team, a Kenyan, ended up running double legs–20 miles a day–and on one or two days ran a triple leg. There were also several others that were running 1.5 or 2 legs a day so they wouldn’t fall behind schedule.
That matches everything I’ve heard from visitors from around the world. It’s not guaranteed that you’ll get food poisoning in the PRC but it’s a good bet. (I’d say it was a crap shoot, but… Hmm. Actually, I can’t think of any good reason not to say it.)
I won’t eat my mother-in-law’s cooking because her notions of hygiene fall short of my standards — and I’m hardly a prissy missy. She’ll use a rag to wipe down a counter, say, then notice something spilled on the floor and wipe that up, then go back to wiping the counter. And it was only recently that I managed to bullyrag her into using dish soap. Apparently the soap for sale in the PRC is caustic or toxic or something, so most people don’t use it. Rubbing dishes and silverware with your fingers under hot water is plenty good enough, right? Oh, and did I forget to mention that she doesn’t use hand soap before leaving the bathroom? Running your hands under hot water is plenty good enough. The best part is that my wife would frequently yell at me for humiliating her mother when I’d run the dishwasher with “clean” dishes and silverware. I think I was supposed to put up with chunks on the spoons and bowls and cooperate in poisoning everyone.
I’ve been posting here since 2005, and lurked for a while before that. I came here via The Hardware Guys website, which I found in PC Hardware in a Nutshell.
BTW, you might like to ask Jeff Duntemann to change his pointer back here – it points to the old ttgnet.
SteveF wrote:
“I won’t eat my mother-in-law’s cooking because her notions of hygiene fall short of my standards — and I’m hardly a prissy missy. She’ll use a rag to wipe down a counter, say, then notice something spilled on the floor and wipe that up, then go back to wiping the counter.”
I have marked sponges/rags for various items, in order of (my perception) of cleanness. But I’m nothing like my sister, you could eat off the floor at her place, literally.
“Rubbing dishes and silverware with your fingers under hot water is plenty good enough, right?”
I sometimes do two rounds of washing. The first to get something clean. The second to get it *really* clean. Fresh hot water and detergent each time. Sometimes I’ll just use hot water and soap, no mixing with cold, and leave stuff to soak for an hour or two so that any fat or adhesions really do go away. If cutlery is placed on the table and not used my sister washes it anyway. I don’t always do that but will always wash something if I’m not sure.
“Oh, and did I forget to mention that she doesn’t use hand soap before leaving the bathroom? Running your hands under hot water is plenty good enough.”
Yeah, a girl from my church who boarded here 20 years ago did that sometimes, although she didn’t usually worry about the hot water. I’d hear the toilet flush, and two seconds later the bathroom door would open and Jenny would emerge. Not enough time for any sort of hygiene. Made me *very* cautious about eating any food she’d handled.
There are other stories about Jenny, but as this is a family forum I’ll spare y’all the gory details.
Hm, just got my electricity and water and sewage bills for the quarter. The electricity bill was only $121, which surprised me. I would have expected $300-400. The water and sewage bill was more hefty, at $348 for the quarter. I used 64 kL in three months, the first 49 kL was charged at $2.43 per kL, the next 15 kL at$4.86 per kL. Gotta encourage conservation, don’t we.
I remember seeing my parents’ water bill in 1970: 4 cents per 1000 gallons. (And that’s *real* gallons, not wimpish, undernourished, sissified US gallons.)
“I think I was supposed to put up with chunks on the spoons and bowls and cooperate in poisoning everyone.”
Hey, don’t think for a minute that that sorta thing is exclusive of Chinese or any other country; seen it right here for fifteen years. I actually prefer to do dishes by hand than use the crappy dishwasher; that way I know for sure they’ll be clean. I’ve found stuff baked on them (’cause nothing ever gets rinsed first) by the drying cycle; and I’ve found chunks on dishes already put away in the cupboards. And silverware left on the floors, etc., etc. Not to mention a different cup or mug used for each sip of whatever beverage and then left all over the house and yard.
I just take care of it all, rather than have anyone here “lose face” by me even mentioning it. But the icing on the cake is that I will occasionally be admonished to rinse stuff off before dumping it in the sink, before I can even get my hand on the damn faucet to do so. That is rich.
Who was the offender? Mrs OFD? Princess? Both?
Yeah, I hate dishwashers too. I’ll never get one, because I don’t create enough dirty dishes to warrant one..
Anyone ever heated milk in a saucepan? Yeah, I know that’s what microwaves are for but I don’t like them either. Jenny (see above) would boil milk and then just give the saucepan a perfunctory wash, without scraping the hardened milk off the bottom, let it air dry then put it away. Drove me nuts.
Hardwareguys is still around, just under a new hat
hardwareguys2.com
Leave msg w/ email and I’ll add you.
My thoughts on sanitation are, ahem, somewhat tainted by my experiences in India.
I’m a firm beliver in evolution, so I doubt the species could have lasted this long without some oversight — by which means I mean to say — ehhh “Wash your hands before very meal!”
Can’t hurt!
jim`
RBT, I meant oversight in the philosophical sense, not the supernatural one.
OFD, much as I try I can not reconcile the supernatural with the natural. Can you explain? I’d love to be Suprised by Joy one day, but can’t quite swing my mind around the concept.
Jim,
I don’t pay much attention to HWG any more, sorry. I used to know a fair bit about hardware, nowadays almost nothing. Haven’t bought a desktop or laptop in three years.
Are Howard and Ron still around?
“It seems as though one ought to be able to spray for them”
You mean the TSA Commissars? I think they’re immune to most common pesticides.
“OFD, much as I try I can not reconcile the supernatural with the natural. Can you explain? I’d love to be Suprised by Joy one day, but can’t quite swing my mind around the concept.”
I’m not sure what it is exactly you’re looking for here; what sort of explanation would satisfy you? And it sounds like you may have read some C.S. Lewis and he was/is a pretty good explainer. Also G.K. Chesterton.
“OFD, much as I try I can not reconcile the supernatural with the natural. Can you explain? I’d love to be Suprised by Joy one day, but can’t quite swing my mind around the concept.”
You might (or might not) want to try “The Shack”:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Shack-Wm-Paul-Young/dp/160941411X/
Thanks Lynn, looks interesting. Yeah, Ron’s still around messing with Linux. Howard’s gone.
If your dates are correct, I came here long before the rest of you (except maybe Jim and Slim), because I remember getting a link from here to Jude Wanniski’s old daily blog, and that must have been in the mid ’90’s. Jude was a self-taught economist, which other economists have refused to acknowledge as an economist (kind of like all the various legal Bar Associations banning self-taught scholars who can pass their Bar exams). Nevertheless, for the entire time I read him, up until his death, Wanniski was 100% right about everything he predicted—except for his prediction that GW Bush would not invade Iraq because of Shrub’s professed religious beliefs. That, of course, was a political prediction not an economic one.
This place has been one of incredible insights and resources over the years. It was the only one of several that I approached, which could figure out how I could load Windows (back when Windows was not eschewed here—so that tells you something about how long ago it was), when the only computer I had,—a laptop—possessed a broken proprietary DVD/CD drive with no replacement available in Germany, no ability to boot from USB, and USB DVD/CD drives were, for all practical purposes, still unheard of. Solution, as I recall, was to boot into an old Win98 installation program, which then allowed me to upgrade to W2k. The big problem was that the hard drive was already formatted for NTFS, and all the installation programs on the hard drive (I rip all installation CD’s to the hard drive) could read was FAT32. Nowadays there no end of ways to install OS’es, with some motherboards even having a lite version of Linux already embedded onboard.
The expertise here is immense and special.
Yeah, I remember. Once you couldn’t get two computers to talk to each other and asked for help here. I didn’t know the answer but asked a pal who was a Windows sysadmin. He came up with a list of things to try, I think the fifth suggestion on the list prompted a a cry of “BINGO” in Strasburg that was heard around the world.
@Miles_Teg: Thanks for reminding me–I just fixed my pointer to Daynotes.