Hiatus

I will put this blog on hiatus while I go spend the summer on the tundra. Or maybe a more accurate term would be muskeg. I know my readers will be sad (both of them) but I will not have internet access while up on the tundra.

Sun Worship

This strikes me as a strange time to worship the sun. Shouldn't it be at sunrise or when the sun is directly overhead or even sunset?? Then again this is Brookhaven which is an up-scale neighborhood. Also I don't know how Methodists operate.

Healthcare

There is one candidate for Pres that has had socialized medicine his entire life. McCain was a Navy brat and then was in the Navy himself. Never had to worry about healthcare in his life but he insists that the rest of us should be on our own when it comes to healthcare. Even when he was a POW he had socialized medicine and it really was socialized medicine because when he did have medical treatment it was by the North Vietnamese government. Even tho his wife has a Gazillion Dollars he still has not given up his socialized medicine. If healthcare provided by the government is so bad, why is he still in the system?? He can afford to pay his own way when it comes to healthcare yet he still is sucking the government tit when it comes to healthcare. He says that the private sector should fix healthcare, but the private sector has been running healthcare forever and that is the problem. The private sector worries only about profit and very little about providing the care that patients need.

What really amazes me is that most of those opposing reform of healthcare have somebody else picking up the tab for their insurance and usually it is the taxpayers. They are willing to suffer with their healthcare but the rest us shouldn't even think of asking for what they have. If we were to strip Congress of their health benefits maybe they would be more likely to work for reform of healthcare.

How Big is Your Piece?

If you think your piece isn't big enough, here's one that might make you feel a whole lot better.

Commercials

For a long time I have wondered about some of the ads on TV. One of the ones that has me wondering is the one that goes something like this. "Is the IRS calling you all the time and sending you nasty letters? Do you owe thousands in unpaid taxes, have you years of unfiled tax returns. Don't take on the IRS on your own, let our IRS professionals handle your case for you. We have helped thousands of 'good' people like you." I think in the fine print it says they only help 'good' people who owe $10,000 or more. I don't consider those that don't file tax returns or pay taxes owed 'good' people.

Another type of ad that has me scratching my (some body part) is those that promise to grow your wealth and manage your wealth. There are a ton of these ads on at all times of the day and night. The question is, who are they trying to get?? If you have a 401K at work, it is managed by a broker for you and you don't have a choice on who it is. If you are investing on your own, you already have a broker to buy and sell stocks for you. So who are these ads supposed to entice into doing business with them??

The way they use the word wealth has a dirty feel to it for me. The word wealth didn't used to have any effect on me, but since St Ronnie made greed not only acceptable but highly desirable it has come to have a filthy connotation to it.

Blown Tire

Here is a picture or two of the tire that blew out in Alabama on our trip last weekend. The top picture is me having fun getting the spare out from under the truck. The bottom picture of the tire doesn't look too bad but the picture of the backside of the tire shows how badly it blew!

Random Thought

Georgia, it's not the end of the world but most of its residents believe they can see it coming!!

Gas

Since the early 80's whenever I would travel in the Southeast, Atlanta had the lowest prices for gas. Now that I live in Atlanta this is no longer true. If I go south on I-75 gas is cheaper in Macon, I don't have to go too far north on I-75 and gas is cheaper. If I go west on I-20 it's cheaper in Alabama and if I go north on I-85 it's cheaper in South Carolina. Last weekend we went to Huntsville and saw again that as soon as we crossed into Alabama the price went down.

The trip was interesting in several ways. After we got into Alabama, we saw that we had plenty of time to get to Huntsville and we decided to swing by the Unclaimed Baggage place in Scottsboro, AL. On the way up I-59 we had a blowout. I was passing a car when I heard a funny noise. I stepped on it and got past the car and the noise was still there and it was feeling like I had a flat tire. By the time I got stopped on the shoulder the tire was totally shot. I have never had a tire blow that badly. One side of the tire opened up all the way around the tire along the edge of the tread. The only thing that made this tire change better than the last flat I got with the truck is that this time it wasn't pouring rain. The last time I had to wait for over a half-hour for the rain to let up enough for me to feel like getting out to change the tire.

We stopped for lunch at a Taco Bell in Scottsboro, AL. Now in the past I've had the experience of stopping at fast food places and having to wait a long time for my food compared to the rest of the country. This was the first time that they forgot to fill our order. After seeing people who ordered after us getting their food, including a guy that got multiple bags of food to go like if he was getting food for a large crew of people, the Old Lady went up to the counter and asked what happened to our order and that's when she found out that they forgot to do our order. To make up for this we got two free Apple-Cinnamon Empanadas but they forgot the Cinnamon Twists that we had ordered.

After lunch we went to the Unclaimed Baggage place. There was a lot of stuff for sale there, cameras and electronics and sports equipment some of which makes you wonder what all people bring on airplanes. Mostly tho it was clothes and if I'm going to buy other people's used clothes I'll go to a thrift store.

The rest of the trip to Huntsville was uneventful, coming back was a different story because of a lack of signage. We decided to check out the Little River Canyon park because it was more or less on the way back to Atlanta. The first sign we saw for the park was a sign with an arrow pointing across the road to the parking lot right after crossing a bridge. Then to follow the scenic road along the river and canyon, we had to go back across the bridge and take the first left. After playing tourist along the river we came out of the park and came to a t-intersection with an arrow pointing left and right. Not one sign to let you know what road it was. After driving for 15 or 20 miles south we came to another t-intersection and finally found out what road we were on as there was a sign indicating it was the end of the road and what the number of it was.

Glucose Tolerance Test

My doctor wanted me to do a glucose tolerance test, so yesterday I went to have it done. When one is at a major hospital in a large metropolitan area, it doesn't give one a good feeling when one goes in for a test and one hears the tech calling someone to ask how the test is done. (Neat, talking about self in the third person.) But first, when I got there and found the right place to check in (there are multiple buildings that are interconnected by a maze, I was lucky in that I had a guide to show me how to travel through the maze) the person I talked to called the lab and found there was no paperwork on me even tho the nurse had said she would fax it over that morning. After several phone calls the fax finally arrived. Then I went to the place where they draw blood. That's when I overheard the phone call asking how the test is to be done. Supposedly they draw some blood and check your blood-sugar. Then you drink some sugar water and they check your blood-sugar after one hour and after two hours. Well, a blood sample was drawn and over an hour later someone came with some solution for me to drink. The fact that it took over an hour to check my blood-sugar and figure out how much sugar water to give is amazing. My meter gives me a result in less than a minute. After that things went smoothly, but what I figured would take a little over two hours took over four hours. I got there just after 8am and didn't get out of there until after noon. All this after not eating since 8pm the night before. Who says bigger is better???

Lenscrafters

Last week I picked up my new glasses at Lenscrafters. To say I am not impressed with Lenscrafters at this time is an understatement. First I had to argue with them to get new lenses put in my old frames. I was told that the frames may be corroded, they are titanium which is almost impossible to corrode. Then they screwed up somehow and had to reorder the work. They called several days after they were supposed to be done and said it would be a least another week. When I finally got them, I noticed they hadn't even cleaned the frames before installing the new lenses because the back of the nose pads were still dirty. Also when I went to clean them I noticed that the lenses were loose in the frames. I bought the my old glasses from Lenscrafters in Omaha and thought it would be no problem for Lenscrafters to make new lenses for frames that are their frames. That's what I get for thinking. I've never had a high opinion of this area and this did not improve it.

They didn't just lose one customer, they lost at least two. The Old Lady will be needing new glasses in the near future.

Also on the subject of glasses. Last Saturday we were shopping at a Kroger and decided to get a bottle of cleaner for eyeglasses. They had 6 feet of shelves from the floor to the top loaded with stuff for contacts. The only thing they had for cleaning eyeglasses was disposable wipes. How ignorant is that??

Cold Air

This week I worked on my pickup fixing the air conditioning. The other week I went to Pull-A-Part and got a compressor. I wandered around in the yard until I found one that looked like it would fit my truck. I found two close to each other and looked over both and picked one over the other because the pulley spun without making any noise and I could turn the shaft with some resistance. It cost me a little over $26 because I paid for the 30 day warranty. Then the other day there was no need to use the truck and I changed out the compressors. When I was charging the system I discovered that the gauge on one of the cans of R-134a was off by about 30 psi on the high side. One gauge indicated that it was overcharged and the other one I have said it was barely in the normal range. I had to buy another can of R-134a as I didn't have enough and used the lower reading gauge to finish charging the system.
Now as the car ads in Omaha say it has Cold Air. As the truck is from Nebraska that is fitting.