bitteroldhag

What do you mean underpants too. Of course, I wear underpants when I sleep as well as my nightgown. If there's ever a fire, I'm prepared. I've already figured out that I'll throw Mother out her window, round up the pet and save my laptop. But I'll be well dressed with undies on.

I am not convinced that puny humans can actually cause climate changes, but I may just be dull. I wouldn't mind living in Canada if it weren't so cold. Apparently climate change will affect coastal communities first. Since I live on the great plains where drought is normal, depending on El Nino, it's possible that we can survive. During the last big ice age, there was no English channel and much of coastal France was above sea level. So they are discovering cave painting underwater now. Maybe we've been warming for a long time and have just reached the apex. Frankly, I'll take global warming over another ice age any day. But I do think people get hysterical about scientific stuff as reported by the media who really don't understand scientific stuff. Still I hope those poor old polar bears, vicious as they are, get a nice cooling trend so they won't be marooned on ice blocks. I hope this is a natural phenomenon, but I don't think it would hurt us to stop polluting so much. We have dirtied our nest, and as someone said, the earth will survive, but we might not. Pollution is endemic in the U.S. I lived about a mile from a superfund site in Baytown, Texas, and our Water was well water. People there died of very strange cancers and stuff like that. One of my students died of cancer of the spleen at about age 45. I moved to Oklahoma to escape that and found that Kerr-McGee, not known for their care of the land, had nuclear site about 30 miles south of Tahlequah. They were closed down, but people around Gore said they just thew radiation soaked stuff in the woods and left. Southern winds blow that stuff up here, and our county and Adair county have the highest cancer rates in Oklahoma. No one has made Kerr-McGee clean that site up, and I am pretty convinced that the high cancer rates may have something to do with that site. Because our governments (state and federal) go easy on these companies, many of us are unwittingly being poisoned and killed. I remember when I was in Baytown there was a big todo about a bunch of kids being born without brains in Brownsville, Texas, which gets its water from the Rio Grande which is heavily polluted by American factories in Mexico. One of my students had a child die of a strange brain cancer and another kid died of it in the same very small town, but the authorities told them it had nothing to do with pollution. These kinds of deaths were very, very rare, and it seems to me that two kids dying of this very rare disease in one small town is more than a coincidence. I may not buy the global warming stuff, but I do buy the pollution stuff. We need to clean this up--now.

I thought a whippet was a dog. I'm really over the hill, but I have to say that even though I have not been married in my nearly 60 years, I didn't miss out. So I think that sex before, within, and after marriage is good. Or I did think that. After heart surgery and menopause, I think sex takes too much energy. I'd rather take a nap.

I don't have much trouble understanding East Indians. In fact, when I was in England I had a serious problem understanding a guy from Devon. I was at the supermarket and had no idea what he was saying. A guy in the line behind me translated. He wanted to know if he should sack my groceries> I said, Yes, and then discovered that customers sack their own groceriesin England. Screw that. Then I went to Boots, a drugstore, because I was seriously nauseated and the clerk couldn't understand me and had to get a higher up to talk to me. I speak Standard English albeit with an Okie accent. If one is speaking to "Joe' from India, one needs to understand the w is pronounced v in India. I find the biggest problem is the lousy phone service offered by satellite. Someone told me that upper class Indians speak English with a British accent, but we are dealing with lower class Indians on the phone. They don't speak English very well. My thinking is that I'd like to deal with lower class Indians who can get a leg up in a very caste ridden society though I have to admit it's better to talk to an American or a Canadian. The Apple Macintosh service center is in Canada so we've outsourced to Canada. But the bottom line is that American companies can save a whole lot of money by outsourcing. This is just the leading edge of the global economy. What I want to know is how to make money in other countries so I can retire.

While I don't doubt that global warming is happening, I doubt that people are causing it. The globe has warmed a number of times before and then cooled off again. I think it's sort of egotistical that people think we are causing this. The earth is big and weather systems are something we don't really understand. While the east is basking in warm weather, the west is buried in snow. I think the easterners are just surprised that they got our weather and we got theirs. I have studied the last big ice age because I study the cave petroglyphs in France and I am aware that there was a little ice age in the middle ages in Europe which lasted a while and they also had a warm period when malaria was endemic in England. Henry VIII's son may have died from malaria though they called it the sweating sickness then, and it may be associated with a disease in China. However, there were palm trees in the southern parts of England in those days and the weather was warm. I think the press tends to get hysterical before they understand the real causes of global warming which may be perfectly natural. It's certainly happened before. I wonder why the world was so warm during the pleistocene when the dinosaurs were running around in Montana and Canada. They were apparently cold blooded though some folks think some were warm blooded. Still it's pretty peculiar that reptiles ruled the world until the big meteor strike and, whammo, they were extinct. While I'm all for reducing pollutants, I also think we should consider the idea the world changes and weather changes periodically. Also, I'd sell my condo on the beach if I had one.

If you've ever taught anything, it counts. I don't know what the Roman numeral for zero was. I don't think there was one which probably an already complicated number system even more complicated. That's probably why we use the Arabic system today. They were pretty advanced in the middle ages in the sciences though most of that stuff is pretty laughable today. I suspect our science will be laughable in 500 years, assuming humanity still exists.

Wheetsin -- You are wonderful. Thanks so much for this comment. English majors are good. They are smart, intellectual, and have not only writing skills but people skills. We train them to understand other folks. I had a friend whose brother worked for DuPont and they were training them in people skills because they were simply unpromotable or is that ible? They were a bunch of geeks who were very good in the lab, but couldn't deal with people. They really just needed some English majors. I suspect they could understand the dynamics even if they couldn't understand the math. I regularly discuss quantum physics, string theory and chaos theory in my Freshman Comp classes because it stretches their brains. I don't have to be able to do the math to understand the philosophical questions raised by these theories. Usually it works. This semester I was covering that stuff and talked about Isaac Asimov's theory that we can never know what nothing is because when we focus on nothing it becomes something. One of my students thought that was so cool that I heard him telling his girlfriend about it after class. Maybe we college profs aren't totally useless. Oh yes, I also discuss quadratic equations. It seemed pretty stupid to me that a whole bunch of stuff equaled nothing. So I worried that question for some years -- often asking math profs why all that crap equals zero. They would murmur something about place holders or something but never explained it to me. Finally my freshmen and I figured out that the zero doesn't mean nothing. That means that zero has a value that is not nothing. I loved this. We figured out the zero does not mean nothing, but it means something. How fascinating.

Jack -- I have had the same problem. I haven't lost any weight until this week on the scale, but I'm losing sizes in clothes. My size 16 pants which I was so proud to wear are falling off. This week I finally got over the 4-5 month no-weight-loss period and lost two pounds. But it seems that the fat is rearranging itself and I need smaller clothes. I went and bought some smaller underwear because my old underwear was just huge. So I suppose there are some victories even if the scale doesn't show them. I still intend to try to eat prime rib. I love prime rib, but beef really is a problem even in chiclet size. I eat a lot of pork chops. I hunt the ones with the most fat because the fat helps them go down. Then I steam them in the oven for about 1 1/2 hours until they are super tender and then I broil them to get them brown. They go down really well. My favorite meal is pork chops, cottage cheese and asparagus. I have trouble with chicken though I make Maryland Country Captain a lot You boil it to tenderize the chicken. I like omelets. I have this French cookbook with some omelet recipes and they are good. My brother came down for my mother's surgery and he noted that my eating habits have changed radically. I used to put away a medium pizza with ease and about 2 liters of Dr. Pepper a day. Now I have trouble eating two pieces and the dogs get the crusts. Dr. Pepper is a distant memory. Generally I make my own very small pizza with VERY thin crust and it works pretty well. Amazing how the lapband can change one's whole life, isn't it.

Well, this cheers me up. Mother went to the nursing home today for recuperation from a colon resection. Our nursing home is pretty good though I'm not sure how they treat the terminal patients since mother isn't terminal. They like to take her outside to smoke and so she knows all the smoking nurses, aides, etc. I know them too. I'm also a bitch. If I see something I don't like, I scream loud and long. Mother complained about her night nurse the last time she was in. Mother was an LPN and worked in the operating room for over 20 years. She knows what to expect and she didn't get it from this nurse so she complained. This time, if it ever quits snowing, I intend to go down there at night and check it out. My students who have worked in nursing homes say the day staff is usually good because families visit during the day, but the night staff is not good. So I will be visiting late at night to check it out. Oklahoma had some nursing home horror stories so the government has gotten busy and is checking these homes. Several have received big fines or been closed. But there is much left to do. I support any efforts at making nursing homes better places and I'd like to start with the pay. Nurses and aides deserve a whole lot more pay than they are getting. My brother is an ultra sound tech and he's highly educated, but he makes about $75,000 a year traveling around to fill in for hospitals that don't have techs. The hospital he's at right now offered him a job, but he can't make as much money if he works full time for them rather than traveling. We need to make nursing more remunerative to get more nurses and we need to pay aides well. They may not have a lot of education , but they get the dirty jobs. Also the laws are different in different states. As an LPN in Texas, my mother did the stuff an RN does. In Illinois, she could do the stuff an aide does. So she went into the OR. We have a lot of people who were destined to be nurses. They love it. Let's pay them. And while we're at it, let's pay the teachers too. Teachers teach for love, not for money, but it would be nice to make a decent living too.

The VA has been notoriously lousy for 40 years, but I hear their actual service is improving. I think the kids may have it better than we do because there are fewer of them. They will be paying for more people, but they will also have a chance at those high dollar jobs the boomers will be retiring from. Also there will be very big houses they'll be able to buy cheaper due to lack of demand. I think the future may be pretty rosy for them if the boomers die off pretty quickly and a whole bunch of them will. I personally intend to be dead by the time I'm 72 or thereabouts. What is sapping social security, aside from Congress borrowing from it, is the large number of very old people who are still alive. I note in the local paper that people are dying in their late 80s and 90s and many are living past 100. Social security wasn't designed for such long lives. My mother is cost intensive for Medicare though my father did the decent thing and died at 72. I think baby boomers will die in droves in their 70s which may help, but some will just live on and on, costing the government. I think we should look seriously at Canada's medical system and consider adopting something like that. Of course, Canada has a fraction of the population of the U.S., but still some sort of universal health care might work. We could give it a try. Meanwhile, investment bankers are taking home millions in bonuses and failed CEO's are reaping millions just to get fired. As Hamlet said, something stinks in Denmark (read the U.S.).

I have to admit that I've been avoiding exercise since I got the band, but my weight loss has stopped and I think I need to exercise. The problem is that I had a double bypass 13 years ago; I have a bad heart valve; I smoke like a steam engine; I have a stomach hernia from the heart surgery, and I take care of my 86 year old mother and 7 animals. When I get home from work (I have about 120 students this semester), I just want to lie down. Also I will be 60 this year. I figure I can walk around the neighborhood with 4 dogs following me, but I can't get up the steam to do it. Can any of you talk me into walking? It will take much persuasion, but I'm open to persuasion.

Your friend may have Asperger's syndrome which is a defect where a person simply can't understand social signals and screws up all the time. I had a student with this who was dating a student with the same thing. The other students said it was a scream to hear them talk because they didn't pull punches verbally. This malady is more common that once thought so you might see if your friend simply has no idea how to interact socially. If not, she may be a victim of Asperger's and you just have to cut her a lot of slack.

Only in Tulsa could this happen. She'd been to many docs and they hadn't discovered this cyst. She finally went to a WOMAN doctor and she said that the lady's stomach was hard as a rock so she wanted to investigate. I think some of those other docs are probably sweating out a lawsuit. I once heard a case where a lady was supposed to have a fibroid tumor. When she went into the hospital, they put in a catheter and she lost a couple of gallons of pee. The doctor said she was just lazy!!! Apparently she was so lazy that she wouldn't empty her bladder. I say B.S. If you have to pee, you pee. She didn't have to pee which means something was wrong with her bladder. This was an old male doc who should have retired years ago. So many doctors are complete idiots. I wonder how they keep their licenses.

I just pluck my beard. It's sort of upsetting when I have a better beard than most of my male students. Sometimes I get this wild black hair that grows about 1/2 inch overnight. God, I hate menopause. I hated having periods but that is nothing compared with menopause. Something for you young things to look forward to. Hahahahahaha!

Well, bummer. I had hoped he'd get well. I was at the Kentucky Derby when Secretariat ran. I didn't bet on him since the odds were crummy, but that horse was like a steam engine. I don't think he ever even got winded. He just pounded around the track like he was motor driven. I have to say he was the greatest racehorse during my lifetime and he died too. Alas. I think they should stuff him and keep him around just so people could touch him. He was the greatest.

I bought a MacIntosh 512 computer in about 1986. I have had Macs ever since then, but now I use my Dell laptop all the time. I have a nice Mac with OSX and stuff on it, but it's a desktop and I can't use it on the coffee table. Also the Dell interfaces with school IBMs and the Mac doesn't. But I'm keeping my Mac just in case. I highly recommend both Mozilla Firefox as a browser and Mozilla Thunderbird for email. I also have a gmail account for spam and stuff. All business mail goes through gmail. I think the Google folks are probably a whole lot better at fraud than the Microsoft folks are. Also I think the Mozilla folks are people who lost their jobs when Netscape went belly up. They started their own company and they're good. But if you want a reliable computer and don't have to worry about interfaces, get a Mac. They last forever. In fact, I've had about 5 Macs and got new ones just to upgrade. I never had a Mac crash though my 512 did have a screen problem back in the 80s. By the way, you can also run Word documents on a Mac though it costs a bundle. Happy computing. Also you can get iTunes on a Mac and Apple has the best batch of music of anyone. I downloaded about 53 songs on my Dell, but you can't run your iTune player except with a Mac, as far as I know.

I love the California cows, but I also like the commercial where the kids are dressed as Pilgrims and tell the truth about what happened between the Pilgrims and the Indians. The audience is appalled. I think it's hilarious. But my all time favorite commercial is the superbowl one about herding cats. I can't understand why people like those stupid frogs better than herding cats. I guess they just don't have my sophisticated sense of humor. LOL.

Carlene -- Thanks for this. Now we are going to tax the middle class's health insurance benefits. That means me. I'm seriously worried about medicare and retirement in general. And I'm pretty close, unless they put off the retirement age yet again. I saw some article asking if the baby boomers were going to screw their grandkids with retirement, and my response is that we boomers have gotten screwed from the time we first got a job, if we could find one. I'm sick of getting screwed just because there are a lot of us. A lot of us have paid in to the retirement and medicare system for about 40 years, so why shouldn't we expect to get some return on our investment? Frankly, I didn't ask to get born. My parents made that decision. I don't think and don't appreciate being mistreated because I was born during a baby boom. Besides, I don't have any grandkids. A lot of boomers don't have kids which should make life easier for the generations to follow. I don't know but it appears that the only thing for the boomers to do is commit mass suicide. Clearly, I'm irritated.

I study war literature and one scholar points out that many of the troops in Vietnam really believed they should be heroes because they'd seen so many war movies with heroes. However, once in country, their attitude seems to have been "f**k you John Wayne." I think a lot of young people fall for the propaganda that the military hands out to them on a daily basis. But the truth is that the people who would like them home alive and all in one piece are the real protectors of the military, not the folks who don't care if they are blown to bits. I care. I want them home in one piece--NOW!

My, my. Hitler would have been proud.

My sympathies. Fireworks can be so dangerous. But you have to be optimistic. Besides who cares if he has eyebrows? He's still a wonderful person, and you love him. I suspect he's a bit swollen at the moment, but that will go down and he may look like himself before long. Cheer up. Things could be worse. He's only 18 and young people have an amazing ability to recover. We'll be thinking of you.

Sex drive? What sex drive?

Thanks for missing me. I was enduring the worst ice storm in memory here in Oklahoma. I had no electricity or internet for a week. But I'm baaaaaack.

I don't have any kids so I will be the one getting beat up in the nursing home unless I croak soon. I've been having strange arm pain so I've been popping nitroglycerin a lot. I think it's just tension though what with the rigoes of the ice storm. I am hoping to die early to avoid the nursing home horrors when you don't have anyone to take care of you. My brother and I have figured out that it is a good idea to go up in the Rocky Mountains and freeze to death. After the first part, you just go to sleep. We like that idea.

I'm going to rant about this ice storm in Oklahoma. We were without electricity for 7 days. They closed the university for 3 days and I didn't go in on Thursday and Friday because I was trying to keep mother warm. I am absolutely pooped what with toting all that wood. I usually go through a rick of wood in about two years. I went through half a rick in one week. My arms are bruised and my trees are destroyed. I ran around town trying to get supplies for the storm for two days. I couldn't get much because everyone was sold out. By about Tuesday or Wednesday, my friend suggested that I buy a generator. I went down to Lowe's and got on the list. I was number 178 on that list. Amazingly they got 200 generators that night and a very kind man stayed down there and picked it up for me and put it together and got it running. It was the best $750 I've spent lately. Lowe's got 250 more generators the next day. Unfortunately they didn't have any gas cans. I probably got the last gas can out of the return bin so I had some gas, but I spent days trying to find gas cans. I finally got some on Friday and filled up about 5 of them. Then the electricity came on on Saturday. I have never been in a situation where everyone was sold out of everything. I had two oil lamps but couldn't find any oil for them until I already had the generator. I bought more oil anyway. The only good thing is that roads never iced up and I don't have a dead bird on my skylight. I don't have a skylight. But I have lots of live birds eating birdseed in my feeder and two squirrels who are little pigs. A branch fell on my cable line so we had no TV for weather news or internet. My friend called me with weather reports daily except for the day the phone went out. My neighborhood looks like a tornado went though it and it will cost me a bundle to get the limbs cut down and the yard cleaned up. This was the worst ice storm I've even been in. Meanwhile someone used my credit card number to charge $514 of stuff from Walmart so I was a victim of wire fraud. And my mother is having a colon resection this coming Friday and she's not a good candidate for surgery. But she's tough as nails and we think she can come through it. The problem is that my brother will be here bugging me. He's supposed to alleviate stress but will probably just create more. Well, at least I don't have a dead bird on the skylight.