bitteroldhag

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.

I just went to the bathroom and my brother, who sleeps in the nude, opened the door -- nude. He's not a prepossessing sight. My friend also sleeps in the nude. I can't really imagine that. I tried it once when it was really hot and felt horribly exposed, but I think lots of people sleep in the nude and I'd like to hear from you all about it. Maybe I'm the weird one. I was discussing this with students today and they said they got hung up in their clothes if they sleep in a tee shirt or something. I sleep in a 3X nightgown which is pretty comfortable since I now wear about a 1 1/2 X. Lord, I hope for a 1X before long.

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.).

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.

Tonight I made a prime rib. I was a little rare, but good. I just can't seem to eat beef. I had made this great dinner for my brother and mother prior to Mother going to the hospital for colon surgery and I threw most of mine up. I found a larger piece of beef when I threw up. I chewed like crazy and it didn't get small enough. If I can't eat prime rib that I cook myself, my life is over. I find that I can eat pork chops with no problem and my homemade pizza which has a VERY thin crust. But a lot of other stuff causes PBs even when I chew it up to basically a liquid. I think I may need to have an unfill, but that entails driving 2 1/2 hours to Kansas and having the gal poke around in my stomach until she finally finds the port. I have followed TOM's advice about cutting meat to chiclet size, but the prime rib still wouldn't go down. I'm disgusted about that. Prime rib is expensive and my brother and the dogs will get to eat the whole thing. My brother weighs about 300 lbs. He can eat enything. I think I'm going to give up on buying prime rib since I can't eat it. I can't seem to eat much. Does anyone else have that problem. Also I haven't lost a pound in about 5 months. Of course, I don't exercise. I spend enough time taking care of mother and working. Also I absolutely loathe exercise. Meanwhile, my cousin visited today and was terribly proud that she'd managed to get up to 117 pounds! She's hoping to gain to 120 pounds. Life just doesn't seem fair sometimes.

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.

These mannequins are just large Barbie dolls. I wonder how they get them to stand up what with being so top heavy.

The post on GWB as the worst president in history is getting long, so I thought I'd move along and maybe can discuss the latest on Iraq. I was against the war in Iraq from the beginning and I still am. I think the surge is a method to blame the Iraqis for failure. But everyone seems to be overlooking the fact that the U.S. committed outright aggression when it invaded Iraq for flimsy reasons. I think we're getting what we deserve. Saddam Hussein was a bad guy, but there are a lot of bad guys in office around the world. Why pick on him? Well, there's all that oil. So we're going to waste some more lives to make sure we can get out of Iraq by blaming the Iraqis. Shades of Vietnam!! This is so cynical and horrible that I can't believe we are doing it again.

I just spent 30 minutes trying to FIND those bumper stickers which were hilarious. Maybe we should start another thread about this since this one is getting long. So maybe I'll do that.

In a war zone, people are trained and armed to kill each other. In a city, people are not trained though they may be armed. I think this comparison is a non sequitur fallacy. Maybe we should send city folks through basic training.

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.