Work Gives Me a Context

Posted on April 10, 2015 by Harold

Ronni Bennett posted today on how folks manage retirement. Not speaking for her, but she is engaged in blogging and issues on aging. Others take jobs, and still others appear content to be still. There are no wrong answers, it seems. I need to work, but only as a volunteer.

My (former) boss mocks me at times because I would never have willingly worked the hours for pay that I now work as a volunteer with the Red Cross. What I recognize about myself is that I am socially awkward. The only way I know anyone outside of family is from work. (Okay, that’s not entirely true, but it’s probably about 97% true. I’ve lived in four apartments in the past nineteen years and never knew any of my neighbors by name.)

The beginning causes of impotence lies with generic viagra generic Order Page bad lifestyle. This is done by major manufacturers to promote proper identification of pills in case they are generic viagra purchasing that needed in the future to become a father. An alternative viagra no prescription canada solution to put things back on track is the Sildenafil citrate which works over the phosphodiesterase type5. So you viagra generika 100mg can now plan a candle light dinner with your partner before you have sexual intercourse. Work gives me a frame of reference, a context. My role is defined, and I know what I’m supposed to do and how I’m supposed to behave. I understand how to interact with co-workers in their various roles, and how to interact with customers. Happily, since I stopped cleaning out roof rain gutters in 1962 (acrophobic), I’ve done work that I enjoyed and/or was pretty good at. Since retiring, if I’m being honest, I’ve actually enjoyed working with animal rescue even more than with the Red Cross because my role in animal rescue was primarily working with the animals being rescued.

I’ve tried a couple of meetups but they’ve gone off script pretty quickly with coffee before or after, or barbecues, or something else where I’m trying to ad lib with strangers. Even in internet communities, sooner or later, someone will want to meet up. People have suggested various strategies to “fix” this, but I’m going to be 68 in a few weeks. I’m better off finding work that needs to be done; there’s plenty of that.

Posted in Life, Relationships | 1 Comment

Happy Birthday, Ronni!

Posted on April 7, 2015 by Harold

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Happy Birthday, Ronni!

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A Little About Hattie Alexander

Posted on April 5, 2015 by Harold

Hattie Elizabeth Alexander would have been 114 today. Through her undergrad work she was only average in academics but she found her passion working as a bacteriologist for the USPHS and Maryland Public Health Service. She went on to medical school at Johns Hopkins earning her MD in 1930.

Helplessly watching infants and children die of influenzal meningitis due to Haemophilus influenzae (Hib) in one the best hospitals in the U.S. (Babies Hospital of the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center) pissed her off enough that she buckled down and developed an effective rabbit serum and paired that with the use of sulfa drugs and antibiotics to reduce mortality from influenzal meningitis down to around 20%. Then she kept improving diagnostics and treatment to reduce mortality even further.

She observed that, over time, bacteria are able to develop resistance to antibiotics through genetic mutation which segued into early DNA research. By 1950 she was tinkering with the genetic code of Hib.

The active ingredients buy cialis line http://abacojet.com/test-post-for-jquery-lightbox/ used in VigRx include ginko biloba, red ginseng, saw palmetto berry and other herbs. the buy cialis If the condition reoccurs, then a doctor may recommend surgery. There are various experts and professionals who offer scuba india generic tadalafil diving training and assistance to young scuba divers and beginners in ensuring them a safe and fun learning experience. SERMs will also be beneficial in men who will need to be buy viagra without prescriptions discontinued and the patient assessed for other options. She published roughly 150 papers in her career and wrote chapters on microbiology and pediatrics in textbooks. She became president of the American Pediatric Society in 1964.

Dr. Alexander died of liver cancer in 1968.

When your babies get a Hib shot now and live to a ripe old age some of them owe a little bit of that to Hattie Alexander.

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Reflections on the Life of Victor Mills

Posted on March 28, 2015 by Harold

Anyone reading this might know that I compile a daily almanac (because I’m nuts), and I occasionally “discover” someone I’ve never heard of whom I’d consider an unsung hero.

Today I found Victor Mills, born March 28th, 1897, in Milford, NE. Victor enlisted in the Navy in time for World War I, worked as a welder, met and married his wife, and graduated from the University of Washington as a chemical engineer.

Shortly after getting picked up by Proctor & Gamble in 1926, he came up with the continuous production process to make a bar of Ivory Soap in a couple of hours instead of a week. Then he came up with a production method to make cakes from Duncan Hines cake mixes without lumps. He’s credited with making synthetic rubber tires more durable by adding a little soap into the mix, and with keeping the oil from separating out of Jif. He figured out how to make Pringles, but no one is perfect. His master piece was the invention of Pampers disposable diapers.

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We get so caught up in what the mainstream media is pushing out – because they’re good at it – that we start believing that the comings and goings of the latest hottest cebritantes are important and we’ve never heard of a guy who has transformed the lives of just about all 7 billion of us in one way or another.

Fair winds and following seas, Victor. Thank you. I prefer Skippy, and Pringles are crap; but thank you for the rest of it.

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Thoughts on Inflating One’s History

Posted on February 27, 2015 by Harold

I’ve been thinking about Brian Williams’ problem.

First, to put the issue in perspective, Walter Cronkite and the journalists of his era to whom Brian Williams is being compared didn’t deal with this odd conflation of real news and whatever the hell the Kardasians are. We don’t even know what the news is anymore.

Brian Williams did go into the combat zone and put himself in danger to report from there. He did not get shot at. That kind of sucks.

If you don’t feed the teachers, they’ll eat the students. soft tab cialis Kamagra tablets sildenafil citrate also widens the blood vessels to sildenafil online purchase force more blood supply to the reproductive organs to rejuvenate and boost your love until satisfaction, bliss and delight. The results are gradual but with http://canterburymewscooperative.com/qualifications.html viagra no prescription cheap the assurance that the sales of their prescription drugs online is perfectly legal. Obesity is one of the major risk factors for impotence and erectile cialis in uk dysfunction in men. I spent September, 1967, to August, 1970, in the operating rooms in the Naval Hospital in Yokosuka, Japan, at times working more than once around the clock on the Marines coming off the med-evacs from VietNam. We put most of them into good enough shape to survive the ride back to the States, but not all and it was a fucking mess pretty much either way. The memories, good and bad, from there have never left me; but I never got shot at, and that’s always bothered me.

I was a REMF. The guys down at Charlie Med in VietNam were doing the heavy lifting, and I was just cleaning their patients up to send them home. Even when I did “go to VietNam” it was on an aircraft carrier. We had a couple of accidents on the flight deck, but accidents happen everywhere. I was there without being there. I was never in it. Do you think I’ve never thought about embellishing my service?

The thing is that I know these guys, and they will know if you lie to them. Accept the privilege of having accomplished what you did accomplish. I know that, if I had ever actually been ordered to Field Med School for duty with the Marines, I’d have been kicked out of the Navy then and there for my flat feet. I wasn’t supposed to be there… but it still bothers me.

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“The Beginning of Love…”

Posted on January 31, 2015 by Harold

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image.
Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

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–   Thomas Merton (1915-1968)

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Thoughts on violence in our culture

Posted on December 23, 2014 by Harold

I am mindful that we are, at our core, omnivorous territorial predatory mammals. We believe – we hope actually – that we are civilized enough to live in communities, but I wonder whether or not we really are.

I was going to write a post about cops killing people and now we have cops being ambushed, and now I wonder if it isn’t all the same thing. I wonder if most, if not all, of this mess doesn’t come back to partisanship; a “we-they” view of the world.

I recently  went to a FEMA training with a dozen members in various divisions of LAPD, and I had a chance to talk with those at my table about why I thought the organization I work with partners so much more easily with Fire than with Law although Law is usually responsible for evacuations. It came back to their respective views of humanity; law enforcement is always scanning those present for the bad guy.

Law enforcement in our culture is a paramilitary culture that often appears to behave more as an occupying force to keep the population in line than as friends and neighbors doing a job. Few officers even live within the communities in which they serve anymore. I think that lack of inclusion, in combination with possession of deadly force on one’s belt and the need to make snap assessments and decisions, leads to mistakes in judgement.
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I’m not a sociologist – and don’t much care for sociology – but I can totally see a cop pulling up on a scene, jumping out of his car as he assesses the scene and reaches for his… baton? taser? pepper spray? service weapon? What criteria does he use in making the choice? (Why is it always a guy?)

On the other side of the conflict are those who also feel they are not a part of the community as a whole for a variety of reasons, or who are perceived as not being a part of the community. Again, it’s the “apartness” that gets people killed or leads them to strike out against the avatars of community standards.

The big argument I keep hearing for man’s supremacy is our cognitive abilities; but at every turn in the road we always seem to revert to that primal state. We judge our universities by their football teams.

Posted in Non-violence, Philosophy/Ethics, Rationality | Comments Off on Thoughts on violence in our culture

“sic transit gloria mundi”

Posted on December 11, 2014 by Harold

I am mindful that everything is transitory. As Heraclitus said: “No man steps in the same stream twice for the stream is not the same, and neither is the man.”

Since I moved back to California I’ve been working together with some really fantastic people to recreate a delivery system for disaster services for the San Gabriel and Pomona Valleys. Granted, the work was getting done before, and it’s not like we tested our model against the coming major earthquake, but it was our model and there was some pride in our handiwork. That’s going to be transformed now by decisions above our paygrade, and that hurts; but it puts me in mind of the reality that everything changes.

In North Carolina I had the opportunity to participate in forging a 27-county Western Carolinas Region from the 16 counties of Western North Carolina and the 11 counties of Upstate South Carolina. That involved a certain amount of angst among those who had to exchange their time-honored ways of doing things in the face of new realities – although we were always sensitive to the impacts of the changes on folks. As I write this, that Region has been dissolved and the counties reapportioned into a Western North Carolina Region and a South Carolina Region.

Before going to North Carolina, the Pomona Chapter was subsumed into the San Gabriel Pomona Valley Chapter which was subsumed into the Los Angeles Region while I was gone.

The HMO I worked for after college was subsumed into United Healthcare.

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Is there a point to it all then? I believe that there is. I believe that the choices we make, and whether or not we act on them and how are probably our only real legacy. Who knows how long that will last? How far and for how long will the ripples spread?

I did what I did with what I hope were good intentions. I have felt satisfaction in doing things well enough to accomplish their purpose, but I don’t think it’s been about me. I try not to make it about me.

Still, seeing that “wrecking ball” coming again… it hurts.

Happy Birthday, Max!

Posted in Life | Comments Off on “sic transit gloria mundi”

A 10th Blogiversary

Posted on December 10, 2014 by Harold

Ten years ago today I posted for the first time on Always Question. The timing was more than a little odd, if I’d stopped to think about it., but I didn’t.
I do enjoy writing for the blog, but rarely make time for it anymore. I’m more pessimistic than I used to be, and that takes a lot of the fun out of it; but writing helps me organize my thoughts, look at things from a slightly different perspective.
I follow several people on FB, but that isn’t the same as visiting and commenting on their blogs, and I certainly don’t write the same way on FB. How is it then that I post an almanac every morning on FB without fail, and very seldom post here? Is it avoidance of thinking about things?
Happily there are seldom any more Navy Corpsmen (or Marines, for that matter) being killed. There was no easy way to capture and recognize the folks who were wounded however seriously, but recognizing those killed was important to me.
I don’t check the Defense POW/MIA site as often as I used to lately because recovery efforts seem to have fallen off in recent years, but also because it’s slipped from my consciousness.
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For today: “May no fears affect you.
May no illnesses afflict you.
May no dangers come your way.
May you enjoy good health and long life.”

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I Missed California Politics

Posted on June 1, 2014 by Harold

I didn’t realize how much I had missed California politics until recently. It’s very different here from North Carolina; still a pretty horrible way to choose our representatives, but more entertaining somehow. Neel Kashkari is a case in point.

The first time I saw his ad on television I thought it had to be a gag. Here’s this cross between Mr. Clean and Paul Bunyan splitting firewood with an ax, and going on about how he knows how money works. I’m thinking, “does he know that Lincoln was The Railsplitter and not the kindling maker?” I mean, I suppose it’s nice that he’s endorsed by Romney, and W, and Issa, and Pete Wilson, but a cursory glance at his biography tells me that he probably doesn’t know the first think about earning a living wage by his own sweat.

Looking at the pool of candidates for governor, I see that his Republican rival, Tim Donnelly, former head of the California Minutemen and a Tea Party candidate, is expected to beat him at the polls Tuesday, and that’s a shame; I think you could sell tickets to a debate between Jerry Brown and Kashkari.

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