Lift Up Your Hearts!

That's not how I customarily describe our houseguests, but this one is a friend from Rochester, NY whose purpose in visiting is primarily to work for the success of the man I would like to see defeated in the upcoming presidential election. Are we "giving aid and comfort to the enemy"?

 

Well, an opponent does not need to be an enemy, and I have to admire our friend's willingness to work for what he believes in, giving up his vacation time to boot. I haven't actively campaigned for someone since I worked for the Humphrey-Muskie ticket, and that was before I could vote. That's a little embarrassing, since we have a friend who ran for the U.S. Senate, but it's the truth. We vote, we talk, we provide financial support—but Don's actually down there at headquarters, working. You have to respect that.

And the dinner-table discussions are definitely stimulating!

It looks as if this will be the first season in over 10 years that we won't get our flu shots. We started the habit long before flu immunizations were recommended to the general public. One year there was a particularly nasty strain that was sidelining its victims for about two weeks. We looked at our schedules, particularly those of our children, and decided that we didn't want to deal with the consequences of losing that much time. We considered my father—elderly and with respiratory problems, and thus vaccinated—who had been our regular February visitor since we'd moved to Florida. We'd get sick; he'd stay healthy. Seemed like an obvious choice to us.

Since then, we've enjoyed flu-free years, a blessing even for the young-and-healthy. This year, with the loss of half of the U.S. flu vaccine supply due to the Chiron debacle, it seems prudent to leave the remaining supply for those who need it most (source: Centers for Disease Control):

• People 65 years of age and older
• Children ages 6 months to 23 months
• Adults and children 2 years of age and older with chronic lung or heart disorders including heart disease and asthma
• Pregnant women
• Adults and children 2 years of age and older with chronic metabolic diseases (including diabetes), kidney diseases, blood disorders (such as sickle cell anemia), or weakened immune systems, including persons with HIV/AIDS
• Children and teenagers, 6 months to 18 years of age, who take aspirin daily
• Residents of nursing homes and other chronic-care facilities
• Household members and out-of-home caregivers of infants under the age of 6 months (Children under the age of 6 months cannot be vaccinated.
• Healthcare workers who provide direct, hands-on care to patients

It appears that we are both too young and too old. We're not qualified for the FluMist™ vaccine (live, attenuated influenza vaccine), which is not recommended for

• persons aged <5 years or those aged >50 years;
• persons with asthma, reactive airways disease or other chronic disorders of the pulmonary or cardiovascular systems; persons with other underlying medical conditions, including such metabolic diseases as diabetes, renal dysfunction, and hemoglobinopathies; or persons with known or suspected immunodeficiency diseases or who are receiving immunosuppressive therapies;
• children or adolescents receiving aspirin or other salicylates (because of the association of Reye syndrome with wild-type influenza infection);
• persons with a history of GBS;
• pregnant women; or
• persons with a history of hypersensitivity, including anaphylaxis, to any of the components of LAIV or to eggs.

We could probably get the regular vaccine if we tried hard enough. Yesterday, our local Publix was still handing out flyers advertising its vaccine program, and I gather that many non-medical sites are relying on people's own determination whether they need the immunization or not. But we are healthy, have no small children in the house to worry about, and have little exposure to schoolchildren (a highly-infectious population). Unless and until sufficient supply is available, it's better we abstain. My main concern will be for the people we visit this winter...not enough concern to stay home, however.

I understand that doctors' offices are being strict about who gets the vaccine and who doesn't, not trusting in people's general good sense and good will (probably with good reason). However, I will admit to hoping that the supply is sufficient to cover two additional populations:

• nursing mothers who would prefer to be their babies' primary source of immunization; and
• college students whose schedules make them both more vulnerable to infection and less able to handle disruption.

I suppose we should be watching the presidential debates tonight. But I already know how I'm going to vote on that race. (We need to have debates for the local races, where I'm not yet convinced.)

Nonetheless, Porter—after a grueling week of work—was in the mood for a mystery story. I checked out Blockbuster online to see what we might expect, and found a good assortment of Agatha Christie, Inspector Morse, Rumpole of the Bailey, P.D. James, even a couple of Dorothy Sayers. (Alas, no Father Brown stories, nor Ngaio Marsh.) Thus encouraged, we paid a visit to our local Blockbuster store.

What a shock! They've remodelled since we were there last, and their movie stock has been considerably diminished. More than half the store is now given to game rentals and movies for purchase. There is no longer a "mysteries" section. When I asked the clerk for help, he told me that any mysteries would be scattered around, probably in "drama" or "action." There is no way to browse for a good mystery. Next I asked if they had any Agatha Christie movies in stock, only to learn that there was no way for him to answer that question, as his computer only allowed him to look up movies by title! "You mean," I said, disbelieving," that unless I come into this store knowing exactly what it is I want to rent, you can't help me?" Apparently.

We did browse for a bit, then left emptyhanded. "I'm cured," Porter said. There was nothing. It was nauseating, in fact, even to look at most of the titles and cover pictures.

Actually, there was one movie we might have rented, had we been in the mood. Not a mystery. I suggested The Mission, and when Porter asked what it was about, I replied, "It doesn't matter; it has some great oboe music." Then again, we can hear plenty of great oboe music without sitting through a movie, so we left it behind.

Fortunately, the library is more reasonable, and Porter now sits with Ngaio Marsh's Light Thickens in his lap. A good solution, even if we have to enjoy it in series rather than in parallel.

I can't find an official Baldo website to advertise with a link, but today's comic says a lot about some folks' attitudes toward grading:

We have been found. Try typing "sursum corda" wightman in Google and hit "I'm Feeling Lucky." If you just type "sursum corda" we're 5th on the list. Now I really need to clean up the pages so it says something intelligent in the description....

As Floridians, we've had to endure too many jokes about Florida's elections. I challenge any state to stand up to the scrutiny Florida received after the last presidential election. Many states simply couldn't have done a recount, because they have no permanent record of individual votes. I've voted in Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, and Florida's system holds up well in comparison. Even after the 2000 election, we found that it would have been easy to cheat in Massachusetts, if we had wanted to. I'm not going to complain about their system, because it was nice to feel trusted. But it was certainly a surprise not to have to provide any form of ID when we voted.

I also like Florida's paper ballots. (We had paper ballots in Massachusetts, too.) We've used both the punch-card ("hanging chad" style) and the fill-in-the-circle (standardized test style) ballots, and despite what you've heard on the news, they are not hard to understand! I'm old fashioned enough to think that someone too clueless to understand the simple ballots, or too lazy to take the time to make sure he has filled his out correctly, or unwilling to ask for help if needed, probably shouldn't be voting anyway.
Which brings me to today's Fox Trot cartoon. I trust the old system far more than the highly-touted computerized voting. I know too much about comptuers to trust them with the future of our country. Though it may already be too late. Consider how many parts of our lives are vulnerable to computer problems!

Here's a particularly appropriate excerpt from my father's as-yet-unpublished autobiography (to give a fancy name to the project he and I were working on when he died):

There was no kindergarten in the Pullman School system and I started first grade at the age of five, my sixth birthday coming before the new year and in time to let me start. I went to the Franklin Elementary School, which was about a half dozen blocks away. This gave me a rather short walk compared with that of many of the students. There were no school busses to the elementary schools in those days. I do not remember much about my first four years in school, although in 1980 I did find it easy to remember that one of my teachers had said that Mt. St. Helens was an extinct volcano.

Today's For Better or For Worse comic strip, though it's talking about an actual school, expresses neatly the technique I used when required to produce a curriculum and transcripts for our homeschooled children. "Educationese" isn't hard to speak once you've read enough of it. There is one difference, however: In the comic, the teachers are fitting the material to the students' interests; with homeschooling, the interests generally come first, and when necessary one finds official words to describe the educational results.

While waiting in line at the grocery store today, I picked up a Reader's Digest and read an article about several traditional first aid measures that are no longer approved. Some were ones I've known for a long time, such as putting butter on burns; my mother knew half a century ago that cold water was a much better choice. However, I did not know that hydrogen peroxide is no longer recommended for cleaning wounds. Hydrogen peroxide kills germs, but apparently it also damages healthy cells, and inhibits healing. The proper way to clean a wound? With clean, running water.

Not that I consider Reader's Digest to be the ultimate medical authority, but I wish I could have read that article a year ago, before I had a small, basal cell carcinoma removed from my face. Following the dermatologist's instructions, I cleaned the wound frequently with hydrogen peroxide. It took a long time to heal, and left a nasty scar. Since I normally heal well and quickly, it's hard not to think there's a connection there.

I don't remember if we have the Olympics or the hurricanes to thank for this, but for one of those occasions we had the television on long enough to hear an advertisement for the PBS show, The Question of God with Dr. Armand Nicholi. It caught my attention because Dr. Nicholi's popular Harvard course of the same name was featured in the Boston Globe while we were living in Massachusetts.

Subtitled C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life, the program interweaves biographical information on the two men, quotations from their writings, and a seminar-like discussion among an eclectic group of serious thinkers. Alas, I was too busy to give the two-part, four-hour show the complete attention it deserved, but I saw most of it, and I haven't been so impressed with something on television since Ken Burns' The Civil War. The intellectual quality of this show is as far above normal PBS fare as normal PBS fare is above the rest of television.

Don't be surprised if you see posts appearing with long-past dates. I'm gradually collecting some of my old writings into this blog.

One consequence of having had to keep a weather eye out for hurricane news is that our television set was on quite a bit recently. I'll save my comments on the generally repulsive nature of what we saw for another time.

There were actually a couple of shows that qualified as interesting enough (and un-raunchy enough) to keep my attention for a while. One of these was Medical Investigation, which we found on NBC from 10 to 11 p.m. Friday nights. I can be grateful that the hour is so late, as I'm less likely to be tempted to seek it out. For it is just the kind of story I love: a mystery, and a medical mystery at that. In fact, in at least two of the stories so far the plots were lifted directly from the wonderful—and true—medical detective stories of Berton Roueché.

Alas, the stories were much better off in Roueché's hands. Medical Investigation suffers from bad acting, bad writing, and contrived, embarrassing attempts at social commentary. The subplots amongst the main characters, no doubt an effort to give the series more continuity, are distracting—and detracting. Nonetheless, the appeal of the medical mysteries is so strong that I actually enjoyed the two and a half shows I watched, in spite of the defects.

Thanks to a great deal of help from Jon Daley, I am venturing into the world of the Blog. It sounds rather like something from an old science fiction movie. My first step in having an online presence was the making of my home page, which I greatly enjoy, and which I've used—among other purposes—to keep friends and family informed of our adventures during Florida's recent hurricanes. I could be content simply to keep expanding my webpages; there certainly is a lot to learn and much that can be done. However, what I really like about the blog software is its ability to let other people add comments. Since I hope this will become a forum for the exchange of ideas as well as information, it seems a worthwhile project.

I am only splashing in the shallows of these waters as yet, so please be patient with problems and changes as I set out on this new adventure.

Friday, October 1, 2004. 7:30 a.m. Again, I don’t know who gets the credit for this; it appears to be circulating unattributed.



A few random notes:

• Our grapefruit tree still has most of its fruit!
• We had no trouble (except psychological reluctance) getting Heather and Jonathan to the airport yesterday, and the made it safely home.
• All the plywood is off of our windows, and we are rejoicing in the fact that for the first time in eight weeks the Tropical Weather Page shows no hurricane threatening to come our way.
• While life is essentially back to normal for us, there are still people without power, with “boil water” alerts, and of course with major damage.
• Porter is almost finished with what turned out to be a much bigger job of roof repair than he had planned. In some places, enough shingle parts had come off that the next rain would go right into the attic, so he bought a bundle of shingles and set out to make repairs. Once up on the roof, however, he was not content with that, but replaced the shingles that had only had their tabs broken off (rather than simply patching with roof tar, as he had done after Frances). Eventually this required another trip to Home Depot for more shingles.... And he is very stiff and sore from the unnatural effort of standing for so many hours on an inclined surface. Aspirin, extra doses of vitamin C, and many sessions with the electric massager are gradually improving the situation. He did a beautiful job, and we expect that as a consequence we can afford to wait to do the roof replacement at a more convenient time. By the way, this is one advantage of having a single-story house. Of course I was nervous with him up there, but when I think of my own father doing similar work on top of our three-story house, or of Jon and Heather’s four-story home...!!!
• Porter also repaired our garage door opener yesterday, which **sproing** broke one of its supports. Unrelated to any hurricanes, however.
• We have been pleased with our insurance company, Amica. They were not as generous as they were years ago when our roof was damaged in a hail storm, but they were certainly prompt.
• My brother in the insurance business has been sending me interesting hurricane data, which indicate that our recent bombardment is a “statistical correction” to our having had far fewer hurricanes than we should have expected in recent years. Before this, Peninsular Florida went 38 years with only one major hurricane (Andrew) making landfall. So there is no need to cry “global warming!” (at least, not in this case), nor to fear that this is the result of some major climate change. We can’t expect the peace of the previous quarter century, but neither should we worry that this year’s experiences presage what hurricane season will be like from now on.

Tuesday, September 28, 2004. 1:00 p.m.  The power is still on, and we are all happy about that. Porter is currently up on the roof, making repairs, and is glad that the pool is looking better this morning. Jonathan, Heather and I have a date to see some friends this afternoon, but we hope to get in some yardwork and a swim, too. Jonathan is not yet very helpful with the yardwork, but makes up for it by being incredibly cute as he tries to handle the rake. And he really enjoys the swimming part afterwards.