Jesus Fucking Christ

This photo appeared in The Atlantic's Photos of the Week. 

The "my god is better than your god" mindset just boggles me.

Medical Costs

 I am going to explain why medical costs are outrageous.

Four stitches in my hand. Went to my orthopedic surgeon's office to have them removed 17 days after carpal tunnel surgery (see my May 21, 2021 blog entry). 

Medical assistant Kim carefully disinfected the area with iodine(?) and alcohol. Then she took these tools (see photo) out of their sterile packaging and used them for 90 seconds. She said they don't re-use the tools, so she gave them to me.

Does that explain why costs are high?

Switches Down

OK, so you have a 3-way switch to control the ceiling light in your hallway. Coming from your family room, you flip the switch to turn it on. At your bedroom door, you flip another switch to turn the hall light off. Simple.

You don’t care whether you flip either of those switches up or down, you just flip it to the opposite setting you found it in.

Depending on who installed those switches, you could find that both switches down results in the hall light being ON or OFF. That guy probably didn’t care which way it would be, just like you don’t care.

 

I care.

 

I have installed a fair number of such 3-way switches over the years, and I always make sure that if both switches are down, the light is OFF. If one switch is up and the other down, then the light is ON. It’s just a thing for me. Is that OCD or just anal?

Autopsy?

The maple tree that so well shields our deck from sun grows a billion leaves every spring. In the fall, the aged and decrepit leaves lose all their greenness as well as their will to live. That's what is normal.

Now and then I see abnormalities, like this guy:

I can't get him out of my mind. Dropping dead at such a tender age. It's barely June.

What kind of trauma did the guy suffer? These guys have birds shitting on them all day long and do just fine, or maybe thrive. 

In the absence of other data, I'm going to say that Facebook is to blame. Other leaves on the same branch heckled, mocked, criticized, derided, and made fun of him until he just couldn't take it anymore.

Medical School

 I went to med school the other day. In Dr. Collard's office I studied the HAND poster - which came in really handy when Dr. Collard came in and diagnosed carpal tunnel syndrome.

So I am wearing a brace for 2 months and then most likely scheduling surgery on my left hand.

Not to worry, Dr. Collard says, "the surgery takes 10 to 20 minutes" and "nothing can go wrong."

He didn't really say that last part.

Look Carefully

 Examine this April 20 photo carefully and tell me what doesn't belong.

How Good is Your Water?

I posted this (below) to the NextDoor website yesterday. It has generated 44 comments so far, ranging from "Oh God, that's horrible!" to "Hey, doesn't look that bad to me - what were you expecting, crystal clear water?"

Pretty much my whole life people have told me how good the water is around here – the stuff that Missouri American Water is pumping into our homes. And if you ask MoAm how good the water is, they have a mountain of data to show how good it is.

But in 2017 I installed a filter on the water line coming in. The replaceable cartridge was snow-white, and quite brown in October 2018 when I replaced it with another snow-white cartridge. Then last week I replaced it again, but I took a photo of it before replacement, and it was again quite brown after serving my needs for about 2-1/2 years.

 This time I captured the sediment that was left in the bottom of the bowl when I took the filter cartridge out. After the water evaporated, I put the sediment in a teaspoon for another photo.

I gotta give MoAm a D on this one. Maybe an F, if I knew what was in that sediment. If I knew what brown stuff is embedded in the filter cartridge.