Daily Archives: January 15, 2016

Health

Ordinary Time

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Yule                                                                              Stock Show Moon

Amazing how ordinary a post-cancer operation visit can be. Of course, as long as the numbers stay good it will stay ordinary. That is the great gift of successful treatment, the opportunity to return to whatever life you had instead of checking out your will.

Anna Willis, a P.A., talks with ease about matters sexual, urinary. She’s a 30 something, maybe early 40’s, woman who dresses upscale and has a brusque, but not unpleasant professional manner. “Getting up 4 times at night? Oh, that’s too much. We’ll see if we can get that down.”

Mostly we focused on the .015 PSA. As good a number as possible, a royal flush of a lab result. The plan is to continue ultrasensitive tests every 3 months for 2 years, then every 6 months until year 5. “It’s about the same as breast cancer. the more time away from surgery with clean results, the better the odds. If you get past 5 years, the odds of recurrence are very, very low.”

Cancer season closed out as a time of high alertness in September with the first .015. The return to ordinary time will, I imagine, continue and become more solid if the tests keep sending me good news. Like having stood in the path of a fast moving train and having a good samaritan pull you out of the way just in time.

The West, US History
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Yule                                                                          Stock Show Moon

hcn-masthead

The High Country News  is excellent progressive journalism about the West. I discovered it not long after moving to Colorado and read it cover to cover every time it comes. At HCN.org there is a link to a compilation of articles HCN has published over the years about the sagebrush rebellion.

I’m currently reading through those articles plus articles I’ve collected at various news outlets. The sagebrush rebellion, I’ve decided, is going to be my entré into the dynamics of the New West. As I read and learn, I plan to report here on my new, adopted region.

The West is simpler than the Midwest. Its regional status is newer, really only coming into its own in the mid to late 19th century as native peoples were pushed out and East coast railroad and mining magnates moved in. It is, too, a region built on exploitation, first of the native population, then of resources.

This point is interesting in regards to the sagebrush rebellion which has fixated on the government as the main tyrant. Any cursory reading of Western history would point to railroads and mining companies, then other East and Left coast financiers, corporate boards and offices located outside the region, as the true tyrants here. This is still the case in many ways .

The overlay from that relatively recent past makes Westerners sensitive to control of any kind that bypasses locals. The birdwatching militia occupying Malheur are a symptom of that acuity, acting on the feeling of outside interference, with no sense of nuance about either the history of government lands or the real villains who have their hands on the throat of the West.

More to come.

 

 

 

Memories, Minnesota, Weather +Climate, Woolly Mammoths

A Snowman Will Want to Be Inside

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Yule                                                                                      Stock Show Moon

You wanna find Stock Show weather? Go to Minnesota this weekend. Friend Tom Crane sent me a link to the Updraft blog of MPRNews. “Thought you might want to know what you’re missing,” he said.

Weather January 16, 17 2016

Paul Huttner, the meteorologist for the Updraft blog, repeated a Minnesota weather nostrum often used at times like these: “The only thing between Minnesota and the North Pole is a barbed wire fence.”

In Minnesota, not often, but often enough, you realized the weather could kill you. No winds necessary. This will be one of this times.

Colorado, at least for us so far, doesn’t produce weather like this. If you go higher in altitude, then yes, you can find extreme winter cold, but even at 8,800 feet nothing like this. Can’t say I miss that bitter cold. though looking out the window from a warm house, over a snowy frozen landscape has its charms.