But without a tree this year, Hector is sad.
Think good thoughts for Hector. Maybe he’ll get a tree after all. It’s all the poor little guy wants *sniff*.
C’est la vie!
We’re in the middle of the Brea and Yorba Linda/Anaheim Hills fires, literally. It’s kinda scary but I don’t think we’re in any danger. We’re miles away from the closest fire, which is Brea. The Husband came home early when I texted him one of these pictures. We’ve made a list of what we want to take (really, evacuation is such a long shot) if the worst happens. Of course, the cats top the list! Plus all the usual stuff, prescription drugs, etc. The Husband has identified two guitars he wants to take and me, I’ll grab all the finished jewelry and artwork, plus some of my own personal jewelry, the pieces with meaning.
When The Husband came home, he backed into the driveway, which is one of the major things you learn in the fire zone. We’re not really in a fire zone (we don’t live near a canyon or brushy area) but I know a lot of people in South OC who are and I have one friend in particular who’s a pro at prepping for evacuation, so we know the basics. But I never thought we’d have to seriously enact them. Which I really don’t think we’ll need to do now but we just want to be prepared. I was a Girl Scout, after all.
We know folks in Yorba Linda and Anaheim Hills, though, and I’m praying that they and their houses and families are ok.
C’est la vie!
You don't need kids to walk around the newish Sesame Street kids area. The stuff I'm standing on is squishy and soft. Wish they made that for flooring. I'd love it in my living room!
The rest of our vacation has been about cleaning and recycling. We're off to recycle a bunch of dead electronics that have been cluttering the house and storage for waaaayyyy toooo long. One is the VCR we bought with some wedding money in 1980! It's a beasty - top loading and weighs about a 1000 pounds. No, really...
C'est la vie!
Second, here’s a picture of the jazz group, Reno Jones, at the Brea Jazz Festival last Friday night. Doesn’t it look like something out of Ghost Hunters? “And the air turned chill as the ghost band took the stage, their ectoplasm shining in the night.” We had seen them last year and totally loved them, so we made a return trip (all 10 minutes of it) to see them again and now we know why people bring their own chairs to the festival--I was in pain by the time we left, halfway through the second set (see cheap, offending chairs in foreground). But we bought one of their CD’s to enjoy in the COMFORT of our home and/or vehicle.
Check them out here: http://www.renojones.com/
A background with no foreground!
Homeless Beads--very sad :-(
Being a person of the female persuasion, I've read my share of "women's magazines". In that these magazines set out to demean us if we don't have the current crop of trendy goo gahs in a size fit for Auschwitz survivors and further terrify us with tales of big bad corporate America ripping us off because we have vagina's, I have decided to subscribe only to art magazines for the rest of my woefully untrendy life. Ah, this is a subject for another day… Anyway, in my wayward youth of women's magazine perusal, there was usually an article outlining the horrors someone went through with the health care system, usually with a male doctor patting the woman on the head and saying, well, we'll keep an eye on that potentially fatal bump on your boob, bleeding from the nether regions that's lasted 6 months, etc. So, consequently, when my body is doing or extruding something it shouldn't, I expect to have as many tests as possible as soon as possible. For instance, at my last physical, my doctor detected a small lump on my breast. I have fibrous breasts so I wasn't too worried, however, if she hadn't scheduled an ultrasound that very day, I would have felt nervous at not having this dealt with right away. That wait and see attitude from back in the day is not acceptable to us enlightened women's magazine readers.
Well, it turns out that doctors are ordering as many tests as possible as soon as possible because if they don't and the patient goes to another doctor who does and finds something serious, Doctor Weenie gets shafted with huge malpractice problems. So, doctors seem to be damned if they do (resulting in high medical costs for tests that aren't strictly necessary) and damned if they don't (resulting in malpractice insurance and payouts up the ying yang). And folks like me expect this treatment now, for fear of not detecting something serious in a timely fashion. Doesn't this seem like a vicious circle? Sadly, it's a vicious circle I'm not willing to break because I'm so not into that wait and see thing.
As I said, no conclusions here. We live in a time when medical science can save the lives of people who would have died 40, 30, even 10 years ago because we have the ability now to detect the bad stuff earlier. If I can even come close to a conclusion, it's that the way we deal with health care in this country needs to be changed. We have excellent models in England and Canada to base a new era of health care on, but we also have big ass lobbyists who don't want their power and big bucks to decrease, even if it means better health for an entire nation. To paraphrase Barack Obama, it's time we take responsibility for our woes and demand the change we want.
They were great-so much fun to watch and listen to-and they even got me up and dancing (I use that term lightly!). Too bad it was too dark by then for The Husband to record that for posterity (NOT!).
The dinner was yummy and the cake yummier! The Husband got to try a Hawaiian delicacy called a Spam Sandwich. No, really… Apparently in Hawaii, spam is a big thing. The Spam Sandwich is something like a California Roll with spam instead of sushi. So… A good time was had by all!
