kvetching up

 " My idea of exercise is a good brisk sit. "                                        -Phyllis Diller Today I went to Valley Medical Center cardiac rehab for my initial screening. It is completely different than what I experienced at NW Hospital. I've nothing against NW, but the level of intervention here is extraordinary, and I would assume, will produce better results. OTOH, don't go to the Valley ER with a heart attack. .  . There were many screenings today--all to establish standards to rely on when adjudging metrics. Pre-exercise and post-exercise blood sugar, hand grip, body composition, exercise baseline, starting and ending blood pressure. Maybe others. It's more likely than not that I forgot something.  The blood sugar was in normal range--bizarre. The exercise baseline places me in the highest functioning group, according to the hospital's scale. Tha...

 After a plateau, we seem to be off to the races again: After a brief plateau, my weight keeps crashing. 144.2 this morning, a radical change from just six months ago. While I acknowledge it may be irrational, but every time I step on the scale we purchased for the first and only time while we were together, I think of weighing Jenny every day while she was disappearing before our eyes. I now weigh about the same she did when she last took the measure.  I am tracking my weight on amy Samsung health app, which supplanted the Fitbit measure I used before I lost my billionth Fitbit and switched to the Samsung watch. Back 11 years ago, when I was walking between 3-6 miles a day--EVERY SINGLE DAY--and weighed 155-165 lbs, I couldn't get past the plateaued bottom weight.  No such issue today, clearly. What concerns me is that I was told that weight loss would be de minimus, given the low dose I am prescribed. I have dropped 27+ lbs  since January. If I continue on this pat...

Iran hotline. This explains every pretend deal that has been announced.  

The Brothers Grimm fairy tales are a master class in horror. Evil and terrible outcomes emerge in every page turn from the original tales. I read them for the first time when Leiney was a baby and I bought an old hardback edition at Goodwill. I had no idea how truly discombobulating they were, how shitty it would have been to live in a world where monsters and many of the heroes alike were murderous. I read stories like Snow White, Snow White and Rose Red, Rumpelstiltskin, The Fisherman and his wife, to the kids. Was that child abuse? Or was it, more likely, setting them up to better understand the world we live in today?  As a kid, I was so grateful not to have lived through the atrocities committed by the Nazis, to have missed Jim Crow, the Great Depression, the annihilation of indigenous peoples, naked imperialism and colonialism, the second-class status that women had been relegated to, DDT and the draft, among other things. Then, I grew up. I watched Reagan and the country asc...

Pike Place Market, June 6. Saturday Abby and I went downtown and finally got to The Frye. We tried to go last summer during Pride and decided that was dumb. We tried to go a couple of more times last summer, but it never happened.The Frye is free. I've been walking past it for over 45 years and weirdo me never bothered to go. I was curious, but younger me didn't bother. Weirdo.  Given that Abby is entering her third year leading tours at MHCAM (where she just got a promotion!), I was especially excited to go. She could explain to this Philistine art that I may find inaccessible. Mostly, I just sounded like a boomer complaining about lazy millennials as I made fun of the installation. I tried to keep my mouth shut. I didn't take a picture, not because I think you need to go see the art for itself, but because I don't typically take pictures of garbage. I should have, I doubt you'll likely believe that 10 inches of cassette tape mangled and scrunched and put on a can...

I snapped this over the weekend as Abby and I were driving through West Seattle to avoid traffic on the way home from our weekly hike. This photo tells me that the final nail in the coffin of professional photography is dead, as is the work of expert manipulation of images. This picture was snapped by me, no training but I've been taking pictures using everything from a 35mm and camera phone. I'm not the best or the worst--at least my thumb isn't over my lens. But this picture isn't a pristine snap. All the power lines have been removed. The image in the glass is altered insofar as it is enhanced to be more visible. The most interesting question isn't what will professional photographers do--that job has been dead since Kodak released its first chrap digital camera back in the late 1990s--I think we paid 200 bucks for a one megapixel unit.  As much as I hate James J. Hill's raping and Iron Goat Trail, 2026. pillaging of the Central Cascades and his exploitation ...