My Desultory Blog

Posted By RichC on May 22, 2012

Everyone wants to head home after a hospital stay … and that includes my mom, but if rehab is called for and skilled nursing care required, I can’t think of a better place than the Dorothy Love community. It is just a few miles from my mom and dad’s house in Sidney Ohio and an easy country road drive for my dad. The surroundings are clean and homey, the staff very polite and genuinely kind and care seems to be good. Hopefully they are not too easy on mom and are able to push hard enough to get her to work in rehab so she’ll be back on her feet and able to head home soon. We’ll see.

I had a positive visit this weekend as mom was reasonably clear headed due to the reduction in pain meds, but still very weak. I brought home the meds list and am having the doctors, pharmacist and nursing in the family review them … really hope to reduce a few that cause her to be so tired and foggy in the head.

She has a nice room, a comfortable bed and powered recliner chair as well as a nice sitting chair and TV to make dad’s longer visits survivable. He is happy to be home and enjoyed going out to eat with me before I headed home. Hopefully this stay won’t go on indefinitely and that she’ll soon be able to care for herself, move around without pain and get some quality of life back.
^^^^^^^^^^^
Written Monday

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EDIT Tuesday morning:
My positive feelings on leaving were short lived and I may have written a premature entry … although still found the Dorothy Love facility excellent. Unfortunately mom had some labored breathing Tuesday morning (4:30AM) and they sent her to the ICU and called dad. Dad followed up with a trip to the hospital and calls to my brother and me this morning. I followed up with a call to the nurse in the ICU who indicated her Troponin levels were being discussed by the doctors at the moment, but that her INR was ok. They have her on breathing assist, but she has anxiety with an changes or attention at this point. I’ll probably head up after work today.

Category: Health, Personal | No Comments »
Tags: dorothy love, healthcare, mom, ohio, sidney

Posted By RichC on May 22, 2012

I found this one on my phone, another one on Brenda’s Kodak Zx5 camcorder gizmo and the other couple that included yours truly from Katie’s huge album on Facebook (Taylor’s friend)… a really enjoyable memory seeing all of her photos.

Category: Sailing, Travel | No Comments »
Tags: encore, florida, katie, sailboat, sailing, taylor

Posted By RichC on May 21, 2012

It’s not that the plastic cam actuating handles were cheap … considering the shipping, but being able to repair a 26 year old $260  line clutch to match the other three is a good feeling. I really needed just one handle, but I replaced both so as to keep the old “good” cam handle as a spare part (actually I have another unused broken one on the port side of the companionway hatch). The difficult part about making this repair is that due to locating the two sets of 2 clutches next together, and the fact 3M 5200 was used to cement them to the deck, is that I’m unable to repair them while in place on the boat. Getting this thing off in one piece was a challenge.

http://tinyurl.com/spinlock

Category: Sailing | No Comments »
Tags: encore, sailboat

Posted By RichC on May 21, 2012

So much for day two of the Facebook IPO … no need to look here for some stock market excitement. As the Star Wars line goes, “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for … move along.”  Perhaps there was just too much hype?

Thankfully I didn’t jump when offered a few shares at $38 … it would have been a disappointment since the glitches left many sellers holding stock at the end of the day even though they were trying to sell. There may be better opportunities in stocks that benefit from renewed interest in social networking and technology stocks?

Category: Financial | No Comments »
Tags: facebook, fb, finance, investing, ipo, stocks

Posted By RichC on May 21, 2012

Category: Misc | No Comments »
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Posted By RichC on May 20, 2012

This is a video test to check for streaming compression using Handbrake on a PC. (this is a test for Keith Thomas at GroupBibleStudy.com)

Deleting the Hana-FLV-Player plugin from WordPress as it is no longer supported.

Category: Blogs, Video | No Comments »
Tags: blog, testing, video, wordpress

Posted By RichC on May 19, 2012

Saturday was a great day for cleaning the pool decking, ‘one’ of the back patios, grill and teak outdoor furniture. Ten years or so in, I’m still pleased with how our unfinished teak cleans up even after spending the winter outdoors. I don’t expect to finish the job tomorrow since I’m planning to visit my mom who is “not happy” in the rehab center. I do wish her surgery would have at least relieved her pain.

Besides the nice weather and bright sunshine all day, I ended up spending a few hours cleaning the carburetor on my pressure washer after sitting too long. I’d be curious to know if the several small engine tools I have are unusual in gumming up after sitting over the winter with our current blends of gasoline?

Category: Misc | 1 Comment »
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Posted By RichC on May 18, 2012

Facebook made it stock market debut today with a $5 move from the $38 IPO price to above $42/share and then kind of drifted back to close the day at $38.23. There was plenty of interest. Lots of hype and even a NASDAQ snag to prevent an on time opening this morning. For employees of FB … today made many paper millionaires … and most those who sold shares are probably the real deal. The WSJ commented, “it was a tepid debut for one of the largest and most closely watched initial public offerings.”

There have only been six other initial public offerings that raised more than $5 billion since 1995 … quite impressive.

Category: Financial, Social Media | No Comments »
Tags: facebook, fb, finance, ipo, stocks

Posted By RichC on May 18, 2012

Category: Misc | No Comments »
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Posted By RichC on May 18, 2012

As a country, a nation and a generous people … we are heading down the wrong path when assistance programs fail to teach the value of a dollar [insert joke here about the “value” of a dollar] and instead teaches the next generation dependence on government. “Over the last four decades, our government has quietly done away with almost all of the restrictions once placed on food assistance.”

Food Stamps and the $41 Cake

By WARREN KOZAK

Beware of little expenses.
A small leak will sink a great ship.
—Benjamin Franklin

There is a large chain grocery store in my neighborhood that I rarely frequent because the prices are too high. Instead, I will travel an extra 30 blocks to another store where the costs per item are 20%-30% lower.

I arrange my travel around this activity. It takes a little extra effort, but within a year the savings are substantial. As it turns out, I am not alone.

… paragraph removed …

But every so often I will need one item late at night—a quart of milk, a missing part of a school lunch—and I run over to the high-price store nearby. There, I’ve noticed something happening with increased regularity: The person ahead of me in line or at the next checkout counter is using a benefits card. Since we are now in the third year of our national recession and unemployment remains depressingly high, I understand this.

Recently I had to run into that store and, sizing up the three lines, chose to stand behind a woman with one item in her cart. It was one of those large ice-cream cakes. When the checkout person said "Forty-one dollars," I wasn’t the only one who blanched. The shopper’s son, around 12, repeated it as a question: "Forty-one dollars?"

I quickly calculated that the woman’s cake was eight times more expensive than the kind I make at home to celebrate birthdays. The mother ignored her son’s question.

She took out her benefits card, swiped it through the machine, and they were off. My turn.

I stood there, wondering what lesson the young boy takes away from this transaction. Does he grow up with the faintest understanding of delayed gratification—that you have to earn your money before you can buy candy—or, in this case, an ice-cream treat? I wondered how we arrived at this point as a nation.

… paragraphs removed …

My grandmother did not serve on the president’s Council of Economic Advisers. She did not have an M.B.A. from Harvard. She never went to high school because she had to go to work to support her family. But she gave me an astute piece of financial advice when I was about to enter the world. "Never," she told me, "spend more than you earn" and "always try and save a little something."

When we wonder how this great nation traveled from our grandparents’ common sense to where we are today, it might be easier to understand with this question: How did the country that created the strongest middle class in history, the country that offered everyone the chance to succeed, the country that built and paid for the transcontinental railroad and the Hoover Dam, won World War II and put Neil Armstrong on the moon—how did that country rack up trillions in debt?

One $41 cake at a time.

Mr. Kozak is the author of "LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay" (Regnery, 2009).

READ MORE

Category: Financial, Politics | 2 Comments »
Tags: government, wsj