Travel Tuesday: Photo Dump Wyoming

I stayed the night in a Hampton Inn in Laramie, Wyoming. The next day I was driving west, nearly across the state from east to west, to take US 30 across the corner into the southeast corner of Idaho.  It is a long drive but I had all day, the default route is Interstate 80, a boring and busy route.  The evening before I looked at Google Maps, and asked myself, is there an alternate route, most likely on the old roads that pre-date in the expressways. There is, hwy 130 runs from Laramie, south of the interstate, a little longer but it looked interesting.  I made notes. The next morning Ms. Garmin was not being helpful, I pulled off and did a quick search on my phone, confirming that I was a block from the left turn that would put me on the right road.  What I didn't know was how spectacular the route would be.   

Yes, that is snow on the mountains, on August 1st. 

Fun but underpowered for climbing mountains. 

The average altitude is about 6,000 feet, at nearly 11,000 feet the climate and terrain had changed. 

I knew enough about altitude to walk slowly.  A couple from Florida ventured down to the water, and tried running back up the hill.  She was standing and talking clearly after a few minutes on the ground in a heap.  I was reminded to take it easy and get myself to a lower altitude. 

 

Moody Monday - Well Dr. Freud

So how am I doing? It is probably important to stop regularly and ask that question. A little critical self analysis.  

I am busy, but consistently crossing gotados off the list.  Google is telling me gotados is not a word. It is short for things I got to do.  I am far from caught up, but moving steadily. 

I have started the process of signing up for retirement, a multi step process, I need to keep chipping away at.  

Four people have told me, I am working too much, and I should chill before my head explodes.  I am reminding myself, and others that I have limits, boundaries. Then I wake up early, log on to work early, then work late, I missed my treadmill-hour one day last week because work just kept coming in. Who schedules meetings for 9 AM or 4:30 PM?  

For a couple of years, I reminded my sweet bear that he was not the saviour of the department he retired from, now he is reminding me of the same.  We put a part of ourselves into our work.  It matters, we believe in what we do, and why it is done. We worry about it, and sacrifice for it.  But work is not a sensate being, it does not always return our love. Business is largely a matter of the numbers, and accounting has no heart.  

I am breaking a couple of unwritten rules at the office, collaborating and sharing risk and reward with other departments.  Increasingly each department is seen as a separate business, with its own budget, that lives and dies on it's own numbers.  I keep encountering questions about a plan to split projects with another department.  What if the return to the department is not exactly proportional to the effort. We could be making a profit that shows on someone else's ledger at the end of the day.  We are all a part of the same whole.  A rising tide floats all boats.  I have grown weary of the numbers.  I won't miss that part of the job. I hate that part of the job. 

So how is my mood? Overstressed, obsessed.    

The Sunday Five: Looking back Looking Forward

1. What is your earliest memory of traveling? 
2. If you had to pick one trip to repeat, what would it be? 
3. Where have you traveled to, that you hope to never go back to? 
4. What is your dream trip? 
5. Where to next? 

My answers: 

1. What is your earliest memory of traveling? Arizona when I was in the first grade. 
2. If you had to pick one trip to repeat, what would it be? A couple of weeks in Rome and Florence. 
3. Where have you traveled to, that you hope to never go back to? Fayetteville North Carolina, wonderful people, dreadful trip. 
4. What is your dream trip? Hmm, after the one I am planning for next May, Japan. 
5. Where to next? State College and Harrisburg Pennsylvania.  A mix of work (speaking at a conference) and pleasure I am having dinner with Maddie. 

Please share your answers in the comments. 

Saturday Morning Post: Change

We live in constant change. Several blog posts recently have talking about offshore wind farms, electric cars, and robotaxis.  All of them have critics, and I think all three are in our future. 

Wind power is rapidly developing. It is not without its challenges.  The early carbon fiber blades are not recyclable, something that is being engineered into the newer ones. When a windmill fails it can go out of control, a few of them have caught fire.  Still safer than Chernobyl, or Three Mile Island. Birds fly into windmills, but many more birds are killed by exhaust from fossil fuel power plants, hydroelectric changes fish life.  Balancing out the least harmful, I think renewables are safer.  Short of turning off the lights, and living in the heat and cold, and turning off our electronics, we need something.  If we all returned to the stone age and cooked over an open wood fire in the middle of the cave, we would cut all of forests down and die in a cloud of woodsmoke.  

Rechargeable electric cars are getting better by the day.  With renewable energy from solar and wind, we can power them. They are the future.  Range is improving daily, in ten years we will wonder why we didn't power cars this way before. Smart phones have only been around 20 years, and something like 40% of the world's population, and over 95% in developed countries have one within arms reach.  

Self-driving cars are being tested and perfected. When automobiles were first traveling the streets, some cities passed laws that a flagman had to walk ahead of the car, to warn pedestrians and horses. They were seen as a danger.  Think of some of the driver you see around you, a Commodore 64, had more memory and processing capacity, todays self driving cars have to be safer. Fear not the future, unless we die today, it is where we will live.  

If we could find enough chairmen, we could go back to sedan chairs.  Talk about limited range.  

Freestyle Friday : Fossil Butte Clouds and Shadows

Wyoming is known as Big Sky Country, the sky is the same size, but there are places with few obstructions to see it.  When I looked out over this landscape I first noticed the clouds floating in a powder blue sky, building, drifting, and delighting the eye.  Then I noticed the dark spots in the grasslands.  Those could be differences in the flora, or patches with different levels of water, lower right there are trees, probably an area fed by a spring. But looking closer, and taking five minutes to study the scene, the darker patches are slowing moving, moving like the clouds in the sky, because they are the shadow of the clouds, lit from above, far above, millions of miles away by a bright star that holds us in its gravitational pull.  

Maybe the ancients had it right, we should worship the sun, the giver of light and life.  

Well that was fun to write, looking at the image, describing it, drawing meaning from it.  

Thursday Ramble: Money

Last week I rambled on about religion and politics, this week I will touch the third taboo, money. More specifically money and health care.  (I will spare you the unsorid details of my sex life.) 

Exploring the correlation between health care and age, I have had the pleasure of getting to know a bunch of medical doctors, not in a doctor patient role, but as professionals collaborating on research and policy. 

There is a reoccurring conversation, usually held off the record, often an after the second martini conversation about money and health care. Many have a genuine fear of losing jobs, if they speak up on the job, or in print, or if their name is somehow associated with what they know to be true. 

There are two concerns.  Sometimes they can't get approval for payment to practice the best medicine for their patient, and at other times they are compelled to order tests and treatments, because insurance will pay for it, even if they believe it is not the best medicine. Simply put, the insurance companies and other payers, control the medicine they can practice.  

This deeply bothers a lot of docs. I read an article recently about mental health among health care providers and a primary driver of poor mental health is fighting with insurance companies and corporate practice managers about what treatment they can provide, and what treatment they are compelled to provide.  How bad is it, doctors in the United States have a high risk of suicide. 

A couple of years ago, my sweet bear laughed so hard, that he passed out.  A call to his doctors office, recommended a visit to the nearest Emergency Department.  The evaluation there found nothing wrong, it is simply something that happens sometimes when people are over stimulated - and instructions to follow up with his doctor.  The doc was honest, in saying I am going to refer you for all of the standard follow up tests, several thousand dollars worth, but odds are the tests will simply confirm what we know, there is nothing wrong, you just laughed too hard at a YouTube video.  And that is exactly what the tests revealed, nothing.  But the insurance paid, and paid, and every test that would be paid for was ordered, done and paid for.  

The doc has two factors driving this, if he didn't order the tests, and they missed something, he could be sued for malpractice because the standards of care justify all of those tests, and a practice manager who is urging every test that insurance will pay for, because well that is what pays the salaries.  What happens to docs that don't order all covered tests and treatments, they are rated poorly, don't get raises, and are likely to be assigned the duties that no one wants to do (The midnight to 8AM shift every Saturday night.) 

At other times docs are told they can't try that treatment, or order that test, because insurance won't pay.  Medicine is both a science, and also an art.  Often the docs are not sure what is happening, they are offering scientific guesses.  And at times they would like a little more information to base that guess on, but if it is not in the standard treatment protocol, they are limited in the data they can have to base their best guess on.  

It is a backwards system, where panels of experts and insurance executives determine what your doctor can do or not do. 

How bad is it? The two best doctors we have had the past 8 years, have both left the active practice of medicine for research and teaching.  Jobs that are not controlled by insurance companies and practice managers.  

If we want better medicine, we need to put the doctors in charge of what they recommend.  The docs need to be able to confer with their patient and decide what is enough and what is too much. 

We have a shortage of doctors.  Accrediting medical schools is left to a professional associations.  Want to lower the cost of medicine, get the insurance companies and practice managers out of the picture and open more medical schools, oversupply the marketplace with doctors.  

The flip side of this is abysmal salaries for young doctors.  In the USA, these are the overworked and underpaid interns that provide the majority of hospital care, in the UK it is the "junior doctors"  who are the backbone of the NHS, who make less money than a manager at Starbucks.   

 

My World of Wonders, aka, the Wednesday Ws

What saddened me this week?  The death of Jimmy Buffet, a part of the soundtrack of my life.  He did so much, and as always there was so much to be done.  Keep your adventure list full and keep crossing things off.

Who have I seen?  The first Friday of the month we host an unofficial LGBTQ happy hour gathering in the restaurant here at the condo.  Three of our neighbors were there this month, we talked for nearly three hours.  On the first Saturday morning the condo hosts a coffee and conversation hour, for the first time ever I went over on Saturday, and saw a couple of neighbors I know, and met a couple I had not. There are over 1,000 apartments in the condo, so there are lots of neighbors to meet. 

How was my week?  Well I didn't commit any felonies and I didn't stumble across any dead bodies, those are the positive things.  I did get some things done, moved a few projects along, worked on my angry mood and did some good editing. It was not an easy week.  

What made me smile?  Saturday when I left for the farmers market it was 66F, I put the top down on the car, and the smile came up. By Monday afternoon it was back to 100F.

Who deserves a big THANK YOU!  I am working on a project that needed an approval for an exception to a normal budget rule, and the head of financial services said yes, in less than 5 minutes when we emailed him. 

Where have I been this week? Home, the office, the farmers market, the usual. 

What have I been planning?  I booked travel for Chicago in late October and New York City in early January.  

Who deserves a slap this week?  Probably me, for letting the stress get to me, getting fussy, and grumpy.  Just one, a day, until I get my act together.  

What will challenge me in the next few weeks?  Deadlines, and projects that are behind schedule.  

What made me smile? A high school classmate reached out to me on FB, about bees. Apparently a couple of years after I finished school and moved away, my father gave him a couple of colonies of bees, and he has kept bees on and off for much of his life and reached out to say thank you for the kindness 45 years ago.  

What surprises people?  I made money on Three Mile Island (TMI.) TMI was a nuclear power plant that had an accident in the 1980s, nearly melted down, a disaster.  Shortly before the utility company that owned it went bankrupt, when their stock was down to about $2 a share, I bought some, the company was bought out, and the stockholders were given stock in the new company. I turned a few hundred dollars into a few thousand dollars.  It could have just as easily become worth nothing. Sometimes you just need to take the gamble.  I am still waiting for BP to get their act together, I don't know how you can not make billions in the oil business.  Still the gains are greater than the losses.  

Travel Tuesday: A Wander Around Denver

Denver is an interesting city. It has a deep history (well by north American standards) as a rail-hub just east of the mountains. It has money, old money, new money, and a delightful mix of old and new buildings.  The Convention Center is huge.  The new airport (I was changing planes in the old airport when they held the press conference announcing plans for the new airport) is now connected to the city by light-rail. I had most of a Sunday free, and walked for about 5 hours. 

 

Moody Monday: Framing

Just to the left of my desk at home, is a painting of a Florida fishing harbor at sunset that I bought 35 years ago at a fundraising auction for public television, because I liked the frame it was in, and it sold for less than what the frame probably cost. My thought when I bought was that I would reuse the frame, but the painting grew on me.  Through a couple of moves, I have thought about parting with it, but it strikes a chord with me.  

Thinking about this, some of the things that bother us, upset us because of the frame - the surroundings they are in.  I wrote recently about a conference that we are planning for next spring in south Florida, and I got an email from an old friend saying there was no way she could attend because it was in Florida.  It is not the conference, she was complementary of the program and our efforts to keep it alive, it was the frame it is in. Anyplace but surrounded by Florida.   

Sometimes ugly content, in a nice frame is loved, despite the content.  Back in early 2015 I had a work trip that was 4.5 full days of training, in five days, in four different cities.  Most days were 12-14 hours, including a flight to the next venue at the end of they day, dinner and checking into another hotel.  It was a grueling schedule.  It was also in Hawaii. The frame, the surrounding paradise, offset the difficult content (I will never take on an agenda like that again.)    

Sometimes it is the content, sometimes it is the frame, sometimes it is both.  This fits into so much of life.  Think about the content, think about the frame.  The content is more important than the frame. As MLK said, "judge by the content of the character."   
 

The Sunday Five: Happy Blogiversary 18 Years .

The first photo from 2005

Spain December 2022

This baby is old enough to vote, in some ways it is hard to believe that I have been blogging for 18 years.  In the early years, it was all seen through the eyes of Travel Penguin, then I stepped out from behind the curtain. Travel still gets around, he lives in my messenger bag, but does not often come out for a photo.  He is my mascot, my comfort object.  

The cameras and computers have changed a lot over the years.  Some of the earliest images are scans from prints from film, though I had started to use digital by the time I started posting.  The digital cameras have progressed. I am hoping that the camera system I am using now will last the rest of my life. Most of the posts have been created on a desktop computer, a handful on laptops, even fewer on a phone.  I do wish that the computer software people would maintain consistent file folders across platforms, and software updates for photos.    

There are a few lean years, with only a handful of postings, then I decided to get serious about this. I take the commitment to blog daily seriously.  I have only missed one day since 2015. I have no intention of stopping as long as I am able to do this. 

I have created over 4,000 posts, and have received over 33,000 comments, about 840,000 page views, currently I get about 10,000 page views a month.  (For those that wonder, that number of views generates about $10 a month in advertising revenue - more if the ads are good and people click on them.)  

 So today's Sunday Five:

1: How long have you been blogging? 

2: About how many posts have you created? 

3: About how many page views per month? 

4: How many views over the years? 

5: Do you plan to continue blogging? 

My answers:

1: How long have you been blogging? 18 wonderful years 

2: About how many posts have you created? a little over 4,000

3: About how many page views per month? 10,000

4: How many views over the years? 800,000

5: Do you plan to continue blogging? Yes, 

Please share your answers in the comments. 

The Saturday Morning Post: Back to School Season

I will admit it, I miss going back to school.  When I was growing up, August and September were harvest season on the farm, weather permitting we worked 10 hours a day, 7 days a week from when we started processing honey, until the last barel was shipped to the bottlers.  Going back to school, lessoned the workload Monday through Friday.  And living in the middle of nowhere,  school was social contact with someone outside of the family.  The house I grew up in is still 1.5 miles from the nearest paved road.  

I finished high school, moved to Florida and couldn't really figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up.  So I put off college for a few years.  Then I realized that if I ever wanted to move up in the workplace, I needed more education, and I was driving by a college campus on my way to and from the office.  I pulled in one morning, signed up for classes a couple of evening a week, and returned to school one fall.  It was life-changing.  By pure chance, I had the class with the right professor, who recognized a few things, and gave me sage advice far beyond his years.  I found my strengths, addressed my weaknesses, and really started to enjoy school.  A year or so later, I took a semester off to get married and move into the first house I built for myself.  It took me a couple of years, to get my act together and start back again, I missed it every fall.  It felt so good to be back in the classroom.  One of the professors there inspired me to go to law school.   After a couple of semesters I transfered to Rollins, and really started to bloom.  I learned how to learn at Rollins, how to change my views of the world.  And I met my sweet bear, who had his first faculty appointment there.  

I had a couple of years off between finishing at Rollins and starting law school.  The first year I felt a little extra free time, the second year I missed returning to classes.  I have vivid memories of law school.  I was in my 30's and knew how lucky I was to be able to go to graduate school, as a full time student - with no work responsibilities.  Up until that time I had almost always worked and gone to school at the same time.  I had three wonderful years, expanding my world, preparing me for the work I have done for the last 25 years.  

And every fall, I still kind of miss going back to school.  Maybe next year I will scratch that itch.  I think it is time for some art classes.  

 
 

Fabulous Friday: Around the World

This record has been broken, a little research shows 41 hours 7 minutes in 2013, and I think someone has recently tried to best that.  A lot of going in a short time. This one hangs in the C Concourse at Denver International Airport. 

Burt Routans Voyager is in the Smithsonian, the record for around the world without refueling.  And the gondola of the balloon that flew around the world.  That museum has been undergoing a massive renovation and expansion, it is starting to reopen, I can't wait to see the renewed space.  The old space was spectacular, the new space should be fabulous.  

One of the few regrets I have was chickening out on a chance to ride in a Lear jet from Florida to Arizona and back.  It was taking boat parts to Arizona, and coming right back.  It would have been a fun ride.