All posts by djones

blue skies, friday high five

Can You Guess …

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Time once more for

 

Five Pictures That I Bet You Can’t Guess The Purpose Of

 
  
  
 

Ready to give up yet? Figured out why Duckie and I are battling to the death on the grounds of city hall? Need a hint?

  • Hint #1: Duckie is the mascot of the Blue Skies Therapeutic Riding Club. Blue Skies supplies therapeutic horse riding experiences for the differently abled and physically handicapped.
  • Hint #2: These pictures are from several years ago.
  • Hint #3: Blue Skies raises money each year by challenging a community group or leader to a ticket selling contest. Each side sells numbers on plastic ducks for a float race on the city spillway. Prizes are donated and the big winner also gets cash prizes.
  • Hint #4: The city council and I were the challengees for this particular year.
  • Hint #5: The challenge typically involves not only insane publicity, but a supremely embaressing moment for the loser.
Figured it out yet?

What you see above are some of the publicity photos used to hype the contest and generate ticket sales. Blue Skies seems to win most years, maybe because they have and avid and experienced sales staff (the volunteers from the group and the people they help). The year of these photos, it was a close race but we, the city council and myself, lost. Our embarrassing moment followed a few weeks after the duck float race: we had to enter the city council chambers at the start of an official meeting wearing cowboy hats and riding broom stick ponies while singing a certain western tune. Needless to say, the press was there with glee along with a pretty good size crew of Blue Skies supporters. 

 Now where are all of your embaressing photos?
physical therapy, shoulder, writer's challenge

Overrun Wednesday

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Although this is normally the time for Mama Kat’s Writers Challenge, today has been a bit too overloaded for me to do the prompts justice. So I encourage you to visit Mama Kat and read the responses, I really hated not to be able to do this weeks prompts since they appealed greatly to my sense of the interesting.

Today started with me getting up 4:30am. I had to pick up and take XXX to the hospital for surgery check-in at 5:45. I took her over walked her in until until the admission process was underway, then escaped down to the radio station for the weekly radio show, came back and got a little work done until 10:30am when recovery called and asked me to be there for the instructions from the physical therapist and to bring XXX home once she was fully aware.

XXX was having some shoulder and arm damage from a fall on the ice this winter surgically repaired. I am somewhat the family expert on shoulders and the associated therapy since I crushed my shoulder a few years ago. (You know it is not good when you go to the hospital and the X-ray tech calls everyone in radiology over to look at the pictures with words like “You have to see this, I’ve never seen one of these before!”) After three surgeries and months of some of the most painful therapy I’ve ever done, I have at least 90% of the function back. So XXX has my full sympathy for what is coming.

In XXX’s case the bone was not involved and so she should be able to avoid the locked shoulder and other problems that are attendant with immobilized shoulder joints. Given that I have experienced what happens if the manipulation exercises can’t be or aren’t done, I am probably the appropriate fanatic do the manipulations four times a day for the nonce. It will be interesting to see what develops. I don’t think that XXX realized how much therapy was involved early in the recovery process.

In any case, the PT had a set of four external manipulation exercises to be performed in sets of 10 on the joint 4 times a day for the next four weeks and a start on on “official” (as in at the rehab center) next week. So I am currently the designated “fake” PT therapy person for XXX to do the four times a day exercises.  L got into town this afternoon and so I got a chance to get some stuff done this evening while L stayed with XXX. Right now it isn’t too bad because XXX still has a continuous nerve block running. It will get a bit more interesting after Friday when I pull the nerve block canula and she begins the standard oxycontin and vicodan regimens for the pain.

In spite of all that, I was all ready to respond to the Writer’s Challenge prompts when I got a phone call from L over at XXX’s where she is spending the night with XXX. They couldn’t figure out how to rehook the sling and pads, so I ran over and performed some velcro magic. Given it is now close to midnight, think of me playing PT as you read the Writer’s Challenge responses. I’ll be back for the next challenge.

jackson Browne, running on empty

Running on Empty

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Beyond the fact that it is a classic song from Jackson Browne, “Running on Empty” often describes some of my feelings in very nice language. For those who weren’t around for the No Nukes rallies of the late 70’s, give this a listen:

It took me a while to forgive Mr. Browne for his uninformed support of the No Nuke movement. But I still find many of the lyrics in this resonate even now 30 years later.I always liked the line “people need some reason to believe” from the third verse. That has always struck me as one of the truisms of the song that carries real meaning.

In my brief foray into politics, I have definitely found that it is true. People do indeed need and want some reason to believe. It doesn’t have to be a logical reason; it can be emotional or even imaginary. But once some reason has been presented and latched onto, people are willing to commit and believe and do great things. I am grateful for that, because it means that even a mediocre leader like me has a chance to get important things accomplished.

So I guess I’ll keep on running on empty. What are you running on?

oddness

Odd Thoughts

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This weekend as I was mowing the lawn, I pondered the question of what, if anything, plants think. It is a common theme in speculative and science fiction that plants have thoughts. Generally, plants like trees are pictured as having deep and ponderous thoughts while weeds are pictured along the lines of the flitting hummingbird with short and frivolous thoughts. My suspicion is that both ideas bear more than a trace of anthropomorphism. So my question to ponder was: “What do the flowers on a lilac bush think?”

This chain of illogic was brought on by the sight of the dried and sere remnants of the flowers on the lilac bush in the back yard. Like all lilac species, the blooms on my bush last only for a few short weeks in the spring. During that time they are present in profusion with a wonderful and powerful aroma. However, by this weekend, they were mostly brown shells with somewhat less than one out of a thousand little blooms still living. So the question that came unbidden to my mind was what the one still growing bloom in a bundle of flowers on the plant was thinking. Was it celebrating the life of its brothers and sisters now departed? Was it living in fear that it too would soon pass from this world? Or was it soaking up the last of the sun’s rays as it ended its brief life?

What kind of thoughts would go through your mind if you had to watch all your brothers and sisters die in a short span, but you were still hanging on like that lonely flower? I could picture all kinds of mental reactions. The real problem I had is that it is truly hard to escape the prison of our own anthropomorphism and attribute really different thoughts to the plant. Or to put it in the converse, it is really hard to think of a possible thought for the flower that has not already been expressed by or about some human being.

So I’ll ask you – what do you think was going through the mind of the poor surviving flower? You can assume that the flower had a mind. I’m willing to grant that as a given. Call me a throwback to all the funky Russian journals full of Kirlian photography from the 60’s claiming to see plants thinking. Or just call it a topic to consider. And please don’t tell me it was thinking of schemes like those that fill my spam folder. I figure only humans are that depraved and gullible. {*grin*}

friday high five

Five Out of the Ordinary …

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Time once more for

Five Out of the Ordinary Things Experienced Today

The sight of the United Way executive from the big city to the west actually admitting he had no clue why the program we (the city) funded two years ago is not operational. Needless to say, the funding organizations are not interested in contributing further monies until the program is working and a full explanation of the current vacuum is forthcoming.

The look on the face of the Chairwoman of the School Board when I asked her what she thought of the budget for the upcoming year. (School funding in Colorado has been uncertain from the state, leading to really convoluted attempts by school boards to estimate income for the budget.)

The transforming look of joy on the face of the lady in line in front of me when she replied to the checker’s question, “Going or coming?”, with a hearty “All done for the day and going home!”

The look of astonishment when the speaker at the meeting tonight discovered that the brochures for the service organization he represents had neither an address nor a phone number anywhere to be found. Makes it hard to contact them for services or to volunteer. Maybe the perfect service organization?

The behavior of the software updater on one of my computers. Can you spell cyclic dependency graph? Don’t you wish the update programmer could have?