Check out spectacular geologic images from Steph at this link: http://wordwomanpartialellipsisofthesun.blogspot.com/2017/03/smoking-smoke-rings-mount-etna-sicily.html I especially appreciate the Mount Etna photos because I visited there when the Smith College Alumnae Chorus toured Sicily. Be sure to check out the bonus images in the first comment from Steph, aka Word Woman. Enjoy!
Blog – Top of JC’s Mind
One-Liner Wednesday: Grandma
We love you and miss you, Grandma Ruth.
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Using One-Liner Wednesday to honor my mother-in-law on the first anniversary of her death.
Generally, One-Liner Wednesday is for inspirational or funny (although that is for other folks as I am seldom funny) one(ish) liners. More info from Linda on how to participate is here: https://lindaghill.com/2017/03/22/one-liner-wednesday-any-takers/
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triple threat
My mom, known as Nana here at Top of JC’s Mind, has been having some cardiac issues and has been going to rehab twice a week. Last week, she had to miss because of the giant snowstorm and because she seemed to be suffering from a cold.
She had already been to the walk-in medical clinic once for her cough, but on Friday, her condition worsened, so she went back. They were concerned that she might have developed pneumonia so they ordered a chest X-ray from the hospital. The plan had been for her to stay at the hospital until the X-ray was read, but they were so busy, we had to take her home to wait for the results the next morning.
When the X-ray came back positive, we went back to the hospital. We spent the day in the emergency room, while they ran more tests. We were shocked that Nana’s “cold” had actually been type A influenza. The extra-strength flu vaccine that she had received last fall had kept down the usual fever and body aches that one expects from flu.
The other factor involved was some continuing problems with congestive heart failure symptoms. We are hoping to get a better understanding of the cardiac factors involved so we can chart the best possible course going forward.
Nana has been improving steadily with intravenous antibiotics and diuretics. We are hopeful that she will be able to come home in a few days, in time for Paco’s 92nd birthday this weekend.
We would all appreciate any healing thoughts and/or prayers that you might send out on Nana’s behalf.
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March 17th
Happy Evacuation Day!
B’s dad, who was a very long-tenured elementary school principal in western Massachusetts, used to do an announcement every March 17th about what an important day it was because, in 1776, the British were forced to leave Boston, which had been under siege since the Battle of Lexington and Concord on April 19th, 1775 (which is commemorated as Patriots’ Day). In the days of dot-matrix printers, he even had little greeting cards printed for Evacuation Day, which, of course, involved a Minuteman and cannon.
He used to use Evacuation Day as an excuse occasion to gift his wife with flowers.
After he passed away in 2005, B and I took up the tradition of giving Evacuation Day flowers to Grandma, first having them delivered from their favorite local florist, and then choosing and delivering them ourselves after she moved here from Vermont.
Last year, daughter T, who was home on spring break from grad school, and I chose a planter instead of cut flowers. Grandma loved them and put them in the center of her dining room table, as she usually did.
We didn’t know that Grandma would succumb to a heart attack less than a week later.
We kept the planter there for a remembrance and a splash of color as we did the necessary work to clear out her cottage. Then, we brought the planter to our home.
Over the summer, T, who had just finished her MPS in conservation biology of plants, took over plant care and broke the planter into separate pots, as it was becoming too crowded. The African violet stayed in the original green basket.
When she left in late January for her Missouri job-on-the-prairie, the plants were looking healthy and a few weeks ago, the African violet started to bloom.
So, this week it has many blossoms to remind us of the happy occasion of delivering flowers to Grandma for the family tradition of Evacuation Day.
Oh, and lest I forget, Happy Saint Patrick’s Day, too!
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One-Liner Wednesday: record snow
What our backyard shed looks like when the wind picks up after over thirty inches (0.8 meters) of snow yesterday.
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Join us for Linda’s One-Liner Wednesdays! Find out how here: https://lindaghill.com/2017/03/15/one-liner-wednesday-not-meant-to-be/
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A few more snow photos
A few photos from shoveling part six, following up from my post with photos from earlier in the day:
The snow is supposed to continue until at least midnight and the wind has started to pick up. I am about to go out for shoveling session seven. We are all hoping that we don’t get heavy winds. Big snowstorm is preferable to blizzard.
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burying the lead (in snow)
Yesterday, when we were standing in the cold outside Claudia Tenney’s office, the cold seemed a curse, but it was a (bit of a) blessing in disguise.
Today, here in the Binghamton (NY) area, we are experiencing a nor’easter, which is a storm that comes up the Atlantic coast and whose rotation results in winds from the northeast. This is the strongest we have had in many years, perhaps because it was strengthened by a second low pressure system coming from the west.
The tricky thing about forecasting nor’easters is that the exact track of the storm makes a huge difference in the snowfall amount. The prediction had been that we were going to get one to three inches starting about midnight, with an additional eight to ten during the day.
I set my alarm to get up in the pre-dawn darkness – insert grumbling about Daylight Saving Time here – to shovel the driveway to get to an morning appointment. I looked out the front door to find not one to three inches, but a foot (about a third of a meter) already on the ground with heavy snow continuing, sometimes at a rate of two to three inches an hour.
Apparently, the storm had tracked further west than anticipated – and then stalled. Fortunately, the cold from the day before was holding, though, so while we are getting A LOT of snow, it is light and fluffy, not the heavy, wet snow that mixes with sleet and freezing rain and causes power outages.
Still, it is daunting to shovel so much of it…
I worked for an hour and didn’t even have one lane of the driveway clear when I cam in to rest.
The appointment with E’s obstetrician’s office was cancelled because the office was closed, along with just about everything else in the county. The governor instituted a travel ban and is calling out the National Guard to help in the storm cleanup. We may get as much as thirty inches of snow , which I can believe, given that we have almost two feet on the ground as I write this in mid-afternoon.
(Just in case you had forgotten about E’s pregnancy – I had forgotten myself that I had written about it – you can read some of the backstory here.)
I’ve spent the day alternating shoveling time with rest and recovery time. I am very grateful that, during shoveling round four, our next-door neighbors came to help with their snowblower. Ordinarily, B uses our big Ariens snowblower that my dad gave us when he no longer needed it to clear snow for us and the neighbors, but B is away on business, the Ariens is currently in need of repair, and I am not strong enough to use it. They were able to clear the second pass of snowplow pile blocking the end of the driveway and make an initial path to the front stairs and mailbox, although there isn’t going to be any mail delivery today. Sometimes, the “neither rain, nor snow, nor dark of night” bit doesn’t hold.
I need to get out there for round six now. I am trying to keep the driveway and path clear enough that we could get out in case of emergency. It is getting harder because the snow banks are getting higher than my head, so it is hard to throw the snow over them. I have left myself a little extra space for the driveway, in case of bank mini-avalanche, but I am dreading when the snow slides off the metal garage roof and lands in a giant pile in the driveway. Maybe it will wait until tomorrow, or Thursday, or even better, Friday, when B will return home.
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Another Congressional office visit goes awry
Representative Tenney has refused repeated invitations to meet with constituents and to attend town hall meetings on this topic, so there was a planned event near her office this morning to try again to get our message to her.
I arrived early and met up with several people in the hall outside her office. The office door was locked, but there was a doorbell and people, presumably staff, were arriving and being let in.
To our surprise, Rep. Tenney herself appeared, hurried past us, and tried to open the locked door, before a staffer arrived to let her in. She did not acknowledge that there were constituents of hers standing there with our signs about saving our health care.
Word got to us that a larger group had gathered down in the first floor atrium, so we went to join them, just as they were being re-located to the outdoors, with temperatures in the teens Fahrenheit.
But, we, the people, are intrepid and would not be silenced! We had our signs, some media coverage, leadership from Citizen Action, and a portable sound system. People were sharing stories about how the Affordable Care Act had helped them and what it would mean to their health and their lives to lose the health insurance and medical care access they had gained through the ACA, detailing specific problems with the current House Republican bills dealing with health care, and writing messages to deliver to Tenney’s office (despite it being so cold that our pens weren’t working). We were supposed to be able to deliver messages to the office in groups no larger than three people.
When I went back into the building to warm up, one of the longtime leaders in the Catholic social justice community was on her way to the office, so I joined her. While we were still in the hallway, a woman who was with the management of the building met us, saying that Representative Tenney was no longer accepting visitors to her office, that she did not want us there, and that she was calling the police so that we could not gather outside the building, either. (She also told us that Representative Tenney was in Washington, which was odd as it certainly looked like her entering the office an hour earlier and we had thought that the official ribbon-cutting ceremony for the office was scheduled for today.)
We went back outside and stood our ground. We thought that the entrance plaza where we were gathered was public property and we were not blocking the entrance to the building, so we were within our rights of assembly, freedom of speech, and petition. Two police officers arrived, spoke to a couple of people from our group, and confirmed that we were fine to continue as we were.
Rep. Tenney is apparently not very familiar with the law.
By trying to silence us, she actually gave us an even stronger voice for our message as the rally went on longer than anticipated and will draw more media attention.
She also did not endear herself to the other tenants in the building because she had the management lock the main doors into the building, presumably to keep her constituents at bay. I’m sure the other offices, including the Chamber of Commerce, were not amused about the inconvenience to their clients.
So, Representative Tenney, I ask you once again to vote against any repeal of the Affordable Care Act and to take action to enhance the ACA by permanently securing Medicaid expansion in all states, by making a public option available to everyone, and by negotiating drug prices for Medicare and other public programs so that medications become more affordable.
My thanks to my fellow protesters, the great people of Citizen Action, the Binghamton police officers, and the kind people of Bistro 163, the new coffee shop and boutique that is tucked next to Metrocenter who gave us free coffee and a place to warm up.
And Representative Tenney, you will be hearing more from us, your constituents, on health care and many other vital issues.
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Waking up in the dark
I am not a fan of Daylight Saving Time, which started today in most of the United States.
It is not an accurate name. The amount of daylight is determined by astronomy, not by clocks. Naming the time of sunrise and sunset differently does not change the time between those two events.
What most annoys me, though, is waking up in the dark again. I had just gotten to the point where I was waking up to the light of dawn, which I find more energizing, and now I am instantly back into mid-winter waking-to-darkness.
This is not helped by the fact that we are having a cold snap and may soon have the most snow we have had in weeks, depending on the track of a developing nor’easter.
I know that many people will argue that having it be light longer in the evening makes up for the dark mornings, but we had already been able to eat dinner in natural light, although I admit that we tend to eat dinner on the early side.
By June, it won’t be fully dark until after 9 PM, which makes our usual 10 PM bedtime feel like we are children, being put to bed as soon as evening falls.
Daylight Saving Time, especially the current US implementation, also causes issues with long-distance communications. E’s daily call time with her employer in Hawai’i will shift. B’s daily 6 AM conference call with colleagues in India (thankfully) stays at 6 AM for him, but his India team has to change the time at which they call. Because the US extended the dates of DST, for the next three weeks, US time will be out of sync with many of the countries that observe DST using the original dates.
It would be so much simpler if we just dropped the whole concept and left our clocks alone.
Daylight doesn’t care, but I do.
How do you feel about Daylight Saving Time? Is it observed where you are?
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SoCS: short and sweet
This post is going to be very short, because I just spent a bunch of time writing a post about the Sappho’s Circle poetry reading last night.
I guess the other thing I should mention is that I had to adjust the mike last night because I am so short…
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This short and sweet post was written in response to Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week, which was “short.” Join us! Find out how here: https://lindaghill.com/2017/03/10/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-mar-1117/
Joanne Corey 