Feeling a little worried. Two days ago, my feet felt a little puffy. Figured I had been sitting on my behind too much, so made a point of moving around. Didn't think much more about it.

Yesterday morning after I got up, my feet rapidly became more and more puffy until I couldn' see my ankle bones and the skin across the top of my feet felt stretched to the limit. Could feel puffiness trying to work its way up my calves. Went to doc, of course. He didn't seem too alarmed until he really looked at them and said, "My, they really are swollen, aren't they?" Before that, he'd been sorta giving me the "So what's the problem" attitude that docs can get. Once I had his attention, he gave me a diuretic to help immediate symptom and said come back today for bloodwork. Which I did.

Diuretic worked great and all was well this morning but now they're starting to swell up again. Plus I felt sorta woozy and stupid all day.

I looked up swollen feet on the web and was not comforted to find "heart, liver, or kidney disease" as the most likely causes. Usually when I have blood work coming, I'm an optimist and expect to just get note saying all's well. This time, I really fear I may get the "We'd like you to come in so we can discuss results" phone call.

At least nothing hurts, which is good, obviously. Hubby keeps reminding me I probably just don't get enough exercise and simple changes to activities will solve things. I hope he's right. I know we all go some time but I am not ready quite yet. We'll see.

I had to check the spelling of "eunuchs" so I could properly address the yellow-bellied cowards I was allied with in an online game. See? Computer games are educational.

Up till now, I had enjoyed seeing deer in our backyard in the morning. However, today I find that dawn visitors ate my roses. The Honey Dijon, which was a huge, flourishing shrub is naked of leaves down to within six inches of the ground. Neptune, always smaller and fussier, has been totally denuded. I am not amused. I don't plan to do anything about it but I now understand why gardeners find deer to be such an unwelcome addition to a flower bed.

White House Appears Ready to Drop 'Public Option'

Ready to drop it because ignorant people (many on Medicare) show up and heckle town hall meetings. Ready to drop it because the Democrats are helpless to debunk the extremists' lie machine. Ready to drop it because private insurers and big pharmaceuticals are pouring over a million dollars a day into politicians' hands.

We are so screwed. I keep trying to maintain hope for my nation and I keep watching us fall further into idiocy, instead. If I was ten years younger, I'd move to Canada where they still seem to be sane. As is, I guess I'll pray to die before I have to live in the ruins the rightwing extremists are building for us. Since I probably will have health care that is administered by the same for-profit corporations who fight paying for services until the patient dies, that probably won't be hard to do.

How sad that the very working-class people who would most benefit from public health care are the ones who were so easily manipulated into being afraid of it. Once again, observation of the masses results only in misanthropy.

BART workers are going on strike next week if they don't reach an agreement. They'd like a cost-of-living raise, the company would like them to accept a salary freeze. Meanwhile, the lowest executive salary at BART is $100,000 per year plus perks. They are not talking about reducing those figures.

My husband, who works for a nationwide corporation, has been working without a contract for months now. We recently received notice of an agreement offer -- we would get to pay $75 a month for health insurance which pretty much equals the meager cost-of-living pay increase offered. And the health plan covers far less than it did -- we would pay 75% of prescription costs, for instance. Just one more step toward poverty, and we've been feeling that push for awhile now. And all this while the corporation is posting healthy profits and plans to expand.

As usual, it is comments on the subject from my community which distress me most. "Fuck the workers. I hope a scab steals their job!" And this from people who are working class themselves. 85% of this nation's wealth is held by less than 3% of our population. That, more than anything else, is the cause of our current economic woes. People's own self-interest should lead them to support efforts to see to it an average working man makes enough to support a family and, heck, maybe even enough to buy a family home. Our economy will never recover until there is money flowing through it. I read an article mentioning retail sales had dropped in July. It said "consumers are cautious." I don't think we are. I think the average consumer is near broke.

Reread it again yesterday. Though there are some misses, like Heinlein not foreseeing the internet, he did a remarkably good job envisioning the future. I did have to chuckle at the error when, in the story, the first explorers were sent to Mars with the hope that food and water would be found there. I don't think we'd predict that, now.

Our little Sunny Girl continues to be mysteriously malfunctioning. She cannot hold down more than a tablespoon of food at one time, and though I now feed her literally fifteen times a day, she's still far too skinny. ( Read more... )

I didn't find this editorial to be cheerful but it sure did bring up some good points. Maybe the quality that American CEOs have that is hard to find is sociopathy. It would explain a lot. Definitely worth a read and a little pondering.

"The Wall Street Journal reported last week that 'Executives and other highly compensated employees now receive more than one-third of all pay in the US... Highly paid employees received nearly $2.1 trillion of the $6.4 trillion in total US pay in 2007, the latest figures available.'"

Read more: Profiling CEOs and Their Sociopathic Paychecks by Thom Hartmann

I went looking for news that would cheer me up and found this site. Maybe it will cheer you up, too.
Happy News

I wish there were as many good news stories as saddening ones. I know infotainment thrives on drama but I find I'm not the only one driven away from watching news reports because it's just too much despair to swallow all at once. It doesn't help that when they're reporting politics, I believe only a tiny fraction of what they say.

The Sacramento TV news makes a half-hearted attempt at lightening things up by having 98% "real news" (death, torture, poverty, and fire) and 2% "weird news" (celebrity mishaps, silly scams, and people trying for the Darwin Awards). That's not what I mean. I mean real good news.

The last story I remember reading within the last few months that I considered good news was a note mentioning researchers have made real progress in treating cancer with hormone therapy. According to that story, it wasn't one startling breakthrough but hard work and time paying off. That cheered me up. I can't recall reading a story in the news that cheered me up since then.

I can't be that there isn't any good news. Where can I find it?

I've overdosed on reading and hearing the news every morning. I recognise the symptoms because it's happened before: deep despair coupled with a numb sense of futility, overlaid with bitter misanthropy. There is only one cure that I know of and that's to abstain from the news for awhile. I have to check it several times during the day during fire season, for obvious reasons, but I can skim by looking only for the "Fire Alert" headline. I'll skip the domestic abuse, animal cruelty, arson, DUI, politicians being stupid and/or bought and, worst of all, the comments from my fellow citizens after the stories. I hate to make like an ostrich in response to trouble but it's the only thing that works when saturation starts sickening me.

Some people don't like beauty pagaents because they present an objectified, skewed notion of what a woman should be. Others don't like them because the shows are campy and trite. I don't like them because they breed or attract criminals and lunatics. Seriously.

I didn't notice this till Carrie Prejean and Sarah Palin. I've said what I think of Palin at some length before this. Prejean I dislike because her loud crying about "freedom of speech" when she doesn't understand what the phrase means annoys me. (Notice that Palin and Prejean both love to play the victim card when they get into hot water because of their own actions. Coincidence?)

However, I have found that they aren't the only ex-pagaent queens who are irksome to society. Quite a few of them go from wearing a tiara to doing time. An unusually high number, it seems to me, considering the relatively few people who go the beauty paegent route. Kidnapping, gun running, murder, drug dealing and, of course, the ever-popular driving-while-under-the-influence all come up with even a cursory googling of beauty queen criminals.

Those who watch "America's Next Top Model" may recall the contestant who tearfully left the show because they wanted to cut her hair short. She flounced out saying: "I'd rather go back to pagaents. I think they help us develop as women while modeling is just a career." I haven't seen her in the public eye since then. I hope she didn't win Miss Artichoke, only to follow up by rampaging through a mall with a machete. Maybe all the Vaseline they slick on their teeth so they can smile easily does something to their brains.

It's well past time. I recently found out that since it was criminalized in the 1930s, both the DEA and FDA have, at separate times, recommended either legalizing it or at least treating it as a prescription drug. Both times, politicians ignored their recommendations.

Here in California, the notion is being taken seriously. Not because it makes sense, which it does, but because the state is so broke we can't afford to waste law enforcement chasing it and we could sure use the revenue from tax dollars. It is this state's number one cash crop, and that's saying something because California is the nation's top agricultural producer. Even so, marijuana procedes beat out wine, sugar beets, and almonds. When there is a news story about it, literally 98% of the comments are for legalization, liberals and conservative alike.

I find the points that come up to be interesting.

- Criminalization has done exactly what Prohibition did: opened the door to organized crime by forcing a desired product into the black market. People don't like that, even those who aren't consumers.
- People are aware it's not healthy but it's certainly no worse than alcohol and, in many ways, it's a good deal safer for society since people who are stoned don't do nearly so many stupid things as people who are drunk.
- People are afraid there wouldn't be tax revenue because everyone would just grow it at home. I don't think so. I can brew beer or grow tobacco here at home, too, but it takes more than throwing a seed at the ground to produce a quality product.

I had to laugh because after several articles on the subject and much discussion by many people, someone asked an important question no one else had considered: Why is California even discussing legalizing marijuana for recreational use when the feds have said states can't do that? Oh. Good point. I think we'll probably go ahead and do so anyway within the next few years. Hopefully, the federal government will get on board and do the same, or will at least ignore us till results have been observed. We'll see.

Here's an ad that has only been refused by a few TV stations, so most Californians will be seeing it soon:
http://www.mpp.org/states/california/we-want-to-pay-our-fair-share.html

I knew a drama queen like Palin would never go away quietly. I see this morning that she insists she is not a quitter. Yes, she is. She resigned from her elected duties when the going got tough. Ergo, she is a quitter. She is totally unfit for public duties and, possibly, quite insane. What worries me is that Hitler was quite insane, too, but that didn't stop his political career, did it?

I suppose the people who support this loopy woman disturb me more than she does. Nonsensical statements? They don't care. A disconnect with reality? They don't care. A shocking lack of knowledge about national politics? They don't care. What exactly would disqualify someone for further public office in their eyes? Does Palin have to put on a monkey suit and start swatting at Fokkers from the top of the Empire State building?

I do not like Sarah Palin's politics. I thought she ran the dirtiest campaign I've seen to date. Particularly irritating was her calling Obama a socialist while she bragged about taxing the oil companies in Alaska and giving the procedes out to citizens. Even more irritating was that her rather dense fan club didn't see any problem with that.

In my opinion, she lies as easily as breathing. A recently released email exchange shows her trying to pass off Todd's membership in the Alaskan Independence Party as a mistake -- he thought he was registering as independent. Remarkably, her campaign handler refused to lie and advised her to just smile and pass it off lightly if she was questioned during an interview. Reading notes from folks in Alaska, it seems unlikely Todd was mistakenly a member for fifteen years, especially when Sarah addressed one of that party's conferences, yet she expects people to swallow any bull she spins.

But what I like least about her is her desire to play the victim. After proving herself a vicious character assassin, she has the gall to boohoo over the media criticizing her. I've got news for her. The Bible does not advise her to cry: "Do as I say, not as I do." It advises "Do unto others as you would have done unto you." On that basis, she's been asking for all the criticism she's received, and then some. I wish she would just go away. I hear Alaskans feel the same way -- there hasn't been any crying about her departure. In fact, I get the sense from Alaskan news articles and the attached comments that there have been quite a few celebrations.

Last night, I was having a vivid dream in which I was to fly to China for some business meetings. At the airport, the people who hired me discovered I don't speak any Chinese dialects. Not one word. They were chewing me out about not mentioning this when I told them: "I don't think it matters. I don't think I can go because my leg hurts too much." It did, too. I kept shifting positions trying to make the pain slack up but it wouldn't. My pelvic bone hurt and my right leg bone all the way down to the knee. I woke up it hurt so much and found that part of the dream was real.

I don't know what's going on with it. It's not arthritis because it's not the joint but the bones themselves. This is the second time it's happened in the last two weeks. It feels like the pelvic bone is flexing a bit when I sleep too long on one side. It's not really supposed to do that, so I'm going to up my calcium intake. I am at the age where my bones will get frail if I don't prevent it.

I recently read an article about the autumn of life. In summer, you may have someone you know die and you may have health problems but these events are unusual and usually interspersed with long periods of goodness. Not so in autumn. In the fall of a lifespan, you get to the point where someone you know dies frequently and health problems are a part of breathing. I don't like it much but the article reinforced there's no avoiding it. Either you deal with it or you're miserable with it but, either way, that's the way it is. Personally, I find Vicodin helps with the pain quite a bit. Even more than personal fortitude.

Yay! Sunny doesn't have diabetes or hyperthyroidism. In fact, her bloodwork showed her to be healthy. So, we're still faced with a few mysteries but it's not any of the usual suspects. The vet said he has to just plain take a look down her throat, so she's scheduled for an exam next week. They have to drug her for it as cats don't like tubes threaded down their throat. I've had that done, and I can't say I blame them.

I have to take Sunny to the vet today. She is all skin and bones. I had thought she just had an upset stomach. We've had cats with that before. But for a week and a half, I've been feeding her small amounts on the hour for a total that should have had her packing on weight. Instead, she still lost more weight. The poor thing.

I looked up her problem. It seems most likely it's hyperthyroidism, with a chance it's diabetes or cancer, instead. I think her appetite would be off if it was cancer, though, and she will eat as much as I give her. And she's not been drinking like crazy, as she would with diabetes. On the bright side, they can treat hyperthyroidism with either hormones or by just surgically removing the thyroid glands. No fun but still, not usually fatal. I hope they don't want to keep her when I bring her in, though I guess they might if there are good odds she'll be scheduled for surgery tomorrow morning.

I am dreading the trip. I've only made the run from here to Angel's Camp a couple of times since I took Joanie in and she was put to sleep. Ever since then, I have horrendous panic attacks the whole way. And each time the trip is difficult, it makes the next one worse. I am going to try taking a quarter of a tranquilizer beforehand. I doubt I'll feel it but it might well tone down the jitters, just a little. I hope so. It would be so much better if Steve and I could make the trip together but he can't get any vacation time right now and Sunny can't wait, so that's that. Fingers crossed I do OK. I'm glad it's a podunk road with little traffic on it. That helps.

Since Sacramento will be very short of fire coverage, The Powers That Be decided it would be a good idea to also lay off Sheriff's Deputies. Two-hundred-and-thirty of them.

The Sheriff's Department had tried to scare people into avoiding this by mentioning that if it happened, they would issue many more concealed weapon permits so that private citizens could defend themselves against crime. I talk to people in Sacramento. Trust me, the ones who want concealed weapon permits are exactly the people who shouldn't have them. I can only hope this was an empty bargaining chip on the part of the Sheriff's Department and they won't really arm the vigilantes.

So, inadequate fire and crime protection, closed libraries, faltering schools. I could be wrong but I think this is what a decadent society looks like. I don't think we'll like living in it as it decays.

Sacramento has decided to layoff about 86 firefighters. Remember that California is regularly swept by wildfires, every single year.

Politicians being idiots is one thing but reading people's comments at the local news station site is enough to make me think we get what we deserve. There are working class people saying Unions are bad -- they're not really sure why, except Republicans have said so, so they think it must be true. There are people who live in the community who think the layoffs affect only the firefighters and not the next person whose house catches on fire. There are people who took pay cuts at their job and so rejoice that firefighters have to, as well. Nevermind that a firefighter risks his life every time he goes out on a call while most of us just risk paper cuts. And there's one guy who owns a private ambulance service who is bad mouthing the firefighters because he thinks he can make an extra buck off disaster if they are gone. And there are people swallowing every word he says as truth.

I am once again beginning to think our species is FAIL. How much intelligence does it take to know fast response by professionals when your house is burning down is a good thing?