Goodbye

This is Bill's daughter posting on his behalf.

Unfortunately this will be the last post on this blog, my father passed away on June 6th 2019.  He passed away peacefully in his sleep. You can read his obituary here.


Thank you for all of the joy that you have brought to my dad with your comments.

The futurey

I am informed that 50 percent of people with my medical comdition live two years.

Sick

The American Medical System needs serious work.  Gee what an original thought.  But as a reluctant consumer during the last two months, much on my mind. And its not nearly over.  My friends in Fance are aghast.

Video

To me, this is a captivating video.  I could watch it for hours.

https://vimeo.com/127256409

January

This has been a rocky month.  Not nearly as  bad as that being suffered by the thousands of federal workers put aside without pay, or worse.  But bad enough.

For the last three weeks, easily, I've had a hacking cough that sounds like I'm a two-pack-a-day smoker. It is slowly getting better, but glacially slowly.  Roughly, say, at the speed that a new thought penetrates Trump's consciousness.  Every morning I wake up thinking well, I didn't really cough last night, so maybe.... and then, thirty seconds into any conversation, I start coughing so badly, I have to hold my breath for a moment.  My wife has pointed out that she knows two people whose problem sounded like mine, and they turned out to have strep throat.  I don't think its that, but damned if I know what it is.  All I know is, I WANT IT TO END.  I've taken Mucinex, I've taken Dayquil.  Slowly better.  Still there.

And the other thing is money.  In a nutshell, when our French exchange student was here, she had problems with her debit card, so we loaned her money.  She said her father would do a bank transfer to our account. That hasn't happened. I like these people, and I don't want to think badly of them.  I don;t think they would stiff us.  The student....might, especially if she finds out that I wrote to her mother  a damming -with-faint-praise note about her American boyfriend.  I like him, but I know how her mother feels about any relationships with one specific guy.  Groups, no problem.  One alone, problem. I wrote the note as a way to say you might want to keep aware of this... especially since I know that the daughter lied about the relationship to her mother. So perhaps she intercepted the note where I said hey, about this money we loaned your daughter..... Or maybe its just that the mother doesn't tend to read email . Whatever,  I might just have to forget about that money.  The odd thing is, that would be okay, so long as we were still friends with these people..  I would hate to lose that.

In about two weeks, first cataract surgery.   Hoping for good results. 

The Return

Today, the French kid, who was here for only two weeks this time, returned to France.   We discovered two things:

First, she's really in love with the local guy that she met last year.  Like, really.

Second, that the local guy's mother is telling him slow down, take your time,  think about the logistics, think about where you see this relatiionship in two years.I like this woman.  

Okay, I'm still envious of the kid - and yes, I know how pathetic that souunds - and his advantages -- good looking, money in the family, and now a hyper-cute  if not downright sexy,  smart French girlfriend, too??? - but his mother's attitude counts for a lot.  Which is weird, because, hey, it's not my daughter heading into this.  But still - it does.  So I'm glad for her.

French people

You can support someone emotionally as much as you want, encourage them to change, nod and smile when they say yes, you're right, I need to hear this, I need to do this, I need to change.But when they don't act on it....  there is a point where compassion runs thin.

And when a different person asks you not to let her protective mother know that the guy she's seeing is more than a friend, it gets a little old, too.  Especially when it seems more of a problem to you than to the mother. You begin to wonder If the mother doesn't seem to care, why should I?

Stress

Okay, I'm feeling stressed.

My friend who is defending her doctoral thesis in Paris today said that she should know by 5PM or so, Paris time,  if she was awarded her doctorate.  5PM is 1700 hours.  1700 in France is 1100 here, or 11AM.  Its now 3 PM. Not a word. If she didn't get it, she'll be devastated.

Trump is destroying the ideals of my country, and normal people are supporting it.  Not just the bigots and racists, but normal people.  And there's not a fucking thing that I can do to stop it.  The GOP won't.  And the Democrats can't do squat until they are in office, in two months. I swear, I just want to get the hell out of this country.  Never thought I'd feel that way.  Never thought we'd be this stupid, this incompentant.

The girl who stayed with us last year confirms she is coming to this area in December. She says she will stop by our house  Not stay, but stop by. Because the reason for the visit is this guy she met while she was living here.

My French aural comprehension sucks.  My Italian comprehension is nonexistent. 

Makes me wish I drank.

My Oh My

Comments Only Women Really Understand

I see Comments Only Guys Really Understand all the time and I think Man, most of these are stupid.  But THESE, I think make perfect sense.

Even the one about Lucifer's Waterfall. 

French

I am sure that the French periodically get together and scramble the meanings of their words, just to confuse me.

DANS means IN.  So why does

l'attente de son apparition est vécue dans l'angoisse

mean the expecation of its arrival is seen WITH anxiety?

Just to confuse me, of course. 

Artificial Intelligence... Among Other Things

Why is it that I regard sex toys for women as perfectly normal, but this as creepy?  Shouldn't it be the other way around? Maybe the sex-toys-for-women industry has a better PR function?

Scary

When your wife goes to the local doc to investigate a random recurring pain.... and they recommend a quick mammogram.... and you do searches on LEFT BREAST RANDOM PAIN and find all that it could be - including but not limited to cancer -- that's scary.

Finding out that the mammogram and ultrasound showed nothing abnormal was a relief.

Reading

I don't read the range of things that I used to read, and, thanks to the internet, my willingness to read at more than paragraph length on a specific subject is diminished, too. 

Just now, I was at a local library,  where I read an issue of The Atlantic that contained two articles that interested me -- one about Newt Gingrich and his effect on slash-and-burn politics, and one about the rise of artificial intelligence, both in tools like Alexa and in medical (and other) diagnostic tools (one company offers to generate real-time analysis of a patients affective state, and to use it to suggest questions that the physician might want to ask).  It also contained an article about the state of politics written by David Frum, who suggested that we need to save our society from Trump and Gingrich's style of operation (Frum used a catchy phrase which I don't recall to suggest that Trump wants more and more of our politics to be controlled by fewer and fewer people, and he's succeeding at it)

And yet as I drove home, all I could think of was gee, I wish someone would summarize those articles for me.

Politics

The great thing about being a conservative politician is that you don't have to care about people.  As long as you keep your Papa Dog head of party happy, that's all you need.  Because liberals suck at firing up people, and conservatives are great at appealing to their base instincts..

Israel Connect

In about two weeks, I start weekly sessions with two Israeli kids, and their teacher, to help them practice speaking English.  Should be fun.

If Only.....

Chokepoint

When I bought my smartphone, I switched to TMobile because they offered phones with a chip that could be swapped, which was something I needed in order to be able to connect the phone to a SIM that was owned by a French network. (Trivia: apparently Orange is the big player there; the other networks, such as Lebara, buy space from them.  Guess what happens when Orange itself gets tight on space?)

I don't objectively know if TMobile is better than Verizon, the company I did have a connection to; in fact, given that Verizon has wider coverage, Verizon is probably better.  But I like TMobile more.  Part of that is smart marketing. .  Part of it is that they seem more responsive.  Part of it is that their website is not cluttered with ten thousand services that they want to sell you, unlike Verizon's.

And part of it is stuff like this.

Weaselicious

Republican Mitch McConnell says there is no need for legislation to protect Robert Mueller because 'there is no sign that Trump plans to fire him'.  And, one presumes, if he does move to fire him, McConnell will say Well, shucks, too late, we can't do anything now.

And a California Republican apparently wanted to buy clothes for a vacation, but his wife said No, we don't have the money for that -- but just charge it to your campaign fund and mark it as Golf Balls for Wounded Warriors or Isomething like that.

I can see how this would take a lot of balls. 

Eating

I totally do not get why people like food that looks like this.  I get that they do, but even just the thought of biting into something like this makes me nauseous.  Now a decent burger - that's a different story.

A Different Take On The Need For Affordable Health Care

Hmmm......