Coping: With the Christmas Run-Up

Comes that time of the year when I go through my “seasonal changes” and make ready for my “New Years Revolutions.”

But not before savoring this year a bit more and passing on some of my “best of class learning” for the year.

Seems to me that a reasonable thing to do each year is to spend a little bit of time (if only an hour) sitting down to ask the really important questions, like.

Is my health better or worse than last year?

Did I learn anything important this year?

Did I share things that really mattered?

Am I ready for the coming year?

Am I still in love and full of the boundless energy that comes with love offered and returned?

What are the biggest problems in your life and are you working on solving them?

I think if a person can answer yes to those, they’re got life wired.

Having said that, I’ like to go through a few of my personal responses to this list because odds are good that you might be able to borrow an idea or two.

On Health

Our health is as good, or better, than last year.  We eat exceptionally “close to source.”  Which means instead of using a lot of processed foods, we eat simple fare.

Take breakfast, for example.  I’ve mentioned my “cottage cheese pancakes” now and then and you might want to experiment with the recipe, which is really simple as all get-out.

You take your favorite pancake mix (we use either Krusteaz or Pioneer) and for each cut of dry ingredient you add 2-somewhat heaped-up tablespoons of cottage cheese.  The drier stuff works better than a runny brand for the applications.

Then you add cold water (just like always) except you make the mix a little thicker than normal.  About like a good oat meal.

That’s it.  Place in a well-buttered pan and cook the first side to golden brown (picture above) and then flip. 

A little butter and some pure maple syrup and what you have is a pseudo-blintze in hardly any time at all.

On Learning

Oh, gosh, where to begin?  I go through books like crazy:  Non-fiction.  I look at the library as going “concept fishing” whenever I get a spare moment.  Just this morning on the throne I managed to absorb the fundamentals of the Sears-Haack body and how that may be one of the secrets to getting a few more knots out of the old Mouse.  We’ll see.

I try to keep one or two non-fiction books going all the time:  Pick up a page here and there and first thing you know, you’ve got a lot of knowledge, even about a hobby like ham radio, gun-smithing, or whatever turns your crank.

Sharing Things that Matter

I don’t know if I have ever mentioned this, but both Elaine and I are “shower people.”   It’s either the negative ions (released by falling water and lightning storms, or showers, which is why some people like to get up and hit the shower as much as they hit the coffee first thing…).  The idea of sitting in a tub is not particularly attractive, since you’re stewing in your own dirt.

For some reason until I was about 40, I had always thought of the personal showers hose attachments as an “old person’s” deal.

Something like the Waterpik SM 653 CG Original 6-Mode Massage Handheld Shower, Chrome which runs about $25 bucks.

The reason I like the handheld shower extension is that it has a “high pressure” mode which is ideal for doing a daily “pressure wash” of certain body parts.  Oh?  Yes, of course “there” but also since most have a pressure blasting setting, they get soap out of the hair in a lot less time…and if you every wake up in the morning (thinking something died in your mouth from the previous night) they can also work like an over-sized WaterPik to wash your mouth out.

So if you know anyone who doesn’t have one of these, and who is addicted to the morning showers these things are great…been using them for years, just don’t think I mentioned it before.

The most recent place (outside home)  we ran into ‘em, I think, was up at the Dodge City Boot Hill Casino a few years back.  2011?  We’d flown in (KDDC is hard to see if you’re new to flying that part of the world, the runway looks like dirt, about the same color, but it’s really paved…ended up flying the GPS until we could see the barely visible runway numbers back then).

To make a long story longer, I don’t know if I looked particularly haggard, or what, but they put us in an ADA compliant room, and shower wands are a requirement.  So we didn’t bother changing rooms (ADA rooms are larger with more room to move about) and ever since we’ve been huge fans of shower wands.

Consider yourself “shared” upon.  And if you’re under 50, still thinking shower wands are a waste, give them a try.  It solves the marriage problem of “I like showers like rain”  (Elaine). She’s so meticulous with it, she doesn’t even get the glass doors wet in the shower.

Me, on the other hand?  Call FEMA when I hit the shower.  Set  the hose to pressure-washing mode and 70 PSI, thanks.  Hell yeah…ceiling is wet and so is everything else within 8-feet by time I get done with pressure-washing. Such a clean disaster area you’ve never seen.

One other idea here (kind of a crackpot thing, but you find quirks amusing, right?):  I have a pet theory that people who don’t rinse off well enough after showers set themselves up for health problems later in life: 

The thinking is that soap residues are probably bad for you.  I figure they may block the skin from doing its job OR residues might be absorbed.  So I’m one of those people who uses soap only on the hair, pits, and there.  The hands get clean doing the elsewhere sudsing (if that’s a word) and washing your soap.  (If soap was meant to have hair on it, I’m sure P&G would make a brand that way…but that’s way TMI, lol.)  [That’s just sick and groady enough to become a hit product…hmmm…]

Am I Ready for the Coming Year?

No.,  I would be, but here’s the thing:  We have been down to the Social Security Office twice and spent 7 1/2 hours of phone time and they are a totally F/U’ed organization.  We may try it again this morning, but as I said before, they can’t manage 50-million people getting benefits with a dozen products while Amazon manages 250-million and tens of thousands of products.

Except for Social Security being incredibly bureaucratic (I sent  complaints to my congressoid and sinator, but since I know they didn’t read the last budget bill, the odds of any real action on my behalf are about bupkis…

Other than that, yes.  Ready.  We would otherwise be all chilled, kicked, and enjoying the remnants of 2014.  But thanks to Social Sec. I can look forward to working ad infinitum since they can’t solve simple problems with two face-to-faces (“I can’t help you, there is no one here who can right now, you’ll have to make a phone appointment and we can do that on January 28…). 

They blame budgets, but it’s like the clowns blaming the circus.

Are you in Love?

If you are, then welcome to the club.  Wondrous state of life.  If not, put down this column and head over to a dating site pronto.

Just don’t forget the “pre-niptuals).  (deliberate misspelled).

What Are the Biggest Problems in Your Life

I haven’t figured out how to beat gravity yet (but I keep plugging away at it).

I’m not obscenely rich, but if I were, I  would elbow my way to the front of the line to pay that much tax.  Heck yes!  It would mean we’re making zillions.

And last but not least, no one explains that, but life moves faster and faster as you get older.

A day is 1/365th of your life when you’re one year old.  For an OF like me, a day is 1/24,000th of a lifetime.

This is why for a kid, 10-minutes is a lifetime.  But for me, they seem to go by like flashes in the pan.

Oh, sure:  Exercise, pressure wash, super vitamins, active mind – but it hasn’t slow anything down one iota.

As luck would have it, I’m not the only one with the problem, so if you have cool solutions to the problem, please post them as comments.

There.  All better now.

Brace For Emotional Shock

One bitter note about Christmas is what has fallen out of Grady’s details look at the predictive software project called Nostracodeus over here.

If I may quote?

“The Event monitor suggests there may be an attack by ISIS or ISIL over Christmas. There are hints that it could be directed against the USA and/or its assets.  The event monitor uses the same algorithm that, among other successes, predicted the Washington State school shooting last October.  As with all human attempts at peering into the future, sometimes the event monitor is wrong.  Nevertheless the language that is found mostly in the Middle East scans has become much more aggressive over the past thirty to forty days. “

Terrorists are not particularly bright people.  *(If they were, they wouldn’t follow orders to go blow themselves up and such, but that’s the power of brain-washing for you…)

So with that in mind, we should not be too surprised to see what I’ve been calling the “Global Caliphate” make further moves to coagulate into a huge world power on its own over the holidays while (basically) American stands down for two weeks starting tomorrow.

With all those available eyeballs, what better time to “make a statement” would be their thinking.  They never stop to look at it from the more logical Western perspective:  Why would anyone believe suicidal intolerant religious bigots? 

It must be one of those long wave economic rhymes of history.  With the long wave at 50-60 years (for round numbers) we look back at the period around the end of World War II and look for craziness then:  Yep – the Kamikaze pilots.

Same trip, different “rituals before sacrifice” but same concept of direct living-giving for a cause.  Didn’t work for the Japanese and the current outcome will likely be similar, but in the meantime in both cases the idea was to shock and scare.

Even the tiniest bit of radioactivity at a non-lethal (even miniscule) level would still be blown to public panic by Pandering Media.  So I hope you do a little research on your own so that if something like a dirty bomb ever happens in America, you’ll be well-informed about how radiation actually works.

Your fear-factor is your strings and the goal is to make us all puppets.  But we aware will decline the invite, thanks.

A Wonderful Last-Minute Gift

I have to put in a shameless plug for our www.peoplenomics.com offering as a Christmas present.  If you want to set up a subscription for someone, just put in their email address and make up a password for them (don’t forget to tell them what it is, of course).

It might help them learn something as we slowly creep up on 700 editions in the library over there.

OK, off to the headlines.  Zeus, the foot-warmer cat – has taken up station on my right foot which usually means a cold front’s coming.  I saw him looking at the 45-knot winds up in Roswell, NM yesterday and fluffing up a bit.

Write when you break-even.

George   george@ure.net