My Medical Insurance

You all know what it is like talking to you medical insurance company right?  Bad.

Wrong.  I just spent 90 minutes talking to mine and it was WONDERFUL.  Sharaya explained everything to me, told me about the things they covered and how to get fancy virtual tests covered and all that. 

I now have a primary care doctor (and I can change that easily if I want after a visit).  I can get a back specialist directly after one visit to my new primary care doctor and she says I can get virtual tests done with a simple co-pay in the network (and apparently all such specialists are covered) and my primary doctor will actually pay attention to those. 

She said that is the way their coverage is going; high-tech...  United health Care.

I haven't tested it yet, but she was so positive I nearly fell off my chair.  I will call one of the doctors she emailed me today about my back and a annual physical.

But she was so great I had to post this first...

Bad Back

Mom used to say (in her last 10 years - 74 to 84 years) that "growing old isn't for sissies".  She had to stop playing golf at 75,  couldn't write letters at 76 or so, couldn't type letters after 78, and sufferred from Parkinson's Disease after that.

Dad felt the same way, but he was healthy to 90 and faded quickly over 2 years.  I like his pattern better...

OK, I'm "only" 67, but I'm beginning to understand what she meant.  It isn't so much that you are going to die someday (we all will), but the accumulation of small and large problems is hard to accept and get used to.  And the minor problems of middle age just get worse.

I've always been "annoyingly healthy" (no colds, no flu, no broken bones, no migraines, etc).  But as a single person determined to tackle hard work alone, strained muscles are a routine of my life.  Sometimes, I push my body a bit too far.  I usually get over it in a day or two, but sometimes not.  I threw a rock at a squirrel 30 years ago and strained my right rotator cuff.  Couldn't lift my arm above my head for months.  But it healed.

I stepped on a rock wrong once and limped for a week.  It healed.  Whenever I strain a mucle, it heals.  I'm just used to that happening.  I do something, it heals.  I don't bruise.  Cuts heal in a day.  You get used to that happening.

I think partly that it is because I age slower than most people.  I matured  slowly in high school behind the other guys.  Some of the athletic types were shaving at 14.  I didn't have to until college.  When they looked 30 in college, I looked 16.  I resented it then, but I like it now.

But time is catching up to me.  I first noticed that, when I twisted around doing work, I would sometimes get a muscle cramp in my side.  Then both.   I have always had a slight back problem, but it got worse over the decades.  I get muscle cramps in my legs while laying in bed.

The males of my paternal side live to old age in relative health (85+).  The males on the maternal side do not (65+).  I suppose I will average that.

My point is that I think I've hit the point where things start to go downhill.  Monday, I woke up after doing no particularly heavy work the day before, and I COULD NOT STAND UPRIGHT.  That was a shock.  I expected that I had just slept in a bad position all night.  But even after a hot shower, it didn't go away, and I limped around all day.  The pain was slightly behind the left hip.  Not the joint, the muscle.

I took a double dose of Ibuprofen, which helped.  Standing erect (once I stretched enough) was sort of OK,   Bending over was troublesome; bending back up was harder.  I discovered doing leg squats was the easiest.

I have Ibuprofen because I had one attack of gout in the 90s and aspirin was contra-indicated for that.  The Ibuprofen instructions say 1 pill per 4-6 hours, but the doctor then said 2 were just fine (unless there are problems) and I follow that.  I'm drug-resistant, so I need stronger doses.

And interestingly, the "bad" knee I've had for 10 years has been just fine lately.  When one problem arrives, another one goes away.  And I haven't had leg muscle cramps in weeks.  Maybe that's because I've been eating a banana each day or because I just haven't been able to work hard in the yard.

So here is the situation.  My back is not getting better.  But I'm NOT going to the doctor office while the flu is widespread.  Maybe I've never caught the flu, and I got the annual shot (started doing that only when Dad came to live with me, but decided not to stop), but it seems the current flu shot has only a 30% effectiveness and if I catch a bad case, there isn't anyone here to help.  So I will wait to heal the back.

At least I've learned to adjust to it somewhat.  If I stand erect most of the day, it lessens.  I even did some woodworking today.

So I'm expecting it to just heal naturally and not notice it suddenly in a few more days.

Meanwhile, it is annoying.  The birdfeeder and suet basket were empty this morning.  I dragged out the 8'ladder to refill it.  It sure didn't feel great!  But I managed it.  Life doesn't stop just because my back hurts.  The birds need the food.

I expect that, in a few days, I will feel back to normal.   But not today, and not tomorrow.

When I'm 77, this may be more of a problem.

Upstairs PLant Rack

The plants on the upstairs plant rack are doing well.  The ivy are growing all around the single light and thriving with the southern sunlight.

This spider plant was just one little surviving baby when I pinned it into the soil about this time last year.  It sure liked the fresh soil.  And I water my plants with aquarium water, so they get some mild natural fertilizer each time.  

I have some vague plan to attach an iron rod to the ceiling studs and hang plants from it where the sun will hit them.  I'll need to make or find a water catch tray below them though.

Light Stand

I have to have the light stand ready for seedlings in 3 weeks, so why not do it now?

I took everything off, organized stuff into piles. And kept everything not "plant-starting" or "plant-growing" off.  Most of the plants there were cuttings I rooted in December.  Waxy Hoyas,...

Some failed to root, but most did.  I took out the failed ones and combined the rooting ones into 6-packs.  That saved some space.  And I had some planters half-filled. so I planted more seeds to fill them.

When all was done, I had this...

Celery plants.  For the leaves in salads.  I love the slightly strong taste of them.  I snip a couple from each plant and they keep growing new leaves.

I discovered another new Petunia growing and flowering in a Waxy Hoya cel and separated it for transplanting.  BTW, a 1" putty knife works great for that.

I read that you can grow scallinon-like greens from the top of an onion.   So far, it is working...

I love the taste of endive lettuce.  These are floppy now, but will be sending up heartier leaves soon that I can cut and they will regrow.

The single Snake Plant I chopped up into pieces and repotted...  The pieces are all doing well.  There is some slight new growth.  The interesting question is what to do with 12 Snake Plants.  I'm thinking a row of them in a new-built wood frame on the deck rails come Summer.

Basement Cleaning

Here is a real "Before and After"!

At the end of the growing season, I've accumulated a lot of stuff "out-of-place".  Well, I get busy, you know?  So it was needing some work to get ready for the new planting season.  And amazingly, the new planting season starts in 3 weeks!

So, I had to get to work.  The clutter was bad. 

Even my light stand was clutterred!  It's the old rule of "any horizontal surface gets covered"...

After 2 days work, I had it down to this...

And to show I didn't just move stuff "out of sight", here is the other previously clutterred space...

That old refrigerator is my "root cellar".  I keep bulk veggies in it at 40-45F.  And my seeds are in the tray there too.

Next, I need to clear out and get my light stand ready to stat seedlings...

Freshwater Aquarium

I have had one type of aquarium or another since college when I built a 2 gallon aquarium from plastic sheets I found in the trash in my college dorm (and bought plastic cement to hold it together - a serious expense at the time)

My first REAL job was in the fish department at a department store in 1971.  I had the aquarium I built and needed a few fish for it.  I visited the nearest department store, and was angry that the tanks were dirty and had dead fish in them.  I complained to the person at the cash register (in those days, each department had its own cash register).

The person was the Department Manager.  A real slob, reflecting how he maintained the fish tanks.  He offerred me a job.  I took it (minimum wage was better than no wage, and I hated asking my parents for "spending money" while they were paying college tuition and board).

In a week, I had all the dead  fish removed (and accounted for, for inventory-reporting), tanks cleaned, and asked what to do next.  The Department Manager guy didn't care, but the part-time Assistant Manager was impressed.


It was a chain operation.  Back then, discount stores were called "department" stores because each "department" was a separate business renting space in it.  I bet you never knew THAT!

So the Regional Manager came along once a month (he had dozens of "fish departments" to oversee).  The assistant manager told him what I had been doing (that the department manager had not) and the Manager was fired, the Assistant went to Manager and I got nothing...  Huh?

So I upped my game.  There was one tall display case in the storage room, and I cleaned it up, set it at the entrance to the department, and set up breeding tanks.  One month it would be cherry barbs, another, fancy guppies, another, Siamese Fighting Fish.

I even found a 2 gallon brandy-snifter in the glasswares department and snuck it away to create a self-contained live plant and guppy "tank" that required no feeding of the fish or water changes (other than adding some distilled water occasionally).

The next time the Regional Manager came by, he announced they were closing the department.  But he offerred me the Manager job at one of their better departments in Cherry Hill New Jersey.  20% above minimum wage.

A 20% wage increase would have been great.  But I was still in college and had hopes for a better future.  I declined the offer.  You never know what changes such choices make.  For all I know, my career could have gone into retail sales and store management with company stocks and wealth.  But I stayed in college.

I mention all this because I still keep fish.  Watching them swim around endlessly is soothing.  It gives me something to be responsible for (as if the cats and house and yard weren't enough).  But you know what I mean.  It adds structure to the day.  And Ayla loves watching them move around.

So When I found a algea-like slime couting the bottom of the aqurium last year, I took the whole thing apart (moved the fish to a 10 gallon aquarium temporarily).   I cleaned the plastic plants.  I scooped out all the gravel.  I scrubbed the tank with a pad and then filled it with water out on the deck and added bleach to kill anything in it. 

Then I rinsed the tank several times, stirring up the gravel as I went.  Then I set it all up again and moved the fish back in.

That lasted 3 months.  The slime returned.

I repeated the process.

In December the slime returned.  It shouldn't have, so I did so research.  I learned my problem was "blue-green" algae.  And that the name was false.  It is a "cyano-bacteria", and bacteria is not "algae".  Bleach doesn't kill it. 

I found help at Petco.  There was a woman with a dog (a customer, I assumed) talking to a woman with a Petco uniform.  The usual fish expert was not there.  So I asked uniformed woman if the expert was there.  He wasn't, but she offerred to help.

I was doubtful.  Be sure to understand it was because she wasn't the fish expert that I doubted she could help.  I know about helping customers (spent 5 years in stores doing whatever I could to help), but expertise was needed here.  She had no idea what cyanobacteria was. 

But she was willing to help.  Unfortunately, I know how THAT goes.  The helpful clerk pulls bottles off the shelf and reads them to see if they mention the problem.  I appreciate the willingness to help, but I had done that already and with more experience.

But guess what?  The "customer with the dog" was actually the Regional Manager and knew EXACTLY what I was talking about!  She handed her dog (on a leash) to the clerk, and said I needed "Chemi-Clean" and walked directly to the spot on the shelf where it was stocked.

The spot on the shelf was empty...   But she said they had just gotten the weekly shipment of supplies in.  She went to the back and returned with a container of The Right Stuff!

$20!  Well, compared to cleaning the aquarium again, that was a bargain.  It is harmless to fish and plants.  You keep the water circulating without charcoal filters at high power (extra air bubblers) for 48 hours and then replace 20% of the water.  The cyano-bacteria is supposedly dead.  And the container has 10 doses in it (endless shelf-life apparently).

A week later, the aquarium looks clean.  Without the plants in the aquarium, I see I have more fish than I realized!  Some I knew of, of course (red-tailed shark, 2 corydoris catfish, 1 algae eater), but 11 serpae tetra and 3 tiger barbs.  I thought I had only 6 tetras.  I guess they hide well.

And, in the picture above, you see a small 10 gallon tank at the bottom.  That's where the 6 new tiger barbs are staying for a week while I make sure they don't bring home a disease.  The screen and brick on the top of that tank is to make sure the cats don't get too pawy at them.

The cloudy stuff in the center are air bubbles from a long strip bubbler...

I haven't added the plastic plants back in yet, but they seem clean.  BTW, that brown block above is a piece of petrified wood. 

I'll add them back soon.  But I'm thinking I should add some live plants.  That can wait, but it is on my list...BTW, that brown block

Starter Soil

I mix my own.  I use up a large trash barrel each year.  It works great for me!

Start with a sifter.  I made one 2'x2' of 2"x4" boards covered on the bottom with 1/4" hardware cloth (wire mesh). 

My formula is:
4 parts finished compost
2 parts peat moss
1 part vermiculite
1/2 part perlite

I have a large plastic bin that fits under the sifter.  I add scoops of each item into the sifter and rub it around (wearing heavy leather gloves).  When it is mostly gone and just unsiftable lumps left, I add the sifted material to the trash barrel and the unsifted material to a small bucket

After a 2nd load into the barrel, I stir it all around

Repeat, repeat, repeat...

When I'm done, I have a whole barrel of sifted starter soil and 1 bucket of peat clumps.  I pound that as best I can with a 4"x4"x4' post and toss it into the compost bin.

I re-use planting 6-pack cels, but I soak them in a mild bleach solution in the basement laundry tub and rinse them 3 times.  I have great germination, so no problem there. 

I also cut one one cell out of a 11"x22" flat for ease of watering.  There is always SOME plant I can get by with having 5 of, LOL!

So, this week's project is making more starter soil.

Gardening Organization

I love this time of year almost as much as the first harvest.  Planning is in my blood!

The catalogs arrive daily, but that doesn't matter.  Most are junky scammy ones.  I would mention names but I don't feel like getting arguements about them.  I'll just say that if you keep getting catalogs from places you never order from, those are probably them.  LOL!

The catalogs I like are Johnny's, Territorial, Victory, Selected Seeds, and Brent&Becky's.  Burpee's is good too, but I never end up ordering from them these days.

I have a SYSTEM for keeping seeds and deciding when to plant them inside and out.  My seeds are kept refrigerated in medical specimen vials I found cheap years ago.  They last years longer that way.  I number the vials on top and on the sides.

The tray was easy.  I drilled holes the size of the vial bottoms in a piece of plywood and glued another piece under it.  I'm going to build a better one with a 2nd board 1/2 way up (the current bottom holes are tight to hold the vials upright).  But the main point is that the seeds are all in one tray, sealed and refrigerated (in a basement refrigerator also used as a root cellar for potatoes and carrots and such).

I keep a list of the vial contents using Excel (for easy columns).  A part of it looks like this:

	SEEDLIST 2018
	VEGETABLES
VIAL	CROP	TYPE	ACQ YR
101	PAC CHOI	CHING-CHIANG	18
102	TOMATO	SWEET MILLION	17
103	TOMATO	SUPERNATURAL (ROOTSTOCK)	18
104	TOMATO	BRANDYWINE	17
105	TOMATO	PINEAPPLE	17
106	TOMATO	CHEROKEE PURPLE	16
107	TOMATO	STRIPED GERMAN	13
108	TOMATO	MOSKVITCH	13
109	TOMATO	GARDEN TREASURE	16
110	TOMATO	GARDEN GEM	16
111	CORN	ALLURE	16
112	CORN	ALLURE	16
113	CORN	ALLURE	16
114
115	LETTUCE	ROMAINE, RED MARSHALL	17
116	LETTUCE	NEVADA	17

I also keep index cards for each week of planting or transplanting, with notes...

The number in the upper right is the weeks before or after the average last frost date (April 15th here, but I round it to weekends for simplification.  A few days doesn't matter.  And, as you can see, I change the weeks sometimes.  I also have a set of cards counting backwards from the average FIRST frost date for Fall plantings.

I keep all the empty seed packets.  Sometimes there is good information, but it also tells me where I got the seeds from. 

Ancestry

I mentioned "not finding English DNA" in my recent test.  A friend pointed out that there IS no specific English DNA.  The English haven't been "English" long enough for that.  As Americans and Australians haven't.

Aw man, I should have realized that...  So I'm, 43% German and French because that's where the "English" came from.  And the 38% Scot and Welsh is the interesting part.  The minor parts Iberian and Middle East are probably from when the Moslems came across North Africa and conquored Spain and my Southern French ancestors inter-married. 

The Balkan part is still really interesting, though.

Random Stuff

It's cold here (for my area).  12F (-11C) twice this week, and another week of that to come.  That is close to record lows here and even then, it is usually just a night or tho.  Extended cold like that is very unusual.

Trump made a joke about "Global Warming" being (therefore) obviously a hoax.  Does he remember that this day last year, it reached 70F here?  Probably not.  I think "last week" is a vague concept to him.

I watched a retrospective of 2017 on MSNBC yesterday.  2017 was more depressing than I realized! 

I am beginning to hate the hawk that took up residence in my neighborhood.  My birdfeeder is becoming a deadly attraction to the birds.  Yeah, yeah, "nature", etc, etc...  But I want my small birds more than I want a hawk around.  I've seen it pick off 2 male cardinals, and it's not like I'm staring out the window all day.  I had 12 male cardinals around last Christmas.  The most I counted the past few days was 4.  I'm researching anti-raptor netting. 

New food thing I discovered!  Raw large deshelled shrimp tossed with garlic and cherry tomatoes, and olive oil.  Raw broccoli florets tossed with olive oil and lemon zest.    Set on a baking pan at 400F for 15 minutes.  Served with fried potato wedges with minced  shallots and garlic...

The neighbors have those new star shower lights.  Nice fir the first hour.  Then boring.  I like my stationary strings better. 

The garden catalogs are arriving.  Time to take out my seed tray and see what I need for the new season.  I want to buy a few grafted heirloom tomatoes to see if they are worth it, but companies that self them a few at a time have bad ratings and the good places sell them 100 at a time.  So I'll try grafting my own again.

Saw the movie 'Interstellar' last night.  It made no sense at the end.  I understood what they tried to do, but "FAIL"...

Am still trying to design a mailbox notifier.  Something that let's me know when the mailbox has been opened.  I could buy one, but that's not the point.  I want to figure one out myself. 

Can't seem to win at Scrabble online.  I win until my opponent suddenly gets a 7 letter 50 point bonus near the end. 

Waiting for Spring...

Holiday Lighting Outtakes

Apparently, I can't take pictures of lights at all...