Notes From A Bear's Journey

Becoming Baby     It's an old saying, especially for those of you dealing with an aging parent or relative.  The body slowly staggers a bit in walking, the bladder starts to lose a bit of control and diapers appear, and for the most part, learning again becomes difficult.  On the other side of the coin, new experiences are again fascinating, as are new friendships.  Money and possessions become of little concern, while warmth and food and being taken care now take center stage...we start to again enjoy being babied.     As my mother approaches her sixth week without rehab or seeing a primary doctor (my adventures of such were written earlier , for those of you new to these posts or just wanting to discover what might possibly await you when you move a parent across state lines), there are a few more things to pass on, a few more discoveries of what you may want to watch out for (and I'm sure there'll be more to come).  So let's start...

Sand and Snow     One couldn't help but watch as the snow fell the other day, the flakes piling atop one another until they began to become enough in volume to clog my snowblower.  And the weight that built up as I tried to shovel the corners and stairs...it was all wondrous, that something so tiny and light, could not only come down in the billions (enough to cumulatively cause such heft and volume), but that each could be so individual.  You've likely heard that phrase, that no two snowflakes are alike, the result of crystal formation and fractals and all sorts of other geologic and physics equations.  But it got me wondering about why, when even our massive petabyte computers are unable to create a random number past a certain point, the universe is able to do so en masse...not only snowflakes, but fingerprints, diatoms, sand particles, lip prints (which, along with retinal scans, are proving quite accurate as a means of validating identifications)....

Staying or Exiting     Yesterday was cold and windy in much of the nation, particularly the northeast portion of the U.S. which received nearly 2 feet of snow (.6 meters) in a single day.  Last month, our own city received 22 inches of snow in a day (.55 meters)...and the snow continues as I write this.  But even as the snow battered the east coast, my wife and I were warmly nestled in a restaurant with our mothers, her's nearing 87 and mine well past 90; and other than a good chunk of hearing loss (and mothers being mothers and sometimes testing our patience), both moms are in good shape.  Amazing.  And for some reason, the visits (now common) brought to mind (again) the quickening passage of time...was I merely taking all of this for granted, that our moms would be here for quite awhile, or that we would be here for quite awhile?  Time certainly did appear to be flying by, even as it somehow appeared to be standing still.  Close to four ...

The Physical Costs     The other day saw the completion of my physical, my first return visit in nearly three years, a schedule in keeping with my doctor's request to not have one done every year (for some, an annual physical is almost mandatory due to ongoing health conditions).  In my case, the visit was almost mandatory for had I passed the three year mark, I would have been dropped from his patient roles (something to keep in mind for those of you also not visiting your doc regularly), and since he no longer accepts new patients, would have left me out there searching for a new primary care physician (cue music: Mission Impossible).     It's a good thing to have a physical workup now and then, your blood and urine samples given several days ahead of time, the results read back to you, usually with an EKG (good to at least have one electrocardiogram graph done so that there is a baseline record of your normal heart rhythm to compare should ther...

Planets Align So Rare     There's magic in the air, or so said the song made popular decades ago as sung by Olivia Newton John.  And indeed, to the ancients (even the current ancients like me), looking up into the night sky must have seemed like magic, the stars suddenly brightening as the clouds left and the surrounding light darkened.  But an even more puzzling piece of that magic happened when the stars --or in this case, planets-- aligned.  When they occasionally did align back to back, many prophets predicted a cataclysm for the earth, the supposed strain of the combined gravities pulling our oceans apart (one such alignment of just Mars, Venus and the moon a year ago brought this from the U.K.'s Express : Unusual alignments of the planets has often been linked to what some believe will be the “End of Days”.  Rare formations such as this have been the prelude to “blood moons” - terrifying events which some Christians believe mark the second com...

When Pigs Fly     Boy, don't they (the pigs) wish that they could.  It's an old phrase in the U.S., one meaning something that is impossible, similar to the phrase, "that'll be the day."   But pigs and their resulting products are slowly gaining ground in this world, reaching number three in our meat consumption index, right behind chicken and ducks (rabbits are currently number four but rapidly gaining on pigs as far as the meat humans eat).  Think about it...bacon, pulled pork, baby (really??) back ribs, brisket, pig ears for dogs, Black Forest ham, barbeques and of course, Spam.  And while overall beef consumption has dropped nearly 40% in the U.S., pork is steadily making a gain back to its old days.  One restaurant chain, Applebee's, saw an "instant hit" when it brought its Triple Hog Dare Ya sandwich, loaded with pulled pork, ham and bacon, into its menu offerings.  Said Bloomberg Businessweek in a report on restaurants' increas...

Books Kindled     The arguments for and against all make sense; a Kindle or similar e-reader lets you download books instantly (indeed, my library now has an entire section on their site dedicated to the new arrivals of downloadable books), the back-lighting can be adjusted for day or night reading, you don't have to lug around a ton of books when travelling, and once done (finished or not) you can simply hit the delete button and off it goes, never to clutter your bookshelf.  And of course, the arguments against an e-reader are almost exactly opposite those listed above, some of the reasons making sense and some just a matter of stubbornness and not logic.  Some have written ( as I have ) about the change, the lack of a "feel" of paper on your fingers or the heft of holding a book, the decoration of a finished book being added to a collection on a shelf, the giving of a book passed onward.  But overall, reading is reading and while I might prefer the old...

Soy Vey!     To begin, apologies to the Yiddish pun crowd; but the phrase captured the surprise at discovering that soybean oil might have been part of a marketing campaign whose benefits perhaps weren't as beneficial as originally presented (think back to the days of touting the benefits of margarine replacing butter).  Only now are the studies being released that the linoleic acid (once touted as necessary for our well-being) might actually be contributing to a large part of the growing obesity problem throughout the world...and that oil is getting into us, but not in the way you would think.     One of the reports of this came from a piece in Mother Earth News as written by Richard Manning.  Starting in the mid-1960s, he writes, the use of soybean oil jumped a thousand-fold in 40 years (while other vegetable oil usage such as corn, olive and coconut remained flat), and much of this made its way into animals raised for meat: Today’s industr...

Lion Bones     It seems awful that one has to have these words in the heading, the reader almost hoping that the words are merely some play on a country song title such as Lyin' Bones.  Unfortunately, as the tiger population continues to plummet, the demand for the supposed aphrodisiac qualities of tigers and their bones and sexual organs has now moved to lions, and with devastating effects. Says conservationist Derek Joubert in an interview with National Geographic : Actually, they’re [marketed] as tiger bones, not lion bones, and used in a ritualized way in wine to celebrate Chinese New Year [because they are thought to have medicinal properties].  The lion-bone trade is a new threat that could have been avoided.  No one bought lion bones until five years ago, when South Africa [began] allowing permits to sell the bones of about 30 animals.  By now it is up to over 1,000 a year.  In an earlier statement from his foundation, he added:...

Mind the Gap     Much has been made of the widening gap between rich and poor, in many cases, focusing on the top one tenth of the one percent...the rest, despite their billions, are basically wannabes, likely unable to ever attain the riches this upper, upper crust control.  But dropping back down to earth, we minions are also feeling a bit below the graph, what with U.S. presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, describing the "middle class" as those making less that $250,000 per year.  For me, that is quite a wealthy middle class...and if you're one of the many struggling to live on $50,000 per year, or maybe substantially less, where does that put you?  Is there a light at the end of the tunnel, especially when you watch cartload after cartload of items sail past you at Costco and wonder, how are those people doing it?  Said author Simon Reid-Henry in his new book, How to Spread the World's Wealth Beyond Corporate Elites , "average wealth in the ...