Fresh, Hot Wastes of Time

Last night for my birthday, my husband got us tickets to see The Producers, which was most excellent. Before the show, we went to Eastside Cafe to eat. We were enjoying a happy meal, surrounded by kids having early dinners on their graduation nights. A good time. Until.

A couple is seated at a table near us. The man has his arm wrapped in a dishtowel, ice pack, and something else. He keeps fiddling with the towel to scratch underneath. A little weird, but hey – everyone gets poison ivy once in a while, right?

Then a little while later, the woman goes to use the facilities. While she is gone, the man digs some Caladryl out of her purse. He then proceeds to lift up his shirt at the dinner table and applies Caladryl to his stomach.

That’s disgusting. What kind of person would think that is appropriate behavior for the dinner table, much less one in public at a nice restaurant? I’m dumbstruck by people sometimes.

If someone out there would like to take over handling the Austinbloggers webring, please let me know. I’m over-involved in too many things right now and am trying to simplify. It’s not a big deal; usually about 2-3 ring applications come in per week; you check to see if they have the right ring code, and go to the Ringsurf web page to move them to the members list. Every once in a while check the members to make sure everyone has their codes still, or hasn’t moved sites.

I just did major maintenance on the Austinbloggers webring. 21 current members did not have the web code on their pages, so I moved them to the queue and emailed them the ring HTML. I also added in members from the queue who had the proper code, but there are 6 sites left who did not have the code. There were a few I ended up zapping completely because the domain names were invalid. That makes 27 people in the queue who don’t have the right code (most have none, some just have the wrong site ID) and 50 people who do. I think that some people might be confused because the meta-site is the same name as the webring, but they are not the same. A link to the meta-site does not send traffic through to the other members of the ring.

Webrings are normally used to draw traffic to your site. People see the ring links on your page, think, “Oh, a link to more bloggers who are in Austin… let’s see what the next guy has to say” and click through to the next site. If the next site doesn’t have the ring code, the guy who’s down the line doesn’t get the visitors, and so it’s generally unfair. Think of it like you live on a nice happy river and get lots of company from the people paddling by on their canoes, until suddenly someone upstream decides to build a dam and you’re left sitting next to a mudflat and nobody wants to come see you anymore and your children are crying and lonely and all you can do is sit there and wish your neighbor would take the dam out and why why why, oh the hell with it, might as well just indoctrinate the kids with Disney and Barney and never socialize again because people are inherently bad anyway, what’s the use?

So put your ring code in. Do it for the children.

Last night I noticed that honeybees have moved into the stone wall in the front yard. Apparently since the Africanized bees have hit Austin, beekeepers don’t really come out to take away bees anymore. People now suggest killing the bees rather than remove them. I really hate to hear this, because although I’m allergic to them, they are so beneficial. We’ve got to do something though – at any given moment during the day, around 10 bees are flying in or out of the entrance to the hive, which is around 4 feet from the front door. Hopefully they will not attack the yard guys when they come out tomorrow. I’ve emailed them to let ’em know they might want to skip a week.

If anyone reading this in Austin wants a go at transporting them, let me know! I wonder if we can dismantle the wall to get a taste of Hunny.

Dear Austin,

I realize that sometimes traffic laws and regulations are considered optional. They are, in fact, important. Particularly the following:

§ 545.154. Vehicle Entering or Leaving Limited-Access or Controlled-Access Highway

An operator on an access or feeder road of a limited-access or controlled-access highway shall yield the right-of-way to a vehicle entering or about to enter the access or feeder road from the highway or leaving or about to leave the access or feeder road to enter the highway.

Do you know what this means? This means that if you are on the access road, you must yield to traffic exiting the highway!

I realize that San Antonio has marked each and every highway exit with “Yield” signs on the access road, but that is because they caved in to the ignorant masses of people who don’t seem to care about the silly old law. San Antonio has spent thousands of taxpayer dollars on those signs. Austin cannot afford this. Austin doesn’t even have a proper east-west highway. Our exit ramps are built precariously close to where we need to turn. Try exiting Bee Cave Rd. off Mopac, or MLK off I35 during rush hour if you don’t understand what I mean.

I hereby issue my ultimatum. If you do not get your damned car the hell out of my way when I’m exiting the highway, I will run you down. And I drive a Suburban.

That is all.

Does anyone have experience with Austin nursing homes? Who to avoid, who’s good, who’s depressing, who’s cheerful? I’d appreciate any comments you have to offer.

I’ve been looking through the Nursing Home Ratings in Texas and it’s just depressing. There are degrees of bad things nursing homes can do. “Actual harm with potential for minimal harm” is worse than “Actual harm with potential for minimal harm that is not immediate jeopardy”. Keeping residents strapped down, known as “The facility did not keep each resident free from physical restraints, unless needed for medical treatment”, qualifies as “No actual harm with potential for More than Minimal Harm that is not Immediate Jeopardy”. In order to be in compliance with state standards, errors in dispensing prescription drugs must be less than 5%. That includes wrong drug, wrong dose, and wrong time. Like what happened to this woman, who was prescribed chlorpromazine for depression, but the pharmacy gave her chlorpropamide, which lowers blood sugar, instead. She died.

If you’re caught in that middle land between wealth and poverty, you’ll end up paying $150/day out of your pocket. Medicare doesn’t cover nursing homes. If it’s just one member of a married couple going in, you can divide your assets in half, and the spouse who’s going into care has to spend every dime before Medicaid will cover costs. And if you have more than $180,000 in assets, you can’t get Medicaid at all. Older people have been working and saving all their lives, working full time for 50 years or so. Are there that many who really have less than $180k?

It’s a depressing concept, but necessary for some. No need to make matters worse by putting a loved one into a facility that beats patients. So on behalf of a friend, I’m searching for recommendations.

So I forgot to buy Blue Man Group tickets. They’re sold out now. The professional ticket scalpers are selling them for $120 a piece, when they retailed at $35. Guess we’re going to miss out on the concert. Someone tell me how it was!

This summer was the first reported death in Travis County from West Nile Virus. We live in a particularly mosquito-y neighborhood. Last month I walked into the back yard at dusk. In the space of 90 seconds I had 13 mosquito bites.

Last night around midnight I let the dogs out and saw something moving around over by a bag of old dog food we have by the garage and keep forgetting to throw away. I eased closer and saw that it was a bird. Odd, I thought, to see a bird out and eating at night, but maybe he just had the munchies. Well, he ended up staying around all night long, eventually camping out on the back steps and occasionally nibbling on a bug. He didn’t really fly, he just hopped around occasionally. He let me get within 2 feet of him with a camera. Needless to say, something wasn’t right with him. It finally dawned on me that he might have West Nile. Looking up the virus on the Department of Health’s web page, it says they’re particularly interested in blue jays who are found dead.

This morning he was gone. I don’t know if he wandered off to die. Hub searched the yard and didn’t find anything. We’ll have to keep an eye out for him. All I know is that I’m not going out at dusk without a liberal slathering of Deet. My vet said he thinks that infected birds have symptoms such as muddy thinking and inability to fly. Sounds like our guy.