MickinMD

I learned the Borg are copycats while waiting to see my doctor for a type II diabetes blood test follow-up and flu shot. I got to my doctor's office at 11 am for an 11:15 appointment. Supposedly, a new system was going into effect and I'd have to fill out a bunch of paperwork, have my ID and medical insurance cards scanned, etc. The receptionist said, "Is all your insurance stuff the same?" "Yes." "Then you're good." So, I prepared for a long wait when, to my surprise, around 11:20 am a nurse called my name escorted me to a scale, took my blood pressure, checked my meds, etc. At 11:30 pm the nurse left me sitting in a room, saying the doctor would see me "shortly." At 12:30 pm the doctor arrived with apologies. Lucky I had my smartphone loaded with games and books. I spent most of the time reading some of A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, which was created first as a radio show in 1974. The main characters, Beteguesian Ford and Earthling Arthur, hitch a ride on a space freighter where the cooks let them on but when the Vogons in charge catch them, they throw them off into space, with the Vogan Shouting Officer shouting over and over, "Resistance is useless." I thought Star Trek invented the Borg's slogan, "Resistance is futile," but now I see they copied it - the Star Trek "Universal Translator" subbing "futile" for "useless" so they'd get away with being copycats. At least I learned something new during my one hour wait. Another spaceship rescues Ford and Arthur. So Doc Forman and I discussed my plan to limit calories to 2000/day and roughly follow the Mediterranean Diet, which Doc said was getting rave reviews as #1 at a conference he recently attended. Doc got his B.S. degree at Penn State and was happy with its 59-0 thrashing of Maryland Friday. At 12:50 pm we parted company and Doc said, "Someone will be in "soon" to give you the full-strength flu shot designed for us old-people." Ar 1:23 pm a nurse came into the room without apologies. I stood up and walked to a table to sign the required form ok'ing the shot. "You can keep standing," she said. "There! All done. Bye! Have a nice day!" I barely felt the shot and it's barely sore now, 4 hours later, so I guess its more different than recent years' flu shots which often make my shoulder throb for a couple days due to the current antibodies from past flu shots reacting to the dead flu protein sheaths in the new vaccine. So today I learned "shortly" means 60 minutes, "soon" means 23 minutes, and "Resistance is futile/useless" is from the Vogan Shouting Officers list of sayings and not invented by the Borg. Oh, and soon after I learned the jar of Cibo Naturals "Organic Sundried Tomato Pesto with Basil" served on chicken breast samples at Costco and delicious, is on sale: $2.50 off the regular price of $9.69 for a 22 oz. jar - still on the expensive side but sooo good!

I do lick my fingers while cooking if something good and safely cooked adheres to them - I'm careful to avoid cross-contamination and raw meat, etc. But I always immediately wash them before touching anything.

I made it to Monday. The leftovers are fine, though I think the large amount of gravy I made helps. I don't know why I chose to cook 3 lb of meat that I could replace for $10-$15 except that when I held the excellent looking -due I'm sure to red dye- meat in my hand it felt like such a waste to toss it.

This is what I meant in my original post when I wrote "toss after 4 months" b.s. sponsored by the meat producing companies. The U.S. Dept. of Agriculture has LONG misled the American public about foods in order to support the agriculture industry, going back to the "carrots are good for your eyes" b.s. that was originally invented to cover-up the accuracy of the Norden Bomb Sight in WW2 - the bombadiers were eating carrots. Throw away frozen steak after 4 months or frozen ham after 1 month? No way!

I once had to run my nephew's early childhood music class because the teacher arrived very shaken after he and a bunch of men saved a kid from a pit bull. The kid was going to need years of surgery. Maryland passed a law making the owners personally responsible for any damage done by dogs that had any %age pit bull in them. But opponents got it declared unconstitutional. Still, those dogs can do so much damage with their powerful jaws they should be in the same category as bears, tigers, and other strong animals who might be very nonaggressive in temperament, but if something sets them off they often do tremendous damage.

Maybe they're planning to do multiple tests where some time between them is necessary. I had three tests for cardiac & stress tests, each done on consecutive days: a radioactive dye test where the blood flow through the heart was monitored, another one where a technician watched my heart valves open and close, and a treadmill test.

Burfect did a similar thing week 4. He's done such things so many times he should not be playing in the NFL.

I used to enjoy giving out about 125 little candy bars: Milky Ways, Snickers, Almond Joys, Twix, etc. to the trick-or-treaters. Then, around the beginnings of the 2000's, people started taking kids to Halloween Parties because of what's happened to decent behavior in America. By about 2015 I gave out 6 candy bars - two each to kids who were about 16 years old. It got to the point where it wasn't worth the effort. Since then, I help my brother escort a dozen or so friends of his now-11-year old son around several blocks of his above avg. income community, which is centered on a street with a lot of dead-end streets branching off so there's very little traffic except the local kids. They still do Halloween there as it used to be, except with many more elaborate, scary things at the houses.

Well, since in order to get to the doorway of a room you have to walk halfway to it first, then halfway of what's left, then halfway of what's left, etc, etc, so that there are an infinite number of halfways, how is it possible that we walk can walk to doorways when it is mathematically impossible to do an infinite number of things in a finite amount of time?

The single stupidest thing was when I was getting ready to go out of state to grad school at IIT in Chicago and went on one last date with a girl named Jane who had been a fellow student at UMBC. We planned to go to a "Fiddler's Convention," basically a Bluegrass Festival. Jane phoned me and said, "Come to my house early. My brother says there are these guys sliding off the 50-foot high Atkisson Dam into 2 feet of water at the bottom." Of course, I had to show off and slide, too. It scared the crap out of me - one of the veteran sliders told me to put my hands over my eyes just before I hit the water so the impact wouldn't knock my eyes out. But I did the slide and survived.

I smoked since about age 20 until I was almost 45. I rationalized that it doesn't kill everyone who smokes. Then, the fact that my parents were the youngest of 9 and next to youngest of 6 helped me motivate myself to quit. I had grandparents, aunts and uncles, and even cousins who aged before me and by the time I was in my 40's I realized that EVERY smoker was dying at least a decade younger than the non-smokers. So, in a summer's week when I was going to travel to my cousin's country home - she and her husband had quit smoking a couple years earlier - and help then prepare the base for a screened-in gazebo, I chose that time - away from all my smoking relatives and friends - to quit. My last cigarette was Aug. 9, 1995.

Beautiful! Thanks for sharing!

Tne Browns looked excellent today, especially considering their two starting corners were substitutes. Our Ravens stunk. I think they went in thinking about being 7 point favorites and not taking things seriously. Lamar Jackson has looked so-so the last two games.

It has calories. If you were stranded somewhere and only had beer for sustenance, it would probably sustain you for a drunken month if necessary, though it might raise havoc with your digestive system.

“Gluten free foods have been rising in popularity and many people seem to think, ‘It's gluten free so it must be healthy.’ This is not necessarily the case,” said Chong. The biggest risk of going gluten-free is missing out on a healthy, well-balanced diet. Chong pointed out that there are many gluten-free products on grocery store shelves that are just as unhealthy as their wheat-based counterparts. Examples includes bread and bread products like waffles, pancakes, crackers, snack chips and pretzels made with white rice flour, tapioca flour and/or potato starch, cakes and cookies. Tallmadge wrote, "Gluten-free foods, especially refined foods processed to make them gluten-free (Many made with potato starch or rice starch), cheat the consumer out of the many health benefits of whole grains … and can be seriously lacking critical nutrients such as fiber, iron, zinc, folate, niacin, thiamine, riboflavin, calcium, vitamin B12 and phosphorus." Source: https://www.livescience.com/53061-gluten-free-diet-facts.html

I won't pass up a free Bufferfinger, but I'm not big on peanut butter candy bars. As a diabetic, I love the Kirkland Nut Bars because they're fully-sized candy bars, taste good with "cocoa drizzle, sea salt, almonds, cashews, and pecans and don't make my blood sugar spike. But when I want to toss caution to the wind, Milky Way Midnight - formerly called Milky Way Dark - is my favorite. I'm also a big fan of Twix.

I'm getting my flu shot on my birthday, Tuesday, Oct. 1st when I got for my diabetes blood test follow-up. They're saying one of the likely strains this year, that the vaccine covers, whacks the avg. person much harder than normal. I caught the flu the first two years I taught high school - where you've got kids sticking their noses in your face and saying, "I feel sick." So I started getting the flu shot(s) every year thereafter. A local study showed that teachers in our countywide school system, the nations' 35th largest school system, showed that teachers who got flu shots every year tended to retire with over 100 unused sick days and those who didn't averaged less than 40. Of course, it could be that those who got the shots also tended to take better care of their health in general. I retired with 175 unused sick days.

Dany is awesome! Even Jennifer Lopez commented on being a great fan of "The Mother of Dragons" in one of her interviews about doing the next Super Bowl's halftime show - maybe she'll have Emilia Clarke in it!

What is it trying to summon, rain?

It's unusual if we get a dusting before mid-December and sometimes we'll have a 2-6 inches of snow for Christmas. Jan. & Feb. might have a few weeks in with highs in the 60's and 70's or a couple two-foot snows, several lesser snows, and mostly highs in the 20's or less. We usually get snow the first week of April, when the ground's too warm for it to stick on the roads, yet almost everyone says, "Can you imagine it? We're getting snow in April!"

I made it to Sunday. No stomach ache, no intestinal cramps, no diarrhea. The chuck roast is so tender it falls apart with a fork, so I'm going to shred some of it and have open-faced gravy bread & beef on onion rolls with baby gold potatoes and carrots, quickly nuked during a break in the Browns at Ravens game.

You can make a better tasting one. I don't know how. Since this one tastes very good to me, I'm happy with it.

My guess is that the tongue wins the battle with the mind, which is stabbed in the back by that traitor rationalization. Additionally, rationalization is supported by the fact that most studies are not conclusive, "suggest" something is good or bad for you, then the media treats it like a hard fact. Remember when rats given the equivalent of 900 diet colas per day developed cancer from saccharine and it ended up being banned for a while? Some of us (or at least me) had two solid weeks of headaches withdrawing from an addiction to coffee when it was said to be bad for your health in the 80's. Now it's said by the experts that moderate coffee drinking extends life. I usually drink 20 oz. per day and if they change their minds again, I'm still drinking it. We were supposed to stay away from egg yolks because of huge amounts of bad cholesterol, but now they say sorry, we researchers were wrong about that. Sodium was bad, now some say ok - but others say only if you have a lot of potassium. Yay, bananas! In the 1980's THE diet - which supposedly let men with heart problems start running 10K races - was the Pritikin Promise. 85% carbs! Now the fad against carbs is so ridiculous some food packages brag in big letters "Carb Free!" Rationalization and tongue taste buds are a 3 touchdown favorite by now. If you look at the Mediterranean Diet, roughly equal calories from fats, proteins, and carbs, it's fairly close to the 1990's National Institutes of Health recommendations of 45% Carbs, 30% Protein, and 25% Fats. Both, of course, avoid bad fats. Of course, with so many of us being diabetics, carbs tend to be argued against because of quick absorption into the blood stream. Still, the Mediterranean Diet is what I try (and often fail!) to emulate, trying to minimize high-GI Index carbs. The most balanced thing I've ever read about what to eat is the Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating and it tells you that advances in understanding what's good and bad for the diet are a "cha-cha" - we go two steps forward and then find we have to take one back because we were wrong about something. It condemns things that have very solid research behind them like trans-fats and no fiber or good things like fish compared to red meat. But it holds its judgement on things not clearly understood.

When I was President of my communities homeowner's association, I often made the same kinds of suggestions for road, stop sign, etc. problems. The previous President, who was now Chairman of the Board and showing 30 year-old me the ropes, told me to handle all the problems I could myself because it would make me look valuable to people and help me if I ran for political office. For example, one woman called to tell me her street light was out. I told her to walk out to the telephone pole the light was on, read the 6-digit metal sign nailed to the pole, and I gave her the phone number to call to report it. My advisor admonished me: "You shouldn't have done that. Don't let them know how easy it is. You should have gone to the pole, read the 6-digit number and called it in yourself. Then you'd have that family's and maybe that street's vote if you run for office." But I didn't listen.

Best wishes! Hope the hard work pays off in the great satisfaction you deserve!