Susan's Scribblings the Blog

Monthly Archives: June 2015

• Love That Freedom

  Posted at 2:52 am by kayewer, on June 28, 2015

  It will soon be Independence Day. It’s great to be free, but sometimes it comes at a great price. Our servicemen make sure we can continue to be free, and our laws are designed to help us keep to a standard which can help us not allow ourselves to get out of hand, because true freedom still comes with the burdens of conscience and common sense.

  I will be cooking up the burgers and potato salad, flying the flag outside my home and enjoying the parades and fireworks. Some people go to the beach or a campground. Some don’t go anywhere or do anything. That’s fine. We’re free to do that.

  While you’re out and about or sitting and relaxing on this historic holiday, remember that it took a lot of bloodshed and compromises and hard work to get our country to where it is now. We must continue to work hard at it every day so we can stay free.

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• I Am Not Buying Apple Products

  Posted at 4:17 am by kayewer, on June 21, 2015

  I don’t own an Apple product. Not an IPod, IPhone, computer, watch or anything else they might have on the market. Still I am surrounded by Apple stuff every day, and Apple users have laughed at me.

  I’m not buying any Apple products.

  The newest commercials feature exquisite photos taken by–I assume–normal people using their IPhone cameras. I have never figured out how to use the camera on my Windows phone, but I carry a real pocket camera around anyway, so it doesn’t matter.

  Why does a phone need a camera, anyway? It eats up battery time and storage space. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear the over-the-top soggy and rainy weather we’ve had lately is due to too much stuff stored in that infamous cloud. Yes I know; it’s just a figure of speech, but if you can’t see where it’s stored, does it still exist? And what happens if somebody finds your cloud? Gives that Rolling Stones tune a new meaning, doesn’t it?

  Hey you, get out of my cloud storage!!

  Anyway, now Apple has a watch that you must get custom fitted and comes with an electronic personal trainer that eggs you on to bigger and more exhausting feats of daily exercise. About two years ago, my company gave out free pedometers, so I keep the battery fresh in that little guy, and it counts my steps just fine. Two LED indicators are missing, but I can tell an 8 from a backwards 3, so it doesn’t matter.

  I see lines of people in Apple stores, and the workers are exhausted. My bosses joke with me that nobody is in line at the Windows store. Good. I can get service immediately.

  When the day comes when all the Apple products go on the fritz, I’ll come charging in on my white horse with my Windows all ready to go, and then you’ll all be sorry.

  Don’t throw Apples at my Windows: I’ll make applesauce.

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• Hemoglobin Hostage

  Posted at 1:51 am by kayewer, on June 14, 2015

  There is something about going to have lab work done that puts a lot of us off our game. It’s a part of being healthy, of course, but it’s a complicated process to submit bodily fluid samples or–horrors!!!–let somebody poke your veins with a needle.

  People who are on cholesterol medication, for example, know that it’s important to take your statin every day to keep the bad LDL cholesterol down and promote good HDL cholesterol. They need testing to check liver function. People on blood thinners need to get checked regularly to make sure they have a good circulatory system (though new medications are making that more rare).

  So when my supply of medication started to run low, I called for a refill and found out they wouldn’t send any more until I had my lab work done to make sure my body was functioning.

  Guys, if my body was not functioning, could I put in a request for a medication refill? I’d be un-functioning, as in dead.

  Still, the unsympathetic guardians of whole body health demanded I go bleed into a tube for the cause. So I went early one morning and sat in the waiting room at the local lab. Cell phones were forbidden (no email or gaming) and the magazines were from 1997. I was hungry because I had to fast for the lab work, and the program they had on the lobby TV monitor was doing a segment on cookout food. Since all the other patients appeared to have needed to fast before visiting the lab, we were averting our eyes from the rack of ribs. They looked great at 7 AM.

  When I got to my assigned drawing station (or cubicle of torment), a sign read “NOTE: Students in training. Your sample may be drawn by one of these students.” Sure students have to learn somewhere, but hire some practice subjects with gigantic, juicy vessels from which they can jab at will, not my petite tertiary roads on the blood vessel highway. I hate coming out of a lab looking like a junkie. Once I was poked four times before a spot yielded results, and I had bruises the size of Rhode Island for a week. Prior to a procedure on another occasion I had four technicians with warm towels and relaxing music trying and failing to get anywhere. If somebody knows what works like Barry White for veins, let me know.

  Fortunately I did not get a student; the phlebotomist did admit she was getting over a cold, but she got lucky on the first try, and I didn’t get a bruise.

  My pills were ready the next day. So I’ll be good to go for a little while. Also, I went out for some good cookout food.

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• Photo Synceth This

  Posted at 1:35 am by kayewer, on June 7, 2015

  I’ve been playing around with digital photography (but not on my phone, because I can’t figure out how). Back in the good old days before digital photography, taking pictures was a matter of good focus and what speed of film you used. Now the camera is so smart that it knows the speed without a roll of film, but the rest of the playing field is now complicated by rules which would fill a professional sports manual.

  Before getting off a single shot, I’m tasked with learning what environment I’m in, what the conditions are, what might move in the shot, what objects from far away need to be sharp and what objects in the foreground could be a bit fuzzy, what special effect(s) I might want and how much control I want over my camera. With manual cameras, I focused and clicked; now I have a checklist as tall as Shaquille O’Neal. How does a pro get a decent Pulitzer winner of a shot if he has to go through all that rigmarole?

  The saving grace of a digital camera, for those of us who might want to shorten that checklist to, say, Verne Troyer size (with all due respect, Mr. Troyer), one can use various degrees of automatic control features that let the camera decide some, most or all of the actions to take to get a good photo. This works well when learning, except for one minor detail: the shutter button.

  In the old days, one click did the trick. Now the shutter presses halfway to “compose” the shot, then all the way to capture the image. By that time, your subject has packed up and gone home, and you wind up with a blurry, jumpy photo. Also you realize you should have mounted the camera on a tripod.

  The process of learning the finer arts of digital photography won’t deter me, since I have no desire to stop learning. However, cameras may go further into high tech by the time I think I’ve learned it all. Sad that progress always seem to go faster than we do.

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