Recycle Your Eclipse Glasses

Posted on August 27, 2017 by Jim deMaine

What have you done with your eclipse glasses? Please don’t throw them away—because many of the glasses are certified for safe use for up to three years. Which is good news for people, especially kids, in South America and Asia who might not be able to afford or otherwise acquire new eclipse glasses. Those two regions will experience a total solar eclipse in 2019. And a California nonprofit called Astronomers Without Borders wants your old glasses to share with schools and those kids. Click here to read more from the Scientific American.

Sue Van Leuven sent a note that she is “willing to collect the glasses and send them in when there is an address. People can put them in my Skybox #1503.”

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Margaret Fuller and the seaside spiritual experience

Posted on August 26, 2017 by Jim deMaine

2010 Coronado sunsets and dog beach - 2 010

Photo from the beach in Coronado, California

Editor’s Note: I didn’t realize until recently what an interesting and progressive woman Margaret Fuller was. Very much a part of the Transcendentalist movement I found her thoughts very profound. Here is a selection of quotes. The following essay by Maria Paplova more fully explores Fuller’s thoughts about the seaside.

From Brain Pickings by Maria Paplova: “Who has known the ocean? Neither you nor I, with our earth-bound senses, know the foam and surge of the tide,” conservationist and marine biologist Rachel Carson wrote in the 1937 masterpiece that inspired a new aesthetic of lyrical science writing. A century earlier, another woman of towering genius, immense moral courage, and uncommonly poetic prose offered a different but complementary perspective on the ocean’s invitation to human self-transcendence.

In mid-August of 1839, five years before she mobilized the women’s emancipation movement with her landmark treatise Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 29-year-old Margaret Fuller (May 23, 1810–July 19, 1850) — who, like Rachel Carson, published her first works under the ungendered initials S.M. Fuller — drew on her Transcendentalist roots in a stunning letter to an ill friend, found in The Letters of Margaret Fuller, Vol. II: 1839–41 (public library). More than a century before the German philosopher Josef Pieper’s increasingly timely argument for why leisure is the basis of culture, Fuller makes a beautiful case for the bodily and spiritual rewards of a seaside vacation:

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Why we’re crabby

Posted on August 26, 2017 by Jim deMaine

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Resident’s annual book give-away (and take-away) October 1st

Posted on August 26, 2017 by Jim deMaine

Our 3rd Annual Book Give-away will be on October 1

From Betsy Hanson: This means you need to start right now to screen your book shelves for all your surplus books and DVDs.  We will start collecting them on Sept. 26, and time flies too fast at our age!  It will again be held in the Bistro, where all residents, staff and guests may select as many free books as desired.  This event’s popularity depends on your donations, so start making space for your new additions now!  Books not pre-selected by the Library Committee or claimed at the Give-away will be delivered to the Seattle Public Library’s Book Sale.

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If the winds had been the other direction

Posted on August 25, 2017 by William Calvin

athabasca_amo_2017226 During those BC fires which provided smoke to Washington State in early August, the wind direction farther north at Lake Athabasca was out of the south causing smoke to accumulate in the Arctic.  You can see the situation intensify over a week’s time:canada_omp_2017227

The mountain pine beetles surviving milder winters (climate change) is one cause of this, producing vast tracts of dead trees, dried out and ready to burn.

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Amazon Plans to Lower Some Prices at Whole Foods

Posted on August 24, 2017 by Jim deMaine

From the NYT:  “SEATTLE — The era of Whole Paycheck, the derisive nickname for Whole Foods, may be drawing to a close. Amazon, which takes control of the upscale grocer on Monday, intends to slash prices the same day.

The significance of the move goes well beyond the price of organic avocados, baby kale and rotisserie chickens, all of which will cost less on Monday than on Sunday. Rather, it is an outsize way for Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, to announce his plan to shake up the grocery industry and take on competitors like Walmart and Kroger.

Click here for the full article.

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Justice

Posted on August 24, 2017 by Jim deMaine

Image result for new yorker cartoons

 

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Hearing aids at the Mall – progress in much less expensive hearing aids

Posted on August 24, 2017 by Jim deMaine

From the NYT: “A few years hence, when you’ve finally tired of turning up the TV volume and making dinner reservations at 5:30 p.m. because any later and the place gets too loud, you may go shopping.

Perhaps you’ll head to a local boutique called The Hear Better Store, or maybe Didja Ear That? (Reader nominees for kitschy names invited.) Maybe you’ll opt for a big-box retailer or a kiosk at your local pharmacy.

If legislation now making its way through Congress succeeds, these places will all offer hearing aids. You’ll try out various models — they’ll all meet newly established federal requirements — to see what seems to work and feel best. Your choices might include products from big consumer electronics specialists like Apple, Samsung and Bose.

If you want assistance, you might pay an audiologist to provide customized services, like adjusting frequencies or amplification levels. But you won’t need to go through an audiologist-gatekeeper, as you do now, to buy hearing aids.

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A lethal injection

Posted on August 24, 2017 by Jim deMaine

I entered the exam room as an intravenous catheter was being inserted expertly. The procedure had been explained to me. I wanted to be there to comfort my friend in his last moments. Life had been getting difficult and the infirmities and pain too severe. The doctor entered the room with an appropriate look of sympathy on his face and reviewed the case agreeing that my friend’s quality of life was severely impaired.

The sodium pentothal was slowly injected IV. I saw a questioning look on my friend’s face, he then slumped to the table and died. Being unconscious, his breathing almost immediately stopped, then the heart beat ceased a few minutes later. It seemed so fast.

I loved my friend, my companion, my dog. We walked in the park or on the beach every morning. He greeted me, my wife, my children, and my grandchildren each day like long lost friends. His goal in the yard (thus in life) was to be protective seemingly at all costs.

Today we grieve, but not like when I lost my mother or father, or when I lost a patient. It’s a mixture of sadness for our loss, but contentment that he didn’t suffer and could have a peaceful end.

Many patients over the years asked me for a peaceful painless end. Before hospice and palliative care, a patient would often sense abandonment or a loss of control at the end saying, “Doctor, my dog was treated more humanely at the end than my father was.” Ironically, my experience today has brought me to question how humane we humans really are in our treatment of each other at the end. Do we have lessons to learn?

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The ___________ in the room

Posted on August 23, 2017 by Jim deMaine

Image result for new yorker cartoons

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The deep seas are alive with light

Posted on August 23, 2017 by Jim deMaine

From the NYT:  “People think bioluminescence is some kind of exotic characteristic,” said Séverine Martini, a marine biologist and lead author of the study, published this year in Scientific Reports. “Even oceanographers don’t realize that it’s common.”

Her own awakening came one night in a sailboat off Africa. “I was looking at the stars and learning about constellations,” she recalled, and then suddenly began “seeing things that were glowing in the waves.”

Click below for some amazing pictures!

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L’Aria – September Issue

Posted on August 21, 2017 by Jim deMaine

Please check out the latest Seattle Opera Guild publication (L’Aria) on the Opera page above – or click the link here L’Aria Sept 2017 FINAL!  From Ann Milam

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Rapprochement

Posted on August 21, 2017 by Jim deMaine

Image result for new yorker cartoons

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Trump Says Sun Equally to Blame for Blocking Moon

Posted on August 21, 2017 by Jim deMaine

Satire from Andy Borowitz in the New Yorker:

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Attacking the media for its “very unfair” coverage of Monday’s solar eclipse, Donald J. Trump said on Saturday that the sun was equally to blame for blocking the moon.

“The fake news is covering the eclipse from the sun’s side instead of the moon’s side, but if you look at it from the moon’s side the sun is blocking the moon’s side,” he said. “There are so many sides you can’t count all the sides.”

Additionally, Trump tore into the sun itself, calling it a “showboat” for its role in the solar eclipse.

“The sun thinks the world revolves around it,” Trump said. “Sad.”

Trump said the sun was a “big problem” that his predecessor, Barack Obama, did nothing to solve, but that that situation was about to change.

“It will be handled—we handle everything,” Trump said, adding that a preëmptive military strike on the sun was “very much on the table.”

“

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Can we stop antibiotics earlier than prescribed?

Posted on August 20, 2017 by Jim deMaine

Why do so many prescriptions say, “Take for 10 days” or “Take for 7 days”? Well, we have 10 fingers and there are 7 days in a week. These are historic guesses because often the answers haven’t been critically studied. More recently it’s become apparent that urinary and skin infections plus some pneumonias may do quite well with shorter courses. The effort is to contain the development of resistant super-bugs.

From Al MacRae and the WSJ: “Remember the doctor’s advice to always finish your antibiotics, even if you feel better?

That message is being up-ended by concerns that taking antibiotics when they are no longer needed is contributing to the growing danger of antibiotic resistance.

In a recent article in the journal BMJ, a group of infectious disease experts from England argue that doctors should stop making the recommendation because it isn’t based on any evidence. In fact, they note, studies have shown that in some cases — such as pneumonia — shorter courses of antibiotics are just as effective as longer ones.

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Primum Non Nocere

Posted on August 20, 2017 by Jim deMaine

One of the first tenets of medicine is “Do No Harm.” Yet, the incentives in medicine (fee for procedure) often leads to too much being done. For example my brother recently had a second total knee replacement. Yes he’s overweight but he had no cardiac symptoms. He was referred to a cardiologist and had a cardiac angiogram done as a “precautionary step.” I was appalled because there is no evidence that this is useful and may indeed be harmful – both to the body and wallet.

Barb Williams sent along this recent article from the Atlantic. It is well titled “When Evidence Says No, but Doctors Say Yes.”  The bottom line – do your research, be a skeptic and look for an advocate that can interpret the data for you.

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The USS Indianapolis is found after 72 years

Posted on August 20, 2017 by Jim deMaine

Paul Allen’s team has located the final resting place of the Indianapolis, the subject of intrigue, disaster, lives lost and a controversial court-marshal.

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May You Stay Forever Young – Pete Seeger

Posted on August 19, 2017 by Jim deMaine

 

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Should we record the visit with our doctor?

Posted on August 19, 2017 by Jim deMaine

I used to be a bit nervous when a patient would ask if they could record our visit. Could it be made public, put up on YouTube or used in a later lawsuit?

But in reality, it might be a useful communication tool. According to the NYT, Washington is one of the states where both parties need to approve a recorded conversation. So don’t hit the record button on your iPhone unless you have consent. I used to write out all my instructions and medication changes, finding that my patients would dutifully pull out the crumpled sheet on the next visit.

Some doctors have begun recording the visit conversations then putting this up on a secure web site for patients and family members to review. Wow, what transparency and what a useful way to review just what the heck the doctor really said.

For the article in the NYT, click here.

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Square Dance in the Park – Thursday

Posted on August 19, 2017 by Jim deMaine

square dance

We are having a square dance and you should join us because dancing is fun and summer is almost over so let’s have fun!

 

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A Conservative’s mea culpa

Posted on August 18, 2017 by Jim deMaine

When we strongly believe in a person or cause, it’s so hard to admit that we were wrong. My parents, good Ohio Republicans, were devastated by Nixon’s betrayal to our country and the Presidency. That was then.

Now we hear from another voice: “I Voted for Trump. And I Sorely Regret It.” Author and conservative JULIUS KREIN does his mea culpa in the article above. It’s sad to see that his initial expectations have essentially evaporated. It leaves a vacuum of anxiety – what’s coming next?

Posted in Politics | 1 Comment

Rattlesnake Ledge

Posted on August 18, 2017 by Jim deMaine
Rattleshake Ledge

Rattlesnake Ledge

Today’s view from the ledge above Rattlesnake Lake near North Bend, part of the I-90 Mountains to Sound Greenway. Tours are available to the nearby Cedar River Watershed and Chester Morse Lake – a major source of our local water. For the history of the area, click here.

Ed Note: There are no rattlesnakes! Just the rattling of the leaves in the breeze, hence the name. The climb to the ledge is 1.9 miles. Because of the glare, I shot this picture using my sunglasses as a filter – hence the poor focus, but I liked the color variation. Warning, this trail becomes crowded after 9 AM.

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Yesterday’s sunspot movement

Posted on August 18, 2017 by William Calvin

You will not see sunspots on Monday, just action around the rim just before totality: corona and the occasional big arch.

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Price increase notice – America the Beautiful pass – going from $10 to $80

Posted on August 17, 2017 by Jim deMaine

From Barb Williams:

On August 28, 2017, the price of the America the Beautiful – The National Parks and Federal Recreational Lands Senior Pass will increase from $10 to $80. The pass provides access to more than 2,000 recreation sites, including all National Parks. It’s the best deal going!

Ed Note: And it’s a lifetime pass! Locally check availability at The Outdoor Recreation Information Center — REI store at 222 Yale Ave. N. in Seattle. Phone: 206-470-4060

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