Behold the Fuschia With Apologies to Ogden Nash

Behold the delicate Fuschia
With its fusion of beauty and grace.
fallacy - phallic pistols stem protrusion profusion confusion fusion illusion muse fused infused refused ruse

Potable Water

Introduction of the Term
I confess the first time I heard the term "potable water", I thought it was referring to more tea that classmates assigned to the basement of the college dormitory where I was living during my college days in the early 1970s.

The High Desert of SW Idaho
Despite being raised and spending the majority of my life living in the high desert of southwest Idaho, initially I never gave the thought of potable water being accessible in sufficient quantities other than wondering at times which of the town's two water towers our house water came from. Frankly, as a child, I never gave the idea of potable water being limited and found the idea of paying for bottled water in a gas station only ror suckers to naive to walk around the corner and use the garden hose. God forbid that there come a day when water bottled and sold by the quart inside the gas station would cost more than the gas being pumped outside the gas station.

Backpacking
My first experience of encountering not having potible water accessible was when I started backpacking as a kid. I was taught that water could be your enemy when it came to trying to keep your pack as light as possible. There were companies that specialized in packaging dehydrated food for backpack trips. My memory was that you had to be pretty tired at the end of the day of hiking to be able to convince yourself that the re-constituted dehydrated green beans were anything else than green-colored cardboard. Freeae-dried food didn't come along until later. We quickly learned to try to avoid having water of any kind while hiking. Afterall, like manna from heaven, there were newly formed creeks intersecting with the trail once you got up into the meadows and trees. The creeks derived a thousand or two feet higher in elevation where the winter snow pack was melting and gurgling down mountainside.

At the time, I had no need of a belt, but for backpacking, I rigged one up of nylon cord so that I could hang a Sierra cup with which I could dip into the literally just barely less than freezing, ice cold, clear water of an Idaho creek in the Sawtooth mountains. As my father said on many occasions, the water was worth the price (meaning the effort expended hiking up to the creek) of admission.

During my latter part of college in the mid-1970s, my college hiking buddies and I started hearing of this disturbing report of a disease called giardia that was spreading through the mountain waters of the backcountry - Idaho included. Most of us did not want to address the issue. Maybe it wouldn't spread to Idaho. It was absurd to hike all that way and then have to boil or dissolve pills to kill the microscopic parasitic SOB that was ruining the whole concept of backpacking. Eventually, small, lightweight filtering pumps would be developed. But the concept for me had been introduced, that potable water - whether mountain-fresh creek water or even room temperature - it couldn't be assumed that it would always be present.

US Forest Service Fire Lookout
Fast forward to July of 1977. I had recently graduated from college, had gotten married the month before, and was assigned to spend the summer fire-season living a US Forest Service fire lookout tower along with my new bride and our 6-week old puppy until the end of August when I would start my professional teaching career assigned to teach second-grades students. After quickly discovering short-wave radio, and having the companionship of a new bride and pup, I thought I had cleverly dealt with the anticipated issue of loneliness for the summer. What turned out to be the bigger challenge was the issue of potable water.

By definition, a fire lookout is at the top of a mountain, or in our case, a mountain ridge. Due to the law of gravity, water did not flow up the mountain. Fortunately, there was an amazing spring bubbling up from the hillside just over a quarter of a mile away. Coming directly out of the ground, we did not feel we needed to worry about giardia, just the matter of transporting the water uphill. We immediately got into the routine of taking four one-gallon canteens to the spring, filling them and bringing them up to the lookout. We found that we could function readily enough off of three gallons of water daily. The fourth gallon was stored in two milk cans in the shade under the lookout for when I abandoned my new bride to go start my teaching career, leaving her and our pup to fend for themselves amongst the huckleberries and occasional hiker that came by. The thought of living happily on a mere three gallons of water a day for two of us now seems completely impossible - even without having to hike down and up a hillside to obtain it.

Paraguay
My next experience with limited potable water was during my time as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Paraguay, South America. Similar to the red clay of Georgia or the Grand Canyon, much of Paraguay maintains a reddish color from its clay content in the soil and often in the water.










Paraguay Alaska But by the mid-1980s, SW Idaho was starting to experience "brown outs" in which even irrigation water was needing to be limited. Despite having to deal with school closures due to snow, and having to push myself to clear sideways and drive ways (back then I was young and energetic enough to also clear the snow from three of the homes of neighboring senior citizens as well), I still prayed that there would be a sufficient snow pack up in the mountains for an adequate spring run off into the Lucky Peak Reservoir. After more than one or two years of restricted irrigation schedules on public service advice that if it's brown, flush it down, but yellow is mellow, my first wife and I focused only on wetter areas when seeking to leave Idaho for friendlier and more lucrative places to teach. We settled in the Washington Puget Sound area. power outages in Washington But even now in 2024, having returned to the Idaho high desert in order to marry a lady I dated back during high school, I confess to succumbing to the guilt pleasure of excess when it comes to enjoying frequent baths for soaking and resting my diabetic feet and averaging well more than once a day showers to deal with my sense of feeling sticky from excessive perspiration. corporate greed contamination of aquafer depletion of aquafer Old West fights over water rights

Quixotic Effort to Determine Additional Carcinogenic Noises

In too many ways, I am similar with the main character in Cervantes' 1605 novel. Both Don Quixote and I have tilted at various wind mills with varying degrees ranging from utter failure to efforts of no consequence or recognition.

Too often I became transfixed on problems that I couldn't possibly fix or even impact, to ignoring other issues that I could and should have engaged.

But today, I have a new issue for which I again need to put on my ill-fitting suit of armor, grasp my cracked lance, and mount my over-aged steed. And that issue for which I am willing to 

My Official Idaho Identification Badge

I had to send a pict of my ID as proof for being eligible for a reduced rate for an online newspaper.

I got thinking about my official Idaho state identification badge, and wondered what Freud might think about my ID ID.

Would my ID² be similar or different to his id, or his super id or even his ego?

And even more importantly, what would Freud's mother think about my ID²?

Pride vs. Dignity

As many in America, or at least like many Democrats, and the 2016 U.S. presidential election less than a week ago, I find myself pondering the surprising outcome. I ponder which factors and which qualities mattered, and which factors and/or qualities were overshadowed by the majority of the voters (in terms of the electoral college, not the populace.)

One factor that truly surprised me was the majority's lack of concern, or at least a lowered priority, in terms of the outsider, the celebrity having his finger on the nuclear arsenal. What bothered me most was how easily it seemed Mr. Trump could be baited. While seeming in some ways to be totally without any kind of sense of shame, at the same time, he seemed extremely proud, or rather, seeming to have a threatened sense of pride that he felt he needed to protect. His frequent tweets that seemed to amount to little more than tit for tat, often resorting to little more than name calling or mere insults. I worried how easily it might be that he could be manipulated by others via his wounded pride to act in ways that might prove with hindsight to be fairly destructive or counter-productive.

I pondered how this seemed to be in contrast with the current president. Though often goaded, e.g. accusations that he was not a U.S. citizen, accusations that he was not Christian, accusations that he did not actually graduate from college, etc., etc., etc. The accusations seemed endless. And yet, time and time again, President Obama seemed to stay above it and avoided taking the bait. As First Lady Michelle Obama stated, "when they go low, you go high."

Yet obviously President Obama has a strong sense of pride as well.

I found myself considering the differences in the pride of each: the lame duck president's, and the president-elect's. And what I think I see is a distinction between pride and dignity. I believe that the difference is in how President Obama seemed to focus on maintaining the dignity of the office, and not getting drawn down to petty personal attacks. It is not that he was oblivious, certainly in watching the videos of the press corps' annual dinner with the president as the key speaker, the president demonstrated a keen sense of humor and ability similar to John Kennedy to use self-deprecation to his advantage -- poking fun at himself while at the same time, never de-grading the office that he held or the country that he lead.

I don't know that the president-elect currently has the ability to poke fun of himself, or that he has enough self-confidence that he can walk away from anything that challenges his sense of self-pride. Hopefully, this will be one of the things that the new president will grow into as he prepares to rise to the challenge required of being the single most powerful person in the world and all of the responsibilities that go with it.

New advancements in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU)

Concerns for long-term intensive medical care are starting to focus on the matter of long-term nourishment of unconscious patients. It seems that the limited use of fluids through IV is most likely causing side effects from the lack of using the digestive tract. Experimentation has begun in regard to attempts to feed patients that have been in a coma for a month or more with solid foods - albeit solid foods that are soft, e.g. bread, crackers, etc. Surprisingly, one of the factors of unwanted side effects are foods that are too soupy or liquidy. It got to the point where the liquids caused breathing problems by entering the trachea and even the lungs. Ironically, one effort to try to counter-act this problem is to make food a bit more solid such as with act of toasting bread in contrast to the softer regular, non-toasted bread. Though results have not been fully assessed, the initial efforts have been promising to the point of now referring to patients using this procedure as comatoast.

Matthew Perry's Grandfather's Heart Transplant

I posted this on Facebook Wed, Jan. 8, 2014 of a little known event:

Very few people know that Matthew Perry's grandfather almost became the first heart-transplant patient. Unfortunately, it didn't happen. Back then, they pretty much matched organs by blood type only. However, there were other complications as well. After a young man in his 20's died suddenly in a car accident in northern California, the surgeon rushed to catch a flight up north to extract the heart, and then tried to race back to LA in time. Meanwhile, Mr. Perry had slipped into a deep coma, and the surgeon felt pressure that time was slipping by.

When the flight finally arrived at LAX, the doctor was shocked to learn that his baggage had been lost when he changed flights at SF.

Deeply upset, when asked by members of the hospital staff, the surgeon emotionally explained that there were two things: Mr. Perry's coma, and he had left his heart in San Francisco ...

And now you are one of the few to know also ...

And in case any of you have any doubts as to whether this is a true story, remember Abraham Lincoln is quoted as saying that if it's on the internet, it has to be true!