We Had It All...

Well, back to wet and warm.  After very cold and seriously windy - followed by a brief 24 hour snow storm.  We've had it all in the past week.  The eight inches or so of snow never got a chance to get established...I've never seen snow disappear so fast.  My driveway is now completely bare except for some glaciation at the bottom.

The chickadees and dark eyed juncos have discovered my bird feeder.  The feeder has all sorts of seeds.  The tweety birds indicate their preferences by tossing what they don't like onto my deck.  Not real good table manners; but they are fun to watch.  If we get a half-way decent day I will attempt some bird feeder pics.  The chickadees, in particular, don't seem particularly Elmo shy - but I have yet to point a camera at them.

Last week was fairly intensive on the elder medical front.  Took auntie to the physical therapist a couple of times and to the dentist once.  Mom had a physical and we're still waiting for blood test results.  Next Tuesday I'm taking mom to the orthopod to see what, if anything, can be done to give her some relief from arthritis in her back.  It has started to affect her ability to sleep at night which is a very bad thing.  Don't think they've perfected back transplants yet...

Auntie's last PT appointment was on Friday and I have signed-up to try to get her to the Club for exercise a couple of times a week.  Hard to say how this will work out...  I cautioned her that some people at the Club like to chit-chat and some don't - lots of folks are under a strict time constraint and don't like to be diverted from their daily routine.

I don't think my cautionary advice was particularly well received.  Auntie is a serious chatterbox.  I am positive that she enjoys yakking more than she enjoys exercise.  She loved the PT 'cause the therapist indulged her in her banter.  On the other hand, Auntie has set a goal of being able to walk on the Basin Road flume next spring.  And I THINK she knows that she needs to improve her endurance in order to make that a reality. 

Stay tuned...

In other news I was struck by a story in last week's The Economist which discussed the recent Tuscon massacre.  The point of the article was that the lesson learned should be about guns - the availability and lethality of firearms in this country- as opposed to finger pointing over "uncivil" speech.

I think the point is well taken - although I DO believe that incendiary rhetoric from the Right is a serious issue.

A quote from The Economist:

Opportunists who seek to gain political advantage by blaming the shootings on words would do America better service if they focused on bullets.  In no other decent country could any civilian, let alone a deranged one, legally get his hands on a Glock semi-automatic.
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As the Brady Centre, established after the Reagan shooting to commemorate one of its victims, has noted, more Americans were killed by guns in the 18 years between 1979 and 1997 than died in all of America's foreign wars since it's independence.  Around 30,000 people a year are killed by one of the almost 300m guns in America - almost one for every citizens.  Those deaths are not just murders and suicides:  some are accidents often involving children.
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It is fanciful to imagine that guns will ever disappear from America; they are too deeply embedded in its founding myths and its culture.  But that does not mean that more effective checks on the mentally unstable are impossible, or that restrictions on the killing power of what can be sold are doomed to failure.  Neither of these will happen, though, unless the blame is directed where it belongs.

The 30,000 annual gun related death toll actually surprised me.  By way of contrast, there were 33,808 motor vehicle fatalities in the U.S. in 2009.  The number of vehicle deaths has been declining steadily over recent decades.  The trend for gun related deaths is going in the other direction...