brillohead

Not a single thing damaged here, in spite of being so close to the massive destruction just down the road. We barely even had any wind -- just tons and tons of rain. I couldn't see it last night while driving to work because it was 10:30 and pitch dark, but on my drive home this morning I was able to see the area where I would have been driving if I'd gone to work at the normal time. There is a group of mature trees, both deciduous and evergreen, just snapped off roughly 10 feet (3 meters) off the ground for about 100 yards/meters or more. I've seen plenty of storm-damaged trees in my life, but they usually either tip over uprooted, or split at a weak area in the trunk, or snap off at the base. I don't ever recall seeing trees that look like a giant came along and just broke off the tops like a child picking dandelions. It looked particularly odd with the evergreens, because you saw the fullness of the bottom branches, but the top of the "triangle" is just missing, with just a jagged torn trunk. Equally odd was the fact that none of the debris was anywhere to be seen... it's like the giant child gathered up the treetops in a giant bouquet to take home to their giant mommy. I'm used to storms that tip a tree over or break off a branch and the wood is sitting right there next to the original tree's location. These missing treetops could have gotten spit out of the 'nader twenty miles away.

Ah, yes, the "Jerry incident"! I'm still friends with them to this day!!! Have cruised with them a couple of times since, once on purpose, and once by coincidence.

But how does the bank account feel about that? 😉 What's the typical cost of a Royal cruise compared to the typical cost of an "all suite, tons of crew" cruise?

Another lucky thing about the storm -- I was originally scheduled to work 7pm-7am on my regular inpatient unit, but I got put on-call because we didn't have enough patients to justify a full staff. If I had left for work at my normal time, I would have crossed paths with the tornado just as it entered the city from the southwest. And even if the tornado hadn't gotten me, the deluge of rain was so severe that I wouldn't have been able to see, and if I pulled over to wait it out, I could have been hit by another vehicle that didn't stop. You literally couldn't see the front of your own car during the worst of the downpours, and you certainly wouldn't be able to see the lane markers or another vehicle! All in all, exceedingly lucky. Maybe I'm on Mother Nature's good side (or maybe she's afraid of my redheaded temper! 🤣).

For those who saw the news, my loved ones and I are all safe and sound after the tornadoes ripped through SW Michigan Tuesday night. I live less than a mile and a half from the FedEx facility mentioned in this article (click link for article) and pictured below. This tornado kinda hopscotched its way from the SW corner of the city to the NE corner before demolishing the trailer park (or 'nader magnet as they're often called). There were a few other tornadoes in outlying areas as well. An aerial view of the FedEx facility so you can get an idea of how ginormous it is: A few pics from the trailer park mentioned in the article (if you didn't read the article, there were about 17 homes totally demolished, and 173 with some degree of damage. One trailer was flipped into the road, and another was picked up and dropped on another trailer. Mother Nature does NOT like trailer parks! A friend owned a retail boutique across the street from the barber shop in this article. They recently closed the store, and just got the last of their remaining inventory and fixtures out of the rental space last week. If the store was still open, she and/or her employees would have been right across the street from this: A few blocks NE of the barber shop, my bio-dad's good friend owns a commercial greenhouse, and he said all of his greenhouses were destroyed, and some of his semi-trailers were tipped over. Our school system will be closed this morning, as several areas are still without power and many neighborhoods still have trees blocking the roads. I'm actually posting this from work -- I got called in to cover a shift from 11-7 in our rehab department for an employee who had to call off for her shift because she couldn't get out of her neighborhood due to a tree blocking her road. So, note to anyone thinking of buying a home in the future -- pay attention to how many entrance/exit streets there are for your neighborhood! If your subdivision only has one road in and out, you could be penned in pretty easily! All in all, we were very lucky. Amazingly, in spite of being so close to the FedEx building, we didn't even have any branches down in the yard (and we lose branches from our big old trees in EVERY storm). And the community as a whole is lucky that there were no fatalities and only a few handfuls of injuries with none being severe.

I have been known to "reappropriate" things from time to time in my youth....

Mine varies, somewhere between a 7-10 day cruise....

I haven't done Liberty, but I've been on Freedom (same class) a bunch of times, and it's my absolute favorite class of ship. It's MUCH more walkable than Oasis class (the size of which causes my knees to get angry with all the walking), and the pool decks are bigger, with more shaded area for loungers in the Solarium.

I had asked my doc about getting the chicken pox vaccine back in December of 2005, b/c I hadn't had the chicken pox in childhood. The doc said that I probably had them and just didn't remember it because I was young. I told him that my brother got it from the neighborhood kids (who brought it home from school) when he was four years old, and they didn't adopt me until he was five and a half years old, so I never got exposed. He ordered a titer test to see if I had antibodies or not.... and it came back negative -- I had never had chicken pox. This all happened around the holidays, so I didn't get around to getting the vaccine after I got the test results. Then I volunteered in my son's kindergarten class for his birthday in January (I used to take it off work and stay home with him, and when he started school I still took it off and went to school with him the first couple years). That was on a Tuesday, and on Friday afternoon when I picked him up, he came home with a letter saying that there was a chicken pox exposure in the class that week. Since it's contagious for a couple days before any pox show up, that means I was exposed, and since it's airborne, my almost-OCD-level of hand hygiene wasn't going to protect me like it does for most illnesses. So here I am on a Friday afternoon trying to get a chicken pox vaccine before everything closes at 5pm. (getting the vaccine within 3-5 days of exposure can help reduce the severity of the illness or prevent it altogether, and Friday was my Day Three and nobody would be open over the weekend) My doctor's office didn't have any in stock (because he's not a pediatrician, so he has no need for it -- all of his patients have already had the illness!). The local health department's vaccination clinic is only open a couple days a week, and that day wasn't one of them. I talked to my health insurance, and they wouldn't cover the cost of the vaccine for me, but they did for children as part of a regular "well-child" appointment. That was insane to me, because the chances of me needing to be hospitalized as an adult with chicken pox was way more likely than for a child, and hospitalization would cost them WAY more than two vaccine shots! Anyway, I finally found a private pharmacy that kept it in stock, and I was able to get the first shot at 4:45pm for a nominal fee of $275. Fortunately, I was able to schedule the second dose at the county health clinic for a much more reasonable $75 fee. A couple years ago, the Sam's Club pharmacy pulled my vaccination history (they started offering vaccines around when COVID started, I think) and they saw that I hadn't had the shingles vaccine and they tried to upsell it to me. Once again, the pharmacist was shocked to learn that someone my age had never had chicken pox! I'm a medical anomaly in more ways than one!

I was thinking the same thing.... those goats get pretty insistent!!!!

I'll live vicariously through all y'all on the shingles front.... I never had Chicken Pox growing up, and got vaccinated about twenty years ago, so I don't ever have to worry about shingles.

After work this morning, I was able to have dinner with my half-brother (from my biological mother) and his wife, plus my son and his girlfriend. My son and brother hadn't seen each other in about 7-8 years. I made the "boys" sit next to each other, because I knew that politically they were two peas in a pod and would talk to each other constantly. I was right! 🤣 After we did the "midwestern goodbye" (which lasts 30+ minutes), the guys were still talking on the sidewalk outside the restaurant as the women all went in different directions to the three vehicles!

Don't get me started..... *sigh* I was "too young" to get a knee replacement because "they only last twenty years". So what? I could just get it done again in twenty years, when the procedure and implant have both been greatly improved from what we had at the time! And they wanted me to lose weight first.... well, how do you lose weight when you can't walk without pain???? Such a bunch of baloney!!!

Shame on the doctor for not explaining the entire procedure to you before he started! I'm glad that my explanation made sense.

Hips are MUCH less complex than knees. We rarely have a hip replacement patient spend the night at our hospital (same for knees, but we do see more knees than hips overnight). I can actually only remember one hip replacement in the last year, and that was because she was an elderly woman who lived alone, so it wasn't safe for her to go home (she discharged the next day to our rehab facility for a couple weeks before returning home). My left hip has gone bad because of how long I've been walking around on my wonky left knee... if they'd replaced the knee when I asked them to, I wouldn't also need the hip replaced.