A Friday Ramble...

... begins with the statement, "A lot has happened this week."  Mostly because a lot has happened this week.  I was invited to a Giant's/Dodger game at AT&T, on October first, by my eldest child.  No grandbabies, no members of her "entourage," just Tyff and me.  I like it.  I am really looking forward to going.  I got to play my standard two rounds of golf this week with Mr. Bill.  This week we moved forward a set of tees, and played from the Gold Markers.  We're back to the White markers next week, and probably won't have the lower scores (92 and 93) that we had this week.  We'll be fighting to "make the cut," as Mr. Bill calls breaking 100, at 64, having had a stroke, and losing half a lung to cancer, breaking 100 from the former "Intermediate" tees is a real battle.

     I used to be able to hit drives of 275 yards, prior to the lung surgery, but since then, I'm lucky to get 200 yards from my driver.  It was the stroke, however, that has created all of my problems.  I mean, I was a pretty fair golfer.  I didn't break 80 very often, but I was always around 80 to 85 strokes per round.  I was, when I decided that I no longer wanted to pay $80 a year to have someone figure my handicap, somewhere between 10 - 14 handicap (back before SLOPE).  I just couldn't break 80 often enough to bring it down to a 9 (for those of you who don't play, a single digit handicap is like being in the top 20% of golfers world-wide).  I was pretty good, rarely gambled, and just enjoyed being out in the sunlight.

     The stroke, in 2002, put an end to that.  Since then, I have had to learn to play again, from pretty much scratch.  I guess, all things considered, I'm not doing too bad.  It's finding out how far I can depend on each club.  I said I'm lucky to get 200 yards from a driver, 175 from my 3-metal, and 150 (or so) from my 5-metal.  My hybrids cover the 175 - 145 yard range, but it's getting the range of my irons down that seems to be killing me.  Wedge play is pretty awesome, get me to the 100 yard marker, and I can get the ball close.  I'm learning a lot about clearing my mind before I start my swing, I'm relaxing a little, and hitting pretty cleanly, most often, but I still have a tendency to look up just before impact.  I'm doing it a lot less, but I can still do it if I don't control my breathing, and clear my mind before.  I'm trying to focus on a spot (blade of grass, piece of sand/dirt) immediately behind the ball, and maintain that focus until the club comes through.  That focus keeps me from bobbing up and down (like Tiger Woods is doing so often), and usually results in a square contact, and good shots.  I am also working on attitude...

     There isn't a golfer on any course, any where, that doesn't secretly harbor a dream of becoming the next great pro golfer.  When I retired from the Navy, I was 40.  I'd tell everyone that it gave me 10 years to get ready for the Senior Tour (now Champions Tour).  Guess what?  I didn't make it.  Sometimes your dreams are overcome by other dreams that are actually in your ability make happen.  Golf gave way to studies, as I pursued a degree and a teaching credential.  We didn't have a lot of money, I didn't have a lot of time, and I didn't play much from 1992 to 1999.  By the time I became eligible to play, I was way out of practice, but starting to get better from playing more often.  I became somewhat of a jerk, when I couldn't hit a ball exactly where I was aiming, or when I'd miss a 25-foot putt, or some other such nonsense.  Then the stroke.

     In the aftermath, I had a lot of rehab, but the game was gone.  In the 13 years since, my age and health have had a play in my deteriorating golf game, but there's one MAJOR consolation...  at least I still get to play.  There was a time, fairly recently, when I thought about giving the game up.  It has fortunately passed, as I have found that I may not be hitting the ball as far, but I'm not getting in as much trouble, either.  Besides, who doesn't like a day out in the open?

Made a follow-up call on my referral for my hip, checking to see if the request for and additional  procedure had been sent.  That was done, and re-done, as the insurer claimed he didn't receive the first one.

I also managed to get an appointment with my Primary Care Manager (PCM), Dr. Vogel, to talk about my blood pressure, etc.

It's been a busy week.

Just a Random Thought...

I was driving onto Travis Air Force Base the other day, going to get a CT scan for one of my follow-ups on my lung cancer surgery almost two years ago.  There's a lot of construction, for those of you who haven't been in Cowtown for a while, the biggest is the building of a Amtrak station off Peabody Rd. and Vanden/Cement Hill roads.  The plan calls for an overcrossing to be built on Peabody to take traffic over the train crossing.  To that end, Peabody has been closed at the intersection of Vanden/Cement Hill roads, and the detour takes you all the way back, around the jail, and back onto Air Base Parkway.  Most people in Vacaville/Dixon/Rio Vista areas use the back gate, so it's not uncommon to see traffic backed up in the mornings.

The person in front of me had a rental car, and the current readiness level (Bravo) requires the gate sentries to look in the trunk of rental cars.  There was some junk in the trunk, not hers, the car's, but it was otherwise OK.  It got me to remembering an old car my dad fixed up, and let my sister Sherry use...

It was a brown, 1947 Plymouth coupe, six-cylinder engine, and a 3-speed manual transmission with the shifter on the steering column.  Pop brought it home, and the girls (sisters Sherry and Pat) responded with the 1950's version of, "Ewww!"  It was a total P.O.S., and it broke down in our driveway a couple of weeks after Pops bought it.  I don't remember how long it took him to do it, but he totally rebuilt the engine, and actually had the car running pretty well.  It would be a great car to have today, except for one small thing...

Pops was kind of a lazy guy, and only wanted to travel out to the dump when he had to.  Our garbage service in Vallejo didn't take yard clippings, so we had to store them up, and take them out to the dump ourselves.  Being lazy, Pops just tossed them into the trunk of the Plymouth.  Ever smell dead grass after it has baked for several days in the trunk of the car?  I can tell you, without a shred of doubt, it stinks like Hell, but this was the car my sister Sherry got to drive.  I think my parent's attempt at preventing teen-aged pregnancies was pretty effective, but there were still holes in that plan, as would later be discovered.

One afternoon, my sister had to go out to Mare Island (when it was still a Naval Base), and a robbery suspect had evaded Vallejo Police, getting onto the Base somehow.  They had chased him around some of the Shipyard warehouses, and had asked for the Marines on the gate, now armed with M14's, to search every vehicle for a white male suspect.  Cars would pull up, stop, the Marines would ask to open the trunk (they didn't have interior switches in '47).  For the safety of the driver, they would take the keys, and open the trunk with cover from the other Marine.  Imagine the look on my sister's face when they opened the trunk to find two weeks of grass clippings.  The Marines smiled, closed the trunk, gave my sister the keys with a, "Have a nice day, ma'am."

I don't know why, but something about that incident flashed when I saw the Airman checking the trunk of a rental car.

There's Hope at Last!

I have been fighting a problem with my hips (AVN), and the left one in particular.  On an MRI of my left hip, a cyst and a tear in the labrum was revealed.  Since then, I have been playing the bureaucracy to get an arthroscopic procedure to remove the cyst, and repair the torn labrum.  I thought it would be easy enough, an orthopedic surgeon could take care of that, right?  Sort of... maybe... What do you mean you're not a hip guy?  I don't give a rat's rump if you can boogie the night away, or speak in the current vernacular, I want you to get a f-ing cyst out of my hip.  Oh, you mean you're not that kind of hip doctor?  Elbows, knees, ankle guys.  Yeah, I get it, hip work isn't hip work, mostly for old people.  If you work knees and elbows, you can get on with a MLB, or NFL, or NBA team as a consultant.  Swell...

Finally found an actual hip guy up in Carmichael, a suburb of Sacramento, a drive of 50 miles, or so.  Met with him, got to scheduling, and United Healthcare/Military/Veterans decided that I didn't need something in the Dr.'s request, and "partially" approved the procedure.  Dr. Greene wasn't going to do what was approved, so everything (including a $51 co-pay), just stopped.  This was in early May 2015.

I spent the month of June trying to re-establish the fact that, of the three options I was given (do nothing, get hip injections (steroids), or arthroscopic surgery), the only viable choice was surgery.
I asked my Primary Care Manager, Dr. Vogel, to see if he could get the hip injections coordinated with my back injections, scheduled for July 13, 2015.  Meanwhile, in a series of e-mails through Relay Health (it's meant to computerize appointments, prescription renewals, etc.) but I sent him a plaintive request for help with my referrals, stating firmly that the "do nothing" option was not.

This whole thing began because I was no longer able to walk even nine holes of golf.  I'm fortunate, in that I have access to the military course at Travis, where I pay for my golf annually, and I can get a "cart card" that drops the regular price of renting a cart from $18 to $13 for a full 18 holes.  The fact is, I miss walking the course.  Cypress Lakes (the Travis AFB course) is flat, although there are raised greens and tees, and some small knolls throughout the layout, so it's easy to walk.  Eventually, I'd like to get one of those self-propelled carts, to walk alongside, but I could do with one that is easy to push.  That is still in the future, however.

In July, I met my appointment for my back injections, and was asked if I was ever told that steroid injections in my hip were no longer allowed because of my AVN.  I told him that I was, but that I wanted that little fact brought up again, due to my current problem.  Finally, I got a phone call about the "partially approved" referral, and an appointment to see Dr. Vogel to see WTF was going on with United Healthcare.  Six days later, I get a new referral for Dr. Greene authorizing the arthroscopy.

I called the Dr.'s office today (Friday, August 20, 2015, and got through to his surgical scheduler, who said she didn't have a copy of the referral (she does now).  I'm waiting for her to call me back, sometime today.  There's hope.

Some Explanations

For that one, or two of you who actually read my blog, I need to talk about things that can fill you're time (when you're really bored).  I started this thing after my dad passed away in 2009, as a way of letting off some steam as I took on the job of caring for a mother who's cheese was slipping off her cracker, so to speak.  I took it on because I was close.  My parent's house was less than two miles from mine.  The idea of having her live with us, or our living with her was not in question.  She didn't want to move, and she didn't want anyone moving in, end of story.

I've talked about the experiences, on occasion, but there's a whole lot more that I didn't post, probably more than I ever published.  Some of it is hypercritical, some of it is a bit whiney, and some of it is just inane ramblings that have little use, other than I wrote them down, so I don't have to carry it around with me.  If I want to go back over that time (trust me, that is not happening), it's all there, and I can look at it whenever I want.

I'd like to think that the stuff that "made the cut" was better writing, the reason I published them.  I wrote a lot, at first, and published most of them, but then things got to the point that all I was doing with my blog was putting down a lot of bullshit, and never publishing any of it (thank goodness). 

When Mom passed, I got writer's block, and couldn't get anything going.  I work on crosswords every day, and I'm looking up words, as I'm reading, that I didn't know "for sure" what they meant.  I'm finding that I was mostly correct in my assumptions regarding meanings, but I'm learning a lot of alternate usages, word origins, and entomology, things I used to enjoy as a boy.  Mom was my link to literacy.  Not that my dad wasn't, but he read, mostly, pulp fiction novels, and Louis Lamoure westerns.  That wasn't my cup 'o tea.

I'm struggling right now, in fact, almost three years after she passed.  I don't know what's happening, but I just can't seem to shake it.  Please, bear with me as I work this out.  Read some of my earlier posts, but let me know you've been here.  Maybe that's what I really need, someone to tell my stories to.  What do you say?

After a Busy Week...

Grandson Victor with LouSeal

 

 

I guess one of the coolest things to have happened in a long time has been the rise of the Giants in the West.  San Francisco waited for a long time to get a World Series victory, but three in five years is almost dynastic.  I've been a Giants fan for a long time, but I used to watch the ballgames alone.  Now, courtesy of Comcast Sports Net - Bay Area, we get every game, not just the occasional odd game on ESPN, Fox, or NBC, and they are always on one of our TV's.  Tyffany always liked baseball, and kept score for her brother's games.  She learned the rules, and I always hoped she would marry someone who knew only a little about the game; Peter seems to be perfect.

 

See, if she'd have married some guy who "thought" he knew baseball, the marriage would have lasted one season.  He would divorce her because she would always be right.  I've always thought she could be an umpire, but she'd have to work on her temper, or guys would be leaving the game in groups.  I could see her going into the stands to eject hecklers...

 

Anyway... Since the Giants started winning, even Mary is becoming a die-hard fan.  Having the game on, every game, is kind of her thing.  For me, I can be satisfied with listening to the game on radio, Mary is more visually oriented, so in our two TV living room, one has the game on. 

 

And then, there's the grandsons... Victor (above) once told a group of Dodger fans, in Chavez Ravine, "NO!  Let's go GI-ANTS".  He gets away with it because he's cute, and only six.  Even little Ryan knows, "Go, go Giants!" and he's only 16 months old.

We're a Giants Family.  Three generations worth.  What more can an old geezer want, eh?

Some Things of Late...

Rowe's Royals - circa 1964

Vallejo Babe Ruth League (Ages 13 - 15)

I'm in there, somewhere. -- Me.

 

 

 

 

Somewhere, lost in all of the turmoil that life tends to inherit once you get into your mid-60's, is my complete love of baseball/softball/OTL or other forms of the "American Pastime".  I'll even watch Cricket, if it's on, although I really don't understand it yet, it's roughly the same -- a man throws a ball, a man tries to hit the thrown ball -- whether it can hit the ground, or not, is irrelevant.  That interest in the British game comes only late in life, and is immeasurably better than watching NBA Summer League Basketball (Yes, I will be relentless on this waste of airtime.  No one shows the MLB Winter Leagues, or televises off-season scrimmages between NFL teams.  The NBA has the longest season anyway, and then this?)

 

My apologies to my nephew Brian Gardner for a Facebook rant about flag burning.  You've heard of "Push-button" issues?  That's one of mine.  People desecrate the Flag of the USA because they can't burn freedom.  The group that took the US to court over the First Amendment Rights of people to do so, and did it with straight faces, mind you, never seeing the irony.  Only in a truly free country can you have a right to desecrate the acknowledged world-wide symbol of Freedom (the ideal).  Even when the Supreme Court ruled in their favor, no one got the joke.  Of course, I didn't laugh, either...  I commend you for your choice of venues for your social commentary, but wonder how many Facebook users are capable of getting the humor... "Keep on Trucking," is what we'd say "back in the day."

 

Baseball... I guess one of the things that makes the game so important to me is the fact that it is a True American Sport; bred, born, and nurtured in the USA, and adopted by many countries in the Western Hemisphere, and a number of island nations in the Pacific, predominately Japan.  I've actually gone to a Japanese-league game in Tokyo.  I don't know why the Japanese-language channels don't broadcast the games from home on US cable, compared to MLB coverage here, it's pretty funny.  I know, and I don't mean any disrespect to the people of Japan, for one who neither speaks, nor understands the Japanese Language, the broadcast is a series of Japanese sentences, punctuated by totally American terms such as "Ball-o one," "Strike-e two," and "Hombrun," which of course is "Home Run," but I am trying to show that un-similarities aside, such as the dirt infield, and rooting sections that actually root for their teams, and even local pronunciations of American English, Baseball lives on.  To be honest, my first reaction to the game on Japanese TV in Misawa, I laughed.  I'd never heard baseball broadcast in anything but English, and occasional trips to the SAP for Spanish Language Broadcasts.  Those I didn't find as humorous, probably because I know a little about the language, and the fact that the SLB took the time to translate-out the American phraseology.

 

 

This is me before my first Babe Ruth League game.

1964 - Age 13

 

 

Cute, huh?  Sometimes I wish I could go back and tell him a few things, but then it wouldn't be fair.  The house behind me belonged to our neighbor, a Miss Mina McKnight, who worked as a Nurse in the local schools.  Notice, in the upper left corner, the top of the fence that went across the back of her yard.  She had a small flat spot for a teeny yard, and an uphill slope worthy of the talents of a mountain goat.  I mention that, because going to the left from there, that fence would have been atop a ridge that decreased in height, flattening out on the left corner of a 1/2 acre of open land that was sold to my dad when he bought the house next door to Mina's.  I always thought it was big enough to put a Little League-sized baseball diamond on, and it would have, but for one small problem... the field sloped up the side of the hill that was topped by the fence in the upper left corner.  If I'd have had access to a backhoe, or skip loader, or some such thing, there might have actually been a small baseball diamond behind our house.  We moved in when I was six, and I got the big idea that it could be dug out by hand.  That was doomed from the start.

 

To be honest, I wasn't ever that good.  I played, usually in places that I couldn't do much damage in, mostly because of the fact that I could usually get a hit, occasionally a double, rarely a triple, and two, over the fence, home runs, one in Little League, and one in Babe Ruth League.  Both were "Big Boy" homers, as the Giant's announcers would call them, both deep, and both with bases loaded.  In that regard, my timing was pretty good.  The one in Little League was a fastball, meant to impress me, and the other was a curve that hung out there like a piñata...  both were hit with the "meat" of the bat, and both were absolutely crushed.  I wrote about it at Chico State once, and I don't know what happened to it.  I tried to write it from the perspective of a 10 year-old, and the professor thought that I pretty much nailed it.  I don't know if I've tried to do it for a blog, but that's an idea.

 

I have been a baseball fan for most of my life.  I once liked the Dodgers of Walter Alston, guys like Don Drysdale, Sandy Koufax, John Roseborough, Maury Wills, and Duke Snyder.  We were in San Diego, then, and only got Dodger games on the radio, unless the games in San Francisco ran late, and we could pick them up due to a thing called "the Skip".  At certain times of the evening, some radio stations would reduce their output, leaving some stations more space for their broadcasts to travel.  The Skip had a weather element to it, and I can't remember how that supposedly worked, but the fact that after about 8pm, I could get stations from Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco, and a host of places that were normally way beyond the range of AM radio.  As FM is a line-of-sight medium that doesn't "bounce" well, most people have given up on trying to get reception from distant places.

 

In 1961, my dad took me to a Giants game at Candlestick Park, the stadium's second year of operation.  I was pretty much a Giants fan by then, mostly because of my dad's rants about "the n-----s in Frisco."  I knew then that damning a person because of his/her race was wrong back before the Civil Rights Movement, Dr. King, and the whole deal.  I'm not trying to brag, or cover for any racist tendencies; my dad had enough to go around, but he didn't pass them to his only son.  I became a kind of "closet" Giants fan, afraid of how my dad would react if I told him how much I admired the abilities of Willie Mays and Willie McCovey.  Looking back, he might have had his first heart attack at age 38.  That night, in 1961, for some reason, my dad bought me a Pittsburgh Pirates pennant and cap.  I decided that I would become a Giants fan, just to spite him.  To get to be the Champs three times in the last five years is best expressed by lyrics in two songs.  The first by SF natives Grateful Dead in the song Truckin', "What a long strange trip it's been."  And a Frank Zappa song of the same name as the lyric, The Torture Never Stops.

 

I am blessed, however, to a woman who has learned (sometimes the hard way) to understand and appreciate some of the complexities of the game.  Blessed... OK, to be truthful, I've created a monster.  We have two TV's in our living room, ostensibly because of our differing tastes in programming, but mostly so she can watch (keep track of the score of) the games.  She hasn't gotten to the point of knowing batting averages, or even how they compute batting averages, or how to answer questions like "Who played Short Stop for Cleveland in 1946?" (the correct answer is, "Who gives a %$#@?").  I love baseball, but I look like some kind of piker next to my Mary.

 

As always, thanks for letting me ramble.

 

 









 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 







A Last Shot for Friday July 3

For the Fourth of July weekend, we will be in a house in South Lake Tahoe that has a view of the fireworks.  An odd assortment of family, my daughter, son-in-law, and grandsons Victor and Ryan will be there, as will Peter's aunt and her husband, Peter's parents, and Mary and I.  Mary tells me I've met this aunt before, and if it's the one I'm thinking of, this could be a great weekend.  I'm not so hot on going out for a weekend, particularly the Fourth.  My daughter dug up an article that dubbed Tahoe's fireworks show the 5th most popular destination in the Country.  I expect people to be "wall-to-wall," and traffic to be of nightmarish proportions, so we take our calm and smiling faces, as well as a good classical music CD, and we take what we get on Friday.

Most people will leave today (Thursday), to get as much weekend as they can.  We don't have such conflicts, so we will start out tomorrow (Friday), and hope that we won't have a lot of traffic going up US-50.  It's mostly two lane blacktop, with a few passing zones, getting out of Placerville, all the way to SLT.  If the big trucks are out, it can be a long day.  Worse are the gawkers who don't realize that the purpose of the extra left lane was to allow for PASSING!!!  [OK, must get calm.  I'm starting to project again, and I need to stop.]  I don't think I've ever had road rage, I've seen some guys really get into it, but I'm not a violent person, per se.  I found it much easier, driving in city traffic (both in Sacramento and San Francisco) if I'm listening to classical concertos, or something of that nature.  Particularly Mozart.  Of all of the classical Masters, he is my favorite.

I have a friend coming over to take care of Taz.  He'll have slightly non-traditional feeding for two days, so I don't think he'll starve to death.  I'm going to take my little Venue, and its remote keyboard, so I should be able to take plenty of notes, and have all of the gossip next week.