Category Archives: photography

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birds and color

The first birds that we saw and heard on the beach two nights ago were these: black oystercatchers. The red beak stands out, but if they are standing still, they blend with the rocks! Listen to their wonderful call here: https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Black_Oystercatcher/overview. When I hear the call, I know to look for them at the edge of the water.

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I for intent

My Blogging from A to Z theme is happy things. Three happy things with intent!

We took a beach walk two nights ago and the beach was full of birds. Three great blue herons, three oyster catchers, an eagle landed in the surf, crows, gulls and the flock of brant. There were various dogs being walked, who were not chasing any of the birds, hooray for that!

I love this great blue heron: so intent on fishing. What are you intent on? Intent, intention, attention, retention. So many tents….

I was intent in clinic yesterday. We had a packed schedule and I started thirty minutes early to add an extra patient and I had good intentions to run on time. I didn’t. By the last person I was running 20 minutes late, and three people were grumpy. No, four people were grumpy because I have to add myself to that. I had good intentions, but I can’t control what problems people bring to clinic and they don’t always fit in the time allotted!

Here is the eagle, also intent on dinner. I don’t think of bald eagles as surf birds, but this one had caught something and landed. We did not get close, not wanting to disturb things.

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The photographs are taken at the Port Townsend Bay beach below Chetzemoka Park. Happy blogging.Β 

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Mundane Monday 155: close color

Welcome to Mundane Monday #155. I will post a photograph and theme. If you add your pingback I will list you next week, and very happy Monday!

Last week’s gorgeous entries, theme color contrast:

https://klallendoerfer.wordpress.com/2018/04/02/mundane-monday-line-of-rvs/

https://bedressed.wordpress.com/2018/04/06/photo-challenge-one-mundane-day-last-may/

Have a good day and check out each other’s photographs!

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G for give

My Blogging from A to Z theme is happy things: G for give and generous and goat!

Goat? Yesterday was the opening of our Farmer’s Market which starts with the March of the Goats.

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Give and Generous:

I went to a Rotary fundraiser last night.

I am in the Sunrise Rotary, and the fundraiser was put on by the noontime Rotary. We have three clubs in our county.

There was dinner and both a silent and live auction. The benefit raised $20,000 for a new kitchen for the Boiler Room. The Boiler Room is a youth coffee house, drug and alcohol free, and where people are welcomed and can volunteer. There was a video about three people who talked about how it helped them. The fourth was the director, who told her story from 18 years ago.

Additional funds were raised. I love the Rotary: it sustained me when I had to start my clinic and it does so many things. I am delighted that we are down to two countries with polio virus, the exchange students come from all over the world and go all over the world, the yearly Shelterbox that we buy will go to some disaster area and locally the third graders each get their own picture dictionary. And I get to meet weekly with a wonderful group of people.

I bid on a lunch with US Representative Derek Kilmer. I wish I’d gotten that, I would bend his ear about healthcare. I didn’t. But I came home with an odd ladle and I am signed up for a two day black smithing class at the Cedar root school. And my money will go to multiple projects.

Hooray for all the generous people and organizations working for and with people and the people working for and with them.

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Blogging from A to Z.

 

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Eeeeeee

My theme is happy things, though sometimes they are things where I am trying to find the perspective to love what is happening.

When my son was little, I had Dr. Suess’s ABCs memorized: Ear, egg, elephant, E, e, e!

My words today are everybody, embody and evening.

E for Everybody. Everybody in, nobody out! This is one of the calls for Healthcare for all, and I am still a Mad as Hell Doctor, working for single payer.

Our state representative was here a year ago and said that there is not a mandate for healthcare for all. I said, “I politely disagree. We already have a law in place that emergency rooms cannot turn anyone away. They cannot refuse to treat a person. This is a mandate for care. Unfortunately, the emergency room is the most expensive and inefficient care, unless you are about to die. The emergency room cannot do chronic care: it cannot help people stop smoking, help lower blood pressure, help people with chronic illness such as diabetes, do preventative care like pap smears and checking kidney function to stave off renal failure. We have the mandate: now we need the political will to change to a single payer system that gives good care. A patient can see me in my family practice clinic a dozen times for the cost of one emergency room visit.” S o, everybody in, nobody out. The law that insurance companies can ONLY keep 20 cents of every dollar does not comfort me: I want my dollar to go to health care for everyone and not 1/5 to profit!

Embody: what do I embody? What do you embody? Do you treat your body well? Do you thank it? What is it carrying?

I see people so fixed on success and progress and getting goals, that sometimes we don’t pay any attention to our bodies. We treat the body like a tool, like a hammer or a wrench, use and abuse it, try to make it conform to some idea of external beauty, get angry when it breaks down. Fix me back to where I was three years ago, when I could work 12 hours a day and never ever paid attention to my body. Bad food, tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, gallons of caffeine, energy drinks, sugar, illegal drugs, no exercise… and then we are surprised when it breaks down? Even exercise is seen as an inconvenient and necessary job, like buying new tires for the car. When people say get me back to where I was, I ask, “Back to working the 12 hours a day that caused this damage? Do you think that is a good idea?

And I include myself in that! I have had pneumonia with sepsis symptoms twice. The second time I thought, how dumb I am! My father died and I did not take any time off. I just kept working and added executor to my jobs and cried daily. Is it any surprise that after a year of that I became ill? Now my goal is to not do medicine for more than forty hours a week and to listen to my body and to take breaks!

Evening: the sunset. I am so grateful for the day, for the night, for the light changing and the world turning, for the stars and the moon and the sun and the glorious, gorgeous, generous world.

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This is an evening photograph from Mauna Loa last week.

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For the Daily Prompt: churn.

This is not a churn. It’s a cat. This is Princess Mittens. Oh, I miss her, but she is gone. I was looking for a photograph of students with a churn. I have one, but I found this instead. It is from my old phone photos and I don’t think that I took it: my son, I suspect.

Churning the internet…. “butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth”.

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Big D, little d, what begins with D?

Happy things starting with D:

Discrimination, death, delight.

I am happy that slowly, slowly, it feels as if there is change in the world and a decrease in discrimination. It is NOT gone by any means, but I think it is slowly being eroded.

My parents had a party when I was two and they were both in college. The party was raided in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1963 and my father was taken to jail. My mother and I were left alone and she was afraid we would be lynched by the neighbors. The next morning the paper wrote about a MIXED RACE COLLEGE STUDENT PARTY possibly with orgies. My parents were both suspended from the University of Tennessee.

They were both reinstated after a hearing, because there were no drugs, no underage drinkers, and it was not illegal to have a mixed race party. My parents never touched marijuana ever and I think it was because of that party. I don’t remember it, but I still feel cautious at parties and in crowds. My mother refused to return to the U. of TN and eventually finished her undergraduate degree at Cornell. My parents were so notorious that we left Knoxville as soon as my father graduated.

I grew up learning protest songs and work songs and joke songs. My mother joked about the party and it was years before I found out how terrifying it was. My mother joked that they sat at the one liberal table at the University of Tennessee. I hate discrimination and I do not understand it.

Death: is death a happy thing? Death is as much a mystery as life, and we cannot have one without the other. How could we value life if it were eternal? And we’d also get awfully crowded. I have the privilege of caring for all ages in clinic, all genders, any race that comes in the door, age newborn to 104, what joy! I get to be present when someone is dying and try to help the person and the family. There is no single idea about death or about how to “do it right” and often families struggle with multiple opinions and ideas and feelings. Death is as intense as birth and I have had the privilege to attend both.

Delight: there are many things that I find difficult and depressing, but I find delight too! The latest morbidity and mortality report from the CDC on overdose deaths, up from 52K in the US in 2015 to 62K in the US in 2016: Overdose deaths involving opioids, cocaine and psychostimulents — United States, 2015-2016. We have to work harder to prevent addiction, why do we choose addictive substances, why do people think it won’t happen to THEM?

And yet, I still find delight, taking photographs of bird, seeing patients that I know well in clinic, we laugh often, finding joy walking outside, my family and friends.

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The photograph is from Mauna Loa last week. It is not a giant dinosaur nest, it’s a cinder cone. At least, that’s what a geologist claims….