Tag Archives: hot

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Last on the card: hot

The cover picture is from the hike with my daughter at Beaver Creek, last on my Panasonic.

This is from my cell phone and cracked me up. 19 Crimes and Martha Stewart?

And for our song track, we’ll have another Martha: Martha and the Vandellas, from 1963. Fabulous!

For Brian’s Last on the Card.

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Volcanic fire

A friend and I travel to Hawaii in March 2018. The lava in the caldera had dropped on the volcano and the road around it was closed because of the gases. The changing eruption happened over the next few months. We found a place to wait for nightfall to take photographs. It is way more dramatic in the night, isn’t it? We could see fire rising up in the day too, but at night the smoke is lit up as well by the lava below. A scene on fire, beautiful and terrifying.

The smoke from forest fires has dissipated in Grand Junction. I stayed mostly inside for a few days, which is not hard on work days. The clothes I wear are backwards from the ones I wear on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. There I have a windbreaker and layers for outside and I think my heat pump has had the air conditioning on once ever. Here I need the warmer clothes for the air conditioned inside. I get cold at work by lunch time and go outside to warm up! Very strange.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: fire.

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Cool

I am still wearing sweaters to work.

It is high desert here. One morning it was really pretty cold when I walked Sol Duc in her harness. Really she walks me. Cats are like that. But I wished for mittens. The temperature was 38. The last few days the low is in the high 40s or low 50s. Two days ago it was 90 driving home from work.

The consequence is air conditioning. I do not have air conditioning on the Olympic Peninsula. My house is from 1930 and well designed to stay cool in the summer and we rarely hit 90 anyhow. Two summers ago my heat pump switched to cooling when we had one hot week, startling me. We did hit 100 one day in Port Townsend, but it still dropped thirty degrees at night because of the cool Salish Sea surrounding us. My patients would complain of the awful heat when we got to 80 degrees. It’s all relative, right?

Here in Grand Junction, we are just starting to heat up. The hottest time appears to be around 4 or 5 pm.

I was cold at work all day two days ago. I wore a linen shirt over another shirt and it was not enough. I went outside at lunch and heated up nicely in the sun. Yesterday I took a wool jacket with me. Air conditioning is very strange.

This morning it is 51 now and projected to reach 85. The high desert temperature change of 30 to 40 degrees is not that different from home, but the air conditioning is different.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: ambivalent.

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foxglove

The source of digoxin and digitalis. I am interested when people tell me they don’t take prescription medicines and that they only take “natural” medicines. Meaning pills. Pills do not grow on trees or bushes and are made by human beings. How exactly is the person defining “natural”?

My father said that anything a human could think up was “natural”. “Though that does not mean safe.” Think wingsuits and basejumping.

Digoxin and digitalis are used less than in the past, because there are many other medicines to choose from to control heart rate. However, they are still used because digoxin is one of the very few rate controlling medicines that does NOT lower blood pressure. Most of the others do lower blood pressure. When nothing else works or is tolerated, the cardiologist may sigh and say, ok, start digoxin. It is a tricky medicine because levels that get too high are toxic and the dose is different for each person and the dose must be lowered as kidney function changes with age. We still use it, though.

About one third of prescription medicines originate from a plant source like this, where the plant actually makes the active substance. Plants and animals and humans evolved together. We have deer all over town and they do not eat the foxglove. They love roses but stay away from foxglove.

I am seeing advertisements for a book to make your own medicines at home. I have not bought it. I would stay away from any recipe with foxglove: I want a lab to test to get the dose exactly right.

For Cee’s Flower of the Day. Heh, it turned into an essay of the day too. Wordy, wordy, wordy.

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hot weather flower

Yesterday the downtown bank recorded a temperature of 87! And this is after six months of seeing the sun about once every two weeks, and temperatures mostly in the 40s and 50s.

The beaches have been EMPTY. The delightful Salish Sea gets to a high of 55 degrees, so anyone who swims is brave. But yesterday the beaches were FULL again! Tourists and locals, summer is here! The water temperature yesterday was 9 degrees C, which is 48 F. Cold for swimming.

For Cee’s Flower of the Day.