Tag Archives: outdoors

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Yes, but no cigar

The photograph is from one of my hikes in Palisade in the last few weeks. The rocks are gorgeous.

The title is from an old joke.

I climbed at the gym again yesterday after work. I really like the immediacy of the walls. I do not like the auto-belays. The ones at this gym let you down pretty quickly. I climbed up one wall and then down. I tried the easiest boulder route for the second time and made it! I am a bit stiff this morning but not too bad.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: cigar.

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hiking soundtrack

Saturday my daughter was still here and we hiked the smaller loop at Palisade. It is about 3.5 miles. Coming down, the soundtrack in my brain was “She’ll be Coming Around the Mountain”. I did not sing it to my daughter. One person with an earworm is enough!

My brain definitely plays music. I’ve had 24 years in Rainshadow Chorale and hope for quite a few more. Sometimes in clinic, quite inappropriate music plays. Everything from children’s songs to Bach to Blues, Rock and Punk and various oddities.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: soundtrack.

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On line weight loss drugs

Don’t buy it. Apparently a company call Him is selling a compounded GLP-1 like drug, have worked around the DEA for the moment, but people are getting really sick and there have been some deaths. Article here.

The workaround is that the DEA will let compounding pharmacies make a drug if there is a shortage. Unfortunately, online companies are doing 734,000 prescriptions a month. People can get them on line without a doctor visit or labs, though there may be a doctor signing off. Remember that they are selling an untested GLP-1, and the side effects of the tested ones can include gall bladder disease, pancreatitis and gastroparesis, where the food sits in the stomach and doesn’t leave. And yes, there have been deaths. This may be the salt of the drug, so that it doesn’t have the slow absorption when injected, and hits all at once. Is weight loss that important?

The guidelines for weight loss drugs are here: https://www.aafp.org/pubs/afp/issues/2023/1000/practice-guidelines-medications-weight-loss.html. This article is from October 2023, so doesn’t have the latest offering. I recently saw a person who did not fall into those guidelines. I refused to prescribe. The person responded, “I’ll go to Mexico and get it.” I reply, “Be sure that they do laboratory work and talk to you about the potential side effects.” I am also reading that now there are faked weight loss injector pens circulating. I don’t know what is in them. Fentanyl? Floor sweepings? Who knows.

Meanwhile I am still working on a little weight loss myself. I don’t know if I’ve lost much but clothes are fitting better. The climbing gym and hiking are having an effect. Muscle burns 9 kcal per gram and fat only 4 kcal per gram, so building muscle slims one even if the weight stays the same. My endurance is rising. That feels so good after being on oxygen for a year and a half. I am still trying to eat 1/2 green/yellow or orange vegetables at each meal and I think that is helping too. All this discipline stuff, eeyuk. Oh well.

Anyhow, be careful out there. I do not recommend getting weight loss drugs off the internet or buying it from “friends of friends”. Bad news.

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Summer sunset

Last night my daughter and I went up on dinosaur hill for the sunset. What a summer thing to do!

Afterwards we walked on around the hill. We saw a very beautiful fox! This is zoomed all the way in on my phone, so the colors are not good. She watched us for a while and went on.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: summer.

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Wash, wadi, arroyo

A friend and I did a hike in Palisade this morning. It goes up, up and then there is a loop at the top. This is the fabulous view from the top, towards the west, with the Colorado River and the rest of Grand Junction.

On the loop we look for these:

Petroglyphs! And the bottom one really looks like an elk. Most looked like deer.

I also found this site, about the difference between a wash, a wadi and an arroyo. https://seethesouthwest.com/what-is-the-difference-between-an-arroyo-a-wash-and-a-wadi/

This is the canyon on our right on the way down, but I would bet that there is a wash at the base. These amazing mesas and rocks are carved by water and time.

And here is the mesa across from us to the north, from the top again.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: wash.

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Coping or manipulation?

I see someone in clinic with a difficult boss.

This brought up work stories. Now, are these coping skills or manipulation or a bit of both? You decide.

Long ago I work in a lab at the National Institutes of Health. We are super busy and doing a lot of overtime and have some media pressure as well. Our boss gets us together and gives us hell, about making mistakes. I am annoyed, because I’ve been really careful. I stew. I write a letter, what I think he should have said, which is telling us all great job, you’ve worked super hard, we are under pressure and also we need to not make mistakes. I circulate it to the four other lab techs, who enjoy it. The lab cheers up a bit. Eventually I get brave and give it to the boss. He likes it and reads it to everyone, who try not to laugh. A year after I leave the lab, I visit, and he has that letter up on his bulletin board.

Long ago I am made chief of staff at a hospital. My goal is to finish the monthly meeting in an hour. I have two senior doctors who always blow up about something in the meeting. I decide to be proactive and go to each one before the meeting and prime them. I pick a topic, say I am worrying about it, and what do they think? They each then blow up in the meeting, but now they have no opposition so there is no brawl. I prime them about something that is not really controversial. I do get the meetings done in an hour.

One year I go to the lake with my family. My children are small. My father has been drinking heavily. I call ahead and say, “Will you treat our tent site like my house and not come there if you are drinking?” “You don’t own the lake land,” says my father. “We don’t have to come.” I reply. He agrees not to drink at our tent site.

He is angry, though, and pretty much won’t speak to me. I ask if he would come to a family sing at my site. He says no. I think about it for a while and ask my cousin to hold a sing at her cabin. My father agrees to that, not knowing that I am the instigator. He is happy at it because he’s said no to me and yes to her, and I am happy too, because I love to sing and sing with him.

My father was one of eight people to start Rainshadow Chorale in 1997. I sang with him in the chorale from 2000 until the year he died.

Where is the line between manipulation and coping with a difficult person?

I think this is a time travelogue, so let it be my Ragtag Daily Prompt for today.

The photograph is of my father in 2012. He died in 2013.