Photos

Got my camera and took these in the front yard. These were taken on the eighth.

Then took these on the fourteenth.

I'm feeling pretty good these days. And it was a good feeling to have my camera in hand.

It's been awhile....

Christmas came and went and the new year. And I almost did the same. The paperwhites I bought at Summer's Past are blooming and I came home in time to see them. If I feel well enough will snap some photos. I now know what it feels like to be rushed off to the hospital in an ambliance. Early Sunday the third I was here on the computer 4:30am and I had a heart attack. I've never had one of those before so didn't know what was happening at first. I got off the computer and tried to lay down to see if I would feel better. Took some asprin and still didn't feel better. So about 5:30 I asked my husband to call 911. The Lakeside Paramedics were great. I landed at Kaiser Zion and they took great care of me. I was shipped off in another ambliance to Scriipps La Jolla the nex day where they cleaned out an artery and put in three stents. It was decided that I needed more work so was scheduled for another proceedure. I went home for less than a day and then got dropped off back at Scripps...walked in on my own that time. They couldn't get to work on me for most of the day...I was ready to go home. I wish I had. Things went wrong and I sort lost it. Congestive heart failure. I was not a happy camper. Woke up to a mouth full of tubes and did nothing but fight everyone the first few hours. They couldn't get that artery cleared at all and now I have a pacemaker a ton of pills to take every day and am very tired.

Summers Past Another Visit

This is such a lovely place to visit. First Jackie and I had lunch in Alpine. Our favorite resturant there was closed! So we tried a Mediterranean Grill that we had never eaten at before. It was wonderful. I had lentil soup and salmon. We were celebrating our birthdays...mine was Tuesday and her's is tomorrow. Then we drove back to Summers Past and I took photos. Jackie bought some scented soap. They make it there. I got some flower bulbs...will plant tomorrow. And I took photographs.

Another Birthday...from wood stoves to microwave ovens.

The first thing I think about is I'm still here. Well I'm not that old but I've lived longer than my mother or her mother. I didn't know my grandmother and she never got to see me. Our lives covered the last century. And the world is a lot more interesting than it was at the beginning of the last century. She was born in a world that was just beginning to discover all the modern things we take for granted.

My grandmother married young. She had three daughters and then she divorced her husband. Well he left her first. Anyway it was disgraceful and even more so when she married a young Italian. She had been raised in the Seventh Day Adventist Church. Her friends in the church turned away from her. Her husband was Catholic and he married a divorced woman. They both stopped going to church. They had a son together that they called Valentine. He was born on the fourteenth of February. We called him Uncle Tiny. He was killed in a heavy equipment accident building Interstate 5. He was 39. My husband and I raised my Uncle Tiny's youngest child. Uncle Tiny's wife was my husband's sister.

My grandmother was about 41 when she died. My daughter is 41. My daughter seems so young to me. My grandmother was very unhappy and very ill. Her husband was cruel to her. I have two letters she wrote. The last one is so sad.

My mother hated her stepfather. We saw him when I was a child and Mama would not let us close to him.

Life is life. We make choices and then we live with them or not! My mother was married five times and it wasn't all that easy for my sisiter and I. I promised myself that I would only get married once.

Now my favorite thing is taking digital photos. These first two were taken at Balboa Park a few weeks ago.

These were taken last evening in my yard. I used a 58mm Rokkor lens on my Oly with extension tubes.

The blue flowers are smaller than my fingernail. Focusing is moving the camera back and forth until the shot looks good.

Victoria's Garden

Victoria is a granddaughter of the owner. I asked if I could take photos and the lady behind the counter asked me if it was for a class. I said no and then she asked what I was taking the photos for and I said it was just for me. She said OK.

This place in on the corner of Ashwood and Willow Road in Lakeside. It seems like an out of the way place but it is on the way to Barona Casino. I used to turn at the opposite corner every day on my way to drop off and pick up Hailey for school. Last year I saw all the bright lovely pumpkins and kept thinking I would stop sometime and take some photos...Unfortunately my way back from the school didn't pass this way. Can't turn left out of El Cap High School. Today I started thinking that Halloween is almost here and my chance to capture the pumpkins with my camera would again have to wait a whole year.

I could let you all think that these are really giant pumpkins...but that is a child size chair!

I stopped at the counter and bought some lovely looking peaches. The clerk explained to me that a few days ago some people from the county came to take photos. She said that the owners have been told that they owe the county lots of money...something like a $100,000 for a special use permit...Urf. She also told me that the sort of famous person, in San Diego anyway, who owns the property across Willow Road from them wants to close them down. Very sad. I do like seeing horses, but this friendly cheerful place looks lots better than the dirt brown acres of horse pastures. There should be room for both here in Lakeside.

Old Poway Park

The park isn't really old. It is a lovely place to visit and an interesting place to photograph. From reading about it on the internet it was the dream of one man. He brought some old houses to his property to save them and make an old style western village. When he passed away the land was purchased by the city of Poway and in 1993 the park was opened.

There is a small railway ride that the parents seem to enjoy as much as the children.

I very much enjoyed my time there today and will visit again.

Every Day is a Gift

My daughter and I went to a funeral yesterday. I didn't know the young man that died. My daughter is his mother's friend. He was 22 years old and I went to his baby shower. It was very sad to think that so much hope and joy and laughter on that day ended in a traffic accident. He died on Interstate 8 when a tire blew on his pickup truck. We saw a video made up of photos of his life. We heard his family and friends talk about him. He was a good friend and someone his family loved and was proud of. And I felt so sad for the life that was lost and all the people that loved him left behind.

Someone as old as me has been to more funerals than we would want. The older generation in my family is gone now. I am the older generation. What a surprise! So I remember that every day is a gift and being old is not so hard to take. My father used to say that it was better than the alternative.

I wish everyone would look at life as something special and try to be a good friend and family member, and most of all a good and decent member of society and of the world. My prayer for today is an end to terrorism and an end to people trying to tell society that they need more rules than our freedom to live life without harming others. That those people in this world that want make others less because of race or the fact that they were born female see the light and the wrong they do.

Sunday at the Park

We took macro photos of a jeweled dragon. It is a great structure for children to climb on.

Then we took photos of flowers and such...

I stayed behind and took these of the butterflies.

Health Insurance

It is wrong that healh costs bring profits to insurance companies. Until we rethink this situation we will never have health care reform.

Because health care costs went up in the last half of the twentieth century, it left an opening for insurance companies to make money. The insurance companies could scare people into buying health insurance to protect their assets in case of serious illness. So just as they would buy life insurance or fire insurance they bought health care insurance. It seemed to make sense for employers to provide group health insurance to employees. The cost is then shared by the employer and by each employee. It  and makes health care more aforable for a large group of people. It also gives the insurance companies another way to make money. They would not provide this insurance unless there was a profit. It seems like a win win situation until you think about where much of the money is really going. And it is not for actual health care.

Insurance made it easy for health care providers to raise costs. Some of the money went to health care employee salaries and benefits. More of the money went to make doctors very rich. They were no longer the middle class workers they once were. Anytime there is a pile of  money there is abuse. Doctors and hospitals both added costs above the insurance payments so that the insured would still have to shell out.

I would like to know what makes insurance companies think they have a right to skim off money that should go to health care? Our government needs to take the profit out of health insurance, so that the money paid in by the people for care goes into a fund that will actually pay for the care we need. Workers pay into the social security system and workers could just as well pay into a government health care program that would benefit all. Income taxes can have a portion used for a health care fund. After all our income taxes and property taxes already provide health care for large groups of people that need care and cannot pay. Health care for the rest of us would be a better use for our tax money than spending it on stupid wars that are making this country broke and broken.

We are told that a government run health care system would deny care. Isn't that what insurance companies do every day? We would have a much better chance with a government run program than we do with an assortment of insurance companies. Let them go back to selling other types of insurance. Get them out of the health care business.

The motives of every insurance executive and health care provider should be looked at before we give up on a government run program that would bring health care to everyone.