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.

Schizophrenia

It always surprises me that I can spell it. I remember back in the 1970s reading all the dreadful stories about mental institutions. My own family had one of these stories. My mother's aunt spent most of her life in Western State Mental Hospital. The same dreadful place Francis Farmer the movie star was in. My mother remembered her aunt as being very strange. Finally the family had her committed. Every thing said about Western State was probably true. My mother's aunt was said to have become pregnant more than once.

June was a teenager when I was born. She was a first cousin on my father's side of the family. June had a mental break down. That is what they called it back then. She was a young woman living in LA and working for the phone company. She was trapped in an elevator during a blackout. When they brought her out of the elevator June was out of her mind.

Her family brought her home to San Diego and she seemed to get better. She married and had a son, and another breakdown. The story was that she was doing laundry and piling the dry laundry on the baby. When her husband asked where the baby was she didn't realize that she even had a baby. Another mental breakdown that some would now call post natal stress. She spent time in Patton State Hospital. I saw her after this as a young wife and mother. She got very involved in a chuch. Still she was not all right. Finally her husband left and she was back in the hospital. She lived with another woman not far from us and visited my great uncle and brought him church literature.

I remember June came to my sister's wedding reception in the early 1960s dressed in a pink frilly dress. I thought she looked silly. Her roommate moved out saying that June had gotten too strange to live with. One day June was found with nothing on and cutting up all her clothing. After that was board and care. My aunt brought June to see my youngest son during these years.

The drug companies went to work and created lots of drugs to make mental illness go away. These drugs changed things. The mentally ill could be treated as out patents and the mental hospitals were closed up.

June took a new drug in the early 1980s. My aunt always said that it was the drug that killed her. My aunt was very bitter about that. June's mental state was not talked about by her. When my son David became ill we talked about it then. My aunt could not pronounce schizophrenia without stumbling over the word. I remember when schizophrenia was thought to be bad parenting. My step mom talked about that. I heard from an early age that my aunt caused June to be crazy. By the time my son was diagnosed with schizophrenia that was not accepted thinking any more.

The problem with all the reform and meds that was supposed to free the mentally ill from the abuses of the past is that the mentally ill can decide if they will get treatment or not. Their brains don't work right! They don't think straight!

David joined the Navy and the stress of that situation cause his first break. He left the base in FL and called his dad. His uncle from Kentucky went to get him and put him on a bus back to San Diego. We tried to get him some help. One night when things were really bad we took him down to the county hospital and tried to get him admitted. David had agreed to go. It took forever for someone to talk to him and then they would not admit him. We came back home. David went home with his father. Alone at the house David cut his wrist. Then he called me and told me what he had done. I called 911. By the time I got there they were trying to find him and going up the wrong driveways. The sheriff's deputy wouldn't let me near. Finally they found him and took him away. He was transferred to the old Navy Hospital. I went there several times to visit. One day David walked out with some visitors and came home in a taxi. The taxi driver was shaking from the stress but he wanted his fare. I paid. A few days later I drove David to the Naval base at Pt. Loma and the shore patrol took him away. Back to the hospital. A few weeks later he was discharged and set free to come home with medication that made him feel sick.

After David stopped taking his meds, I thought that it would be possible to get some sort of help from the courts. Some way to put him into a hospital. A woman investigator from the court came to interview David. She said that David wasn't ill enough to take his case before a judge. I asked if we couldn't let the judge decide. The woman said that it was up to her if a case could be brought and she said, "no!" That was that.

He stole his father's somewhat classic Corvair and took off. We drove to a small town in Nevada to bring David and the car home. He stole our truck and took it to Idaho. He ran from the cops and my husband had to go to Idaho to bring our truck back. Another time David took the Corvair to Washington state and his dad flew up there to bring the car and David home. David left again and was caught in a stolen car trying to cross into Canada. The car had been stolen in Utah by someone that picked up David in Oregon  and then just let him keep the car.  He was in jail and then in Eastern State Hospital. After a few months he was sent back to the jail and then released on to the street in mid winter snow with no warm clothing. My husband's brother drove over from Western Washington to get him. Eventually David took the Covair to northern California and drove it out in the woods and into a creek. It was a total loss. That was the last time he took a car.

For many years when David was younger he would leave home and live on the streets sometimes for months at a time. My husband has driven hundreds of miles to bring him home. Sometime in the mid '90s David was arrested in Idaho. The police officer realized that David was not all right. They wanted him out of their town so they drove him to a mental hospital and told him to sign himself in. David left as soon as the cop drove away and called home. David has been driven out of town more than once by police that do not want to deal with him. David doesn't leave as often now and when he does he comes home sooner.

David lived with his dad most of the time. Now he is here with Hailey and I. He is really and kind person and would have been a very special human being if not for his illness. He reads the paper and keeps up on the news. He is great to talk to most of the time. On the surface he seems sane as anyone. Maybe more than most. That doesn't mean it is easy for any of us. He yells at me because the air is full of acid. Someone poisoned him and people are lying about him.

I guess I'm writing this because I'm tired. I had a photo class yesterday that I had to miss. His father is out of town and David is going through a bad time. There is no help out there for the parents of the mentally ill. If they can cope as we have maybe the mentally ill have a place to live and people to care about them. If they do not have families, they often live on the street. I have read that about one third of the homeless are the mentally ill.

The laws and the meds freed them to live on the streets.

Full Moon

 The fourth was a full moon...I think. Anyway the moon was a golden globe in the eastern sky. I sat out on our low brick wall and took some photos. My black cat Tuffy just had to see what I was doing. He started out by rubbing against my legs but soon he was up on the wall with me. And he was bumping into my arms and making it hard to take the moon photos. I got some OK shots anyway. Nothing is ever as sharp as I want it to be. Then the next morning every early I took photos of the moon in the western sky. This time it was white and the sky just turning a dark blue from black. The following day I caught the moon in the bright blue western sky.

So here they are different ways the full or almost full can look.