Shizzle Popped

[sugar magnolia]

Ft. Collins. We had lunch with our granddaughter in Hays on the way through today. She’s a wonderful young woman and a diehard liberal living in hard red central Kansas.

An old injury to the rotator in my left shoulder flared up this afternoon. Driving tends to aggravate it a little but I’m having trouble moving my left arm very far tonight. I’m throwing everything in the book at it. Hopefully it’s better in the morning.

Dealing with the rotator cuff thing right now, and Biofreeze and Voltaren have been my friends.

[Tiredretiredlawyer]

Speaking of Hays, Kansas… In the summer 1976 Hubby and I participated in the Bike-Centennial which was a bicycle ride from Astoria, Oregon, to Washington, D.C. You could ride the entire trip or sections of it. We chose the two week Astoria, Oregon, to Prineville, Oregon, trip. A big fella from Hays, Kansas, was part of our touring group. Everybody called him “Hays” instead of his real name “Dave”. What a trip!

[Shizzle Popped]

Nampa, ID…just outside Boise. ~770 miles in 12 hours and 15 minutes including lunch and gas stops. It was a VERY long day but we’re getting closer. My shoulder fared better today but I mostly kept my arm tucked against my side and only used my left hand to help stabilize the steering. Traffic on I-80 and 84 is pretty light which helps. GPS took us up US-287 to Laramie instead of I-25 and I have to say it’s a much more interesting drive. Most of the drive through Idaho was through a heavy haze, I think from wildfires.

Depoe Bay, OR tomorrow and a 250 mile shorter drive.

[Shizzle Popped]

The Most Comfortable vehicles I have ever driven were Crysler products. They seem to get the driver ergonomics right every time. Total pieces of crap mechanically, but a joy to drive when they are fresh and agile. Zero back aches. No leg fatigue. Neck felt fine. I mean I felt like I was in Mother's Arms. Easy to steer. Accurate turns. Good go fast into traffic. Great power up a hill. I kid you not - every vehicle from a Ram truck to a soccer mom van drove and fit perfectly. Loved 'em. Trade 'em in a 50K. Don't dally. Get another one quick. Chrysler engineers have MTBF (mean time between failures) dialed in perfectly too.

The only Chrysler product I’ve ever owned was an early Neon. For a cheap car it was fairly well executed and reasonably comfortable. Unfortunately, mechanically it was an absolute pile of crap. I didn’t keep it long. When I was looking at cars the last time around, the cloth seats in the lower level Murano were impressively comfortable but I didn’t care for the leather seats in the SL. My wife couldn’t see out of it very well so it got knocked off the list early anyway.

[Shizzle Popped]

Ft. Collins. We had lunch with our granddaughter in Hays on the way through today. She’s a wonderful young woman and a diehard liberal living in hard red central Kansas.

An old injury to the rotator in my left shoulder flared up this afternoon. Driving tends to aggravate it a little but I’m having trouble moving my left arm very far tonight. I’m throwing everything in the book at it. Hopefully it’s better in the morning.

Then I'm really glad Amtrak will be doing the drive back.

Me too! We’re over 1,900 miles on the trip odometer already with another 500 miles to get to the Oregon coast tomorrow and whatever the distance to Lynnwood,WA on top of that. I’m getting too old for this shit. I’m afraid the days of long driving trips are coming to an end.

[Shizzle Popped]

Ft. Collins. We had lunch with our granddaughter in Hays on the way through today. She’s a wonderful young woman and a diehard liberal living in hard red central Kansas.

An old injury to the rotator in my left shoulder flared up this afternoon. Driving tends to aggravate it a little but I’m having trouble moving my left arm very far tonight. I’m throwing everything in the book at it. Hopefully it’s better in the morning.

Dealing with the rotator cuff thing right now, and Biofreeze and Voltaren have been my friends.

I’m sorry to hear about the rotator issue. I was rear ended by an appropriately named RAM pickup around 25 years ago. I thought it was just a muscle strain and ignored it. It cleared up after a week and I forgot about it, until it kept coming back. It’s gotten worse with age. Physical therapy has helped. Some. Voltaren is a life saver. My PA suggested it to me when arthritis in the large toe on my left foot was making it difficult to break in new shoes. I use it for all sorts of things now and it was the first thing I reached for last night.

[Shizzle Popped]

Speaking of Hays, Kansas… In the summer 1976 Hubby and I participated in the Bike-Centennial which was a bicycle ride from Astoria, Oregon, to Washington, D.C. You could ride the entire trip or sections of it. We chose the two week Astoria, Oregon, to Prineville, Oregon, trip. A big fella from Hays, Kansas, was part of our touring group. Everybody called him “Hays” instead of his real name “Dave”. What a trip!

What are the odds? Even today, Hays is only around 20k people and getting from Hays to Astoria still takes some effort.

[bill_g]

Offering you a preemptive Welcome to Oregon! Safe journey tomorrow.

[Shizzle Popped]

Offering you a preemptive Welcome to Oregon! Safe journey tomorrow.

Thanks! I can’t wait. We’ve spent the last seven years missing the PNW!

[Shizzle Popped]

I may have some photos at some point if I can figure out how to downsize them enough for the forum software on my iPhone. I didn’t bring a laptop this trip. I’ve taken a few photos but my wife took a bunch, mostly through the bug spattered windshield though. I clean the windshield every time we stop for gas, not that it matters much. The front of the car is covered in about eight layers of bug goo. I’m got to have to seriously clean this thing before my daughter sees it.

[bill_g]

Offering you a preemptive Welcome to Oregon! Safe journey tomorrow.

Thanks! I can’t wait. We’ve spent the last seven years missing the PNW!

You better get to sleep. It's after midnight in spudminer country.

[Maybenaut]

I may have some photos at some point if I can figure out how to downsize them enough for the forum software on my iPhone. I didn’t bring a laptop this trip. I’ve taken a few photos but my wife took a bunch, mostly through the bug spattered windshield though. I clean the windshield every time we stop for gas, not that it matters much. The front of the car is covered in about eight layers of bug goo. I’m got to have to seriously clean this thing before my daughter sees it.

Download the app Image Size for iOS. Icon is a blue diamond with a curving arrow inside. (h/t to whatever4 for turning me on to that).

[Shizzle Popped]

We got into Seattle late yesterday afternoon. The traffic up I-5 is every bit as bad as I remember and the Renton “S” curve is still a mess even on a Sunday afternoon. There’s major road construction alongside I-405. Maybe dedicated bus lanes they were talking about before we left? Out here in Lynnwood where we’re staying they’ve torn down the old Sears at the Alderwood mall and put up a 6 story apartment building with commercial space on the first floor.

I got most of the bug guts off of the car so it’s presentable again. Tomorrow we’re going upstate and taking the ferry through the San Juan Islands out to Friday Harbor and back. It’s a day trip but it’s one of the most beautiful spots on the planet.

[AndyinPA]

Glad you made it. And, yes, the San Juan Islands are beautiful.

[Shizzle Popped]

We got home early Sunday morning. The last couple of days have been spent trying to unpack, grocery shopping and trying to get back to a normal routine. The train actually got into Chicago on time so we were able to switch our bus tickets to train tickets. The Cardinal from Chicago to NYC runs through Indianapolis but only goes three days a week. The guy at the Amtrak lounge told us to go next door and see if we could get rebooked onto the train. So, we took the last leg on a much more comfortable train and got home three hours earlier.

More on the trip as I get back into the swing of things around here.

[p0rtia]

Glad you're home safe!

[Shizzle Popped]

We're in the St. Louis area again tonight. My dad fell this morning and broke four ribs and fractured a vertebrae. He seems to be doing well and hasn't needed pain meds so far. That'll change tomorrow when they try to get him up and moving around. There's some talk of injecting something into the fractured vertebrae to help it heal but they haven't decided yet. We'll know more tomorrow when we see the doctor.

[p0rtia]

[bill_g]

[June bug]

[AndyinPA]

It's good that he is where he is.

[Shizzle Popped]

On the Seattle Trip:

The car had a little over 3,000 miles on the trip odometer when we turned it over to my daughter before we left. The car is in great shape and is about as fully loaded as they came in 2017. The little gas mileage indicator said 33.7 mpg and that looks fairly close to what my gas receipts say. That's pretty good considering speed limits in the interior west are 75 to 80 mph. Oddly, when the speed limit is 80 mph very few people go around me and they do it slowly. Along I-70 in Illinois and Indiana when I'm doing 74-ish mph they blow around me like I'm sitting still.

The Oregon coast was lovely, as it always has been. Sadly, the area around Depoe Bay and Lincoln Beach are starting to develop. I always liked that these areas were quieter and less populated than areas like Cannon Beach. We did find a nice quiet place along the beach to place the ashes of Kiah, our last Schnauzer. She hated getting her paws wet but loved running through the surf. When we would get out of the car near a beach she would pull at the leash until we got to the water. Then I would let the leash reel out and she would run in and out of the water. She loved the beach.

We went to Fremont to drop off one of my wife's quilts with the daughter of a friend. The friend now lives in Cabo but will be in town later in the month. We had lunch and spent the afternoon walking around the area. Fremont isn't as quirky as it used to be. The area has become too expensive to support quirky. Most of that moved to Portland years ago.

The last night we had dinner at Pier88 in Lynnwood. This place didn't exist when we moved and the only thing on that plot of land was a fairly new Costco. Now there's a Home Depot, apartments and a ton of small businesses. The food was good enough but our server was the real highlight. My wife asked if she could make a Cuban Daiquiri. She didn't know what it was but asked for the recipe so I told her how to make it. She didn't take a single note but when the drink arrived my wife said it was perfect. The entire night was like that. She was absolutely terrific and got a tip that reflected that.

That's all for now. I'll update on the train trip home later.

[Shizzle Popped]

My dad seems to be doing fairly well. They did a Kyphoplasty this afternoon, which is essentially injecting cement into the fractured vertebrae to align and stabilize it. I gather it's fairly routine and it went exactly as planned. Of course, they jostled him around a bit getting him into position for the procedure so he took his first pain meds after he got back to the room. He's tougher than I am.

They're working on getting him transferred into what they call a "swing bed" facility for a period of rehab before he returns to assisted living. I don't really know what that is but it's only offered at the smaller rural hospitals in the area. That should happen tomorrow or Saturday. Once we know where he's going we'll probably head for home. In the rush to get packed and get over here I forgot to grab my Trulicity, which I was supposed to take tonight. Plus my back, which was on the edge after the trip out west, has gone over the cliff. I'm on heavy meds tonight. There was talk of us taking him to whichever facility he's transferring to but they're all 30 or so miles from where he is. Moving him sitting upright in a car with four broken ribs may not be the best idea. One or the other of us will be back shortly anyway. He has unrelated appointments on the 26th of this month and the 7th of October. Mrs. Shizzle is taking the first one since I have an appointment in Indy on that day that's already been moved once.

On a side note, the hospital room he's in is oddly quiet. I've spent enough time in the hospital to know how noisy they can be and how incredibly hard it can be to sleep. There's some noise in the hall but less than I'm used to and when you close the door you can't hear much of anything.

[Shizzle Popped]

We had to move my dad to memory care, not because of his memory but because of repeated falls. After the last fall we all told him he needed help getting in and out of the shower, getting dressed, etc. He didn't listen and promptly had three more falls getting out of the shower. Then he had four falls in one weekend and a trip to the hospital. We moved him to memory care where they have a full time nursing staff and he can't take a shower without help. However, they told us he would have free range into the entire building where he could go see friends and eat with his group. They lied and my dad is extremely unhappy about it. He does have trouble with short term memory but it's minor. We're starting to look for a place close to us.

Recently we learned that our daughter in Seattle has stage 3 cervical cancer and it's spread to her lymph nodes. The prognosis is not great but they're throwing chemo, targeted radiation and immunotherapy at it with the hope that it goes into remission. She started chemo last week.

I spent yesterday afternoon and evening in the ER with Mrs. Shizzle. She's had severe diarrhea for a couple of weeks now and we all thought it was another flare up of her diverticulosis and were treating it as such, but it didn't improve. It's not a flare up we and have no idea what's wrong so we now have a referral to a gastroenterologist. The CT scan in the ER also showed a node in one breast and lung. The breast is probably one we already know about that was nothing and the lung may have something to do with an old case of histoplasmosis from when she was younger, but we'll have it checked. She's also got a little afib going on with her heart and we need to see a cardiologist for that. While they had her hooked up to a monitor her O2 levels would drop into the 70s and 80s periodically and then go back up into the 90s. When she was sitting up she was consistently in the mid 90s. The doctor suspects sleep apnea. Yesterday was not a good day.

With that orange shitbag getting elected I'm now concerned about my health insurance. ACA is what allowed us to retire early and move back to take care of our parents. My wife is now on Medicare but I've got three more years to go. If these assholes pull my health insurance I'm royally screwed.

On the plus side, I have 1,200 square feet of LVP flooring sitting in the garage waiting to install in the family room and master suite. That'll only leave carpet in two bedrooms, the bonus room over the garage and the basement. I'm an occasional woodworker so I would have preferred real wood floors but with three dogs in the house LVP got the nod. Our daughter that lives here is going to do most of the actual physical labor of putting the floor down. I'll do most of the cuts and trim work.

[Slim Cognito]