Good Foods
Topic: Recipes
FRIED PEPPERS AND ONIONS
By Hazel

hot peppers, or medium if you prefer
onions
olive oil

1. Slice peppers lengthwise into spears, then in half crosswise.
2. Cut onions into chunks.
3. Saute both in a little bit of olive oil just until tender and touches of golden brown here and there. Sprinkle with a little salt to taste.

These are wonderful as a sandwich, on a bologna sandwich, or on an American cheese sandwich. Even great as an accompaniment to most any meal.

Afraid
Topic: Politics
I see Medicare is going to raise it's cost and deductibles again. Bush is trying his darnedest to get rid of it altogether and shove us all into HMO's. Given another four years, he might get it done. This scares me.

I am retired with a good medical plan and a prescription card from my former employer, which I earned, and which is head and shoulders over the cheesy prescription cards the government will provide after it's overhaul or wrecking of the current Medicare program. Everything cannot be privatized. The idea that Big Company USA will care more for my Aunt Minnies health care than their profits is blue skying at its most disgusting. That's so not going to happen. I feel sick when I hear the term, Compassionate Conservative. Now if that isn't an oxymoron I've never heard one. This scares me.


The Patriot Act, which let's our homes be entered without due process, seems to be extreme, and maybe a harbinger of other rights that could be taken away arbitrarily. I have been told that it is necessary so the government can keep track of the suspected terrorist. O.K. but it doesn't feel right. That scares me.

Conventions are over.
Topic: Politics
A few political thoughts:

It looks like the campaigns up until election day are going to be down and dirty, what else is new.
The Republicans line seems to be that Kerry is a weak sister and the Democrats is that Bush is a reckless cowboy in town raising hell after the cattle drive.

Perhaps the debates will bring out the differences in the issues that might concern each of us. We can only hope so.

If Bush wins, I wonder what will happen to Colin Powell? He seems sure to not be the secretary of state and seems to be the forgotten man in the cabinet.I wonder how much more Bush can emasculate the Medicare program and empower the drug companies?

Does Kerry's flip flop voting record mean he's wishy washy or sees both sides of an argument and is easily persuaded?

They both have the bank accounts of Midas, so any thought of them empathizing with our everyday problems is too far fetched to even think about, if they could even define them.

Well we'll see what the week ahead holds for these guys and eventually our future.

Observations from an old guy #2
Now Playing: The old days in dentistry, Ugh.
Topic: Observations of a old guy
As a child I went to a 'children's dentist' every six months, actually I was dragged by my mother's strong arm. My primary remembrance of those days was his jamming the Novocaine filled hypodermic into my waiting gums as if he were anesthetizing a cow. It filled me with so much trepidation that for many adult years my dental health suffered from the fear he instilled in me. But today it is so much different and so much better. Dentists have learned the difference between medicating animals and humans. We have a much lower pain tolerance. My dentist is the best. He applies Novocaine when I need it in small spurts until the area is so numb by the time he has emptied the hypodermic, the pain never arrives. In the new dentistry, I have had root canal that is painless, just boring from having to sit so long. With fluoride in the toothpastes cavities have dwindled down to nothing. Alleluia for the new age in dentistry.

Psychology 101: Old guy blabber.
Topic: Age
Psychology 101: Old guy compares life after retirement to childhood. As Lucy said in Peanuts, the doctor is in. This diagnosis bears about as much credibility as Lucy's, but her diagnosis cost a nickel as I recall, and at least this one is free.

In life, hopefully we are granted a long span of years. I am sixty-seven now, and in reasonably good health, so unless, unbeknownst to me, some nasty disease has my name on it I may be able to count on maybe another fifteen years or until my eighties. That is if heredity counts, as my parents both made it into their eighties. So with the fall weather approaching, and melancholia blowing in the air along with the leaves, I have become philosophical about it all, life up to now that is.

I have come up with this conclusion. It occurs to me that childhood up until middle teens, and old age, after retirement, is linked in this one marvelous way. Parallel frames of mind it seems to me existed within me fifty some years ago, and now in the next century. I feel a connection with that boy's feelings then as I do with the old guy he has become.

The childhood we are comparing was one of those normal, not too traumatic regular kind of childhood that most of us were lucky enough to have been granted; and an equal length of years in retirement, I will explain.

As I recall, and I will presume to speak for all of us, it's my ink; my childhood while not idyllic was certainly close enough to what I think idyllic means. My parents came out of the depression so money was not plentiful, but there must have been enough or my parents hid their distress from me very well. My frame of mind then, as best I can recall was one of contentment with no thoughts of having to make decisions, living in the moment, for the moment. I didn't know what was around the next corner, and was content enough living in the world as it was presented to me, either the real world or the world my parents made for me, either way I was happy.

This parallels exactly the feelings I have had from retirement to the present day. I am content, happy, worry free, and angst free. I again refuse to look too far around that corner. I am not an idiot, I know around that corner that I am not yet ready to consider is aging and all it's possible horrendous possibilities. Those possibilities, of course are illness in its many insidious forms and of course, since we have not figured out anyway of dodging it, death.

But being an adult and having a reasonably usable brain I have developed a private faith that even then I will enter another parallel existence of contentment and happiness.

What does this prove? Not a thing. But as thoughts fly in and out of our brains, this one stayed a moment too long and I put it on paper so you too can wonder..is he really sane?