Unacceptable.

Md. boy dies from toothache - MSNBC.com

Oh. My. GOD. I am SO angry.

This kid could have been just fine with regular dental check-ups and an $80 root canal.

This is an outrage. As libertarian as I am, I do think that health care in this country needs to be available to everyone, because we all eventually have to pay for things like this that could have been smaller bills with happier outcomes. Before my husband became an EMT, we were both for keeping healthcare private and market-driven...but after he saw how many people call the ambulance as their primary care provider, he realized that something was very wrong with the system as it is. This boy's death is a HUGE red flag.

Let's see...we'll declare war on Iraq for shifting reasons, but let's keep people here at home sick because--HEY--people being sick is ALSO big business. Nevermind that this kid's final hospital bill was over $250,000.00.

I'd rather pay into a co-operative fund that pays for preventative free clinics that are healthcare "triage" spots that can either help you with a small problem or get you to a specialist for a bigger problem...where you can negotiate your payment for that bigger service. And that doesn't exclude the option for a primary care provider like a family doctor if you can afford one. I'm just saying that there are hardly any decent options for poorer people. It's almost like the "system" wants them dead. That is evil.

So...where are all these Republican "pro-lifers" in congress? The boy that died, Deamonte, must not have rated somehow...poor people that can't afford healthcare never seem to rate. And more people are becoming poor from health issues than ever before.

We are an evil nation if we do not fix our medical care problems; if we as voters and insurance premium payers and taxpayers don't DEMAND a better healthcare system, we will end up paying in the long run, perhaps with our lives and savings. I know that many conservatives simply hold up the Veteran's Administration hospitals and say, "Look at that! The government can't even care for their own!" That may be true, but at least it's care on some level, as opposed to no care at all.

Mardi Gras, Second week

My sister called yesterday and busted me.

She says, "So, your Mardi Gras entry was sort of, uh, weak. Are you leaving stuff out?"

"Yeah," I told her. "The second week was pretty intense and action-packed. I haven't gotten around to blogging about it because..."

Because...I've been putting it off. But now I have some pictures ready and I think I know what I'm going to say about it.

---------

The second week of Mardi Gras began on Friday, February 16th. The day was filled with last-minute construction stuff for us to do since we were at least expecting my friend from KC, Carolyn. We were also expecting Keven the drum maker from Escalante, Utah...we just didn't know when he'd show up. We were pretty certain he may swoop in after midnight, but he could arrive at any time.

At around 4 p.m. our phone rang and my friend was in a cab on the way to our place. We waited outside while the usual parade crowd began to gather for the 6 p.m. parade. The cops would come out and start wandering the street, parking places began to disappear, and the energy level just sort of switched into parade-mode, for lack of a better term. Then, out of the blue, I saw my friend walking across St. Charles pulling her luggage. She just appeared; we never did see the cab or anything. She told us that she was dropped off since she was "cab-sharing" with a guy going further uptown. That was easy!

We got caught up and I settled her into the guest room. Right as the parade began at about 6:20, the phone rang. It was our friend Keven from Utah. He was in town at I-10 and some street some where, shunted off because St. Charles was closed. Shit. It was spectacularly bad timing for him to show up right when the parade began...where would he find parking, or would he even find us at all? About 20 minutes later he rolled in and parked. It was amazing. He walked upstairs, took a piss, and walked right out to the parade. Incredible luck! Typical for him, really. He is charmed in that way, I think. He got really drunk later and tried to dance with a girl in the parade. The police didn't like that...and told him to stay out of the parade. It could have been worse. I'm just glad he got the hint...
The rest of the weekend begins to sort of all melt together in my memory from that point...my brother and sister-in-law showed up at some point on Sunday night, right when a parade began as well...we went out for my husband's birthday on Monday and got some really strong drinks in the French Quarter, then more parades Uptown later, then Tuesday, Mardi Gras, arrived. At this point we had viewed every parade on St. Charles; we were on parade number 21 or 22 when the Rex parade rolled by. After this much bead catching and goody jockeying, I really didn't care to catch anything more. The plastic stuff was beginning to get on my nerves and seemed like a supreme waste of, well, plastic stuff, aka petroleum products, that would mostly end up in a landfill somewhere. I personally had caught over 50 pounds of necklaces.

I talked to my 3rd cousin (in-law) about all of this, and she being the consummate native New Orleanian offered that it was better to be born here and work up to the stamina of 20-something parades, as opposed to just jumping in cold...kinda like drinking heavily...you have to work up to it. I found it to be a brilliant piece of wisdom...she's a fantastically smart person and has all kinds of trivia and recipes to share.

There really is so much more about the second week of Mardi Gras, but I have to protect the innocent AND the guilty here, so if you know me personally, call up and ask me what happened and I'll give you the straight story...otherwise, you'll just have to wait for my memoir.

National Geographic

So the March 2007 National Geographic arrived in the post office box yesterday. After anxiously turning to page 138 and flipping through the article, I could only identify with certainty two photos that I was present for. Page 147 has a photo of two cottonwoods locked in an embrace. I happened to be the person carrying the camera case that day, and I am shocked that any photos from that particular day made the cut.

I'm shocked because we only had one day scheduled down in this canyon, and Frans really liked to spend at least two days in areas to see what the light was doing during every hour of daylight. I was, in fact, standing RIGHTTHERE when the tree pic was taken. There were several pictures from that day that could have perhaps made it, but that one was taken nearing sunset, so a nice peachy glow was going on with the canyon walls.

The photo of Antelope Canyon on page 153 was taken much later in the week. At that point, we had been hired to simply assist with the camera bags and logistics, because everyone knows where Antelope Canyon is...Page, Arizona. So I may or may not have been present when this pic was taken, but I'm certain that my husband was. Early one morning, a large group of photographers went into the canyons to get this "ray of light" shot that everyone wants in this canyon. You wouldn't believe the tripods and cameras that are set up around every bend in the canyon wall...then someone throws some dirt in the air and the shutters start snapping to get the "ray." It's nuts, and you have to go early, because walking tours will trip over everything and get in the photo.

After this pic was taken, our work was done and we were free to go back to Escalante. We went home and bathed, unpacked, then packed all over again and left town for five days to visit a friend in Albuquerque. We were so tired, disgusted, and burned out, that this was the moment that clinched the whole "selling and moving on" thing for us.

There were some people that hired us that were the coolest people we ever met, and they stayed in touch and kept coming back to hike. There were some people that hired us--and these people were the exception--that treated us like servants and constantly impressed that upon us via their actions and snide comments. Although the latter kind of client was really rare, they were vile enough in an encounter that it made us not want to be guides, ever again. And when you are subjected to that negativity for a week when you have the experience, knowledge, and skill to do the job you were hired for, you start to wonder what in the hell you're doing...why you've chosen to do this guiding thing at all when the pay is marginal and you get a fucking Prince Prissy as a customer every few years.

That was this particular job. I'm glad I'm retired from guiding.

Mardi Gras, First week

The first week of Mardi Gras began for us on February 9, 2007. On that day, a Friday, we were working in the condo unit until about sundown (we're living in one smaller unit, and renovating a larger unit that faces St. Charles Avenue). As we rinsed our paint brushes out and put our tools away, people started to appear out of nowhere down on St. Charles...cars began to be parked everywhere, taking any available legal or illegal parking space, and the police began to show up as well and walk up and down the Avenue. St. Charles Avenue is a broad, four-lane street divided by a large grassy median where the streetcars would be running into the Garden District (they have not run since Katrina). This general milling about went on for the next two hours, until traffic was stopped down the far side of the avenue. Then the parade began in earnest. There were two that night, parades named "Oshun" and "Pygmalion." The next day, a Saturday, had four parades (one of them is pictured above), beginning at 1 p.m. and ending after the last parade at 6 p.m. The same parking issues, police strolling, and people milling about went on every time a parade was about to begin.

It was like our corner of the Avenue was invaded and transformed into something quite different every day. We had a break of no parades at all on the Avenue on Monday and Tuesday of the following week--which we needed to finish up work in the unit until our company arrived. It was explained to us that the second week of parades right up through Mardi Gras would bring much bigger crowds and traffic and parking snarls, but we couldn't imagine it...already, it seemed like the celebrations were large enough. We were in for a shock as that did, in fact, come to pass. EVERYTHING, and I mean EVERYTHING, ground to a complete halt. Right before the whole Mardi Gras parade insanity began, we finally received the kitchen cabinets via a shipping company that we had been waiting on since December 12th. We took our last guest to the airport this morning...the cabinets are still in their boxes. But I'll blog about that later.

The first week of parades was sweet--there were 12 parades from Friday through the next Thursday. We were very excited to finish our work during the day and then walk outside and be entertained right in the front yard...they were low-key and very family-oriented. Where we are on St. Charles the parades are very kid-friendly. The weather was very cold at nights, but the whole scene was warm and friendly. And at first, catching the myriad strings of plastic beads thrown from the parade floats was fun (week two brings a different take on the whole bead thing). We were looking forward to having company and to hosting folks for the big parades over the next weekend--little did we know that right outside the front of the building, it would be a mob scene that within a half-mile square would host more humans than we had been around in YEARS. And, we would be trapped in our building for almost the entire duration of the final parades, since leaving would mean we'd NEVER get a parking space again that was close.

This old movie: Miracle Mile

Telegraph Blogs: Arts: Reel Life: January 2007: You should have seen it: Miracle Mile

So we were sitting eating breakfast this morning after all the Mardi Gras craziness and somehow this movie came up in conversation--how great it was. Then tonight out of the blue, quite by accident, my husband was doing Technorati searches for Mardi Gras and this link came up.

Spooky.

It is a good movie; see it if you haven't.

I will write more about Mardi Gras later...it really was too intense to write about while it was going on, and I had out-of-towners to tend to, which always takes precedence over my casual blogging. But I do have some photos, and I will get my take on it out here after I digest it. It was sort of traumatic after living in the middle of nowhere for almost seven years.

Thank you for not smoking. AGAIN.

The weather here has been great. We took the afternoon off yesterday and went for a little walk around the French Quarter since we hadn't been down there in awhile. We needed something to do because we were a little ancy, because...

(drum roll)

We both quit smoking at about the same time. I had picked up the vile habit AGAIN when we were going through the move from Utah to New Orleans--I smoked real heavily for almost three months, but not quite. Then I stopped. On Sunday. Unexpectedly. It was just time to stop, and I stopped. I am blessed with the ability to do that. I don't have an "addiction." I don't really have withdrawal. I just stop, and I feel much better almost immediately.

Husband, on the other hand, has smoked regularly since about 2001. We had both quit for a short time after moving to Utah, but we both picked it back up in 2001. I have quit many, many times since then...Ha ha...usually because I get a crazy sinus infection. I didn't really want to get that far into smoking this time. In fact, I never want to pick up a smoke again. I always say that. I just hope it's true this time. I'm too old to get back into it. Husband just informed me that he is doing well with quitting--no cravings at all. Hmmm...

I gotta say, though, that smoking in a real humid climate in a dirty, air-polluted place is alot harder on your lungs than smoking in a place with the cleanest, driest air in the lower 48. A neighbor of ours in the building here has a really bad cough in the morning that can be heard through the walls. It sounds like he is hacking up part of lung--seriously, it is that bad! As much as we knew we needed to quit, hearing this guy every morning would make anyone WANT to quit! Poor dude...we wonder if he's gone to the doctor because we haven't heard him that much lately. We did check out his pick-up in the parking lot. The dash is covered with empty Marlboro Red boxes.

The End of a Career

We received notice that National Geographic will have an article in the March issue called "Canyon Lands." In 2003, we assisted the photographer providing photos for this article for a week while he took pictures in and around the canyons. Until we had to sell our place and move, this was the most difficult job we had been hired to do as guides.

In order to assist a National Geographic photographer, you have to be really flexible. There is a lot of waiting around for the "right light." There is a lot of hauling 50 pound packs in and out of the most remote canyons in the Southwest. After seven days of schlepping, hiking, not sleeping, and after doing this job that meant so much in terms of what my husband and I did as guides, we knew that it was time to move on from this career, this part of our lives. It was an amazing experience in so many ways, and in others, it was brutal.

Guiding is a young person's job, to be sure. It's a great job to have if you don't really mind about retirement, or making a ton of money. And as you get older, you get more tired more easily...tired of hiking in the same place all the time, tired after a tour, tired of talking about the same things...just tired, period.

We thought that National Geographic would publish the story and pics within two years. It took over three and a half years, and now we're out of the business that the article would have helped to support--we are effectively retired. We reached burnout on the business at the end of 2003, after the National Geographic job. Now, after all this time, we'll finally be able to see the fruits of our labors. In a way, I'm very excited to go through the mag and see which pics I was present for during their creation, the ones I helped to make happen. In another way, it will be bittersweet, a reminder of the life we used to have. From what I understand, the photographer submits the pictures he likes best from the trip, then the story editors pick out the ones they think will work best with the story. So the final published result will be a surprise to everyone that was peripherally involved. Who knows...we may even be in a few photos. We were in a few photos he took--actually, my husband was in many more photos than I was. We both signed model releases. There is no telling until the magazine comes in the mail. We will be sent a gratis copy for our help.

When the issue comes out, I'll write a photo review with page numbers and blog about the situation where the photo was taken, what was going on, etc. It seems to be an appropriate way to end this career--we always wanted to go out on top of the game, and I don't know how you get any better than National Geographic.