The Arrival of Lucky Zander

Exactly two weeks ago today, right before dinner, we received a call from Tammy. She told Joyce, "I think I might be in labor." That's all it took! A smoothly oiled machine rolled into action as Joyce marshaled her troops (me) and began issuing orders. Phone calls were placed and arrangements made for dog feeding and walking and an alert went out to our respective workplaces. There was no packing to do, the suitcases were already in the car, as they had been for two weeks.

In less than an hour we were speeding down the freeway as if the hounds of hell were in pursuit! By 7:30 we were stopped at a roadside rest stop placing calls to Sarah, Geoff, Shelly, Kathy and JJ and then we were sailing up Snoqualmie pass and on to Spokane. We stopped in Ellensburg for gas and searched in vain for an open Starbucks, but by 10:15 they were closed down and settled in their snug little beds I guess, so we settled for a coke for a jolt of caffeine and pressed on.

At 1:30AM we arrived at the hospital, which we found locked down. We had to enter through the emergency room by the psych ward and after much bumbling around we found our way to the birthing center. By the time we found Tammy, she had been given an epidural and seemed pretty mellow for a woman in labor. Of course, Tyler was focused on food, not having eaten dinner before coming to the hospital. Scott came to the rescue with a late night run to a fast food
place he knew about. At about 2:15 I said, I'm going down to the car to see if I can sleep for a bit. The other reason I went to the car was that I was not all that sure that we were parked legally (Joyce couldn't be bothered with such minutiae as a legal parking spot) and didn't want the car towed away. At about 4 AM Joyce called me and said, "You need to go to the house and let the Pugs out" I drove through the deserted streets to Tammy and Tyler's and took my blanket and pillow in with me. I found a comfortable spot in the recliner in the living room and went back to sleep with the complaints of Gunther in my ears. However, there was no way that I was about to let Gunther get up at 4:30 even if he did protest a bit. Finally he settled down and we all went to sleep until 7 AM when Joyce called again with instructions for feeding the "boys".

Tank and Gunther seemed to sense that something was up. After breakfast and a jaunt into the back yard for their morning poo, they settled down on the recliner focused intently on the front door. There they sat in anticipation of the return of their family unaware that everything would be different when Tammy and Tyler returned.

At 7:30 I gassed up the car, found a Starbucks open and got my caffeine fix, then I was rolling back to the hospital. When I got to Division Street Joyce called again, "You better hurry!" she said. Of course, it didn't take that long to get to the hospital, but finding a parking spot and my way back to the birthing center took awhile. After joining Scott in the waiting room, and reminiscing about the births of our children we were ushered into the birthing room just in time to meet our grandson for the first time. He was in fine form, with lots of black hair, which they promptly covered up with a beanie. He reminded me of his uncle JJ without the braided beard.

Tammy looked exhausted, but radiant, and Tyler just stared at Zander with a look of awe. All the while, Grandma Jo was making like a paparazzi in pursuit of a scandalous rock star snapping photos of little Zander over Tyler's shoulder, from under his arm and around the side of his head. I managed to snap a couple of shots myself, although it was hard without a flash since everyone insisted on rocking him when they held him. Joyce and Shannon were glued to their cell phones calling one person after another with the glad tidings! And I probably don't need to add that everyone was beaming.

Pretty soon we were ushered onto the other side of the curtain so that they could deal with Tammy in private. That's when Joyce came to me and said, "Tammy wants you to hold your grandson before we go home." What a wonderful surprise. I took him from Joyce and it all came back. Holding my own children for the first time and my grand daughter for the first time last year and now my grandson. He didn't cry or fuss, I guess I still have the feel for holding a baby and then he stuffed his hand in his mouth and started sucking his fingers.

All too soon we had to scramble for the exit and start the drive back to the wet side (we had an upcoming audit scheduled at work and there was more prep to do). As we drove through wind and driving rain Joyce and I basked in the experience we had just shared. We were both tired and sore from sleeping in awkward positions, but elated! Then as we were closing in on Moses Lake and the car was set in cruise right at the speed limit, we began to climb a hill. I pushed down on the accelerator so we wouldn't slow down... That's when I spotted the Highway Patrol car in the median. I looked down at the speedometer and saw the needle pointing at 80. Of course then I saw the red light flashing in the rearview mirror and pulled over. I got out my driver's license and registration all the while thinking "How much is it for doing 80 in a 70 zone?"
The officer looked at my license and said, "Mr Bunch, the speed limit is posted as 70, but when the weather is bad we generally expect drivers to slow down, not speed up." I lamely replied, "I had the car on cruise and was trying to compensate for the hill." Even I thought that sounded lame. Then came the moment when the officer goes back to his car to write the ticket and to check to make sure you aren't a wanted terrorist or drug runner up from Mexico on his way to Yakima. He came back to the car, handed me my license and registration and said, "You will slow down, won't you?" "Yes, officer." and that was it! No TICKET!

As we headed back down the freeway, at a slower rate of speed, we started talking about the strange streak of luck that seemed to come in the wake of Zander's birth. Even before he was born, Joyce had opened a piece of mail just before Tammy called and found a check for back child support, but instead of the typical 20 bucks she found more than $600. Then Tammy called and we were telling her about the good luck when she told this amazing story. After Tyler had settled Tammy into the birthing room he had to go back to the car for some things. On the way back from the parking lot he spotted a piece of paper drifting around in the breeze. He grabbed it and found himself holding a hundred dollar bill! Talk about a lucky baby. He has two wonderful parents, an extended family who dote on him and a couple of adoring Pugs (or at least one) all here to welcome him to our clan. But Zander brings his own special brand of luck. If I were Tammy and Tyler, I'd be buying lottery tickets with his birth date, and vital statistics for numbers. Who knows, he might just win enough to pay his own way in this world!

The Sun King

Awhile back someone said to Joyce, "Your skin is so smooth, how do you manage that?" Of course what was left unsaid was "your skin is smooth for someone of your age". Nevertheless, I've noticed that neither one of us has many wrinkles yet, and the secret is not some rejuvenating lotion or treatment. All you have to do is live in a place where the sun shines less than a third of the time.
As we all have been told repeatedly, the sun damages the skin and causes aging.

Of course there are other factors at work when you live in cloud country. Joyce and I also recently discovered that we have a vitamin D deficiency and of course, vitamin D is supplied by sunshine. In fact, Joyce was so depleted that with a normal range of 30 to 80, she tested 9. I was much better, probably because I spend time in the garden and get more sun. However, my results was 19. So, we are both taking 5,000 units of prescription strength vitamin D once a week for the next 12 weeks.

The really interesting thing is that lack of vitamin D causes all kinds of symptoms that we both thought were simply the result of the aging process. For example, dry skin, painful joints and muscles, depression, high blood pressure, type 1 diabetes, kidney problems and a pasty face are but a few. So I am hopeful that this course of vitamins will make us both feel better, or at least more energetic. I've always noticed that I have much more energy when the sun shines and usually a rush of optimism and euphoria. Of course this doesn't last long since the sun usually disappears after a couple of days.

This also might explain why I feel so good when we are on vacation in a place like Hawaii or Spain. (I mean besides not having to work and being able to do whatever we feel like.) In fact, my own personal prescription for vitamin D deficiency is frequent trips to the tropics. Wish I could get the doctor to prescribe that treatment and have it covered by my health insurance. Oh well, at least they covered the blood test and gave us a break on the price of the vitamins. In this day and age I suppose you can't do much better.

THE KILLING MOON

There are legends surrounding the moon and tales of madness associated with its' light, and we are under the influence of the full moon as I write this. The past few days as the moon grew steadily larger we have seen an unprecedented killing spree sweep across America. We had the slaughter of immigrants in New York, the family and cop killer in Oakland, the mother who shot her 20 year old son in the back of the head at a firing range in Florida and then put the gun in her own mouth and pulled the trigger. Then closer to home, Monday night in Graham a man killed his 5 children because his wife wanted a divorce. Oh, and then he killed himself in the parking lot of the Indian casino as his grand finale.

And that's not even the full extent the mayhem. Alabama seems to be a favorite place for these family mass murders. You remember the guy who killed his family and then drove 20 miles to his old place of work killing people along the way. I think the cops killed him in the end. An hour ago there was another family killing in Alabama. We don't know the details yet, but we will, thanks to 24 hour infotainment.

You really can't blame the moon I suppose. Only some of us are superstitious enough to believe in the influence of the moon. But it's about as good a theory as any to explain this growing phenomenon.

Some people say it's because of the economy. After all, people are losing their homes, their jobs, their savings, their dignity and they just snap. This makes sense, except that virtually all of these killers are middle class or working class. I mean, how much in real terms did they have to lose? They probably didn't have much equity in the house, and according to everything I've read over the past few years most Americans don't have any savings. What they do have is debt.

The other thing about the economy as a motive, is that during the Great Depression you didn't hear about people killing their families or strangers and then killing themselves because they were out of work and were about to lose their homes. The ones who did kill themselves during the panic on Wall Street in 29 were rich folk. There was a wave of suicides as wealthy brokers and bankers threw themselves out the windows of skyscrapers when they discovered they were broke.

The guys on Wall Street in 2009 aren't the ones killing their families and then themselves. That's because they still have a bonus coming in after they destroyed the economy, I suppose. Besides, they really haven't failed yet. The government is keeping them alive in their Zombie banks while in Alabama another red neck kills his kin.

The other theory is that these guys are paranoid. Right wing talk radio has been telling them that now that we have a black communist for our president the next thing coming is the confiscation of their guns. That being the case, you might as well use your guns to make sure the government can't come after you with their damn unemployment checks and other such socialistic plots. It's kind of like the black sheriff in Blazing Saddles when he holds the gun to his own head and says "If you take one step closer I'll kill the nigger." The theory here is that these guys think that the government is going to put their children in re-education camps after they confiscate the guns. They know this is so because we've got a congresswoman running around saying it's true and besides they saw it on Fox.

My own theory is that America is crazy! The whole goddamn country is one gigantic madhouse. We no longer manufacture anything. We sent those jobs to the guys who were our mortal enemies just 30 years ago. Does anybody remember Red China? Guess what. They're still Red! So we shipped them all of the decent paying jobs and in return we're receiving inferior products, toxic even, which we can buy at bargain rates at our local Walmart.

Oh, and we can't have a decent health care system because that would mean some oligarch couldn't get rich and we all know what a crime that would be. In fact, we tell ourselves we have the best health care system in the world when what we really mean is that we have the most expensive. By any other measure we are not even in the top ten when it comes to health care.

And how about refusing to face the fact that oil has been running out since the 1970s and what reserves are left are controlled by people who want to destroy us.

Or maybe someone can explain why we transport food from around the world to our grocery stores while paving over our best farm lands right outside town. Or why we can't run an election anymore without screwing it up. Or why when you call for assistance you get someone who can't speak English in an English speaking country. Or why we think buying and selling debt to each other is the basis for an economy. Or why we let sexual predators lose on the streets and lock up pot smokers. Or why contracts for speculators are sacred but contracts for workers can be renegotiated. Or why we spend more money than all of the other countries in the world combined on our military. Or why we think everyone is entitled to their own gun. In fact, according to some Americans, the world would be a better place if everyone was armed with a gun.

You see what I mean? These are not the actions of mentally stable people.

GARDEN DETAILS

Something new has been added! I have just created another blog (it's been raining an awful lot and I can't get outside to work). It's called GARDEN DETAILS or WAY MORE THAN YOU WOULD EVER NEED OR WANT TO KNOW ABOUT MY GARDEN. I did this because I want to blog about my garden in detail, but realize that not everyone is into gardening as much as I am. Garden Details will feature pictures, plant lists, plans, projects, observations and all kinds of things that will probably bore anyone who is not a gardener.

Garden at the Edge will continue to be about all the exciting things that happen to Joyce and I here in Cloud Country. zzzzzzzzzzzzz Oh, sorry, I dropped off to sleep for a moment. Anyway, I've created a link and you can check it out if you are wide awake and need to read something that will bore you enough that you can fall asleep.

OUTRAGE OF THE WEEK

It's funny how easily we can get stirred up by something we hear or read on the internet. The other day I heard that a bill had been introduced in the House that would ban organic farming and could even impact gardeners growing vegetables in their own back yard. The story was that a Connecticut representative, whose husband was a lobbyist for Montsanto had introduced a bill called the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009, which would make it impossible for small organic farms to stay in business and would require that everyone use pesticides. I was getting ready to post a blog about this outrage when I decided to find out if the story was true. I went to Fact Check . org and got the true story.

It turns out that the bill would separate the food part of the FDA from the drug portion so that there would be more emphasis on checking food for contamination. Also, the husband of the Congresswoman was a pollster, not a lobbyist, who had conducted a poll for Montsanto as well as Bill Clinton and Nelson Mandela. But the hysteria continues on the internet unabated, describing a plot by food nazis to force back yard vegetable growers to stop growing food for themselves or from sharing with their neighbors. Of course, the government is so effective in their enforcement efforts that they have managed to stomp out every pot grower in the country over the past 40 years. You just know they would be very efficient in going after the tomato growers! They might have to let the war on terror go for awhile, however while they focus on this much more important task.

Mao's Revenge

I find few things more annoying than an alarm clock. Ours makes a sound that grates on the nerves like an electronic cat caught under a rocking chair. Some unknown sadist most likely in China designed this as revenge for our exporting McDonalds to them I'm pretty sure.

The other morning I'd gotten up to use the bathroom when I heard the alarm go off. Usually, Joyce switches it off a few seconds after it sounds. But on this morning it went on and on and on. Now I realize that every 5 seconds of that grating yeeeee yeeeee yeeeee feels like an eternity, but I swear this went on for a good five minutes. I thought that Joyce must have gotten up at some ungodly hour to vacuum or rearrange the cupboards or something and forgot to turn the alarm off, but when I came back into the bedroom she was still in bed. I went over to her side of the bed and turned the alarm off and then I nudged her.

"Hey,Joyce, the alarm has been going off."
"I turned it off!"
"No you didn't. I just turned it off."
"Well I was trying to!"
"No you weren't, you were asleep."
"I unplugged it and took the batteries out. I was just getting ready to take it apart!"
"You were getting ready to take it apart?"
"I was looking for an axe!"

My sentiments exactly!

OUTRAGE OF THE WEEK

Generally, I'm a pretty laid back person and lately I've been trying to chill out in order to keep my blood pressure under control. However, this past Tuesday when I opened the mail my blood boiled. Capital One, the credit card we've been using mostly to make online purchases etc sent us notice saying that they had raised their interest rate from 9.9% to 17.9%. What had we done wrong? Had we been late with a payment, or not paid a payment at all? No, we'd never been late and usually pay the balance every month. Had our credit rating dropped? No, it's still excellent. Had we put more than we are allowed on the card? No, the balance was modest.

I had been hearing that many credit card companies were raising rates, but I figured it was on customers who were less credit worthy. How naive of me! Before George Bush left office the Republican Congress, with the help of some key Democrats, including our current Vice President passed a real turd of a bill making it harder to declare chapter 11 bankruptcy. At the same time they lifted the limit that credit card companies could charge up to 30%. Of course, I'm getting kind of long in the tooth, so I can remember when there were usury laws in the United States that prevented them from raising rates beyond 12%. Thirty percent was considered loan sharking and it was illegal. The only people who loaned money at that rate was the Mafia.

The argument for the increase in rates is a real piece of illogic. Some customers are having trouble paying their credit card bills. It's a lot more risky to loan money to them, so we'll raise the rates on our good customers as well as the bad ones. That way those who do the right thing and are prompt about paying their bills can bail out the deadbeats.

How am I going to deal with this? The next time I receive the bill, it will be paid in full and then I'm calling Capital One and telling them to fold the card four ways and put it where the moon don't shine! I don't need them, nor do I need their credit. I'll pay cash thank you and if you don't want to accept my check, then I won't do business with you. I got along fine without their credit card before and I can again. So their attempt to make me their bitch is going to backfire. If everyone with good credit does what I plan to do, then the credit card companies will be stuck with nothing but the insolvent and that would be just what they deserve.

You know what the worst aspect of the whole affair is? Capital One just got 3.5 billion dollars of taxpayer money to help bail them out. So they took the taxpayers money and then they turned around and screwed the taxpayer after they received the bail out. Are you outraged? I know I am.