Tuesday, December 3, 2019
Snapshots
Very beautiful morning today.
The morning followed a beautiful night where the temperature only dipped down to 34 degrees. It's nice when that happens following a severe storm and/or cold snap.
I'm afraid I was too busy today to document much, so despite the title this post will feature only a single video and no snapshots at all.
Mom was too busy cleaning in preparation for visitors at the end of the week to travel to Cheyenne with me, so there would be no dining adventure.
Before I left she asked me to get her a bunch of bananas. She eats one a day, mostly for the radioactive potassium. Well, for the potassium. It's not all that radioactive.
At the local food store they had exactly seven bunches of bananas, all deeply spotted and so far beyond ripe that I'd call them decomposing. Mom likes them on the green side anyway, so these wouldn't do at all. I promised to get some in Cheyenne.
As I was traveling by myself I decided to make a personal visit to the VA to see if I could get my insurance coverage sorted out. The neurosurgeons have found it impossible to get an authorization number. I didn't hold out much hope for finding anything out, but I thought I might get a scrap of information regarding who to call.
Nevertheless I forged on. Inside the building as I was standing there in the passageway looking at a map of the compound and trying to puzzle out where best to get the gouge, a VA employee asked me if he could help. I explained, and he took me in hand and guided me to the proper place. Even introduced me to the guy who could help
In a remarkably short time the guy was able to find the logjam. He then explained what had happened, what he would do, and how I could follow the progress online through my online account.
What a deal! They've really changed since things were so out of whack a few years ago. Good on 'em.
That chore finished I headed over to the battery place where picking up my battery took about 30 seconds. The young fellow running the register (and possibly the store) was extremely competent, very pleasant, and remarkably well versed in customer service.
My final task was to source bananas. I dove into my phone and discovered that a natural foods grocery was only two doors down from the battery place. It was a small store and filled to the rafters with hippy crystal-grippin' foods and vitamins, but they also had lovely fresh (mostly labeled organic) produce. Including the cleanest, most uniform, green-turning-yellow Chiquita bananas I've ever seen in my life. Seventy-nine cents a pound. Out local food store was asking $1.69 for the garbage they had on display. What a deal!
Of course everything is a trade-off. There's no way I'd voluntarily live in Cheyenne. Part of the price I pay is in having to choose between over-priced, over-ripe, and over-shit bananas or no bananas at all. So I usually pass on the bananas and also pass on the traffic and all the other stuff I don't like about population centers. But since I was there anyway...
To be fair, the produce at our local store isn't always horrible. The storm and transportation snarls were the biggest part of the problem today.
When I finally got back to town after a long but productive day, I had to stop by the -- you guessed it -- food store. I got a couple of odds and ends and got on my way. As I was walking toward the pickup the Potter-Dix school bus pulled into the food store parking lot. Some Kimball kids go there instead of to the Kimball schools, and the bus picks them up in the morning and returns them after school to the single place in town featuring a large enough parking lot to take the bus as well as the caravan of mini-vans converging to take the kids home. Anyway, I paused for a few moments to watch the kids erupt from the bus. It's easy to forget how loud and kinetic kids are at the end of a school day. It was like someone had set off a kid bomb in the bus. One moment they were in there, the next they were squirting out everywhere, hollering and screaming and pushing and dashing and all like that. It was a cool thing to witness.
And that's all I got for the day.
Be well and enjoy the blessings of liberty.
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You give me hope my VA issues can be sorted out. So far, FUBAR.
ReplyDeleteSeems kind of like the luck of the draw whether you get people who really want to help provide care and those who just want the paycheck and benefits and "don't bother me." Seems to be getting better at Cheyenne but man, things really went to feces there for a while. I was even on one of those infamous lists for several years. Hang in there!
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Ok, you can stop singing " Yes, we have no bananas..." now, as you or your Mom now have bananas. Sounds as though it was a good and productive trip to the big city.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the post.
Paul L. Quandt
It was a good day. The bananas were an interesting find, as was the little natural foods store.
DeleteThanks for stopping by and commenting Paul!
Good news on the VA front is GOOD!
ReplyDeleteQuite a turnaround at Cheyenne. Seems like they fired a lot of deadwood and got some leadership in place up and down the chain.
DeleteThanks for stopping by and commenting!
A productive day, even without cow pies or swimming in stock tanks to fix floats!
ReplyDeleteCongratulations on the success with the VA (or at least hopeful signs of progress). Those guys are not doing anything that you didn't do back at the clinic at NAS Oceana (or elsewhere). Chalk it up as payback among the corpsman mafia.
Cheyenne is not a bad town, although the largest in Wyoming, and the Capitol with a population of 62,448, but it is larger than Kimball. (Some big city folks may not grasp the vastness of the west, the heartland that feeds us and a lot of the rest of the world.)
Lately I had been reading about Francis E. Warren, for whom much of Wyoming is named, sorta a cowboy version of Richard C. Byrd of West by-God Virginia (but without the Klan hood). His career is amazing, more or less the King of Wyoming before getting into a life long (well only 37 years) career in the U.S. Senate, the last Civil War veteran to serve in that dysfunctional body. Warren was also awarded the Medal of Honor for service at Port Hudson, May 27, 1863, although it was the only military award at the time, not the pinnacle of heroism as it is now, and most of the 1,500 Civil War MOHs were awarded long after the war. Warren and 3 others in the 49th Massachusetts got theirs in 1893 (when he was serving in the Senate...).
Short story:
In 1905, Warren was chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and the Military Affairs Committee. President Teddy Roosevelt wanted to promote Captain John J. Pershing to Colonel, but the Army refused. Warren’s 25 year old daughter, Frances, married Captain Pershing in 1905, in a wedding attended by President Roosevelt. Pershing was immediately shipped out to Japan as Military Attache and observer of the Russo-Japanese war. Shortly thereafter, Roosevelt nominated Pershing for promotion to Brigadier General, (over 853 more senior officers, skipping the ranks of Major, Lt. Colonel, and Colonel) which only required Senate confirmation, not approval by the Army.
Tragically, Warren’s daughter, Frances, Pershing’s wife, died in a house fire at the Presidio of San Francisco along with with two of the three Pershing children in 1915, while Gen. Pershing was on the Mexican border chasing Pancho Villa.
John Blackshoe
That's amazing stuff John. I kinda-sorta had read about all that stuff but only in bits and pieces over the years. I really love walking around the Cheyenne VA compound on a warm sunny day. Lots of old interwar period buildings which are maintained but mostly unused. It's a very pleasant place, and chock-full of lost history.
DeleteCheyenne itself is actually a lovely place and can hardly be called a city. It's not much larger than the Scottsbluff-Gering-Terrytown-Mitchell-Morrill-Melbeta "metroplex". Compared to Kimball though, it's pretty big. And cheyenne traffic isn't actually bad or even challenging. It's just more than I'm accustomed to. Huge construction boom going on so it must be gaining population. Anyway, we're blessed to have a "big city with a mall and ever'thang" in striking distance.
And yeah, knowing the language and how to interact with people in that setting is a plus.
Thanks for stopping by and commenting!
Wow, didn't know all that about Francis E. Warren, my youngest was born at the AFB in Cheyenne named for him. Sounds like I need to read up on this fellow!
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DeleteGood to hear you are having some progress with the VA. I understand that they can be fubar, but when Dad & I were dealing with them, they were great.
ReplyDeleteYay bananas, good for your mom.
They were super great back in the 2005-2007 time frame, but really went downhill for a while. I was actually on one of those secret "this guy don't get no appointments" lists and was essentially flushed from the system. Occasionally I would fire off an appointment request through their electronic patient portal and never heard anything back, until in 2017 they suddenly answered and I was back in. I was very fortunate because I had no health issues and could do pay-as-you-go here locally for the little things that crop up.
DeleteMom was delighted with the bananas. I see increased trips to the big sity in the future. ;-)
Thanks for stopping by anc commenting Brig!
Here in Wisconsin, we have a chain of convenience stores, Kwik Trip, that has excellent meats and produce. Bananas are 29 cents a pound, and they get changed every other day.
ReplyDeleteThat is amazing. Something like that would be real competition for our food store and might return things to a more normal non-monopoly balance. I'm gonna demand that the city council put one in! ;-)
DeleteThanks for stopping by and commenting Scott!
I've had dealings with the VA precisely once here in Little Rhody, was in 1999 or 2000 so it was a while ago. Wasn't bad at all. My Dad used the VA quite a bit during his final series of illnesses, they treated him well. A lot of it depends on the state and the city where the VA facilities are located I guess.
ReplyDeleteGreat post by the way, bananas, yum.
Unfortunately it's one of those organizations where at certain times and places things can go badly off the rails. Mostly that doesn't happen. When it does the consequences can be a rather bitter pill to swallow.
DeleteThanks for stopping by and commenting Sarge!