Storms roaming around.

[yogi]

I love the taste of pomegranate and used to eat them freely. Now as an adult I hesitate to put all those seeds into my old belly. I had no idea about how pomegranates grow, but apparently they grow on bushes. The skin on that fruit is very thick and I don't see why a bird would be interested in eating it, but when you are hungry anything will do. They sell pomegranate juice in the local stores and I have purchased it a few times. The taste is true to the fruit but it's not the same without all those seeds. LOL

[ocelotl]

In the particular bush, or shrub, grandma had, the pomegranates grew a bit too fast and most of the time the skin of the fruits cracked open by the time they began to ripen. Could be because of the raining season, or the way it was cared off. From there on it was a matter of who noted it first, the family or the birds.

[Kellemora]

Here's a trick for you! Hang some shiny RED Christmas ornaments, preferably plastic, around your strawberries or tomatoes. The birds will peck at them, see they are hard, and just ignore the strawberries or tomatoes after that.

Well, Congratulations to you and the missus Yogi! Wow, 54 years.

Technically, I've been married 54 years also. 13-1-20-20.
My early models didn't hold up to well, and the first one was a real lemon, hi hi.

I sent my cousin a watermelon when he was stationed in Alaska.
What I had to go through to send a produce item across country boundaries was an exercise in frustration.
But I managed to pull it off! Could have bought ten or more watermelons for what the shipping fees and permits cost me.
It arrived safe and sound and he talked about that for years afterward!

Don't like Figs, but we have two huge Pecan trees. My wife loves pecans, but not these for some reason.
I had a pro come out and treat the trees and do a few other things that ensured a great crop of pecans.
They looked great, but she still didn't like all the work of collecting them each do. So I did and they ended up in the freezer.
She ended up giving most of them away because she still didn't like them.
I figured out why though. It was really she likes to go on a three day vacation and travel to her favorite pecan grower, hi hi.
Those vacations she takes are cheaper than having the pecan trees treated and tended to, hi hi.

[yogi]

As a stand alone food, pecan nuts are kind of on the blah side. However, I have several pastry recipes that bring out the best of the nuts. Perhaps roasting them in cookie dough adds something missing in the original nut. LOL I recall from previous posts you going into some detail about that watermelon. If I got it right the only reason it happened is because you had some inside help from an aunt, or something. Regardless, it was a remarkable feat.

Thank you for the congrats. It's truly amazing to me that we have been together for such a long time. We met at a party of a mutual friend when we were teenagers. I left that party knowing and saying to myself that she was THE one. There were no bells ringing, nor chills down my back, but somehow I just knew she would be the one I married. It took five years after that first meeting, but it took better than super glue. I don't know the secret to our success. It all seems so average in retrospect. But, there is no doubt that she is special. To me anyway. The big celebration will be tomorrow, the 23rd. We have not decided what we will do yet; it takes time for us old folks to make such difficult decisions. We'll probably end up at some place like Five-Guys and toss peanut shells on the floor.

[ocelotl]

Congrats on you 54th, Dennis... Don't know, maybe the chats while sleeping are the trick

Leaving tomatoes until fully red is good, but picking them while still pink or orange doesn't take too much flavor from them, and birds won't win you at tasting them.

Transporting a single watermelon to Alaska, and getting it in good conditions is an awesome feat. Kudos for that, Gary.

[yogi]

There is a dish one can cook with fried green tomatoes. For all the tomatoes I have grown in my life, I never made that recipe. I hear it is pretty good eating and now that I'm willing to try it I can't find any green tomatoes in the grocery. I can find tomatillo from time to time, but I don't think they are the same as tomatoes.

[ocelotl]

What I know as green tomatoes are the ones that grow within a thin sepal. Supposedly the tomatillos are the wild ones, but surely are a different variety of green tomatoes. Those have a different, more acid taste than normal tomatoes, that we call jitomates. Normally the green tomatoes or tomatillos ate used for salsas or "entomatado", cut in quarters with onion and garlic and cooked as part of a broth with some kind of meat.

By the way, some bird may have found one of my pepper pots...

[Kellemora]

Awesome stuff guys!

Although I didn't know if for like 15 years. And we only discovered it around 3 to 5 years after we were married.
I was a part-time photographer, helping out a photographer who was overbooked to do weddings.
Of the hundreds of pictures I took the several times I helped him out, I never kept but one print, and even then it was odd for me to do so. After all, why would I want to keep a picture of a group at a table at wedding where I didn't know anyone?
My boss made a print for me, and when he looked at the picture, he said he could see why I wanted that picture. That girl has the hots for you, hi hi. That could be, but the reason I wanted the picture was of all the photo's I took, this was the only one where one of the gals looked me in the eye and smiled the way she did. It was heartwarming is all it was.
WELL, that photo wound up in one of my old snapshot books of random images of things I liked. Not really an important scrap book. So it was not one that got looked at, nor shared with much of anyone.
I was married to a gal for about 3 to 5 years, and although we had gone through my normal scrapbooks a few times. She asked about the old book in the bottom. I said it is just odd things I took, like pictures of fountains, interesting designs and sculptures, and a few pictures in the park of oddly dressed people. In fact, I have one in there I took that I won an award for, a guy who looked like Jesus or an Apostle at Forest Park, plus all the log cabin pictures.
She wanted to go through that album also, so we did. And there in the middle of the album was the picture of the gal I took at that wedding where I was the photographer.
Her mouth hit the floor, she said wait right here, don't move and don't turn the page.
She came back carrying an old album she had of her cousins wedding, and in it was the exact same picture.
The of course she wanted to know how it is I have that same picture? Then she stopped cold mid-sentence and stared at me for a minute. And said, no it can't be. I said I was the photographer at your cousins wedding, I took that picture, and of the hundreds of pictures I've taken while working there, this was the only one I've ever kept.
She said, if I wasn't married at the time, I would have tracked you down. And out of the blue, here we both are!

[yogi]

It's stories like yours, Gary, that make a person wonder if there is such a thing as Fate. Of course there isn't anything like predestination in the real world, but the odds of you and that gal in the picture being together sharing a picture like that have got to be astronomical. LOL. Then again, it just goes to show that IT IS possible to win the lottery.

[Kellemora]

I found the cropped image I was talking about.
Hmm, let's see if it comes up first.
OK, looks like it did as expected.
She was married at the time, and kept her eye on me for some reason.
I was behind her and saw her glancing around for where I might be, and as she turned, I snapped the photo.

[yogi]

I don't know if I would have kept the photo, but she certainly is an attractive woman. It's not so unusual for an instant attraction such as you describe to occur. It's happened a few times in my own experience but I never was able to capture the moment on film, or in pixels. Some people, usually females in my case, just resonate with me. I'm certain a long lasting relationship could have been established with any of them. But, those resonant moments are always fleeting and short lasting. Certainly there is some psychological mechanism at work to explain the attraction. However, the fact that you ended up being with this particular lady well after the photo was taken is beyond explanation. LOL

[Kellemora]

I can say this, she did not look at all like that photo when we met years later. I had no idea she was the same person.
Here is what we looked like in 1991 at my sons graduation. Just before our 10th anniversary together.
I also have another photo of her right before she passed away after she had 5 bypass surgery, so she doesn't look very well.

[yogi]

There is some similarity between the women in the two pictures, but you are correct to say that it would be very difficult to connect the two without knowing the details. The guy in the picture is pretty good looking too. I can see why the ladies might have been attracted to him.

[Kellemora]

Big glasses were in Style around that time, hi hi.
I've been told by a lot of folks that I was a handsome guy.
Shame it wears off with age, hi hi.

It's actually ironic how we ever met again, since we are from two totally different cultures.
And so much was going on at the time as well.
I was elected president of a Parents Without Partners Chapter, and shortly thereafter she joined.
However, this was not before I was dating someone else for a few months already.
I gave this new member a committee job which she loved to do, for a while anyhow, then it began to conflict with her other duties. So I let her off the hook and gave someone else the job. I didn't see her much during the winter and early spring.
Come Summer and our Chapter picnics, and she started showing up at every picnic.
I didn't notice whether or not she watched me like a hawk when she first joined, well because being el presidente, everyone's eyes were usually on me anyhow. But during picnic season I did notice she watched me, not like a hawk, but like she was daydreaming. Like that look in the super old picture had posted first. Little by little she kept getting closer to me, and would come up to talk sometimes when I was alone.
I was paying close attention to all the kids, because most parents usually ignored them during a picnic, and probably at other times as well. I was actually amazed at how nice and courteous a couple of the younger kids were, so I watched them pretty close, especially to see how my kids interacted with them. Always pleasant for all of them, mine included.
Ruth came up beside me and ask what I was watching so intently.
I said you see those two kids over there, the one in brown jeans and the girl with him. I said those are the most amazing of all the kids out there on the playground, wonderfully nice children, wish they all could be that way.
She smiled a hug smile and said, well those are my two kids.
I won't get into why, but a couple of weeks later my date was not with me, and when it came time to eat, Ruth made it a point to sit with me at a table where after our kids finished eating and went back to playing, we could talk for probably an hour or so.
We set a date together to go out to dinner on a Saturday night when neither of us had kids with us.
I guess we just clicked and have never been apart from each other after that date, nor up until she passed away.
She ALWAYS had that same look in her eyes when she looked at me. Well except for a couple of times when I got in the dog house for something, hi hi.

[yogi]

I hate to bring up old clichés, but there is some hard evidence that you and Ruth were a pair whose match was made in heaven. I guess they all seem that way at first, but you two had some startling common interests that played out in the long term. And I know what you mean by that starry eyed look on her face. I've seen it a time or two myself. And, of course, there is no better way to gain the affections of a woman than by admiring her children. You did good my friend.

[Kellemora]

We were very happy together, even though we basically got disowned by both of our families for about ten years, hi hi.
They eventually all came around though, little by little, a holiday here and a holiday there, hi hi.
It's just sad we couldn't get the doctors to do the tests we requested, saying they were not needed.
Well, once we finally got one we had to save for three years to afford, they found just what we thought they would, only by then it was too late and the damage was done.
This is why Ruth spent the last five years of her life in a wheelchair hooked up to medical machines, and was costing me around 26 thousand dollars a month after her insurance capped out. That's where all of our money and assets went. Sad, very sad.

It is just as miraculous how Debi and I met, in some ways even more so. But that's for another day to tell about.

[yogi]

Doctors ... for the longest time I avoided them altogether. I was able to do that because I was young and healthy. I never went for annual physicals or well being checks. It all changed one day suddenly. I was out in the driveway mixing some concrete in a wheel borrow for some patch work. It was hot and sunny and I was sweating a lot, but being young and invincible none of that bothered me. Suddenly, and without warning, an intense pain developed in my lower back. The long and the short of it is that I developed kidney stones. I don't recall if I even had a primary care physician at the time, but it somehow got all worked out at the ER when I got there. I guess the stones were too small to keep me and do something about them. They gave me a dose of Demerol and coincidentally the sharp pain ceased. It wasn't the morphine; the stone simply passed. Well I had to follow up with a urologist and by then I did have a primary care doctor. I had a few episodes of stones after that initial shock and ended up needing surgery. That was the beginning of my intimate relationships with doctors.

I was in my early thirties when the stones developed and didn't get seriously ill again for many years after that. There was the gall stone and the blood clots and the cancer in the prostate all occurring over a period of many years. The point is that I began to feel more comfortable with doctors and nurses given the fact that they saved my life a time or two, literally. Each time I had a serious illness and recovered, I heard stories from ten folks who had bad experiences with the same illness. Many times the doctors who were treating them were less than perfect in their judgement. I grew up by the doctrine of ALWAYS following your doctors' orders. But as I aged and became more involved with them, even the doctors said it was all my choice. They just performed a service. That truly was a shock when I came to that realization. Doctors don't know everything even when they are specialists in their field. They make poor and sometimes lethally poor decisions upon which we as patients are supposed to put our trust. There are always second and third opinions, but that takes a lot of time and even more knowledge of what questions that need to be asked. You could die in the process of getting informed. Which, apparently, that is what happened in the case of Ruth.

The second shock relating to medical care came when my wife of many years became an insurance executive. Among other things I learned that there is a lifetime limit to the payout. Way back when, that limit was a million dollars. I don't know what it is today. In any case it's easy enough to reach that limit when you have a serious illness. There are no legal bindings for the insurance people to keep on paying claims. In many cases it's a question of life or death when they can't or won't pay for a procedure or test. I guess it should not have been a shock, but medical people and insurance people have clearly defined limitations. It doesn't seem right that everything you worked to accomplish and/or acquire in your lifetime can vanish over night when you have to pay for health care out of pocket. The sad reality is that nobody other that yourself is responsible for or cares about your health. It is, after all, up to you to make the decisions.

[Kellemora]

I've been fortunate not to have all the little problems a lot of folks are dealt with as far as their health goes.
No broken bones, no kidney stones, or other things like that.
Because I'm a thin person and physically active, or was, folks were surprised I had a heart attack, and then a second one a year later. But that pretty much put a damper on my abilities to do the things I still needed to do.
And then getting Emphysema and COPD all at once like that was a surprise, and it is really taking its toll on me now.

Today, doctors would have a cardiac cath run if they expected there might be a clot.
But back when Ruth needed to get one, they doctors would not approve same.
We finally found a surgeon who would do one, but we had to pay out of our pocket in advance.
Took us three years to save up enough money to have the procedure done.
I was with Ruth in the hallway as they rolled her to the Operating Room, and the surgeon gave me a good cussing out.
Said I should be ashamed for making my wife go through such an invasive procedure when it was not at all needed.
He changed his tune when he got in there and found 5 blockages, 3 were 100% and 2 were over 85%.
They rushed her to another operating room where they did open heart surgery to perform 5 bypasses, using the veins from her leg. But her heart was too far gone by then for them to help her very much.
It did give her five more years of life in a wheelchair, unable to exert any type of energy to do anything.
That surgeon never apologized for being dead wrong either.
She also had severe COPD and was on liquid oxygen that also cost a bundle to get and keep filled.
Insurance companies only pay for an oxygen concentrator which didn't put out enough O2 to help her, and the bottled O2 like I'm using, even the large 4 foot tall tanks, at 4 liters would only last about 9 to 10 hours each. We finally got a deal on two liquid oxygen containers and had them installed, and they only had to fill them once a week. You can't turn off liquid oxygen tanks, they vent even when not in use, but at 4 liter output, that's a bit more than they usually vent, so we didn't actually waste any.

I know I'm going downhill a little bit more each week, after a couple of major drops a few months ago.
But I could never afford to do for me all the things I did for Ruth to keep her comfortable.
Heck, I can't even afford the medications that are supposed to help slow down the progression of the terminal illnesses.
But that's the way the cookie crumbles I suppose.
A heart lung transplant would make me like new again, or almost, but those are only for the famous and wealthy folks.

[yogi]

There is a sea slug being researched which can regenerate it's own body. I read that some scientists are getting really excited about this discovery because it may have applications for regenerating human body parts at some point in the future; the very distant future in my opinion. I found this article interesting because we experimented with some slug-like creature in the only biology class I ever took back in the '60s. Animals that can regenerate body parts were known back then and now 50 years later some lab dudes are getting excited about it.

Neither one of us will be around to benefit from any self-induced organ regeneration, which means our only salvation could be from a transplant. As you must well know that is beyond major surgery. People do in fact survive total heart and lung transplants, but I don't know that their quality of life is really much better for it all. The stage of life you and I have reached is about comfort and not about health. Being ill is inevitable, but the resources you have will determine how well you can cope with the illnesses. I have to admire you in at least one respect. You know your fate and have a mental outlook that contributes to the comfort factor of which I speak. We could lament about what you can no longer do, but it is far more rewarding to celebrate your accomplishments over the many years in which you were healthy and active. I think we do some of that right here, and hopefully it is at least a tiny bit comforting.

[Kellemora]

All I can say is it is very frustrating to not be able to do many of the things I loved to do.
But on the bright side, I'm not depressed about it, mainly because I found other things to take their place.
Unfortunately, none of those can make me any extra money.

One of my old military friends who lost an ear in Nam. He eventually got a new ear that was grown on the side of pig I think he said. It wasn't a transplant from another human, they took some cells from his body to grow the new ear, and then transplanted it onto him. Unlike getting other transplants, he didn't have to take anti-rejection medications longer than the first couple of months.
He said the best part about having a new ear is he can now wear his glasses again, because he hated contacts, hi hi.
I think he passed away about 3 years ago, maybe longer. He was a good 10 to 15 years older than I was. And it is sad to say, for the life of me I can't remember his name. I keep thinking it was Matt, but that don't sound quite right.

As far as how long we live. I really don't think there will come a time when they have medical procedures advanced enough for us to cross the 120 year old mark. A few might, but it won't be many. Too many things that can go wrong that probably will never be able to be fixed. And with all the garbage stuff in our foods, I'm surprised we are not going backwards in longevity.