I was busy yesterday and couldn't attend to my blogging. We live near the border with Mexico and have had school closings and heightened warnings about the newest threat of the flu. I was not out gettin inocualted or buying up filter masks, I was re-qualifying on the range with some other retired cops who needed a yearly qualification score to maintain their concealed carry permits. A nice young range officer who had recently returned from deployment in Iraq brought us up to date on the latest in police tactical shooting theory and practice. He first started with the range rules and showed us which end of the pistol should be pointed away from us. He also spared us some of the more physically strenuous shooting routines. These involved getting prone and shooting. He was not worried about our ability to get down, but he was alone and was worried that he couldn't get us back up again. We all managed to kill our threatening looking target (a female armed with a shotgun) with every volley. The range is remote, and the county was working on the road going in. By the time we finished with the qualification, they had oiled the only egress. When I got to the pavement, my jeep was covered with globs and streaks of thick road oil. I spent the next hour removing it. The Swine Flu - If I am not mistaken, we have a flu threat every year. I have gotten several of the strains in the past and have suffered the three or four days until it decides to have mercy on me and leave. I may be in the wrong place at the wrong time this year and get it again. I hope my aging body can fight it off as it has done in the past. I am not looking forward to the government getting involved in helping me get rid of it. I stay sick at the government's interference in my life most of the time anyway, why would I want them around when I was sick with the flu? I spent my afternoon trying to sort out insurance payments and my portion of medical bills for a recent procedure I had done. I was convinced at the end of the exercise, that not even the ones who send the bills out understand them. The reason, most of the handbook for medical billing procedure was written by the same people who wrote the Internal Revenue Service rules for filing your income tax. My young doctor said he was researching Australia as a possible new location to set up his medical practice if the government gets anymore involved in our medical system. For every day I spend under a doctors care, I spend two weeks trying to figure out the medical bills. This is utterly ridiculous. I've read that most viruses originate in the avian community, and in their original form cannot be spread to humans. They can spread to swine who apparently have DNA very similar to ours. After the virus is in its swine host, it changes and can be transmitted to humans. I am trying to avoid all pigs and pig products for the duration of the threat.
The incompetent with nothing to do can still make a mess of it.
- Laurence J. Peter
- Laurence J. Peter
