Another one of those interesting weeks, where I have been so busy and the headlines so full of various incidents which I might comment upon … that I am actually so spoiled for choice that I can’t make up my mind on which to deal with first.
Like – Jodie Foster coming out as gay. Ok, I am sure there are some cloistered religious under a vow of silence somewhere up a mountain to whom that comes as a surprise. And possibly a few others who might even care.
According to this story, the troops won’t get paid, and the whole US economy will go crash if the GOP doesn’t go along quietly and raise the debt ceiling. Sigh. Always with the ‘gonna close the Washington Monument!’ threat, if the budget for the Park Service is cut. Sigh. That ploy has got a longer beard on it than a seventy-year old Grateful Dead fan. Like President Kardashian gives a rip about the troops anyway, except when he needs his a** hauled to Hawaii on AF-1, or a nice uniformed dial-a-crowd for a photo op and doesn’t want to risk any booing or thrown rotten vegetables.

Sigh – on the the personal stuff; I finally had to make an appointment about the bronchial cough that had me sounding like I was hacking up portions of lung on a regular basis. Brooke Army Medical Center, where I have chosen to be seen since my retirement – on the basis of making it easier not to have to go round and round with a civilian medical provider – has expanded exponentially in the last three or four years. Much of the pocket of land just off IH-35 which once had just the main three-part brick tower, a circular apron of parking lot around and a good few acres of crusty mown meadow, is now entirely filled in with a huge annex, other support buildings and a multi-tier parking garage. I was not looking forward to threading my way through the newly-complicated maze, but now BAMC outpatients will seen on an appointment basis in a lavish new clinic building on Fort Sam itself. I think back on the troop clinic at Yongsan – sick call for the troops in a ratty old Korean-war era barrack building, where pretty much everyone under the rank of E-6 had to come to mass sick-call four times a week and be brutally treated like malingerers by the staff when they did so – and I smile. The cough seems to be better, by the way, under the onslaught of several different prescriptions. The doctor was a sweetie, by the way. Retired AF medico; also unhesitatingly put me on something for high blood pressure. Apparently, that is to be my chronic complaint for the remainder of life.

I am working on stuff for two different book clients and an editing job – so for a basically unemployed person, I am pretty darned busy. And that’s my week – yours?