And now, for a little rant.

Insurance companies have to be among the most greedy, self-serving, hedonistic companies ever formed in the history of business.

They spend millions of dollars lobbying Congress to protect them from the normal economics of the open market, millions of dollars "compensating" CEOs and such, and millions of dollars avoiding their duty to pay, fighting lawsuits from little people trying to make insurance companies fulfill their obligation to INSURE those people against losses they've sustained. (Um, last time I checked, that was the whole point of buying INSURANCE.)

I am so sick, SO SICK of empty promises, rising premiums, state-mandated purchasing... I mean, you can't even vote against these giants with your feet because the government REQUIRES you to carry "insurance," but does NOT require them to pay you when you suffer a loss. And even if they do pay, it's never without a battle, without delay, and without consequence.

Buying insurance is like legalized extortion, it is; and frankly, I wonder how long we as a society are going to continue to let them get away with it.

I'm done now.

OK, OK, OK.

I give up. Genuine thanks to all of you who sent assistance and good thoughts in the last post, but apparently Blogger won't cooperate with me and let me just password-protect one post, and I'm too lazy to move to Wordpress over just one silly post. However, I'm also cautious... ridiculously so.

There is no secret, no crisis, no gossip. Here's the deal: I wrote something. Like, maybe someday in some universe, even a publishable something. Maybe. Maybe not. But just in case I ever did want to try to get it published, I didn't want to have to fight over whether it was something I had written. And while I trust all of my bloggies, my page is open to people I don't know, people who aren't my bloggies; people who, for all I know, might actually try to publish my maybe-publishable something before I do, and then I'd be really bummed.

I don't like being bummed, so I'm not going to post it. But if any of you (my bloggies) want the first draft, go ahead and email me and I'll fire it off to you.

Thanks again for rallying around my distress call. Y'all are the best!

Help!

I have a post all written and saved as a draft, but for reasons I won't articulate here, I want to password-protect it. Any ideas how to do that in this here Blogger thingamabob? Thanks.

Eclectic and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Month*

Once upon a time, there was a woman whose husband and three charming children made her life complete. Challenging, to be sure, but complete -- in a good way. Then, it became May 2008.

It actually begins sometime in April, when Mr. Eclectic had knee surgery. In itself, not so horrible. Next, Mr. Eclectic had a problem with his inner ear.

It got so bad that the swelling impinged on his facial nerve, which caused him to experience Bell's palsy, making him look like he'd had a stroke. It frightened Eclectic badly.

The medicine the doctor prescribed for Mr. Eclectic's Bell's palsy (or maybe the palsy itself, no one seems to know), gave the shingles virus an opportunity to rear its ugly head all along Mr. Eclectic's already irritated facial nerve. Shingles, in case you don't know, is not very much fun. So the doctor(s) prescribed even more medication.

Eventually, all the medicine combined to nearly suppress Mr. Eclectic's immune system, leaving him vulnerable to "secondary infection." Meaning, now Mr. Eclectic has pneumonia and he's been fighting it for nearly two weeks. He coughs a lot. Especially when he's lying down, like, at night when Eclectic is trying to sleep.

Then, on Saturday, because Mr. Eclectic feels like crap but still wanted to get out of the house, the Eclectics went for a drive. Which was great, right up to the part where we got lost on a tiny, TEENY track alongside an irrigation canal at the top of a fairly steep ridgeline in the middle of nowhere and couldn't turn around. (See "tiny, teeny track" and "alongside an irrigation canal" part of the previous sentence.) Still, the family Eclectic was having fun, being the sort of family that likes an adventure.

BUT: when everyone decided it was time for dinner, we still had to find a way down off the teeny tiny track, and the only way was across the side of a slope, through a pear orchard. The grown-up Eclectics got out of the pickup to survey the route, and everything looked great. What we couldn't see was that the orchardist had quite thoughtfully left the groundwater system on for what we later learned had been the past three days, meaning, there was 6-8 inches of mud hiding under the grassy surface between the trees.

The Eclectics drove slowly across the slope and rather quickly realized that the ground beneath our tires was sliding. It was really no time at all before the pickup nosed heavily into the trunk of a thirty-year-old pear tree, mired up to its hubcaps in mud and grass. Thankfully, the Eclectics have lots of friends in the area, of the sort who will good-naturedly show up for two days in a row and help get your truck out of a hillside orchard, including calling the orchardist to ask him to turn off the ( &%*#!-ing groundwater so the mud can dry).

The insurance adjuster is supposed to show up anyday now. In the meantime, they called our attention to the portion of our declarations page which notified us three months ago that they had discontinued rental car coverage in the case of single-car, at-fault collisions.

Some months, it's just best if you move to Australia.






*Apologies to Alexander and his author.

And you thought I was joking.

Silly, silly bloggies... I never joke about something as lifeless as this blog space has become. I really did take a jillion photos on our trip (over a month ago...), and I really can't post more than 5 at a time. (Thanks Blogger.)

However, this is the final installment. The remainder of the photos not included here are just not worth keeping you on the edges of your seats. (I know you have been.) So with that, I offer you the following pictorial:


This is a blooming Redbud tree in Sequoia National Park:





This is G, camoflaged at the base of one of the sequoias:





Here are B and G, standing somewhat disbelievingly inside a tunnel cut into one of the sequoias that had fallen years ago:





2 minutes earlier or later and we would likely have not seen this guy, recently awakened and ambling down the road. We hung out with him/her for several minutes (from the safety of our vehicle), until he/she finally clambered up the snowbank. It was perhaps the coolest few minutes of the entire adventure:





Here is G at a tournament in Yakima, the very tournament at which his team qualified for the other tournament on May 2,3 & 4 in Spokane. This particular at-bat produced an out-of-the-park, over-the-fence home run which soared into the parking lot and dented the roof of a minivan. (Yes, we offered to pay for the damage; no, the driver did not accept.)




And there it is.

My Spring Vacation... by Eclectic.

I have visions of someday actually writing in this space, but if I were you, I wouldn't hold my breath. Thanks for stopping by anyway.