Objects in Your Mirror are Larger Than They Appear

"It's just a bug." That is what the social worker on the unit told me the other day when I related the heroing tale of my treacherous drive to work. Normally I would agree with him. Most bugs do not bother me, nor do spiders or snakes for that matter as long as they are not pit vipers. Even in Pennsylvania, we have a few species of those. But this was no ordinary bug. This was a monster, by far the largest dragonfly I have ever seen, and I have been in the rainforest in Costa Rica so I have seen some pretty big bugs. This thing did not belong in the Eastern Allegheny Mountains. But it was there, and it was IN MY CAR AND IT WAS GOING TO GET ME! NO REALLY!

Actual size photo of a different man eating dragonfly.

To begin the story, it was any normal Monday. I was driving along my usual road with the once polluted river on the left. There was the strange house with rusty farm equipment and a chicken running loose in the front yard on the right. There was an SUV in front of me, a pickup truck behind me and we were all going 10 mph too fast. Any normal Monday. We all turned right on the US highway and made a fast left on the two lane road that is badly in need of widening. There we all tried to drive 10 mph too fast, but were as expected slowed down by a school bus, dump truck carrying gravel or some old guy who just does not get the point that some of us have somewhere to be at 08:00 and drives 15 mph too slow just to piss us off.

It was somewhere in that transition between going too fast to too slow that I heard the loud buzzing noise in the back of my car. It did not take too long to identify the creature that was making the loud buzzing noise looking in my rearview mirror as it was a HUGE BLUE DRAGONFLY WITH A FUZZY TAIL THAT WAS A BIG AS A WOOLLY WORM. I am not exaggerating this. I am not the kind of person that would normally fear a dragonfly. This was the sort of nightmarish creature that only appears in B rated science fiction movies from the 50's with names like "Attack of the Killer Dragonflies". This abhorrent monster was keeping me company on the way to work while trying desperately to get out of the back window by pounding on it with sheer force and not succeeding. So there I was on a busy road in a line of cars being deprived of any reasonable chance to arrive at work on time and there was nothing I could do about it. I tried the usual interventions. Open the rear windows, no bites. The dragonfly briefly strayed from the base of the window to the top so I tried opening the sun roof thinking maybe it would continue its upward ascent. No go. The monster went back down to its point at the base of the window where it had been on guard most of the trip. I should point out that it was about 55 degrees outside and opening the windows was not exactly pleasant, especially at speed greater than 40 mph. It was a sacrifice I was willing to make if it would get this creature out of my car but it never did work. I had that bug in my car the whole trip and worried the whole time that something awful might happen like it might fly in front of me and get in the way of my view or poop on my leather upholstery or worst of all...

IT MIGHT TOUCH ME! Bug germs! Ewww!

By the time I got to work, the dragonfly had wedged itself between the glass and the shelf below and I was not ready to have a dragonfly carcass decorating my rear window. Like it or not, I was going to have to extract the monster myself. My first attempt by trying to scare it out with a pen made it dig in even deeper into its hole. By then all that stuck out was the tip of the tail which looked surprisingly like the stinger of a scorpion to me. A bigger woman would have just grabbed the tail and pulled the dragonfly out herself. I am not a big woman. In a panic, I dived into the front seat to extract a tissue from my ever present tissue box that resides in my car for my ever allergic sinuses and with that, I grabbed the dragonfly/woolly worm tail and extracted it.

The dragonfly, apparently finding itself under attack, turned around and attacked back, twisting its body around on its tail 180 degrees and attaching to the tissue with a steel grasp. Up until this point, I had not realized that dragonflies had flexible tails. But apparently, the Mothra species does, and this one turned quite readily. I was at least able to get the tissue out of the car along with my radioactively altered friend who had decided he did not want to let go of the tissue and clung to it for dear life as a shook it like a madwoman trying to get it off. Thankfully when it finally did let go, it did not go back into my car but took off into the strange environment it had been transported to. Sadly, the "big city" is mostly concrete and urban blight and this creature came from a mostly wooded area. It may not feel all that comfortable in the blocks of row homes it will find here. Perhaps there will be enough trees to survive in the cemetery across the street from the doctor's lot. (How's that for irony?) I honestly wish the dragonfly no harm. I just do not want it serving the role as my new navigator.

One thing was for sure. I was not going to offer it a ride home.

Shanksville

With it being so close to 9/11, I hear a lot about Shanksville. I do not live all that far away from the city since moving here, and it seems to be a fairly sleepy town for the most part were it not for the tragedy that happened that day. I thought of Shanksville writing my last post as the site where the plane crashed was actually near an abandoned strip mine.

Every crash site from 9/11 seems to have taken on a different symbolism in American culture. "Ground Zero" will always be know to Americans as the former site of the World Trade Center and have a strong association with firefighters and emergency workers who lost their lives charging into the building trying to rescue survivors. This is sometimes taken to a fault as the multicultural nature of the building was lost in the tragedy. People from many places in the world died, probably some from countries that are sympathetic to terrorist causes. The World Trade Center was the WORLD Trade Center. It was not just Americans who suffered that day but people of many countries and this seems to be a neglected fact.

The Pentagon was the military site, regimented and organized. The loss of human life was kept to a minimum. The military does not leave itself vulnerable. The frightening thing was that there was loss of human life. They were hit totally unprepared and the fact that they were was scary. It meant that we were not as safe as we thought and the bad guys could come and get us when our scouts were not looking.

Shanksville was the site of the common man. There was still a crash and a terrible loss of life, but the terrorists failed in their objective, apparently to crash into the White House. This was the only plane where the passengers had the courage, stealth and fast thinking to be able to overcome the terrorists before this happened. As a result the airplane crashed in Shanksville, essentially in the middle of nowhere. Sadly none of them survived. Had they crashed into the White House, none of them likely survived either, but the loss of life and chaos that would have resulted might have caused irreparable damage to our nation. They saved our country.

They are a symbol of what average people can do when they get together and try. It does not take great strength, intelligence, wealth or power to achieve things if people work together.

While there is work being done on what will certainly be an elaborate memorial at Ground Zero and a very elegant memorial has already been built at the Pentagon, lowly Shanksville is just beginning to start on their memorial. They still have yet to raise the funds to pay for it. One of the hold ups was getting land owners to agree to sell their land to make the memorial. This is a conservative area of the country and people are very devoted to their little piece of the Earth. This is the only place I have ever lived where people regularly talk about living on "the family homestead." This is an area with pockets of Amish, Mennonite and Brethren communities that live off the land and simply are not used to this kind of attention. The "memorial" today still is a makeshift hodgepodge of ribbons, flowers and notes left by the visitors to the site. In a lot of ways more moving and bearing the pure emotion of the people who left these items.

But maybe the people on the plane who lost their lives would have wanted this anyways. Something more human, less exotic and more in touch with the real world. Something that represents them.

GPS and the Coal Mines- part II

I left you at the point where the pavement disappeared. We started to question if the road was going to disappear altogether, but that continued, in the form of a gravel road. We had gone that far and survived enough adventures that we figured it was worth continuing. Besides, the little box on the dashboard said this was a road. Must obey the little box.

So the road continued over a slight rolling hill and it reached a point where it certainly did not look like there was any more road ahead, but the GPS said to carry on. The road started withering away into mostly dirt at that point and was largely indistinguishable from the ambient dirt if it were not for the tire tracks. The tire tracks let us know that some humans had driven there at some point. Otherwise there was no sign of human life here. No farmland, no road signs, fences, nothing. Just a dirt road and a GPS that indicated that a road went through this space.

Even my husband had serious questions as to whether or not to press on at this point. I felt that since we had gone this far, we had probably reached the point of no return and needed to press on. "Are you sure there is a road up there?" was his response. I reminded him that he had put his faith in the GPS so far, he was going to have to suffer the consequences of the results now. So we continued on the vague scars on the dirt that comprised a road over this hill. At the bottom of the hill, we finally found signs of human life, just not what we were expecting.

"Oh, look Mitch!" I said to my four year old son. "There's some dump trucks. Your favorite." And there were dump trucks. BIG dump trucks. The kind that one has to climb a flight of stairs to get to the cabin dump trucks. The ones that are so huge that they have to be built on site because they are far too large to be driven on a street.

The kind that are used in mines. Strip mines, generally, and in Central Pennsylvania, this is coal country. And we were driving right towards the entrance of a coal mine.

That @%#ing GPS had just navigated a suburban family in a midsized SUV into a coal mine. A white SUV to be exact. Not that the color should mean that much, but really. It was obvious to all present that we did not belong there. Remember that Garmin commercial where it suggested that a Garmin GPS would prevent the disaster of getting oneself stuck in the middle of a coal mine or other unsavory place? The commercials they show at Christmas where they totally cheapen the Christmas carol in order to sell their product? If you do not, wait a month. It will be back on the TV soon enough. So Garmin, hey! WTF?

That said, there were no "No Trespassing" signs, gates or other markings to say that we could not drive down the road that passed the coal mine, so we kept driving. We had already violated the inner sanctum. We might was well go whole hog and drive right through. Every few feet the constant question of whether or not the road was going to continue on to some sort of paved type state route came up, and surprisingly, the road did continue onwards. The problem was that as we drove on, we came closer and closer to those really big dump trucks that are not allowed on standard roads. We also moved closer to really big front end loaders that could pick up ten of our horrifically bourgeoisie SUV's and dump us into one of those really big dump trucks. If the drivers of those front end loaders knew how much I dislike the coal industry and how supportive I have been of their nemesis, wind farms, some located in clear view of the mine, one of them just might have done that. Probably the scariest part is when one of those really big machines decided it needed to go somewhere else in this barren landscape, it drove out of the mine proper and right past us on the minimally visible dirt path that the GPS sent us down.


"I can't believe you drove us into a d.....arn coal mine!" was stated more than once and had a four year old child not been in the back seat, the commentary would not have been nearly so G-rated. Yes, it was a struggle to censor that commentary. "We're gonna get arrested or killed or something!" My husband's response was basically we ought to just move as quickly as we could but that there were no signs saying that we could not drive on the road so he hoped no one would give us a problem.


My response to anyone who would tell you that there is such a thing as "clean coal" is bull&%#. Coal is not clean and anyone who has ever driven a white SUV through a coal mine can attest to that. Although the ordeal of actually driving past the actual strip mine probably only lasted 5-10 minutes, the coating of black soot that covered the car was amazing. This was not just dirt from driving on a dirt road. That dirt is light brown and hazy. This was pitch black and literally coated the entire car. My husband had to scrub down the rear doors for fear that our four year old would touch it and spread black hand prints on everything in Somerset County. The car looked like it had been passed through a cloud of volcanic ash and the residue rather had the consistency of ash.


Not too much longer after finally clearing the danger of the huge coal mine machines, we actually did get to the road that we were looking for as promised. The GPS did actually get us to the resort without a hitch from that point on.


Our lungs are hopefully not too scarred from the experience and the car was able to be restored to its original color eventually after a thorough scrub down. I am sure the boys at the coal mine got a laugh at their befuddled suburbanite visitors that day. And at least I can say that I can add "driven through a coal strip mine" to my list of interesting experiences, and I am lucky as I have had quite a few. I imagine that if we put our trust into that little brainless box too much in the future, we will probably have more. The problem is I am afraid to find out what.


At least I cannot say "set the cake table at my wedding on fire and had the firemen show up" as one of my direct adventures. I was witness to that event but it was not my wedding. That honor goes to my cousin, who also has a blog on Blogger. I will leave it up to her to choose whether or not she wishes to divulge the details of that little adventure. That's a pretty good one, too.

GPS and the Coal Mines- part I

I admit it. I love technology. I grew up in that cusp between giant mainframe computers that took up a whole building and Blackberry's with more memory than the original Macintosh computers. I took the usual computer programming course in high school, learning BASIC on TRaSh 80's. I learned about binary numbering systems. I watched the Macintosh revolution. I even know how to program the time on my parent's VCR. I have saved both sets (they are divorced and remarried) of parents from the horror of having to hook up a DVD system and actually get sound out at Christmastime. I do not have every gadget that comes out the second it comes out, but I have a lot.

But I love technology with one caveat. Machines are dumb. They do not think. Computers are machines and they do not think. I like technology to the extent that I am in control of it, it is not controlling me. Which is why I do not have a GPS system in my car and am hesitant to use my husband's GPS when he offers to loan it to me. That machine definitely does not think, and using it requires that one allow a snotty little voice be the boss.

I like maps. I like to look at maps. I always have. When preparing for a road trip, I would pour over the maps, plotting out the most interesting, the fastest, or most scenic route to take. My excitement for the trip growing daily with every little turn I figure. I know how to read a map. I can tell a four lane divided road from a small by-road. I can tell roads that are likely to be curvy motion sickness barf-fests by looking at the map and where the road goes. I can tell when a side road is likely to have a lot of delays by looking at the map. That is why I have AAA. So I can always go and get the most up to date maps. Roads do change with time so one has to prepare for this inevitability after all. They are not perfect, but I like them. Maps do not think but I think. I am in control.

So I really do not like my husband's GPS that much. That little box has caused more trouble in our life than a bevy of gremlins (not the AMC kind) could. In one particular instance, the road map showed clearly that one could not turn from Union Ave to 8th St as it was an overpass. The GPS did not see that. It saw an intersection and told us to turn onto 8th St. It gave us a lot of grief when we did not turn off the bridge on to 8th St, hurtling 20 feet or so down to an almost certain death. After it threw its little hissy fit, it "recalculated" and told us how to get to our destination. I have never had a map try and kill me before.

Our most recent escapade with the GPS involved a trip to the local resort where we discovered the previously mentioned most totally awesome AMC Pacer Wagon in existence. My husband was the one who wanted to take the side trip to the tallest point in Pennsylvania before checking in. He likes to go to really remote places that require driving on a lot of curvy roads that take you to scary places where people do not have running water or teeth. You can hear the sound of banjos in the distance. The curvier the road the better, especially if it has a lot of pot holes because I have problems with motion sickness and it really makes for a fun trip when Mommy wants to throw up and gets a terrible migraine. Puking over a guard rail is one of those things that I really do not aspire to put on my list of experiences that I am proud to say I had before I died.


So we went up a lot of curvy roads to get to a nice enough state park where there was an observation tower that gave us a beautiful view of lots of trees. No breath taking view over a valley, no mountains in the background, just a lot of trees. Not worth puking over the guard rail. So we headed out to our final destination to the mountain resort on more curvy roads.


But the GPS directions were confusing, sending us on overlapping roads so we could not tell which road we were supposed to be on. We ended up on the wrong road. So we tried to figure things out with the map. It did not take us very long to figure out that we were going the wrong direction on the highway and needed to make a 180 degree turn. No problem, just turn around and it would take us to the road we were trying to get to. That would have been the smart way to go. I had the map and a handle on the situation at that point. I knew exactly where we were going.



But NOOOOOO!



My husband wants to let the GPS give directions since it has more detailed roads in its files. He turns off the road before we were supposed to on the original directions. "Are you sure about this? This road looks like a pretty minor road. Maybe we should go back to the main road." was my response. He responded with "This looks like it is shorter and will get us back to where we are going more quickly. The GPS says the road will take us straight there."


So we drove on the minor side road for a short time. And it got a little narrower, and we reached a point where it was obvious the road was not used much, as the edges were crumbling. Then all of the houses disappeared, then the farms, then signs of human civilization.


Then the pavement disappeared.

That is where I will leave you in the tale, but the good part comes up next so check back.

The Week in Review

Not much time, so I thought I would summarize the interesting events of the last few weeks at work for you.

-I met a patient who thought that the rock singer Billy Idol was the Messiah. I would hate to see who she thought was the anti-Christ. Personally, if I were in the position to pick a rock star as Jesus, I would think more like Bono or Peter Gabriel, or someone else who has put a lot of work towards improving the Earth/Human condition, etc. Somehow the pseudo pop punk sneer just does not do it for me. I have been hearing a lot of songs from my youth in my head as a result. I am sure I do not like it.

- I was flipped off in a new and even more creative way than all the past creative ways that I had been flipped off by a patient. He even had the style to deny that he was flipping me off, stating he was just showing me how swollen his middle finger was since he broke it years ago. It was the wagging both middle fingers around trying to compare them that pushed it over the edge. I will have to keep that maneuver for my extensive "flip off" repertoire. Some of those gestures come in handy, you know?

- We have had a mysterious underwear burglar on the unit. Some of the patients (all female victims so far) have been fairly polite about the whole thing, but some have not been as so gracious. The worst part is hearing a description of the kind of panties your patient wears. The best part is knowing that your patient does in fact wear panties.

- Morning team rounds got off track one day, straying from a patient's eating disorder as a way to cover up her poor self esteem, to why would anybody want to buy a set of underpants that makes one's butt look bigger? The name of said product was something like "Booty Buddy". I have this suspicion that I will get a pair at my next birthday which is coming up in a few weeks. I take a lot of torment for my rather slim build and I do not expect that to change.

- We have one patient who thinks everyone but one patient and me are trying to kill her. That one patient thinks she is trying to kill him. One patient who things everyone is out to get her. We have one patient who talks to God, one who preaches the word of God. One who has had a case heard in from of the Supreme Court and is preparing to have a case seen in front of "Federal Court". Then we have one really depressed guy who just tries to stay sane.

- None of our patients were caught in any drug busts, but one was hauled in on assault and battery charges.

- And the staff sits in the back and tells politically incorrect jokes about booty buddies trying to keep themselves sane.

Peace.

Wind Turbines and the Coal Mine

One thing you may find about me is that I have a lot of concern for the environment. That may surprise you with my obvious love for cars, but the majority of our carbon emissions actually come from electric producing coal plants and cars can be made more fuel efficient. It does not matter what the industry says, coal is pure carbon and when burned it makes carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. There is no such thing as "clean coal". Or as a work colleague of mine pointed out, it was clean in the mesozoic era, when it was in the form of dinosaurs and plant life. Now it is just carbon. Oh, and sometimes sulfur and other contaminants that create acid rain.

But the problem is that I live in central Pennsylvania which is Coal Country with a capital C. It is ironically a very good place to develop wind farms and the two industries make for strange bedfellows. They do not like each other, that is for certain. There is a lot of anti-wind power propaganda in this area. So much that they have even been able to convince the Audubon Society, of all people that wind power is bad and kills birds. What, and global warming does not? I have watched those wind turbines daily and they go so slow that only the sickest or most inept of all birds would be likely to get entangled in their blades.


The actual building of the turbines is something that one could have an objection to. The blades themselves are enormous, being longer than a standard truck trailer and requiring an oversize load carrier to be transported. There is a facility that stores them very close to where I reside and when they try to bring one through town, it makes for some sticky traffic snarls. The engines are no better being just as bulky and difficult to transport.


One of the biggest complaints offered against wind turbines in this area is the damage caused construction done on the tops of the mountains. To this I respond, it is better than scraping the tops off and dumping the remains in the valleys below causing certain environmental disaster and a flattened mountain in its place. This is a practice known as mountain top coal mining. Through a loophole in environmental regulations during the GW Bush years, this practice increased exponentially causing massive damage to homes, mountains and forests in West Virginia ever since. Yes, there will be damage to the environment to build the roads up to the top of the mountains, but this is no less damaging than that damage caused by roads built to put up cell or radio towers.

Certainly the question of aesthetics has been put forth. Wind turbines are no worse than all those cell phone towers they are putting up and nobody complains about those. Those cell towers are an ugly scar against the sky. The wind turbines are actually quite elegant in the way they slowly sweep though the air.


In the aesthetics debate, wind power still trumps coal power. If you saw my earlier post, you would have seen my first hand account of what it is like to drive through a strip mine, and no, it is not very pretty. And to reiterate, it is not clean.



There are other arguments about noise, light blinking causing headaches, and other distractions for local neighbors to the actual turbines. Much of the responsibility of being a good neighbor rests on the hands of the power company. The newest array of wind turbines going up is very visible from the city, but they went to great lengths not to build near enough to populated areas that they would be disturbed by them. People have had their lives disrupted by having wind turbines plopped down in their backyards. People have had their lives disrupted by coal mines, landfills, nuclear power plants, and strip malls, also. These are things that happen and people need to turn to their local government leaders for ways to work with this, but this does not mean that an entire industry as a whole should be rejected.

Coal and wind power are at odds largely over jobs. Coal was always been here and certainly does not want to give up its market share, but wind power companies have seen a market that is ripe for the picking when it comes to locations, available workforce and room to expand and have a newer option that sooner or later is going to have to become more of a mainstay. Coal power is one of the number one producers of greenhouse gasses currently and the survival of the planet depends on us moving away from coal as a mainstay and towards cleaner options. The sooner the better.