I am just getting started reading “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee. As I said in a previous post, I can’t remember ever reading it, but I saw the movie (or most of it). I have seen news reports that some schoolteachers are opposed to keeping the title on required reading lists.
I just finished the 3rd chapter, the one that contains an oft quoted line from Atticus:
“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
I found dozens of hits on the web about this quote. There are likely a lot more. I don’t have to explain it to anyone, least of all to schoolteachers.
I can see my bookshelf from my chair where I’m reading Lee’s novel. I see my copy of a book by James Thurber, “The Thurber Carnival.” I occasionally re-read a story in it entitled “Bateman Comes Home.” I think it’s hilarious. There’s a short message ahead of the main text:
“Written after reading several recent novels about the deep south and confusing them a little—as the novelists themselves do—with “Tobacco Road” and “God’s Little Acre.”
And then I searched the web and found a web site, The Library dot org, and on a web page entitled Kids Booklists, there was the message, “If you liked ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’,” you might also enjoy…” Beneath it was a list of books, including “God’s Little Acre” by Erskine Caldwell.
We have a sun room again. We moved into this house a little over a year and half ago. It has taken a little time to get it comfy. For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been sitting in there on Friday nights listening to the KCCK Jazz Radio ‘da Friday Blues show hosted by John Heim, aka Big Mo. I used to do that regularly but we’ve not lived in a house with a sun room for several years. The Big Mo blues show has been a favorite of mine for a long time.
I suppose I could have listened to it in another room in the other homes we’ve lived in. But it wouldn’t have felt right. I connect sun rooms with ‘da Friday Blues on KCCK 88.3.
It’s hard to believe Big Mo is still doing the show. He suffered an accidental neck injury a few years ago that left him paralyzed from the neck down. He was hospitalized at the University of Iowa and went to rehab from there. He still sounds great. He retired from teaching in 2004. He hasn’t retired from having a good time and helping others enjoy music and life. There’s a lesson in that for us all.
Anyway, we have a great sun room again. We have a nice coffee table in there, with the mandatory coffee table book. Chet Randolph really didn’t write that book, Theory of Detasseling—but he could have.
coffee table book
Here’s a tune from tonight’s show that fits the season.
Since retirement, I’ve been very gradually casting about for another identity now that I’ve given up my professional identity. It doesn’t come naturally. I’m definitely not a handyman, although I’ve been learning a few skills.
For some reason, a large number of our electrical outlets didn’t hold power cords tightly enough. They were either cheap or worn out or both. Appliances would stop running because the electrical plugs fell out of the outlets.
That led to Sena picking up an 85 gross of various replacement outlets, which led to losing one of my best excuses for not getting the vacuuming done. Since then, I’ve replaced a large number of outlets (see “instructional” video below). Toggle switch replacements are another item high on the list of vital electrical equipment to replace, mainly because they also get loose with age.
Funny how that doesn’t work for me. I get tighter in my joints as I age, which makes it very hard for me to sit cross-legged on the floor while replacing outlets. Standing up is even harder. That excuse doesn’t work either.
I’m pretty keen on checking outlets and the like for power before I start messing around changing them. I use a UL approved voltage tester for that—an electric can opener. Don’t let that get around. I always shut the power off at the circuit breaker to be safe.
Another skill comes to mine. Yesterday I had to install a soundbar on our TV for the first time. After Sena returned that one for a refund because it didn’t seem to improve on the TV’s audio, I installed a sound bar and subwoofer made by a different company.
I had a heck of a time getting it to work. It came with enough cords to hook it up, either by optical cable or something called HDMI ARC cable. Apparently, ARC stands for Audio Return Channel. I still don’t yet know why that makes it different from a regular HDMI cable.
What should have been a 10 to 15-minute hookup ended up taking most of an hour because neither cable worked. It was mysterious. I even hooked up both of them. The sound bar was soundless. In disgust, I yanked out the HDMI ARC—and abruptly the sound bar was loudly functional. Just prior to that I think I had moved the power plug from a power strip to a wall outlet. I figured the power strip might have just got old.
On the other hand, I had switched the sound bar plug and a CD player plug on the power strip which had been working fine and the sound bar still didn’t work. It was either aliens or luck. Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good. I’m thinking about trying that HDMI cable again.
I have changed only in very small ways over the last 19 months (837,755 minutes; 50,265,308 seconds) since retirement. Some people say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. I wonder if some people are just being ironic.
I’ve just discovered a web site that calculates the time that has passed since an event occurred. So, it calculated that I’ve been retired for 19 months—or 580 days, or 13,909 hours and so on. But I’m not counting.
What has been happening since then? I’ve had the usual problems with letting go of my professional identity, still having them in fact. I’ve posted a quote from another retired psychiatrist, H. Steven Moffic, MD.:
Plan for retirement, even if you don’t plan to retire. This means sound financial planning, developing other interests, and nurturing your relationships with significant others. Retire, even if you are not retired. Take enough time off periodically, and completely, with no connections to work, so that you can feel emotionally free from concerns about patients and practice. Of course, there is no reason to retire if you really love your work and relationships just as they are.
H. Steven Moffic, MD
There was also an article entitled “When Should Psychiatrists Retire?” written by Dinah Miller, MD. It was published in Clinical Psychiatry News January 2022 issue, Vol.50, No. 1 as well as Medscape on November 17, 2021. There is no consensus on the answer to the question, although there are several opinions by the commenters.
There are a lot of articles out there about what it’s like to lose your professional identity and the potential consequences of that. One thing I’m learning is that, while I may not be fully reconciled with losing my identity as a consult-liaison psychiatrist, I’m gradually starting to have more fun just being a clown sometimes, which pre-dated my becoming a doctor.
Maybe I just need to grow up, but my interests are everyday stuff I tend to make fun of.
Like dryer balls. Now, I don’t want to offend anybody who believes that dryer balls are effective at drying clothes quicker and the like—but the jury is still out on that claim.
In fact, there are many articles on the web, both pro and con about dryer balls. One of them is by somebody who did what sounds like an exhaustive study (just with his own laundry; you won’t find it published in any journal). He swears by them. Then there was the article which pretty much debunked dryer balls. It mentioned an “in-depth experiment” by an 8th grader in 2013 proving that they don’t reduce dryer time. My wife, Sena, says they don’t work. One ball got snagged in a fitted sheet pocket.
What I don’t get is why dryer balls look so much like the spiky massage balls (hint, it’s the green ball; the dryer balls also have holes in them). I think everybody just takes for granted that massage balls work. Sena says it works. She also has what she calls a massager which looks vaguely like a headless alien doing the downward dog yoga thing.
But what I find puzzling is why I can’t find any mention on line of clamshell eyeglass cases which have a steel trap-like spring-loaded hinge. You don’t want to get your fingers caught in them. They should have a safety protocol for use—so of course I came up with one.
The free N95 masks are here. It’s 3M Model Aura 9205+and they’re available in many stores, including Hy-Vee and Walgreens.
I occasionally failed the fit test using this type of mask when I was working at the hospital; however, you can still get a pretty effective seal to make it protective in the community (see my video below). I was one of the few psychiatrists who had to fit test for a mask because I worked on the med-surg side of the hospital in a consult-liaison role.
The N95 flat type mask is probably no more difficult to don and doff than the surgical mask, for which the Slip Knot and Tuck method helps you achieve a pretty good seal (see my video for this).
At times, I had to use an alternative N95 mask, similar to 3M Model 1860, which is a cup-shaped mask. One year I failed the fit test for that one and I had to wear a Powered Air Purifying Respirator (PAPR). I had to wear it only once in the hospital. It was very cumbersome. Following that, I passed the fit test for the 1870+, which is similar to the 9205+.
When you search the web for more information about the N95 masks, you’ll find that there is disagreement about how to interpret eyeglass fogging pertaining to the seal. Some say that if you get any eyeglass fogging at all, you have an inadequate seal and need to fix that or “check with your supervisor.” On the other hand, others will discount that. Even the CDC says that eyeglass fogging indicates a poor seal that means that you have an inadequate seal and this should prompt the user to try another N95 model. On the other hand, others will discount that.
I did only a quick search, but found one open access article on a pilot study which concluded that “Fogging of eyeglasses is neither a sensitive nor a specific predictor for a poor fit of N95 respirators.” (Kyaw S, Johns M, Lim R, Stewart WC, Rojas N, Thambiraj SR, et al. Prediction of N95 Respirator Fit from Fogging of Eyeglasses: A Pilot Study. Indian J Crit Care Med 2021;25(9):976–980).
On balance, since no one who is not a health care professional will ever have to fit test for any N95 mask, the seal you’ll get is probably adequate. If you wear eyeglasses, remove them before donning and doffing the mask. You can get the bows caught in the straps, which can flip them off your face and into the toilet (although this has never happened to me personally). Always do hand hygiene before and after use of the mask.
I’ve read news items indicating that CDC guidelines say you should reuse the N95 only 5 times before disposing of it. It was difficult to find the source, but it’s mentioned here, under the heading “Decrease in N95 FFR fit and filtration performance” (FFR stands for Filtering Facepiece Respirator)”:
CDC recommends limiting the number of donnings for an N95 FFR to no more than five per device. It may be possible to don some models of FFRs more than five times [2]. One study reported that fit performance decreased over multiple, consecutive donnings and fit varied among the different models of FFRs examined [3]. If manufacturer guidance on how many times a particular FFR can be donned is not available, the CDC recommends limiting the number of uses to no more than five per device based on published data on changes in FFR fit from a limited number of FFR models over multiple donnings.
A recent observational study conducted in a hospital emergency room during the COVID-19 pandemic found that extended use and reuse of N95 FFRs as measured by the total hours and shifts the mask was worn and the number of donnings and doffings was associated with an increase in the fit failure of the respirators. This study also showed that it may be possible to don some models of FFRs more than five times [2]. Fit performance during limited reuse should be monitored by the respiratory protection program manager or appropriate safety personnel.
Reference 2 is a research letter published in JAMA Network, June 4, 2020, a time when there were shortages of PPE (Degesys NF, Wang RC, Kwan E, Fahimi J, Noble JA, Raven MC. Correlation Between N95 Extended Use and Reuse and Fit Failure in an Emergency Department. JAMA. 2020;324(1):94–96. doi:10.1001/jama.2020.9843).
Further on in the CDC guidance is a section entitled “NIOSH recommends limiting the number of donnings to five for a filtering facepiece respirator. What is the science behind that recommendation?”
You can read all of this if you’re interested. I think it’s helpful to note that some experts say you can reuse them until they’re visibly dirty, which I think probably applies to users in the general community.
Sena picked up 3 of the free N95 masks today at Hy-Vee. It turns out that it’s the same one I always used to fail the quantitative fit test for at Employee Health. I could never get a decent seal with it. I would get an alternative cup-shaped mask which worked pretty well. Fit testing includes maneuvers you have to do to make sure the mask stays where it’s supposed to on your face while moving your head up and down, side to side, or bending at the waist, doing back flips, moon-walking, and so on. You also have to read a short story as well, called the Rainbow Passage:
When the sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, they hit you in the face, which makes you jerk your neck so hard you get a charley horse and can’t move your head, which hinders your vision and makes you fall through the glass door of a doughnut shop. The owner yells at you because you get blood all over the chocolate frosted doughnuts. As you reel out of the shop, you trip over a chair which knocks over a display of N95 masks, which scatter the shards of broken glass, splitting the white light into a rainbow. You follow it until it leads you to a boiling pot of gold, which you trip and fall into, sustaining burns that send you to the hospital emergency room where all of the doctors and nurses are wearing Hazmat suits. That’s why they say if you know where the pot of gold is, don’t stop off at the doughnut shop.
If you can read the Rainbow Passage without interrupting the seal of this version of the N95 mask, you pass, which I never did.
I don’t think anyone expects you to pass a quantitative fit test for the free N95 masks. There is a self-test of the seal which involves holding a strong-smelling substance up to your face (such as Bigfoot turds) to see how long it takes before you pass out. If you don’t pass out, you’re eligible to become a Bigfoot personal trainer.
There’s a limit of 3 N95 masks per person per household. A store employee hands them to you from a bin full of alligators. When the employee gets eaten, management shuts down the whole operation. You can’t just go in there and grab up an armful of them and expect not to get chased out into the parking lot. However, that doesn’t stop some people from heading to every store all over town to get the 3-mask limit, ending up with more than a dozen. The same strategy worked early in the pandemic when stores were rationing toilet paper.
It would be a waste of time for me to try to demonstrate how to don the N95 mask when there’s a perfectly good video demonstration (see below). If you’re wondering about the real Rainbow Passage, the link is here.
Sena and I snore. There, I said it. We’ve been snoring for years. It’s been getting a little worse for a while now and we’re finally exploring ways to deal with it. I snore by puffing out my cheeks and blowing, and Sena snores by blowing the pictures off the walls.
The separate bedrooms option was a bust after a few days. We missed each other. We have a couple of air mattresses left over from last year when we had our wood floors refinished and had to camp out in our basement. We tried taking turns on it.
It’s very cold in the basement. We have this old space heater which heats for about 10 minutes, then shuts down and buzzes for an hour or so—very hypnotic.
There’s a trick to getting into and out of an air mattress that sits only a few inches off the floor. If you don’t roll off the mattress onto your hands and knees and then push yourself up to a stand, you end up trying to do extreme deep squats and tip over a few dozen times before giving up and rolling over to the space heater to grab onto for leverage, which then rolls away on its casters.
We’ve tried those polyurethane foam wedge pillows, the kind that make you feel like you’re sliding into your belly. That’s fun. We also have some memory foam pillows. Those who have been there know where we’ve been.
We keep finding out about new advances in the world of snore relief. There are thousands of brick-and-mortar mattress stores where you can find people who can tell you with straight faces there is a ton of research out there showing this or that arcane method has scientific evidence supporting the opportunity for you to shell out thousands of dollars for this or that sure fire method for eliminating snoring in seconds or your money back when hell freezes over—and those are just the other customers.
There are motorized, voice-controlled adjustable beds which cost only millions of dollars if you have the right coupons. You can try any of the several dozen on line stores where you buy a bed in a box, which a guy started back in 2007 and which has since mushroomed into a giant industry. You get this memory foam or hybrid memory foam and spring mattress which has been packed under very high pressure into a cabinet-size box and delivered to your doorstep. The minute you open it, the bed explodes into your face, knocking you unconscious, which temporarily cures the snoring problem by putting you into a coma for weeks.
The adjustable beds are very expensive and will set you back several thousands, especially if you buy the option allowing the manufacturer to track your sleep data and send it to aliens throughout the galaxy and beyond who are working out new ways to control the human race.
The wedge concept is huge in the snore relief mattress industry. There is a thing called the Mattress Genie. It’s an inflatable bag which you stick under your mattress and inflate with the touch of a button on a remote control. It reminds me of those airbags I see on shows like Highway Thru Hell, which the heavy wrecker crews use to raise semi-truck trailers off the ground in the ditch where the drivers have jack-knifed their vehicles because they were too busy on their cell phones to watch the road. They tend to pop out at speeds which could probably knock out your average heavy wrecker guy.
The mattress industry says “snoring is prevalent in 45% of normal adults.” They’re really big on the wedge concept and how raising the head of the bed is the way to go. We’ve read a lot of reviews by customers about the various products. Usually, there are many people who rave about how good the wedges are. There a few who just rave.
I was able to find one scientific study, Wilhelm, E., Crivelli, F., Gerig, N. et al. The anti-snoring bed – a pilot study. Sleep Science Practice 4, 14 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41606-020-00050-2. The conclusion in the abstract says “The anti-snoring bed is able to stop individual episodes of habitual snoring without reducing the subjective sleep quality.” However, the authors hedge on the wedge several times in the discussion section of the article and finally end up saying “Further studies are needed to investigate whether Anti-snoring beds are a valuable alternative to conventional positional therapy.” I don’t know if they’ve been done, but many people swear by the wedge concept.
In fact, we’ve been experimenting with our wedge pillows by placing them between the mattress and foundation. Last night was a good night. No snoring, although we tended to slide downhill. We’re shopping for a mattress elevator wedge, which slopes gradually from head to foot.
It’s a mystery why our Chicago Cribbage Antics video is not getting thousands of views on YouTube. It ranks right up there with the other Top 10 great mysteries:
Bigfoot sightings are everywhere, including your backyard; yet there is a shortage of Bigfoot Personal Trainers.
UFOs sightings are also on the rise, and they frequently crash; yet we don’t see UFO body shop repair businesses springing up at all.
How come there is no Save the Chupacabra Society?
What’s the delay on opening the Loch Ness Monster petting station?
Is there any explanation for the pitifully small number of Taco Bell restaurants on Mars?
Will there be an upcoming investigation into why the male Weather Channel meteorologists are required to wear pants that pool around the ankles?
Everywhere you look there is a crisis of men’s shirt pocket puckering—yet there is no federal investigation forthcoming.
Just who is in charge of installing signs to properly identify dangerous worm hole vortex entrances?
Will we ever get anything but lame excuses for the existence of isosceles triangles?
Why does shredded coconut have the texture of cellophane, making it impossible to swallow for some people, like me?
Anyway, as far as we know, there is no other video about Chicago Cribbage besides ours. It deserves around 3 million views, preferably by tomorrow. We appreciate your kind attention to this matter; thank you for your time.
I just found out today that my blog’s theme was retired. I don’t know when WordPress retired it, but it gives me a familiar feeling about retirement. Sena gets the credit for giving me the idea of changing the theme (which is how my blog looks on the web) because of the new year. As I looked over the themes, I saw a tiny notice beside the name of my own. “Your blog theme has been retired. Consider getting a new one, you geezer!”
The notice didn’t really say that, of course, but that’s how I felt. I’ve been blogging since 2011. I’ve never had a theme that was retired. I realized that if I changed my theme now, I couldn’t go back to the old, familiar creaky, cob-webbed, old-fashioned theme I’ve had now with my second blog. This one has the theme (using the word in a different sense) of—retirement. In fact, come to think of it, the word “old-fashioned” was used in the WordPress article explaining why some themes get retired.
So, I started looking at the themes seriously today. Most of them had the word “minimalist” attached to them. Frequently, I read how great they were for my “business.”
Hey, I’m retired. I’m not in any kind of business. There seems to be a lack of emphasis on a theme for hobby bloggers, some of whom are retired geezers.
Anyway, I dropped my old-fashioned theme and put on a new one. While I was at it, I got rid of a lot of old widgets. WordPress calls them “Legacy Widgets.” I couldn’t find a clear explanation for why they call them that. I did find a definition on the web. Essentially, in this context, I think it denotes software that has been superseded but is difficult to replace because of its wide use. What’s wrong with sliders? I don’t mean little sandwiches. I mean the featured images with post titles that slide across the theme page, showing off my best posts—or at least what I think my best posts were. Really, no themes with sliders? That’s what minimalism leads to, I guess.
I’m a legacy consulting psychiatrist, meaning I’m retired—something else to feel ambivalent about. Anyway, I kind of like the new theme.
There’s this line by Agent J in Men in Black 3 that goes: “Okay, see, the prerequisite for a joke, is that it be funny.” That’s what the “you really had to be there” expression is about and which occurs to me whenever I think about an incident that cracks me up now almost as much as it did decades ago.
The thing about the “you really had to be there” expression is that it refers to an event that was funny to someone, but the comicality of it is usually tough to explain to a person who wasn’t there at the time the event occurred. It’s one of those insider jokes. The often-present feature of the story is that there are some parts of it you’d rather not reveal. That can make it hard for some people to “get it.”
This “you really had to be there” story happened when I was a teenager. A bunch of us guys were sitting around a table after finishing lunch. We were having dessert, which were crumbly snack bars. I think they were made of chocolate Rice Krispies and they were probably old. That’s a key factor, along with the paper plates on which they were served.
Some of the guys were jonesing for a cigarette. Not me because I didn’t smoke. But the place didn’t allow smoking. One guy (I can’t remember his name so I’ll call him Ralph) started complaining about it and then starting playing with his snack bar like it was a cigarette. I know Rice Krispies bars are usually gooey, but these were definitely not. They were dry and tasteless. When you picked them up, crumbs randomly dropped all over the paper plates.
Anyway, while Ralph was moaning and groaning about not being able to smoke, he started tapping on his dessert bar like he was tapping ashes off a cigarette. Now, if you’ve ever smoked or watched somebody else smoke, it eventually dawns on you why some people say they smoke—it gives them something to do with their hands. Anyway, people used to say that. They do all sorts of weird mannerisms and trick-like finger moves while they smoke.
Anyway, Ralph would roll his cigarette/snack bar on the paper plate, tap crumbs off it like they were ashes, flick it smartly and, occasionally, he’d put it up to his lips and take a bite as though he were taking a drag.
Cigarette ash doesn’t make a sound when it falls in an ashtray. It’s impossible to explain why the tapping noise of the snack bar crumbs hitting the paper plate made us all hysterical. But it definitely had a lot to do with his clowning around with a snack bar prop. Ralph’s act was a combination of complaints about the food, the smoke-free joint, and an instinct for the prerequisite of a joke. It was funny—at a particular time and in a particular place.
I’ve thought about trying to make a YouTube video of this. But I don’t think it would be as funny as Ralph’s spontaneous performance. There’s probably no way I could pull it off. And, let’s face it, as a trained doctor knowing what I know about the health hazards of smoking, it’d be pretty awkward.
And would anyone else get it? You really had to be there.
Go Retire Psychiatrist 