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University of Iowa Quick Facts About the Flu

The University of Iowa has the latest quick facts about the flu and how to protect yourself. Now you’re in the know!

Scouting for Food 2023: A National Good Turn for America!

The 2023 Scouting for Food drive is on! The Hawkeye Area Council announcement just arrived on our doorknob the other day. Pickup day is October 28, 2023. Instructions:

Prepare non-perishable food items (canned or boxed)
Place donations in a clean bag or box
Put them out by your doorstep by 8 AM
Make sure it’s visible from the street

The food drive supports local families in need. All items collected will be distributed locally. If your bag is not picked up by noon, please deliver to local food pantry.

An Unexpected Encounter with Bigfoot on the Clear Creek Trail

The other day we put in about a 2.5 mile walk on the Clear Creek Trail in Coralville. We haven’t been there in a long while. It gets really quiet along the wooded trail. Sometimes even the birds don’t sing.

It was pretty quiet except for some strange knocking noises. You know, Sena has taken the lead in spotting Bigfoot in our walks in three parks, counting our latest trek. She saw Bigfoot in Hickory Hill Park, Terry Trueblood Recreation Area, and now again on the Clear Creek Trail.

She’s a Bigfoot hunter, there’s no doubt. This Bigfoot we saw a couple days ago was different. It obviously was interested in helping the Hawkeye football team with their offense. It eats plant-based cheese for some reason. I always thought it preferred beef jerky.

Did you know Bigfoot plays guitar?

150 Years of Coralville and Iowa River Flathead Catfish as Big as Your Leg!

We found out we missed the wheat paste murals posted on various buildings in Coralville this past summer. It’s the 150^th anniversary of the city of Coralville in Iowa this year. You can find out more about it on the Coralville Public Library web site.

We drove around and found some of the murals were still up. They generally last about 2-3 months. There were murals on West Music and the Coralville Recreation Center, but they were gone.

In our YouTube, the murals we found are in order of appearance on the video:

The ice block mural is on Randy’s Flooring on 2^nd Street. It’s a picture of the Jacob C. Hotz Ice Company Employees circa 1900s-1910s. They’re on the Iowa River. Workers were paid 10 cents an hour. Talk about your minimum wage.

The mural of 3 ladies who we don’t know anything about and the “Watch It Grow” image are on the Coralville Public Library in the 5^th St. Plaza.

The long timeline mural is on the Coralville Community Food Pantry on 13^th Avenue.

The Blue Top Motel mural is on Chong’s Supermarket on 2^nd Street. According to the Coralville Public Library, the Blue Top motor court was built in the 1940s. No mention whether lodgers were abducted by extraterrestrials.

The mural of two fishermen with the two huge flathead catfish as big as a man’s leg they landed in the 1920s in the Iowa River is on the Iowa River Power Restaurant on 1^st Avenue. This is my personal favorite. All I ever caught in my wasted childhood were bullhead as big as my fist.

You can see fishline and bobbers floating in the Iowa River. You can even see a handsome sculpture of a dragonfly sitting on a bobber on one side of the river. We saw one guy with at least three fishing poles rushing around to different spots next to the Iowa River Power Restaurant. I think he was hoping to land a big flathead—but all we saw him catch was a snag.

Happy 150^th birthday, Coralville!

Autumn Walking Colors

Sena got some new pants with an autumn leaves print. It fit really well with the colors we saw on a walk down Scott Boulevard.

We always see something a little different along the way. We never noticed that the Sitting Man pedestal has a hole in it shaped like a heart. It could have been chipped into the stone intentionally.

There was a lot of golden rod but we didn’t see any ragweed—which I’m very allergic to this time of year.

The trees around the Harvest Preserve property are changing colors. The old barn across the street from it looks a little more weathered. We don’t know whether the staff will decorate it into a haunted house again for Halloween. They did that last year and it was a hoot.

The walk up the hill to the Sitting Man seemed a little steeper this year. I don’t remember exactly when I got so bow-legged. A runner easily ran up the hill and still had breath to say “Hi” on the way back down. He never missed a step, even though I personally know there are a lot of irregularities in the ground.

Get your walking pants on.

Autumn Miracles

We saw the miracles of autumn the other day, out on the Terry Trueblood Recreation Area. It was quiet, only a light breeze set the flowers and grasses swaying.

There were almost no birds out. No ducks were out on Sand Lake.

On the other hand, I guess there were birds, sort of. We greeted other walkers, an older couple who turned out to be snowbirds. They’ll be heading to Florida soon for the winter. They had no worries about the weather down there. They’ll be in the middle of the state, presumably far away from storm surges. They stay in an RV park over the winter months. It’s not far from a place called The Villages, which is a famous planned retirement community, which got a reputation for being a haven for older but wilder swingers. They have a very large Homeowners Association (HOA), which is sort of a very large and expensive Disney World for older retirees. It’s often called a golf cart community because that’s how most residents get around the place. While there are no HOA fees per se, there is a community development district fee of around $120-220 a month. Dave Barry wrote a chapter about The Villages in his book “Best State Ever: A Florida Man Defends His Homeland.” I told the couple about Dave Barry’s take on The Villages. I don’t think they ever heard of him. They’re excited about returning to the RV park soon.

I was a little alarmed by a loud voice, calling out like a policeman, “Get on the ground!” I looked up ahead and didn’t see a policeman. But occasionally, we heard the barking order, “Get on the ground!” Eventually we saw a young man on a walk, apparently under someone’s supervision. This was the man who was yelling “Get on the ground!” He greeted us politely. As he passed by, every so often he blurted out, “Get on the ground!” I wondered if he might be someone with a form of Tourette’s Disorder, compelled to blurt out something every few minutes. The supervisor was walking side by side with a man who seemed uncomfortable, holding his hands up to his eyes which appeared sunken in the sockets. He made no sound at all. I wondered if, peaceful as we thought the day was, whether he found it difficult to bear what might have been a sensory storm for him. The supervisor was polite to us and paid close attention to the other two men.

Mostly we watched the breeze blowing the grasses and the flowers–and were grateful.

Thoughts on Jack Trice

I was outside doing yard work the day before yesterday and my neighbor across the street walked over to say hello. We got to talking about sports and football came up. His wife stopped watching football because it was so violent—but then switched to watching hockey. He wondered when the Iowa Hawkeye vs Penn State game was going to be on. No, I’m not going to discuss that any further.

Anyway, that led to my mentioning how brutal college football was back in 1923 when Jack Trice, Iowa State University’s first black athlete was killed on the field during a game with the University of Minnesota. My neighbor was incredulous. He’s in his 80’s and he’s never heard the story.

In fact, I had just learned about the whole Jack Trice story and commemoration event in his honor the day before that, only because Sena told me about it.

All this year long there has been a 100-year anniversary commemoration of Jack Trice, Iowa State University’s first African-American athlete. The program will culminate on October 8, 2023 with the closing ceremony.

Football was a rough game in that era—but rougher still because Trice was black. Many believe his injuries were deliberately and maliciously inflicted because of his race. It’s more than plausible. In 1997, the football stadium was renamed Jack Trice Stadium. It’s the only major college football stadium named for an African-American.

Sena and I moved to Ames in 1981 so that I could enroll in Iowa State University. I was so immersed in my studies that I never gave a thought to Jack Trice. I don’t remember the football field being named Jack Trice Field in 1984.

As I looked through the commemoration website, I wondered how it was possible for me to have ignored the story of Jack Trice while I was there.

I think it’s for the same reason I never knew anything about James Alan McPherson, the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and who was teaching at the Iowa Writers Workshop during the entire time I was in medical school, residency and a faculty member at The University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics.

I was working hard. I finally found out about McPherson after reading a news item about a neighborhood park being named after him in 2021.

I should pay more attention. Anyway, Iowa State University did a tremendous job putting this commemoration event together.

Why Can’t I Wear Blue After Labor Day?

I have a few thoughts on the upcoming Labor Day weekend. It occurs to me that Labor Day often evokes images of blue-collar workers. On the other hand, I think in a broader view of the holiday, most of us can think of ourselves as working toward improving our society no matter whether our jobs are in the white-collar or blue-collar sector.

Many eons ago, I was a blue-collar worker. I was a surveyor’s assistant and drafter for a consulting engineers’ company in Mason City, Wallace Holland Kastler Schmitz & Co. (WHKS & Co.). I got attached to my job because it was the first real job I ever had.

I was proud of what I did, even though I didn’t make much money. I had to travel around the state a lot. I lived at the YMCA and ate all my meals in cafes because I was often out of town on jobs and when I was not, there was no kitchen in my tiny sleeping room at the Y.

I wore blue jeans and tee shirts, flannel shirts when I wasn’t out in the hot sun. I liked being outside except when the ragweed was out in the late summer. I had bad hay fever. I tried desensitization shots, but all they did was make my arm swell up. Winters were cold, especially if I had to stand in one place for a long time, either holding up the rod or running the gun.

I was mostly a rear chain man and rod man early on, but moved up to “running the gun” which meant operating the level and theodolite, the former for measuring elevations and the latter for measuring angles. I was proud of my job.

It took me a while to transition from blue-collar to white-collar mindset. In college, I often returned to work for WHKS during the summer breaks. That was where I formed my identity.

Some aspects of the job were simple. You hammered a stake, an iron property marker, or a frost pin if the ground was frozen. Measuring distances, angles, and elevations were often repetitive tasks, yet satisfying because they marked progress toward a concrete goal, like building an airport runway, establishing the outline of a tract of farmland, or raising a bridge. As one of my bosses on the survey crew put it, the work helped you see “the lay of the land.”

Land surveying, mapping, and drawing up plans set my perspective on life when I was a young man. At one time, that perspective made me think I wanted to be an engineer. I respected engineers because they built the subdivisions, highways, dams, and other real things from ideas.

I respected my teachers at WHKS, but couldn’t do the math. And they respected my change of heart.

I eventually became a doctor, after a short stint as a medical technologist in clinical laboratory medicine. You’d think, given my hands-on background, I would have become a surgeon, but I wasn’t made for that either.

I learned basic things at WHKS like being steady, reliable, and focused. I had to learn other things to be a doctor, especially a psychiatrist. On the other hand, in this white-collar environment, especially in a research-oriented academic medical center, I often looked and acted more like a blue-collar worker.

One of the Family Medicine residents who rotated on the psychiatry consultation-liaison service left me a gift of a fireman’s helmet. It fit my head and my approach to psychiatry in the general hospital. What I did mostly was put out the fires, metaphorically speaking, of behavioral eruptions related to delirium which were caused by medical problems. Often, I had to apply blue-collar approaches in a white-collar world. So, can I wear blue after Labor Day?

Happy Labor Day.

Again, Sena Returns Another New Coffee Maker!

Sena is returning yet another new coffee maker. It’s a Keurig K Supreme. The problem? The coffee doesn’t stay hot enough after brewing.

What’s the deal?

I think part of it is that we might need to get different coffee cups. On the other hand, we never seemed to notice our coffee cooling off too fast before-except with the current Black and Decker with a carafe that we’re trying to sort of replace with a K type pod coffee maker.

We used to have the original Keurig years ago. I don’t remember that there was ever a problem with the coffee not staying hot.

When I was a resident, I used to have a little Mr. Coffee I kept in my office for when I was on call. It got a lot of use. And it got really dirty. Well, you know, work… I never noticed a problem with the coffee temperature, though.

Why is the temperature of the coffee an issue now? Why are there coffee makers that allow you to set the temperature of the brew? There are 3 settings on some models, one of which Sena has just ordered.

That’s right. This is trial number 3. The MeCity coffee maker had a pod cartridge that made it difficult to remove the pod after brewing. If you don’t have fingernails, you pretty much have to use a tool to catch the pod edge to lift it out. Back to the store.

The Keurig K Supreme was discouraging because the coffee was tepid within a few sips after brewing. Back to the store.

Isn’t this way too much gassing about coffee makers?

I don’t trust customer reviews much. On the other hand, Sena saw one review where the hacked off guy wrote a one liner in all caps about one model of Keurig coffee maker: “WILL NOT WORK WITH ARC FAULT CIRCUIT INTERRUPTERS!” I think there was an expletive deleted in that one.

We actually had that problem in one of the homes we owned years ago. There was only one option—buy a new house (just kidding).

And a previous coffee maker we had got zapped during the derecho here a few years ago. The numbers on the clock faded and it started to gain time. It’s not like we needed to use the clock. I had retired and didn’t need to set it to brew in the morning any more. So, we got a new one.

That’s when all the trouble started. Does any manufacturer make a decent coffee maker nowadays?

Where will this saga end? I don’t think we’ll return the next Keurig model Sena ordered—unless it doesn’t work at all or blows up.

We might have to start thinking about the cups we use. I guess there are different opinions about ceramic vs glass vs whatever kind of cups. Some hold heat better than others, you shouldn’t fill a cup all the way to the top because your coffee could lose heat faster, mug thickness matters damn it! Extraterrestrials are messing with heat transfer physics, blah, blah.

Should we just switch to iced coffee?