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Just Because it’s Vintage Doesn’t Mean it’s Wreckage
I still have a vintage calculator. It’s a Sharp ELSI MATE EL-505. You can buy one on eBay for $30. I bought this dinosaur back in the early 1980s just before heading to college at Iowa State University. It’s still usable, so just because it is vintage doesn’t mean it is wreckage. The original batteries…
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Hey, How About Them Nielsen Surveys?
Hey, how ‘bout them Nielsen’s surveys? I can’t remember getting any Nielsen media rating surveys before I retired and I’ve gotten two of them since then. They send you a crisp, new dollar bill in the mail to entice participation. More likely, it elicits guilt. You’d return the dollar bill but not in the mail,…
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Reflection on James Alan McPherson’s “A Solo Song: For Doc”
I’ve been reading the short story collection Hue and Cry by James Alan McPherson with the idea that the entire book was new to me. So, I was stunned when I remembered the story, “A Solo Song: For Doc.” It has more than one layer of meaning, but on one level it’s about a Black…
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Snow Moon Reflections
I’m having a little trouble keeping all of the different moon names straight. Last night was the Snow Moon. I managed to get a snapshot of it. It doesn’t look different from any other full moon. It’s called the Snow Moon mainly because February tends have the winter’s heaviest snow fall, according to the Old…
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Retirement and Loss of the Crusade
I recently read an article about Maintenance of Psychiatry (MOC) written by Dr. Henry A. Nasrallah, MD and published this month in Current Psychiatry. The title is “Revamp the maintenance of certification program.” It brought back memories of my crusade to do the same thing in past years. I lost my connection to that crusade…
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Bird Poop Luck and Boston Duck Tours
Last night Sena and I watched a YouTube video walking tour of Boston, Massachusetts. It brought back memories of a trip we made there about 16 years ago. The main reason for the journey was a November teaching conference (sponsored by the Academy of C-L Psychiatry, back then called the Academy of Psychosomatic Medicine) on…
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Hanging In There
It has been a while since my last post. I’m hanging in there although sometimes it’s difficult to stay optimistic. I’m reminded of the Survivor Tree, the Callery Pear in New York City. You can easily google the story about this tree which somehow survived at Ground Zero after the 9/11 attack on America in…
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Homesickness After Retirement
It has been only about 3 weeks since I retired and—I am not living the dream yet. I’ve always been a worrywart and I find that I’m worrying about a lot of things: money, things to do, the future. If you just heard me say that I’m loving retirement, then you’d probably guess I’m not…
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New Mailbox
Well, it has been almost two weeks since my last day of work. That was called my “termination date,” which strikes me as an ominous term. We now have a new mailbox because we moved in June. The mailbox is a sign of moving away from the old way of life and moving toward a…
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The Firefighter Retires
I’m writing this post today because this firefighter retires tomorrow—and I’ll probably be very busy and too weary at the end of my last day on the psychiatry consult service to write. In fact, I’ve been too busy and tired to post for the last several weeks because we’ve been in the process of moving.…
Go Retire Psychiatrist 