One step forward, one step back. Two steps forward, one step back. Three steps forward, one step back.

In 2015, I had my first surgical procedure at age sixty-two. Melanoma. I walked into the hospital early in the morning. By mid-afternoon, I was on my way home and cancer-free. By the next day, I went about my business as if nothing had occurred. The recovery was that easy.

Two years later, it was time for surgery number two. Same scenario. Early morning hospital arrival, home by the afternoon. The recovery wasn’t quite as easy as the first procedure, but it was close. After a couple of days, I was fine.

Since then there have been a few other medical procedures. While none of them has been close to what happened in 2015, there was nothing out of the ordinary.

But last year I noticed something that should have been a warning of what was to come. In June, I had a colonoscopy. It’s a fairly simple thing, right? In the past, they were so easy that after resting for a bit, they’d let me take a cab home, by myself. This last one was very different. I not only needed a ride, but after getting home, I was in bed for the rest of the day.

That brings us to the latest invasion. It was exactly three weeks ago that I walked into the hospital for Diverticulitis surgery. I assumed I’d be walking out the same way. You know what happens when you assume.

I guess I should have known better when they told me the procedure came with an overnight accommodation…and not exactly at the Four Seasons…well, maybe like the Rudy Giuliani Four Seasons. When one night turned into a four-night stay, I figured everyone, including the medical staff may have been understating the length of the entire healing process. I actually figured that out on my own the first morning after the surgery. I woke and noticed I was wearing a catheter. That’s not usually something that would escape anyone but apparently, the drugs at the facility were pretty good. When the nurse removed it, I assumed the worst was over. Again, with that assume thing. What the fuck did I know?!

So now we’re at the twenty-one-day mark of the recovery process. This was supposedly the day where everything was finished. BUZZ!!!

Yeah, I’m feeling better but we still have a way to go. The pain from the Diverticulitis has been replaced by the pain from the three incisions. That’s right, THREE!! It’s still painful to sit up for too long. I tire easily and I’ve also lost close to fifteen pounds that I can’t get back as of yet because my appetite is lacking. You know it’s bad when sugar-free jello sounds better than a pizza.

However, according to my surgeon, there is plenty of good news. The pathology report came back clean. The incisions are healing and look fine for this stage. I can eat whatever I want. It’s just a matter of time until I’m back to normal…at least physically. It’s the time thing that’s throwing me. I guess I’m more than a little impatient. Probably more than a little.

There’s a saying that growing old is for sissies. Until recently I thought what did they know. At least we have the privilege of growing old. So many didn’t get that. Aches and pain aside, that’s a reason to be grateful. All this is another reminder of what it’s like to be seventy-ish. That damn aging process. What’s next?

Related post: Sooner or later Parkinson’s Disease is going to get you

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Creating an inclusive workplace means paying attention to detail. Sure, it’s fantastic to reward your team with the occasional pizza party — but getting a big, cheesy pie every Friday can leave your lactose or gluten-intolerant staff members feeling cheated out of the fun. 

Fortunately, you don’t need to perform culinary acrobatics to ensure everyone gets a slice of the proverbial pie. Here’s how to make room for dietary restrictions during your next office event. 

1. Survey Says 

The simplest way to ensure you make room for every staff member’s dietary restriction is to ask. Communicating shows that you care, and technology makes your job easier than ever. 

It takes only minutes to develop a free survey with the help of the right website and blast it off to your entire team via email. Some services even tally your results, saving you from doing math. 

2. Look for Double-Duty Dishes 

Making room for dietary restrictions during your next office event doesn’t mean preparing a separate meal for each staff member. Get creative with your menu, seeking dishes that do double-duty, hitting more than one guideline at a time. 

Start with the appetizer course. Vegan lettuce wraps with a bold Tamari dipping sauce cover three restrictions at once. They’re cruelty-free, gluten-free and even keto-friendly.

Onto the main course. Pasta dishes often work well — you can serve the meatballs separately from the sauce to please vegetarians. Adding a choice of marinara or alfredo sauce and perhaps some zoodles along with the traditional spaghetti noodles. You can even go the pizza party route if you look for delivery establishments with gluten-free options and a vegan cheese choice.

3. Get Serving Savvy

Many people are familiar with the extreme symptoms a peanut allergy can produce. Other disorders like celiac disease may not produce an immediate reaction upon eating but nevertheless cause severe health damage. Even a small amount of gluten can sicken some sufferers. 

The solution? Allow people with dietary restrictions to serve themselves first at buffet-style office events to minimize the risk of cross-contamination. Prepare allergy-friendly meals in a separate skillet and have plenty of extra tongs on hand so that people don’t double-dip from one dish to the next. 

4. Labels Are Recommended 

Unless you work in the foodservice industry, you don’t necessarily need to concern yourself with the full list of FDA labeling requirements. However, you should list each ingredient on every dish so that people with undisclosed dietary restrictions don’t accidentally indulge. 

When ordering takeout, ask your restaurant to provide a full ingredient list for each dish. Please have them include details such as the oils they use during cooking. While rare, some people have allergies to widely-used substances like canola. 

If serving potluck style, ask your staff members to do the same, writing down each ingredient they use. You could also request that your employees bring in prepackaged items only, but doing so sucks much of the fun away from those who relish the chance to showcase their culinary expertise. 

5. Embrace Potlucks 

Why shoulder the entire burden of planning your next office event solo? Your staff members might enjoy your get-together more if they play an active role in getting things ready. Plus, it allows everyone to sample Barb in accounting’s brownies — rumor has it that they’re to die for. 

Potlucks allow those employees with dietary restrictions to contribute a dish that they can safely eat while introducing others to new ways of preparing dishes. You could end up with enough healthy eating tips to write a cookbook from all the creative modifications you learn. Who knew that tacos could still taste delicious without meat? 

If possible, have individual chefs dole out their goodies by portion to prevent cross-contamination at buffets. Help them out by providing the plates and flatware or look for sustainable disposable alternatives. 

Make Room for Dietary Restrictions at Your Next Office Event 

The goal of office events is to generate team spirit. You can’t do so effectively if some members feel left out because of the menu. 

Fortunately, you don’t have to perform complicated culinary gymnastics to please everyone on your squad. Make room for dietary restrictions at your next office event by following the five above tips. 

Governor to keep children masked until when? To kingdom come?

While Illinois Gov. J. B. Pritzker will no longer require mask wearing indoors, he gave no date for when children will be allowed to attend schools without masks.

Despite his claims that we all must continue to follow the advice of scientists, doctors and epidemiologists, in fact the “science” fails to provide persuasive evidence that children must continue to be strapped into those suffocating bridles.

“Of course we still have sensitive situations of K-12 students,” he pronounced at his Wednesday afternoon press conference after freeing everyone else from the prison. A decision will come about when children can unmask, he said, “weeks hence,” whatever that means.

By delaying a date certain for children and by holding off until the end of the month for “indoor masking,” Pritzker raises the suspicion, as one reporter asked, that he’s keeping open his “options” to keeping the masking mandate.

Pritzker’s response was unpersuasive: The state’s “trajectory” is “trending down,” but we’ve got to make sure that the downward trend continues. Oh, sure. Pritzker is trying to save face as governors in blue states are eliminating their mask mandates, wanting to have it both ways: Appearing to acknowledge what has become apparent (the masks ineffective, especially for children), while staying in control.

Try as he might, the sand is shifting under his feet by a rising tide of Americans who are fed up with this nonsense and the growing appreciation of what “the science” actually says.

One possible reason springs to mind: The teachers unions

For that I turn to the Atlantic magazine, whose leftward tilt in obvious. Yascha Mounk, Associate Professor of Practice at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, makes the case in “Open Everything: The time to end pandemic restrictions is now.”

He was among the first to call for social distancing when the pandemic began and so little was known about the novel virus. But that’s changed, he argued, as vaccines have been developed, therapeutics between understood and the worst is past.

…[W]e should lift all remaining restrictions on everyday activities (which were, in any case, unable to prevent the rapid circulation of Omicron cases this winter). Children should be allowed to take off their mask in school. We should get rid of measures such as deep cleaning that are purely performative. Politicians and public-health officials should send the message that Americans should no longer limit their social activities, encouraging them to resume playdates and dinner parties without guilt.

He makes an interesting and novel point:

 …[T]he unvaccinated are, implicitly, the main justification for ongoing restrictions—in that the pro-restriction camp points to the persistently high death toll from COVID-19 and these deaths are heavily concentrated among the unvaccinated. That attitude is also wrong. We need not put our lives on hold for the indefinite future because others have decided to risk theirs. And since social restrictions are strictest in those parts of the country where most people are vaccinated, they are unlikely to help those who are most in need of protection. Wearing a mask in highly vaccinated New York does little to save an unmasked person in barely vaccinated Mississippi. [Emphasis added.]

It almost goes without saying (because it has been repeated so often), children are the least vulnerable, yet–in Pritzker’s mind at least–they are the ones who for now can’t escape the autocratic mandates.

One possible reason springs to mind: The teachers unions. Pritzker and Democrats in general are lackeys of those unions, including the Chicago Teachers Union. Those unions have been, for the most selfish of reasons, have successfully demanded that children be kept on the mask-your-face plantation.

Hence, as Prizkter says, the children will be bound up for “weeks hence”–at least to long, I should add. It’s unconscionable.

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Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Netflix’s fan-favorite series Love Is Blind is back with a whole new season! Season one kept us on the edge of our seats and wanting to know if love is truly bling. Season two returns with the drama, romantic, magic and heartbreak as a new batch of hopeless romantics hope to to be loved for who they are, rather than what they look like. The new cast of love birds have signed up for a less conventional approach to modern dating, in Chicago, where they hope to meet the person they want to spend the rest of their lives with…without ever seeing them.

With no distractions from the outside world, the singles talk to a stream of potential love interests and when a meaningful connection is made, they propose and then lay their eyes on their fiancé for the first time. Engaged and back in the real world, as the couples plan their wedding day, they will quickly discover whether they can turn their emotional connection into a physical one before the fast-approaching ceremony. Hosted by Nick and Vanessa Lachey, this addictive 10-part series will uncover whether looks, race or age do matter, or if love really is blind.

Comment below and let me know if you will be tuning in to the new season?

For some time now, a Trumpist-Force Ordnance has been massed at the border of the Veteran’s Administratiion. But its intended incursion is clogged with incompetence and ignorance.

The obstacles they’re dealing with are of their own manufacture. The preponderance of their artillery is devoid of munitions and the remainder is loaded with blanks.

Two former Trump-Era officials, Peter O’Rourke and Darin Selnick, both discredited by scandal during the peformance of their administrative duties, are today spearheading a thoroughly offensive offensive , armed with a bulging war chest, most probably brimming with Koch-Bros. funding.

The toxic disinformation salvos began in 2014, when right-wing storm troopers maintained that some vet patients’ deaths were triggered by VA wait-time neglect. The chief claim of the accusation was later refuted by the VA’S Office of Inspector General, which stated “We are unable to conclusively assert that the absence of timely quality care caused the death of these veterans.”

But, regrettably, before the report was issued, Trumpist lobbyists were able to inveigle Congress into passing the dysfunctional VA Choice Act, which marched millions of veterans into frequently faulty private care, while massively bloating the revenues of private healthcare providers.

Since that time, VA has faced more constant sniping from right- wing-extremist positions, all with one aim: Privatization. And, as most of us know, Privatization usually converts into Privation, witness America’s cruelly substandard private penal corporations, and our city’s tax-income-robbing private parking-meter system, and private schools with subpar teachers and subpar student-teacher ratios, etc. etc. etc. Behind the scenes, cabals of predatory Private Providers privately, demonically cackle over their obscenely excessive profits.

Long story short: Against the headwinds of all the preposterous allegations, today’s Biden-era VA stands tall , with recent studies revealing that veterans transported by ambulance to VA facilities rather than private hospitals stand a decidedly better chance of short term and long term survival, far lower costs notwithstanding. Furthermore, a towering pile of academic reports avows that the VA outshines the private sector in nearly every metric, including wait-time. And let’s not overlook the fact that the VA offers free college, free healthcare, and a progressive battle plan to extinguish homelessness.

Enter anecdotal evidence: Allow me to recount the personal VA experiences that led to my VA fan-club buttressing. Thanks to a form-letter signed by then President Clinton (Remember peace, prosperity and budget surpluses?) inviting me to avail myself of VA care, I’ve been thriving under VA ministrations. During my regular no-disappointment appointments, I never have to wait more than 5 minutes for a nurse to take my blood-pressure (and other screenings) and never more than 15 minutes to see my assigned physician, who attentively. invariably and patiently listens. Especially, patiently. In his celebrated book, How Doctors Think, Harvard oncologist and New Yorker contributor Jerome Groopman cites a study that finds the average listening-time doctors wait, before they themselves speak, is 18 seconds; VA doctors easily score far better than that. Moreover, VA doctors have been vigilant in monitoring my conditions, adjusting or adding medications when deemed necessary and making added diagnoses as age ineluctably whittles away my fettle. Indeed, after the head of the Lake Shore facility noted my labored breathing as he passed by, he tested my lung capacity, diagnosed COPD and described medication that has since ameliorated the condition. From a vet’s perspective, that’s the kind of attention that puts me at ease. Why, the Lake Shore facility even furnishes free valet parking from an area otherwise infamous for sky-high parking lot fees. When mass vaccination time came, the VA was extraordinarily timely and incredibly organized. Granted, it’s obviously easier to organize the veritable platoons of men and women who have been well trained in following orders; nonetheless, VA alacrity allowed me to receive my gentle jabs and exit in far less time than I’d anticipated. Same narrative holds for every vaccination visit Ive made.

In conclusion, let me urge readers to repel the horde drooling at the VA borders with their hoard of misleading propaganda. Their vetting of the VA is–using a fitting, old-school word sometimes issued from the lips of our distinguished POTUS–malarky.

The following is republished from November 14, 2019. It’s part of a series of blogs I wrote in the wake of Donnie Trump’s July 25, 2019 phone call with Ukrain’s president-elect, Volodymyr Zelensky.

That call was icing on the cake that Donnie had been baking for years, offering up Ukraine to Vladimir Putin. You can refresh your memory of the event that led to Donnie’s first impeachment by clicking HERE.

Looking back, Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) was either a liar or an idiot when she said that Donnie had “learned his lesson.”

Lucky for her, Republicans’ super power is rewriting history.

THE four people mentioned in the title earned their way there with a common, inexplicable character flaw.

Jordan, Meadows and Nunes are hyper-partisan operatives in the House of Representatives.  They have abandoned their oaths to defend the Constitution in favor of protecting a criminal, which makes them accomplices and co-conspirators.

Other co-conspiring luminaries include Lindsey Graham, Rand Paul, Nikki Haley, Mick Mulvaney and John Ratcliffe and the list grows hourly.

Ratcliffe is a congressman.  Paul is the junior senator from Kentucky, Graham the senior senator from South Carolina.

Mick Mulvaney is Donald Trump’s acting Chief of Staff and Director of the Office of Management and Budget and he’s getting paid for both jobs.

Nikki Haley is the former governor of South Carolina, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and undoubtedly, a future presidential candidate.  She is the most recent recruit into the Trump Crime Syndicate.

John Kass is a respected columnist, a member of the Chicago Tribune editorial board and a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Commentary.

It might seem odd to put Kass’s name in the title with three lying liars, but they share a defining criterion; irrational defense of the indefensible.

Last weekend Nikki Haley made three assertions that defy believability.  She said that Donnie Trump is truthful, listens well and was a good boss.

Only Haley can tell us why she said those things, but all available evidence screams the contrary.

Haley also said that since Ukraine eventually got the military aid as promised-AFTER the whistleblower report-and President Volodymyr Zelensky did not make requisite allegations against Joe Biden, there was no quid pro quo.

Forget quid pro quo.  Unless Julius Caesar is visiting, there’s no reason to get bogged down with a dead language.  It’s bad enough Donnie Trump is killing English.

This particular crime is pretty straightforward.   Trump tried to extort actions from the president of Ukraine by withholding desperately needed military assistance.

He tried to bribe him to do his personal bidding with taxpayer dollars that were earmarked by Congress for Ukrainian defense.

The fact that Trump’s efforts were ineffective and when caught, he released the aid to Ukraine does not make it less of a crime.

Lindsey Graham said that Trump was too stupid and his foreign policy too disorganized to perpetrate extortion.

As Stephen Colbert noted, If being bad at something determined whether or not you are that thing, then Trump is neither a businessman nor a husband.

In John Kass’s recent column, The ‘Whistleblower’ and Rep. Adam Schiff should be first to testify in Trump Impeachment Theater  he makes three assertions, two of which are right there in the title:
1. The impeachment inquiry has been unfair to Donald Trump
2. Adam Schiff should testify
3. The whistleblower should testify

As a matter of policy, common sense and constitutional law, the closed-door hearings held in the impeachment matter were not only appropriate, but constitutionally mandated.

Think of impeachment as an indictment, which is generally preceded by a grand jury investigation before any charges (impeachment or indictment) are brought against the subject of the investigation.

Grand jury hearings are secret.  Only the prosecutor calls witnesses and the subject of the investigation rarely appears, but is not even allowed to have a lawyer in the room if he does.

During the impeachment inquiries, members of the President’s party were not only present, they were able to question witnesses.  As we’ve seen in the open hearings begun yesterday, their only purpose seems to be to discredit witnesses, not to uncover facts.

Think of Adam Schiff as the lead prosecutor or the judge, whichever works for you.  The question is, when have you ever heard of a prosecutor or judge being called as a witness?

Schiff is neither a party nor a witness to the events in question.  His job is to find out if Donald Trump committed acts detrimental to the security of our nation.

Bribery happens to be one crime specifically mentioned in the Constitution as an impeachable offense.  A really high crime.

We are constantly reminded that If you see something, say something.

Whistleblowers are protected by law and should not be subjected to the kind of intimidation that rains down on anyone who crosses Little Donnie.  He’s already accused the whistleblower of treason and suggested that he should suffer the fate of traitors (death).

Protecting whistleblowers the best way we have of protecting the integrity of our government, our national security and ultimately, ourselves.

Where would we be if fire chiefs demanded to know who sounded the alarm and why before responding to calls?   We’d have a bunch of burned down houses, that’s where.

There’s a fire in the White House.  Maybe it’s time to put it out before the house burns down.

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