A week of transition

Happy Monday, Everybody!

Mrs ERJ leaves for Miami on Thursday. Our oldest daughter is expecting a child in mid-May and sweet-talked Mrs ERJ into joining her and Handsome Hombre for-the-duration plus two-weeks.

This week will be filled with fiddly, getting ready things and she already started the pep-talks about not going to auctions and yardsales. Our house IS a bit cluttered and she has a new rule that I cannot get anything knew unless I get rid of two things first.

She/we are getting practiced at this. She spent the month of May with her ailing sister last year. We managed. I missed her so much that I slept on the couch so I could listen to the dogs murmur in their sleep.

I intend to be more proactive this year. I put out feelers about finding some work. One person has an open time-slot on Sunday afternoon. Another gentleman from church has some painting they need done. I hate painting but work is work.

One complication is that I am scheduled to be with Mom on Mondays and Fridays so my availability is weird. Mostly I am looking for things to keep me busy Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. Between that, the garden and mowing grass I should be busy enough.

OCD and Tomatoes

I am not afflicted with OCD but some of my work undoubtedly triggers those who are.

My father and two brothers are the kind of people who would use a transit to site-in trees in an orchard. I poke a couple of stakes in the ground. I might stretch a string between them. Then I pace distance and dig holes.

One of my failures in orcharding was that I planted them too close together. Then I did not stay on top of pruning. It became a jungle. It is easy to underestimate how much aisleway you need between the rows of trees.

I fixed it by removing every-other row. Boy, did I cry a river of tears.

Then I got mad because I was mowing so much grass that could be growing food so I planted a row of grapes between each row of trees. It looks very not-orchardy.

It gets worse this year. The southern-most row is a variety named Swenson Red. Swenson Red is just a little too sensitive to diseases for my liking. It did fine the first few years but now it struggles.

I removed the five vines on the west end of the row and will replace them with dwarf pears. Since I will be planting the rootstock and then grafting-them-in-place, the new pear trees will be tiny and I will be back to forty feet of row not paying its rent.

Then I realized that with the trellis in place, I have plenty of room to run a tomato vine between each quince rootstock without unduly shading the tiny trees.

Does anybody have any recommendations for a big slicing variety? I have a preference for an heirloom variety. Brandywine, Purple Cherokee and Kellogg's Breakfast look interesting.

I am sure Dad is going to look down from Heaven and shake his head. An orchard with rows of grapevines. A row of grape vines with quince and tomatoes alternating on one end.

Crazy world

Did you know that the Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that health insurance coverage must also cover transgender surgery*. Meanwhile health insurance companies can refuse to cover the cost of surgery to repair cleft lips and palates because they are "cosmetic" i.e. "elective".

The court rules on what the lawyers representing each side presents them. The lawyers representing the side in favor of transgender surgery made the case that that transgender surgery was critical for people who were unhappy with their body. That is, the patient was clinically depressed and the patient decided the reason they were unhappy is because they had been born into the wrong body.

Previous law does not allow providers and employers to discriminate between mental/emotional health and physical health. They are all "health" issues.

If you are a normal person and the least bit observant, you know that man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal. That is, things happen and then we find reasons to back-fill events. Those reasons invariably maintain our dignity and self image.

So rather than looking inward at why the patient is unhappy, medical practitioners were given the green-light to enable the patient's break from reality.

Spoiler alert: The patient is still unhappy after the surgery because "God made a mistake" was not the reason why they were unhappy. They are still stupid, or a bitch, or lazy, or using drugs, or have grandiose ideas of their importance after the surgery. They were unhappy because they had real issues that they refused to address.

The suicide attempt rate among transgender persons ranges from 32% to 50% across the countries.  Source

Perhaps surgery for cleft lip and palate would be covered if the parents said their child had a dream of being a trans-gender who practiced fellatio and repair of their mouth was the first step in that path.

*The cost of tranny surgery ranges from $10k for the chassis work (ball joints, new grease zerks and so on) to $70k for chassis work, boob-job and liposuction-redeposit body sculpting. Most tranny surgery is in the range of $20k-to-$25k. Cleft palate and lip surgery runs $10k-to-$20k.