Two steps forward, one step back

Our favorite plumber hooked up the new sink this morning but, of course, there was a snag.

The drain is clogged. He doesn't do clogs, ever since one went wrong and cost him six hours of free labor to fix.

So I have a clog specialist coming from Carmel on Wednesday - $93 or it's free.

Better than last year, but still pathetic

It's time to tally my BMW motorcycle mileage for the year. It's depressing, but not as depressing as 2017.

I rode the K1200GT a modest 520 miles and the K75S at least 290. I say at least because the speedo and odometer are wonky and didn't log several of the miles ridden. That gives me a total of <810 miles, which is 5.6 times more than the record low 114 miles I logged in 2017.

Once again, it was cash flow and other time commitments that kept the bikes in the shed. If we could sell or have full occupancy of our commercial building in Arkansas, this would be transformed overnight, but there has been no movement on that front and the utilities and insurance and taxes continue to eat into our disposable income.

Getting unstuck

Morgan and her fiance Edgar and Austin pitched in to help us remodel the upstairs bathroom - a major step in getting our house back in shape.

The lack of a functioning sink in the upstairs bathroom has been a factor in our not being able to move our bed out of the dining room and into an upstairs bedroom. Yes, we've been sleeping in the dining room since we moved back to Thorntown in August, 2017.

We remodeled the downstairs half-bath as soon as we moved back, putting in a new waterproof faux wood floor, vanity and sink, shower stall and stacked Samsung washer and dryer. We bought enough of the waterproof flooring to do the upstairs bathroom and that's what happened last week. The new vanity is in place and we're waiting for a plumber to hook up the sink. He was supposed to come yesterday morning, but his mother-in-law is at death's door and he needs to support his wife and her family. We can wait. We've waited more than a year already. What's a few more days?

Our upstairs bedroom still needs some final plaster skim coating, paint, and crown molding and then we can move the bed in and get the rest of our dining room furniture out of storage and start using the house as it was supposed to be used.

Afflicting the wrong people?

I've been a working journalist off and on since the autumn of 1966 and always strove to be objective and free of bias.

I took pride in the notion that our job is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.

But I heard that credo picked apart on the radio this afternoon and came to the disturbing realization that it implies a bias to always champion the underdog. It suggests that the underdog is always right and the successful/comfortable are always wrong. The more you think about it, the more glaringly liberal and intentionally subversive it becomes.

What if the little guy is a fledgling Hitler or Stalin or Mao? Are they automatically entitled to better treatment in the press than the Pope or a Franklin Roosevelt or a Harry Truman? Does success always equate to corruption? I think not.

The more I chew on it, the clearer it becomes to me that a lot of us have mistakenly believed our job is to disrupt the social order just for the sake of doing it.

How depressing.

Still at it

I just did a mental inventory of my contemporaries from the old Indianapolis News and came to the conclusion that I am the only one still writing for a newspaper on a regular basis.

It certainly wasn't by design. When I took early retirement from The Indianapolis Star in October of 2000, I figured I was done with newspapers.

But then I married a newspaperwoman 19 years my junior who dragged me out of retirement to write and shoot photos for the Crawfordsville Journal Review, the Jonesboro (Ark.) Sun and more recently the Lebanon Reporter.

I can't complain because I've been able to play newspaper and see my byline in print on a regular basis, but pretty much on my own terms.

Who knew that the callow youth shown here around 1967 would still be an active journalist 51 years later?

Here's my Thorntown Community Christmas Party package on the front page of today's Reporter.

Finally being occupied after 16 months

Sixteen months after we closed on our former home in Arkansas, it appears the buyers are finally moving in.

Former neighbors reported the new owners did some remodeling, including extending the master bedroom and bath about 10 feet into the back yard.

I was beginning to think they never planned to live in it, but just wanted to flip it.

My day

I wrote three stories yesterday - two that made it onto the front page of today's paper and the other destined for tomorrow or beyond - so I decided to devote today to loose ends around the house.

One of the loose ends involved driving into Lebanon to buy an air filter at Menards for the Honeywell air purifier I got from the Vine Program a few months ago.

I stopped at the bank and the post office and about 3 miles east of town I was startled to see the sun roof on my Lexus opening. I struggled with the controls and found that I could get it closed, but only temporarily.
It kept re-opening at random intervals - not a good thing when it could snow or rain at any moment. I called Tom Wood Lexus in Carmel and they said they would be waiting for me.

I got there at 1:10 p.m. and was greeted and seated in the comfortable waiting room. I told service writer Brett Sullivan about my problem and also asked if it would be possible to replace the 2 burned out high beam headlight bulbs.

Two hours later, I was on my way home. They fed me coffee and a free turkey and cheese sandwich from their snack bar, and charged me $104.01 for bulbs and labor, but nothing for reprogramming the computer.

Considering that I didn't have an appointment, I am absolutely gob smacked at how well I was treated. I think I'll be back.

But I never did get to Menards.

Medicare Advantage coverage

I've been living without any enhancement to my basic Medicare insurance for the past eight years or so.

We've managed without too much financial stress until this year when I got hit with incidental surgery center expenses from the previous year's cataract lens replacement and an insanely expensive trip to the ER and an overnight hospital stay when we mistook faintness from dehydration for a heart attack.

Also, I've become keenly aware that I'm losing strength due to lack of exercise and, yes I admit it, aging. I want to join the local YMCA to exercise and regain strength and fitness, but the cost is more than I want to take on. They do, however, give free memberships to folks whose insurance includes the Silver Sneakers fitness coverage.

So, mindful that the enrollment period for Medicare Supplement or Medicare Advantage insurance is looming - Dec. 7 - I've been under self-inflicted pressure to sign up for whatever reasonably inexpensive program will get me Silver Sneakers coverage.

I called the county senior services office yesterday to see if they could help me choose a plan, but they're booked solid through the deadline date.

"How hard can this be?" I asked myself. Surely there's help online.

Yes, there is, and it led me to sign up for Humana Gold HMO Medicare Advantage coverage with will actually save me money because it will cover my medications that I've been paying $29 a month to cover with Cigna. And I get dental and optical insurance included. All at no cost. How they make money doing this is puzzling, but it gets me to the gym for free, so what the hell?

I must have been really worried about this because I have an immense feeling of relief at having dealt with it.

Look for me at the Y after Jan. 1.

Musta shrunk

Unpacking boxes from our move back to Indiana the other day, I found my old Delphi High School letter jacket.

And I got a rude surprise when I put it on. Once I threaded my arms through the tattered taffeta sleeve lining, I was shocked to see just how much it has shrunk in the 55 years since it was my go-to winter jacket.

So much for fantasies about wearing it to my 60th anniversary reunion in five years.

Hey! My brother-in-law is an author!

My brother-in-law Kerstan Bayless just published his first book. It's available on Amazon.com in paperback, but not Kindle. I ordered a copy yesterday.

Mom's pumpkin pie!

My mother made the best pumpkin pie I ever tasted.

It was mellow, flavorful and not overly nutmeggy as lots of pumpkin pies turn out.

Happily, she left us the recipe and Maria has been able to replicate it perfectly on several occasions.

So here, as a Thanksgiving gift to everyone who checks in here from time to time, is Mom’s pumpkin pie recipe.

Enjoy!

Easiest crash ever

My computer crashed Friday, happily after I filed my last story of the week.

I noticed that it wasn't recognizing a USB thumb drive when I plugged it in, so I did a restart and ended up with this screen. I've seen it a couple of times before and it always recovered and launched Windows eventually.

Not this time. I let it go overnight and called Dell customer support on Saturday morning. I spent a couple of hours on the phone with a techie, trying various solutions and getting nowhere. He finally admitted defeat, declared my computer probably dead and said my best option was to let him send me packing materials and ship my computer to their repair facility in Texas where there was a high probability that they would wipe the 1TB hard drive.

That was somewhat distressing, but I realized I had backed up most of my photos to the Western Digital 2TB Cloud Drive I got earlier this year from the Amazon Vine Program.

I had never paid any attention to the Microsoft OneDrive until yesterday afternoon when I found that pretty much all of my photos and all of my documents were backed up there, meaning the only thing I could lose would be some programs (or apps, as we're supposed to call them now).

I moved over to Maria's desktop and created an identity for myself there this morning and installed Google Chrome. I was delighted to see all of my personalized Chrome features and bookmarks carried over as well, so it's almost like having my old computer again. We bought both desktop computers at the same time in September, 2017.

My biggest challenge at the moment is tracking down the installation CD for my most recent version of Photoshop so I can continue shooting and editing photos in Nikon RAW format.

Zooming

My son Steve gave me this H1 Zoom stereo digital recorder for Christmas several years ago.

I wanted it to record live music, but have yet to use it for that purpose. Instead, I use it to record interviews and other news events, which spares me the hassle of taking notes and then trying to decipher those notes. It pairs nicely with my Bang & Olufsen H6 (second version) corded headphones. Transcribing is a breeze with my Logitech mechanical keyboard.

Scanning, scanning, scanning...

I'm evaluating the Epson FastFoto speed scanner for the Amazon Vine Program.

It took me a little more than an hour to set it up, mostly struggling with establishing a Wifi connection.

You feed it your snapshots, 40 or more in a batch, and it scans them at 300 dpi with blazing speed. I timed it at one point yesterday and it scanned 53 pictures in 30 seconds. In all, I scanned more than 2,000 photos in an afternoon. And they look pretty good. Certainly good enough for online use.

It's not cheap - lists for $599, sells for $529 on Amazon - but it's a great tool if you want to digitize a lot of photos quickly.

I received a medical/honorable discharge from the U.S. Air Force 53 years ago today. Here I am with Flight 1499 of the 3703rd Basic Military Training Squadron at Lackland AFB a couple of weeks earlier. My career in the Air Force ended after 41 days with a medical discharge for allergies. But let the record show that I volunteered and was ready to serve.

Early voter

I made my contribution to what I hope will be a Red Tsunami yesterday.

I was in the Boone County Courthouse scrutinizing candidate finance reports and figured I might as well go down to the first floor and vote. Naturally, I voted straight ticket Republican.

This is the first time I've ever taken advantage of the new early voting opportunity. I think I'll miss going to the Thorntown Public Library to vote on election day.

Adios, treadmill

I just bade farewell to the treadmill we bought about 10 years ago in Arkansas.

It's been in one of our storage bins for about 18 months and there never was a hope of getting it through the narrow doorways of our Indiana house and we had no place to put it if we could get it into the house. So I advertised it in three or four Facebook yardsale sites and finally got it sold.

Naturally, the buyer showed up after a sunny day turned into spitting rain and blustery wind with a wind chill factor of 45 degrees. We brought it to my house to hook it up to AC power for a successful test, shrouded it in plastic sheeting and sent it off to Frankfort.

Now I really need to get off of my ass and do some serious walking.

Assignment: Anxiety

I am a very shy person when it comes to approaching strangers for a photo or a quote.
So you can imagine the anxiety I felt this week when I was assigned to roam Zionsville's Main Street and buttonhole strangers to ask them about their family's Christmas traditions and photograph them.
Knowing that a lot of people come from broken or dysfunctional families, I decided to add a second question about their all-time favorite Christmas present.
These seven people (and an eighth - a woman I forgot to photograph - graciously agreed to play along, easing my fear of rejection.
Thank God for that and thank God it's over.
They all gave me great smiles, too.

October 1966

It was about this time in 1966 when I shot this photo at the Hobbs rest park along Ind. 28 about halfway between Tipton and Elwood.

I had just started my first newspaper job at the Tipton Tribune and was about to embark on a cold snowy winter in a rented mobile home that had no skirt to keep the wind from turning the floor to ice.

If I had only known then what I know now... But then we all say that, don't we?

Hostage situation

I have phone calls out on four different stories for the Reporter and nobody is calling me back.
So I am held hostage.
This is what I hated when I did this for a living.