Author: Kristina

San Diego

John was kind enough to schedule a trip to San Diego to coincide with the “Gator by the Bay” blues and zydeco music festival. It was a little odd because they were doing a Mardi Gras theme in the middle of May, and there are definitely no gators in San Diego, but whatever, we went with it. I’m not much of a zydeco fan, but I am definitely a blues fan.

We split the vacation into two parts. We spent the first few days at a resort that John’s been interested in staying at, and then for the weekend music festival we switched to a hotel adjacent to the festival.

When we first got to the resort, I thought it was a little bit hilarious. It reminded me of a Tiki bar from the 1960’s. I kept looking around thinking I’d see my grandfather and his buddies playing poker and drinking Bloody Marys.

But I have to admit the place was pretty, if a bit overdone. I’m beginning to think that faux tropics within driving distance are better than getting on a darn plane nowadays anyway.

The tiki bar vibe was complete with caged parrots.

These egrets and herons appeared to be actual legit wildlife.

The resort also had a retro arcade room, much to John’s delight.

It turned out the clientele was surprisingly diverse, and better yet, the location was excellent. The ocean was one block to the west, and the bay was one block to the east. There was a grocery store, a pharmacy, and plenty of great restaurants within walking distance.

Unfortunately it was a little hard to appreciate the restaurants because I had completely and absolutely lost my sense of smell, and therefore my sense of taste. In theory could taste sweet, salty, sour and bitter, but in reality, nothing tasted like anything. A strong cinnamon tea tasted like hot water. A decadent, and according to John, very cheesy restaurant cheesecake tasted to me slightly salty and slightly sweet. However I can tell you it had a very impressive creamy texture! I could not taste the cheese, or the raspberry topping. I have never lost my sense of smell so thoroughly and completely. What a waste of great San Diego food!

At the worst of my loss of smell, I could not smell even the strongest scents. I put my face to a bottle of vinegar – nothing. Vics Vaporub – nothing. Eventually peppermint essential oils were the first thing I could finally smell.

Here I am on the beach in my ear warmers. I didn’t go anywhere without them.

After a couple of days in San Diego, my doctor sent a second type of antibiotic ear drops out to a pharmacy near our hotel, because my ears were not improving. And I was definitely struggling with exhaustion.

One day I just rested in the hotel room while John went on a tour of a aircraft carrier.

I think we snapped this next picture because we were like, wait – what? Why is the sail up with the boat cleated to the dock?

This was the bay on one side of the hotel. That is our resort you can see in the background. We weren’t in the tower, we were in a lower building without a water view.

Here is the view out our window.

I sat inside and looked out this window a lot. Unfortunately it was just a little bit too cold to sit on the patio while we were there. The weather warmed up considerably by the weekend and it was overly hot at the music festival. Sometimes you just can’t win!

I’m glad I felt well enough to get out onto the beach a few times.

At least once John went out and took pictures of the sunset without me because I didn’t feel well enough. He borrowed my phone, because it has a better camera than his phone, so now I can’t remember which of us took these awesome pictures. But nowadays it doesn’t take a lot of skill to get awesome pictures. I love the camera on my phone, and I love that I almost always have it with me.

I kept thinking I’d feel better in time for the music festival on the weekend. And I was a little better, but not much. I was so grateful that our hotel was within a short walking distance to the festival! It was so convenient!

We bought a three-day wristband, so we could come and go as we wished. I like that kind of festival so much better than the kind that only allow you in once and you can’t come and go. If we got hot or tired or we didn’t like any of the bands, we just walked back to our room for awhile and came back later! It was wonderful for me because I did frequently get tired.

Here you can see how close we were to our hotel. It was so excellent.

This was just one of several stages along Spanish Landing Park, which is a long and narrow park along the edge of the bay. If we didn’t like one band, we just walked to another stage.

And the advantage of having completely and entirely clogged ears was that I didn’t have to wear ear plugs, lol. This experience with impaired hearing has made me realize that if I start having trouble hearing as I get older, I am absolutely getting hearing aids. I will try every kind they make until I find something that I like. I will buy the best dang hearing aids on the market. I hate not understanding what people are saying around me. I also hate hearing noises and not having any idea what the noise is or where it’s coming from. It’s more than disorienting, it’s actually anxiety provoking for me.

Our hotel room next to the festival also had an absolutely gorgeous view from the balcony.

I love, love, love city lights views. In addition to beaches and music concerts it’s probably my favorite thing! Oh yeah, I’d go back here again!

One night John took a walk around the marina to take more pictures of the lights for me.

Now you know what I meant a couple of posts ago when I said it was a great trip even though I was too sick to enjoy it! I need a repeat next year, for sure.

Emily’s visit

As I mentioned last post, John had covid and Emily and her family were all just getting over colds, and I had a new one starting. Fun times! But the house was ready, the weather was great, and the company was even better.

At first, John and I were wearing masks so we wouldn’t give them covid, but they assured us we needn’t bother. Bryan said, “The water is warm, jump right in.” And so we did!

Here is our house, transformed into playland.

The first day was a bit chaotic in that the electric company suddenly, without warning, decided to do electrical work in the alley behind us. This included us being without power for about 5 hours that afternoon. No air conditioning, no refrigerator (that is, we were trying not to open it and let all the cold air out), no microwave, no TV, no recharging devices, how were we going to survive?

Thank goodness for the pool. Here is a funny picture of our first day, with the electrical workers in the background. It looks like they could jump right into our pool from up there!

The kids didn’t care, they didn’t even notice. And I was just happy to be able to sit outside and talk with Emily.

The workers were quite busy back there, and at first we thought they were moving the electrical lines that are crossing our neighbor’s newly subdivided vacant lot. One of our other neighbors started excitedly texting me. “What’s going on? Are they moving the lines? Will the lot sell now?”

I can’t remember if I told you about all that. There’s a vacant lot on the other side of the alley from our backyard, and we even considered buying the lot. But the neighbors who subdivided the lot, separating it from their property, left the power lines that service their house strung across their newly subdivided lot. Those lines need to be moved before the lot is sold. No one wants to own a lot with someone else’s power lines crossing over it.

But it turns out the power company didn’t move those lines when they were out during Emily’s visit. They replaced a pole, and replaced one of our lines. There are still lines crossing the vacant lot that shouldn’t be there.

On the left in this next picture you can see John putting up a shade structure that I forgot we even owned. He must have found it in the storage unit. Neither of us even know what all is in there.

Ta-da, shade!

The electrical work being done was only on the first day. After that, we had our backyard to ourselves.

One day everyone went to the county fair, except me, I wasn’t feeling well. So John took these photos for me.

They also went to various parks and other fun attractions over the next few days.

I missed all the outings, which was kind of sad, but I still enjoyed having them visit. And I was relieved that John was able to take over as social coordinator – as well as photographer. And of course, favorite uncle.

Problems, problems, problems and trying to vacation anyway

For the first time in over a month, I have a free afternoon and I’m not ridiculously sick. It’s been such a hard month! And being sick was not even the half of it.

Where shall we start? Let’s start with the family drama. To all you parents out there – you know when your adult kid is contemplating doing something so obviously misguided that everyone (everyone!) knows it’s going to be a guaranteed disaster, but you’re powerless to stop it?

I’m sure my own parents have felt that way about some of the decisions I’ve made in my life! Well, it’s even worse is when it’s your kid’s partner who is the driver behind the catastrophic idea – because, let’s face it, we have less influence with their partners.

Guen latched onto a dream – a beautiful, ambitious, jaw-droppingly risky, and ultimately entirely unrealistic dream. She started down that road – and at first I watched warily, trying to stay neutral, expecting the grand idea to soon dissolve into the mist as completely unattainable dreams tend to do – but Guen is one determined cookie. (We have that in common.) Then I kept waiting for Callan to step in before all was lost. But that wasn’t happening either.

I waited and waited…I mean, what can a parent do? Stand aside and watch them hurtle towards the edge of the cliff, or say something and risk a relationship breach? And if you opt to say something, how hard do you push? This has been keeping me up at night.

Finally I couldn’t watch the train wreck any longer and called a family intervention meeting. Our schedules are impossible, so my hoped-for family meeting turned out to be me talking individually to everyone in an iterative fashion over several days. I talked to John. And then I talked to David (my ex, the kid’s dad). And I talked to Laura. And Laura talked to Alex. And I talked to Callan again. And Callan talked to Guen. And I talked to Mark. And I talked to Guen. And I talked again to David. And John again. And Laura again. And Callan about 5 more times.

I am happy to announce, we are all still talking to each other! Nobody hates anybody. And even better, this issue might have been resolved yesterday. Either that, or yesterday was just a brief, fleeting truce in a much longer ordeal. We will have to wait and see.

Meanwhile, on a completely different topic but almost as traumatizing, John and I have been having packrat issues. These awful little rodents are the scourge of the desert; more greatly feared by many of us than rattlesnakes, scorpions and gila monsters. They are larger than a house mouse, but smaller than a bonafide rat. They happily build nests under sprawling, prickly pear cactus or any sort of dense underbrush, but they prefer car engines.

First they caused $1,500 worth of damage chewing wires in my car. Then they tried to set up residence in our side yard amongst my gardening equipment. Then they tried to dig their way into the wall of our house!

This sounds impossible but our house is made of burnt adobe bricks, which are fired at a lower temperature than regular bricks, and are not a heck of a lot stronger than sandstone. They aren’t the dark red fired bricks those of you in the rest of the country are familiar with. I feel like I should be making a huff-and-puff-and-blow-your-house-down joke right now, but it’s not quite coming to me. Scritch and scratch and claw my house down?

John is a complete do-it-yourselfer, so instead of calling an exterminator, John handled the packrat problem himself, then patched the hole in the wall with cement, and then left for a week long business trip. A day or two into his trip, he emailed me with the bad news that he had some sort of food poisoning or stomach bug. Meanwhile he was stubbornly continuing to go to his meetings. This annoyed me, because in my opinion he works too hard and doesn’t take care of himself, but primarily I felt bad for him.

The following day, I had even worse news for him then he had for me. Something was dead in the office wall. As a long-time homeowner and landlord, there are few words that strike such terror. And I’ve encountered a lot over the years. Skunk spray. A broken water pipe under the cement slab. A lurking rattlesnake. A live mouse dropping from a hole in the ceiling onto the dining room table. A dead cat in the crawl space under the house. Sewer gas from an undetermined location. Ants, cockroaches, termites, all kinds of leaks and floods. I’m not easily fazed, but this one did me in.

It was the memory of the dead cat in the crawl space over 25 years ago, that made me immediately realize that for sure, no kidding, something died in our wall. Nothing else smells like that. When John got home from his business trip the next day, he was still quite sick, but he valiantly went to work tearing up the adobe brick wall to find the issue.

What followed was an ordeal that I don’t want to go into. I will spare you the details. It was not nice. It was really, really not nice. At all. It was a freaking multi-day nightmare that involved moving everything out of the office, twice. Not to mention me looking for a hotel to rent.

Meanwhile, while John was digging in our wall looking for something dead, we were counting down the 4 short days before my sister, her husband, and their 4 little girls were flying all the way from Boston for their annual spring vacation at our house! In four days! Our house was not liveable. How was I going to find a last-minute rental house big enough for 8 people and a dog? With a heated pool?

Their visit is a highlight of our year. I spend days preparing. I pack away all my breakable ceramics and glass art and white wool rugs. Then we head to our storage unit to retrieve car seats, blow up beds, strollers, and bins and bins of bedding and children’s toys and pool toys. And food! I bought food and made a gigantic basket of snacks for the kids. John bought food to grill for everyone. Emily sent huge shipments of food staples, diapers and other necessities from Costco and Amazon.

Four days until the biggest event of the year at our house, and there’s a dead rat in the wall! After working non-stop all weekend, John finally managed to find and remove the dead packrat. Whew! But oh, our problems are not over yet.

John continued to still be quite sick, but stubbornly went to work on Monday morning, despite his illness and our nightmarish hunt for the dead thing in the wall over the weekend. But by Wednesday, the day before my sister’s arrival, he was still sick and I started feeling a bit of a tickle in my chest. I wondered – who ever heard of a cold that started in the chest? My colds always start with a sore throat and runny nose. What starts in the chest? Unless – suddenly I realized – could it be covid?

I asked John to stop at the store on the way home to pick up a covid test. Sure enough, John had covid! And my family was due to get on the plane at 4 AM the next morning!

I frantically texted her, but you know Emily. She shrugged it off. She’s an emergency room doctor, and she is exposed to covid and lord knows what else, all the time. She wasn’t going to let a little covid exposure stop them. Plus, they were bringing the tail end of some cold virus of their own with them. We were going to have a happy little germ party!

And did we ever. John recovered fairly quickly and was soon splashing in the pool with the children. But I was sick for their whole visit. And the day after they left, I spiked a fever so high I couldn’t believe it. I fevered for 4 days.

I coughed so hard I would grip my head to try to keep my poor aching brains from slamming into my skull with each cough. I lost my sense of smell. My ears completely clogged up. Meanwhile I kept testing negative for covid. I tested 5 times over the course of 10 days. Whatever it was, it was very bad, but it wasn’t covid.

At the end of a week and a half, after my virus had presumably run its course, I still had huge amounts of pain and pressure in my ears, so my doctor put me on antibiotics. Optimistic that I would soon be better with the antibiotics, John and I left for our long-anticipated vacation in San Diego. My doctor told me I was not to fly for fear I’d burst an eardrum with the pressure changes. But we were driving, not flying, so I figured my ears could tolerate it.

We had an ok vacation, but I could not smell anything, couldn’t taste anything, could not stop coughing, and my ears hurt and my hearing was badly impaired. And I was chronically exhausted. My doctor sent a second type of antibiotics halfway through the trip and I still was not getting any better. But it was a great trip! I mean, it had the potential to have been a great trip. It met the criteria for a great trip, in that it consisted of all the things we like! Never mind that I didn’t actually feel well enough to enjoy it. It was still in theory a great trip.

In the next couple of posts, I’ll tell you all about Emily’s visit and our San Diego vacation. Stay tuned, it gets better. (Eventually)

Laura’s fundraiser for MS

Laura is doing an MS Walk fundraiser, coming up this month! You can donate here, https://events.nationalmssociety.org/participant/Laura-Wood

Go Laura!!!

To send me a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com.

I can’t walk, but I can dance

My title sounds like an overly hyped, unrealistic self-help book. How is it possible to be able to dance but not walk? I actually can walk, but slowly, with a certain amount of pain and limping. Weirdly, I’m not impacted out on the dance floor. How is that possible?

Is it because I just stand out there and maybe sway a bit like a tree in the breeze? Uh, no, I’m definitely an energetic dancer. Or maybe I’m so into the music that I don’t even notice my foot killing me? No, not that either, although it sounds almost plausible.

I actually had to put some thought to this. For starters, what exactly hurts? According to pictures on the internet, the problem seems to be my first metatarsophalangeal joint. Say that three times fast!

The MTP joint is down at the base of the big toe, over the balls of the foot, not out in front where you see the big toe. And it only hurts when I’m flexing it, not when I’m just putting weight on it. Which is why I don’t think the problem is in the metatarsal bones.

Here’s a fun experiment. Start by standing up, bending your knees and shifting your weight from one foot to the other. You’re not standing up, are you? It’s such a nuisance to get up out of your chair, I know. Ah, there now we have a couple of you standing up.

Start by bending your knees a little bit. Next, move first one, then the other foot around a little bit, tap the floor with your heel or toe while leaving most of your weight on your planted foot. Pretend you’re playing hokey-pokey! Put that right foot out and shake it all about. Now wiggle your butt back and forth, swing your arms a bit, do a shoulder roll or two and you, my friend, are dancing. Note which joints you’re using. It’s likely that you’re primarily using ankle, knee and hip joints, as well as elbow, shoulder and neck, maybe even wrist and finger joints. But very possibly not your first metatarsophalangeal!

For our next experiment (stay standing, we’re not done yet, don’t worry, this one is easier). Just walk forward a couple steps. That’s it! Take a couple of steps forward. Now what’s bending? Hip, knees, ankle…and most definitely your metatarsophalangeal joint! It’s nearly impossible to walk in a forward gait while keeping your foot flat. But ironically, it’s completely possible to dance!

At home I’ve been wearing a splint that braces my toe all the way back to the arch of my foot. This definitely slows me down and creates a limping gate. When I’m out, I wear stiff boots, which keep my foot from flexing too much while walking. However, it’s March and it’s soon going to be too hot for stiff boots! Now that I better understand what is aggravating my foot, I hope to get better soon.

Laura’s friend Emily took this brief video of Laura and I dancing the other night at my friend Rebecca’s retirement party. It was a great party, and a great visit from Laura and her friend!

To send me a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com.

Atlantic Article

I don’t usually do reposts, but I found this recent finance and tax article from The Atlantic to be interesting.

Titled, “Buy, Borrow, Die” by Atlantic staff writer, Rogé Karma
America’s superrich have always found ways to avoid paying taxes, but in recent years, they’ve discovered what might be the mother of all loopholes. It’s a three-step process called “Buy, Borrow, Die,” and it allows people to amass a huge fortune, spend as much of it as they want, and pass the rest—untaxed—on to their heirs. The technique is so cleverly designed that the standard wish list of progressive tax reforms would leave it completely intact.

Step one: buy. The average American derives most of their disposable income from the wages they earn working a job, but the superrich are different. They amass their fortune by buying and owning assets that appreciate. Elon Musk hasn’t taken a traditional salary as CEO of Tesla since 2019; Warren Buffett, the chair of Berkshire Hathaway, has famously kept his salary at $100,000 for more than 40 years. Their wealth consists almost entirely of stock in the companies they’ve built or invested in. The tax-law scholars Edward Fox and Zachary Liscow found that even when you exclude the 400 wealthiest individuals in America, the remaining members of the top 1 percent hold $23 trillion in assets.

Unlike wages, which are taxed the moment they are earned, assets are taxed only at the moment they are sold—or, in tax terms, “realized.” The justification for this approach is that unrealized assets exist only on paper; you can’t pay for a private jet or buy a company with stocks, even if they have appreciated by billions of dollars. In theory, the rich will eventually need to sell their assets for cash, at which point they will pay taxes on their increase in wealth.

That theory would be much closer to reality if not for step two: borrow. Instead of selling their assets to make major purchases, the superrich can use them as collateral to secure loans, which, because they must eventually be repaid, are also not considered taxable income. Larry Ellison, a co-founder of Oracle and America’s fourth-richest person, has pledged more than $30 billion of his company’s stock as collateral in order to fund his lavish lifestyle, which includes building a $270 million yacht, buying a $300 million island, and purchasing an $80 million mansion. A Forbes analysis found that, as of April 2022, Musk had pledged Tesla shares worth more than $94 billion, which “serve as an evergreen credit facility, giving Musk access to cash when he needs it.”
This strategy isn’t as common among the merely very rich, who may not have the expensive tastes that Ellison and Musk do, but it isn’t rare either. Liscow and Fox calculated that the top 1 percent of wealth-holders, excluding the richest 400 Americans, borrowed more than $1 trillion in 2022. And the approach appears to be gaining momentum. Last year, The Economist reported that, at Morgan Stanley and Bank of America alone, the value of “securities-backed loans” increased from $80 billion in 2018 to almost $150 billion in 2022. “The real question is: Why would you not borrow hundreds of millions, even billions, to fund the lifestyle you want to live?” Tom Anderson, a wealth-management consultant and former banker who specializes in these loans, told me. “This is such an easy tool to use. And the tax benefits are massive.”

You might think this couldn’t possibly go on forever. Eventually, the rich will need to sell off some of their assets to pay back the loan. That brings us to step three: die. According to a provision of the tax code known as “stepped-up basis”—or, more evocatively, the “angel of death” loophole—when an individual dies, the value that their assets gained during their lifetime becomes immune to taxation. Those assets can then be sold by the billionaire’s heirs to pay off any outstanding loans without them having to worry about taxes.

The justification for the stepped-up-basis rule is that the United States already levies a 40 percent inheritance tax on fortunes larger than $14 million, and it would be unfair to tax assets twice. In practice, however, a seemingly infinite number of loopholes allow the rich to avoid paying this tax, many of which involve placing assets in byzantine legal trusts that enable them to be passed seamlessly from one generation to the next. “Only morons pay the estate tax,” Gary Cohn, a former Goldman Sachs executive and the then–chief economic adviser to Donald Trump, memorably remarked in 2017.

“All of this is completely, perfectly legal,” Edward McCaffery, the scholar who coined the term Buy, Borrow, Die, told me. But, he said, the strategy “has basically killed the entire concept of an income tax for the wealthiest individuals.” The tax economist Daniel Reck, who has spent his career documenting the various ways the rich evade taxation, told me that Buy, Borrow, Die is “the most important tax-avoidance strategy today.” The result is a two-tiered tax system: one for the many, who earn their income through wages and pay taxes, and another for the few, who accumulate wealth through paper assets and largely do not pay taxes.

Much of the debate around American tax policy focuses on the income-tax rate paid by the very wealthiest Americans. But the bulk of those people’s fortunes doesn’t qualify as income in the first place. A 2021 ProPublica investigation of the private tax records of America’s 25 richest individuals found that they collectively paid an effective tax rate of just 3.4 percent on their total wealth gain from 2014 to 2018. Musk paid 3.3 percent, Jeff Bezos 1 percent, and Buffett—who has famously argued for imposing higher income-tax rates on the superrich—just 0.1 percent.

The same dynamic exists, in slightly less egregious form, further down the wealth distribution. A 2021 White House study found that the 400 richest American households paid an effective tax rate of 8.2 percent on their total wealth gains from 2010 to 2018. Liscow and Fox found that, excluding the top 400, the rest of the 0.1 percent richest individuals paid an effective rate of 12 percent from 2004 to 2022. (Twelve percent is the income-tax rate paid by individuals who make $11,601 to $47,150 a year.)

One solution to this basic unfairness would be to tax unrealized assets. In 2022, the Biden administration proposed a “billionaire minimum tax” that would have placed a new annual levy of up to 20 percent on the appreciation of even unsold assets for households with more than $100 million in wealth. Experts have vehemently debated the substantive merits of such a policy; the real problem, however, is political. According to a survey conducted by Liscow and Fox, most Americans oppose a tax on unrealized gains even when applied only to the richest individuals. The Joe Biden proposal, perhaps unsurprisingly, went nowhere in Congress. Making matters more complicated, even if such a policy did pass, the Supreme Court would very likely rule it unconstitutional.

A second idea would be to address the “borrow” step. Last year, Liscow and Fox published a proposal to tax the borrowing of households worth more than $100 million, which they estimated would raise about $10 billion a year. The limitation of that solution, as the authors acknowledge, is that it would not address the larger pool of rich Americans who don’t borrow heavily against their assets but do take advantage of stepped-up basis.

That leaves the “die” step. Tax experts from across the political spectrum generally support eliminating the “stepped-up basis” rule, allowing unrealized assets to be taxed at death. This would be far more politically palatable than the dead-on-arrival billionaire’s minimum tax: In the same survey in which respondents overwhelmingly opposed broad taxes on unrealized assets during life, Liscow and Fox also found that nearly two-thirds of them supported taxing unrealized assets at death.

Even a change this widely supported, however, would run up against the iron law of democratic politics: Policies with concentrated benefits and distributed costs are very hard to overturn. That’s especially true when the benefits just so happen to be concentrated among the richest, most powerful people in the country. In fact, the Biden administration did propose eliminating stepped-up basis as part of its Build Back Better legislation. The move prompted an intense backlash from special-interest groups and their allied politicians, with opponents portraying the provision as an assault on rural America that would destroy family farms and businesses. These claims were completely unfounded—the bill had specific exemptions for family businesses and applied only to assets greater than $2.5 million—but the effort succeeded at riling up enough Democratic opposition to kill the idea.

The one guarantee of any tax regime is that, eventually, the rich and powerful will learn how to game it. In theory, a democratic system, operating on behalf of the majority, should be able to respond by making adjustments that force the rich to pay their fair share. But in a world where money readily translates to political power, voice, and influence, the superrich have virtually endless resources at their disposal to make sure that doesn’t happen. To make society more equal, you need to tax the rich. But to tax the rich, it helps for society to be more equal.

To send me a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com.

Palm Springs Post 3: Bighorn Sheep

One of the highlights of our trip to the Palm Springs area back in late January was hiking the Victor Loop at Agua Caliente, where we saw several bighorn sheep.

Most of these photos were taken by Tracey, whose newer iPhone has a much better zoom feature than my old iPhone. I was so impressed that as soon as I got home I bought a new phone. If you want the camera the with the good zoom feature, be sure to read the specs because only some of the new iPhones have them. Two that do have good telephoto cameras are the 16 Pro and the 16 Pro Max. I went with the Pro because it’s smaller than the Max, but still has the same good camera.

She took these photos from quite a distance away.

There’s a little calf in this next picture, awww.

The hike started and ended through a palm tree oasis.

Here are my attempts to take photos of sheep with my old phone. This particular sheep got closer to us than the others that Tracey was able to photograph.

Hmmm, not too bad, but I’ll just stick to taking landscape shots and let Tracey get the close ups of the sheep in the distance.

This rock stayed put nicely while I approached.

A month later the sheep got bored and decided to take a tourist hike of their own:

https://www.nbcpalmsprings.com/2025/02/25/bighorn-sheep-take-an-afternoon-stroll-through-downtown-palm-springs

Too bad we missed that!

To send me a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com.

I Don’t Need No Doctor

When driving to my follow-up appointment with my oncologist a week after my clean CT scan, I did not happen to notice what I had playing on Spotify. I currently have 662 “liked” songs in my primary playlist, (as well as over two dozen more specific, smaller playlists). I was busy trying to find a parking place and wondering whether I was early or late.

As I only later noticed, Spotify happened to be playing a cover by a local Tucson band I like, an old R&B song that had originally been released during the month and year of my birth, and then made popular by Ray Charles a couple of months later. This little piece of trivia will become relevant three hours later, when the same song, queued up and waiting patiently for my return to the car, burst into the quiet of the cancer parking lot when my phone got back within bluetooth distance.

But first, I had three hours at the cancer center. The cancer center’s scheduling system is messed up. A portion of the multitude of alerts, texts, emails, and automated appointment reminders that bombard us patients give the actual time of the appointment, while another portion of the message reminders add anywhere between 10 minutes to 60 minutes of lead time in order to get you there early for prep that you may or may not need.

For example, my CT scan instructions include 60 minutes of prep time that doesn’t apply to me, and yet, they invariably have me come in 60 minutes early anyway. Their system is not nuanced enough to sort out whether you need contrast solution or not, and if so, whether it is going to be taken orally or by IV. I take mine in an IV, which is much faster than drinking it. Therefore, all the many, many automated appointment reminders sending me to the center a full hour early are completely wrong.

Adding to the complication, sometimes they need to do bloodwork first, and sometimes they don’t. It becomes quite a guessing game, and I guessed wrong. After getting my bloodwork done I had two hours to sit around at the cancer center before seeing my doctor. Cancer centers are not my ideal spot for spending a couple of hours. Everyone is suffering and scared. Cancer centers are very, very sad places.

Adding to my impatience was that I already had the (very happy) news that my scan was fine. I could see the report online. So why did I even need to be there to have the doctor tell me that? Well, for starters, I had bloodwork to do. And I needed to check in with the doctor to see if he wanted me to change any of my meds and supplements. And I needed to know when he wanted me to schedule my next set of bloodwork and my next scan.

The standard surveillance for recurrence for most types of cancers is 5 years, and I hit 5 years on March 1 (Yay!!!). But you probably remember how I have always said that in my case, I have to monitor for cancer recurrence for seven years, instead of the typical five years. That is because my kind of cancer is fairly slow to develop and it can take longer to reoccur.

For colon cancer there is a 6% recurrence rate between 5 and 10 years out. That is for stages I-III; I’m not sure the number specifically for stage 3. The likelihood of recurrence is much higher in stage 3 than in stage 1 in general, but on the other hand, it’s likely to happen sooner. So who knows. The point being, I’ve been thinking 2 more years of surveillance.

When I asked my doctor when my next scan was, he said, “You’re done.” I gaped at him, and he said, “Congratulations, you made it 5 years cancer free, and we don’t need to scan anymore.” I protested, being sure it was 7 years. Then I realized that it had to have been some other doctor had told me that, either in Boston where I got my surgery done, or Albuquerque where I did my chemo. This doctor reassured me that the protocol is still five years, not seven, even though, yes, my tumor was moderately differentiated…bla-bla-bla…and yes, the cancer had spread to a node…bla-bla-bla…my ears were buzzing.

I stood up and said, “I’ll take it!” and I burst into tears – the happy, relieved, I’m-not-dying kind of tears that happen all too infrequently at cancer centers. I hugged the doctor (and I am not a hugger) and I thanked him profusely for the work he did “saving lives” and left in a daze, still weeping.

As I exited, concerned staff and fellow patients looked up and made sympathetic noises, this poor women, sobbing as she leaves her doctor’s appointment – she must have gotten horrible news. So I announced my astoundingly good news, “The doctor says I’m ok now! I’m done and I don’t have to come back for scans anymore! He says I’m done!” There were congratulations and prayers and “bless you’s” as everyone there experienced this moment of joy that we all dream of, this moment that proves we don’t all die, that some of us survive and walk out that damn door in a flood of grateful tears.

I cried all the way to my car. As I got in my car, the song started back up again, right where it left off, still playing “I Don’t Need No Doctor”. And I don’t need my oncologist anymore!

I played the song on repeat and cried all the way home. I was such a blubbery mess that I called Laura from the car to tell her that everything was ok. She’s at my house visiting this week, and I figured if I walked in from my oncologist appointment with tears streaming down my face she’d have a heart attack. Which would have been entirely unnecessary.

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Palm Springs Post 2: Art Museum

I love a good art museum.

This glass mirror ball was huge and amazing.

Not sure why this melting rug spoke to me, but I liked the metaphor.

I also don’t know why this next one caught my eye. I’m not usually into rainy scenes. And there’s something about the balance of the composition that seems off a bit. (Not that I’m a qualified art critic, lol). I didn’t so much like it but was intrigued by it. I went back to look at it twice.

I think I was fascinated by how the detail was done.

You know it’s a good exhibit when you can’t figure out why you like the things you like.

In this next one, these dishes don’t look like much in the photo, but in person they create an optical illusion where they appear to be turning as you walk by.

Tracey liked this next one. It’s a fun mix of mid-century architecture with a bright Mexican influence. Palm Springs and Tucson share that unique architecture blend.

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Palm Springs Post 1: The Character of Palm Springs

I met my friend Tracey in Palm Springs for a quick vacation towards the end of January. It’s a good meeting point for us because it’s about halfway between Tucson and where she lives in the California Bay Area. And the weather is good in the winter.

I always enjoy what geographers call a “sense of place”. I haven’t been to Palm Springs very often, but I definite enjoy the feel of the place – like an upscale Tucson, plus a strong gay community.

I love old gay guys. I know that’s a little bit of a generalization, but I do enjoy the public persona that many (not all) adopt. It’s a cultural thing, like a regional difference. We all have our stereotypes about how different groups interact in public. Here’s a few of my other stereotypes: people in New England are in your face, people in the south are super friendly (even if it’s not genuine), people in California are competent and competitive, Midwesterners are polite, Pacific Northwest…ahh…I’d say grumpy. Gray, rainy, never-enough-coffee, cold, damp, tired and leave-me-alone grumpy.

The gay guys in Palm Springs add a cheerfully disarming vibe to the streets and shops that I enjoy. Their energy! Their humor!

In general I’ve found that the classic gay population does not adopt an aggressive persona in order to signal dominance, unlike straight men who can sometimes feel dangerous to me with their jacked up trucks with rolling coal, rude behavior, competitive driving, etc., etc.

I could live in Palm Springs just for the gay guys. Seriously. I love being able to joke around and be friendly, without them getting ideas and sending unwelcome vibes. These men I trust.

One day Tracey and I asked a shopkeeper for nearby lunch restaurant recommendations, and he demurred, saying, “I don’t really know, James brings my lunch…” And it wasn’t even what he said, it was how he said it. So cutesy and sweet and teenagery (although he was nearly my age) and almost bashful. So full of obvious delight. He was just about melting into a puddle on the floor.

This is a much better vibe, in my option, than what one would typically get from a shopkeeper. Oh, and when he did finally give us a restaurant recommendation, it turned out to be an excellent restaurant. Of course.

Here’s an old glass piece in his shop that I considered buying. It looked good in the sunny window.

It’s also an artsy community and I love art. For example, one day when we were walking around in the small downtown, we unexpectedly came across an art sale in a park. The art was quite good.

These stained glass window hangings were cleverly designed. With a quick change of a colored paper backing, they would look like a completely different season. So you could update it every few months to match the current season.

Some of the art had a southwest style. I bought that little blue and gold roadrunner for John.

Palm Springs is also known for its mid-century modern architecture, but I didn’t take any architecture photos. Maybe another time!

Here’s an example of the neighborhood where we stayed (it’s not our actual Airbnb, which was a patio apartment in a nice complex a block or two from where I took this photo.) I’d guess this particular neighborhood was built in the 1970’s – 1990’s. It was on the north side of town. Pro tip – it’s less windy further south.

I love the mountains too! Just like in Tucson and Albuquerque – it’s wonderful to have serious hiking trails on the edges of the suburbs.

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