If you’re sweltering under heat like we are in Texas, join me in a cool glass of iced tea. Close to 110 today without the heat index. I didn’t even look.
So, my Monday started off on a weird note. I had a doctor appointment at noon that entailed I drive about 30 or 40 minutes to get there. Made plans with my daughter who lives in that area to drive to her house so she could drive and drop me off close to the entrance. Parking at that office building is not well-planned, meaning one has to walk considerable distance, and in this heat, that doesn’t work for this old lady.
Halfway to my daughter’s house, someone from the doctor’s office calls to inform me that their power was out due to a widespread outage in the area. Would I be okay with switching to a televisit? Well, actually, no. Last time I attempted a televisit, I had trouble with signing into the app, despite having an account.
One of my least favorite things to hear is, “There’s an app for that.”
Apps don’t like me and I don’t like them either.
My kids will laugh when they read this, as they always remind me that inanimate things don’t have the capacity to not like people. I contend that they do, as evidenced by the many ways they thwart me at every turn. Sometimes my computer goes on strike, picking the least convenient time, and why doesn’t my phone remind me that it needs a charge well before cutting me off a text?
All opposing opinions to the contrary, I still say they don’t like me, and that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Anyway, back to the lie as my hubby used to often say when some sidebar distracted from the main story.
By the time I arrived at my daughter’s house, her power was back on, so I hoped that would be the case at the office, but it hadn’t happened yet as far as the receptionist who was working from home knew. I conveyed my difficulties with the particular app they use, so she said the doctor could call me to at least discuss the information he wanted from my daily blood pressure tracking, as well as the recent test results from the lab.
The result of the conversation was mixed. Because I’ve still not been feeling great since my hospital stay the end of July, he wanted me to go to the hospital where I could be checked by various doctors.
As anyone in their “later” years can affirm, any time you’re in the hospital, it can set your general wellness back. That coupled with the fact that I left the hospital last time without everything being addressed, I was hesitant to rinse-and-repeat. A reservation shared by my daughter.
The doctor needed a bit of convincing, but we finally agreed on a plan. He is going to communicate with the other doctors I see to review meds I’m on and perhaps start a new BP medication to keep it from going so low. Hopefully, they will also talk about the sodium level, which hasn’t dropped dangerously low, but is still lower than when I left the hospital last month. He also advised me to go to ER if any of my symptoms get as bad as they were last time.
I’m so grateful that we had a conversation, not a doctor lecturing a patient, and he was able to respect my wishes.
While so much of the day was a bust. I had a nice visit with my daughter and she gave me a brownie. She makes yummy ones with no flour and no processed sugars, and my endorphins didn’t know the difference.
Chocolate can cure all evils.
Now a fun story from our friend Slim Randles about a certain mule. Enjoy!
Leona was a good mule. She was in a fabled minority in the pack station realm of mules, as she was a riding mule as well as a pack mule. She was also … well …somewhat notional in nature. There was how Leona pictured her world, and there were the rest of us, who were wrong, of course.
Mules are worth a lot more than a horse in the eastern California High Sierra, and there are reasons for that. They usually live longer than a horse, they learn fast and never have to be shown twice, and they won’t jump off a 300-foot cliff just because a 40-foot pine tree sneaked up on them.
When they learn something, it’s learned. Period. This includes bad things as well as good things. It’s up to the packer to discover just what these atomic boogers are in the life of each mule and avoid them.
With Leona, it was one spot on the Kearsarge Pass trail between Kearsarge Meadow and Slim Lake. Yes, as I told every kid I packed in, it was named for me because of how good a cowboy I was. Some of them asked why Slim Lake was 200 yards long and only 20 feet wide, but you know kids.
But just at the top of the little divide there was Leona’s booger spot. There was a short piece of trail that was level and maybe five feet wide, which would have made it flatlands anywhere else.
Well, one night I was riding Leona and leading some horses and mules down that stretch of trail. Leona knew how to get back to the pack station, so I was just making sure UFOs didn’t hover and suck us up.
We were good.
When we got to that little stretch of trail, close to midnight, I discovered, through pack station Braille, that three hikers had rolled their sleeping bags across the trail and sacked out. I didn’t become aware of this until Leona had walked straight over the first two. All three dozing backpackers then saw mules walking over them, jumped straight up, and mules began knocking hikers down like ten pins.
It was beautiful.
Every time after that, if I was riding Leona, when she came to that spot, light or dark, she wouldn’t go through until she’d thoroughly blown nuclear snot all over it.
Mules are the greatest man-made animal.
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Brought to you by all the aging packers of the eastern High Sierra. Having cameras along sure would’ve been a plus.
Check out all of Slim’s award-winning books at his Goodreads Page and in better bookstores and bunkhouses throughout the free world.
All of the posts here are from his syndicated column, Home Country that is read in hundreds of newspapers across the country. I am always happy to have him share his wit and wisdom here.
Slim Randles is a veteran newspaperman, hunting guide, cowboy and dog musher. He was a feature writer and columnist for The Anchorage Daily News for 10 years and guided hunters in the Alaska Range and the Talkeetna Mountains. A resident of New Mexico now for more than 30 years, Randles is the prize-winning author of a dozen books, and is host of two podcasts and a television program.
That’s all from me for today folks. I do hope your Monday was more productive than mine and this is the start to a good week. I’m pumped because temperatures might drop by Wednesday and highs will be in the upper 90’s. I’ll take it!
