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July 6, 2024: The Debate Debacle – Your Responses

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I am heartened that, so far, 180 people have looked at my July 4 blog post (Blogger shows me how many people read each post but not their identities).   I also have received some great responses via email from various sides of the political spectrum.   I would like to share these with you, identifying the writers by their first names and where they live.   I’ve “cleaned up” some of the grammar, punctuation, etc. but I’m not going to comment on these emails although you are free to do so or send me more emails for future publication on the blog. By the way, I’ve decided to scrap my idea of visiting Colorado politicians’ offices in person.   I discussed this idea briefly with a friend who has experience lobbying Congress.   “Should I make an appointment to speak to staffers or just show up at their offices?”   I asked.   “You need an appointment but they are unlikely to give you one,” he replied.   This snapped me into reality:   Why bother making all the effort to speak for 2 minutes wi
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July 4, 2024: I’m Mad as Hell and I’m not Going to Shut Up!

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The Wandering Geographer hasn’t done so much wandering lately, at least not internationally.   Since my ill-fated trip to Chile last November, I’ve been gun shy about getting on another plane to fly to an exotic destination.   Save for a few days in northwest Mexico in February, I’ve not ventured outside the border. Yesterday, I finished a water resources and soil erosion report for our visit to the Heartland Ranch Wildlife Preserve (southeastern Colorado) in late April.   Now I’m ready to do a bit of personal writing.   Needless to say, I find myself despondent, angry, cynical, and in a state of defeatism following the Biden-Trump debate a week ago.   When Biden got to the inarticulate statement, “…we beat Medicare…,” I buried my head in my hands, shook my head, and exclaimed, “No, no”.   I’ve never seen such a fucking fiasco from a President of the U.S.   I wanted to cry but couldn’t find the tears. At the end of this shit-show, CNN had a panel discussion.   I was half-expecting
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Addendum, November 19-22 and Beyond: Getting My Heart Back to Normal

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I don’t want to bore my readers with a lot of medical mumbo-jumbo so I’ll keep this simple, and you’ll understand why my heart problems doomed my South American trip from the start. One of the first items of business after returning home was manually downloading the data from my tiny, implanted heart monitor to a phone-like device on my nightstand which then transmits the data to my cardiologist’s office.   The monitor records the rate and nature of my heart beats, and an electro-cardiologist can study the readout to determine what’s happening electrically in my aging “blood pump”.   Normally, the downloads and transmissions automatically happen once a day, but I wanted to be sure my doctor had all the latest data from my trip when I called his office which I did first thing on Monday morning. I have a tiny recorder implanted under the skin next to my heart which records my heartbeats.  I’ve had two of them – their batteries die after 3-5 years and the one in my hand was the first on
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November 17-18, 2023: Definitive Proof that Flying is Hell!

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After packing up my bags for the long trip home, I faced up to the depressing task of writing emails cancelling my plans for the following week.   One went to Javier Heusserd, the coordinator and national secretary for SERVAS in Chile.   I was due to arrive at his home west of Santiago by bus later that afternoon.   Javier had invited me to spend two days with him and his wife, Christine.   The other email went to Katterina Cuesta Lepe , head of the Huara Spanish School in Pichilemu where I was to spend five days of intensive study of Chilean Spanish.   (Emails to two other SERVAS members who had offered me accommodations in the Valparaíso area later in my trip followed a few days later). One of the clerks at the hotel front desk called the police station and got the case number I needed in order to obtain a copy of the police report I had filed the previous day for the stolen camera.   They got the necessary number and called me a cab.   The imposing, modern, white courthouse was a
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