Pain, Pain, Go Away!

I don't normally get into online arguments, especially now that vegetrollians have gone away to start eating meat again or scolding people for--well, practically anything nowadays. But something set me off the other day and I finally realized why.  A poster on a forum asked how he could cheaply obtain several hundred rose starts to make a giant rose garden out of an uncultivated piece of ground at his house. I love roses, I've grown a lot of them, and know what's required to grow them. I asked several questions about cost and maintenance of such a project and pointed out potential pitfalls, all of which he waved away, even though he mentioned he was on a budget.  For anyone under the delusion that gardening is a dainty hobby, a garden this size typically has a crew and a professional horticulturist to plant and take care of it. Annual pruning alone would take one person two solid weeks of stoop labor. And since rose gardens went out of style with bridge games and Tupperware

Michigan sheriffs aren't the only ones against some of the state's COVID restrictions. Governor Gretchen Whitmer went to Florida to visit her father, weeks after warning others against taking spring break trips .  Michigan is currently the biggest COVID hotbed in the US. Nevertheless, Travel Michigan ran an ad on a local Indianapolis radio station this morning to entice Hoosiers to come visit "pure Michigan." Michigan is too far away to pick up Indy radio stations, so contrary to Travel Michigan's website, they couldn't have been trying to lure fellow Michiganders to take a camping trip, which is apparently allowed now.  Manistique MI--an island of calm in a sea of craziness. Photo from Pixabay . Maybe it's an unofficial acknowledgment that the lockdowns have only kicked the can down the road and that Michigan needs the revenue.  If I go to Lake Michigan this year--something I've meant to do for years--I'll probably stay on the Indiana side where

Sitting in another doctor's office this week, I wondered if I was on my way to a 17-year bout with diarrhea, like John Nicholson in The Meat Fix . I wondered if this doctor would have any fresh insights. I wondered why Community Health sent me to a clinic 30 miles away when I live in a city full of doctors. This doctor saw that the lab never ran the lab test for ova and parasites as they were supposed to, so she opened the order for the test. After an examination and taking my symptoms, she suggested seeing a gastronenterologist. I countered with a request for a prescription for a gut zoomer test. She looked it up and was skeptical of it and admitted she wouldn't know know to read the results, but she did write out a prescription for it. No way was I going to get scoped and run the risk of ending up like Wolverine , who went in healthy for a colonoscopy and nearly died after getting perforated and needing an intestinal transplant.  Later that day, my stomach felt like it was bu