River Fog

 I love looking out in the morning sunrise and seeing the river fog settled over the Clackamas River. I know when I used to drive to Warm Springs and see the fog settled on the Deschutes River it was so beautiful. Now I just get a cup of coffee and set in my heated house and watch the action of it.  It moves up and down. I never knew how much movement river fog has before.

Mt Hood is glowing proudly with its new coat

 I never tire of looking at Mt Hood. I grew up looking out the window at Mt. Hood while I stood at the sink washing dishes, outside doing chores.  It has always inspired me and made me feel at home and safe.

When I moved to Estacada, Oregon last year from Central Oregon I figured it was only a 2 hr trip home so I could go home and see my beloved mountain. I also love the rest of the Cascade Mountain Range in Central Oregon. Mt Hood and Mt Jefferson being my favorite.  When I got to my new home I had this amazing view of Mt. Hood. Anytime I am lonely or depressed I go look out the window and know the friends I am missing are just on the other side of her.  She makes me serene again, she settles me nerves, I am at home if I can see her standing majestically tall and proud.

She is the second most climbed mountain. fourth highest  in the Cascade range. tallest one in Oregon. She has so much native history and they called her Wy'east who was a warrior.  You really should google it and find out about this mountain as it has so much about its history I can't write all of it in my blog and bore the ones that don't want to know that much.

Every year it seems we loose a climber or a hiker on it.  It is beautiful and dangerous.  When I was a child it stayed covered with snow year around but now only the glaciers remain in summer.  It is beautiful from all sides and you can take a great drive around it, go up I84 to Hood River and turn and go through Parkdale and up to hwy 35 and over the mountain to hwy 26 and back to Portland and see how amazing she is from all sides.  I keep calling the mountain a she but Wy'east was a he. 

Wanting a beautiful relaxing day trip, head up and around Mt. Hood, see the meadows, the streams, the mountain, the trees, the valleys, she has it all. 

The First Chinese takeout

 

I do not know if this is a true story or not but it is a fun story and made me smile. I was watching a documentary on ghost towns.

It was not this ghost town but one that the Chinese were working on the railroad. They had a custom that when they buried their dead they would place a lot of food around the burial plot.  The people would wait until nightfall came and go out and collect the food and take it home and eat it. Hence the first known Chinese take out.

Not sure why I thought it was a fun story but it really stuck with me. I love stories on history or how something came about. Like I said I don't know if this has any truth to it but the documentary said it was true but it was an interesting thought for sure.

Politics, we will never be the same again

 Posted off Facebook by a friend that said to copy and paste so here goes.

"This morning, I realized that everything is about to change. No matter how I vote, no matter what I say, lives are never going to be the same.

I have been confused by the hostility of family and friends. I look at people I have known all my life so hate-filled that they agree with opinions they would never express as their own. I think that I may well have entered the Twilight Zone.

You can't justify this insanity. We have become a nation that has lost its collective mind.

We see other countries going Socialist and collapsing, but it seems like a great plan to us.

Somehow it’s un-American for the census to count how many Americans are in America.

People who say there is no such thing as gender are demanding a female President.

Universities that advocate equality, discriminate against Asian-Americans in favor of African-Americans.

Some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, and other people are not held responsible for what they are doing right now.

Criminals are caught-and-released to hurt more people, but stopping them is bad because it's a violation of THEIR rights.

People who have never owned slaves should pay slavery reparations to people who have never been slaves.

After legislating gender, if a dude pretends to be a woman, you are required to pretend with him.

It was cool for Joe Biden to "blackmail" the President of Ukraine, but it’s an impeachable offense if Donald Trump inquiries about it.

People who have never been to college should pay the debts of college students who took out huge loans for their degrees.

Immigrants with tuberculosis and polio are welcome, but you’d better be able to prove your dog is vaccinated.

Irish doctors and German engineers who want to immigrate to the US must go through a rigorous vetting process, but any illiterate gang-bangers who jump the southern fence are welcomed.

$5 billion for border security is too expensive, but $1.5 trillion for “free” health care is not.

If you cheat to get into college you go to prison, but if you cheat to get into the country you go to college for free.

And, pointing out all this hypocrisy somehow makes us "racists"!

Nothing makes sense anymore, no values, no morals, no civility and people are dying of a Chinese virus, but it is racist to refer to it as Chinese even though it began in China.

We are clearly living in an upside-down world where right is wrong and wrong is right, where moral is immoral and immoral is moral, where good is evil and evil is good, where killing murderers is wrong, but killing innocent babies is right.

Wake up America. The great unsinkable ship Titanic America has hit an iceberg, is taking on water and sinking fast.

Copied and pasted. I suggest you do the same!

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Rainbows give us hope

 

I thought today our world could use a rainbow. Rainbows give us hope, rainbows make us smile. Rainbows remind us that no storm lasts forever.

Our country needs a picture of a rainbow today to give us hope.  We need to find a way to end our hatred and discontent in our nation. There is a reason it says "United we stand, Divided we fall". Many forces are about to divide our nation and it isn't all Republican's or Democrats'  m Trump or Biden. One person does not have that much strength. It is other countries, extreme groups. It is like a gossip that everyone joins in on and then after it destroys someone you find out the gossip was wrong.  DON"T PLAY INTO HATE.

Touch is needed to survive

 Boy has COVID made a difference in our lives. One of the most important things in life is family. I find it extremely sad that our elderly set in nursing homes and no one is allowed to visit them.  This picture is of my family, 5 generations of love and strong women there.  My mom loved that little gal there and they had a special bond.

I can't even begin to feel what these families that have loved ones in the hospital and can't go see them. They have proven time and time again that love and caring have cured more people then all the fancy equipment they can use.  Stats show that small community hospitals with caring and touching staff heal the patients after surgery faster then the big fancy hospitals with all the equipment.

Love is the essence that makes our world work.  You can see what lack of caring and love does to a whole country with all the hate filling our country in this day and age.

We need a connection with others.  It is a basic human need to live. People who don't get touched become insane or even murder people, it messes us up emotionally and here COVID makes us where we can't touch each other.

When I was working the Emergency room as an ER tech and the Ambulance as an Advanced EMT and doing police work too the things I saw will be forever lodged in my mind and heart. People asked me how in the world can you do that job?  Well let me tell you how. I care for other humans, the idea that someone is laying alongside the road bleeding and in pain with no help goes against my nature. I would never want a loved one of mine to lay there and no one help them because it was to unsetting to them. It is more upsetting to me to see them need help and no one is there.  There are some days I had to take a break and go to my husband just to get a hug and that gave me the strength to go on.  Sometimes it was just a good friend but that touch and that caring would always get me through.

I remember one wreck was so horrible we lost many in our profession that finished the job and then went back to the station and quit. That was in police that were there and EMT's that were there and fire Rescue. I don't think one group made it without someone quitting. It is almost indescribable the pain the rescuers went through.  We lost 3 kids and some others and the only one we were able to save was the drunk that had caused the wreck to begin with.  I HATE with a passion drunk drivers and what they cause.  If you want to drink then drink but no one, I mean no one has a right to get in a vehicle and drive after he has drank at all.  Even one beer affects your reaction time.  You do not have the right to risk other peoples lives.  To make a long story short without a bunch of gory details, we loaded up patients heading to the hospital working like beavers to try and save them and the blood was so bad it was dripping out the back of the ambulances, as soon as one ambulance was loaded another was loading too. We went two directions to get to the hospital, back before air life was in the area. We ran for their lives as fast as we safety could do so.......two days later our board of directors got a written complaint to the board of how unprofessional our crews were as our ambulances were bloody and when we got to thee hospital the ambulance doors were open and they could see the blood and how disgusting it was that our crew members had blood all over their uniforms....really lady???  really???  

In our rural area we were lucky to have any advanced EMT's, many rural areas run with first responders. The three of us that were advanced kept our radios and pagers on at all times as people don't decided when they are going to have a heart attack. We responded as a second out call (not on duty) because it was a cardiac event (heart) and in the middle of the night, we threw on our EMT t-shirts and were finishing dressing as we ran out the door. We arrived and the man was unconscious, we dosed medication to him and got him stable and loaded him up and took him to the hospital and he survived with no aftereffects and we were so proud.....and then the board got a letter again complaining that we arrived in T-shirts and our hair wasn't combed and she thought it was unprofessional. Well those minutes it would have taken us to get a uniform on and our hair combed would have cost him his life.

 I must admit we had one EMT that refused to go on a call when he had been sleeping until he brushed his teeth. He said how would you like it if you had someone with bad breath in your face?  Well if I was dying I don't think I would care........

I survived and wish I could physically still do the job but I survived because I got my hugs.  This not being able to hug people is messing people up mentally. Suicides' have gone up dramatically, yes stress has something to do with it but touch can heal so much of that stress. We need interaction between people. 

 Touch is a necessity.   This is why people who have pets live longer. It does not have to be a human but the love of an animal and petting them can also help you. That is why many hospitals let animals come in and even have therapy dogs etc. that come in and visit patients because it works.

It is important that we social distance but we also have to have some touch for our souls to survive. WE can't keep locking our elderly in a jail cell to be served meals to and left to just set alone all day.  We can't keep our patients in hospitals in there alone, the effect it has on families is painful and damages us to our souls. I can not even imagine the pain of having one of my loved ones in the hospital trying to survive and I can't go see them. That is as harmful.

I wish I had the answers that plague our world in this modern age. I know many times in the past we had plagues and many died and they were separated and quarantined but in those days it was family members that attended them and hoped they didn't catch it or already had it. The point being they were cared for by a loved one.  I admire our nurses and they are caring loving people. I know how much it means to me when I would go to my community hospital and have a friend that is a nurse or doctor on duty and know I was cared about meant to me.  It is just different when you know them. A nurses job is a amazing dedicated job and we would be in so much trouble without them but there is nothing like having a loved one there.  A hug from them will get you through anything that is why God says "love is the greatest gift of all", it is one of the most beautiful things on earth and the most destructive when it is abused or used unwisely.    

I treasure my family and my friends and my animals that give us so much love and strength. Don't judge homeless people that have dogs, they need those dogs, those dogs are their lives. I gave a man on a street corner a bag of groceries and he was so thankful but when I handed out the bag of dogfood he started crying. I know if I hadn't given him the dog food his dog would have ate most of his stuff I had bought. Sometimes that dog is what gets them through life. I know mine have. When mom was so bad I am not sure I would have survived but passed with her if it wasn't for my dogs. When she went to bed at night and I laid and cried my dogs would snuggle me and get me through.  People don't understand what they mean to me but for 2 years they were my world, my strength to get through the day as I watched my mom slowly drift away day by day and there was nothing I could do to stop it>

Politics......Sick of it

 One of these days the people will realize that the right wing and the left wing are on the same bird called congress and they don't much care about us, we are just the bait they use to get their way.  Everyone worries about who will be president....well the real problem and power lay with congress not the president. I will never vote for someone that has been in congress for years and not fixed the problems. Moving them from a different seat to another chair will not change anything. Moving from the house to the senate will not make them work harder or more honest.

We need to clean up congress, look up your facts, a lot of them have criminal histories and many of their deeds are cleaned up at our tax money being spent on it.

People say, I had no choice as none of the other candidates had the experience, the experience of screwing the American People and dividing us?????  How do they get experience???  If you know how to make phone calls you can find people who know how to do things. I found out in 911 you don't have to know everything you just need to start making phone calls until you can find someone that will help you get what you need.  Don't be embarrassed because you don't know an answer, say I don't know but I will find the answer for you and get on that phone and start following leads until you find the answer.  As my dad told me, if you come to a fork in the road and it didn't work don't lay down and quit, try a different road.

Growing up on a farm you do not get the right to say I don't know, if one of your stock is sick or your crop is sick you find out how to fix it.  You don't get to say I don't feel good and am not going to work today or your animals and crops will die. You have to figure out how to get it done even if it means asking for help but get it done you will.

Growing up on a farm with not a lot of money taught me more that I used in life in all my jobs then the book education I received.  Both are good but never put someone down because they do not have a college education. I know many that have a college education but don't have good ole common sense and don't know how to improvise in an emergency, if it isn't like the book says it will be then they are lost and believe me life doesn't run smooth or according to what you think it will.

I am so totally sick of politics, I hate bills that have tons of stuff in them and if you want one thing to have to let 30 thing go in the law that you didn't really want.....cut the garbage and go back to simple language and simple truths. If you want to pass a bill on welfare why are you putting in highways, aid to other countries etc..

Congress was not set up to be a lifetime career. It was to serve the country and go back to your career, congress not only is now a career your working life but also when you retire. Where else can you just work a few days a year and get paid for the whole year with all the benefits of health insurance and every other working mans benefits while you don't work. It costs so much money now because of all the stuff they add on.  Unions also suck, many times when people try to do a job themselves as a volunteer they won't let you because you aren't union. Even fixing a road you can't just go volunteer in most places....

I HATE POLITICS AS IT IS!