As The Sparks Fly Upward

Well, kids, another week has flown right by, and the clock on my Vista sidebar tells me that I have a mere 57 days left in The Brown Zone. Hard to believe—it seems like just a few weeks ago that that number was at 176 days.

Life continues to ramble on here for our little company of soldiers. Tomorrow our outgoing company commander CPT Allen comes to visit us and introduce us to the incoming commander, who takes over as Allen completes his tour. The news of this visit led to a flurry of activity, scrubbing floors, cleaning canisters, double-checking the expiry dates on all of the pharmacy items (all okay!) and generally getting spiffed-up for this visit.

The clinic was inordinately dead this week, until today when things finally picked up. I don’t mind a little “down-time” which gives me a chance to read up a bit on oncology, etc, but when we have a few days in-a-row in which the medics are sitting around the computer table, deliberately annoying each other out of sheer boredom, it gets a bit old. I am beginning to wonder if the very hot weather which has come on with the commencement of summer is the culprit here. If so, will the next couple of months be equally uneventful in the clinic? If this gets to be a pattern, we will start a series of lectures, to keep the medics learning and the docs exercising our not-yet-Alzheimered noggins.

We had an interesting little controversy this week, as my previously-mentioned good friend Barney, the big purple Chevy truck, developed a nice vertical gash in his bumper. (That’s right: we had the truck for all of a week, less than 500 kilometers and already a maimed bumper. This is why we can’t have nice things…) The kicker to this was that the offending driver of said Barnified vehicle, whomever he/she might have been, has not yet owned up to their mistake, which has left our administrative officer 1LT Coleman in an understandably foul mood.

In fact, when the fender-bender was announced to the soldiers (along with the new, onerous rules for checking out and logging in the vehicle), 1LT Coleman got an earful from the lower enlisted about how the car may have actually been hit while parked, and perhaps none of the TMC staff were to blame. This is a good theory, except that the dent in the bumper is, to any reasonable inspector, that of backing into a pole or some similar vertical object. When the medics inspected the damage for themselves, many of them still insisted (and even developed elaborate theories) that something had hit the truck rather than the other way around. 1LT Coleman started to wonder if they were right, but SFC Langer and I held fast–one glance at the bumper and it was obvious. But since the doubt had been cast, I made a mental note to look around the parking area at the cans (not really a parking area at all—just some rocks outside of the barriers) and see if I could find the point of impact.

When I got home from work that day, it took all of two minutes to find the very light pole which had been hit, replete with purple paint and a fresh-appearing (read: not yet dusty) flesh wound scraping beyond the outer, dull-appearing galvanized metal, into a more sparkly layer below. Voila! My scar! Who needs NCIS, when we have amateur crime scene investigator, MAJ Erik Rupard, on the job? No one, that’s who! (Still no perp though. Might have to get David Caruso to cross-examine each of us.)

By the way, for those of you who are (rightly) concerned: Casper, the white trailblazer, is alive, well, and undented. And Barney, though bloodied a bit, remains unbowed, and has a (mostly) dent-free bumper thanks to SPC Hert and his handy mallet.

[opens brain and drops contents out onto a piece of paper]

Jelly Bellies

Way back in March, anonymous good guy “A.G. Family” sent me (among many other things) a big 4-lb bag of Jelly Bellies. This kept me and the various other occupants of my office (a nurse practitioner, a physician’s assistant, and every medic in my clinic) happily sweetened throughout the afternoons. (Okay, occasionally the mornings too.) At four CPB (Calories Per Belly), they are an affordable luxury, even for the weight-obsessed people who make up the U.S. Army (remember: soldiers’ next promotion often depends upon what that scale reads). I recently finished off that bag. Actually, that’s not quite true: there are about one-hundred “tiramisu” JBs left. If you want them, send me your address, as there are no takers in the clinic at this point.

So with bag #1 running out, Mom Rupard came through and sent me a massive Cylinder O’ Beans, which is gracing the little dresser next to my bed as I wite this. I cannot begin to express the inordinate amount of pleasure that popping int my mouth a couple of buttered popcorn, caramel apple, Dr Pepper, or most of the other 47 flavors of Jelly Bellies. Mmmm, high fructose corn syrup…

Running

I am beginning to (dare I say it?) enjoy running once again, for the first time since a relatively brief renaissance when I first joined the Army. I did six miles on Saturday, three on Monday, and 5.5 today. Still riding the bike, too. I’m gonna have to do a better job of hydrating myself, though, as I woke up this morning and didn’t even have to pee. Not a good sign. I think that we may need another “National Kidney Stone Awareness Month.”

Speaking Of Hydration

I was fortunate enough last night to be in/around the vicinity when the water people dropped off our latest pallet. I immediately dug way in, and grabbed a couple of 12-packs from the middle of the pallet (theoretically protected a bit more from the sun than the outside bottles), and did a little taste test. It tasted sweet and clean, with virtually none of that “aromatic polycarbon” aftertaste of which I am not a big fan. I can feel the mutated white blood cells in my marrow as they slowly normalize their tied-in-knots DNA strands.

Tennis

I have ended up reviving my love of tennis after watching it a bit here in Iraq. For reasons unknown to me, tennis is always ALWAYS on the Armed Forces Network. I have not met any enlisted person who has any interest in the sport (playing or watching) and very few officers. Army sports include, and are limited to, the following: weightlifting, football, weightlifting, basketball, running, and lifting weights. Not necessarily in that order.

With no racquet, no tennis balls, and no tennis courts in Iraq, I have resigned myself to the notion that I will not be playing any tennis until I get back to the states. When I watch on TV, I have noticed that I have an unconscious pattern which determines for whom I am rooting. It goes like this: whomever grunts the LEAST gets my vote. I’m thinking of applying this criteria to my presidential choice as well.

Ladies and Gents:

I hereby apologize for the “blog outage” over the extended weekend—partly a result of poor internet access (it went down last night just as I sat down to write) but mostly just due to lousy planning and a bit of procrastination on my part. Not a whole lot happened this weekend (good weather, no new casualties, clinic is running smoothly), but I did have a unique experience as the weekend began.

On Friday night, we had our “Family Home Evening” which was nice, as always. Our clinic now has two Chevy Trailblazers, including one which was originally white but is slowly turning “Al Asad Brown” (a lighter hue of burnt sienna—kind of a “toasted mango” if you will), and one which is huge and purple (I am not making that up), and which we have therefore named “Barney.” I like Barney the best because it (he?) has a sweet stereo. I was able to procure Barney for my FHE trip, and as I drove back home around 8:30 PM, I noticed that the white truck was parked outside the cans. I took this as a sign that none of my soldiers were in immediate need of transport, so I stopped for just a moment, grabbed the Pearl Jam discs that Tony Fadell sent me a few days back, and hopped back in the truck.

My destination was the “ridge.” I have explained before that Al Asad is located in a “bowl”-like indentation in the land of western Iraq, and beyond the oasis is the edge of the bowl, a ridge of land that forms the “rim” of the bowl. A few days previously, COL Gober had taken me and my bike up to an area of the ridge which I had not known was open to bikes. The ride was very scenic, and getting up on the rim there opened us up to a nice breeze; however, there is no pavement for much of the ride, and hence it is pretty bumpy. As we rode, I was too busy holding onto my handlebars and watching for potholes to enjoy the scenery. Having Barney available to me meant that I could go up there at night, off-road a bit, and check out the lay of the land at night time.

I made it up to the ridge and looked out over the base while listening to Tony’s music. Eventually, I turned off the tunes and got up out of the truck, walking into the 90-degree air (but with a nice balmy wind), and checked things out a bit. Because ambient light is restricted here at night time, the stars are more visible than most places back in the states. Leaning there against the hood of my purple friend for a moment, the place seemed incredibly quiet and peaceful. Had I been “beamed” from the past into that moment in my life, I would never have guessed that I was in a combat zone (though knowing what I know now, the dust/diesel smell is a dead giveaway). I ended up riding along much of the rim that night, enjoying the starry sky, and just observing the various strange little areas of industry which make up a United States military base.

All in all, a nice experience it was. I don’t want to start waxing poetic here (although I suppose that’s considerably better than waning poetic), but in closing I offer you this deep thought: Wouldn’t the world be a better, happier place if we all had a purple truck named Barney?

I usually end up writing my (sort-of) daily blog post right before I hit the sack, which is generally the most convenient time, as my days are spent in the clinic and the gym, and generally away from an internet-ready computer. Today, though, the clinic is pretty quiet (eight patients in the first three hours), so I am taking advantage of this time to jot down a few things that have passed through my brain this week.

One is the incredible resilience and innovation of the soldiers here in theater. The building which currently houses our clinic used to be a Turkish bath, and hence is not quite ideal for patient care. By hook or by crook, however, it has been modified to fit our purposes. Long before I arrived here, the medics had built desks out of irregular bits of plywood, put in makeshift doors where none previously existed, even built a fairly complex workout area in the triage area outside. Currently, they are making a basketball half-court in the driveway (though the first attempts at a makeshift rim have failed miserably). Last week, our front door got blown right off its hinges during one of the more vicious dust-storms. We were able to get it back on, but the spring-loaded mechanism which made it close automatically had been destroyed. SGT Evans immediately put pen to paper and came up with an alternative. The result is a simple pulley strung out and over the door, with a bucket full of nails hanging at the bottom, effectively accomplishing exactly what the spring did. Of course, when we get a replacement door mechanism, we’ll retire the pulley, but it is nice to have it now—keeps some of the dust out of the clinic, and stops the door from swinging wildly open every time someone walks into the clinic. The soldiers here have a “get it done” philosophy likely borne of necessity early in their tour (or on prior deployments) and perpetuated by a Department of Defense bureaucracy which make replacements for necessary item around here very slow in coming (if at all). Amazing what a bit of ingenuity can accomplish.

Second topic: [First a disclaimer: we at the TMC have approximately 1,000,000 drink mixes thanks in large part to many of the swell folks who read this blog. So the following is NOT an elaborate "hint" nor is it a "wish list." Just a silly commentary on something that we soldier-types spend a truly unfortunate amount of time pondering.] I believe that the soldiers in Iraq (and Probably Afghanistan as well) are probably the world’s experts on calorie-free drink mixes. We drink water constantly, and after the first liter or so every day, all of it starts to taste bad (especially the leukemia water, which tastes bad with the first sip and goes downhill from there). So each of us is constantly putting these powdered packets into our drinks. The standard flavors are lemon-lime, fruit punch, and lemonade (a.k.a. “green,” “red,” and “yellow,” respectively). But those of us who drink gallons of the stuff daily are always on the lookout for innovation. Barry and Ellen sent me about a thousand of these things, in a bunch of unusual and different flavors (white grape, raspberry ice, mixed berry, kiwi-strawberry, pure lemon, and a bunch of iced-tea combos). Others have come from other sources, or in general care packages from relief organizations. Occasionally, the DFAC will stock some of these, but they go quickly. A couple of the local favorites include the following:

1. Crystal Light “LiveActive” Natural Mixed Berry. This one has three grams of fiber in it, which is really helpful out here in the land of greasy food and blazing sun. Also, I think the fiber actually gives the drink some “body” (can’t believe I am using a term I think I learned from a 1970s Prell ad) which is often lacking from sugar-free drinks. Ellen sent me this one, and it is my all-time favorite.
2. Propel Kiwi-Strawberry “fit powder.” This is made by the Gatorade people, and I will confess here and now to being a consumer junkie for any/all of their products. The flavor is sweet, but not too sweet, and has a bit of a cotton-candy tinge to it, which helps to satisfy my sweet tooth a bit.
3. Country Time Lemonade. Can’t argue with a classic. This is the sugar-free variety.
4. Crystal Light White Grape. I’m not a huge fan of white grape juice, but perhaps absence has made the heart grow fonder. This is very light, and easy going down. It is also somewhat of a rarity, as no one in the clinic had ever seen it before it came in one of Ellen’s packages. As such, I have worked my way slowly through the packet, and am saving the last couple for the winners of our next medical jeopardy.

So there you have it. If you find yourself in the need of sugar-free drink mixes, print that out and take it along as a handy guide. [Again, though, we have lots of these in the clinic, so please don't think of this as a hint. But thanks anyway...]

Last but not least:

Yesterday afternoon, I got an unexpected package from Tony Fadell, a military Oncologist in Germany who was in my fellowship class with me. Doctors who go through a fellowship together (the training which is necessary to become a sub-specialist in medicine) spend a lot of time together during the grueling two or (as in our case) three years of the intense training. Tony, along with Tanya Wroblewski whom I have mentioned previously, was in my fellowship class, and we all became close friends—a friendship which continues to endure, though we each live in different corners of the globe. In the package was a picture of Tony’s beautiful kids, Sierra and Owen, and some books, candies, and CDs, including a 7-disc Pearl Jam set which will take me weeks to thoroughly digest. Also, a Christmas card, with an apology for its lateness (still earlier than the Christmas card which I sent Tony…tomorrow (yeah, that’s the ticket!). He signed it “brother Tony” and indeed that is what Tony is like—a brother.

Tony’s kindness in thinking of me, sending me some entertainment, and just plain going through the major hassle of putting all that stuff in a box, filling out the customs form, and getting the sucker in the mail, this is all typical of him, a humble, selfless guy. In fact, it is typical of so many of my friends and family out there. I feel like when I get home, I’ll need to visit each and every one of you wearing a t-shirt which proclaims “I am not worthy!”

When I worked at Walter Reed, we occasionally admitted men from the “Soldiers’ Home,” a complex in downtown DC which housed many veterans, usually 70-plus years-old. Although the Soldiers Home had its own hospital, they would be transferred to our facility when they got really sick. These men referred to Walter Reed as “Walter Wonderful” and did not have even the tinest whiff of facetiousness when they said it. They loved everything about the place, from the medical care they got, to the clean and windowed rooms, to the food they were served.

I feel much the same way with regards to each of you: one of the beautiful things that this experience has afforded me is the opportunity to see just how many good people there are in this world—people who at no benefit to themselves and often at considerable expense (both of money and time) find ways to do what they can for the soldiers over here. It seems that every day we receive a package addressed to “any soldier,” and full of goodies, shaving equipment, soap, playing cards, DVDs, books, magazines, chips, crackers, etc. Although the “stuff” is good to get, it is the simple fact that someone cared enough to send it that really affects me and my fellow soldiers, and provides an uplift on those days in which groundhog fever would otherwise be setting in.

Thanks.

[Editor's Note: In re-reading this tonight, I am afraid that it may be perceived as a thinly-veiled attempt to get drink mixes and/or other stuff sent out to the clinic. It is not at all intended that way; my small cadre of readers have been incredibly kind to me, and our clinic still has lots of stuff from previous boxes I have received. We are (truly) in need of nothing, and I personally have more than enough goodies, drink mixes, etc to make it through my last two months, and then some.]

We Al Asad-dwellers are in the middle of yet another hellacious dust storm which has lasted about a week, and have had a few power outages a day over that period (presumably related). When the power went down a couple of months ago, it wasn’t a huge deal; we would just move the functional clinic into the few rooms with windows, and we were back in business. Now that it is warmer, the power outages are a bit more problematic, as the temperature begins to rise rapidly and within an hour of the A/C going off, the buildings become almost uninhabitable.

We sat in the dark in a swelteringly hot clinic today when the lights went off at around 2 PM. After about an hour, the temps inside had to have been 90-plus. We kept the clinic open, but the patients slowed down to a trickle, so I sought a cooler location than my office, and ended up in one of the patient rooms, where I made myself at home on the exam table, inclining one side of the table and laying back on the butcher paper. I popped my ipod in my ear, and put on a good audiobook (”The Long Ball” by Adelman) and listened for a few minutes before the heat and the comfortable position put me to sleep.

I woke up about 15 minutes later in a pool of sweat, and noted that the lights were still out, and I could hear some shuffling down the hall. The medics were moving all of our vaccines into containers with ice, so they would not spoil in the currently-useless refrigerator. Another one of the problems that occurs when the lights go down. We stuck around until about 1630, when the lights came back on, and then we finished our notes and headed home.

Not a whole lot else to report to you from the Orange Zone today, but I would like to ramble aimlessly on one other topic. No Iraq content below, so feel free to check out here, if you wish.

Viva La Vida

In the seventies, when I was a kid, there weren’t nearly as many bands out there making music, but there were a lot more “supergroups”—the kind of rock group that can fill a huge arena, and for whom a new album release was a big event (Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, etc). Today, everyone and his little brother can “release” an album via the internet or iTunes, and they often do just that. As a result, there are thousands of “indie” bands, some of them excellent, some not-so-great (that part hasn’t changed). But a few supergroups remain, and one of those is Coldplay, a British group whose clean sound and artsy approach to music I have admired, but somehow have never quite “gotten into.”

Until now.

Coldplay’s latest album just came out this week (although through the magic of the internet plus a whole lot of patience, I had it a week ago), and is truly excellent. I’ll spare you the full-on review here, as you can read that elsewhere, but suffice it to say that Viva La Vida is a truly great album, start-to-finish. Added to Coldplay’s trademark top-notch production and instrumentation are some really great melodies, and an upbeat theme (”Live life to the fullest”) that runs throughout the ten seamless tracks. It has violins and cellos and pregnant piano chords, among other tricks (including, at one point, a full orchestra), all of which keeps things creative and interesting. Five stars from me, and something that I think even the dadster would like (though he might want to eat a Mento first).

[Note from your faithful editor: I tried to upload a song, streamable from this site, and will attempt again later, but for now the orange dust is gumming up the works and I barely got this much up. The band's official site (www.coldplay.com) allows you to listen to snippets, or watch a video.]

There is a statement, attributed by many to Winston Churchill, which goes something like this:

“If you are not a liberal when you are young, you have no heart; if you do not become a conservative as you get older, you have no brain.”

Now I know that a few naysayers have claimed that Churchill was unlikely to have uttered any such thing, and with this in mind I put rupard.org’s crack research team on the case. I am pleased to inform you that after five minutes of the most intense research ever conducted on this topic by someone living in a bulletproof plastic container, our editorial team can announce with a reasonably high degree of confidence the following: Some human being uttered some parts of this phrase, at some time. I’m not sure that the statement itself is entirely true, though, as many of the contributors to this blog (my friends Steve J and Steve A, to name only the “Steves”) tend towards the Obama side of things, and yet are fairly intelligent young men. And of course we have a few contemporary politicos on the conservative side of things who have proven beyond any reasonable doubt that they are, indeed, Not Quite Brilliant.

Those caveats aside, I have found the liberal-maturing-into-conservative pattern to be true in my life. When I first went to BYU in 1985, I took a “colloquium” class which combined English, History, Science, Psychology and others (help me here, Steve Jordan?) into one big, beautiful, multi-teacher course, in the Karl Maeser building. I spent hours every day attending those classes, and I loved every minute of it, as my intellectual curiosities were awakened, and I began to realize how exciting the pursuit of knowledge truly is. In discussing American History and deconstructionism and philosophy and new psychology, I became more and more convinced that the world was not as simple as Reagan’s speeches made it out to be. I remember feeling sad and a bit ashamed when I watched on TV as the United States dropped bombs on Grenada, while the rest of the people in the Helaman Halls commons room were whooping it up. By the end of the school year, I took the final step: I went to the Provo town hall and registered myself as a Democrat.

Then, I went on a mission.

I will spare you the excruciating details, but suffice it to say that during the time I spent with the actual human beings who lived on the United States’ side of the Mexican border, I saw the fallout of many government programs aimed at the poor people in that area, and I became convinced that Reagan’s mantra was indeed true: “Government is not the solution to your problems; government is the problem.” Many years later, though I am not a lock-step conservative (nor by any means a George W. Bush Republican), I still find that my voting patterns tend to follow a very simple pattern: whichever candidate wants to shrink the size and power of government is gonna get my vote. In these days in which both parties’ mantra seems to be: “Ask not what you can do for your country; ask what your country will do to help you pay for that house you had no business buying in the first place,” it can be difficult to find that “small government” guy. For the 2008 presidential election, it will come down to which of the candidates promises to expand government the least.

So why am I not a fan of government? Ohh, my friend, in asking me that question, you forget that I am smack in the middle of a $12 billion-per-month ($400 million per day) government project, of the largest kind.

In other words, let me count the ways:

Exhibit #1: Individual Body Armor

When I went through CRC (Combat Readiness Course) back in March, I was given a full set of body armor. We were informed that the four “plates” which are inserted into the outer jacket are about $600 dollars a piece, and thus we should try really hard not to lose them. During my time in Iraq, I have worn the complete set of body armor (”full battle rattle”) for exactly 2 hours, which not coincidentally is the exact amount of time that I have spent in airplanes here. Yesterday, I was fitted for an entirely new set of body armor, with “improved comfort.” I am happy to accept this $2500 gift from the taxpayers, and will certainly appreciate that added comfort level when I am boarding a plane in the opposite direction, for another two hours. What will happen to the old armor? They haven’t told us, but if I was a betting man, I’d say that an indefinite stay in a freshly-built storage bunker is in its future. Take THAT, you not-so-comfy life-saving device!

Exhibit #2: The ACUs

I also received four ACU uniforms at CRC (the new-fangled camouflage coats and pants which are required wearing for all Army types since last year). Two of these are fine, well-tailored, and look/feel good even when dusty and well-used. The other two started out that way, but after a couple of washes became dramatically smaller, wrinkly, and (most importantly) quite porous, meaning that they soak rather than repel my sweat, and really like to collect dust (which they immediately deposit on my person). A quick perusal of the tags shows me that the good ACUs and the bad ACUs were manufactured by different companies. How much would you like to bet me that the Army paid the same amount for both types?

Exhibits #3, 4, and 5: The Parable of the Bus, the Truck, and the Routes

Our clinic consists of 10 medics, two providers, one administrator, and three optometry staff—16 people, if you are keeping score. When I arrived at Al Asad, we had a pretty good setup for transportation: a truck (for hauling big stuff, picking people up from the airport, etc), and a bus. The bus could hold 20 people, and was useful for getting the whole crew out for lunch, physical fitness training and tests, and was the sole means for transporting our entire unit of medics in the event of a mass casualty—ostensibly our main reason for being here. One month ago, the Powers That Be at Al Asad decided that we (among many other units) do not need a bus. Upon investigating this in an unsuccessful bid to get the Base Command to make an exception for our clinic, I discovered some interesting things about these modes of transport.

The ubiquitous Mitsubishi buses cost the DoD nearly $5000 a month to lease and maintain, including $1000 to get the oil changed, and a minimum of $1000 for every service call. We would be hard-pressed to go 100 miles in a month in the thing (our living area is a square mile), which leaves the cost at a cool 50 bucks per mile. And the truck? $2800 per month. (And not even a manual transmission!) There are literally thousands of these trucks all over Iraq, most of them leased from the same Iraqi, Kuwaiti, or Saudi companies. Does it seem to you, as it does to me, that it would have been cheaper for the DoD to have simply shipped a few thousand Chevys over here, and had our (extremely bored) uniformed mechanics maintain them? Too easy, apparently. But the story does not end there.

The idea behind de-busing all of Al Asad was that our base can get by with fewer buses if the current bus routes are expanded, and some of the “confiscated” buses are placed in the public pool, thereby reducing the wait time to catch one of these buses. Not a terrible idea on the face of it, but when the bus routes came out, it turned out that they forgot to put either our Troop Medical Clinic (the busiest medical facility on post) or the Combat Surgical Hospital on the bus routes. Yes, they did have stops that were “near” the aforementioned medical facilities. But it turned out that this “nearness” was only “as the crow flies.” The new stop “near” the TMC was only about 100 yards away if one could take a direct route, but unfortunately there are two workyards in between said bus stop and our clinic, both of which require specific passes for entry, and neither of which has a back gate. So the prospective patient who comes to see us with, say, a swollen ankle, or nausea and vomiting, or (gosh forbid) diarrhea, would have to walk a quarter mile to get to us. If the unfortunate soldier/marine needed to be transferred to the Hospital, well he would just have to limp his sorry, hospital-bound butt back to the bus stop, onto the bus (hope he’s not contagious!) then past stops at two mess halls, the stadium, the gym, and the PX to get to his final destination, the post office, which is a mere quarter-mile away from the CSH. Previously, we would have loaded this guy onto the bus and taken him directly to the hospital ourselves.

FULL DISCLOSURE: Lest you think our situation is more dire than it is, I should make you aware that we have had some windfall after all of this bad news. A week ago, our commander in Balad learned of our transportation problems and, bless his soul, he sent a truck out to us which arrived Saturday. It is not an open-bed truck, but it is transportation. However, we still need more transport and are currently in the position of begging the Iraqi army (across post from us) to let us “steal back” one of the Hummers that the US so kindly gave to them earlier this year. They actually have some extras that they aren’t using, but we haven’t been able to negotiate a deal yet, as they are quite aware that they presently hold all of the cards. Good news, though: word on the street is that our latest offer (500 Crystal Light packets, a couple boxes of Marlboros, a carton of Wet Ones ["the rich man's baby wipe"], and a bag of Diana T’s biscotti) is being seriously considered. Cross your fingers!

As I conclude this sarcastic little missive, I sit in the dark, for the third time in the past hour, and the fourth time today. To paraphrase longtime Cubs’ announcer Haray Caray: “400 million dollars a day, and they can’t keep the lights on!” No worries though: any moment now I expect someone will emerge from the darkness to knock on the door of my darkened trailer and utter those inspiring words: “I’m from the government and I am here to help.”