Fun + Stress = Sick
I may have mentioned we had this wonderful signing at Page One Book’s in Albuquerque (get you signed copies of INSIDE STRAIGHT from them. They will cheerfully mail you a book if you give them money 
) My wonderful agent had suggested to my editor Patrick Nielsen-Hayden that he and his wife Teresa stay in my guest house for a few days either before or after the signing. Unfortunately Teresa couldn’t come (I’ll get a chance for a long visit with her soon, I hope), but Patrick did come up north and spend a few days.
I had all these wonderful hikes through Indian ruins planned and then it started to snow. Ian was supposed to join us on these hikes, but when I called to ask if he thought we could try it he reminded me of the narrow sandstone trail, the ladders, the CLIFFS. I reluctantly released that notion. Patrick loves the Southwest so we took a drive up toward the Santa Fe ski area. You couldn’t see the incredible vistas because of the snow and clouds, but it was beautiful. The ponderosa pines were like hulking giants festooned with glitter, and the narrow white trunks of the aspen created the illusion they were dancing through the swirling snow. It was beautiful, but we turned back at the Big Tesuque camp ground because the road was really becoming snow packed.
It ended up being a stay at home and cozy couple of days, but Patrick and I are both political junkies, so we discussed and dissected every possible ramification of Super Tuesday. I’m heading over to Making Light to see if Patrick has posted the breakdown for NY. He had a theory about the City and Obama. Here in NM we are still waiting for the outcome. Less than one hundred votes separates Obama and Clinton. I hope he wins. I think California went the way it did because of all the early mail in voting. People hadn’t had a chance to take a look at Obama before they voted.
I sat up until midnight watching the returns come in. What struck me, and gave me such a sense of joy was the knowledge that an African-American candidate was winning in Kansas, and North Dakota, Minnesota and Missouri. I think the young people are losing these gender/race identifications, and many of the states Obama won last night do not have large African-American populations. I think the idea he can’t win with white voters has been laid to rest. So the race continues, and it’s so exciting.
Now for the stress. When I got home on Saturday night after the signing and the reception, and some time spent with my agent, I had a message from my trainer. Vento had stepped on a nail and driven it into his foot. It wasn’t in the frog, but this was still terrifying news, and since it was eleven o’clock at night I couldn’t call and talk to her. There was the obvious worry that this would lame my boy, but beyond that there was a very real threat of death. If a puncture foot wound becomes infected it’s very hard to kill the infection and it often leads to the horse’s death. I didn’t sleep much on Saturday. I can now report that neither lameness or death are in the offing. They left the nail in until the vet arrived. He removed it, packed the wound with antibiotics, and bandaged his foot. He was then confined in his stall for three days with just hand walking. He never took a lame step and when I finally got out to visit him on Monday he was ready to jump out of his skin. He was like a sulky little kid who was bored, bored, bored and it was all my fault.
I want to ride, but I’m fighting a bad cold. My trainer is flat on her back with a flu/cold, they have closed the indoor arena to work on reinforcing the walls against wind. It looks like it will be Saturday before I get back to riding since Lauren wants to be the first person to hop onto a young stallion who hasn’t worked for a number of days. I’m a wimp. I’m going to let her.
So, there is the tale.
Melinda
February 6th, 2008 at 9:47 am
Oh what a scare. It’s amazing what kind of trouble our horses can get themselves into. Ace’s hair is growing back from where he somehow scraped it off two weeks ago. Like with Vento, fortunately, there was no lameness.
I turned Ace out for a little while last night since the arena is almost dried up from the last rain. He had a great time bucking and running. He also showed that he can do a sliding stop if he wants to. He was down visiting the mini when I called him in to finish his supper. He tore down the line of stalls, tucked his but to stop and spun to come into his stall. Very funny. He might make a reiner some day.
We’re trying to get his weight up again. It’s hard when you really can’t monitor what he’s being fed. I can’t wait until Gayle gets a new place where he can move. His diet will be monitored a whole lot better, just as it was when we were up at Indian Springs and Gayle and Zsuzsu watched over everything.
February 6th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
Hope you’re recovering as well as Vento seems to be. Meanwhile my Puritan roots mean I can’t help myself from reminding you that too much fun will always get you in trouble.
Still, it sounds like you had a great time. Your observation on the paper ballots sounds valid - I wonder if any of the newsmedia will look into the question. In NY I was surprised that Obama didn’t do better. My neighborhood, not exactly a hotbed of radicalism, was covered in Obama buttons and posters - I didn’t see one person promoting Hillary. Barbara Krasnoff compared the phenomenon to PC and Mac users. You run into more Mac users than PC users because they’re always talking up their machines. But there are a lot more PC users.
February 6th, 2008 at 1:49 pm
Whoa, I’m so glad Vento is ok.
College is pretty full on at the moment, seriously cutting into my net time - so this election is being brought to me pretty much exclusively by yours and Parris’ blogs. After the last few years it’s so great to hear you both excited and positive about where things are going to go from here.
Good job * thumbs up *
February 6th, 2008 at 7:18 pm
Can you send some of that snow over? I want snow and only get rain.
I had a virus, too. On my computer. Fortunately I didn’t lose any data, but I had to reinstall the system and all programs and it sucked a lot to be without internet for some days.
February 9th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
It seems to me that a reasonable question under the circumstances would be, “Where exactly was this nail that Vento stepped on, how did it get there, and can I expect this to happen again?”
February 9th, 2008 at 5:56 pm
“I think the young people are losing these gender/race identifications”
– ah… no. Take a look at the numbers.
First, the number of people who actually attend a Democratic caucus in places like Idaho or North Dakota, where Republicans are in an overwhelming majority and which accordingly are not going to go Democratic in November, is miniscule.
Millions voted in Florida; a few thousand show up for a caucus in Idaho or Montana.
By definition, these people are little cliques of eccentrics, like a Republican on the Upper West Side or in Berkeley, only more so; their preferences don’t mean bupkis as far as the general election goes. The results just say what Democratic party activists and political junkies in those states think.
(South Carolina isn’t going to go Democratic either, though people at the DNC have to say they think it might when speaking in public; that’s one of those ritual pieties you have to go through even when you know it’s ridiculous.)
Obama didn’t do well among whites — and these are registered Democrats, remember — in any of the big primary states except Illinois. He did particularly badly among working-class whites. And even worse among Hispanics, usually losing by 3-1, and barely winning with them even in Illinois.
The non-caucus states he took were ones where blacks were over 40% of the primary electorate. He’ll do well in Virginia for the same reason. When a bloc that big goes for you by 80%, you do well. And in the general election, 90% of blacks would vote for him — but blacks are only about 11% of the total in a general election, and they vote overwhelmingly Democratic anyway.
And he gets adoration from upper-middle and upper-class white liberals, of course, who are emotionally pre-selected to swoon over the sort of vaguely ‘idealistic’ uplift he specializes in.
If blacks were 40% of the American population, or most Americans lived in college towns and upscale suburbs, he’d be a shoo-in.
The tracking polls indicate that Clinton continues to lead among Democratic voters by mid-to-high two figure margins.
The fact is, Obama underperforms his polling numbers wherever there’s a real election with demographics anything close to the national norm. He was down 8% from the poll numbers in California, for example, and similar percentages in several other states and nationally.
And he would do exactly the same thing in the general election if nominated; he’d come in 5%-10% lower than what the pre-election polls said he should.
We have at best a 50-50 chance of winning the White House in November, with either Clinton or Obama; McCain is going to be a very strong candidate.
Clinton is probably marginally the better chance.
February 10th, 2008 at 11:09 am
I’m betting the nail was just left over from construction. It’s been so wet up here that things buried sort of ooze their way up to the surface. I’ve never seen any other construction detritus around the place and the barn has been up for a number of years. I think it was just damn bad luck, but fortunately he’s fine and I dodged a bullet.
February 10th, 2008 at 8:58 pm
I’m hardly a serious student of political polling and voting patterns; I can only comment from my own perspective. If Obama gets the nomination, I expect to vote for him. If Clinton gets it, I’ll be debating whether to vote for McCain, as the marginally less bad candidate, or for some third party candidate, likely the Libertarian.
The biggest single practical issue for me in this is health care. I’m 58 years old, self-employed, and uninsured—not because I want to take my chances on staying healthy, but because health insurance is prohibitively expensive. When I was last insured, bare minimum catastrophic coverage cost 16% of my gross income, which left me so broke that I couldn’t afford doctor or dentist visits, which kind of made catastrophic coverage pointless; and I faced further hikes, both from rising health care costs and from turning 55 and having a much higher base premium. I was appalled by Schwarzenegger’s proposing to make health insurance mandatory. Now Clinton is making the same proposal—and being very evasive about how she would enforce it. I could always hope that she’ll arrange things to make the cost endurable, but if she isn’t, her scheme will still force me to pay it. In the meantime, Obama has called for a voluntary scheme, which would mean that if it cost more than I could bear, I could opt out.
Clinton’s scheme follows a pattern that American liberals tend to embrace: identify a desirable thing for people to have, come up with some all-embracing administrative scheme to give it to them, and then force everyone into that scheme. And if the thing it’s providing is harmful to you as an individual, or costs more than you can pay, or certainly if you simply don’t want it—too bad, you have to have it anyway. The British call this sort of thing the “nanny state,” and complain about it. And I think it’s a substantial part of why “liberal” has become a swearword for a lot of Americans. This is just the sort of scheme that appeals to the Democratic Party apparatchiks who favor Clinton. But they have to appeal to a large enough mass of independents to get her in. And I speculate—as I say, I’m not informed enough to do more than that—that liberal idealism will appeal more to those voters than doctrinaire liberal prescriptivism. It certainly appeals more to me.
February 10th, 2008 at 9:28 pm
Health insurance is my big issue too. I have Crohn’s disease so I’m an automatic deny unless I am in a group. I hadn’t bought insurance for a long, long time, I had the WGA coverage, and it is fantastic insurance. Back when I was buying an individual policy you could always use money, pay through the nose and get insurance. Imagine my surprise and terror when I discovered that now they just deny you, and no amount of money will get you covered. At least there is a law that requires an insurance company to cover people in a group.
So, I became Lumina Enterprises, my husband and I are employees, it costs me a lot in legal fees and accountants fees, and state and Federal taxes, but it’s the only way I can buy insurance. Which is costing me a fortune every month.
Patrick told me that while Australia was on it’s way to a single payer system it had an interim step rather like what Obama is proposing. The only way mandatory coverage works is if they give us rebates from the government to cover the cost, or tax breaks up to the full amount of your premium. None of this $500 crap that Bush was proposing.
The problem with allowing people to opt out is that you’re not sharing the cost equally, it’s a smaller pool of people who are buying the insurance thus driving up the cost. And what happens to the people who “opt out” if they become really ill or injured? Do you just let them die or bankrupt them? And if they are refused treatment or lose their homes and everything they own they will be hiring lawyers and suing.
We pay taxes so we have roads and fire departments and police departments. Isn’t this something rather akin to the common good?
I know people are always warning us against the evils of the Canadian system — ooooh, you have to wait for months to see a doctor. Oooooh, you can’t choose your doctor.
Well, I wait months for an appointment right now. And I don’t get to pick a doctor unless they are in my network. I have a dear friend who has left the medical profession. Her take on it, “The system is completely broken.” Which is not a comforting thought.
February 11th, 2008 at 12:52 am
The problem with not allowing people to opt out is that if they are subjected to ruinously expensive costs, they just have to suffer. It’s all very well to say, “Oh, but government mandated health insurance will be available at a price you can afford!” I’ve seen government programs that weren’t what they were sold as before now; No Child Left Behind is a prize example. When I’m told that something is (a) good for me and (b) compulsory, the first thing I think is that if the government finds it necessary to make it compulsory, it can’t be as good a deal as they’re promising. And if the government has the option of making something compulsory, politicians and administrators have much less reason to care if it’s a good deal for everyone; they can just say to the person who finds it a bad deal, “Too bad, but everybody has to comply with this, so we’re fining you/garnishing your waves/forcing you to enroll or go without hospital care.”
If something is really a better deal than the health care system we have now offers me, why do you imagine I wouldn’t take it? And if it’s a worse deal, why should I? I’m not someone who was eager to be without health insurance; I paid for it at a higher price than I could really afford, until I reached a point where I couldn’t pay for it any more. When I hear “mandatory health insurance,” I think of being stuck with paying that same excessive price, or an even higher one, with no way to get out of it—and I don’t think of it as benefiting me; I think of it as ruining my life to benefit other people. That’s not the sort of vision that encourages a sense of benevolence, to say the least.
February 11th, 2008 at 8:34 am
Apologies if I didn’t make myself clear. The only way it can be “mandated” is if the costs are kept low, and/or the government subsidizes those who can’t afford the insurance.
When I talked about people who would refuse the insurance, but head to the emergency room if they got sick I was talking about young people in their twenties who never think that they’ll get sick or old. Boy, do I remember feeling that way. It’s a rude shock when you find out otherwise.
And I understand the the gut clenching terror as the insurance bill arrives each month. I’m managing to pay my “ruinously high” premiums right now, but I couldn’t years ago, and had to drop my individual coverage. Basically the insurance company raised my rates every quarter, and at the end I was up to a $10,000 deductible, and this was seventeen years ago.
All of this is why expanding medicare, and making this a single payer system is ultimately the best way to go. I know there are problems in the Canadian and European systems, but they’re better then this current mess we’re enduring.
The sad truth is I don’t think we’re going to get any relief until the big companies get on board, and start screaming at Washington. It’s the heath care costs that are the biggest burden on American business.
February 11th, 2008 at 10:55 am
I sympathize with those young people. I’m going to take the liberty of quoting from a friend who has been a political activist and who is a more wholehearted Obama supporter than I am: “My little brother is currently living in Massachusetts and is suffering under Mitt Romney’s “universal health care” system, which is to say that he just graduated college with an art degree and is working but can’t find a job anywhere that can afford to get him health insurance, so he keeps getting hit with these huge fines for being uninsured, and right now, he’s scrambling to find some expensive private insurance that will give him basically no care, and on top of that, he has to pay these giant fines, so now he’s terrified that in the name of ‘universal coverage’, he can neither pay his rent nor afford to get sick.”
There’s a potential for a rather grim class conflict in mandated health care. People my age, statistically speaking, consume more health services than people in their twenties (that’s even true of me, and I’m generally healthy; I’ve had two biopsies in the past two years, paid for out of pocket). And people my age, statistically speaking, have more assets than people in their twenties (though I managed to be an exception to that, I regret to say). So mandated health care seems to say to young people, “Okay, kid, we know health care is a really big expense, and it’s going to be painful for you to fit it into your budget. But we’re not going to let you go without health insurance, because a bunch of older people with more money than you have need to be able to afford health services, and you have to suffer to give it to them.” We’re already looking at intergenerational stress over the next quarter century as the Social Security dependency ratio gets less favorable; this could make it worse.
February 11th, 2008 at 11:02 am
Incidentally, Melinda, I want to say that it’s a pleasure to find you so willing to discuss this civilly. I don’t agree with you, but I’ve learned things from you, and I find our brief online conversations rewarding, which makes me want to come back. I hope my approach to these discussions has been sufficiently civil so that that’s not an unpleasant prospect! I’ve run into some real minefields in political discussions this year, with long-time personal friends at both ends of the conventional political spectrum, but your blog doesn’t seem to be one. Thank you!
February 11th, 2008 at 11:14 am
You have been unfailing civil, and always willing to concede when someone has made a valid point. I have also learned from you. For example I had no idea that Massachusetts hits folks with giant fines. That is shocking. There has to be a way to deal with this on a more individual bases.
I know it’s hard on the kids to have to kick in for all us Boomers. Social Security is another knotty problem we are going to have to face sooner or later. For starters I want Bill Gates and Warren Buffet to pay on the funds they make over $96,000 (or whatever the current cutoff happens to be). I also think there should be a means test. When my WGA pension kicks in, I probably could do without Social Security. I know there is this impulse that “damn it, I paid in, I’m gettin’ mine!”, but there is also the question of being part of the society.
I was a pretty fervent Libertarian for a long time, but like I said, my mother’s final illness made me realize that I needed the network of support that society offers, and I think every citizen has some obligation to the other citizens in the society.
I hate it that my taxes are going to this idiotic war, but I also don’t mind paying taxes because there are other things my money goes to support that are vitally important to all of us. I’ve been fortunate enough to be pretty successful in my life. I don’t mind giving back some because of all the advantages I have enjoyed by virtue of being a part of this society.
February 11th, 2008 at 4:29 pm
Thank you. I’m sure much more could be said about this question on all sides, but I think I’ve taken up enough bandwidth for the moment. But it’s been a good conversation and I look forward to the next one.