"The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet." - William Gibson

On NBC network news last night, and today as a video story on MSNBC.com is one of the standard feel-good stories about an 83-year old dr. in a small Illinois town still practicing medicine who takes walk-in patients (no appointments for anyone), makes house calls, works six days a week and charges $5 per visit. He's delivered more babies than currently live in that town, going back three generations. His office is a mass of file cabinets with paper records for every patient he's ever treated. Got an emergency? Go to his back door.
Good ol' fashioned medical practice that focuses on patient care.
Good ol' fashioned medical practice that will be illegal under the just-upheld federal health care law.
Among other things, the new law mandates only digital records for every patient at every medical provider in the country.
I wonder what the good people of that Illinois town will feel about the new law when they discover the only dr. they've ever known can't see them anymore.
Note: not surprisingly, NBC ignored that part of the story. But they probably didn't realize that stuff, huh?

I'm looking forward to seeing people at this Seattle conference that I haven't seen in years. Cheryle, who now lives in Wenatchee, is helping with the music. We haven't seen each other since college back in the... oh, a long time ago. We were in a traveling choral group together, a group in which five of the six gals were named Cheryle. Various spellings, but that didn't do any good when you're calling out to one of them.
None of the four guys was named Cheryle, though we did have two tenors.

In one of those news stories that seems like it was pulled from a TV cop drama a local man has died from his injuries after falling from the third level of a parking garage. He was being chased by a 20-year old Black man with dreadlocks and one arm. The victim somehow ended up hanging by his hands over the outside wall of the garage, only to have the Black man poke and hit at him until he lost his grip and fell to the asphalt below.
Weird, huh?
I found one sentence near the end of the story especially interesting:
"[The police] said he had a prosthetic arm in place of a real one." 
Uhm, are you suggesting he could have had a prosthetic arm in addition to...?

Except for my toiletries the trailer is packed and the camping gear is in the back of the Kia. It's hitched up and ready to hit the road. I plan to leave about 3 a.m. but that's a soft target and it may be earlier or later, depending on how I'm sleeping. I want to reach Sacramento or very near there by tomorrow night, about 13 hours of driving, so an early start not only gets me across the Sonoran Desert before the heat of the day but also gives me time to stop for naps when I get drowsy. I've got two books on CD -  Grisham and Ludlum novels - and several kinds of chips for munching. I'll pack some music CD's tonight, too. There are long stretches between here and CA, and then in the central CA valley where there are no music radio stations. Country western, but not music. This is the hardest part of the 25-hour drive because there's no scenery, just long flat stretches of nothing, with exits every 20 miles or so. By noon on Wednesday things will get interesting as I start the climb toward Shasta.

I hope to post each night during our trip but that will depend on finding an internet connection. And tomorrow night I probably won't have a whole lot of interesting stuff to report.
(I heard that!)
So if I'm missing for a day or two you'll just have to find a way to carry on without me.