Summertime, and the livin' is easy

It's Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial beginning to summer. All of the big blockbuster movies come out about now, amusement parks, ice cream stands, drive-in movies and root beer stands have begun to reopen for the season, and the greatest harbinger of the onset of summer is rapidly rising gas prices, which have shot up considerably since the warmer weather began. Owing to the recession this year, we are told, gas prices won't rise as astronomically as they did last summer, when it peaked at $4.15 a gallon, but I predict seeing it go toward the $3.00 mark before summer's over. Once again, speculation is behind this whole thing. When the stock market crashed last fall, prices plummeted at the pump when the oil bubble that led to last summer's ridiculous prices also burst, sending gas down to levels not seen in years, but as you can imagine, speculators, voracious for rapid profits, leapt on the price drop and began buying up cheap oil futures to jack the prices back up, and OPEC halted production by several million barrels a day as well, also to raise the price back up. On one hand, this is a good thing because it reinforces conservation and the creation of more fuel efficient cars by the automakers, but on the other hand, it puts a real pinch on lower income people who often own older gas guzzler cars because they can't afford newer ones and they need to get to their jobs, so it's kind of a Catch 22 situation, to say the least. If gas gets too high, it will also put the kibosh on travel and tourism, and there are many states who rely on summer tourist travel to make ends meet. Last summer was brutal on states that traditionally bring in big bucks in the tourism industry and that was part of what led to the massive recession we're now encountering. There is also talk in Ohio of lengthening the school year well into July like they do in Europe, because teachers say that they spend the first few months of each school year doing remedial catch up because kids forget what they learned the previous school year. (I don't recall encountering this problem myself whenever I began a new school year. Teachers just dove us into new material without reviewing last year's stuff first.) I don't know if today's kids have shorter attention spans or what, but I don't recall three month long summers doing us any academic harm when I was growing up. The school year now is already longer than when I was young. School starts in August and goes to mid-June, so ending school in mid-July will mean only a few short weeks off for today's kids, hardly enough to allow families to be able to take their traditional summer vacations. But the thinking is that the longer the kids are in school, the more they'll retain year to year and the less remedial catch up will have to be done at the beginning of each school year. So much for long lazy summers of my youth for today's kids......

OWOWOWOW!
Yesterday morning, I accidentally slammed my right thumb in the driver side door of my car while exiting as I arrived at work. Fortunately, being at work meant that I could go right away to the office, to our staff kitchen, grab some ice from the fridge and make an impromptu ice pack, which is what I did, and I kept it on the injury for about 20 minutes, after which I wiped it with an antiseptic towlette and bandaged it. Apparently, it continued to bleed throughout the day, because when I got home from work, the bandage was mighty bloody. I iced it for 20 minutes again, and later in the evening, I soaked it in Epsom salts for about 20 minutes, then iced it for 20 minutes before going to bed, taking a few Aleve tablets as well to dull the angry throbbing pain that wracked it all day. I called a 24 hour nurse line to see what suggestions they had and they urged me to see a doctor immediately, but I didn't feel like going to the ER for something so considerably minor and having to pay such a steep co-pay for an ER visit, so I waited until this morning and went to a nearby urgent care center to get it looked at. The pain was considerably less than last night thanks to taking Aleve, but it still hurt pretty good and was very angry looking as well. My stay at the urgent care was two hours, during which time they had me soak it in an antibiotic solution, gave me a long overdue tetanus shot, since I hadn't had one since I could not remember when, they X-rayed it to make sure nothing was broken and then the doctor pierced the nail to drain out blood that had accumulated behind it to relieve the pressure on it, and thus the pain, as well as to save the nail from falling off. I was glad that the sliced cuticle didn't need stitches, either. He wrote me a prescription for an antibiotic, but I don't think I am going to fill it, because that seems a tad over-the-top to take an oral antibiotic for 10 days because of an injury of this sort. I have some triple antibiotic ointment that I can put on the wound to keep it from getting infected and I plan to continue soaking it in Epsom salts as well, until such time as it shows signs of healing. It already feels better because of the steps I took yesterday, so I think I did the right thing in my own self treatment of it but I am sure glad that the doctor pierced my nail and drained the blood out from behind it. Relieving the pressure sure has done wonders for the pain and throbbing! And I'm glad my thumbnail won't fall off, either. I smashed a finger once in a file drawer and ended up losing the entire nail, which took months to grow back. I just don't want to go there again! So I'm glad that I went to the doctor this morning, even if it did cost me a $50 co-pay, and I will have to pay for the X-rays out of my own pocket because my insurance won't cover them. Hope it doesn't cost too much.