You should see the other guy, indeed. Check off cochlear implant surgery from my bucket list. How did it get on my bucket list to begin with? I better study that bucket list and see what other surprises are in that bucket.

I’m told the surgery went well. Of course I wouldn’t know. I slept through it and missed the darn thing. But the second hand info I received was two thumbs mostly up. This surgery takes about 1-1/2 to 2 hours; mine took close to 3. It had to do with the condition of my inner ear from otosclerosis. Apparently otosclerosis can cause a loss of bone (that was my story previously), but another phase of the disease can add bone. In my case at this stage of the disease, additional bone was encountered and caused some additional work and time. Suffice to say, it’s done and behind me, and now I’m awaiting for the processor to be turned on to see if the implant will do any good. And, I can still smile, Alice, when I choose to, and of course frown ‘cause I gotta keep the bland going, and my taste is as good as it was before surgery. I also had little pain, one pain pill last night, and no nausea or dizziness. Now I’m nursing three days of Shannon waiting on me, and life is good.

We have been watching the Presidential Executive Orders come rolling out, and we are especially close to the federal hiring freeze. It’s too bad. We the people are loving our public lands to death, and without personnel the lands and landmarks that we are in such awe will only deteriorate or become off limits.

One of the compelling reasons we started volunteering was a deck talk we attended when we were visiting Padre Island National Seashore in the days when we were Minnesota snowbirds traveling in a 16-foot Scamp travel trailer pulled by a Ford Ranger. Ah, life was simple then. Anyway, the talk was by a volunteer, and the theme of the talk was about the items that washed up on shore (Shannon would later do that very same talk when we came back to volunteer in 2012), but the volunteer talked quite a lot about the need for volunteers. He made it quite clear the Park Service and other federal agencies simply did not have the staff to do programs and keep visitor centers open. In our times since when we volunteered at different sites throughout the country, we met young (and sometime not so young) seasonal employees trying to gain enough experience and pay their dues to become hired full time for any natural resources agency. They were the future, and even though it was a struggle to finally get on full time, there still was a hope that someday these young (and not so young) folks would take over the leadership of these federal agencies and become full time stewards of the lands we love. However, the future has become a lot more murky, and the bright hope has dimmed significantly. Sad.