BTW, we are in ABQ and have been here since January 2. I know this does’t even qualify for bland news, but that’s our life… We came here because we are in between volunteer gigs, we need to catch up on our doctoring, and we like ABQ. We thought doctoring was our only chore, but as usual we had to do some more tinkering on the motor home (another year, the same old same old), and now Lilly is at the vet this morning. But the sun shines most days, and I’m looking out my front window and seeing fresh snow on the mountains. I can think of worse places and situations to be in.

I apologize for the rest of this blog post. It’s gonna be mostly about medical stuff. I have observed throughout my life that talking about one’s medical condition increases as one ages. So this is an alert, if you’re younger than 70, you might want to stop and turn back. The following will just be boring medical stuff.

Most important, Shannon saw yet another cardiologist. This time it was at the clinic at the main UNM hospital. So, it is her cardiologist; however, her original cardiologist has escaped to somewhere else (CA?), and she saw yet another new cardiologist. Same practice; different cardiologist. However, this time she went forearmed with almost all of her cardiology records. It’s been good to finally have her records. They answered some of her questions and, or course, generated other new questions. Anyway, she could bring her new cardiologist up to speed quickly.

I must say, she has been feeling and doing much better since her heart attack in Roswell. The cardiologist in Roswell took her off a heart drug that was controversial across all the cardiologists and doctors she has seen over the last 4 years. Her new heart drug, which she was on years ago before we became nomads, seems to be doing the job nicely.

The questions,  among many, remain. What exactly is going on with her? Does she have A-fib? Why does she get pain around her heart? And, why did she have a heart attack? Her new cardiologist was not sure whether or not she actually has A-fib. (The cardiologist in SC and in Roswell believe she does not have A-fib.) And so, the NM cardiologist wants her to wear a monitor for 3 weeks, and if nothing shows up, he will assume she does not have A-fib, will take her off of her expensive blood thinner, and we get a green light to go someplace exotic…oh, maybe like Alaska.

And then there is me. Can’t hear a damn thing. I know you’re thinking that may be a good thing at times. Yes, at times, but the “times they are a-changin’.” I am scheduled for a cochlear implant on January 25. I’ve been in contact with someone here in ABQ who has had 2 implants, and tomorrow I go to a Cochlear Community gathering for recipients and soon-to-be recipients…me. Surgery on the 25th. Follow up with the surgeon a week later. And then the work begins. On February 6, I meet with the audiologist who turns on the implant. I meet again on the 9th when adjusting continues. I will then have continual follow up with the audiologist until she and I are thinking my hearing has improved and I can function.

I go into this with some, no with a lot of misgivings. The implant will be in my left ear. This is the ear that I essentially have not heard out of for decades, maybe 30+ years. I don’t remember. For the longest time it was labeled a “dead ear.” The surgeon at first was reluctant because the literature says results are better if the ear was used within 20 years. In other words has my brain lost its ability to process sound because it has not been stimulated for decades? The surgeon relies on the audiologist to make the recommendation. When I was evaluated by the audiologist, she found that the left ear was able to process sound. So, she thought there was enough hearing in the left ear for a cochlear implant to do some good. And so a cochlear implant will be done in the left ear on January 25.

I also learned why my hearing went and is going south. I was born with a condition called otosclerosis. It is a hardening of the middle ear bones (hammer, anvil, and stapes) so that they do not vibrate as they should when stimulated by sound. In my junior and senior years of high school, I had operations to replace the stapes with  plastic protheses. My hearing was phenomenal after that. (This condition is passed along maternal lines. My mother had the same condition, wore a hearing aid, and had the same operation as I did after seeing the success of my operations.)

I assumed that the stapes replacement was end of story for otosclerosis. Oh, how I was misguided. The CAT scan I had in November revealed that the disease has been ongoing throughout my life causing a loss of the bones; the middle ear bones have pretty much disappeared. No middle ear bones, no passing sound to the cochlea and brain. So, a cochlear implant makes sense; likely I will go deaf without the implants.

My-oh-my. This has gotten intolerably lengthy. If you’ve gotten this far, you have my great admiration. It definitely shows me that you have the stomach for full time RVing. Go for it!

Wow! Based on the response from my previous blog post, there are a lot of closeted bland people that trip over this blog. And I thought readers were more the salsa types. It's obvious that I can't run away from this blog. Who knows how many other people that may come across this blog and are still in the closet and have no place to get their bland on but right here. (In keeping with the bland, I hope you noticed and appreciated that I used a period for punctuation for that last sentence rather than a bold exclamation point. Hope you can keep up.)

Speaking of bland, we had lefse for breakfast this morning. On Christmas Eve, a snowbird from Minnesota heard that the substitute organist was from Minnesota and presented Shannon a gift of lefse. And this was no store-bought lefse. This was lefse made in someone's kitchen or a Lutheran church basement by rosy-cheeked seniors with Norwegian sweaters. Lefse is one of the bland foods one eats when in Minnesota, but it is so good. Some butter and cinnamon sugar rolled up in lefse, and one forgets temporarily the joys of eating pie for breakfast.

So, bland is looking pretty good right now.

It's Christmas Day. This is probably the second best time to post a blog entry. Of course, the best time is any other day of the year, but today you only get second best.

Every Christmas since going on the road in 2012 has been different. This year we have seen the mountain top. Shannon played for the Christmas Day service at a Lutheran Church in Roswell, and we ate a Christmas dinner at a Chinese restaurant sans the staff singing carols. She has been filling in for the organist most of the month of December and will end her gig on January 1. It has been a rejuvenation for her, and it has been fun for me to hear her again. We even drove around last night after the service and looked at Christmas lights in the neighborhoods of Roswell. Today we FaceTime with the kids and grandkids; so, it kind of feels a little like Christmas.

Writing this blog feels like getting back on the horse after having fallen off and cracking my coccyx. It's been almost three months since last making a blog entry, and the bets were running against a resurrection of the blog. So, the horse is standing in front of me, but I'm not quite sure my coccyx wants to try out the horse once again.

When I started the blog, my intent was to make it a travelogue of our RVing and volunteering adventures. But over time, we have settled into a sitting and staying pattern rather than a life of traveling down the highway (we generally avoid back roads). How can a blog even with glossy color photos make the sitting and staying exciting and luring enough to want to tune into it much less write the darn thing? And, I have tried to avoid using the blog to write down my deep, esoteric musings and political rantings. I know you're muttering a silent prayer of thanks right now, and you're right to do so. When I do get back on the horse, (yes, my coccyx feels better already) I don't want the blog to turn into the very blog I have tried to avoid. So I'll be doing a non-travelogue, muse-free, apolitical blog. Bland? Yup, but I do have lots of years eating and living with Northern Europeans where the word "bland" has been used more than a few times to describe diet, clothing, and temperament. And I've managed to have lived through the bland, and maybe you will too.

So love the chilis, but get ready for the bland.

It's Sunday and that means pie for breakfast. Today it was Hatch green chili apple pie. Fresh apples gave it a smooth sweet taste followed by a burn. This pie gives a whole new meaning to "hot apple pie."

Pie for Sunday morning breakfast is one of our few traditions that we have tired to keep no matter where we are or what we are doing. This tradition grew out of a small group summer Sunday morning gathering before church at a local cafe for coffee, goodies, and conversation. This was when we lived in Bemidji, Shannon was the organist at the Methodist Church, and Evan Hazard was promoting pie for breakfast. He said, "why not?" He pointed out that it's got fruit and crust which made it a perfect breakfast meal. He must have been very persuasive because we have been doing it ever since. It helps that Shannon loves pie almost as much as ice cream. So, green chili apple pie was appropriate for a Sunday morning in New Mexico. In OR we ate a lot of Marionberry pie for breakfast. It's tough sometimes, but we try to stick with local fare.

We have finished our first two days of volunteering at the Bitter Lake NWR VC. Tomorrow we will be on the road to Carlsbad to put up some posters. And then we will be done for the week. Three days on, Monday - Wednesday, and the rest of the time is our own. Our work is primarily at the VC, but we will also do other work as needed. VC work not only includes the usual routine behind the front desk, but also some custodial and maintenance chores. It seems like it will be a good mix of things to keep our attention. Visitor numbers are not high right now; both of our days the visitor numbers were in the 20's to 30's. On Saturday, we noticed the number of visitors was 8. All the refuge staff have offices in the VC; so, there is lots of comings and goings.

How the heck did we get here? Good question. The last blog entry was from our time in Twin Falls, ID in early September, and that seems like eons ago. The next stop after Twin Falls was Grand Junction where we visited with Shannon's sister, Fern, Shannon got her hair dyed turquoise to get her psyched for returning to New Mexico, and visited with Shannon's cousin Joan and her husband Ron who we last saw when they visited us in OR. We then made our way to ABQ, NM stopping in Gallup to have lunch with Barb, a friend from many lifetimes ago growing up in Lititz. We then spent almost two weeks in ABQ getting caught up with doctors and dentists and RV repair technicians. We left ABQ on Friday, September 30 ahead of the masses arriving for the Balloon Fiesta, and we arrived at Bitter Lake NWR that afternoon.

We are at Bitter Lake until the end of December. Right now it is hot and dry, and we are under constant assault by house flies and mosquitos and rattlesnakes. Kind of the opposite of our 4 months in OR. First frost might occur in November and maybe we will get some relief. And then again the first cold weather to knock out at least the flying varmints may be in January. When we are in places such as eastern New Mexico, we are always reminded of our MN friends Ken and Ruth who visited us when we were in TX down along the Rio Grande in 2011 at our first volunteer gig. Ken said, "What are you doing in such a god-forsaken place." If he would visit again he would probably say, You haven't gotten any smarter in 5 years of traveling."

Bitter Lake NWR was established in 1937 to protect waterfowl. It is along the Pecos River, but the river is not a major player in creating the habitat the refuge protects. Most of the water on the refuge comes from underground aquifers with water coming to the surface via artesian wells. The marshy areas are fed by the artesian wells, and the excess water flows to the Pecos River. There is a unique area of the refuge that has sinkholes filled with water some as deep as 60 feet. The geology of the area is dominated by limestone and gypsum, and underground water weakens areas of gypsum resulting in a collapse and a sinkhole. Bitter Lake was so named by early settlers who found the lake had a high alkaline content.

Despite the dryness of the refuge, it does serve as an important stop over location for migrating birds. We are told that thousands of lesser sand hill cranes and light geese (snow and Ross) spend time here. In fact we have been told that the cranes are starting to arrive, but we have not seen or heard any. At  Bosque del Apache NWR where we were last fall, the crane population there was dominated by the greater sand hill cranes migrating from Idaho and Montana. The lessers that will be showing up at Bitter Lake spend the summer in the Arctic. And unlike Bosque, Bitter Lake NWR does not plant and cultivate food crops for the cranes. During the days, the cranes disperse looking for food, but come back to the refuge at night for roosting. It will be fun to observe the differences between the two refuges and the crane populations.

We have now made it out of Oregon. We arrived yesterday in Twin Falls, ID where we spent an enjoyable day today touring Twin Falls with Shannon's niece, Candise and her wonderful family. We had much in common, but I only think so since I didn't get much of the conversations. The amount of laughter indicated that all were having a good time. Candise's two daughters stayed around all day, and that is no little feat to hang out with a bunch of old folks for the day. We enjoyed getting to know Jason, Candise's husband, who was a real hoot and had a most admirable beard. I kept thinking, do I have enough years left in my life to be able to grow a beard like that? Imponderable question, indeed.

Our trip though OR went off without any major hitches. We spent two nights in Bend, and decided if we ever move to OR, Bend would be high on our list of places to settled down. We spent most of our full day between the High Desert Museum and the tasting room at the Deschutes Brewery. The museum was well done and very informative about life in the High Desert region, and we would definitely recommend it to anyone getting close to Bend. Oh, and the tasting room at the Deschutes Brewery, too.

Bend is on the eastern slope of the Cascades and is starting to feel the effects of the rain shadow from the Cascades. Ponderosa pine dominates the vegetation. As we traveled eastward toward ID the pine soon gave way to juniper which was then replaced by rabbit brush and sagebrush. Along the way we passed through framing and ranching areas primarily raising alfalfa hay. After Burns (OR) the terrain grew more mountainous and quite pretty as we followed the Malheur River to Vale where we spent our list night in OR.Vale was advertised as the onion capital. I think we saw more potato fields and were close enough to ID to call them Idaho potatoes.

Tomorrow we head for Provo, UT and the next day onto Grand Junction, CO where we will spend about 5 days visiting Shannon's sister.

Labor Day. The last day of summer. The last full day on the OR coast. The last of our volunteer gig for 2016 on the Siuslaw National Forest. The last local seafood meal on the coast. The last of a lot of things and at the same time the beginning of the rest of our lives. Tomorrow we head eastward ultimately toward New Mexico where we will be volunteering at Bitter Lake NWR in eastern NM. But it will be several weeks of traveling and visiting before we settle down again.

Today was a day of packing, repacking, rearranging, throwing out, cleaning and washing, and starting things to make sure all systems will fire when we leave tomorrow. This phase is always exhausting, but the exhaustion is tempered with the excitement of moving on. We ended the day by driving on top of the Cape (highest point one can drive to on the OR Coast) to see the sunset. We were surprised to see the other RV volunteer couple, Mal and Jerry, also staking out a spot in the rock shelter built by the CCC's to witness their last sunset. They also are leaving this week, and both of us had our last day of work on Sunday.

We have been on the go since coming here. Kedric and Paul live in Portland which is about a 3 hour drive (based on my driving), and we have traveled to Portland a number of times while Kedric and Paul have come to Cape Perpetua twice. We visited Crater Lake and agreed it is one of the iconic National Parks and everyone should visit if they have any chance at all. We visited the redwoods in CA but we're a little lacking in awe since we had spent several days earlier in the year visiting the sequoias. We traveled to Mt. St. Helens and were awed more by the sights and experiencing the story of the eruption and the aftermath than of all the other places we visited in OR and WA. We spent time in northwestern OR and southwestern WA learning new aspects of the Lewis and Clarks saga than we tend to ignore or gloss over when thinking of their journeys further eastward. And the cream of our travels was a visit with grandkids and their parents in MN. Along the way we renewed acquaintenances with former neighbors and work colleagues. It has been a summer on the move.

Along the way and even before we arrived here. I have lost a significant portion of my hearing. I actually didn't have an abundance of hearing to lose, but I lost some anyway. I have not had an explanation as to why the hearing loss, but an MRI did reveal that there were no tumors involved. And the MRI looked fairly normal. The result of my worsening hearing is my inability to do visitor services work. And, my hearing loss is a source of frustration for Shannon because I can no longer converse readily with her. We do have some volunteer gigs lined up this winter and into the spring that involve campground hosting and landscaping work. Being able to hear is not as critical when doing these jobs compared to  visitor services. Not being able to hear as a campground host may be advantageous. I won't be able to hear all the raucous noise in the campground. Anyway, we are not sure what my hearing loss portends for our future as full time RVing volunteers. As usual LIFE is unpredictable, throws curves at you, and keeps you on your toes. And so it goes.