THE “GLUE” THAT HOLDS US TOGETHER!
Hello all,
From Margie Thompson:
The cutoff date for tickets for the Keith Kelley Club Candy Cane Christmas dinner dance is November 30, 2023.
Retired members free, guest ticket is $105.
Click on the link below to register:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/
Password is: KELLEY
A gift for little Nancy
A Holiday to Remember
EDITOR’S NOTE: THIS MAY BE A REPEAT, BUT HERE GOES”
A NOTE FROM BOB BELL – UPDATE
Hey Leroy, You suggested a while back that I write up some comments about being in an Assisted Living facility, to help the next guy who might be in that boat. So here goes, with a little background: I got out of stroke rehab in Aptos just in time to fly to our new home in Knoxville, TN. Two months later I stood up too fast after a nap, and it felt like something grabbed me and threw me across the room. That was my intro to Vertigo. After the broken hip healed, the vertigo remained, and has necessitated my going into an Assisted Living (AL) facility.
There are 50 rooms here, monthly pricing depends on room dimensions. Here they are all private rooms with attached bath (shower), unlike that of a San Jose friend who found herself in AL with a stranger for a roommate. My room, including 2 options, costs $4200/month, guaranteed rate for my occupancy.
Meals here are just OK. Eggs, etc to order for breakfast daily, and lunch and dinners on a menu schedule that repeats every four weeks. Chefs are great, and helpful, but they are limited by budget. There are two sister facilities in town with fancier food, but at higher monthlies.
Activities include occasional volunteers presenting keyboard or guitar music, senior choruses wanting a place to perform, Bingo. etc. My outlets are music CDs, Youtube on the desktop, and reading. And of course The Farsider.
The other 50 residents are a real mixed bag. Maybe 20% male and three married couples. My dinner table (not assigned, but settled into by combination of accident and choice) is usually five other men. One is a retired USN nuclear submarine captain who, after Navy, worked for a while down the road at Oakridge, which is no longer secret, but still a national nuclear energy laboratory. He is the most interesting, although he’s usually engaged in whatever is on his phone. Another is a retired civil engineer who tried to interest me in collecting pennies,but is less and less animated about anything. There’s a retired prison guard whose every sentence is something I can’t understand, followed by a silent laugh. There’s a taciturn retiree from FAA, DOT, who offers no further detail; and finally there’s a retired dairy farmer who sleeps even when eating. Sounds like a bleak existence, no? But I wonder how the folks here would describe me….
Wife Linda did not like living alone in a big house, so we just closed the sale on it, and she’s in a senior apartment which offers 3 meals a day. I would dearly like to join her there, but the damned vertigo can get so bad that a wheelchair is a daily necessity.
A word about Knoxville, Tennessee – the retiring Chief of Police did some housecleaning, and there were some IA cases still unsettled when the new COP came on board from New Orleans. One of the five DCs opted to retire rather than face the charges, which all involved failure to take action on internal race discrimination charges. The new COP has meted out discipline (one demotion, one suspension), and all those cases are closed. The new guy is very open, gets a lot of press, and seems to be saying the right things. I like the direction he’s taking the KPD.
Cost of living here was a nice change from CA. We sold the Aptos Hills house for a million and bought here for exactly half that. Things are catching up here, though. After three years, we sold the Knoxville house for $716,000(!). And that’s it for the Bells’ real estate adventures. From now on it’s paying Rent.
The Univ . of Tenn. is in Knoxville. Football is BIG here, esp.after a good year,and likewise for the baseball team and the Lady Vols softball team. Knoxville is no hick town by any measure; never a mention of moonshine (that’s in Kentucky, next door North.) There’s a symphony and the opera, albeit overbalanced to be sure by a whole lotta country music.
So there’s my story of a California Yankee in the new South. Leroy, you asked for photos of my cute nurses, but I don’t know how to get them out of the phone and into an email.
My best to all, Bob Bell
Sobering Thoughts!
“Men & Women, like nations, think they’re eternal. What person in his 20s or 30s doesn’t believe, at least subconsciously, that we’ll live forever? In the springtime of youth, an endless summer beckons. As you pass 70, it’s harder to hide from reality as you lose more and more friends and relatives.
Nations also have seasons: Imagine a Roman of the 2nd century contemplating an empire that stretched from Britain to the Near East, thinking: This will endure forever…. Forever was about 500 years, give or take…. not bad, but gone!!
France was pivotal in the 17th and 18th centuries; now the land of Charles Martel is on its way to becoming part of the rapidly expanding Muslim ummah.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the sun never set on the British empire; now Albion exists in perpetual twilight. Its 96-year-old sovereign is a fitting symbol for a nation in terminal decline.
In the 1980s, Japan seemed poised to buy the world. Business schools taught Japanese management techniques. Today, its birth rate is so low and its population aging so rapidly that an industry has sprung up to remove the remains of elderly Japanese who die alone.
I was born in 1945, almost at the midpoint of the 20th century – the American century. America’s prestige and influence were never greater. Thanks to the ‘Greatest Generation,’ we won a World War fought throughout most of Europe, Asia, and the Pacific. We reduced Germany to rubble and put the rising sun to bed It set the stage for almost half a century of unprecedented prosperity.
We stopped the spread of communism in Europe and Asia and fought international terrorism. We rebuilt our enemies and lavished foreign aid on much of the world. We built skyscrapers and rockets to the moon. We conquered Polio and now COVID. We explored the mysteries of the Universe and the wonders of DNA…the blueprint of life.
But where is the glory that once was Rome? America has moved from a relatively free economy to socialism – which has worked so well NOWHERE in the world.
We’ve gone from a republican government guided by a constitution to a regime of revolving elites. We have less freedom with each passing year. Like a signpost to the coming reign of terror, the cancel culture is everywhere. We’ve traded the American Revolution for the Cultural Revolution.
The pathetic creature in the White House is an empty vessel filled by his handlers. At the G-7 Summit, his wife had to lead him around like a child. In 1961, when we were young and vigorous, our leader was too. Now a feeble nation is technically led by the oldest most corrupt man to ever serve in the presidency.
We can’t defend our borders, our history (including monuments to past greatness) or our streets. Our cities have become anarchist playgrounds. We are a nation of dependents, mendicants, and misplaced charity. Homeless veterans camp in the streets while illegal aliens are put up in hotels.
The president of the United States can’t even quote the beginning of the Declaration of Independence (‘You know – The Thing’) correctly. Ivy League graduates routinely fail history tests that 5th graders could pass a generation ago. Crime rates soar and we blame the 2nd. Amendment and slash police budgets.
Our culture is certifiably insane. Men who think they’re women. People who fight racism by seeking to convince members of one race that they’re inherently evil, and others that they are perpetual victims. A psychiatrist lecturing at Yale said she fantasizes about ‘unloading a revolver into the head of any white person.’
We slaughter the unborn in the name of freedom, while our birth rate dips lower year by year. Our national debt is so high that we can no longer even pretend that we will repay it one day. It’s a $30-trillion monument to our improvidence and refusal to confront reality. Our ‘entertainment’ is sadistic, nihilistic, and as enduring as a candy bar wrapper thrown in the trash. Our music is noise that spans the spectrum from annoying to repulsive.
Patriotism is called an insurrection, treason celebrated, and perversion sanctified. A man in blue gets less respect than a man in a dress. We’re asking soldiers to fight for a nation our leaders no longer believe in.
How meekly most of us submitted to Fauci-ism (the regime of face masks, lockdowns, and hand sanitizers) shows the impending death of the American spirit.
How do nations slip from greatness to obscurity?
* Fighting endless wars they can’t or won’t win
* Accumulating massive debt far beyond their ability to repay
* Refusing to guard their borders, allowing the nation to be inundated by an alien horde
* Surrendering control of their cities to mob rule
* Allowing indoctrination of the young
* Moving from a republican form of government to an oligarchy
* Losing national identity
* Indulging indolence
* Abandoning God, faith and family – the bulwarks of any stable society.
In America, every one of these symptoms is pronounced, indicating an advanced stage of the disease.
Even if the cause seems hopeless, do we not have an obligation to those who sacrificed so much to give us what we had? I’m surrounded by ghosts urging me on: the Union soldiers who held Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg, the battered bastards of Bastogne, those who served in the cold hell of Korea, the guys who went to the jungles of Southeast Asia and came home to be reviled or neglected.
This is the nation that took in my immigrant grandparents, whose uniform my father and most of my uncles wore in the Second World War. I don’t want to imagine a world without America, even though it becomes increasingly likely.
During Britain’s darkest hour, when its professional army was trapped at Dunkirk and a German invasion seemed imminent, Churchill reminded his countrymen, ‘Nations that go down fighting rise again, and those that surrender tamely are finished.’
The same might be said of causes. If we let America slip through our fingers, if we lose without a fight, what will posterity say of us?
While the prognosis is far from good. Only God knows if America’s day in the sun is over.”
Read it and weep, forward or erase it! I read it and am now forwarding it to you, believing that we in America are at the moment in time to stand up, or let it fall! We now may soon be at the next step in our country’s future. I believe that it might be closer than we think.
WELCOME TO PENIS PARK
JOKE!
C’ya
LPYle#1621
😂😂😂👍
🥰
Leroy,
Another fine job on the weekly rag. Was good to hear from Bob Bell and glad he is getting along, albeit without his wife Linda’s presence. I’ve had intermittent vertigo of late but I’m lucky that it can be controlled by medication at this point. Sure appreciate your work on this weekly communication to keep us all informed and moving forward.
Merry Christmas to you and yours.
Jim McMahon
Thank you!
All the best,
L
Had sent in a very complimentary comment on Bob Bell’s great update and writing, but seems it didn’t get attached to the link. I repeat my compliments on his detailed and very interesting piece …. and that it was great to hear from him back there in Knoxville, Tn …. a place very familiar to us. Maybe next trip through we’ll find him and get out for a Starbuck’s run, or something. Grea job, also, on your continued publication.
THANX!