Classified

The headline says, "Biden aides find more classified documents."

Although some politicians are quick to make comparisons with Trump, the difference here is that Trump refused to return the documents to the National Archives after repeated requests to do so. Finally, the FBI had to raid Trump's home to retrieve the documents. Whereas, when Biden aides found the documents, they called the National Archives immediately and National Archives personnel retrieved the documents the next day. 

I once had a job where I worked with classified documents. I used to write classified documents. After writing the document, I would stamp the pages with the proper classification such as Confidential or Secret, and I would stamp the first page with the appropriate paragraph of law that enabled the document to have that classification. Then the document would go into a locked file cabinet. I never took documents home, or even out of the office. Even though I wrote the document, once it was stamped it was classified and had to remain at the office in the locked file cabinet.

It seems to me that a lot of people in Washington are playing fast and loose with classified documents, and I'm sure some of the documents contain information that affects our national security to a much greater extent than the documents I wrote. I am surprised at this behavior and at the casual attitude regarding these documents. If I had taken classified documents home, and it was discovered, I would expect to be in hot water right away. I wouldn't have to wait over a year for the FBI to come to my home and retrieve the documents.

I'm just really surprised by this entire "I-found-some-more-classified-documents-in-a-closet" attitude, as if that's completely okay and nobody seems to be responsible. It's a la-de-da attitude that would certainly not be accepted when I was working with classified documents. Of course, now it's a different day and attitudes do change. But sometimes, the change is not for the better. That last statement could apply to a lot of things today.

The Toyota

It's January 10, 2023. Exactly a month ago, on December 10th, Nuria (my significant other) was in an auto accident. It was the other driver's fault. Finally, today, the other driver's insurance company made an offer on the damage to Nuria's car. The car, a 2009 Toyota Camry LE with 57,362 miles at the time of the accident, was totaled. Nuria paid $14,867 for it last July, five months before the accident.

The other driver was at fault so his insurance, Progressive, is responsible for making us "whole." Today, we received a phone call from Progressive and they are asking us to accept their offer of $10,812.  

We have looked at many cars online, and we found one that is comparable to the one that we lost. It's a 2010 Toyota with 38,242 miles for $13,000. It's the same color, inside and out, as her Toyota that was totaled. But it has had one accident and two owners. Her previous Toyota had no accidents and one owner when she bought it.

Not stated in the advertised price is the fact that this dealership adds $675 to every purchase as a "paperwork fee." I know because I have done business with them. Thus, if we buy the car, the real price will be $13,675.

If we take Progressive's offer, we will have to add $2863 dollars (total: $13,675) to get close to the $14,867 car she was driving in December. 

Here's a thought: why won't Progressive pay us enough to buy a 2009-2010 Toyota Camry LE with no more than 60,000 miles? The car that was totaled was in excellent condition—fit, finish, paint, and interior. They are offering about 80% of what we need to get a car similar to the car she had. Except the car she had, at the time she bought it, had no accidents and one owner. 

Now I know that her car had depreciated during the time she was driving it, but five months? Really? It probably didn't depreciate enough to offset the higher price, due to inflation, of an identical auto now.

I'll keep you posted on what happens. Maybe Progressive will restore Nuria to the car she was driving without making her pay 20% of the purchase price. And maybe not. I'll let all of you know what happens.

This is the blog post about Nuria's accident: Nuria Part 2 

UPDATE:

I had a long conversation with a Progressive agent. I couldn't budge him from the original $10,812 settlement offer. He said he could not offer more than that amount, nor could anyone at his company. He emphasized that the insurance offer is not a replacement value for the car. The insurance offer is based on the value of the car at the time of the accident, as reported by J.D. Power. (J.D. Power owns N.A.D.A., which lists the value of cars.) He said that auto insurance companies always reimburse the insured in the amount computed by a company like J.D. Power, and this is called an "arm's-length transaction," because the insurance company isn't responsible for computing what the value of the car was when it was damaged. 

I understand what the insurance company is doing, and my response to the agent was, "You're telling me that you will pay me a 'wholesale' value for the car, whereas I have to pay a 'retail' value to replace the car." He agreed with my assessment, that that is what is happening. Nevertheless, Nuria can't buy a car like the one that was destroyed with the money that Progressive will pay us. We must add money to the insurance money in order to replace the destroyed car with a similar car—same model, year, mileage, etc. That's how insurance works. So, I'll say it again. Insurance will not pay replacement value for your loss. It will pay to repair the car, but if the car is not repairable, it will pay you the value of the car at the time of the loss, which may be, and probably will be, less than retail price for your car in your area.

Bummer.

Lessons 2

My reader LL left a comment to my previous post, Lessons, in which she said, "I believe this would mean that those we come in contact with merely tumbled out of another life -- and have nothing to do with us -- such as our family members."

I don't know if that happens, but I do think that sometimes we are closer to someone passing through our life than we are to our family members. Someone we think is a stranger may come into our life to teach us a lesson and then leave us to ponder the lesson. 

About a year ago I posted a blog titled 3 Poems. I'll repeat the second poem here, as it touches on what I was saying in "Lessons."

---

My connection to you

is more than who you are

and what you do.

My connection to you

is lifetimes of love.

Perhaps you were my daughter

many lifetimes now.

Perhaps I was your son

not that long ago.

Maybe we were brothers

or sisters

or lovers.

Man and wife

or children together.

I look into your eyes

and see someone that I know

well beyond our time together.

I loved you long before we met.

I had forgotten how much.

Now,

I remember.

---

Existence is a puzzle and I cannot see the whole picture. I can see a few of the puzzle pieces, and that is all. 

I have beliefs—call them principles—and one of them is that a Creator must be fair. A human life is one page in a very long book. But you are learning, whether or not you think you came to this earth to learn.

Here is a piece of writing that I created about 25 or 30 years ago. It seems like another lifetime now. It was originally going to be one chapter in a book, but I got distracted by other things and never completed it.  

Lessons

Suppose reincarnation is real. Suppose you die and then you're born again. But suppose that in your next life, you're born into a poor family in a poor country and you grow up struggling just to survive. Suppose you fall in with a group of gangsters, like many do in our big cities right here in the US, and therefore you become a gangster. You're young, but you're stealing cars, robbing drugstores, selling dope, and maybe you have to kill someone, because it's either them or you. Do you think you would turn out to be the same person you are now, who knows right from wrong, who knows where the line is and doesn't want to cross it?

I'm asking if you think you have a soul and whether that soul has learned values that it will carry with it into another life. Values: like good and bad, right and wrong. 

I ask that because I think we do have souls, and some of us have lived many lives and been through many experiences, both good and bad. And some of us are young souls, and like a toddler bumping into furniture as he struggles to walk, some of us with young souls are bumping into "the rules" and bumping into "laws" and end up hurting people and ourselves. But do we learn, and do we remember?

Do the lessons get more difficult as we move from life to life? When you learn to be a good person, do you then learn what it feels like to be a paralyzed person, or a falsely-accused prisoner? Do we have to go through every conceivable situation in order to reach perfection?

Now some people will say, no, we only live one life and then we are judged. What kind of judgment is fair when everyone has a different starting point and some have a smooth road while others have a road full of potholes? Where is the fairness? There is none. Either there is no judgment or the judgment comes after many, many lifetimes are lived. I believe the latter. 

I'm a long way from perfection. I don't even know which way to go to reach perfection. But I know when wrong is being done, and I know when good is being done. I know that some people do good and other people do bad. Is it what they were taught? Or is "knowing right from wrong" something they have learned by living hundreds of embodiments on this earth?

I suspect we live hundreds of lifetimes, and I suspect that each life we live is judged. But not judged by a Supreme Being, but rather judged by our higher selves, the spirit that exists within each of us. I think we know when we've done wrong. We learn something in this life, we are born again, and we learn a new lesson in our new life. Wash, rinse, repeat, until we get all the stains out. That, I believe, is our human existence.

Don't judge others. Some are just starting their journeys and they have a long way to go and much to learn. You're here on earth, so you're still learning lessons, too. We're all learning lessons. Be kind to others and remember that they're just learning, so sometimes, like all of us have done, they make mistakes.

I made a little slideshow to wrap up this blog post. View it here.

Damar Hamlin

I turned on the national news at 7AM this morning, and at the top of the show was the news about Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin. Hamlin was making a tackle and fell to the ground, got up and walked a few steps, then fell to the ground again, unconscious. His heart had stopped, the news people said. More likely, his heart had gone into atrial fibrillation, an abnormal rhythm in which the heart quivers instead of beats. Therefore, his brain wasn't getting fresh oxygenated blood and he passed out. This can happen when the chest takes a hit at just the right spot above the heart and at a certain moment in the heart's rhythm. 

The NFL keeps about twenty medical specialists on the sidelines at every game. They rushed to Hamlin's side and began CPR. This continued for 9 minutes until his heart began beating on its own. They took him to University of Cincinnati Medical Center, a level 1 trauma center about 10 minutes away.

Hamlin has a history of supporting charities, a history that began before he entered pro football. At the time of the on-field medical incident, he had a GoFundMe account that was trying to raise $2400 for a children's charity. When awareness of his accident spread, donations zoomed upward and surpassed three million dollars. When I checked, the top donation was $5,500. For those who would like to donate, you can donate here.

I've had several sudden attacks of atrial fibrilation (a-fib), but with me, my heart beats irregularly. It makes me feel exhausted. The first attack occurred in 2004. Two days in the hospital were able to restore my heartbeat. The next attack was in 2011, and again in 2013, and then again in 2014, in 2015, and in 2016. Each time, I was in the hospital for three days. Usually the treatment worked and I left the hospital with my heart beating normally. 

Except for the last attack. In 2016, the doctors were unable to fix my heart, and I left the hospital taking three medicines for my heart, and today—in 2023—my heart still has a-fib. My cardiologist wants to put me on another medication, a modern blood thinner, but I draw the line at three heart medicines. Besides, the next medication he wants me to take is considered by some medical experts to be too dangerous, and they think it shouldn't be on the market. Like some other meds, it's a two-edged sword. It can save you or kill you. It killed Charlie Daniels, the fiddle player and leader of The Charlie Daniels Band. He had a hemorrhagic stroke (a.k.a brain bleed) and by the time they got him to a hospital and gave him drugs to counteract the blood thinner he was taking—he was dead. I think God is going to take me when he wants me. I've known people who should be dead but through a "miracle" they lived. And I've know people who suddenly died much too young. 

I wish the best for Damar Hamlin. The last news I heard reported that he was still unconscious in the hospital. Good luck, Damar Hamlin. May you live to play another day.

[Update: According to the latest news at 6:30 PM, it appears that Damar Hamlin suffered from ventricular fibrillation, not atrial fibrillation. According to WebMD: "While not as common as AFib, ventricular fibrillation is more deadly. It can cause sudden cardiac arrest or sudden cardiac death, the leading killer in the U.S."]

Reminder Program

I always wanted to be a writer, but I don't write well enough to make writing my vocation. So writing became a hobby. I began writing science fiction stories at age 15.

I wanted to be an electrical engineer, so I went first to a two-year college, because that's what I could afford, and then to two universities, graduating with a BSEE from Virginia Tech. 

While I was working as an engineer, I decided to learn how to create websites using HTML (hypertext markup language) and Javascript. Today there are many websites that offer tools that make it easy to create a website. You don't have to know HTML. Even if you just rent space on a web server, you can buy a website design tool to create the HTML for you. But when I started creating websites, the only "tool" I used was Windows Notepad.

After I retired from engineering, I wanted to learn how to write programs for Windows, so I did that. I taught myself how to program in Visual Basic, which, despite the name, is a programming language as complex and versatile as Visual C# (C-Sharp). 

I learn best by doing, so I jumped into writing my first VB program. But what should this new program do? I recalled how difficult it was for my mother to remember to take her medications as she grew older. Some of her meds were to be taken every day, some were to be taken every other day, some could not be taken at the same time as certain other meds. It was complicated, and she drew up little charts to help guide her, but with growing dementia, even the charts weren't enough. Not being able to take her meds on schedule probably contributed to her death. Surely, I thought, other people must have this same problem. So I wrote a medication reminder program, and while I was writing it, I decided to also throw in an appointment reminder. 

I began writing it on Windows Vista using VB Express 2005. My Vista computer crashed and I bought a new machine running Windows 8.1. I installed VB Express 2008 and continued writing the Reminder plus other programs with that tool. Eventually, I upgraded my design tool to VB Express 2010. By then I had almost all the Reminder program elements written and functioning. 

I still use my Windows 8.1 PC, and ReminderXR runs fine on it. I know it runs on Windows 10, and I assume Windows 11. If you think you could use a Medication & Appointment Reminder that runs on Windows, you can get it here. Here's how:

Download RXRsetup, disregard the warning that says it might be malware. (I have to pay money to register the program in order to get rid of that warning, and I refuse to do that for a program I give away.)

It's a reliable program. It has one noticeable bug: if you set an appointment to repeat (every week or every two weeks) it sometimes doesn't delete the original appointment. It always creates the new appointment and you can always delete the old one manually, if it bothers you.

Anyway, and this is the point of this blog post, I wrote the Reminder program to help older people to remember to take their medications and keep their appointments. Now, twenty years after my mother passed away, I use my Reminder program every day. It's very helpful to me. When I wrote it, I didn't see that coming. I thought I was just teaching myself to write software for Windows. Not only does it remind me to take my medicine and keep my appointments on time, it's useful for looking up things I did months ago (trips to the airport, to the doctor, etc.). 

It's a funny world. Who knows where your actions will lead you?

Today, there are probably many similar programs with more features than ReminderXR, but the program I wrote does everything I need. Maybe it will help someone out there in the world. I know one of my readers, LL, uses it almost every day. Unless she found something better, and if she has, she hasn't mentioned it to me. So if you want to download it and try it, good luck and I hope it works for you. 

(Note 1: If you visit the website you may notice there is a Help section inside the Reminder-XR section. If you missed it, it's here. There is also a Backstory section that provides more information on the program, and it is located here.)

(Note 2: So why is it called ReminderXR? I originally named it RxReminder, as in Rx (prescription medicine) Reminder. But somebody registered that name, and so, since most of my working files begin with the letters RXR, I just renamed the program ReminderXR. (RxReminder = ReminderXR = RXR)

(Note 3: While you're at my VirtualWayne website, you'll find links to some of my philosophy and a number of photos on Flickr. Though, strangely, some of the photos have simply vanished.)

(Note 4: I have other websites, and Stardust Realm is one of them on which I wax philosophical. It's best read after midnight when the house is quiet.)

New Year 2023

My reader "TA" left a comment to my previous blog post in which she wrote, "Weird things happen in our lives, miracles exist. Remember that we are in this earth for a reason. Do you know which one is yours?"

I could not agree more. Definitely, weird things do happen in my life. Miracles do exist. I am certainly in this earth for a reason.

The reason we are on earth is to learn lessons that we could not otherwise learn. We have to experience life, and do things, and face consequences, and then we learn a lesson. When we do unto others, others will later do unto us those same lessons, and we will learn how we made them feel. Then, in the future, maybe we will choose to do something different.

It is impossible to learn all our lessons in one lifetime, so we return to Earth. We return many times—hundreds of embodiments. With each lifetime we learn a little more, and our lessons go from primitive to sophisticated. We learn what it feels like to hurt someone when we experience being hurt. We experience physical pain, then we move onward to experience emotional pain and mental anguish. We betray someone, then in another lifetime we experience betrayal, and we learn how it feels. With each life we live, and with each experience, we become better people. We become aware of how our actions affect those around us, how our actions hurt others, and how our actions can comfort others. With each lifetime we grow a little. It's a long process: we live hundreds of embodiments on earth just to nudge us from a primitive soul to a caring human. Eventually we know the Truth and feel the Truth. We evolve.

I knew a woman named Marion Starnes. She headed the Terra Nova Center, a spiritual retreat in North Carolina. She was one of those gifted people who could see the past lives of others. I asked her, "Do first generation souls ever come and talk to you?" Marion replied, "Very rarely. No, first generations are too busy trying to get themselves out of jail." I thought her reply was excellent and cut right to the heart of the issue. "First generations are too busy trying to get themselves out of jail." We are here to learn, and sometimes our lessons are harsh, but only because our actions were harsh. Physics tells us that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. That's how it works for our souls, too. We are always learning and we are always evolving. We are becoming better souls and better humans. 

No doubt some of my readers won't believe what I am saying, and that's okay with me. But if they behaved as though my words are true, then they will end up being better people despite what they believe. You never forget bad things that happen to you. You always remember the wonderful things that happen to you. Eventually, you will learn that your life here on Earth has a purpose.

"Weird things happen in our lives. Miracles exist. We are here in this earth for a reason.  Do you know which one is yours?"

May God bless you and may you have a wonderful year ahead. Just remember to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Bless those who curse you, and pray for those who hurt you. I hope that you have a wonderful New Year!

Terry's Double

It's 3:10PM on New Year's Eve. The New Year is 8 hours and 50 minutes away. I don't feel like writing a new blog post, so, as I've done once before, I'm going to steal a post from one of my other blogs. This post was originally published on The Applebee Chronicles. And oh yeah, Happy New Year everybody!

The Nissan

We picked up Nuria's rental car yesterday. It's a 2021 Nissan Sentra SV. Cars have come a long way since my Jeep was built. The Nissan owner's manual is 510 pages. There are also several other manuals about the vehicle.

It doesn't use an ordinary ignition key. No, it uses an electronic pendant. First, you use the pendant to unlock the car. Then, you use the pendant to start the car. Starting the car is complicated enough that there is an online video showing you how to do it. (See the video below.)

Doing anything, like turning on the A/C, or the headlights, or even the radio, is different enough that you have to learn how to do it. I suppose that eventually you would get the hang of it. I'm hoping we won't have the Nissan long enough for me to remember how everything works.

Late December

This morning, I got out of bed and I walked around the bed to the bedroom window (one of them) to adjust the Venetian blinds, and I discovered that the window was cracked open a half inch. It's probably been open since autumn, but I keep the blinds closed and no one could see that it was open. That may explain why my heating system has been running so much. When it's 8 degrees outside and your bedroom window is open, even a half inch, the room is going to be chilly and the heat is going to run. The opening was a half inch wide and 36 inches tall. That's equal to one inch by18 inches tall. And that's 18 square inches, which is equivalent to a round hole that has a 5.75 inch diameter. That's an almost six inch diameter hole in the wall. When the oil company fills up my heating oil tank, I'm going to pay for that oversight.

Nuria is going to get a haircut today, her first since she arrived here on September 20th, a little over three months ago. She's going to walk to the hairdresser's shop for a 3PM appointment, then walk home. Then we'll drive to Enterprise Rent-a-Car so she can pick up a rental car to use until the insurance matters are settled and she can buy another car. I hope that will happen in January.

We visited one of my very good friends yesterday. He is in poor condition. He is unable to stand up or walk due to several health problems. I hope he will survive this year, but with the condition that he is in, he's probably ready to go. There often comes a time when life is more of a burden than a joy, and the future holds no promise of change. 

I'm going to start a diet on New Year's Day. I'd like to lose about 30 pounds. I've tried before, and I've given up. I went on the Atkin's Diet three times. Each time, the same thing happened. I began losing weight for two weeks, then my weight stabilized for two weeks, then I gained weight for two weeks, at which point my weight was equal to my starting weight. At that point I quit the diet. So this time I'll have to do something different. Maybe combine Atkin's with a fast every other day?  I know I'd feel better if I weighed less, but I definitely don't want to be hungry every day.

Jonah Goldberg has an interesting column in the LA Times today. He compares Trump's annus horribilis (as he describes it) with Nixon's scandalous presidency. You can read it here.