Saturday, February 15, 2020

Hospital Blues

My son and his son were in a horrible accident. They were driving home from my grandson's MMA class. We still don't have many details about the accident itself.

When first responders arrived on the scene both my son and my grandson were unconscious. They used the jaws of life to get my son free. Then they pulled my grandson through his father's side of the car.

My grandson is a tall boy. From his size you would think he was a grown man. But he is only 14 years old so the took him to Children's Hospital.

His leg was broken in 5 places. Bones in his foot and toes were broken. He had surgery to repair them. It was a long surgery. A couple of days later he began complaining that his back hurt. An MRI revealed several compress fractures of vertebrae. His mother is with him and friends and family are in and out to do what they can.

He has healing and therapy ahead of him. Thankfully he is fine otherwise.

My son has multiple breaks in both arms, multiple breaks in both legs. 5 broken ribs, both ankles are broken, three compression fractures in his back, and broken bones in his feet and toes. He has had surgery on one leg and arm to stabilize the bones. He had a second surgery to repair some more of his injuries. Two more surgeries are scheduled for next week.

When they release my son from the hospital he will have to go to a rehabilitation facility where they have the things necessary to take care of him. He is looking at a lot of therapy.

I write this not looking for sympathy. It is to explain that I am taking a break until things are more stable.

Tuesday, February 4, 2020

Shall We Caucus?

I will bet you wish you knew someone who took part in the Iowa caucus. They have still not announced the results and it is about 16 hours later.

You do know someone. I was there. In my small town we had exactly 21 people taking part in the Democratic caucus.

I felt it was not run as efficiently as I would have liked. I like a little more order than I saw there. This is only my observation and not meant to cast aspersions on the process.

The doors were closed at precisely 7:00 PM as instructed by the rules.  A cover letter was read that explained what we were going to do.

There were local representatives for 3 of the candidates. Since they were residents of our town they would also be voting.

Each representative spoke to the reasons we should vote for their candidate. If someone wished to speak about a candidate who did not have an official representative we were welcome. Two of us did.

Then we were given a card and a pen so we could write the name of the candidate we were voting for. We then were grouped by candidate.

The groups were Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Tom Steyers, Pete Buttigieg, and Amy Klobuchar. That was it.

In order to be "viable" and move on to the next level a candidate had to have at least 15% of the total of votes attending. Bernie Sanders and Tom Steyer were eliminated and their supporters chose other candidates.

In the end Pete Buttigieg had the most supporters. To close the caucus a delegate was chosen to go to the county level and represent the top candidate from our precinct.

So that was the result in my precinct. I have no idea yet what happened in the rest of the state.

I normally keep my political beliefs to myself because I choose not to share them. I will share that my candidate was viable but did not come out on top. I hope he did well in the state. I also hope that people will vote in their primaries too.