Fudomyo9-A Lesson in Perseverance

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 110

2009-02-15T12:37:00.001-05:00

It's a new day of a new week...

therefore...l

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 109

2009-02-12T13:11:00.001-05:00

it's only one more day...

nibble, nibble......

....

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 108

2009-02-11T09:17:00.003-05:00

'tis really a new start as wireless networking is here to stay - hoorah!

the bad news - we are still in lockdown as the GI infection continues to run rampant - quite literally...

good news?? -

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 107

2009-02-03T10:36:00.002-05:00

The library has been closed due to a gi infection going around....

...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 106

2009-01-28T11:06:00.002-05:00

I have a cold and will miss therapy today but maybe I can write a little bit...

We have a new President, I wish him well...

We still don't have wireless Internet ...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 105

2009-01-18T11:19:00.000-05:00

A new day...

a new week....

a new beginning.....

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 104

2009-01-02T08:21:00.001-05:00

The Second Day of the New Year...

...

...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 103

2009-01-01T05:52:00.001-05:00

Happy New Year!

...

...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 102

2008-12-28T14:37:00.002-05:00

It is the day that begins the week so it is appropriate to begin anew...

...

...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 101

2008-12-22T09:11:00.001-05:00

Hello World!

...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 100

2008-12-10T13:24:00.004-05:00

All I want for Xmas is my two front teeth...

and maybe a few more...

...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 99

2008-12-08T17:11:00.003-05:00

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood won't you be mine? I remember hearing that line so many times with BJ growing up with Mr. Rogers...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 98

2008-12-07T16:12:00.001-05:00

It is the beginning of a new week...

Showdown in the Big Tent

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 97

2008-12-06T14:09:00.002-05:00

It's time for a test drive on the super-highway of life whatever the hell that means...

Obama Pledges Public Works on a Vast Scale

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 96

2008-12-05T16:48:00.003-05:00

Happy Birthday

LENA!

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 95

2008-12-04T05:57:00.003-05:00

I will try to be as direct as possible...

I am fine I just need a break from the responsibility of doing anything...

In Banking, Emanuel Made Money and Connections

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 94

2008-12-03T06:40:00.001-05:00

this is the largest bold type

this is the smallest

and this is normal

and this is large....

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 93

2008-12-02T06:25:00.002-05:00

Good Morning to All!
Today is Tuesday and it is the day I try Notepad 2008 in my blog...
Sayonara

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 92

2008-12-01T08:44:00.004-05:00

A new Monday, a new Month and a new attempt to blog more productivly... hmm.../ is that a word???

Google’s Gatekeepers

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 91

2008-11-26T11:25:00.001-05:00

It's the day before Thanksgiving and I am getting hungry for turkey...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 90

2008-11-22T14:13:00.002-05:00

This is the last try at this on Sunday ...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 89

2008-11-12T10:51:00.003-05:00

It's now been a week to remember with yesterday being Veteran's Day and tomorrow being Salmon Brook's Nemorial service...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 88

2008-11-07T07:09:00.002-05:00

'tis Friday the end of the weak or the beginning of the end or just TGIF!!

Sayonara!

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 87

2008-11-06T15:30:00.002-05:00

It's time to bare all, to come clean or to communicate what happened to see where we go from here... The 'library box' got stolen or trashed... It had in it two self-inking stamps that said 'Salmon Brook Library', extra pens, the index cards that indicate the books that were checked out by dates...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 86

2008-11-04T06:25:00.001-05:00

umm.....

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 85

2008-11-03T06:20:00.001-05:00

I'm not over my anger at the theft in the library so I won't be ....

Sayonara!

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 84

2008-11-02T08:36:00.003-05:00

Some Good News:

New York City Marathon
Elite Women Getting Older, and Better

By JULIET MACUR
Published: November 1, 2008

After nearly a decade of running marathons — 19 races that add up to 497.8 pounding miles — Catherine Ndereba insists there is one thing she cannot live without. Not her coach. Not her agent. Not even the occasional Philly cheese steak, her reward for training 90 to 100 miles a week.

It is her massage therapist.

“When I was younger, I never used to have a lot of fatigue in my muscles — never,” Ndereba, 36, said recently in Norristown, Pa., her training base in the United States. “But now, if I don’t have a massage at least twice a week, I feel like I can’t move. I don’t feel old; I still feel like I’m in my 20s. But, yes, sometimes, there are a few signs that my body doesn’t agree.”
Ndereba, a four-time winner of the Boston Marathon and two-time Olympic silver medalist for Kenya, is among the 41 elite women in the field for Sunday’s New York City Marathon. And many of them have probably noticed uncharacteristically sore muscles or creaky joints.
Their average age is about 33, one of the oldest groups of elite women, if not the oldest, in the history of the race, organizers said. Two-thirds are 30 or older, including the favorites Paula Radcliffe, 34, and Gete Wami, 33. Nearly half are 35 and older.
“It’s unusual to see so many really good women of that age, but this is probably a fluke that they are all so good at once,” Mary Wittenberg, the race director, said. “I do expect to see a changing of the guard because we are probably looking at the end of a superstar generation.”
“Gete, Paula, Catherine are in a class by themselves, but time is ticking,” she added. “They are probably getting close to the point of diminishing returns.”
Those runners are not pioneers in racing marathons — and often winning — into their 30s. At that age, many distance runners are in their prime, some experts say, because their bodies are accustomed to the mileage required to train for the 26.2-mile races.
Many also started running marathons only after they had built a foundation in shorter races, to prevent burnout and injuries. A widespread belief is that elite runners have a limited number of marathons in them, so they also tend to use their time in competition wisely.
Grete Waitz was 35 in 1988 when she won her ninth New York City Marathon. The year before, the British runner Priscilla Welch was a seemingly ancient 42 when she crossed the finish line first.
This year in Beijing, Constantina Tomescu of Romania won the Olympic marathon at 38. In September, Irina Mikitenko, 36, won the Berlin Marathon. She began running marathons last year, she said, because she was mentally tough enough to do so after having two children.
To some, the current wave of older women succeeding in marathons makes sense. More women are running the distance these days, they say, so more they are training at a higher level.
More women are also sticking with the marathon because of the economic incentive, said Ryan Lamppa, a researcher for Running USA, a nonprofit organization that tracks trends in distance running.
Top runners like Radcliffe and her peers receive six-figures appearance fees from big-city marathons, agents and race directors said. So a hefty payday is guaranteed just for showing up and finishing. Five of the women in Sunday’s field have made at least $1 million in prize money in their careers, according to the Association of Road Racing Statisticians. The top 10 women on Sunday will also receive prize money.
First place is worth $130,000 of the $301,000 purse, second place $65,000, third $40,000, fourth $25,000, fifth $15,000 and so on down to $1,000 for 10th place. In addition, bonuses ranging from $5,000 to $70,000 are paid for reaching certain time standards.
Twenty years ago, though, the total women’s purse in the New York City Marathon was $134,500, organizers said, and a decade ago, it was $165,000.
“If the sport was back in its amateur days, you definitely wouldn’t see as many 30-plus marathoners than you do now,” Lamppa said. “I don’t think they’re staying in the sport purely for the love of it. It’s a nice gig if you can do it long enough. But, you know, it’s a painful gig, too.”
To make a decent living at marathon running in your 30s and 40s, Lamppa added, athletes must remain fast enough to finish in the top 10. That could be a challenge for an aging athlete.
Hirofumi Tanaka, an exercise researcher at the University of Texas, said endurance athletes had the edge over sprinters as time marched on. He said sprinters peaked at 22 to 24, and marathoners peaked at 28 to 31. Some marathoners reach peak performance around 35, he added. The trick is finding the way to extend that time frame.
High-level marathoners should be able to do so, said Dr. Vonda Wright, a professor of orthopedics at the University of Pittsburgh. In a study published in March that looked at male and female American masters record-holders in distances from 100 to 10,000 meters for the past 50 years, Wright said she found less than a 1 percent decline per year in performance as they aged from 30 to 50.
The slow-twitch muscles needed in endurance sports do not decline significantly until athletes reach their late 30s or early 40s, she said. But fast-twitch muscles that sprinters rely on begin deteriorating in their late 20s and early 30s.
“If you are a runner in your 30s or 40s, it’s really a sweet spot to be in,” Wright said. “You’ve trained longer, so your heart works more efficiently and your lungs exchange oxygen more efficiently. You know your race, you know your body. Biology might not have taken over yet, so you don’t see that muscle physiology decline that would prevent them from being amazing.”
That decline, however, could happen any day — and there is no telling when the athlete will notice it. Waitz, one of the best female marathoners, said from the time she was 35 until she retired at 38, she could sense her body changing.
“The end sneaked up on me,” she said.
After 10 years and 20 marathons, Waitz said, it took longer to recover from races. She became injured more easily. But she said the change in the mental aspect of the marathon prompted her retirement.
Waitz said she did not feel as hungry to win as she once had, partly because she sensed that her body was not as strong.
“I always say that there are two ages of a person: a running age and your biological age,” she said. “So after all those marathons, I was old as a runner but still young as a person. I still felt fast, but I was not. It was time for me to go.”
Ndereba, a marathoner since 1999, said she had no idea when she would retire.
“Now why would I quit if I can still finish in the top five?” Ndereba said. “Why would I quit when there are people out there, so many people, who would want to run like Catherine, but they can’t? I will run until I feel I can’t do it anymore.”
With her massage therapist, she said, she still feels much faster and stronger than she did at 26, when she made her marathon debut in Boston.
Ndereba said she was in so much pain after finishing sixth in that race that she needed to be carted off in a wheelchair.
“So now, I don’t need a wheelchair when I finish,” she said with a smile. “It shows that I’m only getting better, right?”
More Articles in Sports » A version of this article appeared in print on November 2, 2008, on page SP1 of the New York edition.

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 83

2008-11-01T11:13:00.001-04:00

Happy November 1st, the night when we get an extra hour of sleep...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 82

2008-10-31T07:12:00.003-04:00

Happy Halloween!!!

All 'allows eve!!

Sayonara!

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 81

2008-10-29T08:43:00.003-04:00

It's not isolation it's called 'containment'. The fire doors from the lobby to A-wing are closed thus preventing me from going to the kitchen, to the library or to Dick's room... Peg and I got online and ordered the dictionary and the stand for about $90.00 so we have about $10.00 left for the magnifying glass as we had $100.00 authorized from Resident Council...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 80

2008-10-28T06:32:00.001-04:00

Baby it's cold outside!!!

Sayonara!

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 79

2008-10-27T07:02:00.004-04:00

Monday ! Monday !

Sounds like the beginning of a song maybe by Simon & Garfunkel??

The Good News ?

The Barnyard Strategist

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 78

2008-10-26T12:22:00.002-04:00

'tis the day for new beginnings, for renewed effort, for fortitude to see it through to the end of the beginning... hmm?? it seems we're in a loop....

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 77

2008-10-25T14:13:00.004-04:00

It doesn't take much to make one day different from another... Yesterday we finally got rid of the 3 big closet wardrobes that were in the Rosewood dining hall and limiting the library from expanding....One was donated to the therapy alternative room and the other two went into the TV lounge... All credit goes to Peg Kinney fixer-upper extra-ordinaire...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 76

2008-10-24T06:31:00.006-04:00

Whimsical... Going out on a whim...Turn right at the next whim...Isn't this fun???

Sayonara on a whim!!!

NYTimes Editorial

Barack Obama for President

Published: October 23, 2008

Hyperbole is the currency of presidential campaigns, but this year the nation’s future truly hangs in the balance.

The United States is battered and drifting after eight years of President Bush’s failed leadership. He is saddling his successor with two wars, a scarred global image and a government systematically stripped of its ability to protect and help its citizens — whether they are fleeing a hurricane’s floodwaters, searching for affordable health care or struggling to hold on to their homes, jobs, savings and pensions in the midst of a financial crisis that was foretold and preventable.
As tough as the times are, the selection of a new president is easy. After nearly two years of a grueling and ugly campaign, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois has proved that he is the right choice to be the 44th president of the United States.
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Mr. Obama has met challenge after challenge, growing as a leader and putting real flesh on his early promises of hope and change. He has shown a cool head and sound judgment. We believe he has the will and the ability to forge the broad political consensus that is essential to finding solutions to this nation’s problems.
In the same time, Senator John McCain of Arizona has retreated farther and farther to the fringe of American politics, running a campaign on partisan division, class warfare and even hints of racism. His policies and worldview are mired in the past. His choice of a running mate so evidently unfit for the office was a final act of opportunism and bad judgment that eclipsed the accomplishments of 26 years in Congress.
Given the particularly ugly nature of Mr. McCain’s campaign, the urge to choose on the basis of raw emotion is strong. But there is a greater value in looking closely at the facts of life in America today and at the prescriptions the candidates offer. The differences are profound.
Mr. McCain offers more of the Republican every-man-for-himself ideology, now lying in shards on Wall Street and in Americans’ bank accounts. Mr. Obama has another vision of government’s role and responsibilities.
In his convention speech in Denver, Mr. Obama said, “Government cannot solve all our problems, but what it should do is that which we cannot do for ourselves: protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools and new roads and new science and technology.”
Since the financial crisis, he has correctly identified the abject failure of government regulation that has brought the markets to the brink of collapse.
The Economy
The American financial system is the victim of decades of Republican deregulatory and anti-tax policies. Those ideas have been proved wrong at an unfathomable price, but Mr. McCain — a self-proclaimed “foot soldier in the Reagan revolution” — is still a believer.
Mr. Obama sees that far-reaching reforms will be needed to protect Americans and American business.
Mr. McCain talks about reform a lot, but his vision is pinched. His answer to any economic question is to eliminate pork-barrel spending — about $18 billion in a $3 trillion budget — cut taxes and wait for unfettered markets to solve the problem.
Mr. Obama is clear that the nation’s tax structure must be changed to make it fairer. That means the well-off Americans who have benefited disproportionately from Mr. Bush’s tax cuts will have to pay some more. Working Americans, who have seen their standard of living fall and their children’s options narrow, will benefit. Mr. Obama wants to raise the minimum wage and tie it to inflation, restore a climate in which workers are able to organize unions if they wish and expand educational opportunities.
Mr. McCain, who once opposed President Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy as fiscally irresponsible, now wants to make them permanent. And while he talks about keeping taxes low for everyone, his proposed cuts would overwhelmingly benefit the top 1 percent of Americans while digging the country into a deeper fiscal hole.
National Security
The American military — its people and equipment — is dangerously overstretched. Mr. Bush has neglected the necessary war in Afghanistan, which now threatens to spiral into defeat. The unnecessary and staggeringly costly war in Iraq must be ended as quickly and responsibly as possible.
While Iraq’s leaders insist on a swift drawdown of American troops and a deadline for the end of the occupation, Mr. McCain is still talking about some ill-defined “victory.” As a result, he has offered no real plan for extracting American troops and limiting any further damage to Iraq and its neighbors.
Mr. Obama was an early and thoughtful opponent of the war in Iraq, and he has presented a military and diplomatic plan for withdrawing American forces. Mr. Obama also has correctly warned that until the Pentagon starts pulling troops out of Iraq, there will not be enough troops to defeat the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
Mr. McCain, like Mr. Bush, has only belatedly focused on Afghanistan’s dangerous unraveling and the threat that neighboring Pakistan may quickly follow.
Mr. Obama would have a learning curve on foreign affairs, but he has already showed sounder judgment than his opponent on these critical issues. His choice of Senator Joseph Biden — who has deep foreign-policy expertise — as his running mate is another sign of that sound judgment. Mr. McCain’s long interest in foreign policy and the many dangers this country now faces make his choice of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska more irresponsible.
Both presidential candidates talk about strengthening alliances in Europe and Asia, including NATO, and strongly support Israel. Both candidates talk about repairing America’s image in the world. But it seems clear to us that Mr. Obama is far more likely to do that — and not just because the first black president would present a new American face to the world.
Mr. Obama wants to reform the United Nations, while Mr. McCain wants to create a new entity, the League of Democracies — a move that would incite even fiercer anti-American furies around the world.
Unfortunately, Mr. McCain, like Mr. Bush, sees the world as divided into friends (like Georgia) and adversaries (like Russia). He proposed kicking Russia out of the Group of 8 industrialized nations even before the invasion of Georgia. We have no sympathy for Moscow’s bullying, but we also have no desire to replay the cold war. The United States must find a way to constrain the Russians’ worst impulses, while preserving the ability to work with them on arms control and other vital initiatives.
Both candidates talk tough on terrorism, and neither has ruled out military action to end Iran’s nuclear weapons program. But Mr. Obama has called for a serious effort to try to wean Tehran from its nuclear ambitions with more credible diplomatic overtures and tougher sanctions. Mr. McCain’s willingness to joke about bombing Iran was frightening.
The Constitution and the Rule of Law
Under Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the justice system and the separation of powers have come under relentless attack. Mr. Bush chose to exploit the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, the moment in which he looked like the president of a unified nation, to try to place himself above the law.
Mr. Bush has arrogated the power to imprison men without charges and browbeat Congress into granting an unfettered authority to spy on Americans. He has created untold numbers of “black” programs, including secret prisons and outsourced torture. The president has issued hundreds, if not thousands, of secret orders. We fear it will take years of forensic research to discover how many basic rights have been violated.
Both candidates have renounced torture and are committed to closing the prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
But Mr. Obama has gone beyond that, promising to identify and correct Mr. Bush’s attacks on the democratic system. Mr. McCain has been silent on the subject.
Mr. McCain improved protections for detainees. But then he helped the White House push through the appalling Military Commissions Act of 2006, which denied detainees the right to a hearing in a real court and put Washington in conflict with the Geneva Conventions, greatly increasing the risk to American troops.
The next president will have the chance to appoint one or more justices to a Supreme Court that is on the brink of being dominated by a radical right wing. Mr. Obama may appoint less liberal judges than some of his followers might like, but Mr. McCain is certain to pick rigid ideologues. He has said he would never appoint a judge who believes in women’s reproductive rights.
The Candidates
It will be an enormous challenge just to get the nation back to where it was before Mr. Bush, to begin to mend its image in the world and to restore its self-confidence and its self-respect. Doing all of that, and leading America forward, will require strength of will, character and intellect, sober judgment and a cool, steady hand.
Mr. Obama has those qualities in abundance. Watching him being tested in the campaign has long since erased the reservations that led us to endorse Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic primaries. He has drawn in legions of new voters with powerful messages of hope and possibility and calls for shared sacrifice and social responsibility.
Mr. McCain, whom we chose as the best Republican nominee in the primaries, has spent the last coins of his reputation for principle and sound judgment to placate the limitless demands and narrow vision of the far-right wing. His righteous fury at being driven out of the 2000 primaries on a racist tide aimed at his adopted daughter has been replaced by a zealous embrace of those same win-at-all-costs tactics and tacticians.
He surrendered his standing as an independent thinker in his rush to embrace Mr. Bush’s misbegotten tax policies and to abandon his leadership position on climate change and immigration reform.
Mr. McCain could have seized the high ground on energy and the environment. Earlier in his career, he offered the first plausible bill to control America’s emissions of greenhouse gases. Now his positions are a caricature of that record: think Ms. Palin leading chants of “drill, baby, drill.”
Mr. Obama has endorsed some offshore drilling, but as part of a comprehensive strategy including big investments in new, clean technologies.
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Mr. Obama has withstood some of the toughest campaign attacks ever mounted against a candidate. He’s been called un-American and accused of hiding a secret Islamic faith. The Republicans have linked him to domestic terrorists and questioned his wife’s love of her country. Ms. Palin has also questioned millions of Americans’ patriotism, calling Republican-leaning states “pro-America.”
This politics of fear, division and character assassination helped Mr. Bush drive Mr. McCain from the 2000 Republican primaries and defeat Senator John Kerry in 2004. It has been the dominant theme of his failed presidency.
The nation’s problems are simply too grave to be reduced to slashing “robo-calls” and negative ads. This country needs sensible leadership, compassionate leadership, honest leadership and strong leadership. Barack Obama has shown that he has all of those qualities.
More Articles in Opinion » A version of this article appeared in print on October 24, 2008, on page A30 of the New York edition.

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 75

2008-10-23T10:17:00.003-04:00

Greenspan Concedes Error on Regulation

The Reckoning
Struggling to Keep Up as the Crisis Raced On
Articles in this series are exploring the causes of the financial crisis.Previous Articles in the Series »
Related
Times Topics: Credit Crisis — The Essentials
Times Topics: Treasury Department, U.S.
Times Topics: Henry M. Paulson Jr.

Todd Heisler/The New York Times
In nearly a century, no Treasury secretary has faced a more difficult financial crisis than the one Henry M. Paulson Jr. is contending with.
It was the weekend of Sept. 13, and the moment Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. had feared for months was finally upon him: Lehman Brothers was hurtling toward bankruptcy — fast.
Knowing that Lehman had billions of dollars in bad investments on its books, Mr. Paulson had long urged Lehman’s chief executive, Richard S. Fuld Jr., to find a solution for his firm’s problems. “He was asked to aggressively look for a buyer,” Mr. Paulson recalled in an interview.
But Lehman could not — despite what Mr. Paulson described as personal pleas to other firms to buy some of Lehman’s toxic assets and efforts to persuade another bank to acquire Lehman. With all options closed, he said, the government’s hands were tied. Although the Federal Reserve had helped bail out Bear Stearns — and was within days of bailing out the giant insurer American International Group — it could not help Lehman, even as its default threatened to wreak havoc on financial markets.
“We didn’t have the powers,” Mr. Paulson insisted, explaining a decision that many have since criticized — to allow Lehman to go bankrupt. By law, he continued, the Federal Reserve could bail out Lehman with a loan only if the bank had enough good assets to serve as collateral, which it did not.
“If someone thinks Hank Paulson could have made the Fed save Lehman Brothers, the answer is, ‘No way,’ ” he said.
But that is not the way that many who have scrutinized his actions see it. Bankers involved say they do not recall Mr. Paulson talking about Lehman’s impaired collateral. And they said that buyers walked away for one reason: because they could not get the same kind of government backing that facilitated the Bear Stearns deal. In retrospect, they added, it was emblematic of the miscalculations by the government in reacting to the crisis.
The day after Lehman collapsed, the Fed saved A.I.G. with an emergency $85 billion loan, but the credit markets around the world began freezing up anyway. It was at this point that Mr. Paulson — feeling outgunned by pursuers, like Butch and Sundance — decided he had to find a systemic solution and stop lurching from crisis to crisis, fixing one company’s problems only to find several more right behind.
“Ben said, ‘Will you go to Congress with me?’ ” said Mr. Paulson, referring to the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke. “I said: ‘Fine, I’m your partner. I’ll go to Congress.’ ”
Seeing a Problem Earlier
In nearly a century, no Treasury secretary has faced a more difficult financial crisis than that Mr. Paulson is contending with. For months, he and his team have been working around the clock, often seven days a week, trying — in vain — to keep it from deepening. In an hourlong interview with The New York Times, Mr. Paulson defended Treasury’s actions, saying that he and his aides had done everything they could, given the deep-rooted problems of financial excess that had built up over the past decade.
“I could have seen the subprime problem coming earlier,” he acknowledged in the interview, quickly adding in his own defense, “but I’m not saying I would have done anything differently.”
History will be the final judge. But in contrast with Mr. Paulson’s perspective, other government officials and financial executives suggest that Treasury’s epic rescue efforts have evolved as chaotically as the crisis itself. Especially in the past month, as the financial system teetered on the abyss, questions have been raised about the government’s — and Mr. Paulson’s — decisions. Executives on Wall Street and officials in European financial capitals have criticized Mr. Paulson and Mr. Bernanke for allowing Lehman to fail, an event that sent shock waves through the banking system, turning a financial tremor into a tsunami.
“For the equilibrium of the world financial system, this was a genuine error,” Christine Lagarde, France’s finance minister, said recently. Frederic Oudea, chief executive of Société Générale, one of France’s biggest banks, called the failure of Lehman “a trigger” for events leading to the global crash. Willem Sels, a credit strategist with Dresdner Kleinwort, said that “it is the clear that when Lehman defaulted, that is the date your money markets freaked out. It is difficult to not find a causal relationship.”
In addition, Mr. Paulson and Mr. Bernanke have been criticized for squandering precious time and political capital with their original $700 billion bailout plan, which they presented to Congressional leaders days after the Lehman bankruptcy. The two men sold the plan as a vehicle for purchasing toxic mortgage-backed securities from banks and others.
But even after the House finally passed the bill on Oct. 3, markets remained in turmoil. It was not until Britain and other European countries moved to put capital directly into their banks, and the United States followed their lead, that some calm returned.
In the interview, Mr. Paulson said that even before the House acted, he had directed his staff to start drawing up a plan for using some of the $700 billion to recapitalize the banking system — something that Congress was never told and that he had publicly opposed.
Why? Because in the week before the plan passed Congress, conditions deteriorated significantly, Mr. Paulson said.
But many complain the worst of the turmoil might have been avoided if it hadn’t been for Mr. Paulson sticking with an original bailout plan that they viewed as poorly conceived and unworkable. “They were asking the most basic questions,” said one Wall Street executive who spoke to Treasury officials after the bailout bill was passed. “It was clear they hadn’t thought it through.” Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, who had called for an infusion of capital into banks in mid-September, said, “They are so much more on top of this recapitalization plan than they were about the auction plan.”
Even as he defended his actions, Mr. Paulson said he was worried that some of the government’s moves could wind up haunting future Treasury secretaries. He pointed in particular to the decision to guarantee all bank deposits and interbank loans, something the United States did to keep pace with similar decisions in Europe. “We had to,” Mr. Paulson said. “Our banks would not have been able to compete.”
But the federal guarantees could create “moral hazard” and simply encourage banks to take on dangerous risk, he acknowledged. “This is the last thing I wanted to do,” he said.
Summer of Eroding Conditions
The subprime mortgage debacle began emerging in the summer of 2007, about a year after Mr. Paulson left his job as head of Goldman Sachs and joined the Bush administration. But the true depth and extent of the losses did not become clear until earlier this year, Mr. Paulson said.
“We thought there was a reasonable chance of getting through this,” he recalled.
Then came the near failure in March of Bear Stearns, which was rescued in a takeover by JPMorgan Chase only after the Fed agreed to cover $29 billion in losses. That briefly lulled the markets into thinking the worst might be over. But during the summer, conditions deteriorated, and in early September the government was forced to take over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage finance giants.
With increasing speed, other problems emerged, most notably Lehman and A.I.G., which was also burdened with bad mortgage-related investments. Both became the focus of intense meetings the weekend of Sept. 13-14.
Mr. Paulson, by then, had become frustrated with what he perceived as Mr. Fuld’s foot-dragging. “Lehman announced bad earnings around the middle of June, and we told Fuld that if he didn’t have a solution by the time he announced his third-quarter earnings, there would be a serious problem,” Mr. Paulson said. “We pressed him to get a buyer.”
Here the views of Mr. Paulson and his critics start to diverge, over what transpired in marathon meetings with Wall Street executives at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York that weekend.
Lehman officials said they believed the firm had not one but two potential buyers: Bank of America and Barclays, the big British bank. But both had conditions. Bank of America wanted the Fed to make a $65 billion loan to cover any exposure to Lehman’s bad assets, according to one person privy to the discussions who did not want to be identified because of their sensitive nature. Although this was more than double what the Fed had made available to facilitate the takeover of Bear Stearns by JPMorgan, Bank of America justified the request on the grounds that Lehman was larger.
Barclays also wanted a guarantee to protect against losses should Lehman’s business worsen before Barclays could compete its takeover.
The government initially was not clear in telling Bank of America and Barclays that no help would be forthcoming, participants said. The New York Fed president, Timothy F. Geithner, in particular, was uncomfortable about drawing a line in the sand against government support for a Lehman takeover. Participants said they were left with the impression from Mr. Paulson and Mr. Geithner that the government might well provide help for a serious buyer, with Mr. Paulson also trying to get Wall Street firms to create a $10 billion fund to absorb some of Lehman’s bad assets.
It remains unclear whether a more consistent message would have changed the outcome. But by Saturday, Bank of America, frustrated by the government’s unwillingness to commit to a deal, turned its attention to Merrill Lynch, which agreed to a takeover. Barclays, equally frustrated, walked away on Sunday, said the person with knowledge of the discussions.
Mr. Paulson said in the interview that Treasury was not at fault. The $10 billion industry fund had not worked because executives in the room realized that bailing out Lehman would not end the crisis. There were too many other firms that needed help. “I didn’t want to see Lehman go,” Mr. Paulson said. “I understood the consequences better than anybody.”
At a White House briefing on Sept. 15, Mr. Paulson shed no tears over Lehman’s failure. “I never once considered it appropriate to put taxpayer money on the line in resolving Lehman Brothers,” he told reporters.
In the interview, however, Mr. Paulson said the main issue was whether it was legal. Under the law, the Fed has the authority to lend to any nonbank, but only if the loan is “secured to the satisfaction of the Federal Reserve bank.” When pressed about why it was legal for the Fed to lend billions of dollars to Bear Stearns and A.I.G. but not Lehman Brothers, Mr. Paulson emphasized that Lehman’s bad assets created “a huge hole” on its balance sheet. By contrast, he said, Bear Stearns and A.I.G. had more trustworthy collateral.
People close to Lehman, however, say it was never told this by the government. “The Fed and the S.E.C. had their people on site at Lehman during 2008,” said a person in the Lehman camp. “The government saw everything in real time involving Lehman’s liquidity, funding, capital, risk management and marks — and never expressed any concerns about collateral or a hole in the balance sheet.”
The aftermath of the Lehman bankruptcy was disastrous. “Lehman was one of the single largest issuers of commercial paper in the world,” said Joshua Rosner, a managing director at Graham Fisher & Company, referring to short-term debt issued by companies to finance day-to-day operations; this market locked up in the wake of Lehman’s failure. “How could you let it go bankrupt and not expect the commercial paper market to be completely crushed?” Why Bear Stearns but not Lehman, wonders Representative Barney Frank. Mr. Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, has generally been a supporter of Mr. Paulson during the crisis. “If it was the right thing to do, why did they do it only once?” he asked.
In response, Mr. Paulson said that only now that the bailout bill has been passed does the government have the authority to intervene in a nonbank failure in cases of firms that lack adequate collateral, like Lehman.
A Difficult Sell
Lehman’s failure was followed by another strategic misstep by Treasury, critics say. They assert that Mr. Paulson initially pushed the wrong systemic fix: a bailout plan that revolved around buying up toxic securities, rather than putting capital into the banking system, a far more direct way of providing assistance.
Mr. Paulson rejects this view. In the interview, he cited several reasons he and Mr. Bernanke concentrated initially on purchasing distressed assets. First, he said, this plan had been in the works for months and was much further developed. “If we had felt going in that the right way to deal with the problem was to put equity in, we would have taken some time and developed a program,” he said.
He also worried that Congress would not be receptive to the idea of Treasury taking an ownership stake in banks: “This is a very complicated and difficult sell. We want to put equity in, but we don’t want to nationalize the banks. And I don’t know how to sell that.”
But he doesn’t dispute that he changed direction. Mr. Paulson said that by Oct. 2, as he was departing for a weekend getaway to an island with his family — his first weekend off in nearly two months — he told his staff, “We are going to put capital into banks first.”
Although the bailout bill still had not passed, the financial markets had deteriorated. He did not, however, inform Congress of his change of heart, and the House debate revolved almost entirely around the asset-purchase plan.
Just 11 days later, Treasury had come up with a plan to inject capital into the banks — which Mr. Paulson sold to the nation’s nine largest financial institutions on Oct. 13. “I can imagine being dinged for some things,” he said, “but not for moving that quickly.”
He also defended Treasury’s recapitalization plan against critics who say that he did not extract a high enough price from the banks getting taxpayers’ money. “I could not see the United States doing things like putting in capital on a punitive basis that hurts investors. And we don’t want to run banks.”
The Global Extent
Asked what he might have done better, Mr. Paulson replied, “I could have made a better case to the public.”
He added, “I never felt worse than when the House voted no” on the bailout plan Sept. 26, its initial rejection before ultimately passing the plan.
As for Lehman, Mr. Paulson insisted that it was “a symptom and not a cause” of the financial meltdown that took place in recent weeks. The real problem, he contended, is that banks all over the world made wrong-headed loans that have now come back to haunt them. After meeting recently with European central bankers, he said, “the thing that took your breath away was the extent of the problem. Look at country after country that said they didn’t have a problem, and it turned out they had a huge problem.”
Mr. Paulson added, “Ten years from now no one is going to say that this crisis was brought about because Lehman Brothers went down.”
Nelson D. Schwartz and Stephen Labaton contributed reporting.
More Articles in Business » A version of this article appeared in print on October 23, 2008, on page A1 of the New York edition.

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 74

2008-10-22T09:11:00.002-04:00

Keep on truckin'... Keep on keeping on... Don't give up... Persevere as if your life depended on it which it does...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 73

2008-10-21T08:35:00.002-04:00

I need to get a life... to experience the joy of living to the fullest... to taste the bittterness of defeat.. to be whole again and not segmented...

The Mommy Track

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 72

2008-10-20T09:05:00.004-04:00

I am reading a book by James Patterson titled 4th of July... and I have checked out in large print his 5th Horseman so I will be reading Patterson for a while...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 71

2008-10-19T05:41:00.002-04:00

A new week... a new beginning... I never did say more about my roommate, he is 95 and is a Commander in the U.S.Navy

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 70

2008-10-18T07:36:00.002-04:00

It's difficult to stay focused.. to know what to say or how to say it...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 69

2008-10-17T11:52:00.002-04:00

Another day, another dollar... and all is well... I have a new roommate... he can see, hear and speak...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 68

2008-10-14T06:27:00.002-04:00

It's 0630 am and all is well... sorry I haven't been on the last week... problem with computers again...

More later...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 67

2008-10-08T08:46:00.001-04:00

Hooray! Joyce is coming today!

I'm fine...

The library is good...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 66

2008-10-07T06:34:00.002-04:00

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood, won't you be mine?

My roommate will be leaving next Wednesday...He has a female 'friend' who visits daily and they are obviously in love .. it's nice and he dosen't correct anyone who calls her his wife..

I'm having some major problems with therapy... I'll wait until I talk with Brian before I write about it here...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 65

2008-10-06T08:49:00.003-04:00

Amen...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 64

2008-10-05T06:42:00.007-04:00

Pressured to Take More Risk, Fannie Hit a Tipping Point

As Credit Crisis Spiraled, Alarm Led to Action

Behind Insurer’s Crisis, Blind Eye to a Web of Risk

I listed these articles from the NYTimes to complete the series on what caused the meltdown...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 63

2008-10-04T13:28:00.002-04:00

I have experienced another roommate death... I have a new roommate who is blind but alert and vocal and friendly... The nurses were nice and concerned about me...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 62

2008-10-03T13:02:00.002-04:00

The Reckoning
Agency’s ’04 Rule Let Banks Pile Up New Debt

As rumors swirled that Bear Stearns faced imminent collapse in early March, Christopher Cox was told by his staff that Bear Stearns had $17 billion in cash and other assets — more than enough to weather the storm.
Drained of most of its cash three days later, Bear Stearns was forced into a hastily arranged marriage with JPMorgan Chase — backed by a $29 billion taxpayer dowry.
Within six months, other lions of Wall Street would also either disappear or transform themselves to survive the financial maelstrom — Merrill Lynch sold itself to Bank of America, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy protection, and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley converted to commercial banks.
How could Mr. Cox have been so wrong?
Many events in Washington, on Wall Street and elsewhere around the country have led to what has been called the most serious financial crisis since the 1930s. But decisions made at a brief meeting on April 28, 2004, explain why the problems could spin out of control. The agency’s failure to follow through on those decisions also explains why Washington regulators did not see what was coming.
On that bright spring afternoon, the five members of the Securities and Exchange Commission met in a basement hearing room to consider an urgent plea by the big investment banks.
They wanted an exemption for their brokerage units from an old regulation that limited the amount of debt they could take on. The exemption would unshackle billions of dollars held in reserve as a cushion against losses on their investments. Those funds could then flow up to the parent company, enabling it to invest in the fast-growing but opaque world of mortgage-backed securities; credit derivatives, a form of insurance for bond holders; and other exotic instruments.
The five investment banks led the charge, including Goldman Sachs, which was headed by Henry M. Paulson Jr. Two years later, he left to become Treasury secretary.
A lone dissenter — a software consultant and expert on risk management — weighed in from Indiana with a two-page letter to warn the commission that the move was a grave mistake. He never heard back from Washington.
One commissioner, Harvey J. Goldschmid, questioned the staff about the consequences of the proposed exemption. It would only be available for the largest firms, he was reassuringly told — those with assets greater than $5 billion.
“We’ve said these are the big guys,” Mr. Goldschmid said, provoking nervous laughter, “but that means if anything goes wrong, it’s going to be an awfully big mess.”
Mr. Goldschmid, an authority on securities law from Columbia, was a behind-the-scenes adviser in 2002 to Senator Paul S. Sarbanes when he rewrote the nation’s corporate laws after a wave of accounting scandals. “Do we feel secure if there are these drops in capital we really will have investor protection?” Mr. Goldschmid asked. A senior staff member said the commission would hire the best minds, including people with strong quantitative skills to parse the banks’ balance sheets.
Annette L. Nazareth, the head of market regulation, reassured the commission that under the new rules, the companies for the first time could be restricted by the commission from excessively risky activity. She was later appointed a commissioner and served until January 2008.
“I’m very happy to support it,” said Commissioner Roel C. Campos, a former federal prosecutor and owner of a small radio broadcasting company from Houston, who then deadpanned: “And I keep my fingers crossed for the future.”
The proceeding was sparsely attended. None of the major media outlets, including The New York Times, covered it.
After 55 minutes of discussion, which can now be heard on the Web sites of the agency and The Times, the chairman, William H. Donaldson, a veteran Wall Street executive, called for a vote. It was unanimous. The decision, changing what was known as the net capital rule, was completed and published in The Federal Register a few months later.
With that, the five big independent investment firms were unleashed.
In loosening the capital rules, which are supposed to provide a buffer in turbulent times, the agency also decided to rely on the firms’ own computer models for determining the riskiness of investments, essentially outsourcing the job of monitoring risk to the banks themselves.
Over the following months and years, each of the firms would take advantage of the looser rules. At Bear Stearns, the leverage ratio — a measurement of how much the firm was borrowing compared to its total assets — rose sharply, to 33 to 1. In other words, for every dollar in equity, it had $33 of debt. The ratios at the other firms also rose significantly.
The 2004 decision for the first time gave the S.E.C. a window on the banks’ increasingly risky investments in mortgage-related securities.
But the agency never took true advantage of that part of the bargain. The supervisory program under Mr. Cox, who arrived at the agency a year later, was a low priority.
The commission assigned seven people to examine the parent companies — which last year controlled financial empires with combined assets of more than $4 trillion. Since March 2007, the office has not had a director. And as of last month, the office had not completed a single inspection since it was reshuffled by Mr. Cox more than a year and a half ago.
The few problems the examiners preliminarily uncovered about the riskiness of the firms’ investments and their increased reliance on debt — clear signs of trouble — were all but ignored.
The commission’s division of trading and markets “became aware of numerous potential red flags prior to Bear Stearns’s collapse, regarding its concentration of mortgage securities, high leverage, shortcomings of risk management in mortgage-backed securities and lack of compliance with the spirit of certain” capital standards, said an inspector general’s report issued last Friday. But the division “did not take actions to limit these risk factors.”
Drive to Deregulate
The commission’s decision effectively to outsource its oversight to the firms themselves fit squarely in the broader Washington culture of the last eight years under President Bush.
A similar closeness to industry and laissez-faire philosophy has driven a push for deregulation throughout the government, from the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency to worker safety and transportation agencies.
“It’s a fair criticism of the Bush administration that regulators have relied on many voluntary regulatory programs,” said Roderick M. Hills, a Republican who was chairman of the S.E.C. under President Gerald R. Ford. “The problem with such voluntary programs is that, as we’ve seen throughout history, they often don’t work.”
As was the case with other agencies, the commission’s decision was motivated by industry complaints of excessive regulation at a time of growing competition from overseas. The 2004 decision was aimed at easing regulatory burdens that the European Union was about to impose on the foreign operations of United States investment banks.
The Europeans said they would agree not to regulate the foreign subsidiaries of the investment banks on one condition — that the commission regulate the parent companies, along with the brokerage units that the S.E.C. already oversaw.
A 1999 law, however, had left a gap that did not give the commission explicit oversight of the parent companies. To get around that problem, and in exchange for the relaxed capital rules, the banks volunteered to let the commission examine the books of their parent companies and subsidiaries.
The 2004 decision also reflected a faith that Wall Street’s financial interests coincided with Washington’s regulatory interests.
“We foolishly believed that the firms had a strong culture of self-preservation and responsibility and would have the discipline not to be excessively borrowing,” said Professor James D. Cox, an expert on securities law and accounting at Duke School of Law (and no relationship to Christopher Cox).
“Letting the firms police themselves made sense to me because I didn’t think the S.E.C. had the staff and wherewithal to impose its own standards and I foolishly thought the market would impose its own self-discipline. We’ve all learned a terrible lesson,” he added.
In letters to the commissioners, senior executives at the five investment banks complained about what they called unnecessary regulation and oversight by both American and European authorities. A lone voice of dissent in the 2004 proceeding came from a software consultant from Valparaiso, Ind., who said the computer models run by the firms — which the regulators would be relying on — could not anticipate moments of severe market turbulence.
“With the stroke of a pen, capital requirements are removed!” the consultant, Leonard D. Bole, wrote to the commission on Jan. 22, 2004. “Has the trading environment changed sufficiently since 1997, when the current requirements were enacted, that the commission is confident that current requirements in examples such as these can be disregarded?”
He said that similar computer standards had failed to protect Long-Term Capital Management, the hedge fund that collapsed in 1998, and could not protect companies from the market plunge of October 1987.
Mr. Bole, who earned a master’s degree in business administration at the University of Chicago, helps write computer programs that financial institutions use to meet capital requirements.
He said in a recent interview that he was never called by anyone from the commission.
“I’m a little guy in the land of giants,” he said. “I thought that the reduction in capital was rather dramatic.”
Policing Wall Street
A once-proud agency with a rich history at the intersection of Washington and Wall Street, the Securities and Exchange Commission was created during the Great Depression as part of the broader effort to restore confidence to battered investors. It was led in its formative years by heavyweight New Dealers, including James Landis and William O. Douglas. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt was asked in 1934 why he appointed Joseph P. Kennedy, a spectacularly successful stock speculator, as the agency’s first chairman, Roosevelt replied: “Set a thief to catch a thief.”
The commission’s most public role in policing Wall Street is its enforcement efforts. But critics say that in recent years it has failed to deter market problems. “It seems to me the enforcement effort in recent years has fallen short of what one Supreme Court justice once called the fear of the shotgun behind the door,” said Arthur Levitt Jr., who was S.E.C. chairman in the Clinton administration. “With this commission, the shotgun too rarely came out from behind the door.”
Christopher Cox had been a close ally of business groups in his 17 years as a House member from one of the most conservative districts in Southern California. Mr. Cox had led the effort to rewrite securities laws to make investor lawsuits harder to file. He also fought against accounting rules that would give less favorable treatment to executive stock options.
Under Mr. Cox, the commission responded to complaints by some businesses by making it more difficult for the enforcement staff to investigate and bring cases against companies. The commission has repeatedly reversed or reduced proposed settlements that companies had tentatively agreed upon. While the number of enforcement cases has risen, the number of cases involving significant players or large amounts of money has declined.
Mr. Cox dismantled a risk management office created by Mr. Donaldson that was assigned to watch for future problems. While other financial regulatory agencies criticized a blueprint by Mr. Paulson, the Treasury secretary, that proposed to reduce their stature — and that of the S.E.C. — Mr. Cox did not challenge the plan, leaving it to three former Democratic and Republican commission chairmen to complain that the blueprint would neuter the agency.
In the process, Mr. Cox has surrounded himself with conservative lawyers, economists and accountants who, before the market turmoil of recent months, had embraced a far more limited vision for the commission than many of his predecessors.
‘Stakes in the Ground’
Last Friday, the commission formally ended the 2004 program, acknowledging that it had failed to anticipate the problems at Bear Stearns and the four other major investment banks.
“The last six months have made it abundantly clear that voluntary regulation does not work,” Mr. Cox said.
The decision to shutter the program came after Mr. Cox was blamed by Senator John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, for the crisis. Mr. McCain has demanded Mr. Cox’s resignation.
Mr. Cox has said that the 2004 program was flawed from its inception. But former officials as well as the inspector general’s report have suggested that a major reason for its failure was Mr. Cox’s use of it.
“In retrospect, the tragedy is that the 2004 rule making gave us the ability to get information that would have been critical to sensible monitoring, and yet the S.E.C. didn’t oversee well enough,” Mr. Goldschmid said in an interview. He and Mr. Donaldson left the commission in 2005.
Mr. Cox declined requests for an interview. In response to written questions, including whether he or the commission had made any mistakes over the last three years that contributed to the current crisis, he said, “There will be no shortage of retrospective analyses about what happened and what should have happened.” He said that by last March he had concluded that the monitoring program’s “metrics were inadequate.”
He said that because the commission did not have the authority to curtail the heavy borrowing at Bear Stearns and the other firms, he and the commission were powerless to stop it.
“Implementing a purely voluntary program was very difficult because the commission’s regulations shouldn’t be suggestions,” he said. “The fact these companies could withdraw from voluntary supervision at their discretion diminished the mandate of the program and weakened its effectiveness. Experience has shown that the S.E.C. could not bootstrap itself into authority it didn’t have.”
But critics say that the commission could have done more, and that the agency’s effectiveness comes from the tone set at the top by the chairman, or what Mr. Levitt, the longest-serving S.E.C. chairman in history, calls “stakes in the ground.”
“If you go back to the chairmen in recent years, you will see that each spoke about a variety of issues that were important to them,” Mr. Levitt said. “This commission placed very few stakes in the ground.”
More Articles in Business » A version of this article appeared in print on October 3, 2008, on page A1 of the New York edition.

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 61

2008-10-02T13:46:00.002-04:00

Good aftern00n it is indeed Thursday already, and I now have Internet service after only 3 days...

Sayonara!

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 60

2008-09-30T22:57:00.003-04:00

Well it's been a while... would you believe a whole week without a computer that connected to the Internet...??? My room, the rec room and the library... 3 computers all having problems... I am now in my room using my laptop and it's about 11 pm so I am going to sleep ... I hope all remains well tomorrow...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 59

2008-09-25T18:23:00.001-04:00

I am connected via the 'wireless network' in my room using my laptop...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 58

2008-09-21T06:53:00.004-04:00

Text of Draft Proposal for Bailout Plan

The Wall Street Bailout Plan, Explained

The Best Mind of His Generation

A Professor and a Banker Bury Old Dogma on Markets

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 57

2008-09-20T07:42:00.002-04:00

Joyce was in to visit and brought me several birthday presents among them a pint of Cherry Garcia ice cream and it was delicious... It was good to visit with her and she looked fantastic...

More later...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 56

2008-09-19T06:33:00.002-04:00

Today, Jason will be coming in to fix the problem with our routers and the wireless Internet connection... I just hope it's true...

Drug Label, Maimed Patient and Test for Justices

Saudi Women Find an Unlikely Role Model: Oprah

Sayonara!

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 55

2008-09-18T08:04:00.002-04:00

A delicious breakfast served in the Rosewood dining room on Thursday morning...

U.S. Court, Long a Beacon, Guides Fewer Nations

You Just Can’t Kill It

Sayonara!

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 54

2008-09-16T06:42:00.003-04:00

Thank you for the comment BJ, I too think it's a tossup between Hawaii and Vermont... I'm happy to report that the 'lockdown' is over and that the library is open full-time... that is to say Sunday thru Saturday 9-12 am , 1-4 pm and 6-7 pm... Volunteers needed...

E.R. Patients Often Left Confused After Visits

Gut Instinct’s Surprising Role in Math

Sayonara!

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 53

2008-09-15T07:16:00.002-04:00

The 'lockdown' continues... Saturday I got a call from the library, a nurse asked me to help a male resident who was looking for a book on poetry... So they gave me special permission to sneak thru A-wing and go down to the library... It turns out I couldn't help him until after he left I thought about the Internet and I googled 'let me count the ways I love you' and it came back with the entire quote from Elisabeth Barrett Browning which is what he wanted to give to a couple on their wedding day...

Sayonara!

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 52

2008-09-14T10:58:00.004-04:00

A new week with new beginnings... Where to begin???

Vermont?

Hawaii??

Sayonara!!!

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 51

2008-09-13T06:19:00.003-04:00

The institute is in a lockdown condition and it feels more like a prison... The 'neighborhoods' are isolated from each other so that whatever cold is spreading will be limited to one... No meals shared ... No Rec room activities... No therapy sessions unless you're in B wing.... No trips to the Salmon Brook Library... No going outside unless you are in rooms 12-16 C-Wing which are open to the main lobby... Lockdown...

No Bingo... oh my God there might be a rebellion...

Not good news not bad news just news to think about!

Sayonara!

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 50

2008-09-12T06:50:00.004-04:00

The library will now be asking for volunteers to 'staff' it' during the recommended open times.

The Good News of the Day:

A West Bank Ruin, Reborn as a Peace Beacon
By ETHAN BRONNER
Published: September 11, 2008
JENIN, West Bank — Pessimism is a steady companion these days for advocates of Middle East peace. A lame-duck Israeli government is negotiating with a weak Palestinian leadership in the twilight of an unpopular American administration. Few forecast success.
But a quiet revolution is stirring here in this city, once a byword for the extremes of violence between Israelis and Palestinians. In 2002, in response to a wave of suicide bombers from Jenin, Israeli tanks leveled entire neighborhoods.
From that rubble, now newly trained and equipped Palestinian security officials have restored order. Israeli soldiers have pulled back from bases and are in close touch with their Palestinian colleagues. Civilians are planning economic cooperation — an industrial zone to provide thousands of jobs, mostly to Palestinians, and another involving organic produce grown by Palestinians and marketed in Europe by Israelis. Ministers from both governments have been visiting regularly, often joined by top international officials. Israeli Arabs are playing a key role.
The aim is to stand conventional wisdom on its head. Instead of a shaky negotiated peace treaty imposing coexistence from the top down, a bottom-up set of relationships that lock the two societies together should, proponents argue, lead to a real two-state solution.
“We got a clear American message that the Palestinian state will start from Jenin,” asserted Col. Radi Asideh, the deputy commander of the Palestinian security forces here who have recently received new Land Rovers and AK-47 assault rifles. “The plan is to have a security model that can then be implemented all over Palestine.”
Those may sound like the hopeful words of a credulous officer. But here is Gen. James L. Jones, special American envoy to the region in an interview this week after visiting Jenin: “I see this as a kind of dress rehearsal for statehood, a crucible where the two sides can prove things to each other.”
And Ehud Barak, Israel’s defense minister, in an interview in his Tel Aviv office, said: “So far, Jenin is a great success. The Palestinian police have created a different mood there. We need to see money being poured into projects now to keep the momentum going. If done right, we think this could become an example.”
As one Western official involved in the plan noted, Israeli defense officials do not make a habit of speaking well of Palestinian police, so Mr. Barak’s words are telling. Still, Mr. Barak’s last point is also crucial because, unsurprisingly, not everyone agrees on what it means to do it right. Each side in the triangle — Israelis, Palestinians, international donors and facilitators — argues that it has done its part but that things are moving too slowly because of the others. Israel says Palestinian forces still do not deal with terrorists and so its forces must continue night incursions. Palestinians worry that the focus on Jenin will take away from the broader issues that need to be solved, like Jerusalem and refugees. The likelihood of failure still far outweighs that of success.
The choice of Jenin as a model might seem strange given the level of violence that emanated from here in the years of the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising. Since then, the city and region of Jenin have been severely economically depressed and chaotic.
Until late last year, for example, armed militia men used the hospital as a dormitory. Gunfire in the streets was common. One day, Colonel Asideh recounted, when militia paychecks failed to arrive, gunmen pumped bullets into four of the local ATMs, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage.
Today, such men have given up their arms and the police walk the beat in this town. The hospital has been refurbished with American aid. Shops downtown stay open late. People feel they can breathe.
Jenin, officials on all sides say, offers many advantages for a pilot project, an idea arrived at by American and European officials in February when they sought ways to build peace on the ground.
First, they said, Hamas, the main Palestinian militant opposition in the West Bank, is relatively weak in Jenin. Second, after the evacuation of four Israeli settlements in the region in 2005, the area is essentially free of settlers, a major source of friction elsewhere. Third, the barrier that Israel has been building causes little friction in this area because it is right on the boundary between Israel and the West Bank, not over it so there is little territorial dispute.

There is also a fourth reason. Gilboa, the Israeli region that abuts Jenin, is an unusual and unusually well-suited neighbor. Small and rural with 30,000 people, it is 40 percent Arab and 60 percent Jewish and the inhabitants have worked assiduously to create their own kind of model — of Arab-Jewish coexistence in Israel.
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Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times
MEETING OF MINDS Qadoura Moussa, left, governor of the Jenin area, with Daniel Atar, right, and Eid Salem, Gilboa officials.

The New York Times
Jenin was once a byword for Israeli-Palestinian violence.
An example was on display last month when high school students in Gilboa took part in what may be the only one of its kind in the world — the finals for the Bible-Koran contest. Twelve teams, each made up of one Jew and one Arab, were asked questions in both Hebrew and Arabic about the holy books. A mixed team of Jewish and Muslim teachers acted as judges. An Israeli Arab was the master of ceremonies.
Isaac Herzog, Israel’s minister of social welfare, was on hand and told the audience that Gilboa was a model for Israel, that every Israeli Jew should learn the Koran, that equality of opportunity should be the norm.
The head of the Gilboa regional council, Daniel Atar, is a Jew and his deputy, Eid Salem, is an Arab. Together they have built a warm relationship with the Palestinian governor of the Jenin area, Qadoura Moussa. The three meet frequently to formulate plans for economic cooperation in agriculture and commerce. Together, they have visited the French-German border area and Switzerland, seeking models of coexistence.
“There are two kinds of peace,” Mr. Atar said one recent afternoon in his office with Mr. Salem at his side. “There is the one on a piece of paper that doesn’t stand up to any test and there is the one built from the bottom up. That is the one we are hoping to build. It is increasingly clear that if Israeli Jews cannot figure out how to have good relations with Israeli Arabs, there won’t be peace beyond the borders, either. We have a choice in Israel of making peace or living in a bunker.”
One result of the discussions among the three leaders is a decision by the Israeli authorities to allow some Israeli Arabs into Jenin on a daily basis for the first time since the intifada. It has been a delicate move made with little fanfare because in principle it is illegal to allow certain Israeli citizens to do something others may not and also because movement across the boundary invites the possibility of security breaches.
It is delicate for another reason. In recent years, Israeli Jews have grown worried that among the 1.3 million Arabs who are Israeli citizens, there is a growing radicalization and identification with the Palestinian national cause and militant Islam. Increasing their contact with the West Bank could add to those concerns.
But Israeli Arabs have relatives here and want to do business here, and the Israeli authorities say they want to encourage that as a means of helping the Palestinian economy. If Israeli Arabs are permitted to do that in large numbers, that could represent an important change in their status in the eyes of Israeli Jews — from potential fifth column to bridge builder.
There are small signs of it already. Inside the Jenin refugee camp, a tough neighborhood of 16,000 inhabitants that is inside the city of Jenin, Fadi Abu Hijab, 27, owns a new sewing workshop with half a dozen employees. They make clothes on order from shops in Tel Aviv, he said, and Israeli Arabs are the brokers who come to deliver the material and pick up the finished products.
In addition, the university here has 80 Israeli Arab students and is working to attract several hundred more. The Israeli authorities have taken other steps — removing key checkpoints so that movement around Jenin is easier, granting V.I.P. checkpoint passes to about 1,500 Palestinian officials and businessmen, issuing work visas to some here, and agreeing on the building of new police stations, courthouses, schools and jails.
For anyone who remembers the Gilboa-Jenin boundary area a decade ago, however, all of the incipient changes seem minor. Until the 2000 uprising, thousands of Israelis — Jews and Arabs — shopped here regularly in their cars. Thousands of Palestinians from here worked in Israel. The industrial zone now being planned by Tony Blair — the international community’s envoy to build Palestinian institutions — and talked about as a major breakthrough, was supposed to be built then.
Today the main crossing point, then the site of a sprawling market, is a maze of security towers and checkpoints. Israeli soldiers refrain from cruising Jenin by day but still carry out occasional night raids and maintain overall security control of the region. And while Israeli Arabs are now being let in, they may not yet bring cars, greatly limiting the appeal of the trip and the shopping.
There are other concerns. The Palestinians have asked to base their newly trained battalion for Jenin in an abandoned Israeli settlement, a good spot in terms of location and infrastructure. But Israeli officials are worried about how it will play in Israel and have so far said no.
Israeli security officials say their Palestinian colleagues are good at law and order but not at stopping terrorist groups. They say that Islamic Jihad used to be strong here and is no longer because Israel spent years destroying its infrastructure and killing its militants, setting the stage for the Palestinian security takeover. But if they relax their vigilance, the Israelis say, the situation will deteriorate. Early on Wednesday morning, for example, Israeli soldiers and security men raided a home in Jenin and detonated a 30-pound pipe bomb.
The Palestinians complain that they are often urged to arrest someone just because he wears a beard. They add that as long as they are seen as puppets of the Israelis, the project is doomed. The key is for Palestinian security officials to be seen as agents of state building. Then the population will cooperate. This requires the kind of discretion that the Israeli Army has not been known for.
“The intifada turned them into enemies in one day,” Mr. Blair said in an interview. “Now we are trying to recreate a sense of mutual confidence after seven years. It is a very slow process. But what is happening in Gilboa and Jenin is exactly the direction we would like to go.”

Sayonara!

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 49

2008-09-11T08:40:00.002-04:00

Sorry it took so long getting back to this but the library claimed the time...

The cardiologist yesterday claimed another 'cure' for modern medicine and began weaning me off the nitrogen drug Imdur...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 48

2008-09-08T06:36:00.002-04:00

The library is beginning to look nice but we need more shelves already...

Had another pain free night so can't complain...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 47

2008-09-07T06:01:00.002-04:00

Today is... work on library day...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 46

2008-09-06T07:36:00.003-04:00

First - the Bad News...

And then Worse News...

Finally Good News...

And it almost the start of a new week, I guess that means today is Saturday... I have not had any chest pain since before Tuesday, the day of the operation...

Life is good...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 45

2008-09-05T08:16:00.002-04:00

It's time for a moment of silence... Our friend Alberta died last night... She will be missed her cries were a part of the environment and her pain was our pain...

Sayonara!

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 44

2008-09-04T05:53:00.002-04:00

Welll, it's done and all is well. I have one new metal stent in the L.A.D. (left anterior dystolic) artery of my heart...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 43

2008-09-01T07:03:00.002-04:00

Happy Labor Day!

'tis good to be enjoying the show...

Sayonara!

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 42

2008-08-31T06:17:00.003-04:00

The day before Labor Day... The day before September starts... And two days before my operation...

The 'good' news:

Enough said...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 41

2008-08-30T03:35:00.006-04:00

It's the end of the week and thus the end of my medications, tomorrow I start the new week and a new method of self-medication, that is to say I will be popping my own pills out of their plastic bubbles and I will have to keep track of ordering replacements. It's also the end of the month tomorrow and I will have to turn in my sheet... On Sunday Trevor will be here and he will help move the bookcases out of the Rec room and to the Rosewood dining room... Also there will be a surprise Birthday party for Dick Kenney, Peg's husband...

For the bad and good news:

Books of The Times
Weapons of Mass Destruction and Other Imaginative Acts

By MARK DANNER
Published: August 27, 2008

Scandal is our growth industry. In our era, revelation of wrongdoing leads not to definitive investigation, punishment and expiation but to ... more scandal. Permanent scandal. Frozen scandal. The weapons of mass destruction that turn out not to exist. The torture of detainees who remain forever detained. The firing of prosecutors, which is forever investigated. These and other frozen scandals metastasize, ramify, self-replicate, clogging the cable news shows and the blogosphere and the bookstores. Unpurged and perpetually unresolved, scandal transcends political reality to become commercial fact.

Nancy Crampton
Ron Suskind
THE WAY OF THE WORLD
A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism
By Ron Suskind
415 pages. Harper. $27.95.

Unfortunately, and somewhat misleadingly, “The Way of the World” by Ron Suskind comes smartly dressed in the garb of the genre: an embargoed release, strategic leaks to whet journalistic appetites, author interviews across the cable networks. And the book delivers, serving up two interlinked revelations that add materially to the W.M.D. megascandal: first, that more than three months before initiating the Iraq war President Bush and his highest officials received information, via the British, from Iraq’s intelligence chief, Tahir Habbush, that Saddam Hussein had destroyed all his weapons of mass destruction years before — information that the officials “buried” but that turned out to be true. And second, that after paying off Mr. Habbush to the tune of $5 million and resettling him in Jordan, White House officials used him to run a scam on the American people, drafting a letter over his name, backdated to the summer of 2001, in which Mr. Habbush informs Hussein that he has been training Mohammed Atta, soon to be the leader of the 9/11 attacks.
This forged letter, meant to establish beyond doubt a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, was leaked in December 2003 to an Iraqi politician and longtime C.I.A. asset — Ayad Allawi, soon to be named the first interim prime minister of Iraq — and thence made its way, via a prominent British journalist, to the front page of The Daily Telegraph, and from there into the American press, receiving prominent treatment in various places, including “Meet the Press” and an Op-Ed column by William Safire in The New York Times. Perhaps, as you nursed your coffee that day, you saw the program or read the piece? According to Mr. Suskind, that was your government at work.
Despite White House and C.I.A. denials, Mr. Suskind’s case, if not definitive, seems strong; and had Hussein not been captured the very day the article appeared in The Telegraph, the C.I.A.’s handiwork might have had a significant political effect. The letter also helpfully mentioned that Iraqi intelligence and “a small team from the Al Qaeda organization” arranged for a shipment from Niger to reach Iraq, presumably a reference to the elusive yellowcake that President Bush referred to in the notorious 16 words in his State of the Union address in January 2003. If you are going to use your intelligence service to fill the politically damaging holes in the case for war, you might as well fill all the holes.
Now using the C.I.A. to manipulate domestic politics in this way is — if one might venture to use a quaint word — illegal, and thus, as Mr. Suskind points out, “the sort of thing generally taken up in impeachment hearings.” In the age of frozen scandal, with a handful of months left of George W. Bush in the White House, such hearings are unlikely, though perhaps it is not utopian to hope that Congress, controlled now by the opposition party, might use its subpoena power to look into the matter. And though this particular scandal combines in an irresistible way all the darker aspects of the present administration — secrecy, self-dealing and the kind of solipsistic arrogance best embodied in Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld’s vow that, in the occupation of Iraq, “We will impose our reality on them” — one can’t help regretting a bit that its shadow, self-projected as it is, has loomed so large over what is a complex, ambitious, provocative, risky and often maddening book.
In a crowded, highly talented field, Mr. Suskind bids fair to claim the crown as the most perceptive, incisive, dogged chronicler of the inner workings of the Bush administration. To him we owe many of the signature expressions of the era, among them “Mayberry Machiavellis” (from his essential and prescient 2003 Esquire piece on Karl Rove and John DiIulio, first chief of President Bush’s “faith-based initiative”) and “reality-based community” (from an October 2004 article for The New York Times Magazine). A Pulitzer Prize-winning former reporter for The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Suskind is at heart a storyteller whose chosen yarn, told and retold, is the “education of the innocent,” whether that wide-eyed rube is Mr. DiIulio; or Paul O’Neill, Mr. Bush’s first treasury secretary, whose rude and ill-fated coming of age is impeccably detailed in “The Price of Loyalty”; or the bevy of national security professionals whose desperate preoccupations as they improvise a “war on terror” are vividly described in “The One Percent Doctrine.”
Behind the highly promoted scandals in “The Way of the World” lies a complex web of intersecting stories, the plotlines of a varied traveling company of actors whose doings Mr. Suskind chronicles with meticulous care: an Energy Department intelligence official charged with preventing “the markets” from supplying terrorist groups with enough highly enriched uranium to make a bomb; an Afghan teenager brought to Denver as an exchange student; an Illinois lawyer determined to save her client, a Libyan — perhaps a terrorist, perhaps an unlucky baker — who seems to be slowly dying in his Guantánamo Bay cell; a former prime minister of Pakistan, immersed in a doomed crusade to retake her office; a Libyan-born Islamist cleric — and police informant — expelled from his perch at a “radical” London mosque; a Pakistani financial analyst rousted by Secret Service agents for making the mistake of adjusting the volume on his iPod at just the wrong moment. These narratives and others perform, in Mr. Suskind’s hands, an intricate arabesque and manage, to a rather remarkable degree, to show us, in this age of terror, “the true way of the world.”
Amid the intense and vivid storytelling here, Mr. Suskind takes many risks and not all succeed; the book will be criticized for sentimentality and a kind of wide-eyed, communal optimism that are easy to ridicule. Still, the reporting is solid and often sublime: one doesn’t have to believe entirely that Benazir Bhutto, twice Pakistan’s prime minister, twice deposed, was “evolving, in public” and “creating a powerful counterpoint to bin Laden’s saga of violence and salvation” to find Mr. Suskind’s account of her last campaign chilling and powerful.
And the revelation of an effort to steal and sell fissile material in Georgia’s now celebrated “breakaway region” of South Ossetia — one of “three dozen significant attempts” to traffic in such material, mostly uranium, since 1994 — is only the most terrifying of a dozen or more newsworthy disclosures in this book, all of them reflecting darkly on the obsessive secrecy, political ruthlessness, ideological single-mindedness and breathtaking incompetence of the Bush administration.
In a time less sated with scandal, many of these might have made headlines on their own account. Alas, scandal — subject, like everything else, to inflation — has become a highly overpriced commodity. At bottom, Mr. Suskind is intent on posing deeper questions: about transparency and the “dying cult” of secrecy; about “defining human progress together”; about the “lack of imagination about what the nation might yet become.” These are hard, frustrating, complicated matters to which he offers only tentative answers, some of them vague, sentimental, even naïve. But he is brave enough to try to discover, through relentless reporting and a sustained and admirable act of sympathy, the right questions. In this age of scandal, we must be grateful to him for that.
Mark Danner, the author most recently of “The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War’s Buried History,” will publish “Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War” next spring.

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 40

2008-08-29T02:45:00.004-04:00

Hello, it's Friday morning and all is well....

Complete Text of Obama's speech:

Obama Takes Aim at Bush and McCain With a Forceful Call to Change America

News Analysis
In Speech, Bringing Lofty Words Down to Earth
By PATRICK HEALY
Senator Barack Obama made his promise of “change” specific and showed that he could fight his opponent

And for the bad news:

Sayonara!

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 39

2008-08-28T05:27:00.004-04:00

Thursday breakfast coming up, a high point of the week... It is a real treat to have a 'real' meal in the Rosewood dining room served by the staff and made to order... Orange juice (not from concentrate), a fruit cup, 3 eggs over medium, 2 bacon and 2 english muffins--- yum... and sometimes topped off with a waffle and syrup or with strawberries and whipped cream...

I didn't learn anything new yesterday, the appointment was supposed to be a post-operation one so I have another one in a month...

The good news story:

And the semi-bad news story:

Sayonara...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 38

2008-08-27T03:49:00.002-04:00

1) I have an appointment this afternoon with Dr. Mansoor and next Tuesday the day after Labor Day at 630 am for the cardiac surgery with Dr. Fram.

2) This Friday there will be a Resident Council Meeting to determine where the library will be.

3) We are still waiting for Jason to address the static IP address issue...

See, gentle reader, how fluid and dynamic some decisions are and how some are static and set in stone when it wants to be...

Sayonara!

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 37

2008-08-26T08:24:00.002-04:00

It's Tuesday and I am ...... tired...

Have a good Day...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 36

2008-08-25T06:37:00.005-04:00

Today is hopefully the day a decision will be made on what is to be done:

1) About my heart...

2) About the location of the new Salmon Brook Library...

3) About the Salmon Brook server needing a static ip address for the Internet...

Isn't this exciting???

And the good news story...

And the decisions are:

3) Bruce reported that he did get an address and had called Jason....

2) The library will be located in the Rosewood dining room...

1) And the doctor hasn't called back yet...

Sayonara!

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 35

2008-08-24T05:40:00.006-04:00

Welcome to the start of another week another day to be thankful for this life!

If you need good news, welcome to the club, all of us are in quest of the good news:

Wikimedia pegs future on education, not profit

And for the good news from New York:

Doug Kanter for The New York Times
Games Close With a Flourish

And good news from Connecticut:

First Phase Of Reforms Launched In Hartford Schools

Sayonara!

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 34

2008-08-23T08:04:00.003-04:00

Good Saturday morning to all of you (I mean Joyce and BJ since they are the only ones that leave comments so far) who read this.

I survived another night, I did have minor chest pain at 530 am but it went away with 2 doses of nitro... I'm back taking my own meds but just spent a long time getting straight what the 8 am meds should be... Dr. Elaba did increase the nitrates to 120 mg and the new drug for cholesterol is not in yet... I take 11 separate pills at 8 am...

Bad news for today:

Names of the Dead

Published: August 22, 2008

The Department of Defense has identified 4,141 American service members who have died since the start of the Iraq war and 574 who have died as a part of Operation Enduring Freedom, which is centered in Afghanistan. It confirmed the deaths of the following Americans on Friday:

Iraq:

HOPPER, Nickolas Lee, 27, Sgt., Marines; Montrose, Ill.; II Marine Expeditionary Force.
STANCIEL, George, 40, Sgt. First Class, Army; Greenwood, Miss.; 18th Engineer Brigade.

Afghanistan:

TODD, David J. Jr., 36, Sgt. First Class, Army; Marrero, La.; Afghan Regional Security Integration Command-West.

And for one more bummer!

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/23/business/yourmoney/23money.html?8dpc=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1219516168-/C51p2Ct743gqtP7I6VW3g&pagewanted=all

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 33

2008-08-22T06:05:00.005-04:00

If it wasn't so sad I would laugh or cry or whatever one does while having chest pains... It's 6 am and I have had two doses of nitro and I peed in a urinal between the doses and Patrick came in and cleaned me up after the second dose and the blood lady arrived and took 1 vial of blood shortly thereafter and I got dressed and got up...

Needless to say I am feeling better and the panic is going away but there is a sense of deja vu about this and I am tired of it.....

Perhaps at another time I can write philosophically about this but for now the good news is that I'm still here.,.

The other good news is that I phoned Dr.Fram (note the spelling) and left a message that he should call the nursing home about my getting plavix and aspirin and all is well and calm again at salmon brook nursing home....

And just because you, gentle reader, have been accustomed to 'real good news':

Older, tougher, smarter
Aging athletes pick regimens that can make them younger
Julian Guthrie, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, August 22, 2008

(08-21) 20:12 PDT -- Swimmer Dara Torres, 41, says her strokes have gotten better with age. John Dane III is a 58-year-old sailor competing in his first Olympics. Constantina Tomescu-Dita of Romania is a 38-year-old mom who grabbed gold in the women's marathon, tearing up the 26.2-mile course like it was nothing. Equestrian rider Hiroshi Hoketsu of Japan, 67, insists he's never been in better shape.
This year's Olympians are significantly older than they were a generation ago, competing at the highest levels thanks to dramatic changes in the way they train, recover and think about their sport. They also are benefiting from the simple fact that they are continuing to push themselves.
Karen Francis, a behavioral neuroscientist at the University of San Francisco and author of "Physical Dimensions of Aging," has been watching the Olympics with special interest but has not been surprised by the prevalence of older athletes.
"Our knowledge regarding what happens to the body with age is really changing," Francis said. "It used to be that the gold standard for physical performance was 20. But now you have people who are continuing to train and are pushing the age curve up."
In the process, these athletes are becoming more wily.
"I liken it to a pianist who has done very deliberate practice for 50 years. That individual will know exactly what is needed to perform the piece," Francis said. "The older athlete is aware of how his or her body has changed with age and will anticipate what is needed to perform."
Scientists hard at work
At the same time, scientists are learning more about the benefits of exercise, findings that could lead to continued jaw-dropping performances by older athletes.
"We are learning that exercise actually reverses some basic aspects of aging at the molecular level," said Simon Melov, who directs genomics at the Buck Institute for Age Research in Novato. "Exercise doesn't just make muscles stronger, it makes muscles younger."
Melov is studying the mitochondria of worms, mice and humans to create a genetic blueprint for what muscle looks like at different ages. His first study, involving 50 men and women, showed that six months of resistance training "in a very real sense, made the muscle younger," adding to the person's fitness and agility.
Melov's next study, which he hopes to begin early next year, will involve twice the number of people and look at how a subject's genetic fingerprint is affected by months of dedicated yoga, resistance training or endurance workouts.
"Our goal is to be able to take a biopsy (from the quadriceps muscle) from someone who is 50, for example, and to know whether the person has the muscle of someone younger or older," said Melov, who is 46 and has increased his own workouts of running and weight training since seeing the results of his research.
A recent study out of Stanford University School of Medicine supports the idea of using exercise to prolong longevity. Researchers compared more than 500 runners over age 50 over a 20-year period to a similar group of nonrunners, looking at everything from rates of orthopedic injuries to the ability to perform basic tasks.
"We had legitimate questions at the beginning of our research," said Jim Fries, senior author of the study and emeritus professor in the medical school. "Was running on hard surfaces going to cause the knees to age prematurely? And would the body in general fall apart from too much abuse and overtake any health benefits that occur in the short term?"
The researchers found that runners not only developed disabilities years later than nonrunners but also that the gap widened with time - even as subjects entered their eighth and ninth decades of life.
"We did not expect to get such clear results," said Fries, who at 69 runs 20 miles a week.
Knowing when to rest
Sports scientists say the ability to compete at more advanced ages also has to do with a revolution in the understanding of what is needed to get a body ready to perform.
"There is increased importance placed on the role of recovery, on giving a body rest," said Chris Thompson, a sports scientist at the University of San Francisco. "Older athletes should not train seven days a week. If you're 40, you can perform like you're 25, but you can't train like you're 25."
He said the nature of training for athletes of all ages also is changing.
"A lot of exercise being done now comes from exercises once done for rehabilitation after an injury," Thompson said. "Ten years ago, 'core training' that focuses on strengthening the torso didn't exist: pilates, yoga, bridges on the floor, stability balls. It took bright people to say, 'Hey, let's do this on the front end.' "
He said trainers and athletes employ what's called "periodization," alternating workouts that are intense and light, long and short to prevent overtraining and burnout.
"Michael Phelps knew which days he would need to be at his absolute best," said Thompson. "So his trainers created a routine working back from his competition date."
Thompson said that he will not be surprised if the trend of slightly older athletes continues in the 2012 Olympics.
"The human body has an outstanding capacity to adapt," he said.
Mill Valley resident Eve Pell didn't start running until she was 40, and she went on to become the fastest woman road runner at the age of 60. A year ago, at 70, she competed in several races at the World Masters Game in Italy.
"At the Games in Italy, you'd see all of these wiry, gray-haired people in their warm-ups running and jumping," Pell recalled. "You see how active they are. Running does retard the aging process - and that's no small thing."
It can also bring some fringe benefits, Pell said with a laugh. She met her future husband, Sam Hirabayashi, who is 80, while running.
Mind and body fitness
For the body
Kaiser Permanente offers tips on "fitness for everyone":
Aerobic exercise: To strengthen your heart and lungs. One of the best and easiest aerobic activities is walking. You don't need special equipment, and it can be done almost anywhere. To get aerobic benefit, walk briskly - fast enough to increase your pulse and breathing, but not so fast that you can't talk comfortably. Some people start by walking 30 minutes daily during lunch or after work. Others start more gradually, with a 10-minute walk every other day. You can also add up exercise time over the course of a day. Walking 10 minutes three times a day is roughly equivalent to walking 30 minutes once a day.
Muscle-strengthening and core stabilization activities: To build muscles, improve posture and balance, and burn fat. The key to core stabilization is learning to use the deep muscles of your trunk. There are several muscles involved, but the first one to work on is your transverse abdominus. The transverse abdominus wraps around the front of your body like a corset. It's the muscle you feel when you cough. To contract the transverse abdominus, imagine pulling your belly button back toward your spine. Hold this contraction for five to 10 seconds, then relax.
Flexibility: To reduce pain and tension and increase range of motion. To stay flexible, stretch all your major groups of muscles. These include the muscles of your arms, back, hips, front and back of your thighs and calves. Try to stretch for 10 to 12 minutes a day, after a brief warmup. Do some stretches first thing in the morning, take a stretch break instead of a coffee break, or stretch in the office for a few minutes. Or participate in activities that include stretching, such as dance, martial arts (aikido or karate), tai chi or yoga.
To find out more about Kaiser's fitness tips and plan, go to http://www.permanente.net/.
For the mind
Dr. Karen Francis, a behavioral neuroscientist at USF and author of "Physical Dimensions of Aging," urges people to do at least one new thing every day to challenge the mind and body. She believes that mental and physical agility can be enhanced by even the smallest of changes in one's routine.
Here are some of her suggestions:
-- Take your first step up a flight of stairs with the "other" leg, the less dominant one.
-- Control your computer mouse with your "other" hand.
-- Brush your teeth with your "other" hand.
-- Stand up while you read or work.
-- Hike on a new trail instead of walking your usual route.
-- Do a crossword puzzle with a friend and read the questions out loud. Don't always do a crossword puzzle from the same source.
-- Read an article in the paper out loud while walking around the house.
-- Walk 20 minutes from your house or office, taking as many turns as possible.
-- Learn a new language.
E-mail Julian Guthrie at jguthrie@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 32

2008-08-21T21:30:00.005-04:00

For the first time I am going to type in blog in an emotional state in an attempt to have a cathartic effect on my anger... It is 930 pm and I am ripping mad....

Let me digress gentle reader to explain the waiting game of my life for the last two days...

It's 530 am and I am waiting for the ambulance to take me to my scheduled 630 am appointment in center 8 for my operation... I wonder if it will be my newly made friend Jason from AMR the ambulance service... I told him about the blog and said I would mention him but I forgot the -persevere in fudomyo9-persevere.blogspot.com which is the address of the blog... Anyway, Dr. Framm came in at 7 am greeted me and said I would be patient #3 and therefore would have to wait a while...

Needless to say six hours later it is 115 pm and I am still waiting... I ring the call button and this voice says 'may I help you?' and I reply that I would like to leave and re-schedule the operation and just at that moment the nurse comes in and says they are ready for you and I repeat what I said and she says don't be silly they are used to this.... So I go down to the second 4 operating room it's 4 pm and my only recollection is of Dr. Framm pressing down hard on my right groin and he is trying to stop the bleeding from the site where they were putting the catheter in my artery on the way to my heart... I get the feeling that things are getting frantic and that all did not go well,,, 'tis true they stopped the bleeding and they didn't even reach the heart the catheter was too short... I remember the doctor saying we would talk tomorrow about what next and I was taken to the 10th floor to spend the night and they had dinner... yea! I remember my roommate speaking on the phone a lot which BJ commented that she tried several tines to call and the line was busy..

I laid out the options that the doctor had laid out emphasizing the tentative nature the situation because it was somewhat dependent on what Dr. Mansoor the cardiologist said and he wouldn't be back from vacation until next week,,,, Anyway Dr. Framm indicated that we could order different catheters to be custon made or we could rely on an aggressive treatment of medicine to clear the blockage or we could try the left wrist.... I picked up that Framm was leaning to the left and that is not a political statement but one can only hope... Bottom line is BJ's comment that his advice to keep on using Plavix and Aspirin was a good thing.,.

It was 9 am that Dr. Framm left me and discharged me by saying that he would have the nurse call for an ambulance .........

Six hours later at 315 pm the ambulance arrives...

Six hours later at 915 pm when I get my meds and there has been some change to be told by Marilyn the supervising nurse tomorrow I am told that NO I will not get plavix and aspirin...
I am furious.... Dr Framm told me that it was important to take them and Venti the night nurse says well he didn't write it down........

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 31

2008-08-19T08:35:00.002-04:00

The Good News:

Life Is Short...

I heard from Joyce twice yesterday, I slept soundly last night and even missed my 6 am pills because I didn't wake up until 8 am, and finally only one more night before my operation... I am a little nervous...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL # 30

2008-08-18T05:55:00.002-04:00

Monday, Monday....

No chest pains last night one more thing for which to be thankful...

Today's good news:

‘It’s Therapeutic For Them To Talk About Their Lives’
Program Lets Senior Citizens Pass Along Oral Histories
By ANN MARIE SOMMA Courant Staff Writer
August 18, 2008
ROCKY HILL — - To the casual listener, 81-year-old Barbara Bennett's recollections of her life growing up in Seymour may sound ordinary. But decades from now, her recorded words could mean everything to her grandchildren searching for their family history.A few months ago, Bennett participated in a new program offered by the town's human services department that records the oral histories of homebound seniors. During three sessions, Bennett sat with trained volunteers and filled six compact discs with anecdotes and memories of her life.The discs have taken on a new poignancy; Bennett recently was diagnosed with lung cancer."I had a chance to dig into my memory bank and talk about a few things I haven't talked about in years," Bennett said. "My children know most of the stories, but my grandchildren don't."
Oral history has become in recent years a way to preserve memories and life experiences of people whose stories might otherwise have been lost. Oral histories are being conducted in towns and cities across the nation. Even the Library of Congress is storing recollections of U.S. veterans who were in combat or supported the war effort.Carleen Zembko, a certified therapeutic recreation director who trains the volunteers for the program, said the recordings enable listeners to eavesdrop on events, attitudes and ways of life that no longer exist."Even a relative's favorite food or their soft spot for animals become clear to a family member trying to understand their own sensibilities," Zembko said.Zembko said her own family could have benefited from oral history. Her ancestors came over on the Mayflower, but the family's history was lost when her father died. Zembko's traumatic experience of giving up her beloved dog, Laddi, at age 8 when, her family moved from a farm in Lebanon to Manchester provides insight into what makes her tick, she said."That event impacted my life," Zembko said.To date, two seniors have participated in the program, which began earlier this year when the town purchased new audio recording equipment and trained volunteers to conduct interviews, said Mark Williams, the town's director of human services. The program is proving to be a fulfilling experience."It's therapeutic for them to talk about their lives," Williams said.The historical narratives take form as the interviewers ask the seniors questions that elicit memories of past events. Bennett said she was amazed at how quickly long-forgotten memories resurfaced, a small miracle for someone her age, when memory has a habit of slipping.She began her life story with her birth in 1927 in Brockton, Mass., then her family's move to Seymour and then forward in time to her marriages and the deaths of her two husbands, the births of children, her work at Danbury Hospital as an X-ray technician, and her move to Rocky Hill in 1967.Interspersed are stories passed down to her over the years about family members, her recollection of a snowstorm in the 1930s that dumped enough snow to come up to her hips, and her candid talk about her previous fight against lung cancer."If you don't tell their children what has taken place, they will never know. I could have used more information on my grandmother, but I came from a tight-lipped family," Bennett said.Bennett has postponed moving in with her daughter in Vermont as she recuperates from cancer surgery. She'll take the discs with her when she moves."My children know I've done this. If they want to listen to the tapes, all they have to do is ask me," Bennett said.Contact Ann Marie Somma at asomma@courant.com.

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL #29

2008-08-17T06:46:00.002-04:00

The good news: no chest pain last night and US rivals shine at church forum

and more good news:

DeGeneres, de Rossi marry: reports
Posted 4 hours 8 minutes ago Updated 4 hours 7 minutes ago

The couple have been dating for about four years. (Getty Images: Kevin Winter, file photo)
US comedian and talk show host Ellen DeGeneres has married her long-time partner, actress Portia de Rossi, at their home in Los Angeles, according to People magazine.
DeGeneres, 50, and de Rossi, 35, exchanged handwritten vows in an intimate ceremony attending by 19 guests, a representative for the couple told the magazine.
The couple have been dating for about four years and have been open about their relationship, appearing at red carpet events in Hollywood together.
DeGeneres announced her plans to wed de Rossi, the former Ally McBeal actress, on her talk show, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, in May after California's Supreme Court overturned a state ban on same-sex marriage.
DeGeneres made broadcast history in 1997 when her TV alter ego came out of the closet on her ABC America sitcom Ellen, becoming the first openly gay lead character on US prime-time network television.
She previously had a relationship with actress Anne Heche.

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL #28

2008-08-16T16:45:00.002-04:00

It's Saturday and a new day!!

The good news...Septuplet joy for Egyptian couple

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL #27

2008-08-15T07:52:00.003-04:00

Almost the end of another week and BJ hasn't left yet her flight was cancelled...

But I did make it through the night without any chest pain...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/15/sports/olympics/15gymnastics.html?hp

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL #26

2008-08-14T06:12:00.002-04:00

I have returned from the hospital with mixed reviews. The good news is that found blockage and will repair it the bad news is that Iwill have to go in again next Wednesday at 630 am...

Additional good news is that I don't have a clot in my leg it was a mistake by the nursing home test.... Additional bad news is that the surgeon who will be doing the two stents required doesn't believe that the blochages caused the 'chest pains'...

So I am really looking for additional 'good news'... Max and Lena and BJ are still here but leave tonight for San Francisco...

I have one small bookcase in my room but the 3 larger ones are coming later...

The library collection is growing but the rec room has not been cleared yet...

I haven't checked on the status of the 'routers' yet but...

I take it the gentle reader can see the pattern here therefore:

THE GOOD NEWS FOR TODAY IS:

Wild one at Fenway: Youkilis' homer lifts Boston over Rangers 19-17 after Sox blow 10-run lead

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL #25

2008-08-12T05:45:00.005-04:00

Good morning to whom ever is reading this...

A good news story:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/science/12ethics.html?8dpc=&_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all

And another:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/08/11/MN391292Q6.DTL&tsp=1

And 'won' for the good 'gays' or is that 'one for the good guys' :

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/08/12/BADU128V6V.DTL

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL #24

2008-08-11T07:11:00.004-04:00

Good morning and all is well... sort of... Henry died this weekend..,. He seemed so alive and healthy, tall and thin and walking with his cane...

Giant Retailers Look to Sun for Energy Savings

By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM
Published: August 10, 2008

Retailers are typically obsessed with what to put under their roofs, not on them. Yet the nation’s biggest store chains are coming to see their immense, flat roofs as an untapped resource.

In recent months, chains including Wal-Mart Stores, Kohl’s, Safeway and Whole Foods Market have installed solar panels on roofs of their stores to generate electricity on a large scale. One reason they are racing is to beat a Dec. 31 deadline to gain tax advantages for these projects.
So far, most chains have outfitted fewer than 10 percent of their stores. Over the long run, assuming Congress renews a favorable tax provision and more states offer incentives, the chains promise a solar construction program that would ultimately put panels atop almost every big store in the country.
The trend, while not entirely new, is accelerating as the chains seize a chance to bolster their environmental credentials by cutting back on their use of electricity from coal.
“It’s very clear that green energy is now front and center in the minds of the business sector,” said Daniel M. Kammen, an energy expert at the University of California, Berkeley. “Not only will you see panels on the roofs of your local stores, but I suspect very soon retailers will have stickers in their windows saying, ‘This is a green energy store.’ ”
In the coming months, 85 Kohl’s stores will get solar panels; 43 already have them. “We want to keep pushing as many as we possibly can,” said Ken Bonning, executive vice president for logistics at Kohl’s.
Macy’s, which has solar panels atop 18 stores, plans to install them on another 40 by the end of this year. Safeway is aiming to put panels atop 23 stores. And other chains, including Whole Foods Market, BJ’s Wholesale Club and REI, the purveyor of outdoor goods, are planning projects of their own.
Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest retailer, has 17 stores and distribution centers with solar panels in operation or in the testing phase. It plans to add them soon to five more stores. People at the chain are considering a far larger program that would put panels and other renewable technologies at hundreds of stores.
“It’s going to be the Wal-Marts of the world that will buy these things over acres and make a difference,” said Roger G. Little, chairman and chief executive of the Spire Corporation, a Boston company that provides solar equipment.
Analysts are not sure how much power the rooftop projects could ultimately produce, but they say it could be enough to help shave total electricity demand. In many communities, stores are among the biggest energy users. Depending on location and weather, the solar panels generate 10 to 40 percent of the power a store needs.
If Wal-Mart eventually covered the roofs of all its Sam’s Club and Wal-Mart locations with solar panels, figures from the company show that the resulting solar acreage would roughly equal the size of Manhattan, an island of 23 square miles.
Booming demand in recent years has driven up the price of solar panels, and analysts say it costs far more to generate electricity from solar energy than from coal.
Coal generation costs about 6 cents for a kilowatt hour, which is enough electricity to run a hair dryer for an hour. Natural gas generation costs about 9 cents a kilowatt hour, said Reese Tisdale, a senior analyst with the consulting firm Emerging Energy Research. In comparison, “best case” for power from solar panels is about 25 to 30 cents a kilowatt hour, he said.
But retailers believe that they can achieve economies of scale. With coal and electricity prices rising, they are also betting that solar power will become more competitive, especially if new policies addressing global warming limit the emissions from coal plants.
Retailers, hoping to create a bigger market and positioning themselves at the forefront of a national shift toward renewable energy, are encouraging one another to join the bandwagon.
“We’re hoping that our purchases along with some other retailers will help bring the technology costs down,” said Kathy Loftus, who is in charge of energy and other initiatives at Whole Foods Market.
Most of the efforts so far are in California, New Jersey and Connecticut, states that offer generous incentives. Executives say they would like to convert many more. How quickly they can do so depends on government policy because retailers rely on tax incentives to offset the cost.
Corporate officials describe a federal tax credit for renewable energy, one that Congress has let expire and then renewed several times, as particularly important. A Congressional deadlock over offshore oil drilling has held up legislation that would renew the credit for next year.
“Every project that starts development has to be finished by Dec. 31 or you lose tax equity advantage, and nobody’s willing to take that risk,” said George Waidelich, vice president for energy operations at Safeway. “You’re talking about millions of dollars.”
Retailers are fast becoming energy experts. They are experimenting with traditional solar panels, a new type of thin solar panel and ground-mounted tracking systems that move with the sun.
They are also combining those systems with other rooftop technologies like skylights and solar water heaters.
“Solar has become part of the kit that we think about when we open a store,” said Sharon Im-Lee, REI’s energy manager.
American retailers are following the lead of stores in Europe, which are much further along. Store-roof projects are so numerous in parts of Germany that they can be spotted in satellite photos. Government subsidies there, however, have lasted for years.
“In Germany, there are none of the concerns you find in the United States about whether support will be around next year,” said Jenny Chase, an energy analyst in London.
Retailers in the United States tend to buy their own solar-power systems, at $4 million to $6 million for a store the size of a Wal-Mart, or enter into an agreement with a utility company that pays the up-front costs and then gives the store a break on power bills — an approach that appeals to big chains.
“It really helps make it economical for the retailer,” said Kim Saylors-Laster, Wal-Mart’s vice president for energy.
Retailers are also looking at other ways to extend their use of renewable energy by testing technologies like wind turbines and reflective white roofs, which keep buildings cooler in warm weather.
Bernard Sosnick, an analyst with Gilford Securities who has examined Wal-Mart’s plans, said the day might come when people can pull their electric cars up to a store and recharge them with power from the roof or even from wind turbines in the parking lot.
“It’s not as over the horizon as it might seem,” he said.

And another...

http://www.courant.com/features/lifestyle/green/hc-greenkids0811.artaug11,0,4818929.story

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL #23

2008-08-10T13:54:00.002-04:00

Sunday's dose of good news:

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The City Exposed: Tamale Lady
Mike Kepka, Chronicle Staff
Sunday, August 10, 2008

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theCity Exposed Archive
Tamale Lady
A recent Friday, 6:08 p.m.: The sun fades, a long week is over, and happy hour at Zeitgeist is in full swing. The Tamale Lady wheels her heavy cart through a crowd that can hardly wait to give her $4 for a hand-wrapped hunger satisfier. Peddling homemade tamales by night to bike messengers and Mission hipsters, Virginia Ramos, 55, likes to say, "I don't know you, but I love you," a motto she lives by. Ramos, who cleans houses by day, came to the city from Mexico 28 years ago looking for a better life for herself and her seven children. Now she couldn't imagine living anywhere else. She credits her happiness to the thousands of hungry souls who have helped her find a shining path through a tough world.

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL #22

2008-08-09T06:17:00.003-04:00

Next week I go to the hospital for an angiogram...

The good news for today from USA Today:

CERN's new collider to fire first beam next month

GENEVA (AP) — The largest machine ever made to explore the world's tiniest particles will be launched next month with an initial attempt to fire beams around a 17-mile circular tube, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics said Thursday.
Scientists from around the world have been waiting eagerly to run experiments on the $3.8 billion Large Hadron Collider, under construction since 2003 and in planning for years before that.
The new Geneva collider will recreate the rapidly changing conditions in the universe a split second after the so-called Big Bang. It will be the closest that scientists have yet come to the event that they theorize was the beginning of the universe. They hope the new equipment will enable them to study particles and forces as yet unobserved.
"We're finishing a marathon with a sprint," said project leader Lyn Evans. "It's been a long haul, and we're all eager to get the LHC research program underway."
Collisions of particles to see what happens will take some time longer, but they should be occurring this year. The first beam will travel in a clockwise direction on Sept. 10, a laboratory statement said. When beams are stable in both directions, they will be steered into collision.

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL #21

2008-08-08T05:34:00.004-04:00

I made it through two nights in a row without chest pains... Of course I was sleeping sitting up and I got up at 5am...

I did receive a call from BJ last night they were delayed in Chicago but will be here after the Mountain School reunion on Sunday night or Monday... Hurrah!!!!

I have an appointment with my cardiologist, Dr. Mansoor today and Dr. Elaba wants some answers today...

The following is some "good news" from this morning's NYTimes...

BELLOWS FALLS, Vt. — Few people would describe Stephen McAllister as conventional.
Clifton Adams/National Geographic
POLISHING HISTORY The Estey Organ Company in 1927 in Brattleboro, Vt. Today, the Estey Organ Museum is home to old reed and pipe organs.
After all, he once jumped out the window of his 11th-grade English class during a discussion of “Don Quixote” that he considered “particularly boring,” getting himself expelled from school in the process.
Now, Mr. McAllister has a plan that may seem as quixotic. At age 59, he has returned to this gritty river village, buying an abandoned paper mill on the Internet that he is turning into an eco-resort, a go-to place for “green marriages, green bar mitzvahs and carbon-neutral vacations.”
It is the kind of entrepreneurially eccentric idea that writers of a Depression era federal guide to Vermont found flourishing back then, especially in this southeastern sliver of the state along the Connecticut River, which has long bubbled with a kind of creative chutzpah.
Vermont, the authors suggested, was not just a state, but a state of mind.
“Vermont apologists have defended this attitude as the very essence of liberty,” they wrote. “Outside observers have considered it as a consistent manifestation of unenlightened perversity.”
Revisiting some of the river towns nowadays finds them trying to rebound from factory closings, farm consolidations and fading Main Streets by again embracing idiosyncratic ideas, and drawing on the bedrock that once made these towns vibrant: the river, the railroad and a hardy independent streak.
Consider the colorful characters in the 1937 guide, a nationwide writers’ project sponsored by the Works Progress Administration that has been republished online and is attracting new public attention.
In Brattleboro, there was Dr. Robert Wesselhoeft, a German political refugee, who established the “water cure,” a mineral spring attracting far-flung folks with frayed nerves, reportedly including opposites like Stonewall Jackson and Harriet Beecher Stowe.
In Bellows Falls, Henrietta Howland Robinson Green, an investor then considered the richest woman in America, reportedly did not change her undergarments until they had worn out, rebuffed heat and hot water, and refused to pay for a doctor to treat her son’s broken leg, which was eventually amputated. (The site of this miser’s home is now a bank.)
And in Putney, John Humphrey Noyes, a “magnetic, elusive, and provocative” religious fanatic, wrote in 1847 that “ ‘there is no more reason why sexual intercourse should be restrained by law, than why eating and drinking should be’ ” and “led his followers from communism of property, through communism of households, to communism of love, or, as he called it, complex marriage,” the guide said.
“There has always been real creativity and real eccentricity and independent thought,” said Dona Brown, an associate professor of history at the University of Vermont. “People who had a big idea and went with it,” often exhibiting “a tinkering or artisanal quality.”
“They had this idea that they could fix things, even fix humanity,” Professor Brown said.
That spirit seemed to come in bursts, usually after economic hard times. The early 1900s spawned manufacturing masterminds; the 1960s, following a postwar slump, drew back-to-the-land hippies.
Now, that cycle is recurring. In Brattleboro, when people “saw the regular businesses not being viable, they really wanted to make sure Brattleboro didn’t suffer,” said Elsie Smith, 37, who, with her twin sister and trapeze partner, Serenity Smith Forchion, started the New England Center for Circus Arts in a defunct cotton mill, where arts-related businesses were offered low rents.
The mill’s strong beams allow circus folks to “hang off them without worrying too much about bringing the ceiling down,” Ms. Smith said. More importantly, here, “you’re not odd or weird or strange for being a circus performer.”
In Bellows Falls, “by the mid-1990s, 75 percent of the stores were vacant,” said Robert McBride, a painter who has helped convert derelict buildings into housing and studios for artists, igniting an economic resurgence. “People were saying we needed to get a mill back, bring back in a big company. Wasn’t going to happen. So we brought artists to the table.”
Among them is Denny Partridge, who returned here after decades in New York to perform plays in bakeries and other offbeat venues during the “mud season” of late winter and early spring. “I’ve always had a theory that art exists best in places where life is hard,” she said.
A group from Brooklyn, “So Percussion,” has been commissioned to write and

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL #20

2008-08-07T07:25:00.002-04:00

I just had Thursday breakfast in the Rosewood dining room. 3 eggs over medium, 3 slices of crisp bacon, 2 english muffins, a fruit cup and a large orange juice sat very well with my pallet...

And now to face the day... I survived the night without a trip to the hospital for chest pain and that's a plus...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL #19

2008-08-06T08:50:00.002-04:00

I had more chest pains last night about 1:45 am and after 1 dose of nitro under the tongue only alleviated it about 1/2 hour I got sent to the hospital and during the ambulance trip they sprayed under my tongue with liquid nitro and I reached the hospital pain free. The hospital took an xray of the heart and lungs and got some lab tests on my blood and sent me home by 8 am...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL #18

2008-08-05T09:11:00.004-04:00

Today is the first day of the rest of my life therefore...

I began the self-medication program today - which means I don't get the meds from the nurse and the nurses cart instead I unlock my bed stand and get my pill box which has a weeks worth of pills organized by day of the week time of day .... I have about 12 different meds which I take for various ailments and I had to pass an oral exam on the meds... I also had to pass a mini-cognitive exam given by the social worker...

http://www.santabanta.com/jokes.asp?catid=8953

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL #17

2008-08-04T07:23:00.003-04:00

I had a few scares in the last two nights... On Saturday night I had chest pain about 3 in the morning but it went away after I had a dose of nitroglycerin under the tongue... But last night I had chest pains again at about the same time and the on duty nurse said there wasn't any order to give me nitro and that the doctor on call didn't know me and would rather I went to the hospital to check... it out... anyway I sat up and after a while the pains went away...

I just spent a half hour putting my night stand at the foot of the bed so I could more easily lock and unlock it in accordance with the new medication schedule which makes me responsible for taking my own medications and locking up the remainder for the week... I also have to take a test about my medications...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL #16

2008-08-03T10:01:00.004-04:00

http://www.thehealthcareblog.com/the_health_care_blog/2007/02/policy_not_so_f.html

A lot of information about financing health care...

A few interesting anagrams:...

Internet Anagram Server = Isn't rearrangement rave?
Dormitory = Dirty Room
Dictionary = Indicatory
Schoolmaster = The classroom
Elvis = Lives
Listen = Silent
Clint Eastwood = Old West Action
Madam Curie = Radium came
A telephone girl = Repeating "Hello"
Western Union = No Wire Unsent

After the daily ritual of watering the courtyard hanging flowers I helped Peg install 2 birdfeeders and a birdbath...

I wish there was some person who understood the a/c system as it pertains to the rec room on the weekend... it is unbelievably warm....

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL #15

2008-08-02T08:09:00.004-04:00

"nursing home abuses"

NCJRS Abstract - National Criminal Justice Reference Service

Gray Panthers St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture Find ...

Health Blog : Death Spiral Holds Enduring Appeal

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL #14

2008-07-31T10:13:00.002-04:00

Chris - I have to my aforementioned reference to this hardworking practitionary to the Occupational Therapy skillset, needless to say I don't have a clue what that means...

I can find my way to the library and to Subway all by myself.

http://www.jumbojoke.com/teenagers_are_like_cats_1683.html

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL #13

2008-07-30T07:22:00.000-04:00

Today I have delivered 13 new shirts to Bruce to be labeled for the laundry... I have begun sprucing up the blog with a new color scheme... I wish people would realize that thie blog is as much theirs as mine... all they have to do is comment and the comment doesn't even have to make sense as long as it's not obscene...

Speaking of Norma again she is the Occupational Therapist who raises baby goats for profit and still has time to raise 5 girls as a single Mom well sorta...anywho that's why I have a 'kid' crush on her...

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL #12

2008-07-27T08:39:00.000-04:00

Today is Sunday a new day, a new week, a new beginning... I need a quick kick in the buttocks to wake me up and get the juices flowing or at least the words...

Trevor is the administrator of this institution and he is a great find if anyone could only find him..
just kidding... he's the grit that binds us up in knots and promises the world..like a library in the Rec room and wireless Internet in each room... but it seems that we will have to wait just a little bit longer....

Brian is a good guy he even wears jeans like the rest of us. I'm so glad I completed my therapy before they kicked me out or did I??? I think I was kicked out because I could not pay or medicaid part b was in default or something like that...

Chris from O.T. was awesome in her training of me to fly on my own ...

Norma , I miss Norma... she holds a special place in my heart... I guess it's the 'kid' in me...

Joyce, I received your email about the library see above comment to Trevor for a update on it.

that's all folks..Bob

CHERRY TREE LANE JOURNAL #11

2008-07-17T06:36:00.000-04:00

A library... that's whatI've been promised.. It's to be in the Rec room with bookshelves and every thing....