Rudynate

You did everything by snail mail, telephone or going to the office. There was no e-commerce. no zoom, no telehealth, no Internet. I started graduate school at a Cal State campus in 1992 and the faculty had just gotten access to the internet - they were all incredibly excited. Berners-Lee had just invented the world-wide web. Netscape had just invented the first web browser. I had been reading William Gibson's novels, so the first time I heard the word "Internet," I knew exactly what it was. I just thought, "Oh my god, they've done it."

I have fond memories of PSA. At the time I lived in Denver. A direct flight from Denver to SF was quite expensive. You could save a lot by flying to LAX and taking PSA to SF. We were young boys then - we didn't think much about how much of our valuable time we were wasting by not using a direct flight.

It was only a few years before that, that there was no such thing as the smoking section on an aircraft - the whole cabin was the smoking section. Non-smokers just had to live with it. Back then, smoking was much more common - it wasn't the unusual thing it is today - people smoked everywhere - in the waiting room at the doctor's office, in college classrooms and lecture halls, in the hospital, in movie theaters, in the grocery store while shopping, etc.

As a young man, I was an oral top - loved to get my dick sucked. Didn't like doing it too much. Then I went through a decades-long stage of being versatile - loved it either way. Now, I'm kind of bored with oral - I just want to get on with the butt sex. I can say, though, that when I suck a man's dick, he finds it pretty memorable.

If you were receiving care in a well-run PrEP program, none of that would be necessary - at Kaiser, I have a standing order for STI, kidney and liver function testing. Once a year I get tested for hep C. I get the med refilled every 3 months - I order over the web and the med comes in the mail 3-4 days later.

I got I got my first orthotics when I was about 25 - I was training for a marathon and got a stress fracture in my forefoot. The podiatrist taped my foot and told me I could keep training as long as I wasn't experiencing any pain. He told me I had a forefoot varus which is a fancy name for flat feet. He predicted I would need foot surgery by the time I was 40. I saw 40 many moons ago and still haven't foot surgery, but I wouldn't wish my feet on my worst enemy.

excellent idea.

There is one little problem with Venmo - I am told it is difficult to get the money back if you accidentally pay the wrong person. I always think about that when I'm paying someone.

Arthur Frommer described this strategy in "Europe on Five Dollars a Day."

Yep - big problem. Orthotics are great if you are wearing sneakers/athletic shoes that have some give, but they make a pair of dress shoes, for example, too tight. I have two pairs of Frye lace-up boots that are just the best shoes I have ever owned. I wouldn't be able to use orthotics with them.

I see that one all the time. Fortunately, I have used the Norton software and think it sucks so I never bite.

I think I have had three different pairs made by podiatrists, one of whom was Dr. Steve Subotnik, a semi-famous podiatrist in San Leandro, who had lots of experience working with athletes and weekend warriors. I haven't used them in a long time because they screw up the fit of your shoe- its hard to find shoes that are deep enough after the orthotic is inserted. I read an ad recently for orthotics that are thinner so they don't interfere with the fit of your shoes. I want to look into those. They used to x-ray your feet and make plaster casts of them. This newer system using impression material sounds a lot better.

There's always something about them that smells. The email address is usually the giveaway. I haven't been taken in but eventually they will get smart enough to fool me. I don't think it's just the elderly they target - it's anybody who is taken in by their fake emails.

I don' t know where I got the idea, I guess maybe the advertising worked, because I always bought AMEX traveler's checks whenever I traveled. It was part of my "getting ready" ritual - going to AMEX and buying traveler's checks a couple days before I left. I lost 500.00 worth once and they gave me a lot of grief about replacing them so I switched to checks from another company.

I have noticed the same thing - on more than one occasion, the tracking history indicated that the parcel was here in San Francisco and was then returned to the original location and sent back to San Francisco by a different route - sort of like when the GPS hiccups and starts sending you in circles.

I think Kaiser's PrEP program is about the best there is. I don't think it is true that they discourage people from going on PrEP. After all, every person who goes in PrEP and stays on it successfully is one less person they have to worry about catching HIV, which will cost a lot more that keeping someone on PrEP for the rest of their life. The Department of Infectious Disease, which administers the PrEP program is only too happy to put guys on PrEP. Early on , when Truvada first became available for PrEP, my PC doc, who is notoriously cheap, discouraged me from going on it because my husband is poz and undetectable. I put it off for a couple years and ended up going on it.

I've paid through Venmo a couple of times. I liked it - saw no problem with it.

This morning I signed up to try Martha Stewart's meal kit. We start at the end of next week. I will report back.

I had a small jar of pre-workout formula with the inconvenient brand name "C4" in my luggage. They ran all sorts of tests on it and called in an explosives expert to examine it. I told them "just forget it, I don't need it." But they said they had to go through their testing protocol. It didn't take that long - 20 minutes or so. But the notion that I would be carrying a jar of C4 explosive, that was labeled C4, and that I could be detained for it, seemed completely absurd to. After they ran all their tests, they gave it back to me.

For them, it's a low-cost or no-cost value-add that encourages your loyalty as a customer. Attorneys are not going to give legal advice for free because that's how they make their living. Attorneys, more and more, are adopting new value-based pricing models that feature fixed fee packages with lots of low- or no-cost value-adds.

Our neighbors down the street always drove a Nash. They were an older, childless couple who spent most of the year cruising on freighters. My father bought the Packard used from an old lady's estate who really had only driven it to church and back.

We didn't pay for them weekly. Every morning my mother gave us each a quarter for our lunch. A lot of the kids brought lunch from home in "lunch boxes."

I just googled it, had never heard of it - the forerunner to American Motors, which manufactured Ramblers and morphed in to JEEP. Our family car for several years was a 1949 Packard.

I remember when lots of Catholics had little statues of the Virgin Mary on the dashboards of their cars. Also, they often had St. Christopher medals pinned to the carpet underneath the dashboard.

Eisenhower's presidency. When I still had a conventional 9-5 job, some of the younger people would ask me how old I was. I would tell them,"Let's just say I remember when Eisenhower was president." They would give me a blank look, obviously not even knowing who Eisenhower was. I actually have a framed photograph of Eisenhower on the wall, not because I think he was a great president, but mostly as a joke. I also remember school lunches for $.25 and extra milk for $.02. I also remember living in a small town where everybody knew each other so well that even when I was in a strange part of town, the people there knew who I was.