Orin

Excessive sodium intake can damage the kidneys, so they tell you to keep it under 2,000-2,400 mg a day. That suggested using potassium chloride instead, except some physicians also warn on that. So I avoid or reduce salt on and in foods as possible, and use a mix of NaCl and KCl when necessary. My working kidney is stable, even though my diagnosis is Stage 3 CKD. Go figure.

Update: I hit 4.4 mph on my 2.4 mile walk today, and got my heart rate into zone 4 for a tad over 6 minutes. We have one of those body composition scales, and it spits out a ton of calculated values, but most of them are flaky when I'm not hydrated, so for the most part, that's the one I take notice of.

With one good kidney, and one idling at 5%, one of the dietary changes I need to honor is keeping my salt intake down. (Grumble. Back in the 80s, I'd been introduced to mizithra cheese, which has about half my daily target per ounce, and that's just one of the things I miss.) Anyway, sauces can be problematic because most of them have a goodly load of salt to make them yummy. Fortunately, low-sodium worcestershire sauce is just the ticket, so I started with that, and found a recipe starter using Dash garlic seasoning. It goes something like this... Put some worcestershire, crushed garlic and crush red peppers in a coverable baking dish, stir it up Add cut-up chicken, I fill the base of the dish with small pieces Sprinkle with Dash garlic seasoning and mix it in to coat the chicken. Flatten the layer of chicken pieces Cover with cut up carrots, celery, bell pepper and onion; add more worcestershire and Dash Put cover on dish and cook for 25 minutes at 375 F Remove dish from oven, take off cover, add unsalted pistachios and cut up broccoli Put dish back, uncovered for 10 minutes Break up clumps of chicken and mix it all up before serving Garlic bread goes well with it.

Thanks. The photo is from a little over a year ago. Here's a better copy.

Back in 2014, I had some lab work, and my GP panicked: the results indicated that I had kidney trouble. Soon after, I had imagery, which revealed stones, and had them removed. They were made of sodium oxalates, so I needed to restrict some things from my diet. Spinach, you say? Can't stand the stuff, so no problem. But almonds? Geez. And salt, too. But you can get used to that. Anyway, I needed a nephrologist. The one I was recommended by my GP had a hell of an attitude, though. The guy said my kidneys will only get worse, there's no cure, only dialysis treatments, and I'll eventually die from kidney failure. Needless to say, I found another nephrologist. Some time later, I had some more imagery. This time, to see how they were functioning. It was interesting to watch. The one on my right side was working pretty well, but the one on my left was stuck at idle, about 5% of normal. So the plan was to keep an eye on function with regular lab work, and keep hydrated. Now it's 2025, six years after a triple by-pass that was not triggered by a heart attack, and I'm still flying with one mostly working kidney, one kidney idling, and my labs stable or getting slowly better. I have to conclude that there's more money to be made with dialysis centers than would be made from some drug that hasn't been developed. I guess I'll celebrate my 74th this month by seeing if I can best my top walking speed, 4.3 mph, on my 2.4 mile walks around the neighborhood hills.

Thanks, @azdr0710. I've been spending a lot of my social media time on BlueSky, because there's a contingent of folks from various government agencies providing insight into what's really happening there. In the time since @RadioRob dropped the politics area here, I've wondered whether the members who really wanted to discuss it have found another venue to do that in, especially since this site and the people in it can be directly affected. Anyway, we've been in NC for couple of years now. I guess the surgeon who did my triple-bypass 6 years ago did a good job, because I'll hit 74 this month, I'm still doing 2.4 mile walks around the hilly neighborhood, and my top speed is 4.3 mph according to my watch and phone.

I'm surprised the opposition didn't claim that the various pastries depicted something else entirely, so that the painting was actually covert communication intended for others 'in the know'.

Well, I had a different reason for walking out of one. I don’t recall which city it was, but the cinema played Fantasia with the reels out of order.

Mixed among the vitriol in the Politics forum were some posts that didn't center around politics, per se. The problem, though, was that nearly anything that even tangentially impinged on the realms poisoned by partisan rhetoric got sucked into the tornado. So I'm curious whether there's a way to craft a sub-venue here to host those sorts of discussion. In an earlier age, 'salons' served that purpose. So I pose a question: are there aspects of that forum worth transplanting? What sorts of topics of interest to members, which are not political, don't have a place here now?

Delta Sigma Phi, at Florida Institute of Technology, in the early 70s. It being a technical school, pledge tasks were biased towards rewarding imaginative ways of satisfying the challenge. For example, one of the brothers set two pledges the task of 'separating a pile of punch-card chad'. One pledge laboriously sorted them by the numbers printed on them, but then ran into trouble differentiating between the ones with a 6 from those with a 9. The other pledge immediately hatcheted the pile with his hand, and split the one big pile into two smaller ones. During the Greek Week competitions, there was a kite-flying event. My frat decided to make the biggest kite, and worry about flying it later. Materials included 4 tarps, a bunch of wooden quarter-round moldings, u-bolts, and duct tape. When it was completed, and brothers were holding it for launch, one of the crew realized that in a 5-mph breeze at a 10° angle, the force would far exceed the strength of the cord we were using. But that didn't matter, because the people holding the rear didn't hear the signal to release the thing, and it folded up in a glorious mess.

How do you remember someone who has affected so many people in so many ways over so many years? Is it by seeing the ways in which his guidance and support of people he knew through this site's predecessor reflected that influence to others? Is it from a feeling of kinship among people who were once strangers and who have become members of a community? For me, he was, at one time or another, a friend, a fellow programmer, a business partner, a housemate, an adversary, and a fellow traveller on a spiritual journey. He made no secret of who he really was to those he trusted. His flamboyance was epic, just ask anyone who saw him traipsing around Microsoft. But that was just the public version of him. He turned it up to 11 when in character as his clown or drag personnae. You should have seen him in that custom robe with flames.

That's an important observation @Charlie, but we need to generalize it. The hot spell we just went through here was about 30F warmer than normal temperatures for a large area. So, yeah, anyone expecting the weather to be consistent with the climate they've come to know wouldn't be prepared for it. But there have been hints. We moved to WA in early '91, just after the floating bridge sank And since that time we've noticed changes in the 'normal' weather patterns for the area, just not this drastic. But there are other changes happening as well. Sea level has only risen a relatively small amount so far, but it's enough to threaten some islands, and the cities, airports, seaports, and military bases along many coastlines are already seeing high water problems even when there isn't a storm. If weather patterns shift, the areas affected by hurricanes and tornadoes could move, a prospect that people living where such things hadn't happened before won't be prepared for, either. Replicate that around the world. Advance planning is usually done for expected events, so cities and nations won't be prepared to deal with all kinds of events that 'nobody could foresee', except those who did and were ignored. Denial won't help.

Would it help to Follow the thread, and then go to it in the Activity Streams menu item forContent I Follow? Or you can actually bookmark the thread you are reading in your browser, and open to it directly.