I know I'm in trouble again for not writing for a while. We went to Athens, Georgia to visit Katherine and Chad, old friends from Santa Cruz who have relocated there. We found rural Georgia to be very scenic and the people very friendly. The Athens area is a very hip part of Georgia, sorta like Asheville is to NC. We spent a weekend visiting, seeing the local sights, and doing a house concert that paid for the fuel costs to get there and back - not bad! It was a 9 hour road trip, so we got pretty saddlesore.
Andi is in CA visiting family and friends and so I am taking advantage of the empty boat to do all kinds of messy projects. Progress is getting made. Old family friend, Merritt, is going to be joining us on the trip to the Azores and I want to have all the projects done before he gets here. We leave on June 2, if the weather be good.
Last night I watched a Michael Moore movie, Sicko. It is a MUST SEE! He takes on the Medical Insurance companies and drug companies. I know that MM is a blatant propagandist, but he is almost the only one taking the opposite point of view from the official propaganda fed to us daily by the mega-gazillion dollar drug companies and HMOs (who have more lobbyists than we have congressmen). Even from my personal experience as a reasonably healthy person, I can see that every year claims submitted to HMOs get more and more scrutiny as they try to squeeze out a little more profit for their shareholders. My dermatologist has been trying to collect for my visit last July to get some pre-cancerous stuff cut off my skin. Blue Cross is trying not to pay even though they have collected a minimum of $600/month for my entire working life and often twice that. The official line is that a single-payer system like they have in Canada is inefficient and produces poor quality health care - we get told that and we somehow buy it. Well, I walked over and asked the Canadian across the dock about the Canadian health care plan. He loves it. He had a hip replacement - zero cost and he only waited 3 weeks to have it done. We are getting snookered here! Check out this movie and watch the special features, too. It is healthy to be skeptical about things that are fed to us in the media - managing us is a huge corporate priority, so wherever there is a profit being made, the news from that source is suspect. Health Care is too important to come from a for-profit business that increases their revenues by discouraging medical service!
OK, enough soapbox. Write or call. Oh, check out the improved website - www.sailingflamenco.com.
Here is the house where we stayed.
Here are Andrea and Katherine.
Our host owned a pair of donkeys.
Part of our tour included seeing the local covered bridge over the Broad River. I grabbed this shot from a video with the new video camera.
Here we are, doing a house concert.
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