Bone Scan,Vog, Safety Check

[Note: This is another blog based on my weekly emails to my family on the mainland.]

1/14/23

Aloha Everyone -- 

I hope your week went well.  Mine was pretty quiet, which was fine by me.  Weatherwise it has continued to be dry and cold (62d last night!).  Most mornings, as usual, are beautiful, though we've been experiencing

Our Winter Flowers

a fair amount of vog since Kilauea began erupting. When the summit eruption began, it was spewing about 15k tons (!) of SO2 (the main ingredient in vog) per day.  It still is hard for me to grasp that gas can weigh 15 tons, but there it is.  When SO2 combines with water vapor and particles in the air, it becomes VOG, a whitish/greyish haze.  Besides its unaesthetic aspect, vog is pretty nasty stuff, since part of it is actually H2SO4 -- sulfuric acid. Before you ask, breathing sulfuric acid is definitely not a good thing for your lungs (nor are most other forms of air pollution).  The potential harm varies with how concentrated the vog is and how long it lasts.  Here, we almost always get a break at night, when our winds shift to down slope breezes and push the stuff out to sea. Also, the concentration is less at higher elevations.  Bottom line:  this is something you live with if you live here, part of the price tag of the positive aspects.

The "Kilauea caldron" is still cooking, but has settled down quite a bit.  The latest SO2 measurement was down to about 3.5k tons per day, which should lead to less vog when we can clear out the current accumulation.

In other news, on Thursday I had a bone density scan to check on my osteopenia.  My last scan was in 2019, after being on Tamoxifen for several years.  This one will see what's happened in the intervening years and whether I should go on another round of the medication.  The scan was at the radiology lab that got hacked a couple of months ago, and the appointment had been made back in August for the soonest available slot.  I'd rather have played golf on Thursday with Karen and her friend, but when I tried to change the radiology appointment they told me the soonest available would be several months from now because of the backlog.  So I stuck with it and instead of chasing a little white ball I had my body nuked.

Since I was already out and about, I decided to make good use of my time by taking our suv in for its annual safety inspection.  The best location I've found for this is a place north of town near Costco, in an industrial area made up of a number of large warehouse-type buildings that are subdivided into various businesses.  An enterprising family got a franchise for doing the safety checks and really has a streamlined operation that makes this yearly chore fairly painless. You check in at an open-air desk, then when it is your turn you drive into an open door on one side of the building, get the check done, pay your money, and exit the other side.  Everybody is friendly and upbeat, and the whole thing for me took less that 1/2 hour.  Since the safety check facility is near Costco, I then made a stop there to get some things.  I figure this counted as extra exercise because, like most of these big box stores, it's enormous.  And of course I did a lot of zigging, zagging, and backtracking trying to find things.  I'm sure I deserved my reward of a Taco Bell lunch.  (I admit, TB is a guilty pleasure of mine.)

Ok, off to market and the beach.  Stay warm, stay healthy, and don't fall for false equivalences.