December 4, 2019

by drplasticpicker

I went to a large middle management meeting, and climate change was front and center. As a large health care organization in Southern California, we are getting ready. There have been 17 active wildfires in California in October 2019, 94,000 acres burned, and 129 million dead tress. We discussed extreme heat events, and that the last 8 out of 10 hottest years have been this last decade. Heat related illness cause more deaths annually than all other extreme weather events. We looked at color coded maps that estimate the increasing reach of Dengue fever. And that climate change drives increased domestic violence, child abuse/neglect, mental illness exacerbations and suicide attemtps and completions.

(more…)

December 3, 2019

An original poem by drplasticpicker after a middle management meeting. Just in good fun to help me digest the topics presented today.

Today I went to a large management meeting

With doctors and nurses and managers I was seating

A VUCA world they were saying

To God we should be praying

Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity – they can be defeating

But as I sat there fading in and out of sleep

My attention the imported business paradigms did not keep

I’d rather be outside cleaning

Protecting Snowy Egrets they are preening

Vision, Understanding, Clarity, Adaptability – what the bleep?!

VUCA this, VUCA that, VUCA world, VUCA prime

VUCA past, VUCA present, VUCA future, VUCA crime

Note: This is strictly for entertainment purposes. It was a decent meeting. They ordered roast beef sandwhiches which I avoided, and I refused a plastic water bottle. VUCA that plastic!

December 2, 2019

by drplasticpicker

I’m old enough to have been there when Cyber Monday became a term. I’m old enough to have known “Facebook” was the actual Freshmen picture registry at Harvard that was given out to the incoming class so that they would know some basic information about their classmates, before it was co-opted by Mark Zuckerberg. And I’m old enough now to remember when we never had Cyber Mondays and the world was fine without it. Drplasticpicker is technically the tail-end of Generation X, the generation of latch-key kids when our parents were thought to be somewhat neglectful and we came home afterschool by ourselves. We let ourselves into the houses with our latch-keys and made ourselves TV dinners, and sat in front of the TV watching sitcoms and doing our homework alone. At some points our working parents came home to parent us. And we then threw out those plastic microwave meal trays away.

(more…)

December 2, 2019

by drplasticpicker

This is the third post in this series. Since ocean plastic picking, I now spend a few minutes every day figuring out what other easy actions our family can take to help the environment. I like to track of these actions on the notes section as free text on my iPhone. So this is my summary for November 2019 in what I call our Secondary Environmental Net Positives.

(more…)

November 29, 2019

by drplasticpicker

Happy Thanksgiving and Indigenous People’s Day to everyone from the Plastic Picker family. Today was one of those milestone days. Like riding your first bike, aceing an organic chemistry midterm or draining your first abscess – today drplasticpicker cooked my first Turkey! It was a 7 1/2 lb bird and it was glorious!

One of my middle management friends is male, older and wiser and always says, “For those that have great strengths, they have great weaknesses.” My great weaknesses are some of the practical matters in life. I became a good driver late in life, and now in my mid-40s I cooked my first Turkey and I am beyond bursting with pride.

For the actual turkey recipe, it was the first one I googled “Easy, No-Fuss Thanksgiving Turkey” https://tastesbetterfromscratch.com/easy-no-fuss-thanksgiving-turkey/. Thank you internet!

Being a second-generation American and married to a first generation American, Thanksgiving was always a complicated holiday for me. I grew up watching Thanksgiving on TV with those 1980 sitcom families, and that was what I thought “Thanksgiving” was supposed to be. Then going off to college, living away from my nuclear family for 15 years, marrying a first-generation immigrant from New Jersey whose family also did Thanksgiving a bit “off” compared to TV shows, and then having children while still doing medical training and feeling that I should be providing them a sort of tradition that I never had myself.

(more…)