A reminder as to why NOT to move to Malden

Downtown Malden, with one of its sixty-zillion nail salons. SRSLY?

If you recall correctly,  Business Week magazine named Malden as the best place to raise kids in Massachusetts.  This was in 2008, and Malden sucked then.  It’s getting worse now, yet Malden flies banners all over the place squawking about this *honor*.

The truth is, the place SUCKS, and it’s not even a good place to raise PETS.  A lot of that has to do with the fact that most of the homes here are rentals, and most landlords won’t even allow pets.  yet landlords are forever bitching and moaning that they can’t find anyone to rent their units.  Well, maybe if they allowed pets, they’d have a better choice of tenants than they do now.  And pet owners are much better tenants than Section 8 people who have a zillion kids.  When they keep the pet owners out, those people go elsewhere, and the landlords have no choice to rent to whatever white trash comes along.  These are trashy people who cry poverty, yet seem to have enough money to spend on a playstation 3 and sixty-zillion games to go with it. Yet they pay NO taxes, and they dump their trash near our cans, because they don’t want to pay for the city trash bags, and would rather get US and others in trouble for putting out non-bagged trash.

If you need another good reason not to move here, check this out: Eight injured in Malden blaze last Friday; department reflects on fighting fires after budget cuts.  This house is three doors away, and it’s scary.  All the more reason to want to move, if the city feels that public safety is less important than spending money on useless crap.

Finally, let’s not forget this:  Malden Shootout Leaves 1 Dead, 2 Wounded.  Just a few blocks away from my house.  I suppose the next budget cuts will be cops.

This is a big part of why we’ll be moving to New Hampshire when our current lease is up.  Enough is enough.

Not the way we’d want to go to Vegas!

Melrose-Wakefield Hospital - stay far, far away unless you have a death wish!

I can’t believe that summer is almost over!  As David Letterman just said, “summer has gone by quicker than a Brett Favre retirement”.  And this summer was a good one – nice weather, and no major medical issues.  As you may know, we’ve had a couple of summers all but ruined due to the ineptitude of Melrose-Wakefield Hospital.  If you do a search of that name on this blog, you’ll see some of the horror stories about that dump.  Not only did they almost kill my husband, but did you also know that they could very well have gotten him addicted to morphine?

It’s true.  A few years ago, Mike had to have an emergency appendectomy.  After the surgery, he was hooked up to this IV thing where you push a little button and it puts morphine into your system, in order to reduce any pain.

But the thing was, he wasn’t in very much pain, so he barely hit that little button.  Also, he knew that it was morphine, and he didn’t want to risk getting hooked on the stuff.

So you would think that the nurses would be happy that he wasn’t in much pain and did not need to use much of the drug.  But NOOOOOO…they YELLED at him for NOT using enough of the stuff!  Can you believe it?

WHY?  Did they WANT to get him hooked on the stuff?  We know that they like to keep patients in this hospital for as long as possible, in order to soak the insurance companies for as much as possible.  We know that Hallmark Health has been having money problems.  Is getting a patient hooked on a narcotic drug another way to keep patients incarcerated for longer?  Who knows?

As far as I know, Melrose-Wakefield does not do any sort of detox/drug rehab stuff.  So what would they do with a drug addict, except keep him there and keep feeding him the dope?

If Mike had gotten addicted to this drug, possibly the only way he’d ever have a chance of resuming his life and his career is to go to a rapid detox center. Rapid detox is an intensive treatment, in which the patient is withdrawn from the drug within a few hours, as opposed to a week or more.  This reduces the symptoms of withdrawal dramatically.

However, this is only for the physical dependence on the drug, the patient would still need to get the appropriate psychological counseling.

I don’t know how many such places are in the United States, but I know of this one place out in Las Vegas.  Hey, I like Vegas, but this isn’t my idea of what I’d want to do while there!  And it is rather pricey – starting at $13,000, and not covered by insurance.  They do offer various forms of financing, though.  And I think it’s well worth it for those addicts who truly want to get their lives back.

But still I wonder, WHY would a nurse, a medical professional, want to try to force a patient to take such a drug, risk getting addicted, when it was not truly needed for pain?  I mean, in Mike’s case, just some regular over-the-counter Tylenol would have been sufficient.  I know people who really do suffer chronic pain and are on narcotic pain-killers.  Without them, they cannot function.  But these people are also under the care of specialized pain doctors, who carefully monitor their patients’ use of these drugs.  They do not want to see their patients abusing these drugs and turning into addicts who need a rapid detox program.

This whole thing with Mike and the morphine happened years ago, but I’m still shaking my head over the insanity of it all.  Needless to say, we will never so much as get a Band-Aid from any Hallmark Health facility ever again.  We now get all of our health care from Lahey Clinic, which is a much better place.  Thanks to their excellent level of care, Mike is no longer in and out of the hospital all the time, as he was when he was still with Melrose-Wakefield.  Lahey prefers to keep people OUT of the hospital, by caring for their patients properly in the first place.

So, once again, I remind you that if you want to live a good quality life, stay away from Hallmark Health!

Opinion – The Massachusetts Bottle Bill

So now, Massachusetts wants to expand their current “bottle bill” by including containers other beverages, such as water, juice, iced tea, etc.  Right now, only containers of soda and beer come with a five-cent deposit, to be refunded upon return of said containers.  Story here.

My opinion?  Not only is this a bad idea, but I wish they’d do away with the whole bottle bill.  It’s nothing but a time-consuming annoyance that is completely unnecessary.  If more cities and towns would encourage recycling, then people could just put these containers out in their recycling bin once a week, and have them taken away.  See?  You can recycle without it taking up too much time and hassle.

Most stores that are convenient to us have bottle/can return machines, as shown here.  You just stick the containers in one by one, and when you are done, you push a button, and they give you a receipt, kind of like one that comes out of one of those Epson tm-t88iv receipt machines. You take it to a cashier in the store and they give you your money. Simple, huh?  But not so fast…

Every single time I have tried to use one of these things, I am pushed and shoved by other people trying to use them, you’d think it was Fort Knox, the way they go crazy and can’t wait their turn to use the machines.  It’s absolutely insane!

There are two Kappy’s stores near us that have a redemption counter, and for the most part, those are easier to deal with than the machines.  But sometimes there are lines, and often, even if there is no line, you have to wait for someone to come and take your stuff.  They do not have a dedicated container redemption person, usually it’s one of the cashiers who comes over and takes care of it, when s/he is not busy ringing up customers.  And the fact is, the most convenient times for us to return anything would be evenings and weekends, when Kappy’s and similar stores are the busiest.  So there you have the time-consuming part!

So, you may ask, why don’t we just put them into the recycling bin and let homeless/poor people take them if they want them?  After all, there are a LOT of people in our town who go around with carts that they stole from Stop & Shop and pick through people’s garbage looking for deposit containers.

Because they can’t just be satisfied picking through the recycling bins, that’s why?  They have to rip through every single garbage bag looking for more, and they often leave a mess.  And now that we have a Pay-As-You-Throw program here, we have to pay up to $2 per trash bag.  If the bags are all ripped up, the trash collectors won’t take them, we have to put the trash into another $2 bag and hope that it won’t get ripped up again by the time the garbage truck comes back next week.  And anything that is strewn on the ground, WE have to clean up.  More time-consuming crap!  By not putting out ANYTHING that might be worth money, we’ve managed to keep these people away from our trash.

Up in New Hampshire, they do not have a bottle bill.  People just put their beer and soda containers into their recycling bins, they get picked up, end of story.  No skeevy people picking through the trash and making a mess.  Another good reason to move there.

When  we go up there for a weekend of Fisher Cats ball games, we always buy beer to drink in the hotel room, and we buy it in New Hampshire.  We always leave the empties in the room, in the beer box they came in, when we leave, because if we bring them home, we’ll have no choice but to put them into our recycling.  And since they LOOK like deposit bottles, they will attract the undesirables.  However, they will not work in the machines here, they have a special bar code on them saying that they came from NH.  But the hotel we always stay at has a restaurant/bar downstairs that serves bottled beer.  So they have big recycling barrels somewhere.  They can just dump our bottles into that.  And yes, I do leave a decent tip for housekeeping for this service.  I also don’t want to put them in the trash at home, because of Pay-As-You-Throw, it can get very expensive.

For a while, I was saving empty Sam Adams beer bottles, to use for bottling my own home-brewed beer.  These bottles do not have screw-top grooves on top, and can be capped using the bottle-capping tool that commonly comes with most home-brewing equipment kits.  I saved far more than I’ll ever need for making the typical five-gallon batch, we have a ton of them in our storage area, more than enough to allow for the inevitable breakage.  But now we have more than enough, no more room, we have to get rid of them somehow.

In our town, there is no limit as to how much we can put out each week for recycling.  This is a very good thing.  I think that a state law that would require people to put out more stuff for recycling would go a lot further than any bottle bill in keeping the streets clean and helping the environment.  Then there’d be no homeless people and such ripping open residential trash bags and leaving a mess.

As for people who buy a can of soda or a bottle of water at the store – why not put recycling containers next to regular trash containers on street corners, to make it easy for people to dispose of the containers?

Most working people are under serious time constraints.  But anyone, no matter how busy, can throw all of their empties into a bin and stick it out on the curb.  It only takes a couple of minutes, anyone has time for that.  It’s time for the bottle bill to go bye-bye.

Get a rare inside look at Portland Head Light!

Thanks to 207 on WCSH6 in Portland, Maine.  Today they posted a video that takes the viewer inside the Portland Head Light in Cape Elizabeth, Maine.  This is something that most of us never get to see.  Please click HERE for the story and to watch the video.

Eighty-nine stairs to the top?  Wow!  I bet that the lighthouse keepers of old never needed the world’s strongest fat burner in order to keep their weight down!

I’ve been to this lighthouse many times, both visiting Fort Williams Park to see it, and seeing it from a boat.  It is truly a thing of beauty.  They have a nice museum inside, but no, they do NOT let visitors up into the lighthouse as they did the people from the TV show!

Maybe I will kiss “Maine’s Blarney Stone” next time we are there!

Thank you for riding the T

Gotta love how those recorded announcements on the MBTA always say that, as if we have a choice!  Basically, it seems that these days, people ride the T for one of two reasons…they don’t have cars, or they want to go someplace where driving and parking is a royal PITA.  Our recent venture on the T was the latter.

Although we live near three Orange Line stations, since we were going to Harvard Square, we opted to drive to the Alewife station, at the end of the Red Line, and park there.  That meant we didn’t have to be on the train for very long…just three stops and we’re there.  Also, we knew we’d be coming home late, and hanging out at Downtown Crossing to wait for the Orange Line is not a fun Saturday night activity.  It is if you like to look at weirdos and drunks, which we don’t.

Maybe more people would voluntarily park their cars and ride the T more often, if only they’d do something about the smelly bums, weirdos, and drunks.  After the concert we attended at Harvard University, we went to the Harvard station to catch our train, and there was a bit of a wait.  There, in the station, was one of the grossest, stinkiest bums I’d ever had the misfortune to see and smell.  Not only did this guy not have any recent relationship with soap and water or laundry detergent, but he was being gross…spitting, making disgusting hacking sounds…I thought he was gonna cough up a lung right there on the platform.  Yuck.  We were at least able to move far enough away from him so that we wouldn’t end up in the same car when the train came.  Turned out he didn’t even get on the train, he was just hanging out in the station.

Maybe if the T did a better job in kicking and keeping these undesirables out, there would be fewer people driving in Boston/Cambridge traffic.  I know we wished we’d driven all the way in…sometimes even the high cost of parking in the city is worth every penny, if in exchange you don’t have to deal with smelly bums.  Sheesh, what a PITA that guy was, trying to get away from him and all…wished I’d had a natural cure for hemorrhoids, maybe it would have made that pain in the ass go away!

One more rant…train from Harvard to Alewife was stuck in the tunnel between Davis and Alewife.  An operator kept coming on the P.A. system with an announcement, likely about the delay…but NOBODY COULD HEAR IT.  Sheesh, if you are going to make announcements, talk loud enough so that people can hear, ya think?

I hate the T.  Thankfully, it’s rare when we go anywhere where it’s easier than driving.  Usually we just go places that we can easily drive and park at.  I don’t care if gas goes up to five bucks a gallon, driving beats the crap out of the crap that is the T any day!