Povey Prattle

Monday    Stress Test at Cardiologist's Office Tuesday    1   Dentist for teeth cleaning. New hygienist (liked her).                  2  Eucharist and Scripture study with colleagues at St. Boniface, Siesta Key, FL 3   Fighting with the bureaucrats at a Financial Service Company Wednesday   1   Fight continued.  I won, (with terrific assistance from the Church Pension Fund). So   I am not Mary Gilligan after all. 2   Report from Cardiologist who reported  "some anomalies", so back for a nuclear stress test Oct 14th Thursday   1   N o hot water. Figured the problem was electrical  Called for service 9:42 a.m.        ...

If you have followed my blog you will remember that I recently spent time at the Sarasota Office of Fidelity Investments with a view to rolling over my "low income" Tax Sheltered Annuity to a "better income" producing Investment Retirement Account. This is partly because when I reach 70 1/2 (this November) the I.R.S. will mandate that I take "Minimum Required Distributions" each year. The IRS estimates my life expectancy to be 27 years, so my MRD's  each year will be the principal divided by 27. My principal is very modest, but I have the vague hope that the yearly earnings will at least keep pace with the mandated withdrawals. None of this is of great financial import - my retirement savings are not huge, but I'd like them to outstrip inflation. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ALL WELL AND GOOD, except that when an advisor at the SRQ branch of Fidelity Investments entered my Social Secur...

The other week or so my Primary Care Physician, the ever fabulous Dr. K-isten P-ulus ordered up a stress test for me. (We are trying to find out why I experience chronic fatigue). The test was slated for today at the offices of the Sarasota H--rt  Speci-list Group's Dr. Ch-ppy  Nall-ri. (I scramble names so that they will not be trawled (trolled?). The pre-test instructions were manifold. No food after midnight. No alcohol after midnight  (damn, I had to forgo my usual 2:30 a.m. Bloody Mary). No coffee (even de-caff) in the morning, no breakfast. Ambiguous instructions re medications. Drinking water allowed. I was instructed to be at the Doctor's Office half an hour before the appointment.  I chose to arrive fifteen minutes in advance as I had already mailed in the volumes of paper-work which all physicians and surgeons require. I was told that the procedure would take up to two hours, and that I might wish to equip myself with a book for the fo...

"A Long Way Home" is a memoir by Saroo Brierley (G.P. Putnam's Sons 2013). From the book jacket:  "Saroo Brierley was born in a poor village in Khandwa, India.  He lived hand-to-mouth in a one room hut with his mother and three siblings for the first five years of his life.....until he got lost.  For twenty five years". "This is the story of what happened to Saroo........ How at only five years old, uneducated and illiterate, he wound up on the streets of Calcutta. And survived,  How he later wound up in Hobart, Tasmania, living the life of an upper-middle-class Aussie.   And how, at thirty years old, with a propensity for solving mathematical formulas, a stubborn memory desperately clinging to the last images of his home-town and family, and the advent of Google Earth, of all things, he found his way home" I took the book out at Sarasota County's Fruitville Library yesterday (27th Sep 2014) and finished reading it today (28th Sep 2014). I...