u/SueBeee

I get incredibly irritated when people say something cryptic or incomplete in an attempt to get me to guess what the fuck they're talking about, or to do the mental work to do so. Example: "Have you seen the XYZ? I can't find it".

"What is an XYZ"?

"Oh, sorry, it's my [insert description of some obscure tool that I have absolutely no way of knowing about]".

I am tired. Tell me what you mean, clearly, or GTFO of my face. My dear, sweet yet exhausting husband absolutely loves to do this, and I am afraid one day I am going to just snap and throw things at him.

I am fully in my 60s crabby period. I hope it goes away eventually.

My husband's company is switching to Sidecar in January.

I am retired and he is still working so we took his company's insurance. I am 63, and not eligible for Medicare for a little over a year.

I am not reading good things about Sidecar, it sounds like a total scam to me and I really don't want to depend on it. I can get Aetna for about 3,000 a month for the two of us until I turn 65, but before we do that I'd like to hear from others about this-the good, the bad and the ugly.

We are both healthy, but you never know at our age. Would we be insane to go with this for the 14 months we need it? We'd be out about 35 or 40k if we went for the Aetna plan.

I thought I'd share a brief talk that Dr. Murphy from NVSL (division of APHIS) shared this morning at the AAVP conference here in the very non-sucky Puerto Rico.

So historically, 100 million sterile male flies per week have been released at the Darien Gap, which is a very VERY remote area and a handy geographical bottleneck for these flies. Last year we started to see some of these screwworm flies, Cochliomiya hominovorax, slip past the gap and into southern Mexico. Spotty cases were reported and then as you can imagine, increased and moved northward. This week we saw the first five cases of C. hominovorax, the new world screwworm, breach US borders. The USDA sounded the alarm last year and funneled money into new sterile male facilities at the Tex-Mex border (but unfortunately cut funding across the border). This is scheduled to fully open for sterile male production in about a year. Apparently there are no updates to this schedule for the time being.

Right now, surveillance and communication between ranchers, veterinarians and the government agency is key. We have the index case in Zavala County TX in a 3 week old calf (the navel stump) and additional cases there and in Lasalle County TX in cattle and a goat in Gillespie County TX. A fifth case has been identified in a dog in Lea county NM, that dog had a travel history to Mexico.

The image below shows the specimens submitted from the index case calf that were identified as NWS. Dr. Murphy went into the morphological characteristics of the L2 and L3 fly larva and also the adult flies. Note the shallow spiracular pit and the characteristic spiracle morphology with incomplete peritreme. There is no validated molecular test for the identification of these things so ID must be done morphologically for now.

Murphy emphasized that while it's all well and good to be able to ID these things, time is of the essence, so if you have any doubt at all, send the samples to the lab for ID, they don't mind negative samples at all. In other words, don't screw around. Info about submissions are at screwworm.gov. When in doubt, send it in!!

Note that screwworms are not found in carrion/dead animals, they are only seen in live animals.

That's pretty much it for what I've learned for now.

I am just at the end of my rope with this.

I do not feel safe when the people around me have guns. I do not understand why this is so difficult for people to grasp. More often than not people argue with me about it.

I suffered a really terrible trauma a few years back and it will never go away. I will always have PTSD. I do not trust anyone and especially if they are overt about carrying a gun (almost always men).

Someone just called me a "Karen" for being upset about someone shooting near a house in town.

If someone were shooting near my house, I'd freak the everloving fuck OUT and would not be ok for days.