#if i knew i was peaking in 2012-2015 i would not have taken it for granted | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

dansnaturepictures · 4 years

Photo

Celebrating 10 years of my interest in butterflies, and subsequent interest in moths, dragon and damselflies

As I tweeted earlier 10 years ago today I photographed a Silver-washed Fritillary butterfly at Bolderwood in the New Forest. I said to my Mum on the walk I’d like to know what species that was. I was excited coming home from school as a 13 year old one day that summer when she’d brought me a butterfly and moth identification book. Beforehand as a budding birdwatcher just into photography I had seen butterflies whilst out, it turned out I saw a Silver-washed Fritillary in summer 2009 at Acres Down in the New Forest identified later form a photo I’d taken of it, I could recgonise a Peacock or Brimstone and had heard of Speckled Wood but it went no further. But after that moment that summer from my first ever Small Tortoiseshell on a glorious day weather wise at Simonsbath on Exmoor on our West Country holiday to my first Common Grayling at another part of New Forest walks around Bolderwood I enjoyed seeing and sometimes photographing butterflies whilst out and then using the book to identify them. I also did this with the occasional day-flying moth or one that came into the house such as Five-spot Burnet and Yellow Shell. With my eyes open on that massive day for me looking back with the Common Grayling at Bolderwood we also noticed and then identified via the internet a Golden-ringed Dragonfly which paved the way for us to like the dragon and damselflies and notice and start to identify them too.

This of course overlapped into 2011′s spring and summer where I saw butterflies for the first time from Marbled White and Large Skipper and Small Heath to Small Copper. I mostly watched butterflies at our local country park Lakeside and other immediately local areas and the New Forest where we went nearly every walk back then, I saw my first forest heathland specialty Silver-studded Blue that year too. In those first two summers with perhaps the amount of new birds we were seeing slowing down whilst I loved birds so much and was proud of my way of life with my hobby, getting into butterflies and the satisfaction of zooming into the natural world and learning something new was a revelation and something that excited us so much. Moths here and there were along for the ride and 2011 was a year I got more and more into the dragon and particularly damselflies too.

This has set the tone for an amazing decade where beside my main interest in birds which itself has got deeper and deeper in that time and my photography I’ve had a brilliant interest in insects to compliment it and enrich my connection to and fondness of the natural world. I look forward to the sunny and warm/hot days which will allow these butterflies to emerge and fly every spring and summer the peak butterfly season and the sign posts the butterflies provide to take from spring into summer especially and its been a true honour to see 46 spectacular species, take so many photos of them and have some of my greatest ever experiences with these flamboyant insects. Over the 10 years the damselfly and dragonfly interest has gone nicely alongside the butterflies perhaps a little lesser interest for me and the moths are something I have dipped into. Its quite easy with butterflies especially to do a year by year look back as the peak season is probably March-October so its a cross-section of a year whereas if I did a post commenting on each of my birding years I’d have too much to write and be here forever with so many I am lucky to see each month. I used to even be able to list my top 5 butterfly days mostly when I’d seen a lot of species or individuals but I’ve had too many such days each year now luckily! So that’s what I do for the rest of this post, introducing pictures of these insects that I’ve taken in the past in this photoset as I go.

The other big thing about my insect season in 2011 was that I purchased an important bit of photography kit, my first ever macro lens which I only replaced this year and still have for backup. This helped me massively in terms of being able to get those precious pictures I needed to help use the book to identify species and just take for fun. I was able with the macro lens to get so much closer than I would with my normal lens and get that important detail. I found whole new thrills just from using the macro lens of chasing butterflies and taking little safety shots in case it flies off when one landed as I make my body (bend down) to get nearer and nearer to the subject and in the right position.

Something I always refer to as the thrill of the chase. It was a whole new way of photography to learn to the point and shoot stuff I do with birds for example and that shows why my butterfly interest probably wouldn’t have happened without my photography interest which I only developed two or so years into my birdwatching interest. One of my proudest 2011 butterfly picture efforts was the first in this photoset of one of my favourites the Red Admiral at yes - you guessed it - Bolderwood in the New Forest in a hot spell that October. 2012 was something of a comedown for many reasons we didn’t have our best butterfly season but still saw some, and the other insects the second picture in this photoset of a Beautiful Demoiselle at Whitefield Moor in the New Forest one of my best photos that year.

This only paved the way though for a rapid expansion in our butterfly interest and the species I could see similar to that of birds that year and years to follow in that we explored many more new habitats to allow us to see different butterflies as well as the ones we’d seen between 2010 and 2012. Visits to places like Martin Down, Stockbridge Down, Noar Hill and Bentley Wood in Hampshire (now what I call our butterfly big four) places we’d never been before allowed us to see lots of new species at these sites. We saw 11 new butterfly species for us that year the highest amount of new ones we’d ever seen in a year and those four places in particular we’ve come back every year since for those species and more. One standout moment of 2013 was visiting the Isle of Wight seeing my first ever Small Blue and the very rare Glanville Fritillaries at Ventnor one day in June I took the third picture in this photoset of the latter we have never seen them again since.

Our 2014 butterfly season was much the same as a year with those new places explored again seeing the ones from 2013, the ones we’d seen before and five more newbies. I recorded 39 butterfly species seen that year. That figure would stand as my highest butterfly year list total until 2018. I took the fourth picture in this photoset of one of my favourite butterflies the Chalkhill Blue at one of those places Stockbridge Down in July 2014.

2015 and 2016 for butterflies were two years where we used these newfound special and wild places and species and saw most of a defined set of them again including the ones I saw before 2013 and 2014 and the batch I first saw in those years. I took great joy in taking macro pictures of it seemed a slightly different set each year and I felt after a camera upgrade in 2013 my pictures were getting better and better of them. I didn’t see a new species again until 2018 but I just loved seeing the ones I had already again and again and learning what comes out when and all the little quirks. I was still so fascinated by these insects and so very happy to see them. In 2015 I took the fifth picture in this photoset of an Elephant Hawk-moth at Blashford Lakes and 2016 one of my favourite dragonflies the Southern Hawker at Rutland Water showing how moth and dragon/damselflies were still something we saw and photographed over that period. 2015 and 2016 also with us living right beside Lakeside such a good habitat for butterflies now saw the development of my little walks there within days often just with my macro lens to solely see or try to butterflies such as Marbled White and Small Skipper in summer especially. That went a stage further in 2016 with me working then to create something I do every year now seeing these species and more in cut throughs of the meadow area on my commute home on light and sunny/hot evenings then popping back over with my macro lens to see more and photograph them.

But what I had loved doing was just as I do with birds, for butterflies, (moths for a bit but I don’t anymore) and nowadays dragon/damselfly (joint list) alongside mammals is keeping year lists. My butterfly year lists managing in the middle part of last decade and beyond to get to above 30 each year were the ones I was second most excited about after my bird ones the real staple of my hobby. By 2017 I held ambitions to beat or level my 2014 total of 39. When I saw my first Brown Argus of the year at Stockbridge Down and my first Painted Lady of 2017 in the garden on one August day my 37th and 38th species that spring and summer I knew I had one more I felt I could see, the Clouded Yellow a rare and unpredictable one I’d seen ever year since my first in 2013. I got a bit complacent looking back within myself and wrote about this on social media and lo and behold I didn’t see Clouded Yellow that summer and didn’t manage it. I did take many pictures of butterflies I was proud of in 2017 though like the seventh in this photoset of a Marsh Fritillary at Martin Down.

2018 will go down as my biggest rollercoaster of a butterfly year and a classic and pivotal one for me. I had a poor start with the cold weather in March, but in the hottest and most truest summer for years I had a boom period catching up a lot of the species and seeing so many through spring and summer. I always had the chance to make our 2018 memorable as after years of searching for them mostly at Bentley Wood and my Mum’s husband but not us seeing one in 2017 there we had booked up to go on a wildland safari of Knepp in Sussex the rewilding project on 1st July 2018 to try and see them in the key days they’re around what had become our dream butterfly the Purple Emperor. We saw over 50 of them that day and had one of our greatest ever butterfly days as I took the eighth picture in this photostet of one. Only a week before, with a holiday to Yorkshire for Bempton Cliff’s seabirds in between a classic summer week, we’d seen our first new butterfly for four years a White-letter Hairstreak at Southampton’s Peartree Green a butterfly we saw again at Knepp that day. So there was a mini expansion here and in a glorious summer this helped with numbers. When I saw a Brown Argus during in Butterfly Conservation’s ‘Big Butterfly Count’ something I love doing every year now later that July at Lakeside I did what I couldn’t a year before and made it butterfly 39 of my year to match 2014. One key species I needed to see was left the Common Grayling which I did use the New Forest heaths and manage to see again to take my 2018 year list to 40. Sightings in September of one I’d only seen before in 2013 a Silver-spotted Skipper and eventually finally seeing a Clouded Yellow for the first time since 2016 and on 42 2018 was cemented as then my highest ever butterfly year list and most extraordinary butterfly year.

2019 surpassed 2018 and I always call it my greatest butterfly season but it was actually my greatest butterfly year with extraordinary amounts and a lot of species seen in very hot patches of especially February and a bit of March too with the sun shining so much a top start. Then despite a wet late spring a little through that time and the summer I saw all the ones I usually would. An unexpected Knepp trip last summer on our own for me without the safari brought us Purple Emperor again and White-letter Hairstreak views to mean I could match 2018′s total. What also helped were sightings throughout the year of two more new ones for me Lulworth Skipper at Durlson in Dorset a great southern specialty and a northern one a Northern Brown Argus at St. Abb’s Head, Scotland during our seabird holiday last year to Northumberland. I also caught up with another slightly forgotten one when I saw my first Small Pearl-bordered Fritillary since 2014 where it was a life tick at the same place at Bentley Wood. This allowed me to see 45 species in the end last year beating 2018 by three, and there was only one species I didn’t see last year that I have seen in my life the Glanville Fritillary. I took the ninth picture in this photoset of always one of the stars the Duke of Burgundy last year at Noar Hill.

From 2018 and especially 2019 leading into 2020 I got more interested in dragon and damselflies recognising and photographing many more species. Our discovery of Thursley Common in Surrey allowed us to see new species my last two dragon and damsel year lists have been my highest ever and have historic dragonfly days for us with so many seen as well as one at Rutland Water’s Lyndon reserve last year. For moths alongside the stack of day-flying ones I see each year which grows a bit as to what I recognise I have started to notice some coming in our house at nights and taking pictures of them and mostly using other’s kind knowledge find out what they are and add them to my moth list so its only a life list I keep of them now within my insect and mammal life list document separate to my bird year list one. Its still something of a side interest I don’t know what it is and photograph every moth I see but its nice to enjoy them now and again.

Then we get to 2020 which started a bit like 2018 with one butterfly seen in February then bad weather. But as spring was springing and common/early butterflies were all around the coronavirus hit the UK and the obvious need for lockdown looked set to threaten our year for butterflies and like it may be a dip. But with a new macro lens for me in tow I got it for my birthday this year producing butterfly shots I was so proud of I made the best of it. In fact, on daily exercise walks over Lakeside in the first bit of the lockdown and other local ones seeing butterflies alongside other wildlife became a strong source of hope and optimism for me and a brilliant way to escape the doom and gloom seeing these insects I adore with the moths and dragon/damselflies too. I discovered for butterflies I could see so many at local Lakeside and other areas such as the Small Copper in the final picture in this photoset taken in May species I would usually see further afield. I wrote this post on late May bank holiday Monday and timed it to go out but once restrictions eased a little we were able to safely whilst following social distancing rules get back out to other butterfly sites further afield for us where we’d usually go and my numbers we saw of species this year haven’t suffered greatly. In fact alongside the sense lockdown brought me of how much spectacular stuff I can see on my doorstep I saw most of my butterflies this year on my earliest or second earliest date ever so that’s been an interesting little quirk.

Thanks for all the appreciation you have ever shown my butterfly and other insect photos and thoughts. Here’s to the next 10 years!

1 note · View note

thevividgreenmoss · 5 years

Link

Obama occasionally denounced the ‘fat cats’ of Wall Street, but Wall Street contributed heavily to his campaign, and he entrusted his economic policy to it early in his tenure, bailing out banks and the insurance mega-company AIG with no quid pro quo. African-Americans had turned out in record numbers in 2008, demonstrating their love of an ostensible compatriot, but Obama ensured that he would be immune to the charge of loving blacks too much. Colour-blind to the suffering caused by mortgage foreclosures, he scolded African-Americans, using the neoliberal idiom of individual responsibility, for their moral failings as fathers, husbands and competitors in the global marketplace. Nor did he wish to be seen as soft on immigration; he deported millions of immigrants – Trump is struggling to reach Obama’s 2012 peak of 34,000 deportations a month. In his memoir, Dreams from My Father, he had eloquently sympathised with the marginalised and the powerless. In power, however, he seemed in thrall to Larry Summers and other members of the East Coast establishment, resembling not so much the permanently alienated outsider as the mixed-race child of imperialism, who, as Ashis Nandy diagnosed in The Intimate Enemy, replaces his early feeling for the weak with ‘an unending search for masculinity and status’. It isn’t surprising that this harbinger of hope and change anointed a foreign-policy hawk and Wall Street-friendly dynast as his heir apparent. His post-presidency moves – kite-surfing with Richard Branson on a private island, extravagantly remunerated speeches to Wall Street and bromance with George Clooney – have confirmed Obama as a case of mistaken identity. As David Remnick, his disappointed biographer, said recently, ‘I don’t think Obama was immune to lures of the new class of wealth. I think he’s very interested in Silicon Valley, stars and showbusiness, and sports, and the rest.’

Embodying neoliberal chic at its most seductive, Obama managed to restore the self-image of American elites in politics, business and the media that had been much battered during the last years of the Bush presidency. In the updated narrative of American exceptionalism, a black president was instructing the world in the ways of economic and social justice. Journalists in turn helped boost the fantastical promises and unexamined assumptions of universal improvement; some saw Coates himself as an icon of hope and change. A 2015 profile in New York magazine describes him at the Aspen Ideas Festival, along with Bill Kristol, Jeffrey Goldberg, assorted plutocrats and their private jets, during the ‘late Obama era’, when ‘progress was in the air’ and the ‘great question’ after the legalisation of gay marriage was: ‘would the half-century-long era of increasing prosperity and expanding human freedom prove to be an aberration or a new, permanent state?’ Coates is awkward among Aspen’s panjandrums. But he thinks it is too easy for him to say he’d be happier in Harlem. ‘Truthfully,’ he confesses, ‘I’m very happy to be here. It’s very nice.’ According to the profile-writer, ‘there is a radical chic crowd assembling around Coates’ – but then he is ‘a writer who radicalises the Establishment’.

For a self-aware and independent-minded writer like Coates, the danger is not so much seduction by power as a distortion of perspective caused by proximity to it. In his account of a party for African-American celebrities at the White House in the late Obama era, his usually majestic syntax withers into Vanity Fair puffs: ‘Women shivered in their cocktail dresses. Gentlemen chivalrously handed over their suit coats. Naomi Campbell strolled past the security pen in a sleeveless number.’ Since Clinton, the reflexive distrust of high office once shared by writers as different as Robert Lowell and Dwight Macdonald has slackened into defensiveness, even adoration, among the American literati. Coates proprietorially notes the ethnic, religious and racial variety of Obama’s staff. Everyone seems overwhelmed by a ‘feeling’, that ‘this particular black family, the Obamas, represented the best of black people, the ultimate credit to the race, incomparable in elegance and bearing.’ Not so incomparable if you remember Tina Brown’s description of another power couple, the Clintons, in the New Yorker in 1998: ‘Now see your president, tall and absurdly debonair, as he dances with a radiant blonde, his wife.’ ‘The man in a dinner jacket’, Brown wrote, possessed ‘more heat than any star in the room (or, for that matter, at the multiplex)’. After his visit, Joe Eszterhas, screenwriter of Showgirls and Basic Instinct, exulted over the Clinton White House’s diverse workforce: ‘full of young people, full of women, blacks, gays, Hispanics’. ‘Good Lord,’ he concluded in American Rhapsody, ‘we had taken the White House! America was ours.’

A political culture where progress in the air was measured by the president’s elegant bearing and penchant for diversity was ripe for demagoguery. The rising disaffection with a narcissistic and callous ruling class was signalled in different ways by the Tea Party, Occupy, Black Lives Matter and Bernie Sanders’s insurgent candidacy. The final blow to the Washington (and New York) consensus was delivered by Trump, who correctly read the growing resentment of elites – black or white, meritocratic or dynastic – who presumed to think the White House was theirs. Writing in Wiredmagazine a month before Trump’s election, Obama hailed the ‘quintessentially American compulsion to race for new frontiers and push the boundaries of what’s possible’. Over lunch at the White House, he assured Coates that Trump’s victory was impossible. Coates felt ‘the same’. He now says that ‘adherents and beneficiaries’ of white supremacy loathed and feared the black man in the White House – enough to make Trump ‘president, and thus put him in position to injure the world’. ‘Every white Trump voter is most certainly not a white supremacist,’ Coates writes in a bitter epilogue to We Were Eight Years in Power. ‘But every Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one.’ This, again, is true in a banal way, but inadequate as an explanation: Trump also benefited from the disappointment of white voters who had voted, often twice, for Obama, and of black voters who failed to turn out for Hillary Clinton. Moreover, to blame a racist ‘whitelash’ for Trump is to exculpate the political, business and media luminaries Coates has lately found himself with, especially the journalists disgraced, if not dislodged, by their collaboration in a calamitous racist-imperialist venture to make America great again.

As early as 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois identified fear and loathing of minorities as a ‘public and psychological wage’ for many whites in American society. More brazenly than his predecessors, Trump linked the misfortunes of the ‘white working class’ to Chinese cheats, Mexican rapists and treacherous blacks. But racism, Du Bois knew, was not just an ugly or deep-rooted prejudice periodically mobilised by opportunistic politicians and defused by social liberalism: it was a widely legitimated way of ordering social and economic life, with skin colour only one way of creating degrading hierarchies. Convinced that the presumption of inequality and discrimination underpinned the making of the modern world, Du Bois placed his American experience of racial subjection in a broad international context. Remarkably, all the major black writers and activists of the Atlantic West, from C.L.R. James to Stuart Hall, followed him in this move from the local to the global. Transcending the parochial idioms of their national cultures, they analysed the way in which the processes of capital accumulation and racial domination had become inseparable early in the history of the modern world; the way race emerged as an ideologically flexible category for defining the dangerously lawless civilisational other – black Africans yesterday, Muslims and Hispanics today. The realisation that economic conditions and religion were as much markers of difference as skin colour made Nina Simone, Mohammed Ali and Malcolm X, among others, connect their own aspirations to decolonisation movements in India, Liberia, Ghana, Vietnam, South Africa and Palestine. Martin Luther King absorbed from Gandhi not only the tactic of non-violent protest but also a comprehensive critique of modern imperialism. ‘The Black revolution,’ he argued, much to the dismay of his white liberal supporters, ‘is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes.’

Compared to these internationalist thinkers, partisans of the second black president, who happen to be the most influential writers and journalists in the US, have provincialised their aspiration for a just society. They have neatly separated it from opposition to an imperial dispensation that incarcerates and deports millions of people each year – disproportionately people of colour – and routinely exercises its right to assault and despoil other countries and murder and torture their citizens. Perceptive about the structural violence of the new Jim Crow, Coates has little to say about its manifestation in the new world order. For all his searing corroboration of racial stigma in America, he has yet to make a connection as vital and powerful as the one that MLK detected in his disillusioned last days between the American devastation of Vietnam and ‘the evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society’. He has so far considered only one of what King identified as ‘the giant American triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism’ – the ‘inter-related flaws’ that turned American society into a ‘burning house’ for the blacks trying to integrate into it. And in Coates’s worldview even race, despite his formidable authority of personal witness, rarely transcends a rancorously polarised American politics of racial division, in which the world’s most powerful man appears to have been hounded for eight years by unreconstructed American racists. ‘My President Was Black’, a 17,000-word profile in the Atlantic, is remarkable for its missing interrogations of the black president for his killings by drones, despoilation of Libya, Yemen and Somalia, mass deportations, and cravenness before the titans of finance who ruined millions of black as well as white lives. Coates has been accused of mystifying race and of ‘essentialising’ whiteness. Nowhere, however, does his view of racial identity seem as static as in his critical tenderness for a black member of the 1 per cent.

#this review still slaps #essays #*

16 notes · View notes

housingandhomelessnessla-blog · 5 years

Text

The Harsh Reality of Homeless Veterans

Aaron Legaspi

Trevor Seifen

SOC 290

Professor Miller

Due Date: January 23, 2019

The Harsh Reality of Homeless Veterans

Individuals, male or female, who have served our country deserve the utmost respect from every person in the U.S. for ensuring protection from any threat that may exist outside of America. Serving the U.S Army or Navy takes a lot of courage and pride. Every day these veterans are faced with dangers being outside of U.S. soil. When in war with another country, U.S. soldiers were faced with the fact that their lives hang in the balance. A main theme veterans have been through is terrorism. With terrorist attacks occurring on U.S. soil, a main priority when dealing with these issues is with the help of the Army and Navy intelligence. Many of these conflicts solved by soldiers entering dangerous territories outside the U.S. and capturing or in some cases, killing the wanted terrorist. Although their lives were at risk serving their country, these individuals stood up to the enemies and never backed down. Fear was never an option for soldiers. Overall, these veterans knew what was at stake when they joined the Army or Navy. Veterans served the U.S. with honor and understood that their life was at stake when joining the military. With all these risks, why are veterans are being mistreated and ending up on the streets they once protected from all harm outside the country?

Let’s begin once a veteran decides it’s time to go home for good. After retirement from the Army or Navy, a veteran is qualified to many benefits. One of these major benefits is retirement pay. For retirement pay, a veteran pay is based on how many years he or she serves, and when the individual enlisted into the Army or Navy. Retirement pay can be upwards of $60,000 per year according to The Military Wallet. Others benefits a veteran receives includes health and dental care. Veterans health and dental expenses are covered due to these benefits. With all these benefits being included once you retire from the Army or Navy, there are still thousands of cases of veterans living on the streets and not getting the proper care they deserve for serving the United States. Due to the rise of housing prices and not enough social network support, these benefits can only do so much for veterans to live a normal life outside the Army or Navy.

According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, there were an estimated 40,000 retired veterans that are currently homeless all across the United States. Many of the homeless veterans are between a variety of ages, with data consisting of individuals as early as teenage years. A majority of homeless veterans are single. According to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, most of the homeless veterans are male and most the homeless population consist of 45% of African American and Latino race. Many of these men or women who are living on the streets have mental illness, alcohol issues, and other disorders. So why are these veterans not being properly taken care of? For someone who protected the country from any harm, it is hard to believe the after-life is harsh for many veterans. I find it frustrating that there are veterans out of the street in a poverty states and little to none is being done to solve this major issue in the United States. All veterans deserve a better post Army or Navy life and should not be on the streets struggling to survive after protecting our country. In hand with attempting to adjust from non-military life the average homeless person is twice as likely to deal with mental health and/or drug abuse than the average homeless individual. Usually sending them to feel ashamed about needing help or no longer qualify for some of their benefits. If there was a focus on reintegrating all of our veterans into society while regularly checking up on their mental health so that they will not be left on the streets to handle themselves.

This is what the United States Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) is left to handle. The department was established in 1865 with the mission statement: “Honor America’s Veterans by providing exceptional health care that improves their health and well-being.” The program provides veterans with access to health programs (Dental health, Mental health, and Sensory aids), Debt management centers, and Rehabilitation programs. Although these programs usually had many requirements that the injured or discharged could not meet because they were waiting for their cases to be processed so they were left on the street without family support especially in Skid Row in 2013 when the veteran homeless population was at its peak.

The main source of help came from the American Legion who went down the streets helping homeless veterans by understanding their circumstance and providing them with the resources they could like another phone number to call that would handle their injury claims more serious. Stuart stressed the idea when we talked to him in class that we have enough money for the problem, but we need to put it in to all the right places with the correct motives behind each program. Examples with these focuses are found on LAHSA with their mission to redesign VA programs to target chronically homeless veterans and creating a country wide peer network support system.

Once Veteran Affairs gets the proper funding and programs for veterans to be automatically entered into so that there would not be so many delays because the people who are fighting for our freedom, should not have to fight to live in the same country.

Bibliography

National Alliance to End Homelessness, “Veteran Homelessness,” 22 April, 2015

Website: https://endhomelessness.org/resource/veteran-homelessness/

Hjelmstad, Michael, 2015, “A Night on Skid Row with LA’s Homeless Veterans,” The American Legion, April 2, 2015

Website: https://www.legion.org/homelessveterans/226723/night-skid-row-las-homeless-veterans

National Coalition for Homeless Veteran, “FAQ About Homeless Veterans,” 2018

Website: http://nchv.org/index.php/news/media/background_and_statistics/

Stuart, Forrest, “Down, Out, & Under Arrest,” The University of Chicago Press, 2016

National Alliance to End Homelessness, “Veteran Homelessness,” 22 April, 2015

Website: https://endhomelessness.org/resource/veteran-homelessness/

Military Benefits, “Military Retirement Benefits,” 8 July, 2018

Website: https://militarybenefits.info/military-retirement-benefits/

LAHSA, “Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count,” 31 May, 2018

Baker, Jason F. and Philip M. Roberts. 2012. Women Veterans: Housing and Health Care Concerns. New York: Nova Science. Retrieved January 21, 2019.

Pearl, Libby. 2015. “Congressional Research Service.” Veterans and Homelessness.

US News, 2018, “Officials: US Veteran Homelessness Declines 5 Percent,” November 1, 2018

Website: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/california/articles/2018-11-01/us-veteran-homelessness-declines-5-pct-in-2018-to-38-000

0 notes

itsjustascarecrow · 7 years

Text

so. today marks a pretty special occasion for me. today officially marks the 5-year anniversary of the first LA Kings/hockey game i’ve ever been to. on Thursday, April 4th, 2013, my dad and i went to the Kings v. Wild game and saw Justin Williams score one minute and twenty nine seconds into the first period for what would eventually be the game-winning goal, as former Kings backup goaltender Jonathan Bernier posted a shutout.

so i’m making a post to sort of commemorate this achievement(? i guess you can call it that)--5 awesome years of being a hockey fan, and all the amazing games and events and players i’ve seen in these past 5 years.

first i’ll start w/ some totals (that do not include the game i’m going to tonight):

Games:

NHL: LAK (46); SJS (9); COL (5); STL (4); CBJ DAL (3); ANA ARI BOS CHI EDM MIN PIT (2); CAR CGY FLA NSH NYR PHI TBL TOR WSH WPG (1)

2012-13: 6 total (2 regular season, 4 playoff) 2013-14: 9 total (6 regular, 3 playoff) 2014-15: 8 total (all regular) 2015-16: 12 total (1 preseason, 10 regular, 1 playoff) 2016-17: 12 total (2 preseason, 10 regular)*’**

*2017 NHL All-Star Game (not included in total) **includes a non-LAK game (CBJ @ ANA)

AHL: ONT (6); BAK (2); CLE IWA SAR SDG (1)

2015-16: 4 total (2 regular, 2 playoff) 2016-17: 2 total (all regular)

NWHL: BOS NYR (1)

2016-17: 1 (regular)

Goals Scored:

NHL: -Kings: total - 127 by season: 2012-13: 18 2013-14: 28 2014-15: 24 2015-16: 30 2016-17: 27

-Opponent: total - 109 by season: 2012-13: 10 2013-14: 26 2014-15: 16 2015-16: 26 2016-17: 31

**CBJ @ ANA: 4-0 CBJ final score (not included in any above totals)

AHL: -Reign: total - 13 by season: 2015-16: 8 2016-17: 5

-Opponent: total - 9 by season: 2015-16: 8 2016-17: 1

NWHL: -Pride: total - 4 -Riveters: total - 3

largest amount of goals scored by a single team: 6 (Kings x3, Stars x1) number of shutouts: 9 (includes all leagues: Kings x4, Sharks x1, Penguins x1, Blue Jackets x1, Condors x1, Reign x1)

Wins vs. Losses:

NHL: Kings: 26 Opponent: 20 by season: 2012-13: 5-1 2013-14: 5-4 2014-15: 5-3 2015-16: 7-5 2016-17: 4-7**

**does not include CBJ @ ANA

AHL: Reign: 4 Opponent: 2 by season: 2015-16: 2-2 2016-17: 2-0

NWHL: Pride: 1 Opponent: 0

there’s probably a hell of a lot more info number-wise i could put on here, like which individuals we’ve seen score the most for and against each team, etc., but honestly idk if i have the patience to figure that out, lmao. also i’m sure there’s plenty of games we’ve been to where so-and-so or what’s-his-face got a milestone goal/point/game career total but again, can’t be bothered to go back and look it up. for those who may want more info tho, here’s a post i made a while ago that i update regularly w/ all the games i’ve been to w/ a final score and the goal-scorers.

for real tho like. i don’t wanna get all sappy and shit and suddenly turn this post all emotional (just watch me do so anyway) but i honestly cannot express how much this sport means to me. like insert tragic backstory(tm) here and how hockey was what saved me and all that jazz but shit like. i mean yeah this shit’s got it’s ups and downs but at least whenever i get frustrating about personal stuff, i can distract myself w/ a game. or if the game’s pissing me off, at least i’m not focusing on all the shit going on in my personal life. b/c before i started watching, i really.. didn’t have much, kinda??

basically i went through a major bought of depression throughout 2012 which sorta peaked in early 2013 w/ stuff i’d rather not discuss here, but if my dad hadn’t taken me to that game 5 years ago, i honestly don’t know if i’d still be around today. i felt like i’d lost a lot. nothing interested me anymore. my favorite band at the time broke up when i felt like i’d already hit rock bottom. i had like no outlet for what little strong emotion i did feel at the time b/c otherwise i just felt empty. but when Justin Williams scored that goal a minute and twenty nine freaking seconds into that game, i knew that was it. that’s what sealed the deal for me.

i had zero idea what to expect, even w/ my dad giving me a basic rundown of the roster and some basic rules about the game. like we watched the wild warm up (b/c that’s where our seats were) and my dad kept pointing out Zach Parise to me damn-near every time he skated past us b/c he’s a former UND alumni, as is like half my family on my dad’s side, but after a while it was like “okay dad, i get it. Zach Parise. UND. pretty cool,” lmao. and then the game starts and it was so quiet. like i’ve been to like a million high school football games, a good number of pro baseball games, and one pro basketball game, but all of them were.. well a hell of a lot louder, for one. like people were watching the game, but at the same time they weren’t. people in and out of their seats all the time, tons of idle chit-chat, etc. but when that first puck dropped, people sat down and shut up. they watched, like. really watched. and when Williams scored, the utter elation of the entire building (save the wild fans of course), the horn, the “hey hey hey!” chant complete w/ fist-pumping--it was just. i honestly can’t even describe it properly. but what i can say was that it was the first time in a looong time i felt genuinely happy.

and here i am exactly 5 years later. going back to Staples for my 47th Kings game. and i like to think i’ve seen some pretty wild shit in these past five years. league rule changes that ultimately changed the entire ASG format, amazing players both leaving and joining the league (i.e. Teemu Selanne, Auston Matthews), the 2014 Olympics, a few All-Star games, and a World Cup, the first paid pro women’s league and the U.S. women’s team fight for equitable wages, the first transgender athlete to play pro hockey (i.e. the amazing and inspirational Harrison Browne), a freaking expansion team in Vegas.

and speaking of Vegas, i went to the first ever hockey games held in the new arena, and while it wasn’t the result we wanted, at least i got to spent two nights in a row in the coolest new arena in town, plus i got to see 3 native players on the ice in one game on the second night vs. the Avalanche, which is probably more than any other team/match-up in this league could boast. and i could not have been more proud.

i was there for Andy Andreoff’s NHL debut where he got into a fight w/ Matt Hendricks in his first shift on the ice.

i accidentally met Matt Greene’s parents b/c his mom happened to notice my dad was wearing his jersey and asked for a picture.

i ran into Bob Miller outside Staples and he let me see his 2014 Stanley Cup Championship ring, the same night they raised the banner.

the first time i saw my next favorite team, the Avalanche, was three years ago on the 2-year anniversary of my first Kings game, and i took @gofredthefish along for the ride.

i stood and cheered and cried for Mike Richards and Justin Williams on their return to LA after both had signed w/ the Capitals.

i was there to see Jonathan Quick’s epic scorpion kick save against Winnipeg three seasons ago (the night before we drove down to San Deigo so i could catch an Of Mice & Men concern, then drive back to LA the following day so i could catch a flight to Bismarck, ND to visit family for senior year spring break).

i jokingly put a “native curse” San Jose’s bench before warmups back in 2014 during the first round of the playoffs, the night the Kings started their reverse sweep (as well as it being Tyler Toffoli’s 22nd birthday).

the first shootout i ever saw went to the Blues, courtesy of Troy Brouwer’s goal in the 7th round.

sent our 2014 Olympians off on a high note w/ a 2-1 overtime win against the Blue Jackets where Robyn Regehr scored the gwg from right in front of where i was sitting.

went to my first game in Honda Center and the Ducks were gloriously shut out. (i was also one of maybe ten Blue Jackets fans in the entire building.)

saw Dwight King score on Marty Brodeur from the blue line, Alec Martinez score on the Avs twice on the same play, Milan Lucic’s first game in Staples Center as a King, got a video of the signature Nick Foligno/Sergei Bobrovsky Hug(tm)--twice, since they shut out the Ducks that one time, saw the home team get a 3-0 shutout in both my first NHL and AHL games, was there for the Luc Robitaille statue unveiling outside Staples, and stood less than 10 feet away from Cam Atkinson outside Staples before the 2017 ASG.

i went to a Reign game where they knocked the San Diego Gulls out of the playoffs just a couple of weeks after i was released from the hospital after falling into a diabetic-induced coma (also i had a cold but i’ll be damned if i wasn’t gonna persevere).

i went to two separate You Can Play-sponsored LGBT+ Pride Nights for both the NHL and NWHL--and speaking of which, that particular NWHL Pride Night was my first ever women’s hockey game ever. and Boston kept their “undefeated since last january” record alive and well.

and the one moment that still makes me cry every time i think about it was when i saw Matt Duchene score his first goal of the season in 2015-16 in what would eventually be his first 30-goal season. i was sat in the second row right in front of where he threw himself into the glass in celebration, so i like to think we kinda celly’d together.

but best of all, i got to meet @hockeyacegrace earlier this season on Native American Heritage Night, and took @kylorenedict to the Kings’ opening night against the Flyers to kick off the 50-year anniversary of the First Expansion. and not to mention the many other wonderful friends i’ve made in this fandom, who also include (but are not limited to) @brandoncarlo, @jodrouin27, @sadchihuahua, @elzaechelon, @marianyossa, and @dominic-turgeon.

basically just. here’s to 5 gods damned years of selling my soul to this hell on ice. and gods damn it, here’s to 5 more.

#and to think i was gonna make this post even longer by adding random info on every single game i've ever been to #LMAO not happening; this is probably already too much but. i don't have the heart to edit shit out #but yeah just. holy fuck. 5 years of hockey. like again there's probably way more i could've added but i think i'll leave it at that #@ nhl you're kinda in the doghouse w/ all this shit about the olympics right now #and @ kings so are you for not making the playoffs #but i'll be damned if i'm gonna stop watching now. i'm in too deep at this point so just. fucking. thanks i guess???? lmao idk #i guess again: here's to 5 more years and hopefully more cup victories and more women's games and the league just being less shit #hockey #random bullshit #hockey at staples center

2 notes · View notes

richmacleod · 7 years

Text

After a lost year, Vic Black is fighting his way to get back to the big leagues

The story of 27-year-old, right-handed relief pitcher Vic Black is one that has it's fair share of peaks and valleys. Spending time in both the Pirates and Mets organizations from 2009-2015, Black has shown the potential he's capable of. Recently, however, his story has become one of shoulder troubles, minor league stints and uncertainty.

Born in Amarillo, Texas on May 23, 1988, Vic Black isn't one of your typical stories about a professional baseball player who was born with the immediate love of the game. In fact, it was quite the contrary for him.

As many people likely know, football is a dominant force in Texas and as a kid, it's what Black watched the most. As far as other sports, the only other thing he ever really watched was volleyball, and that's thanks to growing up with his three sisters.

It wasn't until he was a 10-year-old that Black first made the decision to play baseball. And still, it wasn't because he had the burning passion to do so.

"I think I got in the last year you could be in coach pitch, and it was because my buddies were playing," Black told About.com. "I don't think it was a desire like 'man, that looks like so much fun,' I just couldn't hang out with my friends because they had to go play baseball, so I said 'that's a bum deal, I'll just go play.'"

Seven years later, Black was fully immersed in the game of baseball, playing for the Golden Sandstorm of Amarillo High School... As a catcher.

"The longer you're in the field, the more you understand the game around you," Black explained.

While he has dealt with neck and shoulder problems throughout his career, Vic has never had any elbow issues and believes that both the health of his elbow and a better understanding of the way the game is played are thanks to playing in the field throughout his four years at Amarillo High.

It wasn't until the end of his high school days that Black began to see what he could do on the mound. "I loved throwing from the outfield, I loved playing long toss," Black went on to say. "You start getting that feeling like 'it's getting there kinda fast.' I'm looking at the other guys throw it, but then I throw it and I think, 'there's something different.'"

Black claims that for the most part he didn't know much of what he was doing on the mound those days, but his velocity became an impressive trait as he was able to dial his fastball up to 96 MPH in the final game of his senior year.

"Being able to throw hard, it's something you get excited about," Black explained about his velocity. "This is fun, I wanna go do this as much as possible."

While he was still a work in progress as a pitcher, Black's velocity was dynamic enough to get him drafted out of high school as a pitcher in the 2006 MLB Amateur Draft. As chance so happens, Black was selected in the 41st round by a team he would wind up on years later: The New York Mets.

"I knew I had the kind of arm to attract them," he recalled, "but to go do it at that time would've been unwise due to, honestly, no development whatsoever. That young, there's so much to be learned in college and you're given the opportunity without the expectation that somebody's going to take your job if you don't do well."

Considering this, Black ultimately decided not to sign with the Mets and headed to Dallas Baptist University instead.

Soon after arriving to college, Black made the full transition from catcher to pitcher. "You receive the ball well, but the whole picking it and not really being able to hit thing isn't gonna quite play out," manager Eric Newman joked with him. From that moment on, it was all about pitching for Black.

In three college seasons, Black appeared in 48 games (42 as a starting pitcher). While his 4.64 ERA wasn't enough to impress teams on it's own, he was able to draw plenty of interest after amassing 246 strikeouts in 246.1 innings pitched. That equates to a career 9.00 strikeouts per 9 innings rate.

After being taken in the 41st round of the 2006 MLB Draft, Black found himself ascend to the 49th overall pick in the supplementary first round, taken by the Pittsburgh Pirates just three years later. To this day, Black is the highest draft pick in Dallas Baptist University history—a school that was once home to current and former major leaguers such as Freddy Sanchez, Ben Zobrist and Ryan Goins.

While it would still take three seasons to reach the big leagues, Black feels the lessons learned in the minors were not time wasted.

"The biggest thing that I had to learn was that it doesn't happen right then," he said. "Especially when you get drafted high, you're thinking this means that I'm ready. Stephen Strasburg was our No. 1 pick that year and everyone was saying 'oh, he's ready' and as someone who was 48 picks behind him I was thinking 'yeah, I think I might be, too.' You get that mindset, but then you get there and you start facing challenges."

Entering 2010, Black was the 12th ranked prospect in the Pirates farm system, however due to shoulder and bicep injuries, he appeared in just 29 games over the course of his first two years. It wasn't until the 2012 season that he had his first full minor league season, where he really began to make his name.

Now a full-time reliever, Black dominated Double-A during 2012 as he recorded a 1.65 ERA while racking up 13 saves and a whopping 85 strikeouts in just 60 innings pitched.

After posting a 2.51 ERA in Triple-A Indianapolis up through the All-Star break the following season, Black finally got his first shot at the big leagues as Pirates closer Jason Grilli went down with a strained right flexor tendon.

"My roommate at the time Duke Welker starts banging on the door, yelling 'Vic, your phone's going off!'" Black recalled. "I finish up showering, I'm in my pajamas and Duke is refusing to answer my phone, so I take it out, call my manager back and the first thing he says to me is 'pack your bags, you have to be at the airport in an hour.' At first, I wasn't even sure if it was joke or not."

It wasn't.

Black hopped on a plane to meet the Pirates in Washington, D.C. for their series against the Nationals. Finally, he was a big leaguer.

"It was blazing hot, I was sweating through my suit but it was the greatest thing in the world," he said about his trip to the ballpark that day.

Just one month after making his major league debut, Black's world changed as the Pirates traded him to the Mets—the team that originally drafted him out of high school—along with Dilson Herrera in exchange for Marlon Byrd and John Buck.

Despite Pittsburgh being on the cusp of breaking a 21-year postseason drought and leaving the only organization he had ever known, the new opportunity that presented itself was something that was exciting.

"I got called up, debuted in D.C., got traded a month later and then met the Mets for the first time... in D.C.," Black said, chuckling at the odds of such a thing happening. "It was cool, I was in a spot where I could get an opportunity to pitch the way and in a role I'd like to, but it was really what my agent said that was exciting. He told me 'Vic, there's L.A., there's Chicago, but then there's New York. They don't even compare.'"

Black finished out the 2013 campaign by pitching in 15 games for the Mets out of the bullpen, going 3-0 with a 3.46 ERA, 12 strikeouts and four walks in 13 innings pitched, but it was the following year that saw him really take a step forward.

While he did begin the 2014 season at Triple-A Las Vegas, it wasn't long before Black found his way back to the major leagues with the Mets and, once again, he showed his potential. In 41 games with the team that season, Black recorded a 2.60 ERA with 32 strikeouts (albeit with 19 walks) in 34.2 innings pitched.

Yet again, though, the injury bug bit the 26-year-old reliever as he sustained a pinched nerve and herniated disc in his neck, along with a shoulder strain that caused him to be shut down for the remainder of the season.

Even with the injuries, Black seemed as though he was set up to be a part of the Mets bullpen for years as he had been nothing but productive for the team at the major league level in each and every big league stint.

Then came 2015.

In the beginning of the season, Black found himself working his way back from the shoulder injury which curtailed his 2014, hoping to make his way back to the majors. Unfortunately, that's not what happened.

"It was a struggle," Black admitted. "There were some days where my arm didn't feel good, there were other days where it felt great but I just couldn't seem to figure out why. It didn't make any sense, we had seen several doctors who didn't really have a grasp on what could've been going on, it became more of a 'we think' situation, so we let it play out."

By the midway point of the season, Black continued to struggle mightily in the minor leagues as he posted a 25.86 ERA with 18 strikeouts and 14 walks in 18.1 innings pitched over 20 appearances between Single-A St. Lucie, Double-A Binghamton and Triple-A Las Vegas. The right-hander also had to deal with a groin issue that sidelined him for over a week in the first half of the season. After that stretch, however, things seemed to be headed in the right direction as the right-hander had a stretch of allowing just one run in 11.1 innings pitched over 12 appearances.

"I felt like I was kind of getting some rhythm back," Black explained. "My agent had some conversations with the front office who told him to keep me focused and that when rosters expand in September, there's a good chance I could be called back up."

With not much time left before the rosters expanded, things seemed to be on course for Black, who entered a game looking to keep the tying run at third from scoring with two outs. Much to everyone's surprise, the batter at the plate laid down a perfect suicide squeeze to tie the game. The following night, things continued to fall off the rails as Black was hit hard, allowing three runs in less than a full inning and blowing the save in the process.

"This is not happening right now," Black thought at the time. "In the past I don't get hit. If I give up runs it's because I walked a couple guys and then missed a pitch. I just didn't know what was happening."

On August 30th, just two days before the major league rosters expanded, the Mets acquired reliever Addison Reed in a waiver deal with the Diamondbacks and the team informed Black ahead of time that he was being outrighted, leading to the end of his career in New York.

"I wasn't showing what I did the year before so with that and the move they made, they couldn't afford to keep me on the 40-man roster at that point," Black said of the team's reasoning.

What began as a promising Mets career ended with injuries and frustration for Black, who admits that the end of the 2015 season did get to him at times. With all of the injury problems he's experienced over the years and the recent news of his former teammate Jenrry Mejia receiving a lifetime ban from baseball due to three PED violations, I asked Black if he's ever felt the temptation of steroids to keep him on the field and help him make his way back to the majors.

"I had a conversation with my dad back in 2011 when I had just come off of a year and a half of injuries and throwing 86-87 MPH. At the time a few guys in the big leagues had been suspected of using and my dad just looked at me and said 'don't you ever do that,'" Black explained. "My response to him was that with everybody there will come a point where we just can't play well enough to compete at this level anymore and when that day comes and I can't naturally do this anymore, I'm fine with walking away."

Today as pitchers and catchers begin their first workouts of the 2016 season, Black has yet to find a new team. And while he would love to return to New York, a place he describes as home now, he realizes his time with the Mets has come and gone. As such, Black posted a public goodbye to Mets fans on Twitter earlier in February, as he felt they deserved to be acknowledged after all of the support they'd given him over the years.

Soon to be 28-years-old, Black continues to remain optimistic at his chances to return to the major leagues. "For me to be able to play 15 more years past this, I think that would be a testament to staying true in battling the situations as they continue to come," Black said of his remaining goal. "I still believe I can do it, there's no doubt in that."

Still unsigned, Black aims to be ready to pitch again later this summer, whether it comes on a major or minor league contract. All he asks for at this point is another shot. And for someone with the ability to reach 97 MPH consistently on their fastball and break off a curveball like he's shown he can do, he probably deserves one.

Today, Vic Black cherishes his time with the Mets and even though it's come to an end for now, he remains hopeful of a reunion down the road one day. "I got to be a part of the city, and not just a player," Black said of New York. "And that was the best part of all."

2 notes · View notes

reneeacaseyfl · 5 years

Text

BBC – Future – The true toll of the Chernobyl disaster

Springtime was always the busiest time of year for the women working at the wool processing plant in Chernihiv, northern Ukraine. More than 21,000 tons of wool passed through the factory from farms all across the country during the annual sheep shearing period. The April and May of 1986 were no exception.

The workers pulled 12-hour shifts as they sorted the piles of raw fleece by hand before they were washed and baled. But then the women started getting sick.

Some suffered nosebleeds, others complained of dizziness and nausea. When the authorities were called to investigate, they found radiation levels in the factory of up to 180mSv/hr. Anyone exposed at these levels would exceed the total annual dose considered to be safe in many parts of the world today in less than a minute.

You might also like:

• The bold plan to give Chernobyl a new life • The bunkers built to survive an apocalypse • How plants have reclaimed Chernobyl’s poisoned land

In 2005 the UN predicted a further 4,000 people might eventually die as a result of radiation exposure from Chernobyl

Brown’s research, however, suggests Chernobyl has cast a far longer shadow.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, however, says that health studies on liquidators have “failed to show any direct correlation between their radiation exposure” and cancer or other disease.

Some of those living closest to the power plant received internal radiation doses in their thyroid glands that were up to 37,000 times the dose of a chest x-ray

But this still represents a small proportion of the people affected by Chernobyl.

Brown has found evidence hidden in hospital records from around the time of the accident that show just how widespread problems were.

The Chernobyl disaster is the largest anthropogenic disaster in the history of humankind

Even now the Ukrainian government is paying benefits to 36,525 women who are considered to be widows of men who suffered as a result of the Chernobyl accident.

“It was labelled as normal and sent all over the country, although they were told not to send it to Moscow.” – Kate Brown

It meant people outside Ukraine would “wake up to a breakfast of Chernobyl blueberries” without even knowing it, she says.

Astonishingly, two of the three men are still alive despite having minimal protection from the radiation during their mission. The third man, Borys Baranov, survived until 2005.

—

Join more than one million Future fans by liking us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter or Instagram.

Credit: Source link

The post BBC – Future – The true toll of the Chernobyl disaster appeared first on WeeklyReviewer.

from WeeklyReviewer https://weeklyreviewer.com/bbc-future-the-true-toll-of-the-chernobyl-disaster/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=bbc-future-the-true-toll-of-the-chernobyl-disaster

0 notes

tshirtfashiontrend · 5 years

Text

Ex-soccer star Hope Solo reveals painful details of miscarriage with twins

Link Buys Now: https://kingteeshops.com/ex-soccer-star-hope-solo-reveals-painful-details-of-miscarriage-with-twins/

Ex-soccer star Hope Solo reveals painful details of miscarriage with twins

Ever since she stepped into the spotlight as a goalkeeper for the U.S. Women’s National Team in 2000, Hope Solo’s life has seemingly been an endless series of high-profile peaks and valleys.

She won Olympic gold medals in 2008 and 2012 but was benched in the 2007 Women’s World Cup semifinals as the U.S. lost. After falling short again in 2011, she helped lead Team USA to the World Cup title in 2015. Her final international appearance ended with a penalty-kick loss to Sweden in the 2016 Olympics.

But Solo’s lowest point was one never made public, until she revealed in an interview for the July issue of Elle magazine that she suffered a miscarriage in February 2018.

Solo told the magazine that she and her husband, former NFL player Jerramy Stevens, had been trying for a while to have a baby. Then about a month after the miscarriage, while still experiencing both physical and emotional pain, she learned from a doctor she had been pregnant with twins — one of them ectopic.

Former USWNT goalie Hope Solo

“The doctor said I was hours from dying. They ended up having to remove my fallopian tube,” she told Elle.

At that same time, she was also running for president of the U.S. Soccer Federation. Although she didn’t win the election — finishing last — she made equal pay and working conditions for male and female players one of her primary themes at the USSF convention.

“I knew my voice was important,” Solo said. “That speech took a lot. Even before all that, it would have taken courage.”

Since those losses, Solo has continued her fight for women’s rights in soccer. With an existing gender discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission at a standstill, she filed a federal lawsuit against the USSF last August. In March, all 28 members of the current U.S. Women’s National Team joined her.

#Ex-soccer star Hope Solo reveals painful details of miscarriage with twins

0 notes

kingteeshops · 5 years

Text

Ex-soccer star Hope Solo reveals painful details of miscarriage with twins

Link Buys Now: https://kingteeshops.com/ex-soccer-star-hope-solo-reveals-painful-details-of-miscarriage-with-twins/

Ex-soccer star Hope Solo reveals painful details of miscarriage with twins

Ever since she stepped into the spotlight as a goalkeeper for the U.S. Women’s National Team in 2000, Hope Solo’s life has seemingly been an endless series of high-profile peaks and valleys.

But Solo’s lowest point was one never made public, until she revealed in an interview for the July issue of Elle magazine that she suffered a miscarriage in February 2018.

Former USWNT goalie Hope Solo

“The doctor said I was hours from dying. They ended up having to remove my fallopian tube,” she told Elle.

“I knew my voice was important,” Solo said. “That speech took a lot. Even before all that, it would have taken courage.”

#Ex-soccer star Hope Solo reveals painful details of miscarriage with twins

0 notes

ionecoffman · 6 years

Text

The Recurring Puzzle of an Illness That Paralyzes Children

As the summer of 2014 gave way to fall, Kevin Messacar, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Colorado, started seeing a wave of children with inexplicable paralysis. All of them shared the same story. One day, they had a cold. The next, they couldn’t move an arm or a leg. In some children, the paralysis was relatively mild, but others had to be supported with ventilators and feeding tubes after they stopped being able to breathe or swallow on their own.

The condition looked remarkably like polio—the viral disease that is on the verge of being eradicated worldwide. But none of the kids tested positive for poliovirus. Instead, their condition was given a new name: acute flaccid myelitis, or AFM. That year, 120 people, mostly young children, developed the condition across 34 states. The cases peaked in September and then rapidly tailed off.

“We didn’t know if it would go away,” Messacar says. “Unfortunately, it came back.”

After just a few dozen new cases the following year, AFM returned in force in 2016, afflicting 149 more people. The next year: another lull. And in 2018: another spike, with 62 confirmed cases so far and at least 93 more under investigation. Parents have described their children collapsing mid-run like “marionette dolls,” or going to bed with a fever and waking up paralyzed from the neck down.

This third wave confirms what many doctors had feared: AFM wasn’t a one-off, but likely a new biennial normal. It’s still rare, affecting just one in a million people, but that’s little comfort for the roughly 400 children who’ve been affected, many of whom are looking at lifelong disability or paralysis. “It’s exceptionally frustrating to see it again this year, when we know how much people’s lives are overturned,” says Priya Duggal from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “We don’t really know much more than we knew in 2014—but we’re trying.”

AFM is a new term, but not a new syndrome. Its package of symptoms can be caused by a wide range of factors including, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes, poliovirus, West Nile virus, environmental toxins, and genetic disorders. The question isn’t what causes AFM per se, but what is specifically behind the biennial spikes that have appeared since 2014. (There was a small peak in 2012, too, before the condition came to national attention.)

That has proven to be a tough problem to crack. In this era, it seems that scientists could easily grab tissue samples, sequence the genes of everything in it, and pinpoint some consistent microbial culprit. But that hasn’t happened—so far, no single germ has shown up in every case. Despite all the tools of modern science, new diseases, especially rare ones, can be very hard to understand.

AFM is uncommon enough that a hospital might get just a handful of cases in a given year, if any. Many centers must join forces to pull off a rigorous study—and that’s logistically complicated. The condition is also geographically unpredictable. Some places had cases in 2014 but none this year, and vice versa.

More importantly, it’s too risky to take biopsies of the actual affected tissues—the nerves of the brain and spine. Instead, doctors have mostly drawn and analyzed samples of spinal fluid, and there’s no guarantee that whatever causes AFM is actually there.

So far, most of the signs point toward a virus as the cause, and specifically some kind of enterovirus. Unlike influenza, which circulates in the winter, enteroviruses are infections of the autumn, which is when AFM cases peak. They mostly infect young children, and the average AFM patient is 4 years old. Enteroviruses need a large enough population of susceptible hosts in which to circulate, so many lie low after waves of infection and crop up in cycles of two or three years—just as AFM does. And although many enteroviruses circulate widely but have little effect, they have a track record of occasionally infecting the spinal cord and causing paralytic illnesses.

“It’s not too far of a jump [to suspect them],” says Roberta DeBiasi, an infectious disease chief at Children’s National Health System.

One particular enterovirus, known as EV-D68, has emerged as the lead suspect. First discovered in 1962, it seemed rare and unexceptional. But in 2014, it caused a huge surge of respiratory illness throughout the U.S. That year, “our hospital was the busiest it’s ever been,” Messacar recalls. “The floors were packed, and we hit capacity.” And when paralyzed children started showing up at the same time, he put two and two together. He and others noted that in 2014 and 2016, EV-D68 was the most commonly identified virus in people with AFM.

[Read: How will Trump lead during the next global pandemic?]

But it’s not in every patient. So far, the CDC has only found the virus in the spinal fluid of a single child, and in fewer than half of the stool samples or nasal swabs they tested. “I am frustrated that, despite all of our efforts, we haven’t been able to identify the cause of this mystery illness,” said Nancy Messonnier, who directs the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, in a recent press briefing. The agency notes on its website that “the cause of most of the AFM cases remains unknown.”

Messacar thinks that the case for EV-D68 is stronger than the CDC is admitting. Certainly, caution is commendable; the wrong viruses have been blamed for perplexing illnesses before. But “I don’t think AFM is as much of an unknown as it’s portrayed,” he says. He is frustrated with its billing as a “mystery illness.”

Enteroviruses, he says, are not like typical nerve-infecting germs. They can move through nerves directly, so they don’t always show up in spinal fluid. And EV-D68 isn’t even like typical enteroviruses. Unlike other members of its family, it is quickly destroyed in the gut, and doesn’t show up in stool. It mostly thrives at the back of the nose—a place that few doctors thought to examine when AFM first showed up. Why look inside the respiratory tract of a child with a neurological disease?

Even when doctors did take nasal swabs, their odds of finding EV-D68 were low. In many neurological infections, the worst symptoms aren’t caused by the virus itself, but by the body’s disproportionate immune response. That response can continue even after the virus has been cleared, which means that patients often test negative for whatever first triggered their illness. All the researchers I spoke to think that AFM likely behaves in this way, especially since there can be a seven-day gap between the condition’s initial cold-like symptoms and the severe paralytic ones. By the time parents seek medical help, their children could be suffering from their bodies’ misplaced attempts to fight an enemy that’s no longer there. “The expectation that you’ll find a pathogen in every case is unrealistic because you’re already behind the clock,” says Messacar.

As a workaround, researchers could take the complicated steps of analyzing the bodily fluids of AFM patients for immune cells or antibodies that specifically recognize EV-D68. Their existence would at least suggest that the virus was once present. But even without such confirmation, there are other lines of incriminating evidence.

After the EV-D68 epidemic of 2014, a few hospitals, including Messacar’s, started actively searching for the virus in nasal swabs taken from patients with generic cold symptoms. Their surveillance showed that the virus disappeared in 2015 and returned a year later, coinciding with the second AFM wave. It vanished again in 2017 and returned this summer. When the latest AFM wave hit, Children’s Hospital Colorado actually saw it coming.

There’s also compelling evidence from laboratory studies. Last year, Alison Hixon at the Colorado School of Medicine showed that EV-D68 strains from the 2014 outbreak can paralyze mice by infecting and killing the movement-controlling neurons in their spines. When Hixon isolated the virus from those neurons and injected them into another group of mice, those rodents also became paralyzed. That fulfills all the traditional criteria for causality. It falls short of a slam-dunk case only because the experiments were done in mice.

Another enterovirus, EV-71, has also been implicated in AFM. It’s endemic to East Asia, where it infrequently causes a similar polio-like illness with the same two-to-three-year periodicity. Messacar’s team detected it in Colorado this spring, and they’ve found it in 11 patients with AFM. Several enteroviruses could be behind the AFM cases.

But even if that’s true, it doesn’t explain why the disease suddenly became a national problem in 2014. Conspiratorial corners of the internet were quick to suggest that immigrants had imported a mystery virus—a ludicrous hypothesis, since EV-D68 was first identified in California five decades ago.

It’s possible, though, that the virus has changed since then. In one experiment, strains from 1962 didn’t paralyze mice in the same way that those from 2014 did. This would hardly be the first time that long-known viruses suddenly became more dangerous. Zika virus, for example, was thought to be innocuous when it was discovered in the 1940s, but only recently acquired a mutation that seemingly allows it to cause severe neurological problems.

“For me, it’s not really about the viruses,” says Duggal. “I’m really trying to figure out what causes the paralysis.” Much like polio virus, which paralyzed just 1 percent of those it infected, it’s likely that AFM is caused by widely circulating viruses that only lead to problems for a small, susceptible minority. That’s why you don’t hear news reports of entire schools coming down with AFM. The disease doesn’t even sweep through entire families: Whenever an affected child has had a sibling, Duggal says, that other child has always been always healthy. In one dramatic case, scientists isolated genetically identical strains of EV-D68 from two Californian siblings, one of whom had AFM and the other of whom had the sniffles.

Duggal is now sequencing the genes of people from 60 affected families, to see if the ones with AFM have any unique mutations. Other factors might be relevant, too. Gut bacteria, for example, can affect an animal’s susceptibility to polio. And since humidity and temperature affect the global circulation of enteroviruses, Carlos Pardo-Villamizar from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine wonders if the world’s changing climate is influencing the new trends in AFM.

To an extent, every disease behaves like this. No germ sickens every person it infects. Instead, the outcomes of encounters between pathogens and hosts almost always depend on their respective genes, and other factors like climate, diet, the microbiome, and more.

The point is: Diseases are complicated. If anything, scientists have been lucky to study many viruses—flu, Ebola, smallpox, to name a few—that are potent enough for their consequences to be clear, regardless of other variables. But there’ll be many instances in which the threads of cause and effect are harder to untangle. Epstein-Barr virus, for example, infects half of Americans before they get to middle-school, and 90 percent of them by adulthood. It usually does nothing, sometimes leads to mono, and very infrequently causes cancers.

AFM is similar, and its emergence provides a new opportunity for researchers to confront age-old questions. How do you prove what causes a disease? When does your evidence become strong enough? And while you’re collecting that evidence, what do you do for the people who are affected?

“In 2014 and 2016, there were only one or two cases of full recovery,” says Duggal. This year, for whatever reason, the children in Colorado infected with EV-71 are recovering more quickly. But at least one child has died, and some are facing long-term disabilities. Every patient immediately gets intensive physical therapy. If that fails, doctors have tried antibody infusions and plasmapheresis (a process that filters blood) to reduce inflammation, but it’s unclear if these do any good. “There’s no proven efficacy, but also little risk,” says DeBiasi. “Once you get to other therapies, you’re starting to go up the risk equation. It’s not a cookbook approach.”

There’s no clear line on prevention, either. With uncertainty lingering around viral causes, the CDC’s advice is generic: “It’s always important to practice disease prevention steps, such as staying up-to-date on vaccines, washing your hands, and protecting yourself from mosquito bites.” Basically: do the stuff that prevents other diseases.

Messacar would like them to be bolder. By all means, he says, be open to changing evidence and continue looking at other possible causes, but in the meantime, proceed as if EV-D68 is the actual culprit. That means two things. First, begin developing vaccines, a process that could take years. “It may seem early to start thinking about that, but if we don’t do the groundwork, and AFM comes back in a bigger way, we’re going to be years behind,” he says.

Second, Messacar says, public health workers should actively search for the virus in the same way that they do for flu. The CDC does have a surveillance program for enteroviruses, but it’s a passive system that relies on clinicians sending in samples. A more active program, of the kind that only a few hospitals do, would specifically test for EV-D68 in the noses of any child who gets admitted with respiratory problems.

A month ago, after the third wave of AFM had started, Pardo-Villamizar began convening a nationwide group of colleagues from hospitals that were seeing cases. Their goal is to share as much information as possible on how best to study, diagnose, and treat the illness. “We always depend on the CDC, but they’re designed to establish surveillance for diseases, not management and diagnosis,” he says. “We, as clinicians and scientists, should be doing that.”

For Messacar, the most important step is to take the disease seriously. “Right now, it’s very uncommon compared to polio in the 1950s, which caused tens of thousands of cases a year,” he says. “But I don’t want to downplay this as a rare disease, because of the long-term consequences. It’s jumping up the list of public health priorities, and it deserves increased funding and attention.” A fourth wave is likely to hit in 2020. He wants the country to be ready.

Article source here:The Atlantic

0 notes

inerginc · 7 years

Link

GTM Smart Grid http://ift.tt/2eJlQnQ

Gulf Power’s residential demand response program may be 20+ years old, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t kept up with the times. In fact, last summer it was tapped twice to do something it wasn’t even designed for -- to help the utility’s distribution grid operators avoid blackouts or equipment overloads on a specific feeder.

Here’s how Caroline Stickel, team leader at Gulf Power’s Energy Select program, described it in an interview at the Itron Utility Week conference in Houston this week. Twice last summer, her group got calls from Gulf Power’s distribution operations team, asking for immediate load reduction on a specific circuit, adjacent to another that needed to be taken out of action.

Energy Select doesn’t usually dispatch its customers in this pinpoint fashion -- like most residential demand response, it’s typically used at a systemwide level. But over the years, it has tapped continuing waves of technology to communicate with its customers, from cellular-connected free programmable thermostats and load switches starting in 2000, to customer broadband-linked Wi-Fi thermostats and smartphones starting around 2011.

Meanwhile, Gulf Power, along with its other Southern Company subsidiaries, had rolled out smart meters to its customers, allowing distribution grid operators to link Energy Select customer accounts with specific points on their geographic and grid software models. That came in handy last summer, when it sent out emergency price signals to several hundred customers it knew were served by the problem circuit.

All but a handful of homes responded, between “immediately” and within half an hour, she said. A typical peak price event drives about 2.5 kilowatts of load reduction per customer, or anywhere between half and three-quarters of a megawatt in aggregate. That’s not much compared to what it gets out of its nearly 19,000 customers across the system. But in that moment, it was enough to avoid a blackout for many thousands of customers, as well as the risk of equipment blowing up.

The demand-response-as-grid-asset business case, from Pensacola to Poughkeepsie

Locational demand response is the term for this kind of pinpoint demand-side energy management trick, although lately it’s been going by the name of non-wires alternative (NWA). Beyond the fun of using the name of a seminal gangster rap group in a grid context, the term has caught on largely because it’s what New York is calling its first-of-a-kind projects to defer billions of dollars of infrastructure investments with distributed energy resources.

The link between Gulf Power’s experience and New York’s Reforming the Energy Vision (REV) initiative comes via Comverge. Gulf Power started its 20-plus year partnership on residential demand response with a company called Scientific Atlanta, one of the two corporate divisions (the other from Lucent) that would eventually form Comverge. The company went public in 2007, but agreed to a buyout by private equity firm H.I.G. Capital in 2012 that reflected broader challenges in residential and commercial and industrial (C&I) demand response markets.

H.I.G. then built a deal in 2014 to combine Comverge's C&I operations with Constellation Energy's CPower, itself created out of a former Comverge business line, and leave the residential and small business side exclusively to Converge. The company started to win big contracts, including a large-scale pilot project with New York utility Central Hudson Gas & Electric in 2015, to build a NWA to help avoid some major grid upgrades to maintain grid reliability for a region with about 50,000 customers.

In May, Comverge was acquired by Itron, making its projects part of Itron’s smart meter and grid networking portfolio, and Evan Pittman part of Itron’s Distributed Energy Management business development and strategy team. While an associate director of corporate strategy at Comverge, he worked with Central Hudson for some time on finding the right combination of residential and C&I load to accomplish a demand-side alternative to upgrading a substation, reconductoring a feeder, or making an upgrade to an interconnected transmission line, each an expensive proposition.

The utility isn’t saying just how much these capital improvements might cost -- that’s one of the figures it’s been permitted to keep confidential, he said during a Monday lunch session with reporters at Itron Utility Week. But he did say that, of the 16 megawatts of responsive load targeted for the program, “we’re about halfway there” -- an increase form the 5.9 megawatts of load it reported in April.

On the cost side of the program, Central Hudson’s Peak Perks offers customers an $85 check, plus $50 or so paid out in annual bill benefits, along with free Wi-Fi thermostats (up to two) or a pool pump load switch. That’s a pretty hefty incentive, and has helped it reach greater than 30 percent customer participation rate in its targeted areas within six months, rather than the more typical three years or so. Simple Energy, which runs the utility’s CenHub platform, has also played a part in keeping customers engaged.

But Comverge/Itron is aiming to capture an even greater share of customers, approaching 50 percent, in certain regions, Pittman said. That’s because it’s being asked to squeeze a lot more load per household, business, factory and farm than most demand response programs -- nearly 10 percent of the targeted region’s peak demand, compared to 1 to 2 percent share of peak load contributed by a typical demand response portfolio.

At the same time, “our incentives are perfectly aligned,” he said. Any savings to come from the difference between paying for the program and its still-confidential deferred capital costs will be shared, with 30 percent going to utility shareholders and 70 percent going to customers. That provides an incentive to each side to achieve and exceed their goals. Comverge/Itron’s pay-for-performance contract also puts it on the hook for any shortfalls in load reduction, he added.

Peak pricing, time-of-use rates and localizing demand response

Central Hudson’s demand response program differs from Gulf Power’s, in that the former is designed specifically with locational grid needs in mind, while the latter just happened to be available for the task last summer. But Gulf Power’s experience indicates that today’s technology, properly integrated into utility operations, has the ability to be localized to some extent.

The question then becomes how to incentivize them to do so. In the past, most utilities paid customers in advance for letting them turn their air conditioners off during the hottest days of the year. But Gulf Power from the beginning has used a tiered rate structure, combined with equipment that can respond automatically to its peak price spikes, to enlist customers, said Stickel.

This Residential Service Variable Price (RSVP) rate has four tiers. Two are below retail rate about 85 percent of the time. The third a bit higher, and is called in for much of the remainder of that time. But the fourth, called only for a handful of hours per year, is way up there. Today, it’s at 74 cents, compared to the standard rate of 11.5 cents, she said.

That’s much steeper than any of the time-of-use (TOU) rates being applied in mass-market programs, such as Canada’s Ontario province has implemented, or those being considered by California utilities under mandate to roll them out by 2019. But since it’s an opt-in rate, it self selects for people willing to take the risk in return for an overall lower electricity bill, according to Stickel.

New York’s NWA projects to date have relied on a number of methods, from Central Hudson’s contract with Comverge to Con Edison’s auction for demand-side resources for its Brooklyn-Queens Demand Management project. Steve Hambric, vice president of Itron Distributed Energy Management, noted that his company is also working on a TOU pilot for Central Hudson, as well as a coming partnership with a commonly available smart thermostat vendor.

The one thing that Central Hudson doesn’t have and Gulf Power does is smart meters. Like the rest of New York’s investor-owned utilities, the Fortis subsidiary has just begun to offer customers an Itron smart meter, currently under an opt-in program that comes with a cost of $5 per month. Not surprisingly, there hasn’t been much uptake yet. Itron is also rolling out 12,400 electric meters and 7,300 natural gas meters for New York State Electric and Gas.

Itron is set to own a large share of the state’s unfolding smart meter markets, given that it’s in the midst of acquiring competitor Silver Spring Networks, the smart meter networking vendor of choice for New York City utility Con Edison and sister utility Orange & Rockland’s $1.3 billion, 5.2 million smart meter rollout.

#Micro-grids #GTM Smart Grid

0 notes

philsadelphia · 7 years

Text

The new Phillies, Rhys Hoskins and a double unlike any other

Rhys Hoskins / Photo by: Lauren McLaughlin

Rhys Hoskins stands in with a 3-1 count. Pedro Baez fixes himself and readies what could be a decisive pitch for him, for Hoskins, for the Dodgers, the Phillies and, 200 miles away from Citizens Bank Park, my sanity.

“My heart’s really pumping …” I say with a tinge of surprise while holding my tablet. My wife chuckles.

A strike taken. I exhale. My heart continues to throb.

It’s September 19. The Phillies are in baseball’s basement, currently the second-worst team in the game, and they’re playing a team with 96 wins, the best in baseball. This game, for all intents and purposes, doesn’t matter at all. Sure a loss could help the Phils get closer to the first pick in the 2018 First-Year Player Draft, and sure a win could help the Dodgers get closer to clinching the National League West division, but no, this doesn’t matter. From a distance, there’s no reason for my heart to be pumping any harder than usual. But I’m a Philadelphia sports fan. I’m a Phillies fan. This was totally different.

***

If there’s anything you can say about Phillies fans these days, it’s that we’re patient. And if there’s anything you can say about Philadelphia sports fans, it’s that we’re so patient that it borders on miraculous. We’re told every year that the Eagles are this close to being a real contender; meanwhile, the Patriots continue to wipe up the league from a million miles away, and we watch the Cowboys become instant darlings right down the block. It’s slightly worse than being told every year that the Flyers are a Class-A hockey organization, when – show of hands – how many of you were alive when that organization last won a championship? Then there’s the other half of me, the pure-blooded Sixers fanatic who jumped on the Hinkie train early and never looked back. We’re so close we can … well, look, building a champion in the National Basketball Association does take time. And so we trust.

The Phillies are about as far as the Sixers from winning the ultimate game. Though there’s nothing in sports quite like the Process and everything it birthed, the Phillies are playing a long game that’s nearly as taxing to endure. We watched in 2012 as a veteran team with injury problems limped to .500. We sighed deeply in 2013 as Charlie Manuel walked away from us with his Wawa bag and Delmon Young, Kevin Fransden and John Lannan filled our summer days. In 2014 we saw hope dash with Domonic Brown’s poor play, Cody Asche’s steady nothingness and Sean O’Sullivan’s penchant for giving up all the home runs. We hit rock bottom in 2015, found new life with Pete Mackanin, Andy MacPhail and Matt Klentak, and began putting all our hopes and dreams on names like Maikel, Aaron, Jerad, Jorge, Jake, Nick, J.P. and Vince.

Last year was a slog. It had moments, and sure we unearthed some gems in Cesar Hernandez and Odubel Herrera, but nothing really happened. Maikel faltered. Aaron broke. Jerad was just Jerad. Jorge barely showed. Jake, too. Nick never came. J.P. never came. And Vince never grew. We had to wait another year, but what the heck was another year going to do?

***

It’s September 19. Jorge is on third base, a victim of a far-too-inside fastball. Cesar walked – he does that a lot – so he stands on first. And Odubel is on first because he took an extremely and beautifully long time, drawing out Baez into a four-pitch walk. Odubel clapped and celebrated after the fourth ball. It was peak Odubel. That walk brought home J.P., who hit his first career triple and started this whole thing. All of this was happening, and there at the plate was the unexpected star we weren’t pinning our hopes on two years before: Rhys. Taking walks and clouting balls into the seats, Rhys had taken the city by storm, and here he was, standing in the spotlight in the seventh inning of a 2-2 tie. He had a full count, a pitcher doing everything to ensure each new pitch was the last he would throw, and he was probably the most comfortable person in the ballpark.

“Oh man, come on Rhys, come on.” My wife watches the tablet with me and mutes the television. He fouls off pitch after pitch, wasting Baez’s attempts at finally putting this to bed, but also getting closer and ever closer to striking that ball head on. I’m waiting for something. I know something will happen.

That’s something I haven’t felt in years.

***

Remember Ryan Howard? No, not the guy who limped in the 2011 NLDS. And not the guy who struck out far too much after that heartbreaking moment. I’m talking about the guy who swept us away with every blast he struck. I’m talking about the guy that had us in hysterics because once he connected with a pitch, that ball would sail farther and higher than any ball we could dream of hitting. I’m talking about Game 4 of the 2009 NLDS: “Get me to the plate, boys,” and the certainty of that entire plate appearance. I knew, you knew, he knew and we all knew he’d deliver. For years, Ryan Howard was certainty. For years, Ryan Howard seized our bottle of anticipation – all shaken up by Jimmy Rollins’ singles through the hole, Shane Victorino’s swift slides, Chase Utley’s perfectly placed liners and Jayson Werth’s marathon walks – and in one clout, opened that bottle and created an explosion unlike anything we ever experienced. That’s what brought everyone to the park. That’s what made them king. That’s what we hope to get one day again.

Well, it happened again.

Another 3-2 pitch. I wait for the one just low enough, the one he can drive, maybe out of the park but at least into the outfield. And he gets it, a fastball down in the zone, perfectly placed for his bat head. The ball screams into left-center and bounces to the wall. A game-breaking double. Everyone scores. I pump my fist, jump up and down and scream like it was 2009 all over again. Or 2008. Or 2007 or 2006. We’re close. We’re not there yet, but we’re close, closer than we thought. We need pitching. We need reinforcements. We need to see them develop. But we’re close.

I have to stay patient, and we should, because 2018 shouldn’t be a time for high expectations. Let’s be real, let’s focus, and let’s remember trust. But on September 19, in a game that really didn’t matter, everything seemed to matter for the past, present and future.

I’m getting my heart ready.

from Phillies Nation http://www.philliesnation.com/2017/09/the-new-phillies-rhys-hoskins-and-a-double-unlike-any-other/ from Phil's Blog http://philrobertson023.blogspot.com/2017/09/the-new-phillies-rhys-hoskins-and.html

0 notes