It’s the 5th of November, so naturally we are watching V for Vendetta tonight. It’s the greatest freedom movie of all tme.

Since I have three teenage sons, I’ve found over the years that we can keep track of work gloves better if they all get thrown into the same drawer in the garage after work projects. But I’ve noticed that left-handed gloves in the drawer have always outnumbered right-handed ones, and I’ve often wondered why.

Today, while tending my first wood stove fire of the season, I burned the tip of the middle finger on my right hand while opening the wood stove door because there was a hole in the glove I used to operate the stove’s door handle. I threw the glove away, went to the garage drawer to get another, and found only six gloves there, all left-handed. It suddenly occurred to me where all the right-handed gloves had gone.

My brother, Hugh, is visiting from Maryland. He’s on the right. That’s John Silveira on the left. Lenie and I are in the background. Hugh and I play golf every day when he visits. Since he’s as bad as I am, I at last have a chance to beat someone.

Been thinking a lot about the H1N1 virus lately, doing research on whether or not my kids should get the vaccine when it becomes available in two weeks. Annie just announced she’s pregnant, which puts her in the highest risk category for swine flu so I’m particularly interested in whether or not she should get it. The CDC says of the 700 pregnant women who have confirmed H1N1, 27 have died. That’s a very frightening statistic.

Coincidentally I’m rereading Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. He says European diseases killed 95% of native peoples in the Americas within about a hundred years of Columbus’s arrival. The Indians had no resistance to Eurasian diseases like smallpox, flu, cholera, measles, and a host of others, so they died in droves. H1N1 is fairly mild now but it has the potential to mutate and become more deadly, and modern humans, just like the Indians back in 1492, have no defense.

I’ve asked Silveira to help me with the research. I’ll let you know what I decide.

Had a pain in the center of my chest and a fairly severe headache on the right side this evening. It was nearly identical to the pain I felt nearly four years ago, when my body first told me I had heart disease requiring triple-bypass heart surgery, which I had six weeks later. It’s probably nothing to worry about. But I’ll call my doctor tomorrow and get a few tests, just in case I’m being given the chance once again to make a preemptive strike against death.

Funny how we perceive things as we grow older. I’m 65, in good shape except for my heart disease, and I’ve got a good outlook on life with a lot of work left to do. A pain in the center of my chest, for me, is just a reality check. I’ve already had a good life, founded BHM, and have a great family. I’m on “extra” time.”

That’s compared to many measures: My father’s lifetime was 57 years; he was born in 1907. The average life expectancy of people born in the U.S. 100 years ago was about  50 years. (It’s 76 to 81, depending on gender, today.) In 1900, the world life expectancy was only about 30 years (today, it’s about 64). During the Roman Empire, Romans had an approximate life expectancy of 22 to 25 years. So I feel fortunate to have lived in the modern era. I’ve already lived three times longer than the Romans.

The wind here is expected to die down (what a pun!) Wednesday, so Silveira and I will go out on the Pacific Ocean and try to catch a ling cod, or at least a big black rock fish.