Some Christmas decorating stories

The Texas Department of Insurance had a door-decorating contest for Christmas for many years - decorate your office door, win a ribbon. As you know, being an atheist has never stopped me from enjoying lots of Christmas, and so I participated with vigor. One year, I covered my door with silver foil wrapping paper, then cut out a six-foot tall pine tree from green wrapping paper and pasted it on there - and then made a couple hundred origami stars, in many colors, and pasted them to the tree. It wasn't terribly fancy but it was lots of homemade, and I certainly got good at folding those stars. Made a big one for the top of the tree. Got an honorable mention.

Probably the funniest thing I ever did was rescue the covers of "annual statements" that were being disposed of. Insurance companies send in these huge (11 by 14, or larger, and about 130 pages) financial statements every year. They get kept in hard copy for a couple of years, then microfilmed, and then the hard copy gets destroyed. (This is the 80's and 90's - a lot of companies don't file hard copies any more in the 21st century, just electronic.) The covers are heavy paper stock, in different colors for different kinds of insurance companies - property/casualty companies have yellow covers, life insurance companies have blue covers, and there are peach and tan and green and pink... So, one year, I rescued all the covers, cut them into strips, and made a garland of paper circles, the kind we made out of construction paper as kids. And I strung that garland along the wall over the doors ALL THE WAY AROUND OUR FLOOR OF THE BUILDING. It didn't win any prizes, 'cause it didn't do much for any one door and didn't fit the categories, but I still think it should have won a recycling prize. That sucker had to be a couple hundred yards of garland. Needless to say, if I hadn't already had a solid reputation for being crazy, that garland would have cemented it.

You might think about doing that with some of your junk mail, if it comes in colorful envelopes!

Article of the week

Here's an article from Health Day News:

U.S. Hospital Admissions Rise for Pulmonary Heart Disease

Between 1997 and 2005, U.S. hospital admissions for chronic pulmonary heart disease rose from 301,400 to 456,500, an increase of more than 50 percent, according to the latest News and Numbers from the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

Pulmonary heart disease is a serious, often fatal, lung blood vessel disorder that causes symptoms such as shortness of breath, chest pain, fatigue, dizziness and fainting. Most people with pulmonary heart disease have an underlying heart or lung disorder.

The AHRQ found that:

About 20,000 hospital patients died from chronic pulmonary heart disease in 2005 -- a death rate of 4.4 percent. That's two times higher than the overall death rate for all hospital patients.
Women accounted for 60 percent of hospital stays for pulmonary heart disease.
In 2005, hospitalizations for pulmonary heart disease cost $5.6 billion. Each hospital stay for a patient with pulmonary heart disease cost an average of $12,400, compared to an average of $8,100 for all hospital stays.

I can't tell whether they mean heart failure included in there or not. In any event, it's good to see someone noticing that there are other heart diseases besides the vascular ones that all the attention and money are usually focussed on.