Showing the excellent common sense of her Maine upbringing, Mom joined us after Christmas in fleeing the absurd Indiana frostbite temps for the additional 50 degrees of SoCal in winter. A very nice high is settled in out over the Pacific, driving the jet stream way up to Canada until it plunges down and freezes the bejeesus out of the Midwest. Mom feels reeeal sorry for her friends back home. :)
The dead of winter is ideal for a stroll along the ocean. What better than the Santa Monica pier?
Good thing it’s a Tuesday; even in January, the Pier is packed on the weekends. Only drawback is that the very fine carousel is closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays. But, there were other attractions. Mom is a dead game sport. We had to hold her back.
Since I’m writing this mainly for the folks back in Indy, I have to add a beach shot, complete with sand castle!
You might notice the lack of bodies in the water. The air temp might be 70 degrees, but that water is still freezing. Unlike the East Coast, which is warmed by the clockwise Gulf Stream, our counter-clockwise currents come down the coast from the north. The surfers this time of year wear wet suits.
At home, Mom has a bird feeder and generally keeps half the avian population of Indiana alive. Old habits die hard. Sign? What sign?
Our Lazy Daze Caravan Club was having a monthly gathering at Lake Perris out in the Moreno Valley, southeast of Los Angeles out by Hemet. It’s a reservoir lake, with extensive day and overnight visitor facilities. Mom was game for a bit of camping, so we loaded “Albatross” with the necessities and took off Thursday morning for the 90 mile drive. The spacing at Perris is generous, but every site is sloped, making leveling the rig a bit of a challenge. Solutions range from the Rube Goldberg to the smoothly engineered. That’s us (ahem) on the right.
The weather was picture perfect, mid seventies each day, with snow-capped mountains in the background. Last year, this same Caravan at this spot was drenched with solid rain every day and low temps, so this was a bit of earned karma for the group. We had about 96 rigs show up, so it was a good turnout, and all very laid back.
One of the club members is the local coroner, and he made a last-minute invite for anyone who was interested to tour the morgue and see an autopsy. Say, WHAT? Loni would have killed to do this, but she had signed up to be our group’s distaff member in the intergroup washer-toss tourney, and couldn’t get anyone to take her place. So, yours truly, he of the squeamish stomach and green gills, went instead. Photos were verboten nearly everywhere, but here’s where a deceased is first brought and “checked in” on one of those gurneys.
The facility handles thousands of autopsies a year. An autopsy must be performed on any accidental death, homicide, or unknown circumstances, to determine the cause of death and the manner. The bodies are kept in a large refrigerated room that normally holds up to 125, but can be configured to hold 800 in the event of a catastrophe (like, maybe, the dam breaking at Lake Perris?). There’s a smaller locker that holds dangerous corpses (advanced putrification harbors diseases, infectious COD’s, etc.). This county’s policy is to do a full autopsy whenever one is done. Other places might do only a partial (head only, torso only, etc.). So, we got to see the full Monty – twice! It’s just like on CSI or NCIS. “Y” incisions, cut down to the ribs, peel back the flesh, cut out breast bone from the ribs (ordinary garden loppers are the high-tech tool of choice), and scalpel out the organs. All the major organs are removed for dissection and inspection, then they are placed in a bag and put back in the body cavity. The skull flesh is cut with a scalpel, then peeled in one piece, starting at the back of the head and pulling forward down over the face. Then the skull cap is cut with a large Dremel-tool-like circular saw, taken off, and the brain is removed. The skull later is replaced, and the skin pulled back, and the body can be prepped for open-casket viewing with nary a trace of the autopsy to be seen. There were a dozen of us there, viewing through windows from an observation room adjacent to the main autopsy room. We saw a traffic accident innocent victim (the drunk walked with a sprained ankle) and a relatively young guy who threw a blood clot into his lung. I had my doubts before we went. After all, I generally look away when this kind of stuff is shown on TV, but I was surprised to experience no adverse reaction at all, nor did any of the rest of the participants. It was all so, well, clinical. And fascinating. Afterwards, we were all still smiling, and upright.
So, there you have it, the Adventures of Mom (and us) in LaLa Land.
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