Moderation and the lack thereof

Remember the revelation, several years ago, that a daily glass or two of red wine was good for one's heart? I took that as great news, although at the time I was not a great lover of red wine. Hell, if it was good for me, I'd drink it! My problem arose from my belief that if a little of the stuff was good for me, a lot must be better! And down that road I went, skipping like a drunk munchkin toward Oz. I drank red wine when available, and I drank other alcoholic beverages at [frequent and lengthy] other times. Hence my membership in the club to which no one aspires to belong. I don't drink alcohol anymore.
But still I don't know moderation.
I don't have the moderation gene. I don't know how people eat one slice of pizza, or one cookie, or smoke one cigarette after dinner. If I like something, I want it, I want a lot of it, and I want it until it is no more. 


On Thursday someone gave me two chocolate truffles, brand name Moser Roth. I had never heard of the brand, but I knew they would be good. Each truffle was wrapped in cafe au lait-colored heavy tissue paper with a sophisticatedly discreet quarter-inch-square foil sticker. Packaging has so much to do with one's enjoyment of some things. As a courtesy to my donor, I unwrapped one and popped it into my mouth. It . . . bloomed gradually, spreading over my tongue in cocoa-y flavor and light yet rich texture.

I put aside the second little package to enjoy later, knowing that its life would be measured in minutes. And it was. And it was just as delectable as the first. If I had had two pounds of the things, they would have been gone, and I would have been ill in, oh, say . . . a half hour. 

I have smoked cigarettes off and [mostly] on for the better part of forty years. No one but a complete fool [or an addict] would think that would be anything but a Very Bad Idea. I stopped for ten years. One day, I thought, "It's a beautiful day. I'd love to have a cigarette." And I bought a pack and smoked for four more years. Stopped again for four years, chewed nicotine gum the entire four years. The dental hygienist loved me. All that gum chewing kept my teeth nice and clean. One balmy early summer evening four or five years ago, I decided that smoking a single cigarette would be a nice way to spend a few minutes with Husband on the patio. And I was off again. I liked it, and if one of an evening was . . . nice . . . then two or three would just prolong the pleasure. Thus spake the addict. 

Now I am taking Chantix and it is working. I smoked, and did not enjoy, the last cigarette on the twelfth of August. Chantix, you see, takes away all the pleasure part of smoking and leaves a person with the bad taste, the stink, the awareness of the toxic gases' immediate effects on one's digestive and other systems. Not only did I not want to smoke, but other previously irresistible items lost their gleamy, glistening, glowing attraction. Ice cream, carrot cake with cream cheese frosting, salty things . . . their reedy, wheedling little voices no longer called to me. 

"I want to take this stuff for the rest of my life!" I thought.

See? 

If it's good, I want it all and I want it forever.

The idea is that one takes this medication for a few months while one builds other habits to replace the after-dinner cigarette, the morning-coffee-and-cigarette cigarette, etc. And then one stops taking the medication.

I can only wonder, idly at the moment, what substance will click, like a coin dropping in a vending machine, into the empty space left by the absent Chantix.

The phrase, "Moderation in all things," is common extrapolation of Aristotle's Doctrine of the Mean (as presented in his Nicomachean Ethics). His ethic works around finding the mean, or middle ground, between excess and deficiency. 

It should be noted that Aristotle's ethic is often misundertood by its summary: moderation in all things. It is frequently reasoned by those unfamiliar with context that the common phrase means that a person should approach all things (whether healthy or unhealthy) with moderation; therefore, reasoning that a moderate amount of a bad thing can be indulged is not uncommon to find. This is an inaccurate representation of the perspective summarized in the popular phrase.    ~Blue Letter Bible

Oh.

No thought Thursday

All my life, I have loved kaleidoscopes...

...the magical colors, the infinite patterns that form and change.

So this is a joy to me!

I think if I stared at it long enough, it might send me off into dreamland,

which, it being nearly time to Get Ready For Work,

would be a Bad Idea.

Kaleidoscope

If I lived alone

I would be a bad example for people looking for vital old people. I would be the Crazy Lady On The Country Road.

I think, if I lived alone, I might never get out of my nightgown. As it is, as soon as I'm in the door after work, I'm out of my shoes and clothes and into my jammies.
I would sleep at odd hours, for irregular lengths of time, and eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on rye bread for days on end. And then I would switch my menu to canned artichokes for a while, moving on to chopped spinach with butter and salt.
I would read by the light of the moon, and fall asleep where I sat with my book.
I would wander around outdoors, in my nightgown, with boots and a down jacket and earmuffs, checking for green leaftips poking hopefully out of the barely thawed ground.
I would clean closets at 1:00am and feed the dogs whenever they looked as if they would eat.
I would drink pots of coffee at 3:00am, get myself minimally clothed, and do the food shopping at 5:00am. And then come home and take a nap.

I know all these things because Husband is traveling for a few days.
It's probably a good thing that I have the framework of employment to bind me into some semblance of an ordered human being.

Isaac Mizrahi: "Color is like food for the spirit--plus it's not addictive or fattening."

A couple of weeks ago I was hanging up freshly-washed damp things to dry as wrinklelessly as they might. My hanging place is the top of an antique chest on chest. It's six-and-a-half-feet tall and has a big wide crown molding. It's a perfect place for clotheshangers, with room below for the items of clothing to be surrounded by air currents. One of the things I hung up was a magenta peachskin jacket. 

I keep folded things in the drawers of that chest. I opened a drawer to put away something and saw a scarf that I had forgotten I owned. It coordinated perfectly with the jacket. I draped the scarf over the shoulder of the jacket to remind myself to wear them together during that workweek. 

The workweek that followed included the Tuesday afternoon on which I protected the porch floor from a nasty dent by bouncing a log of firewood off my toe. In the following days, I wasn't much inclined to dress myself colorfully. Accessorizing was beyond the focus of my interest: simply applying body-coverings was adequate. So it wasn't until last Thursday that I got myself done up in those bright colors. Almost ready to come downstairs to leave for work, I saw an orangey-red necklace that was perfect with the scarf. 

Orangey-red with magenta? 

Well, sure, if there's a scarf between the two.

I felt stunning all day.

I am once again, and still, high on the magic of colorful accessories. 

And, have I mentioned (more than ten or twelve times) how much I love eBay?

This weekend I have eBayed my way into these beauties for $.99 apiece.

The only thing I own that I think might go with this is a blue shell. 

But who knows, once I hold it in front of the clothes in the closet, what might occur to me...

I do have a teal green silk shirt...

Oh! This! The jewel tones! The proportions of the thing!

How many ways could I wrap this around my neck . . . 

or fling it over my shoulder?

Mmmm . . . summer white slacks . . . 

any number of colorful tank tops . . . and this!

Tidy and tailored brown slacks/white shirt combo,

with this soft but tidy-and-tailored-looking scarf fluffing and flowing somewhere on my body...

Breathtaking as this one is . . . in its shimmery silvery blue, 

it pried out of me the princely sum of $4.

 

This necklace caught my eye. 

I looked at it closely. 

Looked at it again. 

"Looks like a bunch of baby's  toy blocks strung together," I thought, and passed  it. 

Then I went back and looked at it some more.

I am one of those who are called, politically correctly, "big girls." 

Dressing in classic neutral colors did nothing to make me look smaller. 

In fact, dressing conservatively made me feel as if I were trying to hide. 

And, "One thing there's no getting by–

I've been a wicked girl," said I;

"But if I can't be sorry, why,

  I might as well be glad!"

~from The Penitent by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Now that I am old I shall wear purple. And orange and blue and red and yellow. All together if I choose.

And whenever I catch a glimpse of myself mirrored in a winter-darkened window, 

I shall feel uplifted and rejuvenated.

The toe of the stargazer is often stubbed. ~Russian proverb

I am not a stupid person, but I have always been clumsy. I have always stubbed toes, dropped things, maneuvered only half my body through doorways, smashing the other half into the jambs. I have dropped an industrial-grade mop bucket on my foot, missed stair steps and skidded to the bottom with an unnaturally angled, and therefore badly sprained, ankle, nearly removed the tip of an index finger in a Hobart commercial slicer. On my way back to bed in the middle of one night, in an astonishing feat of precision, I managed to snag an electric cord between my toes, trip, and fall, breaking my ankle. In my youth, a boyfriend and I had a conversation about why all this should be so. I contended that the cause was deeply psychological, that my body image and self-perception were unclear, that I didn't know what size I was on the outside. He said, "I think you just don't pay attention to what you're doing." In the years since that conversation I have had innumerable occasions to recall it, and I believe he was correct: I don't pay attention to what I'm doing.

On Tuesday afternoon I came home from work, left my shoes at the door, prepared the dogs' supper with their pills carefully hidden in tiny dablets of butter on the side, made beds, mopped the floor, emptied the dishwasher, and went to the porch to load firewood into the wagon. I was tired, and feeling a little desperate to finish my chores. I had brought home some ready-made supper, so when I had brought in the firewood, I would allow myself to fill my glass with ice water and relax. 

I hurried. 

I had, perhaps, eight pieces of wood in the wagon when I hauled from the stack the crucial piece of wood that held the whole jigsaw puzzle together. Many . . . many . . . very well-dried, very hard and heavy chunks of wood rumbled out of the woodpile and dived for my feet. It happens often enough to be routine; I would wait until they had stopped moving, and resume my labor. At least one of those logs, however, landed on my foot. On my big toe, in fact. The impact caused me to make noises, some of them intelligible, few of those polite. 

The wood stopped falling. Wounded Angry I recommenced, with renewed vigor, to chuck wood into the wagon. As I reached near my feet to pitch one of the offenders onto the load, I noticed a bright bulb of dense red at the corner of my toe. Hm. Broken skin then, not just the usual contusion. I pulled the wagon through the doorway, removed my knee-high stocking, took a quick look at the injury, wrapped a paper towel around my toe, and limped over to energetically transfer the wagonload of wood into the woodbox. Behind me, the dogs took up their habitual muttering at each other. Their noise shredded my last nerve, causing me to apprise them in stentorian tones of the facts that they were very lucky little dogs, had no problems about which to complain, and they needed to shut. up. now.  Intelligent little canines that they are, they, in fact, did shut. up. which fact may have saved their fuzzy little lives.

I performed the dance routine that enabled me to keep the door open long enough to angle the emptied wagon properly and roll it back to the porch and added some of the freshly-gathered wood to the rekindling fire in the stove. I filled my glass with ice and water, took a long swallow. My toe throbbed and I had begun to shake with fear of what I might find when I unwrapped the paper towel, which was quickly absorbing (should I write an appreciative letter to the people who make Bounty paper towels?) an alarming quantity of blood. 

We do what we have to do: I turned on some good bright lights and unwrapped my toe. 

My toenail was broken. Not across, but diagonal, a third of an inch from the tip toward the cuticle. Horrifying sight, and extremely painful. The log had made a good dent in that poor toe.

That was about the time Husband arrived home and came through the front door to find me breathing heavily, gasping a little, replacing the paper towel as snugly as I could bear. 

"What happened? Are you hurt?"

I explained to him.

"Do you want me to take you to the emergency room?"

Going to the hospital would require that I first walk all the way to the car and then sit in the vehicle without thrashing like a wounded bear for sixteen miles. I didn't think I could do all that. I hunched over the kitchen counter and growled, "Oh, what are they gonna do?" 

I ingested a quantity of over-the-counter pain medication, and perhaps a few of the dog's Tramadol tablets, and settled on the couch with my foot on the coffee table. After a couple of hours my toe stopped paining me enough that I could breathe in regular in/out rhythm. I observed mournfully, "My poor feet."

Husband looked up from his reading. "You do have a lot of trouble with your extremities."

I laughed tremulously. "I have a lot of trouble with my whole body!"

Ascending the stairs to my bed was surprisingly painless, and I slept well for three hours. I got up and swallowed more Tylenol, and perhaps a couple more of Max's Tramadol tablets, and went back to sleep. At 6:45 yesterday morning I got out of bed and considered my options. 

• I could call in sick, but the likelihood was that this particular difficulty would be painful for some time, and I would need a doctor's excuse to be absent from work for the two weeks I anticipated I would need to recover. 
• I could go to the emergency room and call work from there.
• I could go to work and call the doctor's office and see how soon I could get in at the clinic.

I opted for the last: it seemed like the thing a normal person would choose.

Closed shoes of any description would be impossible: I wore sandals out into the 28-degree weather. At work, I moved haltingly up the stairway and into the Morning Job office. Morning Boss, who, upon my return to work two weeks after last summer's mastectomy,  asked me, "Now, what was it you had done, June?" noticed nothing. I overheard her telling someone she would need to be out of the office for a short time. I asked her when she expected to be out and I said I needed to go to the doctor's office at some point during the day. I related the story as amusingly as I could, and called the clinic. My doctor would be in meetings until noon, and was booked up after that. He would call me back. 

Fine.

At 1:00pm, Afternoon Boss observed that I was getting a little raggedy and suggested I stop waiting for the doctor to call and just go to the emergency room. My whole leg had begun to twitch with pain, and medical attention for my toe had moved to the forefront of my mind. I hied myself off to the hospital. My greatest concern was that the exposed nail bed would get infected and I would grow, and forevermore sport, one of those oddly shaped toenails that you sometimes see on Old Women In Clunky Sandals. 

As it happened, however, the doctor was less concerned about infection than he was the "distal undisplaced fracture of the great toe." There's really not much to be done with it, except wait for it to heal, and not go on long hikes while it's doing that. 

In the end, undramatic. 

...except for the eventual shedding of the toenail. It has grown increasingly ugly in color and shape since Tuesday afternoon. I shall avoid clunky sandals until it's back to normal. In the meantime, I circle the firewood carefully, aim for the dead centers of doorways, grip stair handrails tightly. I know from experience that I can handle only one of these minor disasters at a time.

Third time lucky

Today was the reschedule date for the procedure.
The doctor postponed it due to excessive snow and ice. 
...on the roads, I mean.


At least this time I knew it was scrubbed before I drank the fifty-five-gallon drum of whatever-it-is.

Waiting out winter

In October I mentioned that I was morphing into my October self.
I am now fully into my Dead of Winter self.
Coworkers ask me nearly daily, "Are you all right? You look as if you're going to cry." 
Or they say, "You aren't yourself today."
To the first comment, I answer, "This is my January face."
To the second, I inquire, "Who am I?" and they only repeat the original observation.
I could tell them who I am: I am my Waiting Self.
All winter I wait. 

I am just waiting, waiting, for Light to return.

My face apparently reflects that. I would never make a successful poker player.

Nobody says those things to me outside of work because when I am not at work I am asleep. I get home and take care of the dogs. If I'm ambitious, I provide some sustenance for Husband's consumption. Then I take off the makeup, get into my nightclothes and count the minutes until an acceptable hour to retire to . . . ahhh . . . my bed.  My soft, cuddly bed.

This is the first winter that I have given myself over, as much as I have always wanted to, to sleep.
It is working for me. I am not wretched in mood and body, as I recall being in other years.
Before electricity, there was the habit of First Sleep and Second Sleep, and that makes a great deal of sense to me. The sun goes down: this human wants to sleep.

Today Slight Chc Snow Hi 30 °F

Tonight Slight Chc Snow Lo 12 °F

Friday Chance Snow Hi 29 °F

Friday Night Cloudy Lo 11 °F

Saturday Chance Snow Hi 27 °F

Saturday Night Mostly Cloudy Lo 8 °F

Sunday Partly Sunny Hi 20 °F

Sunday Night Partly Cloudy Lo 3 °F

Monday Partly Sunny Hi 21 °F

It isn't warm that I miss so much, although I do love the summer-skipping-out-the-door-in-whatever-I'm wearing-or-not. All the same, isn't it kind and good of Mother Nature not to slam us from August temperatures into these "no higher than 30 . . . ever . . . into the foreseeable future" temperatures?

Never cut a tree down in the wintertime. Never make a negative decision in the low time. Never make your most important decisions when you are in your worst moods. Wait. Be patient. The storm will pass. The spring will come.   ~Robert H. Schuller 

An award

Thank you, Miss Kim!

As the honored recipient of this award, my instructions are to:
Write a post about the award including a link back to the donor;
Share seven things about myself; 
Pass it on to fifteen seven bloggers I've recently discovered.

As regards that last, Elle, who favored Miss Kim with this little award, began a trend of reducing the number of recently discovered bloggers from fifteen to seven. Miss Kim followed that lead, and I'm counting that as a rule revision.  I don't go surfing through the blogging world very often and I generally find people who've found me first. So . . . a couple of these blogs are ones that I went searching for just so I could give them this award. 

1. I is Roxie
2. Hyperbole and a Half
3. Suburban Soliloquy
4. Rusty's Retreat 
5. Sightings at 60
6. Babyboomer Flashback
7. The Discovering Alcoholic

So, now . . . seven revelations about myself.

1. For an old broad, I'm a little bit of a makeup junkie. I don't overuse it, but I do over-buy it. I think it has something to do with the color charts, which, being colorful, seduce me.
2. I think Maxfield Parrish's art is dreamy. Real artists have told me they don't like his work because "it's too commercial." Doesn't matter to me: I can go away somewhere when I look at his colors.
3. I don't drink alcohol anymore. My sobriety date is September 29, 2005.
4. If I were never to hear a shrill poodle bark again, it would be too soon.
5. According to Peter Urs Bender, I am an Amiable, who, under pressure turns into a Driver.
6. I like being up in the middle of the night, and arrange my weekends to accommodate that quirk.
7. This is my hair. It is all you will ever see of me on this blog:

2011

It is a new year now.
It is no longer 2010, and this is my helpful reminder to those of you who might not deal with dates a lot.
Go through your checkbook and put "2011" in the year blank on all the checks.


2011!  ...which, by the way, I wasn't sure I would live to see. I don't mean last spring I wasn't sure. I mean when I was twenty. I couldn't imagine living in a year that didn't begin with 19.
Having read the book, I think that I couldn't imagine living past 1984. 
Long, long ago, probably when I was about twelve, I calculated the year that I would be able to retire and came up with 2013. 
Bizarre. 
Unfathomable.


All that aside.
I've decided to use "2011" instead of "11." Plain old 11 could be November, or the day after he 10th, or the year. It confuses me. In the last century, only between 1932 and 2000 (inclusive) was it safely cogent to abbreviate the year to two digits. Now that I think about it, I don't know why I didn't have that trouble with 2010 (*see below).
I like the way "2011" looks. The first two numerals can be nice and rotund and whimsical, because they have those two nice strong posts behind them to lean against, to keep them in line.
2010: My handwritten zeros never look the same, especially when there's a completely different shape to form in between them. I didn't like writing that all year. *I used "10."
2009: Just a goofy number, isn't it? A pitcher-eared apple-cheeked Alfred E. Newman of a number.

2008: My problem with 2008 was that sometimes I would make a little snowman out of the eight and sometimes I'd write it according to The Palmer Method . . . ∞ standing up instead of  overwhelmed, prostrated by the idea of its own longevity.
2007: I have a problem with 7s as well as 8s. I can't write them the same way twice consecutively. Sometimes they come out all flourishy and serifed . . . and sometimes they're nice straightforward over/down. 7. If the latter made a noise it would be a firm and slightly metallic anh-unh. And sometimes my "anh" wasn't long enough and the 7 looked like a 1.
2006: Too many round parts. I took up too much space with all those circles. On occasion I'd get carried away with all the roundness and my 6's tail wouldn't be quite visible: a problem.
2005: Once again, too many chubby little circles.
2004: Just too much going on with this one. Circles, lines, angles! 
2003: Circles!







2002: Well, now. To my eye 2002 had a nice symmetry. It makes me think of an Ionic column.





2001: A weak sister to 2011. The roundy bubbly shapes were too much for the final digit's strength.  That poor final 1 was trying too hard and not quite standing up for itself.


Alrighty then. 
What to label this post but "quirks."

Night lights

I haven't seen any blog posts about the hoop-de-do eclipse the other night. I was up around 2:30 and the world was bright with moonlight, although clouds covered the sky. I've spoken with a couple of people who saw the world go dark around 4:00. By then I was back in my bed. I had wanted to see that eclipse sky just because the last time it happened the Tudors were in power and I'll never get another chance. Such a historic event and I missed it for want of sleep.


Earlier that day, around 5:30, I noticed a patch of pale light on the bathroom wall.  It took me a second to realize that it was a reflection of moonlight from the mirror on the opposite wall.  It charmed me because that window is small and high up on the wall, and facing nearly north/northeast as it does, it hardly ever gets direct light. There's something about patches of pale light on walls that soothes me.
When I was very young, sometimes I would stay for the random overnight at my grandmother's. Her house was one of gazillions built in a little northeast mill town in the railroad heyday of the late 19th century, the front door opening into the side hall with the stairway (that bottle of pink Air-Wick between the balusters on one of the stairs) and with the rabbit warren of upstairs rooms. No hallways in the days when that house was built, each bedroom led to another. My room, the one designated for overnight grandchildren, was a small room off her bedroom, with a small metal frame bed and a white matelasse coverlet. She would tuck me in at night, we'd say our prayers, and then she would leave me. The excitement of streetlights would keep me awake. After she'd gone back downstairs, I always looked around for a long time, just to see how different the furniture looked, illuminated by the pale secret oblongs of light cast through the windows. Streetlights! Such sophistication to a country kid.
When I grew up and lived in a tiny studio apartment, sometimes I would sit with my lamps off at night, just to look at the room in the wash of yellow-gray light that came through the windows from the street. I could move around and do almost everything I wanted to do in that light, feeling hidden yet protected, private but not alone.  The headlights from the infrequent car crossed the wall and disappeared. Here . . . and gone . . . the travelers oblivious of my observation. 
I got married and we lived in the suburbs where, shortly after our purchase of the house, the town planners in their infinitesimal wisdom changed the zoning across the street and welcomed a twenty-four hour supermarket, with adequate lighting for the parking area. I was assaulted by, pummeled by, Light all the hours of the night. I could not find a dark spot. The charm of light at night was no more. And so we moved to the country.


In the country, there is night light even when the moon is new, even on cloudy nights: I don't know where it comes from. There is no problem navigating while walking outdoors at 2am: brush and stone walls are solid humps of black and the open ways are colorless. One walks carefully, still, since the dips and bumps of the hayfields elude exposure and an ankle can turn quickly; it would be a long cold crawl back to the house. Down the hill toward the village I see the amber glow of the lights around the sheriff's office and the jail. In the other direction, through the bare trees, more orange light, a faint glow from what is called a city, twenty miles away. Amazing that that light could intrude here, across such a distance.


As I grow older, I need (they tell me, correctly) more light by which to read. To live, it seems, I want and and am comfortable with less light. A few years ago a friend who was staying with us came upon me in the pre-dawn while I was setting up the coffeemaker. 
"Why don't you turn on a light so you can see?" she asked. 
"Oh, I'm fine," I said.
"Oh," she said. "You're one of those."


It's a contradiction, since I love daylight. 
Maybe it's just artificial light that I dislike.

21 Names for Your New Baby

In the last ten years, only one couple I know has named their son something a little off the beaten track of first names. They named their first born Holden. Refreshing, to hear something other than Michael, Matthew, Zachary, Jeremy, or Sean.  Apparently, though, Holden is on the upswing in popularity.  
Bad news.

I'm tired of the same old names.
In memory, it seems as if every girl in my elementary school years had one of five names: Karen, Barbara, Debbie, Patricia or Linda. Those seem to have gone mildly out of fashion, but they're old standards.  I challenge you to find any group of fifteen females under the age of twenty-five containing fewer than four Jennifers, three Kaylas, and five Amandas. (It seems, may all the saints be praised, that Heather, at long last, has passed from popularity.)


I'm not so much in favor of completely off-the-wall names, either.
I know a woman who was named after a character on a soap opera.  Spicy name, American as apple pie, or French toast, or bread pudding, but odd. Husband thinks it sounds like a  stripper's stage name. It is my belief that a person ought not to be named after a fictional television character.
I worked with a young man who named his child a made up sound that he and his significant other liked. To me, the name sounded like a conglomeration of the name of a racetrack in Florida, Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald's given name, and a primitive percussion instrument.  I wondered how the child would ever get through school without correcting, a hundred times a day, the pronunciation, never mind the spelling, of her appellation. Or maybe it wouldn't matter to her. Maybe she'd continue her parents' laissez-faire attitude and let people pronounce and spell her name however they could. How would she know to what sound she should respond?


I haven't recently looked at those little "100 Names for Your Baby" books displayed for sale next to the supermarket checkout, and I wonder what they're suggesting now. I daresay that whatever's in those books, we'll be seeing a lot of in the next few years.  
If I were in a position to influence the naming of any infants, I'd suggest a return to some of the really old names. 
Make his or her name mean something! 
Provide the child with something up to which to live!
Make the kid stand out when his teacher calls his name: "Aloysius!"

Have you met recently, for example, any infants with these names?

Norma

Eleanor

Beatrice

Edna

Dorothy

Nellie

Ethel

Dorcas

Cynthia

Bertram

Arthur

Harvey

Walter

Ralph

Gordon

Elmer
Clarence

Henry

Frederick

Stanley

I know you would expect to look into the baby carriage and see a tiny girl with tightly permed hair and plastic-framed glasses, or a baby boy with a comb-over and prominent neck tendons, but you'd get over that, wouldn't you?

“Despair is most often the offspring of ill-preparedness” ~Don Williams, Jr.

Last spring my doctor told me that he had scheduled me for a particular medical screening that we, of a certain age, should have and to which we never look forward with happy anticipation.  You know the one:  It's the one where the doctor sends a television crew in the exit door and travels Where No One Has Gone Before in search of tiny mushrooms that, if found, must be removed.  It's the one where they always say, "Oh, it's nothing. The prep is far worse than the actual procedure."


In my case, others have been there before. Twice. It didn't faze me. A piece of cake. Old hat. 
Unpleasant in the preparation . . . an intense but relatively short process, all things considered, but once everything in there is all nice and clean it's . . . interesting . . . to watch the monitor to see inside of my very own Odessa Catacombs.

So I'd done the prep before; I knew what to do.  I thought.  Until I picked up the prescription from the pharmacy last Tuesday after work. Instead of a small 16-ounce bottle, like the last time I enjoyed this process, the pharmacist handed over a jug the size of my head with a couple of cups of powdery stuff in it. 

All right, I thought. I can do this. It's the same thing. Just more of it. Okay.

I toted my parcel home and opened the envelope that had arrived a week before. I had thought it was simply confirmation of my appointment.  Oh-ho no! The envelope held the instructions for my Prep, the process of which had expanded, in the three years since my last appointment of this nature, from one evening of Lovely Beverage Drink & Drain to a twenty-four hour period during which I had been supposed not to eat. Anything.  

Oops.

I had eaten lunch, and upon arriving home, while I had unfolded and read the instructions, I snacked on the very tiniest piece of leftover baked sweet potato. Including the lovely crispy . . . skin.

"Oh. Well," I thought. "I know how this goes. There is no chance that anything could be left behind après le déluge."

I dissolved the powder in water. A lot of water, to fill that jug. I added the tiny packet of Delicious Lemon Flavor. And at 6pm commenced to drink, every ten minutes, eight ounces of the stuff. Le déluge followed, as expected, and I grew paler and colder as the hours passed. And cleaner!  You know the crude, rude saying, "He thinks his s__t don't stink?" Mine truly didn't.

I finished off the Gigantic Jug of Lovely Beverage, swallowed the three little tablets that would complete the process, and tottered off to bed, where I slept . . . very lightly. 


Wednesday morning, I had a cup of coffee, black, as permitted, black coffee being a "clear liquid." 

I did not bother with makeup: all the products were too heavy for me to lift to face height. My eyes looked like tiny burned holes in the puffs of eyelid: there's a lot of sodium in that Lovely Beverage. I looked a little like the undead with a head cold. But who cared, really? The object of observation would be nowhere near my face. And off we went, Husband as designated driver to get me home in a couple of hours when, presumably, I would be happily out of it to one degree or another.

I checked in at the clinic, wobbled to the elevator and to the nurses' station and limply handed over the yard of sticky labels. I exchanged my clothing for paper slippers and the easy-access cotton gown and delivered myself to the room where the fantastic voyage would take place.  The blood pressure cuff went on, the IV went in, I answered the thousand questions that must be answered. I signed the paper that said, "If I die, I won't blame you." I admitted that I had not avoided food the previous day. 

The nurse lowered her clipboard, looked at me, and said, "You didn't." 

I looked at her.

The doctor arrived, said, "I understand that you didn't follow the instructions exactly."

"Yes, that's right. I didn't. But I'm quite sure I'm prepared."

The doctor disagreed, and suggested postponement of the procedure. "With your history, and blah blah blah..."

I looked at her.

She looked at me kindly, but unyielding.

"Oh, poop," I said.

"Exactly," she returned.

Husband brought me home, delivered food to my gaping mouth and sent me to bed. 

I get to do the whole thing over again in January. At which time I'll open the envelope when it arrives. And follow the instructions.

Well, hell. 

It's a day off work.

Dressing for the weather

This is the season of my dressing wrongly.
Summer is easy: It will be hot and humid. I wear sleeveless or short-sleeved things and keep a pair of shorts handy for throwing on as quickly as I can walk in the door from work and shed my slacks.  Winter's pretty easy too. I wear the same styles, except with longer sleeves, and more of them on any given day. And of course, the down coat is a daily given in real winter weather.


This morning when I was getting dressed, it was coolish, but humid. I put on a tank top and a sleeveless shirt with my slacks. Walked out the door: Perfect. Sometime during the middle of the day the temperature went down and humidity increased. By the time I got home I was thinking of hunting down a jacket before the dogs and I headed out for After Work Wander. The dogs weren't happy with the wind and the "63*F, feels like 59*F" (that's 15*C for the rest of you all over the world) either; it was a short Wander.
And that's just the outdoor weather.


In the morning, Jane's office is stuffy and warm. We could incubate hens' eggs in there without a light bulb. Occasionally she turns on the air conditioning and just as I stop mopping the sweat from my hairline, she begins to shiver like a chihuahua and turns it off again. In the afternoons, I have a little more control over the room temperature, but the a/c units are on the other side of the office, and blow directly onto my coworkers' desks. If the temperature's set for June Comfort, Paul and Aaron begin to lose sensation in their fingertips, so I try to go easy on them. I leave the temperature a little higher than I would like and I turn a fan on myself. Having come from the hotbox that is Jane's office, I usually give myself a stiff neck from the breeze, but the rest of my body's comfortable. I think the solution might be a wool muffler around my neck and my bare arms waving in the breeze. 


When I left the office this afternoon, I left the a/c on because we'll have a meeting there this evening. I'll turn it off as soon as I get back there, and we should all be equally uncomfortable for the duration of the gathering. I'd better get out a jacket so I will be able to bear the dark and rainy 53* that will greet me when I head home again.


I need to move somewhere where the temperature is always 77*, dropping to 63* overnight. All the windows would be open, at least a little bit, all the time, and there would always be just a slight breeze.  And I'd like the sun to stay up until I will it into setting.  That would be perfect.  


Not so very much to ask, is it?

Doo wop

I woke up with Don & Juan's What's Your Name rolling through my brain. 
I love the harmony of doo wop, I love that the artists dressed formally, moved through choreographed poses as they sang. (They didn't make videos of performances in 1962, but I probably saw them on American Bandstand.)
Life was one big prom night.

 

I wonder why that particular song was at the tip of my consciousness upon awaking. 

Ten thoughts upon returning to work after staycation

...in no particular order.


I don't want to go.
It's a perfect day to mow the lawn.
I miss my nap.
Next vacation day is x number of days away.
All these books are due back to the library on Saturday and I haven't read half of them!
From end of next vacation to surgery/recovery is x number of days.
I hate clocks.
I love being home so much: Is this agoraphobia?
How soon would I get tired of eating milk and crackers if I retired?
Who will be here to appreciate all this if I'm at work?