Queen Mediocretia of Suburbia

March 4th

A dad joke from my Dad: “What is the army’s favorite day? March 4th.”

Replace “army” with “militia”, and it still applies. Supposedly the Trump cult will be marching on Washington again, on March 4th, the day of the original inauguration, from back when people had to wait months to travel after the election in early November. 

Domestic terrorism, normalized. What else could we expect? We have Lies, normalized. Tax fraud, normalized. 

I certainly hope the National Guard marches forth and foils the supposed plot to bomb the Capitol on the fourth. 

Masking Flavors

I recently joined in to a Facebook conversation all about how we like our fast food. Do you get pickles on your cheeseburger, wasabi with your sushi, what do you get a pizzeria, etc. 

There was a definite trend to my answers. Cheeseburgers plain. Sushi plain. No extras. No mustard, ever. Because I still believe that mustard is a way to mask the taste of slightly-spoiled meat. Same with wasabi. If my meat or sushi is off I want to know. And why eat a  bite of cheeseburger if all you’re going to taste is pickle? I want it to taste like a cheese and burger, that’s complicated enough.

This rule only applies to condiments and vegetation. Spices are fine. (Well, except for when I doubled down on the cinnamon in my last batch of butter chicken after halving the garam masala and tomatoes. It was ... cinnamon yogurt chicken?)

So I’ll give you spices, especially garlic and onion, it seems like they help kill any growing bacteria. But condiments are right out. Blergh.

Of course, the big exception is coffee. Doctor that up so it doesn’t taste like coffee at all, please. 

What are your views? Do you like catsup with a hint of burger?

Every Year With this Birthday Month Nonsense!

Ah, March is back, the month in which Gary has his birthday, and as it is his birthday month he gets everything he wants with no argument.

I’m already doing everything except feed the raccoons and hit the Start button on the dishwasher. He has started a new thing, where he asks me to get the throw and put it on him. The throw is in arm’s reach. He would have to un-recline the recliner to reach it himself. 

This is going to be an extra strain this birthday month, because he’s experiencing covid fatigue, chronic migraine fatigue, and now a doctor looked at his weight and suggested he might want a sleep study for his sleep apnea fatigue, and my god you’ve never seen anyone so insulted.  I hope he gets over that. I tried to convince him that maybe if he has three things making him fatigued and one can be fixed, he should FIX IT. (I was also mad enough to throw something so I tore off my shirt and threw it at him. Can’t really be taken seriously topless. Didn’t think that out.)

I know I should be glad he’s still here, and I am. It’s just a whole month of slavery is tiresome.

 

Much Better Brains

Oh these brains are so much better than the other set.

But are they perfect? Maybe, or maybe not. What about the same brains in green? Already on order.

Annual insurance Nonsense

Sigh. A recap. I have mentioned this before. (Those are only the two most recent posts; I’d say there’s a yearly post on this topic.)

1. I take very a expensive MS medication. This is redundant. No such thing as a cheap MS medication.
2. I am fortunate that the manufacturer acknowledges it is outrageously expensive, and provides financial assistance for, I suppose, every human who takes their drug. (I wonder if everyone says “financial assistance” through gritted teeth.)  
3. This comes in the form of paying my $4,600 deductible. With a 200 dollar a day pill I meet my deductible on January 23rd.
4. The rest of the year I go to my standard physical, gynecologist, mammogram, and so on. No big wallow in the hospital or anything.
5. Every year each health insurance company I have had tells me they have an issue with how I am getting reimbursed by the financial assistance company.  I play their game. They don’t like me getting a check, I use the assistance company’s credit card. They don’t like the card, I go to electronic deposit.
6. This year they took a new dodge: they paid the full amount, including my part. So, since I didn’t pay the deductible, I can’t be reimbursed for the deductible. And the financial assistance certainly wont dole out cash every time I get antibiotics or get a UTI. Well, bad example, but you know what I mean. I’m still better off than I’d be without insurance, and I doubt I’ll even come close to meeting my deductible, BUT STILL.

When I realized what was going on, I took one trip around the phone circuit: specialty pharmacy transferred me to the insurance who transferred me to the regular pharmacy who transferred me to, yes, the specialty pharmacy. 

I called my assistance coordinator, who said, “Wait until three months from now and see what they do the next time you get your meds.”

I planned to do that, all the while avoiding all doctors just out of spite, but then my brother tracked down the number for the insurance complaint line in my state.

It was the quickest pickup of any phone call, and the shortest. She said:

“Insurance companies started doing that last year. There’s no law against it. Nothing you can do. “

It was disappointing news, but I loved that she actually ANSWERED my QUESTION. 

You win this round, insurance company.

Gary’s Safe

I am generally cranky when Gary wakes me up, which he did right before midnight. He barged into my room, which is my room because I was thrown out of the marital bed for keeping him awake with my “energy,” and said, “Well I’ve got mine.”

”Got your what? Why are you waking me —“

”Vaccine appointment.” He held up his iPad.

That woke me up. I went from muttering into my pillow to sitting on the edge of the bed.

He said, “Oh no, it’s tomorrow. I can’t go tomorrow. That’s too soon.”

”Too SOON?”

“I was going to sleep tomorrow. And I want to wait until it’s warmer and do a drive-through vaccination.”

To summarize what I said in response, it was multiple iterations of, “So you’re going to put the rest of us at risk so that you don’t have to get out of bed?” and that seemed to convince him.

He said it was a 40 minute wait, but people were distanced, and he got the Moderna Vaccine. I feel I plumped up just from the the unwinding of every muscle. I might have gone boo-ii-ing.

Weekly Paint Progress: 2/25

This week the dog went from this:

... to this: 

I wanted to compare it with the earlier dog.

I like the new one better.

I am going back to the guided books. I noticed I do have a book entirely on Flowers. I seem to have painted the section on Peonies. Bunch of peonies in a white pitcher. Did not stick.

The next thing is square, so it will need to be small, as I have no large square canvases.

I am this far:

The Little Things

These things have pleased me lately because I anticipate a bad situation, and then find it has not happened. 

• I open the garage door, expecting a cold dark garage, and find it is a cold illuminated garage, because we always keep the lights on in the garage for this very reason. Somehow even after thirty years I still think the garage will be dark, just like after a year of quarantine I still think every work meeting will be in person.
• I open the dishwasher, expecting a ten minute chore with pots and sorting all the silverware, and Gary has compulsively run the dishwasher with, and this is true, three forks, one spoon, two coffee mugs and a bowl.

I know both of these things are very wasteful for the environment, but the burst of joy I get is worthwhile, and as I have said, we have more than made up for it by 1) never using plastic baby diapers and 2) never washing cloth baby diapers.

German Schmaltz

My brother’s surgical scar from this past summer still has not healed, and interestingly, the wound specialist blames Dave’s fat. It’s fighting to get out and is tearing apart where they stitched up his muscles. 

“Wait,” I said, “your muscles are below the fat. It’s muscles, fat, skin.” I thought back to every raw chicken I’ve met.

”Not with Germans. There was a House episode with about it. Germans have fat, muscle, skin.”

I’ve looked at House transcripts and I can’t find this. Also, we aren’t German. Also, Gary’s drum-tight German belly backs this up. Also, I want to buy a raw German chicken now.

I was so taken in by his theory that I looked things up and we are both right.

So now some of his visceral fat is going to be scooped out, evidently, and a new wound made, but now I’m wondering if he will have some kind of pit and if the extra skin could just be lapped over in a double-breasted fashion to keep all the blood and fat securely inside.

Why don’t I see visceral fat in poultry, though? I suppose it’s all scraped out with the hearts and livers, but then where does it go?

It does explain why I can lose ten pounds and look exactly the same, though. 

Sad Little Brains

Well, I have very poor visual-spatial perception (I think that’s evident from the paintings) and the brain soap I bought is just too small for the mini-skull.

Larger brain soap is on order, though. 

Birds

We’ve had an epic snow here in the Midwest, the kind of snow that makes the raccoons stay in torpor, so the squirrels and birds have been eating food that doesn’t smell of raccoon paws. It’s very popular.

We’ve discovered two interesting things about birds. 

First, even though we keep a heater in the ground-level bird-bath in winter, our birds won’t use it to bathe when it’s below freezing. Instead, they bathe in the snow and sometimes leave lovely little wing patterns. 

Second, they are as cute af when they drink from said heated bird-bath. They:

1. Consider drinking
2. Poke their beaks in the water 
3. Come up with a beakful, tip their heads back and gulp, and this kills me:
4. Smack their lips. Well, beaks. Clack clack clack.
5. Start over again.

Gary’s Dance

I made a mistake this past Thursday. I left the guest room door open when I was in a Zoom meeting, and Gary came home and poked his head in.

I gave him a barely perceptible nod, because I was paying attention to my meeting, and I am a professional.

He began a sinuous dance. He waved his arms like a hula girl. I bit my lower lip hard.

He began flipping his long white hair and I lost it, and I reached to turn off my camera just as my boss asked, “Ellen, are you in some kind of distress?”

And then, everyone had to meet Gary, only, no one really met Gary. They met Retired Gary. All I could think of was how furious Work Gary would have been if I had tried that. 

Wee Addition to the Medical Bathroom

I have made the bathroom into my own 25 year art project. You saw the addition of the epithelial cells chart. 

I thought, I just need one more thing. A speculum.

I did find this festive rainbow speculum ...

... but I checked the dimensions and given the shelf it’s going on, it’s just too big. (But we can say that about all specula, can we not?)

But, if you look at the left side of the shelf below, there is tiny speculum on a stand.

It’s a wee speculum key chain, literally off the chain. 

And look, it even opens if you need to do a Pap smear on, say, a squirrel.

Maybe that’s too big for a squirrel. 

Bring me a lady raccoon, then.

Weekly Paint Progress: 2/18

This week the peonies went from this:

... and then they took a really surprising turn and went to this:

... when they were originally this:

Dark, thick peonies. No more peonies ever. What next? Maybe a giant croquet ball? A cylinder? A box?

The dog went from this:

... to this, and it’s perplexing. So dark.

Okay This Makes Two New Buzzwords

I was in a department meeting when a visiting speaker said, “I mean, that’s what’s you expect. It’s table steaks.”

Then she went on, but I was still hung up in this new phrase. Table steaks? Like ... table wine? Kind of a lower-grade steak you get a restaurant, not a fine steak/wine, but a table steak/wine?

And OF COURSE I had to go into the department group chat and say, “Did she just say table steaks? What does that mean?”

Of course, it’s some poker reference. Table stakes. I suppose it’s the expected ante or something? I don’t know. All I know is that add this to the Oregon Trail references and 1) I don’t know what anyone is saying at work anymore and 2) I have heard it used twice now in two days.

I’m going to quietly post this photo in the chat every time I hear it from now on.