Queen Mediocretia of Suburbia

Key Fob

 

I've used the new car so rarely that I've only been out after dark twice.

I sometimes imagine going to a mall, or the opera, or a party, or any of the nighttime activities my friends are doing. I picture setting off for my car across a dark parking lot and gripping my keyring with the keys spiking through my fingers, in the futile ersatz-weapon fashion, and I realize I can't do that anymore, because the new car has a key fob, not a key. The key fob is all bulky and round. Not good for eye-gouging at all.

I suppose I could gather up four house keys, but I only have two now, not enough for my four finger-slots. I suppose I could put two legitimate weapons on my key ring. Like, say, a cute little  shiv. And then a wee pointy taser, maybe? Or a ring-sized strap, because the first thing that happens is you drop your keys. 

I do have that panic button on the key fob, though. 

These are the thoughts that cross my mind when I have been stuck at home too long. Overly dramatic anxiety pageants.  

Planning Ahead

I may have taken the first step out of Covid vulnerability. I waited a month and the high liver numbers are trending down, so I might be able to stay on the statins that were messing with my liver, and therefore get my cholesterol low enough that I might feel confident in my heart health, to risk the cardiac side effects that come with Evusheld (the closest thing to protection that many immunosuppressed people can get).

Whew. That's five steps, and I've just taken one, and frankly no doctor has told me yet that I can stay on the statins, liver numbers trending down or not. 

And of course, at the end of it all I'll still be old, and therefore still vulnerable, and probably not leaving the house. Still, I'd rather be stopped at the edge of the front porch then hiding back here in bed. 

Mini Cooper Design Flaw

There in a flaw in the Mini Cooper design. When one is plugging in the charging cord, it is impossible to avoid ones reflection.

The window above the plug is reflective, and the blue-black body below is reflective, so you get two unavoidable images. Both reflections were so strikingly awful I had to come back out and take a photo. 

Even worse, in the initial reflection that inspired me to post this, I was smiling AND looking down AND reflected from below. Even without all that, look at that wattle. I could carry a child in that pouch. And this after I've lost weight. I carry all my water weight in my wattle, evidently. I could live a month like a camel on that wattle water weight.

Oh, and then there's the funhouse effect if you look below at the chassis reflection.

(Yes, I sleep in a Barenaked Ladies t-shirt, and yes, I considered putting on a bra, but it would not help my thesis that my reflection in this car looks awful.)

Tooth Says "Hello"

I was in the dentist's chair waiting for the novocaine to kick in, thinking those pre-dentist thoughts.

• A tooth is going to break off as he's working on it.
• He is going to drill through my tooth all the way into my brain.
• The novocaine is going to wear off and I'm going to feel everything.

Then I said to myself, "Ellen, dumbass, you've been going to the dentist for years and none of those things have ever happened."

Well, that was before the novocaine wore off in the middle of the procedure.  

If you are wondering, well, store this away for next time you are in the dentist's chair: when the drug wears off it doesn't hurt for long because you yank your entire body away immediately. 

"Oh!" the dentist said, "Did you tooth say hello? We'll just give you a boost." Like a bump, or a hit: all the druggie slang. But that shot didn't take immediately, so my tooth said "Hello!" again, and we had to wait a while longer.

This time before he started again he said, "Now promise you won't take a swing at me."

I said, "I can't promise you that." 

He was very delicate, tapping my tooth daintily with the drill about seven times before he put any muscle into it. It was over soon afterward, except for the drooling. I didn't get my face back for three hours after.

It will be interesting to see if I'll be more nervous next time or less. 

Clean Teeth

Another visit to the dentist. When I had my root canal I heard the dentist was too booked with two years of neglected cavities that I couldn't schedule a regular cleaning for another six months.

That means I haven't had my teeth cleaned for a few years now. I warned the hygienist it was going to be bad. I've been flossing, but there have been a lot of days I've been taking "hygiene vacations".  

Two cool things happened.

• She said she needed a moment to extract a chunk of tartar that had fallen into the back of my mouth, because she was afraid I "would choke on it." (I demanded to be shown. It was smaller than a split pea. nothing I could choke on, so she was kidding. It was grey enough to make me say, "Gross," but I was laughing at her comment at the time, so it was a happy "Gross!")
• I have cavities in all but five of my teeth, and now one filling has fallen out. I am telling myself that tidying up an empty existing cavity for a new filling will take less drilling than a virgin tooth would require.  

Back on the dentist wagon, then. It does give me a chance to see other people, I guess. My schedule is so empty I'm almost looking forward to getting this cavity filled.

Garden Adventures

I fell so many times in the front yard last year that it's on my neurology chart. Up till yesterday we had over a hundred days without an accident.

I wasn't doing anything athletic, I was sitting low on the rock wall, and I tried to stand up and lost my footing. Totter ... totter ... succumb to gravity ... rear, back, head.

Laugh in case anyone is watching.

Then if course today I used my new extendable telescoping overhead hedge trimmer. Worked great. No accidents. Unless you count slicing through the  extension cord twice. 

I taped the power cord twice, and now the things it powers make an alternating grinding sound.  GRRRRRRgrrrrrGRRRRRRgrrrrr. Iffy. Possible I never noticed the sound before. So, I suppose that counts as an accident. Reset t0 0 DAYS WITHOUT AN ACCIDENT again. 

Post Closing Day

There have been a few loose ends after selling the house of my youth. 

• A few hours before closing I started to get weepy and forced myself to think bad thoughts about the house, and that led to thinking bad thoughts about my youth. I spent some awful teenage years in that house. Cheered me right up.
• Closing day I was around at least seven people not in my bubble, what with signing forms and cashing the check. Of course I started sneezing the next morning. Runny nose, felt like a bad cold. You know, just like Covid.  I took a home test, came out fine. My cold shuddered at that nasal swab and cleared up instantly.
• Two days after that I was driving back from delivering some old manuals to the front porch of the old house and felt an overwhelming sense of freedom. Not my house anymore, not my problem anymore. And frankly, the renters put that house in better shape than when they got  it.
• Some identity theft software I had utterly forgotten about alerted me that someone might be transferring the deed illegally.
• I am still getting postcards offering to buy my house. Still.
• Given that my chest pain started the day after the realtor said the loan went through, I was certain it would go away the day after closing. No such luck.

 

The Garret and the Bees and the Other Women

During my first teaching job, I lived in a big three story house with two other women, much like Mary Tyler Moore's living situation if Rhoda, Phyllis, and Mary were too busy grading papers to speak to each other.

(An aside: Mary Tyler Moore lived behind the big window on the third floor (and Rhoda lived in a turret on the same floor; I just looked that up), yet Mary had a sunken living room. Who puts a sunken living room on the third floor? How does that happen? Is there a dropped ceiling on the second floor below Mary's apartment?)

I lived in the attic, which was described to me as a "garret." I shared the attic with what seemed to be one or two bees.  Imagine a wacky episode in which Phyllis the landlady neglected to scare the bees out of the garret until one morning Mary was driving to work and a bee under her suit coat tried to bite her to death. (This episode would have subplots in which Rhoda got locked into the first floor bathroom, and Phyllis was dating someone from Iran.)

Those six months in that big house in Webster Groves were the only time I ever lived semi-independently, without my parents or Gary. I wish I'd taken time to have more fun. And I wish I'd spoken to those women more instead of grading papers every night. But I might as well wish I were a news producer in Minneapolis with a lot of bouffant hair and a sunken living room. We were who we were at the time. 

Gardening Lesson

I was out in the yard, assembling one of those hardware store decorative garden fences.

The panels sort of resemble this. you are supposed to shove a panel into the ground, then working left to right, position the next panel so the hooks on the left slide into the little cylinders on the right.

It took four attempts. The second to last time, I attached all the hooks and eyes, then lashed it together with zip ties, and then tried to hammer that into the ground, and that didn't work any better than the previous attempts. 

Here is the trick. Plant your garden fence into a new garden. Probably not where you want to plant it. Not clay that has no wiggle room, not a lawn, not an existing bed with roots that throw everything off,  just six inches of virgin topsoil. Works like a dream. 

But, no one needs that advice, because -- as I discovered when I tried to look for a replacement panel -- they don't sell this hellish puzzle any more. (They've moved to a new puzzle that seems easier: there are just rings on both sides and you hammer a stake through the rings.)

It was a long five hours out in the yard, with breaks the three times I got hot and my eyes got blurry, but once I found the secret I got fifteen panels lined up in five minutes. They just aren't where I need them or want them, but like the wallpaper and the stenciling, it was so hard to do it will have to stay forever.

 

Pre-teen Bus

The summer I turned 11 I discovered the bus. There were no transfers involved, I just walked a mile and a half to the main road that wraps around Saint Louis and hopped on the bus marked SOUTH. I gave them some coins and kept quiet and got off the bus when I saw the place I wanted to be. 

No one questioned me. I think it must have been after puberty, which ravaged me for a week, and after that I had 32 C breasts that came with a bus pass, evidently. 

Usually the place I'd go was Northwest Plaza. The window shopping let me fantasize spending adult money, and that was unsatisfying. What satisfied was buying whatever food I could afford.  There was a fast food place there, but I preferred the Magic Pan Crepe restaurant where I could buy soup and pretend I was independent. Then I would get in the bus marked NORTH and get back before my parents got home from work. As if I needed them. I could get soup ten miles away if I had to.

When my parents discovered I had been taking the bus -- I think I just told them casually, hey, I can just take the bus to Grandma's, she lives by Northwest Plaza -- they blinked a few times, looked at my breasts, and agreed. 

At the end of the summer they sent me off in a bus to visit my other Grandma, the one who lived a hundred miles away. on that bus I sat next to a man in gauze pants who said I had pretty skin and asked if he could touch it. Obviously I said no. I am still alive. 

There was a long gap in bus rides, because after that summer I had a new school and new friends with siblings who had cars. I don't think I rode the bus again until I went 30 miles SOUTH on the same bus, this time with a transfer, to buy a sword for my first serious boyfriend. This time mom was shocked, I don't know why, maybe it was the transfer, more probably it was the devotion to the boyfriend. 

Then she sighed and said, "Well, you seem to be fine, I guess I don't have to worry about you." I think she should have stopped worrying after I told her about Gauze Pants Man. 

I suppose there's just a moment in life when you have that magic combination of independence and time and breasts and bladder control to take a bus, but if you lose any one of those it's not an option anymore. I wonder what the senior bus is like. Is it full of independence, like my pre-teen bus? It's coming, I can tell you that.

Package Warning

Last week when I bought the zip-on fitted sheet (which is a bit deep for my mattress but delightful to zip off)  somehow I entered my address one digit off. Jumped through a few hoops, got the sheets.

Then I discovered on the USPS web site that I'd made the same mistake for a surprise sweatshirt I bought Gary, and the next morning Gary got this text message:

"That's odd," I thought, "Why are they sending the message to Gary?" we clicked that link and stopped at the spot where they said the package was three dollars extra, and that's when I pumped the brakes. 

I sent an email to USPS asking if my suspicious were valid and if there was another way I could pay, and almost immediately they called back and said, "That's a con." 

But it was so convincing! I would show you the professional page where that link goes, but I can't, all I get today is this:

Here's the odd thing: I really did have a package with the wrong address, one digit off. The postal customer service man explained my regular postman would have delivered it, but I had a temp today. In fact he was so helpful I began to think he might be a con artist himself, wriggling in to my good graces.

No con thoguh, just a coincidence, not surprising given how many packages Gary and I have been ordering.

Socialization Update

It has been about a week since I made my concerted effort to connect more with humans while isolated.

Text Conversations
It is remarkable how my phone has been battering me with text dings and buzzes. It seems the handyman texts, then the realtor, the property management company, the neighbor, my brother, and then the strangest one was my childhood friend texting "Where did you live in Florissant?" literally fifteen minutes after I closed on the sale of that same house. I texted with Friends 2-4 for the first time in a few months, so that was nice.

In non-text news, I chatted with the lawnmowing service from a distance. 

Communal Sports Events

The Blues hockey team were progressing in the playoffs, and while the city wasn't as demented as they were when the Blues won the Stanley Cup, it was headed that way until they lost. The Cardinals baseball team have been reunited with Albert Pujols, and winning in such blowouts that the spirit of Whitey Herzog was resurrected and they let Yadi the catcher and Pujols both pitch for a while. I wonder if they'll resurrect Pujol's restaraunt in Westport. (Because with a name like Pujols ...)

Steven Page Patreon

I have watched two Q&As and been awed by how confidently people ask questions. Withoutnthat I woukdn't have known he was opening for The Who five nights in Canada.  I mean, The Who. I've even heard of them.

Masterclass 

You might think watching a Masterclass doesn't count as a communal experience, but I got to hear David Sedaris talk about the Tiffany essay in Calypso that impressed me so much. Evidently there are two camps: the people who comdemn him for his treatment of Tiffany, and people with Tiffanies of their own. 

... It was also nice to hear he has trouble with endings too.

Closing Day

Well, today is the day we close on the sale of the house I grew up in. It feels awful to sell a house that's been in my family for almost fifty years. awful, even though it's the best possible conclusion: selling to the renters who have taken very good care of it for ten years. Plus I'm selling in a good market, and when you add ten years of rent on top of what we're getting with an as-is sale, I think even my Dad would approve of my financial decisions. 

It's totally possible they turn it around in to their own rental property and then will sell it for double in a year, and that's fine. I know they've painted every possible surface and might not even wait till closing to change the flooring. If things fall through, as they do at closings, then free flooring for me, I guess. 

But I doubt that will happen. It will be anticlimactic, and hopefully the market will still be down so the money can be converted to off-price stock, and my late Dad will be even more pleased. Funny, this is the first time since he died in '88 that I have imagined my Dad judging me from the beyond. It's probably the biggest investment I've made, and it stemmed from when he assumed a skimpy $27,000 loan in the '70s.

I wonder why I'm so concerned about my imaginary dead dad being pleased. Why am I not just pleased with myself like a normal person? I suppose it's because I feel guilty trading my history for cash. But cash isn't cash, it's security. It'll keep us in our homes when we're old, I hope.

Plus, it's not like I'm auctioning away a family farm that's been our family's homestead for generations.  

So I shouldn't feel guilty, right? But I still do. 

What Worked Before

This phase of the pandemic has been particularly hard for me. First time around, we were all in it together, and we banded together to keep ourselves entertained with online concerts and creativity and the entire globe was going through the same nonsense.

Now the entire globe seems to be going on vacation, while three percent of us are at home with chemo or autoimmune diseases and no community bonding. (And, a special thought for people who have to be immunocompromised because of cancer chemotherapy, fighting for their lives in multiple fronts. Awful.)

Anyway, I thought I should look back at what got me through 2020 and try to find something similar today, something that would give me community and entertainment. I'm searching for good things from the Covid Times that are still around in the Post-After Times, (which may turn into the Before Times Redux if the Northeast keeps getting worse). 

Steven Page is still doing his Saturday from home concerts, but they are sadly on the one day I am stretching my family bubble. Only, now I can watch the replays because I joined his Patreon. And the Patreon gets me access to all the concerts I had to miss, and also QA and sessions where I can lurk and watch my cruise / Facebook / concert friends talk to each other.

So that's one thing. If I'm trying to resurrect more Pandemic coping strategies from before, what else can I do other than baking sourdough?

Another Sad Thing in a Sad Week

This isn't too terribly sad, it's just annoying.

I was rubbing the backs of my ears, trying to analyze why my mask felt so snug, and I realized I AM TOO FAT FOR MY MASK, damnittohell.

The water weight from the Mediterranean diet is puffing up my face and now my KN95 tugs on my ears. Annoying. 

A Brief Hitch

Well, my plan to get some protection against the virus hit a snag. The plan was:

Qualify for a protective dose of Evusheld. I still wouldn't be leaving the house, because of Gary and other vulnerable people, but at least if I caught the Covid on the wind it would be less dire. 

For that, I need my heart to be in good shape.

To that end, I need to get my cholesterol down.

Therefore, statins: hopefully ones that would not affect my liver enzymes too much.

So, this was discouraging.

Those bad liver enzyme numbers were curse-worthy when I saw them on the patient portal. Gary tried to cheer me up by reminding me that even if I didn't have a compromised immune system from the MS drugs, I'd still be compromised by my age, so why even try.

Still, doctors know better, and the doctor's keeping me on the statin for another six weeks to see if the numbers settle down. I guess it's possible that this was just a hiccup. One of those two numbers is always high from the Mayzent. 

I know people who are so young they take no pills. Can you imagine? Here I am taking pills so that I can be rewarded with more pills. 

Rewriting the Novel: The View In-process

Oil paintings look the best to me when I have things roughed in. The real danger zone comes between when the paint is roughed in, with all its potential, and the final finishing highlights are put in.

That's when things go south. And the only place it can go is south, because I haven't screwed it up yet. I think that's when people tell themselves they have no talent and give up, whereas I slog on, damnit, ignoring my lack of talent.  Paintings. Guitars. Books.  

The thing about paintings is you can see how they look immediately, and you can hear your guitar, but you can't tell how a book reads in the moment. So again, you have to let it rest to forget it a little. 

I really hate that part. But here we are, ignoring the book so I can see it with fresh eyes, after which I will be cursed to keep pounding on it. 

In Which I Do Nothing

Someone I know subscribed to Masterclass, and given that I may not be leaving the house for the foreseeable future, I went ahead and paid out for my own subscription. It seems pretty expensive, especially if you feel knowledge is free. But, I got a license that lets Gary use it too. So he might become even more insufferable.

The first class I took was from David Sedaris, and what was the first thing he taught me?

"Leave the house."

Knew that.  I remember back when I would do things JUST to get a blog post. (See Segwaying through Forest Park.)

And now my social activities are dropping one at a time, and I can't really contribute to the ones that are still there. Because I am boring. I have nothing to share. It's odd that life-or-death Covid drama saps any drama from my life story, but there it is. Or isn't. 

But at least there's a path forward. My heart is fine, and if my cholesterol is fine I will plead for the Evusheld -- but even then I've got vulnerable people around, and I still need to watch out. And stay in. 

Someone needs to go take a Segway tour on my behalf. I need to sign up for some on-line live concerts to replace the ones that have moved on. Maybe I could take up those ultra-violent multi-player games and boast about how many teenage boys I made cry. Things need to start moving.

Russian Progress

I am proud to say that if any Russians try to speak with me on the topics of: eating apples, drinking milk, and the locations of the subway, the square, and the horses, I will be able to keep up my side of the conversation. Well, as long as my side of the conversation is presented as words that can be dragged and dropped into the correct order.  

I am still in the first section, and on to genitives, which is a word form we don't even have in the US. 

I admire the pairing of the difficult genitive lesson with the easy animal vocabulary lesson. I am very, very dismayed the first two animals we learned were not moose and squirrel; I think that was a missed opportunity.

Fitted Sheet

There must be some reason this hasn't become the standard for fitted sheets everywhere. These are fitted sheets you put on your mattress, and then when you need to change them, you just zip off the top.

The video is vague, but I picture a fitted sheet installed upside down, so the elastic is visible, only instead of elastic, there's a zipper and a sheet that zips on.  Otherwise, you'd just have a fitted sheet again that would eventually ride up the mattress like underwear, but the sheet eventually snaps up to the top. 

I was all excited by this prospect, only to read the flaw is that the sheets sometimes tear. I assume they tear at the zipper and that there is a weight limit, or perhaps I don't know, an activity / enthusiasm limit. 

I went as far as measuring my mattress. Sadly, my mattress is two inches smaller all around than the twin size sheets sold by the first company I found. I'd already found a twin bolster that was two inches too large for my mattress. A Great Mattress Upsize must have happened in the last thirty years. (Yes, my mattress is thirty years old, but it's been an unused guest bed for twenty.)

So, this may turn into a cascade of ill-advised purchases: new mattress before any zippered fitted sheet, unless the new freakishly flat box-spring substitute doesn't fit the cherry sleigh bed the entire room is built around, and then I don't even want to think about where that goes. Raze the house, I guess. 

Of course, if I made my own I could tailor them to fit my bed, but for that I'd have to get my sewing machine fixed. That might be a better solution.

Wildlife Takeover Update

Well, I need to decide between the two men who came out to deal with with our concerns. My concern is the animal skittering at dusk and dawn, Gary's concerns are the intermittent rain in the bathroom and the attic access.

Both men agreed that:

• There are no animals crawling between the fireplace and the siding, those nails have just popped out because that's what nails do.
• Putting up a screen to keep animals out of the attic would be smart.
• My vents are shameful. Rusty, nasty, evident holes, mold and decay.
• They don't need a mask but I do.

One of them, Mr. A:

• Noticed my gutter has a dent.
• Told me he had Covid last year and "It's like a cold, you can't catch it twice." 
• Looked at the neighbor's houses and told me what was wrong with their roofs and siding, which was delightful.

The other, Mr. B:

• Actually went up on the roof and took photos of the vents. He didn't use the drone he said he had in the truck. 
• Kept his distance and offered to get his mask out of the truck.
• Heard me say there are constant skittering noises; walked immediately to where he felt the squirrels are getting into the house and dancing on the heating vents.
• Asked to see the bathroom vent and thus admired the medical bathroom, which was delightful.

I certainly don't want to make a decision based on one man's evident immunity to colds, and I'm sure they both knew the vents were bad based on the age of the neighborhood. But I did place a shim in Mr. B's animal access hole area, and lo, today the shim was tossed aside.

So Mr. B gets the job. 

 

Number 386 in a Series

Yet another too-hasty Amazon order.

Luckily, it is tasty popcorn, made with the magic MS-defying olive oil.

Wildlife Takeover

I was out in the back yard and noticed our chimney siding no longer lines up at the top. Click the photo below to see how the edging is canted out, and also note that on the left side the nails are almost entirely out: you can see them silhouetted against the sky.

Not unrelated: there has been a party going on overhead. The sounds are skittering, thumping, sliding. No cheeping. Noises are at dawn and dusk. 

Of course, the obvious culprit is raccoons, but certainly I'd hear them vocalizing. They chitter. Chimney swifts make noise, I suppose. Squirrels never shut up. You know what doesn't make noise? Bats. 

Bats would be so cool. Because the repair person would just pull off the siding, shoo away the bats, we'd rehome them into a bat house, happy bats, happy husband. 

That's Best Case, of course Worst Case is pest control racoonicide and fines levied and crying raccoon babies. We find out this week. 

Draft 2 Done

The requisite "shitty first draft" is now an equally shitty second draft! But it's better, because it's twenty percent shorter, so, less shit. Even still, the resolution is somehow more bloated, and needs to be rearranged.

I discovered other issues, and now there are two additional drafts on the list. I suppose it's like cleaning: it has to get dirtier before it gets better. 

The writing style is very pedestrian. Doesn't sparkle at all. That's slated for draft twenty.

I suspect that like Jerry, I might die before this is finished.

Errands

When I was partly laid off, I remember my "free" days were utterly consumed by running errands. It was infuriating to think I had 40% more free time, and I just frittered it buying stamps and going to the hardware store.

I have not run an errand in over two years. It was vital before. I had to go to the post office if I wanted to mail a box; I had to go to the DMV to renew my plates. 

Who knew? Who knew there were all these other options? Put the box on the bathroom scale and buy the postage from usps.gov. Renew my license plates online. The only errand I find that I have to do in person is to get things notarized.

And has eschewing errands made my life move faster or slower? Less busy work, so that's good, but less time spent being busy, and that's bad.

Mr. Science

I had the best of all possible junior high school science teachers. He was literally Mr. Science. From his obituary six years ago:

From 1970 - 1985 he was the Astronomer/Lecturer at the McDonnell Planetarium, and from 1970 - 1980 was known as Mr. Science, acting as the host of the Science Show and appearing several times on the children's show, Corky the Clown, teaching young kids about science. Les was also member of the St. Louis County Auxiliary Police from 1959-1969 and was a Science teacher at the Ferguson-Florissant School District for 40 years.

I thought of him when I had the cardiac stress test (the one that proved my heart is "excellent"). My baseline blood pressure was 104 over 58. I remembered when Mr. Science taught a lesson on blood pressure, he double-checked to confirm that my lab partner was correct to have read my BP as 90 over 60. 

You'd think I would have gone into a science field, given that I had the best science teacher available, but no. I don't even think I could make a battery out of test tubes and copper wire if called on to do so. Seems a waste of an excellent teacher. 

Today I Learned: Gary Edition, #2

I need to make a new category up top there, one for the times Gary explains something to me that I do not already know.

We had one recently about the Great Schism, and just a few days ago he taught me a little biology. 

I was under the impression that cats have sex pretty much any time they are in heat, any month of the year. (I am telling myself that both cats have to be in heat and it is consensual. Do not disabuse me.) I also believed that cat heat happens on a monthly basis, like ovulation.

But NO! Gary found it hilarious that I would think that about cats, and reminded me about the raccoons that spend every spring  having noisy sex in our yard.

"Yeah, but cats aren't like that." I said. Because cats are civilized. And domesticated.  And there are photos of them in hats.

But according to this article, most cats are born in the spring. Like raccoons.

And unlike dogs, who do it whenever. 

Religion, Again

Elvis's gospel catalog popped up on Alexa the other day. It's hard to resolve the two personas of Elvis: gospel-singing Elvis and drug-addled Elvis. I've decided he was all-in on the gospel and only half-hearted about the drugs.  

I was only half-listening, and a song came up on the rotation with the words "and the flurry of God's trumpets," and suddenly every word of "The King is Coming" came back to me from my five years of Southern Baptism. 

I know that during that five year period the radio played "Annie's Song" by John Denver twenty times a day, and I probably heard "The King is Coming" three times in that same five years. It's remarkable to me that I remember one song in detail and the other I falter after "You fill up my senses like a light in a forest?" (And now that I check, it's "a night in a forest.")

I decided to research if music, memory, and religion all take up space in the hippocampus, and that led me to a study that reads "The findings of this study indicate that certain religious factors may influence longitudinal change in hippocampal volume during late life." Religion shrinks your brain, essentially.

But I say, correlation or cause? Also, did the subjects find religion late in life because of their atrophy, or can my early religion come back and bite me in my eighty-year-old ass?

Scary thoughts, and this study suggests the resulting cortisol stress is going to shrink my brain too. 

Bill of Rites

It's  Good Friday, and I am thinking about religion. I'm a hybrid of baby Catholic, teenage Southern Baptist, and adult Agnostic. Here are the three of seven sacraments I have participated in.

Baptism

I was baptized Catholic, grandfather was a convert, there was no debate. They sprinkled me and evidently that got me into heaven. 

In my teens I thought I could use my free will to change religions, so when I became a Southern Baptist they felt the Catholic rite was bogus and instead I needed a full immersion. I argued, given that I had already gone though the rite of walking up to the altar in front of strangers as the Baptists do, and I felt that was enough public attention. No, they said, I had to be put in a robe and immersed in front of strangers and then raised up soaking wet with my robe plastered to my bosom. Baptist Church Wet Robe Contest. 

I think I held out a few months. Eventually it was just too unpleasant watching  my parents' amusement as church elders come to my house, and so I caved. 

Marriage

My Catholic baptism gave me a wink and nod back into the Catholic Church when I married a Catholic. It interested me that the sacrament of marriage doesn't transfer between churches. In fact, if I'd been married at the City Hall and then tried to marry Gary they would have taken points off for sex without their blessing, but they would have let me. However, if I'd first married someone else in the Baptist church I'd have to get that annulled. So what if I'd been immersed, then later wanted to be sprinkled? They wouldn't expect me to be annul my baptism, right? Does that happen? 

Anointing of the Sick

Surprise sacrament! I didn't even know this was a thing until I got MS. However, you too can line up in the church basement and be anointed with holy healing oil. It didn't hurt, and unlike marriage, if I'd had hands laid on me in another church it doesn't need to be un-done. 

Now, of course, I have run out of rites and run out of interest in religion. No doubt I'll pick it up again in my dotage. I could switch to Eastern Orthodox or Mormon and see which credits transfer and which don't.

Carded

In searching for the Genesis of Spunky, I encountered an old post on how it felt to be carded at 44. (I was not gracious.)

It stood out because I was just carded a few days ago. I was carded the only way I could be carded during Covid. I ordered sherry (for cooking) through the grocery application, and the shopper is required to scan the buyer's ID for liquor purchases. (You all may know that. I didn't. )

Carded a few months shy of 60. Could be a record.

Rewriting the Novel: Hitch

I thought this pre-resolution chapter was all set for a second draft, but upon review it was off the rails. Zero tension. Zero conflict. No one grows. You just wait.What I have to do is made my heroine's dark night of the soul even darker. I hate that part. 

So, I hacked it. Well, I kept half, so it got a hemicorporectomy. But, that meant I have to pull about 3,000 words out of the ether again. I'm doing it, but it now the chapter has an alternating structure: it starts with draft two quality, then there's some draft one, draft two, draft one, and so on, and good LORD my first drafts are awful.  

And since it's half miserable and half acceptable all I want to do is improve the acceptable stuff, given the choice. Polishing the turds: more fun than producing the turds. And the turds are the darkest turds. (I have not used that word ever before in this blog, so I am making up for lost time.) 

I'm making myself come up with one sentence a day. On with it, then. 

Apartment Therapy

Now that the renters are buying Mom's house, I won't need to do any renovations there. Regardless, I continue to be transfixed by the before and after section of Apartment Therapy, specifically the kitchen renovations. I know I'll never use the tips and tricks in my own home, because I will be one of those ladies who die at 90 and strangers will gush over my perfectly maintained late 1980's ranch home. 

The big tip that I see on 59% of the kitchen makeovers is painting the cabinets: one color for the upper cabinets and another for the lower.

I Googled to see how long that nonsense would hold up without dings and scratches. All I found was one designer gushing there were no nicks in his kitchen after ... two years. I am not impressed.    

Woodwork? Paint it. Brick fireplace? Paint it. Bathroom tile? Paint it. Ugh.

I'm going to keep following Apartment Therapy for the next twenty years until I read an article that begins "Joe and Jenny were thrilled with their late 20th century ranch house, except for their painted kitchen cabinets. With just some turpentine and elbow grease they were able to strip the cabinets down to the original Honey oak."

Cooking Hack

Mom taught me to peel potatoes and carrots and turnips when I was very young. She was 13 when she lost the full use of her arms, so no peeling for her. She taught me how. 

Before last weekend, this is how I would peel a vegetable:

Pick up the carrot with chubby end in left hand, hold chest high, frantically run the peeler away from sternum, raining peels into sink. Same thing with potatoes, without a preferred end. Turnips were harder, because they are round, but still peel while suspended below ones breast bone.

Something came over me last weekend. Fatigue? Possibly. I decided to change it up.

I put the cutting board across the sink. I positioned the carrot on the board with the bulky end away from me. With my left hand I pinned down the end and with my right I dragged the peeler toward me. I rotated the carrot as I went.

That went so well I did the same with the potato: I propped it up on a cut end and pivoted it like a top, peeling down to the cutting board.  I did much the same with the turnip, but I peeled from bottom to top, like I was giving it a little turnip shave.

Way, way easier. Also cleaner: there were no carrot shavings behind the blender this time. I wonder if other people peel mid-air like mom taught me. I can't have been the only one.

Basket

I used my Intro to Baskets kit and I did indeed make a wee Navel-Orange sized basket.


Lots of flaws, but it IS a basket. It was pretty soothing, as one would expect from the stereotypical mental hospital hobby.

Rewriting the Novel: Fun

I've probably said it before, but the second draft is SO much more fun than the first draft. You are God and you can put everything right in Creation. And Creation is made up of hundreds of puzzle pieces, and if a piece doesn't fit you GO BACK and change things so it fits. 

I still don't know why I don't go back to bad oil painting and recreate them too, but I don't. If I did anyway, it wouldn't be fun. It would be unraveling and re-knitting a sweater. 

Like recently, I had two pages in which I have the heroine explains her complicated fix to a physical problem, and the explanation comes as she's drawing someone a diagram. Slooooow. Difficult. Killed the flow. And short of drawing the diagram on the actual page, I couldn't see how to fix it, until I realized I was in her head, I could just have her figure it out in one paragraph and scribble it out in far less detail in the next. Two paragraphs, not two pages. 

Fixing that was so fun. So much more fun than re-painting. It's the re-assembly: you don't get that in painting. You can take what you have and re-use it, only better. And maybe it's because you can use the mistakes for good, maybe that's why I like it.

6,000 more words and Draft 2 is done.

Diet Update

One nice thing about this heart hiccup is that I took a break from the Keto diet and put my body into Mediterranean diet gear instead.

Fruit! Not just blackberries! And bread if it's packed with 27 grains and seeds, minimum. And a new surprise friend, Impossible plant-based burgers, as long as they are sprinkled with taco seasoning or something else to tamp down that slightly sweet taste. 

It seems that the trick to feeling good during both diets is to avoid anything made with sugar. One dose of sugar and I wake up feeling foul the next day. Just contaminated. 

The trick will be to pick one of the other. I can see myself picking the worst parts of both. 

Rewriting the Novel: Write What You Know

The novel now has three scenes involving raccoons. Raccoons fearing noise, raccoons avoiding noisy places until those places go quiet, and one scene just has the threat of raccoons.

I should branch out into other wildlife to symbolize "nature" but I can picture raccoons best.

Compare and Contrast

There are ads on the news channels touting online home sales - you register and for 2% of the sale you can sell your house, like, in a day.

I have also been hearing older people tell me how one generation back buyers just knocked on your door, assumed your loan, signed some papers at the bank, boom, they owned your house.

I was unfortunately born in the time between past and future, and here in the here and now selling a home is miserable. I have 22 pages of contracts to initial and sign. 

I unearthed all of Mom's files regarding the house, and you know how long her contract was? One page.

More misery on top: selling the house severs one of my last ties to Mom. I'm sad, thumbing through her files and seeing the garden map she drew, along with all the warranties I need to get to the buyers. And all the checks and receipts, none of which are interesting only that they are in her handwriting. 

It makes me want to buy a cheap house and flip it so I can see what this is like without all the emotional baggage.

Gary and Queen Christina

Gary will often start a conversation with me by explaining some fact. This goes one of three ways.

• I know the fact, and I wait patiently while Gary Garysplains something I already know, and he shouts "LET me FINISH" if I interrupt. 
• I don't know the fact, because Gary has just pulled it out of his ass and then doubles down on it if questioned.
• I don't know the fact because Gary has struck gold with something I don't know.

 The last one is rare. 

So, we were watching The Girl King, which was an updated historical account of the same Queen of Sweden that Greta Garbo played. 

So, [SPOILERS] the Pope takes an interest in The Queen, and Gary said, "I wonder if that was back when there were two popes."

I said, "Huh" and he then paused the movie and spent twenty minutes telling me about the Western Schism and the pope in Rome and the Anti-pope in France and the bonus pope in Pisa.

It was far more interesting than the movie at that point, which was surprising, given that she is one of three women buried in the Vatican. And my compliments to Gary, who explained things very well.

Bathroom Addition

I felt the medical bathroom needed a pop of color, so I got an eyeball the same color as Gary's eyes.

It was hard to find a good spot for it until I noticed the obvious.

I told Gary that now I had to buy another one, but he offered up his eyepatch.

I like it. It makes a statement.