The Bee’s Knees 🐝

In the past few days, I was working feverishly on a blog post in which I explained in excruciating detail, my personal medical epiphany to include a full page list of symptoms, links to medical articles, and photos of knees, for God’s sake.

And then I stopped. What was happening reminded me of the intense looking-inwardness episode I experienced some years back, when I finally, and quite accidentally, located my paternal relatives. It was if I had cracked some other-worldly code, and it was all about me - my feelings, my anger at the secrets, my joy over learning the truth at last.  Okay, a big deal for me, but not something I needed to bore you with. For one thing, finding family is not that unusual today, and we all have our stories. Also, a lot of stuff is just too personal to share, and should remain en famille.

This time, I thought long and hard before going off into That Place where it is All About Me and I enthusiastically but wrongly assume you out there on the net are waiting breathlessly for my next word. What I discovered about my medical condition was earth-shattering - for me - even though it doesn’t change my course of treatment one whit. I realize that for everyone else it is just a lot of hooey. Most people, especially around my age, are facing multiple health issues and other family crises, and have neither the time nor interest to go delving into mine. Too many of those I care about are dealing with illness far worse than I have ever known. So I am going to shut up about myself for now and move onto more important things.

But I am going to indulge myself one little bit and share this old photo. Just because it is unbearably adorable, circa 1930-style:

Down here in sunny Florida we are still counting ballots. Shades of the 2000 election (I recently saw a meme that stated “all the ballots in Florida have finally been counted . . . Al Gore was declared President.”). There are mandatory recounts in place now, and soon-to-be ex-Governor Voldemort is melting down daily. This is theatre, folks - whatever happens, the other side is going to cry foul, so sit back and enjoy it.  The next big election is in 2020, and don’t forget to vote.

Let me just leave you with this thought - if GWB, with the assistance of the Supreme Court and his brother, then-Florida Governor JEB! had somehow not managed to steal the election, what would have been the difference? Most likely, we would not be in the 17th year of a war, started in bad faith and at least in part responsible for the destabilization of the entire Middle East. Maybe California would not be burning so fiercely, nor shoreline waters rising so precipitously.

Who knows? I’m not a prophet, just a blogger with an attitude problem.

A gentle blue wave lapped against a small red-brick wall . . .

Midterm elections are finally, FINALLY over. How the results impact the 2020 election is a work in progress, but as a Purple State voter with No Party affiliation, I wasn’t surprised at the endgame. This time, no one gets to gloat. At least here in Florida, there were just razor-thin differences between the candidates despite intense campaigning, a cautionary tale for both sides.

From the Winners and Losers Department:

Winner: Keeping in mind that how I voted is between me and the ballot box, I am very pleased that Laura Shaffer handily won the election for Circuit Court Judge for Florida’s Ninth Judicial Circuit.  

Big Winner: Chris Wallace of Fox News, for neatly biting off Laura Ingraham’s head and spitting it out onto Sixth Avenue.

Big Loser:  Donald Trump. Assuming the House follows through on the promise of more investigations, the next two years of his presidency are going to suck. And yes, I know Robert Mueller’s self-imposed communications blackout is coming to an end.

Biggest Loser: Nancy Pelosi. I’ll leave the reasons as an exercise to the student.

Biggest Winner: The American Democracy.  This time, you got out and voted in record numbers. Keep up the good work.

Sorta Smiling While Trying to Unskew My Chi

As authorized by the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution, yesterday I headed to the Kissimmee Civic Center and voted.  It was the only thing I could do to try to overcome the feeling of helplessness as I continue to watch my country fracture, and then sink.  Voting is an imperfect solution to an overwhelming problem, but it should never be overlooked or ignored. I am enough of a cynic to believe that “honest politician” is an oxymoron, but still I persist in the voting ritual. It is, after all, the American way.

I haven’t been feeling great lately, as my fibromyalgia continues to bubble.  It’s been an even burn, meaning there haven’t been any acute localized sharp pains, but instead a chronic medium-level pain everywhere. Tai chi has been at least as helpful as Meloxicam, and much kinder to my digestive system, although my hyper mobile knees have been fighting back lately. No matter how carefully I position my lower spine so that I can gently bend my knees, that nasty old Ehlers-Danlos gene insists on snapping them backwards. That, my friends, is bad tai chi. When I can’t get rid of the negative chi that inhabits my physical body, I have headaches, mini-panic attacks, nightmares, breathing problems, and some really stellar muscle pain. Then I have to rely on certain prescription medications, which I am convinced are playing havoc with my endocrine system, instead of relaxing to Chinese music while Playing The Lute, or White Crane Spreads Its Wings.

We have our annual before-tax-season-cruise coming up in just a few weeks. That’s the good news.  The bad news is that the Carnival Sunshine had a bit of a balance problem last week caused by a stabilizer malfunction and precipitously tilted over at an angle not normally reserved for 100,000 gross ton ocean-going vessels. Now I’ve had my share of cruises through near-hurricane conditions, including one terrifying trip trying to steer clear of Super Storm Sandy, and I usually wear Sea-Bands to effectively deal with motion sickness, but I have never seen dinner settings fly off the tables, nor watched most of  the water slosh out of the pool. I certainly have never thought we were having a Titanic-like experience, but that is exactly what occurred to a number of passengers. Fortunately the tip over was short-lived, but there was some minor injury and major cleanup. Apparently everything was back to normal within a few hours. Boy, I wish my personal stabilizer problems could be cleared up by the ever-efficient crew of the Carnival Sunshine.

Romeo and I are not looking forward to Monday’s vet appointment, because as we both know, there will be pain. He’s been unhappy since Friday, when I brought him in to Hunters Creek Animal Hospital to have his teeth and tummy checked, and the subsequent home administration of antibiotics, probiotics, and steroid medication.  He even peed on the bed, which he never does, to register his protest.

Very satisfactory side dish

Field of Greens

Other than cleaning up after our nominally pad-trained bunch, things here are pretty normal. We’ve managed to establish a holding position against The Great Ant Invasion of 2018, the occasional pesky palmetto bug, and a small rodent visitor with very sharp teeth, who fortunately limited his forays into a single cabinet under the kitchen sink, where we keep two large containers of dry pet food. No, he hasn’t managed to break into them but it isn’t for want of trying.  And on that note, I’m heading out to check on my garden. Yesterday I harvested a variety of greens - mustard, collards, kale, and one other I can’t remember - and cooked them with good stuff for a very satisfactory side dish. Today, maybe a baby romaine salad.

Always nice to catch up with you all. Be well, and VOTE 🗳

By the way, those are teen tiny micro mini GREEN BEANS!

Pittsburgh

The worst part of yesterday’s massacre in Pittsburgh was the realization that I wasn’t surprised. Heartsick, yes. Surprised, no.

Because anti-Semitism, like racism is everywhere. It is in the fabric of American culture, the warp to the weft of freedom, democracy, and all those other high-flown words about the greatest nation on
Planet Earth.  Here is the dirty little secret of the United States: at our very foundation, we are little more than conglomeration of dirty little secrets like malignant xenophobia and sexual perversion, glazed over with a thin veneer of civility. The current Occupent of the Oval Office is entirely responsible for shredding that veneer like a Banksy painting, and by doing so, emboldening the scum of American society to act out on their worst, most evil impulses.

There is so much more that I could write but the stress of the grief and anger has triggered a fibro flair so that my brain, along with every muscle in my body, is a mess.  I need clarity to write well, and my thought processes are as clear as mud. Even as I am typing this I am losing words and the ability to string them together to form sentences. My head feels as though it is going to explode. I have to stop now.

Just one more thing - from the bottom of my heart I want to thank all of my non-Jewish friends and relatives who have publicly expressed their outrage at this anti-Semitic attack, along with their love and support.

Well, Fibromyalgia

I don’t yet have a recipe for you because, well fibromyalgia. I did quite a bit of cooking over the weekend, in between watering my raised beds and planting cucumber seeds, but nothing special nor original to post. There’s that copyright thing again. I do have one dish left to prepare, which I am aiming to finish sometime today before limping off to tai chi class.  I was going to try a riff on my Hot German Potato Salad recipe using Italian-type flavors, but I think I’m  going to stick with the original. That recipe I can post here, as it is a family heirloom.

Speaking of recipes, the sock I am currently working on is coming along fine, probably because I am using a 9 inch circular needle instead of the five 7-inch double-pointed needles I worked with on the previous and now finally finished number. If you are a sock knitter you can get this recipe (pattern) for Heart Vine Socks as a free download on Ravelry.

Last week I told you how I was trying to better organize my Knitting UFOs by giving all my attention to two major projects and sticking to them like white on rice. Without patting myself on the back (which I can do rather nicely thanks to Ehlers-Danlos syndrome) I have to admit that the sock progress has been gratifying.  We haven’t spoken of the second Big Project yet, and I feel that now is the time.

No, not shawls.  If you know me well, you know that I love to knit shawls. I own a bunch of them (wore one just this morning) and they are probably my favorite knit to gift.  I think of those shawls I’ve given to friends and family as portable hugs.  Shawls are always appreciated. People seem to understand hand-knit shawls, but don’t always understand hand-knit socks. 

I do have a good number of unfinished shawls, but I am steering clear of them, especially the one in Orlando Magic colors. If I pick up those needles, my socks will languish for another six or twelve years. No, my resolve must be as hard as that rock in that old rock-and-roll. Besides, determination is good for my self-esteem and Lord knows I can always use an extra dose of that.

So instead, I am determined to also finish a different major undertaking which I call “The 90 Square Project.” Terribly original. When it is completed, this afghan/blanket/bedspread will fit a queen-size bed. Right now there are 27 blocked knit squares tucked away in a very big box, and I’ve got the 28th square on the needles, ready to grow. If for no other reason than to give my hands some respite from size 1 sock needles, a size 7 needle project sounds practically dilly dilly.

There’s no set completion date, which takes off any lingering pressure to work fast, because let’s face it, my fast knitting days are over. But in the past I’ve managed to knock off quite a few of these squares for smaller projects. BABIES!

They are probably the most fun a knitter can have, and a great way to learn being much more interesting than say, a scarf.

So that’s where I am hobby-wise, at least until my new coloring markers arrive from Amazon. 

El Cielo Esta Nublado. Muy Nublado.*

Saw this article today, which got me thinking about stuff:
Confrontation in Virginia

When I was in sixth grade, around spring of 1966, along with all of my classmates I had to make a decision whether I wanted to study Spanish or French in junior high school. I thought about this as seriously as I could, taking into consideration my future goal of becoming a nurse. I chose to learn Spanish.

Now I lived in North Woodmere at the time, a part of the Five Towns which sit along the border with the New York City borough of Queens, coincidentally the birthplace of the current President of the United States. My reasoning was thus: I expected to work as a nurse, most likely in the City, at least to start. Many of my future patients would likely be speaking Spanish, so to be most effective as a nurse it would make sense for me to be able to speak Spanish.

I was 13 years old. I spoke English with a Brooklyn accent and I knew the barest smattering of Yiddish. It never occurred to me to resent the fact I would need to learn some Spanish to effectively communicate with some of my patients.

I figured this out when I was just a kid, so can anyone tell me what the f*ck is the matter with this woman? She’s not the first to stage a confrontation because perfect strangers were speaking Spanish in their shared air space.  In fact, it’s become a regular feature in the news, along with white folks calling 911 on black folks for some really stupid reasons.  Why has it become acceptable, in some people’s minds anyway, to openly and aggressively display racism, bigotry, anti-Semitism, and the most malignant form of nationalism?

Hint: It has something to do with that guy born in Queens, NY. That gonif, the self-proclaimed nationalist.

noun: nationalism

1. patriotic feeling, principles, or efforts.

   synonyms:

   patriotism, patriotic sentiment, flag-waving, xenophobia, chauvinism, jingoism "their extreme nationalism was frightening"

   • an extreme form of this, especially marked by a feeling of superiority over other countries.

     plural noun: nationalisms

As it happens, I never did become a nurse, but my fractured Spanish was useful after all. Practicing law in Osceola County, which ranks right behind Miami-Dade as having the greatest number of
Spanish-speaking residents, I was able to communicate sufficiently with my clients, at least to direct them to my office where I always employed a Spanish-speaking paralegal or clerk. Most of them spoke some English anyway, so we managed the case just fine.

My personal belief is that multi-lingualism is a blessing, not something to be scorned or scolded. I was never great at foreign languages, but I always tried.  Traveling in foreign countries I am always pleasantly surprised at the number of people who speak English.  To me that was a great kindness, and made me feel welcome. Let’s face it, I don’t speak Italian (although I can understand a little because of its similarity to Spanish), nor Greek, Creole, or Korean (okay, I can follow the taekwando commands and say good morning and thank you in Korean but that’s it.) I can count to 15 and tell you my dog’s name in French (assuming my dog’s name is Fifi), follow tai chi Chinese, pray in Hebrew, and insult you in Yiddish.

I’m gonna stop here before I get preachy. Anyway, early voting has started here in Florida, so please take the time to vote.

*Translation: The sky is cloudy.  Very cloudy.

A Perfect Day For Bananafish

Part of my morning routine, intermixed with a double dose of caffeine and lavish application of The Best Pain Cream In The World, involves an inquiry of the electronic imp known as Siri:

“Hey Siri, what’s the weather today?” This being Florida, her usual response is a depressing mixture of over 90 degree temperature and over 90 percent humidity. This morning, though, she blew me away with “It’s currently cloudy and 75 degrees in Kissimmee. Expect mostly clear skies starting in the afternoon. Today’s high will be 80 degrees and the low will be 68.” In other words, although late to the party, it is finally autumn here in Central Florida. Monsoon season yesterday, and today I might need a sweater by evening.

(The weather this time of year is a little something we keep secret from the tourists. Since Robert and I spent our honeymoon at a pre-EPCOT Disneyworld exactly 44 years ago, we sort of figured it out, and since even monsoon season in Florida is better than frostbittten toes on the Long Island Railroad we moved here, lock, stock and a barrel of kitties, 27 years ago.)

After hearing the weather report, my very first thought was that it was a perfect day for cucumbers. Yesterday, despite high humidity that left me sweating like an NBA player in the last 2 minutes of the fourth quarter, I managed to make some preparations to the beds for starting cucumbers from seed. This happens to be adjacent to the space that was overtaken by a couple of rogue cucumber plants this past spring. The original space has been filled in by slow-growing and annoyingly fruitless strawberry plants. I’m ready to see if I can recreate last season’s cucumber razzle-dazzle, starting on this perfect day.

You may know that from time-to-time my brain plays silly tricks on me (like interpreting the mechanical whine from a small desk fan as the sound of Joe Garagiola announcing a Yankee’s game) and today was no different. I thought “a perfect day for cucumbers” while my brain took an unlicensed time jump back to the late sixties and brought up “a perfect day for bananafish.”

J.D. Salinger - more than just The Catcher in the Rye.

I’ve been playing catch-up with my cooking this weekend and damn if I don’t hurt like hell. I am going to plant the damn cucumber seeds and I am going to finish my last bit of cooking, if it kills me.  Assuming everything goes right, I’ll have a recipe for you later today, and maybe cucumbers for lunch next month.

Forty-Four Years

It’s called marriage.

Happy Anniversary to my bashert, the love of my life.

Fibromyalgia Friday

It all catches up to me on Friday. This Friday is no different. It took an Act of God, two different prescription medications plus a caffeine tablet, deep breathing of one essential oil, careful application of The World’s Best Pain Cream, sitting-down tai chi, and the gentle ministrations of one deeply concerned cat to get me out of bed without crying.

After such a difficult morning, I now find myself stuck on how I should color the Daleks. That should be the worst of my problems, but it is exacerbated by the fact that I dislike Daleks, almost as much as I dislike Cybermen. Maybe I’ll just ignore the damn Daleks and move on to something else, like my almost-complete cat picture.

(I also dislike most stinky cheeses, beets, beer, tattoos, swordfish, Twitter, racists, Fair Isle knitting, and Rick Scott. I won’t bore you with the rest; we all have our lists.  I think that is part of being human.)

As a whole it was a good week. Last Friday we drove to St. Augustine for a family birthday party. Saturday I had a thoroughly enjoyable tai chi class, and later that evening I watched an episode from the new season of Doctor Who. And so on with the good stuff.  Monday I completed planting my raised beds with tomatoes, peppers, peas and green beans, kale, collard and mustard greens, parsley, and romaine lettuce plus one yellow squash plant (hope springs eternal.). Being able to do the work while standing is miraculous!  My new iPad (courtesy of my Apple insurance policy) arrived in the mail, as did the Otterbox to help protect it from my ever-fumbling hands.  My son arrived safely in Boston, the Orlando Magic won their first regular season game against the Miami Heat, and I spent another lovely Thursday on a Girl’s Day Out with my mother-in-law. I discovered that dill pickle potato chips are a satisfactory substitute for the fried green tomato potato chips, which have disappeared from grocery shelves everywhere.  So mostly very good, and then came a rough Thursday night and a wicked Friday morning.

But this is my attitude: see all that good stuff in the paragraph above?  Well worth a bad day and a couple of bad hours, I think. And compared to some people, I’ve got my health. (I’ve also got vermin problems with ants, a couple of palmetto bugs the size of a teacup Yorkie, and one rotten rodent under the kitchen sink, trying to gnaw his way into a large container of cat kibble. Climate change seriously scares me, even more than the petulant pretender to the throne occupying the Oval Office. I am positively gobsmacked by Kimberly Guilfoyle’s transformation into a Stepford Sycophant.  You know, just stuff. Annoying stuff, that’s all.)

I hope your week has been at least as good as mine.

I’m Knitting As Fast As I Can

First let me apologize for the font fight that overtook Sunday’s post. I tried to fix it several times to no avail. When the Blog makes up her mind that there will be no further editing, she is more stubborn than Siri. Yes, I saw The Matrix.  Damn.

Last week, I was making progress knitting this sock while watching Doctor Who. This week I was still knitting this same exact sock while watching Doctor Who.  I’m pretty sure I used to knit a lot faster. Heck, I could knit a sweater while standing up on a subway platform waiting for the A-train. A baby sweater. And maybe I was crocheting it. I crochet much faster than I knit. But I don’t care for crocheted socks.

To make matters worse, now that I finished the damn sock I can’t find a needle to finish it with.
Somehow I am missing every single metal wool needle I own. We’re talking 3 regular and at least 2 extra long needles. I checked out every project bag on my desk without the slightest luck. No wait, I think I missed the bag with the blue socks; not there, check the denim bag with the unfinished blanket ... Got ‘em.

Being “retired on disability” creates a conundrum of sorts. Certainly I have much more time to enjoy my hobbies, with knitting being at the top of the list. But having this type of disability means my annoyingly weak hands no longer move as quickly as they once did. In fact, there are times I am simply unable to support the weight of the knitted project.  To paraphrase my father, my knitting now has 2 speeds - slow and stop. This really sucks, because a year or two into this banishment/retirement, I decided to limit the number of UFOs (Unfinished Objects) in my closet. I picked two big projects to concentrate on, and I resolved not to buy more yarn, and not to cast on any new projects. I haven’t bought more yarn mostly because I have no more room to stash it, and I haven’t cast on any new projects (with the notable exceptions of three rather cute baby sweaters, but they don’t count because, well, BABIES!)

The leftover multi-project I have been concentrating on, with variable success, is socks. Somehow, awhile back, I kept casting on new socks until the number approached a statistical universe, or at least nine pairs.  Bad idea. Really bad.

So I came up with a new strategy: two of those were not too far along nor worth finishing, so they were put aside to be frogged for future use. The other seven would be worked for each project to finish one whole sock, then go back to the first project and in the same order finish the second sock. I thought it would break up the boredom of working the same pattern twice in a row, and I was right. I now have six lovely unmatched knit socks, and I’m working on the last of the first socks, and then ...

I’m gonna need more room in my sock drawer, and that’s A Good Thing.

In the event I’ve inspired you to learn how to knit and/or learn how to knit socks, I recommend that you head right over to Ravelry, the most amazing yarn-based site in the galaxy ... or at least on the Internet. And it’s FREE.

Know Thyself and Thy Dill Pickle Soup

If you can’t bend your thumb back to touch your wrist, congratulations.  Seriously, it’s a parlor trick not worth having, and worse, it is a symptom of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome.

Same with knees that bend backwards, or being able to touch the floor with both palms on the ground, or bringing your hands to the namaste position behind your back. I can do all that and more. But I can’t wear high heels, or ice skate or shoot a gun. No matter how often or how severely I fall, my amazing elastic ankles never break or sprain. As a kid, I was the number one gym class zero, being unable to climb ropes or hold myself up to work on the rings, and I was hopeless at volleyball. To my mother’s despair I turned out every single pair of shoes long before I actually out grew them.

I could go on but you get that I’m going somewhere with this self-diagnosis: Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a rare disorder of the connective tissue. Besides explaining a number of minor failures that afffected my childhood (because at that age, nobody likes to be different), this epiphany is helping me to know myself and more importantly, to forgive myself for a life full of physical, emotional, and even dental ailments that plague me to this day. I bruise easily and I heal badly. I drop everything. My dental situation borders on tragic.

“The problems resulting from a body built with defective collagen are widespread and variable.  Persons with EDS Hypermobility often exhibit symptoms of dysautonomia, a dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system, which regulates unconscious organ function including heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, respiration and digestion. Chronic pain, sleep disorders and fatigue are common in persons with EDS Hypermobility...Structural abnormalities of the gastrointestinal track are also common, resulting in a variety of conditions including Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Chronic recurrent headaches and eyestrain are also common, as a result of abnormal intracranial pressure and enlargement of the dura, a membrane of fluid surrounding the brain and spinal column. Patients frequently suffer from allergies and sensitivities.” https://www.healthrising.org/blog/2016/07/01/chronic-fatigue-fibromyalgia-ehlers-danlos-syndrome-diagnosis/ 

What about the fibromyalgia? So many symptoms overlap, it seems to me that fibromyalgia itself is most likely a symptom of the EDS, or at the very least, a prominent comorbidity, which explains why I feel I’ve had fibromyalgia for many years prior to the 2012 diagnosis. Back to childhood, in fact. Those weren’t growing pains!

Having had this revelation you may ask how it affects my current course of treatment. Well, I had the opportunity to put that question to my neurologist, endocrinologist, orthopedist, and rheumatologist. All agreed it was a fact worth knowing, but it would not change a thing.  And the source of all this? Genetic, possibly from the paternal side. Predestined, you might say. Maybe that little bit of knowledge would have resulted in kinder treatment during my growing years.  Who knows?

I’m okay with that, really. Because when I resolved the chicken-and-egg issue and realized the EDS was the source of so much, if not all of my health problems, I felt a lot better about myself. I only wish I could tell my mother I wasn’t turning out those shoes because I was too lazy to walk the right way.

And now because you’ve been so patient listening to my endless health problems, here is one of my crazy-ass recipes to try:

Dill Pickle Soup, My Way

This is my recipe, inspired by the recipe created by Cathy Pollak for NoblePig.com. 

1 stick of butter, divided

1 bunch green onions, sliced thin, white and light green parts only (about 3/4 cup)

2 stalks celery, chopped (about 1/2 cup)

3 carrots, chopped (about 1 1/2 cups)

1 small clove garlic, minced

kosher salt, white pepper

2 large Russet potatoes, peeled and cubed (about 1 3/4 pounds)

1 - 49 1/2 oz. can Swanson Natural Chicken Broth

3 large dill pickles, chopped (about 1 generous cup) - purchase a large jar of dill pickles, as you will also be using most of the pickle juice; I use Batampte, found in the refrigerator section.  Also, I like the pickles chopped fine, but you may like them not-so-fine.

1 cup sour cream

1 cup all-purpose flour

1/4 cup water

2 cups dill pickle juice

1 1/2 teaspoons Old Bay seasoning

1/2 teaspoon white pepper

1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper 

In a large pot, melt half of the stick of butter over medium high heat.  Add the green onions, celery, carrots, and garlic clove.  Season with a small amount of salt and white pepper to taste. Lower the heat to medium and sauté the vegetables for 10 to 15 minutes, until the onions are softened.

Add the potatoes, the remaining butter, and the chicken broth.  Bring to a boil and cook until the potatoes are tender, about 20 minutes.  Do not overcook the potatoes. Add the pickles and continue to boil for 10 more minutes.  Reduce the heat to medium. 

Combine the sour cream, flour, and water, and then add 1 cup of the boiling soup liquid, and whisk together until smooth.  Gradually add this to the soup, whisking well after each addition.  Stir in the pickle juice, the Old Bay, white pepper and cayenne, then cook for another 5 minutes.  The pickle juice is pretty salty on it's own, so don't add any more salt until you taste the finished soup.  I like salty foods, and did not need to add any more at the end.

The Gift That Keeps On Giving

On Monday I had absolutely nothing on my schedule, so I set out to do stuff. I organized my calendar and made a lab appointment. (My brand new endocrinologist wants to get to know me better so he has given instructions that involve collecting and testing the majority of my bodily fluids.)  I knit quite a bit while watching the Orlando Magic lose in preseason. One point, just one damn point. I also took my regular afternoon nap, which I really needed because I’d been playing in the dirt for about an hour.

I love naps. Always have, but the fibromyalgia made them a bitter necessity rather than a lovely luxury for weekends and cruise ships. During the last year that I was working, there were times I locked my office door so I could take a quick snooze.  At least twice, I curled up under my desk.  I still need a nap almost every day, but the state of my retirement (as opposed to my former employer, the state of Florida) allows me to stretch out on my own bed, among gentle breezes from room fans and the comfort from proximity with a couple of carefully positioned pets. Anakin has taken over Chelsea’s spot nearest me, except when he decides to emulate the late, great Ira and sit on top of me to make sure I’m still breathing.

I really did play in the dirt quite a lot as a kid - I was sort of a tomboy - but now I call it gardening. I really like to get in there and do the dirty work.  Never mind that I had my nails done on Friday, I rarely wear gardening gloves unless I am handling the bougainvillea or the roses. Or picking cucumbers, now that I think of it. My garden was in need of some serious attention, and for once, the weather was not too awful, if you ignore the rain shower that arrived with little notice.

I wanted to accomplish three specific tasks - to clear the overgrown beds on the west side of the house, to straighten up the strawberry bed, and to start some seeds in my porch rail boxes.  Just 10 minutes into pulling dead tomato plants from the dirt, my back gave a twinge to remind me that people with fibromyalgia don’t generally make the long haul when it comes to stuff like gardening. That’s why you have a terrific handyman, the same one who built the terraced beds for you, my back told me, with a big sigh because we’d had this same conversation numerous times in the past.

So in the end, I got just one of those garden tasks done, and the other two are sitting out there getting beaten up by the fringe storms from Hurricane Michael.

My urban garden, started some months after the end of Life-As-I-Knew-It, has brought me much enjoyment, as well as countless vegetables.  I don’t get the really high yields, but what I do get I use in my cooking. As I was clearing the beds and pulling out dead tomato plants, I noticed that there were 3 kinds of peppers and one Japanese eggplant waiting to be harvested. In October! From an early spring planting! And let’s not forget that perennial herb, rosemary. This is her third season in our herb garden, outliving the rest of that Simon and Garfunkel song.

Simple pleasures. Life is good.

I left a couple of those pepper plants and the two eggplant plants in place, just giving them a much-needed trim.  Will they gift me with more veggies? Stay tuned.

A Post Which Definitively Answers The Question “Which Came First ...”

Most of my regular readers know I have fibromyalgia. While I’d been complaining about muscle aches and pains for years, 2010 was the watershed year, a culmination of encroaching symptoms that would gradually but definitively destroy most of my life as I had known it up to that point. It didn’t help that my former primary care physician was an unprofessional imbecile. By the time I realized I had to augment him, and then replace him, I’d run the gamut of all the ways the state and federal governments screw around with a disability application. In all fairness, the PCP did have help - the psychiatrist I had used on and off for a decent number of years had suddenly taken leave of her senses as well.

Once I had gotten my medical care back on track I was, with the assistance of a social security firm, able to retire on disability (albeit 5 years before I had planned on retiring), collect my pension from the state, and get down to the business of daily life with a dreadful disorder.  Fibromyalgia is a terrible disease that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, if I had one. But it is part of who I am at this stage of my life, and I really do try to make the best it. I can’t hike up the side of a Korean mountain during monsoon season, but I can make it to the cruise terminal at Port Canaveral, so I consider myself pretty lucky.

If you are unfamiliar with fibromyalgia, here’s a quick overview: I am in pain all the time; the only thing that changes is to what degree of pain I am experiencing that particular day. I do NOT take opioids. I experience brain fog far too often to allow me to practice law or hold down any kind of job. You get the idea. My social life is limited by my disabilities, and I spend much more time with my medical providers (PCP, rheumatologist, (new) psychiatrist, mental health therapist, neurologist, orthopedist, endocrinologist, gynecologist, dental specialist, and let’s not forget those early-morning appointments at Quest Labs) than with my friends.

One question that has popped up over the past few years is “when did I get this disorder? What triggered it to explode in my late fifties - was it menopause? Unusual levels of stress at the office? The gastric bypass surgery I’d had in 2003?  I had no answers, although my old nemesis stress seemed the most likely.

And then, a month or two ago, I had an epiphany, brought about by something that popped up on my Pinterest feed, with a picture that left me staring. I haven’t been able find that damn picture since, but it had reminded me of an old photo, and then I knew that the egg had indeed come before the chicken.

Can you see it?

Do you get it?

By the way, can you bend your thumb so that it touches your forearm?

Work on it.  I’m going out to play in the dirt before the storms come.

It’s A Girl!

After this week’s bone-chilling, depression-inducing, government-sanctioned attack on women, at least the BBC got it right. #She’sMyDoctor

This isn’t over. We will have a female U.S. President in my lifetime. We will put a stop to the crushing misogyny that seems to exist deep in the souls of too many people We will be believed and respected. We will become and remain totally individually autonomous in our own minds and bodies.

Today the newly-regenerated Doctor rates a Global Simulcast. That’s a hell of a lot of viewers for the first female in what has been an all-male franchise for over 50 years.  Great start!

Beat those numbers, Donald Trump!

Slow Cooking Madness: Barbecue Sunday Sauce

I decided it was time to clear out my kitchen freezer, which was stuffed to the gills, assuming any kitchen appliance actually has gills. I pulled out deeply frozen Italian sausage, turkey drumsticks, beef chuck ribs, about half a bag of meatballs (I didn’t make them, but they’re not too bad) and a bag of mixed color frozen peppers. From the pantries (I have 3 floor-to-ceiling, plus additional cabinets) I salvaged 2 jars of spaghetti sauce, 1 large bottle of Sweet Baby Ray’s barbecue sauce, garlic cloves, and canned mushrooms.

Before I get to the next step I want to assure you all that I still love to cook, passionately, and although my fibromyalgia has stolen much of the cooking joy from my life, I still manage to have fun while keeping my family well-fed. Sometimes that involves my dumping all the ingredients into my largest crockpot. Nothing that a haute cuisine chef would approve of, but hey, it usually works.

For this, I added the ingredients in the following order into my 8 quart crockpot: frozen peppers, drained bottle of garlic cloves, drained can of sliced mushrooms, Angus beef meatballs (from B.J.’s), whole sausages, turkey legs, and the beef chuck ribs, all the proteins still frozen. Except, there is an extra step you don’t have to take, but this is how I do it: sprinkle the frozen meats (no meatballs!) with granulated garlic and slip them under the broiler just until they pick up a little color and are easy to separate with a pair of tongs. Pour some of the spaghetti sauce and some of the barbecue sauce over each layer in the crock.  Make sure to collect all of the sauce clinging to the sides of the bottles by swishing with a small amount of water. I like to do the same with any meat juices in the bottom of the cooking pan.

Building the layers

So now you’ve got everything in the crock, all the sauces have been poured over the top, and you put on the cover. Cook on the low setting until the beef is tender and the drumsticks are cooked all the way through. Except I did something different because of the late hour. I cooked it on low for 3 hours, 7 to 10 pm, then let it cool a bit and moved the crock to the refrigerator for overnight. Next day I got rid of the excess fat, rotated the position of the meats, and went back to cooking on low for about another 3 hours.   I then moved the meatballs, sausage, and turkey legs to some baking pans while the beef chuck got more time to tenderize.

You can serve it over a huge platter of spaghetti, or go rogue and pass on the pasta. I plan on adding frozen corn fritters to the air fryer. One small step for dinner, one giant step for,clearing out my freezer.

Political Dissonance

So the farce that was the investigation into allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brent Kavanaugh is over and now We The People will wait for the final and meaningless full Senate vote. If I sound bitter, it’s because I am. All that I, a patriotic American, held dear to my heart has been rototilled into the ground by a series of bad Presidential administrations and worse Congresses. This is still the greatest country in the world, but that grand distinction has been slowly unwinding since Clinton’s second term, even possibly since the assassination of JFK in 1963. Let’s face it, Ronald Reagan was no saint, and while Jimmy Carter appears to be a truly good man, he was a dreadful President.  If Gerald Ford hadn’t pardoned Richard Nixon ... who knows, right?

If I wasn’t already on prescription medication for depression and anxiety, I would be a mess. There is a great sense of wrongness that permeates our society. I am relieved to a certain extent that my retirement due to disability has given me a reasonable excuse to withdraw from the broad social milieu. I belong to no political party, because they all make me gag at their hypocrisy. I don’t miss going to court, because after 24 years of unwarranted blame and egregious verbal abuse, I finally admitted to myself that the majority of judges in all jurisdictions and at all levels of government are entitled, egotistical little demigods.

We The People are getting what we deserve. There exists a huge swath of bigoted, racist, anti-Semitic, xenophobic, misogynistic bullies, who are now totally unrestrained by conscience or social convention from expressing and acting upon their worst instincts. The soulless and dishonorable head of state has set a pernicious example and too many Americans have fallen into a joyful lockstep with his nasty ways.

So now it’s over, proof positive that there is no honor among thieves. But what the hell ... we’ve had an accused sexual offender on the Supreme Court since 1991. What’s one more?

And the Angels wept

Life Is An Art

So I went to Home Depot looking for herbs and vegetables, and walked out with nothing. There was no cilantro, no turnip greens, and no decent specimens of flat-leaf parsley. Even the strawberries looked limp.  I have a small strawberry patch on the side of the house, and I wanted to expand it a bit, but no such luck. Winter squash seems to be available, right alongside the summer squash. I know that doesn’t make sense but this is, after all, Central Florida.

When the weather ignores the calendar and continues to creep into the 90’s, gardening has to remain on hold. I  have little control over body temperature, and a few minutes too many weeding vegetables will send me to bed and keep me there for two solid days.

On Thursday my mother-in-law and I had that rare perfect day where both of us felt pretty darn good and were able to make a number of stops before getting lunch. (I could write volumes about how lucky I have been these past 45 years, but let me sum it up in one sentence: I have the Best Mother-in-Law in the world.) One of those stops was at Lowe’s to check out their herbs and garden plants. What they had looked better - tomatoes, peppers, collards, romaine, and flat-leaf parsley - but there was still no cilantro worth buying, no turnip greens, and no strawberries whatsoever. I have some seeds I ordered, so I’ll go ahead and start those, but until I find some decent fruit and vegetables ready to plant, I’ll be spending my time indoors doing stuff.

Which brings me to my knitting. I’m pretty sure there is a small group of people in Russia who follow me here or on Pinterest because of my interest in knitting, especially socks and lace knitting patterns. To them I say “hold tight” for another day or three, I promise to get back to the fascinating topic of the Fish Lips Kiss Heel.

But today I want to tell you about one of my other favorite air conditioned activities, one that I recommend highly for those seeking tranquility while having to spend inordinate amounts of time sitting around the house.

Coloring books.  A favorite from my kindergarten days at P.S. 217 in Brooklyn. I was a little hyper and not well-socialized back then, to the despair of my teacher, but sit me down with a bunch of crayons and some construction paper, and I was entranced.  I always colored inside the lines, by the way. Still take pride in that accomplishment, along with graduating law school.

These days there are coloring books for adults, and I am hooked.  I blame/thank my former supervisor Raquel, who gifted me a cat coloring book and some colored pencils back in the early days of my banishment/retirement from the practice of law. Since then I’ve expanded my collection of supplies, including today’s delivery from Amazon.

I love color, especially as it presents in nature. I find the peace in my soul as I stare open-mouthed at a perfect flower, or a bright red cardinal, or a ladybug. And even though the monarch butterfly caterpillars consumed a great deal of the dill and basil in my garden, I forgave them because observing their rich colors was a fair exchange for the tzaziki sauce and Caprese salads that were never prepared.

So I color, in every medium I can get my hands on. I even have the 96 crayon box from Crayola, because I always wanted it as a kid. The best, most peaceful, tranquility-inducing medium remains the colored pencil, however. Practically hypnotic, endlessly relaxing. I might even add “therapeutic” to that list. The airy repetitive movements are so very soothing. You can start and stop how ever many pictures you want; no one will be grading you on your coloring completion skills or color realism.  This is truly for fun. In today’s world of harsh reality, economic upheaval, and mind-blowing political shenanigans, any fun we can find is precious.