Stir Crazy

It's been chilly, but sunny and bright, this weekend. George the cat didn't even want to come right back in the house this morning, he opted to sit on the front porch in the sun for a while. It's beautiful outside.

Inside is a different story.

I'm still on crutches and it's starting to get to me. I'm disgusted with Bob. I've had it with the cats. I drink too much coffee, and then I really get cranky. I'd be a bitch on wheels, except I don't have wheels at home (the wheelchair stays at work) I only have these blighted crutches. I'm a bitch on sticks.

Woe is NOT me, except in my own mind. It's sunny and I think I NEED to be outside working in the dirt. Isn't it silly? When I find dirt in the house, it gripes me. But I love the dirt outside. Maybe I should just start planting seeds in the house. If dirt that grows things is good dirt, I'll at least have a different attitude about it.

One thing is working well. The old glasses I'm using until the new ones arrive give me a hazy view of the world. So I don't see weeds sprouting. I know they're out there because the farmers have already used RoundUp and the fencelines are yellowed. I hope that by the time I can get outside and work again I don't have to use the electric chainsaw to deal with the weeds.

Another good thing is that the wood from the trees that were taken down is now being split and stacked everywhere. Weeds won't grow where the wood is stacked, and it will give the lizards a place to play when it gets warm enough.

In the meantime, I'll just go back to reading. I'm currently re-reading Blood Sugar 101.

To the right of this column, down a ways, is a list of blogs I follow. If you're diabetic, and I know several of you are, be sure to check out the Diabetes Update. Jenny Ruhl has the best information I've found anywhere. Her book is a compilation of things that are on the Blood Sugar 101 web site that you can access through her blog. It was Jenny's information and Dr. Bernstein's Diabetes Solution that started me on the road to success with my diabetes a couple of years ago. Yes, my diabetes is well under control, with no medication. I'm a member of the 5 Club. But I still have these stupid problems with my feet. I'd kick something, but that would probably mean another 4 months on crutches.

If you're diabetic and are having problems keeping your blood sugar under control, or don't really like all those pills you're being given, read Jenny's information. She's not selling anything, not even her book. 

It's 11 a.m. Time to switch from coffee to tea. Time to have an attitudectomy. Or is that an attitudotomy? No matter, paste the smile on the face and hope it works from the outside in.

Smiley face to everyone this a.m. (barf)

Diabetes 101

To the right of this column, down a ways, is a list of blogs I follow. If you're diabetic, be sure to check out the Diabetes Update. Jenny has the best information I've found anywhere. Check out the Diabetes 101 site that is linked to hers.

I have this on my mind today because yesterday I got my copy of Jenny's book, which is a compilation of things that are on the web site, and was reminded that this information is what started me on the road to success a couple of years ago.

If you're diabetic and are having problems keeping your blood sugar under control, or don't really like all those pills you're being given, read Jenny's information. She's not selling anything, not even her book.

Good luck on your way to joining the 5 Club.

Scrounging for Glasses

For at least 20 years I wore the same prescription in my glasses. I'm nearsighted. One eye was as bad as it could get and still benefit from correction, the other was marginally better. I'd only get new glasses because the lenses were scratched or the frames broke.

For the past 4 years my eyes have changed dramatically. Every year I have to get them tested and get a new prescription because they keep improving. You'd think that was a good thing, but it still requires shelling out money for new glasses. AND it means that none of the 20 or so pairs of old glasses I've kept will quite suffice.

Like right now. I had to leave the frames for both my driving glasses and my computer glasses at the optometrist's to have new lenses put in them. I've found an old pair I can use for driving. They are actually a pair I used to use for computer glasses, that prescription is strong enough now for distance.

But I haven't been able to find an old set that I can use for work. Eeek! I won't get the new ones for 2 weeks! I guess I can do what I'm doing right this minute, peering at the screen with a naked face, my nose 10 inches from it. It's like sitting in the front row at the movies.

Holy Fajita!

Have you ever seen a red bell pepper this big? There were 2 at the market and I had to have one, along with the regular-sized ones. The produce manager says they were grown in a hothouse. Even so, that's a huge pepper.

Out in my own yard, there are no vegetables sprouting. Of course, I don't plant any because we're surrounded by acres and acres of vegetables grown by people who know what they're doing. Last week the ground had dried sufficiently that all the tractors were busy for a few days planting the first of the spring crops. It shouldn't be long before the asparagus pops up. Yum!

There are a few flowers starting to bloom. The miniature daffodils and the primroses are bright faces I get to see on my way to work in the morning.

My Pink Perfection camellia, which has been only 3 feet tall for 20 years, is covered with delicate blossoms.

In the house, the little Texas Mountain Laurel has this sunny window all to itself and is starting to grow more leaves.

I'll transplant it when I'm sure we won't have more frost. Also, I'm going to figure out how to protect it from slugs and cottontails and all the other critters around here who have never tasted one of these plants. Maybe a short fence made out of screen?

I only spent 3 minutes in the yard to take the flower photos. I have a foot appointment tomorrow and didn't want to show up with yard detritus stuck to the velcro of the monster boot, when I was supposed to be inside and off the foot all week. (Which I was.)

I did get a field trip today, though. Bob and I went to Costco. I took the wheelchair. I may never go back to Costco without one. Usually I wear my prescription shoes and thick socks and still worry that all that walking will cause a blister on the Cinderella foot. I don't go down aisles unless I know I need something there, so I won't put any more miles on the foot than I have to. I am slower than slow. If Bob's with me, he gets tired of pushing the cart and waiting for me to catch up.

But today I had my hot red wheelchair and my professional Atlas nitrile gloves. I flew up and down every aisle in the place. Bob had to keep moving to catch up. By the time we got to checkout, I still had enough energy to argue with him about the self-serve lane. I HATE it. He thinks I'm just old-fashioned. Well yes, I am, but checking yourself out sucks. After he had to rescan 3 bulky items because they didn't scan properly the first time, and follow the machine's instructions (what did they do, interview people until they found the snottiest voice to record?) he was getting bored with it. Finally a real person had to come along anyway and straighten things out. She smiled at me and told me to have a good day, because people think they get points for being nice to a person in a wheelchair. She sneered at Bob, though. I mean, someone his age who can't figure out the system? Disgraceful!

When you get to the door, they check what's in your cart against the receipt. We discovered that you get a different colored receipt when you use self-serve, and they check your cart more carefully. The checker found an item in the cart that wasn't on the receipt. He called for another lady, who took Bob back through the checkout line. Bob snarled. The guy at the door said, "Hey, don't worry, this happens all the time!"

So why do they have the crummy self-serve system? Can't they find some really incompetent people who could do the job as poorly?

I prefer the wonderful humans who wait on me in the regular lanes. Some of them have been there for years, they are friendly and efficient and deserve to keep their jobs. I filled out yet another complaint form to say so and deposited it in the box on my way out.

Oh, and I beat Bob back to the car.

Out Having Fun

I haven't been posting because I'm out doing things. Spent my day off at Kaiser in a wheelchair. I used my Atlas nitrile gardening gloves like the pro wheelchair racers use their leather racing gloves. I was up and around all 3 stories of the building pounding on doors and going to appointments.

Between foot doctor appointments I went looking for an endocrinologist and made 2 new friends.

The foot appointment was a disappointment. I wanted the doctor to say, "You have 16 days, 3 hours, and 23 minutes more to wear the monster boot. Then this will happen....Then we will do this..." But no. Medicine, the doctor said, is an inexact science. He'll let me know when the time comes to get out of the boot. I asked, "How will you know when that is?" He answered, "There will be clinical evidence." I said, "What the heck does that mean? Will there be a test I have to pass or something?" "No," he said, "I'll look at your foot and I'll know when I see it." End of conversation. He wouldn't tell me what he'd see because he doesn't want me looking for myself.

On the good side, the x-ray (he did let me see the x-ray) shows no damage. So when the foot heals, there should be no residual bad stuff. I had taken the orthotic out of my shoe and packed it with me so that when they took the cast off I could see if the foot had changed shape. When I pulled it out of my purse and held it up to my foot, the doctor was suspicious. "WHAT are you doing?"

"I'm making sure my foot is still the same shape," I said. "I don't know about you, but I can't remember what it looked like a couple of months ago." He sort of wiggled one nostril at me, like a disgusted bunny.

Back to the bad side, even though I've been off my feet, the foot that's not in a cast continues to mess with my mind. It has grown calluses even though it hasn't done anything.  I showed them to the foot doctor. He wasn't happy, he started to lecture me but must have realized that it's not like I could leave the bad foot home and go dancing in high heeled shoes on the other one. He decided the left foot just has very, very sensitive skin. Well great. You could make a football out of the skin on any other part of my body, but not the Princess foot. You know the story of the princess and the pea? Well somehow I ended up with her foot. The doctor thinks it needs to be pampered and protected. I think it needs to be smooshed in the mud out in the yard. I'm tired of freeloading feet that don't do any work.

I had been thinking that since I'm having so many foot problems that are supposedly related to diabetes, I needed to see a diabetes doctor for advice. Last week I went to my primary care doctor to get a recommendation. He wouldn't give me one. He looked at my blood test numbers on his computer. "You're doing great!" he said. "You're doing wonderful!" He said this to me as I was sitting in front of him in the wheelchair, my foot entrapped in the monster boot.

Yes, I am doing great. My A1C is always between 4.8 and 5.2 or so, my cholesterol is 123. I don't take any meds whatsoever (thank you Dr. Bernstein for your wonderful book, you are so, so correct about carbs). So why am I in a wheelchair?

That's why I went exploring Kaiser looking for the "diabetes department." I figured I'd knock on the door and find out how I could get in without my doctor's recommendation. When I finally found the door it was closed. Everyone was out to lunch for an hour. A nurse walking by said to try member services after lunch.

So first I went to lunch. Kaiser has a nice cafeteria way down in the bowels of the building. There is a first class salad bar. I was the only one using it. As a general observation, from my limited time there, I'm telling you that hospital workers don't follow very good nutritional practices. Two doctors who were still in surgical scrubs sat at my little table with me. One had a cup of coffee and two huge donuts. The other had a Mountain Dew soda and a big bag of Cheetos. They were talking about their retirement investments. I had to wonder if they'll live long enough to retire. I had to wonder if they were cardiac surgeons.

Member services provided me a friendly lady to answer my questions. The answers were all "No." "So, you're telling me my notion that somewhere in this building is someone who can answer my questions is just a fantasy?" I asked. Finally I got a "Yes." Well, what would she recommend? "I'd go home and Google neuropathy."

It was a while before my next appointment, so I wheeled myself out to the sunny side of the building and put my feet up on a planter to catch some rays. That's where I met my two new best friends, Dave and Christa.

They were waiting for their roommate to be released so they could take him home. Home, I'm pretty sure, was a trailer park somewhere. Dave and Christa looked like they had a lot of miles on them, mostly hard ones. Dave was only 43. He appeared to be 70. For the next hour I got to hear all about their lives in stories that they skillfully told, revealing bits and pieces at a time. Forget reality TV, real reality is much more entertaining. Occasionally they would pause, as if allowing me an opportunity to tell my own story. I avoided the embarrassment of revealing how dull my life has been by asking more questions about theirs.

It would have been a wasted day, medically speaking, if I hadn't made a stop at my dentist's office on the way home. I told him about my foot woes and he suggested just taking off my shoes and sitting with my feet in the sunlight for a while every day. I have done that this weekend. It feels good.

But wait! There's more.

On Friday my friend Carlotta came down from Placerville, picked me up, and hauled me halfway back to Placerville to visit a couple of other old friends, Loretta and Anita. We all showed horses when we were kids, we were stable brats. We're pretty much still brats, it's nice to know that some things don't change.

Today it was sunny again. I snuck outside and did some garden work. It took me an hour to prune 4 small blueberry bushes and plant 4 bulbs. Butt gardening (from a stool) is not easy. Tonight is Bad Movie Night. Jonathan has been out in the game room cleaning it while Bob's at work. I made a big pan of lasagna and an apple pie.

Here's my picture for the week. Why two boots? Because after the foot doctor hacked on the calluses on the left foot, he decided it needed to be protected also. (From what? Another podiatrist with a blade?)

Happy VD on Monday!

Windy Day

It's a sunny day with a stiff north wind. This morning on the way to work I stopped and watched a huge flock of seagulls playing in the wind over the dump. When I die, I want to be reincarnated as a seagull. They don't just fly, they glide and soar and dance. They appear to love the wind.

I've seen the flock on its way from town to the dump on a windy afternoon. They fly no more than 12 feet off the ground in a long line, dipping and swirling. If they're close enough to the road, you can see them smile.

A little further down the road is an area that was under construction last fall. There are vernal pools near the road. The construction people had to fence off the vernal pool areas to protect them from construction equipment operators who evidently can't discern the areas to stay out of with heavy equipment. I guess that's a good idea. But the fences are 36-inch black plastic sheeting tacked to wooden stakes. You can imagine what that looks like 6 months later on a windy day. Rio Linda.

The black sheeting was blowing across the road, bunching up and clogging the natural drainage, it's just a mess. Where is the government idiot who insisted this stuff be erected? Don't they monitor to be sure it's taken down before it turns to trash?

This is not the second book report, is it? You know how it is with book reports, no one likes to write them, you leave them until the very, very last minute. That's not what I'm doing. I'm actually reworking it until I'm satisfied that I don't come across as barely literate. And I'm having a hard time doing that because I just got an email from Ken.

I worked with Ken for several years. Saw him last week outside of Kaiser and we traded email addresses. The people I worked with in typography, before I had a "government" job, were the best in the state. Ken was a good writer as well as a typographer. He still is. He uses big words, correctly. I don't work with anyone like that in education, sad to say.

Have to go back and edit my poor little book report.

Book Reports

I have finished North Spirit, Sojourns Among the Cree and Ojibway by Paulette Jiles. Also this week I read The End of Days by Zecharia Sitchin.

Telling you this is supposed to disguise my own current inability to think beyond the mundane.

As I reported when I started North Spirit, my friend Merlene loaned me the book almost a year ago. I was just coming out of a time when I'd been reading a lot because I had to stay off my (stinking, stupid, puny, dumb) feet. But then Merlene showed me I could travel. I could sit on my butt in a car and not just in a chair. So away I went!

Now I'm back in a chair with an entirely different foot ailment, but with the same orders: stay off my feet. So I'm reading again.

North Spirit is an interesting look into the everyday lives of people who live way too far north in Canada for my tastes. The author wasn't there in a "superior" role, she had the same attitude that you or I would probably have had: admiration for people with good survival skills and delight at making new friends.

The author compared the lives of Ojibway who still followed the traditional ways to those the Canadian government had attempted to "modernize."

Western society puts so much hope in education. Jiles wrote that the Ojibway children needed to know how to raise and use sled dogs, or even - if they were to modernize - how to fix snowmobiles. They needed to learn how to survive cold winters. But the government insisted the children had to go to school and get a traditional education. The sort of education that only prepares a student for further education and eventually poops him out of the system totally unprepared for self-preservation. He'd even have to move somewhere else because he couldn't survive in his own native environment. Requiring an Ojibway kid to be in school all day meant that his family couldn't maintain its trap lines in the winter because the kid couldn't go with them. Within a single generation, the only things kids learned were how to fill out welfare forms and to live in government-subsidized housing.

Jiles said, "The worst of it is our conviction that we are well-meaning. That we can pour down goodness and rightness from the top. We are maple syrup. The rest of the population is a stack of pancakes." p.134

From suburban California, we look down on third world countries and tell ourselves, "Tsk tsk, yes, it's difficult for them to live in today's society because THEY aren't educated."

Are we really better off? In the third world, there are still people who can take care of themselves. In the U.S., especially in suburban California, we are at least 2 generations away from a population that can do that. And people are being herded into living situations - master planned communities - where it would be impossible, anyway. In a prolonged emergency, the people in Anatolia, the local development that often draws my ire, don't even have enough room in their miniscule yards to house a purloined goat. If electricity is off for a week, if no water is dribbling out of their faucets, if no fuel is available so they can drive somewhere to get things they need, they are helpless. Totally helpless in a sterile "community."

For the Ojibway, if the village store has no gasoline for a couple of months in the winter and you can't use your snowmobile, you might still have dried fish or meat and other things stocked away, and you have a supply of wood for the stove. And some of the older folks might still run sled dogs. In Anatolia, the stuff in your refrigerator will be rotten in a week. If you can't find more Cheerios and milk, what are you going to do? Grow your own? Just throw that last handful out in the dirt and you'll be harvesting more in a week or so. Isn't that how it works?

After living with the Ojibway and witnessing their frustrations, Jiles concluded: "I was sick of government. I had never had to deal with government so much in my life. It was everywhere, it made up rules for every aspect of one's life. All these government agents and ministers and assistant secretaries had to be paid high salaries with travel and per diems. Why did we put up with them? Why were they so necessary? Where did they come from? Were they from outer space? Have they all just taken over our brains?" p.198

And that leads me to the next book. I'll tell you about it tomorrow. Or maybe it will take longer than that.

See? Mountains!

With apologies to those of you who are suffering from the excesses of weather throughout the rest of the world, it is a fairly sunny morning in Northern California, with an almost-warm breeze wafting through the soft air. It's not an ideal day to view the Sierra Nevada mountains, I had to outline the tops of them in blue to separate them from the hazy sky in this picture, but I wanted to show you the view of the mountains from my window. With the horse shed smack in the way.

I also love the view of the oaks along the riparian area, and the plowed fields. That solid green area just below the bare dirt is the neighbors crop. Lawn. (Let them eat lawn!) I don't love the view of that.

It's a lovely day, I want to be out in it, planting flowers, playing with the fuzzbutt chickens, watching the pigeons. But I'm being good. I'm just sitting here with my foot on the counter, looking wistfully out the window instead.

This experience is giving me a glimpse of what happens after you die. Life just goes on without you. The weeds and the animals don't care if I'm here or not, they just toodle along and do what they need to do. It's hard to accept, when you're the sort of person who thinks that nothing can happen unless you are personally responsible for assuring that it does. Very humbling. I might even learn something from this. I've already learned that if you sit around in frustration, chewing the inside of your cheeks, it makes your facial wrinkles look worse. OK, so that's not very deep. I've been reading other people's brilliant philosophical thoughts to make up for my own lack of them, though. Cut me some slack.

My brother and sister-in-law are in Corvallis, checking to make sure their granddaughter is being raised properly. Or maybe they just went to see this sunny smile.

I'm proud to report that even though her Polish genes are somewhat watered down, Miss Tessa is carrying on for the Blawat family. Is this not true Polish fashion sense?

When my brother and I were young and lived in the mountains for a while, our neighbor dressed just like this. I think she was Ukrainian, though, and she wore a paper bag over her knitted cap. Jerry, do you remember Amelia? She used to sit out in the late spring and shoot the birds out of her cherry tree. She always wore a dress over her jeans in the winter.

No More January - Yay!

As I told my cousin Nancy, I vote for January 2011 as Peskiest Month of the Decade. I have personally had more grumpy days this month than all of last year combined. Everyone I know has had some sort of nastiness to deal with.

It was hard to blog, unless I could find humor in adversity. My vocabulary isn't that extensive. All I could do is sit with my foot elevated for hours and hours on end. Then go to bed and try to sleep. I flunked.

Today is the first of February. The rest of 2011 is going to be great. Either that, or I'm just going to adjust my attitude and pretend like it's great.

Let's all leave January where it belongs, in the past.