Adventures in Babysitting

Inspirational song: Taxi (Harry Chapin)

The boys played all day. I was quite content to stay home while they went brewery to brewery on the trolley. I dare not ask just how much beer they drank. That's not my concern. My job was to pick them up at the end of their tour, run them through the McDonald's drive-through, and get them home safely. I performed my duty, but they didn't make it easy.

After a solid eight hours of drinking, they were quite unruly from the moment they crawled into the car. They had armloads of take-home goodies from the breweries. (I can't remember which size is a growler and which is a crowler. They were smaller, so I think they were crowlers.) And they were thoroughly loaded...with stories. My first question was whether the anecdote they texted home was just an elaborate joke. I begged them to say it was a joke. It was not.

When we were college kids, and the guys graduated from nearly clear American style beers to microbrews, they came up with a theory that beer was better if it was so thick and dark you could lose your keys in a glass of it. The Mr brought this criterion up at a bar. Was just drunk enough to pull a key off of his key ring, and throw it in a beer. I don't think I could repeat the chain of events that led to the two of them chugging beers, but apparently the key went right down. Yes. Down. 

I was grocery shopping with my daughter when we first heard about the Gatekeeper and the Keymaster. We predicted tomorrow's conversation as we walked to the car, imagining her explaining why she was escorting her dad to radiology. "Uh-huh. Swallowed a key." (Pause) "52."

Now we are all sprawled on T's couch, watching Mystery Men while I wait for Mr S-P's buzz to wear off. Might take longer for T. He has been sound asleep since the first 10 minutes of the movie. I'm glad I won't have his hangover tomorrow.

Humanity is a Comedy

Inspirational song: Pack Up Your Troubles In Your Old Kit-Bag, and Smile, Smile, Smile (Murray Johnson)

Thank goodness Oscar winning movies come back into theaters and give us another crack at them. This afternoon T texted our group to see who wanted to go see 1917 with him tonight. I was the only one with flexible enough plans to take him up on the invite. In fact, he even bought my ticket, in exchange for me being designated driver. We started at the little cantina next to the theater, so he could get a burrito and margarita or two first.

We chatted over dinner about how wild and stressful the news is lately, and how much we needed a break from reality at the movies. Now, we weren't sure how much of a pleasant diversion a movie about World War One was going to be. He made jokes about how this was going to be a light-hearted romp, and that's when he smiled wryly, shrugged, and said "y'know... humanity is a comedy." Nice try, but we both knew what we were about to get into.

I don't think there was a single comedic moment to break up the stress of this movie. There was tension up until the final moments. I hadn't spent too much time reading reviews of it, but I had seen someone on Twitter crack wise about how it was all filmed in one shot, start to finish, and Benedict Cumberbatch was just sitting in a bunker day after day, waiting for them to make it all the way through in one take so he could deliver his lines at the end. I watched carefully to see whether it was truly one long shot. It wasn't quite one single take, but it was presented as if it were, following the lead character from beginning to end. As the audience, you get heavily emotionally invested in this guy. I still haven't come down from it, although I haven't quite been home half an hour yet.

T says he could watch it again, and would be willing to go with Mr S-P, who couldn't alter his schedule to go tonight. Me, I'm not sure I could handle the tension again so soon. Ot was incredible, but wow. I think I need to cuddle a cat now. (No pictures tonight.)

In Effigy

Inspirational song: Respect (Aretha Franklin)

As long as we can still safely gather, game night happens on the regular. For the first time this week, I mused aloud what we would do if quarantining becomes recommended for the general public. I asked the engineers whether they had a favorite videoconferencing platform. It felt like I was just spitballing based on some movie thriller not on real life. Still, having a simple, practical plan isn't out of bounds at this point. I'm pretty sure I count as part of the "vulnerable population."

For now game night still goes on as usual. I spent all day making dinner, as I love to do. I put a pork shoulder in the crock pot at 9 this morning, and it was fall-apart tender by the time they arrived. I had homemade coleslaw and cornbread (GF), and a vegetarian main dish of zucchini and yellow squash. It makes me so happy to be able to feed my big extended family this way, and I've done it at every opportunity since high school. Maybe I have been training to be a grandma my whole life. I'm gonna be great at it when it finally happens.

Our game entered the absurd by the end. We were using figurines from other, very different campaigns as stand-ins for monsters as we battled. We faced four giant hyenas. We had two oxen figures from the campaign that ended last year, dating from the week before I joined it. (We had a pet known as Goldi-ox.) It felt personal fighting them, even though they were just on the map to mark spots. But they were nothing compared to the ones at the tail end of the party, opposite of where my character was. The two foes there were represented by an ogre and the miniature Mr S-P made for his other alter-ego, Sant'a'a Klaas. I wasn't following the back battle entirely, but at one point the Santa hyena was electrocuted and set on fire. There was an awful lot of glee from the other side of the table at the idea of taking out Santa. I'm not sure I was entirely comfortable with it.

Harvey came down and made sure we all saw how cute he was. He waited until the battle was essentially over before he walked across the map. He parked himself next to stacked plates, and studied a leftover piece of pork for several minutes before swiping it. So he's good, but he's not perfect.

Shook

Inspirational song: Da Doo Ron Ron (Shaun Cassidy)

It’s exceedingly rare that I make corrections to previous essays. It’s not that I don’t make mistakes. I make a ton of them—typos, grammatical errors, memory lapses, and just plain getting facts wrong. It takes away the seat-of-the-pants purity of my writing to go back and alter anything after the publication. Occasionally I will have such a grievous error that I have to issue a retraction, but I haven’t done that often either. But I will be damned if I screw up my song for the day and let that stand. And I did it yesterday. Because I remembered incorrectly and claimed the show we have been watching was set in the summer of 1978, I put the number one song for July up. Now that I have been corrected and know that it is set in July 1977, I am now using the proper song. Shouldn’t I have instinctively known this would be the right one? Wasn’t I hopelessly obsessed with Shaun Cassidy in the summer of 1977? I was just sure, with all the fire that burns in a grade school girl’s heart, that I was going to grow up and meet him and he was going to fall instantly in love with me and marry me. I owe it to that failed dream to put up the right song for the theme I was going for.

I’m still a little shaken. In less than a week, we have raced through the whole series of Hunters. It was crazy good. Yes, there were a ton of anachronisms, and we said them out loud when we noticed them. That isn’t proof that the show was flawed; it was proof that we are old and pedantic. This series was fantastic. It was every bit of that old cliche: an emotional roller coaster. It had tons of surprises. Sometimes the mysteries were hard to solve. There’s one character who I really can’t figure out whether they are a good guy or bad guy even at the end of the season (and I am not giving away who that is). At the end, I was just staring open-mouthed at my TV, barely able to squeak out a “wow.”

I got nothing else to write about now. There might have been important stuff I should have gone over today, but this has left me barely able to speak my own name aloud. It was so absorbing. I think I have a picture of Harvey I can throw down at the end here, and I’m going to call this thing complete. Take my recommendation: if you have Amazon Prime, watch Hunters. If you don’t, find a friend who either wants to invite you over for it, or wants to loan you a password. Holy cow.

Translation

Inspirational song: Shadow Dancing (Andy Gibb)

Cleverness only got me so far tonight. It ended oddly, and with me laughing so hard I was wheezing.

We have started watching Hunters, an Amazon Prime television series. It's all about a diverse group who hunt Nazis in the summer of 1978. It centers on a 19-20 year old kid whose grandmother survived Auschwitz. The grandmother died in the first episode, but they refer to her constantly and there are tons of flashbacks. They use a name that sounds cool, and I am struggling to spell it. Is it "zafta?" "Safta?" "Zofta?" 

I went to Google translate to make guesses at it. I tried zafta with a z. Google said it detected Turkish, and it meant "in Zaf." Okay, that doesn't mean anything like grandmother, so I tried again. I entered Safta with an s. That apparently agitated Google translate, because it detected it as Swedish, and it screamed at me in all caps: "MAKE FRUIT SYRUP." I'm almost afraid to try it with different vowels. 

I still don't know what I want my grandmother name to be. I've always been boring, using "grandma" to refer to all the ones in my family (except my great grandmother who we called Granny). When I talk to my daughters' cats and dog (yes, I do, and quite frequently), I refer to myself the same way. But now that there will be a human, I need to decide whether I stick with the classics or use something more unusual. If I could figure out how to spell it, this word they keep using on Hunters might be fun to try out, and see whether it sticks. I just have to be sure it means what I think it means.

Shopping List

Inspirational song: Baby, Don't Get Hooked On Me (Mac Davis)

For weeks, my daughter and I have said we were going to inventory the stuff she already has for the arrival of the Littlest Smith. She got some serious hand me downs from friends and family, like a crib, a bassinet, high chair, and what not. She's gone through the thrift store a couple times, to find things that still have some good use left in them. And she and I, as a whole, have showed entirely no restraint shopping for baby clothes. So looking at it as a whole, we thought we were pretty well stocked up.

Then I came over to her house, made a list of what she has, and compared it to what the internet says you need. In a flash, we went from feeling like we had everything to feeling like there was a long way to go. We made a second list, of what we have yet to acquire before Smith Jr arrives, and we set out to Target, to learn how this whole baby registry thing works nowadays.

The scanners Target hands out now are really just iPods in red rubber cases, with a scanner camera attached. You use your app login (I used mine so she doesn't get spammed), and get to it. It was easy in the beginning. We went down each row in order in the store, making sure to grab everything with bees and anchors, her two favorite motifs these days. By the time we were four aisles in, looking at the ludicrous selection of bottles and feeding systems, we started getting overwhelmed and our choices were less informed. 

The instructions say to scan twice as many items as people you have invited to the baby shower, so people have plenty to choose from. I think we tripled up compared to how many people we expect to invite. That's okay. If not everything gets purchased, Little Smith will still be just fine. They have the main things they need: clothes to keep them warm and dry, a place to sleep, a food source, and most importantly, parents who already love them unconditionally. Whether they get the spoons with color-changing silicone tips that alert when food is too hot won't diminish that one bit.

Once we have had a chance to recover from an exhausting stroll through Target, we will make a couple other registries, at other big stores like Amazon and Walmart, so we provide equal opportunity for her friends and family to shop where they are comfortable. She also wants me to find the right way to encourage her shower guests to shop second hand, in order to be less wasteful. I'll be curious to see which of her friends does that, and what they find.

The registry app gave us a countdown timer in days until her due date. Seeing just how few there are to go gave me a bit of a panic attack. I'm super excited, but also feeling the need to nest, even though it's not my house that has to be ready right away. I gotta get busy.

Work It Out

Inspirational song: Mission Impossible, Original Theme (Lalo Schifrin)

So this is what failure looks like. Or more accurately, this is what a pity win looks like.

Six of us went to an escape room this evening. The kids had given their dad four passes to this particular event for Christmas... in 2018. We aren’t really good at using gift cards right away, so it took being reminded over and over, and for his birthday to roll around twice before we made concrete plans. One of the girls ended up passing on going with us (and the other lives out of state), but our youngest and her husband, plus neighbor T and his girlfriend joined us for an hour-long attempt to solve all the puzzles needed to get out of the rooms.

The name of our room was “Dead Presidents,” and we knew nothing of the theme when we arrived. We got little more than “it was a bank heist” when we were turned loose and told to solve it. There really was little instruction, other than basic house rules that if there was a sticker of a hand with a No sign through it, it meant don’t touch that item, and that there was no reason to overturn the heavy furniture or climb through ceiling tiles.

Now I consider each of us quite smart, in very different ways. Some are good at math, some at reasoning, some well-rounded in their education. (Not saying who is who. Talents overlap.) But with so little to go on, it really took us a long time to get headed in the right direction, once we cleared the first hurdle or two. We were given a walkie-talkie to use when we needed a hint (and were allowed up to four). We should have asked sooner.

On the chance that someone from my hometown reads this, and would actually try this escape room, I will give no information that would give them an undue advantage if they go.

I thought we were sailing to success when we opened the side door of the room with twelve minutes to spare. When I realized we had to solve a whole second room, I plunged into despair. Room two was shorter and easier, but still we had to do a lot of work. We ran out of time when we were super close to finishing, and the monitor told us to go ahead and work through it. It took us an extra 4:53 to finish. That is still a fail, even though we worked out the puzzles.

The monitor told us this room has an 8% success rate, so we weren’t supposed to feel bad. Didn’t help all that much. I’m a 90+ percentile kind of girl. I don’t like failure. This left all of us wanting to go back and try a different room. Our daughter has picked out one called “Kaboom.” We are working out whether to go before or after the newest Smith arrives.

Fistfuls of Meat

Inspirational song: Misty Mountain Hop (Led Zeppelin)

They were doomed to failure. The challenge was too extreme for more mortals to accomplish. In one short hour, they were tasked to consume six pounds of food and drink, to celebrate the sixth anniversary of a growing and thriving brewery in town. It was a pound of beer ("a pint's a pound the world around"), a pound of fries, and a four-pound cheeseburger. It's utterly ridiculous. The brewery offered six slots for the competition. As this is Mr S-P's favorite brewery in town, the place he stops anytime he wants to have a beer outside of his own home, naturally he wanted to be one of the six. He talked our neighbor into being a second. Three other mad souls offered their own bellies as sacrifice. There was not another in the sphere of influence of this brewery willing to round out the six. It certainly wasn't going to be me.

I arrived shortly before noon. The eaters were halfway through their allotted time, and more than halfway through their "fistfuls of meat," as T's girlfriend so accurately put it. They all looked pained. There were obviously different strategies. One guy attacked his burger, leaving the fries and beer for last. One guy ate the meat and left the bun, managing about half the fries. T shaved columns off the burger and nibbled at the rest. Mr S-P ate his burger from the top down, like an archaeologist on a meaty dig site. I'm not sure I could identify the strategy of the last guy.

By the time I started watching, my guys' race was already run. I think they picked at it a little, and finished their beers, but that was all they could muster. The two guys on the far end really worked it. Plenty of people came by to cheer, jeer, and marvel. The time-keeper walked through often like a town crier.

No one ate everything. I don't think it was possible. In the end, it came down to weight. They weighed what was left. The winner and second place were separated by an ounce or two, each having around a pound and a half left. T made it under two pounds. Mr S-P didn't. Not sure about the other person. Mr S-P seemed deflated that he came in dead last. I looked at his tired face and bloated belly and said, "Did you really lose? I bet tonight when everyone else is truly miserable, you'll find you are the real winner."

Time and Place

Inspirational song: Back in the New York Groove (Ace Frehley)

No playing around tonight. For that matter, I need to straighten up and fly right most nights for the next long stretch. I’m entering a phase where I need to get my beauty sleep early, and be up and on the road hours before I normally cross my threshold. Sure, some of it will be early medical visits, including another trip to Anschutz in a couple weeks. But the fun stuff will be getting back into the work groove. There’s an important training session at our next monthly meeting that we will start early (so I have to leave home at terrible o’clock). And tomorrow I get to meet with some brand new clients. I need to get a good night’s sleep so I don’t come off as being as rusty as a woman who took months off to be sick. Let’s pretend that’s not exactly what I am.

When I walked to my car this afternoon, I found footprints in the snow that weren’t mine (under those that were). I am not so good at identifying tracks to know whether it’s that white cat who looked so much like Rabbit creeping around my car, or a raccoon who decided the alley was boring and ventured out. Considering trash day wasn’t until this morning, making the alley very interesting to your average raccoon, I’m leaning toward guessing it was the cat. I hope she has a warm place to stay.

Narrative Update

Inspirational song: Sunny Afternoon (The Kinks)

Another day, another doctor visit. This one was totally routine. I checked in with my rheumatologist, got my regular meds re-upped, and caught her up on the story so far. I think I remembered most of it to tell her. She had access to most of the test results, because I was careful to add her as a CC all along the way. What I provided today was the narrative to go along with the imaging reports. She let me vent a little about how much there is to emotionally process, and how cranky I am at the poor prospects of anything ever getting better. She didn't criticize me once for having negative emotions.

Driving to Denver, covering 3/4 of Costco on the way home, taking care of prescriptions, and finally carrying in and putting away groceries turns out to be the limit of what I can do in a day anymore. I miss feeling productive. I can only hope that something actually moves forward on the thyroid issues and the paralyzed diaphragm/compressed lung problem this year. I just don't feel like this is sustainable. And that's the gist of what I whined about with my rheumatologist.

This week someone posted a very old video of the Kinks, one of my all-time favorite bands. (I do not remember who did it, nor what platform it was on.) The video was the band lip-synching to Sunny Afternoon, in a snowy park, on a gloomy, overcast kind of day. It might have seemed extra gloomy because the video was shot in black and white. The song has been stuck in my head ever since. Today was a gorgeous sunny day, but yesterday it snowed morning to night, culminating in a blast of heavy snow right when I had to go out for drinks with some rotary folks. In the spirit of that Kinks video, I will use photos from last night's snowy trip to a bar now. Despite the sun and pleasant late winter weather today, it seemed an appropriate twist.

Baking

Inspirational song: Sheep Go to Heaven (Cake)

The Shoveller: Lucille, God gave me a gift. I shovel well. I shovel very well.

Lucille: Honey, you shovel better than any man I've ever known, but that does not make you a superhero.

                                     Mystery Men

With a group as large as the regulars who come over for games every week, it feels like there's a birthday all the time right now. It's high birthday season from December to March. Making cakes and birthday dinners is kind of my thing. It makes sense, as I have the most limited diet by necessity. I'm willing to put in the extra research and work to keep myself on an even digestive keel.

Some times I just buy a cake mix from the grocery store, and I'm working my way to a clear favorite of the available gluten free mixes. (Pamela's is in the lead for chocolate, but Namaste has a pretty good spice cake.) 

Some times I make cakes from scratch, and I'm not 100% great at choosing recipes that won't fail off Pinterest. Today I fiddled with an angel food recipe for the Mr's birthday, swapping out 1/4 cup of gluten-free flour that is primarily rice-based for an equal amount of arrowroot. I thought maybe it would make a softer cake. Yeah, it did, but it was also wetter. That might have been a failure of folding the flour into the egg whites. Or I didn't let it cook long enough. Hard to say without making another one in quick succession.

Last week, my foster daughter wanted a lemon cake. Together we agreed on a recipe that used almond flour, and she wanted a cream cheese frosting. My set of springform pans is 3 different sizes, so I spent the whole afternoon making two copies of the cake, one after another, so I could layer them and have the sides line up. I dug through a drawer to find I had a star tip for decorating, and I kind of half-assed stars all over the cake. Even having chilled the frosting, by the time I was at the end I was tired and the heat of my hands was making the frosting come out like yellow Hershey's kisses. I was still proud of my creation. I took pictures last week, but didn't show them off at the time.

I doubt I'll ever find myself on one of those baking competition shows, and not just because I only ever bake gluten free. I don't have the stomach for that sort of stress, and my back gets so tired I have to take frequent breaks to stretch it out. Even so, I'm proud of the tradition I am building. I think they know I do this because I care. None of us needs a whole lot of new material things for our birthdays. All of us needs to know we are loved and wanted. This is my way of reminding them of that.

Hometown

Inspirational song: Small Town (John Mellencamp)

This is not the smallest community I’ve ever lived in. I’d have to do a little research to know for sure whether the town where I grew up in Oklahoma or the spot in New Mexico where we still own a house (more albatross than house at this point) is smaller. Off the top of my head, I’d say Ada has a smaller population, but Clovis is littler side to side. Can’t say that Barstow, Lompoc, or Grand Forks were sprawling metropolises either. Still, my current (and avowed final) hometown is modest even if not tiny in comparison to those of my personal history. I like it that way. While I appreciate healthy growth over economic blight, I would be really sad if this place grows out to smother the farmland surrounding us, to merge with the sprawl of Denver.

I had to take care of yearly business this afternoon, having emissions run on my car and renewing the tag. It could have been stressful for someone like me, going through an unfamiliar process (first time I’ve had to do an emissions test on the car I’ve had for the last seven years) and dealing with bureaucracy. Nope. There were only four people in line in front of me for emissions, and the whole experience was fast, smooth, and done by startlingly cheerful people. I didn’t arrive at the DMV until after two this afternoon, and when I sat down with my line number, I initially thought I would be there a painfully long time. Again, I was pleasantly surprised at how quick and easy it was start to finish. Sure, I had enough time to run back out to the car and grab the proof of insurance that I didn’t bring in the first time (and then didn’t need to provide), but I was still out of there in less than half an hour. I can’t say that the entire credit goes to this being a small community, but I really want to do so.

I was a little wiped out after several hours of being out and about, so I came home to rest. I zoned out, had a snack, and really had to wind myself back up to go back out to the grocery store. I eventually got myself there. I politely declined to purchase Girl Scout cookies on the way in the door, grabbed one of the small carts, and turned towards produce. I had barely cleared the customer service desk when I heard, “Hellllloooooo!” My daughter was standing there with an armful of protein smoothies. I offered up the upper basket of my cart; she emptied her arms, and then walked around the whole store with me. Not only is it awesome to live in a small town in general, it’s even better when it’s small enough to run into your kids in stores once in a while. That was always my benchmark for when I felt like we had settled into a town as the military moved us—how long did it take to recognize someone when you were out buying food? This small town really feels like home now.

Not Much

Inspirational song: James K Polk (They Might Be Giants)

After all these years of being able to come up with a theme essay on the fly, I’m rather disappointed in my inability to come up with something profound for Presidents’ Day. There’s probably a lot I should be able to say. Not a lot I really want to, though. The holiday inconvenienced me mildly, in that a business I hoped to visit today was closed. It’s the only way I noticed what day it was at all.

I’m ready for the days to have more meaning to me than just which doctor I’m visiting, but for now, that’s really how I’m passing my time. I’m stuck between wanting to use it as my ongoing topic to write about and wanting to keep it private. These desires are always in conflict.

The head cold that tried to ruin my weekend is nearly gone. It’s in my best interests not to force myself to stay up late, trying to come up with something more riveting. I’m going to call this done and get myself to bed on time. As the snow starts to fall gently, I’ll find that picture I took of the last overnight snowfall in my garden space, and pretend it’s current.

Soirée Jeu

Inspirational song: Games Without Frontiers (Peter Gabriel)

Now that football season has ended, in a satisfactory manner, we needed something to do with our Sunday evenings. The neighbor asked whether we would be interested in making it a regular board game night until the end of summer. We all agreed. We would have been fools not to.

I really can’t name the first game we played, that took most of the evening. It was something about a haunted house, but the name just didn’t stick in my head. It was very complicated, and I didn’t do particularly well. The first half of the game is team-building, where the whole party explores a decrepit mansion a room at a time. As you draw cards and roll dice against the odds, eventually someone sets off the haunting phase of the game. This particular version pit T against the rest of us, with him as a zombie lord. My character, a 13 year old boy with few exceptional strengths, died when he couldn’t run away from the two zombies who appeared in the same room as he. It was a surprise when Mr S-P and our old college roommate found a couple really good artifacts in the deck of cards, and teamed up to defeat T’s zombies. It was thrilling to the end.

The foster kids had to leave after that game, because of work, but the rest of us stayed and played a round of the bean game, a German card game called “Bohnanza.” It’s not a complicated game, but strategy is important. We all did well, but the former roommate and I tied for first. This is definitely one of our favorites.

Foster daughter printed up more 3-D figurines while she had T’s printer (which she returned tonight). The ones she brought were so perfectly customized I nearly broke myself laughing at them. One is my daughter’s character in the campaign Mr S-P wrote himself, a cat who received all the magic powers when a sorcerer blew himself up in the same room, so the cat can shape-change into a small boy (named Oliver). She printed a miniature with both the cat and boy on it. And for two year, Mr S-P has been playing a character who has slowly evolved into the most flamboyant, gregarious, charismatic adventurer I’ve ever seen. He’s not quite a bard...more cult leader at this point. His most powerful attack is intimidation. Just that. Foes frequently either shut down emotionally and get dispatched, or they give up and run away altogether. I took several photos of the figurine. It has been hours now, and I’m still giggling at how perfect it is.

No Iowa

Inspirational song: Angel (Sarah McLachlan)

A few weeks ago, I skipped a “caucus 101” meeting. I thought that was the precinct leader training, but on further reflection, it might have just been an instructional basic for the general public. Either way, I had too much happening that day, and didn’t make it. I made sure to show up to the for-sure precinct leader training this morning at the library. I and another 100+ people were determined that Boulder County caucus would not resemble the disaster in Iowa earlier this month. They pulled the presidential candidate decision out of caucus since the last cycle. That is now done by mail-in ballot as a primary, and registered independents can vote in either party race (but only one). This caucus will select delegates for US senator, plus choose favorites for state senator and house races, and some local candidates, like county commissioner. If anyone in our precinct wants to be a delegate at the national convention, they have to start as a delegate for a senate candidate, and be willing to attend county assembly and convention (that’s two things). I had a goal of going to the national convention before I got sick last year, or rather, before I knew how sick I was. I had kind of given up on that goal, but now I’m breathing life into it again. Competition for those few slots is tight. The odds are against me. But I might as well start down that path and see where it leads me.

I’m glad I have two caucus meetings under my belt now. It made all the info today seem like an easy review. My first meeting, when I volunteered to step up and lead an orphan precinct, was a nightmare. The rival factions were so angry with each other. I didn’t know that the math was in the instructions, and when I faced assigning two delegates and an unevenly split room, I panicked. I am still scarred. Two years ago, rather than a full, angry room, we had four women in a section of a meeting hall around the corner from here, and we were all convivial the whole evening. I expect the caucus this year to fall somewhere in between. There is a lot of interest, but the main event will be the senate race.

I spent the whole meeting with a tissue mashed into my face. I don’t know how it is possible that I picked up a rhinovirus, having spent most of the last week or two alone. Maybe when I walked into one of the clinics for tests. I woke at three this morning, to discover it’s impossible to sneeze while wearing a CPAP mask, and once I gave up wearing it for the night, I wondered whether the machine itself had rocketed an allergen up into my sinuses. I was awake for hours, wishing I could rest before the meeting. I took a Benadryl after the caucus training, and I’m about to test whether a second one would dry my nose up enough to wear the mask at all tonight. Wish me luck. For that matter, wish me luck for a lot of things, not the least of which is that people get their passions out on Super Tuesday, and come to caucus ready to behave civilly.

Restored

Inspirational song: Too Much of Anything (The Who)

Periodically days come along where I have to pretend the whole world doesn’t exist. I often go too many days in a row pushing myself too hard, ignoring the warning signs that a crash is coming. There wasn’t an actual crash today, only because I finally took the time my body needed to regroup. I did the least amount I could get away with. Stayed home. No major cleaning projects. Minimal cooking. TV stayed off most of the day, in favor of mostly just reading and listening to music. When the early afternoon slump hit, I lay down for a nap. But pain still found me.

My particular flavor of chronic pain usually involves the sensation that my blood is composed primarily of tiny needles. I feel it most keenly in my face, forearms, and backs of my hands, but on days like today, when the cumulative effects of over-doing it reach a certain threshold, it gets me all over. I suppose there are medications that would dull the tingling and burning, but I refuse to live my life numbed like that. I find it preferable to just slow down and rest to stop the pain. It does work, too. It’s basically bedtime now, and I only have occasional little stings, and they don’t last long.

Of course, I had the best little nurses a chronic pain sufferer could want. When I had my nap, Athena came up and grabbed my hand tightly. As I lay in bed reading before starting writing just now, Alfred came up and inserted himself between me and the tablet. They have tag-teamed care of me all day. I’d be cool with offering them more than half the credit for me feeling rested and improved as the day closes out.

Hope

Inspirational song: Dr Feelgood (Mötley Crüe)

What gloriously good news came today! The results of the thyroid biopsy from Monday are in, and when I went for my regular checkup at my oncologist, I got to see the printout. The calcified nodule that was biopsied came back benign, which was a nice relief. (My GP's office had called yesterday with that much info.) There was more, though. There were lymphocytes present, and the report says there is evidence of Hashimoto's thyroiditis. It seems counterintuitive, I imagine, but this is good news--really, really good news. I've been imploring doctors for years to dig deeper with my symptoms, because I knew something just had to be wrong with my thyroid. The typical response was to test TSH, see that it is mildly elevated, and then not care to investigate further. It has been frustrating, most especially when the answers to my questions about inexplicable weight gain were met with accusations of lying about my diet and exercise habits. And nobody batted an eye whenever I asked why I never sweat, no matter the circumstances. These were only the most prominent of the symptoms I begged them to evaluate.

Of all of my doctors, there are two specialists who make me ridiculously happy when I see them, and I'm starting to feel similarly comfortable with my new primary doc too. Visits to my rheumatologist and oncologist leave me feeling positive and well-cared for. Just the biopsy result was enough to provide euphoria. The rest of the visit today was as restorative as spending hours at a day spa. She paid attention and she communicated well. She gave good advice and instructed me to get some physical therapy for soreness in the arm on the mastectomy side. The only thing that left me scratching my head was realizing that she stole my pen when she wrote down the name of the endocrinologist she recommends. It was a pen I had conspicuously taken from the spine doc a week earlier, so I was more amused than mad.

I haven't gotten a diagnosis of Hashimoto's yet per se. I have this biopsy result. Oncologist took blood today to get a read on current TSH. I see rheumatologist next week. I have an appointment with an ENT in March. If I follow oncologist's advice, I'll switch that to an endocrinologist instead (or in addition to?) There are still many steps left in this dance. But man, for the first time in ages, I'm really looking forward to traipsing through them.

Mini Maxi-Heroine

Inspirational song: I Can Make You a Man (Rocky Horror Picture Show)

Technology gives me a headache. The older I get, the harder it is to adapt to new systems. I feel like I’m bonking my forehead into brick walls with each choice clicked. I get frustrated. Then I get mad. Then I just want to run away. I can't decide whether to hope it’s a function of my age, or a function of the way my brain has reacted to chronic illness. I don’t even know it matters. I just know it’s exhausting to feel dumb like that.

I went on a website today that should have been super easy. It is for the giant majority of people who go there, I have no doubt. It was a place to design a custom miniature figurine for games like Dungeons and Dragons. They either 3-D print them and mail them to you, or you can download the file and print it yourself. That was the part that tripped me up. I was supposed to buy the file, download it, and email it to my foster daughter so she could print it while she had T’s 3-D printer at her house. Ah, but it was not so straightforward. I had to try every option I could think of, starting over from scratch four times because the website reset every time I walked away in my uncertainty. When I finally thought I was ready to move forward, I freaked out a little when I had to create a login for the site. (Not sure why that gave me such anxiety.) Then I was just sure if I downloaded it to my device and then emailed it, it wouldn’t work, as if there were some sort of self-destruct switch in the code once you opened the file. It doesn’t work that way. I got the file eventually, but when I tried to email it, my gmail account refused to find the file on my iPad, where I had put it. Just didn’t bring up that folder at all. I was sure it was unattainable at that point, and I was ready to start breaking things I was so mad. I stomped around, got myself some dinner, and then reconsidered my options. It was then I remembered I had other emails available on this device. I opened up clunky old aol, and guess what found and attached the file with no problems! Old people’s email for the win!

When T first showed us the 3-D printer he got as a Christmas gift to the whole group, I couldn’t imagine what I would make with it. Ideas eluded me for weeks, until my foster daughter started calibrating and tweaking it. She sent me to this website, Hero Forge, and told me what to do, in a vague sense. I wanted to totally pull the I’m Old, I’m Your Mother, You Do It card, but she wouldn’t let me get away with it. Once I got going on picking features for my figurine, I kind of liked it. They didn’t have a base model that was an Amazon (my character’s race). I selected half-giant, and went from there. My Miriam looks like Barbra Streisand around the What’s Up, Doc time period, but those facial features just weren’t available. I did the best I could. I remade her costume a dozen times over until I got as close as I could to what survived the shipwreck, and what she has picked up thus far. (I cheated and gave her nice boots that she isn’t currently wearing.) She fights two-handed with a glaive, so she’s holding that, in a “heroic pose.” It irritates me that all female characters in these sorts of fantasy games are expected to look like strippers, so I was glad there was a slider bar to lower her bust size. I didn’t make her quite as flat-chested as Brienne of Tarth, whom she is also modeled after, but she definitely doesn’t look like she consumes hormone-enhanced meats and dairy, like modern girls do. And key touch: I put a cat by her feet, as Miriam has all but adopted Oliver, our shape-changing sorcerer, who we think is really a cat who pretends to be a boy, not a boy who pretends to be a cat.

I did manage to get the file to my daughter with the printer, so hopefully when she comes over tomorrow it will be done. Once I persevered through the hurdles of the website, I wanted the instant gratification of printing it myself. There was enough of a snowstorm raging tonight to keep me from venturing out to nag the kid about printing it right away. I have to just review the pictures I took as I was describing to her what I was choosing. And yes, these are camera pictures of my iPad screen. Look, it’s what old people do when technology confounds them. They make do.

Brazen Thieves

Inspirational song: Free For All (Ted Nugent)

Once again, the pictures tell the tale. I came home this afternoon, and saw a squirrel standing in one of the Adirondack chairs I made in Charleston (from the fence we tore down). That little jerk was ripping the stuffing out of a pillow I failed to bring inside last fall. Murray came bounding over, barking, and chased him up the fence and then up the tree. I think this squirrel has moved into the nesting box that hangs high in the chokecherry tree, from when we accepted three babies from the wildlife rehabilitation center. I have no idea whether he (or she) was one of the rescued babies. I waited by the back door for Murray to lose interest, which he did posthaste. Squirrel came right back after that, and dug out a second giant handful of polyfil, to take up to the box. It's supposed to be super cold at night all week. Whatever, kid. I can get new pillows at Target next summer. Be warm.

My other animal story has no pictures. We got home from Costco with two bags of cat food, one grain free and one merely gluten free. We did what we usually do now, blend them in the big plastic bin with a lid on it. The cats went nuts, swirling around out legs, trying to get in the way, as the Mr poured one bag and I the other at the same time. Alfred got closest, diving open-mouthed in the deluge of kibbles. We had to chase him off, but I felt bad about it. Imagine what joy that must be for a cat. Skittles commercials come to mind. 

Needled

Inspirational song: I Hope That Something Better Comes Along (The Muppet Movie)

Knowing a large percentage of the hospital staff by sight (if not by name) is probably not a milestone I expected to reach this soon after moving to my current and hopefully final hometown. At lunchtime today I greeted the outpatient registrar warmly, saying “I’m back!” Now, she was already holding a sheet of labels each printed with my name, so testing how well she actually recognized me is impossible to verify. There are plenty of people who do know who I am and who I’m related to, for sure. They may not know me as well as my local pharmacists (whom I adore), but I’m comfortable at that hospital far more than one would think. It would kind of be nice to go back to total anonymity and unfamiliarity with the processes contained therein, but that’s not likely anytime soon.

Today’s biopsy, or more specifically fine needle aspiration, was quicker and easier than I expected, even knowing going in that it wouldn’t be a very big deal. There were a handful of people crowded into one exam room—me, ultrasound tech, IR doc, pathologist, and Mr S-P. They lined up the nodule on the screen, doc washed my neck with the orange stuff, popped in a little lidocaine, and we were off. They use a teeny needle to acquire just enough cells to fill the barrel of the needle (and they pounce it to fill it, which is an interesting experience), and the pathologist immediately transfers them to slides. I was warned that they could have to try as many as four times on the first go-round, and if they didn’t get a good sampling of cells when the pathologist looked them over, they might even go again, while my neck was already numb. They took three needles full, and the dude took the slides across the hall while we waited and chatted. We got the all clear, and they stuck a bandaid on my neck and sent me on my way.

I don’t know how long it will take to get the results. Originally my primary care doc’s assistant said it might be as soon as tomorrow. The ultrasound tech tempered expectations by saying three to six days. I went on the Sloan-Kettering website, and they said theirs could take up to two weeks. Holy moly, that sounds like a long wait! I’m still on the right side of the odds here though. Chances of this whole thing being manageable and easy greatly outweigh the bad stuff. So as long I keep myself distracted for the next few days, I ought to be able to carry on as usual. I doubt I’ll lose any sleep over this one. At least not from anything other than a little discomfort from the puncture wound in my neck.

Fine

Inspirational song: Que Sera, Sera (Doris Day)

Soldier: Oh, God is testing us.
Boris: If He’s gonna test us, why doesn’t He give us a written?
                                                            Love and Death

There is yet another test just after lunch tomorrow. It ought to be a scary one, but really, I don’t care how this one turns out. If it’s bad stuff, then it will get worked on. If it’s wait-and-see, then that’s still okay because finally, someone is looking at this thing that has stubbornly refused to capture attention from anyone other than me. I just want somebody to take it seriously. Well, someone already has. I was almost out the door of my doctor’s office a few weeks ago, giving her a report of all the litany of tests she set off when she sent me to a pulmonologist. I made an offhand comment on what I thought was an unimportant incidental finding on the CT scan. Doc immediately got a focused look on her face and said, “I don’t have that report. I want that report.”

I had an ultrasound a week ago. Tomorrow I have a fine needle aspiration. I should have results by Tuesday at the latest. I called to make the follow-on appointment with the specialist as soon as my doctor’s office gave me the number, but I called too soon. They hadn’t gotten the notes yet, and thus gave me the first regular appointment, more than a month out. If this is nothing urgent, I suppose that would be fine. If it’s time-sensitive, I can ask to move it up.

I spent the weekend reading a long article (133 pages if printed) intended for medical professionals about potential treatments and outcomes. It was complex, but I found it readable if I just skimmed the  statistics. I found it oddly comforting rather than stress-inducing. It made me feel like the science is solid, and no matter what happens, I’ll be fine. That is, unless I get brushed off with another “within normal limits” dismissal, as I have for years. Please, anything but that.

She Reminds Me of You

Inspirational song: Cheatin’ (Gin Blossoms)

Harvey got very agitated by the back door this evening. He assumed an aggressive stance, shook his butt, flicked his tail, and danced a little like he was having trouble holding back his feet. My daughter was over for the evening, and I was in the middle of making dinner when he started this nonsense. I asked him what he saw, imagining it could be a raccoon on the wrong side of the alley fence. I peered out into the dark yard (we never did replace the back light after painting the trim years ago), and creeping across my snowy back yard was a white cat with a black tail. I would have thought I was hallucinating, but obviously Harvey saw her too. My heart stopped beating for a moment. She didn’t look exactly like Rabbit, because instead of a black dot on her forehead, she had more of a swoosh, almost like she wore a tiny black beret. She stopped and looked at me, and we stared at each other for most of a minute. I didn’t want to scare her away, but I couldn’t help talking to her through the glass. I told her to find someplace warm for the night, because more snow is expected. She trotted off back to the south, and I regretted not having my phone handy for a picture.

When I saw her, she was almost standing on Rabbit’s grave.

I think I need to go be quiet for the rest of the evening, while I let the feelings wash over me.

Thick

Inspirational song: Love Is Thicker Than Water (Andy Gibb)

The selection of prescription medications and vitamins I take daily is a carefully crafted cocktail, frequently updated by my best physicians. I’m not perfect about getting them every day at the exact same time, but generally I get them more often than not. Major disturbances in my flow tend to have outsized consequences. Last summer’s detour from my routine during chemo made for extended periods of pain and fatigue not caused by the cancer drugs themselves, and it took months to get my blood concentration of lupus drugs back to levels that alleviated sufficient pain. I don’t like lengthy disruptions to that routine.

Now I’m waiting for a new biopsy, and they asked me to avoid taking anti-inflammatories for days prior to being punctured, so my blood isn’t too thin. I understand the desire to avoid excessive bleeding, but I’m cranky about the process and its effects. Daily prescription NSAIDs don’t do anything for acute pain, but they keep me closer to neutral for the chronic stuff. I haven’t taken that particular pill since Wednesday, and the stinging pain is already back. It’s like rolling in a hot tub full of tiny insulin needles. No tragic pain, but irritation galore, especially in my face and forearms. The needle biopsy is on Monday. I have days more to wait through the stinging. This is the less well known part of chronic illness, the death by a thousand cuts feelings. It seems petty to complain about it, but it gets all the nerve endings vibrating as much as a rollicking round of poison ivy, it really does.

I stayed home with my jangling nerves all day. There was solid snow for most of the day, enough to make the roads sloppy. Staying off of them was the wise choice. It was much more fun to take it easy, put on a giant pot of pea soup, and listen to tunes on Spotify that I hadn’t thought of in years. February is good for days like this.

Compliance

Inspirational song: Just Can't Get Enough (Depeche Mode)

It's snowing again, and the lady on the weather forecast said it was sloppy wet. Cool. This is the sort of thing I love. However, it means I am less inclined to go next door and remind Mr Call of Duty that it's bedtime. I'll just stay home in dry jammies and let him figure out for himself when he gets tired.

I had my first check-in with the respiratory therapist who evaluated my first three weeks on the CPAP. He was impressed that I have been perfectly compliant thus far. You have to have 21 days in a 30 day period, within the first 90 days. Once I'm done writing this, I will have 21 days in a row, right off the bat. I'm still struggling with getting used to the apparatus, but the charts show I'm improving. He showed me my average pressure, and said he can bump the starting pressure up by one click, in the hope that it would stop my panicky not-getting-sufficient-oxygen feelings early on. (These seem to be a combination of my compressed lung and my intolerance of muggy, humid air in general.) 

I'm also trying a different mask fitting. He wants me to try the kind that are basically nose buds (like the ear buds for music). I'm dreading trying it, but I'm going to do it. I'm very curious how much fiddling it's going to take before I actually sleep the entire way through a night. Maybe this will get me partway there.

Flashback

Inspirational song: Ticket to Ride (The Beatles)

There was a throwback to the old days that I just didn't need. I had been having a lot of positive, productive experiences with doctors lately. Less so today. It wasn't that it was a negative experience. The orthopedist was perfectly pleasant. She just didn't have anything to offer that was really going to move me forward, to lessen pain and increase flexibility or core strength at this time. She didn't think my MRI was particularly indicative of anything other than the degeneration she would expect to see in someone my age with my other physical ailments. She suggested that steroid shots in the areas that hurt might be useful, but the other stuff (especially what I'm seeing the thoracic surgeon for) would probably take precedence and make shots harder to tolerate. As nice a human as she was, I'm really feeling like this was a waste of two months.

I'd like to roll with this punch, but I'm going through too much these days to keep my usual good attitude about it. To be perfectly frank, I have my cranky pants on. Give me a few days to absorb the disappointment.

We didn't have our entire usual game group this evening. This is the week for the small group, and one of our core folks is sick. So those of us who remained played a board game next door. It mostly got my mind off of the frustration. Not entirely, but enough for now.

Inspired

Inspirational song: Cabin on the Hill (Flat & Scruggs)

Last night's snowfall ended up coming in smack-dab in the middle of the estimates. I guess I shouldn't have doubted. When all was said and done, there were four to five inches on the ground. It satisfied my need for winter precipitation. There will be a couple of decent days, after a bone-chilling night, and then more snow this weekend. Just like I like it. If only I had ever bothered changing out my tires for the season. 

We went looking for another new viewing experience on Netflix tonight. I had intended on finding a classic musical. That is not where we ended up. When we saw a cabin-building competition series, naturally I offered that up to my cabin-building husband. It was set in rural Wales, with each episode being two unusual cabins built off-site and transported to face off against each other. We made it nearly all the way through three episodes before he sacked out. I don't know whether any of it inspired him for his own off-grid retreat, but I sure had fun watching it. None of the cabins has been boring thus far. 

I hope next year I can have enough of the deferred maintenance on my body completed, so I can physically get back up the hill to our cabin. I was assigned a specific art installation and I intend to see it through. But first we have to finish insulating it, cladding the interior walls, and starting to add the fixtures. For my own sake, I hope we get the permanent ladder to the loft done early in the year. I had trouble making the last leap from the top step of a conventional ladder to the platform. (The top step being the one where it always says "Do Not Step!") I'm also looking forward to getting more stuff up the hill and out of my garage, so that maybe, just maybe, the following winter I can park a car in it.

Unexpected

Inspirational song: Nothing Ever Goes As Planned (Styx)

I ought to talk about the train wreck that the Iowa caucus appears to be, but I have two good reasons to tread lightly: one, I am a precinct leader who will have to work caucus in a few weeks. I could end up in a cluster of my own, and I don't want to bring bad karma on myself for mocking someone else's pain. Two, I didn't actually watch the process. Early in the evening, I fell asleep in my chair, not even checking Twitter until almost seven in my time zone. I watched a little coverage while I ate a salad, and then Mr S-P and I decided it would be much more fun to watch a movie. As compelling as the live disaster might have been, we made the right choice.

We had only vaguely heard of the movie The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. When we paged through comedies on Netflix, we saw this come up. At first, it looked like a mid-20th century western, but I recognized Tim Blake Nelson in the thumbnail, and we looked close enough to see it was a Coen Brothers movie. Knowing nothing about it, we jumped right in. It was a series of short vignettes, and it was absolutely nothing like we imagined it would be. It was super dark, yet it was actually a comedy. The big names stars were sprinkled throughout, but some of the lesser known people were fun surprises all along the way. I kept reaching for my phone to check IMDB every few minutes, exclaiming things like, "No way! That guy is Dudley Dursley!" I think I need a few days to digest this movie. I don't know how soon I might want to rewatch it, but I feel like I must. It was absolutely beautiful, in its gloriously grim humor.

This side of the state shut down this afternoon, in anticipation of a major snowstorm. It was already getting slick when I came home from an appointment late this morning. But though it snowed nearly all day, it barely accumulated on the grass, much less on the roads. Days ago they told us 2-6 inches total for the day. Then it worked all the way up to 1-3 in the day and 5-8 in the evening. I'm pretty sure they backed way off, maybe even under the initial estimates. It's just not coming down out there. Still gonna be cold though. This snow will stick around a few days, probably until the next waves arrive, two in the next week.

YEAH!

Inspirational song: Rollin' With My Homies (Coolio)

My throat is sore. My voice is hoarse. I am more than mildly tipsy. And I'm in good company. Everyone in this room is as giddy as I am.

It has never been a secret how much I love football. Of all the championship games I've watched, even the Broncos four years ago, and all those Steelers games when I was in grade school, this might easily be my favorite one. There have been a few I've been emotionally invested in. A few crazy cool wins. Some losses I disliked witnessing (pretty much any time the Patriots pulled out the W.) But surfing along with my neighbor's obsession with the Chiefs, 100% catching the bug with him, has made this the best one yet. 

We made way too much food, all of us. I'll probably end up freezing some mac and cheese. I'm kind of glad I didn't try making chocolate chip cookies too. And we found the intestinal fortitude not to purchase balloons. Whew. But for sure there was plenty of food, plenty of hooch, and plenty of dogs. At one point there were six pups in the back yard (when our 2 came over). Barley hated being in the back yard when the commotion kicked off. He watched from the window for most of the first quarter. Dogs came in after halftime, and T went out for a smoke at the end, watching from the same window spot.

I think I have more high-fiving to do. Hopefully the hooting and hollering is done for now. My throat won't recover for days.