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Berry Time! Buy lots, and soak them in booze for a few weeks. (drink the booze, throw the berries away)... Or spread them on a tray and freeze them, then once they're frozen stuff them in baggies. They're like tiny popsicles that you can cook with.
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I had my second follow up visit with the surgeon today. Apparently, recovery is going extraordinarily well and I am being impatient. No big surprise, I guess. I have another appointment in early August, and if things continue on the same route, I will have permission to "do things" at that point. I didn't inquire what the "things" were, for fear that I might already be doing them. Still, a little surfing at the end of August? Dancing? Vacation on a plane? Driving? In the meantime, I still take myself for walkies every day; no more walker, except on really long walks. Stretching is difficult; my hip holes make it so I can't do the same stretches I've done for years. The doctor told me I could invent some new ones, rather than possible overdo it in physical therapy. I think mine will involve stretching to reach the bowl of m&ms and pretzels on the side table. 30 reps, each side.
Ok, the back: It wasn't so much my disk pressing on the sciatic nerve root as it was the vertabrae. They have been yanked apart to give the nerves room and poof! pain is gone. And I am supposedly taller, but that's as yet unverified. The graft site hurts like hell--while bone doesn't supposedly have many nerves, something sure does feel pain. I've noticed that if I just lay around on the couch and don't do anything, I don't need pain meds anymore (except the morphine that is a replacement for my daily required methadone). When I do my doc-recommended walking, it makes me need pills. I need to look into this. Which is better, at this point? Oh--re: Harry Potter. If you haven't finished it yet, keep reading--he gets less whiny. Just like an angry teen, no? Give them a solid 600-pages worth of attention and they lighten up. Why didn't I get to go to this tradeshow? Why did anyone think that grumpy old Incredible Hulk should shill for candy companies? Why can't my doctor paint little sexy dancers on the pins that will be inside the little cage in my back? Then I could be thinking about my Gogo Disk Party instead of my Surgery. Why is the new Harry Potter not coming out until after my surgery, when I could really use a nice long, absorbing, mentally lightweight book to read between now and then? Why are you still faintly shocked that I can read so quickly? Why haven't you eaten at Bambuza yet?
Sweetie has an acquaintance that wanted to work at the downtown library, and she was never hired. He commented that this did not speak well of her, as apparently anyone can get a job there. While there are a few wonderful souls who love books and are kind, smart people, the majority are a whacko bunch who clearly need jobs with no contact with the public. I suggested that perhaps this person wasn't crazy enough to be hired. Anyway, folks, just use the website. Wanna git married? These are funny. I like the free tickets to Charo's show the best, but...a ceremony performed by the Grim Reaper? Liberace impersonator? A creepy old miner? The Bond wedding is pretty appealing--I'm all about dancing girls at a wedding. Although the $40 fee for the air-brushed glory of the drive-thru chapel is hard to beat. I like that they describe it as "unique, yet romantic", like generally those adjectives are incompatible. Plus, it's where Stone Cold Steve Austin got hitched. Wonder if he liked the unique part or the romantic part?
I eat out a lot and get paid for it, and review a lot of trendy diet books and get paid for that, too. Every night, I see people cramming their faces with liquid bread (aka "beer") that used to be an important part of peasant meals--it gave them the carbs they needed to walk everywhere they went (always barefoot, always uphill) and toil for their masters and whatnot. I see people eating and drinking at one meal, enough meat and milk and bread to equal several days of basic caloric need. I see people super-sizing their order of espresso--of all formerly dainty items. Are we such babies we must start our days with a giant bottle of warm, sweet milk? Now that Lay's has a line of hippy snacks, "all natural" means "only unknown bottled flavors sourced from condensed non-manmade materials were added. Plus the bag is all smooth and faded looking."
Meanwhile, of course, diet books are routine top sellers in the non-fiction market. Having read stacks of them without any intention to lose weight, I see that they all really say the same thing: Eat More Goddamn Vegetables! For a while there was an ad campaign that told us to eat five servings per day. That number isn't actually the ideal number--that is the lowest starting point that the USDA people thought wouldn't seem too scary. A better number is more like eight. That's one piece of fruit (obviously, adjusted when you're talking about watermelon and pineapple and such.), one 8-oz glass of whole juice, or one cup of cooked vegetable matter. (Cooked cup translates to ~1.5-2 cups raw). If you drink a glass each of vegetable and fruit juice, eat two different types of fruit (a banana and a peach. an apple and a cantelope. a plum and a mango.), a two-cup salad, a cup of greens and a cup of brocoli every damn day, then you can eat whatever else you need to fill you up--ice cream, fried chicken, biscuits and gravy, beer.
Putative is currently living by the rules of Dr. Atkins, minus a small piece of lemon chess pie and other possible birthday indiscretions. I threw a fair amount of disgust his way about it, before he saw fit to kill my alter ego with a death attack. (Note: be nice to DM. Pie is not enough.) He wanted to know why I was so rant-y. Well. Following a set of rules that you can only tolerate for short amounts of time is silly. Tracking what's ok and what's not--assigning feelings of guilt/anger/frustation to food--takes the pleasure out of eating; connecting unpleasant feelings and food is not a good foundation for dietary health. People who turn to precisely pre-formulated diets presumedly already have some of these feelings about food. Lists of "good" and "bad" food just reinforce these, adding a messed-up layer of morality that food simply shouldn't be connected with. These falsely constructed moral issues allow us to be distracted from the real moral issues that currently surround food-related industries. Let's eat faltering species of fish, because we don't feel guilt about them they way we do about beakless chickens. Let's buy organic imports from multinationals while local farmers go under. Let's accept that responsibility for protection from harmful bacteria has been thrown onto the consumer, rather than the processor. If attention is paid to these, and food buying decisions based around your ethics concerning agri-business, you end up healthier by default--even if you're buying a lot of locally processed, organically fed bacon, and eating it with gravy and biscuits. The second part was about tension. Just this: 10 days from this moment, I'll be in recovery from a ~five hour surgery. I'm a little tense. |