Update – the good, the bad, and the indescribable

August has been quite a month.

My son, Lunatic Writer, had what appeared to be another heart attack. He’s only 42, but unless I’ve lost count, this is his fourth. He had a triple bypass after the first. Doctors found two blocked coronary arteries; they put a stent in one, but after four hours of work they decided it wasn’t possible at present to do anything about the other. He was placed on Plavix with a warning that if he doesn’t take it he’ll die within two months. Fortunately I had some Plavix that my cardiologist prescribed, and my internist (after a telephone argument with the cardiologist) unprescribed. I got it off to him.

If the blockage isn’t clear in six months they’re going to do another bypass, but they don’t want to if it is avoidable, because it will use the last possible bypass vein and he might need it more later. He doesn’t have as many as most people do because of a bone-deep friction burn from when he was hit by a car while using a payphone at a 7-Eleven.

Freaky Angel’s careful, heart-smart, cooking has gotten him to a perfect lipid profile except for a too-low LDL. This is a family trait, I’m sorry to say.

My mother-in-law died. This was surely a relief to her; she has been in a state of advanced dementia for several years, and this saved her the ignominy of having to be transferred to an Alzheimer’s center. Now she can think again, and see clearly what she wasn’t able to see before–that her family really does love her.

Lunatic (the above-mentioned son) and his Angel suddenly  became in a very large hurry to get married. I helped all I could, and so did my daughters and my husband. They were married Sunday, and I was able to hear part of the ceremony–especially Lunatic Writer’s wedding vows–on the phone. I am extremely delighted with my new daughter-in-law, and I wish them a happy eternal marriage. Freaky Angel’s pragmatism is quite attractive, and somewhat matches Izzybella’s. She has the same likes and dislikes of most of the rest of the family. This time he’s made a wise choice–like all of us, Angel has her flaws, but not loving her husband is not among them. She is far and away the most interesting of all the females he’s ever been temporarily attached to, and she’s definitely much smarter. I wish we could help her find her stolen children.

My weight is now down to 168–only 7 pounds over what I weighed when I went into the hospital to give birth to Lunatic Writer. I left weight 104–the only time in my adult life when I was underweight, except for just before my first wedding, when I was having whooping cough and vomiting everything I ate.

My garden does the best it can with my desultory watering, weeding, and feeding. I didn’t get any veggies except snow peas planted in the spring because of a cornea transplant after which I wasn’t allowed to dig or till. I have another transplant coming up in September or October, so anything that doesn’t get into the ground now doesn’t get there at all. But my two chinquapin trees won’t get here until October. I’ll have to dig their hole before I get the transplant. I guess I can kick the dirt back into the hole, or ask my visiting teacher to help with it. She keeps hunting things to help me with.

I have successfully created an obsession. I have in the past had a habit of leaving the dishes for two or three days before washing them all. I decided to consciously push myself to wash them immediately, hoping to create first a habit and then an obsession. After all, OCD can be useful in a lot of ways. Now every time a dish is put down I rush it to the dishwasher. When the dishwasher is full, I run it, and as soon as it finishes, I put the dishes away and put into it any dishes that got used while it was running. I even get up in the middle of the night to put away a load of dishes and put in whatever is new.

It’s past 0430 and I’m still up–severe muscle spasms in left leg and buttock. No fun at all. But now will go back to bed and read some more of the Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes book I’m on.

DON’T SUPPORT COP-KILLER ICE CREAM!

Ben & Jerry’s is about to come up with a library-related ice cream, and people are excited about it. I was too, until someone posted the following information:

Convicted Cop Killer Mumia Abu-Jamal.

At the recent National Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) conference, the delegation in attendance voted unanimously to begin a boycott of persons, products and companies associated with the supporting of convicted cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal.

In case you don’t know, he was convicted in the 1981 killing of Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner under overwhelming evidence.  The act was an especially brutal and sadistic murder that still haunts the family, friends and coworkers of Officer Faulkner.  The New York Shields presented Officer Faulkner’s family with a Medal of Valor at their 1999 Police Memorial Breakfast.

Convict Abu-Jamal has written a book, “Live from Death Row,” and attempted to place himself in a celebrity status as a result of his criminal behavior.  Others have supported his pathetic attempt to gain stardom and freedom, all the while spitting in the face of Officer Faulkner, his family and every single law enforcement officer in the United States.

The F. O. P. has announced the formal boycotting of the following:

1. Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream Products (donators to a defense fund for the killer).

2. Actor Paul Newman and his products (an outspoken supporter of the killer).

3. Actress Susan Sarandon (supporter of this convicted killer).

4. Filmmakers Spike Lee, Oliver Stone and John Landis (supporters of the killer).

5. Writers Norman Mailer and Joyce Carol Oates (supporters of the killer).

6. Super-model Naomi Campbell (supporter of the killer).

7. Musicians: Sting, David Byrne and Michael Stipe of REM, (supporters of the killer).

8. The Backstreet Boys who are performing “free” benefit concerts for the killer’s defense fund. One of their “benefit concerts” scheduled for Baltimore, Md. had to be canceled when Baltimore police officers refused to work the overtime shifts for security at the concert.

As you may not know, a tape recorded statement made by this heinous convicted killer, was played at the graduation commencement ceremony of EVERGREEN STATE COLLEGE IN WASHINGTON STATE in June 1999.  This resulted in over 800 graduates walking out and another two dozen turning their backs during the killer’s three minute diatribe of hate.

The F.O.P.’s position is getting widespread coverage in the media, as well it should.  The members of the New York Shields stand with our fellow brothers across this country in strongly supporting this boycott and honoring the memory of Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner.  We urge you to participate in this boycott and request that you pass this e-mail on to your coworkers, partners, family and friends.  We must stand together against this brutal murderer.

Please do your part and pass this important message along to your friends.  Call your local grocer and tell them about Ben & Jerry’s support of a cop killer.

http://www.guazabara.com/Convicted_Cop_Killer.htm

I have no idea WHY and on what basis these individuals and companies are supporting a cop-killer, as there seems to be no possible doubt of his guilt.

Who Are We?

After both of us being in Who’s Who in America in 2009–one of only two couples in Utah so honored–we were today informed that in 2010 we’ll both me there again and also in Who’s Who in the World. So if you ever wonder who we are . . . Wingate-Firms.com will tell all about it when we do our next update later this week.

Now if I could just breathe . . . I’d be very happy.

New Health Blog I Found

T and I have spent a lot of money on health and medical newsletters that have turned out to be 20% fact and 80% advertisement. This blog has everything they have and doesn’t cost anything. healthyfellow.com Since we have let our subscriptions on them run out, I was glad to find this. Foi, it has some stuff in it that will be particularly applicable to you as a vegan. Its link is with the other links.

I’m going to post two Rodale book reviews in the next few days, so keep an eye out for them.

New Medical site

Certain of my offspring–you know who you are–have a tendency to call me as well as, or instead of, the doctor. You are always welcome to call me as well as, but call the doctor first if it’s an emergency. I came across a new medical information site that provides information for people faced with medical problems. It’s natmedtalk.com , and I’ve put it in my links so you can remember where it is if you want to use it. That doesn’t mean you can’t call me too!

My apricot tree is blooming right in front of my window, but dammit, it’s SNOWING again. I just hope it doesn’t kill the blossoms, but I don’t THINK it’s going to get that cold. Nuts. I just checked the weather forecast. 26 degrees Thursday night. That just might do it. Whoever wrote “Popcorn Poppin’ on the Apricot Tree” must have had a different kind of apricot tree from mine, because mine is pink.

The snow is falling straight down. The windmill says there isn’t a drop of wind but last time there was it was coming from the southwest.

Online it says stevia seeds are very difficult to start. Mine came up under a week after planting (indoors under lights). Admittedly only three of twelve seeds are up yet, but I’m giving them time. One Shasta daisy is up and two hollyhocks are sprouting. One Siletz tomato seed seems to be about to sprout. I was worried about them because the seeds are three years old, but they’re the earliest large tomato and they’re indeterminate. Alaska tomatoes are earliest of all, but they’re small and determinate. If the Siletz plants do okay I’ll have tomatoes near the end of June, which is good for Utah.

I WEIGH 188 THIS MORNING!!!!! Sorry, Foi, I should not flaunt such an accomplishment when your insurance company is flouting your ambitions in the same direction in such a disrespectful and obnoxious manner. But you’ll probably have tomatoes in May. Enjoy them. Enjoy a lot of them. They’re about as low-calorie a food as you can get, besides being delicious.

Bulbs are popping up all over but none of mine are blooming yet. It’s been a late, cold, winter. The ophthmologist has finally given me the go-ahead to work in the garden provided I do no heavy lifting, and then the weather goes and behaves in this scurvy maner. Last week, when the weather was gorgeous, I couldn’t garden without a risk of dislodging my cornea transplant.

And there are at least SIX elm popups I must go and cut down before they grow six feet long. This is the time of year they grow a foot a day, and I HATE them. I never thought Linden Guice’s granddaughter would say that about any tree, but really, they’d take over the universe if given half a chance. And it’s never just ONE stalk. It’s always at least three and more often five. Some of them have been cut down, mowed, poisoned, and otherwise attacked and they just keep coming back. I can’t poison one batch which I have been cutting down and/or mowing for five years, because it’s right in the middle of my garden area and I don’t like using toxins where I grow food.

AND I need to rake the rotten apples over into the compost. I can’t use the wheelbarrow because T gave it away, but that would be “heavy  lifting” anyway. I can’t even compost the elm twigs. They’d sprout in the compost. I can’t feed them to the worms because they’d probably make the worms sick. I can’t feed the apples to the worms because I have only 250 worms. I would like some red worms for Mother’s  Day this year instead of flowers, please. I’m serious. You can find them at eBay.

I’m reading all sixteen volumes of the Richard Francis Burton translation of The Book of a Thousand Nights and One Night, usually condensed and bowlderized into the children’s book The Arabian Nights. Trust me, for this book bowlderization is necessary before you hand it to the kids. Anyhow, after I finish reading it I’ll go reread Lasagna Gardening and then write a review.

The across-the-fence neighbor–we don’t socialize much because he speaks about 200 words of English and I speak about 200 words of Spanish–has bought his kids a trampoline which is too close to my back fence for me to feel his kids are safe. I don’t want one of them to come down straddle of, or headfirst on, the fence. I hope he moves it more toward the center of the yard when the weather warms up. In the meantime I’m thinking what I can plant to totally block that back fence. Grapes, maybe? Then they and we could share the fruit. Or maybe climbing nasturtiums for the summer? The nasturtiums would go away and the grapes would be permanent, but the grapes cost a lot more. Ah, I dunno. I don’t mind seeing and hearing kids playing, but anything I glimpse out of the corner of my eye when I’m working is distracting.

I don’t think I’m through with this entry but I also don’t have anything else to say right now, so I’ll post and come back later.

I haven’t forgotten . . . .

I haven’t forgotten I’m writing a book review about lasagna gardening. I just haven’t done it yet. Tomorrow I’m getting a cataract removed and a cornea transplant. I’m not especially worried about the cataract, but there’s about a 20% chance of a cornea transplant causing trouble, possibly months down the line. Anyhow I’ve been running all over the house catching up on laundry, water distilling, dishwashing, and so forth. Today’s the first day since my bypass surgery that I was able to make my bed myself–now I’ll have to depend on other people for that again for a while.

My son has a new blog here–Lunaticwriter.  Actually he’s not a lunatic. Like most of the rest of the family, he’s crazy all the time, not just when the moon is full. But he’s a good writer and very entertaining. He’s also a very sick man. His lungs and heart are both functioning at about 50% capacity, and he has no job (not that he could do one if he had it) and no medical insurance. He’s seeing a doctor tomorrow to try to figure out what can be done. He needs oxygen a lot more than I do, but I’m sitting here with an oxygen cannula attached to my nose and he doesn’t have one.

My seeds from Burpee finally came today. I would have gone outside and planted T’s snow peas, but after doing four loads of laundry and three loads of dishes and unmaking and remaking my bed I didn’t have the energy. Also I barfed all day. This is very common after gastric bypass.

I’ll be planting a lot of biennials and perennials in the front yard. I’m tired of being the neighborhood outlaw for what our yard looks like. I THINK one of our neighbors sneaked in when we weren’t looking and put grass seed and fertilizer on the yard, because I have grass where I didn’t have grass last year.

It’s eleven PM and I’m NPO (that means nothing by mouth) at midnight, so I’m going to go drink as much water as I reasonably can in the next hour. I’m to be at the hospital at eleven AM, and I probably will be too dry to talk by then. I hope they start an IV in a hurry.

So the garden book lady bids you farewell and goes back, without much regret, to the Richard Francis Burton translation of The Book of a Thousand Nights and One Night, which you probably know as Arabian Nights and probably haven’t read all 12 or so volumes of. The unabridged version is much easier to follow, but Burton definitely had a tin ear when it came to poetry, a quality his namesake the actor did not share.

I told T he has to read poetry to me in the recovery room. He’s tentatively decided to read me the beginning of Paradise Lost. As Patrick would say, ooo-KAY.

I am opinionated, Part 2

I have decided that the Book of Esther was written by a lawyer. Read it, looking for synonyms for ‘kill,’ and you’ll quickly figure out why I said that.

I long since decided that Paul, author of over half the New Testament, was blind by the time he was in his thirties. Whatever caused the blindness was apparently painful, which is probably one of the reasons Luke, a physician, traveled with him so often. The other reason probably was that nobody else could get along with him for longer than about two weeks–his quarrels with Peter are notorious, and even Timothy had to have a break from him at times. I don’t know whether “I told him to his face” originated in the letters of Paul, but it’s definitely there, in reference to an argument with Peter.

I am very very tired of snow. It is snowing again. I have to go up to the Moran Eye Center tmrw, which is above the University Hospital, which is above the Upper Campus at the U, which is above the Lower Campus at the U, which I couldn’t get my car to when I was teaching there and had a car. Hey, weatherman, it’s MARCH. Enough with the snow in the Valley, okay? It’s fine to snow in the mountains, but the Valley is tired of it.

Tomorrow or the next day I’m going to write a real review of LASAGNA GARDENING. I found out that I hadn’t given it away when I thought I wouldn’t ever be able to garden again and gave away so many of my gardening books, most of which I want back but haven’t the nerve to ask for them.

My sacroiliac hates me. The feeling is mutual. My doctor says “lose weight” when I mention it, but I’ve lost 30 pounds already, and my mother was never overweight but had sacroiliac trouble all her life. She was often told that she “walked funny.” I walk the same way she did.

Now I’m going to go away and lose myself in the Book of Esther. The Garden Book Lady will be back tomorrow or the next day, or whenever.

Uhhh . . .

I just came across a new site that looks interesting though sadly misspelled–http://www.moneytrooper.com. I’m going to check it out for a few days and see what happens, and let you know. There are so many good things online, and so many frauds, that it’s hard to tell which is which until you’ve tried it out. So I’ll do the trying out for you and let you know. Amazon Mechanical Turk, for example, is working well for me but might not for somebody else.

Other than that, not much is happening. After a rather refreshing discussion (to quote Amelia Peabody), I ordered my garden seeds and plants yesterday. If I don’t use them T will NEVER let me try to garden again, so I better make a decent small garden this year. I’m supposed to plant peas on March 17, but did not order pea seeds. Neither of us really likes them that much. I’ve got some for snow peas but they’re several years old, so I don’t know if they’re still good or not. If it’s not raining or snowing that day I’ll go stick them in the ground. It can’t do any harm.

The garden book lady is going away again. TTYL—

Other than that

I can reach things!

I now weigh less than I have in the last twenty years. If I don’t get those clothes out of the garage and go through them, I’ll have shrunk out of them before I can wear them once.

AND–I can now reach the clothes that lodge at the very back of the washing machine without having to get the Grabbit.

Hamilton Books has sent us a catalog of cookbooks. I’m going through it looking for recipes for post-weight loss surgery, but haven’t found any yet. I’ve marked a couple of books about tofu cooking, because I like tofu but don’t know how to cook it, and our neighborhood Chinese restaurant has moved. We don’t know yet whether it still delivers here or not; its flyer said “limited delivery area.”

A kind neighbor assembled my rowing machine, so I’m starting out ten minutes at a time. I hope to work up, within a couple of months, to thirty minutes a day, and then start increasing the resistance. In early May I hope to have another sleepover at the sleep specialist, and then I should be able to send the oxygen collector away. It heats my room 10 degrees, and a room on the southwest corner of the house doesn’t need extra heating in the summer. AND T turns off the swamper when he goes to bed, no matter how warm it is in my room. He says the swamper needs to rest. Undoubtedly, but so do I.

The Burpee catalog is still beside my computer. I’m looking now at snapdragons. The double supreme mix is gorgeous but I should have already started it indoors and I haven’t even ordered it yet. By the time I could get it ready to set out, it would already be too hot for it. Nuts. Maybe I’ll find some as plants. Sunflowers. The breeders have actually produced a GREEN sunflower! When I think of sunflowers I think of something like Kong or Super Snack Mix. But I doubt I’d bother with getting the seeds off and shelling them to eat–I’d be more likely to cut the whole heads off and leave the heads under the spruce tree for the birds. Birds enjoy sunflower seeds very much, and we enjoy watching the birds.

Green zinnias. Purple zinnias. Cactus-flower zinnias. Globe-flower zinnias. And etcetera. Maybe some zinnias would be nice. I’d like to have enough flowers that I could have cut flowers in the house the year round, though of course that’s out of the question in winter unless we managed to acquire a greenhouse, for which I am not holding my breath.

Oh well. I have nothing to complain about. T has even consented to let my rowing machine live in the living room, as it will not fit under either computer table, which was the original plan. He demands only that I be seen using it at least once a day. That is not unreasonable. It has really smooth action. I could have gone longer than 10 minutes today, but I don’t want to push my luck and not be able to use it at all tmrw.

Becky and Spencer are coming over tmrw, along with Ally and Owen of course. Ally has acquired the nickname of “Cat.”  She drew a cat on T’s birthday card as her signature. A two-year-old’s drawing of a cat is not easily recognized as a cat, but after I was told what it was I could see that it had a cat-shaped head and a couple of front paws. Its back paws and tail seemed to be missing, but that’s forgiveable in a two-year-old.

I’m off to return to reading Madeleine L’Engle. I just got through reading one of her books and was perfectly furious because in the paperback copy I have of it, all the theology was cut out, and it needs to be there for the book to make sense. The drawings illustrating folding space in a tesseract also were not in the paperback copy. I’m finding this second book to be just as bowlderized in paperback as the first was. I wish I had every one of her books, but most of them are so hard to find, and they don’t turn up on Kindle.

TTYL–