Nacho, Nacho Man!

Even with all that is going on and going wrong with me, I still manage to EAT well and cook up the odd feast here and there. This weekend I was in the mood for good broiled nachos so I made these:

While preparing my Passover Sedar I caught myself singing "Matzoh, Matzoh Man! I'd like to be a Matzoh Man!" to the tune of the old Macho Man song...and so of course that's what I was singing when I devoured these nachos.

Finger Puppet

Lately, I've come to the conclusion that if I went to the doctor and said I had a brain tumor and some athletes foot, he'd fix me right up with antifungal foot cream right away. Brain tumor? Let's take care of that natty little foot fungus first, shall we? Take two aspirin and call me next year and we'll look into that tumor thingee.

Although I had an MRI weeks ago, I have yet to find out the results (because the results were lost, or at least they never reached any of the clinics that needed a copy) and in the meantime I guess they want to keep me happy with little amusements.

Like this electronic finger puppet!

Now, this little gadget is supposed to measure how much oxygen I'm being deprived of in my sleep. I suspect it has a hidden agenda: to deprive me of sleep ENTIRELY. It has bright red lights and a flashing green and yellow light. VERY bright. So bright that I had to bury it under the pillow last night or I was afraid I'd get hypnotized like a chicken and slowly starve to death because I'd be unable to break the trance.

At least Mackie loved it. I wish I could have gotten a picture of him staring at it. He just could not figure out what those flashing Christmas lights were doing in our bed! He sniffed at it and stared at it and finally figured out that if he lay down on it, he could make the lights go away. So he tried to lay on the thing every chance he got.

I'm waiting for the lady to come and pick up this gadget and take it away. It was just a one night stand! Supposedly inside the meter is a recording device that will tell my neurologist the astounding and amazing fact that I don't sleep well.

The Secret Meaning of Hot Flashes

As I was marching across the tundra, mile after mile this morning, taking my garbage to the dumpster in the rain, I noticed that the rain was not actually penetrating the heat shield barrier around my body. The water was, in fact, sizzling into vapor the moment before it reached my actual flesh.

And this is when it dawned on me! In order to assure the survival of the species, Nature devised this amazing thing called Hot Flashes. Imagine generations of arboreal and mud-dawber clans dying out because they did not have any old women around to impart knowledge and demand accountability of the young. They did not have any old women around because as we know, most tribal cultures drive their elderly into the swamps or the snow once they are no longer of use to the clan and thus become a gaggle of useless mouths to feed.

And thus it became that our feminine DNA decided to morph itself into a midlife Heat Radiation Source, so that all the tribal peoples could gather round and get warm and stay dry in bad weather. Not only did this keep the People from freezing to death in the long winters, it insured that they were a captive audience for the storytelling, scolding and law enforcement of the Wise Old Crones of the Clan.

The fact that we have evolved away from being jungle creatures in igloos and yurts squatting over a toasty Matron in order to cook our strips of yak meat has not yet sunk into our DNA. And that is why we have millions of women wandering around emitting nuclear heat with no one to whom it might benefit.

I don't know about you, but if I can find a noble reason for the sudden 100° rise in body temperature resulting in the swamp sweats and brain fog of a hot flash, I can better put up with them. That's my theory and I'm sticking to it.

An Arboreal People

You know how you have that favorite item that just hangs in your closet because you are saving it for special? Actually, I have a few pieces like that. I wore one yesterday; my turquoise blue tee-shirt. I wore it with khaki capri's because it was a fine spring day: just right for that shade of blue.

I went to the Blood Source yesterday and gave blood, finally. Wearing that lovely blue shirt. Nobody told me I could end up with my favorit shirt looking like this:

Apparently the nurse had the cuff too tight and when he stuck the needle in my vein it sprayed out all over everything. I don't know because I had my eyes closed. I can't abide the sight of a needle penetrating my flesh so I can't look.

Nobody told me I could get all blood splattered from donating blood! It's just another one of those things I'm not so keen on doing, now that I know more about it.

Like when I found out that I didn't reallly want to belong to an arboreal people after all. I thought it meant living in one of these lovely conservatories:

Table Tale

I've always loved my South American Hardwood table ever since I bought it back in the Pleistocene Era. I've served many a dinner party, potluck, buffet and brunch on it's surface. I've used it for Christmas parties, Easter parties, and for Passover Seders. Entire quilts have been pinned on it, holiday cards have been mass-constructed on it, and more recently it has acted as a paperwork organizer as I wend my way through this medical miasma I am currently experiencing.

Last night I said goodbye to this old friend! I sold it to a lovely couple, just starting out, who were looking for good pieces to start their lives with. I told them I was so glad they were not dirtbags! They liked that.

How awful that floor looks! Of course it's not from lack of scrubbing. It's just old and stained and discolored and 'all woe out'. In the meantime, I've set up my little folding end table to act as a pretend table. It's not right but it's the way it has to be for now.

My cousin recently told me that she hated the old adage 'there is no use crying over spilled milk' because it seems to her that is EXACTLY the thing to be crying over. Whats' the use of crying over a glass that is sitting perfectly full on a safe table? Spilled milk must be cried over in buckets. All the regrets and and 'woulda-shoulda-coulda's' must be sobbed out in gallons and gallons of spilled milk.

And then you wipe up the mayhem and face forward again.

All I Need is a Cat and a Sink!

One of the things I've been doing lately is exploring dirtbag-cheap options for living while I wait for a decision on whether I am eligible for disability. This has entailed driving into the swamps and hollers of North and West Sacramento, navigating the teensy narrow twisty-turny lanes in old defunct trailer courts and even prying open rusty gates on razor-wired abandoned storage containers.

The old adage that 'if it's too good to be true, it probably is' applies in spades when you are chasing down the rumor of a neat free place to live. Good old Patrick's idea of a 'clean, easy, safe and reliable storage container at NO CHARGE' turned out to be a filthy, hard to access, boarded up and easily impregnated back end of an old semi that he's parked on an abandoned lot and surrounded with fences and razor wire.

Upon opening this trailer, I saw that it was half full of car batteries, all hooked up to store energy from a couple of solar panels on the roof. Patrick proudly switched on the solar-power-activator, and pulling a small light bulp out of his pocket, he inserted it into a socket on the outside of the trailer and Viola! Instant Light!

"Of course," he demured, "This won't power up a microwave oven or a hair dryer but you could have light!" I refrained from pointing out that it would be on the OUTSIDE of the trailer and therefore of absolutely no use whatsoever.

On the other side of the lot, tucked up under the trees, was an amazing old Airstream camper. I could see that Patrick had made his mark on it, as well. In the little living room area he had installed a big honkin' wood burning stove, effectively rendering the seating area null and void.

Patrick doesn't like to mess with the government so he rigged up the solar panels and 50 car batteries to avoid getting the necessary permits to just run electricity onto this property. And water? Who needs water? I asked him how he planned on managing the plumbing issues and he just figured he'd haul in a chemical toilet. Patrick's take on things is that he's 65 now and doesn't want to take on any more projects. I agree with his philosophy and by the same token I'm 50 now and don't want to live without a bath. Or even water so I could scrub the place up!

Shame on me for not taking my camera along because you'd have to see it to believe it. Patrick said his plan had been to run an extension cord across the lot so he could plug in a light in the Airstream using his fantastic Solar Energy Plant!

One of the other places I got wind of involved a small, 8x25 trailer that a woman was just GIVING away because she didn't want to mess with it. Of course after talking to her I realized there was more to it than that. She was behind several months in her lot rent and the management company wanted first and last deposits, etc; It was a cute trailer but I looked it over and saw that someone had taken a wrench to the faucet handles and removed them doing some serious thread stripping in the process. I'm handy but not so handy I can re-plumb an old trailer, so I had to pass on that opportunity.

But all this searching for a poverty dwelling has led me to think about what I want, and what I need. Electricity, running hot and cold water, someplace safe and non-leaking to rest my weary head, and somewhere Mackie will be happy and safe as well.

Roses in April

Well, there is nothing like spending 15 minutes of pissed-off frustration each time I want to log on and make a simple post, to sour me on the entire idea of blogging. Although I am fully signed up for the 'new blogger' and have done all that is necessary, I am still stopped at the dashboard and refused entry until I type in 47,000 times my weight in excess acidic remarks. Then it makes me log in under my old blogger identity and go from there. So why won't it let me do that to begin with? I dont know. I feel stuck in blogger/google-blogger purgatory.

And all I wanted was to show these incredible roses that I gleaned from an obliging bush out behind my apartment. That's all! Happy Easter and Happy Spring, y'all!