Life as a Spectator Sport

I decided to spend my day doing things I like to do, so for starters, I roasted about ten ounces of coffee, all the green beans I had left. I was out of roasted coffee, and I am not a nice person if I don't have my morning brew.

If you're going to roast coffee inside, at least with the primitive equipment I do it with, the first job is to cover up the smoke detector(s). Roasting coffee creates an unbelievable amount of black smoke. I almost always manage to set them off anyway, though I got lucky this time.

When I first began roasting coffee, I used a cast iron frying pan with a spatter screen on top to keep the beans from flying all over the kitchen as they pop. Shelley gave me a manual corn popper for Christmas last year, so that's what I roast in now. I didn't get this batch as dark as usual, but it will be good anyway. After roasting, I let them cool a bit and then toss them back and forth between two wire mesh strainers, preferably outside in a breeze, to let the wind carry the burnt skins away. If that isn't possible, I just bang the strainer against the inside of the kitchen trash can after each pass, to knock the skins off the wire mesh. Then the coffee sits overnight to finish cooling and to let off any gases that may be present (carbon dioxide, mostly). In the morning, I'll grind enough for my coffee and I'll be a human being again for a while.

Among coffee's other virtues, it reputedly helps stave off Type II diabetes. My blood sugar on the day of my little incident in Wytheville was on the low end of normal, and that was not long after I'd eaten breakfast, so I guess I'm not at great risk for diabetes either.

We have acquired a new kitten, a female tortie that Mike found wandering near the dump. It is the most calm and easy-going kitten I have ever seen, scrawny as all get out, but quiet and sweet-tempered. The vet said he thought it was about 12 weeks old, going by its teeth, but it's hardly any bigger than a well-fed kitten half that age. I had no desire to have a kitten, not in the least, but Shelley has more or less adopted Rippy, and she was concerned that her cat, Chloe, was being left alone for long periods with no company, since Clarence has to go with me now. I half-heartedly agreed that I would think about a kitten, and of course, the next thing I knew, Shelley was calling to say she had one for me. Mike named it Neko, which he says is Japanese for cat. I'll post a picture when I have a chance to take one.

Saturday, August 26, 2006

What next!

I spent an hour this evening doling Clarence's medications out into his new multi-compartment pill tray, and then a couple more hours trolling the web looking for pictures of allopurinol, a gout medication, and furosemide, otherwise known as the widely prescribed diuretic, Lasix.

The reason for my search is that in going back over Clarence's pills to make sure I had gotten everything in the right compartments, I realized there were two identical aspirin-sized white pills in the morning compartment of each day, and there should not have been. There is nothing he takes two of at one time. I lifted out everything but those two: Plavix, metoprolol, clonidine, imdur, potassium, colchicine, lipitor, lotrel, aspirin, a whole pharmacy. That left the allopurinol and the furosemide. Certain I must have made some mistake, I got the two vials back out of his top dresser drawer and opened them to see which one I had duplicated. The pills in them both were identical. One label said allopurinol, the other said furosemide, but the contents of the vials were the same.

So I spent the next couple of hours trying to figure out which of them was in the wrong bottle. Unfortunately, none of the images I could find on the net exactly matched what I had in the two bottles. So I still don't know, which means he can't take it, whatever it is, until Monday. The pharmacy we use is a locally-owned small drugstore that is closed on Sundays. But on Monday morning I will go back to the pharmacy and inquire sweetly, "Could someone tell me which of these is allopurinol and which is furosemide?"

The allopurinol was a new medication and that vial had not been opened before tonight, so there is no possibility that I mixed them up. The drugstore screwed up. I've read horror stories of similar things happening to other people, but had never run into it myself.

What next!

Saturday, August 19, 2006

The Horrible Summer

I think that's what I'm going to call the last three months. We seem to be coming out of it finally. Clarence is home from two weeks in the hospital and almost four weeks in a nursing home for "rehabilitation." Every time he leaves the hospital, he is less able to manage things for himself, and whatever rehab he got in the nursing home didn't help him get back to where he was before the hospitalization. He can no longer walk even from the bedroom to the bathroom without assistance, nor take his medications by himself. And he came home with two huge bags of meds, twenty-one different things in all. I think he was grossly over-medicated in the nursing home, but there isn't much I can do until his own doctor can see him again. With that many different meds, administered at different times during the day, it's hard enough for me to keep up with them. So Clarence is going to have to go with me whenever I'm away from home from now on unless I have someone else here to stay with him. That was just what I needed.

On a happier note, I did finally get my car, photo below. It took an entire day in the dealer's showroom, with Clarence--just retrieved from the nursing home--having to be wheeled down a steep hill outside and in through one of the service bays to the lower level restrooms every time he wanted to use the bathroom. And of course it took the usual round of haggling with the salesman and the sales manager. They insist that they have almost no markup on the Yaris and wouldn't budge from the sticker price, but I did get a couple of concessions, including moving my satellite radio antenna and power cord from the Daewoo to the new car, so I don't have to take the Yaris to a car audio place and pay through the nose to get it done. Then they wrote up the contract with everything under the sun financed on it. Extended warranty, sales tax, license and registration--you name it, anything they could include was in there. I spent the last ten minutes telling them to "Take that off and see how much the payment comes down" and managed to trim $50 a month off. Why on earth would anyone finance their sales tax? It made a $25 dollar difference in the monthly payment just to pay that up front. I'd have paid that sales tax five times over in interest if I had let them keep it in the financed amount.

But I finally drove out with the car, and I love it. We went up the mountain to do an inspection after we left the dealership, a good test for the car on a steep winding road, and it handled wonderfully. The Yaris has a long wheelbase for its overall length, and it took those curves and switchbacks without any trouble at all. I was also concerned about whether it had enough engine reserve to handle cruise control in fifth gear, but it did just fine. Once I was back down the mountain, I engaged the cruise control and never had to shift at all until I slowed down for my driveway. Now I have to find someone to go over to the dealership with me and drive the poor old Daewoo back, since I'm keeping it. I'll eventually fix the many little things that are wrong with it, and it will be an adequate car for Kate when she is able to move down here.


And now I need to drive the truck to the dump with its two month load of garbage bags before they close at noon. Clarence can't go with me for that, because he can't get up into the truck, so I hope I'm not going to come home to find him on the floor again.

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

I SAID I needed a vacation!

I've had numerous episodes of chest and arm pain lately, and much shortness of breath. These are not good symptoms for an overweight person to be having. And considering that Kate was just hospitalized for atrial fibrillation after experiencing nearly identical symptoms, I figured I was probably headed in that direction myself. So when I woke up feeling rotten today--short of breath, a dull throbbing pain in my chest and one arm--I just wanted to get through the day and head home. Tomorrow, I promised myself, I would go to the doctor.

I made it as far as the rest area on I-81 south of Wytheville. By then I was dizzy, light-headed, hardly able to get a good breath, my chest was tight and my lips were tingling. I pulled over, called 911, dosed myself with a couple of extra-strength aspirin and enough tincture of capsicum to restart a stopped heart, and waited to be hauled off to the hospital. By the time rescue arrive, the combination of capsicum and aspirin had gone a long way toward making me feel better, but I was still short of breath.

Three hours later, after the usual routine of EKG, X-rays, multiple vials of drawn blood and various people poking and prodding, I was told I'd had a panic attack and that nothing was wrong with me. "I don't have panic attacks," I said, rather coldly, I'm afraid. "I'm the one who stays calm and holds things together when everyone else is freaking out."

The nice young physician's assistant claimed that anyone could have a panic attack, even if it had never occurred before, if there was sufficient stress. So I suppose I've had sufficient stress. I'm rather embarrassed about the whole thing, but glad to know there really was nothing wrong with me. "Your EKG looked like a 20-year-old," he said, "your cardiac enzymes are right where they ought to be and there was absolutely nothing abnormal on the x-ray. You're healthy as an ox. You're just trying to manage too much at one time right now."

So I've had an expensive but informative day. If it really is all in my mind, I can deal with that. After all, there is hardly anything more reassuring than to be told your EKG looks like a 20-year-old's. And this little episode should surely be enough to justify a real vacation. I told Clarence that even if I had to pay Patricia to move in there for a week, I was going to get in the car and leave all of this behind me for at least that long.

That is, of course, if my new car ever turns up. It was supposed to be on the dock in New York on the 10th, at the dealer on the 12th, and ready for me to pick up yesterday, the 14th. It hasn't even made it to the dealer's lot yet, so who knows what is going on. I have to turn the rental car in tomorrow, and I'm not looking forward to driving the Daewoo any more than I have to.

I think it's time for a long hot bath and some of the "Tired Old Ass" bath salts that Kate gave me for my birthday.

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