April Fool is a day late. I started to put ice in the Mini-Mate — what? I used a tray of ice and didn't refill it?
The frost-free feature of the little freezer had had plenty of time to work on the ice. With six trays, there was enough ice for the soda, plus enough to conceal the bottom of the ice bin.
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And now the Mini-Mate is back in the fridge, to be iced up again before we go to Fort Wayne in the morning.
Dr. Bolduin took out Dave's catheter and didn't put in another. So far, it looks as though we *won't* have to go to the emergency room, and will next see the doctor in July. But the six hours to be sure aren't up yet.
I hope the staple removal goes as well.
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When spell checking the March (aka "Marcy") issue, I was amused that Thunderbird suggested "blarney" as a correction for "kilarney", but when this was followed by a suggestion that "hypothyroid" was a suitable correction for "levothyroxin", I was downright spooked.
"Killarney" isn't in Thunderbird's dictionary either. The correction is still "blarney".
I woke up at five this morning and reflected that that was the same time I woke up yesterday, but *this* time I'm going back to bed. I slept until six, went back to bed, and slept until half-past seven. I no longer recall waking up for my one-o'clock pill, but I checked at five and it was gone, as was some of the water in the bottle I take it with. (I take it with water from a bottle as a check on whether I took it with "plenty of water".)
A good night of sleep, starting about half-past ten. This surprised me, because I had a three-hour nap late in the day yesterday.
Before we were dressed, Dr. Crevecoeur's office called, which saved Dave the trouble of calling them. We re-scheduled yesterday's appointment for four o'clock this afternoon. Staples are out, use up the remaining Adaptic transparent dressing, then rely only on antibiotic cream three or four times a day, use up the prescription cream, then use one from this list — I think we already have tubes of all of them. See you again on the eighteenth.
I think the donor site is finally showing signs of healing. Dr. Crevecoeur warned us not to leave the Tegaderm on more than four days before changing it. (It had been leaking much more often than that.)
We got home just in time to share a Banquet "chicken-fried chicken" patty and an orange for supper. Dave intends to order wings for tomorrow evening.
As for yesterday, I'll deal with that tomorrow. Or, perhaps, leave it at "So far, it looks as though we *won't* have to go to the emergency room, . . ." was wrong.
Not about Wednesday, but about yesterday. In Fort Wayne we go in entrance three, punch the elevator for floor three, and get out right in front of plastic surgery.
A woman who rode up the elevator with us tried to direct us to urology. Dave wasn't wearing a hat, so the bloody mess on his head must not be as striking as we see it. Of course, it wasn't bloody any more, but the staples were conspicuous.
It looks ever so much better without them. I wondered how they clinched the staples; it appears that they don't, but just drive them straight in like fence staples.
For a while, the
[I should have typed a couple more words before shutting down for the night.]
Kathy and Dave dropped in yesterday evening, and we had a pleasant visit. They are in town for the eclipse, so won't be here long.
The weather today was glorious, and I rode my bike to Kohl Plaza, with stops at Bomy's food pantry, where I got rid of some stuff I'd bought by mistake, and Goodwill, where I dropped off a very ugly pair of pink garden pants and found a pair of beige striped linen-rayon pants of the length we used to call pedal pushers. They fit nicely, but I suspect that they'll be a bit warm come July.
A Web site that DuckDuckGo turned up says that pedal pushers are back in style, but are a few inches shorter — and must be worn with long sleeves, which looks very "the temperature suddenly dropped so I threw on another shirt" to me.
The site also informs me that everyone has a denim jacket in "their" wardrobe. Well, I do have a shirt made from tissue-weight indigo denim that I mistook for chambray, and it does open down the front.
I paged down to look at the styling suggestions. I ought not to have done that immediately after eating. The "shoes" were particularly vomit-inducing.
/diatribe
I stopped at Kroger on the way back because we were low on milk.
This lovely day for a ride interrupted a long string of cold, wet, and windy days. Weather Underground says that rain will resume tomorrow afternoon, let up on Monday and Tuesday, and resume as showers on Wednesday and Thursday. Well, it *is* April.
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My first stop in Kohl Plaza was a new store called Pop Shelf, where I found two items I'd been looking for for a long time, stick makeup and washing soda. The only checkout was self service AND IT DIDN'T CRASH! My super powers are waning.
I saw dandelions and violets on the way home from church, but there aren't any in our lawn yet.
I met a tourist on the Ninth-Street steps. She came for the eclipse and decided to take in the Village at Winona on the way.
Another lovely day, but it's overcast now, which bodes ill for tomorrow's eclipse.
There's a notch in the cloud-cover graph which just might be in the right place.
It's sharp shadows now (11:32), but the sky is hazy and spotted, particularly in the west.
I saw violets in the grass while hanging out a sheet and some other hot whites.
Evening:
We got a good look. The crescent moved around as it got thinner. At maximum, I would have needed to turn on a light in the sewing room to type, but it was still plenty light outside.
It wasn't quite over when I sat at the picnic table to sew outside for the first time this spring. I was about halfway through the job when something hit my knee. I looked down to see what it was:
AAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!
The patio is covered in cottonwood stickypods.
There are visible leaves on part of one of the cottonwoods, but there are a lot more stickypods up there. I think I was sitting outside during the entire fall; it just went "poof".
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I thought changing a sheet would be a quick chore, but I found a blood spot on the top layer of the mattress pad. Since a freshly-washed blanket goes on the bottom of the pile, nothing can go forward until it's out of the dryer.
I may finish mending one of the do-rags I wear under my helmet in hot weather today — if there's enough pale-yellow thread to thread the machine.
If I were in a hurry, I could hem it by hand.
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No work done on the do-rag, but I did dump some stuffing on Jeanie.
Dave and Jeanie are still in the throes of moving. I doubt that I cheered Dave up any by mentioning that we found the stuffing while cleaning up after our move, which was twenty years ago.
Today's paper says that the town is trying in vain to interest Aldi in opening a store in the old Marsh building. One of the officials said "It would make a lot of sense." A lot of sense for the town — I would love to have an Aldi on my side of SR 30 — but would it make sense for Aldi? I'm sure that it has not escaped Aldi's notice that a grocery went broke in that very building, and the near-by Kroger went broke after Marsh was no longer competition.
With all the developments on that side of town, ranging from trailer parks to ultra-posh lakeside mansions, it seems mysterious that a grocery store can't make a go of it.
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I was much interested, upon reading the rest of the minutes, to learn that the annoying stretch of CR 300 N between 150 W and Fox Farm is the only gravel road in the county.
Until I said "Wh-ait a minute! What about N 75 W?
I used Street View to confirm my memory, and it not only isn't paved, it hasn't any ditches.
Maybe it's technically a dirt road. (On Thursday, 25 April 2024, I learned that 100 W, north of Claypool, is also gravel.)
Recently, I moved all the 2023 Banners from /Pcw to /LETTERS/23BANN. I'm still disoriented; when I open DosBox to edit, I move the cursor into the second column and have to move back into the first.
Washed dishes, sorted the papers, have a stack of cardboard under weights to be bundled before we take the recycling out.
I've mislaid my garden knife again. I *think* it's somewhere in the house.
Grumble, gripe. Another example of information-free data: a page many screens long that ended "Now you know what a french fly is." No I don't, because the writer of the article didn't know. He, she, or it merely regurgitated a bunch of text without even checking for duplicates.
From various pages, I deduce that a french fly is a fly opening that closes over a button or snap that secures an adjustable internal belt.
I got into that search because I wanted to start a discussion of my Goodwill garden pants with "I don't see why the makers put a fly on the pants, but I do see why they didn't bother to put a zipper under it . . ." — I thought I could find a discussion of why flys are thought to be ornamental. Well, I knew I couldn't, but one can't say "that's impossible" to *everything*.
What I wondered at was the fake front pockets on the pants — continuing the pocket opening into a usable pocket would have been zero bother at most, and would cost only a very few square inches of fabric that were probably thrown out with the offcuts.
At which point in my ruminations I noticed that the ornamental button in the middle of the free edge of the pocket opening was wrapped with a tube of self fabric intended to make it look as though the pocket were buttoned closed.
The button flaps on the rear pockets, however, are quite real.
This morning, I tried and tried to turn on the sound to a video I was playing, and finally remembered that I'd unplugged the Linux speaker so I could plug in the iron.
Several weeks ago.
I got all out of breath screwing in a hook for the little skillet I bought last Saturday. It didn't help that I had to use a flashlight to see the mark for the hole I was drilling.
The fellow who was setting up a yard sale beside his antique shop said the little skillet was for frying one egg, but the deep sides make it quite impossible for that. (I do have a one-egg griddle.) I bought it for making onion sauce, which it does quite well.
I used olive oil instead of butter when trying out the skillet, and that also worked well. As did a bit of shoyu stirred in after I turned the fire off.
It's a simple recipe, if a tad tedious. Put butter into a skillet over the lowest-possible heat, chop enough onion to fill the skillet at least half an inch deep, stir until all the onion is greasy, cover, cook until brown, which will take at least an hour. Stir every five minutes or as intuition tells you.
I spent yesterday evening wondering why my hair adamantly refused to be pushed out of my face. This morning, I remembered that I washed my hair before yesterday's dental appointment — it had been so long since my previous shampoo that I was afraid that my hair might stink.
I hope I can remember all the stuff I was too busy to write about. (No emergency rooms were involved.)
I was reminded of "Manstealers" today, and that reminds me of how small things create large things. "Manstealers" was a response to a deservedly long-forgotten story that took place on a planet named "Theros". So I called my planet "Theralithia", discovered that there is a real-world mineral called "theralite", and thereby created a vast swath of the universe.
But there was no room for it in the story.
I understand authors who spoil their stories by trying to cram in all the neat features of the universe they have created: I want to shoehorn in the ranking system that explains some of the details in "Two Broken Toys", and the history that explains how it got that way. I don't think I've written that in the notes, so the world will never know.
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Dave is wrapping up his new radio to send it back. He ordered the more-expensive of two choices, and it turned out that it was the cheaper one that had the feature that he wanted.
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We went to Goshen this morning. No incidents. It rained furiously a couple of times, once going out and once coming back. Not as bad as that one trip back from Fort Wayne, but it was thinking about it.
Last week, we went to the dentist on Tuesday and Fort Wayne on Thursday. Dr. Crevecoeur is pleased with the graft, and thinks that we can stop putting Tegaderm on the donor site Real Soon Now. The area that is leaking is much smaller than it was, and the puddle under the Tegaderm isn't as red as it used to be.
I had a couple of culinary disappointments on my Saturday bicycle ride. I had a light breakfast so I could have an empanada at the Farmers and Artisans Winter Market. On my previous trip, they'd introduced a margarita empanada, and it exploded in the oven into a gooey mini-pizza. This time he had solved the exploding problem by lining a muffin cup with empanada dough, and it was much neater but not nearly as yummy. I'll have meat next time. Oops, that was the last Winter Market. But the empanada makers come to the ice-rink market.
At the Legion craft show, I bought a cup of stuffed-pepper soup. It smelled delightful, but the guy who put in the sugar thought he was making barbecue sauce. It was a very good recipe otherwise: heat hamburger, rice, and other pepper-stuffing ingredients in tomato sauce such as one would pour over a pepper and don't bake it down thick.
I took the soup to the library to eat it, and thought I would eat first and make a pit stop afterward. While I was eating, the library closed for the day. The courthouse closes on the weekend, and the public toilets in the parking lot were locked. But the CCAC was open. I turned around there and went home by way of two Mexican groceries and Kroger.
On the way to the Legion hall, I dumped some stuff at Mary Anne's Place, but didn't find any garden pants to buy, and had gotten off so late that I couldn't buy a doughnut at Asian Cajun, which is just as well, as neither of us should eat doughnuts.
But I bought two half-dozen cookies at the Winter Market (peanut butter and chocolate chip). Also bought peanuts in the shell at Carniceria San José. Another culinary disappointment: At El Padrino, I spotted what I thought was Mexican chocolate, but when I got home and read the label, it was palm oil that had been flavored with sugar and artificial strawberry essence, and colored with cocoa powder. The sugar and strawberry are subtle, and the cocoa undetectable. The package suggested melting it and dipping frozen fruit in it.
It's sheet-changing day. I never make a bed without thinking of Nancy telling me that one good yank is worth a dozen pats.
I've finally mastered the art of changing Tegaderm. This morning just might be the last time I put new Tegaderm on after taking the previous one off.
When I was getting into bed for my nap on Monday, I noticed that my laundry would be whipped to pieces if I left it on the line, so I took it in by the "Awk! It's starting to rain!" protocol. Yesterday, I put the sheet I left draped over a chair on the bed, and this morning I folded the stuff in the basket. It was thoroughly crumpled, but I *had* folded the pillowcase, the sweat rags were easy to shake out, and the wash rags don't hold a crease.
I'm delighted that the 10mg lisinopril tablets Dave picked up at Zales for me today are a different size, shape, and color from the previous batch, which means that after I've taken all of the current bottle, I can use up a bottle of 5mg tablets that are the same size, shape, and color as the current 10 mg batch.
The new tablets are also impossible to confuse with levothyroxin, which relieves a bit of anxiety.
A thirty-day supply barely covers the bottom of the bottle. A Q&A I came across while looking for something else said "Q: Why are pill bottles so big? A: To make room for the label."
Duh. I never thought of that.
Lisinopril is twenty cents a bottle. The "something else" I was looking for was the price of an empty bottle. One that looked a bit cheaper than the reversible-lid bottles Zales uses costs twenty-one cents. Some bottles were cheaper than fifteen cents, and I presume that Zales buys more than fifty at a time.
Because of the weather prediction, I did my Saturday ride today, which led me to think that Sunday was tomorrow half the evening — and I can't even say that I'm tired and stupid, because I've yet to notice that I skipped my nap.
But I feel signs that my pint of tea is wearing off.
My goal was to increase my range to twenty-five miles, and Google Maps says that I rode twenty-five miles even. And I plugged in only part of the forthing and backing I did in Claypool.
The only lunch place in town was closed, apparently for some unforeseen circumstance. (I carry food bars for just such an emergency.)
This is the first time in ages — probably since 2020 — that I've come home without having spent a cent. I did use Quicken, though, to record the twenty cents Dave spent on Lisinopril.
I was surprised by a sign saying "factory store" on Country Club Road . . .
And, upon checking the name of the road, I see that I made a mistake in entering my waypoints, which brings my total down to 24.8 miles. But I think I left out more than two-tenths of a mile of exploring Claypool.
Anyhow, when I saw that there was a retail store, I swerved into their parking lot, but it was three fifty-seven, the door said that they close at four, and the door was locked. I didn't take note of the name, but there's a "Seymour Midwest" in about the right place.
Since I didn't buy anything, I thought I didn't need to unload my panniers. This morning, I remembered that I'd put the contents of a tray of ice cubes into the insulated pannier. And the bag I'd put them in was empty; whether it was a leak or an improper seal, I threw it out.
Fawchunately, I line the bottom of the pannier with a thick layer of newspapers in case of just such an emergency.
This morning, I drove to Kroger and stocked up on frozen food. Just before I left, I got a text, showed it to Dave, and forgot to put the phone back into my pocket. It's amazing how insecure I feel when I have no clue as to what time it is.
It didn't help that Dave was expecting to need the car at two. I got home a little after one — we slept late.
And the prescription arrived some time during my nap, well after two.
Another culinary disappointment: Kroger appears to have discontinued the ginger beer I particularly like. But the three cans we have left should last for months.
I learned today that plain seltzer flavored with rhubarb tea tastes exactly as sour as undiluted rhubarb.
I noticed another flowering stem while raking mulch around the rhubarb, so I'm making more tea. I haven't picked any leaves yet, save what come with flower stems. There's not a lot of use for rhubarb when one shouldn't indulge in tons of sugar.
It seems to me that I used to pick rhubarb by pulling the leaves off. Trying that on this bush crushes the stem and doesn't loosen it.
The rhubarb bed is now mulched with some dyed-black wood chips that Brent discarded.
I hauled two wheelbarrows of the same mulch to the asparagus bed this morning, and another in the afternoon. It looks nice, but I think I should have held out for corncobs or duck mulch. But it will probably need mulching again before I get around to going some place where I can buy duck mulch.
Blessedly boring: we have appointments tomorrow and Thursday, both follow-ups, and only three appointments in the rest of May.
🚲
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