Please, Not the Emergency Room

The Tide stain remover pen was not up to the gore

 

So at 4:15 this morning, I'm sitting on the edge of the bathtub in Jerry's bathroom, typing in "How to Stop a Nosebleed" on my laptop, which is balanced on top of the laundry hamper.

Jerry's perched on the toilet, holding toilet paper to his nose.  There's blood all over the place. It could be only several teaspoonfuls, but a little blood goes a long way. 

"Do not tilt head back," I read.  "Lean forward and pinch nose where the bone meets the cartilage.  Breathe through your mouth."

He complies.

"Do this for 15 to 20 minutes," I went on.  "Do not stop to check."

He stops to check.

"It's still bleeding," he says.

I bring a clock into the bathroom.  After 20 minutes, he stops the pinching.  Still bleeding.  Another round of pinching, another check: Still bleeding, though not as heavily.  At the beginning of the third round, I say to hell with it  and call the Anthem Blue Cross advice nurse.

Could I please put Jerry on the phone so he can give permission for her to talk to me? she says.

"It's okay," he mumbles into the phone, through a wad of tissue.

The nurse asks me several questions and decides we should go to the ER. 

I report back to Jerry.

"No," he says.   "We'll have to wait forever."

By now it's 5:20 am.  I decide to call his doctor for a second opinion.   A colleague of hers calls back.  She says we need to go to the ER.

"It's a slow time right now," she adds helpfully.

"She says you have to go," I tell Jerry.

"It's a waste of time," he says.  But he stops pinching, stuffs  tissue into his nostril,  and gets dressed.

I  throw on some clothes,  coughing because I'm still sick.

He sits to put his socks on.  Then he checks.  The nosebleed has stopped.

"I don't need to go," he says firmly.

I throw his pajamas, bathroom rug, and assorted towels into the bathtub to soak.  Then I strip and re-make the bed, put on my jammies, and get into it--at 7 am,  exactly the time the sleep therapist says to get out.  I sleep until 11.

In the meantime, Jerry falls asleep sitting at his desk and somehow prints three pages of the same phrase.

By four this afternoon, The Consumptive (still coughing) and The Former  Bleeder managed to round up some much-needed groceries at Berkeley Bowl.

Post-its, Tabs, and Yellow Pads

 

This morning I scanned several young-mom blogs while I lolled in a chair trying to recover from a cold .

To my amazement, not only do some already have their Christmas trees at the curb, but many have gotten out fresh notebooks,  post-its, and blank calendars, and they're busy organizing their lives for the next year.  Which often involves color-coded tabs: "kids," "house," "school," "projects," "holidays."

I felt like I was gazing at them through a telescope.  I'm a long, long way away.

I used tabs, there'd only be two: Life (with lots of subcategories) and Death (no categories, just there as a reminder).

Yesterday I spent a few hours with my friend Ellen, who for health reasons is planning to move to the East Coast from a house she's lived in for 35 years. The young-moms would probably do their thing with tabs and notebooks.  We're operating with colored Post-its, a felt-tip pen, and whatever yellow pad I can grab before I head out the door.

A pink post-it means that Ellen's keeping whatever it is.  When we've finished with a cupboard, we slap a green post-it on the door, which means "All Goes,"--to the dump, a sale, whatever--it's outta here.  Purple is for items to go to her brother and his wife, and blue means gifts for friends.

I ran out of steam around 3:30, with a cold coming on and a hacking cough. I'm not allowed back in bed during the day unless I'm extremely sick, per sleep therapist, so now I'm sitting in my chair in the living room dozing and croaking orders at Jerry. 

And thinking.  I might add one more tab: YOLO, which I learned from NPR this morning means "You Only Live Once." Is it a subcategory of a Bucket List?   At this point, I can only think of tap-dancing lessons and going to Russia.  There may be more, though.



 

 

So Long, Christmas!

 

 

It's 364 days before we have to go through it all again!  Hurray!

 

Jerry and I take lots of walks this time of year. I feel pent-up in the house, what with my activities like the Pantry and pool exercise on hold during the holidays.  Jerry goes along, because he doesn't want to "set around the house all day" [stet].

 

A few days ago, we walked the perimeter of the UC Berkeley campus, starting at Oxford and Hearst, going up the hill past the Daily Cal office to Top Dog, where we had lunch. 

 

We continued up Hearst, past the steps Jerry remembers walking down when he first walked on to the campus as an entering junior  in 1953.   

 

Jerry took a photo of me (above) sitting where I did before my first class at Berkeley--on the steps of  International House in October 1970.  Mark Schorer lectured in the I-House auditorium.





 

Then we walked down Bancroft, past the University Art Museum, which opened during my first quarter at Berkeley.  From my eighth floor dorm window, I'd watched the festivities at its back entrance.

 

We cut across Lower Sproul Plaza and walked back along Oxford to the car.  A sentimental journey and some exercise. 

 

Today we took a walk around Lafayette Reservoir. I like to check up on the ornaments people leave on a particular tree each year:

 

 

 

 



Christmas Past

 

 

Merry, merry, c. 1956.  My sister, me, and Santa at the Emporium, San Jose.  Who came up with those hats for little girls?

 

 

 

Courtship (?), Millennials Style

 

 

 

Yesterday I had a plan to throw a few Christmas decorations around the house.  Leah said she'd come over to help.

But I hit a wall before she even arrived.  Couldn't face fishing things out of boxes in the basement, moving luggage out of the way to get at them. Not in the mood.

Last summer
 

So when she got here, Leah fixed herself a whiskey sour, I had plain water, and we got into a discussion on how today's young people get together in the romantic sense.  (She's 21.)   

Stage One:  Eye flirting, or "sticky eyes."  This could take place at a party, for example.  An attraction.

Second  Two: Talk 'n flirt.  Probably at same party.

Stage Three:  Weird talking/texting.  An awkward intermediate stage that could happen over days or weeks.   Will things proceed?

Stage Four:  Hanging out.  Sometimes you might make an arrangement to hang out; sometimes it just happens.

Stage Five:  Things are more than hanging out and just possibly a date.  Or not.  A very confusing stage moving toward more formalized getting-together.

Stage Six:  Dating.  Either party can initiate this.  It may imply monogamy, but not necessarily.

Stage Seven:  Boyfriend/girlfriend status.  A deliberate decision.  Big step.  This could go on for years.  Usually monogamous, but not always.

After I wrote this all down, I felt sorry for Leah and her group.

Me:  "This sounds awful!  Too many gray areas."

Leah:  "It is awful.  There's a big movement in my generation's culture to be really, really casual."

Me As Suspicious-Second-Wave-Feminist:  "I suppose this works to the guy's advantage, casual sex, etc."

Leah:  "Not always.  Sometimes girls use it.  They say they thought it was just a "hang-out" when a guy they're not really interested in thinks it's a date."

Are you glad you're old?


Leah helping to decorate my tree when she was nine





Getting A Grip on Guns

 

 

"Wanna to put on  a disguise and go to a gun store?" I asked my friend Leah yesterday morning.  She's home from college for the holidays.

"Are you crazy?" she said.   CRAZY as in all-caps.

"You could distract them, while I scope it out," I went on.  I was serious.  She's the only person I could think of who'd go along with this.

The problem is that I have no idea how I'd disguise myself to look like someone who isn't a) a scaredy cat who's afraid of guns in any form, and b) a very dubious believer in the Second Amendment.  I don't know a magazine from a shell or a pistol from a handgun. 

What I want to understand what it is about guns that makes people love them so much.  If I gripped a gun, would I understand?  If I went to a firing range with one?   What makes people so emotional about giving them up?  I'm scared even of the guns I see on police officers' hips.  Guns can cause death.

The plan's on hold while I figure out where we'd go.  There are no gun shops in Berkeley that I can find on the internet.  A nearby gun shop in El Cerrito has bad reviews on Yelp (unhelpful staff; they'd see through me for sure).  I'm scared to go to one in Oakland, and it's kind of a long trek to Novato.  Stay tuned.

Is It Christmas Yet?

 

 

No!  I'm resisting it.  No tree, no wreath, no poinsettias, no red bows.  We are a Christmas-free zone.  Did send out two dozen cards (above).

There's been some dicey health news from family and close friends over the past couple of weeks, the kind where you wait for results of further tests and try to practice positive, sensible thinking.  I'm not very good at that.

And then on Saturday I helped a friend interview realtors to sell her house, because she has health problems that mean she must sell and move across the country.  On Sunday morning, I went to Stockton for the funeral of a friend's mother, who was born in China; the family members wore torn strips of black fabric as armbands, which was very moving.

All of this got me down a bit. 

On Sunday night I went to my quilt group's annual Christmas Party, which was a definite lift.  I'm very sorry for you if you're not a member because a) the food is outstanding, and b) the group is all-accepting, and you can be as tart-tongued and cranky as you want.  (You cannot be racist, homophobic, or semi-automatic gun-toting, however.)

Pictures:

 

A quilt in the entryway of our hostess, Alice.

 

The table set  for 13

 

Standing around in the kitchen.  Three members have moved away (Inverness, Mendocino, and Seattle/Angel's Camp), but everyone's on deck for this party. 

 

 

 

 

 

Making The Best Scalloped Potatoes in the World, which include whole milk, heavy cream, Swiss cheese, garlic, salt, and pepper.  Deliciously decadent.

 

 

 

 

 

Acorn squash about to be doused with chili-lime vinaigrette and roasted

 

 

 

 

 

Two desserts:  Chocolate "Mint Melissa" cake from Masse's Bakery, Berkeley.  And a selection of cookies, including gingerbread.

 

 

 

 

 

Box of See's candy, custom-packed with all our favorites.  (Do you see any California Brittle? No, because Mabry and I ate it all before dinner.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mabry's latest project:  Crocheting 100 different snowflakes,  stiffened with glue to make ornaments. We each got some as gifts.

 

 

 

 

 

The No Problem Quilters,  2012

 

 

Time Stops

I was in San Francisco yesterday when I heard about the school shootings in Connecticut, and each time I checked the news on my iPhone, it was more and more horrifying.

This morning  I got an e-mail from a schoolteacher I know, giving directions to a Christmas party at her house tomorrow and ending with "Peace on Earth."  Which seems especially poignant coming from a teacher.  It's hard to think of a place less defended than an elementary school. 

Walking around Union Square in something of a daze, Suzanne and I came across the Macy's windows featuring kittens and puppies available for adoption.

Number of pets adopted from the store windows.  Note mailbox to right, stuffed with real letters from children to Santa.

 

An avid admirer

 

 

 

 

A tangle of kittens

 

 



Caught mid-scratch




 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dropping In For A Charity Experience

The un-glamorous reality

 

The phone rang at the Food Pantry last week, and I grabbed it, thinking it might be a client checking to see if we were open or if we had meat to give away that day (yes and yes).

No.  It was a mother asking about her 13-year old son volunteering at the Pantry over the holidays.

No, again.

I tried to be diplomatic. He's too young. We have a lot of volunteers right now.

Here's what I didn't say:   It would be more trouble training him for a few weeks than it's worth.

Also: Trying to give a kid a tiny taste of life in another socio-economic stratum is tourist-y.  If it's an on-going commitment, after school, every summer, every single holiday,  maybe the kid will absorb the experience and make it his own. But ordering it up so the kid will appreciate his own good fortune: Not a good idea.

A lot of work at the Food Pantry and other agencies is drudgery. Most newcomers aren't dealing with clients at all. Instead, they're in the back room filling plastic bags with rice, sorting through spoiled produce, and knocking down boxes. It'd be more like the kid cleaning up his room. Sometimes kids help pack bags for Thanksgiving, which can be very helpful. But they never get near the clients.

I wonder if I should mention that? 

Dan & Son

 

 

 

Dan, a former graduate student of Jerry's, just became a father.  Here he is with his new son, Raylan, soon after the birth.   (I'm not showing the photo of the mother, Michelle, because I've never thought it was fair to show brand-new mothers propped up in bed looking a bit worse for the wear).

So Dan has been e-mailing us with an account of Getting to Know Raylan.  Jerry and I laugh like mad and wait for more updates.  Dan is refreshing, scientist-observant, and irreverent.  Here are a few excerpts:

"He's quite a handful; we both feel like we've got this really demanding pet and we're not sure where he came from."

"We seem to have a pattern of hungry, gassy, sleepy, poopy, repeat."

"Raylan continues to think that 2:30 am-6 am is party time and 6 am-12 noon is a great time to be asleep...We keep wondering who he is and when his parents are going to come and get him."

There's more, but Dan thinks he would be hunted down by other new parents if it were made public because he's too irreverent.  I think he's honest!

HOW Many Calories?!

 
I used to make Christmas cookies: every damned year I'd get out the flour and butter, melt the chocolate, grease the cookie sheets. It was like some phantom held a gun to my head and said, "You have to make Christmas cookies! You're a woman!"

Jerry liked them, of course, but I was crabby and exhausted,  and after several years, I liberated myself.  No more of that.

But now Ladies Home Journal  has started appearing in my mailbox.  I never asked for it and I'm the wrong demographic, but it's free, so I'm reading it.

The December issue just arrived, and there's Ina Garten, the Barefoot Contessa, on the cover.  She's having her first ever Christmas cookie swap with a bunch of women food bloggers in their 30's and 40's:

One recipe, "Chocolate Peanut Butter Globs,"  really tempted me.   It sounds substantial, like something you could sink your teeth into and savor.   Among the ingredients:  chocolate chips, unsweetened chocolate, walnut halves, pecan halves, and peanut butter chips.  No word on how many calories, and who cares?  It's Christmas. 

I was semi-onboard.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Globs

Then I took a closer look, which didn't take long.   I  didn't get farther than the second line in the recipe:  "Line 2 baking sheets with parchment." 

I don't do parchment paper.  No way.

Sigh of relief.

Insomnia Program: The Visual

 

 A fairly accurate portrayal of mornings around here these days: 



 

 

*Thanks to "Proof of Evolution: The Theory That Mankind Evolved from Other Species Can Be Observed Daily," Funny Times, December 2008  (Bannerman)

Minor Kitchen Catastrophe

Kitchen drama today: A package of raw chicken leaked all over a shelf in the refrigerator.   A river of salmonella!  In the fridge!  Nightmare!

"What a disaster," I wailed.

"Why did it leak?" asked Jerry-the-scientist, examining the package as it dripped blood on the kitchen floor.

"The plastic bag  didn't have a twist-tie! And it was upside down, oh, God!" I rooted around under sink for Soft Scrub with Bleach.

"This doesn't usually happen," he mused. 

 "Throw it in the sink!  Aaaaargh!"  I pointed to the sink like he didn't know where it was.

He dropped the package in the sink.  Then he went back to the fridge and extracted a plastic bag of bread that was sitting in a pool of chicken blood.  He put it down on a formerly uncontaminated counter, near the dish drainer full of clean dishes.

" Aaaargh! No!"  I cried.  Everywhere I turned: more chicken blood.  I washed the refrigerator shelf three times with Soft Scrub.

It took me 25 minutes to decontaminate everything and transfer the bread to a clean plastic bag.  I could have strangled the butcher.

Does this resonate with anyone but my sister, who was also raised by a Food Poisoning Phobic (our dad)?   I nearly called her, but I was too busy wiping every surface in sight with Soft Scrub.  Now I need extra-rich handcream--and maybe a drink. 

Soggy Weekend

It's winding up to rain big time in the Bay Area (hysterical weather people predict a "fire hose" and a "deluge").  Here's a recommendation for a good read.

  

I loved this book!  If you went to college and faced a big turbulent scary void when you graduated, didn't know where you were going to live, where you'd find a job, whether you'd ever find a boyfriend/girlfriend, where you'd go to graduate school or if--this book evokes that time  so thoroughly that I thanked God several times that I'm old. 

A girl, two guys, all brand-new graduates of Brown University, Class of 1982,  try to find their way, their lives intersecting romantically and intellectually.  I thought the writing was wonderful, the descriptions so apt, but not over-the-top.  Here's a sample:

"Beyond the bay window of Carr House, the graduation traffic was now steady.  Roomy parental vehicles (Cadillacs and S-Class Mercedeses, along with the occasional Chrysler New Yorker or Pontiac Bonneville) were making their way from the downtown hotels up College Hill for the ceremony.  At the wheel of each car was a father, solid-looking and determined..."

Roomy parental vehicles!  Solid-looking fathers!

Below is  a photo taken the day I graduated from Berkeley wearing a home-made, flame-colored dress.  I was full of book-learning and a baby in Life.  Several bummers followed.

Graduation lunch, June 17, 1972.  Claudia, Debbie, my sister, my mother, and me.

Full Extent of Shopping This Weekend

 

 

 

That's it. 

Fortunately, these were buy-the-entire-spool, so I didn't have to have ribbon cut.

It would have been a long wait:  I had #64, picked up just in case while I searched for ribbon, and the last number called was 52.  But there was a bit of a wait in the cashiers' line, with 16 people ahead of me.

Now all I have to do is buy some gifts to wrap.

Another Pie Bites the Dust

Someone donated 16 homemade pies to the Food Pantry the Monday before Thanksgiving.  Bill, the director, didn't have the heart to tell her that we can't give out homemade food, so he told each of the volunteers to take a pie.

No problem!  I brought an apple pie home to Jerry, the Pie King.  He polished off the last slice this morning. Then he wanted to know when I'd be calling Leah, next door, about a slice of the pecan pie she'd made for Thanksgiving.  He'd heard one was available.

Here he is on his birthday one year, wearing a t-shirt I made:

Art Trek: Works from the William S. Paley Collection and the Louvre

When are the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco--the de Young and the Legion of Honor--going to show art that isn't a) decorative, b) all about fashion, and/or c)  pretty much stuff you've seen before? 

"Milk Can and Apples," 1879-83, Paul Cezanne

Jerry and I were in San Francisco last weekend and dropped into the de Young Museum to see paintings and sculptures from the William S. Paley collection/New York Museum of Modern Art. The show, "A Taste for Modernism," consists mostly of Post-Impressionist works.  Lots of big names: Cezanne, Matisse, Gauguin, Picasso, and Toulouse-Lautrec. Much of the art is wonderful, but it's very, very familiar.

"Seated Woman with a Vase of Narcissus," 1941, Henri Matisse

Paley was a founder of CBS, and he spent part of his fortune on paintings, many of which hung in his Manhattan apartment.  There are photos of his apartment, which was elegant, but do we care that he shared a decorator with Jackie Kennedy?

(Someone does care--perhaps the chairwoman of the board of the Fine Arts Museums, who's a well-known socialite with lots of money and whose own house has been photographed for shelter magazines?) 

Afterward, we ate hot dogs from a food truck in Golden Gate Park.  Delicious and we didn't have to brave the crowded museum cafe.

Then we took a walk along the Coast Trail at Land's End--terrific views--and ended up in the parking lot of the Legion of Honor, where we took a quick look at a new exhibit from the Louvre, "Royal Treasures: Louis XIV to Marie-Antoinette."  If you're into bejeweled trinkets designed for kings of France, this is your kind of show.

 Kenneth Baker, art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, described the show as "a feast of eye candy from the French aristocracy," and called the items "dazzling tchotchkes of excess."

He also wrote " 'Royal Treasures' and its ilk on the exhibition front reduce museum-going to the higher window shopping."

It's very off-with-their-heads.  And at $20 a head (no pun) to get in without a membership card, a bit steep.

Even Jerry, not a big art museum fan although God knows he's been dragged around enough of them, called the show,  "garish."

But the walk and the hot dog were great.

"A Taste for Modernism," William S. Paley Collection, de Young Museum, through December 30, 2012.

"Royal Treasures from the Louvre: Louis XIV to Marie-Antoinette," Legion of Honor, through March 17, 2013.