… I like turtles?
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Category: blog
Count me in
Every week I count out three different prescription pills and one over-the-counter drug into a one-week pill minder. Every week I think of my mother doing the same.
My brother and I traded exasperated texts when one of us witnessed this. By the time I shot the photo above, Mom had only eight months until others would count out the pills for her, and she had but 18 months left with us. She’s closer to 89 than 88 in that photo. Never strong in linear thought and simple arithmetic progressions, aging had taken a bit more away from what once was there. Our exasperation hid our anguish at several things: who in their right mind would think it’s a great idea to make tiny little white pills which will be taken mostly by old people with arthritic hands? And shouldn’t it be a regulation that no pill can look exactly like another? And how can a person not just look inside the pill minder partitions to see if there’s a pill in there before you start? Which of course left us with the question, how can one not notice when a pill isn’t taken one day of the week?
Having worked in pharmaceutical manufacturing, I have a formalized method for dispensing my pills, and for taking them.
- Open the container and flip out all ‘leftovers’. (I sometimes elect not to take the decongestant so I have leftovers.)
- Take prescription blood pressure medicine #1. Drop one into each partition. Double-check that it’s just one-per-cell. Close that pill bottle. Turn it upside down.
- Take prescription #2. Cut a tab in half. Drop one half each into the first two cells. Work left to right and repeat for cells 3-4 and 5-6. Drop another half tab into the seventh day’s cell. Close that bottle. Turn it upside down.
- Start the same for prescription #3, dropping two tabs in each cell.
- Cut seven tabs of the OTC drug in half, dropping the split tab each time into a cell.
- When it comes time to take the day’s pills, flip out the day’s cell into a little pill cup I have, then put one half OTC tab back in. At the end of my breakfast, dump the contents of the pill cup into my palm. Stop. Stare at the pills to be sure I know each of them and that there are the right number of each. Swallow them down.
“Rigidity for the things which should be rigid,” is my motto. Otherwise I don’t care. (Okay, yeah I do, but that’s a lengthier post about borderline OCD-ness.) Yet…when I dispense my pills each week, I think of how difficult this was for my mother when she was but 15 or so years older than I am now. I don’t believe she had nearly as much trouble when she was 70. What’s coming down the road? Why couldn’t I see that being 88 is not like being 64?
Next week: how to torture yourself about any trivial thing for the rest of your life. Please prepare by reflecting on your teenaged years and the relationship you had with your parents.
If I ran a restaurant…
… I would serve a dish of duxelles, a French term referring to a mince of mushrooms, onions, herbs and black pepper which is then reduced to a paste. I’d add cream and a dash of madeira. I would serve this as a two- to three-inch smear over sliced breast of duck. I’d call it …
Dux’ and Quackers
[Patrons will kindly stop throwing bottles at the stage.]
Goodbye, Christmas
Western Catholics have lost touch with the historical End of Christmas. Today, February 2nd, is that day, the 40th Day of Christmas (counting Christmas day as “1”). Christmastide, i.e., The Twelve Days of Christmas culminates at Epiphany; the period of time between Epiphany Sunday and the Presentation of the Lord (at the Temple) culminates at Candlemas (in the Western church). Traditionally some cultures leave Christmas decorations up through this day. As I may have stated previously, leaving Christmas decorations up past this day carries very bad luck so let’s not tempt that, okay?
I lean into this gradual easing into Ordinary Time. Though we’ve marked the 2nd and 3rd Sundays of Ordinary Time–we forget that usually this day falls midweek and doesn’t take precedence over a Sunday–we also tarry with the Christmas spirit through this date. I like that Jesus at 12 years of age stands at the threshold of adulthood. Time to put away the pleasantries of our Christmas-childhood and enter the reality of our calling.
Winter, NC-style
Prior to moving to North Carolina, my definition of winter used the words “cold” and “icy” and “snow”. I’ve had to redefine that, but in unexpected ways. Those words still pertain but in lesser roles. In fact, snow only made cameo appearances the past two years. (I acknowledge I’ve now jinxed us for a multiple-inch snowstorm before February ends.) The photo above documents the approximately one-inch snowfall we received a week ago today. Prior to that no measurable amount had been recorded here since January 2022. (“Measurable” as defined by the National Weather Service records. I only examined records for Dec-Feb backwards until I found some because I don’t think we’ve ever had snow in November or March this century.) After a trace fell on the 16th and 17th of January that year, we received two inches on the 21st and 22nd. On the 23rd another inch fell.
All of this seems manageable to the historical Me living inside my head, but we’ve succumbed to a combination of the contagious fear of the locally-raised and Old Folk Fartism. We generally just stay home when any measurable amount of snow falls. During the eight winters we’ve lived in our current house, only one has recorded a “real” snowfall, defined completely subjectively as “about four inches or more”. It fell December 9th, 2018:
Although Raleigh has experienced significant snowfalls in the past quarter century, the real snowstorm fell in February 2014. This local TV news account tells it better than I could. It dropped less than four inches of snow, but just imagine a nice topping of sleet and a city of nearly 200,000 people, none of whom have put snow tires on their cars. Raleigh has hills: not steep hills, but steep enough that folks just abandoned their cars when they got stuck. Click through to the article–if you live in the northern half of the US, you won’t believe it.
There have been others–in 2000 nearly two feet of snow fell, and nine to ten inches fell at Christmas in 2010–but the salient feature of winters here is that at some point between December 1st and the end of February you will get at least one day at 70 degrees or above. Thus, winter here compares to a streaming series with six to nine episodes; winter in the north compares to a traditional network series of twenty or more. You still get the drama, but it’s over soon. Last week’s one-inch snowfall started with freezing rain. Low temperatures and shaded streets made it a bit slick for days, but today marks the beginning of highs in the 50’s and 60’s. And yes, one forecast (Foreca and the European model ECMWF) says we’ll hit 71 on Friday.
I rest my case.
Marching
To those who face the frailties of life and to those who have transitioned elsewhere…
We're marching to our deaths at birth
Then unaware of Life's propose.
Plans made, plans dashed, let's laugh with mirth
As march we must to last repose.
When first we view our life's true end,
Made real by year, yet not by day,
We vow to hoard, vow not to spend
More time in idleness, in play.
Not 'til our bodies tell us true,
Our end looms close, looms real,
Do we admit, "I wish I knew–
Please, one more spin around your wheel."
This knowledge brings its own reward,
Knits us to others suff'ring too.
As I face down my ailments hard,
I understand how so do you.
In the past month one of my blogosphere contacts has died, and another faces a tough cancer battle. Here in the physical world a good friend struggles to walk, a second puts on a good face as her husband remisses into cancer, a third breathes slightly easier that her sister didn’t die last week, and our closest friends both battle mystery ailments. On a personal note, sciatica has said, “Remember me? I think I’m gonna stick around this time,” and my blood pressure has decided to ignore all my meds. I really can’t think of one good reason for the fact I want to grab every single person between 40 and 60 and declare insistently to their startled face, “WAKE UP! QUIT WASTING YOUR TIME! DO WHAT YOU WANT, DO WHAT YOU MUST, BUT FOR GOD’S SAKE QUIT DOING WHAT YOU DON’T WANT, WHAT YOU KNOW IS WRONG FOR YOU!!” Yeah, I wouldn’t have listened to me either. I don’t really have regrets. It’s just the shock with how quickly it changed in the past five years. There’s no way to prepare for it–but for some reason, perhaps the shock, I want to turn around a tell someone how I never realized what this was going to be like. Sure, I’ve seen folks navigate these years, but for some reason I never saw the road that connects I’m Okay Right Now with I Am Really Old And About To Die. And I really wish I had.
Goodbye, Hawai’i
At the beginning of this sporadic accounting of our Hawaiian vacation last fall, I mused on 100 Days of Hawai’i, and I threatened to go all “grandpa” on y’all. As this parade of entries has wound down, I think the ol’ grandpa genes kicked in more. Therefore I’ll keep this short, sweet, and hopefully mildly entertaining.
After the visit with my cousin our first full day on Maui, we loitered for three days as described recently. Two serendipitous events occurred to ensure an encore visit with my cousin and her husband. First, I left my camera and that package of very expensive Kona coffee in their car after our first visit. And second, I realized there was no way we wanted to get to the Kahului airport by 7 a.m. if that meant a one-hour drive and dropping a rental car. It would have seriously impacted the lazy vibe we were working on! I rebooked the flight for the next day, booked a hotel near the airport, and told my cousin so we could meet again for another visit since they lived near the hotel and the airport. This gave us a day to leave the Kapalua condo leisurely, stop at various viewpoints on the southern coast, and spend a lot of time at the Maui Aquarium.
Even in the populated middle of Maui where things are fairly dry (see above), the mountains showed how they catch the clouds and their rain.
Except for a few photos I couldn’t resist posting while on the vacation, I opened this lengthy travelogue with aerial shots of Oahu and Hawai’i. It seems only fitting we say goodbye to Maui and the Hawaiian Islands the same way.
Maui coastal shots
Looking back near four months now I cannot recall what we did of note for the three days after we connected with my cousin during our first full day on Maui. Only two salient things leap to mind: hanging at the nearest pool on the second day and driving the north coast a bit on the fourth. It seems as if we must have done something else…didn’t we? Our fourth day also represented our final full day on the western end of Maui. We had been told the natives didn’t really like tourists going up along the north shore, but we took a ‘chance’ and except for a bit of display for what I think represented a Hawai’i Separatist Movement we experienced no animosity. We certainly saw spectacular scenery as the road dove to near sea-level and then ascended to the tops of cliffs.
By my estimation I took around 100 photos of the coast and/or sunrises/sunsets while we lingered on Kapalua Bay. Dawn would start with the low-contrast promise of sun:
And sometimes not so low-contrast…
I guess most of the time we stared at sunrises in the morning, sunsets in the evening and in between we ate and stared at stuff like this…
More products I don’t usually see
Our second morning at our Kapalua condo we decided the odd mix of “general store” and “deli counter” at the Honolua Store #89 which we had seen our first night going to dinner bore further scrutiny. For one, eating muffins two consecutive days for breakfast held no appeal. Two, I needed that coffee as explained in my Kona coffee post. Three, eating purple pancakes had “yes, you have to do this” written all over it. They’re purple because of ube, a species of yam––I can’t remember why the syrup is purple:
While waiting for my purple pancakes I saw a display card for something I didn’t want to have:
After breakfast we purchased numerous supplies such as chocolates, coffee, more beer, and other fixin’s and such to encourage us to mostly just stay in place and stare at the ocean.
Rainbows over Molokai
Dawn on our second morning at Kapalua Bay struck clouds delivering a rain shower between us and Molokai, creating a brilliant rainbow. This may be common: I’ll post another instance later in this series.
all the voices in my head 