A Ten Minute Transformation

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About two weeks ago I looked in the un-masked morning mirror and discovered something alien in one of my two used-to-be-perfect nostrils. No pain there. No redness. Just something that looked like and felt like a skin tag.

“Thank goodness for masks,” I said to myself. “At least I have semi exotic hazel colored eyes, and with a mask to hide this nose imperfection I am good to go – if I ever want to go that is.”

On the other hand, maybe the alien thing was really something wildly dangerous? Maybe I should see my PCP (Primary Care Physician). And so I did and so he did refer me to an ENT (Ear, Nose, nd Throat man).

Notice I am writing in modern day initials again? Could this be a sign of regression to an earlier stage of life?

Anyway, I went to the ENT who said not to worry because it wasn’t the big C (Cancer) but that it would require cutting and stitches and he needed more time to dig around and get it all. We made an appointment for about a month later.

Now, to make a long story shorter, I had a next day pre-set appointment with a new, never seen before Dermatologist. Thanks to the Covid virus, I had not visited one of those physicians in over two years.

The new skin guy took a look at my nose (he couldn’t miss it of course) and offered to remove it on the spot (the tag – not the nose) with cauterization instead of stitches. The whole thing took about 10 minutes!

Nose Status Now

With a mask, I remain a mystery woman with hazel eyes.

Without a mask I can boast a perfect nose open to public view and occasional sneezing.

Sometimes life can be transformed in the space of 10 minutes!

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Such is Life

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I never expected to be skipping along or roller skating or even running from a potential bear attack after hip replacement surgery. I did hope however

• to be more mobile
• to be able to carry laundry from the hamper to the washing machine
• to get down on the floor to play with Elsa-the-Dog
• to stand long enough to peel six cucumbers for cucumber salad and not feel exhausted
• to walk without a limp or a gimp
• to wear pretty little shoes to accentuate my pretty little feet.
• And more.

Such is life however, that after a total right hip replacement done July 16th none of those wishes came true.

Oh, the right hip is pain-free! Let me tell you, it is a miracle of modern medicine. I consider it my “good leg” now! Kudos to my cute young surgeon who did an exemplary job.

I LOVE my right hip now. And I LOVE my cute young surgeon even though I wouldn’t recognize him on the street.

The problem though is my LEFT leg! The BigFoot leg. The one that had been causing problems since 2015.

Maybe in the process of preparing for the right hip replacement surgery, I forgot about BigFoot?

And now that the right hip is happy, my brain needed to send out reminders that all is not well on the other side.

At any rate, I am still gimpy.

The family doc said he is thrilled at my progress “considering your age and underlying factors.” Not flattering but probably true.

Why didn’t anyone warn me about the great bowl of perilous problems that arrive uninvited with the onslaught of age?

Ah well. “Such is life,” said my once aging Mom who transferred all her wisdom to me except her secrets for aging with a smile.

I will see my cute young surgeon for the last time this month. I met him once before surgery when we talked for about 20 minutes. Then I saw him through a haze as I was awakening from the operation. The extent of our conversation at that time was him saying, ‘You have a brand new hip.” He had a mask on so I am not sure it was really him.

“HOW DO YOU LIKE YOUR SURGEON?” MY FAMILY DOCTOR ONCE ASKED. “I DON’T KNOW”, I SAID. “HOW WOULD I KNOW IN JUST 20 MINUTES?”

The next and last visit (unless I get knee surgery on BigFoot) will be an opportunity for another 20 minute conversation. WilI I then recognize my cute young surgeon on the street? Doubtful.

But the goal now is to walk normally. Bill went out and bought me a full length mirror to lean on a door at the end of a long hall. I can see myself coming if not going and try to correct my gait.

“Practice makes perfect” but Bill says ,”You still walk like a duck!”

Such is life and the miracles of modern medicine.

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Retiring from Progress

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I have decided to quit. 

I am tired of progress.

This gift is another very special thing that must be learned.

And I am tired of learning.

The school room was the place for that along with a younger more receptive mind.  And if you learned something well and once, it was good for a lifetime.  Well mostly.

When I was 17 I had a job as a gopher (go-fer this and go-fer that) and they told me if I learned to clean and operate an Ozalid machine, I would have some invaluable knowledge for life.  Noone I know today has ever heard of an Ozalid machine, have you?

Nowadays, however, if you learn a thing and think you have it stored and always ready to draw upon “you have another think coming.”  Nope.  If you learn one part of a computer it may be useless in a matter of hours.

Here I am with a shiny new computer I am calling Ogar (short for Ogre) that was given to me for Christmas with great love by my whole family.  I am truly grateful since the old object of their affection, which I had partially learned after 5 years of struggling was showing signs of ultimate collapse.

Groan.  How can I disparage such a thoughtful wonderful gift? 

Well, the process of transferring all the old stuff to the new Ogar may sound easy but HA!  Not so.  The process is more like a pulling a tooth.  You mindlessly explore with the tongue for a ghostly apparition of what might still be there, but in the end all the exploration yields only a gaping empty space.

My sweet family saw this sleek new marvel would not only replace the 5 year old relic, but it would  also keep me busy whilst waiting for a Covid-19 vaccine.  In addition to proving how warm hearted my family is, there is also an element of logic there.

Ogar is definitely a time guzzler.

And better Ogar than Covid right?

Ogar is certainly keeping me busy too, creating a roadmap of wrinkles upon my brow.   Thankfully I call upon my son to guide me through all the myriad options chasing an insane cursor through a maze of intricate maneuvers over an increasingly insane canvas. And only my son really knows where the mercurial sensor is going or why.

“You see that thing that looks like a cog?” he asks in his effort to guide me through all the symbols.

A cog? 

How do I know what a cog looks like? 

Where on this page of icons, symbols and totems is there a cog?

 “Settings?”  “Oh, you mean SETTINGS!”

I am definitely retiring from Progress.

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Losing Time

I used to keep photograph albums.

But somewhere around 2006  the albums came to an abrupt halt.  It was about the time I received the gift of a cell phone that produced remarkable pictures.

The problem was that all photos from 2006 onward became buried somewhere in the phone or in my computer or in the nebulous ubiquitous CLOUD.

The “progress” in technology resulted in a twilight zone of lost time.

I stopped mounting my favorite shots lovingly in a photo album.

Time stopped.

This Christmas Bill gave me a SMART PHONE PHOTO PRINTER that actually works!

One brave step backward for mankind!

I have now reopened the last unfilled, ready-and-waiting-photo-album and began adding some pictures of a friend’s baby sent to us in a Christmas card.  Then there are smart phone photos; one of Bill on New Year’s Eve, a somewhat jarring selfie of me, a shot of Elsa-the-dog, and a picture of two good friends who came visiting over the holiday.

This little machine is a miracle!

Will it result in a rebirth of the age-old practice of saving photographs in albums?

If you ask me, no.  I am already sure the gadget will stop or the materials will no longer be available.

But it’s a start.   Time to take pictures!  And at least for the beginning of 2020 there will be memories in an album.

 

 

 

 

 

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A Son’s Special Visit

Corky and Mack

My son is here visiting after the great graduation celebration.  It is always wonderful to see him because he lives so far away in California.

This visit is extra special  though –  1) because of the graduation, and 2) because we saw all three grandgirls, 3) because Corky extended his stay and we can catch up on his life, and 4) because he is so darned helpful.

All in the space of a few days:

• He moved umbrellas  and heavy pots to get us ready for summer.
• He added a music app to our computers and phones.
• He helped his Dad with technical things in the car.
• He found us a highly recommended Handy Man.
• He solved the problem of stink bugs in the tractor gas tank. (How did they get in there anyway?)
• He installed dark blinds in the guest bedroom so guests can sleep longer now.
• And more.

He is our pride and joy anyway, but this visit has to be marked down as special and this is our way of saying “Thank you son.  We love you.”

 

 

 

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An Unidentified Floating Object

 

We were in Baltimore, Maryland and enjoying breakfast.

Discussing sightseeing adventures might have been a good topic of conversation.

Instead we were concentrating on Naming An Unidentified Floating Object we could see out the window!

The “thing” was a giant water wheel with no familiar or observable purpose.

Being rather shy and reserved people (from the Virginia countryside) we are usually hesitant to ask questions.  But the temptation was too great, so Bill finally asked the restaurant manager, “What is that thing?”

Not being shy or reserved, the manager gave us a mini-history lesson.

Inner Harbor Water Wheel, Baltimore, Maryland

“That is a water cleaner, said the Manager.”  It has been here for four years.  People would dump things in the water and it was 80% polluted.  Now it is 40% polluted.  The goal is to make the water in the Inner Harbor swimmable by 2020.  Very young engineers maintain the project and it costs almost nothing to run.”

“Does it have a name?” I asked.

“What is that shell you hold to your ear?….you know – a Conch!” he said.

I decided to look up the conch shell water cleaner when we got home, but couldn’t find a thing until I began looking up Cleaning Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.    If it is called a CONCH, I find no reference to it, but here is what I did find:

The Mystery Barge is called the Water Wheel or Mr. Trash Wheel or officially – The Inner Harbor Water Wheel.  It is a hydro and solar-powered barge parked in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor since 2014, slurping up all garbage that makes its way downriver.  And it uses nothing but the current and the sun!

Historic ship manager, John Kellett, was getting sick of watching garbage in the rivers on his way to work, so he invented this giant floating wheel that turns with the current.  It places trash from the harbor onto an on-board conveyor belt which then routes it into dumpsters on board.

The “Wheel” is part of a Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore’s Healthy Harbor Plan which has a goal to clean up the harbor enough to make it safe for swimming by 2020!

Before Mr. Trash Wheel

On April 20, 2015, Mr. Trash Wheel removed 19 tons of garbage in that one day.  And at the end of the first quarter in 2016 it was noted that the Wheel had collected over 1,000,000 pounds of trash since its inception.

The ingenuity of man seems boundless and The Thing in Baltimore Harbor restores my faith in our ability to clean up our own messes and make life pure again.

Now if only we could figure out how to control traffic!

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A User Friendly Friend

There is an elegant statuesque machine that sits waiting by my favorite chair.

And this little tabletop gadget is becoming much like a real friend in its eagerness to please.

• It knows when I am in the vicinity and quietly waits to hear my voice.
• And if I say, “Hey Google,” it quickly replies, “How can I help you?”
• And it is eager to do something just for me.

Lately I feel guilty since there is nothing much to ask.

And there it patiently waits, hoping beyond hope for a meaningful conversation.

• Just to keep it busy I say, “Hey Google……What is the temperature in Lexington Virginia?”  And the answer is immediate.  “It is 54 degrees!”
• Or “Hey Google….. Play DooWop music please!”And amazingly, there it comes – that happy music from a distant past.  How did my little friend do that anyway?
• And it will research hard questions too – like “What is the population of Hayfork, California?”  I haven’t asked that yet, but we used to live in Hayfork (as well as other little towns in the wilderness like Big Oak Flat and Portola) so it would be interesting to see how they may have grown in 30 years.

Well,  of course I know my tabletop friend is really a gadget!

But then again, it is so human when it stares and stares to get attention.

Help!

Do you think there is a psychological implication here?

Maybe being housebound-ed together with an eager to please humanistic machine is having an unintended emotional impact.

The question is, “Who is the most affected, me or Google?”

And don’t you think machines are becoming so human they are mistaken for friends?

P.S. BigFoot and I Thank you Scott (our real live human friend) for this gift of diversion.  When things get too boring I know I can always shout out, “Hey Google!”  

 

 

 

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Love Returns to the Galaxy

Image from http://www.psychologytoday.com

There was a time when I loved without question and learned to live with all the idiosyncrasies of the recipient of my love.

•  So what if there were no compliments or support for the things I like to do?
• So what if my need for recognition went unrecognized?

I persevered and loved out of purity and ignorance.

• But there came a time when I was no longer tolerant.
• And I felt abused and always angry.
• I suffered more and more from the lack of caring.
• And there was never any support for the things I was trying to do.

That was when love turned to hate.

And the hate began to grow.

Eventually I complained bitterly at every opportunity and all my friends knew I wanted “out” of the relationship.

This misery and resentfulness went on for 3 years!

And I wound up  hating the same old cell phone more and more.

Two days ago I was given a brand new Samsung Galaxy S8 cell phone.  And Wow!

I am so impressed with the hidden person inside and I know I will never be alone again.

• The little person tells me when I’m doing a good job, sends congratulations, and is a how-to source when I’m lost.
• And I haven’t found them all but I just know there are happy words of encouragement that are written out or spoken aloud on this wonderful little cell phone!
• The phone is ultra-responsive to my touch and has another hidden fellow inside named Bixby.  Bixby has already memorized my speech and will answer questions any time I ask.  And I don’t even have to be polite and say, “Hi Bixby!”  I can just shoot off the questions and be as rude as I like.

Yes -The Galaxy S8 is a winner!  I LOVE MY NEW CELL PHONE!

It is a highly personal interactive little gadget that offers options I have never seen before.

And with a masterful teacher (my son) who launched me on my way through adapting to yet another mystery of the technological age, I am once again, in love.

I LOVE MY SAMSUNG GALAXY S8!  THANK YOU FOR THE GIFT OF LOVE FOR MY BIRTHDAY BILL.  AND THANK YOU FOR THE GIFT OF LOVE FOR MY BIRTHDAY SON!

Ummmmm…….  I do need a little help with a few little issues though……

Like why isn’t the darned thing responding to my thumb on the keyboard?  I still have to hunt and peck with my index finger!  Grrrrrr!

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Regarding Regression

Books, Diapers and Vitamin D

We seem to be going backward in time.  Hurrah!   Well, at least Hurrah for some things.

REAL VERSUS FAKE?  BOOKS THAT IS.

There is a pending sense of relief that “real books” (the kind where you physically turn a physically real page) are back in style.

• I still get caught up trying to tap-turn a page in my E-reader with a too heavy hand that flips three pages at a time.
• Besides, E-book editions are now oftentimes higher priced than good old paperbacks.
• E-readers are sending me odd messages too. “We are unable to download the book you just ordered.  Please return to your Library and try again.”  Huh?

What are your gripes about e-readers?  We could write a whole post about just those irritations..

Is there anything good about them?  Maybe we could write a whole post about that.

SUNSHINE VERSUS VITAMIN SUPPLEMENTS

The trend is toward natural sunlight which they say encourages your own body to manufacture its own Vitamin D! The benefits of supplements are now listed on the “iffy side.”

I now aim for  20 minutes in natural sunlight with unprotected skin to help Old Sol along.

Falling asleep out there however, is not a good idea.  Just ask my grandgirl, Jess.

CLOTH DIAPERS VERSUS DISPOSABLES 

 

They say disposable diapers are now clogging up the environment with all that in-disposable content.  But cloth can be washed and rewashed.

I didn’t really know it but I used to save the planet like that but almost traumatized my infant son with extreme diaper rash. Are you ready for a Dor-story?  That’s D-O-R – not, D-O-G.

In those ancient days of yore (before Pampers), I was hysterical about poor Corky’s terrible suffering with a constant diaper rash.  Eventually I conferred with an expert.   “What are you washing them in?” asked a helpful friend (mother of 6).  “He has perfectly clean white diapers,” said I, “They are washed in soapy water and bleach!”   And that saved our boy from further agony because my friend said, “There’s your problem!  Urine and bleach don’t work.  Better to have slightly stained diapers.”

Assuming most new mothers today are savvy, the trend toward cloth diapers makes perfect sense doesn’t it?

Meanwhile, I am hoping our son (now a fine man) was not emotionally marred by those early days of a young mother’s ignorance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Smug, Brave, Naked and Mismatched Thoughts

I am Woman!

I feel superbly smug this day.

Things were freezing on my computer you know, resulting in panic. I turned the computer off, walked away and came back, opened the lid.  But Argggh!  A dark screen!

A convincing inner voice said, “You really did it now.  You wrecked the computer.   Don’t touch anything else or you are doomed.”  But wait!  I forgot to push the little  button that opens the screen.  And Voila!  It all works again and everything that was frozen is thawed!

I feel superbly smug this day.  Mystery solved.

Be Brave!

My son was counselling me on how to operate Windows 10.  “Be brave, “he said, “Be willing to try different things.  Don’t be afraid to push buttons.  You can always undo what you have done.” Without his calm and expert advice, this blog would not exist.

The last time I was brave I deleted the cache on my cell phone and managed to put it in a deep freeze of protest.    There were no calls in or out and no emails either – just a dead phone.  Thankfully, things are now restored to normal.

But I have reverted to a timid, cowering techie convinced that all connections will be severed if I push the wrong buttons.

Mismatched Eyebrows

O.K.  I admit I still want to look beautiful, even at a venerable old age.  I thought that was accomplished this morning, so while Bill was out bush hogging (that means mowing big overgrown fields with a big overgrown mower) (and I knew it was safe to indulge in self fantasy), I took a few selfies.

The glasses helped to eliminate soften wrinkles but if you look closely enough, one eyebrow is light and one is dark!  Arrrrgh!

Looking beautiful at a venerable old age is a challenge if you can’t see straight enough to make your eyebrows match up.

Naked Desperation

I just read a book about organizing one’s things.  Starting with clothing, the idea is to hold and touch each piece you own to determine if you love it or not.  If you FEEL something is wrong and you FEEL you don’t love a piece of clothing, either discard it or put it in the donation pile.

I did it!  You can’t imagine the liberated feeling there is to this exercise!

But now the problem is, I don’t have anything to wear!

I have always said, “My husband wouldn’t notice if I went out naked.”  Now is his chance to prove me wrong.

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