fourth of july meme
i normally shy away from that meme thing. this one got my attention.
13 questions.
i'm not real up on expenses, keep us informed and i'll kick what i can.
breakfast was iced coffee haven't gotten around to any food yet.
pollen count is low. i love the desert this time of year.
book(s) Nixonland, i have to read it in spurts because it destroys my peace of mind. number two, the fiction is A Plague of Doves, it's brilliant work. I'm expecting a shipment. there was an online discount blowout at barnes and noble and i spent enough in four and five dollar increments that i got free shipping. i didn't save any money or trim any expenses, but i got a lot more books.
dvd's in the too watch pile include Lust, Caution ang lee on ww2 shanghai and slipstream written and directed by anthony hopkins.
the early gilly links grabbed me into the wee hours of the morning too.
sincere thanks for that. it was the colonial warfare series that first grabbed my attention with gilly. i emailed him a comment about how looking back at my military service, every single place there were people trying to kill my ass was a former european colony. 100% groupings are very rare in life and require a little extra thought and attention n'est ce pas?
1. Um, coffee?
2. I had my usual workday breakfast - hot tea, and half a toasted bagel with cream cheese. At 3:30 this morning. Gah.
3. It's not so much the pollen (which is enough to leave a dusty film) as it is the tropical heat and the high humidity. I have to cut slices from the air to get it down my lungs.
4. Book: The Iliad (again). DVD: Revenge of the Sith (the rise of Palpatine as Emperor is a very strong political subtext over the first three episodes).
1. Well, as I'm eating lunch right now, I notice that you've left off food, and unless you're planning on peanut butter and salami the whole time, you'd better earmark funds for that. You should also set aside money for emergencies, jusst in case. (It's never enough, but it's better to have some than none.) Be aware that you will not be at the convention 24/7, and that there is tourist stuff to be done in Denver. Don't wait till you're dead.
2. I sautéd some onions, garlic, and ginger in olive oil, threw in cubed portobello and sliced shiitake, poured in a small can of diced tomatoes, added basil leaves, rosemary needles, and a bit of oregano for flavor. This simmered for a while. I boiled up some pasta and cut up some chicken and scooped out some of the sauce.
It wasn't bad.
3. Don't know where you are. Here, I haven't yet been out, but Tree Orgy Season is characterized by sneezing in tempo, itchy eyelids, and a nose alternately congested and liquid. That's not happening. September is when the next bout is due.
4. I just took Blazing Saddles out and am sort of working through The Last Lecture, but I just realized that I bought a mystery about three weeks ago and never read it, and can't find it now.
Well, the All-Star Game rosters should be coming out soon...
Maggie's really, really does have some of the very best bacon I've ever had in my life. Our friend Jesse is not overstating the case here.
It's been an awful morning healthwise. Still crashed out from my Florida trip, which is my last week's Blog For Our Future post is STILL not done. There's not enough synaptic function to support that kind of focus.
Breakfast and lunch were both about trying to fix that. A bowl of fresh summer peaches, diced and covered with cream (an important source of butyric acid). A smoothie with banana, fresh berries, Activia yogurt, coconut oil (full of lauricidic acid, which promotes ATP transfer) and nondenatured whey powder (supports glutathione production, which my body simply sucks at).
And then a B12 shot, which perked me up for about 45 minutes before wearing off. And then a steak -- my daily dose of carnitine, which my body also sucks at making (the same broken biochemical cycle that outputs glutathione also makes methionine, which is an essential component in making carnitine, which in turn is essential for energy production). And a big mug of chewy black English tea, nothing like the wimpy orange pekoe stuff Americans drink.
Food as medicine. Seems everything I eat these days is aimed at propping up my body's failure to produce the things required to keep me running right. (Coke for breakfast? Jesse, I'd spend 36 hours recovering from that kind of nonsense.)
The good news is that it was all good food, fresh and organic and mostly made at home. And it was lovingly prepared and served up in my bed, with kisses, by the world's most darling man. I don't know why he puts up with me -- but day after day, he does.
The other good news is that, for the first time in 24 years with this, we're pretty sure we know what's causing it -- and it's FIXABLE, with about 75% certainty. It's just gonna take a couple of years.
Ho to Minstrel on chewing through Nixonland. It's like eating a very rich chocolate cake -- I read for hours, and discover that I've barely gotten ten pages along. I'm a fast reader, so this is just odd -- at this rate, I should finish it sometime this side of Christmas.
Gonna be a bed day. Had hoped to get some writing and sewing done. Maybe later, if I perk up. I'm trying really, really hard to get over this before going to Netroots Nation next week -- which will, of course, whack me out all over again.
Well, I'm not going to answer any of the questions. But if I could, I'd sure join you for a Maggie's Mess. I'll at least have the Coke here.
I've been following the news of the Big Sur fire probably a little more closely than is good for me. I got interested a couple of weeks ago in Emile Norman, an 89-year-old artist who built his own house on a ridge outside Big Sur and still lives/works there. A brilliant, sweet man -- saw him in a documentary on PBS. He's been evacuated and is putting daily updates at his website. House crammed full of decades of art is still standing, but who knows how long. I think it will kill him if it burns, I really do.
When I was 22 and ever so stupid, I drove up Highway 1 from a visit to L.A. with a girlfriend who was mooching off me. We'd been told by everybody to eat at the famous Ventana Inn, so I insisted we stop. She didn't like the menu (an irrational vegetarian, not the healthy kind) and I had to pay for her to keep her in the place. I didn't have enough money to pay our bill and leave a tip, so I didn't leave a tip. I still feel bad about it, after all these years -- I've waited tables for a living, it sucks. And now that place may burn down, too.
I do learn lessons, though it seems slow, some weeks. If it was now, I'd let her rot in the car, order what I wanted and leave a great tip. How we treat strangers is as important as any girlfriend on the planet.
1) Parking
2) Dinners over - ate out as we spent the day painting - Indian buffet
3) Dunno about pollen, but I'm gasping for air here - tenant in the apartment to be painted had cats = instant wheeeezing.
4) I'm reading Andy Lee & Pat Foreman's book on Chicken Tractors.
And did someone say pie? I'm in the middle of making unbaked strawberry pies for tomorrow (should show up on my blog Monday or Tuesday) which are far too damn good to be used in a pie fight.
Mrs. Robinson,
If you feel like disclosing,
what's wrong?
It's wonderful that there is a
75% chance that it can be fixed.
Sad, that it may take a long time.
My thoughts are with you.
It's Lyme (and probably a few of its fellow travelers -- one of the nasty things about Lyme is that it always comes with company).
I've probably had it since I was a kid -- in my teens at the latest. It started taking me out when I was 26, and laid me flat after my son was born nine years later. I stopped work in '97 when I was finally diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which eventually turned into a diagnosis of myalgic encephalomyelitis (which is what most CFS is -- how ME got turned into a non-existent junk disease called CFS is a criminally sordid history that will bring eternal shame on the CDC, and maybe I'll tell it sometime.)
ME's tricky because it's a very specific syndrome (the Health Canada description runs to 114 pages; the WHO lists it right in there between MS and lupus; and NIH studies have found that it's more debilitating that either MS or AIDS on a day-to-day basis), but nobody knows how it starts.
Lately, it's emerged that about 20% of ME patients have Lyme and/or some of its friends. So when I turned up with some joint pain that was decidedly Lyme-like a few months ago, a smart friend suggested it was time to get tested. I came up clearly positive.
So here I am -- and here we go. One to two months of anti-fungals, followed by one to two years of antibiotics. Got a great Lyme doc in Seattle overseeing the process.
And yeah, I'm pretty excited, especially on down days like today. I take good care of myself, and my worst days now are nothing compared to the ones I had a decade ago. (Hey: I'm sitting up in bed and typing, and also able to move and speak. Ain't life good?) But the prospect of living with something incurable -- and then finding out that it could be OVER (or at least significantly better) in a year or two is, well, life-changing.
Wow, Mrs Robinson, that's really exciting. Having been through a similar process, I have to say it really *is* life changing. Good luck! Keep us posted!
Ferdzy, if you don't mind sharing, what was your process? (I'm collecting stories right about now to prepare for what's ahead...)
Sara -- I hope everything works out and the illness is completely cured. My sister was diagnosed with CFS some years ago so I sent her a copy of what you said about it.
I had an acquaintance in high school who had some disease they said she would die of before she was 21. so she didn't take care of herself and wasn't concerned, since she thought she wasn't going to live long enough for nutrition and drugs to matter. Then they discovered a cure. That was her story anyway -- I don't remember what she had.
oh, the questions:
Expenses: taxis?
For breakfast we had cereal, for lunch we had a Subway sandwich. But dinner was in a new Italian restaurant. We had bass, lobster ravioli, spinach, Caesar salad, and Zabiglione. (you should see what spellcheck did with that!)
Pollen: I don't notice, as I am not allergic to it, or much of anything else either. (I am constantly thankful for that.)
Book: I am reading The Secret History of the American Empire subtitled "Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth about Global Corruption" by John Perkins. Everybody should read it. It's well-written too, almost like a novel.
Not quite so severe as your story, but when I opened the Globe & Mail one day and read that "hepatitis C used to be known as non-A, non-B hepatitis" I hit the ceiling, shrieking all the way up.
To make a long story short, 10 years later I am cured, and have a noticeable amount more energy than I used to. I had not actually identified myself as being sick, but I always wondered why I was such a limp dishrag, and why couldn't I make more of an effort, and get things done...
If you really want the gorey details, let me know and I'll email you my life story. 
Sorry to read that about the Lyme disease Mrs. R. and my best wishes for a
complete recovery.
Mrs R. - Good luck with the malaise. I just finished a salami and provolone on Italian 5 grain sourdough bread with oil and wine vinegar, a glass of seltzer, and sending some bread to GNB - keep Steve's legacy going.
me... a few days late
1. coffee/ tea to keep us up, caffinated and blogging throughout the convention. AND our transport to the BIG speech if Obama moves it outside of the convention center to Mile High.
2. Today's lunch special, grilled chicken on sweet potato salad
3. for us it is more pollution than pollen, sadly
4. reading The Right Brain, and watched Pan's Labyrinth which was pretty graphic and depressing. I was surprised. It was visually stunning though.
Kim C, your friend's story reminds me of the old quip: "If I'd known I was going to live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself."
Me, I don't realistically expect to see 70, but in my head I'm looking forward to 90.
Sara -- Maybe now that they know it's Lyme Disease and can deal with it, you can really expect to see 90.
Three of my grandparents lived to 85, while my parents made early 70s. I hope that doesn't mean I can only expect 60s. (My other grandparent died of stupidity -- he got stuck on the railroad tracks and got run over by a train.)
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