Oh, Gee

In addition to my regular annual checkup with Dr. N, yesterday was my annual eye exam. This was no accident; when Dr. N schedules appointments for her patients, she looks for appointments they already have and schedules around those. This is handy for people who live far away or whose insurance only charges one copayment per day, but it always makes me nervous that I will miss an appointment. 

Dr. N saw me promptly, however and came bearing mostly good news. My blood work looked good and my total cholesterol had dropped even more.

So then it was on to my ophthalmologist, Dr. Hottie. No, I don’t call him that to his face, but he is a sight for sore eyes. First I had something called a visual field test, and had to push a button every time I saw a flickering light. Then the standard vision test, then I had my eyes dilated and got the standard glaucoma tests. Somewhere in there, a technician took pictures of my optic nerves.

By the time Dr. H came in to see me, I was checking my watch wondering when I’d get out of there and if I’d have enough time to go buy my husband’s Christmas present at Lowe’s. I wasn’t expecting to hear that I have glaucoma. My left optic nerve is showing signs of notching on the lower margin, and I have corresponding “shadowing” in the upper left visual field. (The eye is flipped with respect to the optic nerve, the lower nerve innervates the upper eye and vice versa.) Dr. H reassured me they had caught it early. He also explained I have low tension glaucoma, which wouldn’t have been diagnosable by a standard test of eye pressure. In low tension (or normal tension or normal pressure) glaucoma, eye pressure is normal but the optic nerve shows damage anyway. Treatment is the same: eye drops to lower eye pressure and if that doesn’t work, surgery to increase drainage of eye fluids. Ten percent of people with glaucoma can lose their vision even with treatment.

I cannot figure out if I am the healthiest sick person I know or the sickest healthy person I know. What I do know is that I have an interesting reaction to bad health news. Whatever anger, fear, or self-pity comes along later on, my initial reaction is always the same: shame. If something is wrong with me, I caused it. 

I don’t think I’m the only person who reacts that way, either, because we have the Adam and Eve story to suggest that this is a pretty widespread belief. If human beings feel soreness and pain, and eventually die, it must be because we did something wrong. We must have brought it on ourselves some way. Women must have done it, because we’re the ones who bleed mysteriously. Shame and pain, they’re almost sisters.

Today I’m feeling a little calmer. I have drops to put in my eye each night and I go back to Dr. H in a month to see how they’re working. Other than that, there isn’t anything I can do. This isn’t something that diet and exercise will fix. This isn’t something that requires major lifestyle changes.

Oh, gee. I wasn’t expecting this.

So Maybe It Was a Little Excessive

Sunday morning I went to the emergency room. It wasn’t anything life or death. I had sliced my finger the day before while making lunch. (My husband’s first question was, “Was it one of our new knives?” They aren’t really new; we had simply sent them back to the factory to be sharpened, but I was able to reassure him that yes, they are really, really sharp.) It took some time and many, many paper towels before I was able to get two bandaids on it. I decided if it was still bleeding in half an hour, I’d go to the urgent care clinic, but half an hour later the bandages were clean. I had an appointment for a checkup  on Monday (actually today), so I figured I’d be okay letting it wait. 

But as the day went on, any pressure on it made it bleed and hurt. Ochsner’s urgent care clinic hours were over by then. I finally found their website’s guide to when to seek emergency care, and realized I didn’t know when I’d last had a tetanus shot (one of the indicators to seek care under “Lacerations”) and hadn’t been able to bring myself to look at the cut so I had no idea how deep it was. That night I had a hard time sleeping with the pain and felt some nausea, not to mention throbbing, signs of possible infection. So at the crack of dawn, I told hubby I was going to the ER. He offered to drive me.

As it turned out, the cut wasn’t as bad as I feared. I had missed the six hour window for getting stitches, although Dr. B wasn’t sure I would have needed them anyway. There was no infection, but she prescribed an antibiotic just in case. They dabbed on some ointment and slapped on a regular bandaid, except it was 1” wide instead of 3/4”. They wrapped it looser than I had with my bandaids, eliminating most of the throbbing. I left with instructions for wound care, the rest of the ointment, and prescriptions for the antibiotics and some pain pills. I was only given those after I paid my $100 copay.

Note to self: next time you slice an appendage, do it on a weekday.

Since I was apparently not dying, I was able to go ahead with my plans for the day, making cornbread for the Chili Cook-Off. I made chili for the Chili Cook-Off one year, and won third place, with my version of Chili Blanco. I replaced the chicken with pork tenderloin, slathered with cumin and slow cooked the day before. The recipe requires a lot of slicing and dicing however, not to mention the one-day head start, and I am feeling a little off that sort of thing right now.

So instead I decided to tackle a nice, simple recipe: Yeast Raised Corn Bread. The only cutting it required was snipping the 2/3 cup of chives. Most of the kneading is done by a stand mixer with a dough hook (which I just happen to have.) We also had a box of vinyl gloves which my husband uses when he’s staining wood projects, so I could protect my hand while not risking the lives of people with latex allergies.

The recipe calls for fresh chives and fresh or frozen corn. I had actually picked the recipe out two days before, and since John was going to the store anyway, had him buy frozen corn and chives (otherwise I had planned to use canned corn and freeze dried chives, which we had on hand).

The first snag I ran into was with the chives. By the time they were all snipped, what looked like 2/3 cup turned into more like 1/3. Then there was the corn. The only frozen corn my husband could find was corn in butter sauce. I wasn’t sure how the butter sauce would affect the recipe, so I decided to use the canned corn after all. Once drained, the 14 ounce can was closer to 1.5 cups instead of two, but I decided that was close enough.

The recipe is really easy, although time consuming as yeast recipes are. Almost all the work is done by the mixer. I ran into yet a third snag, however. I added the flour/salt mixture until the dough left the sides, but not the bottom, of the bowl, just as the recipe said. Then I turned the speed up to medium, just as the recipe said. At that point, the dough, which had been behaving perfectly, began sticking to the sides of the bowl again. All I can think of is that the higher speed caused the canned corn to begin secreting liquid. I added a little more flour. When it was time to turn the mix out on a board and knead it a few times, I covered the board about 1/8” thick with more flour. By time I kneaded it a few times, it was perfect: easy to form into a ball and put aside to rise. I use a trick I learned from the Farm Journal Book of Breads: put the bowl with the dough into a cold oven and put a pan of hot water on the lower rack. Dough rises perfectly every time.

When it came time to shape the dough into balls and put them into muffin tins, I ran into my final snag. I have old muffin/cupcake tins, dating back to the 1960’s and 70’s. I don’t know if the recipe’s inventor uses larger muffin tins or if the extra moisture/flour caused a problem, but there was just too much dough for 18 muffin cups, something I did not realize until I had cut the dough into 18 pieces. So I grabbed two cookie sheets, rolled the pieces into balls and placed them on the cookie sheets to bake.

They wound up flattening out a little and looking like hamburger buns, but they tasted great. There were enough chives to give a nice sprinkling of green, but not enough to give a true chive flavor, so they really needed the 2/3 cup, but the amount of corn seemed sufficient.  Most of the rolls disappeared at the chili supper, but I managed to snag two of them to bring home and we used them tonight to make pulled pork sandwiches with leftover pulled pork I found in the freezer. Toasting brought out the corn flavor even more.

If I make them again (which I probably will because hubby loves them), I’ll either make 24 rolls in the muffin tins or make 15 hamburger buns-sized rolls on the cookie sheet. Then I can freeze them and pull out as needed for pulled pork, beef, or chicken sandwiches. 

So maybe my trip to the ER was a little excessive. Maybe making a yeast version of cornbread which takes four hours instead of the Jiffy Mix version was a little excessive. It’s a great recipe, though. My recommendations would be to use the full amount of chives and use either fresh or frozen corn, not canned. Also, don’t slice your hand while chopping celery the day before, but you probably figured that one out already.

Thankful

I had much to be thankful for this year at Thanksgiving. First of all, I’m thankful that I am able to afford retirement. I’m thankful we were able to visit my son in London, and I’m thankful for my husband taking good care of me while I was laid up with a broken foot. I’m even thankful for the bad housing market that prevented our selling our house and moving to be near our son as we had planned, because he’s now sold his condo in the states and is working in London for at least a year.

Of course, I’m thankful for the big-hearted friend who invites us and around three or four dozen other friends and relatives to her Thanksgiving feast every year. 

But there was one thing that put a damper on my thankfulness this year. D’Artagnan, our new kitty, went missing. He followed Truffle out the door as usual at 6 AM Thanksgiving morning, but he did not start yowling to be let in fifteen minutes later. An hour later Truffle was in, but no D’Artagnan. As we left to go to my friend’s house, still no D’Artagnan. I figured he would be waiting impatiently outside our door when we got home, and didn’t worry about it.

Thanksgiving dinner was even more crowded than usual, but we did reconnect with old friends. The blessing this year was a blessing over the bread delivered in Hebrew and then translated into English (we’ve had Catholic and Baptist blessings in the past, so this was new). People spoke animatedly over the upcoming LSU-Arkansas game and we teased one friend over not having worn his Arkansas shirt.

When we got home, Truffle was waiting impatiently for us, but no D’Artagnan.

Friday morning I made posters and taped them out around the subdivision, and posted a “lost” notice on Craigslist. By Friday night when I went to bed, still no word. I heard John disable the alarm and open the front door at one point, but he had been checking the front door pretty frequently, as had I.

D'Artagnan's picture from the "Wanted" -er-"Lost" poster

This morning Truffle woke me up to let him out at 6AM, as usual. I disabled the alarm and went to the front door to let him out. A desk chair was parked under the door handle. As I turned to go ask hubby what was up with that, I saw a familiar black and white furry form by my feet.

“Where have you been?” I exclaimed. “He came in last night,” my husband explained. “I think he’s been in someone’s house, because he wasn’t hungry or thirsty.” He had put the desk chair by the door so I wouldn’t let the cat out again.

Did I mention I’m thankful for furry companions who wake me up at ungodly hours of the morning and keep me up all hours of the night and rip up my furniture and leave paw prints on the windshield of my car? Because I am.

Foreign Exchange: Part 4, The One That Got Away

After Anett, I wanted to try again for a student from South America, and we found Eric, from Chile. Our first few students had to be picked up from Houston, but Eric flew from Houston to Baton Rouge and we picked him up at the airport. He seemed quiet, but he had had a busy few days in Houston after his long trip, so we figured he was tired. 

When he got into his room he asked, “What’s that smell?” We didn’t notice anything unusual and Eric decided it was “just the smell of the house”. When Anders was with us, he had left some sweaty gym clothes on the carpet for a few days and we did notice a musty smell but we had cleaned the carpet. We took Eric out for dinner and he fell asleep soon afterward and slept for most of the next day. 

We found out later that when Eric woke up Sunday he had called our AFS rep and asked to be moved to another family. In fact, he really wanted to go back to Houston and be placed with another family there, because he did not want to be in Baton Rouge at all.

The next weekend,  we took Eric and another AFS student, also from South America and staying with a family halfway across town, to the water park and then to a Mexican restaurant. They conversed to each other mostly in Spanish. At this point we still did not know Eric was looking for a new family. 

Eric did tell us that he almost did not get his visa to come to the U.S. The immigration official in charge of his case kept saying no and Eric finally had to meet with him in person and insist. In light of later events, we wonder what the immigration official saw. We became certain that Eric had decided to ask for a new family even before he met us, so maybe he indicated something of the sort to the immigration officer.

We also learned from Eric he had been responsible for his younger brother’s care since his dad left the family and his mother had gone back to work, and that he missed his brother badly.

I tried to make Eric feel happy and at home. Friday afternoon, which I had off, I made him empanadas, a food he especially liked. I consulted him over the recipe and followed tips he gave me. It took all afternoon, and while he seemed appreciative, I could tell he still thought of us as strangers and not people who wanted to make him feel welcomed.

Shortly after school started, Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast. We had only a tropical storm, but school was closed for a week and I had most of the week off as well. I took Eric to the house of a co-worker who had two teenagers, a son and a daughter. He enjoyed himself there and the family liked him as well. The three teens cooked up a plan for my co-worker and her husband to become his new host family, but her husband did not feel comfortable having a strange young man in the house with his daughter. So that fell through.

When school started again, things got even worse. Katrina had sent a lot of refugees to Baton Rouge, and since no one knew when the schools would be up and running again in New Orleans, parents were advised to enroll their children in the school nearest to where they were. Eric’s high  school was flooded with new students, and the guidance staff was overwhelmed. They tried to make time for Eric, but it was difficult. Eric was frightened that another storm would hit us, and, it was becoming apparent, badly depressed. I arranged for a pediatrician acquaintance of mine, an immigrant from Colombia, to see Eric when he started to have stomach pains. Dr F attributed the pains to homesickness and tried to convince Eric he’d feel better if he gave it some time.

We were still trying to make Eric feel welcomed. We took Eric to a Latin American festival held by a local church. He didn’t like it that most of the food and entertainment was Central American. He did run into Dr. F at the festival and was touched and surprised that Dr. F stopped to have a conversation with him.

Eventually, Eric decided to go home. By this time, the school nurse had opined that he needed to be on anti-depressants. My view was that if he needed to be on anti-depressants, he needed to be home with people who loved him and could monitor him effectively. However, although Eric wanted to go home and we wanted him home, his mother did not agree. It took a few weeks for her to agree to his going home. I could understand her point of view. She had paid a lot of money for Eric to come to the US, and I suspected she wanted him to have some time free of home responsibilities.

In early October, we said good-bye to Eric. He wrote us a letter, which he read us, thanking us for hosting him and offering to show us around Santiago if we ever visited there.

I was perfectly willing to say good-bye to being a host parent forever, but John wanted to try again the next year. And thereby hangs another tale.

(Part Three of my experiences as a host mom is here. Part Five is here.)

The Renaissance Festival

When the Byrds recorded Renaissance Fair in 1967, the first Renaissance Fair in the United States, in California, was only four years old. By the time my son was in middle school in the 1980’s, there was a Texas Renaissance Festival in Houston, and most local schools went there on field trips. By 1999, Louisiana had its own Renaissance Festival*, held on ten acres of piney woods northeast of Hammond. As the website explains:

The village of Albright is approximately 10 charming acres of tranquility. Upon entering the majestic front gate, visitors will be greeted by the many residents of Albright, whether it be the Baron, the Mayor, the Inn Keeper or countless others.
There are delightful aromas and sounds filling the rustic streets of Albright. From bagpipes to the hammer dulcimer, from roasted pecans to garlic mushrooms, your senses are delighted at every turn! For fulfilling your thirst, there are many beverages from which to choose. The coffee shop offers tea and hot cocoa while the Painted Badger Pub and King Head's Tavern offer various spirits. A variety of soft drinks are found throughout the village. Piper's Pubs bring you many delicious flavors of root beer and cream ale.

Opening Procession

Opening the Gate

Lute Player

Fire Eater

This is the kind of menu you plan when you're stoned.

Or so I've been told, I wouldn't really know.

Joust

I went to the first festival with a friend to celebrate her birthday. While we were there, I bought her a pair of earrings of her choosing and bought myself a ginger beer in a ceramic bottle that was supposed to entitle me to free refills forever. The ginger beer tasted like ordinary root beer; I didn’t make it to the next year’s festival and soon I stopped seeing advertisements for it, so I assumed it was no longer being held. The ceramic bottle made it into a donate pile. 

A week or so ago, I saw a full page advertisement for the Louisiana Renaissance Festival on the back page of Red Shtick, a local humor magazine. (Well, some of us find it funny.) “I didn’t know they were still holding that,” I said to my husband, “Do you want to go?” He hemmed and hawed and finally allowed his arm to be twisted. So Saturday we went.

The festival was much as I remembered it, including the place that sold the root beer. If I had still had my ceramic bottle, I would have got a free drink. (I really need to stop watching Hoarders; so far this year it’s cost me $66.) There are more attractions - I don’t remember a wine tasting (sold out), whiskey tasting, or Tea with the Queen from our earlier visit. The attractions I wanted to see, the Joust and the Birds of Prey Exhibit were still there. There were also three jugglers/fire eaters, two of whom were going to participate in a contest on a stage covered with mousetraps right before closing. We left before then.

Many of the attendees were in costume, although not necessarily Renaissance costumes. One woman I saw wore a Star Trek costume. There was a shop (shoppe?) where you could buy or rent a costume if you wanted. The festival site advertises itself as a  wedding venue but there were none taking place the day we were there.

“I like this better than the State Fair or the Angola Prison Rodeo”, my husband said. Someone who does not know my husband might think he meant next year we’ll be going to the Renaissance Festival instead of the State Fair and the Prison Rodeo. Someone who has been married to my husband for almost 24 years knows it means we’ll be going to the Renaissance Festival in addition to the State Fair and the Prison Rodeo.

I looked for possible Christmas gifts at the vendors’ booths but didn’t see anything suitable for the people I buy for, at least not for a price I could afford. There were some lovely bits of handblown glass for mind blowing prices. The glass blower gave demonstrations on the hour and interspersed glass blowing lore with lifestyle advice and political views. No one argued with him, he was holding a wand full of hot glass. I liked him.

In addition to the joust, the birds of prey, the juggler/fire eaters, and the glass blower we saw two comedy acts and a bagpipe/belly dancer act. I’m not sure how historically accurate it all was but it was a pretty day to be out in the piney woods. The festival is going on for three more weekends, so if you happen to be in the vicinity of Hammond, Louisiana looking for something to do (and believe me, if you happen to be in the vicinity of Hammond, Louisiana you will be looking for something to do), go visit the festival.

*According to the Renaissance, Medieval and Pirate Faire Directory, 44 states currently have Renaissance, Medieval and/or Pirate Fairs, at least if I counted correctly.

The Bank of Mom

When I was growing up, my parents had one income, five kids and no spare cash. It was just understood that once you hit eighteen, you were going to need an income of your own. My older brothers lived at home for a few months after they started working, and then they joined the military. I went off to college on the bountiful grants, scholarships, and really cheap loans available to members of the Baby Boom generation, the same whiny ass generation that is rapidly developing amnesia in its old age and thinks it made it on its own with no handouts. My younger brother did the same.

My son, however, was reared with a different set of expectations. I started saving before he was born to make sure he could go to college loan free. With only one of him and four wage-earner parents (he does have two step-siblings), he had a pretty cushy life. He did start earning his own way even before he left college, working twenty hours a week and full time summers at a computer job that paid well more than minimum wage to pay his living expenses while his parents paid tuition, fees and books. I was surprised he made it through college given how much he hated school and how much he could earn without a degree, but he persisted. He has been self-supporting ever since, for the most part, but every so often when he does get in a jam, he relies on the Bank of Mom.

From what I can gather, polling friends and relatives, he is not alone in this. They all make occasional-to-frequent small loans to offspring who don’t seem to have emergency funds. Mine seems to be at the head of the pack when it comes to paying back in a timely manner, too. So my fears of enabling a dependent lifestyle seem unfounded, especially since I’ve only loaned him money about four times in ten years and it’s all been paid back.

I can certainly understand why the Bank of Mom is an attractive alternative to other banking options. The Bank of Mom does not demand collateral. The Bank of Mom will even make you an interest free loan to pay back the high interest credit card bills you ran up wining and dining your college girlfriend who then dumped you for a medical student. The Bank of Mom is open at 2 in the morning when you are stuck in an airport in Paris because you forgot to tell your bank you’d be overseas for several months and they shut down your debit card over those funny looking charges. The Bank of Mom was actually open because she was awake with abdominal pains that had her wondering if she needed to go to the emergency room, but at least she wasn’t awakened from a sound sleep. After half an hour of dealing with the airline, the pain went away anyway, so apparently it was nothing serious. 

The Bank of Mom does have a pesky habit of posting, “Did you make it home okay?” on your Facebook wall when she hasn’t heard from you after paying for your airline ticket, but at least she doesn’t charge interest.

The Bank of Mom also doesn’t charge picky exchange fees when you and all your money are in London and you get a reminder of a bill you still owe back in the U.S. The Bank of Mom didn’t even demand a coherent explanation of what the bill was for.

 And when the Bank of Mom sends you birthday and Christmas cards, they are picked out especially for you and not part of a mass mail out of hundreds or thousands of similar cards. A dozen or so similar cards, tops.

So for those of you who still deal with the Bank of Mom, or its affiliate, the Bank of Dad, I make a plea. In exchange for the non-existent interest, the convenient hours, the outstanding customer service, and the speed with which a loan can be arranged, extend a little tolerance for the loan officer who posts “Did you make it home yet?” on your Facebook wall. Before you start complaining how that embarrassed you in front of your friends, ask yourself, where were those friends at 2 in the morning when you needed the loan?               

Anadama

I used to love to bake. I learned to bake bread when I was in graduate school, and home-baked bread was often the only bread I could afford. I tried all kinds of breads. I bought The Farm Journal Book of Homemade Bread, which I still have and which has all kinds of short-cut recipes, such as CoolRise French bread and brioche.

One of the cliches that puzzles me about baking is that baking recipes, unlike other recipes, must be followed precisely and don’t allow for innovation. It seems to me that if that were true, there would only be one recipe in the world for banana bread, or whole wheat bread, or ordinary white bread. I’ve even run across more than one recipe for croissants, which are all kinds of fussy to make. Somebody must have been playing around with these recipes.

So I am perfectly happy to mess with baking recipes. By swapping out cottage cheese, instant minced onion and dill seeds in Dilly Casserole Bread for Campbell’s Cheddar Cheese soup, chives and parsley, I made a batter cheese bread that got honorable mention in a local contest. 

My favorite bread recipe to mess with is Anadama Bread. My Farm Journal book gives the history of Anadama Bread as follows:

A Massachusetts fisherman, tired of the cornmeal mush his wife, Anna, spooned up for meals, added molasses and yeast to it and baked the first loaf of this bread while muttering “Anna-dam’er, Anna-dam’er” (or so the legend goes).

A batter bread with the addition of something thick and mushy allows for a lot of messing around with. The Book of Homemade Bread even offers one such variation, with oatmeal substituted for cornmeal. My own variation is made with a can of sweet potatoes, blended to a mush. It gives the taste of potato bread but is a lot faster and easier to cook.

I had promised to bake pumpkin bread for the UMW fall bake sale, and had actually been planning to use my trusty Anadama recipe with a can of pumpkin in place of the cornmeal, when I saw that Libby makes a pumpkin bread kit, with all the ingredients for two 9x5 loaves or three 8x4 loaves (or one 9x13 pan or cupcakes). Recalling that quick breads seem to sell faster than yeast breads anyway, I  opted for the easy path. The kit even came with a glaze to put on top. What could be easier?

Saturday evening I baked the three 8x4 loaves in disposable pans. After cooling the breads according to directions, I put them back in the pans and glazed the tops. I wrapped them each in plastic wrap, not too tightly so as not to mess up the glaze. I thought about putting them in the refrigerator, but I had read somewhere that putting baked goods in the refrigerator dries them out faster, and it was a cool night. I thought about moving them across the room to the baking center, but I’d have to clear it off. So I left them on the counter near the window.

When I next looked at them Sunday morning, little black specks were moving across the glaze: sugar ants. I said a quick “Anadama!” or at least one syllable thereof and thought frantically for a moment of just scraping off the glaze before realizing the ants were all over the pans and the bread had to be tossed out. If I had made the yeast bread, this wouldn’t have happened. If I had just moved the bread across the room to the baking center, it wouldn’t have happened. I donated the amount the breads would have sold for to the bake sale and made a note to call the exterminator the next day.

I’m still going to try the Anadama pumpkin bread just for fun. I’m not going to leave it anywhere near the window.