Dinner, Drama, and a Dead Body at my Continuum Care Complex

Fancy, five course dinners planned around a Murder Mystery game where twenty of us play a character and twenty other residents dine and watch the action from the sidelines has become a tradition here at my continuum care complex. Last week was our third murder mystery dinner and once again I took a part. I actually signed up for the audience but the Life Enrichment Director asked me if I'd switch. There was a method to my madness, so to speak, because I knew she wouldn’t get enough actors to sign up and like last year, she’d ask me to switch from an audience member to a player. I said, "yes IF I can pick the part I want to play" and both this year and last year she let me. Some of the parts require fancy costumes—cocktail dresses, tailored suits—stuff I don’t own and don’t have the money to buy for a one-time event. Last year a guy even rented an outfit for $50! A lot of borrowing of props to round out our costumes goes on the week before these parties. One guy came with borrowed boxing gloves hung around his shoulders, another came wearing a borrowed tux with tails and carrying a top hat and a wand. One lady offered me to loan me a hundred dollar bill to put in my pocket. I turned it down.

If you've never been to a murder mystery dinner party, here's how they work: you are given a character before the party date with costume suggestions and you show up in costume. As you sit down for dinner you’re given a scribe to read and suddenly your dining table turns into a crime scene. For example my introduction speech was: “I’m Lucky Hart, current world poker champion. I don’t want to sound heartless but this murder has come at a really bad time. I’ve got a tournament in Paris tomorrow night and have to be ready. It wasn’t me anyway. Ever since Sterling left us, I’ve been one of the casino's bathrooms practicing my poker face in the mirror. What? You this comes naturally.” There are four times (between courses) where you have a part to read. And all night long there’s ad-lib accusations, drama, suspicious glances and cat-calling between tables going on and way too much laughter for a place where a murder supposedly happened just before you all sit down for the first course.

My suggested costume was jeans, a hoodie over a t-shirt and a baseball cap. I have lots of hoodies but it’s been really hot and I didn’t want to wear one so I bought a light weight shirt with a hood. I also figured out how to use rubber bands to put cards up my sleeves that showed when I waved during my introduction and I bought a $4.00 patch depicting a poker hand that I put on a purse with double-faced tape.

The part called for me to have poker face to stay in character. I knew it would crack up my fellow Mahjong players because they tell me all the time that I don’t have a poker face. Little do they know that sometimes when I get excited over a tile I just drew that I’m faking it and other times when I get a good tile I don’t show it in my body language. But for the most part, they are right. I get way too excited when I’m close to winning. 

For dinner the chef served five courses consisting of a Caprese Salad with burrata cheese, peaches, tomatoes, basil and microgreens. That was followed by a course of suffron-herb risotto, roasted red pepper and lobster tails. (Myself and another person who is allergic to shell fish got chicken instead of the two tails.) After that course we were given a watermelon with lime zest Sorbet to “cleanse our palate” followed by prime rib, Au-gratin potatoes and asparagus. Dessert was my all-time favorite comfort food. Bread pudding. Not just any bread pudding but bread pudding with bourbon butter sauce and vanilla ice cream that was to die for. Our chef won an Iron Chef Contest over a dozen other chefs working in places like this for a reason and at parties like this her skills really shine. At $25.00 for this meal it was worth going over my food allowance for the month. 

If you ever get invited to a mystery murder party, go. Even more fun would be to plan one. Just google Murder Mystery party games. There are several companies making the kits, for various size parties. The one we used came form a UK company. They have seventeen different themes. Ours was the Murder at the Casino and it had characters like: Buck Meister who stole the show. In real life the guy who played the part is a straight arrow, a classy dresser and very wealthy but for the part of Buck—a “red-blooded, ready to ride rodeo cowboy”—he came in jeans, a cowboy hat and boots and a white t-shirt that he’d cut down the front and held it together at the bottom with a big safe pin, his bare chest and gray chest hair hanging out of a very wide V. He’d also cut the sleeves off the t-shirt. You couldn’t help laughing every time he got up to do his speaking parts. Few of us knew he has a good sense of humor. Another standout was a guy at my table who all night long never broke out of character. He was a big, bold mob boss who dressed to kill and literally did. He was going to get me fitted for cement shoes if he ever caught me cheating at his poker table. There was also a magician, a casino floor manager, a crooner, a private detective, a TV reporter, a princess and others parts I’ve forgotten. 

What’s great about these parties is that the fun doesn’t just take place at the party itself but also before and afterward they generate a lot of conversation. For example, I was at the lunch table the next day for over two hours and when I went back to my apartment I had a sore belly from laughing so much over the rehashing of the murder mystery. ©

 Until Next Wednesday...

The Pink Salt Trick: Myth, Magic or Just Salty?

More than likely you've heard of the Pink Salt Trick for weight loss. I've known about it for a year or more but it's only been a few weeks that it's come to the center of my radar screen. This winter I've been gaining weight at an alarm rate and when I got my summer clothes out most of them were too tight. I hate tight clothing on me and other people. If they show tummy rolls and cellulite I won't wear a garment. Even on women who are slim and fit if her "camel toes" are showing I'm going to mentally call her out for wearing a second skin and calling it workout gear. And before anyone is tempted to scold for not being politically correct, I would never say anything out loud to another woman, to her friends and mine so how is that body shaming if I keep it to myself? Either way, I'm not going to be silenced in my own blog for what I think. Sooner rather than later all of us who grew up with a certain standard of decency in dressing will die off and then the sin of women judging the way other women dress will be solved.

Boy, did I get off track! Back to pink salt. I can't help thinking about my brother when the topic of salt comes up. A few years ago when I was on a kick to learn more about cooking I wanted to buy a pricey gift box of salts from around the world. I was fascinated that you can get black, pink, brown, yellow and blue salt as well as the white I've seen all of my life. My brother and I bickered back and forth, as siblings tend to do, about whether or not they tasted any different. He thought it was a rip off---that there wouldn't be any difference except in price---and I thought it might be one of the secrets of good cooking that he learned and I didn't. 

I never did get my sampler box of salt but I did manage to buy some pink Himalayan salt at the grocery store that went mostly unused until recently. Pink salt comes from the Himalayan mountains and supposedly it contains many trace minerals including calcium, magnesium and potassium. Anytime I've dieted in the past I've never tried the fad diets. It's been Weight Watchers, Tops, gym memberships and once I did a doctor supervised, all liquid diet that was my favorite because I never got hungry. I take that back, my mom and I did the cabbage soup diet once. That must have been back in the '70s and I haven't eaten cabbage since. 

When I first googled the Pink Salt Trick I lucked out and found a straight forward recipe---a practically free concoction to put together.  I was not so lucky the next few times I google the Pink Salt Trick looking for more information about its safety, etc., and I found instead Oprah's VERY LONG video hawking a weight loss pill based on pink Himalayan salt. Both the free concoction and Oprah's pill claim that they tackle insulin resistance and is an alternate to the Mounjaro shots that people are paying big money out-of-pocket for but are getting amazing results. Both Pink Salt Tricks have dozens of testimonials attached to their claims.  

I'd already tried the free version before stumbling on to Oprah's video and silly me I thought I'd just be finding some science behind it and variations to the basic recipe so I started watching it. Instead, near the end of her VERY LONG video she revealed that she's selling pills, pills called Prozenith made with pink salt and three other ingredients you can only get in Japan. It ticked me off that she made one of those so-called medical break-through videos. In my mind if it's a good product you don't say things like "we only have 182 bottles left in stock so order now!" You also don't make people buy two bottles at a time for $79 each while encouraging people to buy eight at a time at a reduced rate of $50 a bottle. You also don't have to offer the first ten people who place an order a zoom meeting with Oprah. 

Out of curiosity I did a google search to see if you could by the Prozenith any place else other than at the VERY LONG video website and I found a product on Amazon called Pro Prozenith that contains two of the four ingredients in common with those in the pills Oprah is hawking but for less than half the price. The labels even look the same except for the addition of the word Pro and the difference in the ingredients. 

According to the VERY LONG video The Pink Salt Trick was first introduced in Dr. Casey Means book, Good Energy and from what I gather from the video she helped Oprah loss a bunch of weight and afterward they started working together to make the Pink Salt Trick into a pill form that they could bring to market. Their formula has pink salt, quercein, bern berberiene and mountain root. The practically free version has pink salt, lemon juice, honey and water. 

To make things even more interesting a 10 minute video of Oprah showed up in my Facebook feed that I suspect was AI generated. It introduced the Pink Salt 'Hack' and a web link to a guy selling a liquid drop version of a concoction made with pink salt, bern bereriene and an ingredient you can only get in Brazil. See a pattern here? I didn't watch his entire video because the ending was predictable...a high pressure pitch to buy his high priced hack/liquid drops.

Like I said before, I didn't know there was more than one Pink Salt Trick out there before I tried the practically free version. All the testimonials for all three versions claim dramatic lost weight without changing their diet or exercising. To judge if this is true, I drank the nearly-free concoction for a week without going to our gym or taking walks around the campus. I also didn't give up eating things I know I should. For example over the week I had 7 pieces of Ghirardelli's dark chocolate squares, 4 cookies and 2 bowls of ice cream and I didn't cut the portions down on any of my meals nor did I pass up on the bread they serve here with all dinners. I lost 4.8 pounds in the first seven days and maybe it's magical thinking but I feel better---less food obsessing going on in my head. No foraging in the kitchen out of boredom. It also didn't effect my blood pressure. 

By the middle of my second week, the scale seemed to get stuck and by the end of the week I'd only lost two more pounds and I had given up all sugary stuff except for my daily dose of chocolate, so I expected more. I really need to add exercise to the mix. I only average around 2,500 steps a day. Am I going to keep using the salt? As long as it doesn't start effecting my blood pressure will---I'm checking it 2-3 times a day. If you'd tried a Pink Salt Trick what was your experience? ©

Until next Wednesday.  

The Pink Salt Trick Recipe

1/4 teaspoon of pink salt dissolved in an 8 oz cup of warm filtered water. Add a 1/2 teaspoon of lemon juice and 1 teaspoon of raw honey. Drink this first thing in the morning on an empty stomach. I've seen suggestions where you can add grated ginger, mint leaves or coconut water to mix things up, if you get bored with the taste or can't get it down. I find that drinking it fast without stopping allows you to avoid the taste issue all together. 

 

Here's an article claiming the Oprah endorsement is fake and so it the pink salt trick - tells how to spot fake endorsements. Click here.

While Rome Burns, I Play in my own Little World

I'm going to write a post that ignores what went on over the weekend---ignores the 45 million dollar military/president's birthday parade, ignores the thousands of 'No Kings' protests, ignores the inhumane tactics used by ICE, ignores that the president is illegally sending federal troops in where governors don't want or need them, ignores the so-called "Big Beautiful [ugly] Bill" working its way though the Senate and will end up bankrupting us if it passes, ignores the political assassinations in Minnesota. I'm even going to ignore how smart and courageous the new pope was with his live stream message on parade day that surely irked 45/47. Instead of writing about any of those topics I'm going to be Miss Merry Sunshine and share details about all the fun stuff, frivolous stuff and mundane stuff going on in my little corner of the world. In other words, while our seat of government metaphorically burns I'm taking a mental health day.

Let's start with the customized paint-by-number I recently finished to the left. This one is of my oldest niece's oldest grandson and by the time this post goes live another customized paint-by-number kit should arrive from Amazon of my youngest niece's youngest granddaughter. I had hoped to eventually do all of my great-great nieces and nephews but my arthritic hands aren't going to last that long. So I cut the list down by eliminate my nephew's seven grandchildren and will just concentrate of those of my niece's which puts me at four done and three to go before hanging up my paint-by-number brushes. I still hold out hope that I'll be able to find a painting style that works in my old age---one where fine details are not required. If I ever get the time! They keep us so busy here on my continuum care campus that blocking out a chunk of time to experiment is hard to do. On the day this post goes live, for example, this is my schedule: Chinese restaurant lunch off campus with fellow residents from 11:30 to 1:30, Teaching Kitchen back here from 2:30 to 3:00, Mahjong from 3:00 to 4:30, a Magic Show from 4:30 to 5:30 and from 5:30 to 7:00 is a cookout in our park featuring their mouth watering ribs. In the morning and after 7:00 PM I'll catch up on publishing any comments that come in on this post. No one is forcing us to sign up for everything offered and believe it or not, I could have taken a couple exercises classes before the bus picked us up for lunch.

Also in the somewhat fun department is I'm getting a new computer. My current one won't expand enough to get Windows 11 and Windows 10 won't be supported after October 14th. The IT guy here on campus is also a shirt-tail relative on my husband's side who has taken to calling me Auntie Jean and he helped me pick out a reliable HP machine. (We're both worried about tariffs and a higher than normal demand causing shortages if I wait until fall to make the change.) When the new computer gets here he'll help me move my files and photos over to it, hook up Wi-Fi and my printer. I've also made the decision that it's time to join the mouseless community. So I've been practicing using the touchpad. I find it frustrating but already I can tell that it's a good decision for my arthritic wrist.

Speaking of my wrist, I saw my orthopedic doctor this week for a follow up on the Synvisc gel he put in my wrist and to get the results on my yearly bone density test. The day after I got the shot the top of my hand swelled up and I thought it wasn't going to work but he said that it takes time for it to seep in where it needed to go which turned out to be true. Anyway, as I told him it helped 80%. I can once again pick up things without dropping them, put my earrings in and all motions from the wrist to my finger tips is usually pain-free. 

I still have a great deal of pain in my forearm. For that the doctor did some more tests and I got a final and firm diagnosis on what is causing it. My theory from day one has been proven right, that the forearm pain is not coming from the crushed vertebrae in my neck or my arthritic wrist. It is 100% caused by the surgical mess in my elbow from a long-ago break---something he wasn't willing to assume on face value until he'd ruled out everything else. The only real cure is another elbow replacement surgery but at my age I don't think that's a wise choice, so he's recommending a daily steroid pill for life for the pain and inflammation and for me to quit doing anything that causes the sharp pains. That means---among other things---I need to rethink the bras in my life. Eventually he may have to remove the screw that he can feel poking out the surgical site but we'll cross that bridge if it looks like it will actually break through the skin.

And last but not least I'm four days into using the Pink Salt Trick. If you don't know what that is, I'll explain in my next post when I have more data to know if it helps or not. It sounds crazy, but I've done crazier things. Spoiler alert! One thing I've have learned: there are two Pink Salt Tricks going around the internet and a Pink Salt Hack. One is practically free and the other two are not. I'm doing the free version. ©

Until Next Wednesday...