Deck Clutter, Body Scans and the Secret Service

I have turned into one of those old people I used to laugh at who has a yard full of cheap garden doodads and baubles. I don’t have flamingos, plaster ducks and gnomes like my childhood neighbors did but on my side deck, just outside the window where I sit typing, I have junky dollar store stuff and plants that have no coordination except I liked them when I saw them at the garden center. A large pot of pink geraniums sits on one side of the deck railing clashing with my dog’s red fire hydrant on the other side. On top of the railing, a huge plastic flower that spins in the wind is dominating a pot full of moss roses and next to a large thermometer hanging on the railing is a fruit jar solar light and a red mystery plant I bought hoping it calls out to the hummingbirds, "Fine dining here!" In my defense, I won that spinning daisy somewhere. I liked it better when it was bright pink but even sun faded, it still fascinates me when it takes off at warp speed. If I lived near a wind turbine farm, I’d probably be zoned-out hypnotized with the slightest breeze.

Up close to the window are two potted tomato plants and a pot of lettuce. A few days ago I suspected that the rabbits had discovered my lettuce because I noticed chewing on the lower leaves. Imagine my surprise when I discovered my dog chomping away on my future salad! He’d better leave my tomato plants alone! If the number of blooms equals the number of tomatoes I’ll get 36 on the Chef Jeff’s Tomato Grape and three on the Chef Jeff’s dwarfed premium patio plant. My sweet basil, mint plant and pot of pansies round out my ‘container garden’ and they all are sitting next to a white plastic chair where I can sit and hide behind a large rail-hugging container that holds a sweet potato plant and some colorful foliage plants I can’t spell at the moment and am too lazy to look up. And have I mentioned the upside down wine bottles inserted in a plant? In my defense I have another deck and a patio that are nearly naked. Apparently I like my outdoor clutter where I can see it…or more importantly where other people can’t see it and laugh at the old lady on the cul-de-sac. I've posted photos below so you can laugh, if you want. What goes around, comes around.

Now that I’ve filled half my Wednesday word quota up with a tour of my deck, it’s time to get down to how my week is going so far. I started out Monday in fine old people form, arriving for an appointment to see my new dermatologist at 11:45 when the appointment was actually scheduled for 1:45. Oops. But I got lucky and their 1:45 appointment canceled as I was leaving and they hustled me back in to fill up the doctor’s time. Quickly, I got nearly naked for a stranger with a magnifying glass to do a full body mole scan. I’ve had four basal cell carcinomas removed so this procedure is recommended every year and he found nothing but a common rash “we all get as we age,” he says. He called in a prescription so I can quit going around itching the back of my ear and my belly. I was glad I had a professional pedicure last week because he checked in between and underneath my toes which my old skin doctor never did in the five years I’d gone to him. The new doctor is also 20-25 pounds overweight, a nice perk to have in a doctor who is going to see your unclothed body. If he had been drop dead cute like a TV doctor or too old to care if I die of skin cancer in between my toes, I wouldn’t have left his office feeling like Goldilocks finding just the right bowl of porridge.  

Tuesday I was at the dentist for my real 11:45 appointment of the week. Yup, I had them reversed in my dyslexic brain. He’s now the only doctor I have who I have to take the expressway and a long drive to see. And that’s saying something when I have an ear doctor, ophthalmologist, allergist, internist and orthopedic doctor plus a skin doctor, dentist, chiropractor and a foot doctor. Remember the good old days when one doctor and a dentist did it all? Gosh, does that date me! The last half of my week will include my Book Club and the Lunch and Movie Club so hopefully I’ll have something interesting to think about, if not to write about.

I did just finish the new James Patterson book that he co-wrote with Bill Clinton titled, The President is Missing. I read it in two days--- couldn’t put it down if that tells you anything. I saw an interview of these two guys and they said the book is an accurate representation of how the Secret Service works which is the reason I wanted to read the thriller in the first place. If that’s true---and I have no reason to doubt them---I’m impressed with how these highly skilled people work to keep our elected officials safe, not to mention the “toys” they have at their disposal. But to my non-liberal readers be forewarned that there was a little bit of “preaching” the kumbaya method of governing at the end of the book when the president gives an address to Congress but, to me, it just balanced out the tribalism that was peppered here and there in the plot and most certainly in our nightly cable news. ©

geranium

dwarf tomato, basil and lettuce after picking

pansies

wine bottles

wind spinner

chef Jeff's tomato grape

Levi thinks he's a hummingbird

bird feeder pole turned into a wind chime stand

Blue Tooth, Stephen King and Death by Toaster

I have a blue tooth, not to be confused with I have blue tooth, the short-range wireless interconnection for our devices. I have an actually blue tooth in my head. It’s a temporary given to me by my dentist at the first of three appointments to give me a new cap. At the second appointment I’ll get a core built and impressions make, at the third appointment I’ll get the new cap glued in. I asked the dentist if he’s afraid he’ll forget which tooth he worked on when I come back and he said, “No, but I thought about not telling you it’s blue so you’d freak out the next time you brush your teeth.” While he had my mouth full of Novocain he replaced two other fillings that were put in more than twenty-five years ago---silver fillings that are now white fillings. Not that they had any problems other than they were “showing some wear.” But I said, “Ya, sure, take them out if they’ll help you pay the rental fees on your boat slip.” 

On the drive home I thought I might be morphing into a character in a Stephen King novel. Along the side of the road was a dead cat, curled up and looking like it was sleeping, and someone had tied a ‘Happy Birthday’ balloon to the poor animal. Who does that? Several thoughts entered my head, each more gruesome than the next: Maybe a neighbor didn’t like the cat pooping in his petunias and killed it. Maybe a husband was jealous of the attention his wife gave her cat and poisoned it. Maybe a stalker murdered the cat and placed it where the owner would see it on her way to work. I couldn’t think of logical or innocent reason for why someone would tie a balloon to a dead cat. Like did someone just happened to have a balloon in their car and used it to help its owner find their missing pet? And if they did, what were they thinking! Wouldn’t the average Joe or Jill know that would be creepy? It creeped me out as I fought against tears coming and once again---in less than a month’s time---I find myself typing, “And I didn’t even know the damned cat!” 

Stephen King plots of evil doings were still on my mind when I stopped at a garage sale where a guy who had a John Wayne Gacy serial killer look about him was selling a tea cup yorkie puppy---six months old, spayed and supposedly housebroke and in good health. Great with kids. Recent haircut. Price tag: one dollar. These dogs usually go for hundreds and when I asked why he was selling her, he said and I quote: “It’s complicated.” Complicated as in the puppy doesn’t actually belong to you? I wanted to ask but instead I said, “I’ve got time for ‘complicated.’” But he didn’t and, my gosh, that puppy was sweet! It’s the hardest thing I’ve done in recent memory to walk away from that puppy but my instincts were telling me he was selling the dog out spiteful towards an x-wife or girlfriend. Who knows, but I didn’t sense any love lost on the wee little thing. I thought about giving the guy his dollar and taking the puppy to the vet to have it scanned for a microchip so to see if she was reported as lost or stolen. Then what if it wasn't? I felt guilty leaving that puppy behind thinking it could end up like balloon cat along the side of the road if no one snatched her up and gave her a good home. But getting a non-returnable, second dog is just not a whim decision you make on the way home from getting a blue tooth.

The next day I boarded the mini bus owned by my senior hall. I hate that bus. It feelings like traveling inside a tin can and I’m probably the only one who rides in it who actually uses the seatbelts. We all have to die of something but a highway accident is one of my least favorite ways I’d like to do it. It doesn’t help that we used to live near a person who drove an ambulance and who got a gruesome thrill out of seeing dead people. She’d describe how “cool” it was to see an eye that had popped out of its socket---stuff like that---and it comforts me to know she lost that job for undisclosed reasons. She was the type who’d harvest your organs to sell on the black market before driving your body to the morgue…well, at least she would do that in a Stephen King novel.

The reason I was on our mini bus is because we were headed to Holland, Michigan, for our annual restaurant crawl. How a crawl works is they drop you off at high-end restaurant for the first course of salad or soup, then you shop your way down the street to another restaurant where you have your pre-ordered and paid-for main course. Then you shop your way around the block before hitting the last place where we have dessert. For my tastes, they allow too much time for shopping but the tourist town has plenty of benches for enjoying the sunshine and I was with two of my Gathering Girl pals, so we had a good time not to mention the food was to die-for. I did buy something: a $2.50 bamboo toast tong. I didn’t even know they made a gadget like that and I was thrilled. Now I can quit worrying about electrocuting myself when I stick a fork in the toaster without unplugging it. Never let it be said that I wasn’t a risk taker in my pre-toast tong days. ©

Image at top: a Penny Black rubber stamp

Medical Week for the Widow

I’ve been running the roads. Monday, the doctor. Tuesday, the dentist. Wednesday, the infusion center for my first Reclast treatment. I live on the north end of town and everywhere I had to go was on the south end which meant I had to take the expressway with its dreaded S Curve that cuts through the heart of the city. I’ve hated that curve since it was built in the early 1960s. Back then, the power brokers (think a handful of Trump-like creatures) dictated which buildings would be hazed by a wrenching ball and which ones would be spared. Surprise, surprise, their property still stands. A friend who drives the S Curve twice a day says it makes him feel like a race car driver as he banks his car near the outside wall, then crosses over to bank the other side. It’s his favorite part of the day, or so he says. I would rather eat earth worms but that won’t get me to the south end so cancel that trip to the bait shop to buy me a gift. 

I went to the doctor prepared to be bubbling over with happy good health and sharp, witty old lady banter. I was determined to make up for the last time I was there when I told him I didn’t feel well but I couldn’t put my finger on why I felt so spaced out. SPACED OUT? Damn! I thought as drove home that day, I shouldn’t be saying things like that to a guy who could transcribe that into my records as: showing signs of dementia. This time he had a new twist for my visit. He brought a woman in from “records” who, I was told, was going to chart everything we talk about so that he could get back to face-to-face patient-to-doctor talking. “I assume she’s sworn to secrecy?” I asked. “Yes,” the doctor assured me with a broad smile, “what happens in this room stays in this room.” And thus their weird experiment began. It will be interesting to see if they’re still doing it when I go back again. 

When I go to the dentist I probably drive past a couple of hundred dentists along the way. I’ve known the guy since before he went to dental school 25 years ago and if I planned on staying on the north end of the town I’d probably change to the one within walking distance of my house. Old people who drive 40 miles an hour on the S Curve while everyone else is going 80 are frowned upon. Fortunately, I'm still able to keep up but I stay firmly planted in the center lane and hope the pretend race car drivers don’t loss control as they do their crisscross antics in front of me. Once, on an icy night when there were no other cars around, I did a loop-de-loop in the middle of the S Curve. Side note: I just looked up the term ‘loop-de-loop’ to make sure I was spelling the ‘de’ part right and was shocked to see that the urban dictionary defines a loop-de-loop as a sex term for what we old timers used to call the 69 position. I assure you I was not having sex on the S Curve. I was driving south bound, lost control and ended up going north. Since then they’ve spent millions trying to make that section of the highway safer for wintertime driving but I still hate that expressway and the political string pulling that put that ridiculous curve in the city. End of rant.

I told the doctor that I was nervous about getting the Reclast treatment because of my hive and allergy history. He said to tell them at the center if I get itchy so they can slow down the infusion and give me an antihistamine. “Great,” I said, “I’ll scream bloody murder if that happens.” “I wouldn’t advice that,” he replied, “but do let them know.” What I actually wanted him to say was I was worrying unnecessarily, that reactions to Reclast infusions rarely happen. According to the nurse at the center, it is rare but it can happen at the time of the infusion or anytime in the first two weeks. Wonderful. Two weeks of drinking a million glasses of water a day (to help flush the stuff through my system) and two weeks of eating a couple of extra servings of calcium rich foods a day (because the infusion will be working to take calcium from my system and depositing it into my bones) and I’ll be out of The Valley of Hives-Hanging-Over-My-Head. And did I mention only one cup of coffee a day for the next two weeks? 

I did learn something at the center. They now have an infusion medication for chronic hives, if you can get your insurance company to pay for it. I told the nurse I’d mortgage my house to cover the cost if I ever get them as bad as I had them a few years back. Every day for nine straight months of itching, having my face distorted from giant hives and popping four different prescription medications a day was not a walk in the park. On the way home from the center, I stopped for a fresh supply of antihistamines---just in case---and a gallon of ice cream. What a happy coincidence that my new blender came with a malted milk blade. There goes that eleven pound weight loss recorded on my medical chart this week. ©