Crunch

We were finally on our way. We had gone through the last several hour Baurs, the car was packed and we were headed for the freeway. And then, as Walt stopped to allow approaching cars to pass before he completed his right turn, we were rear-ended by the car who wasn't watching Walt as he stopped. Fortunately nobody was hurt, but our poor car is all smashed in and Walt had to climb into the trunk from the inside of the car to tie the trunk lid shut.

We held up traffic while waiting for the police. Actually cars could squeak past us, but this truck driver was very angry that the woman in the car that hit us refused to move her car until the police arrived because there was NO way he could get past the two cars.

Finally the police arrived, had us move the cars and then there was the report to be written.

Up until that time it had been a lovely day. We went over to Tom's and spent an hour or so with Bri. Walt and I were out on the patio with her when her babysitter came out to check on us and Bri looked at her and said, "I'd like some privacy, please." So the babysitter went back in the house and the three of us had our privacy. Silly girl.

Grandpa and Bri played frisbee...

...until Grandpa accidentally threw the frisbee up on the roof and Aunt Jeri had to climb up and get it because she didn't want Grandpa falling off a ladder again.

When Bri and the babysitter went to the park, the rest of us went to Original Sambo's restaurant on the Santa Barbara beach and had the best brunch, including a ceremonial "short stack" which we all shared and again toasted Grandma with (she always referred to Phil as "Short stack")

We returned to Tom's (Bri wasn't back yet) and Jeri played "Amazing Grace" out on the patio for Alice Nan, who wanted to hear it again. Then we left Jeri and Phil there, getting packed to leave for the airport and their flight back to Boston, and we went back to Alice Nan's to pack up our stuff and start the long drive home.

Which takes us back to our accident.

The other thing that happened on the way home was that we received the news that one of Ned's good friends, Brendan, had died. Apparently he went to the doctor because he didn't feel well, was hospitalized and died the same day. Ned doesn't know of what yet. Such sad news. He was Ned's age, and a sweet guy and I am very saddened by his passing.

Enough with the DEATH for awhile, God, OK???

A Cup of Peanut Butter Cookies

The latest Morning Story from WGBH is called "The Million Dollar Cookie" and it is the story of one of the contestants in the Pillsbury Bake-Off, Kerstin Sinkevicius, who tells how she developed her Caramel Chai Bar...and what was going on in her life at the time. (I love these stories!)

The story took me back to my childhood and the times that my father would get so excited about his kitchen experiments. My mother has always been an excellent cook, who mostly concentrated on the basics -- roasts, meatloaf, potroast, Mac 'n' Cheese, crispy fried chicken with shoestring potatoes. Yumm. Nobody cooked them better. She was not, as a general rule, however, an experimental cook.

Perhaps her most adventurous cooking was enchiladas. I don't remember a woman named Amalia, but apparently she lived in the flat above my parents when I was very little. She was apparently from Mexico and she made terrific enchiladas and taught my mother how to make them. They were great favorites of everyone, but took two days to make, so my mother didn't make them often.

(In later years, when I finally convinced her to teach me how to make them before she forgot how, I realized that the time-consuming part was that she was making her own chorizo sausage to add to the recipe, and the meat mixture needed to age for two days before being combined with other meats to make up the filling in the enchiladas.)

I don't remember when my father started experimenting in the kitchen. Food was very big in our house and it may be that he began tinkering with recipes when I was quite small. I don't remember when exactly he created his potato salad, but I have not tasted anything like it since (and I am a connoisseur of potato salads), nor any potato salad that I like half as much. The secret, he always told me, was in slicing the potatoes as thin as possible. No chunks in his salad. To the potatoes you added finely chopped onion, Best Foods (or Hellmans) mayonnaise, chopped parsley, hard boiled eggs, and finely chopped sweet pickles. I don't know that I've seen another potato salad recipe that used sweet pickles. But it truly was the best potato salad ever and he made it frequently for picnics and such. I was always his official taster because I loved the potato salad so much.

I also remember one Christmas time when he made egg nog from scratch. I must have been quite young, because I can see the mixer that he used and I don't remember it being around when I was growing up. But it took lots of whipping cream to make a sort of custardy base to which he then added the liquor. I didn't get to taste the liquor version of the egg nog, of course, but I sure loved the egg base.

But perhaps his most memorable recipe experiment was peanut butter cookies. I still don't quite know how he managed to create what we found when we returned home that day. I remember that he was laughing and said that he had tried to make peanut butter cookies but that he must have done something wrong.

My mother always said that my father's cooking philosophy was that if a little of something was good, then a lot of it must be much better.

Well, knowing the ingredients of peanut butter cookies, I still can't imagine what ingredient he had used "a lot of" but what he got was something the consistency of milk. We each had a small glass of "peanut butter cookies," but there was no way these babies were ever going to see the inside of an oven. As I recall, it wasn't even thick enough to be a cake batter.

Forever after, Karen and I teased him about his famous peanut butter cookies. And I don't think he ever tried making them again.

But it's nice to think about my father and his kitchen experiments because the results were usually delicious (heck, even the glass of peanut butter cookie tasted good!) and there were lots of laughs involved in his kitchen adventures. I think they are memories of the parts of my life with my father that aren't clouded by something unpleasant that happened later on. They were just fun times in the kitchen.

* * *

Miracle of miracles, I was able to get to a reclining position last night and went to sleep on the couch for the first time since my fall. It didn't last and I woke up only a couple of hours later and had to move back to the recliner, but it was nice to see progress.

Lizzie was so funny. I have this blanket that I use on the couch, that I had moved to the recliner. Before going to sleep, I tossed it in the general direction of one of the chairs in the living room while I went to the bathroom. When I came out, Lizzie had made a bed on the blanket. I removed her, took the blanket to the couch and went to sleep, and then when I got up and went back to the recliner, I sort of dragged the blanket, Linus-fashion, behind me...Lizzie on top of it determined to make a bed, however temporary, on the blanket!

This morning I was actually able to scoop dog food out of the bin without lifting it up first, though I still can't turn to the right and lean over to get a piece of tissue out of the Kleenex box. But there is definite progress today, which is encouraging.

Learning My Limits the Hard Way

Life was easier last night without puppies. And without a puppy sleeping in the crook of my arm, I slept all night, until Lizzie landed on my stomach at 6:30 a.m. Lizzie is not a respector of the gradual wake-up, and does not understand "go away, bitch, and let me sleep." There is no snooze alarm on her head.

I am generally a fairly amiable early morning waker, but occasionally I am just too deeply asleep to be pleasant. This was one of those mornings.

However, you do not say no to a Happy Dog who wants Breakfast Now! It's just easier to give in and get up and feed the damn dog.

Now, I don't really understand the need for me to Get Up immediately. Lizzie is the most annoying dog to feed in the world. From the moment she decides IT'S TIME until food is actually put in her bowl, she is unstoppable. If I'm working, she puts her paws on my shoulders over and over again. If I'm sleeping, she climbs into my lap and licks me awake. When I get up the leaping starts. Up-down-up-down-up-down, eyes bright, mouth grinning. It's Snoopy doing his Supperdance over again.

The excitement builds as I go into the kitchen, put the two bowls on the counter and fill them. I put her bowl down first and go to the other side of the room to put Sheila's down. Then Lizzie stands there. She won't eat. She watches Sheila eat. She doesn't start eating until Sheila finishes her own food and starts looking at Lizzie's. Then she marches to her bowl and growls. But she still doesn't eat.

Sometimes she actually finishes her meal; other times she walks away and lets Sheila have it. I do not understand the dog.

If you're not going to eat the friggin' breakfast, why can't I sleep an extra 15 minutes???

However. I digress.

Once I was finally awake, I did a body assessment and the muscles seemed to be better, but of course I still can't do the bending/stooping/turning movements. But I only had a couple of things to do and I would just take it easy again.

One thing I had to do was to go to the home of the guy I had just written a feature article about. The newspaper photographer had gone to rehearsal and taken pictures, but I wanted a photo of him and his wife and the photographers were all booked up, so my editor told me I could take the photo myself. I would just drive over, take the photo, drive downtown, drop the photo and the other photos he had given me off at the newspaper office, stop off at the supermarket to pick up a few things, come home and go back to taking it easy.

Then I found out that one of the most painful thing to do was get in the car. It involved getting the right leg in, getting the butt in, and then lifting the leg on the sore side. You don't realize how much your chest wall muscles play in the act of lifting your leg until your chest wall muscles hurt! Oooo...oooo...ouch!

But there was no way around it. I went and took the photo (and am DELIGHTED with how it turned out--just exactly the way I wanted it to.

Then I climbed back into the car again and went to the newspaper office and discovered something else it's hard to do with an aching side: parallel park. I'm generally pretty good at parallel parking, but I felt almost as if I was learning all over again.

Then there was the short flight of stairs. Not many, but each one a reminder that I needed to move in a more careful way. I dropped off the photos, basked again in the praise for the article I'd written while trying to balance a puppy on my lap the day before, and then gingerly made my way down the stairs and climbed back into the car again. (Funny to think of "climbing" into a Honda!)

Off to the grocery store to pick up a few things. A $111 handful of things. Rising food prices? Nahhhh. I got more than I anticipated because I didn't want to have to go shopping again for a few days. I was going to be content to just stay at home and give my side a chance to get much better.

By the time I climbed back into the car, I was actually starting to feel not well. That last leg up into the car made me break out in a cold sweat. Then I went home and, since Walt wasn't home, carried the groceries into the house.

It's really silly that such a simple injury could have such a huge effect, but I learned several years ago when I disconnected my shoulder what a difference having to move your body in a different than normal way made. You hurt in places you never hurt before, and it's bloody exhausting.

After I got the groceries put away, I took a nap (fortunately I woke up long before Lizzie thought that I needed to feed her, so I got a full nap in).

The thing about minor injuries is that the older you are, the longer it takes to recover, and the more you do, behaving like normal when you shouldn't, the longer it takes.

So on my schedule for the next two days is doing nothing that requires any use of the chest wall muscles. Maybe by Sunday, when I'm driving to my mother's for brunch, I'll be feeling much better.

Yawwwwnn

I have this yawning problem. Well, it's not really a problem for me, but I yawn a lot. People are always asking if I'm tired or bored, and I'm neither -- I just yawn a lot. In fact, sometimes it's downright embarrassing to be in the middle of a conversation about something I'm interested in and find myself yawning, which makes the other person think I'm bored, when I'm really just very into the conversation and it's just that once I yawn once, I can't seem to stop. It's like people I know who go on sneezing jags. I just go on yawning jags.

I especially yawn when I'm cold. Walt has finally come to realize that my yawning when we're driving in the car doesn't mean that I'm sleepy or bored, it just means that it's cold outside and my body has somehow decided that the way to get more oxygen into my bloodstream to warm me up is to yawn.

Or at least that's how I explain it.

Or maybe I yawn because I don't get enough sleep and I'm not aware of being tired, but it's just when I sit down to concentrate on something, all those tired genes come to the fore and cause me to yawn.

I try not to be too obvious about it, but I guess I can be. My mother usually comments about the fact that I almost always yawn when I'm talking to her on the phone. It doesn't mean that she is boring me, it just means that...I yawn.

It's a very weird thing, but I've been doing it for so long I don't even think about it any more. What's particularly weird about yawning is that half the time I don't yawn in response to seeing someone else yawn. Sometimes I fall victim to the yawning contagion, but most of the time not. In fact, when I started thinking about my yawning problem, I did some research on yawning and why we do it (conclusion: nobody really knows, though there are lots of theories).

The article said that it bet that before I finished reading it, I would yawn. But I didn't. Made it all the way through the article without yawning once, not even looking at the two photos which were supposed to trigger the yawning response. How about you?

It sure seems strange around here tonight, with no puppies. It's always sad to give up a puppy that we are fostering, especially when they are too young to go up for adoption yet. Munchkin didn't get picked up until mid-day today, so we had one last night together.

He was a good puppy and slept curled up on my arm all night and didn't wake up until after 6 a.m.

But the taking care of Munchkin until he was picked up made me glad that I had asked for him to move on. Munchkin is very demanding for such a little guy. He absolutely cannot stand not to be in my lap or in my arms. I wished that I had a sling so he could just ride around on me all the time. We both would have been happier for it.

I was on deadline this morning, trying to finish my spotlight feature, which was due today, and you just can't compose and type an article while you are cuddling a puppy. It just doesn't work.

I would put him down and within 5 minutes (or less) he would be crying to be picked up again. Every single time I picked him up I had the pain in my side again. People have suggested that perhaps I cracked a rib, but actually this wasn't the side that hit the ground. The pain is definitely more, as my friend the transcriptionist diagnosed it, "more chest wall/muscular strain and stretch." Like any sore muscle, it is getting better, but slowly, and anything that involves getting to a standing position, or a sitting position, or bending over or reaching off to the side or coughing or, yes, yawning sends pain up my side, while just sitting in one position, watching television or here at the computer does not.

By 10 a.m., I knew for certain that sending the puppies off had been the right decision and I was very eager for Munchkin to go.

The afternoon passed quietly and I almost forgot about my side until it was time to feed Lizzie and Sheila, which meant leaning over to pick up their bowls. I still have to lift the container of dog food up halfway in order to scoop out their meals. Can't bend over.

I'm sure I'll be better in a couple of days. I'm just sorry that whatever I pulled doesn't cause me to turn pretty colors of black and blue, so there will be no photographic evidence. (And in my life...if there are no photos, did it really happen?)

Faw Down, Go Boom

My mother tells me that whenever I fell down as a little kid I would say that "I faw down, go boom." I did it big time yesterday.

You know how when you have a bad fall, everything seems to go into slow motion? I remember climbing up on the sink one time to fix the curtain at the top of our window. My foot slipped and I fell to the kitchen floor floor, but I remember as I was falling, assessing how my body was positioned, if I was likely to hit the kitchen counter, and what would happen if I hit the floor wrong. All in a matter of a split second.

That was kind of how it was yesterday. I had taken Munchkin out to the back yard to play with the other puppies (because he generally won't leave my side) and I sat down at the table on the concrete patio to read the paper.

I got up from the table and everything went wrong. Sometimes when I turn wrong my bad knee sends shooting pains and kind of gives out a little. When that happens. I automatically shift the weight to the other leg, but somehow that leg was tangled up in the leg of the chair and I started falling, in slow motion, wondering what would happen when I cracked my head on the concrete.

Walt, bless him, was there and caught my head before it bonked the concrete, but my body hit so hard that I peed all over the patio.

(Why do they tell you to wear clean underwear when you go out. If you get into an accident, your bladder releases whatever is in it. If you die, both your bladder and bowels give up their contents, so nobody knows if you had clean underwear when you left the house or not!)

I was immediately surrounded by five very worried dogs, which was lovely, but just what I didn't need as I tried to drag my pain-wracked body to an upright position. It was instantly apparent that I had wrenched something in my side. From just below my breasts to just below the waist, the muscles sent excruciating pain shoothing everywhere along my left side.

I hobbled into the house and changed my clothes (not easy when you are in pain!) and proceeded to figure out what I could do and couldn't do in my new pain-wracked state. I discovered I couldn't bend over to pick up anything. I was fixing chicken for dinner and had to wait until Walt came downstairs to get the bag of frozen chicken breasts out of the freezer for me. I could also put the pan into the oven, but it was much more comfortable to have him take them out for me.

I could pick Munchkin up, since he always raises up on his hind legs and paws at my leg, but I couldn't put him down unless I found a pile of pillows and then dropped him from a foot above the pile.

I sat in the recliner for awhile with ice on the affected area, but it was frustrating that after going through all the gyrations to get into a reasonably comfortable position, I would have to get right up again to get something I forgot or something else.

It was a no-computer night because I couldn't sit comfortably to type, so I sat and watched Idol and Dancing with the Stars and The Daily Show and finally decided it was time for sleep. But where?

The night before, in a desperate attempt for a good night's sleep, I took ALL the dogs up to the guest bedroom to sleep. Despite the stabbing pains that I get when I try to sleep in a bed, I thought maybe having room for everyone would make it worthwhile. It actually worked because I had all the puppies on one side of me, and the big dogs curled up along my backside, like the back of a couch. I considered doing that again, but I wasn't sure I could walk upstairs.

I tried the couch in the living room, but it was instantly clear that there was no way I could get to a reclining position, so I went back to the family room again and settled in on the recliner under puppies. I did wake up around 2 and had about an hour and a half awake, but eventually fell back asleep again.

Things were ever so slightly better in the morning. But the most difficult part was trying to deal with the puppies. It's hard to get comfortable with your lap being used as a playing field. I can't get food out of the dog food bin but I can lift the container and put it on the kitchen counter and get it that way.

I finally decided that I just wanted to reduce the number of pain-producing things in the house, so sadly wrote to Ashley and asked if she could find new homes for the puppies. Someone came to pick up the older puppies and it did not go well. They were both spooked and Scrappy bit one of the women trying to catch him. He also left poop all over the family room...literally scared the shit out of him. I finally called him to jump into my lap in the recliner, which he did, shrinking away from the people trying to catch him. I felt awful when I put a leash on him and helped drag him into the carrying crate. I do not feel good about sending them away, but when I tried to clean up those poop piles, I knew I had made the right decision.

There is still no new home for Munchkin and we'll see if I'm better enough tomorrow to keep him, but at the moment Ashley is still on the hunt for a new foster home for him.