Killing the Rabbit

So I took a pregnancy test yesterday. I know, I know . . . pretty ridiculous at my age. But things that have been happening for years have stopped happening lately. And things that never happened before are happening now. And that’s all I’m gonna say about that. So I thought, what the heck, may as well eliminate that vague possibility.

Of course the test turned out negative. I mean, what kind of miracle do I think I am anyway? But the idea of it being positive conjured up some pretty scary images. Can you imagine having a teenager in your seventies! Heck, it’s hard enough reigning them in when you’re in your fifties — may as well just hand over the car keys on their tenth birthday. On the other hand, it might be nice having a strapping young kid to push your wheelchair around.

   

Anyway, my husband and I had a lively little conversation around it this morning, somehow ending up on the actual test itself: little blue line = yep / no blue line = nope. A far cry from the tests we used to take that involved a doctor, some urine and a rabbit. I don’t claim to know how all that worked but I remember the old phrase about how, if the rabbit died, you were pregnant. Dead rabbit = yep / rabbit still hopping = nope. Things have sure advanced a lot since then! All we have to do now is to pee on a little stick. As opposed to peeing on a little rabbit and hoping (or not hoping) that our urine turns out deadly.

My husband got to wondering if other animals peed on rabbits to see if they’re pregnant, and whether that might be the reason why rabbits tend to be so quick when you try to catch one. Their mommas much teach ‘em young: “ya see another kind of animal approaching, don’t ask any questions — just hop your furry little self out a there ‘for you find yourself all peed on.”

So anyway, thank you technology for coming so far in the arena of pregnancy testing. Thank you little blue line for staying the hell off of my pregnancy test. And, thank you aging body for dodging that miraculous bullet. 

Who ever said that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush?

My husband just completed a four day mulching marathon, taking the time to weed and prune while he was so outdoorsy focused. Pretty admirable considering it’s been in the hundreds for days here in H-town. He told me that had downed 2.5 gallons of water on the hottest of the four days.

 

Me, I stayed indoors . . . I’m not much for heat these days. So I watched from my air conditioned sanctuary as, little by little, the mountain of mulch shrunk until it was finally gone, distributed amongst the plethora of flower beds my husband likes to tend. Oh sure, I kept going out there to check on him, to ask how hydrated he was keeping himself, to offer an occasional meal.

During one of my trips outside, he told me he’d accidentally knocked a nest of finches down from the palm tree in the back and how bad he’d felt watching as the parents panicked. The babies (there were two of them) were fully feathered but not quite ready for that maiden flight. He described how they flitted from branch to branch until they ended up in a low Nandina underneath the palm. During the course of the afternoon, the parents had adapted and kept bringing them food, albeit to their new location.

And here I have to switch topics and talk about my two Boston Terriers: Sampson and Piper. My dogs are sort of OCD in their own special way. Piper’s obsession is her Frisbee. She’d chase the thing until it grew legs and chased her back. And, unlike Sampson who thinks capturing the Frisbee is just the beginning of a game of keep-away, Piper will always bring it back. Then she’ll drop it onto your foot as a reminder that your job—and your only job—is to throw it again. And again. And again. And if you’re not paying attention, she’ll push it further and further up your leg until you remember what your job is.

   

But Sampson’s compulsion is border patrol (and you might have just figured out where this story is heading). He spends his time scouting the boundaries of “his” quarter acre lot, catching lizards and turning them into delicacies. He obviously hasn’t read the warnings of the potential toxicity of certain types of lizards. But then, Sampson has always eaten anything he can fit into his mouth. I’ve lost track of the number of times he’s made himself sick. But, like the toxicity warnings, Sampson seems equally clueless to the laws of cause and effect.

 

So I’m out there this afternoon (in the shade, mind you), sitting on my cushion and trying to find some OM time when I hear the familiar sound of my dog trying to pin some unsuspecting critter against the wall of the garage. But this time, there’s a lot of squawking and screeching that goes along with it and I know right away that it isn’t his typical prey… lizards don’t sound like that.

I give Samson the “leave it” command which he knows to obey. Then, unwrapping my crossed legs, I rush over to the bushes by the garage. By this time Piper has lost interest in her Frisbee and has joined in the fray. She decides to take over where Sampson left off and, while I’m snatching up one of the babies, she’s chasing down the second. I manage to get her off the poor thing before she gets it. Then, holding the screeching baby, I herd my two carnivores into the house, shutting them inside. 

Now I’ve got a bird in the hand but still one in the bush and I’m really not sure which is better. The parents are both freaking out as the baby I’m holding is squawking like there’s no tomorrow and I’m trying to decide what to do with it. I know the second baby is okay because I can hear it talking to its parents who’ve set up a tag team, one on me and the other on the second baby.

I stand there stymied for I don’t know how long. I mean, where do you put a two inch baby bird so that your idiot dogs don’t use it as a petit four? Finally I get a brilliant idea and decide to build a nest from an empty flower pot. My plan is to secure the pot to their native palm tree, high enough so the dogs can’t get them.

So I carry the pot and the bird into the front yard where there’s a bucket of dry stuff left over from yesterday’s pruning. The parent patrol is breathing down my neck as I single handedly fashion a crude nest in the bottom of the pot. But when I gingerly set the baby into its new nest, it pops back out in less than a nanosecond. Trying a bigger pot doesn’t work either… seems this kid is quite the little jumper! I’m thinking empty garbage can with those tall, tall sides. But I get to wondering if that might only set up a perfect opportunity for one of the neighbor’s cats.

    

Finally I decide on a new tactic. I figure they’d lasted all night in the Nandina so maybe they just need to go back there. I carry the little guy over and release him back into his bush. Then I tackle the job of snagging the second one which proves much harder than the first. I have to chase him back and forth, from one side of the garage wall to the other for about ten minutes before I finally pin him into a corner. Then I release him back into the Nandina too, watching as both parents worry nearby.

So as of right now I have no birds in the hand but two in the bush—which is all good. But the best part is that I also have none in my dog.   

Time is a clever thief

Time is a clever thief, he thinks, as it marches out the door

For now that I know full well its worth, I don’t seem to have any more.

I think about time a lot, what a funny thing it is. How, when we were kids, it was actually possible to get bored. We’d whine at our parents, “I got nothing to dooooooo…..” Finally they’d threaten to give us some chores if we didn’t find something ourselves.  

But time changes everything doesn’t it? Changes our attitudes toward things, changes our relationship to it. Time (like other things) seems to shrink with age and we have less and less of it as the years go by. So we try to cram as much as we can into each moment, knowing how precious each one is. But then we wonder, is that the best use of it? To make sure that we have none left over at the end - as if that’s even possible? Or should we let our moments drag while we sit around contemplating things like, well . . . time?

My son and I talk about weird time stuff . . . concepts like beyond eternity and the implications of that. Or what the boundaries of the past’s future would be relative to today. We like movies that play around with concepts of time. Like Deja Vu with Denzel Washington or Frequency with Dennis Quaid or The Lake House with Sandra Bullock. Movies we can argue the plausibility of – as if any of it actually IS plausible.

And yet . . . I was in Singapore in the spring of ’98 for a few weeks of business. It was hectic and there was a lot to do. Plus the whole jet lag thing and, well . . . I woke up one morning and remembered that my anniversary had been the day before. And I’d forgotten all about it. So there I was sitting in my hotel room, feeling like a real bonehead when I realized that time had provided a reprieve. See, Singapore is a day ahead of Houston. So I called a Houston florist, one who did same-day deliveries and I ordered a gorgeous orchid delivered to my husband at work. Then I went to work myself – the day after my husband would get the gift I just ordered. He called me later that day (which was really the day before) and told me how thrilled he was with the orchid! So the gift was perfect and … did I have to tell him how late I'd been orchestrating the whole thing? I think not.

So, wouldn’t it be fun if we could actually do more stuff like that?

 

It was the day after tomorrow and Ronda remembered that she’d forgotten her brother’s birthday. So she set the clock back several days and went shopping, picking out a sweater she’d seen him wearing the following week. Then she snuck back into his birthday with the gift wrapped in next Sunday’s paper. She set the gift on the new coffee table, the one he’d buy with the money he’d get for his birthday. She snuck out the back door, barely closing it before he got home from work the next day. It seemed she’d been gone only a few moments but in reality, she hadn’t been gone at all. He looked up and smiled, already wearing the sweater. It fit perfectly. Of course it had to - after all, he’d been wearing it for a while now.

   

But no . . . we can’t do anything like that, can we? We’re stuck within this linear flow of time, living from minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day, trying to cram all we can into each one. 

It was just yesterday when I was floating around in the pool thinking about time . . . specifically, how little of it I have left to enjoy my backyard oasis. Only one more summer before my husband’s retirement will take us up into the Blue Ridge Mountains. I suddenly realized how close that really is! How the next two years will barrel down on me like a derailed freight train. So, I paddled around a little longer, trying to appreciate these last "few moments" before they're gone! 

And I guess maybe that's it, isn't it - how we choose to spend what little time we have. Perhaps we should be going for quality rather than quantity, be more selective about the activities we participate in - the thoughts we choose to think, the people we opt to spend time with. Maybe we even need to try to be bored from time to time. Just so we can feel that sense of standing still. Rather than trying to outrun the freight train.  

Adventures in Arthritis

So, it’s been over a month now since the evening I was here, home alone, tapping away at my keyboard when I felt the rush of something coming over me. If I didn’t know me so well, and the fact that I never get the flu (knock on simulated wood grain finish), I’d have sworn that’s what it was. Complete with nausea, cold sweats and dizziness all dropping in on me like a lead brick. I didn’t need to be a medical genius to know that something was way out of whack.

Then I passed out. Three times.

I still remember how it felt coming back to the surface then sinking again, and again . . . It was definitely surreal in every sense of the word! Each time I regained consciousness, I felt like there were two parts to my brain and they each wanted something different. One wanted to stay in that odd place where there was literally no brain activity at all. Okay, some could argue that I go there often but it’s just not the same. It was strange and dark and so inviting! But the other part of my mind was desperate to escape it. The battle raged on and on for all of two or three seconds each time I “came to.” It must have been during one those struggles that the thinking Linda picked up her cell phone. Then the non-thinking Linda took over, dragging us both back down to the dark place again. 

I finally grabbed hold of enough clarity to wonder a couple things: how the phone got into my hand and what the hell I was supposed to do with it. It took a couple more seconds to figure that out and when I did, I decided to call my husband. Okay, I know . . . I probably should have called 911 instead. But for lots of different reasons, I didn’t. I made my husband come home. And then HE called them.

A “G.I. Bleed” is what EMS called me as they poked a few needles in for fluid and other sundry stuff. I spent two nights in the hospital, got two transfusions along with an upper endoscopy and a (yuck) lower one too. At the end of it all, it was ulcers, the kind that had bled into my stomach until I’d lost enough blood to deprive my brain of oxygen (hence, the passing out). Everyone was pretty sure the culprit was meloxicam, my arthritis meds.

Since then I’ve read a ton of stuff about the dangers of NSAIDS (non steroid anti inflammatory drugs . . . yep, even the over-the-counter kind like Tylenol and ibuprofen). Since then I’ve stopped taking anything remotely resembling them, especially while my bloody stomach heals. Since then I’ve learned that there are a lot of deaths attributed to the use of NSAIDS every year. I also learned that long-term use can actually make arthritis worse since certain NSAIDS inhibit the absorption of liquid into the cartilage. Gee, thanks a lot, doc. 

But I have to take full responsibility for my actions. After all, I was the one who trusted the advice of the specialist without doing my own real research. I was the one who read all the possible side effects and thought, “Naaah - that kind of stuff happens to other people and not me.” But we live and we learn, don’t we? And if we refuse to learn . . . well, that’s a whole other story, isn’t it?

So now I’m on a new mission: to find a holistic way to live with chronic pain. I’m upping my turmeric until I can get my hands on something called Curcumin (an extract of turmeric). It’s a natural anti-inflammatory with all sorts of health benefits. I’ve talked to a couple friends who have been taking it for a while and they swear by it. So what the heck, I’ll give it a try.

And I’m trying Chinese acupuncture, a modality that’s been around for something like 2,000 years. When I told my son this, he asked what they used for needles back then. What a great question! So I posed it to my acupuncturist and she said . . . fish bones. FISH BONES! Can you imagine? So I got to wondering who the first person was to think; “Gee, I bet I can stick this fish bone into my hand and make my back pain go away. . .”

Sort of like the first person who ate an egg . . . I mean what the heck was he thinking? 

But anyway, since the needle poking appears to be helping, I'm thinking that brave, ancient soul was pretty smart! . . . the one with the fish bone, not the one with the egg.

And so goes my adventure into arthritis . . . the saga continues with the unexpected benefit of losing a little weight from of all the new stuff I cannot eat! Life is just filled with little perks like that.

How to Tell Time in a Noisy Bar

We spent judgment day at my new favorite restaurant. The place is perfect really, within spitting distance of the house, great food, awesome margaritas. The only bad thing is that all of Houston seems to share my love for it. So there’s typically a nice little wait.

So the night the world was to end (and here I’m thinking how Harold Camping has lost all credibility), we’re sitting at the bar, killing our obligatory forty minutes by sipping margaritas (and please don’t tell my acupuncturist this since she’s suggested I abstain from alcohol during this phase of treatment.) But gee! We’re at my favorite Mexican restaurant! And I’ve abstained for weeks now. Well, okay, days. What could one little margarita hurt? Well, okay, two.

So we’re drinking our second margarita (except for Ronnie who’s working on his diet cherry coke) when I start thinking, surely, we’ve waited longer than forty minutes! I remember how one time the hostess forgot to light up our little flashy thing and we ended up at the bar way longer than we should have. By the time we got to our table, we’d forgotten what we were there for.

So I start wondering what time it is. And here I should probably share the fact that I’ve not worn a watch since I escaped the corporate world years ago. Basically, I never know what time it is. Which makes me either early or late for everything. Well, okay, mostly late.

Anyway, I’m rummaging in my Ameribag with all its hidden pockets, trying to find my phone since it now serves as my only connection to real time. Sometimes I use it for the date, too. Okay, sometimes even the day of the week. When I see my husband reach into his pocket for his cell phone, I know what he’s going to do; he’s going to call me so I can track down my own phone by the sound of its voice.

I have the most awesome ring tone! It’s the one Adam Sandler had on the movie Bedtime Story and it’s both obnoxiously annoying and hilarious at the same time! I Crack The Heck Up whenever someone calls me. My husband hates it though and I have to remind him that he’s the one who tracked it down and converted it from an MP3 file into a ringtone.

My son loves the thing too. And so, much to my husband's frustration, we both have the same ring tone! One day last week, I was sitting in the car and needed to get in touch with Ronnie. When I called him, I heard my own ringtone, muffled somewhere nearby. At first I didn't realize it was his phone, buried in the seat cushion. So I sat staring at my own phone wondering . . . how the heck is it doing that?! 

So anyway, that’s what I’m listening for as I sit at the bar, holding my Ameribag up to my ear. I don’t think it’s such a silly thing to do. In fact, I think it’s pretty brilliant since the bar is noisy and, how else am I supposed to hear the thing if I don’t get close enough? But then I’ve had a couple margaritas, unlike the waitress who walks by, takes one look at me and cracks up . . . 

But, hmmmm . . . now I’m wondering - maybe it was because she heard my awesomely annoying ring tone! !