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Casting Off the Crutches…and Adjusting to the New Third-World America

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Well, hallelujah. It looks like your honored scribbler may live, after all. Another miracle!

The belly virus is about gone. Tho’ it still feels like someone socked me in the gut, at least I can now stand upright. And here’s the weird part:

After three days and four nights flat on my back in bed, the hip and back pain are almost gone! For a period this morning, the pain level was actually down to zero, the first time in two years.

It’s returned to some degree, of course, but it’s still much, much better. It’s as though the bod’ needed to give the physical therapy exercises and the swimming and the sitting at a desk a rest! Or maybe like taking the weight of the upper body off the lower lumbar vertebrae somehow let something shift away from whatever nerve it was pressing on.

Whatever caused it, any relief sure is welcome!

And speaking of causes…

Initially I thought I’d brought on the bellyache with a perfectly awful asparagus soup I concocted. Instantly after eating it, the bod’ blew up with gas like a weather balloon. And forthwith things went from bad to worse. Much worse.  Resolved: pour the puréed asparagus stems down the drain, praying that it doesn’t clog the plastic plumbing as it seems to have done the human plumbing.

Soon, though, it became apparent that this was a viral infection, with the classic collywobbles, headache, and a rather startling fever.

On reflection, it’s unlikely the asparagus soup harbored a virus, since it was cooked until the stringy stems dissolved into mush — a good 45 minutes or so. It was still very hot when I ate it.

What suspects had I encountered over the previous 24 hours, typical incubation period for an enterovirus?

• boxed salad greens
• mango
• avocado
• raw fruit bowl at a restaurant
• banana blended into OJ

Uh huh. Right now we’re told people in a dozen states are complaining of stomach infections associated with a salad mix — not the type I favor, and not here in Arizona. But still. This isn’t the first time.

No, indeed. This is far from the first time. And although I was brought up in a place where we had to disinfect every bite we put in our mouths, I’ve always been pretty complacent about produce purchased in the Safeway and waypoints.

This is America, after all! We’re a First-World country! We never fertilize our fields with human waste. We have safety regulations. We have health regulations. We have…effing globalization…

And so yes, we’re getting plenty of produce grown under unknown and probably questionable conditions.

When I was a little kid, my mother treated every head of lettuce, every piece of fruit, ever radish, every stick of celery, every other vegetable we might eat raw by soaking it in a sink of Clorox-laced water, as she had been taught to do by company officials. Anything that couldn’t be soaked in Clorox or cooked to insensibility was simply off-limits.

Strawberries were off-limits.

Raspberries were off-limits.

Blackberries were off-limits.

Fruits with rinds that could be peeled had to be doused in Clorox, too, and washed with soap and water before eating. Even though you cut off the peel, if you hadn’t taken care of the microbes, the knife would pick them up as you sliced into the fruit and smear them through the juicy center. Et voilà! Amoebic dysentery!

Watermelons of the time — we had none of these tiny little seedless melons in those days, but wonderful, juicy, incredibly sweet mammoth things that your Daddy had to pick out because he knew how tell which one was the ripest and because he could lift the the behemoth — watermelons were too big to submerge in a sink full of chlorinated water. So we were told to wash them all over with soap and water. Then dry. Then slice and serve. But…

But we were not to eat any juice that dripped out and puddled up on the plate. Which of course was exactly what every little kid craved to do: as soon as Mom’s back was turned, grab the plate, lift it to the lips, and slurp down that sugary watermelon juice! My mother watched me like a hawk whenever she set a piece of watermelon in front of me.

Every time my mother dragged the groceries in from the commissary, she would wash and disinfect all the fresh fruit and vegetables — which were considerable, because back in the Day real food was all we had to eat, except for some drech that came from cans. And some ur-processed-cereals — puffed wheat, puffed rice, Cheerios, and something gross that was coated in goopy syrup sort of like the stuff that holds popcorn balls together. Most of our food was actual food, and most of our meals were prepared from scratch.

At any rate, this sanitary regimen worked for ten long years, during which no one in our family developed a serious intestinal disease.

Ten. Long. Years.

Week after week and day after day of disinfecting every bite of food in Clorox and detergent…

Then came the day my mother persuaded my father to retire from the Arabian American Oil Company. She and I were to go home a few months before the end of his contract, during which time my mother would establish a base of operations in the San Francisco Bay Area, out of which Standard Oil tankers sailed. My father would move from his handsomely paid shore job in God-forsaken Ras Tanura to handsomely paid captain of a tanker sailing up and down the West Coast.

The evening before we were to fly to New York, our next-door neighbors invited us over for a farewell party. Dinner included a small green salad — in those days, a mound of iceberg lettuce. Our hostess had not bothered herself with disinfecting the stuff. And wouldn’t you know it…

By morning, my mother was deathly sick.

Our journey back home was summarily canceled, and within hours she was on a hospital plane bound for New York, bearing a diagnosis of amoebic dysentery.

In those days, the treatment for amoebic dysentery was akin to chemotherapy. They put you through three regimes of highly toxic medication, each one of which would make you as sick as the parasite did. Or sicker. She was in the hospital in New York for three months while the doctors subjected her to this hideous routine. By the end she no longer had diarrhea. But they couldn’t guarantee that she was free of the parasite — in fact, they told her she probably would harbor it for the rest of her life, and that for my and my father’s safety she should wipe down the toilet seat with Lysol every time she used it.

And that, my children, was why one dipped one’s food in Clorox before eating it.

Well, I’m not making like a raccoon with a puddle of chlorine bleach. But after this, I most certainly am going to wash every piece of raw produce before eating it. And I’m never going to eat anything raw in a restaurant again.

I do favor baby romaine lettuce in those plastic boxes. It all goes into a sinkful of detergent and cold water. Pick out any sickly leaves. Rinse well in clean, cold water. Spread over towels to dry. Wash plastic box well. Dry. Repack lettuce into clean plastic box, with a sheet or two of paper toweling. Hope for the best.

Everything fresh and vegetal picked up at Sprouts and Safeway today — the first time I’ve been able to crawl to the grocery store in a week — went into the detergent-filled sink:

• lettuce
• grapes
• mangoes
• tomatoes
• papaya
• nectarines
• avocados
• lemon
• and yeah, even some strawberries

If it has a tough skin, it gets scrubbed. If not, it at least sits in the soapy water for a good ten or fifteen minutes.

This was a nasty bout of stomach bug, but it was as nothing compared to what a lot of Americans have gone through in recent years. Past time, it is, to accept the fact that we are no longer a “First-World country” where our food supply is concerned. Vast amounts of produce are shipped in from countries like China and Mexico, and even produce grown and packed in America cannot be trusted to be safe.

I don’t wanna go through this again. And pretty clearly, the only way to avoid it is to treat fresh produce as though it came from a Third-World country. Which it did — no matter where it was grown. Can’t cook it? Wash the hell out of it! And never eat anything in a restaurant that doesn’t come out of the kitchen hot.

Don’t drink the water, either.

Quiet for a While Here

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Funny will probably be out of commission for a few days. I’m sick as a dog, having picked up some kind of enteritis to complement the unremitting hip pain. Mountains of work are incoming; I missed the deadline for the corporation’s annual report, a fiasco aggravated by the fact that the idiot Corporation Commission’s website is not accessible on a Mac and emits printable forms in a format readable only in IE, which I refuse to install because of its chronic security issues; and I haven’t done the course prep for the online magazine-writing course.

{sigh} My poor old dog. If I’d known how much pain that GerShep was in — the vet said virtually every bone in her body was arthritic — I’d have put her down a lot sooner than I did. Wish there was someone to extend the same favor to me.

LOL!! Speaking of IE, here’s a hilarious review of the program as it relates to Apple.

MacFanBoy, meet Allosaurus.
State of Arizona, meet the 21st Century.

Bead Frenzy!

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Okay, so I finally got around to confronting the dead coral snake, also known as my latest Fail in the bead necklace department. When the thing fell apart, only about half the beads shot off and scattered all over the floor. Only about a third of them rolled under the freezer. Since the thing was about three times too long, this was not the end of the universe. Nor of the coral snake.

Spent a fair amount of the day pulling hundreds of seed beads off the broken strands of upholstery thread and stringing them on wire. Added some grayish glittery Swarovski beads here and there. This helped a little to mute the reptilian look. Instead of trying to make it one continuous loop, I attached a craftsy-looking clasp, mooting the how-to-run-it-all-together headache. And then I added a little “tail” to the thing, with a little silver dragonfly at the end.

These ministrations resulted in a pretty versatile affair: you can wear it in one long flapperish strand or wrap it twice around your neck, and you can let the dragonfly dangle seductively down the back of your neck or turn the beads around and wear the charm in front.

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Not such a ridiculous disaster now…maybe it’s even good enough to offer at the upcoming silent auction. Will have to think about that.

MexicanCrossThen it was on to experimenting with designing the proposed Anglican rosary, now that the pretty little Mexican cross is in hand. The various mounds of jasper I’d ordered from Fire Mountain hadn’t arrived, but I had an old cross that predates my last period of apostasy.

For the beta version of the rosary project, then, I used the old choir cross, which looks kind of like pewter, five 10-mm beads of aventurine or amazonite (not sure which it is), 28 rondelles of African jade, and heaven only knows how many 6-mm beads of gray feldspar. The color combination went pretty well with the pewtery cross. I used silver- and gold-toned glass seed beads as spacers.

Not a bad effect, but way, way too long. I’d strung three feldspar beads to function like a “chain” between the actual prayer beads, and that was just too many. Eventually I’ll take it apart and rebuild it…am thinking it should have no more than one feldspar spacer between the aventurine and African jade pieces — but maybe not even that. Maybe none. It may be that the silver and gold glass beads alone will suffice.

Along about the time this got finished, the mail arrived, bearing the new jasper beads. The variety called “fancy jasper” is really very pretty. I expect I’ll use the ten-mm fancy jasper for the cruciform beads and the “invitatory,” and then fill in the “weeks” with autumn jasper, a lovely, warm stone. A hundred sterling silver beads came in package, too; they’ll make very classy spacers.

Thanks to the beta version, I think one of these silver things between each bead will suffice. 🙄

I’ve got some turquoise rondelles and tubes laying around in there, liberated from long-defunct pieces of jewelry. I’m thinking one or two of those could decorate the dangle from which the crucifix is suspended, highlighting the Southwestern effect.

My friend Carol came up with two really cool old stone crosses. Since I’ll have enough beads left over to supply the entire parish with these things, I may make those into rosaries, too.

How d’you like these gladioli?

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$1.99 for five long stalks of these things, at Trader Joe’s yesterday! Hot diggety!

 

 

Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman, the Lynch Mob, and America’s Reality

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Are you as tired of hearing the endlessly nasty hysteria over the George Zimmerman trial as I am?

Here’s the problem: George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin are not the issue at all. They’re stand-ins for the issue: icons, if you will.

The real subject — and the one we as a nation should be addressing — has to do with the practical results of poverty, unemployment, and discrimination for Blacks and for our entire culture.

We can jump up and down and yell about the killing of Trayvon Martin until we all turn blue, but nothing that’s done about it will change the larger, horrific facts:

• Unemployment among adult Black men is still at 13.2 percent, far above the 7.5 percent rate for the population at large.
• Poverty is still widespread among Black Americans.
• Incarceration and “correctional” supervision stand at an astronomical rate among Black adult men.
• Life expectancy for African Americans lags behind that of their fellow citizens because of poor education and poverty.
• The first Black president of the United States, a man of enormous talent and accomplishment, can say with sincerity that he identifies with a kid who dresses up in hoodlum attire and covers his face with a “hoodie”; and when our president says that, he, too, expresses the pain of discrimination and poverty.

Those are the issues America should be addressing. The Zimmerman trial is a distraction.

Personally, I respect the President and hear his grief in his words. However, that doesn’t change the fact that when I pull up to a red light in a blighted neighborhood (which, because of the poverty rate among African Americans, is likely to be home to a larger proportion of Blacks than in other areas), yes: I invariably check that the car doors are locked. If I’ve carelessly left them unlocked, you bet I’ll hit the lock, and I DON’T CARE if it hurts anyone’s feelings.

On three different occasions, strangers have tried to enter my car at stop lights, once when I had a small child in the car with me. Sorry if it makes you feel bad, but my safety is more important than your feelings.

After the lynch mob settles down, those of us who do feel sorry that the present state of affairs harms a large part of our population need to work together to eliminate poverty and the crime, discrimination, despair, and blight that come with it.

That’s what people are really talking about when they carry on about George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin. White folks may not know it, but black folks surely intuit it. Together, we must face that reality.

A House Is Not a “Home”…

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…and it decidedly is not a “dream.” That’s an embarrassing little truth that Evan lays bare in a recent post at My Journey to Millions. In a burst of his characteristic common sense, he wonders whether a better name for “the American dream” might be “the American nightmare.” In a shoot-from-the-hip comment, I vaguely agreed with him, despite several commenters’ arguments that “owning” a home is better than renting. But since his post went up, I’ve found myself returning to his query of the sacrosanct American ideal. The question is impossible to brush off, especially if you’ve had any serious experience with homeownership.

Consider: if we do a search for “real estate” in our city, we find a Google link to Trulia: “Find Homes For Sale in [Yourtown].” Realty Executives wishes to direct us to “Historic Phoenix Homes,” something that surely is an oxymoron, to say nothing of moronic. We’re lectured that “Buying a home is one of the biggest investments you may ever make financially” and “the Urban Team can help you buy a home,” to which we answer, “That’s quite a trick,” because my dears, home is not a place; home is where you hang your hat.

We don’t buy and sell homes. We (and our mortgage lenders) buy and sell houses. A house is, in most (but not all) circumstances, an investment. Because real estate prices in livable neighborhoods are so outlandishly huge, few of us who live outside the One Percent can afford to pay for a house in cash; consequently, most of us borrow outlandishly huge sums, putting up our “homes” as collateral and nailing ourselves to debt that will persist for upwards of 30 years. Over three decades, should we last long enough to pay off the loan, the mortgage interest alone will be as much as or more than the purchase price of the dwelling.

Some investment, eh?

Oh, you say, but in 30 years the house will be worth many times more than what we paid for it! Well…not quite.

In 30 years, the value of a dollar will be worth many times less than it was when you bought the shack. If you are very lucky and the neighborhood doesn’t decline, the amount you can clear from the sale of your future paid-off house will be just about enough to purchase a similar home in a similar or lesser neighborhood. In terms of real purchasing power, then: no. Thirty years from now your house will not really be worth more than what you paid for it.

In the meantime, though: you’ve actually disbursed, to the mortgage banker, twice as much as the house’s purchase price. That is, after thirty years have passed, the place is worth about half what you paid for it, over the long run.

Almost.

But not quite: you’ve installed at least one new roof ($5,000 a hit); repaired and probably upgraded the plumbing system ($5,000 to $10,000), likely upgraded the kitchen and bathrooms two or three times ($5,000 to $15,000); painted inside and out four or five times ($2,000 to $5,000 if you hire someone to do this bitch of a job); replastered the pool ($10,000); cut down a 25-year-0ld shade tree ($1,000) and replaced it with an expensive specimen tree ($500); installed a new security system ($1,000 + a monthly subscription); installed energy-efficient windows ($5,000), replaced the door the burglar kicked in ($500 to $1,500; $500 deductible for the home insurance, plus the increase in premiums), replaced two water heaters ($500 to $800 apiece), repaired the HVAC system three times (a lot) and finally replaced that, too ($4,000)…and on and on and on.

Begins to make Evan’s “American nightmare” sobriquet ring true, doesn’t it?

You know, it’s not necessary to pony up mortgage payments for thirty years to achieve the “American dream.” If you crave to own a house, some day, you could do what my father did:

Don’t purchase the roof over your head until you retire, at which time you will need housing that doesn’t drain your bank account once a month.

Instead, during your entire working life, either rent or live in company housing. Take the savings that result — which will be considerable, since you will not have to pay for maintenance, repairs, insurance, taxes, mortgage interest, and fancification of your dwelling — and invest every penny.

Then, when you’re ready to retire (which, if you’re not paying through the wazoo for the roof overhead, is likely to be well before the age of 65 or 67 or 70 or 75 or whatever standard “retirement age” is inflicted on your generation), use part of your savings to purchase a modest but comfortable, low-maintenance house in cash. This will vastly reduce your monthly out-of-pocket costs — now you will have to pay neither rent nor a mortgage — and you will have achieved the “American dream.” Since you will have been married for upwards of 25 years, it’s unlikely you’ll divorce, and so your investment in the “dream” will be pretty safe. Voilà.

During the entire time I was growing up (and before then, as far as I can tell), my father never owned our several homes. He and my mother rented, except when we lived in Arabia, where Aramco provided our housing — essentially the same as renting. My mother, who was in charge of finding and maintaining these dwellings, usually got us into fairly decent places to live. Some were very nice indeed; only one was typical Southern California ticky-tacky. We never wanted for comfortable, peaceful housing. And as for said housing being a “home”: home was what the people who lived in it created.

My father was 53 when he quit his job to retire; my mother would have been 48. He moved them to Arizona (women didn’t make these decisions then, nor did they buy and sell houses, at least not without a power of attorney from their dear husbands), because taxes and real estate prices were far lower than anything they could find in California. He bought a house here in cash, providing them with a place to live that cost almost nothing: a modest annual tax bill was about it. Of course, they had to pay for the utilities and maintenance — but because the house was new, maintenance and repairs were almost nil for quite some time.

For him, the American dream was to quit working. And he achieved it largely by avoiding what Evan aptly calls “the American nightmare.” My father didn’t let himself get sucked into the myth.

Why should you?

 

 

 

Use It Up, Make It Do, Wear It Out: The Joy of Fixing Stuff

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UseItUpWearItOutMakeItDoSome years ago, I bought a pretty little copper watering pot. It came from Smith and Hawken, though I may have found it at Target, which used to carry quite a lot of Smith and Hawken products, especially before the outdoor department was shut down. I don’t even think Smith and Hawken makes this design anymore — it doesn’t come up in a cursory search.

Well, it was very cute, but none too practical — its long, graceful spout dispenses water too slowly for my taste. I’m the douse-and-run type of indoor gardener, I’m afraid. So it got set down between a couple of potted plants and pretty much forgotten, unless a visitor remarked on how interesting it was. Last time I used it, it got splashed with water and put away wet, giving it a smallpox-like spattering of dark, round stains. Over the years, it acquired a dark brown layer of tarnish, which did nothing to cover the pox.

It looked terrible. I pushed it back behind the pots (too lazy to find a real place to put it away) and forgot about it.

Well, you know, indoor plants suffer as much from the drought as the landscape and the forests do. The dry air sucks moisture out of potting soil, and in the summer when the AC is set at 80 to 83 degrees, it’s really too hot for tropical plants best suited to live on the rainy side of Hawai’i. They cling to life, but barely.

The other day I decided to clean up the dead foliage and then thoroughly water and fertilize the poor little things. And what should I find in behind the sanseveria and prayer plants but that old copper pot, much the worse for neglect.

Would a quick scrub with Barkeeper’s Helper clean off those dark, ugly water spots?

Nothing ventured…

…And nothing gained: the answer was nope! It did revive the copper glow a little, though. Not much, but some.

The rubber gauntlet was now down: here was a challenge I had to rise to.

Out came all the metal-cleaning products and all the old-wives’ wisdom to which I am privy — which by now, my children, is quite a bit. So…

How to Clean and Polish Copper

Just about any good metal cleaner will help to scour tarnish off copper. The ones actually marketed as copper cleaner are by far the best — brass cleaner and silver cleaner will work, but not as effectively. Dedicated copper cleaner, interestingly, is not all that easy to find these days. If you want it, you may have to order it online.

CopperCreamPersonally, I prefer the creamy type, possibly just because that’s what I’ve always used. But I didn’t have any around, so used some silver cream, also by Wright, which seems to have a good toehold on the grocery-store shelves.

Silver cream didn’t work much better than the Barkeeper’s Helper. So it was time for recourse to the home products.

Just about any combination of salt plus sour stuff will eat the tarnish right off uncoated copper. Your choices look this:

• vinegar and table salt
• cut lemon and table salt
• ketchup (contains vinegar and salt, along with all the sugar, the tomato, and the artificial ingredients)
• lemon juice and cream of tartar

Neither ketchup nor lemon & cream of tartar work much better than Barkeeper’s Helper, which is good enough for government work. If you don’t want a really shiny effect, one of these three choices may do the job for you.

Rubbing a half a lemon over the metal and then sprinkling liberally with salt does the job a little better, IMHO. It’s a fair amount of work — you have to reapply the lemon juice and salt several times, and scrub well with a dampened sponge.

The easiest and hands-down most effective home copper cleaner is a combination of white vinegar and table salt. You can mix these together (at least 3 Tbsp salt to two cups of vinegar) or simply pour vinegar all over the object, then salt it generously, and then scrub with a sponge or rag.

Whether you use lemon juice or vinegar, WEAR RUBBER GLOVES FOR THIS CHORE! Vinegar and salt combine to form hydrogen chloride, a strong acid — I once actually etched a concrete floor with the stuff.

As soon as your copper piece is clean, wash it well in soap and water or with baking soda (neutralizes acid), and wash down your sink, lest any leftover acid etch the porcelain. Then dry the piece well with a clean, dry towel.

Copper tarnishes fairly quickly in the presence of oxygen and carbon dioxide — that would be the stuff we call “air.” Some people like that effect, regarding it as a pleasing patina. Others like their copper shiny.

You can delay the corrosion and also give your copper piece a deeper glow by rubbing a very light layer of vegetable oil over it. Go easy on this — you don’t want it to be greasy, just polished. I used olive oil, which also makes the brightwork in the kitchen and bathroom look pretty nice.

Don’t you love to bring new life to old things like this? I think it’s much more satisfying to fix stuff than to go out and buy new stuff.

Here’s how the little pot turned out…

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