Coffee heat rising

Consumer-proof Packaging: What’s in YOUR Kitchen Drawer?

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So the other day I went to open a bottle of cheap wine, the type with the screw-on cap. Naturally, I reached into the kitchen drawer — premium real estate in this house — and quite naturally pulled out a wrench.

Yeah. There’s a wrench in the kitchen drawer, something no woman in my mother’s generation (or in mine, until rather recently) would EVER have allowed to take up space there.

This led me to reflect on the the ubiquity of consumer-proof packaging — almost everything you buy is hermetically sealed in layers of plastic (much of it hard as a football helmet) and cardboard — and how much I hate that kind of waste. And how much I hate the ways it has to be dealt with.

In addition to a wrench, my kitchen drawer contains a pair of pliers (good for pulling off the hated inner paper seals of paper and tinfoil, among other things), a heavy-duty pair of scissors, and an extra-sharp ultra-cheap grocery-store knife that I don’t mind denting or bending. The tin snips won’t fit in there — have to walk out to the garage to get those, whenever I need to hack into one of Costco’s accursed heavy plastic clamshells.

Costco isn’t the only offender. You get impermeable packaging from Fry’s Electronics, Target, Walmart, and even sometimes from Amazon, despite the latter’s policy designed to discourage it.

Also needed:

• A screwdriver and a hammer to break into the adult-proof pill and cleanser bottles
• A package of thumbtacks to render the adult-proof bottles openable
• A hacksaw, for worst-case scenarios

How can I say how much I resent having to own a tool chest devoted to opening containers? And how can I say how much I hate the amount of useless plastic and cardboard that goes straight to the city landfill, often tainted with a few drops of blood from my fingers?

Am I the only person who is made crazy by the crazy packaging? What tools do you keep in your kitchen drawers these days?

Neighborhood Patrol? Really?

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What on earth could they be thinking? The current bunch that’s taken control, with vivacious élan and enthusiasm, of the neighborhood organization has decided that nothing will do but what we must have a neighborhood watch.

Astonishingly, the Phoenix police department is aiding and abetting this bit of foolishness. The neighborhood association is recruiting people to join up and take a (1) training class, after which, presto-changeo, “you will leave the class trained to help with our PNP.”

You realize Arizona is a concealed-carry state. The legislature in its infinite wisdom got rid of the requirement to get a concealed-carry license by taking a firearms safety class. So everyone and his little sister is lugging pistols around. Even if these volunteer coplets are told not to carry guns, you can be sure at least some of them will.

And you realize that according to the best crime map that covers the city of Phoenix, since last August there’ve been about eight or ten crime complaints here in the ’hood, most of them petty thefts out of driveways. Much as I complain about the inner-citiness of it all, the place is really pretty tame.

And there’s a kid in the neighborhood who goes around tricked out in full thug regalia, complete with sagging pants and a hoodie with the hood pulled up over his head. And yep: he’s a black kid. About 14 or 15, I’d guess. He usually hangs out with a bunch of kids who affect a more average look. But the first time I saw him, I was certainly given pause — straight-looking pals notwithstanding.

So, the question is, what part of “George Zimmerman vs. Trayvon Martin” do they not recall?

The risks in having a bunch of nervous, half-baked civilians tromping around looking for criminals defy belief. If they’re likely to be carrying concealed weapons, so are the perps they encounter (if any). So are the innocent citizens they mistake for perps. We’ve seen what self-appointed neighborhood security guards can do when they meet up with a black male in a jacket with a hood.

Back when my parents lived in Sun City, the county sheriff had this old-guys’ citizen’s patrol. My father actually joined it, he being bored and restless. He was an expert marksman. But most of them weren’t. One of the old buzzards tangled with a burglar who was trying to break into a loading dock door at a strip shopping center. Burglar shot and killed him.

Thank goodness this bunch of enthusiastic neighbors is just a passel of volunteers. If it was an HOA, we could all be liable for a lawsuit if someone gets hurt or killed.

Such a stupid idea. If the local burgers couldn’t transcend their idiocy, wouldn’t you think the cops would have better sense?

Boob: To Be (attached) or Not to Be (attached)

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Okay, so the Mayo docs have relented on the clinic’s policy to the extent that they’re offering me a choice: if I want to take a chance that the 2014 no-ink-on-tumor guidelines for excision margins are safe, they will give me radiation and hormone treatment. Or, if I prefer not to run the 20 percent risk of recurrence and 10 percent risk of invasive cancer, then they will lob off the offending boob.

Which, they wonder, do I prefer?

A man of my acquaintance thinks I don’t understand anything I read on the Internet, especially if the reading level exceeds that of, say, Cosmo or People magazine. I imagine the editor of Mathematical Biosciences and Engineering would disagree, but that’s neither here nor there. Assuming he’s right that I’ve been overthinking this thing, I’ve done a little cost-benefit analysis, based on my subjective feelings about the matter and informed only by facts available in the most dumbed-down sources available to us pretty little air-headed girls.

Interestingly,  here’s the result, quite the opposite of the direction in which I’ve been tilting.

Boob yea or naySo in this thing, a negative number represents exactly that: a negative. A positive number represents a desirable outcome. A zero indicates either that the circumstance is not applicable or that I don’t care about it one way or the other.

I’ve tried to think of all the aspects entailed in keeping the boob and in having it amputated, and of all the implications entailed in each aspect. Probably I’ve missed some…but I’ll bet I haven’t missed much that matters, at least to me — and this is supposed to reflect my subjective preference.

In terms of whether to keep the boob or not, both options are very negative. We have now heard not one but two heavy-hitting oncologists, both women and at least one of them nationally respected, state that if they personally were faced with this choice, they would try to avoid radiation. I have never reacted well to hormone therapies of any kind, birth control included, and you may be sure that whatever side effects aromatase inhibitors evince, I will be enjoying those. One of them is joint pain. With chronic back pain and sciatica that sometimes flares to the point where I can barely walk down the hall to the bathroom, I don’t feel I need more joint pain. So the fact that each of these therapies has negative side effects, some of them life-threatening, is a bad thing. And even with radiation therapy, the Mayo crew estimates risk of recurrence at 20% and risk of invasive cancer at 10%.

Obviously, the mutilation, the violent surgery, and the ensuing pain of a mastectomy amount to a bad thing, too.

So we’re trying to figure out which is the least bad of two bad options.

And lookit here! Keeping the breast accrues more than twice as many negative points than getting rid of it!

Then we have the fact that these doctors — and one doctor in the wild — are pressuring me to get reconstructive surgery. From what I’ve been able to tell, reconstruction has some failings, most of which result in further surgery or at least disfigurement that you have to learn to live with. Because I am not my boobs, I do not believe that (as one quack informed me) I will quickly become suicidal if I don’t have a fake boob pasted on my chest.

But, just in case I’m staring at this question through a glass darkly, I decided to ask the Excel Ouija board about reconstruction, too. The options presented in my first effort, “Do It” or “Skip It,” seemed a little vague, as it was difficult to know how to score “skip it.” So I tried again with something roughly like a cost/benefit comparison: what are the benefits vs the drawbacks of a) going ahead with reconstruction and b) declining reconstruction?

Here, the result accords more closely with my inclination: the point value of the benefits for no reconstruction outweigh the drawbacks by about three to one. The drawbacks of reconstruction outweigh the benefits by more than three to one. (Would be nice if I’d typed that correctly, but I’m not jumping through the hoops to build and upload a new jpeg for ONE character!)

So. I think this quantifies my point of view on the issue: given two bad choices, the least bad option is mastectomy.

Creamless Creamed Spinach

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SpinachnovSpinach: weirdly, I love it!

Especially I love it prepared in the Julia Child mode. Julia would quickly parboil a few fistfuls of fresh spinach — dump it in boiling water and then forthwith pour it into a colander or strainer. Then she said to wrap it in paper towels or a clean white cotton towel and wring the water out of it; then toss it on the cutting board and chop it up. Next, melt a ton of butter in a pan, add the spinach, cover, and allow to sit over very low heat while you go on about your business preparing the rest of the meal, at least 20 minutes or half an hour. Keep the heat pretty darn low, especially if you’ll be preoccupied any longer than 20 or 30 minutes; maybe stir now and again. Season with salt & pepper.

Well, heaven help us, the result is mind-boggling: the spinach more or less absorbs the butter so you end up with something indescribably buttery and delicious.

I’ve learned you can do that, much faster and with far less work, by using a good brand of frozen spinach. Get either the leaf or the chopped variety, as you please. Melt butter, pour the frozen spinach into the pan, stir around a bit until it defrosts, cover, and continue as above.

Now this is good enough…but the other day I accidentally learned how to make it IN-FREAKING-CREDIBLE!

Craving some creamed spinach, I stuck my head in the fridge and discovered, not surprisingly, no cream. But there was a giant package of Costco yogurt. Heh heh…here’s how this came down:

Acquire:

1/4 of a fresh onion
a handful of pine nuts (probably optional)
a package of frozen spinach
a cube of butter
a little nutmeg
a little cumin
no-fat or  low-fat plain yogurt
a large saucepan or small frying pan, with lid

Chop the onion. Doesn’t take very much. I had a red onion on hand and used about 1/4 of it. You could add garlic, too, if you wanted.

Melt about 1/4 to 1/3 of the cube of butter over medium heat. Gently cook the onion and pine nuts in till the onion has softened nicely, maybe even begun to caramelize, and the pine nuts are starting to brown. If you’re using garlic, chop or mince the garlic and add it toward the end of this process. Stir now and again.

Open the package of frozen spinach and dump in as much as you think you can eat, which is likely to be more than you expect because this is amazingly delicious. Do not defrost it first. Do not cook it first. Just dump it in frozen. Stir around as it defrosts.

Add another 1/4 cube of butter. Oh, maybe even more, if that makes you feel happy. Sprinkle the spinach with a little nutmeg. Add a little cumin — more cumin than nutmeg, I’d say. Not a lot — maybe 1/2 teaspoon or so. Just sprinkle to taste. Stir. Cover. Turn heat to “low.” Go away.

Prepare the rest of your dinner. Occasionally check on the spinach and stir a bit, but otherwise leave it covered and simmering away.

Right before you’re ready to serve it up, turn off the heat. Remove the pan from the burner. Give it a second to stop bubbling, if it’s doing so. Then add yogurt to taste. I probably put in about a quarter to half a cup. Stir. Add a little salt and a little fresh-ground pepper.

And serve it up.

This turns out to be bizarrely delicious. Why, I could not say. But it is truly extremely good.

Image: Victor M. Vicente Selvas. Public domain.

Decision Taken — At Last!

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Blew the entire darned morning at the Mayo today, talking with a new radiation oncologist. I must say, she was very impressive — almost as impressive as WonderSurgeon.

She said it was within the realm of possibility to treat the boob with radiation and aromatase inhibitors. However, said she: “If it were me, I’d choose a mastectomy.”

Once again the decision is up to me. And the truth is, I’d just as soon have it off. Apparently WonderSurgeon has the idea that I’d prefer to keep the boob come what may. That’s not at all true.

I’ve been ambivalent to the ultimate degree of ambivalence. On the one hand, I would very much like NOT to have any more surgery. I do not want reconstruction because that looks like an invitation to more complications and more surgery; if we’re going to do this, I’d like to keep it as simple as possible and just effin’ get it over with. On the other, if mastectomy is not really necessary, naturally I’d just as soon keep my body intact. Especially now that WonderSurgeon magically restored the diseased boob to its former splendor…or even better.

And, as our venerable reader George likes to say, “on the other paw…” I’d just as soon do without radiation therapy and five years on a drug with potentially baleful side effects.

The choices are these:

a) leave the boob on, subject yourself to a course of radiation whose worst side effects will start to surface nine years from now and can continue to arise over the next thirty years, plus five years on an unpleasant drug, and still run the risk of invasive cancer; or
b) remove the boob, reduce the risk of invasive cancer to something under 1 percent, and moot the dangerous therapies.

I mean, really: which of these makes sense?

Yup…the answer is behind Door B.

Asked her about the potential side effects of the radiation treatment she proposed…

Bone damage? Not so much with modern treatments: an occasional fractured rib
Soft-tissue cancers? Definitely a potential
Lung cancer? Probably not; again, much less probability with newer technology
Lung damage? Scarring in a small part of a lower lobe. This can lead to pneumonitis, which is usually minor but can become life-threatening. It is treated with massive doses of Prednisone.
Lymphedema? Low risk
Fibrosis? Low risk
Hypothyroidism? Didn’t get a comment
Brachial plexopathy? Not so much
Leukemia or myelodysplastic syndrome? Very low incidence

Translations: any of these things is a possibility, although most of them pose fairly low risk.

Pneumonitis and new cancers are probably the most likely of the unpleasant side effects. I’ve had prednisone, in very low doses…and I do NOT want any more of it, thank you. Its aftereffects appear weeks or months after you’ve taken it, and they’re very unpleasant, indeed. I wouldn’t take it unless I were at risk of dying, and I wouldn’t put myself at that risk for the sake of keeping a boob hanging on my chest.

And one “not-a-cancer” has been quite traumatic enough, thank you. Don’t think I need to enjoy a real cancer sometime — anytime — in the future.

This has been going since last June! My life has been turned upside down; everything I’d planned to do business-wise and personally has been disrupted, it’s drained my checking account, the whole thing has me teetering on the edge of stark-raving-CRAZY, and I WANT IT TO STOP!

If chopping off the boob will make is stop, by all means let’s get on with it at the earliest possible moment.

For the nonce, though, I have to get back to work.

Later! 🙂

Like a Flash!

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Lightning_strike_jan_2007Twenty minutes till time to shoot out the door for the 7:15 ayem meet in Scottsdale. This post is gonna have to be short & fast, because there’ll be no time for blogging frolics between now and the middle of the night.

So, yes, off to the meeting, where thank God all I have to do is preside, not present.

Then shoot back here, part company with carpooling pal, and shoot out to Staples and Michael’s, there to buy supplies for my latest organizational scheme: another whiteboard, this one to keep track, on a monthly basis, of the book-marketing schemes.

Yesterday I got a start on a few of the several strategies that I’ll be trying out on Slave Labor, which as books go comes under the heading of “test run.” I hope to use Slave Labor as a device to learn as much as I can about producing, marketing, and selling self-published opuses, which with any luck can then be applied to the upcoming, better books, two of which I hope to put out shortly.

Then it’s back to the Funny Farm, here to shovel a three-month-old stack of paper off the desk.

Forgive me, Mammon, for I have sinned. I have not reconciled Your bank account statements for the past three or four months; I have not even looked at Your illustrious bills; I have refused to think about the pile of statements from Your engine of money production, Fidelity…

It is going to take the entire day to plow through that stuff. WonderAccountant has been importuning me to haul this stuff over to her and to set up a new billing system in QuickBooks. I’ve resisted personfully, but  the work can’t be put off any longer. Student papers were graded yesterday, I’ve almost recovered from the last Adventure in Medical Science, and now I’m out of excuses: it is time.

Ugh.

And so {sigh} to work…

Image: Lightning Strike in 2007. fir0002. Flastafffotos.com.au.