Coffee heat rising

20 Excuses to Cheat on the Diet

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Stupid Reasons:

1. It’s only a little pasta.

2. I swam 50 laps yesterday. That’s almost a mile. Or so.

3. Don’t you think losing 1.7 pounds overnight is a bit much? Maybe we should put the brakes on this dieting phenomenon for a day or so.

4. On other days when I’ve fallen off the Diet Wagon, nothing has happened. In fact, after I ate the lamb souvlaki pita and the deliciously greasy French fries sprinkled liberally with feta cheese, the weight went down 1.2 pounds.

5. I can’t face another bowl of baked eggplant. 😛

6. It’s a hideous hot, cloudy, steamy day that’s so miserable the air is clammy even indoors where the AC is blasting away. This calls out for comfort food.

7. It would be a shame to let all those beautiful, sweet  Campari-type tomatoes go to waste. They call out to be made into comfort food.

8. I can’t face another plateful of cabbage salad. Or any other kind of salad. :mrgreen:

9. It’s so hot in here that Cassie can barely bring herself to harass the Human with Ball. She needs a piece of limp spaghetti to cheer her up.

10. M’hijito has gone incommunicado and will not answer requests to help his crippled mom haul a year’s supply of pool chlorine tablets back to the house from Costco. This calls for comfort food.

11. The ongoing PITA hurts so much I can’t even contemplate dragging through a regular grocery store, to say nothing of limping almost to the back of a gigantic Costco. That also cries out for comfort food.

12. Harvey broke last night and today ran up a $70 repair bill.

13. That comes a day after the $100+ tab for cleaning out the DE filter, which in this ungodly heat must have damn near kilt the service dude.

14. An unplanned $170 in pool bills leaves too little money to buy a year’s worth of pool  tablets from Costco, anyway.

Real Reasons

15. On top of their usual round of headaches and the days of not knowing whether the house in Yarnell is still standing, La Maya and La Bethulia have both come down with a nasty bug. Other people’s misery should be acknowledged and honored with comfort food.

16. Half of beloved Yarnell has been reduced to piles of ashes. Many homeowners there were uninsured. It remains to be seen how much, if any, of the town will be rebuilt.

17. Nineteen fine young men were lost to the pile of ashes. In making the loss of half the town seem insignificant, this also makes the event infinitely worse.

18. No one seems to know when the residents there will be able to return to their property. Water and power are out; the water situation was described by a Yavapai County Sheriff’s deputy as “extremely bad,” and cleanup crews want to replace all the propane tanks, any one of which may be a continuing hazard.

19. The climate change some of our craven leaders would like to ignore and of which the current ten-year-long drought is just one manifestation pretty well guarantees that over the next few decades most of the West’s forestland will die off and burn away. Some of the most magnificent country on the planet is becoming unlivable.

20. It is way too late to do anything about this. Such things render the choice between spaghetti and cabbage salad irrelevant.

 

Shoulda Been a Christian Scientist

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My great-grandmother, the one who lived to the age of 94 without ever seeing a doctor because it was agin’ her principles, may have been right.

You’ll recall, maybe, that for the past two or three weeks I’ve been so crippled with back pain I’ve barely been able to crawl out of bed. Don’t think I mentioned the facial rash that itches like the dickens or the gut-tossing moments of wooziness.

The pain and rash started to ramp up just about two weeks after I started the blood pressure med CardioDoc  prescribed. By June 16 I could barely move around the house, certainly couldn’t do any weight-loss exercises, and really should not have been driving the car, since moving my foot from the gas pedal to the brake pedal took real, concentrated, agonizing effort. And if I got a dizzy spell while I was behind the wheel, I became an instant menace on the road.

Meanwhile, I’ve dropped about 13 pounds. The weight and BMI are now well within the “normal” range for a woman my height.

CardioDoc remarked that once I hit the target weight — another 8 or 9 pounds to go — I may be able to get off the irbesartan (the unpronounceable generic name of the drug he has me on).

Well. The pain got so bad I made an appointment with the Mayo to find out whether Young Dr. Kildare’s speculation that I need a hip replacement is correct. And then I started to make a few connections. Every time some quack wants to put me on meds for the rest of my life, I try to tell him that if a drug has a bizarre side effect, I’m gonna get it. And every time, they go “uh huh, uh huh, yes dearie.” And every time, yup: whatever wacko reaction has about a 1% incidence, that’s what happens to me.

Sooooo…. I started to look this chemical up.

And lo! We have all of these apposite phenomena:

• Muscle cramps or spasms
• Muscle pain or stiffness
• Joint pain
• Bone pain
• Sleepiness or unusual drowsiness
• Unusual tiredness or weakness
• Hives or welts
• Cracked, dry, scaly skin
• Itching
• Dizziness, faintness, or lightheadedness when getting up from lying or sitting position
• Pain or discomfort in the arms, jaw, back, or neck

Huh. Think of that. More to the point, think of all those.

Well. I have to say, I do appreciate the “sleepiness or unusual drowsiness.” I’ve been sleeping like a hibernating mama bear ever since I swallowed the first of these pills. I sleep all night, and then I sleep again all day. Since chronic insomnia is a hallmark of my personality, this is a refreshing change.

However, all the rest of the phenomena come under the heading of “the cure is worse than the ailment.” Interestingly, a four-year trial following more than 4100 people with heart disease showed no improvement in survival outcomes.

I was going to experiment with tapering off this drug as soon as I hit the target weight. But once I found all those side effects, each one of which exactly describes one happening or another (occasionally I’ve been so dizzy I’ve thought I was going  pass out, and at some of those hypochondriacs’ forums on the Web, irbesartan users have described the back pain and the facial rash to a T), I decided to accelerate the experiment.

Three days ago, I stopped taking the drug.

The facial rash has already subsided. Last night, after several hours of frolicking in the pool with M’hijito and Charley the Golden Retriever, the back pain was just frickin’ excruciating. But this morning it was down to a “3” on the famous pain scale of 1 to 10, ten being something worse than death. It has been hovering around 8.

The dizziness and faintness are gone.

The blood pressure?  Measured at 5:00 p.m. each day:

July 2: 116/67
July 3: 113/73
July 4: 107/72!!!!

That last, after swimming 30 laps and slurping down a fruit frappé.

Irbesartan has no rebound effect. But it takes quite a while, apparently, for the drug to work its way out of one’s system. Test subjects who had eight weeks of exposure still showed about two-thirds of the drug’s antihypertensive effect a week after quitting. I’ve been swallowing the stuff for a little over a month, and so presumably, the allegedly “normal” blood pressure readings over the past few days represent the lingering effect of the stuff.  We shall see what the readings look like in another week or three.

But for the nonce, it looks a great deal like this is another instance of pharmaceutical overkill. I should have been asked to get the fat off before being put on a drug, any drug. Just this moment I feel a lot better than I have over the past few weeks. The pain is down to about a .75 or 1 on the infamous 1-to-10 scale. I’m not really up for walking three and a half miles, but if the pain doesn’t flare again, I certainly will be very soon. Actually, if it weren’t hotter than the hubs of Hades out there and soggy enough to rain, I could easily bicycle the desired three miles.

Well, it’s only 105, but humidity is at 38%. If there’s no lightning at sunset, I’ll try for another 30 laps in the pool — that’s almost a half-mile of swimming.

Evidently, Great-Grandma and her equally devout daughter, my great-aunt, were onto something. Holy mackerel.

Happy Independence Day

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Here’s a surprise:

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How beautiful, eh? They popped up out of the dry, dry ground, where even the cactus is looking parched. First came a little stand of green spikes that looked like a small patch of bunchgrass about six or eight inches high. Then this morning, pow! Here were all these amazing, brilliant yellow blossoms. Floral fireworks!

No idea what they are. They must have come from one of the bulbs I planted last winter. But as I recall, none of ’em looked like that.

Hope your Fourth of July is a little cooler than ours: 113 for the predicted high.

😉 Some like it hot.

At A Gai Shan Life, Revanche has been going to town in the writing department, with that timeless question — whose turn is it to pick up the tab? — and plans to descend on Comic-Con 2013 and scrumptious recipes with a little sushi porn on the side.

Speaking of comics, Donna Freedman recently posted another Tundra give-away. We’re a day late and a dollar short today, but you should visit Chad Carpenter’s weekly archive after reading Donna’s beautiful rumination on the summer — dang! but that woman can write.

And speaking of eats, Money Beagle whips up an original and clever biscuit recipe.

Did you see Asian Pear’s “Canadian” nail polish? I love artsy-craftsy nail polish designs! So much fun…and so much better than a tattoo. 😉

At Budgeting in the Fun Stuff, Crystal goes in search of a sane price for contact lenses.

Amanda Grossman tells a really neat story about how frugality can make your life better, posted over at Frugal Confession.

At Prairie Eco-Thrifter,. Miranda offers five tips for getting off your duff and exercising.

At Planting Our Pennies, Mrs. PoP reflects on the significance of anniversaries and on marriage in general, eliciting a lot of reader comment.

And speaking of marriage, over at Grumpy Rumblings Nicoleandmaggie share their own viewpoint on the subject.

Personally, I’m for polyandry. Each woman would have as many husbands as she pleased. Think of the advantages… You could have one who could do gourmet cooking, one who was handy with tools, one that liked to ride herd on the kids, a couple who earned six-figure incomes, two or three who were particularly scenic…now we’re talkin’ matriarchy!

At I Pick Up Pennies, Abigail wonders if some coupon deals, especially Groupon, might be a bit on the guilt-inducing side.

Read the Declaration of Independence lately? Well, today’s a mighty good time to do so. At My Journey to Millions, Evan has posted the entire thing.

At NZMuse, the bride and groom continue their journey through Asia. Ever heard of a sleeper bus? E-musings tells you all about them.

Mrs. Accountability has a funny tale and some grutching about Amazon’s marketing practices.

§ § §

Hallelujah, brothers and sisters! The sun is over the yardarm! That means The Fat Lady is about to put a couple of lamb chops on the grill, thereby providing an excuse to open a bottle of wine.

Happy Fourth of July to One and All!

San_Diego_Fireworks

 

Cash Worked! Is This a Sea Change?

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You may recall that a month or so ago I decided to try to cut the number of credit-card transactions per billing cycle by withdrawing a wad of cash from the credit union and using that to cover transactions of $30 or less. The idea was to have fewer ditzy receipts to keep track of and fewer transactions to have to verify and reconcile.

So, I took out $120, the cycle having already begun, reducing the amount budgeted for credit-card spending from $1100 to $980. The plan was to try to make the cash last till the end of the month, and should it fail before month-end, to economize and reduce the number of credit-card purchases as much as possible.

This was a daring experiment for me. Problem is, money washes through my fingers like sand. The reason I charge everything is that the extra hassle involved in making a credit-card transaction and then knowing I’ll have to ditz with reconciling it against a month-end statement gives me enough pause that I don’t just buy everything my little heart desires. Weirdly, the charge card makes me spend less, and I like having a paper trail for every expenditure.

On the other hand…why? Does anyone really care that they bought a package of disposable razors at the Walgreen’s?

Well, I did run out of cash about 10 days before the end of the month. However, the AMEX billing cycle goes from the 21st to the 21st, so once the pocketbook was emptied, a whole new charge-card budget kicked in. This meant that I had to make two or three charges under $30 between the 21st and the 30th, but because I was determined to keep that stuff to a minimum, I hardly ever went into my favorite food emporia during the last week or so of June.

But it seems to have worked. At the end of the month, the bank account was $145 to the good, and that was in spite of a $200 palm-tree-trimming bill, a $108 water bill, and a $135 power bill.

A hundred and forty-five dollah to spare is pretty good! Usually I just break even, especially as the summer heats up.

There were still plenty of charges to enter and reconcile, but not as many as before. And because I really felt motivated to stay out of stores toward the end of the month, overall spending was really cut. The final AMEX bill: only $837!

Compare that with the usual AMEX budget of $1100.

Now of course, that $1100 was reduced last month by $120, to $980, but I still spent $143 less than that.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens this month. We get our highest power bills in July and August. And the AC has been pounding away in the 118-degree heat. Today is cooler — only around 112 — but it’s getting a bit muggy out there. I figure next month’s electric bill will come in at around $225. The DE filter on the pool needs to be cleaned — that’s a $100 hit. And pretty soon I should get a nuisance notice from the Department of Motor Vehicles, announcing the annual soaking for the car’s air pollution test and registration: another couple hundred bucks down the drain.

So, this month and next month: Stay out of stores! Don’t drive the car!!

 

Doldrums

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Yarnell_Hill_Fire_with_firefighters_in_the_foregroundThe entire state is stunned over what’s gone on in Yarnell. The loss of almost an entire crew of Western firefighting’s best and brightest leaves everyone floundering, struggling to comprehend.

Heavenly Gardens Community College has a firefighting program. Many of our students are at the college specifically because of that program, and so often some of the young people drawn there move through my classes. And one of my all-time favorites, a quiet guy who so loved the outdoors he could barely tolerate sitting inside a classroom but whose writing was superb, went off to fight fires in Wyoming. Checked the list of the deceased and didn’t see his name in it. Thank goodness.

No word today about the fire, whether it’s still consuming the town, or which parts of the town are still standing. The local papers are understandably preoccupied with the 19 deaths and all the activity around them. A British paper has printed some aerial photographs. It’s hard to correlate the mental map of Yarnell with the devastation seem from a helicopter, but if the image seen in the seventh photo in that series correlates with a Google or Mapquest version of the street map, what I think is La Maya & La Bethulia’s house looks unscathed.

Maybe.

Presumably it will be days or even weeks before people are allowed back in there.

Speaking of days, weeks, and profound doldrums, the Mayo finally called back with appointment dates and times for me to get still more X-rays and then meet with a rheumatologist out there. “Out there” is their Scottsdale clinic, which is halfway to Payson from my house.

The timing couldn’t be more perfect: today the excruciating pain acts like it would like to resolve itself. Pain scale is about a 4 on a scale of 1 to 10, down from 8 the day before yesterday and 6 yesterday. Today I can almost walk normally, and forcing myself to walk without a lurch hurts little more than the Frankenstein tromp. Apparently it’s calmed down to the point where the anti-spasmodic has a noticeable effect, which has not been the case for lo! these past two weeks. Heh…They’ve got me scheduled the middle of next month, by which time presumably no symptoms will be evident.

Cripes. What a grand medical system we have.

I’ve come to the conclusion that Young Dr. Kildare’s initial guess — pinched nerve, not muscle spasms — was probably correct, and his second, most recent guess — degenerative hip disease — is probably wrong. The pain is in the back, not in the hip. Give me a marker and I can draw a circle around it, just to the right of the tailbone. That is NOT hip pain. What we have is referred pain from a back problem.

Image: Yarnell Hill fire with firefighters. U.S. Department of Agriculture. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

 DAY-UM!!!!!

Just as I was about to hit “Publish,” I knocked a glass over. It exploded all over the living room floor, shooting shrapnel under, over, and on top of the sofa. And half the other furniture, too. And splashing liquid all over the floor and under the sofa.

The floor needs to be cleaned. It was already covered with dog hair before Charley showed up for a four-day visit, and by the time M’hijito retrieved the retriever, the dog dunes were up to my ankles. But I’ve been putting it off because just limping up the hall hurts like the dickens — the last thing I’ve felt like doing is hauling a vacuum and a mop around.

So now I got to drag the coffee table aside and heave the eight-foot sofa across the room, scrub up water and the old dried-on coffee one of my charming clients spilled all over and under the sofa and vacuum up all that broken glass and as long as the damn vacuum cleaner was out go through the whole house and suck up pounds of dog hair.

Every push on that vacuum feels like someone is shoving a dagger into my hip. OW WOW  WOWWWWW!!!! God, but it hurts!

So…now the pain level is up from 4 to 8. Again.

So much stuff I thôt I wuz gonna get done to day… Guess not!

R.I.P. Yarnell Firefighters

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Hideous  news out of the rustic little plateau town of Yarnell, where we love to hang out. Nineteen Hotshot firefighters died in a brushfire trying to protect homes. They were dropped into an area near the fire but the wind shifted and blew them off-course, so they were surrounded by a wall of flames.

We’re told half the town has already burned: 250 homes. On Twitter, where the most immediate news is appearing, they’re saying the area called Glen Isla is burning. La Maya and La Bethulia’s place is in another section, so there’s still a little hope. But it looks like a pretty remote one.

It took a while to get ahold of them. Mercifully, they were both here in the Valley — at a movie, far from the lurid news. So it was good to know they’re OK.

Sort of. La Maya has been using the Yarnell house as a writing retreat this summer, spending the weeks up there working on a monograph that she needs to finish before she goes up for full professor. She has a lot of research materials stashed there, much of it from archives here and in Ohio. That will be a very serious loss, if their house burns. Hope she brought her laptop down here, at least.

The A-frame house they show going up in flames looks very much like one SDXB and I looked at some years ago. We decided against it, he being highly skeptical about the construction in the outlying counties, where building codes are most often honored in the breach. That was one of three houses up there that I’ve seriously thought I could live in. But the prospect of abandoning what little social life I have in the sixth-largest city in America to move to a small town was just a bit too daunting. And the prospect of taking care of two houses was too much to contemplate.

Thank goodness! I’m sooo glad I don’t own property up there.

Once a fire gets started in that chaparral up there, it can move extremely fast, especially at this time of year when everything is tinder-dry and winds can really whip around. The town is built right up into the chaparral, many of the houses nestled among the huge, picturesque boulders. Really, as I think about it, just about every house has trees and brush growing right up to the walls. There’s a tree in direct contact with La M & La B’s deck, and the house I coveted the last time we were up there had a large, flammable-looking tree towering over it. A fast fire in a fast wind would be almost impossible to stop.