BEWARE OF GREEN FOOD -- ANOTHER HANDY HEALTH HINT

A while back I had a heart procedure done at a local hospital. As we checked out, Spouse suggested lunch at a Chinese restaurant since they serve many healthy vegetables. This particular restaurant also serves its own version of pizza and a few Mexican dishes apparently for those Chinese-food haters who were dragged along against their will.

I chose my usual favorites – the healthy fried egg roll, the healthy fried shrimp rangoon, the healthy fried rice, making it a point to skip the fish bait which no one should eat unless they want parasites and hepatitis. However, considering I had just been released from the hospital, I did make a concession to have some healthy guacamole.

We weren’t too far into our meal when I loaded my fork with a big glob of guacamole. No chopsticks for me, no siree bob. As soon as the guacamole entered my mouth, I had a nanosecond of exploration of this substance along with the immediate thoughts : Hmmm . . . "What an odd texture for guacamole." followed by a most inelegant "What the f . . . !" right before my eyeballs started spinning in their sockets. Then, while the top of my head blew off like Space Shuttle launch, green stuff started flowing from my ears, nose, and mouth as I tried desperately to rid myself of this Al K. Duh-inspired poison. If you have ever had your mouth fumigated with a blow torch and then rinsed with rubbing alcohol, you have some idea of the experience of this guacamole. Of course, Spouse has no idea of what’s going on and thinks something has gone wrong with my heart again. I can’t talk because my tongue and teeth are in flames, and I’m still trying to get the stuff out before, God forbid, it should go down my throat. Somehow in the midst of my physical chaos, I noticed a woman two tables away pointing at me and laughing. Bitch. She wouldn’t think it was so funny if it was her hair that was singed from the inside-out.

Afterwards, we learned that the Chinese guacamole was actually wasabe, some sort of nuclear horseradish that probably glows in the dark. People who go to Chinese, Japanese, and other -ese restaurants to eat fish bait apply a dot of this green stuff (which masquerades as guacamole) about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. Apparently they believe it will act like Germ-X and kill all the parasites, viruses, and bacteria in the fish bait they are eating. And they just may be right.

Lipstick and Stroke - Health Hint

Now, men, don’t think you are excluded from this little missal just because it mentions lipstick. You occasionally use Chapstick, don’t you? The other day I was having a perfectly normal morning getting ready for work until it came time to put on my lipstick. I use that two-step kind where you paint on the color and then coat it with gloss. Most women usually start with the upper lip and do their little Cupid bows. Personally, I follow my own lip line unlike those women who never learned not to color outside the lines. Have you ever watched women watching other women put on lipstick? The watcher moves her lips very carefully in sync with the put-er-on-er. I suppose if we just watched the watcher, we wouldn’t really need a mirror. But I digress. Then I get to the lower lip. I say "lower" lip because I can’t spell bottem.

So I start doing the lower lipstick just like usual. Only the lower lip lipstick didn’t go on as usual. My lip was . . . well, . . . flaccid. (For all you visual processors out there, no doubt you can draw some sort of parallel.) I had to practically put my lip in a splint to get the lipstick on. My immediate reaction: Dear God! I’ve had a stroke!

Now if you had read one of the previous blogs about recognizing the signs of a stroke, you would know to check the following, which I did:
S * Ask the individual to SMILE.
Okay. I grinned into the mirror like a rabid chimpanzee.
T * Ask the person to TALK and SPEAK A SIMPLE SENTENCE Coherently) (e.g. It is sunny out today).
I’m in the bathroom listening to the tv which is making sense to me. That rules out receptive aphasia. I started chattering like a magpie and it sounded all right to me, but that rules out nothing since people with expressive aphasia jabber not knowing they aren’t making sense to the listener. So I called a friend, and he seemed to have no difficulty understanding me.
R * Ask the person to RAISE BOTH ARMS. If s/he has trouble with ANY ONE of these tasks, call 999/911 immediately and describe the symptoms to the dispatcher.
Both arms went up okay and even flapped around a bit, just in case.
T * Tell the person: STICK OUT YOUR TONGUE. If the tongue is crooked, if it goes to one side or the other , that is also an indication of a stroke.
The tongue went out okay.

As I thought more about this problem, it occurred to me that strokes occur hemispherically, that is, it causes a problem on the right side or the left side, not JUST the lower lip. Therefore, something else caused my "broken" lower lip. How in the world was I going to go to work and be out in public with a wobbly lip?

Fortunately, a banana saved the day just in the nick of time. On the way out the door to work I grabbed a banana and took a bite only to discover that my flaccid lower lip was not the result of a stroke; it was the result of having forgotten to put in my lower dentures. So, before you rush off to the hospital thinking you are having a stroke just because your lower lip is acting the fool, first – make sure you have on clean panties, second – go through the STRT checklist, and third – see if you have teeth.
That’s all folks.

Handy Health Hints

From time to time I’ll try to treat you to tantalizing tidbits of timely topical tips. (Cool alliteration, huh!)
They will not include tips on how to grill on your outdoor chicken crematorium.
1. Recently I learned an important life lesson: if you eat a bowl of delicious stewed prunes, you really should follow it up with a Kaopectate chaser. I am not kidding.

2. As you age, your teeth might desert you for one reason or another. In that case, you will probably find yourself the proud owner of faux teeth. These faux teeth won’t have a great deal of loyalty to you, by the way, and tend to be quite oppositional. The best solution is to nail them in with implants. Alas, not all of us can afford such costly solutions. So you have to resort to tooth glue such as Poligrip which is, by far, the most superior product of this sort. Tooth glue not only has to adhere your teeth to your gums, it also has to act as padding between the two. So you squeeze it in the little trench of your faux teeth in the morning and pop the teeth in your mouth for the day where you can pretty well expect them to remain until you are ready to remove them. Ah, therein lies the rub. During the day, the stuff sets up sort of like . . say. . the goop that attaches labels to products that, when you try to get it off, looks like a giant booger that you find yourself playing with in some sort of morbid fascination. And this goop has the strength of a bungee cord. So if you ever feel the urge to hang by your teeth from a tightrope over Niagra Falls, it would probably work out pretty well. The other night when I took out my faux teeth, somehow they slipped from my fingers and bungeed back so hard that it split my lip. I am not kidding. That Poligrip is strong stuff.

3. We all have bathrooms. We all keep supplies in our bathrooms. We should never lay our Preparation H on the shelf next to our Poligrip. Please see #1 and #2 for all the reasons you will ever need to have for this bit of advice. I am definitely not kidding. For those who process everything visually, you might want to poke out your mind’s eye right about now.
That’s all for now.

Life is no Picnic

Since nobody reads this blog, I can just mutter anything and no one will know the difference. Does anyone know what "blog" means? I didn’t, so Wikipedia informed me that it’s short for "web log." But, if you didn’t already know that, you won’t find out from me because you aren’t reading this since nobody reads this blog, which is fine with me because I rarely can think of anything to write.

Here we have our typical, hot summer - just right for the kind of barbeque we didn’t have on the Fourth of July. That would be because I blew up our barbeque grill.

Having cultivated a little self-awareness, it behooves me to admit that often I look but I do not see; I hear but I do not listen.

Many, many times I had watched Spouse fire up the grill to grill something delicious for dinner. Or so I thought. One lovely Sunday Spouse went out and bought a brand new, shiny barbeque grill. He assembled it with great anticipation, but other plans kept him from initiating it that day. However, he is a patient man; he enjoyed dreaming of those thick steaks he was going to grill with the professional burn marks across them, caveman style. During the following week, I decided to grill chicken for dinner and called Spouse at work to ask if he minded if I used his new grill. "No, problem," he said, and gave me complete instructions on how to use it.

"Pile up the coals and use a lot of lighter fluid to get them wet. Then light the coals. When the fire dies down, put the chicken on the grill and close the lid. Be sure you watch it." he instructed.

I got every bit of his instructions, every single bit. However, Spouse, the safety-conscious engineer, had always wheeled the grill out into the yard to start the fire and then brought it back to the patio which had a cover of wood beams and Lexan. This somehow had escaped my attention even though he had done it in front of my very eyes many times.

So I carefully made a pyramid of coals in Spouse’s shiny new barbeque grill right there on the patio and mentally reviewed the instructions. He said to use a LOT of lighter fluid to get them wet. Okay, done. Now when you look at the can of lighter fluid, you won’t find any markings that say, "a little," "some," or "a lot." In my completely unbiased judgement, it seemed that probably the whole can would constitute a lot. Which is what Spouse definitely said to use. A lot. So that’s how much I used. The whole can. It seemed to sort of evaporate as it poured on, so I understood why he said to use a lot.

Contrary to what you haven’t read here because you aren’t reading this blog, I’m not completely stupid (there's lots of room in there for ignorant, also), so I stood back to throw the match on the coals. Ladies, if you have been looking for a quicker way to pluck your eyebrows, this is it – that is, if you’re going for the brow-less look. Stand one step closer and you can go for the face-less look. Anyway, flames immediately started licking the wooden beams, and I immediately started wracking my brain for solutions from my high school classes. History . . . Mrs. O'Leary's cow. Should I pour milk on it?hmmm. Civics . . . Nothing there. English, likewise. Social Studies. Ha! Algebra, something about X + Y. That won’t do it. Wait! It was either Physics or Chemistry. You are supposed to eliminate the supply of oxygen to extinguish a fire. That’s it! So I slammed down the cover of the grill and closed the little swivel things on each end. Almost instantly the glass cover blew out of the front. Whew! That emergency taken care of, I went into the house to wait for the fire to die down, according to instructions. You know, for a safety-conscious engineer, he really should have told me to wear safety goggles.

After a while, the flames died down to about an inch or so above the grate. Using my logic that fire cooks food, it seemed time to put the chicken on to cook. I brushed the large shards of glass off the grate and laid out the chicken pieces carefully so as not to get burned by the dancing flames and went back into the house.

Spouse called from time to time to ask me if I was watching the chicken. Dutifully I would look out the kitchen window and report that everything was okay, meaning that the patio was no longer on fire which, of course, I had not mentioned to him. I didn’t make any actual trips outside. I’m used to using ovens where you leave stuff alone and let it do its own thing. I thought men just like to poke at barbeque stuff just like they like to turn knobs and dials and to push buttons just because those things move. I didn't know they were actually doing something at the barbeque grill.

And then Spouse came home from work. And then he saw his brand new, shiny barbeque grill. That just happened to look as if it had been sucked through an airplane window during combat. What he didn’t see was chicken. The chicken had long since been incinerated with nothing left but remnants of the bones. The only printable words that emerged from Spouse had something to do with the fact that I would never be allowed to operate any outdoor cooking device again, from campfires (like that would happen since I equate camping with spending a weekend at Dachau) to Habachi’s. We are now the proud owners of the only chicken crematorium in the State.

Al K.Duh Mice Magnet

The Sur-Realist finally has some news. Wes’ attorney has filed his appeal with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. However, since he would not send a copy to me to read, I can only surmise that it said something like this: Dear Real Judges (unlike that dumb ass Wingate, who only made it through college and law school by virtue of Affirmative Action), Please note all the egregious moral and legal errors that stupid jerk made as he deliberately set up my client, Wes Teel, for conviction. We would appreciate it if you would send Wingate to federal prison where he will have a chance to really study law. Love, George.
P.S. I'm sorry I saved his life in Court that day.
If you would like to read Paul Minor’s brief (which is anything but), go to this site supplied by the Sun Herald. Minor's 5th Circuit appeal brief

About my identity. I am the Executive Assistant to a Mafia Don who doesn’t like for people to bother me. When that happens, he points them out to his newbees to "make their bones." Uncle The Don likes his world to run smoothly, and if I’m upset, he’s upset. It’s a trickle-down thing.

I think I have discovered our Al K. Duh connection. It’s my husband, the engineer. He thinks we have mice because we have a field behind our house. Nice try, City Boy! That explanation would hold water for regular mice, but not for those armed kamikaze mice wearing suicide vests (okay, it was dark and I didn’t have on my glasses, but I’m pretty sure the little sheet-head had one on.).

My first clue to Spouse’s connection came when I noticed the clock radio. Let’s start with the fact that my husband is a man. A man’s man, to be exact. Some men go out and buy themselves magnificent toys such as a yacht, a Farrari, a Linguini, beautiful blonde arm candy. My husband can’t afford any of these. Big bills and busty blonds upset me. And when I’m upset, in comes The Uncle Don. Trickle-down. See? Besides which, Spouse is interested in Engineering Things that would bore the paint right off the walls. We often have stimulating conversations about sine waves and electricity. My sweet Spouse has tried for decades to explain time zones to me by using grapefruits and oranges. However, as brilliant as he is, he doesn’t read body language very well. Glazed-over eyes, yawning, turning off the lights, and going to bed in the midst of one of his lectures has never shortened one, to my knowledge. He firmly believes that one day, I too, shall understand sine waves and electricity if he just repeats the lectures often enough, complete with gestures in the air.

Anyway, I digress. Before he learned how to comparison shop on the internet, Spouse was not a reconnaissance shopper. His shopping method involved dashing into a store that may carry what he wanted, usually Walmart, grabbing the item, and checking out as if he were trying to catch the last helicopter out of Saigon. The grocery store is his one shopping exception. Spouse has some sort of fascination with every single item in grocery stores. It would be faster to stay home, plant the crops, thresh the wheat, raise the cow, bake the bread, and brew your own Pepsi instead of waiting for him to poke around in the grocery store. Let’s just say that Mr. Whipple would have to take Valium.

So Spouse came home one day with a real prize - a clock radio. He went out and bought it himself with no prompting and was delighted with its features. He thinks It has a really good sound system (like who cares what a buzzer sounds like) and you can set it for two time zones (there went the lecture with the grapefruit and oranges again.) "And," he says, "It only cost ten bucks!" It buzzes and wakes people up. That is, if there was any possible way they managed to get any sleep whatsoever during the night with It in the room. You see, It was apparently made from a refurbished floodlight formerly used in Hollywood at opening nights. By the way, if any airports should have a problem with their landing field lights, please just let us know. I’ll gladly donate the clock radio to sit right there on the landing field although It would probably blind all the pilots as well as the people in the tower. So, after a few nights of taping paper, then tin foil over the lighted face to no avail, It was relegated to the floor with its face to the wall. It sits there blinking just outside the bathroom door, serving as a sort of a night light for the blind.

Wait! Did I say "blinking?" Yes, I did. There It sits at Al K. Duh level, blinking some kind of signal known only to kamikaze mice. And that’s not the only clue I sluethed out around here. Spouse, the Engineer, who now reconnaissance shops on the net, found himself the all-time prize watch. It does things like give him the equation for the co-efficient of linear expansion; it can plot a course to the core of the earth; it can store phone numbers and addresses. It may also tell time. But this marvel of wrist watchery has one fatal flaw, it has a direct connection to Mecca, home of the little sheet-head kamikaze mice.

Every night Spouse dutifully lays his Captain Marvel Watch on his bedside table (that would be the one that doesn’t get knocked around by serial killers or Al K. Duh mice.), and he has to line it up pointing to Colorado! The Rule Book that came with the watch told him to do that, and Spouse, the Engineer, always follows Operating Rules. Now think about this. One end of the watch is pointing to Colorado, supposedly to line it up with some time zone thing or other (probably an errant lemon, or something.) Well, excuse my geometry or trigonometry or whatever math (and geography) I valiantly ignored, but that makes the other end of the watch wide open and directly pointing toward Mecca!!! With my dead reckoning, his watch may be shooting toward the direction of Colorado, but it is sucking up from Mecca (for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. By golly, I remember something from Physics!) Therefore, every night, Spouse’s watch - while getting itself reset to the correct time - is sucking little sheet-head kamikaze mice right out of Mecca where they recognize the destination by the blinking clock radio light right at their mouse hole.

Well, that solves that riddle.