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.

What's Up

Dear Readers,
The Sur-Realist is touched with your concern for my welfare. Let me bring you up to date. Work takes up a great deal of my time; ennui takes up the rest. Blogging is not a passion of my life, thus thinking up something that might interest you does not fall within my natural talents, as you may have already noticed. Since our last contact I have kept in touch with Wes and have been fighting miniature terrorists.


Wes has been making an excellent recovery from his triple by-pass surgery. This cannot have been easy for him. He was stricken with a heart attack his first week in prison and had the surgery soon thereafter. Wes has had to go through the post-operative hospital stay without the comfort of contact with any family members who weren’t even notified. When he was returned to the prison compound, the friends he had made in the small community tended to him faithfully and helped him through his recovery. Wes was very weak for a long time but is now coming along very nicely. He has been removed from convalescent status and has been given the job of tidying up the unit. He enjoys having an activity that keeps him busy for part of the day along with the prayer group. We speak on the phone almost every week, and it certainly makes me feel better. It probably cheers Wes, as well, to keep in contact with people from home.


Anonymouse #1: You are right that the freedom to go to the polls is what makes America great. If only we had some decent choices . . .


Anonymouse #2: Yes, I’m okay. Thank you very much for inquiring. Someone has made an attempt to get to me, but we are trying to circumvent it. Unfortunately LegalSchnauzer, Roger Shuler, lost his house in Alabama because he continued to stand on principle when the Sheriff auctioned it off illegally for something like $2,500. I salute him for his integrity and single-mindedness. I’m afraid my pragmatism and need for a roof over my head would have gotten in the way of my principles in this case.


Anonymouse #3: You don’t understand the Sur-Realist. I have two extremely strong values that I uphold above all others: loyalty and protecting/defending those who can’t defend themselves, i.e., children, elderly, the sick, and the unjustly accused, among others. Just for the record, I spent all day yesterday on the phone trying to protect a molested child only to learn that the police in Georgia do not consider it a crime for a father to put his finger up his child’s panties. In speaking to the Judge in that misguided State, I did hasten to assure him that even though Georgia police do not consider it a crime, we here in Mississippi do. Apparently the judge shares the police’s views there because I was not successful in convincing him to protect the child.


Now about my personal fight with terrorists. It all started in our rather large bathroom where I was sitting minding my own business. You know how you get that feeling that you are being watched? The hair on the back of your neck starts to stand up, and you feel eyes boring into you. Those of you who grew up on the lap of luxury will not have this sense quite as finely honed as those of us who grew up in genteel or even abject poverty. We are the ones who can speak knowledgeably of outhouses. We are the ones who still turn on the bathroom light at night. In case you haven’t guessed why, it’s to make sure there are no snakes or spiders in there. And the Sears catalog was always handy. At least our outhouse was fairly near the house. My grandmother’s outhouse was on the other side of a barbed wire fence! No, it didn’t make any sense to me either, even as a child. Anyway, the point of this digression is that people who obtain their childhood training in outhouses become hyper-vigilant in bathrooms. Therefore, I was immediately on super alert when I felt beady little eyes on me. As I looked up, there across the bathroom stood a mouse, hands on his hips, staring me straight in the eye. Even without my glasses, I’m pretty sure it was wearing a little rag on its head. Obviously, Al Queda had invaded my bathroom. You’d be surprised how naked you feel sitting on the toilet without your Glock when you need it. Al and I kept staring at each other until, in a sudden kamikaze move, he charged me! Now what do you do when a mouse charges you while you are sitting on the john? You abandon your Sur-Realist dignity and run out of the bathroom where your spouse is laughing as if something is actually funny. Humph!


But Al Queda was not finished with me, not by a long shot. He bided his time, lulling me into a false sense of security. Months later, I heard a knock on the leg of my bedside table. Now what would you do if you heard that in my middle of the night? If you are at all like me, you would assume that it’s a serial killer. You see, I had stupidly forgotten about Al Queda. But I am always prepared for serial killers. My spouse does not like for me to fire the gun randomly into the bedroom every time a serial killer wakes me up, so I keep a bar-b-que fork for defense. My plan is to stab the serial killer in the balls and yell, "Snake! Snake!" This is to throw him off guard. So, here I am trying to locate my bar-b-que fork in the dark while the serial killer is actually knocking on my bed table. Between you and me, I find this disconcerting. I’m also kicking my spouse at the same time, thinking that we both should be awake for this. Finally, Spouse gets tired of the whole thing, turns on the lamp, comes around to my side of the bed, and discovers Al Queda caught in a mouse trap. Now, I did not actually see Al because Spouse took care of him, knowing I would prefer to dispense with Al using one of my weapons. Apparently, Al must have come after me wearing a little dynamite belt which padded the trap bar and kept it from killing him immediately because it flipped over and he was trying to escape dragging the trap with his mutilated body. I have no merciful feelings for Al Queda. Well, not too many. I hope he didn’t suffer too long. Maybe he and his ilk will leave me alone now.

See you later.

The Sur-Realist would like to take this opportunity to congratulate and thank Roger Shuler, the brilliant journalist who writes the Legal Schnauzer blog, and Scott Horton, the renowned law professor from Columbia Law School, the writer of Harpers.org. Because of the efforts of these two men, Don Siegelman, the former governor of Alabama, has been released from prison, pending his appeal.

In particular, Roger Shuler has worked tirelessly to uncover the corruption that created the Seigelman case and the Paul Minor / John Whitfield / Wes Teel case where no crime existed. In an extreme simplification, the Republicans (and I’m embarrassed at this time to be a member of the party) felt the need to feather their own nest and found that the easiest way to do that would be to eliminate some of the high rollers in the other party. The belief is that Karl Rove engineered this play, and this has been discussed on MSNBC by Dan Abrams. Scott Horton followed the research begun by Shuler, and he interviewed all the parties involved in the Minor case. He believes that a gross injustice has been done to these men just as it was done to Siegelman. The U. S. House Judiciary Committee will soon be hearing Siegelman's testimony in this matter. Rep. Artur seems very supportive and wants this practice investigated. Hopefully, this means the Minor / Whitfield / Teel case will also be investigated by Congress.

It doesn’t matter if you love or hate Siegelman, Minor, Whitfield, Teel, or any other Americans who were turned into political prisoners in our own country simply because they contributed to the wrong political party. You should be absolutely outraged that we have political prisoners. We have kept our military in constant peril to establish democracy in places that have no concept of a democracy and seemingly no use for one. And behind their backs, our government has sanctioned the persecution and prosecution of people innocent of the crimes of which they stand convicted. Thank God we don’t still burn people at the stake.

Just in case you think you might be safe from the risk of similar persecution, think again. The Sur-Realist has been informed by reliable sources that an arch-nemesis of Wes, a politician, has now started to attack even Wes’ innocent friends and supporters. In Alabama, Roger Shuler is in danger of losing his home simply because the "powers that be" want him to stop blogging. Thank God for people like Shuler and Horton, people who dig up the truth, no matter how obscure, and fearlessly expose evil for what it is and let the rest of us know. They, too, serve to preserve America. God bless them and keep them safe from harm.

TO HELP YOU SAVE A LIFE

Blood Clots/Stroke

This is worth sharing. STROKE: Remember These Four Letters.... S.T.R.T.

A neurologist says that if he can get to a stroke victim within 3 hours he can totally reverse the effects of a stroke... totally . He said the trick was getting a stroke recognized, diagnosed, and then getting the patient medically cared for within 3 hours, which is tough.

RECOGNIZING A STROKE: Remember the "4" steps, STRT . Sometimes symptoms of a stroke are difficult to identify. Unfortunately, the lack of awareness spells disaster. The stroke victim may suffer severe brain damage when people nearby fail to recognize the symptoms of a stroke . Now doctors say a bystander can recognize a stroke by asking three simple questions:

S * Ask the individual to SMILE.

T * Ask the person to TALK and SPEAK A SIMPLE SENTENCE (Coherently) (i.e. It is sunny out today)

R * Ask him or her to RAISE BOTH ARMS. If he or she has trouble with ANY ONE of these tasks, call 999/911 immediately and describe the symptoms to the dispatcher.

T * Ask the person to 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. A cardiologist says if everyone who reads this sends it to 10 people; you can bet that at least one life will be saved.