Sasha Looks Into It

He had had some fainting spells earlier in the week and, working with my veterinarian, I took him to the clinic, where they found he had tachycardia and some other evidence of heart disease.  We started him on a course of medication designed to ease the irregularities in his heartbeat and (we hoped) to eliminate the fainting spells, and things went a little better and seemed almost back to normal till Friday mid-afternoon, when they went downhill fairly rapidly.

I took him back to the clinic then, where they stabilized him, and he and I started home with a new set of medications, with the object of seeing if he would fare any better over the weekend, but we were overtaken by events.  Before we got home things took a turn for the worse, and, once home, Sasha could barely get out of the carrier by himself, and the spells were now coming one right after the other.

So I brought him right back to the clinic, and at my request they kindly and promptly (and in my presence) put him to sleep.

I know that ‘putting to sleep’ is both a euphemism and a cliche; but in this case I could see a peaceful end to a series of struggles over the past few days that he had made plain he wanted no part of any longer.  We had 14 good years together, twelve of them with his brother Kasha, both of them with me from tiny kittens.

After Kasha died, Sasha and I made ourselves into an even closer relationship than before (and believe me, we were already close).  He loved to sit on my lap while I read or worked at the computer, and even in the last days he loved to play string.

All the cliches apply: The house feels so empty, I keep expecting to see him at any moment just before reality catches up with me and I realize over again that he is gone and won’t be coming back, and all the rest.

I took him in the carrier in my car, the world’s best car, as I call it; and we drove toward the MedVet clinic through one of the most spectacular sunsets I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been in a lot of locales to see a lot of sunsets, and this was one of the world’s best sunsets.

It seemed a fitting salute to the passing of the world’s best cat.

I hope you didn’t — or don’t — stop telling them stories!  Kids love to hear stories from grandparents (they are not like the impatient early middle agers (30′s and 40′s are the worst, with some late 20′s mixed in).  I loved hearing stories from my grandparents, and my Dad, too, when I was a kid.  It’s only later that the stories-ennui seems to set in…  I feel like I’m something of a time machine, because I had a step-grandfather who was born in 1865 (!!!!) and he used to tell me stories from his life…  as did all my other grandparents and parents as and when they could.

Those are stories I value now, and wish I could hear more of.

It’s the opposite of magic tricks.  Kids aren’t taken in my magic, but grownups are; kids are willing to listen to grandparents’ and parents’ stories, but as grownups we lose the ‘wanna’ for a while…

So please, please, for their benefit and your pleasure, keep telling those stories to the grandkids as long as they’ll listen!

[My friend is] also the person who has known me longest and most closely who is still alive — and therefore with whom I have the greatest communication bandwidth: a few words get across a great deal of meaning (i.e., I don’t have to stop and explain things to him: he was there, or already knows of them, and a word or two suffices to refer to all that).  As you get older, having to explain things or else risk being misunderstood (or ignored) gets to be more and more of a strain on conversation, complicated by the current trend of no one listening to anything, no matter who is talking, for longer than 10 seconds at a time — and you’re lucky to get that much.

Eventually, not many people much younger than you are care what you have to say, even when you know it’s vitally important, for them as well as for you — and, all too often, those few who do aren’t willing to go through all the background explanations that are required to bring them up to speed to actually hear and understand your intended meaning. Inevitably, some of those explanations take the form of recalled events or anecdotes from your past, at which point some people inevitably decide (erroneously) that you’re living in the past or starting to ‘lose it.’

So, after a while, you start really missing the people who can actually hear what you’re saying — or who are interested enough to wait around long enough  — a minute or two? — for you to finish saying it.

… two points seem important to me:

First, as Van Jones points out, anyone actually wanting to cut taxes would start with the big stuff, by making the bailout recipients pay back what they got, quick march, before they take any more of those infuriating bonuses; and also stop the subsidies to big corporations and tax breaks to the rich.  And then, re-evaluate those two wars, in which our brave soldiers are sent to kill and be killed for reasons yet to be explained to anyone’s satisfaction, and civilians die, countries are ruined, and only the war profiteers (aka M-I complex) profit — and which are costing us millions a day (maybe more; I don’t have the figure but I’m sure someone does).

These are governors of states, and members of state legislatures, not national figures, you may argue. They have to deal with state finances. But like-minded governors of states could band together to get those bigger things done, and work with their elected colleagues in both the Executive and the Legislative branches to do so (every state has two senators and a group of representatives in Congress; and groups of state governors have met with Presidents before now, to get their points across and work together to a common goal).  That they don’t now, tells us something.

Real tax-burden champions wouldn’t start by worrying about the small but necessary potatoes of social and civil services. Those services are pieces of the necessary infrastructure, which are — think about it — of no consequence to the rich, who can afford to pay for whatever they want and need, whenever they want and need it, but vital to the rest of us, and they are irreplaceable once gone.

Teachers, nurses, along with police, fire, and paramedics, our first responders (those heroes of 9/11, never let it be forgotten), do you want them ready and able to do the job or not?  Well-trained, up-to-date, ready to do their vital work, using the best and best-maintained equipment, ready to roll?

I do. So why, I’ve been asking for a long time, are so many people who are not super-rich marching to the tune and agenda of those who are?

Second, another Van Jones point, we’re not a poor country, despite attempts from all sides to make us feel and act as though we are!  We’re being drained by the bailouts (the collapse came on September 15, 2008, under Bush, please remember, and the big bailout was pushed through, still under Bush, on October 3, 2008) and subsidies and tax breaks to the rich and, not least, by two wars, at least one of which had no cause whatever (no WMDs).   Yes, but further cutting already pared-down  services that more of us need more than ever, thanks to eight years of job losses running into the millions under the Bush regime, and wrecking the infrastructure of the countryby neglect, is not the way to do it, no matter who you are.

I want to say to them: Get real.  Grow up.  Go get the actual job done you keep talking about — finding ways to pay for what we need, and not pay for what we don’t — or pipe down…

I found I really needed a new pair of shoes, and bought some from Zappos.com, a totally pleasant experience.  A nice delivered-right-to-my-door present to myself, and much needed.  Comfy, too.

Then, in December, just to make a change, I rearranged my kitchen.  Unless you’re into very heavy lifting or total remodeling, there isn’t much you can casually rearrange in a kitchen — but I changed where my table and my cutting-board-topped movable island were standing.  Not least, I found a place for everything that had been sitting around the kitchen on counters and tables and stowed it all. I liked the whole kitchen a lot better.

Then, in January, I found the need to streamline my diet and myself and accomplish a few other goals along the way, and my rearranged kitchen came into its own, all streamlined itself and ready to rock, everything at hand, well-stowed when not.

Then, this month, two new, no-plunger-needed toilets were installed in the house.  My decades-old original-equipment antiques, ones I’ve been coaxing and fixing and plunging for all the years I’ve lived here, broke in the most extremely inconvenient way, and when the handle snapped so did my patience, and two new wonderful swallows-everything-without-a-ripple toilets (low water usage and all) are now in place.

Then, last Thursday, a new window wall I had ordered a while back was put in. I was fortunate to find a 60 F. day without rain (in February!) for the installation — the weather prediction had held.

Then, two days ago (Monday) I visited my CPA to get my taxes finalized. I had already entered the preliminary data online and uploaded electronic copies of all documentation, an activity that had kept me out of trouble while the windows were going in (and, since that visit, my taxes are ready to file).

Then yesterday I noticed that one of my tires seemed soft. Since my car is low-mileage and my tires tend to age out rather than wear out, and it had been quite a while since I had new ones put on, I suspected strongly that new tires would be needed, whatever the diagnosis on the particular tire that looked soft. I took it in to my local Firestone service center to have the tires checked for aging and tiny tell-tale cracks (and change the oil, please, while you’ve got it on the lift).  The outcome: an oil change plus an entire set of new tires, the old ones being completely superannuated (universal astonishment behind the counter that they had lasted all those years).  My car is a great car — its non-flashy but solid make  and small size having nothing to say about its quality — and it deserves nothing but the best.

I felt great! And I still feel great! No, I didn’t go there trying to spend money, but the new tires were necessary, they are good ones reasonably priced, and my car really needed a new pair of shoes — just the way I had when this whole series of  unrelated but transforming events began.

* Look here.

I don’t usually puff particular brands and models in my writing, both my readers are now pointing out, so why this time? And, really, why this subject?

Because if there’s one thing in your house you want to have working absolutely right, it’s the toilet.  I don’t mean just getting along OK most of the time, or requiring the occasional assist from the rubber plunger, or using way too much water to get only mediocre results.  I don’t mean something that has to be kept going by plumbing life-support, replacing floats and gaskets and flusher handles and everything else turn and turn about. I don’t mean having to become savvy yourself at keeping toilets from running off at the tank.

No, I mean, works right, and works right the first time, and works right with very little water usage.

And has a surface that’s a dream to keep clean, not one that stains up over time permanently and irrevocably, not one that requires a choice between the use of harsh chemicals (not always effective, but always harmful to the environment) and looking at offensive and ugly stains.

And is quiet and sturdily built. One high enough off the floor for a grownup, even a tall one, to sit on it comfortably. That does one thing and does it very well.

A toilet that can truly boast, along with its new owner, “I am flushed with pride.”

Yes, I am  dieting the good diet, and now I’m exercising the good exercise by using my Wii Fit Plus again (lapsed time: nearly 1 year).  But “come back in three months” from the doctor puts a time limit on the superb pleasure of just winging it, especially when (dietetically, at least) I was already doing well on a careful vegetarian diet with not too much sodium.  That makes it both the good and the bad news: the ‘well’ that I was doing, or anything like it, turns out to be not good enough — until it can be made to do so, with more stringent efforts; and we get to find out only at the end of the three months, and only if we put our quadriceps into it as well as our molars.

One of the things I like least about tracking those individual nutrients in grams and milligrams is the spurious precision of the results.  If the testers’ particular piece of kiwi — 1 medium —  fruit weighs 56.7g and is measured to contain 1.7 g of protein and 0.8 mg of fat and 2.3 g of fiber,  then that’s the value put in in the database.  When you track your foods by recording that you’ve eaten 1 kiwi fruit, those amounts — the standard amounts; the diet tracker is at heart a database-accessing tool, although the one I have does lots more than that — are what show up in your tracking list, to be added to others by the end of the day.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to tell whether the kiwi fruit you ate, even one judged to be 1 medium by size and weight description, weighs exactly the same amount as theirs.  Even if you are fanatical enough to weigh accurately in grams each item of food you eat before you prepare it, and calculate the exact differential in values from that ideal (I’m not willing to go that far; and I’d like a life outside the kitchen, thanks), even then you couldn’t be 100% sure of the accuracy, since fruits and all foods vary slightly in their makeup, while conforming to a general standard which makes them ‘them.’

So all those decimal places (there are often two or three of them in evidence, especially for scarcer nutrients) may be as accurate as possible for that one piece of originally weighed and measured fruit (no one’s disputing that) but, when you add up everything you eat all day long, all those decimals with their aggregate rounding off (nothing in life is ever really exact, least of all measurements of nutritional components; once you get past “1 kiwi fruit” it comes down to the degree of precision you choose and where you decide to round off) introduces a spurious precision into your totals.  People differ one to the other, and so do kiwi fruit or anything else you eat.  And, larger, smaller, how finely chopped or sliced, slightly more or slightly less in an individual piece plus your serving, cooking or preparation method, and more, all enter into the variation from the ideal that is represented in the database.

On the other hand, calling it ‘one fruit’ and leaving it at that for the day is not only more accurate (it actually matches 1-1) but more precise.  At the end of the day, I can’t trust that I’ve actually eaten (say) 1237.8 calories.  I’ve eaten probably something close to 1200, and probably a little over, but a diet in which I count servings of fruit, vegetables, grains and bread, protein foods, dairy foods, etc. is much more accurate and an awful lot easier to track and tally, once you get used to the sizes of servings in each group.  How do I know how I’m doing? By eating the ‘spread’ of food servings called for by my diet in each group.  So counting by servings and types of food seemed more sensible, lots easier,  and less spuriously precise than counting grams, mg., etc.

Or it was, until it became important to me to track sodium, since I don’t know the sodium content of most foods, and certainly not (without reading the labels, but that only gets you so far) of made foods.  I recently pulled a loaf of otherwise praiseworthy whole wheat bread (store-bought) from my freezer.  Only after I ate a sandwich and went to record it   (I wasn’t at the store trying to read labels, I grabbed it from my own freezer, which holds a lot of ‘prior’ foods) that I learned how much sodium was in each slice.  Way more than I wanted, I’ll tell you that.  I may have to go back to making my own bread. I use a lot less salt — and it’s a lot more work.

I guess that’s the other side of things: planning, cooking, eating, attendant cleanup, recording what I eat, buying more food, etc. can take up a huge amount of my life.  I don’t want to spend my life doing ONLY this.  I keep telling myself part of the difficulty is that I’m new to this particular effort (true) and that when I once get past the initial stage I’ll find it easier (a core repertoire of known recipes and meals, a familiar shopping basket of foods, etc.) and I’ll be able to spend less time at it.  But each aspect of the diet, at least the one I’m concocting for myself with the help of reliable nutritional information from trusted sources including about the DASH diet, and books from Harvard: this, and that), opens a vista of new ramifications of kitchen activities, at least so far, and doesn’t seem to close off or shorten any old ones.  There’s even a DASH diet online program (fee required).  Depending how my own Herculanean efforts pan out, I may try that.

For instance, I ordered varous grains, beans and seeds from a good seller, Bob’s Red Mill in Oregon.  The foods came, just as good and as well-packaged as I had hoped.  But then I found I needed a more permanent storage medium that I could open and close and reseal and stand up on my shelf, so I ordered a dozen quart-sized Mason jars.  Again, these came in fine shape.  I spent several hours in the kitchen filling jars and labelling them (we neophytes have to learn the visual differences between amaranth and quinoa, hence labels taped on the front and recipes, cooking instructions, and nutritional info taped to the back, “front” and “back” of a mason jar being arbitrarily assigned by moi).

Now I have to plunge into a forest of recipes and cookbooks — one of my favorites already in hand, and the ‘net being only one source of many — that use these grains and legumes, so that I can enjoy the many and varied nutritional benefits they contain, in delicious, flavorful dishes.  Thus, yet more vistas of action and research, and buying the other ingredients (non-grain and non-legume) called for by the recipes, once I locate the recipes I want to try.  Where the foodstuff hits the plate, that’s where I live, in the great state of spurious precision.

I’m eating well so I can have strength and health to live well to eat well so that… at least it seems so right now.  I won’t even mention the old foodstuffs tagline about how this too shall pass.

I feel a little like Yosemite Sam saying “Back Off,” but I refuse to pay a monthly fee simply to keep ads from appearing along with my posts, when they didn’t in the past.   In and of themselves ads are intrusive and irritating — they’re trying to catch your attention. The ads have their own colors and visual style, ones that clash with my sites. Worse, since the particular ads you see are selected by a computer using keywords and in other non-human-considered ways, ads promulgating the exact opposite of what I may advocate, feel or think can easily appear with my posts, especially when the posts are viewed singly.

I do understand the need to fund development and upkeep.  However, the “put up with the ads we’ve now put everywhere vs. pay to keep the ads off” route is not a good way to do this, to my mind. After all, you put the ads in, and then told me I could pay you to keep them from appearing. Trendy, perhaps, and done more and more often today, but not exactly friendly-feeling.

In the abstract, I’m willing (maybe — let’s see the terms of the deal) to pay a small amount as a regular user of your service, either monthly or, better, annually) to see that you stay in business under reasonable conditions.  After all, I’ve got a certain investment in your keeping my previous posts available on the blog sites I’ve set up. Even with good archiving of blog copy, I’d find it a bigger job than I’d like to re-create the run elsewhere.

But putting ads all over the place well after I’ve put lots of posts into an initially free  – and ad-free — blogging service, and then, afterwards, saying if I don’t want the ads, I can pay you a monthly fee to keep them off, feels like something a bit different to me.

For all I know, many people may not mind viewing ads wherever they look on the internet, whether they are text-only ads with links or animated ads or even video-based ads. Others, those who view my newly-added posts on RSS feeds, may not even have to see any ads at all. I DO mind the ads that are now infesting the net everywhere you look. I don’t want to have to find and click the ‘close’ button on the ad before I can read the material I came to the site to see, which so often is located carefully right under the ad window.

I dislike seeing the ads on my blog sites very much, not least because I’ve set up and designed my blog sites to be simple and visually attractive — I’m not merely an RSS-item generating station, although one or two readers prefer to view my blog pieces using that functionality — but rather I offer a consciously chosen visual experience when you view the entire blog site, as I really would like you to do.  OK, as overwhelming aesthetic experiences go, compared to, say, viewing the Pietà or the David up close, my blog sites are no big deal, but each offers a certain atmosphere that enhances the content of the blog pieces.

At least, I find it so, and I hope both my readers (the non-RSS ones, at least) do, too.

So, for now, I’m putting up with the ads, because I don’t want to have to pay merely to keep them off.  But, when a notice comes from me that a new blog post is available, you may choose to visit the link to the general blog site where the newest post appears at the top (links to the sites are posted handily in the signature of the emails) to minimize what looks to me very much like advertising pollution.

As I remember the scene, one character in an episode on the second season of The Wire points out “We used to make things ourselves in this country.  Now we just take money out of each other’s pockets.”  If those aren’t the exact words, that’s exactly their gist.

I think he’s got a point.

For instance, my interest in a dietary change (words my doctor told me) is to watch sodium levels and lose weight.  Calorie-watching is important but secondary to me.  I’d rather watch my total portions and balance of nutritional elements, and stay within healthy, pre-determined limits.  So “fat-free” foods are not by themselves a necessity. I’d rather use moderate amounts of unsaturated fats and oils and avoid saturated ones, not try to cut fats out altogether.

Having said that, why am I tracking with a (very fine indeed) software tracker that counts calories, carbohydrates, protein, fat, sodium, and fiber?

Because a.) foods nowadays are labeled with nutrition labels, and large databases exist based on those nutritional elements; foods are not often labeled in terms of exchanges or food-type portions; and b) I’d like to track what I eat both ways, because of tracking sodium in particular and a desire to see the nutritional makeup of what I’m eating and c.) this is a fine, flexible tracker that does this type of nutrient-counting very well in an easy-to-use entry and simple-to-read report structure I like.  (I’m using Perfect Diet Tracker available for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux, also available through the Mac App store, where I bought mine.  I recommend it highly.)  I’m tracking exchanges separately.

And now, back to our exciting story of dietary adventure: each morning I enjoy a small pot of coffee, lightened with a little half-and-half.  In a recent shopping trip I saw some fat-free half and half and wondered what could possibly be of interest in such a product.  The whole essence and enjoyability of cream — the entire point of it, as it seems to me — is the butterfat.  My attitude towards foods has always been to fish or cut bait: I don’t normally use ‘substitutes’ or ‘concocted’ foods.  Use it and own it, by counting the calories, fats, etc. as part of the dietary allowance for the day; or give it up altogether.

But, in a fit of unthinking excess dietary zeal that day I said, “Aaaah, I’ll try this maybe I can use the calories or fats elsewhere.”  I should have paid more attention, perhaps, to the clue offered by the crowd of ‘fat free’ containers remaining in the half-and-half area of the dairy case, and the dearth of regular ones.

I got it home, and put some in the coffee the next morning.  Not as good as the real stuff, but acceptable, sort of. Definitely sweeter, and that’s not good (I’m not fond of sweets). An acquired taste? Maybe. H’mmm.

Then I did a side-by-side comparison of the ingredients in standard half and half and an equal serving size of the fat-free type, using my computer-based diet tracker.

In this comparison, R = regular half and half and FF = fat free half and half; in each case, a leading national brand is represented:

Calories: R 40,  FF 20

Carbohydrates: R 1g,  FF 3 g

Proteins: R 1 g,  FF 1g

Fats: R 3g, FF 0 g

Sodium: R 10 mg, FF 30 mg

Clearly, what you lose on the roundabouts you make up on the swings.  While yes, with the fat-free type, you’ve lost half the calories (20) and all the fat (3 g.), you’ve also gained three times the sodium — not good in my case — and carbohydrates. In addition, you’ve lost most of the flavor and texture, and gained a certain sweet flavor that I don’t care for (skim milk and corn syrup are the first two ingredients listed).

I like a small amount of half and half in my coffee, used moderately it fits within my diet, and I am going to buy some of the real stuff for that purpose when I go shopping later today.

Other people may have different preferences and needs and I wish them only good luck and happiness.

But as for me, a lesson learned: give me the real deal, or else forget it entirely.

This may seem like a pointless gesture, one that will be seen or noted by no one.  Here’s why I don’t agree that it’s pointless: I’ll see it, I’ll be there, I’ll know it. That matters to me. And it’s equally important to me that I be holding my flag, appropriately positioned at half-staff.  I don’t have a flagpole holder on my house, as many others do, or I’d be flying the flag from there at half-staff as directed by the President, all day long.

And, it should be noted, I don’t routinely fly my flag outside my house, as some of my neighbors do, because that is their way of proclaiming a political identity which I don’t share.  It strikes me as not beforetime to reclaim the use of the flag for all citizens who wish to display it.  How to do that without giving a false impression of political orientation?

Today’s moment of silence for victims of a tragic event — a tragedy which brings to the attention of all of us to a nation-wide atmosphere of hatred, hateful speech and hateful actions, which threatens the peace and well-being of our country more profoundly, at this moment, than any foreign enemies — seems to me a moment when I can display my flag, at half-staff, as called for by the President to mark this occasion, without danger of having the message of that flag misinterpreted.

I hope that you will observe this moment of silence.   Observing the moment of silence across this country today is important, whoever and wherever you are, and whether you, or the building you’re in or company you work for, are flying a flag at half-staff or not.