Monthly Archives: November 2023

When You Have the Flu: Some Unsolicited Advice

etc., funny things, health, humor, , , ,

I keep revisiting this post — this time because I just tested positive for COVID, which is, after all, uber-flu. Anyway, I feel too crappy to write something new.

Say you’ve got a touch of the flu. Keep far away from me – you feel awful and I don’t want to feel awful too. I know you don’t want visitors, but here I am, and at least I’ve brought a gift: a few suggestions for entertaining things you can do while you suffer in peace and quiet, except for, you know, the coughing and sneezing and assorted other noises you’re making. Relative peace and quiet, if you know what I mean.

Drink tea. It really doesn’t matter what kind, since you can’t smell it anyway. Earl Grey will smell just like jasmine. Peppermint and English Breakfast, the same. And if you want to, you can use any variety as the base for my father’s restorative tonic, which consists of tea, bourbon, and horehound candy (tea optional), or boring old lemon and honey, if you insist, though my father would not approve.

Cuddle large, fuzzy cats. Do this even if you’re allergic to them. You’re already sneezing as much as humanly possible, so you have nothing to fear from dander. Bonus: A large, fluffy cat makes an excellent substitute for a heating pad or hot water bottle.

Read. Or pretend to. Actual reading may distract you from how miserable you are (unless you’re reading Les Miserables). Pretend-reading will encourage people to keep their voices low, plus it doesn’t matter if you fall asleep with the book elegantly displayed on your chest. (Make sure it has a classy dustjacket, even if the book inside is Fifty Shades of Gray, which I don’t recommend, unless it’s for pretend-reading. It can lead to barfing, which may be in your future anyway.)

Eat chicken soup. Tell everyone that you need it for the fluids and the electrolytes, which is true. Egg drop soup is an especially good variety – if you can’t convince someone in your household to make it and bring it to you, you can always convince the Chinese take-out down the street to do it. Nibble saltines daintily, or the little fried things that look like Chinese tortilla strips.

Hit the Nyquil. I don’t mean the non-drowsy kind – sleep through as much of the illness as possible. Warning: Do not mix Nyquil with Southern Comfort or the bourbon-horehound mixture (see above). You’ll barf and you may be doing that already. Also, don’t mix Nyquil with cough syrup, which can cause unintended psychedelic effects and more barfing.

Squash tissues. Let them blossom all around you in a protective ring that no one will want to cross. If you try the tissues with built-in lotion, don’t use them to wipe your glasses before trying to read (see above).

Call the doctor. Don’t go see the doctor. You’ve got a virus and there’s nothing she can give you for it. Just ask how long it is until you can get an appointment and rest assured that your ailment will be over before then. You may want to actually go if you start making a sucky (in both senses), moist kind of wheezing sound when you breathe. The advantage is it will keep people even farther away from you, but the downside is that you may have pneumonia, which is even less fun than flu.

Use Vick’s Vapo-Rub. You won’t be able to detect the scent because your nose is busy with something else (snot), but other people sure will, encouraging them to keep a respectful distance. If you don’t have Vapo-Rub, try Ben-Gay. Bonus: nice warm feeling on your chest. Note: If you use either Vapo-Rub or Ben-Gay, do not cuddle the large, fuzzy cats (see above), unless you want to look like Bigfoot. Just sing “Soft Kitty” instead, or insist that someone else sing it to you.

Whine. Punctuate with coughs and sneezes. Again, the goal is to get people to leave you alone. If this tactic isn’t working, move on to even more disgusting symptoms. Keep a bucket by your bed, just so people get the idea that you could use it at any moment.

P.S. I’ll give you one guess why I wrote this. If you don’t get the answer right, I’ll start whining. And coughing. And sneezing. And barfing. Just bring me some egg drop soup and leave quietly.

You wouldn’t want to catch what I’ve got.

Keep me in Nyquil!

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Buying the Past

arts and crafts, etc., family, travel, , , , , ,

No, you read that right. It’s buying the past, not burying the past. (Unless you read it wrong, of course. But it’s still buying the past, not burying the past. But I digress.)

Dan and I went on a brief vacay to Gatlinburg this week, and commerce was committed. A wonderful time was had by all, particularly the local merchants. We only had a few days in town, so we had to really focus on where we wanted to shop and what we wanted to get.

Dan is something of a history buff and loves antiques. He collects old bottles and clocks in particular. Once he even brought a large clock (I’d say about two feet by 1 1/2 feet) home from England, packing it in his luggage with clothes wadded up around it. It made it home safely. (What was ironic about it, when we got home, he looked more closely and found that the clock was made in Massachusetts. Somehow, this poor wandering clock had made it from the States to England and back again. But I digress again.)

So, when we got to Gatlinburg, he was all fired up to visit the same antiques shop we went to the last time we were there. Alas, we weren’t staying in the same place, but a number of miles away. Even with GPS, I couldn’t reconstruct how to get back there. I couldn’t even remember the name, except that it had “antiques” in it. We did find another shop, though, and Dan happily puttered around it, coming away with a beautiful cobalt blue decanter set and an old, framed print of an iris. He was satisfied, and I was satisfied that he was satisfied.

Another shop we visited was one of my favorite kinds, a rock and gem shop. Dan likes them, too, but he mostly buys tumbled rocks and carved statues, while I go for semi-precious gemstone jewelry. Dan found a vase carved from diaspore and black onyx, and I got a set of earrings and a necklace made of tanzanite, a very pretty blue mineral, set in silver.

Anyway, Dan’s interest in the past is primarily in the last 100 years or so, while mine is in the millions of years. My tanzanite was formed 585 million years ago, at an estimate, and has been waiting ever since for me to dangle it from my neck and ears. I have plenty of jewelry of similar vintage.

Now that I think about it, so has the diaspore that Dan’s newest vase was carved from. (Been around millions of years, that is. A carved diaspore vase is heavy and would both give me kyphosis and rip my earlobes off. But I digress yet again.) (Kyphosis = widow’s hump. I was showing off.)

There’s nothing wrong with new things. I have an e-reader and buy digital books all the time. I have a collection of plushies. I have souvenir mugs and shot glasses from wherever we visit. I have a Lego orchid that I’m still putting together. Dan has power tools and hand tools. He has kitchen gadgets like an egg cooker. He has modern glass and ceramics. We both have t-shirts that commemorate various people and events. (Our latest is a Jimmy Buffett and the Coral Reefers t-shirt.)

And we don’t forget about the future, either. The time we’ve spent at science fiction conventions has resulted in the acquisition of glass sculptures blown as we watched, prints such as the one of a cactus taking off into space, and posters of the covers of sf novels. NASA juice glasses (past and future for that).

But, in many ways, our hearts belong in the past. Not the rest of us, of course. Dan and I would both be functionally blind without glasses, and I would likely have been burned as a witch. Maybe Dan, too. Plus, there would be smallpox and bubonic plague to contend with. No, I think we’ll stay in the present and buy our pieces of the past. Safer that way.

It’s a Bargain!

Christmas, etc., family, funny things, holidays, humor, , , ,

It was the gorilla mask that did it. Sure, it was after Halloween and, sure, I’m sure he got it for a very good price. But I ask myself, as my husband obviously didn’t, Why do we need a gorilla mask?

The easy answer is, we don’t. We don’t go to Halloween parties and don’t even dress up to hand out Halloween candy. Dan has breathing problems and can’t wear a full face mask for more than a minute. I have no desire to wear a gorilla mask at all (or to hand out candy either, a chore I leave to Dan every year).

The thing is, Dan works at a big box store and is in proximity to lots of things that are on sale. And he can almost never resist. (He also has a problem resisting free things, like stuff that neighbors set out at the end of their driveways. I’ve trained him to pass them by. But he expects praise for doing so. But I digress.)

There are pet supplies (in addition to the absolutely necessary gushy food for Toby). We have three cat trees, one of which sees use as a side table facing the TV. Toby only uses one level of the big one and ignores the third. He also ignores the catnip mice (though not the catnip treats). And who wouldn’t ignore the dog toy shaped like a giant t-bone steak that Dan thought Toby might use as a pillow? (Toby. Toby did. Dan did buy a nice cat bed that Toby uses a lot, so he gets points for that.)

Some of his finds are more like presents. When a sweater or tunic in my size goes on sale, he’ll snap it up and bring it home like it’s some kind of hunting trophy. (I don’t think he ties it to the hood of his car, though.) They don’t always fit, of course, and he says he’ll take them back if they don’t, but he never does. I need a separate section in my closet for them.

He’s also fond of clearance china. He brings home large soup mugs with appropriate sayings on them, like “Official Cat Mom” or “Looney Tunes” or less appropriate ones like “Merry Christmoose.” He also likes platters and sandwich plates that don’t always go well with our china pattern. Sometimes they’re at least in the ballpark, or completely neutral white. (Yes, surprisingly, we do actually have a pattern—Pfaltzgraff Yorktowne. I chose the paint for our newly rebuilt kitchen—blue—to harmonize with it. This is something I never thought I’d ever do (have a pattern), though I never thought I’d ever get married either. Life is surprising. But I digress again.)

The bargain food tables are also irresistible. Not that he always knows what he’s getting. We’ve ended up with spices like togarashi and galangal (which I always thought were martial arts), plus pickled banana leaves. Our cooking repertoire runs to things like grilled chicken breasts and ground beef, seasoned with Mrs. Dash, garlic, and oregano. He also buys bargains that really aren’t. Olive tapenade in EVOO isn’t cheap, even at half price. We still have lots of odd culinary experiments just a-waiting for us to be brave or tipsy enough to try.

I can’t really complain, though. Last night he brought me Graeter’s black raspberry and chocolate chip ice cream, which was on sale for some unknown reason. It’s good to have someone watching out for me. I don’t even have to share (much) with him, since it’s not sugar-free. (My theory is he’s trying to keep me fat so other men don’t hit on me. My last digression for this week. I swear.)

Lest you think this all goes one way, I buy weird stuff for Dan, too, though I’m pretty much limited to shopping on the internet. One of my recent finds was a Mr. Natural Keep on Truckin’ t-shirt. I’ve also gotten him a Funko Pop Jerry Garcia. (Can you tell what era he grew up in?) We hardly ever save these surprises for Christmas. Instead, we give ourselves a treat. This year, we’re getting matching tattoos—one gift that I hope isn’t a slight irregular!

Cat Songs

cats, etc., fun and games, funny things, humor, music, pets, , , ,

My husband and I have some silly traditions, some of which I’ve mentioned in the blog. There was naked cooking with Julia Child impressions, for instance. And we make up little nonsense songs. Well, Dan makes up most of them, mostly about me. (My nickname, which no one else may use, is Bunny, so they often have titles like “When Bunny Comes Driving Home Again.” They’re silly, as mentioned, but infinitely better than the NSFW song an ex-boyfriend once wrote describing my physical charms. But I digress.)

But this post is about cat songs. Not songs the cats sing, of course — their repertoire is pretty limited. Not songs about cats either (“Year of the Cat,” “Cat Scratch Fever,” “Stray Cat Strut,” “Honky Cat,” “Nashville Cats”). No, these are songs that we’ve made up about cats we’ve owned over the years.

Shaker’s song was really more of a poem or a chant than a song. It went:

Shaker in the park

Shaker in the pool

Shaker for dessert

Shaker after school.

Shake, shake, Shaker puddin’

Puddin’, puddin’, Shaker puddin’.

(Shaker was a very dignified tuxedo cat. She didn’t approve.)

The song will make no sense unless you remember a product from the 60s and its jingle (indeed, it doesn’t really make any sense at all, whether you remember it or not). The product was called Shake-a-Pudding. It was a brown plastic cup with a lighter brown plastic lid. If you put milk in the cup and added powder, then shook vigorously, hoping the top didn’t come off, what you got was something that at least resembled pudding. An interactive dessert. At the time, we thought it was neat-o.

Toby also has a song based somewhat on a commercial. It goes like this:

His name was Toby.

He used a Flowbee.

Obviously, this requires some explanation. First of all, it’s sung to the tune of Bary Manilow’s “Copacabana.” So far, so good. The Flowbee mentioned in the second line was one of those products you used to see on after-midnight infomercials from companies like Popeil or Ronco. Exercise equipment. Beauty products. That sort of thing.

Technically, I suppose you could call the Flowbee a beauty product. It was an attachment that you put on the end of your vacuum cleaner hose. It would make your hair stand on end so you could lop an inch or two off the end. I think it was mostly used on children who were too young to know any better and was responsible for the infamous bowl cut. It’s described by the company (yes, you can still buy them) as a “Vacuum Haircut System.” Need I tell you that we’ve never used one on ourselves, much less on Toby?

Louise had a song of a sort, or at least one line of one:

Every little breeze seems to whisper: LOUISE!

Naturally, the name was shouted.

Julia, the most beautiful cat in the world (she told me so) had a whole verse. Obviously, it was ttto “Julia” by John Lennon, which was written about his mother. Our Julia’s version went:

Julia, pinky nose

Pretty fur, naughty lips.

So I sing my song of love for Julia.

(No, I don’t know how the “naughty lips” part got in there. Cats barely have lips at all, and I don’t know how they could be naughty. That’s just the way the song went. So sue me. But I digress again.)

Dushenka had a tune that should be familiar to TV cartoon aficionados:

Shenka-Shenka-Doo

Where are you?

On your little kitty adventure.

Laurel’s song was melancholy.

Pooska-wooska-pooska

Pooska-wooska-pie

Pooska-wooska-pooska

It’s Laurel’s lullaby.

I even sang it at her funeral.

Of course, all the songs are doggerel (catterel?) and make us seem like idiots. But the cats don’t care. They’re used to us talking like idiots. (Does Toby want his noms? Pet, pet, pet, the incredible pettable pet. Mama loves kitty. Does kitty love mama? Ribbit.)