Writing thought + driving thought + cooking thought!

cross-posted from Dreamwidth/Livejournal

Although I never participate, I watch a Minute-a-Day writing blog, where they post a trigger to write on, every day. The theory being you set aside one minute to write on that one thing.

They don't always interest me, but they almost always have interesting responses.

Today, the trigger was: If you could tie a note to a helium balloon, and know it would reach someone who had passed away, what would the note say?

Well, if I could direct it to the right person - Dad - it would say: We miss you so much. That was my first thought. After that there was a barrage: Mom is doing okay, pretty good actually, we love you. There are grandbabies! You should see them! I'm doing well. The girls are doing well. Everyone is currently employed, which is a bigger deal than you would think. And.. I could probably think other thoughts, but it struck me that the visceral first thought was "We miss you so much." It would make him feel bad, and I don't want that, but it's true, just the same.

Other thoughts for this brief lunch post:
I think up dumb things in the car. Conversations I will likely never have. Revisited arguments and "I could have said that better, or said THIS instead!" Things I need to get done but am not sure how or when to prioritize. The usual "I think I forgot to turn the dishwasher on when I left the house" problems. And, slightly more productive, recipes.

Today, on the way to get a bad-for-me-junk-lunch, I was thinking of what to do with the leftover jasmine rice for dinner tonight. There will be chicken. There will be carrots. What to do to the rice to zest it up a bit? Well, I think I have fresh parsley and chives in the basket. And some onions. (Although personally? Chives are oniony enough, so I might skip one or the other.) I have chicken-broth-in-a-cube. I have mushrooms! Terry dislikes mushrooms... so I have to pull those back out of the sautee if I do those. But still: sautee up the mushrooms and onions in butter. Add some seasonings (like the fresh parsley and maybe chives... also some sage perhaps), pull the mushrooms back out and maybe the onions if I did them, then brown the leftover rice a bit, add in the broth with some liquid and let it soak it up and we should be good to go!

Sometimes I do this for the whole dinner, in my head, before I get home, but I had to pay attention to ordering lunch and stopped. So I'll probably just do the usual cut-breasts-into-medallions trick and season them and cook them up in the pan. It'll be nice and easy, which is good, because I'm so far behind on house chores it's NOT funny.

Okay. Time to eat, then go vacuum. Cleaning day at work is always so rushed....

Communication Breakdown

So... at a certain level of things, when it comes to communication, I really suck. And most of the time, I know this and try to compensate. Sometimes I don't do a good job at all.

Mom is having her eyes fixed. She's had cataracts, at some level or other, for years now. They finally got bad enough that we made an appointment, had her check and confirmed, and now they're being fixed. (I even got to look at them through actual doctor office instruments/microscopes!) She had surgery on her non-dominant eye on the 7th, and her dominant eye yesterday. They like at least a week in between, so that they can be sure the correction level they attempt in the lens implant they create and put in is good enough to work. It's not like contacts, y'can't pull 'em out and start over. Or at least, you don't really want to. She's doing very well, and today we go in for her first follow-up.

Now, MOST people, when they have this done, are corrected for distance. This is because it often happens to people later in life, who are used to wearing reading glasses anyway (or are at least mentally prepared for it) and they don't want to wear glasses to do other day to day things (like drive, play golf, go to the store, whatever). Now, mom has had to wear glasses since she was 10. Her range of sight is better than mine, which is truly dreadful, but she still had to get things pretty close to her nose to deal with them. Her hobbies include a lot of reading, computer work, cross stitch, cross word puzzles, and basically indoor stuff on tables. (Planting/potting houseplants, hanging baskets, etc.) She doesn't 100% hate the great outdoors, but she distrusts them a good deal unless many different criteria are in perfect alignment. So, the doctor agreed that it would be more comfortable for her to be corrected for close-up. (She always wears prescription driving sunglasses, cuz the glare is Evil^TM, so she's gonna have to wear something ANYWAY.)

So far, things seem to work really well. All this past week, she was having to remember to take her glasses OFF to read something, but other than that.. she can see much better, and the nasty sepia tone fog is basically gone. But it means her current prescription lenses are utterly useless. Which makes her feel trapped, because she has to ask for help with getting anywhere outside her own home. (Maybe down to the mailbox on the street corner, but no further than that.) ... It doesn't matter how much I reassure her, she's not gonna be happy this way, and until her eyes are completely settled down (3 weeks from yesterday), she really can't be fitted for her final progressive lenses. So, hopefully, after the follow-up today, she'll get a scrip for single-vision distance lenses. They'll be $70, but really, it's worth it to have the backup glasses for her in case she does something dreadful to her normal glasses. And, if everything goes well, by the 2nd week of May, she should be able to travel, which she really wants to do.

I've been updating my sisters by email (occasionally including other family members as it's seemed logical), of what's going on, but last night I twittered: Kinda almost exhausted after having mostly passed out at mom's app't. Why must I have this aversion to hollow needles intended for veins? Followed by: OTHER than that, very good day. Mom doing well after final surgery. Ate Kowloon's yumminess. Sipping jasmine tea now. Pretty quickly after that, I got a startled direct message from one friend, afraid I'd had surgery and done something bad with a needle, and an instant message in chat from another, also worried. So I had to correct perceptions. MOM'S surgery. MOM being punctured. Me fainting. Feh.

Sometime when I was pre-teen (or early teen) I developed a thing about needles, specifically them entering/leaving human bodies. (Sometimes even them being used on pets tweaks me out, but not as often. I think thick fur helps obscure what's going on.) I remember having absolutely no problem with needles when one of my sisters was getting allergy shots very regularly, and then sometime shortly after that? No good. I'd say that 60% of the time I get woozy and actually pass out. This can be affected by having eaten, not being dehydrated, being well-rested, and my body temperature being pretty level.

Yesterday I had eaten, drank fluids and slept well. But I was way way way too hot. And mom was in pain. That particular nurse was not listening to what she was being told, and kept trying veins even though mom had told her that her veins are tiny, roll, and move out of the way regularly. I saw the needle come out of mom's arm from the 2nd try, saw/heard pain in mom's voice, and started having that vague dark-fog effect at the outside of my vision. I'd been trying NOT to look, but it seemed like it should've been long enough and... I did. Dumb me. So I looked away, immediately, and tried to focus on what I was reading: 's gov't docs article, and... then the sound started getting fuzzy. And next I knew I was being held in the chair and coming to. It wasn't long. Less than a minute. Maybe even less than 30 seconds. I hadn't disrupted too much, thank goodness, but I still felt chagrined, frustrated, and vaguely guilty. Amusingly, when mom tried to tell me I should've put my head between my knees, the male nurse said "Actually, probably better she didn't. She'd've keeled forward and whopped her head on the floor. That wouldn't've been good." As it was, I just started sliding out of the chair/losing my grip on the papers in my hand. They made me lay down, take oxygen by nose tube (I have total understanding of my dad's grousing about those things now), and drink orange juice (which made me nauseous, but cold clothes helped with that). Luckily, my color was back long before mom even went into surgery, so noone gave me a hard time about being her driver. (For witnesses, I apparently go this really horrid shade of olive green in the face, which kinda makes sense, with my skin tone.)

So. THAT covers THAT. ;) I suppose I should cross-post this to the blog where my cousins read... for informational stuff on mom, and amusement factor on me. (Which this is... crossposted from livejournal)

Thoughts on a Meme going around...

Copy this sentence into your livejournal if you're in a heterosexual marriage, and you don't want it "protected" by the bigots who think that gay marriage hurts it somehow.

I'm not, actually, anymore. I was. I got divorced. I had rights I was able to utilize under that divorce that allowed me half of everything, and things like insurance protection if I needed it. Now, I didn't utilize some of those rights, but I still had them. A lot of my same-sex friends don't have those rights. That's not fair. (And yes, we all know the world isn't fair, but I think it's good to have it as a goal in life.)

I think they should have those rights as well as the "happy" marital rights. I don't think that the meaning of a loving commitment between people, hopefully for life, is at all diluted or injured by opening it up to even more people. I don't think it will adversely affect my tax situation. It means more people will be eligible for certain marital tax breaks, among other things, yes, but I see that as a good thing.

Now, at the moment, I'm happier being NOT married but in a stable relationship than I was during the last few years of my marriage. If you had told me that then? I probably would have argued with you. Hind-sight is 20/20. But I could marry my significant other right now, because he's male. Now, what if he was a she? I think it'd rankle that I couldn't, really. I think it'd hurt that I'd be stuck with a domestic partnership. I think the judgmentalness of people who frown upon same-sex marriage would affect me in ways I can't even think of, even though I try to shrug off other peoples' opinions. I do not like that my friends and other people I don't even know have to deal with that every second of the day.

I do think about it, when I vote. I still have to prioritize, and sometimes I hate it when I only have a choice between voting for money for kids/streets/cops/firefighters and voting for something that would further less hate in the world. And deep-down, I suspect lawmakers do that kind of thing on purpose. Because they know that there are a lot of people like me, who don't have knee-jerk distrust issues with gay and lesbian people, and so they find other ways to get us to subtly vote "against" them. It sucks.

So even though the above statement doesn't completely apply to me, it applies enough that I'm posting it.

*Cross-posted from my livejournal.