Cooking.....

I like to cook. My mom was an adequate cook when I was a child, but it wasn't until she got competitive with the other Baptist Church ladies that she began to really branch out.  Both Hubby and I have memories of meals we will NEVER cook for our families:  Chipped beef on toast, Pork chops cooked to shoe leather consistency. Tuna noodle casserole. Spam.

I never tasted a Brussels sprout until I ate dinner at a friend's house and her dad picked some from the garden. "Salad" at our house always had some kind of macaroni or potatoes in it. I never had a piece of whole wheat bread (although we did have some awesome black Russian rye bread).

When I moved out, I was on an extremely limited budget. I learned how to balance plant proteins, and ate very little meat. I learned how to cook soybeans.  I just never learned to like them.

Over the years I've learned a lot of things about how to feed a lot of people for not a lot of money, and how to entertain, and how to get a meal together with either a little or a lot of effort, but no matter what, I generally enjoy the process. 

My Dad once said, "I never know what to expect when I sit down for dinner here, but it's always good!"  He wasn't a man to toss out a complement lightly, and I remember that one with gratitude.

DeeDee

PS It's quiche tonight.

Weather....

When I grew up, weather just seemed to happen.  We'd wake up, and there was sunshine. Or rain. Or snow.  People talked about it, and there were weather reports, but they tended to be vague and no one seemed to expect them to be at all reliable.

Now, my phone pings, and tells me that rain is going to start, and be light (or heavy) in 5 minutes, so I need to make choices NOW about what to wear, whether to walk now or later, or whether to put a sweater on that nearly furless pup.

I mean, it's not that they're never wrong predicting next week, but in the minute-by-minute? They GOT that stuff. 

So this morning I need to ignore the condition of my house and get stuff in from the yard.  We have snow coming.  And while many people aren't looking forward to it at all, I don't mind. 

I watch the Make-A-Wish site.  Recently, a desperately ill child's wish was to See Snow.  The pictures of that child enjoying a winter day made me smile all the way to my toes.  Sure, she didn't need to shovel any, and likely never will, but it made remember, REALLY remember, the childlike delight of snowmen, snow angels, sledding, and catching snowflakes on my tongue; and the absolute gratitude of shedding layer upon layer of snowy wet clothes to share a hot drink with my Mom at the  warm kitchen table afterward.

DeeDee

Full Hands.....

Larry decided to go for a walk with us the other day.  He's an old man, so he won't walk if it's hot, or if it's raining, or if it's.....well, whatever it is that makes him feel lazy most of the time.

 But the other day it was cool and clear, so he came along, giving me two big dogs and a little dog to manage.

Along the way, I passed a woman who was juggling a cigarette, an umbrella and a coffee cup.  She looked at me and said, "Wow! You've got YOUR hands full!"

Ignoring the irony of the moment, I responded, "It beats having them empty."

This is the fundamental truth of life.  We can either rejoice and thank God that our hands are too full, or we can live with emptiness.  When I had 7 kids in the house, I heard the "you have your hands full" thing ALL of the time.  It took me a long, long time to realize that I prefer them that way.

DeeDee

My New/Old Job.....

Before Babygirl became ill I was our church's choir director. I really don't know how long I did the job. I thought it was just a couple of years, but sorting through the old music, I've come across four years' worth of cantatas, so.....

But the year before Babygirl go sick, I got sick. I was out of work for about 5 months recovering from a spectacular bout of migraines (yeah, that can happen) and had just come back when we learned about B

abygirl.  Looking at what her needs were going to be, and how often we might be gone, I resigned the position.  Sadly, there was no one to replace me for a couple of years, and the new director, when he arrived, was, well, more traditional. But he was a student. I figured he'd graduate and move and then I'd volunteer again as Babygirl's health stabilized. But he kind of, settled in.

So this past summer I reapplied for the job versus the current director. And I thoroughly enjoyed terrifying everyone at my day job by letting them know I was applying for a new job.

I started again in September. 

Lordy, I am out of shape for this. 

It's not just the standing and waving your arms around part (although we have a couple of people, entirely new not only to the choir but to music in general, who took a bit to understand exactly WHY I was waving my arms around LOL), it's the hunt for the right music, learning the music, making sure you have enough copies, because initially you had 6 people and now you have 16 (THAT's a good problem to have!) and finding the time to clean out and organize spaces that the last THREE choir directors have been neglecting (Oh, oops, was one of them me?? My bad.)  I figure it's about 4 - 8 hours of work for every anthem. My Fitbit tells me I walk up to 2 miles during each Wednesday rehearsal, and at least one mile on Sundays at church.

This is what Choir prep looks like.

But music lifts my heart and gives my soul purpose, and I'm grateful.

DeeDee

Walking......

One of the blessings of my life is that I live in a small city with good sidewalks, parks, and streetlights.  Anyone of my patients who lives here and tells me they "can't afford" to exercise gets a fairly stern lecture from me about the affordability of feet, and the fact that absolutely everybody has the same amount of time in a day, and choices about how they use them.

When I decided to improve my health, I began with two very fat dogs (Simon and Garfunkel) and one morbidly obese human.  I began to walk a mile a day, which in my neighborhood is a circuit around the three blocks nearest my home, and it includes what, at the time, I considered to be a substantial hill.  A mile initially took me about half an hour, maybe a bit more. 

Garfunkel sadly died young, and I've walked Simon into senility, and have gradually increased my walks to at least three miles daily (about 40 minutes with a dawdling hound dog), more on weekends.  And that big hill?  Pah!  There are no big hills in my neighborhood, but there are steeper ones, so I make it a point to climb at least one of those every day.

One of my more judgmental hobbies as a physician is to take note of the patients who are closest to my age and see how I am doing against the pack, as it were.  This is grossly unfair, of course:  My patient population is poor, under insured, undereducated, and overrepresented by refugees and immigrants.  I look pretty good by comparison LOL.  However....many of my similarly-aged colleagues have died, of cancer or cardiovascular disease, or more frighteningly, suicide.  I'm not looking too bad against THAT pack either.

I have health issues.  But I'm still walking. At 60, it's something big to be grateful for.

DeeDee

The Beauty of Change....

One of the things that I've come to dread, in a way, is change.  New medical information on anyone in my family makes me very anxious, and I think, honestly, that I was never really an anxious person before.  Shy, yes. Introverted, yes. Depressed, sometimes. But in my interior world, repetitive and useless worry really never had much of a voice until Babygirl became ill.

But I live in a part of the world where change is a routine and frequently breathtakingly lovely part of life.

Raking leaves is inherently meditative. You can lose yourself in the sound, the smell, and the coolness of the air, and be grateful.

DeeDee

The Annual Month of Gratitude.....

It is, amazingly enough, November again.  I'm not sure how it happens so rapidly.  Eight years of November blogging.

I'm not promising daily posts. Clearly I can't, since I already missed the first two days LOL.  But since I did miss two days, here are the three first, most important things I can think of that I am grateful for so far this month:

1) I am not blogging this from a hospital. In 2012 we descended into headache hell and had it cross paths with sepsis hell and ended up in CHOP for a week. This post does not do justice to the level of desperation I recall from this day: In An Old House In Paris. (Start here if you want to see the whole week; Fever and Toxic Waste) This is what I talk about when Babygirl and I represent Make A Wish at events:  The knowledge that we were going to go and see Paris gave me something to give her to hold onto that long, long night. I can't even type it without tears of gratitude to those wonderful Wish Granters.

2) Although Babygirl still has her headaches, far too frequently for my taste (or hers), there is yet another new class of medication out there for migraine prevention that may help her.  We'll be talking to neurology next month.

3) I had nothing but good news from my own doctor at my visit this week. My sugars were higher than I liked, and my weight had been 'stuck' for quite a while before my last visit, and so I finally asked for a weight loss drug. My doc thought it was a good idea, but my insurance thought I wasn't fat enough to actually need it. THAT was eye-opening, so I kicked the exercise up a notch and added an extra mile to my morning walks. You know, I weigh myself every day, and check my sugar, but was pretty convinced that I was doing poorly on both counts.  Turns out my testing supplies are outdated, but my scale is pretty accurate. My sugars are good, and my weight is down an additional 10 pounds this year, bringing the total weight loss to 90 pounds in the past 12 years. (Well, truth be told, I've probably lost about 184 pounds, because if you lose 5, gain 3, lose 5, gain 10, well.... you get the idea. The struggle is real.) It was heart-lifting in a year of struggle. Right now I have dropped from "morbidly obese" through "obese " to "overweight," but I weigh now about what I did going into high school. The goal is to weigh what I did coming OUT of high school, which, since I am an inch shorter than I was then, will still leave me "overweight" from a medical standpoint, but I think a 115 pound weight loss goal seems reasonable.  But it's not about the pant size. It's about making an effort to be there for Babygirl.

DeeDee