Monkling’s Blog

This is sort of a part 2 of the earlier post. Some may think this is sick humor but I think it’s pretty funny so I’m back to share - like it or not.

With the Parkinson’s, Frank doesn’t walk quite right. His right side is affected so he doesn’t swing his arm when he walks, his leg doesn’t move properly and he sorta leans forward. When we were at the doctor’s, Frank said if he forces himself to stand more upright and concentrates on his stride, he walks more normally but he was complaining that it’s a lot of work.

The doctor told him something like, “Your brain can rewire itself. It can be trained. If you do that, you will train it and it will become easier.” She also said he needs to exercise as much as possible, which is hard with the hours he works.

Fast forward to tonight: We needed some twine to tie up the newspapers. Instead of hopping in the car, we walked the 4 blocks to the store. Exercise, ya know. So as we’re walking, I notice he does seem to be walking a bit taller. (Hard thing to do when you’re only 5′4″ to begin with!) I decide to be his little cheering squad.

“Hey, you look normal! Okay, now swing that arm.”
“I can only concentrate on one thing at a time.”
“No problem,” I tell him and I dance around to his right side and push his arm so that he’s swinging it. Anyone who happened to peek outside and saw us would have thought we were nuts. Of course they’d be right.

Then I was complaining how it hurts to shake stuff with my right arm - you know, like say I want to make mojitos or I need to shake a can of Pledge.
“Oh, you need to let me do all the shaking around the house because I can shake things up real good. The problem, of course, is then I can’t stop shaking.”

Okay, I will go quietly now…

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For some odd reason, I remember that line being used by John Travolta in Welcome Back, Kotter. Why that sticks in my mind and yet, I can’t remember what I did yesterday is a mystery but there it is. I do remember a scene with Travolta saying that. That pretty much describes me. If my head is about to split open from a horrible headache, I am going to take some sort of pain reliever. If I am sneezing my head off and my throat is itching so much that I want to stick my hand down it and rip it out, I’m going to take antihistimine.

The rest of my family, however, seems to find this odd and would rather be in pain and uncomfortable than take something. “If I take Tylenol or Aleve, how will I know when I’m better?”

Hey, if they’re into pain, fine. Just don’t sit there complaining to me about it.

Today Frank is home from work because he had a couple of appointments - one for the dentist, one for the neurologist. I went with him to the neuro doctor. With Parkinson’s, there’s not a whole lot that can be done and the one main medication, levodopa, isn’t something you give to patients with early onset Parkinson’s because it stops working after a few years. I guess they figure if you’re already 70 or so, what the heck. But when you’re not even 50, they want to hold off using that. So we use other stuff.

I got to sit in on the conversation.
“Is the new medication helping?”
“I don’t see any difference between this and the last one.”
“It’s not any better at all?”
“Well this one doesn’t upset my stomach like the other one.”
“Okay, you’re on a very low dosage. We’re going to increase it.”

Right away the man starts complaining. Never mind that the amount he’s on isn’t really enough to help a freaking mouse. “I don’t like taking drugs.”

I believe I mumbled something like, “Tough luck. Deal with it.” I also think the doctor heard me and laughed. Well smiled, anyway. Geez, half the world is looking to get drugs and my husband complains about having to take 1 tiny pill once a day. Good thing he doesn’t have some disease that requires 10 pills 8 times a day, eh? On the positive side, at least I’ll never have to worry about him turning into a drug addict.

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It seems that the town I lived in for 7 years, from when we moved there when I was 19 until I got married at 26, is in the Guinness World Records book. I can’t actually confirm this because I don’t have a copy of the book and I’m way too lazy to bother walking over to the library to look this up. The item supposedly that made the town famous is having the most number of bars per square mile. This does not come as a shock to me since I can think of 6 bars right off that are within a 3 block radius.

Now, as I said, I have no idea if the town is really listed in the book but I do know there seems to be a whole lot of underage drinking going on there. Back in those olden days (1976) the legal drinking age was 18. By the time 1977 rolled around, I had found a job working in the village park and made a lot of friends who had all grown up in the village.

I grew up in Brooklyn and I had never set foot in a bar until I started hanging out with that crowd. At the time, they were all of legal drinking age but what I found so amazing is that this group had all been drinking for years. I heard stories of girls sneaking bottles onto school buses, on their way to girl scout camp.

My son once made a comment to me about living a sheltered life. The boy has absolutely no idea what that means. At almost 22, he’s done more things, gone more places, had more experiences than I had at twice that age. I think he just wants me to think he has been sheltered. He doesn’t fool me. A couple of his closest friends live in that town. Even if it’s just a rumor and the town isn’t listed in that book, I’m not that clueless.

NOTE: SOMETHING’S WRONG WITH WORDPRESS. IT WON’T ACCEPT COMMENTS & I’M GETTING ERRORS. I’m waiting to hear from my web host’s support. Hopefully they will respond quickly but if there are no new posts for a few days, well you’ll be able to hear me cursing clear across to the west coast.

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Yesterday afternoon, we were sitting out front. It was peaceful and quiet. The only sounds were those coming from the park across the street - kids giggling as they played, birds happily singing in the trees. No, wait. That’s in my fantasy world. What was really going on in the park was there were teenagers playing basketball and cricket, loudly cursing at each other. Then, near the handball courts by the corner, kids hung out with their cars parked nearby, radios blaring out rap music.

Suddenly another sound broke through! There was wild flapping of wings accompanied by blood chilling, louder than normal coos. Bodies crashed, wings slapped the metal of the air conditioner and we watched as what I assume was a male pigeon tried to have his way with a female pigeon. It seemed she was not too happy about it and responded by trying to rip out her potential mate’s jugular:

Nicky was upset. I’m not quite sure why. It may be because he is opposed to violence. It may be because he, having been neutered, can never do what those pigeons were about to do. In any case, he expressed his anger by barking at the birds.

He was rather annoyed that they ignored his barking & continued their violent mating ritual. If he had been capable of flying, he would have whipped out his Superdog cape and flown to the rescue of the little girl pigeon. And if those pigeons entertain the thought of putting a nice little nest on top of my air conditioner… well they had better think again.

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I installed a new plugin. It allows you (any of you, not just Peg) to edit your comments. But - you need to be registered and logged in, which really isn’t a big deal. It’s not like I have nothing better to do than look at anyone’s email address and make up spam. Although I probably could write some real interesting spam email if I set my mind to it. Admittedly, I don’t have much of a life but I do have a tiny one so I don’t think it’s likely that I’ll spend any time writing any spam.

One thing, though. I’m not sure if maybe it’s just the server being slow today or if the plugin is causing a problem but when I played around with it, it took forever to post a comment. Also it was acting perfectly fine in Firefox but a bit weird in Internet Explorer but I hardly ever use Explorer so I may just have some weird setting on there that screws it up.

So, if it seems to be causing problems, I may need to remove it. Nobody wants to wait 10 minutes for the stupid blog to post a comment. Meantime, consider this an experiment.

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We’re only going to cover one of those sins here today. Today’s lesson is about sloth. Do you want to know why that’s listed as one of the 7 deadly sins? It’s because laziness never pays off. It is due to laziness that no one here in the blog world will get to see what I saw on our walk by the bay.

Today was a lazy sort of day. It’s warm and sticky out, which means the same inside since we now have no A/C (although that situation will be remedied this Friday when they install a new unit). There were no plans for the day and it’s just so easy to fall into being sloth-like.

When Frank suggested taking a walk out by the marina, I was too lazy to bring along the new digital SLR camera. It’s about 20 times the size of my little point & shoot, weighs about 50 lbs. and I didn’t feel like lugging it along. I was too lazy to be bothered carrying it. Instead I took the little one. When we got to the water, we saw these:

“What are those?” I asked Frank, like he would know.
“Birds.” He grew up in the Bronx so what does he know about birds.
“Are they swans?” I stood waiting for the one we were watching to stop cleaning itself or looking for bugs or whatever it was doing and sit with it’s neck all nice. “Damn, why didn’t I bring my good camera. I could have zoomed in so we could see it better.” The zoom on the little camera rots.

We walked a bit further down and then saw more birds:

“They’re cranes!” I was very excited. I figured they had to be cranes since they had long necks & long legs. I snapped some pictures, again cursing my laziness in not having the good camera with me. You can’t even tell from this photo that they have long legs and necks.

I have learned my lesson. I will no longer give in to laziness. Okay, that’s a lie. We all know I will. But I will try not to, when it comes to carrying my camera.

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About 2 months after Frank & I started dating, he invited me over to his family’s house for a barbecue. His story was, this was a 4th of July barbecue. He left out the part about it also being a birthday party because his birthday is July 1st. “I didn’t want to tell you it was my birthday because I didn’t want you to feel like you had to get me something.” That was his excuse. (In case you’re wondering, that was 25 years ago, this July and I have absolutely no idea whether or not I ended up getting him a belated birthday present .)

I had already met his parents & his sister but at the party, I got to meet some of his friends. It was also when I learned about this leaning towards pyromania that my kids seem to have inherited.

I’ve witnessed many, many lightings of charcoal for barbecues over the years. I have never, either before or since that day, seen anyone light charcoal in quite that manner. There was no lighter fluid, no electric fire starting thingie, & none of that match-light stuff. That was for wimps. This was a real fire.

I watched as Frank & his father piled crumpled newspaper into the barbecue pit. This was followed by small twigs, gradually working up to larger sticks. Finally came the charcoal briquettes. These were carefully balanced on top of the entire structure. Frank seemed to have a particular method and had this down to a science with a very specific number of briquettes. This was serious business and they could not just be randomly placed. Then came the ceremonial lighting. Flames shot up about 2 stories high. You could feel the heat halfway down the block.

When the smoke and flames finally settled down, amazingly, the charcoals did seem to be lit up just like any other barbecue. Food was grilled and eaten and I still dated him, although I did keep him away from matches after that.

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I know summer is officially here, not because it is Memorial Day weekend. I know this because it’s nearly 90 out already. And our air conditioner is broken. It started working perfectly fine. It’s the first time it’s been turned on this year. Then I hear my son turning it off. “I heard a popping noise and it smells like smoke.” Ah, wonderful and on a holiday weekend. Fat chance we’ll get anyone in to fix it. Won’t even bother calling. Good thing we have plenty of ice and mojito fixings.

In order to forget about the heat & the broken A/C, we will just have to eat a lot. In addition to the burgers and shrimp we’re gonna throw on the barbie, I made a couple of salads. One is the traditional macaroni salad but the other is something different. Remember when I did my “Guess The Contents” contest? Well here’s your chance to see exactly why I had bulgur wheat in my house. (Don’t listen to Peggy. It was not maggots!)

This is a little invention of mine - Tabbouleh, Italian Style:

I took an actual recipe and twisted it. This is what’s in the bowl:
bulgur wheat
balsamic vinegar & olive oil
pignoli nuts
basilico (aka basil, pronounced bazza-knee-goal if you’re in my family)
chopped up tomato
crumbled goat cheese
parsley

Personally I think it tastes good but we’ll have to test drive it when the rest of the family gets here. There will also be a full mojito report. If the report is not coherent, you’ll know we did a whole lot of experimenting.

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Please note that the title does not say, “Mom And The Evil GPS.” Like everything else in this family, my GPS does seem to have some issues but that’s a blog entry for another day. For today, this is all about me.

Normally I function quite well as a GPS unit. Many times I will receive phone calls for directions. Usually these calls are from one of the kids although others have been known to use my services. The phone calls go something like this:

Brrrrrriiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnnnngggggg (that would be the phone ringing)
Me: Living GPS Unit here. How may I assist you?
Person: I’m lost.
Me: Tough luck. Go find a map or a gas station.
Person: Unless you want me to come to a dead stop on the bridge, go to the trunk to get a map and then get hit by a car which will send me flying off the bridge into the ocean, you need to help me.
Me: Fine. Let me get the map software up & running. Okay, where are you?
Person: I have no idea. If I did, I wouldn’t be lost.

Eventually we end up determining where the lost person is and I am successful in helping the lost person navigate to their destination. This is always accomplished while sitting at the computer, eyes riveted on every tiny detail of the street map software.

Last night I found out that once I am taken away from my computer, I am useless. This discovery was made when I gave directions to Steve and Theresa on how to drive over to a ball field to watch their cousin’s Little League game.

Technically my directions were right. I told them to get off the highway at Sunrise Highway. The glitch came in that the exit does not say, “Sunrise Highway.” I was already at the game, awaiting their arrival when I got a phone call. “There is no exit for Sunrise Highway.” Oops. I suddenly realized it actually says, “Route 27.” If I had the map software in front of me, I’d have seen that & I would have told them not only the exact exit name but the exit number as well.

Ah, well, Next time they can just get out the map. What do people expect when they’re getting a free service? And no, I am not going to put my phone number up here on the blog so that you, too, can have me as a Human GPS.

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It’s true. I am addicted to my computer. I am addicted to the Internet. I am addicted to email.

This morning my email was down because my server was having a few problems. I couldn’t get any mail for a few hours. I was not a happy camper. It’s not even like I was expecting anything. I don’t have anyone I email on a regular basis. Yet, just knowing that I was being deprived of my spam, well I was not a happy camper.

What? No 347 emails asking if I want to enlarge a body part I don’t even have? No 872 emails thanking me for my loan application? How would I spend my morning if I didn’t have all those spam emails to delete??

Then another thought occurred to me. What if my blog goes down? People will try to read it and will get some error saying “page not found” and they will leave forever. No one will bother coming back. I’ll just be sitting here talking to myself. Oh, wait. I already do that, anyway.

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