Goob
Rosemary had a brunch today. Her birthday is this week, her dog's birthday was last week, and she never had a housewarming party. I was so unorganized that I only brought some potato salad Frank made and a bottle of plum wine.
Frank injured himself making that potato salad. Emma had asked him very nicelky to make it so she could take it to a picnic in Berkeley. He was taking the boiled potatoes off the fire to drain them, and the big pot splashed scalding water on the ground, and he slipped on the hot water, and the pot and potatoes and all went flying and the pot hit him above the eyebrow. He curled up in a screaming ball on the floor and staunched his bleeding on the Persian carpet that keeps sneaking into the kitchen from the living room. I cleaned up and salvaged most of the potatoes he tended to his wound. Being an EMT he knows how to do this: it's not what mommies do. For the first hour or so, no pain relievers of any kind and no ice. We had gotten this powder you sprinkle on a wound to encourage scabbing, and he used that, and said he wanted to bruise some because the problem with forehead cuts is that they gape and the bruising would help the wound close, and the pain relievers would all tend to slow down scabbing.
how to get blood out of a wool carpet: use a clean sponge, cold water, and hydrogen peroxide
Oh, the potato salad got made.
Rosemary's house is very close to McLaren Park in San Francisco, that is, it's in that area where the streets tend to be named after foreign capitals and so on. (why won't livejournal let me select text for cutting and pasting? What's up with that?)
I had a wonderful time, of course. It was for me like a family gathering is for other people. Most of the people were connected through my father and the old Suburban Palace collective, though others were connected in other similar ways. I got to see my baby great-niece and other youngster's I've known since they were but a wish and a promise. And Rosemary has a darling roommate, a kid who looks much younger than her 21 and has the cutest girly posters on the wall, you know, a little punk, a little Justin Timberlake, a little politics. The roommate has a sweet brindle miniature dachshund and adorable friends. They all wear those pants that sag off the but, with decorative underwear and three-inch belts, piercings, tattoos, cute little hairstyles, like a United Colors of Benetton ad -- they're even all somewhat dfferent colors, all alert, pleasant, vibrant.
And of course there was too much food.
One of her neighbors is a lunatic artist who has a crapton of mysterious objects piled up on the sidewalk outside his house. Most of the objects are commercial debris -- a mannikin, a huge head, two huge fake wagon wheels (I thought if I was true to my principles I would get him to sell me one for Bella's Wheel of Organisms. But dang, they were huge, too big to put into my car, and it would take a lot of Fimo animals to fill it up. I'm talking about Bella and Chain here, which I do intend to finish, especially after today). The coolest thing he had was his newest. From a distance it looked like a Pachinko game for giants. When you get close you see that it has a great huge map of San Francisco with inset maps of the Bay Area and California, and a bunch of buttons that light up notable places like San Francisco State University (cue annoyed rant about the naming of the three-tier college system in California) and Candlestick Park (which is how you know this thing is pretty old: since corporate naming rights that poor ballpark has been through several other names, and now it's called Monster Park after Monster.com, which is a shame). The artist himself, who is not really a lunatic when you talk to him, was wearing overalls that read "Goob." He said he collects overalls and I couldn't tell from his description whether he buys them new and has silly names put on them or whether he gets them used with the names already on them. He thinks "Goob" is short for "Goober Pyle," Gomer Pyle's dumber cousin. This is hard to tyhpe because the cat keeps having those weird rolling stretching fits that cats have. Like surly half-orgasms that knock your keyboard into your stomach and then they glare at you for interrupting them.
So I was pretty thrilled with meeting him and conversing with him -- not the cat, the artist. It put me in mind of Bella and Chain and I just knew this artistwill find his way into the book, complete with the name "Goob," but it will be his real name. Or real-ish, anyway.
I have a lot to say, here, which is why these cuts all over the place. You know what I wish? I wish that you could make it so that when you clicked on an lj-cut link you'd only see the extra text that pertains to that link, not the whole long version of the post. So that people could better choose how to read the post. Anyway, I seem to have discovered an allergy I did not have last week: one with potentially serious implications. I resent. I resent with both hands. I just spent over thirty dollars on various gourmet nut things to have for company and I don't think I can eat them.
Well, Rosemary lives in San Francisco, and whenever I take a long drive I like to have something munchy in the car to help me stay awake. So I got cashews, which are charming and have less fat than other nuts so I can fool myself I'm not eating that much. I'd been munching oin them a while and I realized that my mouth was very iunhappy. I thought "odd, maybe the cashews are irritating my mouth." I munched a little more and the bad feeling in my mouth really felt like an allergic reaction. So I threw the bag into the back of the car and drank water and kept driving and my mouth gradually felt better. Less prickly and scary feeling.
So I was at Rosemary's about an hour or more -- so maybe two, maybe as much as three hours after the cashew incident -- my arms began to itch hideously. I couldn't stop scratching. I broke the skin before I realized what I was doing. I took benadryl and thought about the cashew incident and decided I must be allergic to cashews now.
Cashew allergy is one of the ones where people sometimes have anaphylactic shock. It's also one of the ones where you don't have to eat or even touch the offender to have a reaction. Sometimes. It can be milder if it feels like it.
So like a good electronic age child I looked up cashew allergies in google and got contradictory advice. One site says that if you're allergic to cashews you should avoid pistachios and mangoes. Losing pstachios is sad, but I don't care about mangoes. Another site says if you're allergic to cashews you should avoid almons, poppies, pistachios, sunflower seeds, rye flour, sesame and kiwi!
Still another site says you should avoid all nuts, peanuts, wheat, milk and fish if you're allergic to cashews.
Cashews belong to the sumac family, along with poison sumac,poison ivy, and poison oak. We only have poison oak around here. Supposedly a sensitivity to cashews implies an extra sensitivity to poison oak. I'm not especially sensitive to poison oak -- I may or may not have had a mild and perplexing case last year. Or maybe it was something else. If I did, then there's a change, and maybe it goes with the new sensitivity to cashews (if that's what it was, and not a coincidence).
I don't like that my breathing is a little cruddy right now. I'm going to go take some more antihistamine and use the inhaler and go to bed.
Needless to say, I'm on a kind of moratorium on the whole nuts thing until I can get clear guidance.
But -- whine -- I love nuts!
Frank injured himself making that potato salad. Emma had asked him very nicelky to make it so she could take it to a picnic in Berkeley. He was taking the boiled potatoes off the fire to drain them, and the big pot splashed scalding water on the ground, and he slipped on the hot water, and the pot and potatoes and all went flying and the pot hit him above the eyebrow. He curled up in a screaming ball on the floor and staunched his bleeding on the Persian carpet that keeps sneaking into the kitchen from the living room. I cleaned up and salvaged most of the potatoes he tended to his wound. Being an EMT he knows how to do this: it's not what mommies do. For the first hour or so, no pain relievers of any kind and no ice. We had gotten this powder you sprinkle on a wound to encourage scabbing, and he used that, and said he wanted to bruise some because the problem with forehead cuts is that they gape and the bruising would help the wound close, and the pain relievers would all tend to slow down scabbing.
how to get blood out of a wool carpet: use a clean sponge, cold water, and hydrogen peroxide
Oh, the potato salad got made.
Rosemary's house is very close to McLaren Park in San Francisco, that is, it's in that area where the streets tend to be named after foreign capitals and so on. (why won't livejournal let me select text for cutting and pasting? What's up with that?)
I had a wonderful time, of course. It was for me like a family gathering is for other people. Most of the people were connected through my father and the old Suburban Palace collective, though others were connected in other similar ways. I got to see my baby great-niece and other youngster's I've known since they were but a wish and a promise. And Rosemary has a darling roommate, a kid who looks much younger than her 21 and has the cutest girly posters on the wall, you know, a little punk, a little Justin Timberlake, a little politics. The roommate has a sweet brindle miniature dachshund and adorable friends. They all wear those pants that sag off the but, with decorative underwear and three-inch belts, piercings, tattoos, cute little hairstyles, like a United Colors of Benetton ad -- they're even all somewhat dfferent colors, all alert, pleasant, vibrant.
And of course there was too much food.
One of her neighbors is a lunatic artist who has a crapton of mysterious objects piled up on the sidewalk outside his house. Most of the objects are commercial debris -- a mannikin, a huge head, two huge fake wagon wheels (I thought if I was true to my principles I would get him to sell me one for Bella's Wheel of Organisms. But dang, they were huge, too big to put into my car, and it would take a lot of Fimo animals to fill it up. I'm talking about Bella and Chain here, which I do intend to finish, especially after today). The coolest thing he had was his newest. From a distance it looked like a Pachinko game for giants. When you get close you see that it has a great huge map of San Francisco with inset maps of the Bay Area and California, and a bunch of buttons that light up notable places like San Francisco State University (cue annoyed rant about the naming of the three-tier college system in California) and Candlestick Park (which is how you know this thing is pretty old: since corporate naming rights that poor ballpark has been through several other names, and now it's called Monster Park after Monster.com, which is a shame). The artist himself, who is not really a lunatic when you talk to him, was wearing overalls that read "Goob." He said he collects overalls and I couldn't tell from his description whether he buys them new and has silly names put on them or whether he gets them used with the names already on them. He thinks "Goob" is short for "Goober Pyle," Gomer Pyle's dumber cousin. This is hard to tyhpe because the cat keeps having those weird rolling stretching fits that cats have. Like surly half-orgasms that knock your keyboard into your stomach and then they glare at you for interrupting them.
So I was pretty thrilled with meeting him and conversing with him -- not the cat, the artist. It put me in mind of Bella and Chain and I just knew this artistwill find his way into the book, complete with the name "Goob," but it will be his real name. Or real-ish, anyway.
I have a lot to say, here, which is why these cuts all over the place. You know what I wish? I wish that you could make it so that when you clicked on an lj-cut link you'd only see the extra text that pertains to that link, not the whole long version of the post. So that people could better choose how to read the post. Anyway, I seem to have discovered an allergy I did not have last week: one with potentially serious implications. I resent. I resent with both hands. I just spent over thirty dollars on various gourmet nut things to have for company and I don't think I can eat them.
Well, Rosemary lives in San Francisco, and whenever I take a long drive I like to have something munchy in the car to help me stay awake. So I got cashews, which are charming and have less fat than other nuts so I can fool myself I'm not eating that much. I'd been munching oin them a while and I realized that my mouth was very iunhappy. I thought "odd, maybe the cashews are irritating my mouth." I munched a little more and the bad feeling in my mouth really felt like an allergic reaction. So I threw the bag into the back of the car and drank water and kept driving and my mouth gradually felt better. Less prickly and scary feeling.
So I was at Rosemary's about an hour or more -- so maybe two, maybe as much as three hours after the cashew incident -- my arms began to itch hideously. I couldn't stop scratching. I broke the skin before I realized what I was doing. I took benadryl and thought about the cashew incident and decided I must be allergic to cashews now.
Cashew allergy is one of the ones where people sometimes have anaphylactic shock. It's also one of the ones where you don't have to eat or even touch the offender to have a reaction. Sometimes. It can be milder if it feels like it.
So like a good electronic age child I looked up cashew allergies in google and got contradictory advice. One site says that if you're allergic to cashews you should avoid pistachios and mangoes. Losing pstachios is sad, but I don't care about mangoes. Another site says if you're allergic to cashews you should avoid almons, poppies, pistachios, sunflower seeds, rye flour, sesame and kiwi!
Still another site says you should avoid all nuts, peanuts, wheat, milk and fish if you're allergic to cashews.
Cashews belong to the sumac family, along with poison sumac,poison ivy, and poison oak. We only have poison oak around here. Supposedly a sensitivity to cashews implies an extra sensitivity to poison oak. I'm not especially sensitive to poison oak -- I may or may not have had a mild and perplexing case last year. Or maybe it was something else. If I did, then there's a change, and maybe it goes with the new sensitivity to cashews (if that's what it was, and not a coincidence).
I don't like that my breathing is a little cruddy right now. I'm going to go take some more antihistamine and use the inhaler and go to bed.
Needless to say, I'm on a kind of moratorium on the whole nuts thing until I can get clear guidance.
But -- whine -- I love nuts!