Category: miscellaneous

The Wife’s Colors Dream

First, I had this dream about sharing my apple pie with a young woman. As she was eating my crust, my wife came along. I went off to talk to her.

My wife and I ended up in what seemed to be a living room. Other family members were vaguely int the area. But my wife came to me and said, “I want you to look at my colors and tell me what you see.”

And I was all, “Huuuhhh?”

Other than being Caucasian as my wife, this dream wife didn’t look at all like RL wife, even though she’d started out as RL wife. Her hair was darker, heavier, and longer, and she had this pale, long, face with bright red lippy.

Second, she was dressed like a goth.

Third, she was holding up some kind of panel in front of her.

I thought the panel was a mirror at first. Then I saw that it reflected with nothing but swirled with images that reminded me of melting steel. I was trying to answer my wife’s request to tell you what colors I was seeing and describe her clothes, skin, and hair. She unleashed a heavy exasperated sigh at me and said, “Not those colors.”

Then I saw the mirror thingy was changing. Yellows and oranges were emerging, along with lesser spots of apple green and pine green. There was also a stretched out blotch of purple that was so dark, it was almost black.

I described these things to her, and then, somehow, I knew the colors had to do with her health, and told her, “I think you can change these colors. Just think of the color that you want to be, and that’ll happen.”

She was doubtful but almost immediately, a soothing fair blue swept across the mirror.

Dream end.

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Wednesday’s Wandering Thoughts

The area’s electric power went down. It was a valley-wide outage affecting all of our little city, along with several other small cities. Turned out to be a major transmission line failure. A crew went out and found and fixed it.

Electricity ceased about 11:24 AM. I was at my writing haunt, which is a locally known coffee shop. It was suddenly so quiet, and a little darker. “The power is out,” a barista exclaimed.

Only three customers were in the shop. One barista looked over at me and asked, “What did you do, Michael?”

I was innocent, of course. We were all told to leave. Turned out it wasn’t just that little corner of existence.

I drove home. All the traffic lights were out. People were handling it with courtesy and awareness in my part of town, but others later said they witnessed some flagrant driver idiocy. Takes all kinds, we agreed.

It’s weird how something like this can affect the day. Like, okay, power is out. I drove home. Clicked on the garage door opener to verify it didn’t work and parked in the driveway. Went in with a key to the side door. I was thinking what will I do with this time? Well, I can still write on the computer. I just won’t be on the net. Battery will last a while. Or I can dust furniture or cut the lawn.

A smoke detector was announcing that its battery was on low. So I located it, got out the small metal step ladder and took care of that. I remember my wife not wanting me to purchase those little steps. “Just use a chair,” she urged. But I figured we were adults and should have the proper tool for the job, so I paid the $40 for the stairs.

My wife then arrived home. She didn’t have any house keys, and I saw her trying to ring the doorbell. After I let her in, we wondered, what does work for us? Can we get texts and make phone calls? She had one text from the county telling about the outage. I called her. Her phone rang but we couldn’t connect.

So we sat and talked. Not like we don’t sit and talk every day but something new is always coming up. Then I get a text from my sister saying, “I see trump just screwed up again.”

I texted back, “what happened? We don’t have power.” But my text wouldn’t go. How could I receive a text but not send one?

Fifteen minutes later, the power was back on. It too much longer than the outage lasted to return to the rhythm of the day.

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Wednesday’s Theme Music

Mood: Wednesdaycopic

This is it, the last day of July of 2024. It’s gonna roll on without you so hurry on down to the Last Chance Saloon to get your final taste of July of 2024.

July was a tumltuous month. The RNC was held and Don Old Trump wisely chose a lying hypocritical sycophant as his running mate. An assassination attempt enlivened the news days. Judge Cannon, a Don Old Trump appointee, dismissed the classified document case on him with reasoning that shocked legal experts. Heat records were set for the planet. Disasters unfolded across the world, including wildfires throughout the United States, and the stock market continued going up. President Biden dropped out of the running to be POTUS again, Vice President Harris leaped into the fray, and the Olympics began. Those are just the basics.

It’s Wednesday here in Ashlandia, where the wine is fine and the weed does the deed. 73 F now, we’re anticipating a high of 97 F. I’m awaiting my furnace control board so I can continue my DIY repairs on my HVAC. I haven’t been working on it because of the high heat. Although we both agree, we’ve been surprising comfortable about ninety percent of the time, my wife is beginning to show signs of impatience.

Our quality is good, still, ranging in the 20 to 30 range around town.

We’re under 100 days until the election. Think it’s 98 now. The pressure is getting ratcheted up. Don Old Trump is looking shaky these days. Vance is offering little reassurance in his early performances.

In other words, they’re under pressure. The Neurons selected “Under Pressure” from the grey mental jukebox and has the David Bowie and Queen collaboration from 1981 is rousing the morning mental music stream (Trademark carbonized). Hope it works for you as theme music for today.

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Sunday’s Wandering Thoughts

I don’t know what I’ve done to Liberty Mutual. They’re a small insurance company. Yeah, that’s snark.

Liberty Mutual does a lot of television advertising. Most of it is pretty corny stuff but with exposure and repetition, you do remember who they are. Guess that’s their goal.

This week, they’ve begun calling me and leaving me voice messages every. Fucking. Day. They also send me three to five text messages every. Fucking. Day. And they call me Vincent.

I don’t know why they turned on me like that. We went for years, ignoring each other. Now, I actively hate them. Their company’s name is forever linked to irritation and annoyance. Just thinking, ‘Liberty Mutual’ has me grinding my teeth.

I sure as hell will never be a client.

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Friday’s Wandering Thought

I watched a crane fly in my house. You know them? Many people mistakenly call the mosquito eaters because they look like giant mosquitos.

Like many of them that I’ve observed inside, this one was banging against the wall, bouncing off and flying back into it.

I thought, what a life. What a way to spent your time.

Then I realized how many people are like that crane fly, doing the same thing over and over again, never learning, never changing.

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Limitations

I limit what I share. That’s true in life and includes my blogging.

One, I’m a private individual. Two, I don’t want it to appear as if I don’t respect and appreciate that I have it pretty good. Three, I’m boring and lead a boring life. At the same time, I sometimes decide to share because I endure something in isolation, hunting information, coping and struggling. I suspect that I’m not alone.

So, Ima gonna talk about my feet and ankles. Yes, but this is actually about edema, sodium, and hypertension.

Hypertension has plagued me my entire life. Brief doctor checkups were required when I was a child in my early teens first trying out for an organized sport. The first time, the physician said two things: “You have high blood pressure, and your ears need cleaned.”

When I was in the military, physicians would regularly order me to go through a week of coming into the clinic, hospital, or infirmary daily to check my blood pressure every day. I never paid much attention to it. It was always kind of high and never changed.

I should have been paying attention. That’s on me and my overconfidence and ignorance.

My hypertension finally caught up with me and began manifesting as edema several years ago. I have Mom’s very slender ankles, ankles which my wife always envied. Now they’re puffy. Swollen. Discolored. Stiff.

My healthcare team isn’t quite sure what causes my edema, whether it’s actually my lymph nodes, or venous insufficiency. I don’t want to oversimplify; multiple factors influence it. I always figure venous insufficiency played a large part, but I’ve also discovered that my body doesn’t deal well with sodium. Sodium is used in cooking, baking, and food processing as flavoring and a binding agent and preservative. My body decided it can’t stand sodium. When my blood results come back, high sodium levels always stand out as critically high.

This all came to a huge issue for me when I sprained my right ankle, first in May, then again in June. Both times, I was just moving when — snap – crack — my right ankle gave out and I went down in a blaze of pain.

The second time this happened, I couldn’t believe how much my foot and ankle swelled. Suckers ballooned into huge sizes. Shoes would not fit, limiting my footwear and activities.

I’ve been on amlodipine for several years to help with my blood pressure. I’d quit taking it for reasons I couldn’t even quite define for myself. I don’t know what I was thinking, for real. I resumed the med in early June. But when I went in for my annual check with my PCP in late June, my BP was 169/89. That concerned her.

It concerned me as well. She urged me to track my BP for two weeks and report the results back to her. Take your blood pressure morning and evening every day, she said. If it stayed high, we would need to address my meds. I agreed.

The first week’s results were horrendous. My right foot and ankle were also regularly swollen during that period. So was my left ankle. All of this was depressing. After the first week, I stopped tracking my blood pressure for a day because I was so upset. I had to make changes.

I’d been watching my sodium levels since the edema began manifesting. Now I carried it to hyper-vigilant levels. High levels of sodium are in so many foods. Condiments like mayo and mustard were gone, along with any salad dressings, pickles, olives, etc. I mean, I’d already cut them substantially back but now they were completely verboten. I’d treat myself to bacon once in a while before; no more. The butter we use has sodium; it was cut off. Bread was cut out. Rolls. Cheese. Salsa. Guacamole. Many favorite foods were simply eliminated from my diet. Raw fruits and veggies, which I’d always eaten in regular quantities, were eaten more frequently. I also increased my water intake. I cut down on my coffee consumption, and whenever I go to the coffee shop, I order a glass of water with my coffee. Desserts and treats are off the table.

The results paid off. My two-week average when I turned in my records to my PCP was 134/79. I had several second week readings in the 120/70 range. I had one reading of 117/72, and another of 106/69. My right foot’s swelling subsided. My ankles’ swelling declined. Besides that, I lost six pounds and an inch off my waist. I became more limber and flexible and slept better.

What I sort of realized/hypothesized was that the edema and swelling which I saw in my feet and ankles were happening internally as well. As things reacted to more fluids and less sodium, that unseen swelling also diminished.

Anyway, that’s my story. If you’re out there dealing with hypertension, high blood pressure, and struggling with edema and sodium, you’re not alone. I feel for you. I hope you can make changes and that those changes result in improvements.

They did for at least for me. It’s not over, though. I remain on that strict, almost completely sodium-free diet. Sometimes, we need to face it, this is how it must be.

And that’s how it is.

Cheers

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The Russian Military Dream

I had a cavalcade of dreams last night. One stood out more strongly than the rest. I was in the military for over twenty years. Not infrequently, I find myself in the military again in dreams. It was so again last night.

In this one, I’d been selected for a new position. I was an E7 master sergeant, which is what I retired as. My predecessor, training me, was an E9 chief master sergeant. He was telling me that this position was a catapult to promotion if I do it right, and he thought I’d do it right. Hearing all that pleased me.

Then he gave me a black attaché case. “You’ll always be carrying this,” he said. “You are now the Russian nuke guy. That’s what everyone will start calling you.”

I’d had some idea of what I’d be stepping into even though it’d been a pretty close-hold process. They’d checked my security clearance and records, noted that I’d been on the Personnel Reliability Program because I’d controlled nukes. My top-secret clearance with all the tags of SI, SCI, TK and TQ that came with being associated with a covert intelligence program pleased them, too. Now I got why.

The Chief was explaining that I would be regularly briefed about anything and everything associated with Russia’s nuclear weapons. Locations, capabilities, changes, updates, whatever. Everything from personnel, process, and equipment. I’d be told everything, constantly. The idea was that I would be the national command authority’s primary go-to if any questions about Russia’s nukes came up.

Then he began taking me around offices, introducing me as ‘the new Russian nuke guy’, explaining that I was replacing him. Everyone shook my hand and welcomed me.

The dream ended while I was still in that process.

I have no idea what it all means but I found it weirdly reassuring, because I’d been selected. I was needed. That kind of thing feels validating, you know?

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Tuesday’s Wandering Thoughts

A young middle-aged woman is at a table with a middle middle-aged man. That’s how they appear to be experienced but amateur eye. Both are attractive. She’s in light grey yoga pants and he’s in khaki hiking shorts. He’s tall, with graying curly hair, while her brunette hair sweeps away from her face and lightly lands on her shoulders. The two are so average white people of the Pacific Northwest. I notice them in the same way as I note others in the coffee shop.

But then, what makes her memorable, after they disposed of their coffee cups at the busing station, she methodically moves through the coffee shop, straightening up the chairs. He goes over and stands by the door, waiting for her to finish. She joins him and they depart, leaving the tidy tables and chairs behind.

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Monday’s Wandering Thoughts

Out for a break from writing, I was walking up Walker Street in front of SOU’s derelict houses. A doe just finished giving birth to a fawn in one of the yards. Hearing me, Mom turned attention my way, and then sniffed and licked her newborn. Standing, the tiny creature took a few tentative steps. Then Mom gave me another long look. I called out, “Be smart, stay safe, my friends.” Big ears coming my way, Mom and baby turned together and watched me continue my walk.

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