Some news from my house, mostly to explain why there isn’t an actual posting today.
There is, first, affliction news, some of it good, some of it deeply annoying.
Affliction 1: the respiratory virus. Not RSV, but something. It has been moderating, and is now essentially gone, leaving me with only my background sinus infection. This is truly wonderful, and its passing was signaled by the (fairly spectacular) return of my sex drive yesterday. More on suppression of sex drive as a symptom of infection, and on the benefits of its return (beyond, well, physical pleasure) in another posting.
Affliction 2: what I’d started calling the Sleep Monster (which has already stolen a large chunk of this day). Sudden-onset, irresistible, roughly two-hour chunks of deep sleep (accompanied at the end, and sometimes at the beginning, by a liminal period of visual hallucinations). Essentially, I pass out, with a short warning period beforehand. It just appeared out of the blue about a month ago.
A lot of my conscious time today was spent rooting around for information about conditions resembling this one, which I’d started playfully thinking of as monster-sized, or industrial-strength, narcolepsy. (Ordinary narcolepsy I knew a fair amount about. A crucial fact about it is that it’s an auto-immune condition; and oh dear, I live in a dense forest of auto-immune conditions.) Well, it turns out that narcolepsy is amazingly variable, and I seem to have a variant, complete with the hallucinations, which are well-known.
Insert stream of vile epithets here.
A lot more to be said about the condition, but not here, today.
Thanksgiving dinner for one. Yesterday I managed to assemble and combine the materials — delivered from the closest LuLu’s Mexican restaurant — for an eccentric Thanksgiving posole (which I used to actually prepare from scratch and cook, for Jacques and me) — but then the stew comes in so many variants that it would be hard to describe any of them as truly eccentric. An enormous amount of stew, including a relatively small bowl of it that I used today as the basis for an astounding garbanzo stew. (Thus creating one big bowl for lunch today, another bowl saved for another time.)
More on all this stew stuff in another posting, along with an explanation of why I’ve abandoned my recent standard Thanksgiving meal — vermicelli Singapore-style and crunchy green beans — in favor of a return to posole. (For other posolistas: I go pork (not chicken, though I note that El Pollo Loco makes a damn good chicken posole that needs just a bit of spicing up), white hominy (not yellow), and red sauce (not green, though posole verde with chicken is fabulous)).
(For those of you who are cooking at home, consider using some of that fine dark leftover turkey meat in a posole.)
The magic slipper / moccasins from L.L. Bean. In the midst of all this, the indoor / outdoor shearling-lined suede shoes (from the Wallin company) I mostly live in pretty much fell apart and had to be replaced. I geared up to replace them, did a Google search on them, got a page showing what were surely those very shoes, but from L.L. Bean, went to my LLB account and was immediately presented with the catalog page for those shoes, without having to search through the catalog; no magic there, but a good thing (given the narcolepsy, my time is precious).
But, eerily, the page was already filled out with all the details of my Wallin shoes (which were a knockoff of LLB’s, and came to me as a present from my daughter): size, width, color, all just perfect. I have no idea how they worked that, but the whole transaction took, like 10 minutes from my Google search to the shipping information.
The shoes arrived late yesterday afternoon. They are perfect.
Yes, I know, I owe you a huge bunch of postings, to complete ones hastily tossed out in the fog of illness.
November 24, 2022 at 8:02 am |
You know, you don’t “owe” us anything. I take great pleasure in these postings, but I don’t consider them in any way my due, and I expect this is an attitude shared by most if not all of your readers.
I’m glad to hear your respiratory symptoms are resolving; my sympathies for the other stuff.
November 24, 2022 at 9:27 am |
Well, I’ve promised to complete some postings and to give fuller accounts of others that were brutally condensed. Those are promises I intended to keep, things I owe my readers. It is, I admit, difficult to live day to day, as I am trying to do, and also honor promises about the future.
November 24, 2022 at 9:44 am |
What Robert said