Arnold Zwicky's Blog

A rambling account of an excellent Saturday morning — which started at 1:30 am, after  an especially fine 8½-hour sleep (more on that later) and eventually brought me to the realization that I was about to run out of some grocery staples (celery, carrots, salad greens, citrus fruit — mandarins or clementines) three days earlier than expected, so at 6 am I put an order in for these groceries from the local Safeway, via Instacart.

Now, I’d never grocery-shopped on a Saturday before — maybe they’d be out of a lot of things by this point in the week — but I forged ahead, and paid $2 for delivery within two hours (so as not to interfere with Elizabeth when she arrived to allot 119 doses of medicine into 28 compartments in 7 little plastic boxes for the week, a task my painful disabled hands can’t manage). Almost instantly, the Instacart shopper found everything on my shopping list, no substitutions, and passed the order on to a delivery person, who turned up at my door at, omigod, 6:40, while I was just beginning my second breakfast (when you get up at 1:30 and have breakfast at 2:30, you’re ready for another meal at 6:30).  Next thing to magic.

Rambling on. The first breakfast was a fairly normal American-crunchy breakfast: a bowl of granola topped by fruit-and-nuts trail mix and fresh blueberries, with plain yogurt, and a glass of cold unsweetened cold-brewed black coffee (ok, the coffee is genuinely eccentric).

The second breakfast? Some reheated leftover extra-cheese all-meat pizza (with lots of red pepper flakes for tang) from Five Star Pizza in Palo Alto, plus the last of the previous stock of mandarins.  Deeply satisfying.

In between the breakfasts, I washed the breakfast dishes; looked up the procedure for renewing my CA senior ID card (fraught with problems); sent a pair of complex messages to my caregivers; did the on-line advance check-in for my Tuesday medical appointment at PAMF; shaved; made my bed (a challenging task for someone as disabled as I am, but I wanted to make the house look nice for visitors); searched out several quotations for use in another posting I’m working on; checked out my comics feed and comments on my Facebook page; and used a box cutter to reduce to small pieces of cardboard the three boxes the latest shipment of my green-tea teabags came in (this used to take me more than an hour of painful, tiring labor, but I have evolved an efficient skilled routine for doing the job — the box cutter is absolutely essential — so now it takes only 10 minutes; cardboard has to be chopped into small pieces to go into the Palo Alto recycling bin). There might have been more; I multitask a lot.

(MSNBC usually plays in the background of my activities, so I keep up on what’s happening in the world, but their news was not yet functioning when I started my day, so I half-watched some old episodes of Third Rock from the Sun for a while. Which I found remarkably unpleasant; how could I ever have enjoyed this program?)

Last night’s sleep. Was unbelievably satisfying. I went to bed at 5, dead tired after a long day of little achievements yesterday, and fell almost instantly to sleep. Then came a long series of (varied) story dreams, a few about sexual encounters, but most not; all vivid and eventful and pleasant — not a single pursuit or torture dream in the lot.

Since I live in Diuresis City, I awoke hourly (at or near the quarter-hour) to whizz. As I’ve written on this blog before, when things are going smoothly (as they were last night), I awake, stand up and brace myself against the side of the bed to whizz into one of the two hospital urinals on the table of my walker, right alongside the bed, and then subside back into the bed and sleep, all in under 30 seconds.

The whizzing itself is immensely pleasurable, and while I’m doing it, I’m getting fine music from my Apple Music app, which plays all night in my bedroom. Last night, by happy chance, the entire night was taken up with the Mozart piano concertos. All of them. This is some of my favorite music in all the world (I have played the piano part for some of it), and several times I wanted to stay awake a bit longer and actually listen to the current movement develop (Mozart is full of delicate surprises, and lots of playfulness and joy), but I was already falling back into sleep and needed to roll back into bed.

I actually came back to full consciousness around 1:15, right on the whizz schedule, but drowsed around in bed for 15 minutes as plans for the day crowded my mind, until I realized that I really was up. I gave thanks (as usual on awakening) for having been granted one more day of life, and also for having been granted that extraordinary night of sleep.

And discovered that both my urinals were full to their very tops, so that I had to roll the walker very slowly and carefully to the bathroom, where I could empty them into the toilet.

And then through the morning bathroom routines, which normally take about 20 minutes and include taking my levothyroxine tablet, after which I have to wait an hour before eating anything — but I can drink my green tea and start the day’s work.

Which continued, after my second breakfast (and clearing up after it) with the posting you are now reading.

This entry was posted on May 20, 2023 at 10:04 am and is filed under Language and food, Language and medicine, Language and the body, Music, My life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.