Arnold Zwicky's Blog

I’ll be posting separately about the margins of sleep time; this is about how my days go once I get past the starting-the-day stage (which came at 1 am today). Well, it’s about how this day went, and this particular day happened to include hot and sour green bean, chickpea, and brown rice soup (which doesn’t come along very often).

By 5:20, I’d had breakfast (around 2:30 am, waiting over an hour after I’d taken my thyroid medication) and cleaned up the dishes, shaved, made my bed, checked my blood pressure (fine), collected all the trash (including the nasty smelly trash in the bathroom) in a big plastic bag to go out to the trash bins for pick-up, took a pile of stuff to the recycling bin, had three sizable bowel movements each requiring sudden rapid action to get to the toilet in time (success! but you can see why I don’t go out for restaurant meals), started making a big pot of soup for lunch (using left-over Chinese food), finished a posting on a Bizarro cartoon (postable when my aws access is fixed), emptied the various urinals scattered around my house, started a posting about my sleep schedule, took some compostable garbage out to throw on the garden strip in my front patio, ordered backup tea bags and Kleenex from Amazon.

MSNBC goes on in the background all day, providing me with lots of news and commentary — some of it thoughtful and informative, some of it soothingly repetitive, some of it arresting and attention-grabbing.

Then at 6 am I put in a big grocery order from Safeway via Instacart, for rapid delivery (everything was available on the shelves, and the stuff was delivered about 40 minutes later; I put it away in the fridge and cabinets). Brought in the New York Times from my doorstep, put some sections in the recycling pile, skimmed the others. Shortly after that I did a load of cool-water laundry (waiting a while so the washer wouldn’t annoy the neighbors too much); that laundry is now dried, folded, and put away. Had a snack of shrimp ceviche around 6 to tide me over until lunch — the soup — between 9 and 10.

At 10:30, I’m about to do the coconut oiling of my legs and arms. Hope to be able to do some shapenote singing — both pleasure and prescribed therapy — later; my voice is coming back.

I’m wearing a black tank top with gay as fuck in white lettering on it. Will probably not be rambling in-your-face on the streets of Palo Alto, though; it’s already 83 F and still going up.

All of this I do unfrantically — just very steady, slow work, moving from one thing to another, with my walker (except for the panicked races to the toilet). Well, there’s a lot of time, and no interruptions. Some of the ADLs (activities of daily living, as they say in the therapy trade) are genuinely challenging exercise. And I can now do them smoothly, without fear of falling, even bending my knees without too much pain in my knee joints.

Life consists of medical activities of one kind or another (including taking all those pills, in 5 installments per day); a huge schedule of domestic maintenance; and posting stuff (on my blog, in e-mail, and to friends on Facebook — my connections to people in the outside world). That’s very nearly all there is. (Well, some of you will recall the sex breaks. I’ve been too busy for one today so far. But the day is not yet over.)

Now, using the leftover dry-fried string beans and brown rice from a Chinese food order:

Hot and sour green bean, chickpea, and brown rice soup, on a base of finely chopped bean thread, carrots, and celery, long simmered with herbs and spices (the chopping made possible by a utensil specially developed for the disabled and the frail elderly)  — with soy sauce, Tabasco sauce and vinegar added to the broth.

The whole operation  took about 5 hours (most soup is a long-term operation). Yielding  a very thick, flavorful, and crunchy soup, most satisfying. With enough left over for at least one more meal.

Then the long process of washing up, all done by 10 am and now behind me.  The day slips on past me.

This entry was posted on August 7, 2023 at 11:24 am and is filed under Language and food, 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.