(I was hoping to get one little posting done, a tiny thing I started working on yesterday morning, just to show that I could finish something, however trivial, before tackling the mountain of more ambitious postings sitting in my queue; and to then be able to get out in an anomalously hot and beautiful day, maybe take my walker around the block. And then, roughly every 30 minutes, something new came in to take me away from my minuscule task, some of it alarming and disastrous, but all requiring my attention. At the very end of the day (having left the house only to get my mail) I finished the playful “Sol is secretly queer”.
By then, I had another, even more minuscule, task to do today. And it’s been like a replay of yesterday. While I was describing yesterday to my caregiver, a pair of contractors — surprise! — appeared, seeking the water shutoff valve for my condo and the one above it, so that they could get on with repair work in the condo above me. Half an hour of complex negotiations followed, then my water was off for several hours while workmen trooped in and out. While this was going on, I was obliged to do complicated advance sign-ins on-line for upcoming medical appointments. And now I return to my bit of domestic trivia.
I have not wept. I have not raged. I am, inexplicably, in a good frame of mind (and my vital signs are wonderful). I created an excellent soup for lunch out of random leftovers. I haven’t been able to work my weekly shower into the schedule (well, there was the 7 am grocery delivery, not expected until 10), but what the hell, there’s always tomorrow. I am wearing my FAGGOT t-shirt; I am faggot, hear me roar. I will, somehow, be able to do this.)
Yesterday, on Facebook, Toni Borowsky posted plaintively about a device that was supposed to open cans that have ring-pulls:
— TB: Damn thing doesn’t work — or I’m doing it wrong.
— AZ > TB: I’m sorry it doesn’t work. For a while I just had to wait until one of the days my caregiver comes by, so he could do it. Then I got a mongo can opener and used that. But an assistive device would have been nice. (My nightmare is that when I become unable to open pull-top cans or get the protective seals off jars, I will be put into a nursing home, which I view as a death sentence with a polite veneer. )
Anthea Fraser Gupta then offered a device for screw top jars [AZ: It turns out there are many ingenious devices for this purpose]
— AZ > AFG: I have a wonderful device for screw-top lids and caps. Unfortunately, I don’t know what it’s called. [It was found for me years ago.]
But then (a bit later):
Found it! The OXO Good Grips jar opener:
(#1) Bottom view, showing the toothed edge than can grab anything from a small cap to a wide lid; note the cutout on the face of the device, which shows the user which way to turn the device; and the thick, sturdy handle
(#2) A view showing the Good Grips at work on a small cap; like my mongo can opener, it provides an enormous mechanical advantage, crucial for someone with painfully weak fingers
(My insertion of the images in Facebook was all balled up — I clearly don’t understand how to do it — but both images got posted, even though they were attached in peculiar places)
A note about Toni Borowsky. TB was born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa in 1951. She got her PhD in linguistics from UMass – Amherst in 1986, with the dissertation Topics in the Lexical Phonology of English. She now lives in Australia.
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