Author Archives: kzmclain

Got Staples?

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Before I go any further, I need to say God bless medical personnel. All medical personnel. Doctors, nurses, respiratory or radiation technicians, CNAs, phlebotomists….you name it, I admire them. More than I would wish of the last 10 percent of my life has been spent with lots of medical people. What I feel when I spend any time around folks in the medical field is gratitude and a strong understanding that if you offered me an annual salary of $500,000, I could not work as even a Candy Striper.  Blood makes me woozy. Vomit makes me throw up. Needles give me the willies. I accidentally drop pills down the drain.

Yesterday afternoon I took Bec for her two-week surgical follow-up. If you are counting on your fingers, you are correct that it has not been two weeks since she had surgery. In fact, yesterday was a week and a day. Still, she had scheduled her follow-up for Thursday (which, of course, is still not two weeks; just sayin’), but an issue with her bandage arose that required an earlier appointment. Because of the appointment change, she knew she would not be seeing her surgeon, but a physician’s assistant instead.

We were put into an examination room, and within minutes, a young man in perhaps his early-to-middle 20s wearing a track suit comes in and cheerfully greets us. He asks all of the right questions. How are you doing? How is your pain? Are you getting around alright?

He then instructs her to pull down her pants so he could look at her surgical site. She did so.

“You have staples?” he said with great surprise in his voice.

Despite his apparent surprise, he left and returned with a medical version of a staple remover, and began snipping staples. As he snipped, he offhandedly said, “So this is your two-week follow-up?”

Bec replied that it really was only a week plus a day, but she had an issue with her bandage that brought her in earlier. He immediately stopped snipping. I sensed a bit of panic.

“Does that change your thoughts about removing the staples?” I asked him. He admitted that it might, and went to get Someone More Important.

After he left, Bec and I looked at each other. Who do you suppose he is, we wondered. Bec swallowed hard. Maybe the maintenance man?

Our friend returned with someone who certainly looked at least a bit older, so hopefully more experienced. He looked at her surgical site and said with great surprise in his voice, “You have staples?”

At this point I began to wonder if perhaps the surgeon had been rummaging through a drawer the morning of the surgery looking for some Lifesavers and found some unused staples and decided that waste not, want not was a motto by which he would live.

This man left to get Someone Even More Important. At this point Bec and I were just hoping it would be someone not wearing a track suit.

The two of them return with a woman who seemed very experienced, and she looked at the surgical site. Bec and I held our breath. The staples either didn’t bother her or she had been forewarned before entering the room that perhaps gasping at the sight of staples wasn’t doing anybody any good.

“It looks great,” she said. “Keep snipping.” Not a word about staples.

The bottom line is that Bec got a great report, she no longer has staples in her leg (and perhaps never should have), and instead of surgical gauze, she has little bandages that will remove themselves at their own pace. By next week, she can drive a car.

But the best news is that as the young man in the track suit left the room, he didn’t grab the trash can on the way out. It gave us great hope that he wasn’t actually the maintenance man.

No Neighbor Problems

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To get to Lincoln, Nebraska, from my home town of Columbus, you drive south out of town on state highway 81; 81 ends as it meets state highway 92 just east of Osceola; you turn east on state highway 92 until you get to David City; you then turn south on state highway 15 until you get to Seward, where you then make your way into Lincoln.

At least that’s how I remember it.

Somewhere before you get to Seward, there was a small two-lane road that signage told us would take you into the town of Bee, Nebraska if you turned left. Population 156. I made the drive between Columbus and Lincoln about a million times because I attended the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, and, unlike most of my friends, I was a homesick freshman. So I would catch a ride any weekend in which someone I knew was going home.

My confession of homesickness relates to my story only because as I would drive (or ride, as the case may be) to and fro so often, I would pass that sign for Bee, population 156, and wonder what it was like to live in a town of 156 people. Keep in mind, I didn’t live in a huge metro area; however, my home town had in the neighborhood of 10,000 people at the time, and that felt perfect to me. We had three or four grocery stores, many churches, a city park, a thriving downtown WITH A BAKERY, three high schools (two public and one Catholic), and plenty of places to eat (though no fast food joints when I lived there). We even had a community college.

I’m guessing Bee maybe had a few small homes, a gas station, a post office in need of paint, a teeny-tiny food market, and a bar. Always a bar.

I remember always thinking that I would be comfortable living in a small town. On the other hand, Bec couldn’t wait until she got to a city where everybody DIDN’T know your name. She has told me that even as a small girl, she imagined living in a city the size of Washington, D.C. And she, of course, actually has lived in not just that city, but other cities for most of her adult life.

But not me. To this day, I will imagine how lovely it would be to live in a little village the size of the fictional Mitford, NC. And then I have to remind myself that while Mitford has a wonderful food market with anything Father Tim needs to make a gourmet meal, in real life that same market would have canned goods, snacking chips, a small variety of meat, beer and pop, and sad looking fruit. There would be no multi-plex movie theaters, no pho (unless you lived in a village in Vietnam), and no liquor store with an enviable wine selection. The hardware store would be the only place to buy ladies’ underwear and toothbrushes.

Recently a friend of mine posted a story on Facebook about a very real town on the north border of Nebraska called Monowi. In Nebraska, the town/city boundary signs list the name of the town/city and its population. As of this photo, you can see that Monowi had 2 residents…..

According to the story published by the BBC, there remains only one – 84-year-old Elsie Eiler. Since the photo was taken, her husband Rudy died. She is the only remaining permanent resident, though the tavern seems to attract a bit of a crowd. According to Elsie herself, she “pays taxes to herself, grants her own liquor license, and is the only remaining resident.”

She goes on to say, “When I apply to the state for my liquor and tobacco licenses each year, they send them to the secretary of the village, which is me. So I get them as the secretary, sign them as the clerk and give them to myself as the bar owner.”

The story is worth the effort it would take to click on the link, if only for the photography.

By the way, I checked the population of Bee, Nebraska. It had 191 people in the 2010 Census. A population boom from the days when I drove past the sign, wondering who could possibly live in Bee, Nebraska. Perhaps it’s on its way from a village to a township. Maybe it will even be on the map someday. Go Bee.

Every Day’s a Holiday

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Recently, Bill and I decided to have breakfast out. Pancakes sounded good to me. We had some errands to run, so we began talking about where to have our breakfast. There was an IHOP in the vicinity of our errands, and since I love their double blueberry pancakes, we decided that would be our breakfast destination.

That particular IHOP – and really, all breakfast places in east Mesa – are quite busy on weekends what with people wanting breakfast after church or families with working parents enjoying a relatively low-cost meal out on a weekend morning. Sometimes you can wait up to an hour at even mediocre restaurants. But this was a random Tuesday and it was a little after 9 o’clock in the morning. We decided that all the seniors will have eaten and men and women conducting business over breakfast will be long gone.

When we pulled into the IHOP parking lot, it looked busier than I had anticipated. Still, ever optimistic, we parked behind the restaurant and headed towards the front door. When we turned the corner, much to our surprise, there were people everywhere. Waiting outside; waiting inside; milling about in the parking lot. Lots of folks.

I made my way to the front counter to put our name onto the list, jockeying past wheelchairs and walkers and little kids running here and there. The wait was longer than we expected, and since we had those aforementioned errands, we decided to go elsewhere. As we turned to go, we began wondering aloud just why the restaurant was so busy on a random weekday morning.  Suddenly I saw the sign on the window. NATIONAL PANCAKE DAY. A FREE STACK OF PANCAKES FOR EVERY DINER.

In the words of my favorite fictional Episcopalian priest of Mitford fame, Father Tim, “Aha.” Seniors in our part of the East Valley are not ones to turn down a free stack of pancakes. As for Bill and me, we would pay cash money for our pancakes and go somewhere with a shorter wait. Village Inn’s pancakes sufficed just fine, though they were not free…..

Did you know that every day of the year is National Some-Kind-of-Food-Or-Another Day? For example, today is National Cheese Doodle Day. Since I had to look up what a cheese doodle was, I am not going to feature a recipe…..

Turns out I eat cheese doodles all the time (though admittedly I prefer the crunchy kind). I’m not sure one can actually make one’s own cheese doodles. It appears a corporation had enough money to buy itself a food day. They look like Cheetos to me, but whoever makes Cheetos wasn’t foresighted enough to get itself a “day.” I wonder if IHOP is giving away a free bowl of Cheese Doodles today.

I was marginally aware that there was such a thing as food holidays, but it still caught me off-guard when Bill dropped this hint this past January 26: Hey Kris, did you know that tomorrow is National Chocolate Cake Day? Just sayin’.

As it happened, I had inadvertently purchased a box of Ghirardelli Chocolate Cake Mix a couple of weeks previously when I thought I was purchasing Ghirardelli Brownie Mix. Bill is a fan of the chocolate brownie. Oddly, the cake mix only made one layer, but I knew that if I added a chocolate ganache, it would make him smile…..

…..and it did. He was caught off guard since he had no preconceived notions that his hint would actually be heard by his loving wife. How he knew that January 27 was National Chocolate Cake Day remains a mystery. Perhaps he has every National Something-Chocolate Day marked on his calendar.

If I forget to tell you tomorrow, Happy National Oreo Day (another holiday about which Bill can get excited).

Saturday Smile: World Famous

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As part of my Thursday Thoughts this week, I included a paragraph about Jen and how she was going to buy Austin a new Garmin step counter and then have lunch. He told his mom it was going to be the best day of his life. On Thursday morning, Jen showed Austin his photo on my blog and read him what I had written. His exuberant response? Oh my gosh! Now everybody in the whole wide world can see me! I am happy in his confidence about my readership. While it’s true that potentially everyone in the world COULD see him, I’m afraid my loyal readership doesn’t include the whole wide world…..

As for Lilly, her response? How come there’s no picture of me?

So here you go, Lilly. Now everyone in the whole wide world can see you too…..

Have a great weekend.

Friday Book Whimsy: The Third Wife

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Adrian Wolfe has been married three times. Twice divorced with children from each marriage, he has maintained friendships with all of his wives, and they with each other. The third try, however, doesn’t end on quite as positive a note. His third wife is hit by a bus one night after spending the evening drinking. Did she commit suicide? Was she pushed? And why was she out drinking anyway?

The author of The Third Wife is one of my favorite writers – Lisa Jewell. Her puzzlers are always truly puzzling and her characters are all realistic and flawed, but mostly likeable. This book was no exception. It was interesting to look at Adrian and his big, supposedly happy extended family and imagine that anyone could be so clueless as to think that all of this was as it appeared. It isn’t hard for the reader to put his or herself in Maya’s Third-Wife shoes and realize that it wasn’t all fun and games to be part of this whole scenario.

The author kept me wondering throughout the book. Who was sending Maya such mean emails? Do they all like each other as much as it seems? Did Maya jump or get pushed? I kept thinking that the answer was obvious, and yet again and again it became apparent that things weren’t always what they seemed.

I loved the ending of the book. It felt realistic to me and boded well for the future of the entire Wolfe clan.

Thumbs up on this book.

Here is a link to the book.

Thursday Thoughts

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S-U-C-C-E-S-S
This week has been a bit of a blur.  Bec was the one who had hip replacement surgery on Monday, but when I saw her yesterday afternoon, she looked better than me. Par for the course, I guess. She’s a trooper, that one. She comes by it honestly, as both of my parents suffered a great deal at the end of their lives, and you would never have known it from being with them. Anyway, the surgery went exactly as it was supposed to go. Her surgeon – who looks like he was going to leave the hospital to get ready to go to the Freshman/Sophomore Hop at school – took about two hours to change her life for the better. She got out of the hospital on Tuesday, with a walker, a little plastic container from which she needs to suck air to prevent pneumonia, a couple of medications, and a go-get-em’ attitude……

Jen drove her home and spent the night with her. Aside from not really being able to get comfortable to sleep, she’s doing remarkably well. The pain yesterday was worse than it had been, but her doctor had warned her that it would happen like that as the anesthesia and the pain medication they had injected into her during the surgery wore off. Still, she dutifully walks around and does all of the exercises that she’s supposed to do. Thank you to everyone who sent good thoughts and said prayers. It all worked! However, I’m not sure why I’m tired.

Baby, It’s Cold Outside
Well, not really, but it has been a chilly week with high temperatures only in the mid-50s and lots of clouds. We even had a drop or two of rain the other night. Today is the first day of warmer temperatures and of the rest of my life too.

Dating Game
Jen has been out here for her annual spring visit with Maggie and her grands. She timed it so that she could be here for Bec’s surgery as well, which was very nice of her. As for her grands, well, Austin and Lilly couldn’t possibly be happier that she’s here. Yesterday, she got permission from Maggie and Austin’s teacher to take him out of school a bit early so that they could have lunch together and she could buy him a Garmin Step Counter to replace the one he broke. He proclaimed to his mother yesterday morning, “I think this is the best day of my life.” …..

On the other hand, Lilly was very put out that she was not included in the date. A very pouty lip and eyes filled with tears. Never mind that Jen told her that they would have a date today. When you’re 4, the next day is never going to come.

Our Year of War
I’m reading a very interesting book entitled Our Year of War: Two Brothers, Vietnam, and a Nation Divided, by Daniel P. Bolger. I’m not generally interested in books about war, but this book is fascinating, not the least because it is the story of two brothers from my home town of Columbus, Nebraska. One of the brothers – Tom Hagel — was in Bec’s class at school. The other – Chuck Hagel — is a couple of years older, and went on to become a United States Senator, and eventually the Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush. I recommend the book.

Ciao.

Dope

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When I was young, somewhere in the neighborhood of what we then called junior high (as opposed to middle school), I often walked from home or school to downtown Columbus with some of my friends. We would walk around downtown, wandering in and out of Woolworth’s or JC Penney’s or Montgomery Wards, or best yet, ride the elevator at Schweiser’s Department Store. Just ride the elevator. It was a THING.

One of our compulsory stops was at Tooley’s Drug Store, an all-purpose pharmacy and what-not store. We would look at the make-up, test the colognes, peruse the comic books, and finger the jewelry. Then we would head to their little café to enjoy a fountain drink. To be honest, I don’t remember my drink of choice. It was probably just a plain fountain coke as I’ve never been a big fan of vanilla or cherry flavoring. What I distinctly remember, however, is that one of my friends always – ALWAYS – ordered a Green River. My assumption then – and frankly, still – is that the soda jerk mixed club soda with some sort of lime flavoring and sugar or simple syrup. The beverage was served to my friend in a fountain glass just like my coke. I imagine she enjoyed this drink, but I can unequivocally tell you that she ordered it because it was green. She is 100 percent Irish, and green was her go-to.

What I didn’t know – and actually, just learned – is that the Green River soft drink  is indigenous to Chicago. It originated in 1919 in response to Prohibition. You might also recall that on St. Patrick’s Day, the Chicago River is dyed green. Hence, Green River.

Bill and I have a favorite hot dog place not far from our AZ home called Chicagoland. All things Chicago – hot dogs, beef sandwiches, gyros, etc. Recently, they added something to their Chicago repertoire – bottles of Green River….

Bill – who is a confirmed cola drinker (Diet Coke being his beverage of choice) — was nevertheless delighted to see the new addition and immediately bought a bottle, which we shared. Despite the fact that I love All Things Lime, I could take or leave a Green River, thank very much. Very sweet. Bill felt the same because See Above: he likes cola. Still, it brought back memories for both he and I.

It got me to thinking about what we called soft drinks when we grew up. In Columbus (and most of the Midwest) we called it pop. Bill said, however, that he grew up calling it soda. But, of course, he was one of those big city Chicagoans!

Interestingly, however, he said his cousins who lived in western North Carolina called soft drinks dope. As in, let’s go have a dope. That term originated from the fact that when Coca Cola was first manufactured, it contained cocaine, referred to as dope. I had always heard this rumor, but checked to see if it’s true. It’s true.

I asked him if they would even call an orange soda an orange dope. He looked at me like I was a crazy woman and said, “They would never have bought anything but a Coke or an RC Cola, so I have no clue.”

As a child, my pop of choice was strawberry. We never had pop in our refrigerator when I grew up. My guess is that few people did. At dinner, we drank milk or Kool-Aid. But on Saturdays when we would eat our noon dinner at Grammie and Gramp’s apartment above the bakery, she would give me 50 cents to go next door to the Ski Lounge Bar and buy a strawberry pop. Looking back, it makes me laugh to think that a bar would have orange or strawberry or grape pops. Today: wouldn’t happen.

For kicks, put on your reading glasses Baby Boomers and check out what Huffington Post says people call soft drinks in various parts of the country…..

The Best Part of Waking Up

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I originally posted these thoughts about coffee below on February 19, 2015. I am reprinting this blog post because I spent yesterday at the hospital with my sister Bec following her hip replacement surgery and was unable to be creative when I got home. Her surgery went fine and she will be climbing mountains before we know it!

I am almost always up before my husband. Frankly, I am up before most species of birds. I am, and always have been, an early riser. If I sleep past 6:15, someone should put a mirror under my nose.

By the way, being an early riser doesn’t mean I wake up whistling. Far from it. Bill, who nearly always sleeps longer than I, wakes up annoyingly jolly. He bounces out of bed and immediately begins talking and/or asking me questions.

How’d you sleep? What’s your blog about this morning? What are your plans for the day?

Fine. Read it for yourself. I’m retired so I have no plans. Please stop being so cheerful.

Because of this difference in our morning personalities, I love my little bit of quiet time in the morning before he gets up. My routine is always the same. (Now that’s redundant!) I turn on my computer, I walk around and open the blinds to let in morning light or at least watch the sun come up. I make the coffee. While it brews, I post my blog.

By time I’m finished posting my blog, the coffee is ready. I pour a cup, and put the rest in a thermos pot that I have heated up with hot water. Then I sit down with my book and take that first sip.

There is nothing better than that first sip of hot coffee in the morning. Nothing. Better. Period. Not the second cup. Not even the second sip. That first sip of coffee, so hot it can burn your tongue if you’re not careful, is divine.

If you looked up coffee connoisseur in the dictionary and then checked for its antonym, you would see my picture. I am simply not a coffee snob.

A few years ago when I started reading food magazines and watching Food Network, I began to focus on what needed to happen so that my coffee was extraordinary. Freshly roasted whole beans that you grind every morning. The beans must come from certain parts of the world. The water had to be a certain temperature when it brewed. The coffee had to be poured at a certain temperature. It had to have a chocolate taste followed by tobacco and saddle leather flavors at the back of your tongue.

One day it occurred to me that I was just as happy with a cup of coffee from Circle K as I was from beans grown by a lonely farmer at the foot of Mount Kenya.

Yes friends. I have no coffee palate.

By the way, right now both of my sisters are absolutely cringing and checking our family tree to make sure I am actually from the same bloodline. On the other hand, my brother is thinking, yeah, I’ll meet you at Circle K for a cup of joe. My sisters really are coffee connoisseurs. Unlike us, they don’t have holes in their stomachs from cup after cup of crappy coffee.

But even I draw a line.

A while ago, I decided that I was going to try to make homemade tortillas.  I read that you could use a big coffee can to flatten your tortillas.

So off I went to Walmart to find coffee in a big can. To my surprise, coffee is no longer sold in metal cans. They all come in bags or in plastic containers.

After looking and looking, I finally found one lone brand of coffee in a big 3-lb. can. Three pounds of coffee for something like $5.75. At that price, it must really be swill, I thought to myself. Still, I needed that can.

About that time, a woman somewhere around my age reached for that same coffee. “It’s my husband and my favorite,” she told me. “It isn’t too strong and we like the flavor.”

So I bought the coffee.

The next day I brewed up a pot of the coffee. I sat down with my cup and took that much-anticipated first sip.

It was, to put it bluntly, undrinkable. Simply awful. I did the unheard of thing and poured an entire pot of coffee down the drain and, what’s more, poured the remaining unused coffee grounds into the garbage can.

Even I have standards.

You Da Man

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I had an acquaintance once who had a particularly annoying sense of humor. She would say things like, “Wow, you wear that shirt a lot; you must really like it. Just kidding.” Or maybe “Did you put your make-up on in the dark this morning? Just kidding.” Somehow, to her, adding just kidding to the end of her comment made it less hurtful. It didn’t.

I struggle with a lot of the Bible. Not struggle as in disbelieving the word of God. Struggle as in understanding why God did some of the things that the Bible says he did. The Old Testament, in particular, has many instances of actions taken by God in which I say to myself, “Really? That seems mean.”

Right up there on the top of the lot is the story of God asking Abraham to sacrifice his beloved only son, Isaac. The part of the story that I have always struggled with was why God felt the need to make Abraham prove his love. Doesn’t God know everything? Didn’t he already know how much Abraham loved him? Asking Abraham to do such a horrific thing and then stopping him at the last second by saying – basically – “Ha ha, just kidding. But you did good, boy!” seems insecure and mean-spirited.

But the truth of the matter is that there are a lot of things that I don’t understand about God and his world. For example, what was the point of the transfiguration? What was Jesus talking to Moses and Elijah about as they appeared at his side as they were – according to Mark’s gospel – “conversing with him”? I even go so far as to wonder just how Peter, James, and John even KNEW it was Moses and Elijah. Were they wearing nametags? Did Jesus greet them? “Hey there, Mosey. Thanks for stopping by.”

Seriously, these are the things I wonder as I listen to God’s Word being read at Mass. I’m pretty sure God’s going to have a good talk with me when and if I make it to the Pearly Gates.

As I pondered the readings later on after Mass, however, here are a couple of thoughts that occurred to me regarding God’s request that Abraham sacrifice the son he loved so much. (And I absolutely didn’t go out and get my Ph.D. in theology last night, so these are just the random thoughts of a struggling Christian.)

Abraham is a pretty important guy in Jewish history, and therefore in Christian history as well. He was the father of the Jews. According to Genesis: I will bless you abundantly and make your descendants as countless as the stars of the sky and the sands of the seashore; your descendants shall take possession of the gates of their enemies, and in your descendants all the nations of the earth shall find blessing.

By the way, here are some of my mom and dad’s descendants, and therefore Abraham’s…..

Because Abraham is such an important person, he needed to be totally in love with God and incredibly loyal and strong. While it’s true that God knew that Abraham was loyal and would obey his command, perhaps he needed Abraham himself to recognize just how loyal he was to his Lord. Abraham needed to truly believe that he was God’s chosen leader of men and that he fully deserved this position, as demonstrated by his obedience. No doubts.

It further  occurred to me that according to Genesis, once Abraham and Isaac reached Moriah, he told his servants, “Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you.”

Once they built the altar, Isaac asked his father where the lamb was that they were going to offer. Abraham answered, “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.”

In the past, I have always assumed that Abraham said these things so as to keep everyone calm and to prevent Isaac from freaking out. But it dawned on me as I pondered this reading that perhaps Abraham told his servants that they would be right back, and told Isaac that God would provide the sacrifice, because every part of his being knew that God would never make him sacrifice his beloved son. No way, no how.  Perhaps he didn’t know the point of the exercise, but he knew his God. He wasn’t lying when he said they would be right back; he was fully telling the truth.

Now that I’ve address that concern, I will get to work on the Transfiguration. Hmmmm…….

Saturday Smile: Honey, I Forgot to Duck

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Despite the fact that the temperature was only in the 50s and it was mostly cloudy, and despite the fact that the Rockies lost to the Diamondbacks 7-5 when they had been ahead 4-1 at one point, the opening game of the Spring Training season was yesterday, and the fact that Bill and I were among those watching the action made me smile. After all, it was the first game and they were out of practice. Some of the boys looked about the age of our grandson Alastair and you could still smell the farm league on their clothing. And though the weather was not perfect, there was no wind and when the sun would poke out from the clouds, it was extremely pleasant. And a beer at a ballpark tastes good in any season…..

Our seats were tremendous, only six rows up from first base. We saw lots of foul balls head our direction. In fact, one thing that didn’t make me smile was that one of the balls whizzed past us at an amazingly high clip, and hit a woman not 50 feet from me right in the face. Not good. The medical squad appeared quickly, and she was walked out looking like she had no black eyes, but maybe a broken nose and perhaps some missing teeth. I suggested to Bill that maybe those seats weren’t the best choice after all.

Nothing says welcome spring like the start of Spring Training, and it made me smile (despite the fact that I still take the world’s worst selfies)…..