A Day Like Any Other Day

Today I got a message on my house phone from a mysterious male caller. It went something like this:

"Hi, [Mrs. Linklater], this is a voice from only 45 years ago. I'm not going to leave my phone or name now. Maybe tomorrow. I have some surprise stuff."

Forty-five years ago? Doesn't that mean whoever is calling me is dead? Okay I can do the math. Forty-five years ago was the year I graduated from college. At first I figured my caller was someone I knew from when I was exploring the northwest passage with Lewis and Clark. Or somebody who hung with me during that long winter I spent stuck in the snow crossing the Donner Pass.

Wait a minute, I graduated in 1965, not 1865. My parents gave me a brand new '65 Mustang for graduation, which I immediately gassed up and drove across country. I know people who would kill to have that car today. Me for instance.

I knew immediately from the message that there was only one person who would know who my secret caller was -- my old roomie from college. Sure enough, she confessed to giving the mystery man my number. But she still wouldn't tell me who he was.

Frankly, I hope it's Gerard Butler. I know. He wasn't a speck on the flypaper of life forty-five years ago. Still, Gerard would be a nice surprise, knocking on my door wearing that leather Speedo from his acting tour de force in The 300.

Since I started watching that bastion of breaking celebrity news, TMZ, and learned that Gerard is a serial "dater" -- a euphemism for any actor who sleeps around as much as Warren Beatty did in his heyday -- I've been a fan of his.

After I discovered Mr. Butler, he has been showing up in movies I didn't know he was in. There was "P.S. I love you" where he played Hilary Swank's dead Irish husband. [I didn't say they were good movies.] He was speaking English in that nearly unintelligible, yet charming, River Dance accent, but I frankly didn't give a shit, because the guy is really goodlooking. Izzie's dead guy from Grey's Anatomy was also in the same movie, playing another Irishman, so I got a two-fer watching that flick. [I think I finally may be over my Russell Crowe thing.]

Gerard showed up this morning again. I was watching Lara Croft, Titular Tomb Raider, waiting for a re-run of JAG [because I do love men in uniform], when -- ta-da -- there's my boy Gerry playing opposite Angelie Jolie. He's supposedly a Scotsman in that movie. Go figure. I guess the director figured all white Anglo Saxons sound alike, so nobody would know.. Naturally, I still couldn't understand a word he said, but, somehow I knew exactly what he was saying.

Best line of the movie? Gerard to Angelina, who has taken the barechested Gerard to his knees with a ferocious Kung Fu move after he dared to put his hand on her bare shoulder: "You can break my wrist, but I'm still going to kiss you." Oh, be still my heart. That line was almost as good as the time Sean Young told James Woods, "You're going to fall in love with me." This was back when they met for the first time on the set of a movie. Woods' comeback to her was, "Unless I kill you first."

I actually wrote that scintillating bit of conversation into the opening of a beer commercial. For some reason, I was told it would be inappropriate. Yeah, but it still made for a great ad.

Okay, everyone, out of the pool.

What's In Your Closet?

One of my brothers is a little bent. Compared to his skewed view of the world, my rants are as tame as June Cleaver. Last night he called, but I just didn't have the emotional energy to listen to him, so I waited until this morning to call him back.

Nothing like the cold, clear light of day and a hearty breakfast to make difficult relatives more bearable. He gave me fifteen minutes on how George Bush the First caused Kennedy's death when he was head of the CIA. This was not an easy accomplishment since Bush Uno wasn't CIA Director until Gerald Ford appointed him during the seventies, well after JFK was gone.

This fascinating piece of information was followed by breaking news about the shooter from the grassy knoll, identified as James Parrott. Apparently Parrott has finally confessed to shooting Kennedy in the head. This confession has come just in time apparently, because he's in jail now and dying. And that's just part of today's paranoid phone call. I usually just tell my brother that these things may be important to him, but I'm not really interested. No point telling him he's wrong about anything, except today I mentioned that H.W.Bush wasn't head of the CIA under Kennedy. Naturally, facts are irrelevant to conspiracy theorists, so he ignored me. Eventually when I don't argue with him, he runs out of steam and just promises to call back. Lucky me.

This behavior has been going on for years. I once felt the need to call the local police in his fancy, faraway town to give them the name of his next of kin. I thought there should be someone for them to contact in case they finally had to shoot him. This was around the time he really seemed to be going off the deep end, picketing judges during his divorce outside the court house, stuff like that.

I talked to the Deputy Chief for almost an hour. He needed no introduction to my brother, since he'd arrested him more than once over the years. During our conversation, I gave him my brother's back story -- yuppie childhood, Stanford Law, hired by a top law firm, wife and daughter, two homes, all kinds of reasons for him to lead a normal life. Somewhere he got derailed. The excess alcohol and drugs of the sixties and seventies left him divorced, broke, and working as a handyman. It wasn't until years later that I was able to piece together what had happened.

At the time, I wasn't sure whether my phone call to the police would help my brother's cause or not. Surprisingly, a few weeks later he called about an unusual traffic stop. Apparently he didn't have a sticker on his pickup's license plate. But he said the officer who stopped him treated him with unusual deference and enormous respect. He didn't even get a ticket, just a reminder to make sure he took care of his obligations quickly.So, thanks, Chief.

Meanwhile, he was getting so angry and paranoid during those years that I began to think he might even be the Unibomber. I kept my thoughts to myself until one of my other brothers said he'd wondered about that too.

Then, quite by accident, a guy I knew in high school told me that he had been molested by our town's extremely popular cub scout leader. He didn't think it had affect him though. So I didn't point out that he was the only one who didn't seem to realize that his best friend all through college was gay. Or how he spent the sixties as a drugged out roadie when he wasn't traveling in India with a beard down to his knees, smoking anything that grew.

I told my friend's story to my brother, who told me that the same cub scout leader had molested him too. I was speechless. Suddenly the reason for all kinds of my brother's behavior began to fall into place. His sudden, scary interest in collecting and shooting guns. Getting arrested driving his go-cart down the main road in town at fourteen. Calling his high school adviser a fag. Hitting another boy so hard in the head for taking his pie that he lost his hearing. Followed by alcohol and drugs.

Lately, my brother wants to come out to live with me, so he can help around the house. But I told him he'd have to find his own place because his personality is racing so fast that he makes me crazy. He actually thanked me for being so honest. Nothing like having a dry alcoholic with full time mania around.

He has come to visit before and started painting my hallway at midnight, among other things. Someday, if I ever recover, I'll share the events of his last visit. More than five years ago.

Then I'll share heartwarming stories about my little sister.

Health for Hypochondriacs -- Today's Episode

They sounded like cheerleaders at a football game:

"Go!! Go! Go Mrs. Linklater, you can do it!!! Come on!! Keep trying!!!"

No, I wasn't in the weight room at Gold's Gym. I wasn't at the finish line of a marathon. I wasn't wrestling some guy for the pin ball machine.

I was taking yet another medical test to determine my survival potential during the upcoming surgery for a pair of fancy new hips. Apparently, once the docs sign you up for a surgical procedure, they try to see if they can kill you first. Or at least wreck as many other body parts as they can.

Yesterday they took my heart to the cleaners. Before you go into surgery they want to be sure that your ticker has been UL tested. So they pound on it and kick it around the office to see if it's got the right stuff.

Then they give you a treadmill stress test. No biggie, but since my hips aren't made for walking anymore, exercising on a treadmill was not an option.

Now, however, you can lie down and just pretend you're on a treadmill. This is accomplished by putting a drug into your vein that makes your heart think you're at the gym. Or running away from the cops. I noticed they never mentioned having sex. The idea is to get your heart beating so hard and fast you think you're going to die.

I mentioned my concern over the treadmill drug killing me and I was assured that I needn't worry. I was in a hospital wasn't I?

I had another, more technical concern. During a regular treadmill stress test your blood pressure does something interesting. Normal resting pressure is 120/80. During exercise, while the systolic goes higher [say to 180], the diastolic drops out [to the 60s or 70s]. That just means your blood vessels are wide open for all the blood your body needs while it's exercising. So, I wanted to know if the treadmill drug created that effect too. Otherwise it meant my heart would be pumping like hell, but the blood would be trying to squeeze through spaghettini instead of mostaciolli.

Here again I was told not to worry. But something in me wondered if anybody had actually thought this through, since they didn't have to do the test themselves.

The concept of an alternative treadmill experience feels kind of like being a crash dummy. You can be part of a traffic accident without actually having to run a red light. I could have a heart attack without ever lifting a finger.

There's another problem too. I'm on a medication that keeps my heart from beating too fast. My drug tells my heart to take it easy. And their drug would be telling my heart to hurry up. The drug I take could keep the drugs they were going to pump into me from working.

We were about to find out.

I lay down and the tech hooked me up to the EKG machine with more wires than a Frankenstein experiment. Then she put on a blood pressure cuff. Next, she started an IV and hung up a bag filled with the treadmill drug. Finally the other tech covered me with the goo for the ultra sound.

My heartrate started out at 60. It had to get to 130 something for the test to be considered successful. At this point, I realized that the only good thing about getting old is that your target heart rate gets lower and lower.

Thump thump thump. Thump thump thump. My heart rate went to 63 and back down. It sped up a little when I talked so they told me to talk more. It took another ten minutes to get it up to 70. My drugs were winning, Undaunted, the techs continued to try fooling Mother Nature. Now they had me squeeze a couple of rubber balls. [There's a Remo joke in here somewhere.] I pointed out that squeezing rubber balls was to running on a treadmill as riding a bike was to wrestling alligators.

So they upped the ante again. More of the treadmill drug dripped into my vein, in a vain attempt to make my heart beat faster and faster. After fifteen minutes, my body was just getting confused. My drug was saying one thing. Theirs was saying the opposite. Meanwhile I was doing my best to imagine I was jogging in the country. But if I relaxed for a minute my heart rate immediately dropped back down into the sixties. More drugs. More talking and squeezing rubber balls. After twenty minutes my heart rate was hovering around 75 - 80 when the tech announced they were going to give me atropine. Reaching for that drug told me I had the heart rate of a dead person.

After the jolt of atropine, the cheerleading really got started. Both techs, the ultra sound lady and the IV lady, sat next to me looking at the monitor, yelling at my heart rate, "Come on!! Come on!!" It finally got into the high eighties when I begam laughing at them.

Clearly my drug was beating their drug.

The monitor mocked them again and again. My heart rate never got over 99. Ir immediately dropped back down as soon as they stopped pumping all those pretend treadmills into me.

Meanwhile, my blood pressure got a little scary -- it climbed to 170/100 and showed no signs of bottoming out because my heart rate never got high enough. I had visions of my BP going to 200/140. But the doctor, who was hiding in the safety of another room, finally told the techs to stop the test.

They still managed to get some ultra sound pictures of my heart standing by Niagara Falls and next to the Lincoln Memorial. But it wouldn't qualify for the Boston Marathon, since it was beating at an eight hour pace.

When I sat up, after all the gadgets were removed from my body I was dizzy. The whole room was spinning and I had a headache. That made everybody think my blood pressure was too low or I was hypoglycemic. HEY!! You just dumped a shitload of crap into my veins, you'd have a headache and be dizzy too !! The atropine also makes your mouth dry, so my tongue kept sticking to my teeth as I talked.

Tomorrow, a trip to the OB/GYN -- Look for that exam on YouTube.

Snow in London

[CLICK TO ENLARGE PICTURES]

Recently there was snow in London. This was an international news event, since the last time there was measureable snow in that city people were wearing Roman togas. For centuries winter has been 38 degrees and rainy.

My daughter and son in law, who live there, sent me some photos of their house after four fluffy inches caused madness and mayhem.

I've been to London in February and there were spring flowers already blooming. I've been there in December and there were roses on the bushes. So snow is truly out of character. Mostly you get clouds and fog. Did I mention the rain?

Fortunately, no snow landed in their kitchen. However, the kitchen picture provides a useful cultural comparison of another kind. What makes it a distinctly British kitchen, even though it sports granite countertops and other modern accoutrements, is the tall, narrow refrigerator there in the back. On that island across the pond, living space is generally at a premium, so size is everything.

Many homes are over 100 years old, although 400 years is not out of the question. Plus the city itself is over 2000 years old. You can still see remnants of the original Roman wall that kept the Visigoths at bay. In fact, the lady who previously owned the house in the pictures, before my daughter and her husband, lived there for 94 years. I wonder how many dead cats they had to remove? Despite its age, the house wasn't replaced, only remodeled. The Brits don't do teardowns. Mostly because the houses are all attached and that could get ugly. I think the last time they tore down a building was after the bombing in WWII.

Needless to say, small and efficient spaces tend to be status quo in a country surrounded by water. Don't get me started on the narrow streets and the people who insist on driving Range Rovers. The kitchen in the photo is quite sizable by British standards. You can actually sit down and eat in it.

What I discovered while visiting over there a few years ago, is that even though there may not be much room by American standards, a British kitchen still manages to fit in everything an American kitchen does, just smaller or narrower. They have dishwashers, often a Miele or a Bosch, but they're only about 18 inches wide.

Even when my daughter and her husband lived in a roomy factory loft, there was still a compact kitchen. But it included a combination washer/dryer squeezed between the fridge and the dishwasher. However, the dryness cycle of the washer/dryer was more of a dampness cycle, so you had to hang stuff up afterward to finish the process. But it was still very convenient.

One trip over there and you get a real sense of how excessive American consumption is. We're the fat people, dismantling 50 year old homes and building ginormous houses with turrets, remember?

I should have asked for a picture of the food in the refrigerator because it has a distinctly British look and taste too. I remember eating British yogurt and thinking it was much more sour creamy and less sticky sweet. Bacon doesn't look like bacon as we know it. Juice is often in giant boxes. Even honey was different and came from places like Israel and Lebanon, instead of clover fields in Wisconsin.

And they talk funny too.

Tat In A Ringer

I woke up in the middle of the night a week or so ago and my left tat felt like like somebody had stomped on it with steel boots.

Funny, the last time that happened was at a Phi Delt mixer. But this time nobody was drunk and I wasn't wearing that Clockwork Orange inspired rubber dress that was so ahead of its time.

It was three in the morning. Poker After Dark time. I'd fallen asleep around 8:00 PM, watching yet another cable broadcast of an NCIS rerun Actually the pain of my boobula wasn't what first woke me up. These days the painful need to pee takes precedence. Only after getting out of bed did I experience the poke poke poke of discomfort unique to anyone born with female breasts as original equipment. The pain was significant enough for me to say out loud as I took my place on the throne, "Owww! WFT?"

Had I fallen on a cactus plant? Had some animal locked its jaws on the last remaining piece of unbaked skin on my body? Was I part of some S&M initiation that nobody told me about? Seriously, let me know next time.

Whatever, it felt like a flaming goldfish was swimming around in my mam glands. A fish on fire. EWWWW. It was seriously creepy. So much so that I was too freaked out to touch it again. Like not touching it would make it go away.

As soon as the doctor's office opened, I called to schedule a mammogram, but the rules say I had to see the doc first. The docs have a need to confirm what you already know before they let you get help. She said something like, "Yes, you have a large mass in there." I don't think calling it a "goldfish" is a medical term. At least I got my appointment for a slam bam thank you mammogram with a side order of ultra sound.

For any men who haven't left the room yet, let me enter the world of TMI to help you understand the one of a kind experience of a mammogram. It's not too hard. Just imagine what slamming your cockatoo in a car door would feel like. The bad news is that it really hurts. The good news is that it only hurts for a second or so. A very long second. Long enough in my case to squeeze the snot out of whatever evil goldfish alien was swimming around in there. By the time I got to the ultra sound portion of the day's festivities, that big honking creature was down to the size of a dime.

"Looks like a cyst," said the doc. 99% of the time, things that look like cysts are cysts. Which means they aren't full of cancer, they're full of liquid. The way they find out is to stick a needle in the thing that looks like a cyst and see what they catch. If no liquid comes out, a biopsy needle goes in. For some reason, they couldn't find out if it really was a cyst for another week. I think because that would be way too easy.

So yesterday they stuck me with Lidocaine, then stuck the apparent cyst with a needle. I watched the ultra sound machine while they were doing the procedure. They took a bunch of still pictures as they went -- none of which I'm posting here. Ta-da, it really was a cyst. They sucked out the bug juice until everything disappeared. Hasta la bye bye. But they want me back in six months as punishment for not having had a mammogram in way too long.

Somebody remind me in August.

Cynical Sunday

I think the new secretary of the treasury should get twenty lashes with a wet noodle for giving such an uninspiring speech that the DOW dropped three hundred points.

I think that being a 65 year old woman is punishment enough for any past sins.

I think it's a sign of the Apocalypse when a US Senator embarrasses our public educational system by saying, ". . .would have went" during an interview on a national news program.

I think that the mother of those eight babies gives new meaning to Octopussy.

I hope somebody includes plenty of barbecue sauce for all the pork in the "stimulus" package.

I hope someone reminds Michael Phelps of that old adage, "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, and you should lose ALL your endorsements and be banned from competing in the next Olympics."

I hope MLB comes up with retroactive punishment for guys like A-Rod and his ilk, who won their MVPs, Cy Youngs and batting titles on 'roids.

I hope G-Rod [the Blago man] climbs back into his hole and stops embarrassing us. Oh, no, he's on TV again.

I hope somebody finally realizes that stealing 50 billion dollars from people who trusted you with their life savings is worth the death penalty. Or removal of their testosterone delivery systems. Or, AT LEAST, house arrest.

I hope the next people up for cabinet posts remember to call their CPAs and nannies before they get grilled by any more Senate committees.

I hope the next time someone like the Hudson River pilot miraculously saves 155 people from death that we give him lots and lots of money so he doesn't have to do it again.

I hope that Donald Trump does something about his hair. Anything.

I hope I don't have to turn on the TV and see another news segment with Nancy Grace talking about the "tot mom." Same with Geraldo. And what's with Campbell Brown?

I hope Christian Bale stops taking himself so seriously. To paraphrase Jon Lovitz, it's only ACTING!!

I hope the Post Office realizes that not delivering mail on Tuesdays is stupid. It sure isn't good for small businesses who are always waiting for their checks. Not to mention that we have a lot of Monday holidays which just adds ANOTHER mailfree, checkless day. Saturdays make more sense for a bunch of reasons.

I hope this entry will hold you until I can get back on my own computer.

Catching Up

In between mopping up and waiting around for the electric guy and any number of other people, I've been trying to schedule some hip surgery. This usually means appointments with docs of various sorts, one of whom was a back doc because one of the hip docs was concerned that my back would not survive the hip surgery.

So the hip doc sends me to a back doc with an MRI order. The back doc has a name that sounds like a pharmacist. A name as free from sex appeal as, say, Mortimer Snerd. Someone who sounds over fifty. Someone comfortable in black socks and bermuda shorts.

Only the guy who walks into the examining room isn't a nerdly Snerd type, it's Hugh Jackson. He shook my hand and wondered why I was laughing. Actually, I was just smiling out loud. Private joke I told him. My experience with docs, especially the young ones, is that they don't examine women over a certain age. Unless you're at death's door, they don't touch you at all. Too much like poking around their moms, I think. EWWWW. They shake your hand and you show them where the pain is and they comment, without having to touch anything. In the five minutes we spent together [me being 65 and on Medicare] he said there was no need for an MRI -- that we all have stenosis and ratty disks as we age. He could tell as much from my plain ol' x-rays. So I should just get on with the surgery and we'll sort things out later. In other words, if my back suffers neurological damage from the surgery, he'll fix it. Well, thanks, doc.

To prove to me that I had nothing to worry about, he asked me to lift my left leg and hold it straight. I performed the task well. So he asked me to put my left leg down and do the same thing with my right leg. I passed that test too. Then he said to hold both my legs out straight while twisting and turning my ankles. No reflex tests or searching for numbness. All done.

And people wonder why I keep putting off hip surgery.