Laugh Out Loud

My youngest son is a cook. Even though he is now titled "executive chef", he is a cook. That's fine, even great. He likes what he does and goes to work daily not thinking about work bur thinking about the task. Lately the task has transformed into something different. The owners of his current establishment purchased a very old "diner" in Park City. Park City is home to the Sundance Film Festival and a few ski resorts, so it caters to the "do you know who I am?" crowd, but also to the more grungy types who frequent either of those activities. I worked for the film festival several years ago so I have no sympathy whatsoever to those who think their product shines.

Anyway, my son was asked by his boss/owners to develop a new menu, in keeping with the diner style of the place, for their purchase. He came to dinner last night after what has been an exhausting few weeks developing a new menu, still in keeping with the "diner" ethos but different from what happened before. We had talked both before we went to Italy and after and he had said that he wanted to put Salisbury steak on the menu since so many diners currently feature meatloaf. They are in their first week of operation and the Salisbury steak is the current favorite of all diners.

Always Planning Ahead

Though I am not even done with the applique border on Summer Stars let alone layering and quilting it, I am planning my new project, sort of. Before we left for Italy I ordered "Bella Bella quilts". The book arrived while we were in Europe. Then when we were in Italy we spent a fair amount of time in various churches in Florence, Siena, and San Gimagnano. Some of the floors, as many quilters before have remarked, are spectacular mosaics and of course the Bella Bella book demonstrates this nicely. Norah McKeeking isn't the first quilter to see this. I even have a very old book by Ami Simms that has quilt patterns from ancient mosaics. But what I am contemplating is slightly different since I am more of an applique person.

While driving through the spectacular Tuscan country side, I realized that the hills on the horizon in many cases are different from the norm. Often there were cypress trees, lined up in a row, across the horizon, not like a clump of trees but more like the spikes on a New York Beauty block-silhouetted against the sky. Add to that mental image the fact that we walked part of the pilgrimage trail of St. Francis and you probably can begin to see what's going on in my brain. Of course my son has already told me he wants some variation of the spectacular La Rosa Veneziana so I don't know what I will end up with.

And then, the most spectacular floor wasn't a geometric mosaic at all. The floor in the church of San Miniato on the hillside overlooking Florence reminds me more of scherenschnitte, with floral and bird designs in black and white. That would be a fun project as well.

Places I Do Or Don't Want To Live

My husband and I joke about moving somewhere, probably in Western Europe, because life in the US has become so irritating. We like Europe and since we wouldn't be citizens of any of the European countries, their politics wouldn't annoy us as much as politics in the US annoy us. But I have always told him that I don't want to live anywhere the bugs are bigger than say an inch long. That even knocks out many places in the US like Florida where the cockroaches are way bigger than that and they fly. They are so big they don't call them cockroaches, they call them palmetto bugs as if that makes them unique or desirable.

Well I really enjoyed my one trip to Australia and because I didn't take my husband with me (it was a swimming competition), I have told him that we should go before we get too old to endure the interminable plane ride. After seeing this

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/oct/24/australia-giant-spider-mouse-carry-horrifying-impressive?CMP=share_btn_link

in  the newspaper this morning, I think I have changed my mind. I didn't mind the flying foxes in Sydney but I don't want to be in the same room with a spider that hunts and carries off mice. 

Long Hours

I just finished 31 hours of essay scoring. Four of the teachers at the high school saved their The Grapes of Wrath essays for my return from Italy. Some of the essays were good, some were rotten, some were wild flights of fancy that had nothing to do with the topic. Sophomore students here have the grammar skills of third graders so there were tense shifts and pronoun problems throughout the essays. One teacher, who is brand new (which brings up the entire issue of why anyone who is smart and young would pick teaching in this state that has the lowest per pupil expenditure in the entire country), emailed me when I was in Italy to ask if I would include his papers in my schedule. He wrote, "I heard you were kind enough to score these essays." I wrote back that my kindness was exaggerated even though I was certainly willing to score his essays. I think he thought I was kidding.

Guess What?

My husband and I were only in Italy this trip but we did talk to Italians, Americans, and British citizens. Universally they were all opposed to Trump to the point that some were hesitant to deal with us if we showed support for Trump. That's curious for a couple of reasons with the first being that under other circumstances we have not found a unanimous opinion. Going back to the Iraq invasion we found a diversity in those who would express their views. One shopkeeper/artisan from whom we purchased a hand worked poem shrugged and said that Italy had lived through Berlusconi so he wished us well.

Jet Lag

It's funny that when I travel, I don't get much jet lag going east to Europe and losing a day, but I suffer for several days coming back west. My husband and I just got back from 12 days in Italy. We went to Florence, Emilio-Romagna, and Siena. I list Emilio-Romagna even though we did stay in a town because that was more for the Italian experience than for visiting a specific place or site. It's a lovely time of year in Italy--nice temperatures and good harvests. Our trip was a mix of famous museums and cathedrals and walking some of the St. Francis trail along with fabulous food and welcoming people. We only had one bad meal the entire time and we visited churches from the Duomo in Florence to small Romanesque churches. It's not that we are religious; it's that so much of the art, technology, and sheer effort of humans went toward building these buildings so visiting them gives one a better sense of who they were than simply visiting a building filled with paintings.

Double Standard

I have written before that Hillary Clinton is not my first choice for president but we have two candidates (yes, there are more than that but only two that are possibilities given our electoral system) from which to pick. Neither is  without blemish, but what astonishes me given the most recent revelations is that there hasn't been much outcry over Trump's behavior at his beauty pageants. People all over the country were up in arms about Obama's announcement of gender neutral bathrooms, exclaiming that "...no man can see my daughter naked."  But Trump walks in unannounced and surely unwanted into his teen beauty pageant dressing rooms, timing it to when he knows these barely pubescent girls will be naked, and so far no one is crying foul. These aren't 70 year old women remembering a plane flight from thirty years ago. These are girls who are only 18 now describing events from only three years ago.

Honestly

Recently another new teacher contacted me about scoring essays and giving feedback. He wrote that the other teachers said I was kind enough to do this service for the teachers. I wrote back that although I was more than willing to score the essays, my kindness was exaggerated.

That's my basic philosophy. If you tell the truth you won't surprise anyone later. Is it surprising to me that Donald Trump made repulsive and aggressive remarks about women? Hell no. His behavior is obvious for all to see; it's even one of the traits that those who support him think is admirable. It's his stock in trade but it doesn't make him more palatable to me. There's a difference in character between thinking that honesty is refreshing and thinking that blurting out those vulgar ideas that float around in your head is all right.  I am not even talking about political correctness but about common decency. It's easy to see that Trump went to a second tier private military academy for high school as that is the level of his personality and the imprint on his character.

The Practice of Medicine

Last post I outlined the reasons I thought getting a CT scan was a reasonable action. Turns out it was pretty much a waste of time and resources, plus an unnecessary dose of radiation. The original MRI result showed what the radiologist read as a venous malformation. The CT scan showed conclusively that that reading was false. What was read as a venous malformation is really a genetic abnormality in my bone structure. That's why it is called the practice of medicine.

CT Scan With Contrast

Just a few weeks ago I had an MRI to see if I had trigeminal neuralgia as the cause of my jaw and ear pain. This has been going on for a couple of years now, most of the time mild pain, occasionally bumping up to more severe. There was no evidence of trigeminal neuralgia but the radiologist told my primary care doctor that I had a venous malformation of the jugular and the carotid and recommended a CT scan to get better information.

I talked it over with my primary care and we decided to go ahead although as far as either of us know there are no current symptoms arising from the malformation. My main concern was that I have had several friends recently suffer dissections of their carotid arteries or jugulars. In one case this led to death and in the other four cases there was some degree of paralysis and aphasia. I also have a brother who had a stroke although because we are estranged I know very few of the details but sometimes the venous malformation episodes can present with similar findings and he was in the Czech Republic where there were language issues. So it seemed like a reasonable precaution to have the scan.

I certainly haven't received any results yet but I had other problems prior to the procedure involving the intravenous catheter. The technician had problems inserting the catheter prior to the MRI a few weeks ago, and then when I had a blood draw for a physical that phlebotomist had problems, so this time when the technician asked which arm to use, I simply told her to use the arm that worked best. Well, that turned out to be neither for her. She tried twice on my right arm and once on my left arm. The needles for the dye contrast are a little bigger than for either the MRI or the blood draw so this was not the most comfortable problem. So the technician went off to find the nurse who uses an ultra-sound machine to locate the veins and to help with the insertion. Hallelujah baby, got the needle in the first time and didn't wiggle it around looking for help. I have never had the easiest veins to work with and with aging and having to fast, including liquids, prior to these tests my veins have become the biggest pain.