Local food

Today the moon goes full at 3:19 pm so, according to my spring fast rules, lunch had to be locally sourced. Local potatoes have run out, so I headed out to dig up some Jerusalem artichokes.

They all have these black spots, with red fungus or something staining the flesh nearby. I cut all that off.

Then I headed down to the root cellar and got a cabbage that had been there since maybe November.

It had held up well.

I chopped some up with the sunchokes and steamed it all for a bit, which nicely filled out my meal of local chicken and winter squash.

I really just want to open a can of soup and have some bread and butter, but this definitely forces me to be more creative.

Standards

For today at least, I'm using my blog to file some things I want to remember. I just got a call from Oxfam America wondering if I would renew my monthly contribution. I let it lapse because I'd heard on Behind the News that Oxfam was supporting a project involving genetically-modified seeds. I meant to look into it further, so when this woman called I did a search and found a statement posted on Oxfam's website.

What I like is this sentence:

"Oxfam believes that any decision to use GMOs must be based on the human rights’ principles of participation, transparency, choice, sustainability and fairness."

Nice list for evaluating, what, social structures? My local government? Anyway I felt like filing it somewhere.

Free speech

A candidate signs up to get public financing under Connecticut's election laws and gets state funds to use in his campaign. Then his opponent spends another million dollars, and so he goes back to the state and asks for supplemental funds. The Federal courts have decided this restrains the free speech of his opponent. Funding = speech, they've decided, and if you had to worry that if you 'spoke' ie spent a million dollars and then your opponent might do the same, you might restrain your speech! So much for free speech!

That's kinda weird, hunh?

I got that from this article about recent rulings in CT:

"Supporters of the law breathed relief that the combined state and federal rulings overall preserved the basic thrust of the laws. But some expressed concern about the decision against supplemental grants. The federal panel echoed an argument offered by the U.S. Supreme Court in a recent decision involving Arizona’s public-financing law (the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case) that such supplemental grants violate a self-financing candidate’s constitutional right to free speech. Here’s the logic: If a wealthy candidate’s own campaign spending (now considered “speech”) triggers more public money for a taxpayer-financed opponent, that will affect the wealthy candidate’s decisions about how much money to dole out to broadcast a message, thereby restraining the candidate’s exercise of free speech."

There's a great new e-newsletter coming out weekly called CT News Junkie, it really helps keep tabs on state elections.

Don't forget the primary August 10th!

Rollover 1

My digital camera takes short videos.

June night

You may have to put your speakers next to your ears, but here we go...

Recovery

I'm profoundly tired. I just had dinner: Michele made some cod, and boiled a potato, and I thawed some home-made chicken broth and cooked some frozen spinach. Then it all went into the blender in various combinations, through the strainer, and down the hatch. A buttery potato / cod puree, and then a spinach/ginger/butter/salt soup. C'est bien fait.

I had put in a case of chicken broth in liter Tetrapaks, and find a cup has 1/2 gram of sodium, no calcium, and 10 calories. Really not what I had in mind. What was I thinking?

Today the plastery bandage came off my chin, 5 days to the hour after the surgery. I've stopped the pain killers after last night's misery. I feel much calmer, if heavy with unspecified ache. Only the stitches on the side hurt in particular, when I cough, which I do from time to time from throat tickles. Maybe tonight I'll sleep some, instead of waking every 10-15 min with throat tickles and chokings.

I keep pondering the role of drugs. When I came out of surgery I kept throwing up. This wasn't as horrid as one might think -- the worst is when you're not really throwing up but might sometime soon. But the nurses wanted to control it and they tried 5 different methods on me, including Halcyon, if I heard them right. At another point the next day some dutiful soul approached me (still nauseous) with a syringe of liquid Tylenol. What is it with these dark red sticky sweet preparations? My antibiotic is served up in a similar fashion. I know, someone has Thought All This Through, but something got lost along the way.

And then there's the split pea soup Michele picked up for me - "split pea and ham" with a picture of the little chunk of ham on the label, but the ingredients tell you it's just the water from cooked ham that they let slip into the soup. General Mills. What a world.

Well, that's what's on my mind right now folks. Thanks for listening and have a peaceful night!

Surgery

I sent this email to a friend, thought I'd post it here for the curious / concerned. This is happening in Boston at Mass-Gen.

I was in for the pre-op last Monday so they went over everything again. They'll knock me out, slice open my chest, take some cartilage from where the ribs meet the sternum, play God and fashion a new woman.. no, I mean fashion 2 new jaw joints (the condyles, to be exact), slice me open just in front of each ear and again under the chin on each side (4 incisions around the face), saw off the deformed condyles and stick on the new ones, tuck a bit of flap from the muscles around the joint into the socket for cushioning, and sew me all back up. They'll stick a "splint" ie a piece of plastic between my teeth to hold them apart a little bit and then fasten the teeth together so I don't move the jaw at all for the first week or so while hopefully the bone graft takes. It's a six hour operation! Takes place on Monday the 15th, first thing in the morning. I'll be in the hospital one or two nights, depending how I do.

After about a week they'll give me a little mobility so I start moving the joint and after about 6 to 8 weeks I'll have an open mouth again. Meanwhile I'll lose 5 or 10 lbs and drink a lot of broth and protein drinks and such. The ribs will grow back. Life will go on. I'll be relieved it's over.

The point of this is to give me back the centimeter or so I've lost from my lower jaw and tip it back so the teeth meet properly and I can go back to eating things like salad and nuts and such. I mean, I can eat those now but it doesn't work so well, and I can only fit little bites of everything.

They'll probably inadvertently slice some nerves in my face and I'll have numbness or muscle weakness, which will slowly abate over a year or so. As a rule it's only peripheral nerves.

The ribs will hurt a lot and I'll have to be careful to take lots of deep breaths so my lungs don't get infected.

Sometimes I get pretty freaked out about all this but I saw the surgeon and his chief resident on Monday and they're awfully nice so I felt better. And I find the hospital kind of fascinating -- such a big, self-contained organism.

I'll probably get back on my bike next summer. Maybe. No one tracks bicycle accidents so it's hard to assess the risk very exactly, but it's not negligible. But it's such a fun way to get around it'll be hard to resist.

So that's the report...