Magrilless

In our burgeoning Boston apartment search, we ran across a property with the following advert:

hardwood doggie ok

Should I be concerned? Although she’s a treeing Walker coon hound, no one’s ever specified the type of tree. Do you think we can bluff our way through the application process?

Why is it that it feels so good to be productive on Sunday? It’s Bill’s only day off from work and thus our only day to spend together. And yet, whenever we accomplish a good number of tasks or errands, we feel so proud.

Yesterday, for example, we got right up in the morning and made a shopping list (for two weeks’ worth of meals) over a light breakfast. Off to the grocery store where we were done in no time — home even before the CD we left playing for Eliza had finished. Groceries away and a good brunch. Then a run after a suitable digestion period. Home for a shower so Bill can trip off to lab for his laptop and the movie store for evening entertainment. For the afternoon, Bill wrote a bit and I went crazy in the kitchen: 2 soups, egg salad, 4 flavors of smoothies to go in our lunches. And we talked before bed about how productive the day was and how good we felt about that.

In the middle of the week, though, when we’re looking forward to the weekend, wishing it was here already, Sunday seems like a day to just laze about. Oh, how good it will feel to just chill out for a day. Stay in PJs all day, cook something that smells good in the kitchen, watch movies, play games, day dream out loud. It seems like heaven. In fact, I do all the housework on Saturday in order to make room for it, to make sure we have no real responsibilities for that one blissful day.

Yet when the day arrives, we can’t help ourselves. We feel compelled. Sitting around makes us slightly edgy and errands present themselves in our minds. We go and do. Do.

But now it’s Monday and I’m thinking about the next weekend, when we won’t have to get out of the house by a certain time and can linger over breakfast. When we can have pancakes! We won’t wear contacts but glasses instead, or maybe no glasses at all. Maybe we’ll sit in front of the closet and talk about what we want to pack for Europe. And read on the couch with hot tea and hot chocolate, with the dog on her bed next to us. A bath perhaps. And root vegetables roasting in the oven. Yes, certainly, since it seems so very lovely, it will happen next Sunday.

They finally found something wrong with Bill! Not anything serious — it’s a sinus infection — but just to have a test come back with a result other than “normal” feels almost giddy.

So Bill has basically been nauseated and exhausted since New Year’s. After going to a doctor and having basic tests run (such as blood work for mono, for allergies like gluten, for terrible things like blood cancer or lupus), he was pronounced perfectly healthy. And, bonus, his cholesterol is way down!!!

Then he had a barium x-ray. That’s where he takes a shot of AlkaSeltzer, then a shot of liquid barium (imagine a chalk milkshake with state fair-type flavoring), and then a machine picks him up and rolls him around while the x-ray camera does it work capturing his upper GI tract. No tumors or ulcers. Perfectly healthy.

So he’s referred to a gastroenterologist who does her own battery of tests. No esoteric mono strains, no HIV (whew, that’s a relief), all internal organs like liver functioning normally, selenium levels within normal limits. Perfectly healthy.

Next there’s a CT scan of his lower GI tract. More barium. Gotta love drinking four barium shakes in an afternoon. He lies on the machine while the scanner thingy whirls around his middle and a little cartoon mister tells him when to hold his breath. Guess what? Perfectly healthy.

Somewhere in the midst of all this fun, the GI stuff has tapered a bit, but he’s started to get mini-migraines. Just the beginning of a migraine. The feeling you get when you know you’re about to get a migraine, but then it doesn’t pan out. Is this all related? Let’s do a CT scan of his head to see. And voila!!

A sinus infection. Ooo! Something to do! A plan of action! This is super exciting! A relief! Affirmation that we’re not just imagining things! He’ll start antibiotics that will take his sinuses back to blissful health. And who knows? Maybe his stomach will repair itself at the same time? And then we can really say and really know, “perfectly healthy.”

What era is that, you wonder? Is Bill graduating? No, it’s the era of the really good crackers. Why don’t I just buy more, you ask? These are the really good, home-made, sinful treat kind of crackers. Mustard and pepper and bacon and bacon fat (and not much else except flour I think). When my parents were here for visiting they made a huge batch. Not on purpose (one of those “the recipe calls for a quarter cup of mustard and I accidently used the full cup measure and didn’t realize it until it was already mixed in with the other ingredients so now there’s no choice but to quadruple everything else” scenarios), but boy were we happy about it.

There’s been a tin of them in the freezer for these couple of months, little butterfly and dragonfly and honeycomb shaped goodies. Every week or so we take out a handful to go with our lunch soup. If I know I have these crackers to eat, I’ll gladly slurp boring soup, just for the pleasure of getting to crunch these tasty little guys alongside. They’re like dessert — what you wait the whole meal for.

But now the last has been savored and it’s back to whole grain commercial crackers or toasted whole wheat pitas or carrots and celery. Sometimes being healthy is a burden. I know it means we’ll get to stick around longer. Be like happy labrador puppies cavorting through meadows of grasshoppers and fireflies when we hit middleage. But is it really worth it without the pepper crackers of life?

Yeah, probably. Yeah, he’s worth it.

I think I feel like I should be posting more here. Last night I dreamed that I took the grand staircase in a hotel I was staying at as opposed to taking the elevator. There was a crowd worthy of a presidential visit waiting for the lift, so I elected to schlep my luggage up the stairs. I made sure to take a picture of the hoards on the ground floor, an elegant shot of the deserted marble staircase, and then a picture through my window of the crowds still waiting for the elevator three floors below. The purpose: the pictures and story were to be posted on this blog.

So I guess I’ll be racking my brain for little stories to write here. At least the bar is set low; taking the stairs is not necessarily a thrilling tale. Oh, and I looked for last night’s pictures on my camera. They seem to have gone missing.