It Isn't Belladonna

      Yesterday, I went back to the specialist eye doctor for the last scheduled follow-up to my posterior vitreous detachment.

      Unlike previous visits, the place was crowded, waiting room not full but there weren't any pairs of empty seats left after Tam (my driver for the day) and I sat down.  But the wait wasn't very long, and they took me back for a quick eye exam, numbing drops, eye pressure test (28 front and 30 back?  No, that's tires) and dilating drops. 

      Apparently, it's not atropine (from belladonna or nightshade), which would wear off even more slowly.  It's probably one of the commercial preparations of this stuff.  I am normally light-sensitive and the amount of medication they use for a really serious eye exam leaves me wearing sunglasses indoors (two pairs of them outdoors, plus a hat and even then, it's not good).  It also knocks me off-kilter for a day: colors are wrong and overly intense, sounds are too loud, events too hard to make sense of.

      The tech gave me the drops and sent me off to sit.  You need to wait for the medication to take effect.  A half-hour is ideal.  They've got secondary waiting areas tucked into a maze of exam rooms and they try to keep patients moving.  Most of us had to have our retinas photographed, so they haul you off for that after a quarter-hour and afterward put you in another waiting area, to be seen by the doctor.

      That's what they did with me: a set of eight-by-ten eyeball glossies* and into the next waiting room, this one absolutely full.  By then I needed sunglasses.  I put my Kindle into night mode (amber light and dimmed) to read and waited.  And waited.  People came and went around me.  After forty-five or fifty minutes, I texted Tam that I was starting to wonder if they had forgotten me.  We kidded back and forth, and she went to the front desk to ask.  No, they said, it's just a very busy day.

        We griped back and forth in text for a while, then I returned to my book.  Finally my name was called, by which time I was nearly panicking after over an hour packed into a waiting room jammed with blurry strangers.  The exam room was small, dark and mercifully empty of people.

      The doctor was prompt, brisk and professional.  The room is built with an enormous computer monitor on one wall, covered in retina images and the pertinent parts of the patient's file; the doctor gets up to speed, reading even as he says hello, and starts dictating into a speech-to-text gadget almost immediately while checking the pictures, then reclines the chair and starts looking in my eyes.

      "Bright light, open wide.  Look up and to your left...far left...down and to the left, a little more left, down, yes..."  All the way around on each eye, with occasional short breaks, "Blink, now...good."

      He doesn't waste time or motion.  He's friendly, confident and reassuring.  Whatever the reason for my long wait, it wasn't because the doctor was dawdling.

      The actual eye exam -- and a clean bill of health -- was the high point of my day.  I had trouble navigating my way to the front desk to check out (at least I was expecting it this time) and trouble getting to the car.  I just shut down for the ride home, not looking out the window and concentrating on getting though it.

      Got home, worked online, had a small snack and had to go lay down in my bedroom with all the lights off, TV muttering to itself.  Tam was out, writing; when she came home, trying to order dinner was a jumble of confusion and cross-purpose talk.  We finally found something we both liked and I'm pretty sure we looked at television over dinner, but the details are unclear.  I went to bed early and slept for nearly ten hours.

      And I'd like to avoid that particular type and strength of eye-dilation medicine for a good long while.
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* Where I noticed some clever helper had removed flat metal covers from a machine and propped them against a wall, trapping one under the edge of an oversized medical-type power plug to keep it from falling over -- on the "live" side, and almost touching the pin.  I pointed this out as a probable safety issue.  It'll be perfectly fine until it gets nudged that last eighth of an inch, and then they'll find out what else is on that circuit, probably to the accompaniment of a loud pop and perhaps a puff of smoke.

Walk In At Any Location -- No, Not That One

      A couple of doctors had me down for lab work.  These days, most of that is offloaded to a handful of independent laboratories with multiple locations.  They're all networked and you usually don't even need an appointment; you pick one, give them your name and date of birth, and like magic, the lab order pops up, they do the blood draw (or a few other things) and the results go off to the doctor, neat as can be.

      I went to the (mini) lab next to my GP's office yesterday and gave them my info, remarking there should be two different orders.

      "Oh, the contract changed. At this location, we only do tests for the doctors next door now."

      "But it's still the same company?"

      "Yes.  You could have had all the tests done at any of our full-sized locations, but here we're just doing them for the adjacent office."

      I was there then, and had my sleeve rolled up.  So she did the blood draw for the labs she could handle, and I stopped at another location on my way to work.  This is the opposite of convenient.

      Also, I have bandaids on each elbow.  At least the lab tech found a good vein on my left elbow.  It's usually a challenge.

Can You Repeat That Over Again?

      Radio and TV news writing is supposed to be informal.  Not slangy or imprecise, but more or less conversational.

      Everyday speech has a lot of redundancy, which may explain why I keep hearing horrors like this:

      "It's 6:14 a.m. in the morning and there's a traffic problem on the roads of the city's north side of town.  A man was robbed and his watch and money were taken at an ATM machine when an armed gunman showed up and appeared immediately right after he completed finishing putting in his PIN number...."

      They're everywhere all over the dial.  Oh, no!  It's catching!  And communicable!

"Run In Circles, Scream And Shout?"

      Or, better yet, don't.  Even though the pundits believe we're sliding into a butter shortage.  I noticed the other day that our grocer was out of the fancy imported stuff I prefer.  It was no big deal; butter keeps and at any given time, I have two or three tubs stacked at the back of the fridge.*  I have done so ever since there was bobble in supply during the pre-vaccine pandemic.

      I didn't realize there was more to the story, but it turns out butter prices have been creeping up a little more quickly than the general increasing cost of everything: the entire Northern Hemisphere had a hot summer, which affects milk production, and the return of normal life means more butter-using activities -- baking and cooking in general, mostly (I hope).  Supply is down and demand is up.

      So, panic?  Nope.  It's not nefarious, milk cows aren't extinct, and "What, no butter?" has been a solved problem for somewhere between 153 years and forever, depending on who you're asking and what you want to use the tasty fats for.  Oleomargarine is the most direct substitute and these days it really is (as the old ads imply) credibly close to the real thing.  Margarine is churned out (ahem) via industrial processes and the supply scales up pretty readily.  The observed price increase of butter means some people will already be switching to margarine -- there's "Econ 101" again -- prompting an increase in margarine supply. How well will it track demand?  I can't predict that but chances are it won't be too far off, and to make up the shortfall--

      Humans crave fats.  At one point, we never got quite enough.  That was back when our tools were made of wood, bone and stone and we dressed in leather, fur and leaves -- or nothing.  We never stopped looking for more edible grease and we've picked up a few tricks since then.  Depending on where you grew up and who your grandparents were, you're already familiar with lard, beef or mutton tallow, schmaltz, duck fat, olive oil and vegetable oils generally.  They've all been in the larder for at least thousands and possibly tens of thousands of years.  They all work well for baking and many are excellent on bread or other baked goods.  (Bread dipped in good olive oil, with or without flavorings, is a real treat.  Then there's the Spanish analog to colcannon, mashed potatoes and greens with a bit of smoked meat diced in: the Irish give it a little puddle of melted butter, but the Spaniards serve theirs with olive oil!)  None of  the replacements are butter, true enough, but even seal oil has its fans: humans crave fats.  It's built right into us and we have a plenitude of sources for them.  (I left out Crisco, which is essentially lard for vegans.)

      We may run low on butter this holiday season.  But don't be stampeded; we're not about to run out of the delicious fats we crave or the even more delicious baked treats we make with butter and a long list of useful substitutes.  If some eeeeevil "them" are after our food supply through the butter supply, "they" must have failed Home Ec -- more likely, the fear-mongering talking heads are certain you did.
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* Alternating, these days, between the regular version of Irish butter and the softer cut-with-olive-oil kind, nearly a dollar per tub cheaper and tasting the same as nearly as I can tell.  And there's Consumer Econ 101 in a nutshell.  It'll crop up again.

All In How You Look At It

      Accidentally buying unsliced everything bagels and having to cut them myself: not so great.

      Slicing those bagels over a plate next to the eggs I'm frying for my breakfast sandwich and pouring the poppy seeds, sesame seeds and garlic that falls off during slicing on the eggs: entirely great! (I break and fry out the yolks: I prefer 'em that way and it's less messy.  YMMV.)

      This morning, my sandwich got a two slices of uncured ham that I fried a little, a slice of Manchego cheese on the eggs, and two slices of Genoa salami.  The bagels are pretty large, so the eggs (in my two-egg skillet*) are only a little bigger around; the ham and salami slices are round as well.  The cheese is the only square peg, but it's just the right size to fit.
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* I have accumulated one-egg, 1.5-egg, two 2-egg and one 4-egg frying pans.  They're handy.

It's Just Annoying

      As mid-term election season winds up, the level of fantasy, nonsense, bullshit, denial, dirty pool and general style-over-substance among the candidates staggers and amazes me.  The GOP has a commanding lead when it comes to peddling crap as diamonds -- and an amazing number of eager customers, despite the obvious stink.

      Meanwhile, the Dems offer a much less coherent front (all to the good) and mostly their same old muddled ideas (varying from tolerable to awful, with an average of not so good).  But at least the majority of their candidates are approaching political office as an opportunity to do some useful work rather than a great angle for grift, and even their wildest ideas have a basis, however minuscule, in reality.

      I'll take "annoyingly wrong" over "dangerously crazy" any time -- and the only way I see to nudge Republicans back towards reality is if their candidates are trounced at the ballot box.  Will that happen this November?  Probably not.  Mixed results are more likely, and however the U.S. House and Senate tip, the margin of control will probably be narrow.  That's good, in that it should force debate and compromise on essential legislation, and push the glittering garbage out of consideration, but it just kicks the can down the road and lets crazy remain crazy.

      One good thing: as of this morning, I don't have to listen to people whining that the mainstream media are ignoring Hunter Biden's legal woes.  Looks like some low-level felony-grade stuff, and we will see how it plays out -- right there on the olde-tyme print, video and online media.  Strain at a gnat, swallow a whole camel, but there it is, the story you said they didn't want anyone to see, getting seen.

Literarely

      So, apparently Atlas Twerked isn't a real book.

      I should be relieved.

Not Today, Kid

      Maybe tomorrow.

Listening

      Some time back, I started listening to the original Dragnet radio program, Jack Webb's first take on a "based on real cases" police show and far less preachy than the later TV version.  I reached the last one and went looking for something else.

      X Minus One is a good science fiction series that presented some real classics -- Fritz Leiber's "A Pail of Air," Robert A. Heinlein's "Requiem" and the remarkably prescient "A Logic Named Joe" by Murray Leinster, to name a few -- but there aren't a lot of surviving episodes and it can be overwhelming.

      There's another gem that ran for years: the original Gunsmoke, with William Conrad (trust me, he plays much leaner on the radio) as Marshall Matt Dillon.  Darker and grittier than the long-running TV series, the production values are remarkable and the stories are fully-formed and well-told.  I've been drifting off to sleep with tales of Dodge City in my ears for about a week now.

An Unusual Breakfast

      Okay, not that unusual.  And I swear I had no idea it was just after World Vegetarian Day until after breakfast.

      Yesterday, we had a steak dinner.  The grocer had a great price on ribeyes, and with shiitake and maitake mushrooms, Brussels sprouts and baked potatoes, they made a fine dinner.  I even cleared the old ash and charcoal from the grill and used fresh, new lump charcoal.*  (Mushrooms cooked with a little butter in an open pan on the grill are a real treat on a steak, if you ask me.)

      It made for a large meal.  I'd picked up half an apple pie (fresh-baked in the store's own kitchen!) and we had vanilla ice cream, but dessert was out of the question.

      Apple pie doesn't last forever.  Why not enjoy a slice of hot apple pie with a scoop of vanilla for breakfast?  It's not that different from fruit-topped sugary cereal with milk, after all.  And so good with coffee.
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* Roasting in a covered pan on the grill, I will let ash build up as I conserve charcoal by shutting off the air and letting the coals go out.  But it reaches a point where I have to fish out the biggest pieces and throw away the rest, especially since I'd run out of the lump stuff and have been using briquettes instead.  Fine for roasting but not my first choice for grilling. And you really don't want too much loose ash when making steaks on the grill.

Slow-Roasted Pork Chops

      Not just pork chops -- pork chops with cabbage, turnip and apple, not to mention a few other vegetables.

      Our local grocer's meat case was a little picked-over Friday.  You can always count on nice steaks these days, because the price ensures they're no longer an impulse buy, but the less-costly cuts go fast and it turns out I'm not the only person who knows how to roast a Boston Butt or a London Broil.  They had some nice, thick boneless pork chops, and I picked them up with thoughts of making a tasty Autumn dinner.

      Root vegetables are back; the hot summer wasn't kind to turnips and rutabagas, but big, delicately-colored turnips have returned.  I've had a few commenters wonder why anyone would ever think of eating, of all things, a turnip.  I can only pity such folks.  Turnips have an earthy, faintly sweet, delicate flavor that works nicely with meat and they can be cooked any way you'd cook a potato.  Turnip chips are a delightful treat; a lot of work in a skillet but I wonder how an air-fryer would do for chips or fries?  Fall apples are already showing up, too, a profusion of varieties.  I bought a "Pink Lady" apple nearly as large as a softball and a small head of cabbage.  I already had a bag of carrots, plus a large bell pepper, some skinny mild peppers and a jalapeno.

      The pork chops got several hours in a mixture of soy sauce and balsamic vinegar, spiked with a little white vinegar and seasoned with plenty of garlic and some Bragg's spice mixture; you just put them in a heavy freezer bag, add enough liquid to cover and set it back in the fridge.  About three hours from dinner time, I started building a fire in the grill (it needs emptying), the normal tic-tac-toe grid of kindling stuffed with a standard newspaper page torn into strips and balled up.  Charcoal, most of it left over from earlier, is then mounded up around and over the kindling in a kind of hollow tower with a gap at the front bottom, opposite the air intake.  One match gets the paper going at front and back; pretty soon flame is roaring up through the thing and by the time the pile collapses, the coals are lit and glowing.  I pushed them into two rows at the sides for indirect heat, set the grill bars in place and closed the lid.

      The oval roasting pan -- inexpensive graniteware -- got a coating of olive oil, both chops, and coarsely-cubed peeled turnip (3/4" cubes and some smaller) with smoked paprika and a generous dollop of marinade.  With a two-hour timer,* I set it (with the lid on) in the center of the grill while I peeled and chopped the apple, then sprinkled some mild curry powder on it before adding it to the pan (you can leave the skin on if you like, but it tends to remain in large pieces, which I find annoying).  I took my time dicing the carrots (1/2" sections) and mild peppers (1/4" or smaller).  After tasting the jalapeno, I sliced it into thin rounds and added perhaps a third of them -- this is very much to taste and depends on how feisty the particular pepper happens to be.  Err on the mild side and save the extra to be added at the table by anyone who wants more heat.  I put the the peppers and carrots in the pan about a half-hour into cooking or a little less.

      Cabbage next.  Don't be shy about discarding outer leaves to get to the tender parts; it's inexpensive.  I cut wedges, and with just over an hour left, layered them atop everything else in the pan until it was full.

      At the two-hour mark, I went out with the digital meat thermometer (these gadgets are cheap and well worth owning), expecting to need more time.  Nope -- the pork was plenty done, the cabbage translucent and tender, and it all smelled tempting.

      The meat was well-browned on the outside and on the verge of falling apart.  There was plenty of broth in the pan to put over it and the vegetables were delicious, savory, not too sweet or too spicy.  The apple cooked down soft, while the turnip, carrots and cabbage were tender without being mushy.  I will readily admit this is "peasant food," but it's darned tasty.

      No stirring or measuring and I mostly ignore the pan unless there's something to be added or it's time to bring it in.
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* I use Alexa for this, and set timers at half-hour intervals as a reminder to add remaining ingredients and check on the grill.

A Universal Trait

      Scolds of the world -- Left, Right or apolitical, religious, irrreligious, atheistic or agnostic -- have all got one thing in common: The heartfelt conviction that no matter how bad they feel about their own selves, they can always elevate themselves by making someone else feel worse.

      They think it's all relative and if they can make someone else feel small or worth less, why, that's the same as making themselves feel better.

      It's not -- but you'll never convince them otherwise, and it's only too easy a trap to fall into.  In fact, I may have just done so myself.

      As do we all, sometimes.