Dust mites

This posting is for those whose interests are in the preservation of our natural environment. There are many species of fauna whose survival and continued existence is pretty much guaranteed.

One of these should be of particular concern to those of us who spend most of our time indoors. It cannot be seen with the naked eye, but it is there in abundance, and no amount of care and attention will ever get rid of it completely.

It is the dust mite (Dermatophagoides farinae), a tiny parasite related to the spider family, each no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence. It feeds on dander, which is a fancy name for dust particles formed from the dead skin of humans and animals. Yuck!


Below is a magnified image of a dust mite. Click on the image to enlarge.

Shelf Life

Some people are methodical.  They will check out everything in the pantry or the refrigerator at recurring intervals to determine the expiration dates on packaged food items, and then proceed to discard those that are past due.  This practice would no doubt be religiously followed in well-organized households.

However, many people, I am inclined to think, are like me.  They simply don't inventory their food stocks on a regular basis, and long-expired items may be left in the secret recesses of the kitchen cupboard or the fridge way past their imprinted expiration dates.  Now, of course we may, I think with some assurance, regard a jar of marmelade with a 'best before' date of September 2005 as still edible, and possibly even palatable, in September 2006.  Well and good.  But not all foods are created equal.

For breakfast this morning, I discovered that we were out of oatmeal.  In the back of the pantry shelf was a box of crispy rice flakes.  Without a second thought, I poured some into a bowl, added low-fat milk, and the first spoonful told me that all was not well with the flakes.  So then I took a look at the box top, and there I found the printed date of November 2005.  Ten months past the due date, those crispy rice flakes showed a distinct lack of freshness, a hint of over-the-hill-ness in texture as well as taste. So there is something to be said for taking note of the expiration date on the package.

Tomorrow I will go through the contents of our pantry and throw out the passé items within.  And the day after it will be the refrigerator's turn.

I wonder when it was that I made that left-over egg salad in the small Pyrex dish in the back of the bottom shelf? And why is it that color?

Trust

The wrapper on the roll of bathroom tissue tells us that it holds 425 sheets, double-ply. All well and good, but has anyone ever checked? How can anyone know unless each sheet has been counted?

In a box of breakfast cereal, we learn that the contents are sold by weight, not by volume, and that the contents may have settled during shipment. Indeed. When we open the box, we find that the plastic bag inside appears no more than three-quarters full. Is that all due to the settling? Or could holding back a scoopful of corn flakes per box improve the manufacturer's bottom line?

Who can we trust these days?

Good Intentions

Got a new cell phone recently, a tiny thing no bigger than a business card holder. Problem I have with cell phones is that I misplace them, which is what happened to the last one, and the one before. Now, if they came with a an expandable keychain attached, that would solve the problem.

* * *

Been neglecting my daily walk, having been too 'busy' as noted in a previous post.

It's the same old story. You start the day with good intentions, but your attention is captured by some other chore that is easily done on the fly, like taking out the old newspapers and magazines for recycling, or unloading the dishwasher, or turning off a light that has been on downstairs since last night, and you see that the light actually is coming from your computer monitor, so you sit down at the desk to check your email, most of which are likely to be jokes that your friends have been circulating, some of them being duplicates because they come from people who send them out to undisclosed recipients, and so the joke is recycled from one friend to another and may in fact have originated with you, as you may discover to your annoyance, and find that you are as much a culprit in this merry-go-round as any of your unwitting correspondents, even though you may try as much as possible to check (if the email contains a warning about some disastrous event or a shocking exposé or a religious message or a free gift, and admonishes you please to send it at once to all your friends, because if you do not do it within a specified period of time, a calamity may befall you, or you will miss out on some terrific deal or blessing or piece of luck, or else some poor afflicted child may perish as a result of your lack of compassion from not following the instructions) against a website that purports to unmask all kinds of hoaxes and so-called urban legends, to see whether the email contents are true or false, and all this with the nagging ever-present thought that a computer virus or worm may have insinuated itself into the hitherto pristine machine before which you sit in the innocent expectation that among all this morass of jokes and pop-up advertisements you may find some mail that is actually worth reading.

And an hour or two later, you have completely forgotten what you started out to do.

Friday

On a busy Friday morning, the waiting room in the hospital's lab services department is standing-room-only for the patients (who richly deserve their name). You need to pull a number from a red machine, then wait for the number to be called, at which time you approach a female clerk at one of several windows to present your paperwork. The sign on the wall says: To maintain patients' privacy, please remain seated until your number is called. The clerk confirms some requisite information about you, particularly about your insurance coverage, and then orders you to sit until your name is called.

Having your blood sample drawn for a test is no big deal, but when there's a lot of people waiting and milling around, some confusion will occur. A man thinks his name is called, either because the technician calling out his name has an accent or can't pronounce the name clearly, and he gets up, only to discover that a second man—the right party—has also risen to his feet after the technician tried pronouncing again, and got it almost correct the second time.

A Chinese woman of advanced years, frumpily dressed and holding a walking stick, converses in strident tones with a younger man, seemingly not a relative, sitting beside her with his attention fixed on the television near the ceiling. The woman wears an incongruous red lipstick, quite out of sync with her age and her attire.

The population in the waiting room is approximately half white and half minorities, and perhaps half of both groups are native-born and half foreign-born. Which you may reasonably guess are the approximate ratios of the population of the Great State of California, whose elected Governor is an immigrant of Austrian birth and accent.

Busy, busy

Been busy, hence the lack of postings on this blog. The busyness has nothing to do with productive activity. In truth, it has very little to show for itself. All this running around is generally referred to as spinning one's wheels. Running in place, as it were.

* * *

Meetings and appointments, doctors, financial advisers, contractors, shopping for carpets and furniture. An hour here, two hours there, not counting travel time. Now a stop for lunch and, while trying to get into the carpool lane in rush hour traffic, a quick listen to news on the radio about some secondrate South American noodlehead insulting our President at the wastefully expensive circus called the UN. And how about those New York parking tickets that go unpaid by third world diplomats whose jet set lifestyle is financed by our taxpayers' dollars?

My rant for today.

* * *

We get on in years, and health continues to be either a remarkable gift or a thing of concern, whether our own, or our friends' and relatives'. Those little aches and sniffles and coughs, they may not seem to be something to worry over, but you never can tell. Heaven forbid that they should signal something dire. At our time of life, chances should not be something we take. Medications, yes. Chances, no.

* * *

You can probably tell that my mood on this lovely fall day borders on the gloomy.

d'accord

The essay "In the Waiting Room" by David Sedaris in the September 18, 2006 issue of the New Yorker is an absolute gas.

First Anniversary

I have been blogging for just over a year. September 12 was the first anniversary of this blog.

I'm a bit surprised that I've managed to keep it going that long. Some days ideas can arrive easily. But there are also dry spells when nothing comes to mind. I try to get at least a couple of postings in each week, when I'm home.

Just trying not to repeat myself is a job in itself.

Operation

The background music is familiar: a popular song from the Fifties, sung by a then-famous female vocalist. The music is soft, and you can just about make out the words. The softness of the music is appropriate to the general ambience of the waiting room, where some ten or twelve people are either standing or sitting.

Some are new arrivals who have already announced their presence to the receptionist, a woman in her sixties who wears the pink jacket of a hospital volunteer. Once they have done this, they are told to take a seat.

Their information is passed along to a female clerk, younger, slimmer, and very efficient-appearing, in a form-fitting shirt and slacks, who is working at a computer terminal in a nook at one end of the waiting room. Every few minutes the clerk will emerge from her nook, a folder in her hand, and she will call out the name of one of the waiting patients.

It is interesting that she calls out only the first name to begin with. On answering the summons, the named patient is directed to accompany the clerk through a door into another room, where a nurse, in blue scrubs, takes the folder, greets the patient, and the two disappear as the door swings shut behind them.

If the patient does not answer when a name is first called out, the clerk will try again with the first name, adding a question mark, as she glances around the room. "Edith?" And only after there is no response, will she add a last name to the first. "Edith Bigler?" "Oswaldo?" " Oswaldo Morales?" And so on. Never "Miz Bigler" or "Mr Morales".

My guess is that fifty percent of the patients may be hard of hearing. Some have walkers or canes, and some are attended by family members or other caregivers. Most are there waiting to be admitted for minor surgery — cataracts, hands, feet, ingrown nails, that kind of thing.

The magazines set out in the waiting room are old, some over a year old. Some have pages torn out of them.

Once inside the adjoining pre-op room, you are greeted by a pleasant-mannered nurse who sits you down on a reclinable armchair. The nurse, one of the six in attendance this day, asks a number of questions about past surgeries, allergies, medications taken, and other details.

The music in here is as soothing as what had greeted us in the waiting room — in fact the music in both rooms appears to emanate from the same central source. One may wonder whether in the actual operating theater the same music may be heard.

The nursing station in the center of the room has two computer screens, two telephones, a two potted plants. The nurses come and go, exchanging remarks with one another, and occasionally with the patients waiting in one of the several booths. Some of the patients are lying on gurneys while they recover from their operations.

A janitor comes in and empties the plastic-lined bins by the counter. A large bunch of keys dangles from his belt, into which a pair of green rubber gloves has been stuck. He is about forty-five, lean, of medium height, walks with a slight stoop, and a pot belly sticks out over a large belt buckle. It is quite possible that his paycheck, including overtime, exceeds that of the nurses.

A doctor walks by, on his way in or out of the operating room. He wears blue scrubs, and on his head a sort of shower cap of elasticized plastic. His glasses are halfway down his nose, and a cloth face mask dangles on his chest. He moves right, and then left, and then right again, as though unsure where he is headed.

All the medical staff wear tennis shoes with thick soles. Sometimes their shoes make little squeaks on the vinyl floor.

One of the nurses is particularly attractive, though no longer young. She moves with a fluid grace through the room, as though on ice skates. It is a pleasure to watch her go about her business.

9/11

Last night my wife and I viewed the first part of the docu-drama on ABC titled "The Path to 9/11", and tonight we will view the second and final part. We thought it was well done, with fast-paced editing, authentic characterizations and settings, and enough insight into the actions of the principals involved to provide an understanding of what led to that great tragedy on September 11, 2001.

We were mesmerized by the program, in much the same way as we might have been by any good adventure film set in a familiar locale with recognizable actors. We knew that it was based on the 9/11 Commission's findings, and on interviews, as this was announced at the start, and again at the end, and that it purported to be historically correct. I say we were mesmerized, yes, but we were not really moved.

What did move us was watching the 9/11 memorial services that took place today in New York, at the Pentagon, and in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Seeing the images of the ceremonies, and hearing the names of the people who lost their lives read out by surviving family members. One image that will forever remain with me is of a little girl, daughter of a New York City policeman, whose wife, the girl's mother, also a NYC policewoman, perished when the twin towers fell.

Those are the images that bring the lumps to our throats, and cause our eyes to become moist. Such images will never, indeed must never, allow us to forget what happened that bright September morning five years ago.

California Landscapes

Costa Mesa

Los Banos

Obituaries

In our younger days we hardly ever looked at the obituary page in our local newspaper. There would have been no need, as our closeknit community's grapevine was exceedingly efficient, and the death of someone we knew would have been known before any notice appeared in the paper.

That remains as true, or even truer, today, with the Internet now linking so many of our friends. But for some years now I have been checking the daily paper's death notices. Partly this is due to an innate curiosity, a shade morbid perhaps, about how our fellow citizens departed this life, what they did during it, and how those they left behind will remember them. Another part of it may be a desire to prepare oneself for the inevitable, while one is still able.

Grim as that may sound, I know that my father, who passed away from a dread disease at the young age of 42, himself prepared his death notice for the newspaper not long before he died. I thought at the time that that showed his profound courage. And I hope that before my time comes, I shall be able to draw on his example.

For now, I am happy to be able just to read the biographies in the Obituary section of our daily paper.

I see that the death notices are much longer today than they used to be. My cynical nature tells me that may have something to do with the sad economic state of the print media and the fall-off in paid newspaper advertising. But the obits are definitely wordier nowadays.

It is sadder to read that someone passed away "after a long (or brave, or heroic) battle (or struggle)" with this or that disease. It is less sad to read that someone died peacefully at a ripe old age surrounded by family members.

We may read that this person, if older, is survived by a loving spouse, children, and perhaps grand- and great-grandchildren. Sometimes all are named, and even the names of their spouses may be included in the notice in parentheses. We may share in the survivors' sense of loss, wish them well, and then proceed to read about how the deceased lived his or her life (place and date of birth, education, achievements in sports, marriage/s, family connections, military service, jobs held or careers embarked upon and succeeded in, hobbies, church activities, volunteer work, support for the arts, places visited in the world.) Words such as "dear", "loyal", "cherished", "adored", "tireless", "generous", "humor", "sorely missed", "honored", "greatest joy", "passion" (for sports or hobbies), these may be expected to appear with regularity.

(I can fully appreciate how very difficult it is for any writer to come up with words to assuage the sense of loss over the death of a loved one, and the previous paragraph is not intended to be disparaging.)

More often than not, a photograph of the deceased accompanies the death notice. Usually they depict the person in the prime of life, and in some cases, even in early youth. This gives the notice a distinct incongruity, as when the photo of an attractive young woman in her early thirties is paired with an obituary for her ninety-year-old self.

The last part of the notice will announce the time and place of a memorial service, generally in a place of worhip or the chapel of a funeral home, and where donations to a charity can be made in memory of the deceased.

Dubrovnik

Some pictures of the old town.

Big Weekend

So we begin a long holiday weekend. The sky is overcast at this hour. The flag is unfurled outside our front door.

* * * * *

My sister and her husband are celebrating their 50^th wedding anniversary this weekend, and we are going to join in the festivities down in Southern California. It's going to be a lot of fun, visiting folks we haven't seen in a while.

* * * * *

One of my favorite actors passed away a few days ago. Glenn Ford. I remember him best as the FBI agent John Ripley in the Blake Edwards movie "Experiment in Terror" (1962), who helped a terrorized bank teller played by the beautiful Lee Remick. The story is set in a San Francisco that I can relate to, a lovely city that existed at about the time that I first arrived here in California.

Another great movie of his was, of course, "Blackboard Jungle" (1955), where he played school teacher Richard Dadier ("Yeah, I've been beaten up, but I'm not beaten. I'm not beaten, and I'm not quittin'.")

* * * * *

Attention

Could it be old age that makes one's thoughts wander? I wonder.

Or could it be a more complex process that lies behind the seeming attenuation of one's attention span?

I suspect that, as you get older, there's so much more information coming at you from every direction that it becomes more difficult to fix on just one piece of it for long. Not only that, but all the facts you have accumulated in a lifetime will add to the load, and by a simple process of association, they intrude upon your thinking, and thus they tend to lead your thoughts down other primrose paths.

That's what happens when I go to the dictionary to look up a word. If I happen to chance upon a page or pages containing an interesting word, that new word will invariably capture my attention, and the word I had started out with gets lost in the shuffle.

Could this be due to just a lack of discipline on my part? Maybe so.

And can the problem be corrected? We'll see.