Story of the Day 7/22/2011

Aaron and I became lab animals today.

Well, not exactly, no one was experimenting on us. We were simply donating blood. I was donating the standard pint, at the Indiana Blood Center, and Aaron, because he is such a prime physical specimen, had been asked to donate a double unit- yep, two pints.

Okay, it wasn’t because he was such a prime physical specimen, it was because they were out, or almost out, of his blood type.

So we were sitting there, or really, lying there, having blood drained from our left arms, and a group walks through- a group of about 10 mid-twentyish folk wearing white lab coats being led by an older man in a lab coat.
Older being relative to them, not to me. I probably could have babysat him, 38 years ago.

At any rate, the older man came over and asked if we minded if this group of young doctors came through and he would explain to them what was being done. Ah , what the heck , my underwear wasn’t showing and there was nothing good on the TV, which wasn’t’ even visible from where I was lying.

As it turned out, we were much more entertaining that the TV, because a few of the medical students or interns or residents or who knows what they were, took to staring at me and at Aaron- and not because we were fine physical specimens. Apparently, they were not used to seeing people signing.

While they are standing around in a semi-organized group, the educator gives them some detailed explanation about how the blood is collected, the chemicals in the bags they use to collect it, the mixing procedure, the kinds of needles. Oh and he asks if any of them have problems with needles.
None do, so he hands around a needle of the type that is inserted into my left arm and one of the young docs faints.
She would have hit the floor except that the young man standing near here had apparently been trained in “ how to catch a fainting female” – which must have been one of the classes he took in medical school. At any rate, he did a very good job of catching her before she hit the floor. They then lay her down, and brought over a fan and some ice cold towels.

I felt much better about my bit of lightheadedness, post donating.

As we left the building, Aaron commented to me, “She should become a pharmacist”.

Story of the Day 7/ 20 2011

Sarah’s friend asked her what the name of the interpreter was that she had this past April and May. Her friend couldn’t think of the interpreter’s name.
Sarah told her, “ It is He-Who-Must-Not-Be Named.”

So true.

Story of the Day 7/14/2011

We were walking from the testing center back to our car, today, and Sarah said to me, “This is truly your Story of the Day.”

In keeping with the moment, I taught her two new vocabulary words.
SNAFU and FUBAR.

Sadly, I was not videotaping her when I explained them. The look on her face was both stunned and one of awe that there were terms that so totally captured the flavor of the day.

Today was Sarah’s midterm test for the on-line math class she is taking through IUHS (Indiana University High School). Sarah submitted her request for the exam, last week. The test was then scheduled and the interpreter was set up, and, early this morning, off we went to the testing center, and Sarah took her midterm.

Okay, that isn’t what happened.
That is what was supposed to happen.


Last Thursday, Sarah submitted the request for the midterm. She requested to be tested at the IUPUI Testing Center, and she requested that the exam be sent to them electronically, as in via email.


At any rate, everything was set up for Sarah to take her midterm test at the IUPUI testing center.
Today.
At 1 PM.
The problem, today, started after all of this was set in motion.
You see, for some reason that we have yet to determine, Sarah’s exam was not electronically sent to the testing center at IUPUI. (Indiana University- Purdue University of Indianapolis, this is the Indianapolis branch of the two large universities on one shared campus.)

I had started calling the IUPUI testing center, last Friday, This was the day after my daughter submitted the request on-line. On Sunday, I sent my first email. I though that it might be helpful for the proctor to have my home and cell phone numbers (in case they weren’t clear on the message I left on their answering machine) as well as my email address, so we could set up a date and a time when the interpreter would be available. Yes, this sounds like I am being compulsive, but since Sarah requires an interpreter, and the interpreter needs to be scheduled, and the program at IUHS has specified an interpreter- so that specific interpreter has to be available, I felt that the earlier this was scheduled at a time that would work for the interpreter, the better. You see, the testing center staff is there 5 days a week at set hours, but the interpreter isn’t – and this seems to be a concept that people who have never dealt with an interpreter just don’t seem to get it. No, you see, we do not have a personal interpreter for Sarah who just rides around with us in the car and goes wherever Sarah goes whenever Sarah goes. Oh yes, and who follows her into the bathroom, and stands in a corner in her bedroom at night, just in case.

We have been working on getting one of those, so if you hear of one, who is fluent in ASL, friendly and housebroken, please let us know.


Since I didn’t hear back from the proctor, I sent her an email, on Tuesday, suggesting a date and time that I had already (from emailing the interpreter) found would work.
A while later, I actually received an email response that Thursday at 1 PM would work, but that the exam had not yet been received.

At that time, a large part of my week became consumed with figuring out where in the heck the exam was, and trying to explain to the testing center that we needed enough advance notice to cancel the interpreter, so, to please let us know if the exam didn’t show up in Wednesday’s mail.

All was quiet.

By mid- day Wednesday, I had called and left two more messages and had also sent another email explaining that we needed to know if the test had not been received.

All was still quiet.

Meanwhile, I was ccing the interpreter, who, because of the lack of response from IUPUI was also not sure if the test was going to happen.

This morning, I was still calling, and I was actually getting a response, not to my calls and emails to IUPUI, but from the interpreter, who was also still hanging.
But nothing from IUPUI.

Finally, I got someone on the phone, but the person was almost inaudible, despite my repeatedly asking her to speak louder, and she couldn’t figure out my daughter’s last name, even though I spelled it, twice. I did ask to be called by the proctor- and was told she would call me in an hour.

But she didn’t.

Sarah and I waited until just before we had to leave, but no response.
So, we drove down to IUPUI, and we arrived there at 12:50 PM.
A young man working in the center took my daughter’s ID, and looked and looked and said she wasn’t on the list to be tested. I explained the situation and that we had been waiting to be called back, and that we were supposed to have been contacted if the exam hadn’t been received, and he wasn’t sure what to do, but he said he would call his supervisor (the proctor) who was at lunch, so we could wait.

So we waited.
A young woman came into the room. A very soft-spoken woman- so soft spoken that I struggled mightily to figure out what she was saying. She was, she said, the person who had called me after the mail came, yesterday, (at 3 PM) to let me know that the exam hadn’t arrived.
She called but she didn’t leave a message. She told me this. Why didn’t she leave a message? Because despite the fact that I gave them both my cell and home numbers, she only called the home number which didn’t have an answering machine. And she didn’t email.

By this time, the interpreter had arrived to enjoy this news.

Then, we all got to literally stand around and wait, and wait and wait for the proctor, because we had to find a date and time that we could come back for the test to actually happen.

About an hour after we had arrived, the proctor showed up. Okay, maybe it was only 50 or 55 minutes.
She was very insistent that they had done their part in responding to me by calling me at 3 PM, yesterday, and leaving me a message.

I am dumb, but not only was no message left for me, the person who actually called me yesterday at 3 PM had, just a while before this, told me that she had NOT left a message. Being told this obvious falsehood to demonstrate the lengths they had gone to impress me, just not positively.


When I explained that no message was left (and, be impressed, I was polite about it) and I asked why the other number hadn’t been called (which does have a message system) and why no email was sent despite my numerous attempt, both after 3 PM, yesterday and this morning to find out if we should come, she said that they can’t be bothered to call anyone more than once and that they did call and leave a message. Except, of course, they didn’t.

Sadly, my telepathy just wasn’t working on quite high enough of a level to have received the unspoken message.
No, I didn’t say that, but I wanted to.

At any rate, we set up two test dates. The lady was very annoyed with me, but we set one up for tomorrow, which we did because the interpreter, who was standing there with her date book ready, as well, happened to be available, tomorrow, even though that was really only allowing for one more mail delivery and one more chance for the missing exam to show up.

And we scheduled one of the test dates for Tuesday of next week as a back up. We scheduled it for Tuesday because the interpreter was not going to be available on Tuesday.
Actually, the interpreter was not going to be available after tomorrow, which meant another interpreter, and if we scheduled it for Monday, that would no leave enough tie to find a different interpreter, and if the exam didn’t show up in the mail by Monday afternoon at 3 PM, I figured it was a missing, as in permanently missing, and we were going to have to start from scratch again, anyhow.

I also did something just a little bit obnoxious I made appoint of asking if there was any way that the exam had been received but had been misfiled under another student’s name.

I was told this was not a possibility.

Okay it was obnoxious, but I really do have a hard time believing that the mail from Bloomington to here (a car ride of less than 90 minutes in a state where mail doesn’t regularly going on long hikes) had gotten that lost in transit, and the weird little fact that, while the first assistant was checking Sarah’s ID against the list, I noticed, since I read well upside down (hey I have to have one or two talents) that they had received an exam for a Sarah with a different last name, from IUHS, via snail mail, for a math class…okay, so maybe there are a lot of those going on during this particular week of the summer and I am just being paranoid, but it didn’t hurt to ask.

But the proctor had already mentioned to me that they almost never have the exams sent to them by snail mail- so the possibility of this being another Sarah in the same course at the same testing center for the same day using the same means of exam delivery that is almost never used…


At any rate, I did receive an email, this afternoon, and they have received the exam in the mail, and the test is on for tomorrow.

But don’t cross your fingers until they are hatched or count your tests until they are taken or something like that, because I might just have another Story of the Day for you after tomorrow’s events.

I hope not.

Story of the Day 7/12/2011

It has been a long week.
And today is only Tuesday.
The long week started yesterday morning.

I have a cousin who lives in a group residence on the east side of town.
Her father was my mom’s cousin. Was because he died a number of years ago, when she was a kid. My cousin lived with her grandparents, her father’s parents, until they both died. At that time, my cousin was about 31, and then her mother came and picked her up and moved her to Anderson, Indiana where she lived with her mother and her mother’s mother.
Except that her mother left town rather suddenly, which she has done a number of times in her life for a variety of reasons, this particular time being that she owed a lot of money and it was easier to leave than to repay it; and then my cousin stayed with her grandmother.. Until that grandmother died, when my cousin was 32.

Then her aunts, her mother’s sisters, decided to send her to the homeless shelter; so this second cousin whom I hadn’t since I drove to visit her about 16 years earlier, called me to come get her.

Which was a bit of a surprise for me, since I hadn’t even known she was in Indiana. But I drove out to Anderson, as did Larry- each of us taking a car, since my cousin told me that she had quite a lot of things .

We moved her in with us for about 4 months until we got her a small efficiency apartment about 2 ½ miles away, and then I took to seeing her only once or twice a week, when I would take her grocery shopping and to doctor’s appointments.

But the apartment didn’t work out.

It turned out that amongst her numerous issues was the fact that she didn’t want to have to clean or cook or be left alone at all, and, to top it off, when she became anxious, she would take one of her anti-anxiety pills. And then she would take another one 10 minutes later, because the first one hadn’t’ helped, and a third one another 10 minutes later and so on, until the bottle was empty. Now, a person can manage to live without cleaning their one room apartment, heck, and lots of people do that. And a person can live eating a lot of yogurt and microwavable frozen dinners, and many people do that. But taking an entire bottle of prescription pills is another matter, all together.

So what could we do?

We had learned enough not to move her back in with us, because in addition to a number of slightly unpleasant to live with behaviors ( and I am not referring to the not cooking and the not cleaning ones, ), she also had a much more than slightly unpleasant to live with behavior which was that when she was jealous she hit- even if the person she was jealous of was 7 years old.,

So, after a bit of looking, we found a group residence that, as it turned out, she loved.
No cooking, no cleaning, and staff to talk to at all hours of the night and day. Oh yeah, and they doled out the anti-anxiety pills one at a time at the correct intervals.

So, my cousin has been living there for the past 9 years, almost 10. And she loves it.
And I go and visit her once a month and take her to the store and for a haircut and for lunch.

Which brings us to yesterday morning.
Yesterday morning, at about 9 AM, I received a call from the nursing home Ombudsman. Only she is a woman. And I didn’t’ even know there was such a thing.

The residence in which my cousin is living will stop taking Medicare/Medicaid clients, as of the last day of July. And my cousin is on disability and has Medicare/Medicaid and is about to become homeless. And there are 301 open beds in different kinds of care facilities in the state.
301 beds for people with Medicare and Medicaid.
And those 301 beds are not in Indianapolis, or only a very few are. And there will be about 80 people from this residence vying for those Indianapolis beds. And I am not really sure the facility with those beds is very nice. Actually, I kind of got the impression it isn’t.
And most of the other beds are nowhere near Indianapolis. I mean, they are not in California, but they are still no where nearby.

Tomorrow, at 1 PM, there will be a meeting at the facility to explain all of this to the residents; and I should expect a hysterical phone call. And I am expecting a hysterical phone call.

So, I spent much of yesterday, and a couple of hours, so far, today, finding out more about where some of these beds are located, and how many complaints each facility has against it, and how isolated some of them are (in a farm field, or surrounded by industrial plants and walking distance to exactly one store- a liquor store)

And trying to figure out what I will say when I get the first of what I expect to be a number of hysterical phone calls, tomorrow.

Except, of some reason, the plans were changed, and they told the residents, today. So I have already had one hysterical phone call.
At it is still early.

Like I said, it has been a long week.

Story of the Day 7/9/2011

I reminded Aaron that we will be getting together, tomorrow, with someone who has a daughter who is hard of hearing.
Aaron, of course, is some sort of a role model or something. This is because he speaks. To Hearing parents, that makes him something akin to the Holy Grail.

Obviously, only if they don’t know him very well.

He says to me, “But I am not hard of hearing.’
”I know, you are deaf.”
”But I talk like a Hearing person.”
”Sometimes,” I add, “ when you talk, I can tell you are not Hearing.”
”Well, so sometimes I talk like a drunk Hearing person.”
“A very drunk Hearing person. And only on a very good day.”

Hopefully, he will not do part of his standup routine for them, after all, their daughter is an impressionable 6 year old.

Story of the Day 7/ 8/ 2011

My husband and I recently celebrated our 26th wedding anniversary.

Ours is a very successful marriage, as far as these things go. So far, neither of us has killed the other, nor even tried to. Heck, we haven’t even gotten down to throwing objects.
We are also still on speaking terms. Of course, since he is usually asleep when I come in from work, and I am usually asleep when he leaves for work, this doesn’t have to be tested, very often.

And then, there is the best of all reasons that we are still married. Many years ago, when Ely was in one of his really tantrummy 2 year old stages (and since he was a tantrummy 2 year old for two years, starting at 18 months and continuing unabated until he turned 3 1/2., there were plenty of these,) I, not so casually, threatened that if he ever left me, he had to take the kid.
After the addition of more children, of course, this threat metamorphosed into “ take the kids”, but it is still a very effective deterrent to divorce.

Even now. Just imagine, if he left me, now, there would be no diapers and no two-year-old temper tantrums, but he would have to deal with the public school…

So here we are at 26 years.

Along the way, we have developed many traditions.
Early on, we decided that we don’t like getting presents that we will not use, and are not big on surprises and extravagances, so we stopped buying presents for anniversaries, and birthdays and holidays. Well, for each other. Nowadays, we buy what we want, and give it to the other to wrap and to give back to us.
This works remarkably well. This past Hanukkah, I gave my husband two CDs that he really enjoyed. Not two CDs that I thought he might really enjoy, that I hoped he might really enjoy, or that I was worried he might not like as much as I was hoping, but two that were exactly what he wanted- obviously, since he picked them out. And I knew that his joy in receiving them was genuine.

Anniversaries are a little trickier. When we were newly married and had limited disposable income and had, at that time, not yet accumulated too much of everything, we would decide on something we both wanted for the house, and buy it as a mutual gift. One year, early on, we bought a bread machine this was back in the fairly early days of bread machines, and the thing cost much more than we would usually have spent on a kitchen item. But we also lived in a town with no kosher bakery, so no fresh challah, which we both love. And the bread machine was something we both enjoyed.

Another year, we bought a bookcase, which, since we are both bibliophiles, you might think a necessity, but this was a nice bookcase, not just one of our typical goodwill finds.

But after years of accumulating, we hit a point, a few years ago, when there was nothing we could think of to buy for ourselves. Okay, we could, but since we now have enough disposable income to get a new kitchen faucet when the old one cracks and starts spraying us with water whenever we want to wash dishes and we don’t have to wait until July 4th for a reason to splurge to replace it, we find ourselves plumb out of ideas for a gift. So last year, and the year before, and even the year before that, we exchanged our slightly deranged anniversary cards, and that was it.

This year, today, 4 days after our anniversary, we received some news. It, unfortunately, was not wonderful as in good news, and it wasn’t even a Happy Anniversary wish from someone we detest, it was a radon report.
About 8 months ago, we did a short interval radon test, and the results came back high. This was surprising, because the last time we did a radon test in our house - our old house, the house we lived in before this one, the test came back just fine.
Of course, you are probably wondering why I think a test from our previous home should have anything to do with the results from the test done in our current home, but our current home is sitting on the exact same piece of ground that our previous home sat upon. That is because our previous home burnt down and was bulldozed and rebuilt, and the rebuilt home is out current home. So, somehow, I expected that because the radon test results from our previous home had come back all right that this time would be the same. In fact, that little bit of logic is why we didn’t do the radon tests sooner, since we have been living in the rebuilt house for over 10 years.
And breathing in an awful lot of radon.

So, 4 days after our 26th wedding anniversary, we get this rather upsetting news that the radon level in the house is very high- both from the test done in the bedroom and the one done in the hallway.

And, after sharing this news with me via email, my husband sends me an additional message:

How about two of these for an anniversary gift?
Love,
Larry


http://www.armygasmasks.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=AAAGAS-19

http://www.armygasmasks.com/PhotoDetails.asp?ShowDESC=N&ProductCode=AAAGAS-19


I told him, “No.”

Obviously, we should buy 4 for our anniversary gift, since we still have two children at home.

Story of the Day 6/ 27/2011

Here we are enjoying Lynne’s and Joe’s wonderful hospitality in Garnet Valley.

Their hospitality is especially wonderful, not only because they overfeed us, take us to fun places, watch irreverent movies with us , but because we are not allergic to them. I mean to their house! We are not allergic to their house! Often, when we visit with people, our visit is punctuated by pill popping, our pill popping. Every couple of hours we are trying to do the math to see which antihistamines and decongestants we can now have more of. “Did I already have 3 red pills today? “ “Can I have another Claritin , yet?” “ I took my allegro 180 6 hours ago, can I have….yet?” How many benadryl can I have? “ And that doesn’t’ even include all the rubbing on of hydrocortisone and the inhalers being puffed. And, even after all the doping up , we are sniffing and sneezing and coughing and wheezing, and thrilled to leave.

But Lynne is even more allergic to the world than we are, so a visit to her nice sterile, well dusted home- a home that has no furry pets, no mold problems, no pollinating the air plants doesn’t make us sick!

So, here we are, eating and breathing and being entertained…and today is Jennifer’s party. Lynne was invited. And she planned on attending. After al it is a Pampered Chef party.
If you don’t’ know what Pamper4d Chef party is , it is the equivalent of a Tupperware party, but not for people who need nifty storage solutions for their kitchen, rather for people who like nifty tools that do things in a very specific ways. For example, there is a foolproof measuring cup,. It isn’t really mad fort fools like me, because I don’t’ measure anything- or if I do, I just grab any old cup or mug, and that is just so I don’t’ accidentally spill the entire container of oil into the bowl, this is more for people who want it to be very exactly 1/3 of a cup, or ¼ of a cup, and instead of having to look for the correct little line while they are pouring their cooking oil, they get to “pre-set” the cup.
They also make things like melon balers and vegetable peelers.

Obviously, such tools have great appeal for someone like Lynne, who likes to actual add the amount of oil the recipe calls for, and who actually reads the recipe instead of doing what I do which is to get out the recipe card and then totally ignore it.

This is probably why I own 7 or 8 fancy vegetable peelers.

You see, every time Lynne comes to visit , she brings one. She brings one because she knows that even though she has already given me several, I haven’t used it since the last time she visited, and have no idea to where it may have migrated. I would own more than 7 or 8, but the house fire took care of the earlier collection.

At any rate, after I am dead, my children will indubitably find a wonderful collection of very nice vegetable peelers while they are cleaning out the house.

So Lynne has been invited to the party to buy a vegetable peeler for the next time she comes to visit me, but since she is busy feeding us, and that means having to run out every other day to buy another car-load of groceries ( we eat a a lot), she has made a decision…she can’t go to the party.

But the party is important, because Jenn is doing it as a fund raiser for their synagogue, so Lynne can’t just not go.

So she is sending Joe.

Except I am wrong, apparently, even Lynne now has enough vegetable peelers set aside for her next visit to Indiana, so she wasn’t actually planning on attending, in the first place; she was always planning on just sending Joe to lend moral support.

And so he could eat chocolate.


Joe doesn’t’ really care about vegetable peelers, but Lynne did mention the fact that Jenn is serving chocolate.
Joe likes chocolate.

Lynne has very carefully explained to her hubby that the party will be at Jenn’s house at 10:30.
About 15 minutes after she explained this, Joe came back into the room and asked her , “What time do I have to be at Jenn’s?
This is not a criticism, it is more a statement of how I must actually be related to Joe and not to Lynne, since h4e appears to have my wonderful memory, or lack thereof.

At about 10:15 , Lynne , the kids and I took off for the grocery store, and Joe took off for the party.
At 10:40, while we were looking at different containers of cottage cheese, Lynne received a text from Joe.
“I am here at the party, but only one other person is here and the building is locked.”
Locked? Building?
Joe went to the synagogue.
And so did someone else.

Lynne is saying “ How could he do that? I told him it was at Jenn’s, and then he asked me what time he had to be at Jenn’s.”
Which he did.
But , sadly, I can tell her how he managed to do that, remember, he is the oen I am related to- maybe not by blood, but by brain patterns.

It worked out well, though.
Joe made it to Jenn’s and to the party. And they hadn’t run out of chocolate.

And while he enjoyed himself, he sent Lynne the following text, “Wish they did something like Pampered Chef for sex toys.”
A text that crossed it’s path with one sent to him by Lynne, “ Trying everything?”
To which Joe responded, “No , that is why I was wishing for sex toys.”
And Joyce just said she didn’t’ have enough toys as a kid.”

No, I don’t’ know who Joyce is. But I do know that they actually do have these parties for sex toys. I have a friend whose mother sells for a company that makes the toys.
And I am wondering what sort of snacks they serve at them.

And, Lynne tells me that she actually had a sex toy party, once. And for snacks, she served booze.

But she didn't invite Joe…….

Story of teh Day 6/ 26/ 2011

Lynne took us to the grocery store.
Ostensibly, it was to buy produce, and milk and , as she captioned this photo that she took " You're never too old to be embarrassed by your mother in public."