The Citizens are Revolted

The perimenopause symptoms I was complaining about not long ago all turned out to be short-lived: there was only one mega-period with gallons of blood, the sleep problems disappeared, and I’m back to my normal level of irascibility, or maybe even less, thanks to meditating in the morning, or maybe more, given what happened New Year’s Eve.

However, one weird thing has cropped up, which is nausea. Normally, while eating I can listen to someone describe his or her bout with explosive diarrhea or just how much pus was in his or her infected wound without any distress whatsoever. You have to have a cast-iron digestive system to eat as much junk food as I do. Before the past month or so, I could have counted on one hand the number of times I'd felt nauseous since quitting drinking 29 years ago.

But now it happens quite frequently, and I feel like I’m going to heave if, for instance, someone says something about green beans while I’m eating. “Green beans!? Blech … ”

Jeff is treating it with acupuncture, I have stopped taking fish oil in hopes that is the culprit, and Jack recommends eating fermented sauerkraut made by a woman in Berkeley.

It’s been raining lately, so my ant friends have returned. Some years I leave them unmolested, and some years I get in the habit of killing them, these small creatures who want to live as much as I do and fear death just as I do.

This year I strongly feel I don’t want to harm them, so I have been using a little piece of scrap paper to scoop each one up and tap it onto the Bianchi’s rack so I can go ahead with washing dishes or cooking. I seem to have far fewer ants this year than in the years when I make every effort to eradicate them. It’s almost as if when I treat them with respect, they treat me with respect.

To keep ants out of Hammett’s food, I put the bowl in a shallow baking dish with water and a couple of drops of dish soap in it. This eliminates the surface tension that would allow ants to make their way over to his food bowl. Ants are good swimmers, or at least good floaters. I often find one or two gamely performing the Limp Ant’s Float while waiting for rescue from Hammett’s water bowl, which of course does not have dish soap in it.

Hammett is doing fine. He’s full of energy, as always. This morning he used my trumpet case to get onto the bookshelves and knocked an item or two to the floor. Then he noticed there was a bird outside and rushed to the window. Then he spied a malicious enemy leering at him from the iMac’s shiny monitor and stood glaring at it for several moments. Then he seemed to relax suddenly: Is that me? I thought I was a beefy bruiser. You mean I’m just a fuzzy little cat?

Then he went to dig in the tub a bit, and then he pulled the springy door stop near the front door and let it go several times in a row, making a loud spronging sound, until its white rubber tip came off—a new toy!—and then he walked under the canopy of the sweatshirt draped over my knees and poked my inner thigh a time or two with his front fingers to see if it was time for him to be picked up and told again what a remarkable cat he is, the best cat there is. It was that time.

Good news at work, regarding the proposal I wrote a year or so ago for the installation of bike racks: A high-level manager has agreed to fund a pilot project at three to five locations. We’re hoping to produce a process guide that can be used by other sites that want bike racks. My company employs 150,000 or so people, and makes changes very slowly, like any large company, so it’s exciting to see this gathering momentum.

Two very pretty songs: “Take the Hand,” by Nazz, Todd Rundgren’s early band, and “Second Nature,” by Utopia, another Todd Rundgren band. A song I would never have thought would be good, but is: “I Kissed a Girl,” by Katy Perry. The lyrics probably don’t bear close scrutiny, but it is catchy. Also very good: “Remedy,” by Seether.

Just after I was raving about my chiming clock here, it quit working, so I have tried to rig up a poor woman’s version of it using multiple timepieces, and it’s sort of doing the trick, but not really. I feel groggy in the mornings again, and today I just turned the final clock off and went back to sleep for two more hours, followed, after meditation and breakfast, by a three-hour nap tucked under the flannel sheets with Hammy, who stayed the whole time.

I’m managing to get up in time to meditate before work, but I fear the day will come when it is impossible, so I can’t wait to get my replacement chiming clock in the mail. What I had was the Digital Zen Alarm Clock, from Now & Zen. It costs a ridiculous amount, and is not all that reliable, based on online reviews, but most people still say they are crazy about their clock, anyway. That is, roughly five percent say, “This clock was a piece of crap—it broke after six months,” and the other 95 percent say they can’t imagine waking up any other way.

There is also a non-digital version, which may be a bit more robust. I’ve seen reviews mentioning that the non-digital version has been going strong for 15 years, and the customer service person at Now & Zen, while assuring me that both clocks have a low failure rate, did say the non-digital one might be a bit less prone to trouble, since it is of simpler design.

So I have sent my digital clock back—it had lasted nine months—and sent ten more dollars to get the non-digital version instead. It’s larger, which is not good, but if it works reliably over the long term, that’s the main thing.