Floorwork

Our living room now has a floor! Deciding what kind of flooring to get was like the last temptation of the environmentalists. There are lots of gorgeous tropical hardwoods available quite cheaply. Plus, many of these trees are so slow-growing, they create wood that's incredibly hard and durable, to withstand any number of dance parties, even the kinds of dances that involve shoes. In a few years, a floor made of these tropical hardwoods will be even more rare and valuable I'm sure, since those species of trees will probably be extinct.

There was also the option of bamboo, which is quickly grown on farms, killing no trees whatsoever. Then it's processed into beautiful flooring by Chinese slave labor. There's even a type called "strand woven bamboo" which is every bit as hard as those endangered tropical hardwoods. It's woven and pressed together, with some formaldehyde and probably the occasional unfortunate worker who fell into the vat, a la that Bodies exhibit. This would have been my choice, but Bob nixed it on the grounds that it looked weird, and he wanted a floor that looked like actual wood. So, we finally decided on some good old made-in-the-USA solid oak. It's so rare to find anything made in the USA, I figured this purchase was worth bragging about in my blog. Well actually with the dollar sinking, it's becoming profitable for businesses to make things in the USA again, so that's one good thing.

This floor's selling point, aside from the relatively smaller amount of destruction it wreaks on the world, is that it has a Scotchguard (tm) coating. I think that means it repels Scotsmen. Bob pointed out that it might just make their kilts levitate.

Any week now, the rest of the house will also have a floor, so there is much to look forward to. I can't wait to invite over some Scots.

Bob just interrupted my blogging to have me help him thread wires through the walls. We didn't notice when we first decided to buy this place, but the wiring is bizarre. Bob is redoing everything so that the lightswitches make some sort of intuitive sense, like they control things in the actual rooms they're in, instead of outlets in distant rooms. He's also installing ceiling lights, and threading speaker cables through the walls while he's at it. This means he's always drilling holes in the walls and crawling through the basement or attic or those tunnels that Scotty was always crawling through on the old Star Trek. I think Bob's good at electrical stuff because it's just like neuroscience.

In even better news, today, I finally met with a certified nurse midwife who does home births, and she says she can manage to fit me into her schedule! She's great. She measured my uterus, and said right away that it was smaller than average, but that's to be expected because of the shape I am, and the position the baby was in. She did not keep taking the measurement until she got the "right" one, like the midwives I've been going to. She even said that when she's teaching her apprentice to take this measurement, she has the apprentice hold the measuring tape upside down, so she can't see the numbers until it's time to read it. Finally, a midwife who has a good grasp of actual scientific data collection!

This midwife has a 6% cesarean rate, unlike the other practice's 20% rate, so I'm happy about that. I'm also tired, so that's all the blog you get tonight.

Post-Pennsic blog

Too busy to write, but I have to write something. Pennsic was a blast of course. I wish I had more energy. Near the end of war, I ran into a lot of people who said, "Hey, you're finally here! When did you arrive?" even though I'd been there for a while, because I just wasn't my usual energetic self. I'd set out to busk, but schlepping my hurdy gurdy around was exhausting in itself. Then I'd sit down and try to put it on my lap, but that's a whole intense pilates exercise now, since I don't have enough lap left. I have to lean my torso way back, and lift my legs up, so I'm in a V-shape, with the hurdy gurdy resting at the bottom of the V. Just try doing that on a flimsy 3-legged folding stool on uneven ground. Then I strap it on, using the holes in the strap I've never used before, and then I try to figure out where they keyboard is today. It gets further away every day, and there will soon come a point at which my arms just aren't long enough to reach it. Once I have accomplished all this and am ready to play, that's when I have to go to a port-a-castle.

So, I'm sorry to all my fans who didn't get to hear much of me this Pennsic. I assure you that next Pennsic, I will have a lap again, and will have an accompanist on rattle. I'm sure the little virtuoso will be familiar with my whole repertoire already.

Anyway, I still got to enjoy Pennsic. Teribus is an awesomely butt-kicking band. The Closer-to-Period hafla went amazingly well, especially considering how little I did to organize it. Jamming with Tina, Mary, Bob, and everyone else at it was fun. And, without amplification or painfully loud modern drums, I could actually hear everyone!

But now I'm back in the real world, where I have so much to do I shouldn't be blogging. But anyway, here's a kvetch about my OBGYN office. They want to see me every two weeks, but they don't actually do anything at these appointments. Whenever they want to do anything, like some test, they spring the news on me at one of these useless appointments, and then I have to schedule another appointment, in addition to the useless ones, so they can do the test then.

At these useless appointments, here is what they do: After collecting a urine sample, they leave me sitting in the waiting room for quite a while, in front of a TV blaring some special medical waiting-room channel that is nothing but "Ask your doctor" type ads for drugs I don't need. Then they finally call me in, weigh me, and take my blood pressure (which is always low. If it were too high, that would be a problem. I have a long, long way to go before my blood pressure is too high.)

Then they take a tape measure and measure my uterus from top to bottom. Now, my uterus is basically a stretchy water balloon, with a vigorously thrashing sea creature in it. I think it might actually be one of those big crabs that provides the crab legs you get at Chinese buffets. Now, imagine I hand you, say, a pillowcase full of water balloons of various sizes. One of the water balloons contains this thrashing creature. I also hand you a tape measure, because your job is to hold the tape measure up to the outside of the pillowcase and measure, to the exact centimeter, the length of the one water balloon that contains the thrashing sea creature. You, if you are a reasonable person, would give me a funny look when assigned this task.

But, these OBGYN people are such experts in this, they know they are measuring the exact size of my uterus. In fact, they told me, the size of the uterus, in centimeters, always exactly equals the number of weeks a woman's been pregnant. They just look at my chart, figure out how many weeks pregnant I am, then place the tape measure, and wow, they measure the exact same number they just read off the chart! Miraculously, although they've given me three different due dates, based on different assumptions, they always were perfectly happy with the measurement they got, because it always matched whatever due date they were working with at the time.

OK, there was one problem once. One person measured my uterus, but then when a midwife looked at the numbers, she saw that they didn't match, as the cm measurement was smaller than the number of weeks. So, she called me back into the examination room to measure me again, just to make sure she'd get the number she knew she was supposed to get. To take this measurement, they measure from wherever they think the top of my uterus is, to the top of my pubic bone. Now, I might not know exactly where the top of my uterus has gotten kicked to recently, but I sure know where my pubic bone is, and I also know what's below it, which is why I can tell if someone is pressing a tape measure against bone or against what's below it. Anyway, the midwife, after a few tries, got the measurement she was expecting, so she was happy.

Making midwives happy is not my job, so I am getting increasingly annoyed at these useless appointments. The one cool thing they do is listen to the baby's heart with something they call a "doppler." It's nice to know the baby has a sense of rhythm, but I don't see the point of this. Any creature that's kicking like this has to have a healthy heartbeat. If its heart were to stop beating, being told this days after the fact at my next appointment would not help matters.

Anyway, at these useless appointments, they put on their soothing supporting face and always ask, "Do you have any questions?" I've asked stuff like "What's the cesarean rate of this practice?" The first time I asked that, the midwife acted really surprised that I would ask such a thing, but after she composed herself, she made lots of soothing noises, and said that there was no need to worry about that, since their cesarean rate was probably only about 20%.

Now, considering that extreme, life-threatening morning sickness, like I had (and which is mostly gone by now, thank goodness) supposedly strikes only about 1 in 200 women, a rate of 1 in 5 does not sound like good odds to me. Especially when I know that at least half those cesareans, according to the WHO, are unnecessary.

Now, 20% is better than the national rate of 31%, but still considerably higher than the World Health Organization's recommendation that no country have a rate higher than 5-10%. Cesarian rates are rising by leaps and bounds across the country. Rates of maternal death are rising in lock-step, because cesarians are, surprise surprise, dangerous surgeries. Infant death rates have shown no improvement. The US is currently the 41st safest country to give birth in.

Anyway, at my last appointment, I met with a different midwife, who actually admitted that my water balloon measured a couple of cm smaller than what she was expecting. "But that's still within the normal range," she said. OK, now there's a range, whereas every other person who took this measurement acted like there was one, exact number they were after, and they'd keep measuring until they got it. So I figured this was a reasonable person, and I asked her why this practice's cesarean rate was higher than the WHO's recommendation. She said that it was because they follow standard practices of the US medical establishment, even though these are known to result in worse outcomes than other possible methods. They do all the standard procedures because this reduces their liability, even though it also results in worse outcomes for their patients. I really appreciate honesty like that.

Still, I am still looking for a home-birth midwife. The standard practice of these people seems to be not to return calls.

Oh, the picture accompanying this blog is Bruegel the Elder's "Triumph of Death" from 1562, which I'm posting for anyone who misses Pennsic. That isn't me in the lower left-hand corner playing the hurdy gurdy. I'd get nauseous if I tried to play hurdy gurdy on a moving vehicle.

Djinn's new CD!

We did it! Last weekend, Djinn, after lots of practicing, finally recorded most of the material for our second CD! Now, despite the ridiculous amount of stuff I have to do, I just had to blog about the recording experience.

We decided to record with Diko at Atlantic Studio in Dumbo, Brooklyn. We were scheduled to begin at 11 am Saturday. I was actually about 20 minutes late, because I wasn't feeling well. (which deserves a separate blog.) As soon as I got out of the subway and into cell phone coverage, Pete called me to ask "Where is everybody?" Not "Where are you?" but "Where is everybody?" which was odd. It turns out that both Diko and I were missing.

I got to Diko's studio soon enough, but Diko didn't. We stood outside the studio door and looked at it. Pete called Diko. Pete reported that Diko's response was something along the lines of a groggy "Wha? Oh sh-- Yeah. Sorry. Gimme like half an hour. I'll be there in half an hour."

Well. We went for a walk in the summer heat. In about 20 minutes, Diko texted Pete, saying it would be more like an hour. Now, this is where the story gets a bit confused, since I don't remember exactly how many times Diko texted Pete, but it was quite a lot of times, and it always pushed Diko's ETA ahead by about half an hour. It turns out that, in addition to whatever mysterious thing had kept him from showing up in the first place, he also had to go bail his friend out of jail, which apparently took more time than he'd anticipated. Eventually, Diko wound up being more than 4 hours late, but since he kept pushing the time forward by such small increments, we couldn't make use of that big block of time by doing anything useful in it ourselves, since we had to be hovering within a few blocks of Diko's studio anticipating his arrival.

Carmine made some calls to reschedule a meeting with a client he'd planned for that evening, since it looked like we'd be recording much later than planned. Brad changed his evening plans too. Poor Pete, who, in addition to working on our CD, has also been working extremely hard to finish his latest animation project before a deadline, was particularly twitchy about these wasted hours. Pete is the hardest-working musician I know, so I think this wasted time hit him particularly hard. He can do a lot in 4 hours, if he isn't forced to waste time hanging out in Dumbo.

I ordered Pete to stop and smell the roses. I pointed to some nearby roses. He said, "Those are roses?" This is a very urban band. Anyway, he smelled them, and said that they smelled good. So, problem solved; Pete was happy, right? Not exactly.

Later, I pointed out that Pete had a cute little bright red ladybug on his shirt. Carmine freaked out and rushed to swat away the innocent creature. The band was pretty stressed out that we had to be out here in the wilderness with all these scary wild animals.

Brad and I decided not to get stressed out. There was nothing we could do at this point. Well, I could keep saying "I told you so" and saying that we should have gone to Electric Wilburland, a great recording near Ithaca. I guess that wasn't really helping to improve people's moods.

In one of his text messages, Diko said he'd be there at 3. Then later he said that it might not be exactly 3, but would be sometime around 3. Pete told him to call us when he was close to his studio, since we were sick of waiting around there. We'd be in the air-conditioned coffee shop around the corner, and head for Diko's studio when Diko got closer, so we could arrive at the same time and get to work ASAP. We left Carmine guarding our pile of instruments in front of the studio, while the rest of the band went to bask in the air conditioning.

At 3:15, Carmine called from Diko's studio, announcing that Diko was finally there. He hadn't called us as he approached the studio, although he'd said he would. The rest of the band rushed over there, and watched Diko clean up the clutter that was apparently left from whatever band he recorded last. He had some story about bailing his friend out of jail, which we did not want to hear. Around 3:30, Diko and his studio were ready for us,

Once he actually got to work, Diko did a fine job of recording us. He had very expensive mics, and knew what to do with them. We'd listen to what he recorded, and sometimes say that he wasn't catching exactly the sound we wanted, so he would adjust things so he did capture the right sound. Our next CD will be of much higher recording quality than our last one.

Once the band was finally playing, that old Djinn magic came right back. I'd been worried, but we actually played well. The only trouble was, we didn't get nearly as much accomplished as we'd planned, since there just wasn't time.

The next day, Diko actually showed up on time, and we got back to work, trying to finish up Saturday's job as well as Sunday's. We actually got pretty close, but by evening, our brains were shutting down. We really, really want those missing 4 hours back. I don't know when we could schedule more recording time. Carmine's at Pennsic already, and I'm leaving for there Saturday. By the time we get back from that, we're all so busy I don't know when we could all get together to schedule another recording session.

You might think that the one redeeming aspect of this situation would be that Diko must have given us a big discount. You'd be wrong. He gave us no discount whatsoever. He said that weekend studio time was so valuable, there was no way he could discount it, because he'd be "losing money." That's what happens when you don't show up to work. You lose money. I'm surprised he hasn't learned this by now. If I were him, which I'm glad I'm not, I would have given the band at least 4 free hours of studio time, in an attempt to save my reputation, which is considerably more valuable than money. But as he apparently doesn't care about his reputation, I'm sure he won't mind people reading about his business practices in this blog.

I'm still considering having the band get together and bill Diko for our time. Pete should bill Diko for 4 hours of animation work, Carmine should bill him for 4 hours of web design, and Brad should bill him for 4 hours of consulting time. If I hadn't been in NYC to record this CD, I would have been home working on my new house. Since I wasn't there, Bob had to hire a guy at $32/hour to work on it instead of me. When Carmine and I get back from Pennsic, we should seriously put a bill together.

I have a lot more to blog about, but I have even more to do, so that's all the blog you're getting for now.

I didn't need to get pregnant after all

Let's see how brief a blog I can write about the Ithaca Festival. They moved it to a later weekend this year, in the hopes that it would rain less. It was easy to predict what was going to happen to a plan like that.

But we are Ithacans, which means that a little rain, OK a lot of rain, and some lighting, thunder, and hail, does not prevent us from having a good time. The only trouble was, Bob and Steve, those wimps, didn't want to play their cello and accordion in the rain, so Svraka was down to a one-person band, as I attempted to drum, sing, and play tinwhistle simultaneously. The sound crew scurried to hide their equipment under tarps, but I am The Loud. I need no amplification. The dancers danced under their umbrellas.

The Hogtie Sessions, possibly my favorite band, was awesome as always. They're so confident in their virtuosity, they can afford to be really goofy. The sun shone on their performance, which was right.

I danced a bit, and enjoyed wandering around seeing so many friends I haven't seen for ages. I didn't have the energy to check out every band by running between all the stages, hoping to find my next favorite band. My energy level is still not what it was, but I'm feeling so much better than a few months ago, when I wouldn't have even had the energy to catch my favorites.

I was reading some books on everything that can go wrong with a pregnancy and childbirth, and those were not making me feel better. The general impression I got, though, was that modern medicine is always trying to control things, when actually, every intervention they do just causes its own problems. Some books talk in vague terms about how great these interventions are, while other books cite specific, controlled scientific studies, which prove that these interventions generally don't do any good overall, and often cause more problems than they solve. I'm going to put my trust in the books that cite specific studies. Like for example, it sounds great to chose the exact day I'm going to give birth, make an appointment, show up at the hospital on time and have labor induced. That would be great, if it didn't increase the risk of harming the baby, which increases the risk that I'd need an emergency cesarian section, which would make my recovery much more painful and time-consuming. For weeks, I probably wouldn't even have the strength to lift my own baby as I waited for my severed abdominal muscles to grow back together. No thank you.

I'm reminded of my mother's stories of how she had my sister and me. My mother showed up at the hospital when she felt my sister was about to arrive, but the nurse said that the doctor wasn't there yet, so she should wait. My mother tried to wait a bit, but my sister was not going to wait, so she just arrived when she felt like it, never mind the nurse yelling at my mother to hold it until the doctor showed up. Really, my sister, and to a lesser extent my mother, were the ones in charge there, not some nurse or doctor with delusions of importance and control.

When it was my turn, there actually was a doctor in attendance, which meant that he declared that I was in the wrong position to be born, so he'd have to do an emergency cesarian. As they were preparing to cut my mother open, I turned around into a better position, and was born just fine the normal way, which was no doubt a terrible disappointment to the doctor, who I'm sure was hoping would look all heroic for rescuing me via this daring and dangerous emergency procedure. I mean sheesh, let a baby finish her yoga before being in such a rush to cut her out of her mother's belly.

All these unnecessary and often harmful interventions are in the category that I call "white-lab-coat-science" as opposed to real science. I like real science. Real science uses actual controlled studies to see if something works or not. If it works, it's used, and if it doesn't work, it's not used. White-lab-coat-science assumes that if something is given by someone in a white lab coat, it must be good. Maybe a better word for this would be "superstition."

So, I've read enough to know to say "No thank you" to just about anything they offer me in a hospital. This makes me wonder why I should bother going to a hospital at all. Yes, I know, there is a slim chance that I will actually need some fancy intervention. The trouble is, hospital staff are just itching to use all this fancy equipment they have lying around, and will jump at the chance to do so, whether the baby and I actually need it or not. This isn't just paranoia on my part, this is from reading actual studies (OK, books that quote actual studies.) My recent emergency room adventure is just the latest in a rather long series of my experiences with medical professionals which do not exactly reassure me that they know what they're doing. Ask me about the time I went in about a serious medical concern, but they ignored that and kept looking for a medical explanation for why I, a woman, would have hair on my legs. Women never have hair on their legs, apparently, so they kept looking for the hormonal problem that was causing this bizarre condition. I never could get them to do anything about the original problem I'd gone in for. And then there was the time--

But I digress. I'm seriously considering home birth, which a friend of mine, and a mother of two adorable children, recommended. In a home birth, the midwife will bother taking you to the hospital only if she feels you actually need to go there, which is quite rare. I normally would steer away from something that seems so hippy-dippy, but those all-important Studies Show that outcomes are actually just as good from home births as from hospital births, in terms of the baby's health, and are much better in terms of the mother escaping from cesarians and episiotomies and all that. This means I have to do more research of course, to find a good midwife. My friend Sareanda, a person I know and trust, is a doula training to be a midwife, so I'm sure she will have lots of good information. Of course, she was one of the many friends I ran into at the Ithaca Festival.

Actually, it turns out that I didn't have to go to the trouble of getting pregnant anyway. The highlight of the festival, aside from the Hogtie Sessions of course, was the Pocket Pets booth, which was selling sugar gliders. I had never even heard of them, which means I'm not up on my Australian marsupials. These little creatures are so absolutely adorable, it's a good thing they were prohibitively priced, or Bob and I would have gotten one or two of them and spent the rest of the festival cuddling them, and possibly ignored the baby when it finally arrived.

The odd thing is, I had a dream a few days ago, where I had a little pet creature, and I was asking my NYC friends if they could take care of it for me when I went away for a few days. But in my dream, all my NYC friends said that they were completely incapable of keeping a little creature alive even for a weekend. I woke up thinking that my subconscious doesn't think much of my friends, so I hereby apologize to everyone on behalf of my subconscious. I also woke up wondering what the little creature was. It looked sort of like a chipmunk, but not jittery, and it was intelligent like a monkey. When I related this dream to Bob, I told him that I dreamed I had a pet hamster, although that wasn't the right word.

So it was pretty darn freaky to see these sugar gliders at the festival. I hadn't gotten every detail right, like the long curling tails, and the gliding membranes that stretch between the front and back legs. But they are just as cute as the creature I dreamed. The vendors would hand them out to people, and they would rest in the palm of someone's hand, or sometimes try to crawl up their sleeves or down their shirts. They especially love crawling into pockets. People would pet them for a while, and then the creature would eventually get tired of these strangers and leap, spreading out its gliding membranes to soar through the booth, looking sort of like a bat, and wind up back on the vendor's shirt, and either hang out there or crawl into his pocket. Except when Bob was holding and petting one of these little creatures, it snuggled into the crook of Bob's arm, its huge black eyes gradually closed, and it went to sleep contentedly. I knew just how it felt.

But in general, as the vendors explained, these creatures are social animals, so they bond to the other members of their community, which in this case was these vendors. That's why they always soared back to the vendors. The young animals they were selling were at the age to bond to us, if we'd bought them, which we didn't. We figured there would soon be enough cuteness in the household.

I've been reading books on babies, in order to distract me from the 1001 Things That Can Go Wrong With Your Pregnancy type books. The goal, after all, is not just to be pregnant, but to get an actual honest-to-goodness baby at the end of this, who does all the cute things babies do. Like for example, according to my reading, when the baby is 6 months old, it's often able to sit up by itself, rather than just lie there.

For comparison, a sugar glider at the same age, according to my googling, can soar up to 150 feet through the air, which any objective judge has to admit is much more impressive.

But anyway, we're already commited to this baby thing, and I'm sure it will be fairly cute as well. Bob and I had already been discussing that it's good for children to have pets. You can bet this kid of ours will not be getting a puppy.

I am not a visual person

Yesterday, in celebration of the fact that I hadn't puked for a few days, Bob dragged me out to a big-box home supply store to research decorating ideas for the new house. As the photo in my previous blog shows, this new house, although it has many practical features, also has some features that are so ugly, even I notice them. That takes some serious ugliness, since I am not a visual person. Quite a lot of my friends are extremely talented at all sorts of visual arts, be it drawing, sculpture, jewelry design, costume design, computer graphics, whatever. I assume many of my friends are also very talented at interior decorating, but I wouldn't have noticed. The only reason I notice their talents at the above-mentioned subjects is because many make their livings at them, which I assume requires some skill.

When it comes to visuals, I have no skill whatsoever. That's why it's remarkable that I even noticed the ugliness of this house. The fact that I have even this low level of sensitivity to ugliness means that we have to do something to get rid of the ugliness. Getting rid of ugliness seems simple enough, but the complication is, we then have to replace it with something less ugly. The number of less-ugly options is so overwhelming, I'm almost considering living with the ugliness for simplicity's sake.

It seems simple enough to just paint most surfaces white, but I had no idea how many different colors of white paint there are. We grabbed a paint brochure, and it lists colors like "Ceiling White," "Betsy's Linen," "Blanched Pine," and even "Gilded Endive." Who would gild an endive? OK, I can see some of my artistic friends doing that, and then putting it in a gallery. I might blanch an endive, but I would never blanch a pine, even if it fit in the pot.

We picked up some more brochures, including one that promises "Unmatched leading-edge aesthetics inspired by the subtleties of nature. You can match your mood with a range of patterns, from tone-on-tone veining to 'earthy' randomly scattered particulates." This writing doesn't even begin to describe how I feel about plastic countertops. Match my mood? My mood can change quickly enough, I don't even expect my hairstyle to match it, much less any product with a 10-year guarantee. Considering that recently, my mood has ranged from "about to puke" to "exhausted after having puked" I don't want my countertop to match my mood anyway. Although I have to say, a countertop that features "'earthy' randomly scattered particulates" would in fact match my mood quite well. I don't think I've ever been in a "tone-on-tone veining" mood. That's probably a good thing.

The previous owner of the house was apparently in a "crawling with millions of tiny orange ants" mood, so we'll have to see which would be worse, living with this ant-print plastic countertop, or having to chose a replacement.

So in the big-box store, we were looking at various countertops, wondering why all the patterns were so ugly. Then we saw some granite samples, and went, "Oh!" These ugly patterned plastic things were failed attempts to imitate natural stone, which is beautiful. Imagine someone who had only ever seen the fake wood on the sides of old station wagons, finally seeing real wood for the first time. That was us. The trouble is, even the granite samples were all riddled with cracks and chips, because it's terribly brittle, and from my online research, granite is apparently great for countertops as long as you don't do anything like spill vinegar on it, because it will dissolve. Whose idea was it to make countertops out of this stuff?

So that rules out granite. But against my will, I've also learned about quartz surfacing, which is 93% natural quartz crystals, held together by glue and dye. It's almost as pretty as 100% real stone, yet can actually stand up to having food spilled on it and things dropped on it. It comes in a very nice variety of colors and patterns. Imagine my shock, and even a touch of dismay, to discover that I actually have an opinion about countertops. The thing is, this quartz stuff is almost as expensive as real stone, and Bob and I have to ask ourselves, do we really care enough about aesthetics to install a beautiful countertop? Maybe we should just live with the orange plastic ants.

Interestingly, there are businesses that sell complete used kitchens, cabinets, countertops, appliances and all, at huge discounts off new kitchens. When they build some high-rise of luxury co-ops, they of course have to install luxury kitchens, but when people move in, they all want their own custom luxury kitchens, so the unused original luxury kitchens get ripped out and usually thrown away. There are businesses that salvage these, so we've been looking to see if there's something that would fit our space, that would be less ugly than the ants.

All of this is much more attention than I care to devote to visual matters. In other news, I vaguely remember that someone asked me to play a polka on hurdy gurdy, so I've been working on those, gradually building my hurdy gurdy muscles back up, now that I'm feeling less awful. I don't need fancy countertops when I have a hurdy gurdy.

The Importance of a Small Head

Too much news as usual. Zaghareet magazine nominated Djinn in the Favorite Musicians category. You can vote for us here:
zaghareet.freeservers.com/poll.html
but we're up against such good musicians, I hardly knew who to vote for.

ABC News used some Djinn originals in their documentary, "Secrets of the Sistine Chapel" which was viewed, and presumably heard, by 2.5 million people. Why would that many people even own TVs? TV programs very rarely feature hurdy gurdies.

In more important news, Djinn's live shows have been going very well. We played for Kami Liddle and Sonia, of Bellydance Superstars fame, and they apparently talked us up to Miles Copeland, who would like to put Djinn's Jimmy Hafla on the next BDSS DVD and CD. We're still very proud of thIs CD of course, and we're happy that so many great dancers are dancing to it, but we've written a whole bunch of new material that we have to get around to recording too. I'm sure TV and dancers and such people would find all sorts of uses for it.

In other news, Bob and I bought a house. You know that gorgeous house that had received more attention from woodpeckers than from renovators since it was built in 1900? We both fell in love with that house, so we looked at our finances, figured out how much we could afford to spend on housing, subtracted the amount of money that would be required for tasteful renovations, and offered all the rest. The owner laughed in our face. OK, we never actually saw the owner's face, but the real estate agent conveyed the idea pretty well.

So, no gorgeous, woodpecker-feast of a house. Instead, we got a non-gorgeous, yet very practical house, with a big yard, in a neighborhood that is currently quiet because we haven't moved in yet. It needs a bit of work too, but all cosmetic. The photo at the top of this blog is of some of the wallpaper. That will be coming off ASAP, obviously. So will the yellow plaid wallpaper in the rental apartment out back. It might not make us that much more money in rent, but I figure it will attract a better class of tenant. Anyone want to rent a huge apartment, which will be guaranteed ugly-wallpaper-free by the time you move in?

I've walked around the yard, and am quite excited to see lemon balm growing wild in the woods out back, and water mint and watercress growing in the little stream. There are also lots of jewelweed seedlings, and I've always thought that was one of the most beautiful wildflowers. Also, there's a big boring front lawn that we're planning on ripping up and replacing with more interesting plants. I got so excited, I ordered strawberry plants already. They'll live in pots until it's time to move in.

In yet other news, I've been questioning my belief in evolution. I mean, if evolution is correct, I presumably am the product of many, many generations, who all managed to survive long enough to breed. These individuals must have had good genes to enable them to accomplish this, so they've presumably passed these good genes along to me.

You wouldn't guess it to look at me. The real reason I've done so little blogging recently is that I've been too sick to do much worth blogging about, and even too sick to sit upright at the computer and write some amusing blog about nothing. I threw up three times today before managing to keep down an anti-nausea pill. If it weren't for those anti-nausea pills, I would basically be dead by now, and they were just invented. How can evolution have produced an organism that requires fancy new pills to stay alive?

This is one of those rare occasions where the biblical explanation makes much more logical sense. You know, women's difficulties in childbirth are punishment for eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Well, if that story is true, this is going to be one heck of a knowledgeable kid. Oh, yeah, I'm pregnant. The brainy little babe is due in October.

This kid had better be one brilliant, nobel-prize-winning, olympic gold medalist supermodel for all I'm going through. It has been absolutely impossible to keep down any food or drink without the help of massive doses of anti-nausea pills (about twice the dosage they prescribe to chemotherapy patients.) While I'm very grateful that they've kept me alive, I don't like the side effects, like the headaches and wooziness. I'm not supposed to operate heavy machinery while on them, and my hurdy gurdy counts as heavy machinery. My hurdy-gurdy-playing muscles have atrophied in the last few months, because I've rarely had the energy or coordination to play.

I was running low on pills, so I called the obgyn to get another prescription, and she was like, "What do you mean you're still nauseous? That stage is supposed to be over, since you're in the second trimester already. Besides, we don't really know what the effects are on the fetus, so it's better not to take them." So I didn't take a pill that day, and I threw up literally every 20 minutes for 2 hours, until my throat was bleeding again, so I took a pill. I mean, the effects of these pills on a fetus might be unknown, but the effects of dehydration on an adult are known, and that can't be good for the fetus either. I've decided that I'll only take a pill if I've already thrown up twice that day, and am in imminent danger of throwing up again. I'm actually down to taking them only about every other day for the last week or so, and that is a huge improvement.

I went to the dentist a little while ago, and he was horrified at how my teeth have dissolved. Soaking in acid for a few months will do that. Here I'd managed to get through my 34th birthday with only one cavity ever, and now suddenly about 12 perfectly good teeth have dissolved. OK, 11 perfectly good teeth and one tooth with a filling in it. It's kind of hard to chew now, since my teeth crumble like eggshells under pressure. I'll do something about this when all this is over, but I can't deal with it now. My dad recommends medical tourism to Thailand, which is where he had some work done that would have been very expensive in the US.

Anyway. The point is, there is a kid on the way. It will have a very nice house to live in, and a yard with beautiful wildflowers and lots of mud to play in, and a short walk to very good schools. It will also have a great dad. Now, when choosing a husband, there are many important factors to consider, like "How often does he go dancing? Can he play cello? Does he have the right political signs in his yard?" but there are also other important factors, like "Does he bring you a fresh puke bucket before taking the old one away?" Bob is a great husband on all counts, even in matters to which I didn't give much thought before marriage. I figured, when choosing the father of one's children, the main thing is that he should have a small head. I have very narrow hips. I wear a size XXL hat. This combination does not suggest an easy labor, if the baby takes after me in the matter of head size. I'm hoping it takes after Bob, whose head must be very densely packed, with all the intelligence he fits into a space that small.

House Shopping

It's been too long since I've blogged, so I've accumulated too much to blog about. Rakassah was awesome, amazing dance and music, the usual. But we also had a new experience: Djinn rented a car and got to drive around San Francisco in the carpool lanes!

I finally did a dance performance, klezmer bottle dance, in Ithaca, with the Cornell University Klezmer Ensemble. Klezmer dance has a lot in common with belly dance, just as the music has a lot in common. Doing floorwork while balancing a wine bottle on one's head is an old Sephardic tradition. I was nervous about two things: dropping the bottle, and using inappropriate belly dance styling, but I think it went fine.

But the main thing that Bob and I have been busy with has been house shopping. Bob has disliked his current house for a while. Me, I'm hardly ever there, so it doesn't matter that much do me, but I will concede that it has a tiny, shady garden, and I want a much bigger, sunnier one. In my previous life, I was a Plant Science major at Cornell. I am doing nothing with this education besides watering my houseplants, but, if I could pick the perfect house, it would have room for more plants around it.

Bob also has other complaints, like saying that our kitchen is too small. I tried telling him that it's huge, maybe even too big, but he didn't belive me. He doesn't even cook anyway. He claims that if our kitchen were bigger, he would have room to cook. Whatever. I'm realizing that a person from NYC and a person from Kansas have completely different senses of scale.

I concede that our house is not ideal, because a perfect house would have one huge room, with a nice wooden dance floor, for parties. That's all I need, basically: one huge room for parties and a big garden. Throw in a bathroom, a microwave, and a little cot I can set up to sleep on when the guests leave, and I'm all set.

Switching houses is a complicated process, since we didn't even know exactly how much we'd have for the new one, and when we'd get the money, until we sold the old one. Selling a house means you have to hide half of your furniture, and all your clutter, including all the stuff you actually use, to make the rooms look more spacious. Our house looked great, but when I wanted a tissue or a doumbek or some basic necessity like that, I had to dig it out of hiding. And forget about hand-washing clothes and laying them out to dry, taking up space and looking cluttered. My cashmere sweater ($6 from the Salvation Army) was starting to smell like it was still on the original goat, which couldn't have helped sell the place.

But we finally sold our house, which means we can sprawl out again until the closing in July. The buyer came in and marveled at the nice spacious kitchen. She asked about gardening, so I said that it was possible to fit a few tomato plants in that little strip of earth next to the driveway, and she was delighted.

It's actually quite a nice house, and I'm glad we sold it to someone who appreciates it. It was built in 1880. When my sister saw it, she marveled at the intricacy of the hinges. She can't believe we'd sell a house with hinges like that. They don't make hinges like that anymore. Also, they couldn't build houses out of wood like this anymore even if they wanted to, because American chestnut trees are virtually extinct.

Bob and I have found some very nice houses to replace our house with, but now we have some tough decisions to make.

We've found a beautiful house, newer than our old house, as it was built in 1900. It has a huge living room, with a great hardwood floor, that just begs to have dance parties on it. Plus, it has all sorts of charming details, in the craftsman style, whatever that is. It has cleaner lines, more to my taste than the fussy Victorian style of the old place. It looks down on Cayuga Lake. It has a huge yard. There are lots of old trees in the neigborhood, yet our yard is positioned just right so it's sunny. It's a very short block away from a park with a stunning view down into Ithaca Falls. Bob can walk to work, and I can walk to the Commons to busk there. It even has a separate staircase for the servants. What's not to like?

It's a good thing I'm married to Bob, since he pointed out some rather important things, such as the fact that this house looks like it's been neglected since the 1940's. In some ways, that's better than bad remodeling, but in other ways, it's inconvenient. Like, the electrical system needs some updating. I believe it's currently set up to be illuminated by gaslamps that protrude out of the walls. It has no insulation, and the leaded glass windows, while too charming to replace, are awfully leaky, so the heating bills would be higher than rent I've paid for a spacious Ithaca apartment.

Bob also has objections to cracked walls. He said that our old place had cracked walls before he fixed them, before I moved in. This is lath and plaster we're talking about, so after you take off the wallpaper, then you have to laboriously remove the plaster, lath, horsehair, whatever the Victorians chose to make their walls out of, then replace it with wallboard, which is a huge job. Me, I say if we have cracked walls, that means we hang some large paintings. I think his irrational urge to have nice smooth walls might be attributed to the lead paint dust he no doubt inhaled when he did all this work on our old house. You'd think that anyone who'd done all that work once would know better than to do it again.

Well, he does know better than to do all that again, since he is proposing we buy a house that was built in, like, the 1960's. It also has a large yard, and a pretty large living room, which is all I said I needed at the start of this blog, so I should be happy, right? And Bob is sensibly pointing out that, for all the effort we'd be expending to make the beautiful house practical, we could be instead be making a practical house beautiful. We could install wood floors. We could remove the horrible plastic foam imitation brick from the inside walls. We could remove the horrible plastic imitation wood beams from the ceiling that are trying to make the place look rustic. As for the outside, well, we could plant vines. If we really wanted, we could install a seperate stairway for the servants, but I don't think that would be a high priority.

It's more complicated than that of course. This practical house is in a neighborhood of similarly practical houses. I look at this neighborhood, and I think "suburbs." Sure, I would be planting an interesting garden, but the rest of the neighborhood is all about boring monoculture lawns. There are no sidewalks. It's closer to the mall than to a waterfall. As a New Yorker, I have a deep-seated racial hatred of all things suburban, and I'm finding this prejudice difficult to overcome.

Bob would have to take the bus to and from work, and I'd have to take the bus, or drive, to get pretty much anywhere. Now, in NYC, I have no problem with taking public transportation, so I should not have any aversion to it in Ithaca. But still, it is nicer to be in walking distance of things.

Complicating matters further is that this suburban place has a huge rental apartment in back. Add that rental income to the lower property taxes we'd be paying out there, and there would be a big difference in our yearly budget.

Maybe what this means is that we just haven't found the perfect house yet. Of course, if there is a perfect house out there, it would be too expensive. Hm. Anyone have any advice?

One more thing

For those who enjoyed my last blog, I have one more detail to add. I didn't even realize what this meant at the time, but in retrospect, it might be the best part of the whole story.

When that doctor finally took me to that other room to have a private consultation with me, one of the first things she asked me was, "Do you feel safe at home?" This threw me for a loop. I mean, Ithaca is rated the third safest city in the US. There might be some danger of slipping on all the snow and ice, but when I'm in my house at least, I feel perfectly safe.

I think I've figured out what she was getting at. She was looking for an explanation for all the black-and-blue marks on my arms! If she had asked me, "Do you feel safe in this emergency room?" I would have given her a different answer. But at home, I feel quite safe from vampires.

But seriously folks. I'm still worried about all the other patients in that emergency room, many of whom were not in nearly as good shape as I was, who couldn't stand up for themselves. I'm wondering what happened to them. In the first room I was in, for example, I had a roommate. I don't know what her health problem was, but the nurses gave her a diuretic, which they told her would make her have to go to the bathroom frequently. This seemed like bad news to me, as she didn't look like she was capable of getting herself to the bathroom.

Sure enough, I later saw her struggling to get herself out of bed. I'm guessing this was about 2 in the morning. Since she was having so much trouble, I called for help for her, and kept calling and calling, until someone finally came by, said "Oh, you're falling out of bed" and helped her back in.

I had my own problems to deal with at that point, since this was around the time I was convulsing from a bad reaction to that first drug they gave me. When I next had some attention to give to my surroundings, I saw that this woman's bed was wet. Now, it was pretty chilly in there. Maybe it was just me, but I was really cold under both a blanket and my down coat. OK, it probably was just me. But it certainly wasn't warm. The staff were all in a few layers of sweaters, and they were very actively running around, so that at least is an objective indication of the temperature. My roommate, already quite ill, had no coat, just a thin blanket, and it was now wet. I'm sure that whatever health problem she'd come in with wouldn't have been improved by hypothermia.

Maybe around 5 AM, I heard someone order someone else to change this woman's wet bedding. By the time I was transfered to another room at 7:30, her bedding was still wet.

That's just one incident, and I could relate a whole lot more, but I'd rather put it all behind me. OK, one more thing: you have to picture the young yuppie, with blood streaming down his face, charging around the room and shouting, "But you know what really pisses me off? This is very expensive shirt!"

A nurse assured him that peroxide would take those bloodstains right out, and that quieted him down. I might complain about them, but these nurses have some serious skills.

Oh, and sorry to all my friends who I didn't call. I wasn't very capable of it when I first arrived, with the oxygen mask on my face and without use of my arms and everything. Then later when I was more mobile, it was in the wee hours of the morning, and I didn't want to bother people. Also, my cell phone's battery was almost empty, which was rather nerve-wracking, as it was my only connection to the outside world, and it was fading faster than I was. OK, I'll bother you next time, but hopefully, of course, there won't be a next time.

Anyway, I'm now safely in Ithaca. Bob and I kept our appointment to look at houses with a real estate agent today. Ithaca might be safe, but dang, the property taxes on some of these houses would cost more than the mortgage. Just outside the city, taxes are lower, but then again, we'd be outside the city. Much to think about.

Hospital Review

I did not pass out on the Times Square 7 train platform Friday night. Instead, I decided to very quickly lower myself to the floor. In dance parlance, this was a level change. I even made a point of choosing a part of the floor that was not signifigantly grungier than other parts of the floor, in the brief time I had available to make this decision. I would have liked to have put my hood up, so my bare head wasn't lying on the grungy floor, but I didn't have that kind of energy.

For those of you who have seen those signs in the subway that say what to do when you're not feeling well in the subway, and wondered if the system works as well as advertised, here is my review.

When choosing a subway platform to collapse on, just as when choosing one to busk on, I have to say the busier the better. I don't know what would have happened had I collapsed on one of the more obscure platforms, but for the Times Square platform at least, help arrived almost immediately, in the form of one those orange-vested guys who sweeps up litter. As I was too large for him to sweep into his dustpan, he asked if I needed help. I was about to say that of course I didn't, I would be getting up in just a minute, when I realized that that wasn't true, so I said "Yes."

It's a good thing that he could differentiate me from the people who regularly lie on subway platforms, presumably enjoying it and resenting interruptions.

In no time at all, he fetched some other guys, who again asked how I was doing. It's really hard to say anything other than "Fine, and how are you?" when asked this, but considering how stupid that would sound from someone who is lying on the a subway platform, I fought this instinct. I said that I wasn't feeling well. No, I had not passed out, I had just decided to lower myself to the floor. And, er, well, no, actually, I didn't think I could get up. And why yes, thank you, by bag would make a better pillow than this floor.

So more reinforcements were called. Someone put Wet Floor signs around me to stop people from tripping over me as they rushed to their trains. But New Yorkers are nimble at charging past the fallen without a look back, so I don't think this was even really necessary.

Subway platforms are cold, and they conduct heat much better than the air. I became keenly aware of this as sweat soaked through my shirt, sweater, and coat, forming a perfect heat conductor between my skin and the platform. I started shivering uncontrollably, almost convulsing really. Shivering was taking so much energy, I was seriously wondering if there was any real advantage to lying on the floor in the first place, and if sitting up or even standing might be more energy-efficient. This was a moot point, however. The advantage of shivering is that it doesn't require any coordination.

In really very little time, I'm sure not more than ten minutes no matter how unpleasant those minutes were, some EMTs showed up, with a cheap-looking little orange plastic wheelchair. I mean, this thing had like two tiny wheels on it, like on a shopping cart.

Whatever, I was hardly in a position to take issue with the tackiness of the wheelchair. The guys put me in it, piled my hurdy gurdy and gig bag on my lap, leaned me back at a dizzying angle, and off we went. Maybe this model of wheelchair has the advantage of being light, as they really did whisk me up stairs and into the waiting ambulance.

My excuse for collapsing on the platform was that I've hardly been able to keep food or even water down since, well, Sunday morning. This has happened to me before, and I could write more reviews for comparison, but I don't have time now. The short of the matter is, my digestive system doesn't work that well in the best of times, and when any little problem sets it off, it shuts down completely, starting me on a downward spiral that shuts the rest of my systems down too. This sucks.

We discussed enough current events to establish that I know who the president is, unfortunately. We even theorized a bit about who the next president might be.

I've often thought that my veins are my best feature, but it's always nice to hear. The EMTs found a vein worth stabbing right away, and hooked up an IV to fill me with the water and salt that I'd been unable to take in through more conventional means. They also hooked me up to an oxygen mask, like flight attendants always show off on airplanes but never let you use. They did all sorts of tests, and generally didn't like the results, but had some arguments about whether those bad results were my fault, or the fault of the equipment. I remember complaints like this from my last ambulance ride as well. The thing is, people with test results like mine are not supposed to be coherent, or even concious, and this always confuses EMTs. I like to think that I have coherence to spare.

The equipment did seem pretty beaten up, with chips taken out of it, and dingy cracks. The EMTs did seem to know how to use it, though. They also were very pleasant. They thanked me for not being homeless and/or fat, since I'm sure such patients are no fun to whisk up stairs.

They were so pleasant it was easy to forgive them for splattering my blood all over my sweater and coat, especially considering that these garments were not particularly clean to begin with, although the subway platform might now be a little cleaner.

They asked if I had a preference for hospital, which I, not being a hospital connesseur, didn't, so they took me to "Rosie's" that is, St. Luke's Roosevelt, which was nearby, and not nearly as crowded as you'd think an emergency room would be on a Friday night in NYC. Then again, I think I got the VIP treatment, and didn't have to wait in the waiting room with the plebes.

The emergency room people put me in a bed with my hurdy gurdy and gig bag, which I appreciated. They didn't like how the EMT guys had done my IV, so they redid it. Twice. They also took some blood samples from my
other arm, eight of them I believe, although I was of course getting increasingly woozy with each of these blood samples so I can't be too sure about the number. They also took a tiny drop of blood for some other test by poking a hole in my finger. Why they had to do that I don't know, when there was plenty of blood scattered all around that they could have used. More got on my coat and sweater, not to mention blanket, bed, and floor.

It was all different people taking all this blood, which is why they asked me why I had all these mysterious black-and-blue marks around my veins. Because you vampires keep poking holes in those veins! Sheesh. Anyway, although they started out praising my veins, they ended up complaining about them, as they had to keep looking for more and more obscure veins that the other vampires hadn't spoiled already.

They also wanted a urine sample, but they actually had to put over three liters of saline into me before I was able to produce one for them. Note to self: do not get this dehydrated ever again.

They also hooked me up to a blood pressure monitor, which would strangle my right arm (the one with all the black-and-blue marks) every 20 minutes or so, and some other mysterious device around my left thumb (which was on the arm that also had the IV drip.) A cool thing about the emergency room is that all the beeping things (I think there were two on me alone) form interesting polyrhythms, that drift in and out of synch with each other.

With all of this blood loss, I started to feel much worse than I'd felt in the ambulance. I complained about this, and they said they'd give me something for nausea. They injected something into my IV. And I have to say that it was very effective for nausea, if that's the effect you're going for. It also made me shake uncontrollably, sort of a shiver, but also sort of a thrashing like some pathetic attempt to get away from how nauseous and generally awful I was feeling. Shortly before I collapsed on the subway platform had been the worst I'd ever felt up to that point, and now already I had a record breaker. I hope I have the name of that drug somewhere, since I never, ever want to take it again.

Oh, and I have to mention that in between all this vampiric stabbing and poisoning, and also in between or sometimes during the blood pressure strangle hold, and under the blazingly bright lights, and while other patients were charging around the room ranting drunkenly or hollering for help, the nurses told me to just close my eyes and get some sleep.

I complained that I was still nauseous, so they offered me some more of that horrible drug, which I declined. So the offered me a different drug, which I accepted with great trepidation, and you know what? It worked. The nausea I'd had all week was gone. They gave me a cup of apple juice and I drank it just fine, and even kept it down. After week I'd been having, this was a truly wonderful, marvelous thing.

So. I was cured. What was I still doing there? I pestered the passing nurses a great deal as they scurried by, and one finally said (as she was taking yet more blood, or course) that they hadn't liked my blood before, as it was too high in acetone. Yes, my blood can actually be used as nailpolish remover. It's a wonder it didn't eat through the linoleum when they dripped it on the floor. I think I read about this somewhere way back in bio. When your body is starving, it first uses up all the stuff it's stored as fuel, and then when it runs out of that, it starts breaking down more important stuff that is really not meant to be broken down. It's like running out of fuel oil to heat your house, and instead burning the furniture and the interior walls. When the body does this the result is acetone, and also the ketones, whatever those are, that they found in my urine and hadn't liked either.

They said they'd send a doctor around to talk to me, and if all went well, I could be out of there by 7 AM. As I'd been there since about 9 PM, it was about time.

More time passed amid the beeping and the hollering, and the arm pressure band that hissed like a boa constrictor as it tightened around my arm. It seemed to know exactly when I might be in danger of actually falling asleep. My blood pressure was always ninetysomething over fortysomething, so I don't know why they needed the same reading over and over again, but when I complained about it, they said that they needed it, so it had to stay on. Eventually I managed to snag some passing employee, and said that I needed to go to the bathroom, but couldn't while entangled in this machine, so he took it off me. No one seemed the least bit interested in putting it back on me when I got back to bed.

Around 7:30 AM, an actual doctor took me to another room for another examination and consultation. She said that if I stayed this sick, they'd have to admit me to the actual hospital, not just this emergency room, which is apparently only a higher level of hell. I told her that the second anti-nausea drug they'd given me had worked great, and I'd even felt hungry under its influence, so I didn't see why I had to stay here. It was wearing off by now (I think I'd been given it around 3 AM) but if I got another one, I was sure I could eat breakfast like a normal person, and thus give my cells something to eat besides do-it-yourself acetone.

So, that was the plan. She said she'd send someone in to give me another anti-nausea pill like the second one, and breakfast. I asked what they had here for breakfast, since I have allergies (which they took note of when they admitted me, and even wrote on my armband) and she said that that was the cafeteria's department, but she was sure they'd have something. If I could actually eat breakfast, and keep it down, and that improved the results of my blood tests, then I would be free to go.

I was extremely cheered by the thought of imminent breakfast. I hadn't really eaten, or at least kept food down, for about a week, as evidenced by my chemically starving, self-destructing body. Oh boy. Breakfast. A breakfast I could actually keep down, thanks to the miracle of an anti-nausea drug! This would presumably be forthcoming any minute now.

Someone stuck his head in, saw that the room was occupied, and hurriedly withdrew.

Someone else came in to take out the trash, and left again.

Around 8:30, I wandered out of my little room to see if I could expedite breakfast in any way.

"Oh!" said the receptionist. "What were you doing in room 14? We thought you were in room 6. I'll send someone around to do that bloodwork right away." While this was not exactly the news I was hoping to hear, I dragged my acetone-ridden, disintegrating body back to room 14.

Around 9 AM, sure enough, a nurse came in with more of those wretched needles and tubes, and no breakfast. She was, of course, there to take more blood.

I'd had enough of this. "There's been a mistake. The doctor ordered that I was to have an anti-nausea pill, and breakfast."

She took actual offence at this. "You can't have breakfast if you're nauseous! I'm here to take some more blood." Yes, the actual plan, in her mind, was to keep taking my blood until it showed evidence that I was no longer starving, and only then would she allow me breakfast.

There were so many possible arguments against that, based on common sense, basic biology, and even thermodynamics, that I decided not to use any of them. Instead, I said that there must be some mistake, since this was not what the doctor had told me. The doctor was the authority figure here, so the nurse should go check with the doctor before doing anything.

To my surprise, this argument worked, and the vampire vanished. I'd been picturing being put in restraints, just like several of the other patients in the emergency room I'd seen, as the nurses persisted in draining my blood until I stopped starving.

There wasn't much of my body left by now except acetone, but I managed to get out of bed again, stagger to the receptionist again, and again inquire about my anti-nausea pill and breakfast. Nothing came of this. I staggered back to my room.

Then, I had a moment of inspiration, like a golden light beaming through storm clouds. I had a small bag of leftover popcorn in my gig bag! Bob, bless his heart, had popped it for me. I'd put it there Wednesday morning in case I ever felt hungry again, and promptly forgotten about it.

Fearing that I had misremembered this, I unpacked my gig bag with trembling hands, and discovered that yes! I had popcorn! Enough of that one working anti-nausea pill was still in me that I was able to eat it. I ate it very slowly and carefully. It stayed down. I was particularly nervous about this, since according to the doctor, my whole future was riding on my ability to keep food down, and thus walk away from here a free woman, or else give in to the vampires and possibly to my doom.

After eating, I felt remarkably better. It was really hardly any popcorn at all, about half a cup, but it was something besides acetone, and it made a huge difference.

There was an old copy of Women's Day propping up one of the trash bins, so I picked it up. This is evidence of my extreme boredom, as well as current inability to play hurdy gurdy with all this stuff done to my arms. It's not my type of magazine. Aside from the topics being boring, it's one of those magazines where it's very clear that the product the magazine is selling is the readership. The customers of the magazine are the advertisers. Almost the entire "non-ad" portion of the magazine was made up of brief articles about great new products the readers could buy. (Boring as this was, I was amused by the ad for frozen peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches. Who needs to buy that as a packaged product?)

I had just about decided that reading this magazine was more boring than staring at the ceiling, when I realized that the real meat of the magazine was buried on the overleafs of the drug ads. There were oodles of "Ask your doctor" type ads for prescription drugs, that had, for example, a picture of a smiling child happily working at her piano lesson, and a supposed quote from her mom who's delighted that this wonder drug has cured her darling's ADHD, thus enabling her to endure any number of forced piano lessons without complaint. OK, it wasn't exactly phrased like that, but that was the gist.

But on the back page of this ad, there was all this fine print listing the possible side effects of this drug, including hallucinations, stunted growth, and, I kid you not, "sudden death." Now this was interesting reading material. I mean really, I'd rather have my kid quit piano lessons. Apparently, some parents think differently.

As interesting as this was, I soon finished the entire thing, so I looked for other ways to amuse myself. I posed myself very carefully, poring over this magazine in as healthy, acetone-free a posture as I could manage, while casually snacking on salty hulls left in my popcorn bag. If anyone walked in, I would be seen as a perfectly normal, healthy person, not worth poking with needles at all. Anyone could see that it was about time to take this stupid IV thing out of my arm. It wasn't even feeding me saline anymore, as that had run out long ago. It was now just a needle in my arm for a needle's sake.

This bit of theater was wasted, however, as no one came in. Under my new popcorn power, I wandered out to try to snag random passers-by who looked like they worked there, to ask about breakfast, or if I could just leave, since I was really feeling fine by now.

This didn't yield conclusive results, so I went back to my room and sulked. It now looked like I'd never get out of here. I called Bob, who was sympathetic. I called Bob's sister Ann, who is a doctor, for advice on how to get service in an emergency room, and she said that just complaining a lot is pretty much all you can do. It also helps to have someone else there looking out for you. I called my sister Thea, who lives in NYC, to see if she could come rescue me, or at least bring me some food. I left a message on her voicemail.

Another vampire came in with her needles and tubes, and still no anti-nausea pill or food. I tried reasoning with her, until I remembered that I should just use the argument that worked the first time, so I did that and it worked again. The difference is, this one actually came back much later to say that the doctor had indeed called for more blood tests, but they were just using some of the blood they'd taken before. But if they hadn't needed that blood for anything before, why had they... Never mind.

Anyway, around 10:15, someone finally brought in a disposable foam breakfast tray! Although I have to call it brunch at that hour. There was no explanation for this apparent change of heart or odd schedule. She also brought me an anti-nausea pill. I wanted it by that point. I mean really, under normal conditions, if I spend a sleepless night being bled, and then only have a tiny bit of popcorn for breakfast, I'm feeling pretty nauseous anyway, whatever happened the previous week. Don't you get like that? OK, maybe it's just me.

Here is a complete listing of items on the tray that I was not allergic to:

One hard-boiled, green-yolked egg.
One very small cup of orange juice.
Two packets of grape jelly.
Salt, pepper, and two packets of sugar.

There was also coffee, but I probably don't even need to mention how badly caffeine messes me up.

A mysterious thing is that there was nothing to put the jelly on, allergen or not, unless I was supposed to put it on the egg. Whatever. I ate the egg, the salt, and even the grape jelly, slurping it out of the packets like it was some slime-themed candy marketed to kids. I drank the orange juice in one gulp. I even considered the sugar packets. At that point, anything besides acetone was pretty appealing. But I know that too much sugar can mess me up at the best of times, and these were not the best of times.

In short, I ate what was edible of this brunch in less time than it takes to describe it. I then figured out how the sink in the room worked, and brushed my teeth. I brushed my hair, which was quite a spectacle by that point. I tucked in my shirt. I sat around waiting to impress someone with my ability to both eat and keep down breakfast, and then lounge about in a relaxed, yet vibrant, healthy way, but there was no one to impress. I even would have been willing to give more blood if anyone had wanted it, if it would have gotten me out of there. Blood-acetone-level-sensing-ability is not counted among our senses like sight and hearing, but I was feeling good enough that I was confident that any blood work they wanted to do would prove that the acetone was gone, replaced by nice healthy blood sugar, courtesy of all that grape jelly.

I wandered out again, with a perfectly healthy, relaxed, vibrant stride, and tried to snag random passers by to ask how I was supposed to get out of here, and also how I was supposed to get this needle out of my arm. A few people said they'd send someone around to remove the needle, and a few people said they'd send a doctor around to discharge me. This cheered me for a while, until more time passed and I realized that I had to keep working at it. I kept working at it. This is not a job for the timid, but it is a great job for the bored.

I eventually got the information that they couldn't discharge me until they got some test results back. That made sense at least. They sent me to sit in the radiology waiting room so they could use my bed for someone who was actually sick. All my strutting around had made the right impression.

My sister called, and said she was coming to pick me up, which was great news. For all my strutting, I still felt more secure traveling in company, presuming they would actually let me leave here.

I was tired of sitting, so I wandered around. I watched them serve lunch to the other patients. I really don't know what kind of connections those patients had, but they were clearly better-connected than I. What the heck, I asked if I could have lunch. One person said to just take a tray off the trolley, but then another person asked what I was doing messing around with the trolley, and what was I doing here, and was I even a patient anyway or just some healthy person who had snuck in off the streets with no good in mind? I mean, two or three shifts had gone by since I'd first come in, so these people didn't even know me as the puddle of acetone I'd been to the first shift.

I pulled up my sleeves and showed her what they'd done to my arms, and she changed her tone entirely. She even offered to get me something I wasn't allergic to, and found a packet of corn chips and some fruit. I was extremely delighted by this, so I took my treasures back to my seat in the waiting room. When my sister arrived, she found a me very happily eating the pear and the corn chips simultaneously. She questioned the health value of the corn chips, but hey, they were technically food, even if they were deep fried.

Around 2:30, someone reported that the results were in and were fine, so she could discharge me. Even though I was in a hurry to get out of there, I took the time to ask what these results were that had taken so long, and what all these mysterious tests had been in the first place, and what they'd needed all this blood for anyway. She said that if I wanted the test results, when I checked out at Window 5 (just follow the blue line) the person there would give me the number of the records department, and I could call them to ask about how to get the results. This implies a rather complicated filing system, in which the records of all these tests are not housed anywhere near the hospital where the tests are needed. I'll make as much of a quest out of this as my patience allows.

She also gave me a prescription for the wonderful anti-nausea drug, that had cured me despite the best efforts of all these vampires. She even took that nasty old needle out of my arm, and put a really thick bandage on it, tight. Nonetheless, when I bent down to sign the thing she told me to sign ("Wait, what are you signing!" shouted my sister the lawyer) more blood than I thought I had left in me soaked all the way through that thick bandage, and poured down my arm, onto the paper I was signing, onto the chair I was awkwardly resting the paper on, and onto the floor. My sister is never happy about me signing anything without reading it carefully, and here I was signing it in blood.

The nurse scurried away to get an even thicker bandage, and put it on even tighter. I somehow couldn't hold a grudge against someone who was handling the paperwork that allowed me to leave this place.

After bleeding me one last time, she of course took my blood pressure. I'd rather she'd taken it before, but whatever. It was apparently high enough for her to allow me to leave. If it had been too low, they would, of course, have had to keep me there for longer, taking more blood samples I'm sure, until my blood pressure got high enough for them to discharge me. That is, they would have bled me to death. OK, with my sister there, I'm sure she would have prevented this. But not everyone in that emergency room had a friend there to help them, and a lot of them were in much worse shape than me, and I'm sure less capable of defending themselves from vampires.

We headed out into the snow. We went to a drug store, but they didn't have that drug, so we decided to look more later. First, I took my sister out to lunch. It was delicious. I then looked online for all the drug stores in the area, and called around until I found one that had it. I sent my sister out to buy it for me. Due to some confusion between the drug store and my insurance card, they charged me full price, $90 for a total of 4, count them four, pills, which should be taken 3 times a day. I will follow up on this later. Anyway, this will at least get me back to Ithaca, where I can recouperate, hope my left hand shrinks to normal size, and make an appointment with my regular doctor to try to interpret those mysterious test results, assuming I can retrieve them.

As I write this, my left forearm, most noticeably my hand, is badly swollen. I can type, but playing hurdy gurdy would be awkward with fingers this thick. I think they damaged the vein pretty badly, either during the three times they put that big IV in, the three times they yanked it out, or possibly just during the 16 hours they had that vein serving their purposes as a needle-storage tube, rather than its natural function to convey blood from my forearm back to my heart. It's not doing that job particularly well at the moment. I assume that it will heal itself just fine with time. I'm not going to a doctor about it, I'll tell you that much.

Wood

I'm in Ithaca, rooting through the pile of interesting instruments I got at that estate sale way back before I left for Qatar. There's a lot of good stuff in the pile. For one, I have this huge Tibetan conical-bore wind instrument, that you would think was some kind of zurna, except it has a single reed! It's a small, thick reed, so it doesn't sound much like a clarinet. It even plays an actual useful scale, unlike some of the other things in the pile.

I've also been busy cleaning off the furniture I brought back from my dad's place. My dad wants to retire to Florida (actually, he says he doesn't want to, but it's the law) so he wants to clear his NYC apartment of stuff so he can rent it out. Anyone need any stuff? I mean any stuff at all, of any kind, I'm sure my dad has a big bin of it. I've already taken a big load of candles to our weekly show at Je"Bon, and the belly dancers were happy to take them. Then last week, I took a huge bag of silly wigs, and those went over well too. There's all this stuff that I'm sure would be useful to someone, so we don't want to just throw it out, but it mostly wouldn't be worth the trouble of putting it on ebay.

My dad also has some beautiful furniture that had belonged to my grandparents. Bob actually managed to fit this big beautiful china cabinet into his car, and once we get it cleaned up, it will make a great home for our instruments. We could even put a humidifier in there, so things don't parch in winter. But someone clumsily spattered paint all over it, so we're scrubbing that off the beautiful wood.

Speaking of wood, our house, which was built in 1880, has quite a lot of beautiful wood in it. You can't get wood like this anymore, since the American chestnut trees that produced it were wiped out by chestnut blight. But some fool painted over all this beautiful wood with boring, and now flaking, white paint. When Bob first moved in, he set about rescuing the wood from this unjust obscurity, but after making a few rooms beautiful, he decided to live with the boring white paint in the rest of the house. I can't say I blame him, as it's a lot of work. But this is an issue now, as we're thinking of selling the place.

It's a fine house, but the thing is, it's just to small to hold a decent dance party in. We have a friend who holds dance parties all the time, and we're envious of the big room she holds them in. (She'd be happy to sell her house to us, as it's usually just below an artificial pond that someone situated on top of the hill in her backyard. That is, the pond is usually above the house.)

Plus, our garden is tiny and shady, and I want room to plant some pawpaw trees. You should go google pawpaw trees. They, like the wood in our house, have inexplicably been obscure for ages. And what native North American fruit becomes popular instead? The cranberry, a tiny, hard, sour fruit. Pawpaws are much more deserving of fame than the cranberry, and I want to plant some.

And some native plums, which are another unjustifiably obscure fruit. Back in 1779, George Washington ordered Major General John Sullivan to wipe out the native Americans who were living in this area, with orders including these: "The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements, and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more." Sullivan followed Washington's orders, and proudly reported that his troops had destroyed "40 Indian towns, vast fields of vegetables and fruit trees, and 160,000 bushels of corn." The people he didn't manage to kill starved to death the following winter. They didn't teach that in your history class, did they? Instead they teach a different story about George Washington and a cherry tree. Apparently the warning signs were there even as child.

The lesson I get from this, aside from the fact that our country's history is not exactly spotless, and they don't teach about the spots in standard history classes, is that there are some native trees that produce very tasty fruit, and I want to plant them. I just hope that Sullivan isn't around to chop them down.

So now Bob and I are looking for a house with a bit more yard, as well as at least one big room to hold a dance party in. Bob also says stuff like our kitchen isn't big enough, and I'm like, dude, you don't even cook, so you are no judge of kitchens. Our current kitchen is bigger than some NYC apartments.

I actually too busy to blog, what with all the stuff to do to get the house salable. Bob and I have decided on a division of labor that involves me destroying things and throwing them away, and Bob fixing them afterwards. First step, that moldy stuff in the basement.