I went for over a year without posting here. It has been an interesting year.

Our daughter got married. Well, she Handfasted. Handfasting is a legally recognized form of trial marriage. The trial period is usually one year. At the end of the year, the Handfasting can be renewed for another period, made permanent, or dissolved. My daughter and her husband chose to make their bond permanent at a ceremony this past week-end. They also introduced their son, Richard Alexander, to the public.

Health is important to me because I suffer a variety of illnesses. About three decades ago, in Panama, I suffered chronic aluminum poisoning. I gained an absurd amount of weight. I was probably up to 500 pounds or so but couldn't find a scale that would read higher than 350 pounds. I am still at 320, having lost 30 pounds over the past eighteen months. A bit over two decades ago we left Panama and I came down with diabetes. During the past decade I have been fighting Celiac Disease and its multiple nutritional deficiencies and its inflammation.

Gluten, I have learned, is not a single protein, it is a collection of related proteins found in wheat, rye, barley and oats. Modern wheat itself has about 20,000 different proteins, about 60 of which are known to cause distress. Gluten contains four to six of those 60. It has not been investigated in depth and most of the 20,000 or so proteins have unknown effects on the human body. In addition, all grains contain substances that attack the intestines, the autoimmune nature of Celiac Disease has the immune system attacking parts of the body (particularly the thyroid gland, the skin and the brain), fermentable carbohydrates (FODMAPs) cause their own brand of destruction, and bad bacteria move in to wreak havoc (SIBO). My intestines have not healed, though I am making progress. I am barely able to reduce the inflammation. The skin on my arms and legs has been damaged and I just recently managed to heal ulcers on my lower legs, especially the right leg. I have been taking thyroid supplements and my thyroid is now sputtering along, functioning normally most of the time. When I consume FODMAPs, usually beans or lentils, the ill effects usually last two or three days instead of the ten days or so they used to bother me. SIBO (Small Intestine Bacterial Overgrowth) is a constant battle, fought with daily supplements of acidophilous and other live bacterial cultures.

The government, health insurers and the medical industry have made my battle more difficult. Now all of the competent doctors who have studied and applied nutrition and other alternative or natural treatments are unable to accept insurance payments, including (or especially) Medicare. They have to operate on a strictly cash basis. That may be a blessing: Medicare is seriously screwed up.

But I was talking about 2014 news and I became a grandfather in September of 2014. My daughter now lives in Tucson but she does bring the baby for visits. He will be four months old in a few days. My son has purchased a house in Britain, outside of London. On his recent visit here he admitted he is likely to continue living and working in England.

My wife, Delia, remains far more healthy than I am. She still works despite being officially retired although work has become more difficult to find.

The bed I had been using deteriorated enough that trying to sleep in it was painful. My back would hurt all day long some days. I moved to what had been my son's bed, a queen-sized platform bed. With guests coming, I had to move back into the master bedroom ... after we replaced the bed. My wife expected me to move back to my son's bed after he left. She was very happy to learn that I prefer sharing the master bedroom with her to sleeping alone in my son's room. I got used to the new bed, a long twin, quite quickly, having minor back pain for only one day. I prefer the smaller long twin size to the larger queen size. But my long twin bed is about 1.5 inches lower than the one my wife uses and she wants to replace both of them with new beds. I don't want to change beds again.

I'll make no promises about posting here more frequently. The past decade has shown me that making plans is useless: the universe will have its way.

I am thankful to still be here.

I've been ill. I no longer post with the frequency I used to. And I have too many Weblog sites: two on Xanga, two on WordPress (I guess that means I now have four on WordPress if Xanga has become WordPress), one on Lycos, one on LiveJournal and several others that I set up but may never have used.

Others have moved on. The people I knew have given up posting or are posting elsewhere.

I have been cleaning out my email inbox, which has about 15,000 unread messages in it. Today I found an old Xanga posting and wanted to check if the person who posted it was still active. Surprise! Everything is different.

I have not posted here for several years. I have not posted on my other Xanga site for several years. I have posted on one of my WordPress sites and on my LiveJournal site this year. I have "posted" and communicated on Facebook, mostly from my tablet rather than from my computer.

I feel the need to find out what is new here.

It has been a while.

I have never seen a clickit, so I don't really know what they are.

Since late June or early July, something has been making a clicking noise each time I enter the bathroom. Each clickit clicks just once per visit. The first click is always the loudest and deepest in tone, but it is followed by softer, higher toned, clicks from elsewhere in the bathroom, mostly from inside the bathtub. At first there was only one clickit, then two, now up to seven or so. A family of clickits.

The alpha clickit usually hides near the door, although sometimes I've heard him calling from near the toilet or from inside the bathtub or near the medicine cabinet. He is usually alone; the clicks that follow his come from some location other than his although the secondary clicks may come from clusters of animals in or near the same location.

The clickits are on duty each day all day and night. The rest of my family seem not to have noticed them; there have been no comments about clickit invasions so far. The clickits just say "Hello," then remain silent until I leave ... unless the weather is cool.

The clickits don't seem to appreciate cold weather. Now that Autumn is upon us, they have started to behave differently. Their clicks are higher pitched, shorter and closer together. Sometimes they click several times per visit, each time I move.

They sound worried.

If any of you have encountered a similar phenomenon, please let me know what clickits are.

Flock

Flock is
described as a social browser. I'm not sure how applicable that
description is because access to social communication sites is only
part of what Flock does.

In just a few minutes after starting
the program, I was able to link it to some of my Weblog sites:
LiveJournal (Am0), Blogger (Am's rAmbles), and Xanga (WordJames and
Am0) but not Tripod (WordJames) or WordPress (I'm not quite sure what
it's called). Plus I was able to access some RSS feeds. Now I'm editing
this entry on Flock, even though I prefer w.blogger for making
LiveJournal entries because of its superior HTML capabilities.

Until 
discovering Flock, I was using a variety of browsers and other tools to
access or maintain my Weblogs: Firefox, Opera, w.blogger, Am0.us,
WordJames.name, Xanga and Tripod. I would like to be able to access all
of them with a single interface. I've fallen short of that goal with
Flock, but it is a step in the right direction.

Flock is based
on the Mozilla Gecko machine, just like Firefox, SeaMonkey and Mozilla.
When I signed on to Flock for the first time, it asked me if I wanted
it for my default browser. I declined. Now I'm more tempted to make it
the default. I'm certainly going to give it a workout over the next few
days.

Recovery

It has been months since I last posted here. My last entry concerned my accident that damaged my left knee.

Following the accident, my knee became very swollen. The pressure building up from the swelling caused blisters to form on my leg, the blisters popped and became infected, and I wound up in the hospital for three nights / four days with bottles of antibiotic pouring directly into my veins. After I got out, I got therapy for the swelling and went to a high-compression thigh-high support stocking -- which is difficult and painful to put on or remove. As the swelling diminished, I switched to regular support hose supplemented by an elastic knee support. I mostly don't use the knee band any more as the swelling continues to go down. The knee continues to be numb and sometime tingles like small creatures were walking on it.

I continue reducing the amount of insulin I require -- my daily dose of Lantus, the slow insulin, is down to 48 units from a high of 110 units -- although I've been suffering an increasing number of low blood sugar episodes, about once a week now. The low blood sugar episodes seem to follow days in which I've had particularly bad diarrhea, and I just started taking a new medicine that may help correct the digestion problems.

I have jumped through almost all of the hoops required for getting an insulin pump and should receive mine soon. The new pumps come with continuous blood sugar monitoring, which should help me head off any future episodes of low blood sugar. It should also help me control the highs, too. Originally expected to be released at the beginning of the year, the new pumps didn't get federal approval until late July or some time in August.

My spine has gotten worse. The arthritis was originally only diagnosed as severe in the upper spine, with the lower spine rated as moderate; now it's all severe and they're calling it "degenerative disk disease" instead of arthritis. The arthritis in my right hip and right knee are at least as bad as ever and I now have problems in my right wrist, having to wear a wrist support most of the time to reduce the pain.

Annoyingly, I have a new problem: if I try to get up early in the morning, I get severe headaches. I like to get up at 7:00, sometimes earlier, but I've been unable to move before 10:00 frequently of late. If I try to get up despite the headache it just gets worse and worse until I can't do anything.

Football season has started. I didn't watch many games in the pre-season and I'll probably continue to pass on watching all but the most interesting. Even by recording the games and fast-forwarding through the commercials, the games last too long for me to sit through them comfortably. I flinch every time the announcers mention that somebody has had hamstring problems ... my left leg hurts in sympathy. Delia has promised to buy me a lift recliner (the chair stands up and pushes me out instead of my having to struggle to my feet to get out), to make television viewing more comfortable and to get me to elevate my legs the way the doctors have ordered me to do. I've picked out the model I want, one of the larger La-Z-Boy models. We were at the store twice this week and I spoke with the store manager this morning on the telephone. It's just a matter of finalizing the deal.

Delia and Cathy have been after me increasingly lately to agree to move my computers upstairs. Delia doesn't want me having to walk half-way around the house to do downstairs or to come back upstairs while Cathy simply wants the increased space and privacy she'd get. I'd lose some privacy and I'd have to clean my stuff up and get rid of a large portion of it. They'll probably win, likely next year, so I'd better start throwing stuff out now.

We didn't exactly choose our wedding date. We fell into it. We originally planned to be married in January of 1972, but Delia came down with pneumonia and spent the scheduled date in the hospital instead. When she got out, we had only two options: the middle of April or late August. Everything else was booked up.

At least we got a date that is easy to remember, the day taxes are usually due. They were due 4/17 this year but I submitted them 4/13 instead, knowing I was going to be busy with party preparations.

Not an anniversary party on Saturday. We were having guests over to celebrate Easter on Sunday.

Cathy was going to cook a lamb leg. She did a bunch of other stuff too, but the main course was to be lamb, cooked in Cathy's new roaster oven. You've probably seen similar machines the last two months of each year, as they are popular for roasting turkeys in.

Since the machine was new, it needed to cure. That is, we had to turn it on at maximum power for at least an hour to burn off the oils left by the manufacturing process. That was to be my job. To make sure I remembered to take it downstairs, Cathy placed it under a chair near the front door.

Delia had to work on Saturday. She was going to decorate her display in the store with flowers and picked up an extra bunch of roses to decorate the house for the party. She passed by the house with them on her way to work, and I went out to get them.

On my way in, carrying the flowers, I tripped over the roaster oven. I managed to protect the flowers from damage but came down hard on my left knee.

I couldn't move at first. After about ten minutes, I managed to scuttle, crab-wise, over to a chair and hoist myself up into it. The knee immediately began to swell. Cathy wanted to call an ambulance but I refused to cooperate. I also refused to let her take me to the emergency room, insisting I would survive. She brought me a moist bath towel and an ice pack.

I spent most of that day in that same chair, moving only when nature forced me to. I consumed a Tylenol-3 and, later, a couple of my Tylenol arthritis formula.

Sunday I calmed the pain with a constant stream of a more natural remedy, wine. I would rather use a natural remedy instead of some kind of chemical. For several days since then I used neither Tylenol nor wine.

I was unable to see a doctor on Monday, but I did visit a bone doctor on Tuesday morning. Xrays showed that no bones were broken. The pattern of bruises developing on my leg were typical of a hamstring tear, so the doctor did an ultrasound. He had Delia watch the screen during the procedure. They both giggled when I coughed and the fluid in my knee sloshed back and forth. He said that the stuff that looked like seaweed in the surf was probably streaks of blood in the liquid.

My knee is still swollen. It is full of fluid, some of which is blood. It was twice as big as normal, but the swelling has gone down a bit. The rug burn, where the skin was scraped off, is red. The doctor warned me to call my primary physician if it seemed to become infected. Otherwise, I'm to walk as much as I can manage and I should rest the leg frequently. I am to return in three weeks, just before I'm due for jury duty.

Oh, and the party was great despite my injury. I didn't dance, which isn't unusual. In fact, our guests hardly noticed that I just sat there, most of the time, without moving.

That's normal for me.

Christmas Dinner

We 'flew' up to Huntington Beach for a dinner party. I say 'flew' because Cathy was driving us in her new truck and Delia always says something about the velocity at which we travel. Cathy was doing a good job with her driving and not travelling at an excessive rate, in my opinion, but she did give some signs that she was less than pleased with the way others were driving.

We were told to be there at 14:00. We were among the first to arrive when we got there at about 18:00. We brought a substantial portion of the vegetables (string beans, potatoes, sweet potatoes) for the meal, returning home with a good amount of meat in its place. Others brought their specialties and there was enough in both quantity and variety to satisfy everybody, so I don't need to list what was on the table.

The usual collection of people attended, for the most part.

At the dinner table, the woman sitting next to Delia was pontificating on the subject of cancers, particularly lymphoma, when Delia started to cry. I had to explain that Delia has lymphoma, which brought a momentary silence to the table. Delia stepped in to fill the silence with her explanation of what had happened to her. Having Delia openly discuss the subject raised the comfort level for all present.

We exchanged presents. My hopes of being ignored were dashed when I was handed a large, heavy package. I have, over the years, established my discomfort with gift exchanges (it contributes to my annual state of depression) by a constant failure to provide gifts, but Delia more than makes up for my lack.

We left as early as we could, Delia trying to hold on to the party experience until forcibly persuaded that we must depart. Traffic was light on our return but the trip was marred by several drivers who either lacked the season's spirit ... or had consumed too much of it. We encountered annoyances, though, not any hazardous situations. arriving safely shortly before midnight.

Christmas Eve Dinner

When Delia and Cathy both work long hours, as for the last three weeks, it falls to me to prepare dinner. Sometimes it isn't much, but something more is expected on Christmas Eve. This year I decided to experiment with a boned lamb leg, something Cathy usually prepares. She is the expert at it.

Knowing what I was up to, Cathy dropped a pile of cookbooks on me, massive volumes individually that, together, made a heap over a foot tall. I don't follow recipes and I already had a good idea what I wanted to do but I glanced at the lamb recipes in several volumes for new ideas. I didn't get any, so I proceded on my own.

A marinade, used to break down meat fibers and tenderize the meat, typically consists of an oil and an acid, at its most basic. I chose a good extra virgin olive oil and, for the acid, both lemon juice and yogurt. I added both garam masala and freshly ground pepper to the paste. I threw in a few more herbs to round it out but those were the important ones.

The lamb leg comes in an elastic net. I carefully removed it, thinking I could replace it later instead of tying the meat up with cotton cooking twine. I cut a number of inch long slits in the meat, which I jammed full of sliced garlic, then I spread the marinade on the inside of the leg. I then attempted to replace the netting I had so carefully preserved.

Disaster! The yogurt mix leaking from inside the leg made it too slippery to replace the netting. I made several attempts, the result of which was to spray or smear marinade all over my shirt, my face and the table. I broke out the twine and tied the leg up with it.

I smeared the fragrant white paste over the bottom of the roast, flipped it onto my roasting rack, then smeared the remaining goop over the top. I popped it into a 400° oven with the timer set for one hour.

The second part of the meal was to be a barlotto, the barley equivalent of a risoto, a labor-intensive way to fix a barley-rice mixture. I had a mix of brown and wild rices in the cupboard that I had been saving for this attempt. I fried the dry rices with a slightly greater quantity of pearl barley (in extra virgin olive oil, of course). When the barley turned opaque, I added just enough chicken broth to cover the grains. I piled in a handful of dried shiitake mushrooms just before adding the second helping of broth. The secret of a barlotto, according to a Molto Mario program I had watched over a month previously, was to top up the level of liquid every ten minutes, just barely covering the grain each time, adding only small amounts to keep from cooling the mix. After each addition, I would stir the mix to evenly distribute the heat. When the meat had about ten minutes to go, I would add a finely chopped medium onion.

That was the plan, anyway. I actually decided to go when the timer showed eleven minutes to completion. Unfortunately, there was a segment missing on the timer. I realized this when the time 'dropped' from eleven minutes to sixteen minutes. The top of the seven had been missing. I compensated by turning the heat off five minutes early, putting a lid on it when I powered down.

Cathy still wasn't home when everything was done, so I left the meat in the oven until she was there. I had wanted it rare but Delia liked it well done, so it didn't matter that much. Or it wouldn't have if the meat had actually cooked enough. As it was, the meat was uncooked in its heart. I snipped the strings, to allow the leg to relax and flatten out, then put it back for an additional twenty minutes. When I pulled it out, some was well done and some still had traces of pinkness.

The proof, of course, comes when you eat. Both Delia and Cathy repeated on both the meat and the barlotto. I thought the meat was as flavorful as any lamb I have ever eaten, the combination of yogurt and garam masala adding highlights to the flavor. There was meat left over ... but no barlotto.

For dessert we had pumpkin pie and gingerbread men.

Happy Birthday to Me

Today is my sixty-fifth birthday. I celebrated by not risking making my cold much worse. I spent most of my day watching movies on television.

Delia and Cathy were both working (despite Delia having a cold worse than mine). It was up to me to fix dinner. I had three Cornish game hens in the refrigerator, so I figured I'd roast them.

Fortune favored me. While doing something else, I spotted a volume of poultry recipes, six of them dedicated to Cornish game hens. All but one required splitting the bird and removing its spine, a task I didn't care to attempt on three birds, so I chose the remaining recipe. It involved smearing a mixture of curry and chili on the birds, inside and out, and popping them in the oven for a short while.

I found chili powder. I improvised a curry from its primary ingredients. I mixed extra virgin olive oil into the dry spices and turned the oven on. I quickly learned that the oil wanted to leave the spices as quickly as possible.

A gummy paste of oil and spices invites problems. The telephone rang. I ignored it. The dog got under foot, demanding attention. I shouted at the dog. The birds kept trying to slip off of the rack. Ignoring these distractions, I managed to smear roughly equal quantities of the messy paste onto and into each bird. Cathy arrived, demanding entrance because she wasn't carrying her keys. I shouted at the door. I then, calmly, washed the gunk off of my hands, unlocked the door without first kicking the dog into oblivion, and deposited the birds on their rack into the waiting oven.

While the birds cooked, Cathy broke out a selection of wines, cheeses, crackers and mushrooms. This was particularly welcome because I had neglected to eat any lunch (I forgot). While the birds, unstuffed, got stewed, I got both stuffed and stewed. There was a white wine (reisling), a red wine and champagne.

Cathy had prepared both potatoes and a pumpkin bread to accompany the hens. When Delia arrived, we served.

Cornish game hens are fat little birds. They are almost as bad as geese. A pound-and-a-half hen produces as much grease as a chicken four times its size. I left the greasy pan and rack for somebody else to clean up.

After all, it is my birthday.

By the way, the birdies were delicious.