Archive: Favorites

Last week, Elise posed two scenarios to her fair readers, “to get your take on kitchen habits: what is normal, and what is not.” The first scenario included meal plans, a stocked fridge, and smooth kitchen operations, whereas the second painted a picture of late arrival home, no food in the house, and caving in to order take-out. After reading a handful of comments empathizing with the second scenario, I shamefacedly admitted that JG and I have a routine that resembles the first one, although I pointed out that we don’t always clean while we cook (at least, I don’t), and the non-cook of the night gets stuck with whatever mess is left behind.

Elise promptly e-mailed me in response to my comment:

Why wouldn’t you want to admit that? I am TOTALLY impressed by it! How do you do it? What do you buy? Who cooks? Can you share some recipes, or ideas, or SOMETHING?? I am desperate

I was stunned. The thought that anyone besides us might want to hear our extremely regimented method of meal planning, recipe filing, and grocery shopping was completely foreign to me. Sure, we can’t imagine living without it, but it’s an entirely different story to describe it to the outside world. After Elise’s encouragement, I present the first of a three-part series on how JG and I deal with meals. So, welcome to our kitchen!

My favorite parts of the kitchen are the gigantic refrigerator that we inherited from the previous owners, the wood floors they put down, our bookshelves of cookbooks, and my Kitchen Aid mixer. My least favorite parts are the little pockets of counter space (rather than a long, lovely expanse) and a complete lack of natural light. We haven’t had to make any major improvements, thank goodness, other than replacing a twenty-year-old dishwasher and stove hood. The kitchen isn’t huge, but it gets the job done. Eventually, I’d like to reface the cabinets and have a more cohesive shelving situation on the opposite wall.

Before I launch into the nitty-gritty (and thrilling!) details of our kitchen processes, I feel the need to disclaim myself to death:

I’m just describing how JG and I do things, and I understand that not everyone will ascribe to or even like how we do it. In fact, I will be pleasantly surprised if this little series does not land me in the So Square We Can’t Even Believe It category. So please do not interpret these posts as a prescription for your life.

So! The topic of this first installment is how we set up a meal plan and create a shopping list for the week. Continue reading →

Our neighborhood is full of dogs, and most of the time, I love it. It’s nice to exchange small talk with the other owners when it’s my turn to take Ted for his walk, and I have definitely fallen into the cliché where I know all of the dogs’ names, but not all of the owners’ names.

That said, in light of some rare and unpleasant encounters, this edition of Dogarazzi comes with a plea:

Please put your dog on a leash whenever it is outside your home or an enclosed area. Please encourage your friends to do the same.

Over the weekend, I was out with Ted for his afternoon walk, and I noticed a dog out in a front lawn while his owner was working out in the yard. I stopped for a moment, since I couldn’t tell if the dog was tethered; he was a black dog with a brown muzzle and ears, easily larger than our golden retriever friend, Friday. I stood in the sidewalk, trying to figure out if I should continue our normal route past the house. I probably should have turned around.

Right away, the dog came padding over to us. He wasn’t aggressive, and he didn’t bark, but he was very insistent to sniff out Ted. I restrain myself from picking up Ted in times of stress because I don’t want to reinforce reactive, excited behavior, but I could tell that he was a little scared of this very outgoing, much larger dog. He tucked his tail between his legs and proceeded to circle me and wrap the leash around my legs, while the bigger dog continued to sniff.

All the while, the owner was calling out, “General! General! Come here! Come back here! Oh, he’s friendly! He won’t do anything! General! Come back here!” My ire quickly rose.

It was not until I was fully incapacitated from the winding leash that the owner came over and put a hand on General’s collar, repeating that “he would never do anything, he’s friendly, see what I mean?” I unwound Ted in stony silence and walked away in the direction that we came.

Even though I so wanted to say firmly, “Your dog should be on a leash,” or even “Please control your dog,” I could not bring myself to do it. The words stayed, paralyzed, on the tip of my tongue, and I wasn’t able to spit them out. I felt as though I would be implying that he was a poor dog owner or that General really would have gone after Ted. No, nothing like that. I just think it’s common sense and courtesy to control one’s animals, and the easiest way to do that is with a leash.

Why is it so easy for me to refuse to start driving until everyone in my car is wearing a seatbelt? Because it’s my car. Within that steel cage, I am in control, and I am responsible for what happens, so you buckle your seatbelt if you’re going to ride with me. Out in the world, I don’t feel nearly as assertive. For instance, I believe strongly in sending kids to public schools, but I don’t go telling others that they should do it because it’s outside the bounds of my responsibility, so to speak.

Keeping a dog on a leash is part of being a conscientious owner. In our neighborhood, a dog can go from a front door to a front lawn, to a sidewalk, and then the street in a matter of seconds. I understand that dogs can get loose by accident, but having a dog wander in an unenclosed lawn within spitting distance of a road, even while the owner is in the general area, is simply not a safe practice, in my opinion. The dog could be distracted by a kid on a bike, a child in a stroller, or even a car coming down the street that is probably not following the speed limit of 25 miles per hour. The leash is a dog’s seatbelt, and it is a safety precaution for the dog.

And, yeah, I’m concerned because Ted is my dog, and therefore, within my domain of responsibility. Plus, he’s a small dog that will usually submit to larger or more vocal dogs. JG worries that, if Ted is overstepped by a much larger dog, like General, that he won’t know what to do, and heaven help us if he accidentally nips the larger dog. Even if Ted is perfectly at ease with another dog, what am I supposed to do if the situation gets ugly? Keep cooing that Ted was always such a nice dog until he thought he was in mortal peril? I don’t think so.

I’m not upset because General was a mean dog, because he wasn’t. He was really quite amiable, and not at all mean. I’m more upset because it seems like some owners don’t see a problem until something drastic happens, like someone is bitten or a dog is hit by a car. Just because there wasn’t an actual altercation does not mean that the situation was under control. Our pets are animals, and we can’t know what will trigger those instincts.

I wish I had been able to say, calmly and decisively, that General was not under the owner’s control, however I would have phrased it. While I work up that courage for the future, please accept this public service announcement:

Please put your dog on a leash whenever it is outside your home or an enclosed area. Please encourage your friends to do the same.

Get your daily dog dose with Smalls, Kaya, Rufus, Ben, Gus, and Zapp!

It’s easy for me to forget that I work at a hospital. Oh, sure, when people ask where I work, I have the answer, but the reality is that I do not work in the hospital. I park on Level 4 of my garage before I walk to my office on the top floor of the administration wing, which is the farthest point from the main care-providing areas. It takes me twenty minutes to walk to the cafeteria and back. We don’t hear any announcements over the public address system. If I don’t leave my desk during the day — which is often the case — I would not come into contact with patients at all. For all intents and purposes, I work at an office.

Today, a physician called about a submission to a scientific journal that uses an online interface, like many other publications. She was a little nervous about transferring files and reviewing proofs, so I went to her office to help. I went down the three flights of stairs to the bottom of my building, walked over to the connecting bridge, followed signs for the south elevators, took them up to the third floor, and made my way to the anesthesiology department. On the way, I greeted a mother and her son, a pre-teen boy almost my height who kept drifting over to the walls to trace out shapes with his finger — a “J” on a locker, an arrow on a sign, and a “1″ on an exam room door. We rode up on the elevators together, and they got out on the second floor.

I sat next to the physician for the next forty minutes and walked her through the submission process to make sure sure that all of the files were included, everything was labeled correctly, and she had saved a copy of the proof. About halfway through, there was a beep on the PA system:

“Attention. Attention, please. Code tag alert. Outpatient lobby. Code tag alert.”

Thanks to my new employee orientation, I remembered that a tag alert meant that a patient was crossing a certain boundary without permission. Usually, it’s a child who is being discharged, but the staff forgot to remove their alert wristband, and it’s no big deal. Sometimes, however, the child is being moved unsafely, without consent, so this alert can be very serious. The safety representative at my orientation made it clear that if we were ever near the location of a tag alert, we should get out of the way, and fast, to make room for security people. I took a deep breath at this announcement. I was glad to be out of the way, but I hoped everything was okay for that patient.

During the walk back to my office, I heard the “all clear” for the tag alert. Good. The relatively short time span meant that the alert was a false alarm, so no one was being abducted or hurt.

Relieved, I sat down at my desk. My next project was to lay out a research poster, and I was startled to read its content: a congenital skin disorder that newborn babies don’t survive for more than a day. I am ashamed to admit that I couldn’t bear to look at some of the images of the disease, but after the initial shock wore off, the reality set in that the pictures showed someone’s baby who couldn’t even be held because of severe pain. It was a stark reinforcement that health care exists because people are not always healthy, even to the point of heartbreaking conditions.

I think working in the medical field is always challenging, but it’s different, somehow, with children. I should be more mindful that my daily tasks of submitting research papers, editing manuscripts, and laying out posters all goes to the improvement of care for these kids. I need remember that I really do work in a hospital.

Last week, I came home to a stack of three packages on our front stoop. One of the boxes contained one of a string of shower/wedding/baby presents I’ve had to order, so I trundled it up to the spare room that’s serving as my gift storage room. But I couldn’t account for the other two boxes.

Well, not completely. JG had told me that day that my awesome mystery birthday gift was out for delivery, and that I shouldn’t peek, so I had a hunch that the enigma was held within the corrugated pile before me. Upon lifting up the packages to carry them down to another room, I realized that the two boxes were:

1. From Amazon
2. Enormous
3. Extremely light

What in the world? Big photo prints? I had no idea.

When JG got home, I reported that the packages had arrived, and he just about rubbed his hands together with glee. “While you’re doing the dishes tonight, I’ll go down and check out your presents. I can’t wait to see them in person!”

Uh, okay.

Sure enough, as I started in on that night’s dirty pots and pans, JG jogged downstairs to survey the loot. He came back up, grinning, and said, “I’m so glad that the boxes just had Amazon’s logo on them. I was afraid that they would put the company logo on the box and you’d check it out just to see what kind of place it was. And then you’d see that they only sell one thing, and then you’d know what it is.”

What was that supposed to mean? I couldn’t even think of a vendor that would only have one product, much less something huge and featherweight. Harrumph.

My sister thinks that it is something fragile. I don’t know what to think. I am not hellbent on figuring out what it is, but I am growing weary of JG’s maddening hints, like how he might order it for his mom’s birthday, too. Last night, after JG said that I would have to open one of my presents tomorrow, on Birthday Eve, but he couldn’t tell me why, I put a stop to it.

“You know how, when people try to convince us that we will automatically want to have kids at a certain point, we both bear down and want to not want to have kids, just to spite them?” I asked.

“Yes…”

“Well, I’m almost at the point where I don’t want to like this present.”

That shut him up.

Two days to go.