There is a rite of passage that happens sooner or later to those of lucky enough to have had a happy, stable upbringing, which is that the doting parents who have until now been lovingly hoarding all your precious childhood treasures for you suddenly decide that they are sick of living with a basement/attic full of your crap, become fractionally less loving, and issue an ultimatum for you to clear out your stuff already. My sister is in the enviable position of having actually semi-useful/valuable childhood crap (several dozen antique 78's, well-ordered files of sheet music, etc.), but over the last week I have come to suspect that I might have been better served actually saving scatological samples over what I did save, which was every journal I have ever kept, starting at age eleven.
The Moth Radio Hour has a program where people can come on and read bits of their adolescent diaries out loud, and some of them are pretty excruciating, but rereading mine (I am up to age 14 at this point) has been a descent into self-loathing I wouldn't have dreamed possible. Very occasionally my 1986 cluelessness will evoke a twinge of sympathy in my 2015 self ("I wonder what I will be like when I am old? Will I have kids? Who will I be married to?"), but generally I am completely horrified by what a bumptious, self-important, boring little turd I was. Is this normal? I have met some pretty awful preteens and teens, but (perverse shades of my former narcissism still persist, apparently) I am fairly sure I was more horrible than all of them. I originally kept the diaries because I was sure they were full of deep truths, and then that eventually morphed into a more realistic "they'll help me remember what happened," which after I had actually become a mother myself turned into, "well, they'll be a good laugh for her when the time comes," and now I think the only conceivable use they could possibly have AT ALL is to keep me honest and humble once my own child turns disgusting. Assuming she emerges in one piece from her own adolescence, then I'll be allowed to get rid of them.
I can't quite stand to post any of the more egregiously self-obsessed preening entries, but here's a little glimpse, written just before my twelfth birthday:
"August 30th, Dear Eleanor [after Eleanor of Aquitaine, an obsession between age 7-12ish]:
D. was laughing at me because I told her that I wanted it to snow eight inches on the morning of my birthday party. I would wake up around nine, to a beautiful crystal world made, it seems, especially for me. The snow would be deep, but early in the morning the little dew-fairies [please bear in mind that I have been menstruating for 6 months at this point] would clear away the snow from the raods, the early morning sun flashing on their silver wing tips. No, I think i would rather wake up, say, at sevenish to see all the fairies shoveling the snow in the pale glow of the winter sunrise. Lovely! For some obscure reason I was the first person in the Seattle area, so I would be the very first to witness it. Then either a bubble or a white cloud [...] would drift through an open window lift me up and I would float, shimmering, a few feet above the ground. Then a whole team of snow-white does and stags with bells on would come out and stamp about, and wake up everyone.
"August 31st. New School Year Resolutions: I will practice my clarinet at least four times a week. I will not put off homework. I will work UNNATURALLY hard at social studies, language and maths. I will write in this journal once a day, probably in bed. I will not "stuff" my locker with old school work, but instead have a folder to put everything in. I will "keep up my physical appearance," i.e. not pick my nose, wear earrings every day, shower every evening, etc. etc. I will not say silly things that I will later regret, and I will not lie. If I buy cookies, I will pay out of my own money. I will try my very hardest to keep ALL of these resolutions. When I get my new diary I will not tear the pages out of it."
There follows about twenty pages of obsessing about whether Giles Sydnor did or did not have any idea who I was and why doesn't he ever look at me and we used to be "really close" (by which I meant that we sat next to each other in art class for a term, arm-wrestled when the teacher wasn't looking, passed notes under the table for a few weeks, and he once lent me his MAD magazine). I really really wish I could have played a video tape for my poor deluded 11-year-old self of the moment 20 or so years later that I discovered that the captain/host of the tugboat tour/party I was attending with some friends was none other than the Man Himself (by then a magnificently successful techie who had taken youthful retirement to concentrate on his boat fetish). I blushed to the roots of my hair and confessed to a life-threatening junior-high-school length crush on him, to which he replied, "That's funny. What's your name again?" Just think of all the time, paper, and biro ink I could saved myself. Oh, well.
Monday, 17 August 2015
Saturday, 22 March 2014
Ants and rants
Two items of business:
1) an indignant rant against snotty assistant tango teachers who cast aspersions on the commitment level of anyone who was unable to reorganize their lives to attend a hastily-arranged last-minute add-on rehearsal last week. To them I say: WTF! go boil your head! I am LEAVING MY CHILD (and dropping an average of $60 in childcare) in order to make it to EVERY SINGLE REGULARLY SCHEDULED REHEARSAL! don't even f*$%^&! start, mister. and then I gracefully, beatifically even, forgive & I move on, to:
2) the new lyrics to "The Ants Go Marching On," by Miss P. S-H., composed this morning on the way to school:
"The ants go marching one by one, hurrah! hurrah!
The ants go marching one by one, hurrah! hurrah!
The ants go marching one by one,
The little one stops to take off his trousers
And they all go marching on...
The ants go marching two by two, hurrah! hurrah!
The ants go marching two by two, hurrah! hurrah!
The ants go marching two by two
The little one stops to plug in his computer
And they all go marching on...
The ants go marching three by three, hurrah! hurrah!
The ants go marching three by three, hurrah! hurrah!
The ants go marching three by three
The little one stops to vroom in his car
And they all go marching on....
The ants go marching five by five, hurrah! hurrah!
The ants go marching five by five, hurrah! hurrah!
The ants go marching five by five,
The little one stops to put on his goggles and his hat and his scarf,
And they all go marching on...
The ants go marching two by two, hurrah! hurrah!
The ants go marching two by two, hurrah! hurrah!
The ants go marching two by two
The little one stops to eat a lollipop,
And they all go marching on..."
1) an indignant rant against snotty assistant tango teachers who cast aspersions on the commitment level of anyone who was unable to reorganize their lives to attend a hastily-arranged last-minute add-on rehearsal last week. To them I say: WTF! go boil your head! I am LEAVING MY CHILD (and dropping an average of $60 in childcare) in order to make it to EVERY SINGLE REGULARLY SCHEDULED REHEARSAL! don't even f*$%^&! start, mister. and then I gracefully, beatifically even, forgive & I move on, to:
2) the new lyrics to "The Ants Go Marching On," by Miss P. S-H., composed this morning on the way to school:
"The ants go marching one by one, hurrah! hurrah!
The ants go marching one by one, hurrah! hurrah!
The ants go marching one by one,
The little one stops to take off his trousers
And they all go marching on...
The ants go marching two by two, hurrah! hurrah!
The ants go marching two by two, hurrah! hurrah!
The ants go marching two by two
The little one stops to plug in his computer
And they all go marching on...
The ants go marching three by three, hurrah! hurrah!
The ants go marching three by three, hurrah! hurrah!
The ants go marching three by three
The little one stops to vroom in his car
And they all go marching on....
The ants go marching five by five, hurrah! hurrah!
The ants go marching five by five, hurrah! hurrah!
The ants go marching five by five,
The little one stops to put on his goggles and his hat and his scarf,
And they all go marching on...
The ants go marching two by two, hurrah! hurrah!
The ants go marching two by two, hurrah! hurrah!
The ants go marching two by two
The little one stops to eat a lollipop,
And they all go marching on..."
Friday, 17 January 2014
Announcing my new culinary philosophy:
It's founded on a triad of ancient but previously underappreciated cookery principles: (a) laziness (b) short stature and (c) wrong ingredients. Here's how it works:
Step 1. Take your toddler or small child to the grocery store/farmer's market. Decide that you really cannot be arsed to try and plan the next week's meals in any kind of coherent, nutritious way. Also it occurs to you that maybe if you just let the toddler choose the vegetables, (s)he will be marginally more cooperative when it comes to actually eating them.
Step 2. Arrive at the produce section. Tell your toddler/small child they can have WHATEVER THEY WANT in this section, as long as it fits in the bag/cart/basket and as long as you do not already have quantities of whatever it is already turning fuzzy and grey in the fridge/fruit bowl at home. Minimal parental input is the key to keeping this part exciting, both for the toddler/small child and for you.
Step 3. Note that they will be limited to what they can reach (see the crucial part about short stature), so they won't be able to buy several pounds of out-of-season chanterelle mushrooms at $49.99/lb, for instance, or any of the other gourmet spendy things that tend to be kept on upper shelves.
Step 4. Take it all home and let it sit in the fridge for a couple of days while you have the flu and can't get it together to do anything more exciting than soup-tin-opening, toast-making, tea-brewing, and self-pity.
Step 5. Open the fridge and ask yourself what on God's green earth are you going to do with: a bunch of lacinato kale, a kabocha squash, a red cabbage the size of your head, 23 carrots, one onion, three zucchini, and a cucumber. Hurrah for the internet!
Step 6. Find a recipe for which you have about two thirds of the ingredients, and replace the remaining third with other stuff that needs to be finished anyway (no lemon juice? how about a glassworth of prosecco that has been going flat for the last month! No flax oil? how about some sesame oil that is definitely older than your child? No almonds to toast? Let's find out at what temperature pistachios will set off the smoke alarm! Etc.) Incompetence and a sense of adventure are very important at this step.
Step 7. Bon appetit! I had a completely delicious salad tonight for dinner which I would have paid CASH MONEY for in a restaurant, had I had any inkling how delicious roast kabocha, kale, red cabbage, flat prosecco, grapefruit juice, slightly burnt pistachios, crunched up seed crackers, sesame oil, rice wine vinegar, cucumber, and a few raisins could be. Next time I might even save some for the small child...
Step 1. Take your toddler or small child to the grocery store/farmer's market. Decide that you really cannot be arsed to try and plan the next week's meals in any kind of coherent, nutritious way. Also it occurs to you that maybe if you just let the toddler choose the vegetables, (s)he will be marginally more cooperative when it comes to actually eating them.
Step 2. Arrive at the produce section. Tell your toddler/small child they can have WHATEVER THEY WANT in this section, as long as it fits in the bag/cart/basket and as long as you do not already have quantities of whatever it is already turning fuzzy and grey in the fridge/fruit bowl at home. Minimal parental input is the key to keeping this part exciting, both for the toddler/small child and for you.
Step 3. Note that they will be limited to what they can reach (see the crucial part about short stature), so they won't be able to buy several pounds of out-of-season chanterelle mushrooms at $49.99/lb, for instance, or any of the other gourmet spendy things that tend to be kept on upper shelves.
Step 4. Take it all home and let it sit in the fridge for a couple of days while you have the flu and can't get it together to do anything more exciting than soup-tin-opening, toast-making, tea-brewing, and self-pity.
Step 5. Open the fridge and ask yourself what on God's green earth are you going to do with: a bunch of lacinato kale, a kabocha squash, a red cabbage the size of your head, 23 carrots, one onion, three zucchini, and a cucumber. Hurrah for the internet!
Step 6. Find a recipe for which you have about two thirds of the ingredients, and replace the remaining third with other stuff that needs to be finished anyway (no lemon juice? how about a glassworth of prosecco that has been going flat for the last month! No flax oil? how about some sesame oil that is definitely older than your child? No almonds to toast? Let's find out at what temperature pistachios will set off the smoke alarm! Etc.) Incompetence and a sense of adventure are very important at this step.
Step 7. Bon appetit! I had a completely delicious salad tonight for dinner which I would have paid CASH MONEY for in a restaurant, had I had any inkling how delicious roast kabocha, kale, red cabbage, flat prosecco, grapefruit juice, slightly burnt pistachios, crunched up seed crackers, sesame oil, rice wine vinegar, cucumber, and a few raisins could be. Next time I might even save some for the small child...
Wednesday, 8 January 2014
My favourite ICD-9 codes
In honour of the recentish publication of the ICD-10 manual of medical diagnosis codes, here is a random assortment of truly delightful ICD-9 codes, with thanks to several friends and colleagues who contributed discoveries of their own. (The best part about it is how difficult it can sometimes be to find the code for something straightforward, like shoulder pain, which is listed somewhat obscurely as "pain in joint - shoulder".) Anyway. Happy 2014 to everyone.
V45.75 - Acquired absence of genitals
993.0 - Airplane ear
V45.75 - Acquired absence of genitals
993.0 - Airplane ear
291.5 - Alcoholic jealousy
365.83 - Aqueous misdirection
293.889 - Alice in Wonderland syndrome
704.2 - Bamboo hair
278.2 - Beery baby syndrome
030.3 - Borderline leprosy
133.8 - Cheese itch
704.2 - Bamboo hair
278.2 - Beery baby syndrome
030.3 - Borderline leprosy
133.8 - Cheese itch
V49.89 - Condition influencing health, not elsewhere classified
V19.7 - Consanguinity (it's a medical condition to be related to someone?)
788.37 - Continuous leakage
061 - Dandy fever
874.9 - Decapitation
307.52 - Depraved appetite
074.1 - Devil's grip
110.3 - Dhobie's itch (I have no idea what this is, but it sounds horrible)
104.0 - Dichuchwa (ditto)
307.52 - Dirt-eating child
360.29 Disorganized globe
360.29 Disorganized globe
759.4 Double monster
388.41 Double disharmonic hearing
785.3 - Dullness
085.0 - Dum-dum fever
388.41 Double disharmonic hearing
785.3 - Dullness
085.0 - Dum-dum fever
078.82 - Epidemic vomiting
E884.4 (but please note that EACH of these has its own subcode) - Fall from...
...bed
...building
...chair
...cliff
...commode
...furniture not elsewhere classified
...ladder
...playground equipment
...rollerskates
...scaffolding
...skis
...slipping
...snowboard
...passenger train
...wheelchair
You can also fall into or on things, viz: Fall...
...into hole
...into other hole (I love this)
...into storm drain
...into well
...on escalator
...on level not elsewhere classified
...on level (pushed)
...on level (tripped)
...on sidewalk curb
...on stair or step not elsewhere classified
...striking object
...striking sharp object
and in case you can't find your specific fall on the list, there is always "Fall Not Otherwise Specified."
638.6 Failed attempted abortion with soap embolism
990 Radioactive fallout
309.0 Fanatic personality
E914. Foreign body entering eye
E915 Foreign body entering other orifice
300.20 Fear
317 Feeble-minded
681.01 Felon
253.4 Fertile eunuch
491.1 Fetid bronchitis
E891.3 Fire in building
E892 Fire not in building
302.84 Flagellantism
798.9 Found dead
009.2 Gay bowel syndrome
102.3 Ghoul hand
098.2 Gleet (??!)
381.20 Glue ear syndrome
783.6 Gluttony
592.9 Gravel
704.3 Grayness of hair
985.1 Haff disease (as in, "I em seek. I haff disease")
935.2 Hairball in stomach
Hairless woman syndrome
529.3 Hairy black tongue
065.1 Omsk hemorrhagic fever
652.65 Hidden penis
E902.0 High altitude residency
E805.5 Hit by rolling stock
E805 Hit by train- employee
E805.2 Hit by train - pedestrian
E805.1 Hit by train - passenger
E805.3 Hit by train - ped cyclist
E805.8 Hit by train - person not elsewhere classified
756.89 Hood
301.51 Hospital addiction syndrome
994.2 Hunger
300.11 Hysterical deafness or blindness
285.9 - Impoverished blood
798.1 Instantaneous death
046.72 - Fatal familial insomnia
309.89 - Homesickness
300.13 - Hysterical dream state
607.89 - Induratio penis plastic
504 - Monday morning dyspnea
085.1 - Oriental sore
528.5- Painful lips
691.0 Psoriasiform napkin eruption
298.2 - Reactive confusion
529.5 - Scrotal tongue
333.91 - Stiff man syndrome
579.3 - Tachyalimentation (eating too fast...)
757.4 - Wooly hair, woolly
E884.4 (but please note that EACH of these has its own subcode) - Fall from...
...bed
...building
...chair
...cliff
...commode
...furniture not elsewhere classified
...ladder
...playground equipment
...rollerskates
...scaffolding
...skis
...slipping
...snowboard
...passenger train
...wheelchair
You can also fall into or on things, viz: Fall...
...into hole
...into other hole (I love this)
...into storm drain
...into well
...on escalator
...on level not elsewhere classified
...on level (pushed)
...on level (tripped)
...on sidewalk curb
...on stair or step not elsewhere classified
...striking object
...striking sharp object
and in case you can't find your specific fall on the list, there is always "Fall Not Otherwise Specified."
638.6 Failed attempted abortion with soap embolism
990 Radioactive fallout
309.0 Fanatic personality
E914. Foreign body entering eye
E915 Foreign body entering other orifice
300.20 Fear
317 Feeble-minded
681.01 Felon
253.4 Fertile eunuch
491.1 Fetid bronchitis
E891.3 Fire in building
E892 Fire not in building
302.84 Flagellantism
798.9 Found dead
009.2 Gay bowel syndrome
102.3 Ghoul hand
098.2 Gleet (??!)
381.20 Glue ear syndrome
783.6 Gluttony
592.9 Gravel
704.3 Grayness of hair
985.1 Haff disease (as in, "I em seek. I haff disease")
935.2 Hairball in stomach
Hairless woman syndrome
529.3 Hairy black tongue
065.1 Omsk hemorrhagic fever
652.65 Hidden penis
E902.0 High altitude residency
E805.5 Hit by rolling stock
E805 Hit by train- employee
E805.2 Hit by train - pedestrian
E805.1 Hit by train - passenger
E805.3 Hit by train - ped cyclist
E805.8 Hit by train - person not elsewhere classified
756.89 Hood
301.51 Hospital addiction syndrome
994.2 Hunger
300.11 Hysterical deafness or blindness
285.9 - Impoverished blood
798.1 Instantaneous death
046.72 - Fatal familial insomnia
309.89 - Homesickness
300.13 - Hysterical dream state
607.89 - Induratio penis plastic
504 - Monday morning dyspnea
085.1 - Oriental sore
528.5- Painful lips
691.0 Psoriasiform napkin eruption
298.2 - Reactive confusion
529.5 - Scrotal tongue
333.91 - Stiff man syndrome
579.3 - Tachyalimentation (eating too fast...)
757.4 - Wooly hair, woolly
Monday, 18 November 2013
Yosemite in November: who knew???!!?!
Hello, great wide world of blog-readers! Happy Monday! Pencils out, everyone, it's a POP QUIZ!!
1. It's the middle of November. You are just coming down with the same cold that your nearly three-year-old has been festering in for the last week (specific symptoms: scratchy throat, prickly skin, and what feels like a tiny PG&E employee with a jackhammer in your left sinus). The sum total of your wilderness experience to date has been exclusively during the summer months, and all camping trips have involved the presence of a more experienced adult. For any female readers between the ages of 12 and 50, your period is also imminent. You decide to:
A. Invest in several boxes of lotion-softened extra-fancy Kleenex, turn up the heat to irresponsibly luxurious, planet-threatening levels and reread Speak, Memory for the second time (you) and Frog & Toad for the 204,583rd time (toddler).
B. Go to bed for the weekend with your Ipod & let the toddler fend for herself. She knows how to make cereal, use the toilet, and more or less brush her teeth. She'll be fine.
C. Split your weekend between drinking tea & doing papier-mache projects with all the free "East Bay Chronicle" newspapers that someone somewhere seems to think you want/need/would ever read. Definitely do not leave the house.
D. Cobble together a load of camping equipment from various garage shelves & kind friends, pick toddler up early from school, and drive four hours to Yosemite, where you have no reservations at the one walk-in campground that is still open in the wintertime, and where the weather is forecast to be just about exactly freezing at night, and where the little "partly sunny" icon on www.wunderground.com depicts, somewhat pessimistically, a large cloud nearly obscuring a tiny sun, rather than the other way around.
CORRECT ANSWER: D. Hooray! Off we go!
2. Once you arrive at Yosemite, you check into the Lodge at Yosemite Falls (which sounds grand, but is actually an overpriced motel, but it is worth it, because even you are not stupid enough to try and arrive and do the camp setup thing in the dark, in November, with toddler, etc.) You eat the dinner you have brought with you, allow toddler to jump on the bed in demented excitement at being IN A HOTEL, MUMMY!!!, and then decide to venture out to blow the coupons you were given upon registration for 1 (One) Free Cup of Hot Tea or Coffee at the Food Court. You and toddler bundle up and head out. Once at the Food Court, you:
A. Take one look at the sticky tables, giant TV screens, and abdominal girth of average patron, and think, meh, I'll give it a miss.
B. Insist on small healthy snack, and then home early to bed, as there is a lot to do tomorrow
C. Split a piece of pecan pie of Half Dome-dimensions and allow toddler to drink the gallon-size glass of milk that the waiter brought, thus guaranteeing that she will spend the next two hours bouncing off walls pretending to be a bear before she collapses into a hyperglycemic coma (followed by midnight and 3 a.m. high-volume urgent distress yipping, because her bladder needs emptying and she can't get up to use the toilet without you there to hold her hand.)
CORRECT ANSWER: C. How is your sore throat feeling, by the way?
3. The following morning, you scrape the frost off the car (sleeping outside tonight...mmmm.....) you make your way to the campground with the help of a cheerful park-ranger-type dude who is doing some park-maintenance-type activities on the side of the road. The most logical response to the query, "Excuse me, is this the correct way to Camp 4?" is:
A. "Yes, that's right, it's just a little further down on the right."
B. "No, that way will get you back to the Lodge."
C. "Go another three miles, take a left, and you'll see the parking lot right there."
D. "Um, well, where's your husband?"
CORRECT ANSWER: D. Really??! Yes, really. That's what he said.
4. Having apparently remembered to bring all camping essentials _other_ than a husband, you successfully set up camp at Camp 4: a large and only a little bit smelly tent (readers unfamiliar with the Great Tent Swap Mystery of 2007, in which my two-person yellow Walrus tent disappeared from my garage & was replaced by a battered but perfectly serviceable three-person blue Eureka tent of completely unknown provenance, will have to wait for another blogpost for details), a camping hammock, a motley collection of sleeping pads & bags, enough layers of fleece to satisfy even toddler's Taiwanese grandparents (lovely people capable of worrying about hypothermia in Orange County in August), an ice-chest full of fig bars, chocolate, and freeze-dried food, and (last-minute impulse buy from REI):
A. a natty little camping stove which comes in a bag measuring approximately 3" by 3" square, weighs a jillionth of an ounce, lights without a fuss every time, and can boil porridge for two people faster than my kitchen stove at home, a revelation for anyone imprinted on gigantic clunky Coleman stoves circa 1963 that are about as straightforward to use as an aircraft carrier.
B. A combination Japanese steel folding knife, LED light, and (very loud - toddler tested it) bear-scaring emergency whistle
C. A microfiber sleeping bag liner, which promises to raise the temperature of your 'sleep experience' by five degrees centigrade, which when you are contemplating the large-cloud-in-front-of-tiny-sun icon before your trip is nothing to sneeze at, no no no.
D. A headlamp/torch set up that you could reasonably do helicopter searches with, along with a little mini blinking emergency light that can be attached to toddler.
E. All of the above!
CORRECT ANSWER: E. REI dividend check may actually be worth something this year...
5. Having set up camp & fed toddler breakfast, you decide to go for a short hike. You pack a lunch & head out of the campground along the trail to upper Yosemite Falls (an unrealistic seven miles, but what the hell, you'll go as far as you can, and then turn back). Toddler stops frequently to exclaim, "Wow, Mummy, LOOK!!!!" She is admiring:
A. The crystal clear view of Half Dome in the distance, framed by a perfectly blue sky
B. The amazing oranges and reds of the autumn foliage in Cook's Meadow below us
C. The sun sparkling off the Merced River winding away at the base of the steep white granite cliffs
D. The puke and maroon stripes on her legwarmers and pink dinosaurs on her snow boots.
CORRECT ANSWER: D. We are slaves to fashion, even when in survivalist mode.
6. You get back to camp that night, and notice that yours is the only campsite with a hammock (where you have been intending to sleep, since wunderground.com did at least say "0% chance precipitation"). You have read that some parks ban hammocks on the grounds that the straps could theoretically hurt the trees, but have seen no such prohibition anywhere on the website or ranger stations at Yosemite. You ask the guy at the campsite next to you if he knows why no one else is using a hammock. He says, oh, I think people are sticking to tents just because it's been so incredibly cold at night. You think:
A. Oh fuckit, let's pack up and go home now, before it gets too late.
B. We could always just go back to the lodge - I'm sure they have rooms free, and it wasn't THAT expensive
C. Well, I suppose we can do one night in the tent and see how it goes; we've got plenty of fleece, so I -think- we'll be OK.
D. WAAAAAHHH!!!! BUT I WANT TO SLEEP IN THE HAMMOCK!!!!
CORRECT ANSWER: D. (I watched a youtube video before we left - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jnoo4BPe2eo by this guy who is proponent of winter hammock camping. He lives in Minnesota, so I figured he knew what he was talking about.)
7. After setting up your hammock with two long sleeping pads lengthwise, a kids' short therma-rest across the middle to prevent Cold Bum Syndrome (a phenomenon common to hammock-campers that the internets, god bless 'em, raised your consciousness about), sleeping bags plus liners, an extra quilt you happened to have in the car, and a just-in-case-wunderground-was-wrong rain fly on a guyrope over the top of the whole thing, and a well-fed toddler rocking thermal underwear and fleece pyjamas, the approximate temperature inside your hammock (and corresponding number of hours of quality sleep you are able to get) is:
A. 40 degrees Kelvin; it wasn't so much sleep as hypothermic metabolic shutdown
B. 33 degrees Fahrenheit: not quite freezing, but we barely slept - should have gone back to the lodge
C. 55 degrees: cold, slept maybe a couple of hours
D. 85 degrees: would have slept eight hours straight except for had to get up at 2 am to peel a layer off each of us because it was -too- warm. (Also, I was still sick, and I wanted a throat drop. But it was really comfy).
CORRECT ANSWER. D. Boo-yah, suckahz, never sleeping in a tent again. Hammocks & microfiber sleeping bag liners rule.
8. The next morning, it is beautiful and clear again, not a cloud in the sky (did we mention it was also full moon, amazing stars, etc.?) but you have to admit, bloody cold. Important parenting lessons you learn this morning include:
A. If you let toddler cavort around the campsite in just her pyjamas and do not absolutely insist on her putting on a coat right now, no matter what, even though she says is not cold and she doesn't want a coat, very soon she will be really cold.
B. When toddlers become cold, they become really bad-tempered.
C. When they are really bad-tempered, they will refuse to do anything at all you suggest, such as (duh) putting on a coat, hat, gloves, etc. to get warm.
D. If they continue to furiously resist coats, thereby getting even colder, they will push forward the frontiers of bad-temperedness into previously uncharted territories of total foulness.
E. Despite all your prior good intentions to raise a good Junior Ranger and teach your child not to drop food at the campsite so as not to attract bears, there will come a time when you will see her dropping bits of her breakfast all over herself and think quietly homicidal thoughts about not cleaning her up afterwards, so as to make her as appetizing as possible for any passing bears.
CORRECT ANSWER: All of the above.
9. One Pyrrhic victory in the coat/breakfast battle later, you decide to scale down your ambitions and walk up the Mist Trail to Vernal Falls (mostly paved, three-ish miles round trip), having stopped in at the Yosemite Valley Visitor Center to talk to a different very friendly (non-sexist, sequitur-capable) park ranger (you) and obsessively stroke the model of a volcano's interior, complete with glowing plastic orange magma (toddler). You take the free shuttle from the Visitor Center (see, now, THIS is a REALLY GOOD USE of tax dollars, any government agents who happen to be reading this, please take note) to the trailhead, and set off. Examples of toddler's abject failure to adhere to basic scientific principles include:
A. Energy: she whined & complained & required bribing & moved approximately three feet an hour for the entire first mile of the hike, and then _ran_ the subsequent two miles at top speed ("Mummy, I zoom like a cheetah!").
B. Thermodynamics: she insisted on stripping off and wading into water that had actual ice-crystals on the actual surface, without becoming either cold or bad-tempered
C. Gravity: she is a surprisingly adept rock climber, and more than once I turned around to discover her four feet up a vertical rock face, saying gleefully, "Mummy, look at me! I'm a bit of an expert!"
D. Conservation of mass: Her stomach can hold consistently 2 oz of nutritious lovingly-prepared picnic lunch, but is a superdense black hole for near infinite weights of fig bars and raisins.
CORRECT ANSWER: All of the above.
10. You attempt to go to "Story Time" at the Ahwahneechee Hotel; this is advertised as being appropriate for 3-6 year olds in the little free Yosemite newspaper thingy, but it turns out it's really for grownups: it's a ranger-type person waffling about the life of Galen Clark & John Muir and a couple of other people, which would be interesting had it not been about one nugget of actual information per twenty minutes with a lot of rhetorical huffpuff in between. Toddler made sure that we could not even enjoy the experience of comfy leather chairs next to a roaring fire in a very posh hotel by:
A. Wriggling continuously as if infested by fire ants
B. Trying to make paper airplanes out of the tear-out cards from a nearby Oprah Magazine
C. Announcing loudly to the room that she needed to peepee, and then contradicting herself as soon as I stood up to take to her to the loo.
CORRECT ANSWER: sorry, this is getting monotonous. all of the above.
EXTRA CREDIT QUESTION:
By now having hammock-sleeping down to an art (eight consecutive hours of warm comfy sleep!) you remember to make the wearing of a coat & hat a compulsory condition of toddler's being allowed to get out of bed. The adjacent campground is now occupied by a woefully underprepared Mexican pair and their equally unprepared Argentinean friend, who are camping for the first time ever (their cold weather outfits consist of sweat pants and hoodies, and they have three thin cotton quilts between them; they did however bring a large teddy bear) and who compensate by making the largest bonfire possible in the firepit and eating marshmallows for breakfast (in Mexican Spanish, they're apparently just the generic "bonbon," whereas the Argentinean called them "malvaviscos;" interestingly spanishdict.com gives several Spanish terms for the English marshmallow, and says that "malvavisco" is the botanical term, i.e. marshmallow root, which is not used at all as an ingredient in the manufacture of present-day marshmallows (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshmallow)). But I digress. Planned activities for the day are: mile or so wander around Lower Yosemite Falls, picnic lunch at the falls, collect some leaves for school project, back to the car, drive home in time for dinner, much-needed bath, and bed. You
A. Follow your itinerary to the letter
B. End up wandering around Cook's Meadow feeling generally gobsmacked by how gorgeous it all is, sticking toes in Merced River, spend an hour riding a 'rhinoceros' (a large fallen tree), remember to collect a few leaves for the school project but not nearly as many as the teacher actually requested, eat lunch, do some more wandering around in the meadow (which, mindblowingly, was the bottom of a lake as recently as 1997), and then frogmarch toddler around Lower Yosemite Falls trail, just so you can say you did it, slaloming around clumps of Japanese senior citizens the whole way, then into the car and drive home.
So all in all, despite the fact that we were both sick, an absolutely terrific trip, and it made me want to go again (a) for way longer and (b) for proper wilderness backpacking, not just staying in a campground.
1. It's the middle of November. You are just coming down with the same cold that your nearly three-year-old has been festering in for the last week (specific symptoms: scratchy throat, prickly skin, and what feels like a tiny PG&E employee with a jackhammer in your left sinus). The sum total of your wilderness experience to date has been exclusively during the summer months, and all camping trips have involved the presence of a more experienced adult. For any female readers between the ages of 12 and 50, your period is also imminent. You decide to:
A. Invest in several boxes of lotion-softened extra-fancy Kleenex, turn up the heat to irresponsibly luxurious, planet-threatening levels and reread Speak, Memory for the second time (you) and Frog & Toad for the 204,583rd time (toddler).
B. Go to bed for the weekend with your Ipod & let the toddler fend for herself. She knows how to make cereal, use the toilet, and more or less brush her teeth. She'll be fine.
C. Split your weekend between drinking tea & doing papier-mache projects with all the free "East Bay Chronicle" newspapers that someone somewhere seems to think you want/need/would ever read. Definitely do not leave the house.
D. Cobble together a load of camping equipment from various garage shelves & kind friends, pick toddler up early from school, and drive four hours to Yosemite, where you have no reservations at the one walk-in campground that is still open in the wintertime, and where the weather is forecast to be just about exactly freezing at night, and where the little "partly sunny" icon on www.wunderground.com depicts, somewhat pessimistically, a large cloud nearly obscuring a tiny sun, rather than the other way around.
CORRECT ANSWER: D. Hooray! Off we go!
2. Once you arrive at Yosemite, you check into the Lodge at Yosemite Falls (which sounds grand, but is actually an overpriced motel, but it is worth it, because even you are not stupid enough to try and arrive and do the camp setup thing in the dark, in November, with toddler, etc.) You eat the dinner you have brought with you, allow toddler to jump on the bed in demented excitement at being IN A HOTEL, MUMMY!!!, and then decide to venture out to blow the coupons you were given upon registration for 1 (One) Free Cup of Hot Tea or Coffee at the Food Court. You and toddler bundle up and head out. Once at the Food Court, you:
A. Take one look at the sticky tables, giant TV screens, and abdominal girth of average patron, and think, meh, I'll give it a miss.
B. Insist on small healthy snack, and then home early to bed, as there is a lot to do tomorrow
C. Split a piece of pecan pie of Half Dome-dimensions and allow toddler to drink the gallon-size glass of milk that the waiter brought, thus guaranteeing that she will spend the next two hours bouncing off walls pretending to be a bear before she collapses into a hyperglycemic coma (followed by midnight and 3 a.m. high-volume urgent distress yipping, because her bladder needs emptying and she can't get up to use the toilet without you there to hold her hand.)
CORRECT ANSWER: C. How is your sore throat feeling, by the way?
3. The following morning, you scrape the frost off the car (sleeping outside tonight...mmmm.....) you make your way to the campground with the help of a cheerful park-ranger-type dude who is doing some park-maintenance-type activities on the side of the road. The most logical response to the query, "Excuse me, is this the correct way to Camp 4?" is:
A. "Yes, that's right, it's just a little further down on the right."
B. "No, that way will get you back to the Lodge."
C. "Go another three miles, take a left, and you'll see the parking lot right there."
D. "Um, well, where's your husband?"
CORRECT ANSWER: D. Really??! Yes, really. That's what he said.
4. Having apparently remembered to bring all camping essentials _other_ than a husband, you successfully set up camp at Camp 4: a large and only a little bit smelly tent (readers unfamiliar with the Great Tent Swap Mystery of 2007, in which my two-person yellow Walrus tent disappeared from my garage & was replaced by a battered but perfectly serviceable three-person blue Eureka tent of completely unknown provenance, will have to wait for another blogpost for details), a camping hammock, a motley collection of sleeping pads & bags, enough layers of fleece to satisfy even toddler's Taiwanese grandparents (lovely people capable of worrying about hypothermia in Orange County in August), an ice-chest full of fig bars, chocolate, and freeze-dried food, and (last-minute impulse buy from REI):
A. a natty little camping stove which comes in a bag measuring approximately 3" by 3" square, weighs a jillionth of an ounce, lights without a fuss every time, and can boil porridge for two people faster than my kitchen stove at home, a revelation for anyone imprinted on gigantic clunky Coleman stoves circa 1963 that are about as straightforward to use as an aircraft carrier.
B. A combination Japanese steel folding knife, LED light, and (very loud - toddler tested it) bear-scaring emergency whistle
C. A microfiber sleeping bag liner, which promises to raise the temperature of your 'sleep experience' by five degrees centigrade, which when you are contemplating the large-cloud-in-front-of-tiny-sun icon before your trip is nothing to sneeze at, no no no.
D. A headlamp/torch set up that you could reasonably do helicopter searches with, along with a little mini blinking emergency light that can be attached to toddler.
E. All of the above!
CORRECT ANSWER: E. REI dividend check may actually be worth something this year...
5. Having set up camp & fed toddler breakfast, you decide to go for a short hike. You pack a lunch & head out of the campground along the trail to upper Yosemite Falls (an unrealistic seven miles, but what the hell, you'll go as far as you can, and then turn back). Toddler stops frequently to exclaim, "Wow, Mummy, LOOK!!!!" She is admiring:
A. The crystal clear view of Half Dome in the distance, framed by a perfectly blue sky
B. The amazing oranges and reds of the autumn foliage in Cook's Meadow below us
C. The sun sparkling off the Merced River winding away at the base of the steep white granite cliffs
D. The puke and maroon stripes on her legwarmers and pink dinosaurs on her snow boots.
CORRECT ANSWER: D. We are slaves to fashion, even when in survivalist mode.
6. You get back to camp that night, and notice that yours is the only campsite with a hammock (where you have been intending to sleep, since wunderground.com did at least say "0% chance precipitation"). You have read that some parks ban hammocks on the grounds that the straps could theoretically hurt the trees, but have seen no such prohibition anywhere on the website or ranger stations at Yosemite. You ask the guy at the campsite next to you if he knows why no one else is using a hammock. He says, oh, I think people are sticking to tents just because it's been so incredibly cold at night. You think:
A. Oh fuckit, let's pack up and go home now, before it gets too late.
B. We could always just go back to the lodge - I'm sure they have rooms free, and it wasn't THAT expensive
C. Well, I suppose we can do one night in the tent and see how it goes; we've got plenty of fleece, so I -think- we'll be OK.
D. WAAAAAHHH!!!! BUT I WANT TO SLEEP IN THE HAMMOCK!!!!
CORRECT ANSWER: D. (I watched a youtube video before we left - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jnoo4BPe2eo by this guy who is proponent of winter hammock camping. He lives in Minnesota, so I figured he knew what he was talking about.)
7. After setting up your hammock with two long sleeping pads lengthwise, a kids' short therma-rest across the middle to prevent Cold Bum Syndrome (a phenomenon common to hammock-campers that the internets, god bless 'em, raised your consciousness about), sleeping bags plus liners, an extra quilt you happened to have in the car, and a just-in-case-wunderground-was-wrong rain fly on a guyrope over the top of the whole thing, and a well-fed toddler rocking thermal underwear and fleece pyjamas, the approximate temperature inside your hammock (and corresponding number of hours of quality sleep you are able to get) is:
A. 40 degrees Kelvin; it wasn't so much sleep as hypothermic metabolic shutdown
B. 33 degrees Fahrenheit: not quite freezing, but we barely slept - should have gone back to the lodge
C. 55 degrees: cold, slept maybe a couple of hours
D. 85 degrees: would have slept eight hours straight except for had to get up at 2 am to peel a layer off each of us because it was -too- warm. (Also, I was still sick, and I wanted a throat drop. But it was really comfy).
CORRECT ANSWER. D. Boo-yah, suckahz, never sleeping in a tent again. Hammocks & microfiber sleeping bag liners rule.
8. The next morning, it is beautiful and clear again, not a cloud in the sky (did we mention it was also full moon, amazing stars, etc.?) but you have to admit, bloody cold. Important parenting lessons you learn this morning include:
A. If you let toddler cavort around the campsite in just her pyjamas and do not absolutely insist on her putting on a coat right now, no matter what, even though she says is not cold and she doesn't want a coat, very soon she will be really cold.
B. When toddlers become cold, they become really bad-tempered.
C. When they are really bad-tempered, they will refuse to do anything at all you suggest, such as (duh) putting on a coat, hat, gloves, etc. to get warm.
D. If they continue to furiously resist coats, thereby getting even colder, they will push forward the frontiers of bad-temperedness into previously uncharted territories of total foulness.
E. Despite all your prior good intentions to raise a good Junior Ranger and teach your child not to drop food at the campsite so as not to attract bears, there will come a time when you will see her dropping bits of her breakfast all over herself and think quietly homicidal thoughts about not cleaning her up afterwards, so as to make her as appetizing as possible for any passing bears.
CORRECT ANSWER: All of the above.
9. One Pyrrhic victory in the coat/breakfast battle later, you decide to scale down your ambitions and walk up the Mist Trail to Vernal Falls (mostly paved, three-ish miles round trip), having stopped in at the Yosemite Valley Visitor Center to talk to a different very friendly (non-sexist, sequitur-capable) park ranger (you) and obsessively stroke the model of a volcano's interior, complete with glowing plastic orange magma (toddler). You take the free shuttle from the Visitor Center (see, now, THIS is a REALLY GOOD USE of tax dollars, any government agents who happen to be reading this, please take note) to the trailhead, and set off. Examples of toddler's abject failure to adhere to basic scientific principles include:
A. Energy: she whined & complained & required bribing & moved approximately three feet an hour for the entire first mile of the hike, and then _ran_ the subsequent two miles at top speed ("Mummy, I zoom like a cheetah!").
B. Thermodynamics: she insisted on stripping off and wading into water that had actual ice-crystals on the actual surface, without becoming either cold or bad-tempered
C. Gravity: she is a surprisingly adept rock climber, and more than once I turned around to discover her four feet up a vertical rock face, saying gleefully, "Mummy, look at me! I'm a bit of an expert!"
D. Conservation of mass: Her stomach can hold consistently 2 oz of nutritious lovingly-prepared picnic lunch, but is a superdense black hole for near infinite weights of fig bars and raisins.
CORRECT ANSWER: All of the above.
10. You attempt to go to "Story Time" at the Ahwahneechee Hotel; this is advertised as being appropriate for 3-6 year olds in the little free Yosemite newspaper thingy, but it turns out it's really for grownups: it's a ranger-type person waffling about the life of Galen Clark & John Muir and a couple of other people, which would be interesting had it not been about one nugget of actual information per twenty minutes with a lot of rhetorical huffpuff in between. Toddler made sure that we could not even enjoy the experience of comfy leather chairs next to a roaring fire in a very posh hotel by:
A. Wriggling continuously as if infested by fire ants
B. Trying to make paper airplanes out of the tear-out cards from a nearby Oprah Magazine
C. Announcing loudly to the room that she needed to peepee, and then contradicting herself as soon as I stood up to take to her to the loo.
CORRECT ANSWER: sorry, this is getting monotonous. all of the above.
EXTRA CREDIT QUESTION:
By now having hammock-sleeping down to an art (eight consecutive hours of warm comfy sleep!) you remember to make the wearing of a coat & hat a compulsory condition of toddler's being allowed to get out of bed. The adjacent campground is now occupied by a woefully underprepared Mexican pair and their equally unprepared Argentinean friend, who are camping for the first time ever (their cold weather outfits consist of sweat pants and hoodies, and they have three thin cotton quilts between them; they did however bring a large teddy bear) and who compensate by making the largest bonfire possible in the firepit and eating marshmallows for breakfast (in Mexican Spanish, they're apparently just the generic "bonbon," whereas the Argentinean called them "malvaviscos;" interestingly spanishdict.com gives several Spanish terms for the English marshmallow, and says that "malvavisco" is the botanical term, i.e. marshmallow root, which is not used at all as an ingredient in the manufacture of present-day marshmallows (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshmallow)). But I digress. Planned activities for the day are: mile or so wander around Lower Yosemite Falls, picnic lunch at the falls, collect some leaves for school project, back to the car, drive home in time for dinner, much-needed bath, and bed. You
A. Follow your itinerary to the letter
B. End up wandering around Cook's Meadow feeling generally gobsmacked by how gorgeous it all is, sticking toes in Merced River, spend an hour riding a 'rhinoceros' (a large fallen tree), remember to collect a few leaves for the school project but not nearly as many as the teacher actually requested, eat lunch, do some more wandering around in the meadow (which, mindblowingly, was the bottom of a lake as recently as 1997), and then frogmarch toddler around Lower Yosemite Falls trail, just so you can say you did it, slaloming around clumps of Japanese senior citizens the whole way, then into the car and drive home.
So all in all, despite the fact that we were both sick, an absolutely terrific trip, and it made me want to go again (a) for way longer and (b) for proper wilderness backpacking, not just staying in a campground.
Wednesday, 6 February 2013
malapropism du jour
A patient told me today that she had been monotonous with the same partner for seven years. Another patient boasted (after telling me that she spoke French AND Spanish) that she was "a particularly gifted linguician."
Monday, 22 October 2012
i heart etymology
In celebration of the fact that it is RAINING for the very first time since I moved to Berkeley nearly five months ago, here is a list of some of the choicer English words that originate from Old Norse (prompted by a very enjoyable post-dinner discussion tonight with half-Swedish friends). The list is I think remarkably evocative of Viking, er, ambiance, although ambiance may itself be too delicate and French a word in this context. It reminds me of a lovely quote from Jon Bridgman, who taught history at the University of Washington for a zillion years, to the effect that, 'If you want to tell whether an English word is Latin or Anglo-Saxon in origin, hit your thumb with a big hammer very hard; all the words that come out will be Anglo-Saxon.' Without further ado (ado also being of Norse extraction), voici la liste:
anger awe awkward axle berserk billow
bleak blunder bulk club crawl crook
cur die dirt dregs haggle heathen
hit ill irk keel knife knot
mire mistake muck muggy oaf odd
outlaw plough ransack rid root rotten
rugged scare scant scathe scrap scrape
skid skull slaughter sledge stagger stain
steak thwart troll ugly
... also, weirdly, 'ombudsman,' (you don't really think of the Vikings having ombudsmen, at least I don't, but it turns out indeed they did). And just in case I am accused of political incorrectness and inferring that people of Nordic extraction are all berserk scary ransacking rotten oafs, they also came up with 'Yule,' so happy very early Christmas to all and to all a good night. I am quite enjoying the early dark and the rain, at least for the moment; it is warming a little northern corner of my soul that doesn't entirely approve of all this eternal California sunshine.
anger awe awkward axle berserk billow
bleak blunder bulk club crawl crook
cur die dirt dregs haggle heathen
hit ill irk keel knife knot
mire mistake muck muggy oaf odd
outlaw plough ransack rid root rotten
rugged scare scant scathe scrap scrape
skid skull slaughter sledge stagger stain
steak thwart troll ugly
... also, weirdly, 'ombudsman,' (you don't really think of the Vikings having ombudsmen, at least I don't, but it turns out indeed they did). And just in case I am accused of political incorrectness and inferring that people of Nordic extraction are all berserk scary ransacking rotten oafs, they also came up with 'Yule,' so happy very early Christmas to all and to all a good night. I am quite enjoying the early dark and the rain, at least for the moment; it is warming a little northern corner of my soul that doesn't entirely approve of all this eternal California sunshine.
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