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The Prague contingent has gone back to their home, but they lost a set of keys somewhere in the process. I miss them. I liked living with Hana and Frank.
I luck out on in-laws: not everybody can say that their son-in-law, their dauighter-in-law, and their brothers-in-law are all golden.
Meanwhile, the grey bears bag consisted of four units of lettuce, two of broccoli, some onions, some celery hearts, some cute little carrots, and two portobello mushrooms. I guess I'm on a lettuce diet for the forseeable future, I used the mushrooms, carrots, onions, and celery to make a dish for the potluck at work today. I thought of making it with broccoli as well but I think I need to have something substantial to eat at home as well as all that lettuce.
I've been saying it for months, but I'm really getting Yanek into the army this weekend. There's no way of avoiding it now, and also, I have figured out what the last straw is, and it's a big one that I've been foreshadowing for a couple of chapters and didn't know it. All the time my forebrain was going "what did Yanek do to piss his foster brother-lord off that much?" and discarding various behaviors as out of character or too slight for a guy I don't want to portray as a complete idiot, I was building and building this very thing. So it's a done deal, and my Yanek is doomed. For the time being.
Did I mention that aside from having no cartilage at all in either knee, I also appear to have pernicious anemia? When the neurologist went on that grand fishing expedition and sent me for an MRI, a raft of nerve studies, and a mountain of blood tests, I came up low on B12 and positiive for antibodies to the intrinsic factor and the parietal cells, which means that I'm just not picking up B12 from my food in the proper way. This is, of course, a world-changing revelation. It means, for one, I get B12 shots the rest of my life and also that the doctors (both my regular one and the neurologist) are urging me to take over the counter B12 pills in addition, and for another, I stop taking acid reducers (proton pump inhbitors) because they also, rarely, block B12 uptake. I'm thinking that not all the cells that take up B12 have been destroyed, because my B12 deficiency is quite small at this point -- but since a person carries years' worth of B12 supplies in the liver, it could also mean that it's not been going on long. In the first case, I'd want to give my remaining B12-processing cells every break they can have. In the second case, if all the cells have been destroyed, it makes no difference.
All this puts more pressure on my diet, as the same foods that are threatening the "pre" part of the pre-diabetes condition and which elevate triglycerides seem to be the ones which in my case trigger acid reflux and the ensuing asthmatic cough. So my way forward is clear, though it was hard to proceed while the Prague contingent was bringing home fifty-pound sacks of potatoes and loaves and loaves of French bread and miscellaneous pastas. Now, there's not much left to deter me from living on veggies, legumes, and meat, so there you go.
As for the arthritis, I've been having much less pain -- to the point where I'm now scheduling the surgeries by convenience rather than by urgency. I walk funny, and now that I know that weird sensation is bone-on-bone, it feels really weird -- but it doesn't hurt much. But the solution to that is not "give up and drive everywhere," since for some reason the bike doesn't feel nearly so weird or bad.
Anyway, that's the organ recital.
I luck out on in-laws: not everybody can say that their son-in-law, their dauighter-in-law, and their brothers-in-law are all golden.
Meanwhile, the grey bears bag consisted of four units of lettuce, two of broccoli, some onions, some celery hearts, some cute little carrots, and two portobello mushrooms. I guess I'm on a lettuce diet for the forseeable future, I used the mushrooms, carrots, onions, and celery to make a dish for the potluck at work today. I thought of making it with broccoli as well but I think I need to have something substantial to eat at home as well as all that lettuce.
I've been saying it for months, but I'm really getting Yanek into the army this weekend. There's no way of avoiding it now, and also, I have figured out what the last straw is, and it's a big one that I've been foreshadowing for a couple of chapters and didn't know it. All the time my forebrain was going "what did Yanek do to piss his foster brother-lord off that much?" and discarding various behaviors as out of character or too slight for a guy I don't want to portray as a complete idiot, I was building and building this very thing. So it's a done deal, and my Yanek is doomed. For the time being.
Did I mention that aside from having no cartilage at all in either knee, I also appear to have pernicious anemia? When the neurologist went on that grand fishing expedition and sent me for an MRI, a raft of nerve studies, and a mountain of blood tests, I came up low on B12 and positiive for antibodies to the intrinsic factor and the parietal cells, which means that I'm just not picking up B12 from my food in the proper way. This is, of course, a world-changing revelation. It means, for one, I get B12 shots the rest of my life and also that the doctors (both my regular one and the neurologist) are urging me to take over the counter B12 pills in addition, and for another, I stop taking acid reducers (proton pump inhbitors) because they also, rarely, block B12 uptake. I'm thinking that not all the cells that take up B12 have been destroyed, because my B12 deficiency is quite small at this point -- but since a person carries years' worth of B12 supplies in the liver, it could also mean that it's not been going on long. In the first case, I'd want to give my remaining B12-processing cells every break they can have. In the second case, if all the cells have been destroyed, it makes no difference.
All this puts more pressure on my diet, as the same foods that are threatening the "pre" part of the pre-diabetes condition and which elevate triglycerides seem to be the ones which in my case trigger acid reflux and the ensuing asthmatic cough. So my way forward is clear, though it was hard to proceed while the Prague contingent was bringing home fifty-pound sacks of potatoes and loaves and loaves of French bread and miscellaneous pastas. Now, there's not much left to deter me from living on veggies, legumes, and meat, so there you go.
As for the arthritis, I've been having much less pain -- to the point where I'm now scheduling the surgeries by convenience rather than by urgency. I walk funny, and now that I know that weird sensation is bone-on-bone, it feels really weird -- but it doesn't hurt much. But the solution to that is not "give up and drive everywhere," since for some reason the bike doesn't feel nearly so weird or bad.
Anyway, that's the organ recital.