Bye bye travel knit

Well it's a new me, more or less. I just gave most all of my Chico's travel knit collection to a patient who promises to sell them on E-Bay and split the proceeds with me. I know that many of you will want to check out this wonderful opportunity to get yesterday's middle-aged look while they're still available.

That said, I held back my favorite outfit--a pair of flowered red and green on black pants (that a 9th grade boy in our carpool six years ago told me were cool) with a red top and black jacket. All travel knit. All hot as hell on that warm February day last week, and all of which were heavy and static-filled. I thought I looked pretty righteous until I got out in the sunlight and noted 1) The black of the seldom worn jacket and the black of the oft-worn slacks were entirely different, 2) the pants were too short which, 3) showed off the horror of my mother's leftover black (different black yet again) socks.

Yes, even my mother had she been around to see this outfit, would have opined "Jude, those pants...those socks...look awful."

Stay tuned to E-Bay; the silly clown pants should debut soon.

Water, water, everywhere

I was chatting by phone with a friend yesterday afternoon. She was telling me about an albino squirrel that had gotten in her apartment, its quarrels with her aging cat, her reluctance to deal with it, her feelings of hapless victimhood. All in all, it was a saga worthy of Stephen King channeling Erma Bombeck but as long and rambling as The Stand.

So I decided to water my plants while interjecting the occasional "You're kidding?!?" to let her know I was still there. All was well with my multitasking until I became aware of sounds like rush hour in a men's urinal--water cascading from three or four over-saturated pots onto the tile floor below.

I guess I can no longer tend and attend--to plants and to conversations--at the same time.

Forget to eat and improve your memory?

Fruit flies, threadworms, mice, and monkeys live longer when they are calorie deprived. The skinny silhouettes of old nonagenarians suggest that the same holds true for humans. Here's a small study that suggests brain benefits for those who underindulge.

German neurologists invited 50 overweight, aging Deutschelanders down to the lab for a diet trial with a twist. The subjects were, on average, sixty years old and a little overweight. Twenty of them reduced their calorie intake by 30% for three months, twenty ate the same number of calories but switched out their fats to the unsaturated variety, and ten motored on with no change at all.

At the start and the finish of the three month study, the subjects took a memory test that checked their ability to recall a 15 item word list after thirty minutes. The calorie-deprived group upped their scores post-dieting by 20% but the other groups had no better recall than when they began.

Could this mean that fewer calories enhances cognition? Maybe...as always, the researchers called for more research (and perhaps for more research grants).

Four Cups of Tea

Not so much a memory lapse as a lapse of consciousness. And who but a menopausal woman would nod off over a book in the middle of a sunny Saturday afternoon?

In my defense, I was already 7,234 steps into the day. That included one Jazzercise 'Express' Class, a trip to Target, two loads of laundry, and vacuuming the entire upstairs plus the living room. So I felt entitled to a cup of tea at the kitchen table, feet up on another kitchen chair, and a moment with my current read "Three Cups of Tea."

My tea was still warm when my afternoon delight abruptly screeched to a halt as a half-dreaming jerk of the arm knocked that very cup of tea, nearly full, into my lap.

My cup runneth over, as doth my coffee pot...

Again. Dang, did it again, twice in as many months. Turned the coffee maker on, but alas, no carafe beneath. Went upstairs, checked e-mail, plucked my eyebrows a bit, found my watch, made the bed, and moseyed downstairs to the smell of burned coffee which had overflowed the basket, on to the hot plate, down the counter, into the canned soup department in the cupboard below, then on to the (fortunately) coffee-colored kitchen carpet. Good thing Mr. Denver Doc snoozed through it all, arriving finally in a freshly mopped kitchen none the wiser as to my morning moment.

Junked mail

don't read this post if you object to trash talk...

My husband shouted upt the stairs "Any mail today?"

"Oh yeah," I bellowed back, "It's on the counter."

"Which counter?"

Oh heavens, must I point out everything? "The kitchen counter, of course."

By now, I'm downstairs wondering how blind a soul can be. Alas, there on the kitchen counter is a small pile of catalogues and empty envelopes.

"You didn't throw it away, did you?"

What does he think I am anyway? "No, of course not," I said as I grabbed the kitchen trash bin and began to look through it.

Well...yeah...maybe I did...

Does this scene ring a bell?

Reality Man smirks as he finds the phone, then writes in to rat on Reality Woman:

Tobi will not be outdone. One of our portable phones went missing. The usual suspects--the dogs--could not be convicted. The "handset find" feature seemed to produce no sound--until this morning, when I, the non-menopausal SO, turned on the feature and wandered near the trash can, which was plaintively beeping. The menopausally-challenged one ascribed it to "overzealous" cleaning of her space.

Trash talk

I was shopping one day a year or so ago and discovered that I could read food labels without my reading glasses if I squinted. Ah freedom, no longer dependent on glasses that are somewhere that I am not, I now scrunch my lids easily and often over the printed page.

So no problem today when my glasses again gave me the slip. Squinted and healed my way through the afternoon. As I threw a wad of exam table paper in the trash, I noticed the dark plastic ear piece of a pair of glasses poking up from under a discarded kleenex box (ah yes, threw that away late morning after a lady wept her way through her appointment). Well how about that, some hare-brained patient has thrown her glasses away, methought.

Need I say more?

Stain or abstain: The coffee question

Here's a riff on a menopause moment of a different sort.

I've always been an early riser. Time it was that I'd rise and shine, as in hit the pavement for a walk, or throw on clothes and get to work early to catch up on charts. Now I rise and read, savoring hot, fresh coffee and the morning paper or a book before anyone else is up.

The operative words in my current, slower, menopausal mornings are 'savor' paired with 'hot, fresh coffee' and 'a book'. Coffee has been exonerated of any connection to pancreatic cancer or breast cancer. Its consumption is linked to decreased risk of diabetes, Alzheimer's disease, and cirrhosis of the liver. I actually don't entirely trust people who don't like coffee, and I am appalled by the number of my patients who declare with a certain virtuous smugness that they've given up coffee only to substitute diet pop.

But I am deeply dismayed by this advice from a New York cosmetic dentist as found in the September issue of Health Magazine:

I avoid stained teeth by drinking my coffee quickly. If you sip it over the course of an hour; it keeps coating and recoating.

Gad, don't want any of that coating and recoating business. Perhaps the good doctor takes hers intravenously?

Grounds for concern

Got the coffee ready early yesterday morning using the fancy Costa Rican beans that my daughter brought back from her recent trip. Flipped the switch, then headed upstairs for leisurely work on my hair and face before breakfast.

Alas, I stopped one task short of completion in the coffee-brewing business--forgot to put the carafe in place. After the basket filled with hot water (our model has a valve that prevents water flow out of the basket when the pot is removed), the overflow, complete with grounds, oozed over the top, onto the counter, under cannisters, dish drainer, toaster oven, Magic Bullet, and into the newspaper.

And my pleasant early morning routine? Grounded!