When we moved into the hotel we’re camping in to wait for our house to be built, I rediscovered the joy of driving the bellman’s luggage cart. Does anyone besides me find this a major challenge?
I always get the cart with the crazy, wobbly wheel. Worse yet, they are impossible to steer and the rack itself is prone to popping out of the cart! I then get preoccupied with replacing the rack back in the dysfunctional hole while our luggage starts to tip over and the wobbly wheel prevents me from steering the thing into and out of the elevator.
I think all bellman’s luggage carts are haunted. They are possessed by the spirits of bellmen who didn’t get tipped.
That is why you should smudge the carts. I don’t mean you should actually rub dirt on them (they’ve got enough of that already). I mean you should get somebody who knows how to do that ritual to get rid of the bad energy in the cart. I think they usually burn sage (or maybe thyme?).
Our hotel is about a 20 minute walk from the shopping mall. Both ways it’s about a 2.5 mile walk. I’ve been over there a few times and I think I’m becoming a mall walker.
The other day at the mall, an older lady approached me and asked me if I’d help open her water bottle, which I was glad to do. It was too tight for her to twist open. She told me a couple of times how she’d traveled to Iceland recently.
On one of my visits to the mall, I sat down in front of a clothing store. Most mannikins have full heads, but at this one, they had only half a head. The top half was gone. I don’t know what it means for a clothing store to have half-head mannikins.
Maybe they’re trying to say, “Hey, if you have half a brain, you’ll shop at our store.”
We saw a sign in the hotel elevator that made us curious. Part of it said:
“There are also lots of ways to get out and soak up some good ‘ol vitamin D from our saline pool to our grill and patio area.”
Not to quibble or get too sciency (“sciency” turns out to be a real adjective by the way, at least in the Oxford English Dictionary), but the bit about soaking up vitamin D from a saline pool is a little confusing. I suspect that sentence was about an outdoor pool. But at our hotel, the pool is indoors.
Here’s the thing. You can’t soak up Vitamin D through a window. And salt water doesn’t have anything to do with vitamin D absorption. In fact, the way we learned in medical school which vitamins are soluble in water was to memorize the acronym “ADEK.” Vitamins A, D, E, and K are fat soluble, not water soluble. You can’t get Vitamin D from swimming in a saline pool. Saline is still water.
According to the National Institute of Health (NIH) web page for the public about Vitamin D, your skin can’t make it from sunlight through a window.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t health benefits from swimming in a salt water pool. For example, an article on the Healthline web site says it may be better for people with allergies or asthma, or if you can’t stand the smell of chlorine.
On the other hand, you certainly can soak up the sun and Vitamin D from the grill and patio area. Be sure to use sunscreen!
I need to make a note about the kitchenette in our hotel room. It’s big enough for Sena to cook a meal in, but small enough for me to knock the meal on the floor.
The kitchen has a fridge with freezer, yet lettuce freezes in the fridge. We have really crunchy salads. It has a microwave. It doesn’t have a stove but you can get a portable induction cooktop, believe it or not.
Sena cooked fantastic chili on that cooktop, which reminded us of the induction cooktop in the house we moved out of.
There’s no oven. But Sena cooked a frozen pizza in our Presto deep dish fry pan. That was a neat trick.
The only thing I did in the kitchen at our house was heat up frozen pizza. Now I don’t even do that. Every time I stick my head in the fridge, I bump my head on the bottom of the freezer door. In fact, I have not done anything in the kitchenette so far but make trouble.
I lost a cooking challenge once for not completing a dish. I ran out of thyme.
We’re camping out in a hotel while our new house is being built. We tried out the exercise equipment. It has been tough to exercise what with all the chores of showing and selling the house, moving all our stuff into storage, and now adjusting to living in a hotel (which will be for a couple of months).
The hotel has a Peloton bicycle. We tried it. One of the foot straps was missing, and we didn’t try the free workout offer.
As some of you know, I wrote a blog post about the Peloton machine a while back, comparing it to my anti-Peloton bike. The title is “The Anti-Peloton Exercise Bicycle.” As part of the moving process, we donated the old bike to charity.
We’re not planning to invest in a Peloton any time soon.
OK, so I watched the Svengoolie movie, “The Leech Woman” a couple of weeks ago and I think I missed the part where the June Talbot was told that the potion containing the pineal gland secretion and powdered flower parts entailed the requirement that the pineal gland secretion should come from a man. You can read the Wikipedia plot summary for background and watch the movie for free on the internet archive.
Leave aside for the moment that the film tries to make you think you can have easy access to the pineal gland through the back of the neck using a sharp point on a ring. Of course it’s deep inside the brain.
What I don’t remember is whether or not June was ever told that the pineal gland secretion has to come from a man in order to reverse aging. It won’t work if it comes from a woman. Aside from devaluing women in general, it was never clear to me that June was ever told that by Malla, the African woman who is over 150 years old but looks like she’s 20 when she gets her shot of pineal and petal.
I’ve looked on the internet for reviews which mention the mistake June makes when she murders her lawyer’s fiancée who is unhappy that June managed to easily seduce him. She’s so unhappy she threatens June with a pistol in a confrontation that gets rather comically violent, resulting a in struggle leading to June stabbing the fiancée in the back of the neck, obviously in an effort to get the priceless pineal juice.
What’s weird about this (other than the obviously ridiculous premise that pineal glands have anything to do with aging or rejuvenation) is that June apparently either forgets or never realized that the pineal stuff has to come from a male to be effective.
What’s even more puzzling is that, before assaulting a woman for the pineal fluid, June had adopted a predatory strategy to pop the pineals of several men, leading you to believe she knew the source had to be a man.
Early this month, I was reminded of the old Operation game (some of us remember the TV commercial) when I wrenched my left ankle. It was the lateral malleolus, to be anatomically correct about it.
I was dismantling a bedstead. It’s kind of an old-fashioned piece and the headboard was pretty heavy. I was removing the side rails. I thought they were hooked to slots in the headboard and footboard and the parts would stay together after I unscrewed the side rails.
They weren’t and they didn’t.
I was facing the footboard removing the last screw from the side rail. I didn’t see the headboard falling when it struck the outer aspect of my left ankle with a loud bang on the joint flexed in sort of a sprinter’s starting posture. Surprise!
I was able to walk with a slight limp. It was swollen and bruised, but I could still put my shoes and socks on. I could even do a left one leg stand for a few seconds.
The swelling is down but still noticeable. It’s much less painful. I thought I could go without seeing a doctor because I could walk on it without limping. I eventually saw a web article about this kind of injury which pointed out that in some cases you can still walk on a broken ankle.
I may be in denial, but I’m betting it’s sprained. The moral of the story is that you should always have a spotter with you to hang onto potentially unstable heavy objects like headboards.
I’m learning how to use the video editor ClipChamp, the free version on the new laptop. So, I muddled through a screen recording of playing what’s called the Daily Cribbage Scrimmage on Cribbage Pro, a feature-rich computer Cribbage game on which you can different skill levels of computer players from easy to impossible as well as online with other live players.
I’m used to using an old version of PowerDirector for my video editing. I would have to expend a fair amount of energy and a little more money to install it on the laptop. I can deal with the webcam on the laptop, but using ClipChamp takes some getting used to.
Recently, we donated some furniture to Habitats for Humanity ReStore in Iowa City. We got the idea from seeing our neighbors doing the same thing a few years ago.
ReStore requires you to put the items in your garage or driveway. The request for pickup is an easy on-line form. You have to upload photos of your items. I forgot to take a photo of the stone table top, so I had to use an old photo I took of it after a Cribbage game.
The story of the contrast between how long it took us to get the stuff out to the garage and how long it took the pick-up guy to get it into his truck is an example of what I’ll call the five-minute rule. If it takes the average person 5 hours to get heavy furniture from inside the house into the garage, it will take the pick-up guy 5 minutes to load it into his truck.
I took a photo of the table upside down because we had to take the legs off. Otherwise, we would never have gotten it through the doorway. It weighed a ton. We laid the table top upside down on a rug in the garage. I screwed the legs back on after we got it in the garage and left it upside down.
Getting a couple of sofas and a very heavy dining room table with a stone top out of the house was no easy task. It took us hours. I don’t know how the movers originally got them in the house. This was one of those “you really had to be there” episodes to appreciate.
We had to remove the feet from the sofas to get them through the doorway. They twist off, but they’re also attached with hex head screws. Oh, and those stick-on pads you apply to the bottoms of the feet so your floors don’t get scratched? You have to scrape those off to get to the screws. Just sayin’. Lucky, we had a hex head wrench that was long enough to reach through the hole in the foot. And even after we removed the feet, the sofas had to be turned just right to get it through the doorway. We’re talking less than a half-inch to spare on both sides.
It took most of the morning to get the items into the garage. I never want to do anything like that again.
Now here’s the kicker. The guy who came to pick up the furniture was a tall, wiry, friendly guy who had a hand truck and nobody else with him. The truck had a ramp. It took him about 5 minutes to hustle everything into the truck. Miraculous. I never thought of getting a hand truck. I probably could have rented one from U-Haul.
On the other hand, I doubt we’d have done much better if we’d had a hand truck. The pick-up guy was not just strong. He used Ninja physical maneuvers which made the whole job look easy. Five minutes.
By comparison, several hours after we finally got the stuff into the garage, it took me five minutes just to limp back into the house and collapse.
But Habitats for Humanity really appreciates your donations.
Go Retire Psychiatrist 