Friday the 13th and counting

Don't know whether you've ever tried it, at the moment I'm eating food without salting it, without adding salt. It takes dedication, because an unsalted dish does not taste at all like the same dish with the proper amount of salt added. Oatmeal for example, in our household growing up, we had oatmeal frequently, maybe a couple of breakfasts a week. Once or twice in those years, we took our first bite after the blessing, and Mama exclaimed, "Oh, I forgot to add salt" and yes, the oatmeal tasted really bland, not flavorful, and the salt shaker was passed around the breakfast table. But then, unsalted is the natural flavor of oatmeal, so, why not?

I'm having oatmeal for breakfast these days as part of an eating regimen to drop a few pounds. It's a packet of Quaker's original oatmeal, 100 calories, four ounces of water, in the microwave for 75 seconds because at 90 seconds it roils up and boils over. Stir it as the boiling water soaks up and cooks the oat flakes and it thickens into gray food as it cools down. No salt. The bland taste is okay, because I have a weight target and this Time I really mean it instead of just thinking about it.

In past years I've tried those salt substitute herbs, that don't do the trick for my tastebuds, and I may use a bit of the Nosalt product that's all potassium, but it works against one of my heart meds. And if I go ahead and "salt to taste" my CHF acts up and by the next morning I've gained five pounds. Which then means clear the calendar for a day or two of FuroForty x Two; but which makes sure I get my exercise by heading for the bathroom every ten or fifteen minutes all day.

My breakfast this morning, just finished, was the oatmeal mix, flakes and water, with a quarter cup of fresh blueberries cooked in it, and four ounces of oat milk added, which gave me a pleasant enough light blue soup. I usually prefer oatmeal thicker than soupier, but this was a nice change and the double liquid made it more filling even if a few more calories for the trendy oak milk. Oat milk was two-for at Publix last week, so I've got two half-gallons of the "extra creamy". It's pretty good, like drinking half and half milk with a bit of sugar.

Who doesn't want to hear rambling nonsense about my food intake &¢ probably should read someone else's blog than my +Time, eh?

For reading variety my email brings several blogs from The Atlantic and other magazine contributors, one that arrived day before yesterday that I didn't get around to opening it yet is "Brooklyn, Everywhere", which I'm looking forward to reading later.

Friday the 13th, a delightful morning here at 7H, 74° and 72% wind from the East at 7 mph. The living room door to the porch is open, no water traffic right now, only the gulls flying by, mostly down just above the Bay surface.

Looking around 7H, our equivalent of a full time suite on a cruise ship that today is docked at StAndrews Florida, and where there is never seasickness. All our furniture here is old family stuff that we love because it makes wherever we are home and part of our life history. Some of it is pretty threadbare, my chair I'm sitting in right now, but Mama saw to its being reupholstered in blue velvet maybe sixty years ago, and I'm not changing it. The chair, there are two identical, both have a blue cushion for several reasons, and both have a red ribbon tied round the right wooden arm as a reminder that they're glued back on, don't push up on; they were in Linda's mother's living room at the house on Bunkers Cove Road. Also the red Chinoiserie desk across the room, Linda's mother had it shipped down from New York in the early fifties, and it's been in the living room since Linda and I were teenagers.

Same with the tall brass lamp: the spring of 1955, Linda's mother had me pick up lampshades for those (they are a pair) from a lampshade shop in Atlanta. I drove up in Linda's father's 1953 Buick Super, for a weekend dance of some kind at Georgia Tech, it was to be a double-date, and Linda and her friend were coming down by train from Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Virginia, where they were sophomores. I'm gonna go ahead and tell this memory, which is part of the reason we are still attached to the tall brass lamps after all these years.

I was a junior at Florida, so it was 1956 not 1955, and I came home to PC to get a car to drive to Atlanta for the weekend. Not one of my parents' cars, and my own car was the 1947 Buick that I've written about here, the car that had to have a case of 10W-30 oil in the trunk to make it from Gainesville to Panama City, and a watering can to stop by the ditch and fill the radiator, and the transmission jumped out of third gear every time the accelerator was lifted to slow down such that you had to pull over to the side of the highway and start over.

Anyway, the plan was for me to drive Linda's mother's Ford station wagon, and I was going to take a mattress with me, because my friend's college room at Georgia Tech didn't have an extra bed for me to sleep on. When Linda's parents found out that I was taking a mattress, they were alarmed and decided that I would drive Linda's father's Buick sedan, which had no place for a mattress.

It was a great weekend that started with meeting the girls at the train depot, and although it has a different lampshade now, the tall brass lamp is part of that memory.

Swinging round to the right, the gold upholstered sofa: it's a Henredon that Linda and I bought on sale for $500 the fall of 1969 at a fancy furniture store in LaJolla, just north of San Diego. It was on sale because the pillows were missing, it's been in our living room since that weekend, which was a couple months before my ship deployed for WestPac. The red pillowcase is on the end so I notice that the sofa is now up on risers because at this age for us it's too low to get up and down; and the red cloth signals me to avoid slamming my right toes against the wooden riser.

The sofa is getting a bit worn on the arms, but it's part of our life history.

Where was I? IDK, it doesn't really matter, does it!

RSF&PTL