7H: condo living!
A highlight is receiving the package of my club coffee, as I call it, in the mail every month. It arrived last week, but I waited until last evening to open it, to count easily how long it lasts, starting with the first mug on April Fool's Day. Every morning I have one eight-ounce serving, kept hot in my magic mug while I sip it, slowly, sometimes over the first hour of my morning.
There's other coffee here, which Linda drinks, and which I also drink if I want a second mug. The club coffee gets rationed out, though, one per day, with two of those little coffee scoopers-full for the eight ounce cup.
Sometimes I have a little snack to go with it, this morning a thick slice of Braunschweiger, German liverwurst from Aldi's, held between two square saltine crackers, the saltines buttered lightly so as to hold to the liverwurst.
The saltine crackers we brought home from Captain's Table across the street, where we went for oysters after church last Sunday. Large oysters from Texas, two dozen, tip each shell up and slurp the cold, salty liquid and the oyster into my mouth. They give a handful of crackers with each dozen oysters, but I want nothing between the oysters and my tongue, so I sometimes bring the saltines home.
Do you chew raw oysters? How else will you get the exquisite, addicting taste? I do like them with a glass of single-malt Scotch whisky alongside though. Islay single-malt, Laphroaig is my favorite. In a small glass, two fingers of Laphroaig and an ice cube, and two dozen cold salty ones.
BTW, the Fields' brand of liverwurst from Grocery Outlet is just as good as what Aldi's imports from Germany, and maybe more like the liverwurst my mother bought me as a boy. With a package of Fields' you get four slices for about $2, which means each sandwich costs me 50¢ plus the bread and mayonnaise. I'm eating limited bread these days, though, so maybe a single slice foldover or, as I say, the saltine cracker. Little or no bread, rice, potatoes. Not even sushi until we meet again.
Reducing or trying to eliminate starch and getting back down to my "regular weight" in Time for my annual doctor visit in August, I'll avoid having him try to insist that I come in more often than once every twelve months. Back to my central theme of life: going on alphabet ninety years old, I do what I DWP, and I work to make it as easy for myself as possible. Starches, salt, and water and my CHF easily make me gain ten pounds in a week. Jeepers: staying alive is a bother, a lot of trouble. But it's worth it as long as I'm living here in 7H with Linda.
For all kinds of reasons, living in a gated condo is great at this extreme old age, much better than living in a house, with a yard and a roof and plumbing and electrical and ...
+++++++++
For years now, comes daily the emails bringing me a poem a day, and a word a day. Haven't read the poem yet. The word for today is "ratchet" which, along with lagniappe, got overused a few years ago by those who were being sophisticated, cool and with it, but the thought for today is nearly always good, this morning,
Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it. -Milan Kundera, novelist, playwright, and poet (1 Apr 1929-2023)
which reminds me again that when humans get unaccountable power we like to be mean, hateful, treat those more vulnerable than ourselves with cruelty. Not only other animals, but especially other human beings. When a PhD student at the University of Alabama gets surrounded by authorities, arrested, and shipped off to incarceration with no due process whatsoever, we know we've arrived. She is a guest here, from another country, on a visa. Why not just send her back home to her own country if we don't like what she said? Why treat her cruelly and incarcerate her? Because we can. Because we alphabet can.
As I say, it starts with the most vulnerable and proceeds until we realize that all of us were vulnerable all along. Arrest on the street, a knock at the door. Does it take tanks and missiles on parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, or the Grand Mercedes parade cars for us to get it?
No, we already got it in the first place, we're getting exactly what we want: rid of everyone not like us.
Soapbox, Bubba, get off it.
+++++++
Here's today's poem. Make of it what you will, any decent poem is impossible to pin down.
| |
|