Turtles With External Ears

A good day off. Stayed up late after work, still got up in time to go to a Baha'i Cluster 19 Reflection Meeting at Clover Park, which was all kinds of fun, then ate lunch somewhere en route and stopped by my friend Loyd's to pick up a Gem Faire weekend pass he had for me. Then I went to the Gem Faire at the Tacoma Dome Exhibition Hall.

If you've never been to the Gem Faire, it's a feast of color for the eyes, featuring strings of beads of stone or pearls or filigree metal, fossils, amber, sparkly gems, beads in the shapes of animals, and a multitude of trinkets. It can be quite a sensory overload. It stimulates my creativity, even more than a trip to the fabric store. In the last few years, with the depression, crowds have thinned, there are fewer vendors, and prices have dropped. Almost everything is 20% to 50% off.

I decided to buy a small gift for myself and looked at several rings the right size for my pinkie [the one that doesn't already have a Baha'i ring on it] and couldn't decide between silver rings with black onyx, green onyx, lapis lazuli, or a deep purple amethyst. Amethyst is my birthstone but usually it's a washed out purple that I don't care for. Deep purple is unusual.

I had the proprietor hold aside several rings while I circulated and percolated some more, and let my conscious and subconscious mind think about the choices. I became disoriented as to which shop I had been at before. Finally relocated "my" folks and selected a ring with a coral stone. The orangey-red or reddish orange [depending on the light] is the right color to cheer me up.

I also found some gorgeous jasper for a new set of prayer beads, to coordinate with smaller carnelian beads for in-between. It's easier to touch an individual bead if there is a space in between the major beads. I also found a large hunk of rock with a polished giant ammonite to set on a bookshelf. Can't get enough of ammonites: the wonderful spiral, the ancient creature a proof that religious truth is relative, exhibiting the principle of the harmony of science and religion.

Came out of the Exhibition Hall into a blinding state of affairs--actual sunlight. So I took a walk around DeCoursey Park in the sunshine. I decided to use the green glass pendant with the Greatest Name, which Enayat gave me on my birthday on Pilgrimage in Haifa, as a centerpiece for the prayer beads. It is a wonderful memento of Pilgrimage.

So now I have a beading project to do, on top of the things I already needed to do: shop for groceries, pay bills online, etc etc etc. Plus finish the scrapbook from Pilgrimage which I started with Pearl on the dining room table, and which is not a one-day project, and is now taking up the dining table.

Oh, yes. Turtles with ears? They have some carved from jade or bone or whatever at the Gem Faire.

Kitchen Sink Cookies--Winnifred Elwood

My mother kept 5 kids in cookies by making monster batches of Kitchen Sink Cookies [everything goes in there but the] which disappeared pretty quickly. They are my favorite cookies in the world. For 1960's standards, these are pretty nutritious and healthy. I left out the eggs. With the eggs, they're smoother; without the eggs, a rougher texture, but still just as soft and bouncy. [The recipe will be printed with Mom's editorial comments; my editorial comments I will put in italics.]

As Mom wrote on the recipe card, "This makes a heap, you may want to scale down."

Kitchen Sink Cookies

Dry Ingredients:

5 cups flour [whole wheat preferred] + 1 cup later on
2 teaspoons baking powder*
4 teaspoons baking soda
2 teaspoons salt
4 teaspoons cinnamon
2 teaspoons cloves
2 teaspoons nutmeg
2 cups raisins
4 cups rolled oats
1 cup dry milk solids [I left this out as well]
walnuts if you like [I used chopped pecans and chopped hazelnuts]

Wet Ingredients:

2 cups "fat" [butter, oil, Crisco or chicken fat . . . oogh!] [I used corn oil]
3 cups sugar, may also use brown [I used 1 1/2 cups, plenty sweet enough]
1 cup honey + molasses together [I used 1/2 molasses, 1/2 agave syrup]
4 eggs [I omitted]
4 cups applesauce
4 cups finely shredded carrots**

Mix dry ingredients. Mix wet ingredients. Add wet ingredients to dry ingredients and mix well. Add 1 cup more flour to make a soft "drop" dough. Chill, drop on greased cookie sheet. Bake about 10 minutes at 375 degrees or till lightly browned and springy on top when touched. Remove at once from pan to rack and cool thoroughly. Store airtight. Adding a cut apple to the container helps keep them moist.

Honey, applesauce and carrots draw moisture and help keep them fresh. Honey helps them scorch if you don't watch it.

*Mom underlined the "powder" and the "soda". I guess I became confused at one time, because they both start with "baking."

**Grating carrots is such a chore I decided to find the grater component for my food processor, which worked "grate". Then when I was picking it up later it sliced my thumb. Argh!

Fun in the Family

Yesterday I had plans to visit one of my friends and his family, bring ingredients for a vegan dinner [I haven't been able to stay consistent with a plant-based diet, but I practice it most of the time], cook and watch the film "Forks Over Knives" and discuss it. Those plans never materialized; however, I had a great time yesterday anyway.

My daughter and her boyfriend showed up yesterday to collect some waste wood from behind the townhouses, and stayed for the day. Since my daughter has a cold, we didn't go on expeditions. We discovered a muskrat in the drainage ditch, watched the movie, made Kitchen Sink Cookies, made some wonderful Daal Soup, and played a virgin game of Lord of the Rings. [Virgin, i.e. never before out of the box.] We got through 2 and 1/2 scenarios out of four before Sauron got us. Which is not bad for deciphering some very complex rules as we played.

The great thing about this LOTR game was the built-in absence of competition among the players. We played against the game, against chance, not against each other. Next time we'll understand even better how to collaborate together to play our strengths and overcome our weaknesses.

Must go. More daal soup is cooking.

The Self and Others

Recently I've been experiencing a lot of fear, emotional pain and depression, sometimes feeling as if I were being consumed by self-loathing. Whenever there is self-loathing, self-hate, self-love or whatever, it seems that the most important word is "self." Something the Baha'i Writings describes as "the fire of self." I've been in a tug of war with myself on a lot of issues. I felt trapped. Last night I finally decided to stipulate that everything negative I had thought, observed, or been told about myself [negative self-talk and criticism and the like] might possibly be true.

Immediately I had a sense of relief, as if I had surrendered, let go of the rope, and the tug of war was over. Sort of an acceptance of where and how I am.

Tonight, for the first time since initially forming our Puyallup Baha'i group, we actually met together for our own Feast. It was lovely. I found we could each talk with complete honesty about what struggles we have been going through, our own philosophies, strengths and limitations regarding teaching the Faith, and we worked to come up with a general plan for how we can grow from a group to an Assembly of 9 people.

We decided to meet together more often, not necessarily for a Feast or Holy Day, but just to meet; to pray more; to teach the Baha'i Faith in Puyallup in ways that work for us, our experiences, and the ways we are "wired", and not to experience or apply any pressure in our teaching work. And to trust that sooner or later, enough other Baha'is will gather in Puyallup that the energy and ability to grow faster will be there.

I left very happy, and looking forward to Baha'i New Year.

I. Asimov, or, Up Until 3 AM

I ran out of time and energy for going to the library in the last two weeks, so I have been reduced to reading fiction off my shelves. I reread the Foundation Trilogy of novels by Isaac Asimov, a set stamped as "no longer belonging to Hayden Lake Library", copyrighted starting 1951, and the actual books I have are very yellowed and fragile, published starting in about 1967 or so.

The first book and a half is deadly dull [which I took as a personal challenge to read anyway], with very flat writing and most notable to me for a multitude of worlds set tens of thousands of years in the future, still hobbling along with a 1950 worldview. How people reproduced is a real study, as there were only two or three women in the original stories, counting the occasional courtesan, wife or secretary. Still, they do read along well--either that, or I'm easily entertained. I hadn't read the books since the early eighties or so, and wasn't as uncritical now as I was then.

The rather flat "voice" of the author, lack of visual imagery, and method of propelling the plot via a series of conversations is a limiting style. However, the intricacies of plot, cross and double-cross, still pulled me along. I finished by reading the fourth Foundation book, Foundation's Edge, written over ten years later and fleshed out better with several more main characters who are female. I went online to find out the title of the next book in the series [Foundation and Earth], which is not on my shelf.

What kept me up and writing until 3 in the morning today was that I came across a three-part interview of Isaac Asimov by Bill Moyer in about 1984 on U Tube. It was a pleasure to see and hear the author speak for the first time since I regularly read his books and developed an affection for him. [I often have conversations with authors in my mind, and wish I could meet them.]

I was rather surprised by his Brooklyn accent [think Billy Crystal in the movie "Princess Bride"] and found myself sort of drinking it all in. His accent, mannerisms, ideas and Humanist ideals and so forth. He died in 1992, while I was still in nursing school. Turns out that he had been infected by HIV from blood transfusions during bypass surgery, which contributed to his death from heart and kidney failure.

He was a contemporary of my parents.

A very interesting man, with intriguing views. We never met, but I miss him.

Stories

I had an interesting set of days at work. Saturday I discovered a lump on someone's eyebrow which they stated nonchalantly was from bumping their head on the wall after they stood up from the toilet. It happened at 6 in the morning, and the soft-spoken CNA informed the night nurse while she was giving report, so she actually didn't hear him. Lots of paperwork, neuro checks, so forth. The resident couldn't see what all the fuss was about. Then I replaced an indwelling urinary catheter which . . . [here I was going to add something snide about what other people didn't do, but decided to leave it out. You can easily imagine it.]

That wasn't so remarkable, although for some reason even after all these years I still feel a rush of relief after placing a Foley successfully. What was remarkable was that after that, the resident was on their side and I was able to see and identify a deep tissue injury on their heel. It was necessary to educate the doctor about what identifies a deep tissue injury and how it is staged; also very lucky that I recently took an online class that made it much easier to identify. More paperwork.

Sunday I discovered numerous new bruises on someone, and today we discovered a place behind someone's ear where oxygen tubing had created pressure and an open area. More paperwork. I'm starting to feel like the queen of incident reports.

After I placed little pieces of foam tubing to cushion the oxygen tubing behind the person's ears, I said I hoped it wasn't uncomfortable, as it caused her ears to stand out somewhat. She mentioned that she had been called "Big Ears" as a child because her short haircut revealed her ears sticking out.

I became curious about why she had the short haircut, which turned out to be related to having such curly, bushy hair that it was best managed by cutting her hair. We talked about permanents, and how they turned her hair almost into an "Afro". I looked through the memory book of photos of her and her daughter, and ended up talking about how I and my sisters all wore braids, as the way to manage our hair. In this conversation I completely lost track of time. This was fun, as I am greatly expanding my toleration for socialization at work.

Towards the end of my shift when I had things mostly in hand and was waiting to give meds to the last person, give report and go home, I was called to a room to see a resident awash in very dark liquid "emesis", testing positive for blood and with frank blood and a smell of iron. [Sorry about this.] Anyway, her blood pressure was very low and I had a hard time getting it.

I really wanted to send her out to the ER for a GI bleed, but the [young, enthusiastic and inexperienced] doctor wanted to keep an eye on her, check her blood pressure every hour, and get an abdominal x-ray. It's in the hands of the night nurse, now. The good thing is that I photocopied documents from her chart to send along if it's necessary to send her out, and the facility is very close to the hospital.

The odd thing is that I'm usually very laid-back, wanting to just keep an eye on people, not wanting to get all excited and send people out unnecessarily. If I want to send someone out, there's usually really something wrong.

I'll be off for two days, and when I come back I'll be able to learn the rest of the story.

Our Excellent Parents

I find myself bragging about my parents once in awhile. I had a conversation with someone at work about food, which somehow led into my mom's habit of baking 12 loaves of bread at a time in the oven, by using 48 oz juice cans as loaf pans and placing the loaves into the oven vertically. My fifth grade teacher challenged mom to make triangular bread, which she did, by flattening the sides of the juice can to make a triangular profile.

We used to harvest terra cotta-like clay from roadside cuts and learned to work up clay and work with it. She taught us to make candles, and occasionally we had a taffy pull. We also used to camp and go backpacking in the Blue Mountains/Eagle Cap Wilderness area. We identified, picked and dried wildflowers, and so much more. Living with my parents was like having home schooling, over and above regular school.

My parents worked hard, and taught us to work, also. We grew accustomed to hardship in many ways: by helping work in their extensive vegetable garden, by carrying our own backpacks on trips [which were primitive by modern standards, and most notably had shoulder straps without padding, which felt as if they would wear a groove into our shoulders]; sleeping outdoors with just a tarp fastened over us to [mostly] keep out the rain, and so forth. Our parents were children of the Depression, and we learned to conserve and use resources wisely.

While the children are yet in their infancy feed them from the breast of heavenly grace, foster them in the cradle of all excellence, rear them in the embrace of beauty. Give them the advantage of every useful kind of knowledge. Let them share in every new and rare and wondrous craft and art. Bring them up to work and strive, and accustom them to hardship. Teach them to dedicate their lives to matters of great import . . .

~Selections From the Writings of 'Abdu'l-Baha

The Horrible Futility of Exercise

Exercise.

I have the body of a fat slob. [She was quite fond of it.]

I'm at a numerical point in my life where the necessity of moving around, strengthening muscles, increasing cardiovascular ability and decreasing adipose tissue becomes increasingly clear. It involves my future.

In reflecting on this it's necessary to tune out the media onslaught of articles and ads which continually hammer at the rest of us to get on the stick. I hate being told what to do or comparing myself to others. It seems that there are a lot of people out there who are graceful and adept, strong and quick, and actually enjoy physical activities. I think they're wonderful. In the words of Peter Sellers in "Being There," I like to watch.

The one factor that is the greatest obstacle to me is not a limitation on time, although I spend a disproportionate time trying to sleep a full eight hours. I work late but am a morning person, experiencing a peak of energy and interest in thinking and so forth in what needs to be the center of my sleep cycle, and then trying to fall asleep and catch the last two or three hours of sleep. It's not a lack of usable limbs, thank heavens, or even really a lack of energy. At heart I hate repetitive exercise because of the overwhelming sense of drudgery it brings on. I can't move without drowning in self-loathing.

To engage in exercise, even something as easy and pleasant as taking a walk, fills my heart with a horrible sense of futility, combined with extreme self-consciousness, anxiety and tedium. So I've been trying to track down the origin of this feeling so I can overcome it. At this point, people who are practical and results-oriented would point out that the best way to overcome an aversion to exercise is to stop thinking about it and just do it. Okay, I can just do it, and I will still feel impending doom. Besides, I like thinking. It gives me something to do while I try to go back to sleep.

So where does this feeling come from? As a child I did enjoy climbing trees, walking, hiking, playing and dancing. But there are two memories that carry the feeling of dread. One is of watching my mother exercising. She really started this in the aftermath of experiencing one of the first initially identified episodes of Guillain-Barre Syndrome, from which she mostly recovered with extensive physical therapy. I don't imagine my mother particularly disliked exercise. Or ironing. However, I have a strong quality of empathizing with others, almost like a sponge, and my mother was very depressed and miserable. I associate the activities of cleaning house, exercise, and ironing, with extreme tedium and futility.

My other memory is of Physical Education at school, which I mostly loathed. I was not graceful, quick, or adept at sports or any activity requiring cooperating in a group or quick thinking. I was already pre-selected as an object of derision. So Gym Class presented an ample opportunity to feel self-conscious, confused, clumsy, left out and miserable. Whenever I become involved in exercise, I still have those same feelings, to a surprising degree, as though my body remembers my humiliation as a "sense memory" and informs my mind.

In my life I have enjoyed walking, swimming, dancing, and Tai Chi, although I found the latter a form of self-consciousness in slow motion.

I wonder if there are any trees around suitable for climbing?

Power Words

Buzzwords. Words about Power.

I've been reflecting on how some buzzwords are meaningless. For example, "bipartisanship." The definition of this is the idea that in the two-party political system, the two parties will somehow work together. I'm not clear about the origin of the two-party system, as I probably tuned out most of Civics class, but having two bandwagons of people with solidified, opposing viewpoints forever at each others' throats does not seem like the most pleasant or efficient way to run a country.

Usually people use the word "bipartisanship" to theoretically mean "unity," when what they really mean is, "let's cooperate by having the opposing party do what we want." The trouble with bipartisanship is that people are still partisan, they are still on a ship [of fools] and they are still headed for the same iceberg in the end.

The new buzzword at work ["Mountain View"] is "teamwork." There's a new Sheriff in town, the streets are not safe, and the number of CNA's on the floor has been reduced so there can be three Unit Managers, an Evening Manager, and a Wound Manager.

Why the person doing the job which in other facilities is called "Treatment Nurse" and in the last facility I worked at, was filled by a long-standing soul of the utmost sweetness, skill, humility and perseverance, is called a "wound manager" is beyond my comprehension. In this facility, they ought to be managing wounds, but in fact seem to be managing the rest of the staff instead. And in the case of the current Wound Manager, not in a way that makes me feel respected.

Most of these new managers share one quality in common. Not long and varied experience; not the quality of leadership which inspires people to look up to them and follow their lead; not a well-organized mind; not an engaging, friendly personality. The quality which most inspired these people to apply for and be hired for the manager position seems to be merely an inherent bossiness.

It's true that I lack the quality of bossiness, and can't fake it. As the youngest child of five, I identify too much with the underdog. I really hate telling people what to do, because I loath being told what to do. I lead from behind, by worshiping the ground the CNA's walk on and helping them whenever I can. But the situation we find ourselves in at Mountain View is having too many people bossing around too few.

In any case, I have discerned that whenever they wave around the word "teamwork," it doesn't mean everyone pulling together and helping each other. It just means, "do what we say."

Two Minutes

I have about two minutes, as I need to get ready for work.

Love and radiance to all my friends and the Baha'is who are fasting this month. I'm doing my best to honor the Fast, although for many years I have been unable to physically fast, as it reduces me to the state of a nonfunctional jellyfish. But I have learned much about the spiritual meaning of the Fast since I lost the ability to physically fast.

Love and radiance to my family, who are on email daily trying to plan a family reunion sometime this summer.

My personal motto at work [I know, "whatsa motto with you?"] is simple: show up and shut up.

Still following the goal to change my relationship with God from primarily begging Him for help, to primarily basking in His love. Will see how that develops.

Time's up.