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It's not that I haven't been dreaming, but I haven't been writing them down lately. Getting plenty of sleep for sleep's sake has been a big deal to me lately. My waking life has been ruled by the surgery I had a few weeks ago, and the surgery I will have Friday morning. I try to occupy my mind so that I don't dwell on it too much, but it's there, waiting in the wings. Friday morning is less than two days away.
I'm not very worried about the surgical procedure itself, but just that it happens as scheduled. If it is delayed I'll have to go through this whole deal of waiting again. I wouldn't say that I'm not good at waiting. Practically everybody is good at waiting. We've all had a lotta practice at doing it for one reason or the other.
My former "family doctor" at the Dogwood Clinic at the VA Hospital in Fayetteville left a few weeks ago. I finally found out why. No, it wasn't to avoid me. Her husband died, and she transferred to a VA Hospital in Florida to be near some of her kinfolk. Although we had some difficulty in communicating because I don't speak Vietnamese, I always felt she was a really good doctor and I liked being her patient.
Her replacement speaks English as a second language too. I haven't found out where he is from originally. His name sounds Arabic, but I am is not familiar with names from the Mideast, so he could be from anywhere as far as I would know. He seems alright so far.
I asked him to write me another prescription for some sleeping pills because I had run out of the ones Dr. Aung prescribed for me. He changed the type of sleeping pill because he said the other ones could be addictive, and nobody wants that, right. Later I found out that addictiveness was not the point.
The new pill, Ambien, is also addictive. The reason he changed it was that this medicine has less of a hangover the next day. On the other hand, Ambien has a reputation for causing people to sleepwalk and not remember what they did when it happens. That's kind of scary. At least he is not one of those weird doctors who won't prescribe addictive drugs because of their religious principles.
If I'm hurting I want the best pain-killers available. Candidly, I don't wanna wait to be in pain to use pain-killers, I just don't wanna get hooked on some drug that has the euphoria taken out. That borders on masochism.
The fresh fig season is almost over. There are still some unripened figs on the bush, but I'd have to beat the birds and the squirrels from getting them when they get ripe, and chasing them out of the tree in weather this hot seems futile. It would just be luck if I find a ripe fig before the animals do.
Making kefir seems to have gotten down to a routine I can live with. I can consume only so much of it before it gets to be a real chore. For the last few days I've been adding the kefir granules to a little more than a cup of milk instead of three cups. I don't want or feel like I need more than one cup a day.
My kefir grains started to look like they were fading into oblivion, so I started putting them in fresh milk more often, and straining the granules out after about 10-12 hours or immediately after I spotted the milk separating into curds and whey. If the milk does completely separate it doesn't take away from the good stuff kefir does, but it becomes more difficult to strain the granules out in order to start another batch.
The way I'm doing it now is to strain the granules out after I've let the encultured milk set out on the countertop overnight, and then when I strain the granules out I immediately return them to the pint jar I've aged the kefir in, add a splash of fresh milk to keep the granules actively making kefir.
After I add the milk I put it in the refrigerator until just before I retire for the evening. It's too hot, temperature-wise, to let it sit on the countertop until the next morning because it gets over a 100° (37.77° C) sometimes in my kitchen, and it works too fast.
By the time I put it out on the countertop at night the temperature in the kitchen is cooler, and then in the morning when I go down to brew coffee, it's just right. I start the coffee, and while it's brewing I strain the granules out and dump the kefir into the blender, put a handful of frozen strawberry slices in with some Splenda and a half-teaspoon of sugar, and make myself a smoothie of excellent taste and quality. What a life... eh?
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