Waiting for the first shoe to drop

It all developed so slowly. It's hard to put a day on when the real impact of the global pandemic hit me. This thing we all refuse to call COVID19 (4 syllables) and instead call the coronavirus (6 syllables) came like the slowest tsunami ever, and we haven't even seen its full crest.



Back at the end of January I got a call for a last minute trip to Chicago for work. I scrambled to get packed and ready, not too hard because for this job I've been there so many times I know what's expected. All black clothes for work, warm stuff for outside, but not too warm because I spend most of the time inside the vast McCormick Center which is connected by corridors to my hotel. Five nights of luxury broken up by brutally long working days and a couple chances to see my friend Roxy and visit the Romanian congregation in Skokie.




The day before my trip a young friend who was following the story emerging from Wuhan China asked me if I was afraid to fly, especially to Chicago, where there was a case of this new virus. No, not afraid to fly, not afraid of Chicago, just afraid I'd miss my 4:30 am wake-up call if I was sleeping "deaf-side up." We contemplated buying an Apple watch with a buzzer so I could rest easier. Ran out of time for that, instead I set my phone alarm for 4:30, 4:31, 4:32, 4:33 and so forth. I found out the hotel still does wake up calls too.




There were some really bad technical difficulties with the test which I can't go into. Suffice it to say we worked the longest day I've ever worked (5:30 am - 11:30 pm) with the most disappointing results. We were being careful with hygiene because it was flu season, but nothing special. Little did I know when I flew home, that was going to be my last flight for a long time. I sat by a young man coming back to his brother's funeral from suicide. A most draining and gut-wrenching conversation filled the majority of the trip home. I arrived back completely spent in every way.




The next Monday I had jury duty selection and was forced to sit by a young woman who was coughing and hacking and snorting and sniffling in my limited breathing space. I tried looking for another seat, but I couldn't and had to sit by the hacker. Sure enough, four days later on a conference with my husband in Santa Rosa, I got a doozy of a cold. Fever, sore throat, upper respiratory infection big time. I ended up with double pink eye and an ear ache, with feeling like I'd been run over by a semi. It took me very long to recover. In the midst of the fog of this virus, I could sense that this mystery virus in China wasn't just in China anymore. It was spreading. My calls in to my doctor for the pink eye and earache were met with many questions about where I had traveled and did I have a dry cough. The answers were Chicago, that blasted courthouse, Santa Rosa and bed, and not a dry cough, mine was a bit wet.




With each half week came more and more bad news, more and more people were getting "it" (one syllable) as we now all call COVID19. Photos arrived from our friend in Seattle who works at Costco of people racing down the aisle to hoard toilet paper. The news was filled with TP, sanitizer wipes, paper towels and death in rest homes. And we thought the craziness had peaked.




The rest of the dates are getting jumbled. We began to rethink the whole "kiss, hug, kiss again, shake every single hand of every single person" at our Romanian meetings, filled with the most kissy-huggy-shaky-handy group of friends you've ever experienced. I started washing my hands more, way more, especially since I had recently been so sick. Then I just started refusing to kiss, and introduced the fist bump and then the toe kick. Then we had our last physical meeting on March 7. We thought it would be for 2 weeks. It's now been 3 weeks and will most likely go on this way for months.


How are we keeping our unity? First we watched streamed talks and meetings from Romania. But then we got direction that we were still to meet as a congregation, but on Zoom. I had never heard of Zoom before. Now it's a regular part of my vocabulary. We have Zoom meetings with our congregation, and it's simply adorable to see these older immigrants taking to this great technology on their ipads and iphones. We are learning how to mute, stop video, raise our hands, upload a nice photo and we're memorizing everyone's pictures hanging above their sofas. But most of all we are staying united, encouraged, upbuilt and connected. Zoom is the best invention of our times. Let's all give a big sanitized gloved hand for Zoom.


About the time I was completely over my cold from February, and in the middle of making marmalade, my husband told me he had a sore throat, wasn't feeling well and was going out to the trailer to self-quarantine. My heart sunk, every muscle in my body began to tingle and I wanted to just curl up into a ball and cry. But I had marmalade bubbling in pots and I had to deal with it. By the time they were in their jars I had calmed down. My thinking process went from total dread to "This isn't a death sentence, this isn't Ebola, he will be OK, and worst case scenario I have stellar examples of friends who have faced the worst of the worst of losing a mate and they are still functioning as beautiful giving people who have true purpose in life". From now on, when I get some bad news, I'm going to make marmalade, because the process got me from an emotional fetal position to standing tall and positive by the time the lids make it on the jars.


During all of this, in addition to Ernst self-isolating in our trailer, we had no bathroom except for the one in the pool house and the one in the trailer. A leaky toilet had led to a stained floor which led to pulling it up to investigate which led to discovering mold which led to finding out it was really bad to tear up a bathroom during a pandemic. "Boo hoo, poor me, no inside toilet!" Again, an attitude adjustment was in order, as I walked out in the dark with my flashlight to use the loo. "Jessica, this is all some people have or know or experience their whole life. Buck up and deal with it." I should have made some more marmalade. Finally after 12 long days the dad of one of Ernst's students agreed to come and put in our new floor. Yippee for floor guys who also set toilets! We were flushing again by the time Ernst was better.


In amongst the growing tragedy this epidemic (now pandemic) has wrought, life goes on. Never did I think San Francisco would order a lockdown of its citizens. "Those poor people!" I thought. Then a few days later my county, Sacramento, got a similar directive. It seemed so drastic, so scary, so unbelievable.


Then we just got used to staying at home. We had enough food, we never hoarded, we just prepared. My motto is "We aren't preppers, we are preparers." We basically lived on beans and rice before this started, the only hard part is getting the amounts of fresh produce we consume. We signed up for a farm box delivery, can't wait to see what it contains.


Our days consist of eating real meals together at our table, spending lots of time with our dog, Zooming with our congregation, getting more stuff done around the house than I ever thought possible and trying not to look at the news while still staying informed. At this writing, we don't know anyone personally who has it, and I hope that stays the case until the experts nail down the best "drug cocktail" to hit this with.


We are eating extremely healthy, our goal is to keep our inflammation down and our blood flowing freely through every artery, vein and the tiniest of capillaries in our bodies. I'm not going to binge eat junk food, even vegan junk food, right before what might be my body's most important fight ever, surviving COVID19. We continue to eat a low added fats, whole-food plant-based diet heavy on the greens and vegetables. Since I'm only working the morning shift on weekends at my school district job I have so much time to mindfully plan meals around the food we have. I'm quickly learning how to enhance frozen vegetables to make our fresh last longer.


Our biggest question now is did Ernst get a very mild version of the virus? He said the back of his throat was a color he had never seen it, it was purple. And his tonsils looked very odd too, with ominous streaks of veins coming off them. Of course we can't know, they aren't going to waste a precious test on someone who only had mild symptoms. It just would ease my mine to know this guy who has survived so many health scares got through this one with just a week of self-imposed isolation.


Without that knowledge, we are just staying home as much as humanly possible, staying connected with our friends and while taking precautions, knowing the picture is much bigger than our little home, our little home with the big backyard and the modest supply of toilet paper. So if you run out of legumes, we can share. But don't come knocking at our door for TP, all we'll hand you is package of frozen collard greens.


Until next time...Stay safe, Stay smart and Stay HOME.

Stay connected

Stay strong

Stay kind

Stay clean

Stay healthy

Stay protected (from paint)

Stay bright

Stay sane (dryer balls in dog food?)

Stay determined to eat the food you already bought

Stay realistic

Stay spicy

Stay masked when necessary

Stay exercised



Stay busy

Stay hopeful we will soon be back with our friends

Stay home!





Marching Onward!

February 2020 will go down in my history as a very, very bad month. I would say I want a do-over, but that sounds too painful, so I'm moving onward and upward. March 1st never sounded so good.

February started with me still reeling from the end of January, which had me going on a very last minute work trip to Chicago. I had two days to prepare, but I've been there many times before so that part wasn't daunting. The daunting part was that usually I travel there with either my husband or with a set of close friends who also work the same exam as I do. This time I was on my own. Staying at a fancy pants hotel all by yourself is a bit pathetic.

The work situation ended up being horridly disaster-ridden. I can't even divulge what happened, just a technology fail of epic proportions. The only good thing about the trip was seeing my friends in the Romanian congregation in Skokie. There's never a lack of new and fun places to visit in Chicago, and my friends were kind enough to come pick me up at my lonely hotel and drive me around town to explore all the vegan options, which seem endless.

That trip took a lot out of me, so I started February off dragging. A few days in I had to drag myself to jury duty where I was forced to sit next to an obviously ill woman who was hacking and coughing the whole time. As interesting as the jury selection process was, and as funny as the judge was, my overwhelming memory of the experience was thinking "She'd better not get me sick, she'd better not get me sick." Sure enough, a few days later, while at a conference in Santa Rosa with my husband, I got sick.

For the next two and a half weeks I was a walking medical dictionary for every possible symptom of a head cold. Fever, headache, double viral pink eye, earache, sore throat, coughing - the list went on and on. About this time the whole Coronavirus thing was picking up speed, and my call in to my doctor about the pink eye was met with "Have you been to any affected areas lately?" Chicago, a jury selection room in Sacramento and Santa Rosa, that was it. It was a doozy of a cold, but I could happily conclude it was of the most common variety. Hot tea, lemon, honey, some Jagermeister and Netflix got me through.

So what else happened in this most dreadful month? Oh, just a trip to the ER for my husband, who passed out after a bout of possible Norovirus. Yep, while I was still so sick, my husband gave me the scare of a lifetime (which can be added to all the other scares of a lifetime he's given me) and had me on the phone with 911 one morning as his BP dropped to a frightening level. The dispatcher asked me how old he was. I'm sure she could have used a ballpark number, but I couldn't remember exactly and when I asked him. that's the point where he completely blacked out. I was screaming "How OLD are you?" so loud, I cringe in embarrassment still. That dispatcher must have thought we needed some serious help, because very soon our living room was filled with paramedics. By this time he woke up, we both knew how old he was and the rest of the morning was spent in the ER finding out he was and is in great shape.

So what else happened? Somewhere in there I gave a talk in Romanian, I didn't cough once but definitely not my best effort. On the plumbing front, our toilet is leaking, which will most likely need a new bathroom floor. The backyard spigot was jealous of all the attention and leaked even more than the toilet. We started a carport/solar panel structure that had Ernst and I completely disagreeing on HOW HIGH we were going to make it (I wanted sensible, he wanted close to the moon. I missed a bunch of work because of being sick and then ended the month proctoring an eventful California Bar Exam. So much drama, and that's not including the total weirdness of people taking the bar exam in surgical masks! Is it proper etiquette to ask "Hey, is that mask for your protection or mine?"

Those were the highlights of February 2020. The weather was glorious, as it often is when one is sick, but glorious in a way that screams "we need rain, please skies, drop some rain because I don't want to water the yard with double pink eye." We got a drizzle the evening of February 29th, which was hopefully a glimpse of a wetter March? We are only one day into this clean new month, and I'm liking it already. A friend asked me to sew up a little project for her niece, and it was the most productive thing I've done in weeks and weeks. I'm getting jazzed about when the real spring hits, excited about some upcoming trips we have planned (Chicago's in there again) and just getting back to feeling good again. March, let's do this!

A rice sock holder and two Bag Buddies.
Yes, I did something besides cough and hack!

The Winter of My Discombobulation

Do you remember the Mary Tyler Moore Show? It's an oldie, it aired back in the 70's. Ms. Moore played career woman Mary Richards, who was super stylish, always pulled together, had an awesome apartment and wardrobe. Her life wasn't perfect, but her outfits and hair certainly were.


Yes, always so polished, except for that one episode when Mary was up for an award. She had a nasty head cold, stuffy red nose and all, she'd had a disaster with her typically perfect hair, hurt her ankle and at the last minute a wardrobe malfunction forced her to borrow a dress from her funky-hip neighbor Rhoda. As Mary limped up to the podium to receive her award, the first thing she said was "I usually look so much better than this!"


I'm no Mary, either Tyler Moore or Richards, but I'm having that moment played over and over lately. I want to wear a sign that says "I usually look better than this."


MY COLORING

2019 was my Year of Going Silver. While I thought there'd be more of it (grey) and it would be hard to get used to, letting go of the dye was one of the best decisions I've ever made, looks-wise. I'm so thrilled I got through it without either buying a wig, bailing and going back to the boxed color or pulling my hair out, strand by strand. It turned out so cool, really cool. And therein lies the only problem with my decision. It's thrown this former warm-toned Autumn into a multi-seasonal tizzy!


None of my tried-and-true colors look good on me anymore. Orange is a lemon, lime green is queasy and brown is downright poopy. My face looks pink and suddenly looks great with silver jewelry, while the rest of me is still rocking gold rings. How can the simple act of finding something to pull over one's head and not look like something the cat dragged in be so hard? The numerous trips to the thrift store - the numerous sweaters I've purchased for $5 trying to find any color that works - the donation pile in the garage stacked up with $5 sweaters to redonate - it's a circle of futility that is only benefiting charities at this point.


I believe I've stumbled onto the answer, though. Picking the brains of my friends Mr. Google and Sara from New York, my dilemma may be nearing its badly colored end. It appears I'm a Soft Summer who has neutral coloring, can wear both gold and silver, but must must must wear muted colors near my face. Muted, Jess. No vibrant oranges, no tomato reds, and slap yourself if you wear a heavy brown near your hair that's no longer brown. "Suited for Muted" is the new catch phrase for 2020. Goodwill pile in the garage, prepare for a wardrobe dump of Autumn colors.




MY SMILE

Because of some shifting molars that were causing some gum issues, I opted to get Invisalign trays this October. The thing they don't tell you about Invisalign is that you won't just be wearing clear liners. They will also be gluing "attachments" to your teeth to get things to move more easily. What do the attachments look like? A bit like tiny pieces of broken Tic Tacs. But on my eye teeth, more like the entire Tic Tac has been affixed. My eye teeth appear pregnant and ready to give birth any day. My lips catch on these attachments while the liners are off. When they are in my mouth? Then my lips look puffy and awkward, a bit like Meg Ryan after her ill-advised lip job, but without Ms. Ryan's adorable hair, figure and obvious knowledge of the perfect colors to wear. Soon I'll be done with this treatment and the ability to smile like a normal person will return, maybe around the same time I learn what "muted" means.

MY SKIN

Winter is hard on skin. The air inside is dry, and lots of ooey gooey moisturizer is necessary. It was probably not the best season to start a strong exfoliating process. One minute my skin is fine, the next minute it looks like a snake when it slithers out of its skin. Or rather, it looks like what the snake left behind. Not pretty. And on top of that, what else happened to this 57 year-old, recently grey-revealed woman wearing the wrong colors, the one with the awkward smile? Pimples. Yep, I have been getting break outs. Go. Figure.

MY HAIR CUT


Wait, you say, "She's happy with her hair, right? She has to be happy about something!" Yes, I'm so very happy about my hair color and that I don't have to think about it any more. I really love the color. I even made my "Memoji" grey-haired. But see that hair style? That is what I was warned about, the ever-so-joyful time spent trying to grow out a pixie cut. I heard it was hard. I heard it was awkward. I heard you either had to get it cut often or just often be annoyed with it. Maybe if I wasn't spending so much money at the thrift store buying wrong colored sweaters, I could be getting it cut more frequently. But just like I had to be patient and let my roots reveal themselves...ever...so...slowly...this funky style will grow out soon. I just have to get thru Winter and wait for Spring and my dry skin to Fall off and soon I'll find my Summer self. Muted, of course.

No Waste November 2019? Sadly, no.

Last year, November 2018, my husband and I (mostly me) decided to take on No Waste November. The goal was to not buy, and therefore not discard, any unrecyclable packaging. It was a challenge, but with a lot of thought, ingenuity and reusable mesh produce bags, we did it. It meant giving up many beloved products from my "can shop there without a brain" favorite store, Trader Joe's. While TJ's has lots of unpackaged produce, their pre-washed items in plastic bags are so easy to use, it's hard to resist them.

So for last year's challenge, I bought lots of loose produce from the bigger stores I normally avoid when I'm busy, namely Raley's, WinCo Foods and Sprouts Farmers Market. It felt good to fill our bellies with healthful food while not topping out the garbage can with packaging headed for the landfill. No Waste November 2018 was a success!

This year as November approached I geared up mentally to repeat last year. No sweat, this challenge isn't that hard. It was amazing to see how little waste we produced last year by simply refusing to purchase "one-use only" packaging.

And then November came, on the heels of the sudden death of a lovely woman we worked with for years on volunteer building projects. She was much too young, much too vibrant, much too full of life to even imagine her now dead. I stumbled into the eleventh month of the year, feeling like someone punched me hard in the middle of everything that counts.

A week after Mindy's memorial service, which was attended by 480 people who were equally stunned to the core, our dear friend Dal died. He was about the kindest, most soft-hearted man I've ever met, with a melodious voice that matched his well-chosen words of support and love. Any corner of me that didn't feel devastated, well Dal's death found it and set up camp. This was a hard month. Very hard.

And so our No Waste November became a Just Get Through November. I'm sure our buying habits and garbage production rates still are well below the average for our area, but yep, I caved and bought some treats. Treats in plastic. Salad kits from Trader Joe's with innumerable little bags of add-ins, in even more plastic. One shot eating, with the trash to prove it. Maybe next year, November, maybe next year.

So while we weren't perfect, and November pretty much stank, I'm going to count up the victories, which surprisingly were quiet orange and came in their own compostable packages.

A needed trip to Yosemite was squeezed in early November.

Soup is good for the saddest of souls.

Ginger Bear did his best to cheer me up.

Persimmons did their thing, looking all perky and cute.

Trader Joe's ingredients, every last one.

Sweet Potato Chocolate Pie!
At least the sweet potatoes weren't packaged. 

A free pumpkin from my husband's work.
Comes in its own wrapper!

I invented Pumpkin Rice Porridge.
Baked in the shell.
Looks awful, tasted great.

Thus ends November 2019.
Eat well.
Tell your friends you love them.

Old photos - a sometimes blurry window on our world

When I was young we kept most of our photos in a big brown striped suitcase in our linen closet. We weren't big on photo albums as family, they existed for only certain occasions. Finding a photo meant digging through the big brown suitcase until you found the one you were looking for, plus twenty others you weren't. The brown suitcase went back East when my Mom moved to Connecticut, and after she died my sister in Portland became the keeper of the brown suitcase photos.

Along the way, I'm not sure how, but I came to have quite a few of the photos that technically belonged in the suitcase. I had a plan at one point to make an album for each of my four siblings of their family history, and I only got to my oldest brother Jim's project. That left me with lots of odds and ends of old family photos, going back to my Dad's family in Sweden. Lots of really amazing pictures of people who we're are related to, we just don't know exactly how. The women all have incredibly long wavy hair, so that might throw a wrench in the belief that they're blood relations. Other family photos contain well-dressed people at holiday parties, and other occasions, some quite mundane. People have come a long way, and unfortunately they are now traveling in yoga pants.

While my fashion sense has changed over the years too, my history of keeping photos organized can be summed up in two words. Hit and Miss. While I have several epic trips documented in amazing detail, and I'd created albums for the first seven years of our marriage, the remaining 21 years plus all the family photos I had went into photo boxes.

Photo boxes are a procrastinator's best friend, or enemy, depending on what you're focusing on. If hiding things away in a pleasant and stackable manner is the goal, they are great. If what you're looking for is your photos stored in a way you can find them, the more boxes you buy, the less likely you'll ever find that precious picture you're searching for.

Our photo organization, or lack of it, came to a head this past month. It's a whole other post I'm not ready to compose, but this summer while in Romania we received the news that my brother Jim was very ill. Upon our return, we were able to spend a few intense but very meaningful days with him before he passed away. With plans for a celebration of life in the works, my sister-in-law asked us for some photos of our family, with photos of young Jim in particular.

Out came the boxes and the photo shuffling started. Of course I couldn't find the ones I was looking for, who could in all those boxes of mixed-up photos? Old Swedish relatives, school photos, letters from my Grandma, get well cards, sympathy cards, camping trip after camping trip and way too many photos of the Pudgy Years, before we became plant-based. For every third photo there was a duplicate, even the really bad blurry ones.

I did my best to go through them all, and I found some family pictures I didn't even know I had. But to really do this right, we had to get rid of our couches. Yes, the couches had to go and here's why.

While sitting down one night contemplating life, I got the sense that our big green couch and love seat were not producing one spark of joy in me. We got them used, they were now even more used, they were too big for the room, they were losing their ability to properly hold up a human form in a comfortable manner and they were emanating the smell of Golden Retriever. Our friend Dan was over for dinner and without much thought I had Dan and Ernst move the couches to the garage. That weekend they went bye-bye via Craigslist.

What does this have to do with photos? Well, we moved the futon from the guest room into the living room as a temporary solution for the missing couches, and then grabbed the IKEA chairs from the tv room to add more seating. That made the rug look like it needed cleaning so it got one. Then the table in the corner looked out of place and bulky so we moved it to the tv room. All this furniture moving gave me a nice wide open space in the guest room to really tackle the photo project. Thank you big green couches, you really did serve us well until you didn't.

On a folding table in the guest room with no bed, I set out every single thing that contained photos or memories. This was the project I never got to when we Konmaried the house a few years ago. The amount didn't seem too daunting, then I remembered my husband must have some more to add. Yes he did, and at that point we had ourselves a photo-declutter-a-rama. Boxes and boxes, framed photos that had been packed away, lots of photo albums with those awful sticky backed pages with shiny plastic film, the ones that were so easy to overload with really bad blurry photos of people with their eyes closed and someone's finger halfway across the lens.

Why did we save so many of these photos? Because those were the days you paid for film, took photos hoping you got the right shot, so you took a few just in case and then you brought them to be developed and you paid for the prints - only to see closed eyes, blurry images and someone's finger halfway across the lens. We saved them because there were no do-overs. The moment had passed and all you had left was the really bad photo. So you put them in your sticky albums. And a funny thing happened. You forgave the photos for being of poor quality and you came to adore them. You didn't see the flaws, you saw the memory. And that's why it's so hard to part with these, they are old flawed friends and you can't just toss them away without a bit of guilt.

There was no way I was going to make chronological sense of any of these. This project isn't for passing down memories to generations to come, this is for us. It's so we can find that special photo when we need to. It's so we can toss the scenery photos and concentrate on the people pictures. I know what Half Dome looks like and I don't need a shot of it from 2004, but I do want that photo of our friends from Germany standing with the amazing granite peak in the background. OK, maybe we can toss the one where all four of them have their eyes closed, but that good one is a keeper!

Instead of by year, we separated them by categories. Places we've lived, friends from each place, dogs we've owned, kids we've known and loved, weddings (even the ones which ended in divorce because it's history) and many many trips. Lots and lots of people photos, and when you're looking at ten photos of a couple or family who mean a lot to you, it's easier to find a few good ones that flatter everyone if not most. If not, then we kept the blurry closed eyes photo. It's a reminder of simpler times.

While we aren't pared down as much as I would like to be, the mountain of photo boxes is now of a reasonable size. I know where all the photos of my brother Jim are, and that's very comforting. I have little tabs separating the categories of our life. The pictures of my childhood dogs are no longer barking up against that trip to Frankfurt, and New York photos aren't bobbing for space with trips to Apple Hill. It's not picture perfect, but I'm calling it almost there. Once we get the picture table down we can get the guest room back in order and bring in a new couch. I'll be sure to post some photos.

First these had to go.

And temporary items were borrowed from other rooms.

Which opened up this spot for a photo table.

Eeks, found more!

Things got delayed with a plumbing problem.

Had to take a photo of that.

The photo I was searching for that started this whole thing.
My brother Jim with his puppy Bantu and my puppy Holly.

Things got serious.

And I found more treasures.

It got a bit better.

Using the game table in the tv room was a home run.

Categories. We have categories.

Whittled down to this, plus some boxes of memories.
And a few albums.
Was it worth it?

When you rediscover that photo of your friend standing on the Twin Towers...

...and that trip to Windows on the World where I ate sushi for the first time?
Even some of the "Why Did I Save This?" photos were worth saving after all.

I was in stitches, but it wasn't funny

That Friday started out so well. I did some volunteer work in the morning, stopped for groceries on the way home and was now preparing a salad for some guests that night. It was our first little pool party of the summer, a summer that came late for pool parties. The house was reasonably clean, the yard was reasonably in order and our young guests were reasonably excited about being the first to take a swim at our place in 2019.


Our guests were bringing the bulk of the meal, they are just that way and I've stopped fighting it. But I wanted to add a simple salad - canned garbanzo beans, halved cherry tomatoes, black olives, chopped parsley and some seasonings. Oh yes, we can't forget the diced red onion. The onion gives it that little bit of punch, that pop of flavor that says you cared enough to dice up something extra. A bit of red onion is perfect for that.


"Almost done here, just have to dice up this onion and the salad is done, hmm, this knife probably needs sharpening again, I just had it sharpened, we sure go through a lot of produce, oh well I'm just about finished..."


And just about then the knife slipped off the onion and right into the tip of my left index finger. The finger that according to instructional videos on how to safely and quickly dice an onion should have been bent in such a way that makes slicing it with the knife next to impossible. The same finger that still bore the slight scar a bit further down from another slip of the same knife from a few weeks before.


In my defense I would like to add that I process lots and lots of fresh produce with that combination of knife and fingers. Barrels of produce both bulky and thick, and heaps of herbs - fine and delicate. I still have all my fingers. For now.


After slicing into my finger I gasped and grabbed a semi-clean, semi-dirty dish towel. It's not like it was covered in chicken juice or anything, but later I did make a mental note to reach for a completely clean dish towel in the future event I cut myself again and there is blood.


After the shivers raced up my spine and into the far reaches of my head, I ran some water under my finger to see what was up. The skin opened up in such a way as to cue up the theme for Jaws, so I knew I had to get my husband involved at this point. I called him in, but was a bit afraid to take the clean/dirty towel off my finger. I decided to try rinsing it again. Jaws 2.


A decision had to be made. Head to the ER for stitches, a visit that would cost $500 in a copay? Or pay out of pocket to visit an Urgent Care not connected to our health plan, which by now seemed like not much of plan. I called the advice nurse and found out Sacramento has an Urgent Care again, located in the south area. My dirty-from-yard-work husband cleaned up my finger and wrapped it enough for me to drive to Urgent Care. He was way too dirty to think of coming, so I drove myself, finger sticking straight up the whole way. Index finger, which is better for driving in traffic.


I arrived and took a number like I was about to order ice cream or make a return at IKEA. I sat down. My knees went weak for a second. But then I began to convince myself maybe it wasn't that bad, "I bet they can just glue this old shark flap shut."


No-go on the super glue, it needed stiches and the most painful shot I've ever had ever ever ever - straight down the center of my finger from the tip. I usually like to look when I get a shot, but the MA said not to look, so I trusted him. I'd like to say I made no noises whatsoever while receiving this shot, but I tell the truth always, so I'll say maybe I groaned a few times. To distract me, the assistant asked what I was making when I cut my finger. Garbanzo salad with tomatoes and herbs. And some red onion. He asked if I was vegan. Why yes, I am plant-based. So was he, and that might have been the first Plant-based High Five (with my other hand) while receiving a shot on the other hand in the history of that particular Urgent Care. We talked recipes while the man with the shot sewed me up with three stitches. He said it was pretty deep. Um, yes, deep is a good word.


I got home with my finger wrapped up, still blissfully numb. We decided not to disappoint our little guests and went on with our little swim party and marshmallow toasting bonfire. I sat there with my finger sticking out like a sore thumb, a position it would stay in for many weeks to come.


First, I must comment on how amazing the human body is. It took longer than I thought, but now at almost eight weeks later I just feel the slightest numbness and loss of sensation on one bit of my finger. I'm sure it will continue to go away and I'll be fine, because it's already 99.998% better.


Second, the body is very adaptable. At first I couldn't do anything right with only nine fingers, I kept bumping it on everything within bumping distance, and all tasks were clumsy and slow. Then I got used to it and when I healed up I had to remind myself that I had 10 fingers. Slowly I got back to typing and crocheting and picking stuff up without wincing. And yes, very carefully, with added skill and technique, I chop onions like a Food Network Star, with less speed. No more slipped knives, no more stiches, just lots of shark-like precision.


Here is the progression of amazingness, our bodies really are amazing.

Ick. Ouch. Stupid onion.

Still ouch.

No yard work for me!

Can't wait to get the stitches out!

Stiches out, Steri strips on.
Ah, the relief.

Go finger go!

Almost there!

I love you non-dominate-hand index finger.