Various and Asundry and Asides on a Sunday

 We’re getting ready to leave town, which means my life is once again a half-baked scramble to do a to-do list before it to-does to me.

Some of the list pertains to preparing for a plane flight, a chunk of the rest is loose notions for posts. Aside:  I write most easily when I’m out walking the dogs or walking up Market street in to work. For some reason, that’s when the ideas pop up. If I were a cartoon, my blog posts could be thought bubbles trailing along behind me.

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 So I went in last Monday for the medical procedure to correct the esophageal constriction I have, called Schatzki ring, again. The nurse plugged in an IV to the back of my hand and electrodes on my chest and, after they put me on the table, an airhose in my nostrils. The rest of the cast called her Shane, and I saw the name “Shangrila” on her medical dog tags. I asked her about it, and she said her parents named her after seeing the movie Lost Horizon.

 They sprayed the back of my throat with an anesthetic to prepare for the tube, and another nurse joked about the things I’d said under sedation the last time, then talked about how they were going to give me “the good drugs.” The IV was already sending me to a calmer place than this frenetic world. But soon the good drugs were coming, ha ha ha. I could opine about their notion of what constitutes a good drug—but never mind.

 I closed my eyes for a moment and when I woke up, groggy, they were done. The endoscopic tube had gone down my esophagus and into my stomach; they verified the ring had re-formed and fixed it again –hopefully this time the fix will last longer than three years. And I can say I’ve been to see Shangrila and the experience knocked me out. Unfortunately, I can’t remember much beyond that …

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 Before that procedure, the handyman came over that Monday morning. I don’t do ladders too well any more, so I had four little tasks to handle, touching up the gold paint on the sunburst under the peak of our roof, fixing a screen and the rain gutter that fills with incense cedar leaves, plus screening over the openings in our addition where sparrows build their nests (I’ve no idea what our contractor was thinking putting in those circular holes; they’re perfect for nests). But I’d been putting all that off for a year or more—what drove us to call him now was our dishwasher breaking.

 As I mentioned last Monday, it turns on okay. The electrical display comes on, and when “finished” it’s hot inside, yet the dishes are still dirty—only now baked on hot and dirty, because our unwelcome guest had chewed through the wires signalling the water to turn on.

I smeared hot sauce all over the wiring back there, and only wish the little pest would take a lick or two before sniffing–so long as it doesn’t like hot chili sauce. (Because it would be so depressing if it did.) These damn vermin are getting expensive—although I was grateful the fix this time was as cheap as re-connecting the two wires it had chewed apart.

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 Speaking of fixes—I have another shot or two of Molly, our new cat and purported “mouser.” (She lived most of her life in an antique store until the owner died.) I spoke to my folks this morning and told them how amazingly docile she is, so of course she chose today to become adventurous, come up the stairs from the basement on her own for the first time, and face down the dogs.

 

I’ll try to post more on that later. Really. I’ll bump it up the to-do list, right behind packing and before … laundry?

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 Finally, the pears. For some reason our pear tree has gone nuts this year. Okay, not literally nuts, just prolifically. As fast as the squirrels gnaw off the green fruit (what is with the rodents around here?), take a few bites then discard it, littering the lawn with enough spoiled fruit to fill a 5-gallon bucket a third of the way, the fruit just keeps on coming. Here’s the tree three weeks ago:

 

Notice how green the fruit is. Now here’s another shot from this weekend, three weeks later:

 

C’mon, I’m ready for pear juice, down here.

And now, duty once again beckons. Off to dog-walk, work-prepare, and commute-go.