Holidays: Sagrada Familia 4

Let’s stop with all the hospital talk for a while, because I’m getting sick and tired of it. Seriously, I was not made for “long, slow recoveries, but I guess few people are. There are so many more pictures from the holiday, so let’s dwell on that beauty.

These pictures showcase the architectural elements inside the cathedral, which are just as beautiful as the windows. I love the light stones.

©Giliell, all rights reserved

©Giliell, all rights reserved

©Giliell, all rights reserved

©Giliell, all rights reserved

 

©Giliell, all rights reserved

©Giliell, all rights reserved

Jack’s Walk

©voyager, all rights reserved

The days of autumn agree with me and I enjoy so many things at this time of year. I love the crisp air that energizes Jack and getting to watch day by day as rich reds and flame oranges appear in the trees. It’s time to start making hearty soups and stews and casseroles with the bounty of local produce filling the market stalls and it’s time to turn on the oven and bake things full of apples. Fall is such a wonderful season. It would be absolutely perfect… if only the days were a little longer.

It’s dark now when Jack and I take our evening walk and Jack’s eyesight isn’t good in the dark anymore. He’s easily frightened by shadows and he tends to bark at things that aren’t normally around, like all the new political signs popping up on lawns around the neighbourhood. The political signs scare me a bit, too, especially since my neighbourhood is sporting quite a few Conservative signs this election season. Nobody wants to look at that nonsense so the photo today was taken late yesterday afternoon from our favourite forest path.

A Beautiful Butterfly Poses for Photos

I apologize to Avalus for taking so long to post these photos. I received them near the end of August when things were hectic for me and I didn’t have consistent access to the internet. They’re beautiful pictures and I’m delighted to share them today.

Here is a beautiful butterfly. It might be a popular monarch (Limenitis populi) or a white admiral (Limenitis camilla), but I am not sure. In German they are called big and small Eisvogel (Kingfisher). 

©Avalus, all rights reserved

©Avalus, all rights reserved

©Avalus, all rights reserved

©Avalus, all rights reserved

Hospi-tales: Stink

You’ve all been waiting for this topic, right?

For somebody working with teenagers, I still got a very sensitive nose, especially when the body concerned is mine and it’s also “amazing” what your mind can fixate on. Here’s the truth: being sick stinks. First of all, while my brain knew what happened, my body was still trying to run away from a sabertooth tiger that had just pierced my leg or something. In other words, it was ramming up the response, trying to mobilise as much energy as possible, resulting in me sweating like an ox. The second, and more lasting thing is medical stink. All the medication needs to get out of your system again and part of it just goes out via your skin. And it’ll keep doing that for a while, so I#m off to take a shower first and use some very sweet smelling body butter afterwards.

You’ll excuse me.

The Art of Book Design: The Story My Doggie Told to Me

Ralph Henry Barbour. The Story My Doggie Told to Me. New York, Dodd Mead, 1914.

And so ends Dog Week. If you like the idea of theme weeks let me know because I have a few other ideas. I’m also open to any suggestions you may have so just let me know here in the comments or drop me a line at affinitysubmissions@gmail.com. The address is in the sidebar just below the colourful, percolating skull.

 

via: The Library of Congress, where you can read the book and see all of the charming illustrations.

Hospi-tales: Pain

Or: getting older just means more opportunities to expand your horizon on “the worst thing that ever happened to me.

As mentioned before, I’m not very loud about pain. As a kid I hurt myself regularly in the way kids do, and the more serious it was, the more quiet I got. I once seriously cut my finger making potato stamps and my mum only noticed when my sis asked why I got red paint and she didn’t. During my first Judo tournament I promptly broke my clavicle in my first fight. I told the people from the sports club that it hurt. Judging from my lack of crying, they told me it would be better in a few minutes and I went to fight another fight. Afterwards I really insisted that this hurt and was taken to the hospital. I said I was in pain, I expected people to believe me. For some reason I still do, despite all evidence.

Anyway, back when Caine posted about her back problems and the work with the pain clinic, I believed her, I understood, I felt empathy, but I didn’t really understand. Of course I’d been in pain before. You can’t break a couple of bones and have children without knowing pain, but I didn’t know Pain. Well, another acquaintance I didn’t particularly enjoy. The hospital was (mostly*) good with painkillers, it was a shame that I was in such a peak that even the morphine didn’t do much anymore. The amount of pain I was in would have been an indicator to transfer me to another hospital for surgery if the treatment of cortisol injections directly into the spine didn’t work. Which leads me from Pain to PAIN. The worst thing in the first days was sitting, as it put weight on my poor inflamed nerve, but in order for them to inject me into the spine I needed to sit and round my back. I simply jumped from the table twice. When we finally got down to it I was crying, whimpering and at the end more or less passing out. If PAIN has a bigger sibling, I never want to meet them.

 

*Sometimes there are nurses who take it upon themselves to decide that you are really not in that much pain and shouldn’t have painkiller. No, not even fucking metamizol, which is usually effective and has lower (but not no risks) than the alternatives.

Slavic Saturday

This post too is a sort-of crossover between Behind the Iron Curtain and Slavic Saturday.

Karel Gott was an important figure of Czech culture. He was a stable star of our music scene for sixty years – my whole life and some more. His parents wanted him to have a respectable working-class job, but he wanted to be an artist – specifically a painter. But by coincidence, he ended up famous not as a painter, but as a singer.

He was exceptional in one way – even during the communist regime, he became very popular in West Germany, to the point that the regime went to quite a long way to actually keep him as a valuable source of revenue. So after he once overstayed his visa, the president himself has pleaded with him to return. He was allowed to come back and he was not punished for flirting with emigration.

However, he has somehow managed to not tarnish his name by any shady collaborations with the regime – too much. Most of his support was by filling concert halls and selling records, and only once did he openly shill, by reading a pre-prepared speech chastising the movement Charter 77.

But his popularity was such that even after the regime fell, it did not suffer. He got involved in the velvet revolution just enough to show he knows where the political wind is blowing, and afterward continued as if nothing happened. There were attempts to dig up dirt on him, and he did indeed do some stupid things when he was young, but nothing could shake his star from the top of Czech musical heaven. He was a bit of a clueless idiot when it came to politics – for example, he thought that Trump is a good politician and that refugee crisis in Europe is a result of some conspiracy – but that could not tarnish his reputation either in a nation of clueless racist idiots, so there’s that.

Nothing could shake him. Nothing but death. He died this week after a prolonged battle with leukemia, at the age of 80.

I did not particularly like him. I do not know why, but his singing has always rubbed me the wrong way. I never found his voice to be pleasant to listen to, with some exceptions. But I have always felt some connection to him, partly because we share the first name and partly because he was simply everywhere.  I have also read his book “Říkám to písní” (I say it with a song) and he seemed like a reasonably nice person then. But his opinions about Trump and his conspiratorial theorizing were just daft babblings of a privileged dude who has no clue. I have mixed feelings now.

He recorded this song in 1966 when he was young and I was not born yet. But it is a song about the inevitable end of his star and his life and for some reason one of those that I like.

Hospi-tales: Of being stupid and emergency care

Well, as you all know I used the last week to to enjoy the benefits of socialised healthcare. This first post will mostly explain about some good things about our system and some bad things about being tough.

I’ve been having some back troubles since summer. They usually flared up, subsided, no problem, right? So when my left thigh started hurting whenever I got out of the car or sat for too long, I didn’t heed it but thought “it will pass”. Please, don’t be me. I don’t know if the worst could have been avoided if I’d gone to the doc then, but I’d be kicking my own ass if I could reach it anyway.

Well, on Friday last week the pain increased to the level that I called my GP. I got an appointment for Friday this week… Saturday morning I decided it could not wait and made Mr drive me to the on duty GP. This is one level of German healthcare meant to prevent people with colds clogging the ER. Problem is that sometimes the person is not a GP but a specialised doctor,though I think they changed the rules and exempted specialists who are not able to diagnose an actual emergency like psychiatrists or eye doctors. The post is located in the hospital so they can react quickly in case of an emergency. The nice doc examined me, determined I had no neurological failure and sent me home with more pain medication. After lunch I had to admit that it wasn’t working and had Mr drive me to the ER.

Well, the system to keep the ER unclogged only works to a certain degree. I saw them send people next door, telling them that yes, their cold was bad but a case for the GP, but there were others who insisted to be an emergency. There was a guy who insisted he’d been waiting for hours (it was 45 minutes, as the friendly receptionist told him) and who demanded to be seen immediately. When he got told he had to wait he told them “well, just tear it up, I’m going home!” And of course actual emergencies and I do understand that an old lady with chest pain is probably more serious than me. But I was never good at making my pain heard, so I got pushed to the back of the line until I told them after two hours that I was about to puke on the floor from pain. That got their attention. I got sent for x-rays (nothing to see, thankfully) and hooked up to IV painkiller. I was offered to stay and first declined (I am not the smartest cookie), but when the painkiller didn’t show any effect I decided to stay.

The morale, dear children: go see your doctor if you can. Don’t wait until you become a Saturday afternoon emergency.

Jack’s Walk

Jack, October 3, 2019 ©voyager, all rights reserved

Jack, October 3, 2019 ©voyager, all rights reserved

It’s been rainy and damp for a few days and this morning the temp was only 10°. It’s certainly not my favourite weather, but as my dad used to say, “it’s better than no weather at all.” Jack says he doesn’t mind the change. He has more energy when it’s cool and it gives him a reason to grow hair. Jack likes to grow hair, lots and lots of hair, and by the end of winter he has a thick, lush insulating coat which he then sheds all over everything come spring – except Jack never does a full shed. Normally we go to the east coast for the summer and Jack needs an undercoat to swim in the cold waters of the Atlantic. This year, though, we fooled him and stayed home in hot and humid Ontario where his remaining undercoat was unnecessary. I kept waiting for him to shed through June and July and even August, but Jack held on to that undercoat through all the hot days of summer. By the end of August I’d given up and figured he’d just start the slow build up to maximum coverage for winter. I was wrong. At the beginning of September Jack went into full shed mode and the hair came out in heaps and clumps and, Oh Boy, did it come out fast. It’s only the second time in Jack’s life that he’s been without his undercoat and neck ruff and the first time was way back when he was a puppy. He isn’t quite finished shedding yet either. You can see the blondish bits around his neck starting to clump and by tomorrow they’ll be ready to pluck. Soon he should start putting on new hair and I’d like to track how long it takes for him to grow his thick, full coat back so I’m going to photograph him about once a month to see how long it takes before he’s as hairy as a wookiee again. Here he is today looking svelte(ish) at the beginning of Autumn. We’ll see how it grows.