A toothsome fellow

The rat's nest...

is bursting at the seams with life-giving energy. Bed, sofas and pod are occupied. Reminiscing abounds. Last night we dragged out the yearbook and perused senior portraits.

So anyway one of the visitors is young "J", an eleven-month-old gentleman with an exceptional disposition. He's the occupant of the pod. He is capable of giving his Mom just a bit of a hard time in the sleeping department, but wakes up VERY cute, with hooded gaze and then a big smile. Today he was fascinated with the colors in Mer's quilt. He is also the mega-star of the trip video. I will add a photo soon (from behind to protect the innocent).

I'm bushed so will elaborate in a later post because it's off to the perch for the weekend! A bit of fresh air, maybe some gardening. Thought we'd be getting waited on by the old timers, but apparently they've been eating cookies and omelettes, so we're going to take our left-over spinach pie and chicken pot pie (yes, I made it again) to subsist.

CT update is that cancerous mass is bigger. For the mentally challenged among us: this is a bad thing. Waiting to hear what the next step will be. Dr D said that maybe it's so thick and dense that the chemeo is having trouble eating away at it. (My translation.) Interesting idea.

Why oh why did I have seconds of pot pie at ten o'clock when I was already stuffed? It wasn't hot so it wasn't even that good.

I leave you with this:
THE LORD OF THE TOFU

Something you should buy at the store

the rat's nest emphasises:
Do not be a snob on this subject. Do not waste bio eggs, bio flour and bio milk on this recipe. Just buy the sweet Easter bread at the sweet shop. Don't try making it. It is a pain in your ass and you'll end up turning it into sweet-bread shortbread (it wishes) which has no taste and just wastes electricity to make. Also, why is there so much fake yeast around? Who ever heard of fake yeast? That looks like white powder or is made out of like 4 ingredients, even if it is from the bio store?
See? I'm fair. Not everything has to come off the farm.

Eggs, myths, friends and chemeo

Don't read this post if you want to stay awake.
Here are my random thoughts for the day.
I am a sort-of eggspert. Why do I claim to be an eggspert? Not because I know how to cook every type of egg, but because I eat eggs almost every morning. (Wetted rye rusks, two eggs over-easy, tomatoes and mushrooms) You're thinking: If the cancer doesn't kill you, the cholesterol and calories will. (Reminder in my defense: HUGE amounts of steroids make you hungry.) I think eggs should be on the list of things that you should get from the source, not the super, like olive oil, honey, lemons and so on. You know: the more spherical the yolk when you break it, the fresher the egg. So last week I had some eggs from the country where the yolk was a perfect globe. No joke. Yummety yum. The other thing is that eggs from the super have really thin shells (something to do with what they feed the chickens), whereas eggs from the village have really hard shells that you have to bang against the side of the pan with lots of power just to get a small crack. Have I said enough about eggs? Moving on.

The Myth Busters annoy the hell out of me. Is that unfair and rude? Is it because I'm not smart enough to like sciencey shows? It's just that I'm prepared to believe that these things are myths without having that goofy bearded guy jump through all those hoops to prove it. I'm so disappointed when I turn on skai tsannel to see one of my nature/animal shows or makeover shows and it's the Myth Busters (or, worse, worst of all, Takaheshi's f-ing Castle). I know this is an unpopular opinion. I am willing to stand alone on this, though.

Eva and Vlad stopped by on their way back to Kefalonia from Evia just for a flying visit. Thank goodness for life-giving friends!!! Babis the dog stayed in the car, which I think was wise because...

I had chemeo today, nasty MTX, so I am a bit...zavlakomeni...how to say in Engliss...stupefied, out of it. I'm just glad I didn't get rejected again.

BAT HUNT

Activity on the perch...
reaches fever pitch.
Yes, there was a bat on the perch. Until Jameser and/or Lou took it down. Sorry, bat. I really am sorry that the boys got the poor creature, but can you imagine if the rents had found a live bat flying around the house this morning?
QUICKDATES from the rat's nest:
Pre-approved for chemeo tomorrow.
New laptop ordered. It's GREEN!!!
Stitches coming out tomorrow.
Made chicken pot pie for the 5th time in a month tonight.
Life-giving guests will be here this time next week.

THIS HAPPENED ON MONDAY

in the rat's nest, the following refrain echoes:

Lappie è morto.

Not the original lappie, but anyway, my computadora is dead dead dead, like a squashed cuca on the ground floor outside the elevator by the sewage hell mouth that I may just may have mentioned in this blog before.

So actually I'm in the priests' hole catching you up on a crazy week beginning with:

FLYING LESSONS
I tried to fly and landed on my face. I will say that again. I landed on my face on the pavement. And had to go to the emergency room for stitches and a tetanus shot. The edge of my frameless glasses, the edge of the crystal, dug a deep gash into my eyebrow. Well, a 4-stitch gash. Now I'm going to be like Notis from Fame Story, or those other people that shave a line through their eyebrow to look cool, but four years after the trend!!! On top of everything else, man. Then in the ER, the resident was surrounded by about eight whippersnappers and called out, okay, who wants to try some stitches? I said, Augh, please somebody with a steady hand, I have enough problems including low platelets! Anyway, there were no volunteers so she did it herself. Pali kala. I am an f-ing freak show. I am a walking talking freak show. This is not even funny. The humor left this situation a long time ago and is now vacationing in the Bahamas.

REJECTION
Got rejected from chemeo again on Wednesday. Screwed up platelets. Set back, way back. Also, neither of the sibs is compatible for stem cells. I am at the mercy of a kind stranger. Will see if that kind stranger exists. Apparently if there is a kind stranger, and this person saves your life, and you live for another year and a half, and they want to, you can get their address and send them a letter to thank them.

OTRAS CO
Can't think of much else, actually. I should probably say that my mother is a hero of social medicine of sorts. She accomplishes stuff with bureaucrats that you would not believe. It's like the one nice and competent person in these offices hones in on her appearance of damsel (but the old lady version, not exactly demoiselle) in distress and rewards her persistence with results. So here I am saying, just go home, there's no way you're going to figure this out today, and she comes home with two signatures, an appointment and a success story about telling off a line budger. Unbelievable. She gave a gardenia to one of her favorite doctors in the fund offices, a plant we had planned to give my onco to thank her for being nice when I called her late at night from the ER to see if I could get a tetanus shot, but she wasn't there so Mom was carting it around on her errands.

Looking seaward

Yesterday Jiora took me for coffee to a big marina which has been gentrified since the last time I was there, probably around ten years ago. The truth is that its polished, suburban image is not what usually calls to me when I think about walking along the water on a sunny day, but it was clean and relatively quiet and there were lots of bikes, but still room to walk.

At one end of the marina is a sort of boat museum. This is the back
and front (or face!)
of a faithful reproduction of a really old boat with oarsmen below and fighters on the deck.
Here's a newer warship.
And this is the view from where we were sitting, sipping a decent decaf latte:
The weather is just getting better and better.

You carry it well, Elvis.

Of course the sis found the link to the news story about the Jimmy look-alike.

An aside: Why do I even waste my time with technology? It takes me ages to be a failure at it and it takes other people a second to do it right. Good thing I don't have self-esteem issues. Except for currently looking like a cross between Gollum and Miss Piggy (just blend the ugly parts of each).

Elvis the German cat weighs 14 kilos, apparently, whereas Jimmy weighs only 6. So why does Jimmy look bigger? Weird. I guess Elvis just carries it well. But if you go to the link you'll see a picture of the reportage. Unfortunately, you can't watch a video.

Do you feel like discussing the a-holeness of letting your cat become the fattest cat in Germany through overfeeding it and then giving it up for adoption because it has health problems related to obesity? Not really? Okay. Moving on.

Saturday I had a nice morning with Jiora at Marina Floisvou. I took lots of pictures with my cell which I can't post because of the technology involved in uploading pictures from my cell to the computer. I will get K to do it for me soon and post them all when I get back to the rat's nest from the Priests' Hole on Sunday. Jiora and I did quite a bit of walking (don't get too excited; "quite a bit" by current standards isn't all that much). Then came home and got the worst leg pains ever, so popped some strong drugs.

I am high on painkillers. Maybe that's why I have insomnia.

PS: Did everybody remember to participate in Earth Hour?

I wrote this Saturday night but the computer spontaneously blinked off and I let it go so the time/date stuff is weird in this post. Some I changed/edited, some I didn't.