I am a deeply sensory person who cares about love and ethics. Hufflepuff to the core. The redwoods were my first home and my heart will live there forever. I live in the sensory world, I am only a visitor to ideas and words. Oh, and my alignment? Chaotic-good.
I’m eating vanilla ice cream and it tastes like vanilla, it doesn’t taste bland or blank. The idea that vanilla flavor is like.. not a flavor, weirds me out.
So I’m on a double dose of steroids, and it’s really hot…
…which means yesterday I went up to the convenience store and bought a crapload of ice cream. It makes it a little harder to burp my g-tube (because anything that goes into my stomach has to come out the tube, otherwise it sits in my stomach until it goes into my lungs), but so hot and so hungry (steroids create a bottomless pit effect even when your stomach isn’t draining properly and even if you’re getting all the nutrition you actually need through a feeding tube going straight to your intestines) that I couldn’t make myself care about that.
All I had in the house to eat was soup, and hot soup is not something that is remotely appealing in this weather. (I can pretty much only eat liquids. Solids stick in the tube. Even ice cream with nuts is out, because chewed-up nuts make burping the g-tube agonizingly slow and sometimes impossible. I once tried New York Super Fudge Chunk, and that was an amazingly mistaken mistake. It took two straight hours to get everything out again, and I got heat exhaustion in the meantime.)
Anyway when I went out to buy four large cartons of ice cream, I expected a reaction. I’m fat. Evidence of being fat and about to pig out, in public, tends to provoke people to staring and judging and laughing.
But it’s so hot out these days.
That I got lots of reactions.
And nearly all of them were sheer envy. :-)
Like, lots of thumbs up, smiling, “Oh my god I wish I was eating ALL of that right now”, that kind of thing.
I did not get a single negative reaction.
And that was really cool.
I never realize how much I have to armor myself against negative reactions until I get positive reactions and see how different it feels from normal.
tumblr experiment: put in the tags what you call this thing
[Image description: A red plate, with a piece of bread on it, with a heart shape cut out of it (or indented into it a bit at least), and an egg inside the heart with the yolk in the center. The egg looks like it’s not very well cooked if it’s cooked at all.]
A really cool article about one of my weird niche interests (ask me about Renaissance recipes sometime, they’re great).
Since I have my main cookbook right by me at the moment, here’s a small sample of some flavour profiles from Renaissance England, prior to the shift in European cooking styles that’s described in this article–all of them from savoury recipes involving meat:
Rosemary, currant, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, brown sugar, pepper.
Shallot, mustard, nutmeg, honey, white wine vinegar.
Onion, rosemary, marjoram, thyme, savoury, bay, parsley, pistachio.
Hardly the plain boiled fare most people picture in traditional English cooking, right?
Renaissance food is awesome.
This has been intermittently getting a note or two and it’s awesome so I’m going to reblog it again. Everyone learn about one of my strange niche hobbies.
I have been here, multiple times!
By referring to the order as a “Little Rosa”, you don’t have to make as big a deal out of the fact that you’re seeking help.
And believe it or not, it gets better. Rosa’s also gives out sweatshirts to the homeless (or sells them to the general public) that has information on local soup kitchens and even computer training in the area, on an insert sewn inside the sweatshirt.
…is the excuse to buy lots and lots of kefir… yum.
(I drink a tiny part of it and stick the other part down my j-tube, that way both my stomach and intestines get the probiotics. And honestly any excuse to drink any amount of kefir is good enough for me.)
Also I’m cautiously optimistic about the skin infection. It seemed to turn around significantly, yesterday afternoon – but then it got a little worse again. There’s complicating factors too. But at least I didn’t feel quite as much like I was watching a border war taking place on my skin, because it’s really disconcerting to watch the redness move back and forth and wonder which side is winning. I’m still kind of nervous about it though, I’ll believe it’s over when it’s over.
Meanwhile I’m photographing it every day so that if someone asks me how it’s been doing I can just show them.
Which reminds me, I took some really gross photos of it when the abscess was at its most leaky, which I won’t describe or post here. But I loved the different ways my doctor and nurse responded to it:
The doctor said “Wow, uh, I’m glad I already ate lunch because that picture is disgusting.”
The nurse nonchalantly said something like “Yeah it’s pretty gross” – while finishing her lunch there in the room and clearly completely unfazed.
That illustrates a very common difference between doctors and nurses that I’ve noticed.:
Nurses have to deal with gross stuff a lot more directly and consistently than most doctors do, so they seem to build up a higher tolerance to it. I mean, both groups of people have to deal with gross stuff, but nurses do more wound care and more direct patient care in general so their days are more saturated with it and they become really hardcore.
I’ve even seen – and this bothers me – situations in the hospital many times over where gross things were happening and doctors were purposely shielded from having to deal with it, while nurses had to step in and take care of everything. The doctors just left and came back later when things were less gross. Even when the patients needed the doctors to have not just up and left like that. And I’ve also seen situations where the doctors didn’t leave, but the nurses were left to handle the more disgusting elements of a situation nonetheless.
But doctors get paid more, go figure.
(Not that I’d begrudge my doctor anything at all, the guy is amazing, but nurses deserve more than they get, and I’ve developed an incredible respect for them.)
Did you know you can buy those cakes at the grocery store without it being your birthday or any celebratory thing? Like you can just walk in and grab a cake and buy it and nobody’s gonna say anything. You can even walk in and get like one of those little kid batman themed cakes (or character of your choice depending on availability) and everyone there is just gonna assume that it’s totally for some small child in your life and meanwhile you get a batman cake all to yourself. Yeah, it’s not gonna be a super fantastic cake since it’s just from the grocery store, but that’s not the point. The point is cake. Cake.
I remember when I discovered that I could buy one of those chocolate creme samplers all for myself for no reason whatsoever, same with cookie dough. It was a revelation.
These days, I can’t eat things without serious consequences (anything I eat has to be possible to drain out of a g-tube quickly, otherwise I get really sick and could even die in the wrong circumstances, not exaggerating) but there was a time when this information would’ve been really cool to know. Right now my food intake is limited to soup broth, and only certain kinds of soup broth at that, so things are different. Plus, I like umami flavors so much more than sweet ones – the older I get the more true that becomes. If I ate the same amount of sugar I could eat as a kid, I’d get sick in ways that have nothing at all to do with my gastroparesis and everything to do with the weird way that kids vs. adults process sugar. Which must suck if you have a serious sweet tooth but your body has changed how much sugar it can handle at a time.
Right now pretty much the only time I crave sugar is when my steroid dose increases at the same time that I miss part of a tube feeding for some reason. That combination makes me go “need sugar NOWWWWWWWWW”. But other than that, sugar actually feels vaguely repulsive a lot of the time. Still, I sort of wish I’d known about this soon after I started getting my first paychecks of my own, because it would’ve been cool to have a cake entirely to myself once in awhile. And I never, ever thought of buying one.
[Image description: Five butterflies, four of them much larger than the fifth, eating an orange and other fruit at a butterfly exhibit in Germany.]
Please don’t remove the image description, it is intended to let visually impaired people and other screenreader users know what is happening in the photo.
Theme
2:06pm
August 4, 2015
362,936 notes
![By dierk schaefer (Flickr: [1]) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons[Image description: Five butterflies, four of them much larger than the fifth, eating an orange and other fruit at a butterfly exhibit in Germany.]Please don’t remove the image description, it is intended to let visually impaired people and other screenreader users know what is happening in the photo.](http://40.media.tumblr.com/9ea30ef17a84d8328af9291711571a6e/tumblr_nq3582X5ED1qdmvbuo1_500.jpg)
