Expiry Dates

Sometimes a little too much time on my hands gets me to pondering over scads of things that we do, eat and mix up; milk products for example. I really love them but have often wondered who first said, “Hey, let’s let the milk sit around until it spoils, separates and then eat the curds.”? Lately, with the rat poison thing, I have been thinking more about this.

In Peru, they make cheese the old way but putting the cow’s stomach’s liquid in the milk to coagulate the milk fat. In some areas they use llama stomach juices too. However, in the north of Peru there is a lizard that they drop into the milk and it produces the same affect. Now having said that, don’t you just wonder about the thought process that got someone to drown a lizard in milk in the first place? Just how many other critters do you suppose they dunked in the milk first or did they just get lucky with that first lizard they tried? Yet on the other hand, maybe a lizard just serendipitously fell in the bucket in the milk shed and started the milk a-clotting. For me this conjured up the image of a soggy little reptile treading milk, I don’t imagine he was built for swimming but probably kept his head above milk, heroically chugging until it started separating it into whey and curds. I imagine that density issues interfered what with curds bobbing in the whey until he finally succumbed to the variable compactness confusion, a poor, drowned, sodden little lizard. I suppose I wax pensive and I am dwelling a bit overly on clotting and curding these days…

Anyway, speaking of thickening milk with bacteria, yogurt fascinates me too. I love Peruvian yogurt better than the Swiss variety. Like most of these things, it comes with an expiration date or sell-by date just like its North American distant cousin. I say distant because the texture and flavor resemblance pales by comparison, a paltry puny relative and nothing more. Still South Americans have a certain obsessive relationship with expiration dates I have noted over the years. They will throw out a case of perfectly good milk because of the arrival of its expiration date. Though just an example, really anything with an expiry date as the Canucks and Britts say goes out of date the day after. Heck, my mother kept every prescription medication that we did not use in a big box in the hall closet for rainy sick days… She knew what they all did and for her; expiration dates served for a mere suggestion. Not in Peru or Chile though. The day after… aspirin has just turned to cyanide. Cough syrup turns to death potion at five minutes beyond the stroke of midnight.

I have had Peruvians tell me that I am risking my health by eating yogurt that has passed its date… Julie likewise asks me if the yogurt in the refrigerator has gone bad??? What does this mean? Just what happens to spoiled milk with more time? Does it get more spoiled? What are the health risks in eating more yogurty yogurt? Some say it goes all moldy… Hello-o-o! What is that green stuff on the Treasure Island, Gorgonzola or Roquefort? How many deaths or terminal illness get attributed each year to Kraft Roka Blue Cheese Dressing for example? “Mrs. Hasler, I regret to inform you that your husband succumbed to a hyper sensitivity to cheese mold…”

Today I went to Costco. They had great huge cheeses from Parma, Italy, aged parmesan cheese… they have dates on aged cheese, use-by or sell-by…all the same to a Peruvian. What does that even mean though? Isn’t the whole idea of aging the cheese that it gets better the longer it sits, or not? I need help here, what happens if you don’t eat the matured cheese by the date that FDA or Costco expiration police say you need to eat it? Does the increasing elderliness of the cheese somehow cause it to go south because the sagacious warehouse store daters say so and so as not to get into dutch with the feds? Phew, now there is a silver lining to health care and even bigger government! Somebody tell Nancy Pelosi! I can see it with roast chickens or putrefying pork chops you refrigerated what with salmonella and all. For me the jury is still out on the brown lettuce that we have thrown out in truckloads. Sometimes stuff just gets science projecty, i.e. really slimy, icky and even smelly like tortillas, celery and raw gizzards with green and often slimy mold, putrescine and cadaverine but aspirin, cheese and yogurt, come on now!

The Cure/Sponge Bath???

One of the fascinating things about requiring medical attention concerns new skills one has to acquire and new information about medicine. I have now had the learning opportunity of spending the better part of each day this week in the hands of surgeons, technicians and nurses who have told me a lot of things and taught me that yes, though not pretty, I can give myself shots in my stomach fat.

Years ago, after hernia surgery, a matronly Peruvian nurse surprised me early in the morning by announcing that she had come to give me a sponge bath! I laughed, actually thinking she was joking but, no, she was all business and got right to work. Not having had a sponge bath since babyhood, I had no clue how to receive it with dignity. Turns out, there is no way… always the helpful sort, and inherently timid about such things, I did what I thought she required of me. Diligently I strove to cover certain sensitive anatomical regions by shifting sheet and gown about strategically to keep these parts out of sight of the nurse to keep from offending her, as I supposed…, the comical bit here is that I actually thought I helped in my assiduous but deluded efforts.

All went along fine until she needed to work in that the neck of the woods in question, so to speak. My dabbling in the process impeded her professional efforts so at this point, she grasped the sheet firmly, snatched it from my hands and flung it deftly, arching it across the room to fall against the far wall. With this she very competently and clearly informed me that my help in the process was no longer required or welcome, as though it had ever been, and that I should just let her get on with her job. I submitted respectfully and dutifully if with little decorum to the rest of the sponge bath.

It did help me overcome my excessive bashfulness by the way.

In my last blog, I told about the ER but it bears repeating that the health care professionals seem to have considered it their responsibility to scare the you-know-what out of me. Though I don’t panic easily, I have gained respect for my current problem. No one has ever told me this often that I could die if I don’t do…, at least not so frequently.

In part, the strange element here is that the cure can kill me just as dead as the problem if I mess it up. Here is what I know. I have clots in my right leg. The clots can rip loose at any time and hurtle across my body to my heart, lungs or brain and snuff me out in a heart attack, embolism or stroke. I have to lie down with my foot higher than my chest until the clots stabilize and then they supposedly get absorbed back into my system.

Meanwhile, they give me medicine to thin my blood down so this does not happen again. I started off having to shoot myself in the belly twice each day with some stuff to kick start the blood thinning. Now I take daily pills called Coumadin or Warfarin to keep it thinner. According to the doctor, I get to do that for several months at least. Here is the kicker though; the pills are actually rat poison. No joke, it makes rats bleed out internally because of an overdose and I suspect that because of size differentials, my daily dose would dust off a rat. The doctors monitor me each day to tell them if my blood is getting thin enough or too thin. Meanwhile they tell me in each visit, if I have blood in my stools, unexplained blood in your mouth, nose bleeds, blood shot eyes, coughing up blood, chest pains, difficulty breathing and so on, get to the ER immediately. Oh goody, another cultural roller coaster!

Now, I have a little question here. Who, is the guy who decided, “Hey, let’s try rat poison and see if human blood gets thin?” Whatever happened to good old blood letting or did leaches just go out of fashion? But seriously, who thinks up any of this stuff?

Quiet Woman Blues

I had some requests for the lyrics to this great song... Enjoy, it is much better with the accompaniment... This has reference to my previous blog in case you missed it.

Quiet Woman
By Canned Heat

I got this woman,
Ain’t no lie
Opens her mouth
Makes me cry,
Five foot three,
Five two is shout,
I tell you people
Without a doubt
I got to find a quiet woman
Find a quiet woman,
Gotta find a quiet woman.
The one I got
Is way too loud.

Friends know my troubles,
Neighbors too.
Smoke too much dope,
No money too,
I tell you people
Ain’t no lie,
I’ll be searchin’
Till the day I die
I got to find a quiet woman
Find a quiet woman,
Gotta find a quiet woman.
The one I got
Is way too loud.

Friends say I’m crazy,
Probably true,
Woman’s built for yellin’ man,
Too bad it’s at you,
Search the world over
‘Til the day I die;
Gonna find a quiet woman
Tell you people why.
I got to find a quiet woman
Find a quiet woman,
Gotta find a quiet woman.
The one I got
Is way too loud.

Things You Have To Do When You Don’t Walk Around Enough In An Airplane

This next blog works out to be an addendum to the head cracked open story in my last blog. In that account, I stopped bleeding very quickly. Just before I left the project on my trip home I noticed that I had a sore spot on the inside of my thigh and that it appeared to have some related swelling. I thought, Oh great! Varicose veins! I got to Lima and called Julie to get me an appointment with a doctor starting a trepidation train that, by the way, was completely justified. Mom’s, ergo, wives spend a good deal of time in this avocation. No exception, Julie does a great bit of her own fretting. Her expressions of concern always begin with, “Now see, that worries me.”

To make this short, I got home to go with Leah to her competition in Indiana but I arrived with a Deep Vein Thrombosis or blood clot in my upper thigh. This is a result in part of too much sedentary travel in airplanes and pickup trucks at very high altitudes and probably some other factors. The good news is that I made it home with out the clot tearing loose and causing me a stroke, heart attack or just simple suffocation. Neat huh?!

Julie had set up the doctor's appointment at 4pm. My Doctor told me that I needed to go to the ER. Her nurse made me sign a form absolving my doc of responsibility should I not go to the ER and die in the plane the next day. Julie and I went down to the hospital and checked into the ER. There began the true odyssey. The packed waiting room had a slice of humanity that truly boggled my mind.

A very large, high-decibel woman with an amazing telephone, accompanied by all of her offspring who spent their time whining and speculating on the potentially fatal foot injury their mother had sustained turned out to have an injured tendon. A guy named Chad had cut his knee with an axe and seemed a no brainer to get in quickly. He managed his pain pretty well and was upright with a compress. However, no one even said, “Stat!” the whole time we were there. We asked the young guy sitting across from us how long he had been there, “Four hours,” he responded. Judging by the little plastic arm band he wore, he had been triaged already. I started my skid into resignation.

To our right another, very large wheelchair bound woman named Inez accompanied her blonde boyfriend in a t-shirt with the sleeves cut away to expose all of his ribcage and the intricate thorn and multi-skull motif tattooed on his right arm. They accompanied an older couple Juan and Lidia. Inez called Lidia mom when asking if she was going to go smoke but said, “Juan,” when she spoke to the elderly man.

Across the room the TV carried a program called TruTV that had a story line about police investigation but either did not hold the interest of or was too close to home for this eclectic crowd. Someone got up and changed it to the Monday Night football game. I am convinced that football won out only because of a paucity of adequate WWF, NASCAR or Monster Truck Pull events on Monday.

At some point they called Juan back and with the disappearance of his colorful clan through the coveted ER door came a hefty sweat suit attired, trio; mother, daughter and daughter’s baby. They seemed to be the caregivers of the baby given the overheard conversation. The mother was complaining that her grandbaby kept surreptitiously “barfing,” and that it, “Smelled gross.” What a stunner, gross as opposed to a yummier smelling barf or what? The daughter blamed the foul smell on antibiotics but I could not extricate the proposed comparison of barfs from my head.

Once back in the ER they sent me to one of those beds surrounded by curtains, next to the telephoning woman from the waiting room. Canned Heat sang described her in “Quiet Woman Blues.” Thankfully someone had collected her children but this did not stifle her loquacity. Though I could not make a single phone call, she had full coverage the entire time and my goodness; I want a battery like hers. I heard every snippet of her telephone conversations. She began to share excessive information about her bodily functions with the doctors and everyone else in telephone range. The sleep patterns of her friends crossed my mind. She called them all night long with her incessant diarrheal blathering. There was a certain irony in this given that so much of the chatter had to do with her own incontinence problem.

At some point she got out and they replaced her with an in obnoxious woman that is the source material for pigeonholing. Pardon my frankness… She made the former resident seem a retiring violet. Bossy, pushy and just insufferable, she had received some medicine at the other facility (not clear at all to me which) and she had chest pains. Her "medical training" indicated to her and she shared ad nauseum with the nurses that this medication was at fault for her current discomfort. When they came to take her blood and asked if she were allergic to latex, she said in a Deep South drawl, “Whaaa, yes ah am and you ain’t goin’ ta give me no iodine, ner betadine ner nothin’ like that neither.” When they started to take her blood she shouted, at volumes exceeding single stroke engines, “Ow, ow, ow, y’alls fixin’ ta keel me!” Julie witnessed that I have not exaggerated. Brashly, she repeated these phrases stridently and abrasively for as long as they attempted to draw her blood. Though I never actually saw her, I am confident that no stereotype of her would be an exaggeration.

Subsequently, they announced that a man was coming in, "not" in custody but who had been firing off a pistol in downtown Albuquerque and they needed to restrain him. I think he actually came in while I was being ultra-sounded but later we heard him cackling high-pitched and raucously, like someone in a Vincent Price horror movie down the hall. He got me to pondering and wondering just what it might take to get oneself arrested in Albuquerque.

In the end I was impressed by the complexity of the ER and the lack of racism, just a spectrum of mankind. Indeed, it was a collection with all of the variety and spice of life, a virtual humanity rainbow to make Jesse Jackson proud. I tried to take note of names of those who floated in and out of my dream, there were LeShaun, Juan, Chad, Jesus, and Pilgrim and I saw more mullets and shaved heads and tattoos than I have seen in ages. There almost seemed a required style in t-shirts, undershirts, ball caps and sweat pants. I came to the conclusion that those ER TV shows are a poor representation of reality since they try to mute the reality for more sensitive viewers. Yet we had an excellent Caucasian doctor, a fine black X-ray technician and an adorable Hispanic nurse named Alicia. She repeatedly apologized and thanked us for our patience. I told her that she has the most interesting job in the world and that she needs to write a book. She said, “It's never really dull here.” her understatement stunned and in the end, I had the distinct impression that I had participated in an episode of,” Dog the Bounty Hunter.”

Things Not To Do While Jogging In Lima Because You Have Spare Time

I am in that category of sporadic bloggers, in case you have not been able to tell. I am reluctant to piffle away the time with miscellaneous stuff that no one cares about but me. However, I have a tale that leads me to a safety tip that may be of use to someone… I went running in Lima the other day and got away later than usual. I try to routinely run before the rush hour gets going. I run a half hour in one direction and then run back to my hotel.

On this morning a fine drizzle fell. It was refreshing but made the sidewalks a little slick. I had run my 30 minutes, turned around and had a concern to get back as quickly as possible because I had interviews to hold. I was not actually in Lima itself; rather a suburb called San Isidro, a nice and well looked after neighborhood. The houses pretty much all have automatic garage doors that lift up and away from the house. They are operated by steel contraptions on the corners of the doors.

Because I had left late, the run became a bit of an obstacle course of people and cars but manageable. When I got to one of these houses where the lady was backing her car out I evaluated the situation. Not wanting to get the door dropped down on me. I decided to go around the front of the car and I sped up to do it. The steel brace was perfectly in my blind spot. I never saw it and propelled myself, plowing directly into it at full speed. The checked inertia nearly knocked me onto my back when I hit it.

I crouched down and put my hand on the point of the collision and said to myself, “Phew, lucky me. I just got a bump and no blood.” This passed in a split second because at that very point blood fairly gushed out of the wound and off of my bald head. I had nothing to control it and it was horrific given the lack of hair and its absorbing capacity.

I needed a little towel or something. A woman came to me and told me to go back to the owner of the house and complain. I asked, “What am I going to complain about? I ran into the bar! Indeed, if you are interested in helping me, tell me where I can get this looked at…” She told me to go to the posta medica about 3 blocks back. This translates to 5 or 6 blocks in my experience. I did head in that direction but realized that that would take time I did not have.

I decided, despite my looking like a character from a cheap horror flick, that I should continue running back to the hotel before it started to hurt and in time to clean myself up for my interviews. I was still 20-25 minutes from the hotel.

The run was full of helpful people asking what happened and offering insights like using kerosene on the wound. The police looked at me in some amazement but only one asked what was going on. Cars with children slowed along side of me with myriad faces pressed against windows to see the funny bleeding man.

I am sure I terrified the receptionist who immediately got me towels and access to the hotel first aid kit. I went to clean up and put some hydrogen peroxide on my wound. Of course I took the commensurate picture. Once at my meetings the ladies there offered helpful suggestions since every so often, the wound would sprout a leak sending a small drizzle down my forehead. We put some vinegar on it and taped it up and by the end of the day, it had scabbed over completely.

The safety tip: Run early in San Isidro and look up, above all in Lilliputianesque countries where the average height is less than 5.5 feet.

No More Odysseys For a While, Please…

Yesterday I had to get to Lima. This involves leaving the project at four in the morning and driving the six hours to Cusco, catching a plane in the afternoon and flying to Lima by late afternoon or early evening. Sounds simple doesn’t it?

We left the camp at 4:45am, Danny, a driver, a coworker, Juana Aparcana and I. The secretary had booked my flight for 3:45p.m., so I had plenty of time. I put on clean clothes so I would not have to take a bunch of stuff, and after all, I just had to sit in the car and plane for six or eight hours to get to Lima.

Things seemed to be pretty well on track. I had worked until midnight so Danny started off driving, but I could not sleep in any case. I took over at about 6am and we made good time. Along about 7am, I began to notice some issues with the gears and thought I had just gotten clumsy and then, suddenly, the car stopped. The clutch had no effect whatsoever and despite the fact that I could get the stick into the gears, nothing happened when I let off the clutch. We got out and had a look see. Danny looked under the truck and the hood and pulled out a handful of fibers and said, here is the clutch disk… We had seen a cellular signal on a phone a few miles back so I just started walking in the frosty altiplano morning light. Juana and I hiked downhill for a mile or so but found no signal. I wandered off into the ichu grass and saw only a pair of comuneros from the local town Capaccmarca with whom I visited for a few moments to be cordial, nice guys, my age I would guess. We said goodbye and I kept up my cellular signal witching.

The hours whittled away and I had decided that I was not meant to get to Lima that day. When I had just given up hope, we saw a van coming up the road towards us. We flagged it down and it was a passenger “Express” from Challhuahuacho to Cusco. It had left at 6am. We asked the driver if he had space. He did and we loaded into it and left Danny there to keep track of the pickup. “We will call when we get a signal,” I told him.

Off we went and at every town, the driver asked for fuel which gave us a little concern. He had said we would be in Cusco by 1pm but I had begun to doubt that. I quit believing fairy tales many years ago and Peruvian punctuality promises fall into that same category. An hour out of Cusco in Yurisque, we stopped to take on a couple of women and the driver continued his combustible (fuel) quest. The ladies loaded large bundles of corn stalks atop the bus and the older of the two muscled her way to the back and wedged in, smashing me against Juana like another sardine in the can.

In Quechua, she told her daughter that this was Saturday and they don’t sell gasoline in town on Saturday. By now we had a clear idea that the driver knew his van’s gauges and that we were not going to make it. He seemed somewhat frantic going about looking for the owner of the “gas station” a house with barrels of diesel fuel in it. At last the owner came out with a key. What a sigh of relief went through the toasty van. We opened the doors and relaxed while the driver bought one gallon of fuel and poured it into the van with a large metal funnel, shaking in the last drips.

We made the last hour in good time but by the time I rolled into Cusco, it was 2:15pm and I had to be in the airport in a half hour. I made it and made my plane despite all of the shenanigans. Many years ago, I told my son William, “If you go on a trip and everything goes fine, “no clutches blow up, no microbuses pick you up and stop in every hamlet looking for fuel etc.”; you don’t have stories.” I recently read a book that said, “Stories only happen to those who can tell them.” I would be happy to have a few less.

Hysterics on a Plane

I flew to Lima the night before last, and had a seven hour delay that really only needed to take about two… We flew into Houston by about two in the afternoon and had to board my flight to Lima at three pm. So far, so good, I got to my gate, ready and happy that I only had an hour layover. They called us to board and the plane, packed full due to tourist season combined with Peruvian Independence Day on the 28th.

Anyway, the plane pulled back a few yards from the gate and immediately the pilot noted a problem with a “whatchamacalit” in a motor feeding air into the back of the plane. Back to the gate for the maintenance guys to have a look. They fixed it up and we pulled out again.

Nope, still not working and now, the fuel pump acted up and the problem needed more attention. This time, they got us off the plane and into the terminal because they could not keep the plane temperature down. We hung around for an hour and a half while they sorted out the problem and then they loaded us back into the plane.

As soon as we were back in the plane one of the passengers decided that he felt sick and could not continue his trip to Peru. They offloaded him but here’s the trick, if you have booked into an international flight and get off, your luggage must exit with you so that people don’t leave bombs on board by getting conveniently sick etc. Anyway, we sat while they got the bag off, about an hour. By now we were delayed about four hours. The plane was uncomfortably hot and it turned out that one of the motors needed coaxing from some sort of a cart to start up and they had one that was too small, so said the captain. This produced a sweltering delay in the broiling plane. I admit to discomfort and sweating profusely myself. A number of passengers began to gripe vociferously about vague discomforts and their waning confidence in the plane itself.

About now a couple of women with babies began to be quite vocal that they were feeling bad and the plane was not cool enough and one in particular complained that since she had just had a caesarian three weeks before and her baby was new, she was afraid that the baby would become ill. One might ask why a woman would fly internationally just three weeks after a caesarian. With no warning, others chimed in with sympathy for the caesarian woman and her baby. Suddenly, the airline was going to kill the baby. The baby would die in the heat yet at no moment did the baby cry, whine or look particularly feeble, that I could see. Somehow then, the argument shifted to us and several chimed in that we all might die like so many chickens in a Quonset hut in southern Texas or something. Wait a minute, we were in southern Texas… On top of that, a third year mechanical engineering student, who I think exaggerated her qualifications insisted that, despite all assurances by the jet engine mechanics, our plane had become unfit to fly, further inciting the panic. Pretty quick we had a reasonably significant mutiny and a half dozen or so passengers opted to take the flight on the next date. Naturally, they did not check availability, and I happened to know that these flights were virtual sardine packs of Peruvians and tourists.

You have probably leapt to the conclusion that this reenactment of the Exodus cost us hours more in searching for stupid people’s luggage. In the end it took something on the order of three hours but did get me an upgrade. Instead of arriving in Lima at 10:30 pm, I got in at 5:30am having spent twelve hours on a plane instead of six and all because of a few hysterical and drastic Latinos.