Res ipsa loquitur

I think I've mentioned before that at the start of the year I like to observe Clean The Insides Of Things January. This year I have to share my joy: I've actually gotten to all the insides* of all the things** in the entire apartment. I don't think I've ever managed to do that in one year before; usually I get to a couple of rooms one year and a couple of rooms the next. Last year I was recovering from surgery and didn't get anything cleaned.

Dare I hope I'll actually be able to do Fixit February too?

* except for the insides of things that still belong to the kidlet.

** except for the chest freezer, which will have to wait until (1) it's not 6 days until garbage pickup comes and (2) it's not freaking 51 degrees outside.

As if to reward my hard work, last night I dreamed Callum Keith Rennie asked me to paint his nails black. His cuticles were a disgrace, but that's very punk rock of him.

Me: I made popsicles.
Kidlet: I saw those as I was squeezing past them to pry out an ice cube.
Me: Pobstacles.

My mother is 85.

( cut for weight-loss culture )

When I was sixteen, we hosted a Swedish exchange student for a year. She arrived bearing gifts, and one of them was a bottle of a perfume called Dots. She translated the slogan for me: "Very French. Very Swedish."

I don't really remember what it smelled like, except that a while later I bought some UII Sheer Scent because it seemed a bit similar, and then some time later I bought a bottle of Fresh Life because it reminded me a little bit of Sheer Scent. Which probably means Dots would have been citrus and not-too-sweet floral with just a slight dirtiness to it. You know how it is with scent and memory - somehow I remember it vividly and not at all at the same time.

If I could find someone to tell me how perfume buffs described Dots, I could probably go on Fragrantica and find something similar. But so far the English-language internet has yielded nothing at all.

Any middle-aged Swedes out there who remember this stuff?

She likes to sleep all the way under the covers, but I was in the bedroom doing yoga at lunchtime, and she stuck her head out to see what was up.

So we've got a guy on our local nextdoor page selling hoarded toilet paper and some kind of magic garlic that can prevent covid-19. Sheesh.

So I learned some things this weekend:

- Even if you have a CPAP machine, sleep apnea can still make your blood pressure spike while you sleep.

- When your blood pressure spikes, it can wake you up feeling like you can't breathe.

- If you call a nurse line for advice and you say, "I can't breathe," they're going to tell you to go to the ER. (No 24-hour urgent care here.)

- If you go to the ER and you say, "I can't breathe," and a blood test shows even the tiniest uptick in one of the chemicals that are associated with heart failure, protocol requires them to admit you to the hospital.

So I spent 12 hours in the hospital Sunday night/Monday morning, when I would have liked to be enjoying a quiet holiday at home.

And the only thing that came of it was that a doctor changed my blood pressure meds.

(I suppose it's better to be hospitalized for almost nothing than to be hospitalized for definitely something.)

I couldn't sleep without my machine, and I was bored out of my skull. Luckily I had "The Goblin Emperor" in my library of e-books, so I read it again. Like, *all* of it in one day.

Also I'm fat and 55, so "chest pains" kept making its way onto my chart. A nurse would come and say, "So are you still having chest pains?" and I'd say, "I have never had one (1) chest pain," and she'd say, "Oh, I'd better take that out of the computer," and then the shift would change and a new nurse would come in and say, "How are your chest pains?" There was a whiteboard in the room with a space for My Treatment Goals, and the goal was "No chest pains." (It's good to be able to achieve at least one goal.) I can't believe how many times I had to tell people I wasn't having chest pains. And what do you want to bet that the next time I see my doctor, she'll look at my chart and say, "So, breathing difficulties and chest pains?"

In the ER, before they admitted me, I was in Room 13. I said to the nurse, "You have a Room 13? Medical people must not be superstitious." She said, "We are *so* superstitious. Because we see what happens when the moon is full!"

I am somewhat less hostile to the dog across the alley who barks in the night now that I know his name is Cecil.

(On the other hand, his humans responded to me staggering over to their patio in my bathrobe and saying, "Guys, it's three in the morning and your speaking voices woke me up through my second-floor window," by saying, "Oh, sorry, we'll try to talk more quietly" instead of, I don't know, "Jeez, I didn't know it was three in the morning. We'll fucking go inside and talk there." So unless Cecil can have a word with them, they're still on my eyeroll list.)

You know how sometimes at the drive-through you can look past the cashier and see notes taped to the wall? "DO NOT PUSH POP BUTTON TWICE," kind of thing?

Tonight I saw a note, taped to an industrial fridge in the kitchen area of a fast-food place, that said, "You all are the pot of gold at the end of my rainbow!"