When last we chatted, I’d just had a call about my mammogram: they wanted me to make a follow-up appointment so they could get a better look at some microcalcifications that were new since my scan a year ago. I had those scans today. If you’re curious, it was almost exactly like getting a normal mammogram, but they only did one side, and the technician said “I’m sorry, but it’s going to squeeze harder”; I don’t think I would have noticed, but it was good to be warned. And afterward, instead of getting dressed, I was sent back to the waiting room in my hospital smock (just in case the radiologist wanted more images) while the radiologist took a look at the scans.

I was glad no one asked about or remarked upon the little patch of sunburn in my cleavage. I had a fun afternoon outside with friends yesterday, and I did pretty well with the sunscreen application, but apparently missed a small portion down the front of my swimsuit. I am a little surprised the sunshine managed to get in there: I am not amply bosomed, and even the word “cleavage” is a stretch. Well, the sunshine managed, and it is a good lesson about how well sunscreen works, because the rest of me is nearly as pinkly pale as ever.

After I’d been in the waiting room for ten or fifteen minutes, the technician came back for me and brought me to the radiologist. The radiologist showed me the scans, which were pretty neat to see. First she showed me last year’s scan compared to this year’s, and sure enough: little tiny white specks on this year’s but not on last year’s. Then she showed me the close-up they did today, and mentioned some positives: the general shape of the cluster is oval, which is good; and also some other things which I have already forgotten.

She said she is 90% sure these are just calcium deposits and not cancer, but the close-up did not give her the information she would want to see in order to be completely sure, so she would like to do a biopsy. She says when she does the biopsy, she will leave behind a tiny little smidgen of titanium to mark the place, in case they need to go back in (like if the biopsy DOES show cancer or pre-cancer), or in case later they want to remember where those little microcalcifications were. It all sounded pretty cool, though of course 10% does not sound like a small chance to me. But the radiologist said if it IS cancer, we have caught it at absolutely the earliest possible stage, and she gave a little laugh that I found reassuring—like, we’d have caught it so early our timing would almost be comical. Ha ha. Ha ha.

I am trying to think of another update. OH. So, I mentioned a fun afternoon in the sun. Friends and I lounged in THESE in the water, with beverages in the cupholders:

(image from Target.com)

It’s a SwimWays Spring Float (Target link) (Amazon link). (One friend had the very similar Kelsyus one, if that’s easier to obtain where you are.) Once in a while we would paddle lazily inland and holler for one of the husbands to bring us a fresh drink. It was BLISS. I have ordered three of the loungers and may order more: I got overwhelmed by the Exactly How Many decision, but didn’t want to miss the Target sale, and knew I wanted AT LEAST three for an upcoming family vacation, so I got the sale price on THOSE anyway, and will order more after I’ve had some time to think.

This morning the mammography place returned my call, and I had to let them leave a message (one does not answer one’s cell phone when one is a library employee out in the stacks), but then I zipped to the break room and called them right back.

The nurse said that I have microcalcifications that are new since last year’s mammogram. She said they were too small to be felt during a breast exam and could only be detected with imaging. She said the radiologist would like another look at them from a different angle, and that I will need to have the new scans done at the hospital instead of at the local mammography place.

I started to look “microcalcifications” up online, because they sounded so unalarming I was certain I would be reassured; then I saw the first few search results and decided I’d rather wait for each step to occur and find out more THEN, if necessary, since there are plenty of outcomes where there is no need to have spent any time worrying about it. If necessary, I am an excellent and speedy worrier, and can easily make up the time.

Paul is still doing a lot of sighing and groaning. I already knew I was not great in the spousal role of Nurse, but I have had a new realization: I would not have been a good childbirth partner, if my spouse had been the one in labor. I would have had to find ways around this—perhaps showing support by buying gifts/treats, and encouraging the use of a doula, and then making myself available to run and fetch whatever was wanted/needed by either my spouse or the doula, or really anyone else on the maternity ward. I am pretty good at darting out to do specific tasks. I am very bad at listening sympathetically to panting and moaning, or dealing with someone making Suffering Eyes at me—EVEN IF THE PERSON IS IN FACT SUFFERING. (Though I might find myself better at it if the person making Suffering Eyes had not been doing so for every little sniffle over the past couple of decades.)

An update on the Paul/cat kidney stone situation: today, a day short of two weeks since he started feeling pain at a level that made him unable to drive, and a week after the cat had HIS surgery, Paul had a procedure done to break up the stones. (My co-worker: “He should have asked if the vet would take him!”)

I don’t know if you know this, but Paul is extremely squeamish. So he has been very conflicted: his very strong urge to get this taken care of and make the pain stop, but also his very strong urge not to go near a hospital, or near an IV, or HEAVEN FORBID near a stent. All of those things he wished to avoid have occurred. And also: the doctor told me they were only able to get one of the two large stones, and Paul will have to go back next week to get the other one taken care of. In the meantime he is peeing blood and feeling, as the nurse described it, “as if he has a UTI.” As someone who has had many, many UTIs over the years, it did briefly flit through my mind that this would give Paul an invaluable opportunity to work on empathy. (It gives me a similar opportunity for personal growth, as he keeps explaining to me that it feels like he has to pee ALL THE TIME!! and when he does pee, it HURTS!! and he can’t CONCENTRATE or SIT STILL!! And I have to work hard not to turn my head nearly upside down like an O RLY WHAT’S THAT LIKE sarcastic owl.)

Meanwhile, the cat has had a week to recover, and is doing very well and is not complaining about how frequently he needs to visit the litter box. I am still putting his cone on him at night just in case, but I suspect we are past the nightmare scenario the vet laid out for us, where he might lick his stitches open. (I am not extremely squeamish, but I did grip the countertop when she described that possibility in compellingly vivid detail.)

Paul’s doctor did not give me a cone for him, so I assume he doesn’t have to wear one.

Meanwhile, not to make this all about me (though I did already mention all my UTIs in a paragraph about someone who just had KIDNEY STONE SURGERY), but on the way home from the hospital I got a call I couldn’t take because I was driving, and I listened to the message when I got home and it was someone calling from the mammography center about the mammogram I had yesterday. They tell you at the mammogram appointment that no news is good news—which means it is not pleasant to receive news. The message was left at 4:15, and said that I should call back at my earliest convenience and that someone would be available to talk to me until 5:00. I arrived home at 4:30, and I called back at least every five minutes (approximately once a minute for the first five minutes, then every five minutes after that because I was imagining my number showing up embarrassingly on a call log) from then until 5:00, and no one ever picked up, I just got the recording; I also left a message (as instructed by the voice mail) fairly early on (I’d wondered if, like at the office of one of Edward’s specialists, the nurses really ONLY return messages), and no one returned that call.

I realize things can get unexpectedly busy. But THEY should likewise realize that when THE MAMMOGRAPHY CENTER (WHERE NO NEWS IS GOOD NEWS) calls and leaves a message, it is a CONCERNING THING. And if they choose to say in their message that they will be available to take a call until 5:00, they should BE AVAILABLE TO TAKE A CALL (or return a message) UNTIL 5:00. This wasn’t a situation where they left a message at 8:30 a.m. and I tried to get ahold of them five minutes before closing: they called me at 4:15, they said they would be available until 5:00, and they were not; so now I will spend all of tonight, and also all tomorrow morning because I have to work and can’t call them again until afternoon, wondering why they called.

I am speechless with rage and despair at yesterday’s Supreme Court overturning of Roe v. Wade. I was at work when the decision was announced, and we gathered around someone’s computer to watch as some of us lost the right to make certain crucial lifelong decisions for ourselves, and we listened as part of the crowd around the courthouse screamed in dismay and horror, and part of the crowd screamed with joy and victory, and I was glad of my Pandemic Mask because it helped partially hide/absorb my Dystopia Crying.

There are plenty of places to go and talk about that decision that resulted in the sudden loss of human rights and bodily autonomy for only a certain segment of the population. You can talk about it here in the comments section, if you want. What I am mostly doing is reposting on Twitter/Facebook what other people managed to say about it, because I can’t think what to say but other people are saying things that I wish to say too. I am also deleting (without reading) all emails from the various Democratic politicians I follow, and I sent an “Our leaders have failed us. YOU have failed us” email to my state’s congresspeople. But otherwise I don’t have anything to say; I am still in the silent internal screaming / gentle hopeless weeping stage, which feels like it started in 2016 and never stopped.

It seems stupid to do a grocery store report at a time like this, but it feels like it’s either “post about how it’s all downhill from here and let’s brace ourselves for the loss of marriage equality, contraceptives, religious choice, etc.”; or else the weird Facebook posts I’m seeing from people I know/suspect are anti-abortion-rights, and who know enough not to rejoice openly, but are posting blithe things asking what TV shows is everyone watching / it’s so hot today! / love this fresh garden produce, or whatever. In a sea of people posting about how if you like to GO CAMPING in a state that DOES NOT ALLOW CAMPING you can COME VISIT ME AND I WILL TAKE YOU CAMPING AND NEVER TALK TO ANYONE ABOUT THE CAMPING, it comes across as nauseatingly obvious that some of us feel like walking into the sea and others of us feel like it’s a beautiful day for celebrating the everlasting union of church and state. A nice mild collapsing-systems post about grocery shortages seems like it might be in the vicinity of what we might want to talk about in between sessions of inchoate shrieking: somewhat anxious, so that it’s doesn’t seem perky or oblivious, but not adding TOO much anxiety to the already overwhelming dread and despair.

I don’t know if you heard the news that sriracha sauce is suspending production. I use sriracha sauce at a slow but steady rate, and consider it pretty essential—but it’s in that category where it isn’t ACTUALLY essential, the way reproductive healthcare is essential, it’s just an emotional support food that makes me feel anxious to imagine going without. But I COULD go without, and/or I could find substitutes. But I don’t want to go without or find substitutes, I want the comfort of PLENTY OF SRIRACHA.

At such times, it is important to find balance: one does not want to HOG the sriracha so that OTHER sriracha fans cannot have THEIR sriracha, but nor does one want to run out of sriracha and regret not buying more of it when one had the chance. So, the next time I went to the grocery store after seeing those articles, I bought two bottles: that felt reasonable. And the fact that the grocery shelves were FULL of sriracha made me wonder if I had fallen for a sneaky marketing trick: perhaps this was just a clever ruse to get people to buy more sriracha! Well, it has a long shelf-life.

In the days after that purchase, I heard more and more sriracha stories, and began to feel that I had not purchased enough. This could be an EXTENDED outage! And I have tried many hot sauces, and none of them are sriracha. And so the next time I went to the grocery store, I bought two MORE bottles, feeling TRULY silly since, again, the shelves were FULL of sriracha; they even had BOTH SIZES, which is not something they always have even in normal sriracha-rich times. By the time I was unpacking the groceries at home, I felt sheepish, and thought maybe I should donate a couple of the bottles to a local food pantry. But then the NEXT time I went to the grocery store: NO SRIRACHA! None at Target, either!! And this morning when I went, again NO SRIRACHA. NO SRIRACHA ANYWHERE. THE SHELF IS FILLED IN WITH KETCHUP AND A.1. SAUCE.

So now I feel pretty happy about my bottles. If I find I am going through them more slowly than expected (the frequent news about sriracha shortages have made me crave it and I have been eating it every day, but that isn’t likely to continue), I can figure out a way to get rid of some—by giving it to a fellow sriracha lover in distress, or by donating it to the food pantry, or by putting it in some sort of fundraiser. (I did that a number of years ago when I had some Necco wafers on hand and the Necco factory had shut down production. Four rolls of Neccos raised $25 for charity! …Then Neccos resumed production.)

That was FOUR PARAGRAPHS about sriracha. (The sriracha is not a metaphor.)

Then, a few days ago, I was listening to the radio in the car and they mentioned that MUSTARD is the next anticipated shortage. Well, for heaven’s sake. Pretty soon I am going to need an entire cabinet dedicated to condiment reserves. Mustard is another of my VERY IMPORTANT THINGS (not actually important in the way the separation of church and state is important, but still feels important in its own food-accessory way). Paul makes me a sauce out of mustard, mayonnaise, creamy horseradish sauce, and sriracha, and I go through BOTTLES of it (I use it as a dipping sauce for chicken, steak, pork chops, etc.). (He deliberately makes it a little different each time so that it’ll continue to be a surprise to the palate, but if you want the basic proportions it’s like 48% regular yellow mustard, 48% mayo, and then the remaining 4% is sriracha and/or horseradish and/or spicy brown mustard and/or whatever else he thinks might be good; make sure you get the CREAMY horseradish or else the little shreds will clog up the mustard-bottle spout, assuming you mix it in an empty mustard bottle as Paul does.)

Anyway today at the grocery store I bought six bottles of mustard, and I really appreciated the clerk not remarking or asking questions. (Do you remember the time I was buying chocolate chips and the clerk didn’t know what they were? I had COMPLETELY FORGOTTEN about that until someone mentioned it recently.) I am going to buy another half-dozen bottles the next time I go, assuming there still ARE bottles to buy, because (1) like sriracha, mustard keeps indefinitely, and (2) unlike sriracha, mustard is eaten by other members of my household.

Something we haven’t seen on the news but have seen in our store: no bratwurst. Not for weeks and weeks and weeks now—and we’ve only been LOOKING for it since we started feeling like grilling, so who knows how long they were gone before then.

I put a question on one of the household whiteboards, and I thought it was a good question, but everyone else just thought they were in trouble. Which: fair enough. But that wasn’t really why I asked it, and it wasn’t meant to be rhetorical/scolding; it was meant to engage them in what I thought was an interesting discussion about the non-obvious complications of sharing a household and chores with other people.

The question was: “Household/community issue: Who should wash the birthday cake pan, when everyone ate the cake?” I am talking about a 9×13 cake pan, where you bake the cake in it and then take pieces out of it until the cake is gone—as opposed to, say, a couple of round cake pans where you remove the cake from them right away. And I am talking in this case about a cake where everyone ate some, and then everyone ate some leftovers.

Here’s why I asked: because at our house, it will not surprise you to learn it is always, always, ALWAYS me who washes the cake pan. And I don’t think that’s fair, when everyone eats the cake, and when I was the one who BAKED the cake, too.

But I was not having much luck coming up with a way it could be NOT always me, because it’s hard to come up with a POLICY. I think we could start with two policy fragments: (1) It should not be the person who baked the birthday cake. (2) It should not be the person whose birthday cake it was. But after that, I get stuck.

You COULD say that the person who eats the last piece of cake should be the one to wash the pan. Two–no THREE–problems immediately occur to me:

1. It leaves out the issue of SOAKING. I would SO much rather wash a cake pan AFTER it has been soaking for awhile. But not everyone in my household can be trusted to return to their soaking items in a timely manner.

2. More importantly, in my own household, where people do not cheerfully chip in and try to do their share but instead try to find wily ways to avoid it, what would happen is that one tiny slice would be left in the pan until it went stale, and then the question would be “Who should throw away the stale cake AND wash the cake pan?”

3. And of course, the person who ate the last slice could be the person who baked the cake, or could be the person whose birthday it was.

By this point I was fairly irritable and thinking that the real solution was to live with different people than the ones I live with. And that’s not wrong, but neither is it helpful for coming up with a policy for this current household.

The only policy I could come up with is this, and it is not as clear or concise as I would like it to be: The person who eats the last piece of cake should put the pan in the sink to soak; the next non-cake-baking/non-birthday person to be washing their own dishes should also wash the pan. This policy would work GREAT in a household of me and my clones! In my actual house it would result in a bunch of people playing chicken with their dishes: “Oh, mine are still soaking,” or “Oh, but yours were soaking first,” or “Whoops, I’m leaving for work/bed for 10 hours,” or whatever.

I am wondering what you think would be best, theoretically, and also what you think would work in your actual household.

Paul is away for most of a week. This is the first morning, and I have been nesting. I put his towel in the laundry, for a week of not finding it spread out every morning so that it damply covers the handle of the toilet until I have to shove it out of the way. I put out a new hand towel, for a week of knowing I won’t find it on the floor, or with a glob of toothpaste on it, or with dirty smears because he just rinsed his hands a little and used the towel to wipe the dirt off or because he used it to wipe up a spill. I changed the sheets, for a week of not finding his corners pulled almost all the way off every morning. I wiped his toothpaste speckles off the mirror, and will enjoy nearly a week of the shine, without feeling resentment at the immediate reappearance of speckles. I cleaned my glasses, knowing no one will spit mouthwash into the sink so vigorously that it crests over the sides and spreads across the bathroom counter and even splatters the wall and therefore also my glasses, so that when I peer at them before putting them on I can see and feel that they are sticky with someone else’s spit-out mouthwash; and without having to think about how I have painfully raised this topic, thinking it would embarrass him, and had it result in no change of behavior, even though I feel 99.9999% of humanity would agree that the over-vigorous mouthwash-spitter is the wrong one and should stop. It’s funny how much more willing I was to pick up and throw away a piece of trash on the floor, when I know another adult didn’t walk right past it earlier. It was odd how lighthearted–cheerful, even!–I felt about clearing away another adult’s dirty cup when I knew it wouldn’t be replaced with another dirty cup.

I handled Father’s Day in my new way, which is to slightly one-up what he did for Mother’s Day. This year he said “Happy Mother’s Day!,” and he offered to make dinner but on a night we were already planning on getting pizza to celebrate Rob’s graduation, and to be fair I was the one who said I didn’t want to postpone it a week and would rather just skip it. So this year I said “Happy Father’s Day!”; and I reminded the children about it a week before; and when we were running errands on Sunday I saw a bottle of lemon cream liqueur I thought he’d enjoy trying and I added it to our basket. I didn’t plan anything ahead of time; I didn’t clean his car or do any other chores I thought he’d appreciate; I didn’t ask him how he’d like to spend the day or what he wanted for dinner, because I assumed he would do/have whatever he wanted as he does every day.

No, things are not going particularly well, I do realize that. This isn’t me saying “Marriage, amirite??” as if I think everyone’s marriage is like this. Though I’m also trying to avoid acting as if having to deal with someone else’s damp towel is the equivalent of living in inhumane and insufferable circumstances.

LET’S PLEASE TALK ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE. I finished The Once and Future Witches, by Alix E. Harrow.

(image from Amazon.com)

I liked it. At some point fairly early on I thought to myself “I’ll bet this was written in the 2015-2020ish era,” and sure enough. There are themes about how non-men are treated by men/society, and about how culturally anything that gives non-men any power or equality (and/or protects non-men from what men would like to do) is spun as being bad/evil and in need of extraction/squashing. Witchcraft was power that was understood to be held by women and passed down by women, and so it made some men afraid/insecure, and when some men are afraid/insecure they get violent/angry toward the thing that made them afraid/insecure. ANYWAY IT WAS PRETTY SATISFYING TO READ. And it made me want to read more about witchcraft.

But it was longer than it should have been, in my opinion. I kept feeling a little burdened by how much of the book I still had left to read. I did really like it, and I WANTED to finish it, and I would recommend it; but I would also recommend getting it from the library, and giving yourself permission to do a little skimming.

Rob has arrived safely in Seattle, and the apartment was not a scam (aside from costing more per month for a studio/efficiency than the mortgage payment we had on our three-bedroom house, but that appears to be normal for the area). That was Wednesday night. We have not heard from him since, though he has participated in his sibling group-chat so we know from his siblings that he is alive. It is starry-eyed baffling to me that he is ACTUALLY IN SEATTLE RIGHT NOW.

Paul and I are both actively working on being cool here. We have decided that even Very Chillaxed Parents could check in after a week, so this coming Tuesday/Wednesday I will send an extremely casual email to see how things are going. I don’t want to make him feel like we’re hounding/pestering him, but I also don’t want to make him feel like we don’t care / like we forgot him. I also plan to explain that although he has grown up knowing his mother Hates The Phone, that that does not apply to her BELOVED CHILDREN, and that if he wants to talk on the phone I am ALL IN.

Instead of doing yoga videos this morning, I looked up physical-therapy knee-pain videos, and tried a few. I will keep trying the exercises for awhile to see if they help. My doctor also said a knee brace would help, but she didn’t mention any particular kind, and I searched “knee brace” and there are so so many options, from “looks like shapewear for fashionably smoothing the knee lumps” to “looks like something a hospital/AI/spacelab would install.” I am overwhelmed. Do any of you have a knee brace to recommend? My guess is that there is variety because there is a variety of needs. And without knowing why my knees hurt, it would be hard to choose/recommend a brace. If it is helpful, my doctor thinks it is osteoarthritis. I think it might also be low-tone / overly wobbly joints. My knees feel a little swoopy, a little tricksy; and all my children have been diagnosed as “low tone” and I think they get it from me (most of my joints bend farther backward than they should, as do theirs).

While I’m on the topic of asking for advice: If you have sliding glass shower doors, how do you keep them clean? I use the squeegee daily, and I scrub them periodically with a scrub-brush and various cleaning supplies, but they always look kind of cloudy/non-shining-clean to me.

School is out for summer, and the remaining kids and I are trying to decide on this summer’s project/plan. Last summer was watching musicals, and we didn’t watch anywhere near all of them, so we could continue that. But I feel like choosing a new mission. I might choose something new for myself, even if the group chooses to keep watching musicals. I am thinking I might read gossipy non-fiction about historical figures, or maybe I will read engaging travel memoirs, or maybe I will study witchcraft (more on this after I finish the book I am reading).

If you and/or your kids have read my dear friend’s new book The Art of Magic, and have not yet left a review, I hope you will do so. (It does not have to be a HIGH-QUALITY or AGONIZINGLY-WELL-THOUGHT-OUT review: apparently even “Wow!” and “Great book!” and “Loved it!” are AMPLY SUFFICIENT.) I don’t think things should work this way: it shouldn’t be “More Media Engagement/Pressure/Popularity = Better Than!!” But it seems that it IS measured that way. And so I wish to do what little I can do to assist, and one of the little things I can do is to nag people to leave reviews. And so here we are. And I thank you so much if you are willing to cooperate with this, because I know it’s a hurdle, and I pledge not to ask too many more times. (Once or twice more, and then stopping permanently, is what I have in mind. So the end is in sight.)

(image from Amazon.com)