Posted inHome life

Urgent alert for highlighting professionals

Highlighters are a big part of my life. I am utterly unable to read a non-fiction book (and I read a lot of them) without a highlighter in hand. I consider myself a highlighting professional. I’ve test driven many kinds of highlighters over the years. I’ve come to settle on what I consider to be the Porsche 911 of highlighters: the tank style Sanford liquid accent. I always have a few extra around the house to avoid a highlighting emergency. However, a big advantage of the Sanford liquid accent is that you can see how much highlighting fluid is sloshing…
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Posted inHome life Sustainability

Global warming: the big truth

Our Oregon weather is way too weird. In mid-February I shouldn’t have to water willow cuttings Laurel planted by scooping dribbles of water out of a usually full creek. In mid-February I shouldn’t have to be turning on the sprinkling system to keep our plants from drying out. In mid-February the thermometer outside our front door shouldn’t say 58.6 degrees. But all this is true. So far this month Salem has gotten .43 inches of rain instead of the normal 3.73 inches. The average high for today is 52, not the actual 59. I’ve lived in Oregon for thirty-four years.…
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Posted inHome life

Never expected to find that on a CD

“Where did this CD come from?” Laurel said a few minutes ago. “I saw it sitting next to your CD player in your hospital room,” I told her. “When I packed up your stuff I threw it into the bag.” “I’ve never seen it before. It’s not one of my Successful Surgery CDs. They’re the only ones I took to the hospital.” Ah, a mystery! The CD had no identifying information on it apart from a hospital patient property label, the same as a pre-op nurse put on Laurel’s CD player that she took into surgery with her. I began…
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Posted inHome life

Greetings from Room 2502, Legacy Emanuel Hospital

Laurel’s hysterectomy surgery today was successful, and I am happily blogging the news from her room in the Family Birth Center wing of Legacy Emanuel Hospital in Portland. Down the hall a bunch of firefighters (subtly identifiable by the “Portland Fire Dept.” on the backs of their jackets) are congratulating a woman who I initially assumed was the wife of a firefighter. Bad sexist Brian! She could, of course, be a firefighter herself. Regardless, there is a certain pleasing symmetry here. One woman is recovering from having her uterus removed from her body in Room 2502, while a few doors…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Home life

Words, actions, and Mean Kitty

Given all the guilt I expressed in my previous post about whether buying our dog a Mean Kitty toy and Valentine’s Day card was injurious to the Third World, I was happy that Serena enjoyed playing with her new friend this morning. To make myself even happier, I decided to transform my guilt into action. A donation went off to UNICEF. Now I could feel good that we were giving more to needy overseas children than to our spoiled American dog. Then I had to deal with my Third World lack of computers while I was recycling mine guilt. I…
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Posted inHome life Sustainability

Yes, Americans do give dogs Valentine’s Day cards

Dear Third World student who is using the Internet to research the question, “Do Americans really give Valentine’s Day cards to their dogs?”: I am pleased to be able to provide you with an answer. Yes. And not only a card, but also a present. Total cost: $2.99 for the card plus $5.49 for the “Mean Kitty” toy equals $8.48. If this is more than the average daily income for workers in your country, I’m sincerely sorry. Really. We Americans don’t realize how good we have it. It bothers me that our dogs have a higher standard of living than…
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Posted inHome life

Why men don’t share their feelings

“How’re you doing?” says Dennis as I walk into the Pacific Martial Arts changing room. Instead of replying with my habitual robotic “Fine, how’re you?” I have a crazy impulse to actually tell him. I’ll share my feelings! “Well, my feet have been tingling for about a week. I don’t know what’s going on. I’ve got an appointment to see a doctor tomorrow.” Without missing a beat (appropriately: Dennis is a drummer) I hear, “You’ve got a brain tumor. No doubt about it. You’re going to die.” For the rest of our hour and a half training session, whenever I…
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Posted inHome life

Not hysterical about hysterectomy

After a lot of soul-searching, Laurel has decided to have a hysterectomy. Recalling what I knew about Hippocrates, at first I thought this meant she would never get hysterical again, like she does when I fail to properly clean dirty dog paws before letting Serena into the house or neglect to rinse food residue from the bottom of the kitchen sink into the garbage disposal. But, after whacking me on the side of my head for my patriarchal ignorance, Laurel explained that it isn’t a “wandering uterus” that is creating problems, but a uterus that gives her debilitating menstrual cramps.…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Home life

A defense of Dr. Lentini

Three weeks ago I wrote about Laurel’s visit to the Salem doctor, Jerome Lentini, who has been accused by the FBI of using unauthorized drugs for Bo-tox treatments on as many as 1,000 patients.

Friday I got an email from a person who apparently worked for Dr. Lentini at one of his “A Younger You” clinics in Tigard and Salem, since her email address was ____@ayoungeryou.org. She felt that Laurel got the wrong impression of Lentini, saying he “is an ethical man who cares for his patients more than any physician I know.”

I’ll share her entire email in a continuation to this post in the interest of fair and balanced reporting.

However…Laurel still stands by her impressions, though admittedly they are from a single visit to Dr. Lentini. She felt that he was uninformed about bio-identical female hormones even though the “A Younger You” web site claimed Lentini specialized in hormone replacement and cosmetic surgery. Laurel says that he pushed Human Growth Hormone (HGH), which wasn’t at all what she was interested in.

The web site has been taken down, but a Google cache of the “A Younger You” home page still exists. There you can see Lentini’s claim that he is Board-certified by the American Board of Anti-aging Medicine.

However…a January 7 article in the Oregonian says, “Although Lentini’s Web site included assertions he is certified by the board, no such certification exists, a board spokesman said Thursday.”

Maybe Lentini really is a competent, caring, ethical doctor, as the message below claims. However, the “howevers” I’ve mentioned—combined with the core accusation of using potentially dangerous Bo-tox—raise quite a few questions that need to be answered before Dr. Lentini opens up a practice again.

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Posted inCurrent affairs Home life

Laurel escapes Botox bungler

It isn’t exactly Silence of the Lambs, but Laurel does feel fortunate that she got out of a Salem doctor’s office safe and sound. The doctor, Jerome Lentini, has been accused of using unapproved drugs for Botox treatments. When Laurel saw the front page story about Lentini in the Salem Statesman-Journal yesterday, she said “I knew he was a sleaze!” Laurel had gone to see him around Christmas not out of an interest in Botox, but because he was listed as an “anti-aging” doctor (I note he now has been removed from the listing, as he should be; the preceding…
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Posted inHome life Writing/Weblogs

I’m losing all sense of proportion

While clearing blackberries today with my new best friend, a cordless chainsaw, I thought about how I’m losing all sense of proportion. Thank heavens. I just hope I can keep going until every last bit of proportionality is lost. I feel like I’m halfway there, but the fact that my mind can spit out an expression like “halfway” shows how far I have to go. This afternoon I took a break from the blackberries to eat some lunch and get the mail. A letter had come from a book reviewer to whom I had written a plaintive query: “Why haven’t…
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Posted inHome life

2004 Hinesland Christmas letter

This year we made a major announcement in our Christmas letter: we’ve declared our psychic independence from the United States of America. Now that we have a full ten acres of south Salem land to establish our Hinesland realm on, the post-November 2 world we found ourselves in begged for an enclave where truly wise environmental, cultural, and spiritual values—namely, our own—could be practiced. The full story of Hinesland, or at least as much as can be conveyed in a single page, is in our 2004 Christmas letter. Most of these were mailed out today to those on our Christmas…
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We embrace artificiality

Artificial or real? We are not the only ones to struggle with this question. Pamela Anderson has bounced back and forth, so to speak, in her own answers. But Laurel and I are happy that we’ve stuck with our artificial choice, the 10 foot tree that has graced our living room for three Christmases. It was difficult for us to make the break from the previously-alive Noble Firs we used to buy from a South Salem lot. Now, we’re happy that we did. If you’ve been considering making the switch to an artificial tree, perhaps the case study that I…
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Posted inHome life

We get heavy into Christmas

Something possessed us to head off to the “Holiday Market” at the State Fairgrounds this afternoon. I was deathly afraid that this event would be akin to a Greens Show, which I’ve worked hard at avoiding my entire life. But Laurel assured me that it was sponsored by the Salem Saturday Market—so likely would be more artsy-craftsy than cutesy-decorationsy. Actually it was a bit of each. We wandered around in our usual holiday spirit. Meaning, each of us looked for stuff that we wanted for ourselves. We do give some gifts to other people, but we also believe in the…
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Posted inHome life

Give me liberty or give me gerbil

It’s fortunate that Patrick Henry didn’t have the same attitude toward death as I do. Or, as I did. For yesterday’s visit to our attorney showed that I’ve become more accepting of my own death—or, as I used to call it, my own gerbil—than was the case eleven years ago. Laurel and I needed to update our living wills and directives to physicians that express how you want to be treated at the end of life when hope is gone. This also was a chance to check on the status of some living trusts we barely understood that we had…
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Posted inHome life Philosophy

For want of a zipper, an hour was lost

I’ve always enjoyed the familiar fable that begins with “For want of a nail the shoe was lost” and ends, after the horse is lost for want of a shoe, and the rider is lost for want of a horse, and the battle is lost for want of a rider, with the loss of a whole damn kingdom. Nail. Kingdom. One so slight, the other so tremendous. What sort of connection could exist between them that causes a single small horseshoe nail to have the power to overthrow a vast kingdom? Science would call it chaos theory or non-linear relationships,…
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Posted inHome life

“Playbuck” press release: What do does really want?

For immediate release by Playbuck magazine “Where all our girls are buck-naked and doe-eyed” Playbuck magazine, the leading voice for male deer, is pleased to report the results of recent in-depth research into the all-important question for our readers, what do does really want? Interviews were conducted with a random sample of 462 female deer, all of mating age. They were asked what turns them on, and what doesn’t. Surprisingly, 86% of these tawny beauties said that they like their bucks to sport some macho antler velvet in the fall let’s-get-it-on season. “I can’t stand the clean antler look,” said…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Home life

We’re coping in our own ways

Everything changed post-November 2. The world is different now. Much scarier. But as Mark Morford says it so well in his inimitable style, the Neo-Con and Christian Right terrorists win if we moderates and liberals don’t go about our lives with energetic confident abandon. Just because the nation’s Moron/Genius Bell Curve had a marked deviation from normal on election day doesn’t mean that those who voted for Kerry have to be affected by the idiocy of a majority of voters. So Laurel and I are successfully coping in our own ways, after a few days of post-election did-that-really-happen? attempted withdrawal…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Home life

Can’t believe I canvassed for Kerry

After I made my commitment to motionlessness with Move On PAC phone canvassing, I can’t believe that Laurel was able to drag me out Saturday morning to do door-to-door canvassing for the Democratic Party’s Carry Oregon campaign. But here’s the proof, sort of. Laurel is barely visible on the far right, and I’m hidden behind the camera, per usual. We were instructed to meet at a south Salem school at 10:00 am to get our marching orders from the party organizer in the middle of the photo. She tried to hand both Laurel and me a clipboard, meaning that we’d…
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Posted inHome life

Well, that was fun

Getting there right on time and then waiting for three hours. Uncomfortable chairs. Having to fill out forms that ask personal questions. Outdated reading material. Other people being called while you sit…and sit…and sit. Why, I found that jury duty is just like going to the doctor. Except you go to the doctor because you have a problem that needs to be fixed. With jury duty, the problem is that you are there and you want to be somewhere else. At least, this seemed to be the case with all of my fellow jury duty selectees this morning, and it…
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