The Allergy Medication Experiment

For years, I have battled seasonal allergies by taking allergy medication at least once a day every day like clockwork at 9 pm because if it’s green and produces pollen I’m allergic to it but I love to be outside when the weather is nice. Last September my doctor told me to try taking 2 Claritin a day instead of one, because I wasn’t getting much relief. In February, my best friend and I were talking and she’d given her seasonal allergy meds the heave ho and stopped taking them and really hadn’t noticed much of a change. So in March, I decided to do the same thing.

It’s been a month and tree pollen has been moderate or high for most of it… and I haven’t noticed a difference in my allergy symptoms. They aren’t worse than last year nor are they better… I feel absolutely no different on them than I do off them and I have literally tried every type (including formulated injections from an allergist) and brand available. Now, the first day the tree pollen was high, I had a small sinus infection so that afternoon I took a dose of Benadryl and took a nap and when I awoke the headache was greatly diminished… and I usually have to take Benadryl when I have a severe sinus headache anyway because I battle migraine induced insomnia and Benadryl is a great help for that. Now, J says I’m snoring a little louder, but since we sleep in different bedrooms most of the time anyway, I don’t see that as a problem. I’ve snored like a grizzly bear since I broke my nose when I was fourteen (and realistically with as awful as my sinuses are anyway I was ]destined to snore like a grizzly bear or worse).

Since evergreen tree pollen is my second worst allergy (cat dander triggers asthma in me if I’m around a lot of it or if my exposure is prolonged), I think I’ll continue allergy medication free all year and compare the notes of this year to previous years and see if the allergy medication was actually working for me (at the moment I’m leaning towards it didn’t).

For the record, I’m still firmly on the side of “better living through chemicals” when it’s appropriate. For example, I’m not going to stop carrying an Epi Pen for accidental shell fish protein exposure, or an inhaler for those times when I can’t escape cat dander. But I also admit, I’ve wonder for a long time if seasonal allergy medication works as well as it claims or should, because it doesn’t seem to work very well for me. I do have friends who it works great for. My matron of honor at my wedding is one of these, if she doesn’t take her seasonal allergy meds every day she walks around with a stuffy nose all the time. But on the occasions I’ve forgotten to take my allergy meds, I haven’t noticed a difference the next day.

I’ll try to remember to write a post this fall about the results of stopping my OTC allergy medications and let everyone know my conclusions.

DIY & Birding

Like clockwork, once the weather starts warming up and we shove winter out the door, I take time to write a blog post about birds. Because like migrating birds, I have moved out of my office to enjoy writing in the fresh air. As I write this it is 8 am on Sunday and I am outside because we are 17 degrees Fahrenheit above the average for this time. When I woke up at 6:56 am it was already 63 degrees and the high is expected to be 85.

In late summer or early autumn of last year, I downloaded a new bird identification app called Merlin Bird ID. It’s free and I highly recommend it to any bird lovers out there. My favorite feature is the Sound ID. Stepping out of my house bright and early, there was a cacophony of birds already chirping, singing, and carrying on. I turned on Sound ID and just let it run. It quickly began filling up with different bird identifications: Eastern Meadowlark, American Robin, Blue Jay, House Sparrow, House Finch, Hairy Woodpecker, European Starling, Red-Bellied Woodpecker, and on and on it went. When I finally hit stop on the recording I had 22 total bird species and I realized I didn’t know my small brown birds as well as I thought I did because Chipping Sparrow, Field Sparrow, House Wren, and Carolina Wren were all identified species.

Now I had a half dozen small brown birds hanging out at my bird feeders at the time and I’d figured they were all house sparrows (who nest in my gutters since the Starlings tore out the gutter guards in 2022) in various life stages. Then one of them started to make noise and I quickly started a new recording: Chipping Sparrow. Another bird let out a squawk and House Wren popped up on my list. I’ve decided tomorrow morning, I’ll try to familiarize myself a little better with “small brown song birds” and try to separate them out of the “house sparrows of various sizes and life stages” category.

I’ve gotten in the habit of when looking at the Audubon app while using Sound ID in Merlin. I have a passable knowledge of my song birds, but once in a while one will pop up and I’ll be like “uh, what is that?” This morning it was an Eastern Kingbird. I pulled it up on Audubon and realized the strange black bird that I’d assumed was a Red Wing Blackbird (it was probably 300 feet from me in a tree and all I could really see was that it was a bird and black) was probably the Eastern Kingbird because it moved it’s head in time to the calls Merlin was picking up.

Of course there are definite times when I can hear the bird but not see it when Merlin identifies it. This is particular true of the Eastern Meadowlark. I’ve learned to identify a few of it’s calls using the app and as a result, I hear it often, but I’ve only ever seen it once and I was the car and it flew across the road in front of me as we traveled along the rural highway next to our house. But the spot where I saw it is close enough to me I’m sure it’s the same bird.

I don’t think identifying birds by their calls will ever serve a practical purpose in my life, but it’s been interesting. This morning I realized the strange high pitched trilling I occasionally hear is a Red-Bellied Woodpecker. I also have a Northern Mockingbird which must nest close by, because I hear it often, but I’ve never seen it (or if I have I didn’t know what it was) and it like the meadowlark and Red-Bellied Woodpecker make some very distinct noises.

I also know the app on occasion makes mistakes. For instance yesterday while I was outside I watched a Blue Jay standing on my fence make quite the racket. Merlin brought up Blue Jay first and then brought up American Crow. Jays are members of the crow family, but I didn’t hear or see a crow. Then again Blue Jays are loud and noisy, so I guess it’s possible Merlin did hear a crow and I didn’t because the Blue Jay had my complete focus with his commotion.

I’m once again considering making my own suet cakes. I have three suet feeders and the woodpeckers will go through a block a day at each feeder if I keep them refilled. Now, I don’t get just woodpeckers at the feeders, sparrows, finches, Cardinals, Blue Jays, and Starlings also like the woodpecker suet. But at 3 blocks of suet a day, it gets expensive very fast (even buying in bulk) and I feel if I made my own it would be a lot cheaper. I’ve tried a few different recipes and none of them have turned out very well. They melted in the feeders and eventually the ground birds like the Mourning Doves got all of it. Also the woodpeckers didn’t seem to like it much.

The side effect of feeding all these birds is that my fence line, where my bird feeders are set up, tends to grow corn and milo every year. One of the first years I put out feeders I had a cluster of seventeen milo plants that came up under one the largest tray feeder. Two years ago I had a huge corn stalk that grew on the outside of the fence for a while (it’s chain link) and then about half way up, it came through the fence and continued growing. J cut the stalk at the base and we still had a fight getting the stalk out of it’s laced up configuration through the fence. As I type these last sentences a Brown-Headed Cowbird has shown up at my feeder and chased off all the starlings, which is nice of him. I hate the starlings. They are destructive (see comment about gutter guards) and bossy. They will chase away the smaller song birds like the black-capped chickadees, finches, and tufted titmouse(s). The sparrows ignore there bullying, but I dislike the house sparrows too since they are nesting in my gutters. So when a bird shows up that can chase the starlings off, it’s always a good thing. usually it’s catbirds, they are merciless when fighting with the starlings. But the cowbirds will also go after them.

For the record, I am working on books. One I’m hoping to make a new series called Crime Stories of Stranger County (CSoSC). I haven’t decided if the other will be a stand alone or not. I’m hoping to get a D&R book published this summer and I have a Nephilim Narrative finished and waiting.

Complications & More Complications

April 10th, I took my mom to the hospital at 4:30 am for surgery. The plan was to place the PD catheter we had to remove in January after she developed a peritoneal infection caused by removing her appendix (she also had her gallbladder taken out at the same time due to symptoms of gallbladder dysfunction). The surgery started at 6:50 am and at 8:10 am I was told the surgeon needed to talk to me. Uh… that’s bad. It hasn’t been nearly long enough for them to be done yet.

Sure enough, there was a complication. When the surgeon made the first incision, stomach acid dribbled out. Except there’s nothing that close to the abdominal wall to leak stomach acid… So uh oh. And the surgeon asked another surgeon to come in an consult, because that’s weird. It turns out when my mom’s incision wounds from her gallbladder removal began healing, tissue grew around the duodenum (the tube that leads from the stomach to the intestines), pulling the flexible meat tube against the abdominal wall and holding it in place there. There were two options: we had to cut the tissue holding the duodenum, but I could also choose to go ahead with the PD catheter insertion, but considering they’d just nicked the tube going from her stomach and intestines, there was a higher risk of developing an infection as the PD catheter healed. Or we could wait and place the catheter in a month. Also, he added, she has minimal scarring from the previous surgeries and the infection. He didn’t anticipate any problems with PD in the future as a result. And then he called her a super healer. And I had a choice to make, sort of.

I’m not going to do something which will increase the risk of infection. We’ll wait and do it in a month and today, just free the duodenum. They’d already done that and just wanted to know if they should go ahead and place the PD catheter. And no, we’ll wait on that. So they closed her up and she was done. The surgeon told me, he had decided to keep her overnight for observation, because there are a significant bundle of blood vessels in the duodenum and since he’d cut it by accident. They wanted to observe her to ensure the stitches held and she didn’t eat any solid food for 24 hours. I was told it would 1:30 or 2 before I could see her, so I came home for a few hours.

Friday rolls around and it’s almost 2 pm and they still haven’t discharged her. I call and ask the nurse why and she tells me my mom’s white blood cell count is slightly elevated and the doctor was concerned about it. I get that, she did have a massive infection 3 months ago. Interestingly, the day after she finished the oral antibiotics in February from her hospitalization for that infection in January, her white cell count was slightly elevated. Friday night, I went back through all her monthly blood work from dialysis for the past year… sure enough, it’s been “slightly elevated” every month. According to the sheet, average is 5,000-11,000 for an adult. Hers was in the 12,000-14,000 range every month.

And that triggered a memory for some blood work I had done once. Now, I’ve been keeping a “migraine journal” since I was 10 years old and I had several notebooks of health information when computers became a thing. Eventually I digitized that journal and keep the file which starts in August 1990. The first 5 years are entries related to migraines only, it records foods eaten, amount of sleep, general overall feeling and then any migraine auras or other migraine related information. But around 1996, I began to include all health information I had access to. I decided to go back through it and in 2002, I saw my primary care physician for swelling and pain in my right arm, wrist, and hand. He theorized it was something autoimmune, especially since I was struggling with symptoms of Chagrin’s Syndrome (an autoimmune disorder which causes excessive dryness to the mucus membranes because the immune system attacks them – dry eyes, dry mouth, dry skin, dry nasal passages, dry … well you get the picture). My entry says my white cell count was 13,900 and I was sent to a rheumatologist. She did more blood work and my white cell count was 14,200 when those came back, but I was negative for all the autoimmune disease… even Chagrin’s. Except a different rheumatologist had already diagnosed that one, so what? She did the test again and still negative and my white cell count was still very high. She decided to put me on 14 days of antibiotics. After finishing them, my white cell count was still over 13,000 and yes, I had all the symptoms of Chagrin’s and she would have bet money that test was going to come back positive each time and it didn’t… but there was no other cause found for the exceptionally dry mucus membranes either. It was listed as Chagrin’s like and she told me to just tell people I had it, because something weird was going on and she couldn’t explain it. Just like she couldn’t explain why my white cell count wasn’t just on the higher side of average but well above it…

In 2003, while at work, I ripped open my palm on a piece of twisted metal while trying to move a desk. My boss, a doctor, took me to the ER because it said it was deep enough I needed stitches. At the ER, the doctor told us it couldn’t have been that bad, because not only was it completely clotted, the scab was firm. My boss insisted he had seen the muscles in my palm and it needed stitches. My boss told the other doctor he had no idea how the cut sealed itself, it shouldn’t have. The ER doctor decided to test my clotting factor (hint: it’s high) and then he and my boss picked off the scab to check out the cut. And possibly just because they wanted to watch it bleed (they did numb my hand first). The ER doctor agreed it was deep and I needed stitches. Five stitches were put in and I was sent home with instructions not to use the hand much because given the location, I could easily damage the stitches. It healed and the large noticeable scar never appeared. 20 years later, I can see the spot where the cut was and the stitches, but only if I look for it. Part of this is because it’s on my palm and that skin regenerates fairly often. But I don’t have a lot of scars in general. Not from my surgeries, not from my multitude of clumsy injuries… I heal well and I heal fast. And now I know my mom does as well.

I’ve also learned she has a high clotting factor. Leaving me to wonder if the combination of an above average number of white cells coupled with the high clotting factor (I’ve had 2 cuts which needed stitches, scab over by the time I got to the ER) makes us “super healers.” If so, it’s nice to know my immune system is good for something, since my B cells don’t seem to remember previous illnesses and allow me to fight them off quickly and effectively.

Oh The Peaches You Will Have

In 2018 for J’s birthday I ordered two White Lady Peach Trees because he loves peaches and said he considered planting a peach tree. I bought 4 year old trees because I knew he’d start getting peaches pretty soon after planting them (a couple of years compared to 6-8 years). I picked White Lady peaches because they are sweet and have very little exterior fuzz (they feel more like nectarines than fuzzy peaches). Neither me nor my mom like peach fuzz and my mom actually skins her peaches before eating them.

One peach tree struggled to grow and it’s stunted and small and has never flowered. The other one is about 12 feet tall and we’ve been getting peaches off it the last 3 (maybe 4) years. Last year, despite the drought the peaches were ripening so fast we were picking them every day and they were still rotting on the tree.

This year both trees are going to flower. Now, most plants are self pollinating which is why even if you only have one, you’ll get fruit. But if you talk to a botanist, you’ll learn harvests are bigger if you have multiples and they can cross pollinate. Last year I canned 14 quarts and a handful of pints of peaches, as well as using them in recipes. Except I don’t like cooked peaches, which limits how many I can use before they go bad even if I’m canning them. (This year I’m going to try making a peach glaze for use on smoked pork – I don’t eat much pork because it’s bland and cured pork can trigger migraines and since I can’t eat BBQ sauce for some reason without it doing terrible things to my digestive system in general, it’s hard to find stuff to put on pork that isn’t just dry seasoning, which can be gritty and gross in high quantities.

But even then, I’d estimate we had 500 peaches per harvest, most of which didn’t get picked because I would get tired of picking peaches and prepping them for canning. If I’m correct and both trees flower, I estimate we’ll have a few hundred on the smaller tree and way over 1,000 on the bigger one. If we pick peaches in the morning and in the evening, I expect to spend most of my day canning peaches or finding recipes to put them in. As a result, I’m gathering an army: “Do you like peaches? You do! Fantastic! When our peach trees start bearing fruit in July, please come pick peaches to take home…” We picked more than 50 peaches a day for over 2 weeks last year and as I said I let a lot of them fall off the tree to rot on the ground or just let them rot on the tree.

I will say, I bought them for the low fuzz, but they are amazing peaches. I think they are my favorite type of peach. The meat is white and exceptionally sweet, sweeter than any other type of peach I’ve had. Unfortunately, cooking them makes them slimy like all other peach types, which is why I don’t like cooked peaches… but everything else about them is great. I’m not sure why it’s not a more popular variety of peach, but even looking at the prices of the new trees the other day, they were priced lower than the others and I’m betting it’s because demand for them is low.

Cell Phone Pet Peeve

In 1996, my parents got cell phones for the first time because my father (never content with just one job) had taken up delivering a commercial paper route requiring him to be out and about between the hours of 1 am and 5 am. When I started driving, I was also given one and since then there has been 1 phrase I have heard more than any other and even 20+ years after it was said to me for the first time it still annoys me.

Friday after picking my mom up from hemodialysis I settled down to work. J had plans for the weekend, which didn’t include me and would allow me to work most of the weekend on turning the Dysfunctional Chronicles into Audiobooks using Audible’s new Virtual Voice system. I get started and my phone rings. It’s the oldest nephew and he rarely calls, we are texters unless it’s urgent. So I answer the phone and instead of saying “hi” or “ahoy” or any other greeting he says:

“Where’s Oma, she didn’t answer her phone when I called.”

And there it is! Since 1996 nearly half of the phone calls my father made to me were “Where’s your mother, she didn’t answer her phone.” I even have a saved voicemail from my father where he called, got my voicemail and said “Don’t call me back, I was looking for your mother, she didn’t answer her phone.” And in the last 15 years, my other family members have taken up the habit.

Before you point out, it’s natural they call and ask me since we live together… I get that, but I know sometimes my mom doesn’t answer their calls simply because she doesn’t want to talk on the phone or she’s busy or she’s intentionally ignoring that person. Also, despite us living together there are days I only see my mom for a total of 3 hours or so during an entire day. I rarely know where she is in the house or what she’s doing. Meaning calling me does 2 things: circumvents whatever reason she had for not answering her phone and disrupts me because I have to go find her.

Therefore, this question, no matter how it’s worded or who asks it, irritates me. I’ve been rude a few times and flat out said “If she didn’t answer maybe it’s because she doesn’t want to talk to you. I’m not going to go find her.” I’d do it more often, but that usually leads to a long annoying debate and would have been both faster and less disruptive if I’d just gone and found my mom and told her to call whoever it was who’d called me.

My second pet peeve about cell phones: On March 3, I attended Kilian’s fourth birthday party. I had my phone sitting on a table (I’d been playing a game on it) and Kilian picked it up and brought it the three feet to me because “I’d lost it.” At some point between me sitting it down, walking about 4 feet from it, and Kilian picking it up and bringing it to me I got a text message – I know because I have a 1 on my messages icon. However, I’ve been searching since March 4th for that unread message and I can’t find the damn thing. My screen didn’t darken in the 2 minutes between sitting it down and Kilian picking it up, but I can’t imagine what he did to “hide” the actual message and prevent me from reading it. On the Monday after the party, I kept thinking “well someone will text me again and I’ll find it then.” Except that hasn’t happened, so I have no idea who texted me or what they texted me about. I just know the 1 remains on the messages icon on my phone.

It’s not even like he deleted it, because if he had the 1 would have gone away. If Apple wants to make a useful iPhone feature, they need to release a way to sort text messages into “Unread” or “Read” like you can do with email.

So, the last week, I’ve been working on making audiobooks of The Dysfunctional Chronicles. I’ve listened to an audiobook generated using the AI Virtual Voices option and they can still be quite good, but it takes work. There are parts which need to be sped up or slowed down. And then there’s picking the correct voice for the book. Unfortunately, it won’t yet allow me to change the pitch of the voice, which would be a nice feature. I decided to do Dysfunctional because it’s a novella series and I think the shorter book is better for Virtual Voices. I’m hoping to have The Dysfunctional Affair available for purchase before the end of April. The other nice thing is the audiobooks can be priced lower than a regular audiobook because I’m not having to pay a narrator a couple thousand bucks per recorded hour.

Reddit

Sometimes, I pop onto Reddit to look around for a little while. I usually don’t stay long because it freaks me out. It might also prove as a species we are devolving. I say this because there are some exceptionally dumb things posted on Reddit and if they are real, we are doomed. And I couldn’t help but ad some commentary. Most of them are about anatomy in one form or another. Have we stopped teaching kids about the human body completely?

1. Young girls shouldn’t cut their hair, because it stops growing when they reach 30 and then they are stuck with short hair for the rest of their lives. (This person needs to have a real conversation with their mother, because at 43 years old, my hair is still growing. Also, do they believe it’s just head hair that stops growing at 30 or is body hair included, because maybe they are just confused about the age and hair thing, I know my mom’s body hair has basically stopped and I have a friend who no longer has much eyebrow hair as a result of age…)
2. White bread comes from bleached wheat and the bleach removes toxins in the flour which is why we are living longer. [Uh, what? If you drop a batch of wheat seeds in bleach before planting there’s a good chance they won’t germinate, also what toxins does this poster think exists in flour that is removed during the modern bleaching process? I say modern because in the middle ages, storing wheat flour sometimes lead to bleaching of the flour, making it whiter than the rest of the flour although nowhere near as white as white flour you buy in the store today. This is the only time I’ve seen someone proclaim white bread is healthier than wheat and it’s weird. Finally, I feel like people should be taught about modern food. Before Christmas, I had a seriously stupid conversation with my oldest nephew about brisket – now my parents used to butcher a cow and a hog every year for the family when my nephew was young, because in the long run it’s cheaper, and I couldn’t believe he didn’t know I got a brisket with the cow J and I butcher every year.]
3. The G-Spot on a woman is actually a miniature prostate. [!!! Uh, according to my anatomy classes no one has ever discovered a prostate in a woman, not even a miniature one.]
4. Only women have pelvises. [I’m not sure if the poster needed a definition for pelvis or what, but it’s obviously wrong. Men and women both have pelvises, because the pelvis is a structurally important part of the human body and not just for childbirth. I learned about the human pelvis in 7th grade health class due to it’s role in making humans bipedal – the pelvis stabilizes and distributes the weight of the upper body and keeps us from falling forward to walk on all four limbs like dogs and deer. If men didn’t have pelvises, they would need to walk on their hands and feet.]
5. Men do not produce estrogen, which is why they aren’t irrational. [Interestingly, the testes actually do produce estrogen in men. And because estrogen and testosterone are important to all humans, they are not gender specific hormones and the body makes and stores both of them, and research has shown some men have higher natural levels of estrogen than some women. And estrogen does not make women irrational, I know plenty of rational women, if hormones are to be blamed for mood swings, we need to blame progesterone, but the male body also makes it…]
6. Autoimmune disorders are created when people drink blood, because during the digestion process our immune system attacks the red blood cells in our stomach, so if we drink enough blood, our immune system begins attacking our own blood. [Are we talking about “drinking” our own blood like when we cut our fingers or drinking someone else’s blood from a glass? Not all autoimmune disorders involve our immune system attacking our own red blood cells, it can attack nerves, muscles, organs… and I know lots of people who have shoved a cut finger into their mouth, but even in my goth days in the 1990s, I’ve never seen a person drink blood from a glass except in movies, and most of the people I know do not have an autoimmune disorder, including myself…]
7. If a man touches menstrual blood, the toxins in it will poison him. [I have questions: what toxins does the poster think exists in menstrual blood since it doesn’t poison women? Why doesn’t it poison embryos genetically destined to be male fetuses? Why isn’t “poisoned by menstrual blood” a more common cause of death for men – especially fathers with multiple daughters? (I have a friend who has 5 daughters all less than 2 years apart, meaning they were all teenagers at the same time and there were mishaps over the years such as blood on the toilet seat and used feminine hygiene products falling out of the trash, so I would expect him to have died of poisoning by menstrual blood by now. The blood on the seat was part of a discussion about raising/putting down the toilet seat.)
8. Women should not eat bread if they are trying to get pregnant. [Why? I need more information, because since the beginning of civilization women have been eating bread at all stages of life and there’s 8 billion people on the planet, so what evidence do you have that eating bread decreases fertility?]
9. Once you’ve been exposed to a virus once, you’re immune to it forever. [This is actually partially true, so I almost didn’t include it for example measles and chickenpox are both viruses that most people only have once because they gain immunity to it… and then I read the comments and found the poster had responded to a comment about the viruses which cause the common cold with this: (colditis is responsible for the common cold and a person can only have it once, if a person claims they have a cold after being a kid and exposed to colditis, they are lying to get sympathy…) I have never heard of colditis or any virus which ends in -itis because it is more commonly used to denote a disease such as colitis and pancreatitis. Furthermore, I don’t know how many different viruses cause a runny nose, small fever, cough, sore throat, and sinus pressure/headache, but it’s a lot and these collective viruses are responsible for what we call “the common cold.” It’s possible some of them are indeed viruses we only get once and then have immunity to for the rest of our lives, but there are so many of them, it’s impossible to catalogue all of them let alone prove we are immune to them.
10. Finally: eating too many green vegetables, will cause liver failure because the stuff in the plant which makes them green is toxic and the job of the liver is too remove it. That’s why people turn yellow when they have liver failure, it’s a build up of the green stuff in the blood because the liver isn’t cleaning it out. [What!? First off the “green stuff” is called chlorophyll and it’s not toxic to people in any quantity. I know some vegetarians who eat a lot of green vegetables and they aren’t having liver issues. Hell, I eat a lot of green vegetables and I’m not having liver issues. And if memory serves me correctly, all parts of the plant contain chlorophyll, there’s just more of it in the green parts or there are lower amounts of other chemicals/proteins which mask the chlorophyll.]

I get the debate over teaching kids about sex, but this shouldn’t preclude teaching them about the human body in general. Because some of these are just…. wow. For example, the poster talking about the pelvis was male… if he should ever break the pubic bone or injury his pelvis in some other way, is he going to argue with the doctor that he doesn’t have one? Or the female who is convinced drinking blood causes autoimmune disorders, what will she do if she’s ever diagnosed with lupus or fibromyalgia, because as a female she has a higher chance of developing one than a man. Or the male who didn’t believe we could catch a cold more than once… What will he think if he has children and his toddler experiences one cold after another because children appear to constantly pass rhinoviruses between their group of playmates over and over again.

The Extreme Bake Sale

My in-laws own a campground in northern Missouri. They built it to be small and leave plenty of space for activities, instead of creating space for campers on all 10 acres. I believe their are 12 full hook up spaces for campers along with a shelter house. Most of the spaces are rented on an annual basis.

A handful of years ago, a tornado ripped through the area, causing serious damage to several campers and the shelter house, because we do live in Missouri which is considered part of Tornado Alley. We’ve discussed building an underground storm shelter, but it’s going to be expensive so it’s remained talk.

After the week’s devastating storms across the plains and Midwest, one of the people who rents a camper spot sent my mother-in-law a message suggesting we have a bake sale to raise the money to build a storm shelter. Now in our discussions, we’ve figured out building a large enough underground storm shelter will cost around $30,000. If everyone is at the campground on a weekend we have a tornado, we will need to accommodate up to 30 people (people have kids, friends, grandkids, etc up for weekends often, so it’s not like we only need to have space for the occupants of the rented spots which would still be around 20 people) and several pet dogs. Meaning a prefabricated shelter isn’t an option because neither the underground or above ground options will fit that many living beings. This means we would need to build a basement or cellar without a building over it. Allowing a square foot of space for all the living beings (FYI this is an uncomfortably small amount of space) per person it would need to be 35 feet by 35 feet. A more comfortable accommodation would be a cellar of 70 feet by 70 feet. And would give us space for more people, in the event several groups of kids/grandkids/friends were visiting with multiple renters plus all the pets (Jason and I have 2 dogs, my MIL has 4, at least one renter has 3 dogs they travel with)… Making it a standard height of 7 feet tall, we’d need to set up forms for the floor, all 4 basement walls, and the concrete ceiling. Forms require a lot of lumber, plus the cost of concrete, plus rebar to reinforce the concrete especially in the ceiling, and while J has done some concrete work over the years, he’s never done concrete work on a basement (he’s done flat slabs on the ground)… and he’s 1 person, so we’d need to hire a company to build this cellar. On a side note, I’ve always been told building a house with a basement nearly doubles the construction costs…

We would need to have an extreme bake sale to cover the costs of building this shelter. Even if each spot owner donated to the bake sale, that would be 12 groups of donations… which might bring in a few thousand dollars, but no where near the $30,000 we’d need. Admittedly with that few thousand, my MIL might be able to buy and install a prefabricated shelter, but it’s only going to fit her and her dogs… everyone else is out of luck. I don’t know how many cakes/pies/rice krispy treats/cookies/cupcakes/muffins/loaves of bread we’d need to bake for this sale but I think it would need to be held every weekend from 7 am to 7 pm each day with fresh goods for at least 26 weekends… I’m not sure where we are going to get all the customers in need of baked goods though because while we are surrounded by other campgrounds, they are like ours, small… 4-12 spots per campground.

Realistically, we would be better off to pool the money we’d use on ingredients and put that towards the construction costs of the shelter. Once when I was a kid, the church I attended did a bake sale in which people could pre-order specific types of cakes/pies/cookies and then sold random baked goods at a open house/carnival style gathering for non-members of the church. The following weekend the pastor congratulated everyone because it raised about $1,800 and almost 40 years later, I’m still impressed by the amount because it seems like a lot (also it was the 1980s and $1,800 was a lot more money back then). And the day of the festival style gathering for non-members, I remember there being individual slices of pie and cake available to buy and if you can parcel out a cake or pie and sell it by the slice it usually makes more money than just selling an entire cake. So if we sold cupcakes and pie slices, we’d probably need to sell 10,000 “pieces” at $3 each, might be better than selling 3000 cakes at $10 a cake… but of course that brings up the question of where are all these customers coming from? On average, I think 50 people a day drive past our campground… I don’t know what percentage of these people would want baked goods, but I suspect it’s less than 50%. So if 20 people a day were willing to stop and buy one of our baked goods and we needed to sell 3,000 of them we’d need to sell baked goods for 1,500 days to earn the $30,000 we need. Of course, if we did it only on weekends (we’ll go with Friday/Saturday/Sunday) that requires us to do this every weekend for 125 weeks… Figure the campground is active for really only 6 months out of the year (April – October), to get those 125 weeks would probably take 4.5 years. Now, on the plus side the area is much busier on the holiday weekends: Memorial Day, 4th of July, and Labor Day meaning on those weekends we might sell baked goods to 40-50 people a day.

Basically to pull this off, we’d need to have an extreme bake sale including advertising and offering a variety of items and flavors and it would need to be prolonged, turning the campground into a volunteer stocked bakery which would most likely require a license and permit…

Sick

Yesterday, I spiked a fever of 101.3… and I began to cough really really hard. Except those aren’t symptoms of a sinus infection.

My mom had a doctor’s appointment to follow up with our primary care physician after her hospital stay in January. Despite the fever I donned a mask and went with her because my mom no longer tells the doctors what’s going on or me what they say afterwards. At the end of the appointment the doctor asked my mom if there was anything else she needed. My mom without missing a beat said “find out what’s wrong with her” while pointing at me and then explained I was her care giver and I couldn’t do that while sick with a fever and cough.

And to my shock, the doctor decided to check me out. I have a loud crackling wheeze in my lungs, the forceful terrible cough which has lead to some leaking (for the record, as a woman who never had children I didn’t expect to suffer cough incontinence at any point during my life, but…), a fever, headache, sinus congestion, and some spots on my face where my sinus passages are hurt when touched.

I was written a prescription for an inhaler and prednisone and then sent to the lab to get a COVID, Influenza, and RSV test. I despise these tests because I hate having things up my nose.

For the first time in 2 decades I didn’t get my influenza vaccine, because every time I tried I had a case of “the sniffles.” Usually I get it after Thanksgiving but before December 1st. This year I had bronchitis during that time frame and I had the cough/sniffles for several weeks into December, preventing me from getting my flu jab. And then at the end of December I was busy trying to care for my mom who had begun to vomit every time she ate due to gallbladder issues and then she got the peritoneal infection and I developed a small cold, probably due to stress.

Essentially, I expect my influenza test to come back positive since I didn’t get vaccinated this year.

Anniversary, Plague, & Pollen

This weekend was Jason and I’s 7 year wedding anniversary. I didn’t realize there was a “material” for every year of marriage, I thought it was for only milestone anniversaries: 1 year, 5 year, 10 year, etc. For year 7 it’s copper & wool, which is weird and makes me think I should have gotten a box of SOS pads to celebrate… although I guess that’s steel, not copper.

In Bubonic Plague news, there’s a case in Oregon… Now, if you’ve been reading my blog for very long you’ll be aware there are between 5 and 20 cases of Bubonic Plague in the United States every year. There are oddly 2 “hot zones” for plague in the US; spot one is Arizona and Nevada and the other is in the Oregon/Washington area. I bring up this particular case because 2 weeks ago or so, when I was reading about it, there was a chance it was going to end up manifesting as pneumonic plague. Pneumonic plague is the worst manifestations of symptoms because it’s the hardest to treat and the only version of plague communicable person to person. This person caught plague from a pet cat. Cats are far more susceptible to Bubonic Plague than dogs for some reason.

In other terrible illnesses news, there’s a measles outbreak in Florida. Since you’ve all read my rants about measles before, I’ll keep this brief; a news article I read on ArsTechnica stated less than 80% of the children in the school with the outbreak are vaccinated. Someone I was eating dinner with recently made an interesting comment; we wouldn’t have created a vaccine against measles if it weren’t a serious disease.

I think I’ve developed my first sinus infection of 2024 and it’s a doozy. Parts of my face are sore to the touch, I’m coughing, congested, sore throat, and generally feel bad. Of course, I usually get a sinus infection when tree pollen starts floating around… so the biggest surprise is the timing, because usually I make it until mid or late March before I get one. However, at least it isn’t measles.

Lovely Awful Spring

Spring is in the air. I’ve had a couple afternoons already in February where I’ve been able to work outside on my back deck with a heated blanket. I’m looking forward to having another one today as I write this in my office waiting for 11 am when it’s supposed to be 55 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny without a breeze. When I get ready for my lunch break, I will pack up my stuff (laptop, electric blanket, & fingerless gloves) and head outside to enjoy some sunshine and wait for it to reach 65 degrees (today’s high).

I’m more productive in the spring and fall, when I can move outside to work. There’s something about fresh air and sunshine which stimulates my brain. However, there are downsides to 60 degree weather in February.

First, the trees have begun to produce pollen already and I’ve had a few sniffly days which usually doesn’t happen until March.

Second, it’s a sign of a mild winter and indeed it was. We had some severely cold days in January. There were five days straight when my dogs tried to walk between the house and side yard to do their business without letting their paws touch the ground and god forbid I try to put something on their paws to protect them… I have waterproof booties for both, but when I put them on Lola she simply refuses to stand up and chews at them. Kelly stands up and attempts to walk, but she becomes clumsy and trips over her own feet like she’s drunk. I’ve also tried paw wax and it’s a no go, both dogs lie on the floor and chew at their feet trying to remove the protective residue. But a mild winter means more spring insects, especially ticks. I treat the dogs for outdoor beasties: flea, tick, heartworm, etc, but it’s harder to protect myself because Off is a migraine trigger for me and I’ve never found anything that works well without the strong chemical smell that bothers me (Cutter’s bug spray also triggers migraines).

Third, we will have 4 days of 70 degree weather or higher by the end of February and usually that means it will get hot quick. In 2018, we planted rose bushes for my mother for Mother’s Day and it was in the 90s that day, over 100 with the heat index. The roses did not survive the planting and we set a new record high that day. I look for May and June to be intolerably hot again as it was in 2018… maybe worse. This is of course the result of global warming, but it’s causing a shift in seasons as well. In 2023, I was able to continue working outside into the middle of November, usually I have to move indoors full time by the end of October and now it’s February and I’m spending several afternoons a week outside working because the weather I usually associate with late March/early April is happening in February. That said, we still occasionally get April snows, so we’ll have to wait and see how the spring goes… but I suspect it will be warm and by May I’ll be complaining about being forced back into my office by high temperatures combined with high humidity.

However, despite the pollen and grueling summer ahead, I’m glad spring has returned. I love my office, but shut up in it day after gloomy day wears on me. I think I’ve developed seasonal affect disorder as I’ve gotten older, because I just feel blah during winter anymore. And as I finish this post, I’ve moved outside to enjoy the sun and fresh air… and a Blue Jay agrees with me that it is a gorgeous day because it just keeps trilling and chirping in my neighbor’s pine tree.

Hopefully, with the passing of winter I can break out the bird feeders again and get songbirds attracted back. Last September and October a hawk began stalking our bird feeders, grabbing songbirds (it chased one up onto to our back deck, which was noisy and awful) and the last month or so I was outside our feeders were untouched by birds…