Meat Candy, Other Delights

Meat Candy

There was no excusing this. There was no logical format in which a justification could be derived. It was the year 2005, and I was living in Salvador Celi, Quito Ecuador. My roommate was Dimitri Villamar, who had never experienced the decadence of Sloppy Joe’s sandwiches.


I was prepared, with a handwritten recipe from North America that called for 1 lbs of hamburger and 2 tbs of brown sugar. Except the person who’d written the recipe had neglected to cross the “t”, making it read “2 lbs brown sugar.” I’m assuming that person was not me, because I’m mostly perfect and never forget to cross my letters.


I know. I know that this made zero sense, that the proportions were as off as bug spray. In my defense, I was basically drunk with exhaustion. This didn’t curb my enthusiasm for making the delicacy, which Villamar viewed suspiciously as I dumped the unheard-of amounts of brown sugar into the stewing meat.


“Won’t it be a little sweet?” He asked.


“Maybe….but that’s what ketchup is for.” I responded, adding half a bottle of ketchup.


I am not sure which is worse: that I actually prepared 1 lbs of hamburger with 2lbs of brown sugar, or that we ate most of it. I can still see Villamar’s face, scrunched up slightly as he said “It’s good, but still seems a little sweet to me.” The next day, the leftovers had caramelized into a brick of candied meat, and I was aghast when I realized my error. Villamar still brings it up, because he’s mean and wants me to feel dumb for the rest of my life for ONE COMPLETELY UNDERSTANDABLE MISTAKE.


On another note, I’ve had a few patients this week who have left their special brands burned into my memory. One was a person whom I didn’t recognize, but he obviously recognized me from the ED and abruptly proceeded to nearly pull his shirt completely off in a very crowded cashier line so that I could look at the “stuff on [his] stomach” and tell him “what to do about it.” Next time, sir, you don’t need to show me and everybody else in line both of your hairy nipples if you have something that’s just near your umbilicus.


A second patient was just adamant that he didn’t have a blood pressure or pulse. I told him a beautiful tale about The Sword in the Stone, how a wizard once told a little boy to use his muscles; the boy insisted “but I don’t have any muscles!” to which the wizard responded, “Well, then how do you move about?!” I’m not sure I convinced the patient he wasn’t dead, but I did get him to eventually go home, so #winning.





It’s time for kid quotes!


Eliana: “Why did the chicken cross the road? Because he didn’t have any Dr. Pepper and he was a girl!” (Steph is obsessed with Diet Dr. Pepper)


Emerson: “Can we get Fortnight?”
    Steph: “No.”
       Emerson: “Jacob and Ethan have it. They also have their own tablets and games and everything else they want.”
            Steph: “Well, that’s them and their family, but not ours. Do you think having all the things you want and all that stuff makes you better or happier?”
                Emerson, dejectedly walking away: “I bet their lives are going better than mine!”


Eliana, concerned for Stephanie: “Mom, those are one-toed boots. You have 5 toes.”

I GUESS WE'LL HAVE TO BE HIPSTERS

I worked 3 night shifts this week. That translated into several hours of boredom, which resulted in me deciding that an expensive electronic scooter was the most responsible decision of my life right now. 

To be clear, I haven't bought it. I did, however, notify Stephanie that we are moving to a big city with cool subway stations that will require me to own an electric fold-up scooter to solve that previously under-appreciated "last mile problem." 

I don't have a "last mile problem." I have a 16-mile commute problem.  And it's not really a problem, since I have this beautiful paved bicycle path that goes the entire 8 miles from my house to my employment; I'm just a lazy person, so the bike ride gets UNBEARABLE when I'm all whiny and tired after a long shift in the ED. 

Because of my whiny disposition, I want another solution for the times during good weather when I'd like to ride the trail but don't want to expend gobs and gobs of energy slugging it up the hills on my bicycle. 

So that brings me to my solution, which is to buy the nerdiest folding scooter that will transport my 200+lb frame for the 8 mile trip. I guess this will make me a hipster. Cursed hipsters. 

"Educated" by Tara Westover

Words couldn't describe it, but she did. Her life, her experience, her feelings, her evolution, her pain; they were mine, too, their memories trapped in an obscured cage of my own making.

I don't know how to explain this resonance. I don't know how to explain why I spent hours on the verge of tears, nearly overwhelmed that someone else's existence, while different in many ways, could mirror mine in such an uncanny way. Tara Westover was an alternate doppelganger of my growing up; her memoir stirred countless visions of the battles I now relive only in smoky recollections as my mind gazes at the bleached bones of my formative years.

I wanted to gush to my siblings about this book. I wanted to demand they read it, corroborate the similarities, to validate me somehow. But it will not be; my own brother wrote an autobiography, one which he has repeatedly asked me to read, but which I cannot. He even sent me my own copy so that I wouldn't have to be troubled by the meager cost of purchasing it online. I haven't figured out why I've been unable to bring myself to read it; maybe because I don't want to soil my fragile memories with the perspective of another sibling, for fear that I will forget how it was for me, that I will rationalize away years of my own biased knowledge, only to be replaced with an alternate history that belonged to my brother.

I won't take the time today to describe the similarities; this would take me too long. Perhaps I'll have to buy a copy of the book and annotate in the margins where I identify aspects of my life.

Regardless, the book ends with her still in the midst of a struggle between her identity and her aspirations of identity. I wonder how hers will play out, as much as I wonder the same for myself. Here's to the years ahead.

Wrenching Maturity

              Sometimes I can’t tell if the ache inside me is purely nostalgia or if it’s an actual physical condition. It’s that moment when you look at your child and, instead of seeing just his limber frame buzzing by within his world of play, you feel the pang of a thousand missed moments lost in the swirl of time, swallowed by your job or other necessities of life that drag you away every day.

                I feel that about my faith, as well. I yearn to return to my simpler view, to a time when I could look you in the eye and make a statement of certainty unclouded by the thick lens of changed perspective and experience. The truth is, I’ve lost that piece of me somewhere; I don’t know if it leaked out in hospital halls that still echo in my mind with myriad scenarios of loss, anger, relief, and life, or if I’ve whittled away memories one flake at a time, until all that’s left is a lumpy mass of something, beautiful, even artistic, but much more abstract.

                And yet, I still feel hope. I still feel peace when I seek out God in my life. Prayer brings my intangible soul a little closer to its roots, though the words still seem to fall into the emptiness of space. I crave the occasion to make a difference, to help someone feel that they don’t have to close themselves up. I find myself with aspirations to obey God more, to do whatever is closest to the right thing.

                So is my testimony lost? Is it muddled? Or is this feeling just the part where I no longer float in the lazy river between youthfulness and age, but instead recognize that I can swim upstream, downstream, or even stop off at the bank and experience more than the view from the center?

An Emotional Man

So, I like art. I like dance. I like music. And when I see those things, I think about how terrific it would be if my own kids would end up being musical or athletic prodigies; and then I realize that it’s probably too late and I should have enrolled them at age 14 minutes for them to be able to catch up to the amazingly talented young performers of the world.

The problem is that most guys I know don’t appreciate these things (because they’re a bunch of heathens. You can tell them I said that). A musical? Forget it. An amazing dance routine that should bring tears to the eyes of every human being? Totally wasted on these fellows. A vivid paragraph that deftly defines the intricacies of human nature? Wasted ink. Me figure-skating a routine in a tan leotard? Probably worth thousands of dollars a ticket, but they refuse to see the value.

Braeden categorically denied liking a (favorite) song from “The Greatest Showman” to his friend last week, after the other kid had insisted that all musicals were terrible and how he would never watch them. Stephanie and I had a good talk with Braeden afterwards, and told him that he absolutely did NOT have to pretend to have or not have interests simply based on what his friends said. He was convinced, and spent the rest of the day repeatedly listening to the soundtrack. I was proud of him.

For sake of posterity, here are a few quotes from this week:

“Dad, when you were a kid, did they have vacuum cleaners?” -Braeden, after a couple of days of discussing the good ol’ days when we used rotary phones and the internet wasn’t a household thing.

“Does [the road sign] DIP mean Die In Peace?” Braeden, perfectly timed after his grandmother nearly drove us off the road.

“Did you eat your French toast, Eliana?” -Dad

                                “No.” -Eliana

                                “Why?” -Dad

                                “Because I didn’t like it. It was not good. It was not good for me, babies.” -Eliana

“I told you once! Go…to…bed! Cuz you not being nice!” -Eliana, to her mother

“Emergency, emergency! Sawed arm….now add some cream [to the arm]….and sugar.…yum yum yum! You had an emergency. Stay home, and you’ll feel better soon!” -Eliana, playing doctor.

“DADDY IS MY BEST FWEND! DADDY IS MY BEST FWEND!” Sing-song at the top of Eliana’s voice in the grocery store, for the duration of the visit.

On another note, I’m teaching my children well because Eliana came into our room the other day with the statement that she’d been picking her nose and eating it.

By the way, she was doing this thing every morning where she joyously yelled a greeting at the top of her voice approximately 1 second after awakening. There is a 1 in 5 chance that she yells my name. It might be my favorite thing to wake up to, EVER.

So, several months ago, I had this amazing idea about how we should use the extra money earned by my post-hurricane disaster work in Puerto Rico. First, I bought a generator. Then, I built a bathroom.

Well, I didn’t exactly build it. It was already there to begin with; it was just a terrible bathroom. I put on my muscle t-shirt, kissed my walnut biceps, and told myself “Here goes nothing” while sawing into the fiberglass shower enclosure. I tore out the separating wall, re-framed another wall, ripped out the flooring and carpet, relocated the shower plumbing and p-trap, fixed some sub-floor, took out the vanity and toilet, then died of exhaustion.

I revived myself a few weeks later and got to work, this time doing small projects with days lapsing in between, with my virtual tutor (YouTube) coaching my on how I was screwing everything up and needed to re-do it.

And we’re there! Shower is tiled with the enclosure installed, a faux beam has been made, vanity is in place, a new porcelain throne has water in it but not around it, pipe shelves groan under the weight of decorative towels, and there are only a couple of areas that Stephanie says look “terrible!” that need to be fixed.

Riddle of Age

A riddle’s a poem with a mystery tone;

A puzzle, a maze for our thoughts to get done.

Here’s one for your age, that we’ve finished and made:

New once, now not.

Though used is not the term for this lot.

The feeling’s the same as a brand-new game,

And the warranty’s good, though not quite the same.

I'll Sleep When I'm Dead

The majesty of mountains looms in my eyes,

with a lure like the lyrics of a ballad on high.

The grip of the current and the power of the tide,

The trees throwing shade on a sheltered hillside.

The peaceful outdoors always whispers my name,

Calling me forward through life’s tasks mundane.

Time used, not lost, is my quest for today.

The yearning gets longer with each passing delay.

I watch it slip by and it fills me with dread.

So today I will live,

And I’ll sleep when I’m dead.

Literally Dying

Literally Dying

                I asked my boss today if I could get paid overtime, because last night I had vivid dreams that I was frantically working in a one of the I-feel-like-I’m-standing-under-a-waterfall situation of the ED. Picture my dream: The patient board scrolling with so many sick patients we’re in code black; I’m already six hours past the end of my shift, but can’t leave because there is too much to do. I am very dramatic in my dream, intermittently stopping dead in my tracks by the nursing station and yelling “If I don’t get a break soon, I will LITERALLY DIE!!” before going back to the drowning-effect of taking care of the patients. In real life, we are short on a number of medications due to severe national shortages and production delays; in my dream, my coworker Steve checked in for severe nausea and vomiting. I looked desperately through our Omnicell but we were out of all the ondansetron, except for in “raw form” which essentially meant I was scooping stir-fry out of the Omnicell with a spoon and serving it to Steve with several bay leaves on top, which I advised “I probably wouldn’t eat the bay leaves, if I were you.”

                Last Saturday, Matt Bricka and I took the boys up to Twin Lakes to see how the wilderness fared last year in the wildfires. I think we were probably the first up the trail in a while, since there weren’t any tracks through the snow on the road. I had to use my tow straps to yank Matt’s truck out of one area when he got mired in the snow, and we did have to park about 500 yards downhill from the trailhead due to snow impeding our access with the trucks.

                While we drove up there, Emerson piped up with some questions.

“How high in elevation are we?” He asked.

“About 4200 ft above sea level,” I responded.

He deliberated that for a moment, before inquiring “Well, how high aboveground level are we?”

I chuckled, and we discussed it for a few minutes before arriving to the conclusion that we were still 4200 ft above sea level. He did not take this news well. He proceeded to reprimand me:

“DAD! REMEMBER?! I’m afraid of heights!”

                The rest of the hike was fairly uneventful, until we attempted to cross over to the eastern lake. There was quite a bit of snow left over from winter, hollowed out around the spruce and fir trees, and the trail was difficulty to follow. Matt was in the lead, with Braeden and Emerson following; I was off to the left, searching for the continuation of the trail. We were very careful to instruct the boys to walk directly in Matt’s footprints, because of the post-holing risks of walking in the snow drifts covering the trees. Braeden listened closely to our instructions, then promptly veered a couple of feet to the right. The next thing we heard was Emerson yelling “Braeden fell! Braeden fell!”

                When I looked over, Braeden had essentially disappeared. As I approached, I could see an 18-in diameter hole in the snow; he’d fallen straight through two feet of snow, then falling another four or five feet down into the small river of glacier water beneath us. He was shocked speechless by the cold; the poor bedraggled kid then spent the next ten minutes trying to stop hyperventilating over his slightly-broken fingernail as he sloshed his wet boots back to an area where we could build a fire and take three hours to grill the water out of his clothing. The boys lived on a log the whole time, practicing their casting skills with a pinecone that I tied onto the end of the line.

                Frankly, it was the best fishing expedition I’ve ever been on with the boys. I didn’t have to constantly untangle lines, I got to do a bunch of survivalist stuff like help build a fire and chop pieces of wood with my axe.

                Driving home later, Emerson suddenly exclaimed “It’s a good thing I yelled, otherwise Braeden would still be down in that hole!”

                On another note, Emerson told a friend that all he and his brother do is “we mostly just play video games.” Braeden gave Stephanie a Mother’s Day card that read “I love you because you let me watch TV all day” and “I love you because you let me watch Kid’s YouTube.” Stephanie was very displeased, and told me she was never letting them watch TV again because “Apparently, that’s the ONLY thing they love about me….and it was just one dayof TV and YouTube!”

Face Wipes

My wife came in the other day to find me washing my face with the new, coconut-scented facial wipes that she had bought. I was impressed that they did such a good job, and scrubbed at my face like I was trying to get paint off a wall.

She just looked at me with her eyebrows raised, and asked, "What are you using to wash your face?"

"Your new face wipes, of course. They're coconut!" I responded enthusiastically.

She looked a little shocked, before saying, "Those aren't face wipes. They're vaginal wipes!" This was followed by a very rude reaction, as she proceeded to nearly collapse from hysterical and completely over-the-top laughing.

Well!

I wasn't terribly surprised to find this out, since my face had been seeming a little more, er, shiney lately. Perfect pH and all that. 

YouTube Is Fake

So, I've decided that for every minute of instructional YouTube video, I must reserve at least 5,000 hours for the task at hand. For example, installing a door takes about 3min 15 sec on the Tube, but in real life it takes a lot longer because you actually have to go out in the dark of night, cut down your own tree, create a saw-mill using your chainsaw and some leather strips you tore off your jacket, cut your own door, use a hand-lathe to make it beautiful, then hire 15 people to help you haul it into your house and hold it in place while you cut pieces out of the existing doorframe to make it fit, before finally ending up with ten hours of labor put into pasting that terrible "weather stripping" to keep the winter out.

Perhaps I exaggerate.

This is always my problem: they start the videos at some point well into the process, skipping the "simple" yet essential steps to get to the starting line (i.e. actually locating the engine part in question, how to demolish a perfectly good shower, which medication to take prior to starting bothersome activity in question, etc).

But I continue in my quest to be a DIY'er. So far this year, I've renovated my bathroom, cut some lumber, started several brush fires that immediately extinguished themselves because apparently gasoline is a terrible way to get large wet branches to burn, applied paint protection film on a new car, replaced shocks, sent those shocks back because they were the wrong ones, and returned several hundred dollars of equipment back to Amazon under perhaps questionable "Inaccurate Product Description" circumstances. But don't worry, Amazon, I actually ended up spending much more on your website by ordering the replacements of said products.

I took Braeden for a drive yesterday. We talked about our favorite memories; apparently, his first memory is of two-year old Emerson sitting naked on a bunch of Grandpa Oldroyd's towels, with Grandpa insisting that Emerson had "better not pee on those!". Braeden is getting so big, with so many wonderful qualities. I try to find time to actually converse with him; yesterday was fun, talking about camping, road, or other family trips we've taken and what he liked best about them. He said his favorite hike was about a year and a half ago, when we visited Table Rock in Medford. There were eagles, one of which we watched as it dove towards the ground with an eagle shriek that the kids mimicked for the next two weeks. Eliana refused to let us hold her on the hike, even though it was terribly muddy and she was basically only like three minutes old and could barely walk.

Braeden also mentioned how much he enjoyed the Thanksgiving 2017 cabin in Ochoco national forest, when we took the kids sledding in the wondrous depths of snow (about two inches, tops) with Grandmom and Grandad Busey.

It's strange, having those moments with your child. I'll make a joke and he'll laugh, and I find myself startled as I look up and recognize that my baby is maturing into somebody who gets sarcasm. That laugh is less of a giggly chortle, with the more resounding laugh of a big person. I'm glad the laugh is there, and hope it always is.

We bought a new car, a 2018 Toyota Highland Hybrid. We've named it Walnut (color is Toasted Walnut according to Toyota). When we were driving away from Wilsonville, Steph and I looked back and the boys were sitting on the very back row, hugging each other and sobbing with giant alligator tears that we were leaving Black Cherry Turbo behind (our excellent and beloved, but too-few-seats Kia Sorento). I had to do some drag-race style accelerations to get them excited about the new car.