Saturday was a busy day for us. First we had to drive into the country, down long and windy and hilly roads to see our friend Egg the Pig Man and pick up our two new little pigs. Because I’m not the one driving the truck with the Pork Chop Express attached, I really like the drive – it’s pretty scenery as we head up toward the Tennessee border.
Egg the Pig Man met us at the lower part of his property. He had the two pigs already sequestered in a trailer, and all Fred had to do was back our trailer up to his so Egg could run the pigs from his trailer to ours. While we waited for Fred to back up the trailer, Egg told me that he was still “down” in his back and that the doctors were going to put a needle in his back and inject Super Glue. At least, that’s what he thought they said, but now that he thought about it, they probably meant silicone.
After the pigs were run into our trailer, Egg and Fred started talking about food. This was at 10:00, and I hadn’t had anything to eat yet, so I was drooling about 30 seconds into the conversation. Egg had a leftover pork chop for breakfast (he doesn’t like to warm his food in the microwave, it doesn’t taste right. He puts the oven on about 200 and puts the food in there ’til it’s nice and warm) and he was thinking about seafood for dinner.
Egg loves seafood, but his wife isn’t partial to it. He gave us a few tips on where to get some good seafood (there’s a place that has a seafood buffet on Saturdays and he likes to go load up on frog legs and oysters and then he gets a salad for her.)
Poor ol’ Egg – not only does he have a bad back, he also has an aneurysm (he pointed vaguely to his lower abdomen, so I’m not sure where the aneurysm was located) and a kidney stone. They can’t treat the kidney stone (which is too big to be passed) until they’ve taken care of the aneurysm, and they won’t (or can’t) treat his back ’til the aneurysm and kidney stone are taken care of.
Egg’s grandson raises cattle to sell – Holsteins, not meat cows – and he goes down to Florida every so often and loads up his trailer with Holsteins and brings them back here to raise. It takes him a day and a night to get down there, get loaded up, and get home again. He turns a tidy profit, though, apparently. He helps Egg with the hogs, but once Egg is retired, that boy doesn’t want to see another hog. He has no interest in hogs. (This prompted Fred to say that perhaps when Egg retires, we should find ourselves a sow and start breeding her so that we don’t have to worry where we’ll get our pigs. The idea of breeding a sow freaks me OUT because – as Egg says – yeah, a sow’ll roll over on them sometimes and “mash one or two of them.” I don’t want to find a “mashed” wee baby pig, if you don’t mind.)
After about fifteen minutes of conversation, we left and headed home. The pigs (you’ll see pictures on Thursday) are cute – they always are when we first get ’em – and Fred has begun teaching them that he’s the one who brings them their food. They haven’t actually taken a cookie from him yet, but they’ve come close. I’m sure by the end of the week they’ll be eating right out of his hand.
So after we got home with the pigs, I puttered around the house for a while, then napped on the couch for a couple of hours (shaddup, I felt like I was getting a cold). Then I puttered around the house some more. THEN I changed my clothes and put on makeup (!), and Fred and I went over to his boss’s house for a cookout with all the other people who work for the same company and who are working on the same contract.
Fred’s been working at his new job for two and a half months now, and I was both looking forward to meeting some of the people he works with (not all the people he works with were going to be at the cookout, because a lot of them are employed by other companies. This whole contractor stuff is kind of confusing.) and kind of dreading being at a gathering of people I’ve never met before. I’m not the most social of butterflies (I know! You’re shocked!), and was afraid I’d just be standing there alone while everyone else socialized.
(“Don’t you dare go wandering off and abandon me!” I warned Fred repeatedly. He promised he wouldn’t, and he didn’t.)
I shouldn’t have worried – everyone there was super nice, and no surprise to me, the people he particularly likes are people I particularly liked, too. We talked, we ate, we bonded. One of them brought pictures of her dogs and her boat (which is moored in Maine at the moment!) and I got to poke fun at Fred a few times. Really, what more can you ask for in an evening of socializing?
Fred’s boss’s house is niiiiiiice. We spent part of the evening out on the deck which has this HUGE covered section with a fireplace, an outdoor kitchen, furniture, a ceiling fan. Really, I kind of wish I’d brought my camera, because this place was SPECTACULAR. If not for the fact that the roof of the covered deck was comprised of 2000 pound beams that had to be FLOWN in and put into place, I’d be harassing Fred to build me one. (I’m still harassing him to build me a covered deck over the patio, but one not quite so amazing.)
Before we went to the cookout, Fred and I discussed how early we could leave (we were getting there at 6 – that’s past dinnertime for us, y’know, and halfway to bedtime!) and Fred declared that 7:30ish wouldn’t be too terribly early.
And, of course, we were so caught up in talking and eating that it was well after 9 when we left – and we weren’t nearly the first ones to leave.
I’m pretty sure that makes me a social butterfly.
Two things of interest:
1. AmySATX left a comment sometime Saturday asking if I’d ever considered making an apple-habanero jam. I asked Fred if he thought that’d be worth making (since I can’t eat the hot stuff, I usually ask his opinion on this topic), and we talked about it for a bit – would I make an apple butter type jam with habaneros, or would I make the chunky caramel-apple jam and add habaneros to it?
(Y’all may certainly chime in here with your opinion on the topic! I’m going to Sam’s later and will be buying a bag of Granny Smith apples. I’m leaning toward the chunky caramel-apple jam with habaneros added.)
At the cookout, there was a table of stuff to nibble on while we were waiting for the brisket to finish cooking. There was some sort of jam over a block of cream cheese. Fred tried it (he’s my guinea pig) and told me that whatever it was, it wasn’t hot. I tried it, and agreed with him. There was NO heat to the stuff, but whatever it was, it was good. A few minutes later, someone else started talking nearby, and as it turned out, it was apple-habanero jam. “The heat is kind of like an aftertaste,” the guy who was talking about it said. Now, y’all know that I am the wimpiest of the wimp – if there was any heat to that stuff, my face would have gone up in flames. Sunday I Googled around, and judging by the color and the lack of heat, I’m pretty sure that the stuff was apple-habanero jelly rather than jam. The difference being, after the apples and habaneros are cooked, the apple pulp is strained out before sugar and pectin are added to the liquid. Straining out the habaneros = no heat.
2. I tried Coke Zero, and y’all are right – that stuff is pretty good, and Fred agrees. We’re on the way to becoming a Coke Zero household. If you hadn’t suggested I give it a try, I never would have. So thanks, you guys, for suggesting it!
In the guest bedroom, Martin shows that cat bed who the boss is.
Moxie, hanging out in the guest bedroom. (They always end up in the guest bedroom – it’s directly across from the stairs, and there are 300 cat beds on the bed.)
I wish Dodger would spend more time hanging out with us downstairs. He comes downstairs, but if we so much as glance at him, he goes running upstairs. But when we go upstairs, he comes running to be petted. I guess it’ll take a little more time before he’s completely comfortable downstairs.
Marty keeps an eye on things.
“I am hanging out with my bo’friends, lady. You go away!”
Check the attitude, mister, I’m just trying to get a shot of your pretty eyes!
Oh, Corby. Why you so stressed out? You need to learn to relax!
Elwood, atop the canning cabinet in the dining room, keeps an eye on the birds.
Previously
2009: No entry.
2008: No entry.
2007: “Hmm,” I say to Mister Boogers. “It’s almost 80 outside, but only 74 inside. Imagine that!”
2006: You really don’t want to fuck with the Plumbing Mafia.
2005: “GodDAMN you, Mister Boogers!” I yelled.
2004: “This book makes me want to have a baby!” I said to Fred when I was about halfway through the book. “Let’s have a baby!”
2003: No entry.
2002: Gag city.
2001: I think you know what I’m thinkin’.
2000: I’d like to return to my regularly scheduled life, please.
Oh my, “mashed” pigglets… I know that’s terrible but it made me laugh out loud. That and the thought that Egg thought they might inject Super Glue into his back, yikes!
“While we waited for Fred to back up the trailer, Egg told me that he was still “down” in his back and that the doctors were going to put a needle in his back and inject Super Glue. At least, that’s what he thought they said, but now that he thought about it, they probably meant silicone.”
No, it’s a bone cement, and the procedure he’s probably talking about a kyphoplasty. They inject bone cement into a fractured vertebra to stabilize it.
“Poor ol’ Egg – not only does he have a bad back, he also has an aneurysm (he pointed vaguely to his lower abdomen, so I’m not sure where the aneurysm was located) and a kidney stone.”
Probably an abdominal aortic aneurysm, Triple-A. The aorta extends vertically down the length of the torso, before splitting off to supply the femoral arteries. It can bulge, but typically a pulmonary surgeon tracks the size of the bulge until it reaches a certain diameter, then they go in and repair the site. Of course, if it goes, it is unlikely the patient will survive unless they immediately get to a hospital. Dad’s was monitored twice a year for many years, and never reached the threshold where repair was considered.
I’m so glad you commented on this, Jean – saved me a bit of typing! (I’m incapable of ignoring things like this, heh.)
My father has an AAA, too – freaked him out when he first learned of it, until I told him that his is about 1/3 the size that they’d consider it enough of a risk to do surgery for. (His mother died at age 31, when he was only 11, of a ruptured blood vessel during childbirth – no one today is quite sure of the details, but we assume it was an AAA, so he’s admittedly got a bit of a reason to be concerned.)
I type for orthopedic surgeons, and my main doctor (typing-wise, that is) is a spinal surgeon – you’d be amazed what patients come up with. The patients hear the doctor say, “We’re going to inject bone cement into your spine” and they go, “Okay.” Then they get home and think, “No, he can’t POSSIBLY have just said they were going to inject cement into my spine,” so they come up with all sorts of things that they think the doctor “probably meant,” which are FAR more off-the-wall than the original! “My” spinal surgeon does describe the vertebroplasty/kyphoplasty technique as being “sort of like using Super Glue,” so I bet that’s just what happened with Egg.
We had a patient who became convinced that the doctor was going to put a balloon in her spine, with the opening of the balloon outside her skin so that her husband could blow air into it as needed (to move the vertebrae and relieve pressure from the nerve). She came to her fourth, and preop, appointment trailed by several angry grandchildren who wanted to know exactly what kind of quack doctor she was seeing, prepared to threaten him with criminal charges if he laid a hand on their grandma for such a Franken-surgery. That took some explaining!
An awful lot of people also seem to confuse cortisone (frequently injected into troublesome joints) with silicone (widely known for use in plastic surgery), so a lot of people get the idea they’re going in for silicone injections in their backs (instead of the epidural steroid injections with cortisone).
Egg sounds like the kind of person I’d love to spend an afternoon with if I was in a good mood, and the kind of person I’d be trying not to kill after three minutes if I was in a bad mood. LOL
Totally off subject, but it is September and once again I’m here asking for your cats family calendars. It makes the perfect Christmas gift to myself. Please make it include a donation to Challengers House. Thankyouverymuch.
Betty
P.S. I love me that Martin. Oh and kisses for Ms. Poo.
Jean–you beat me to the answer! Abdominal aortic aneurysms run in my Dad’s family. My Aunt Jan had hers repaired about 10 years ago (and broke a doctor’s nose in recovery when she woke up and tried to make a break for it, it took 6 people to wrestle her to the ground and get her back to bed) and is still going strong at 90. My Aunt Lou left hers and died of plain old age at 94.
Your account of Fred’s work party made me smile. It sounds like the way I am at my husband’s work parties. I can be socially functional when I need to, and even enjoy myself, then I want to be left alone for about six months. Unfortunately, introversion actually ATTRACTS people. WTH?
Why do people like Egg man think that the rest of us want to hear about every aspect of their bodies? They must read a lot of Dooce and Pioneer Woman. If he had talked about toe picking – dead giveaway.
Coke Zero? Eh. Try Jolt! The blue stuff is yummy!! (No, don’t…it’s crack in a bottle and isn’t fit for human consumption. I only drink it on my really busy project days or in Las Vegas.)
Poor, poor Corbett. Such a rough life he has.
I LOVE Corbett. He so reminds me of our Schatzi, who passed away a year ago this month. I swear, if we lived closer to Alabama, I would totally come and get him. As it is, Seattle is a bit far away.
Fred willingly left the house to go to a social gathering? HOLY CRAP! I better get my ass down to Alabama because things sure are changing down there.
Glad you are enjoying the Coke Zero! One of the better inventions (I describe it as not exactly regular coke, but an improved Diet Coke).
Sounds like Fred is liking his job and the cook out appears to be a success. Its always so great when those potentially awkward events turn out to be so fun.
My, Elwood is so dainty.
We were “gifted” three kittens! I went to a local animal shelter to look at pups, and on my way out an older woman dropped a pet carrier and 3 kitties bolted! I helped her gather them and find the right place to surrender them. They were full of cats, and she was told that she could pay to have the litter put down. She started crying and said she had to, she couldn’t care for them! I took those buggers. They’ve been de-flead, neutered, shot-up, and wormed. They are alternately terrified and bossy. They are almost 6 months old. We’ve had them a month. They look like a half size trio of Sugarbutt, Tommy, and Mr. Fancypants!!! I admire you fostering all those kittens soooo much! Thank you!