What's Eating Amy's Vegetables?

As part of my winter garden, I planted a bed of cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower in my upper garden, which is not protected by a rabbit-proof fence. Last winter, I saw bunnies engaging in fine dining provided by yours truly so what was I thinking, right? I had a dream that the bunnies would pass me by this year if I smeared sage on my doorpost, or something. I dunno. Mind blip. I might just as well have given the rabbit a twenty-dollar bill and told him to treat himself to a salad at the Garden Café. That would have cost less than buying the plants and the mulch and the fencing and the plant food and all that. When I realized my mistake, I had every intention of moving the tender greens to the lower garden, which is protected by a rabbit-proof fence, but the rain and the holidays intervened and I had more important things to do than rescue vegetables from mastication. Every plant was chewed down to the squeak. I made my bed and sated rabbits got to lie in it. That’s the circle of life, hakuna matata, and all that. But it did not stop there. The situation devolved into a vegetable apocalypse.

No bunnies, not even Bugs himself, could have prepared me for what met my eyes in my garden yesterday. The kale, collards, and garlic in my lower garden were in fine form only a few days ago when I nipped some greens for my lunch. By yesterday morning, something had made a meal out of nearly all of it. I thought these crops were safe inside the fence since the bunnies have never gone inside the lower garden. Yes, I watched Jurassic World, I should know better than to rely on fencing. Clearly something other than rabbits gobbled up my winter gardens, something like birds, bugs, a beaver, or perhaps a stray orangutan. Maybe a mutant vegan velociraptor rex. Should I be afraid?

Keeping edible plants alive and well long enough to make it to my plate is such a chore that it’s a wonder I ever eat anything I grow. Truly it’s a miracle that any of us have the opportunity to enjoy fresh produce at all. Luckily someone somewhere knows how to grow food. I spend an inordinate amount of time in the garden arguing with birds, insects, animals, fungus, mold, weather, extreme temperatures, weeds, oak trees attempting to take root, space aliens, evil spirits, and invisible mutant vegan dinosaurs. And that’s just the back yard. The front yard isn’t fenced.

Things are a little better in this house than they were for me out in the woods when I lived at the Ranch. The first day at the Ranch we were thrilled to see deer in our yard. Within 48 hours, we were running up and down the deck like lunatics in the middle of the night throwing rocks at the deer to keep them from eating the landscaping. The previous owners had a dog that chased them off. We did not have a dog. We got one immediately, and she was the sweetest, smartest dog ever. In fact, she was too smart to waste her time chasing deer when she could be chasing squirrels instead. In other words, we needed to put up a fence.

Let me tell you the main difference between city people and country people. City people turn gooey and dewy-eyed when they see deer. They fold into themselves and find their inner center and fall in love with nature (the abstract concept) all over again. Country people gnash their teeth and holler when they see deer. They find their inner eccentric lunatic bag-lady. To country people deer are unnatural, they are the anti-Christ. The Sunset Western Garden Book, which is the California gardener’s bible, identifies what they optimistically label “deer-resistant plants.” These are generally aromatic plants (think rosemary and lavender), bulbs, and plants with sticky or furry leaves. Deer also steer clear of nightshades (unfortunately) since they are poisonous. Most gardening books will tell you that deer don’t eat camellias, azaleas, or rhododendrons, but apparently no one has told this to the deer (and they can’t read). Then there are the baby deer, who don’t know what they don’t eat yet. They figure it out by tasting. So once I planted Icelandic poppies, which deer actually don’t like. I have seen grown deer point at Icelandic poppies and make fake gagging sounds. Baby deer, however, see the Icelandic poppies and say, “pretty, let’s have a taste.” They bite off the flower and then spit it out. Then they leave a note asking you not to plant any more of those things, which is moot, since the poppies are already ruined because, let’s face it, you don’t grow poppies to look at decapitated stems.

When I moved off the Ranch (where I had a fenced vegetable garden), the first thing I did was fence my back yard. The deer can get into my front yard, but not my back yard. So I have a back yard full of fruit trees. The deer decimated my fruit trees at the Ranch. Now, instead of battling deer, I get to fight off peach leaf curl, shot-hole fungus, marauding woodpeckers, and flying mutant vegan velociraptor rexes. But the natural world is astonishing and by observation people have discovered many useful things about our fellow creatures on the planet. There are organic nontoxic simple counter-measures. Clove oil stops peach leaf curl. Woodpeckers are afraid of shiny mylar strips. Squirrels hate moth balls. My mole chaser (a pole with a rattly windmill on the end) wards off moles and gophers. Straight vinegar (no chaser) kills weeds. Sluggo for snails and earwigs. Copper spray for mold on the apple trees. Neem oil for tomato horn worms and white flies. And on and on. How amazing that we figured out these remedies. If we keep going, we could probably figure out a simple natural remedy for every disease that plagues humans.

So what is really eating my vegetables and what surprising trick can I use to get rid of it? Maybe it’s more than one critter devouring my garden. It could be tag-team decimation; like the rabbits start and then caterpillars take over halfway when the rabbits get exhausted. Or maybe the birds duked it out with cabbage worms to decide who would get to chow down on my goodies. We are all competing for a piece of the vegetable pie and the biggest creature doesn’t necessarily win. It’s disconcerting to be outsmarted by a caterpillar who didn’t even take the Mensa Test. Sigh. In spite of it all, I get perverse pleasure out of pretending to be a gardener. All the aggravation is worth it when a surprising crop of extraordinary cantaloupes bursts out of nowhere, the plum tree goes berserk, a zucchini plant goes wild, or the joyous fragrant basil (steady as a rock, every summer, there is always basil) is as tall as my waist. For all the rest, the food I try and fail to grow, the food I can’t grow to save my life, the food I dream of growing; for all that, thank goodness for the farmers and growers who sell at the Farmers Market and the natural foods store. Bless the hands that bring us our food.

Objects in the Mirror May Be Fatter Than They Appear

Last week I maneuvered a routine health check-up without getting arrested, which was a major milestone for me because I have a medical procedures phobia, an irrational terror of hospitals and needles, and an oppositional defiant disorder that manifests when I encounter health professionals. A question-authority light blinks on in my brain the minute a doctor makes a health recommendation. Don’t take this the wrong way. Some of my best friends are doctors. My rational mind knows that most doctors went into the profession because they want to help people stay well, and if people are sick or suffering, they want to help them feel better. But when I enter a doctor’s office, an evil genie emerges from my psyche, hijacks my manners, and co-opts my genteel personality.

Since I am enthusiastically healthy, and since my last primary care doc skipped town eight years ago (I swear it was not because of me), I kind of sort of gave up on an annual exam. Recently I began to feel deprived because I don’t have a nice family doctor to call in a medical emergency. Besides, after the yellow-jacket fiasco last summer (my blog about that eventis required reading for all my friends), I will have to renew my Epi-Pen prescription in July and I don’t have a doctor to do that for me. A friend of mine who’s a doctor (see, I really do like doctors) told me about a new woman doctor in town who is the same age as my daughter and who grew up around here. So decided to go see her so I could have my own bona fide family doctor again.

My visit to my new doctor began with the receptionist handing me a release form to sign. Because I fear that doctors want to rip out one of my kidneys when my back is turned, I am skeptical of release forms. Sure enough, I took exception to the first item on the release, which gave the docs permission to do any procedure they felt necessary in the course of treatment in their office, including X-rays, blood tests, and electroshock therapy. I informed the receptionist that I didn’t feel comfortable signing the release because I wasn’t willing to sign over blanket permission to do any procedure. Fortunately, the receptionist was patient and clearly found me entertaining. She reassured me that they would not strap me down and do a procedure to me without my consent. She suggested, with admirable calm and a touch of whimsy, that I write on the form that I didn’t consent to that particular item. There is a special place in heaven for kind receptionists who humor eccentric old ladies. The other items on the form passed muster so I signed and was good to go.

Next a junior medical provider took me down a corridor to a massive scale that could have weighed a small cargo truck and asked me to step on. I walked onto the scale wearing my rain boots and winter jacket, with my large handbag over my shoulder, and carrying my lunch, several library books, an umbrella, and a box of my grandmother’s good China. Without a moment’s hesitation, junior noted the weight of the whole lot on my chart, rounding up for good measure. I asked her if she thought I should go on a diet and she offered to weigh me again without the umbrella. Now I know what my weight would be if I ingested four library books and the good China.

Junior took me to an exam room where she took my temperature by waving a wand across my forehead, which made me wonder what else she may have done secretly with the wand, and I became suspicious that she had done a procedure to me for which I had not given consent, like maybe a liver transplant. I resolved to take this up with the whimsical receptionist on my way out. Junior checked my blood pressure, which was a perfect 120/80, and she commented that she doesn’t see that very often. I offered her an organic tangerine. She referred to my information in her computer and asked me if I was taking my Epi-Pen as prescribed. I told her I carry it with me at all times, but, unlike a pill, it’s not that kind of prescription. I offered to show it to her, but she hastily declined, as if I had suggested something obscene. The Epi-Pen is kind of phallic, but not scary-phallic; sheesh. She told me the doc would be in shortly as she backed out the door.

While we’re waiting for the doctor, I will share a quick rant that explains why, despite the fact that doctors are light years beyond me in their understanding of biochemistry and anatomy, I do not trust their recommendations. Doctors are trained to treat disease, mainly with surgery and/or pharmaceuticals. They do not receive adequate training in nutrition, toxins in the environment, and how to prevent disease. Most of the research docs study in medical school was bought and paid for by Big Pharma (i.e., pharmaceutical corporations that profit off drug sales). To support my assertions here, I want to quote Dr. Marcia Angell of Harvard Medical School. Dr. Angell is the former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. In 2009, she published an explosive article called “Drug Companies and Doctors:  A Story of Corruption” in the NY Review of Books. Dr. Angell says, “The pharmaceutical industry has gained enormous control over how doctors evaluate and use its products. Its extensive ties to physicians, particularly senior faculty at prestigious medical schools, affect the results of research, the way medicine is practiced, and even the definition of what constitutes a disease.” Case in point is the ubiquitous use of statins, handed out like candy, and which are not the harmless magic bullet Big Pharma profiteers would like us to think they are. Stash this away for a moment as I will come back to it. Now here comes my new doc.

My new doc, I’ll call her Doc H, entered my exam room. She took the time to chat with me, then asked me some health questions, and she checked my heart with her stethoscope. She pronounced me healthy, said she would be happy to be my “regular” doctor, and that she would renew my Epi-Pen in July. Then she asked me why I have not had a mammogram recently. I told her that my biggest risk factor for breast cancer is radiating my breasts with mammograms. She looked at my health records and agreed that was probably true. (Points!) Then she asked me why I had never had a colonoscopy. I told her I’d rather go hunting with Dick Cheney than have a colonoscopy, that I don’t believe in them, that the prep for one trashes the immune system (it could take years to undo the damage), and that I think in the future bona fide research (if we can ever find any of this stuff) will show that this procedure is dangerous, especially for the elderly. She told me she was required to tell me that if I didn’t have a colonoscopy then she couldn’t tell me whether or not I have colon cancer. Since she can’t tell me whether or not I have brain cancer or pancreatic cancer or stomach cancer or knee cancer, it doesn’t seem like a big deal that she can’t comment on the colon cancer. And since I have no symptoms of colon cancer I have no reason to believe I have it. But if I do have cancer, and I were to trash my immune system prepping for a colonoscopy, I would ruin my chances of producing enough natural killer cells to destroy the cancer before it could get a foothold. I try to be a positive person, but I have no qualms about hating on colonoscopies. Doc H took my tirade about colonoscopies in stride. (Points!)

Next we talked about labs. I have not had any lab tests since the Clinton Administration. I would like some lab tests. I’m curious. Of course, I’ll have to get past the needle part without hyperventilating. I wonder if they would let me bring my cat with me to the lab to calm me down. Doc H wasn’t sure what tests would be worth doing since I’m so healthy. I chose one from Column A and two from Column B. Thyroid Panel. A1c (to measure blood sugar regulation). Test for vitamin D and vitamin B12 deficiency (since I’m vegetarian). C-Reactive Protein, which checks for inflammation that can impact heart health and arthritis, among other things. So far, so good. But then Doc H said that if the C-Reactive test shows inflammation she can prescribe statins for me. As you may have guessed, “statin” is my trigger word.

Big Pharma has brainwashed the medical community (and everyone else, it seems) about statins. I’m Jewish, half my cousins are cardiologists, and they all heartily (excuse the pun) approve of statins. How long will it take for real information about statins to reach the health care community and ordinary people? Statins have serious side effects. For one, they interfere with the ability of the body to process cholesterol, which is critical for brain health. New research is exploring the link between the rise in statin use and the rise in Alzheimer’s. I find this a no-brainer (ha, no excuses for that pun). Our understanding of fat, cholesterol, and heart health is changing rapidly. Fat does not cause heart disease. Sugar causes heart disease and is the culprit for most of our health woes. Good quality fat is an important part of our diet. Instead of gambling with taking statins, people need to eat properly. So when Doc H said “statin,” I went off like a firecracker. Blam! Steam poured out my ears, my eyeballs turned into pinwheels, my hair stood on end, and a speech bubble appeared above my head with the caption “Ah-whoo-gah!” Fortunately, I did not get hauled away in a straightjacket.

Doc H redeemed herself by informing me that the five pounds I have gained since I joined the gym is probably muscle mass, and it’s a good thing. It was worth the whole doc visit debacle, statin meltdown and all, just to learn this. Yay. I’m not as fat as I thought I was, objects as they appear in the mirror aside. I’m muscular. Pass the dark chocolate. I love my new doctor.

Devil bear at the lab. 
Is the cutesie bear supposed to make the needle look less menacing? 

Resolve the Gym

When I joined the gym in August, my daughter warned me about January, when the gym becomes mobbed with people high on the fumes of their New Year’s resolutions. She reassured me that this is a temporary catastrophe. The treadmill frenzy purportedly winds down swiftly since most of the gung-ho exercise enthusiasts who had all good intentions of improving their health but no clue how to use the equipment pull enough muscles to prevent them from doing more damage to themselves by continuing to hog the workout machines, zooming on the Nordic Track at knee-torqueing volume. Throwing your back out offers a terrific excuse for abandoning a fitness campaign. I wonder how many people with fitness resolutions actually arrange for proper training on how to use the equipment safely before they launch into an exercise routine. (Oh, wow, a giant exercise ball, I think I’ll roll on this and bash my head on the floor.)

I admit that I’m selfish. I don’t want to share the equipment at my gym. I go to the gym in the middle of the afternoon on Thursdays and Sundays when two weightlifters, a woman on the treadmill wearing a sleeping baby in a sling, and the cleaning lady are the only ones there. I also attend a couple of classes each week, taught by a professional sports trainer with a perky ponytail and an impressive sneaker collection who always appears encased like a breakfast sausage in brightly-colored, shiny, synthetic fabric. I worry that one day one of the guys in the weightlifting area will have a lapse in mental acuity, go off the deep end, and take a bite out of my teacher’s delectable raspberry leg. She looks so tasty in spandex. But I digress.

I’m not looking forward to the influx of people at the gym this month. It frustrates me when I can’t do my usual routine, which involves cycling through a dozen strength-building weight machines that work arms, legs, and abs. I use each machine three times. (My teacher calls these “reps,” which is short for repetitions. It helps you get fit faster if you know the lingo. I lost five pounds in ten minutes when I started using the word “reps.”) But when other people are on my machines, I have to skip around and go back to the machines I missed. Making this adjustment requires more brain effort than I am prepared to encounter at the gym. And what if I approach a machine at the exact same moment as a new gym user? Will she hit me with a barbell to prevent me from jumping on the machine before she can get on it? I could conceivably wind up in a musical chairs for a seat on one of my machines if too many New Year’s resolvers turn up. This is not the kind of thing you want to have to stay awake pondering in the middle of the night.

People who go to my gym are often a little odd and I anticipate more oddities turning up this month. I can say that because I go to that gym and I’m a little odd. For instance, there’s a wispy dyed-blonde woman who wears terrific fancy workout clothes. She lifts one 2½-lb. barbell over her head with both hands for several minutes, walks as slowly as possible on the treadmill for 20 minutes (she has it on the “do you seriously think you are moving?” setting), and uses some of the weight machines on the “lift-a-peanut” setting. She listens to something on her earbuds the whole time, probably music, or perhaps a motivational recording to keep her awake. I think she might be pretending to do a workout or maybe she works for a workout clothing manufacturer and she is conducting undercover marketing research. There’s a muscle-bulging guy, with what looks to me like the instruction manual for the assembly of a barge tattooed to his chest and arms, who removes his shirt and greases himself up before watching himself in the mirror as he lifts massive weights. They have weightlifting shows somewhere, right? He must be rehearsing for one of those. There are these two guys who go to the gym together and they use only two machines, both of them machines that work the leg muscles. Maybe they are actually mutant grasshoppers. One of them uses a machine while the other one stands next to him and talks with him, then they switch. They do this for quite some time, taking turns tying up these two leg machines and gabbing. They could just as well walk around the grocery store with weights on their ankles and leave the machines for the rest of us to use. Bicep strength must be against their religion. There’s a guy who sets the abs machine at the heaviest setting and adds extra portable weights to it to make it even heavier. I suspect he tells friends to punch him in the stomach for kicks; you know, like Houdini.

Fortunately, no one ever goes on the Stairmaster. So I can always use that when the other machines are occupied. I think people find the Stairmaster daunting because of the picture on it of the Empire State Building and the notation that to climb to the top of that landmark would require 1,860 steps on the Stairmaster. My math skills are limited, but I figure that at two visits per week, I should make it to the top of the Empire State Building by the middle of February. By then most of the people who resolved to go to the gym will have wimped out and I can have the equipment to myself. Getting adequate exercise is critical for health, and building muscle mass is an important piece of a fitness plan. So I encourage you to go to the gym, just not my gym.

My resolution for 2016? I resolve to say five things for which I am grateful every night before I go to sleep. With no repeats. Each night, five new things. And I already said dark chocolate. 

Even though I go to the gym, I was apparently not strong enough 

to pull this "cracker" (also called a "popper") with my son. 

He kept pulling it out of my hand. Someone else had to take over for me.

Happy Holidays 2015

Since I just spent more hours than I would like to reveal crafting my seasonal holiday letter, I’m too burnt out to write a blog this week. Fortunately, I can simply steal material from the holiday letter. So here are excerpts. (Yay for dual purpose news.) Be warned that I am dedicating the upcoming year to honing my comedy-writing skills. Comedy is hard and I always wonder if I’m giving people a laugh or if I’m merely giving them a wince. That said, have a hearty wince.

Ron and I went on separate vacations this year. He went to Chicago and I stayed home, where I found fun things to do by myself, such as having our ancient toilets replaced with beautiful efficient low-flush toilets, which I surreptitiously stroke in adoration when no one’s looking. (The plumber found a velociraptor claw in the plumbing, that’s how old my former toilets were.) I also refinished the kitchen table and had the kitchen chairs stripped (Ron refinished them beautifully upon his return home). I joined a gym, where I take a high intensity interval training (HIIT) class once a week and work out on the weight machines on a couple other days. My daughter pestered me about this for months because she said I need to build muscle mass. Since I joined the gym, I gained five pounds. Wow, muscle mass is heavy. Does anyone know what this stuff’s actually made out of? I think perhaps cheese. One of the women at my gym wears a T-shirt that says “Strong is the new skinny.” Works for me.

If you remember, we moved off the Ranch to live closer to emergency services because of Ron’s health issues. Since the move, our proximity to the emergency room (ER) has saved Ron’s life on more than one occasion. I count 2015 a good year since we only used emergency services for Ron twice. I have learned from experience that if you call an ambulance and they come and save you, then the service is free (here, anyway), but if they haul you off to the ER then it costs you a bundle in co-pay for services. They don’t take persimmon bread in trade for ER services. Also, when you get the ER bill, they refuse to break it down for you to see how they figured the expenses. ER billing services does not comprehend the words “line item.” They could charge you $400 for using the restroom and the bill would list this as “relief services.” They charge separately for toilet paper by the square. Anyway, armed with this knowledge, I make every effort to have the ambulance paramedics revive Ron from his occasional life-threatening low-blood-sugar episodes without dragging him into the ER. They have all the equipment and know-how right there in the ambulance and it’s free. You can’t say “no” to free resuscitation.

So when the health club phoned to say that they had called an ambulance for Ron because they found him unconscious, I screamed into the phone, “Don’t let them take him to the hospital. I’ll be right there.” The woman who called hung up on me. She couldn’t deal with a deranged spouse who seemed to have a perverse death-wish for her poor stricken diabetic husband. I arrived onsite just as the ambulance was about to pull out of the parking lot with Ron inside and I stood in the road in front of the vehicle. By the time I convinced them to open the doors and let me in to see him, Ron was stable and flirting with the nurse. “See,” I said, “no need to rush off to the hospital. He just needed some juice.” (Actually they had him on IV concentrated sugar.) When Ron began singing “just a spoonful of medicine makes the sugar go down,” they yanked his IV and threw him out of the ambulance. The health club staff was super amazing and they did a great job of getting help for Ron right away. They didn’t even call the police to report my frenzied command not to take him to the ER. In general, Ron’s health has improved this year now that he’s free of the stress of having a job. He’s doing astonishingly well for a man with so many health conditions and a wife who pitches a fit if the paramedics try to take him to the ER in an ambulance. There’s nothing like occasional IV sugar to jumpstart the old system.

           

A few weeks ago, Ron revived his Binford Tools T-shirt and replaced our garbage disposal because the old one had corroded and started leaking. For the installation, he cleverly built a winch out of nylon rope, a small length of plastic plumbing pipe, and his wife (that would be me). As a result of this maneuver, I discovered that I am now able to bench press a stainless steel garbage disposal, and that sucker is heavy. (Woo-hoo. Working out at the gym is awesome.) This realization would have changed my life had my husband not insisted that the garbage disposal belongs installed under the sink in the kitchen, and will not remain available for me to impress the neighbors or my children. Argh. He’s so mean.

He’s also a bit absentminded sometimes. For instance, he went around for a couple of days saying he needed to make an appointment with the eye doctor because he couldn’t see out of his glasses anymore and he thought he needed a new prescription. “I’m going blind,” he lamented. Then he realized that one of the lenses had popped out. He found it on the backseat of his car and when he put it back in the frame he could see again. I’m not seriously worried about his cognitive ability since he still does the NY Times crossword in record time and he figured out how to replace our garbage disposal. (Did I already say that I can bench press a garbage disposal?)

           

I enjoy celebrating both the Jewish and Christian holidays. Twice the opportunities to eat festive cheese. My daughter has promised to make tortilla soup for the family on Christmas Eve. We will have all of our children with us for Christmas this year. Plus the daughter of my longtime friend Helen in Scotland is coming to join us for the holiday. The last time I saw Helen, 35 years ago, in Fife (by Dundee), she was pregnant with this daughter, who is now studying poetry in grad school in Texas. She plays the Northumbrian Pipes and I look forward to a demonstration during her visit. Thus we will be the only household in America to pipe in tortilla soup and latkes on Christmas Eve.

I’m going to take a vacation from blogging for a couple of weeks over the holidays to bake gluten-free treats, eat cheese, and spend time with my astonishing children. Look for me on the blog again after the New Year, when I will continue to elicit laughter and winces. May you have health, happiness, delicious nutritious food, laughter, music, time spent with loved ones, a functioning garbage disposal, an abundance of things for which to be grateful, and lots of good cheese during the holiday season.

I was going to put a photo of an uninstalled garbage disposal into this blog 

but I couldn't find one with Hanukkah candles on it 

so I decided to show you this menorah instead. More festive.

First World Problems

Sometimes my husband says the most profound things. Earlier this week I was obsessing about a decision. Finally, as I ran down the pros and cons to him for the sixth or seventh time, he joked, “First World problems.” I laughed because he was so right-on. I have heard the expression before, but ever since he said it, I keep thinking about it. When I looked it up on Wikipedia I learned that the term first appeared in 1979 in G.K. Payne’s Built Environment. It turned into an internet meme in 2005, and it became a popular Twitter hashtag. It is generally used to minimize complaints about trivial issues by people living in the lap of luxury. The quintessential First World problem is slow internet access. In fact, the expression is frequently used with regard to electronic/tech problems. For instance, classic First World problems are 1) I don’t have access to wi-fi right now, 2) I lost the remote, 3) the PDF downloaded instead of opening, 4) my laptop power cord died, or 5) I dropped my iPhone into a pot of boiling spaghetti sauce. If you google “First World problems,” you will bring up links to heaps of funny examples. I just did this and wasted half an hour that I could have spent writing this blog chuckling over these examples. Wasting time reading things online is a First World problem.

Although generally First World problems, my problems still concern me. Here is a short-list sampling of some of my First World problems.

1. I have so much work right now that I don’t have enough time to do my own creative writing (including writing my annual holiday letter).

2. I lost a piece of cheese in my car.

3. I can’t decide whether to make pumpkin bread or persimmon bread for the holidays.

4. I don’t think my Christmas Cactus will keep blooming all the way to Christmas, so maybe I should buy another one in a couple of weeks? Or not?

5. I dyed my husband’s socks pink by accident washing them with a red dress.

6. Writing comedy is hard and I want to give people a good laugh.

7. Last week I played Dez Bryant in Fantasy Football but then Tony Romo broke his clavicle (again) and the backup QB didn’t throw any balls to Dez meanwhile I left Sammy Watkins on my bench and Dez made 5 points and Watkins made 27 and I don’t even like the Dallas Cowboys and I don’t know who Watkins is and I think I should play Charcandrick West instead of Watkins this week even though West had a hamstring injury and this is the final week of the regular Fantasy season and I am agonizing so much about what to do that I think maybe I should stop playing Fantasy next year and…. I need an intervention.

8. I keep getting robocalls from cardholder services even though I am on the do-not-call list so what is up with that? Argh!

9. I can smell a missing piece of cheese in my car.

9. I am not good with numbers and my math ability sucks.

10. Organic food is expensive.

11. I can’t interest any publishers in my unpublished books. I can’t interest any agents in representing my unpublished books. I can’t stop writing books that probably will never be published. I can’t stop kvetching about it. I need an intervention.

12. They stopped carrying my favorite chipotle habañero sauce at the natural foods store so now I have to buy it online.

13. I mortgaged my house to put my children through college and I have no retirement savings so I will have to work until I die.

14. My orange tabby cat sheds on everything.

15. I cry every time I watch It’s a Wonderful Life and my children laugh at me.

16. I can’t find a chemical-free air freshener that smells good to me. (So I don’t have a nice scent to spray in my car to counteract the lost cheese.)

17. I miss my cheese.

I would like to think that mostly my problems are not the silly non-problem problems of the oblivious privileged person, such as breaking a fingernail on the metal soy milk pitcher at Starbuck’s. My problems are the problems of a middle class person living in the First World, and I wouldn’t trade them for Third World problems. Even so, I do have some problems that I think qualify as All World (global/universal) problems, such as the fact that I am slowly going deaf, my access to clean food is compromised by profit-mongers, I can’t protect my children from the miasma of chemicals surrounding us (not least of which are the toxins in food), the damage to our environment threatens my safety and future (and that of my children and future generations), I don’t have easy access to health care that is honest and free of interference by corporate interests, and I am in constant danger of losing those I love to gun violence. Yet in the final analysis, my week of pondering the expression has led me to recognize that my problems are predominantly First World problems; and for this I am truly grateful, especially at this festive time of year when I anticipate being surrounded by friends and family and enjoying our First World bounty.

When I think about my problems from this perspective, I no longer feel nearly so stressed. Except maybe about that cheese. Why can’t I stop thinking about cheese? I’m hungry (that’s an All World problem). 

I googled "cheese in car" for an image for this blog post and this is what I found, which is perfect 

because it's not only cheese on a car but it's also a football image since it's a Green Bay Packers (the "cheeseheads") car therefore related to both my cheese problems and my Fantasy football problems.