DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

It’s official — I have a heart condition. I called my doctor to report my low heart rate. She said, “I’m sure you’re fine. It’s probably nothing. But why don’t you come in to the office for further testing?” If I’m fine, and it’s nothing, why did she want to strap a dozen electrodes to my body and shoot current from one to the next?

But the EKG wasn’t at all painful, probably because it doesn’t actually shoot electricity through one’s body. It simply measures the electricity that’s already there. The worst part of the procedure was the nurse’s haircut; she had a mullet. And, under the white skirt, I believe I caught a glimpse of acid-wash jeans.

EKG stands for electrocardiogram. You might think the abbreviation for electrocardiogram should be ECG, and in fact you can spell it that way if you like, but “EKG” sounds cooler, so that’s what I call it, because appearances are everything, even when you’re laying topless on an examination table under fluorescent lights while an earnest but poorly-coiffed RN glues metal tabs to your chest, with wires running across the room to an old Medusa of a battery charger/arc-welding rig, except it’s encased in that thick pebble-finish plastic that used to be beige but has yellowed to a sort of unpleasantly mucoid smear that screams out “Medical Surplus, $49.95, conductive paste not included”.

I half expected the nurse to shout “CLEAR!” as megavolts of power coursed through my body while my back arched and I bit through the rubber puck she’d stuck in my mouth, but none of this happened, because I wasn’t being defibrillated. My heart may be slow, but it hasn’t quite stopped. I can tell, because I’m still typing.

Anyway it was refreshingly non-traumatic, a nice change considering my age — it seems every time I turn around some MD wants to stick a finger up my butt. (My prostate has a fan club.) Eyeballing the report, which looks like a seismographic recording of a place where, ahh, they have regular but very small earthquakes, my doctor repeated her earlier diagnosis: “You’re fine; it’s probably nothing; but why don’t you go to the lab for further testing?”

I’d be lying if I said I was no fan of needles. The fact is, the mere prospect of getting jabbed in the vein is enough to give me the screaming willies. But I’d been curious about my thyroid, and in a detached way (which is the only way I can manage to think about my thyroid at all without making grossed-out faces and changing the subject) I looked forward to finding out if it was doing the right thing.

I ought to be able to describe the blood test in grisly detail, but I had my eyes closed.

So, a couple of days later my doctor called. “Your thyroid is fine.” She paused. I waited. Surely there was an MRI or spinal tap in my future… but no. The diagnosis is the same now as when I started out: sinus bradycardia. In the absence of other symptoms, or maybe just in my case?, it’s harmless. This was my suspicion all along, but having information is strongly preferable to having suspicions. Also, medical procedures make for great journal entries.

We eat Thai food nearly every week. There are two Thai restaurants in town, one of which makes good curry, and the other of which makes good money. (It is closer to Main Street, serves smaller portions, and charges a buck more per entree. The curry there isn’t any good, but the dinner crowd is bigger, proving that the commercial real-estate mantra is not “Quality! Quality! Quality!”)

Lately I’ve been playing with Thai curry recipes, to save the expense of eating out so often. (Yeah, I’m bitching about a $6 plate of curry. If it makes you feel better: I usually order an appetizer too.) I’ve tried five recipes. Most of them were pretty good, except for the versions that call for fish sauce, a liquid so vile that a single tablespoon can overwhelm three pounds of vegetables, fresh garlic, chilis, and coconut milk. I don’t know what orifice they squeeze that stuff from, but it is so far beyond disgusting that I’ve just gone out to find a new word to describe it… something unfamiliar and therefore undiminshed by past use (e.g. “you’ll love this new detergent!”), and with a hint of the biblical to support connotations of horror: mephitic. Fish sauce is mephitic. You heard it here first.

Anyway, I digress. I’ve made all these curry recipes, and although most of them were good, none of them were curry. There’s a particular flavor profile that is characteristic of restaurant curry, that I’ve not been able to match at home.

The problem with my curries is the paste. I use an inauthentic substitute, mass-produced for the American market and (apparently) dumbed-down for the American palette: Thai Kitchen Red Curry Paste. The resulting dish is vaguely reminiscent of Thai curry, but basically wrong. It’s missing something (don’t say “fish sauce”). Or, it has something extra that isn’t needed, some sort of sodium benzoate or chemically brewed flavoring agent that isn’t quite true.

A reasonable person might ask, “if every time you make curry with that Thai Kitchen stuff, you end up disappointed, why do you keep using it?” Answer: it’s the only curry paste I could find. Also: the jar isn’t empty yet. Finally we remembered, on one of our frequent trips to SF, to visit a Thai grocery store. We found an actual imported curry paste, with actual Thai-language writing on the label. We grabbed a packet each of red, yellow, and green.

The verdict? These packets make a rich, spicy, Thai dish that is… not exactly curry. They’re very good, and I’ll never buy Thai Kitchen brand curry paste again because these are so much better. Yet I’m still searching for the perfect curry recipe. I suspect that no commercial preparation will match what I can get in a restaurant, so I’ve begun experimenting with scratch recipes too. If you happen to have a grandmother from Thailand and access to her secret recipe book, please please please send me her curry recipes.

My Amazon Gold Box contained a most unusual Personal Groomer recently.

I’ll admit to owning a number of personal grooming devices, some of which even run on electrical power. But none of them require two hands to operate. Nor do they have motors whose strength can be measured in horsepower.
(The screenshot is unretouched. I suspect my browser pulled the wrong image out of its cache.)

Via Magazine asks, How clean is your hotel room? The answer may disturb you:

Chuck Gerba, an environmental microbiologist at the University of Arizona, conducted a study of hotel cleanliness. The results? Well, let’s just say that bacteria you’d expect to find in the toilet often turned up on the TV remote control.

Gerba has a knack for soundbites. Here’s another one that’s relevant to hotel-room cleanliness, from a Salon article contradicting advice from Self magazine that women shouldn’t sit on public toilets to pee:

“If you have a choice between licking a cutting board or a toilet seat,” concludes Gerba, “pick the toilet seat.”

I’ve had mixed feelings about writing this article. On the one hand, as Michael Moore illustrated in Bowling for Columbine, US media frequently publish fear-mongering stories, presumably because sensational headlines intimating risk generate high-volume sales.

On the other hand, I don’t get sick very often, but about half the time that I do it’s just after returning from hotel stays and airplane trips. I’m quite sure I’ve handled hotel-room doorknobs, toilet levers, and TV remote controls and then touched my food or face or eyes. The thought makes me shudder. I don’t want to live in fear… but I don’t want some hairy truck-driver’s crotch germs on my hands, either.

The fact that Chuck Gerba travels with disinfecting wipes tells me I have something to worry about. But then again, the fact that the Clorox Disinfecting Wipes website quotes Gerba in a half-dozen studies designed to prove that the Clorox product is a requirement for keeping healthy in this germ-ridden world tells me that Gerba’s research may have been promoted past its actual value. I’m interested in what an expert in microbial science has to say… unless he’s on the payroll of a company that profits from my belief in his research.

But I guess I have more issues with trust than I do with bacteria.

We returned to Armstrong Woods on Sunday to tackle that tough 9-miler again. I credit my wife for keeping me on a training plan. Without her, I’d probably lay around all weekend eating soysage.

I’d finally aquired the lumbar pack I intend to use to haul my clothes and food to the summit of Pike’s Peak. I’m breaking with tradition by not using a backpack, but it makes more sense to me to keep the weight low on my body. Also, if I have too large a pack, I’m afraid somebody in the group might ask me to carry something for them. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’ll need all my strength to finish that climb… I wouldn’t carry someone else’s insulin.

Anyway, within a hundred steps of the Armstrong Woods parking lot, my fancy new pack was bouncing around like a politician’s ethics at a fundraiser. This was an irritating development, to have a thoughtfully-considered, well-reviewed, highly recommended, store-tested, prized new piece of gear fail so miserably in the first moments of a three-hour hike. Not only would I have to endure the bouncing for the rest of the day, I thought, I’d have to return the thing and buy a backpack after all.

But I hadn’t fully appreciated the gloriously complex support harness built into this Mountainsmith Cairn lumbar pack. It has four “Delta compression” straps which, when tightened properly, are designed specifically to prevent bouncing. Had I read the booklet that accompanied the pack, I’d have known this from the start. (For as often as I’m annoyed by people who don’t read the documentation I write, I too rarely read the documentation provided by others. If you think about it, both are manifestations of the same core belief. But I digress.)

So the bouncing was under control, but the profile was not. Like scuba diving, trekking is a sport where the gear does not complement the man: it’s just as hard to look cool in a snorkel as it is to look cool with a 1100-cubic-inch sack strapped to one’s butt. I am consoled by the notion that I didn’t look cool before attaching the pack.

We began the hike along the same route as last time, up the East Ridge Trail toward Bullfrog Pond. On the return, we tried a new descent, using the Pool Ridge trail. Halfway down we learned that there’s an even more discomforting feeling than not knowing which way to turn. The worse feeling is: “we’ve been here before.” Trail maps, like IRS documents, have an ability to make me feel dumb. At the point where we thought we’d finally be back on the map, we learned that instead we’d circled back to the place where we first realized we were lost. Argh!

The feeling of frustration was compounded by the fact that we were standing at a three-way intersection, and we’d been up or down all three of the trails. We’d initially arrived here from one leg, then set out on a second, and returned on the third. There was no escape! We were stuck backstage in Cleveland!

Overall, though, it was a nice hike. The gear worked well. My knees worked well.