Not much work to be done around the place these cold February days. Well, maintenance, of course. Weeding the garden, getting the beds ready for the seeds now sprouting in the protection of the greenhouse. Deadheading the over-eager camellia in front of the house. Personal maintenance, like trying to put something green on the dinner plates every day. Walking down the damn road even when it’s 34 degrees and windy out there, but you know. Exercise.
I’m actually involved in something I find interesting. For years my PC physician has been nagging me about the too-high blood sugar in my yearly-exam blood tests. This year, she suggested a glucose monitoring device that could be put on my arm, and connected to my phone to give me daily readings. Like outsourcing your mom, or conscience, or responsibility. You punch the thing onto your arm and a tiny wire penetrates your flesh. No, it really doesn’t hurt. You put a patch over it and are good to go, even into your daily shower. Then, presumably, you stop eating any sugar. Right. But here’s the rub: Carbohydrates. Carbs also elevate your blood sugar, so stop eating them? Easier said than done.
The interesting thing is to see it register, which it does every 15 minutes, exactly what that morning bagel has done to your score. Oatmeal in your smoothie? Yep. Well, there’s lots of help available out there on line. I think the famous Atkins diet is at your fingertips. The Mayo Clinic diet. But here’s something I hadn’t realized. My body keeps on digesting stuff apparently into the wee hours. I’ll go to bed and the thing will register, for example, 124. (One hundred on this scale being desirable.) Sometime in the middle of the night it will plunge to, say 94. But then, I wake up at 4:00 and it will register 117. What? I haven’t eaten anything since the earlier 94. So what is going on? Beats me.
Enough about me! What about country life?
This is a jam we attended at the Lebanon American Legion Hall. We’d been invited to come by a friend we’d met at the Philomath Jam we sometimes attend. He gave us the particulars, like how to order food. “Did we like to dance?” Left us and sat with his guitar in a small circle near the front.
Well, no, we don’t actually like to dance. Just watch. Fun! Soon a cluster of women were up in front doing the Texas Two Step, to be replaced by assorted couples if the next song happened to be a waltz. Perfect. Decorative cowboy boots were apparently mandatory for the women. Gorgeous. I wish I had a pair. The men? These are guys who know their way around a tractor and a bale of hay. Okay, most of them wore jeans and showed, um, hefty bellies under their shirts. Any boots were tucked away, obviously not a costume.
From time to time someone in the audience would come up to a standing mic, alert the band about the desired key, and begin to sing. I wouldn’t say they were, mostly, great singers, but hey. They were having a fine time. Someone began “I’ll Fly Away” and we all joined in. It doesn’t get better.
Larry loved it. He said that if he were, unfortunately, to outlive me, this is exactly where he’d spend his lonely evenings without me. I think I’m comforted by that.
Another afternoon found me back in Lebanon, about a twenty mile drive, at my favorite yarn shop. I’ve been wanting a project for these long cold afternoons, and decided on a sweater pattern. The shop’s name is Knitty Gritty — pretty cute — and I knew Maureen would help me with the yarn selection. The yarn comes in skeins, which have to be wound into a ball in order to be knit. One can wind the skein around the arms of a chair, the arms of a husband, if available, or let Maureen wind the stuff on a wooden device that looks like a collapsible oil derrick, in scale. The magic of this thing is that it produces a nice ball with the yarn protruding from the center. If you knit, you appreciate the convenience.
Maureen owns the shop, and also raises sheep to provide the wool for her own yarn. While she was winding my skeins, 8 of them, we fell into conversation. It’s lambing season, and she’s been busy with her birthing flock. Says you have to pull them out, often as not. If the ewe doesn’t survive, you will either have to bottle feed the lamb, or find a surrogate mother. Which does seem to work, if the flock is big enough, I guess. Of course we’ve seen the lambs in the nearby fields, looking adorable, but I did have a question. Do sheep have udders like cows? And how many teats per udder? Four, for cows (we all knew that) but two for sheep. Hm. What about horses? Two. Maureen was happy to launch into a discussion of coyotes, then, and the importance of big dogs. If you want to run sheep.
Nope. Don’t want to run sheep, or have big dogs, but I appreciated the info. Just in case. Home again. Dinner (low carb), green salad, and it’s time for another episode of our current favorite series. “Diplomat.” Gotta go.
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