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Moment of Zen: Coffee or Tea?

In the mornings, I tend to prefer a hot cup of tea, but sometimes I drink a cup of coffee. I'm not sure why I prefer tea in the mornings, but I've always liked hot tea. For years, I've gone through periods of drinking tea in the mornings, and then I will go back to coffee for a while. Which do you prefer as a wake me up in the morning: coffee or tea?

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Oddities of Amazon

Isabella looks at me with the same disdain and
horror when I pick her up. 

Usually, when I order stuff from Amazon.com, I get what I order. I rarely have problems. When I have had problems, it’s because I read the description wrong and inadvertently bought the wrong thing. Usually, this has to do with the size of whatever I ordered. However, I recently ordered a corner shield with adhesive to go on my door frames to stop Isabella from scratching. She was scratching off the paint, and I needed to do something before she caused too much damage. I measured, and the ones I found were the perfect size (3/4 inches wide and 48 inches long), and they came in a pack of five. When I got the notice that they had arrived, I went outside and got them. The box was 5.5 feet long and 5 inches by 5 inches. It was a much larger box than I had anticipated, but Amazon often sends things in inordinately large boxes. I got the box inside and opened it up, and it contained only one corner shield.

 

I went back to my order and checked to make sure that I had ordered the correct thing, and I had. Amazon just shipped on corner shield. Four were missing. So, I had to contact Amazon, not one of my favorite things to have to do. The good thing is that Amazon is replacing the whole order. Chatting with Amazon is always an interesting experience. I used to chat feature and did not call because I have a hard time understanding their operators, and with my southern accent, they have a hard time understanding me. It’s easier just to type what I need. “Lester” was very helpful, and he put in an order for a replacement. He told me I would get a return shipping label, but I should ignore it. Then he wrote, “Before I let you go, is there anything else I can help you with?” I immediately started to type, “No, thank you for your help, Lester.” However, before I could even get the “No” typed, he cut off the chat. It was a weird exchange, but he put through the request to send a replacement. 

 

The complete set of five corner shields should arrive on November 25. I hope they do as Isabella is soon going to find out that she cannot scratch the wall anymore, and she will likely move to another door frame. Before anyone suggests that I buy her a scratching post, she has several different scratching toys. She won’t touch any of them. The only plaything I have ever bought her that she will play with are those little toy mice (she prefers live ones, but now that I live in a newer apartment, there aren’t any). She will only play with toy mice as long as they have no catnip in them. She seems to dislike catnip. She did have one other toy that she liked. It was one of those sticks with a string on it, and at the end of the string, there were feathers with a bell attached. The bell was very faint, but no matter where she was or how far under the bed she was hiding, if I jangled that little bell, she’d come running. Sadly, a few months ago, I stepped on it and broke it. I have not been able to find a replacement.

"Do not disturb me."

"What's out there?"

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Health Update

Dr. Gabriel Prado (@gabrielndsprado)
Neurologist, São Paulo, Brazil

I mentioned Monday that I was going to the doctor for my quarterly diabetes check-up. I had an excellent report. My weight is down a few more pounds; my blood pressure was good; and my A1c (a measurement of your average blood glucose, or blood sugar, level over the past three months) was 6.0. To put that into perspective for those of you not familiar with A1c readings: 

•       A person who does not have diabetes has an A1c result of less than 5.7%.
•       A person with pre-diabetes has an A1c of 5.7% to 6.4%.
•       A person with diabetes has an A1c level of 6.5% or higher.

This does not mean that I am back to being pre-diabetic, but it does mean that the medicine I am taking is working. The only issue has been that my blood sugar readings have gone down to nearly hypoglycemic (low blood sugar) levels a few times, so my doctor cut back on my medicine by a little bit.

In addition, my blood test results for everything else came back normal. I have no idea what my levels are on any of the other tests because I cannot access them electronically as I usually do. I know they came back normal because my doctor called and told me that everything looked very good. I did not ask for details because my county (he is the only doctor in my town) is having a surge in COVID-19 cases. Thus he is swamped right now. As I mentioned on Monday, his office has no working computers because of the cyberattack, so he has to write everything by hand and use paper charts. I did not want to add any more work for him by asking him to explain all my levels when I wouldn’t remember them five minutes later anyway. It was bad enough he was calling after 5:30 pm when he should have been on his way home.

My doctor has done a great deal to keep our little town mostly safe from the pandemic. Vermont has not been hit as hard as many other states, and we have been fortunate, but that appears to be rapidly changing as our positive case numbers are rising daily. Currently, we are not allowed to have people gathered together from different households. Since the beginning of the pandemic, my doctor has gone on Front Porch Forum (FPF) to update the community on the state of the pandemic in our area and urge people to follow safety protocols. I doubt many of you know what FPF is, especially since it is something unique to Vermont. 

Each day Vermonters use FPF to connect with their neighbors and the community by sharing postings. We get the postings through email or a cell phone app.  FPF has nearly 160,000 members, or just under a quarter of the state's population, and FPF is now available in all 251 Vermont towns. Whether it’s a lost dog or car, someone has too many roosters and wants to give some away, the theft of a pride flag, or vandalism of a BLM sign, people post to FPF. More importantly, it’s where our legislators give updates, the town and school board post their minutes, and where my doctor can urge people to follow pandemic safety protocols. I find out so much about what is going on in town through FPF. It’s also local. You have to have an address to use the service, and it ties you to the announcements for that town. I used FPF to find my first apartment. I signed up using the university’s address since I didn’t have a local address of my own.

Bonus picture of Dr. Prado

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November

Edward Thomas in Uniform

 November 

By Edward Thomas

 

November’s days are thirty:

November’s earth is dirty,

Those thirty days, from first to last;

And the prettiest thing on ground are the paths

With morning and evening hobnails dinted,

With foot and wing-tip overprinted

Or separately charactered,

Of little beast and little bird.

The fields are mashed by sheep, the roads

Make the worst going, the best the woods

Where dead leaves upward and downward scatter.

Few care for the mixture of earth and water,

Twig, leaf, flint, thorn,

Straw, feather, all that men scorn,

Pounded up and sodden by flood,

Condemned as mud.

 

But of all the months when earth is greener

Not one has clean skies that are cleaner.

Clean and clear and sweet and cold,

They shine above the earth so old,

While the after-tempest cloud

Sails over in silence though winds are loud,

Till the full moon in the east

Looks at the planet in the west

And earth is silent as it is black,

Yet not unhappy for its lack.

Up from the dirty earth men stare:

One imagines a refuge there

Above the mud, in the pure bright

Of the cloudless heavenly light:

Another loves earth and November more dearly

Because without them, he sees clearly,

The sky would be nothing more to his eye

Than he, in any case, is to the sky;

He loves even the mud whose dyes

Renounce all brightness to the skies.

 

About the Poet:

 

If the war goes on I believe I shall find myself a sort of Englishman, though neither poet or soldier'

- Letter to Walter de la Mare, 30th August 1914

Philip Edward Thomas (3 March 1878 – 9 April 1917) was a British poet, essayist, and novelist. Scholars consider him a war poet, although few of his poems deal directly with his war experiences. His career in poetry only came after he had already been a successful writer and literary critic. In 1915, he enlisted in the British Army to fight in the First World War and was killed in action shortly after arriving in France.

 

Thomas thought that poetry was the highest form of literature and regularly reviewed it, but he only became a poet himself at the end of 1914 when living at Steep, East Hampshire. He initially published his poetry under the name Edward Eastaway to disguise his identity due to his fame as a critic. Robert Frost, who was living in England at the time, encouraged Thomas (then more famous as a critic) to write poetry, and their friendship was so close that the two planned to reside side by side in the United States. Frost's most famous poem, "The Road Not Taken," was inspired by walks with Thomas and Thomas's indecisiveness about which route to take.

 

Thomas enlisted in the Artists Rifles in July 1915, despite being a 37-year-old married man who could have avoided enlisting. He was unintentionally influenced in this decision by his friend Frost, who had returned to the U.S. but sent Thomas an advance copy of "The Road Not Taken." Frost intended the poem as a gentle mocking of Thomas’ indecision, particularly the indecision that Thomas had shown on their many walks together; however, most audiences took the poem more seriously than Frost intended. Thomas similarly took it seriously and personally. The poem allowed Thomas to be decisive and enlist.

 

Thomas was promoted to corporal, and in November 1916 was commissioned into the Royal Garrison Artillery as a second lieutenant. He was killed in action soon after arriving in France at Arras on Easter Monday, 9 April 1917. To spare the feelings of his widow, Helen, she was told the fiction of a "bloodless death," i.e., that Thomas was killed by the concussive blast wave of one of the last shells fired as he stood to light his pipe and that there was no mark on his body. However, a letter from his commanding officer Franklin Lushington written in 1936 (and discovered many years later in an American archive), states that in reality, the cause of Thomas's death was being "shot clean through the chest." W. H. Davies, the Welsh poet and Thomas's close friend, was devastated by his death and immortalized him in a poem, “Killed in Action (Edward Thomas).”

 

Killed in Action (Edward Thomas)

By W. H. Davies

 

Happy the man whose home is still

In Nature’s green and peaceful ways;

To wake and hear the birds so loud,

That scream for joy to see the sun

Is shouldering past a sullen cloud.

 

And we have known those days, when we

Would wait to hear the cuckoo first;

When you and I, with thoughtful mind,

Would help a bird to hide her nest,

For fear of other hands less kind.

 

But thou, my friend, art lying dead:

War, with its hell-born childishness,

Has claimed thy life, with many more:

The man that loved this England well,

And never left it once before.

 

 Thomas is buried in Agny military cemetery on the outskirts of Arras. He did not live to see Poems (1917), a collection of his poetry published under his pseudonym, Edward Eastaway. In just under two years, he had written over 140 poems. On 11 November 1985, Thomas was among 16 Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner. The inscription, written by fellow poet Wilfred Owen, reads: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."

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