Category Archives: Health

Business, Health, Uncategorized, work

Moonshine Hand Sanitizer

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The office operations person at my agency is tasked with finding sufficient masks, sanitzer, and sanitizing wipes for our building staff and for staff who transport clients or who visit clients in their homes.  She has networked with her counterparts at other human service centers to find supplies.  Hand sanitizer has been hard to come by,  and they have turned to local distilleries in Fargo and in our community that are making it by the gallon.  She and the other office managers have a Pony Express type of delivery chain, meeting one another at county lines and regional boundaries for deliveries and pick up. She said it feels like they are hauling moonshine and doing something illegal. I like the image of the transfer of distillery products into State vehicles.

Today she sent an email saying that  we should come and get some distillery sanitizer,  but since it smelled so strongly alcoholic we had to put essential oils in it, as the raw odor could trigger some of our addiction clients into relapse. I went down to her office to get some and put some lavender oil in it.  She was right about the odor.  Pineapple essential oil would make it smell like a pina colada!  She told me that when she and another business office staff member were pouring it out of the distillery jugs into smaller bottles, they inhaled a lot of the fumes and it got all over their hands and was absorbed into their skin. She said they both got red in the face and kind of goofy before they knew what was happening.

It is heartening to see how people here are pulling together to solve problems and help, even if it means spraying moonshine all over the place.

What have you seen people do lately to pull together and make things better? Have you ever been to a distillery?

animals, Family, Food, Gatherings, Health, home, Uncategorized

Breaking The Rules

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Today we broke the rules, at least some, of the social distancing rules. Two dear friends, a married couple of licensed addiction counselors from the Rez came to town to sign their wills at their lawyer’s office, and we had them over for cheesecake and a nice visit over lunch. We hadn’t seen them since the summer. We didn’t hug or shake hands as we normally do (shaking hands is a really big deal with the ND tribes), and we sat about four feet apart at the dining room table, and we had a good talk. They brought a jar of tribal produced honey, and we gave them oatmeal bread, French Bread, and lefse. They showed us videos of their newborn Kiko goats, and we showed them photos of our grandson. It was nice, but odd with the lack of contact and the distance we put between ourselves. We were all very self aware of our coughing and took care to shield the others from our exhalations.

I am a pretty rigid rule follower, and this made me somewhat uneasy, but it felt like the right thing to do.

What sort of a rule breaker/risk taker are you? 

Business, Family, Health, home, Uncategorized, work

Work/Life Balance

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I return to my place of work today. Our Regional Director decided I would be one of the few staff allowed in the building to keep things running.  We have had multiple staff quit to join the private sector in the past few months, and at this point I am one of the few clinical staff left who can do things like sign commitment papers.  I am glad we have quite a few applicants for the vacant positions,  but the virus slowed down the hiring process.

Working in the office is just fine as far as I am concerned.  I really dislike working from home.  I need a separation  between work and home for my own sanity, a reasonable  “work/life balance” not possible when I am at home.  This way I can turn off my computer at the end of the day and drive home and leave work at work.

How do you (or did you) maintain a reasonable  work/life balance?  What happens if you don’t?

Family, Health, home, Medicine, Technology, Uncategorized, Words

Your Private Hell

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Husband declared the other day  that his private Hell consisted of dealing with paper (he has neuropathy in his fingertips from diabetes and can’t sort or easily manipulate papers or feel his fingers on a keyboard), keeping organized the cords for our various computers,  phones, and tech instruments,  and the internal combustion engine. He is in Heaven, on the other hand turning a phrase or writing a psychological evaluation.

What would constitute your private Hell?  

Art, Family, Health, Medicine, News, Uncategorized

CONSTRUCTION ZONE

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Today’s post comes from Jacque.

Two weekends of my life have been lost to construction of homemade masks.  This is not usually how I would spend a weekend, but then these are not normal times.  And what else was there to do anyway given our Shelter-in-Place order.  And constructing masks certainly is preferable to allowing debilitating fear and anxiety about our COVID-19 problem to take over my life.  I would rather allow something useful to take over my life.   The need for these was urgent, though.  Several people asked me to send masks ASAP.  Unfortunately, many of them are going to medical providers:

  • Sister-in-law, a doctor. She says they have shields and it was suggested they use homemade masks under them.  They had to find their own homemade masks.
  • Brother-in-law, a nurse. He has masks at his hospital but they are forbidden from using the one mask they have been assigned anywhere but in direct care.
  • Daughter of a friend, another nurse. Her hospital has assigned each nurse one N95 mask with the instructions to use a homemade mask over it to preserve the usefulness of it.  She also had to find her own mask.
  • My mother’s assisted living facility which has no masks at all—they are entirely dependent on donated masks amid the most vulnerable population of all.

To date, I have made 65 of these, and mailed out or given away 60.  Someone at  Blue Cross Blue Shield and Allina designed the masks I have made, then sent them out appealing to anyone who can sew.  An NBC article I found yesterday cited a research study by a Dr. stating that these screen out 79% of viruses and bacteria.    Not bad for quilting materials.  The instructions (thrown together and hand drawn) are here:

Then came the issue of obtaining materials.  First everyone everywhere ran out of elastic, then elastic hair ties which were used to improvise elastic.  I hear people are cutting the elastic off of underwear to make them.  I found shoelaces, ordered 4 spools from a shoelace site, and have been attaching those.  They tie very tightly and stay put.  The medical people need that.  Next, during a trip to Joann Fabric, the store was shut down because people would not stay 6 feet apart in the store.   Thus my on-line order was cancelled.   I went to the Edina Joann, and joined a line in front of the store.  They only allowed 25 customers in the store at once to maintain a distance.  The fly in that ointment was that all 25 customers headed for the quilt fabric department – to make masks.  We did our best to maintain 6 feet of distance from one another.  I did get more fabric, then launched into making more.

I am taking a break now from mask construction, having overdosed on the entire project.  I just could not do one more after yesterday.  I sent them off Monday morning to family in Phoenix, to KC, to Iowa wishing them 79% ability to block a virus and that they perform efficiently.  In a few days I will start some more, but I won’t make that many at a time again.   Today, for a change of pace, I planted my cold frame, wallowing in the joy of early Spring and the possibilities of my garden.  Then I fixed supper, using the baked potato recipe Steve posted yesterday via YouTube.  They were good.

What have you overdosed on lately? 

Business, Family, Health, home, Uncategorized, work

Telehealth

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I have four more days to work from home until the State is assured I am not full of Covid19 germs from Minnesota.  I was trained last week in the computer platform we will be using for telehealth.  Even when I return to the office, face to face therapy and  psychological testing are to be done only in an emergency, and l will either reach out to clients via phone or the telehealth  platform.  There is some glitch in my work computer that I will need our tech guy to fix, as my screen freezes, usually with my face with a weird expression.  The audio works just fine.

Daughter is doing 5 hours of telehealth sessions a day, and she even figured out how to have the children she sees use their own toys to facilitate play therapy.  (“What feelings do your different color leggo blocks have?  Make a sad building with blue blocks. Why is the building so sad?  How does that red leggo block feel?”)   I wish I was as flexible and creative as she is.  I really don’t like doing therapy remotely, and I don’t think my clients like it, either.  Not all insurances will pay for telehealth sessions. I know that some of the more active and aggressive traumatized preschoolers won’t do well with it at all. I think I will mainly be offering behavior management and therapeutic response suggestions to the foster parents.  I imagine if I do sessions from home,  the cats will wonder to whom I am speaking and will want to walk on the keyboard to see what is going on.

What are your feelings regarding telehealth? What have you done remotely?

animals, gardening, Health, Media, Nature, News, Uncategorized

Goats in the News: COVID-19 Edition

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I was tickled to read about the Kashmiri goats running wild in Wales. during the COVID-19 lockdown there.

 

There are more than one hundred of them wandering around town. They were described as “quite naughty” by a local.  I gather they have come to town on other occasions, but the lack of people has made them even more curious to check things out. And oh, my, those horns! Fiber for cashmere comes from the neck region of such goats. I have several cashmere sweaters, and I love them.

What is your favorite sweater?  What are some bright spots in the news or in your life over the past several days?

Family, Gatherings, Health, home, Uncategorized, work

The Basement!

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Photo credit: Wonderlane

I think I may have figured out how I am going to stay sane through all this isolation. I have “discovered” a new room on our house – heck, a new floor! – our Basement. Saturday (I may have mentioned here) we cleaned and organized enough that it feels comfortable down there. It’s an OLD basement (1930 era house) but at least it’s dry. There are five small windows, and the ceiling and walls are painted white, which makes it pretty light.

The joy of it is that I can spread out down there with my mask sewing project – there is room for a cutting table and ironing board. There’s an old rug under all this so my feet don’t get cold – if it feels too cool, I just add another layer. I still need a coffee kiosk, or I suppose I could go up to the “fireplace” niche in my (tiny) bedroom – the Break Room!

But the best thing about this is it feels a little bit “away” from the rest of my life now.  I have a commute – even if it is only up and down twelve steps, it will be a bit harder to get to the kitchen. And with a 900 sq. ft. house, it will give us both some well needed space. Heck, I might even get fully dressed to go to “work”.

Some of the “baboons” here (if you’re relatively new on the Trail, click on FAQ at the top) may already have this sort of space in their abode. If so,

is it useful at this time?

Is there some nook or cranny (attic, closet) at your about that you haven’t explored lately?

If you are living with others, do you have a place where you can get “away” if you want to?

100 Words, Business, Family, Food, Health, home, Stories, Uncategorized

Skim vs. Powdered

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Our discussion the other day about paper plates reminded me of stories that my folks used to tell about their early married life.  My dad was in basic training in North Carolina and my mom moved there to be close to him.  She taught gym part-time and they lived in a small trailer.  One of the stories they told me about how broke they were was that they couldn’t afford to buy a set of plates.  So not only did they eat on paper plates, they cut the paper plates in half!

By the time I came along, they were in better shape, although still not great; my dad was in law school with two part time jobs and my mom was forced to quit working the minute the school district found out she was pregnant!  As a kid, things were tight, not destitute, but definitely tight. One of the ways that my mom saved on groceries was by using powdered milk.  I still remember it after all these years, chalky and for some reason never seemed to get really cold.  I hated it.

At least once a month we had Saturday dinner at my grandparents’ house – hamburger and french fry night.  There were a lot of reasons that I liked to eat my Nana and Pappy’s; one of those reasons was that they had “real” milk.  It was always very cold because that’s the way Pappy liked it and there was always plenty.  They had a special half-gallon carton holder that looked like this:

When my younger sister started school and had “real” milk every day, she began refusing to drink the powdered milk at home.  While I hadn’t been brave enough to do this on my own, I quickly followed her lead and my mom gave up and began to buy “real” milk.  I started drinking skim about 30 years ago and I’m still a big milk drinker all these years later.  My mom doesn’t understand how I can drink skim and  has suggested more than once that I “might as well go back to powdered milk”.  Yes, after all these years, she still remembers how we “forced” her to buy milk.

My milkman told me yesterday when he was making our delivery that big local dairies are going to discontinue skim milk production for a bit.  Apparently skim milk requires more steps and production time; during our current crisis, trying to keep up with demand means cutting out skim so more easily produced milks can make it to market faster.  Who would have thought?  Guess I’ll be on a higher fat milk for a while.

Do you remember any meals you enjoyed at your grandparents’?

books, Business, Health, Uncategorized, Words

It Hits Home!

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It says a lot about you when you really decide that there is a crisis going on.  Work from home? Concert cancelled? Dog class postponed? Even the decision to stay away from Target for now didn’t bring it home to me until this:  Tuesday morning I got a note that the Hennepin County Library is closed until at least April 6.  Oh, the inhumanity!

Of course, it’s ridiculous to think this will have a serious impact on my life.  First off, I still have 14 books checked out; the library computer generously changed all the due dates to April, even the interlibrary loans.  Second off, there are tons of audio books online and I could always break down by reading books on my phone or pc.  Then there is the third off; I probably have 50 non-library books in the house that I haven’t read yet either.  I don’t think I have to panic.  Matbe Funny Planet by Ken Jennings (the Jeopardy guy) will be my next read.

What’s up next on your reading list?