Iron, Where Art Thou?

I'm pretty sure I'm anemic again.

It's a relatively simply equation. I was feeling tired, in a way sleep couldn't fix, which is the defining symptom for me. Plus I had little appetite despite having a bag of Doritos and six types of ice cream in the house (I'm not exactly certain how that happened). And I kind of stopped taking my iron pills two months ago because I felt fine and had already been taking them for four months and had almost, almost passed the blood tests at the two month mark.

But then Sunday I weighed myself and saw I was accidentally down three pounds from my normal weight which simply. Doesn't. Happen. I looked up the symptoms for iron deficiency anemia and confirmed lack of appetite is a classic manifestation.

Drat.

So now I'm taking my iron pills again, and debating whether I want to take the blood tests I'm due for right now, to prove I'm still anemic or wait until I've been taking the pills again so the results look better. I'm almost leaning toward the first because if my anemia was due to over-donating blood it should have resolved by now.

In other news, I think skunk season is over.

Since I moved into the house after Thanksgiving I have smelled skunk at least every other morning when I open the bathroom window after my shower. Once I woke up in the middle of the night because I smelled skunk, and found out it smelled the most right under the entrance to the attic, which weirded me out until I realized these windows probably don't let in the smell too well, so the attic is where it would come through. But for the past few morning I haven't smelled skunk! It does make your morning a little more pleasant to not have that smell.

What I don't get is why I smelled skunk so often here and never at my apartment, which is only 2.5 miles away. I did look up whether meth labs smelled like skunk, when I didn't believe there could really be that many skunks. But Google said no, plus I kept seeing skunk roadkill which I took as corroborating evidence.

Carnitas? Car-NO-tas!

Every fiber of my being is refusing to eat the carnitas I made in the slow cooker on Tuesday, so I'm trying to quell the loud, internal voice that's telling me not to waste food and actually throw it out.

The voice sounds like my mom.

I think the extreme aversion I get to leftovers when they're nearing their week of fridge time is actually my body trying to avoid food poisoning, so I've been trying to obey that more.

Today was busy. First church, then work for longer than I expected because a reactor was having trouble so I had to move it to a different control station and didn't want to leave until I knew it was doing okay. Yeah, reactors are like pets a lot of the time. Are they happy? Do they need to be fed? Have they pooped themselves to death?

Yesterday was busy too. Nathan took me to see the Bay Model up in Sausalito, which is how they used to figure out water patterns and stuff for the SF Bay before computers were invented. It was very nerdy and very awesome. While the cement topography is only painted blue for water and tan for land they have signs up for cities and I could identify certain coastal features, like the small jetty near my office and the old and new Benicia bridges. However, my lack of geography skillz meant most of my identifications were in the vein of "The Delta? I guess it is really big...I saw a dead cow there once!"

Then on the way back we visited both the Point Bonita lighthouse in the Marin Headlands and the Sutro Bath ruins in San Francisco, which wasn't the type of bathhouse I was thinking of but more of a swimming pool. The ruins were quite picturesque:




















They looked very ruined for only having burned down in 1966 but I guess that's what salt water can do.

Breaking Bread

I've been helping set up for Communion at church for about two years now, so I know breaking the crackers for Communion has a very specific progression.

I'll break the first matzoh sheet carefully, trying to get uniform squares of equal size. I'll carefully count each one, then estimate based on the number of sheets in a box if we have enough to cover the expected number we'll need.

This comes into play because despite the number of juice cups I'm expected to prepare, it's always one box of matzoh. Two hundred people? One box of matzoh. Four hundred people? One box of matzoh. I feel like it shouldn't work, but it does. So far.

The second sheet of matzoh I stop counting, but I keep trying to make it into squares. Halfway through the second sheet I realize, again, that matzoh doesn't break cleanly down the rows of fork marks.

Third sheet? Anything goes. Lots of triangles, long skinny cracker bits.

There are normally ten sheets in a box.

I'm on the second sheet now.

We'll see how it goes.