Blessed by the Potato

Warning: the following post may contain information of a graphic and disgusting medical nature.

My parents, in the wisdom of keeping small children away from medication, have for decades stored almost all of our medicine in their bathroom. This is a bit of a pain now though, because it means I have to wake them (no matter how small a flashlight I bring and how softly I tiptoe) whenever I need something in the middle of the night. Usually, what I need is Alka-Seltzer for heartburn. I’ve tried, at various times in the past, pepto-bismol (the thick pink nature of it made me want to vomit), and a few other antacids (TUMs always sounded promising, with their use of calcium salts rather than sodium, but believe it or not I could never figure out how to take them — surely you don’t swallow that giant tablet whole, or chew it?), but Alka-Seltzer is always what I’ve come back to: it works pretty well for me, and pretty quickly. It does of course, have it’s own fairly nasty taste, but even as an extremely fussy child I could pinch my nose and get it down — at least it looks kinda like water.

Stuck as I was this last night with heartburn, no sleep in sight, and no desire to wake my parents (my dad has such trouble sleeping lately that it would be a sin), and no Alka-Seltzer, I decided to be creative. “What,” I asked myself, “was in Alka-Seltzer really? Just baking soda and aspirin, right? And the aspirin is an acid just there for pain relief — the antacid effect comes just from the sodium bicarbonate neutralizing the stomach acid…” So I got a glass of water, stirred in a spoonful of baking soda, and downed that. (Did I mention I was sleep deprived and not thinking too clearly?)

It tasted gross, even worse than Alka-Seltzer. Then pretty much immediately, I started foaming and puking. I had forgotten my grade 5 science fair volcano principles: baking soda, added to an acidic environment produces lava! Err… carbon dioxide, that is, which in a liquid — like vinegar in a volcano or stomach acid — produces a foamy, disgusting mess.

So, my chemistry lesson is that the fizz-fizz stage in Alka-Seltzer is really the sodium bicarbonate letting off the carbon dioxide so you don’t fizz up when you take it. The real antacid properties come from the reaction products left over (sodium citrate, sodium acetylsalicylate), the ones that bring the pH back up without producing gas.

Contains:
• Aspirin 325 mg
• Heat treated sodium bicarbonate 1916 mg
• Citric acid 1000 mg
• Alka-Seltzer in water contains principally the antacid sodium citrate and the analgesic sodium acetylsalicylate.

I really like our new house. It’s cute, spacious, quiet, in a decent neighbourhood (from the front), and even has an as yet untested guest room. Renting has an advantage because we’re not responsible for a lot of the big-ticket items, and they even come to mow our lawn. (Plus the hot real estate market still scares me) Our landlord’s a nice enough lady… but man is she useless when it comes to making repairs (and there aren’t that many that are required). Most of her suggestions involve “buy a tube of that yellow expanding foam and just spray it everywhere.” I don’t really mind helping out and putting some work into the house, largely because I plan on being here for a few years, and because I’m a bit of a nonconfrontational sucker, and often find it easier to just fix something myself than harangue my landlord. I’m somewhat handy, but only somewhat.

One problem we can’t fix though is the water that seeps into the laundry room periodically. It lead to a mold problem a few months ago that we spent a fair bit of money trying to control — first we bleached the wall a few times to kill it off, but it grew back. Then we got this mold inhibitor stuff that worked fairly well on most of it, but there was this one brick that kept resprouting. A UVC lamp helped clear the air of spores and made it smell decent. We called her a few more times to fix the root problem, and she tried to pass it off to us to caulk or patch, and fortunately Wayfare was very good about staying on her case and making it clear that the problem was bigger than that. So finally she broke down and called in some guys (including her step son in law, if I got the relation right) to seal the entire wall with this blue foam stuff (she’s big on her foam). The guys did a decent job of sealing up that wall, but to get to it they had to move the washer/dryer out from the wall, and in the process disconnected the dryer from the wall vent, and just left it for me to fix. I’m not entirely sure how to go about it, either. In principle, it’s simple: plug the steel tubey bit into the port on the dryer. The problem is that the port is in the very far bottom corner, and the tube they used for the vent is completely inflexible with no joints, so I can’t connect it to the dryer away from the wall (where I could reach), and then push the dryer back. It has to be done with the dryer nearly against the wall. I don’t know if I should just get some flexible tubing for the job, or call a professional, or try moving the duct from the top to see if I can correctly jam it in the dryer port (blind). Hey, speaking of flexible tubing, I think I saw some in the ceiling of the laundry room, not really connected to anything…

The house, being over 100 years old, has certainly gone through numerous renovations. I’m afraid it looks like the current landlord hired some pretty questionable contractors along the way (from what we’ve seen so far, nepotism seems to be a big factor in her decision making). The newly redone bathroom (apparently finished just months before we moved in — it still had unpainted patches where the toilet paper holder was to go) has a vent, as many modern bathrooms do, to help blow humidity and unwanted vapours out of the bathroom, and ostensibly, outside. Ours has this flexible piece of ductwork (the kind that, IMHO, should be on the dryer) that goes into the laundry room, and just kind of sits there in the ceiling joists, not connected to anything. Likewise, many of the water seeping in problems (there was a problem with the stairs right before we moved in) has simply been fixed (rather sloppiliy at that) with expanding foam and paint. Now, I don’t play a house inspector on TV, but that does seem like it’s only going to do so much to help the problem. I would think that then the water would just pool up behind the new barrier and rot away the wood or brick, or in the winter, freeze and cause some real havoc. On the other hand, it is a much more involved task to get to the other side of the foundation and water proof that. And, as pointed out earlier, some of the plumbing work was “creative”. By the way, we’re still waiting for that pipe to be fixed.

My current theory is that she doesn’t consider the house a big part of the property value any more. Technically, her dental practice owns the house, and uses the “backyard” for parking (there is in fact, no backyard, just a nice sized deck for us, and a paved parking lot). While the house is very cute, has lots of history, and is in generally good condition, it’s now “just” a rental unit for her practice. She has said that she plans to sell the practice soon (and the house with it), so I think she’s already trying not to sink too much money into something that won’t offer her much return (that is, the state of the house is not really going to help her sell the practice for more, she just needs to do the minimum to keep us as tenants). Looking a bit further into the future, I think she might also consider that if the house were to be sold, the lot would probably be valuable enough as a place to build a newer, bigger house (or rental complex) on that the state of this house wouldn’t factor in greatly.

PS: We’ve lived here 6 months now, and the cat still thinks forced-air vents are the coolest, most interesting thing you could put in a house. Far more interesting than ants, for sure.

PPS: We also need the bulb on the security light fixed. It’s on the roof, and when the landlord suggested I change it myself and just bill her for the lamp, I was willing — it’s only a single storey bungalow, how bad could it be? Of course, after getting up on the ladder it turns out I’m more afraid of heights than I thought. I don’t want to start bugging her about changing it, since it’s clearly not the sort of thing she’d do herself, and it seems stupid to make her hire someone to do it… But without the snow to reflect the ambient light around, it’s really dark back there. So is there anyone brave in the London area that would like to climb up on my roof and change a lightbulb? I’ll make you some cinnamon rolls!

As you all know, I’m going prematurely bald. As many of you know, I’ve been taking rogaine (or store brand minoxidil) for about 2 years now to slow the loss. I haven’t regrown any hair, and in fact it hasn’t completely stopped my hairloss — just slowed it down.

Every time I’m due for a new bottle, I read the box it comes in (perhaps because I’ve got a touch of the OCD), and every time this figure completely stumps me:

“If your degree of hair loss is more than shown, this product may not work”

Yet there are three degrees of hair loss shown in the photos. It just confuses me all to hell. I think the image is trying to say that it will help with a greater degree of hair loss if the hair loss is further down towards the back of your head, but will only help hair loss further up if only a small amount is taking place… but I had to actually measure the distance those circles (squres here — they’re circles on the box, and to be fair, on the box they’re arranged vertically, so seeing the different levels of the boxes is even harder) were from the top of the guy’s head to see that there was a difference there. To my eye, it just looked like three different degrees of hair loss. I really think that figure needs to be redone… it also makes me wonder if I should stop using the stuff. I started out using it with loss somewhere around the middle figure (but possibly as bad as the 3rd), but I think my loss is even further up towards the front of my head than the first figure — and now I’m pretty sure I’m worse than all 3 (though my loss is more side-to-side than these sketches seem to be).

While I do believe it’s helped me not lose any more hair, I certainly haven’t grown any back. Complicating that fact, though, is that I’ve only been taking half the dose. This is something that I do almost all the time with medication: it usually affects me pretty strongly (and I did get enlarged hands and unexpected weight gain), so I’m the guy buying regular-strength versions of everything when everyone else is buying “extra strength value packs” and popping two just to be sure. Even when I had my kidney stone I was breaking my morphine in half. But… perhaps that doesn’t automatically apply to Rogaine. So, I’m going to give it 4 more months, and I’m going to use it at the full recommended strength. If there’s no regrowth then, it’ll be hello Lex Luthor look!

But if Rogaine asks, tell them I stopped using it because of that figure.

So, as I think most everyone knows by now, Wayfare was recently diagnosed with Celiac disease and can’t eat any more foods with gluten… which is a lot. Well, the story’s a bit more complicated than that — first we need to get an appointment with a GI specialist, and a bunch of other steps that I’ll let her talk about. The main thing is that we’re preparing for a gluten-free lifestyle, while at the same time having a gorging good time on all the bread and pizza she can eat as a farewell.

Just to give a bit of background, celiac disease is, from what the internet tells me, an autoimmune attack against the small intestine triggered by gluten proteins found in wheat, rye, and barely. The only treatment is a life-long gluten-free diet (I’m still trying to find out how much, if any, gluten contamination is allowed; I’ve found one source that says less than 200 ppm, which is “separate spoons” low). This is actually kind of difficult, since so many foods have wheat or gluten in them.

Gluten is the protein in flour that gives dough its elasticity or chewiness — it’s also what helps form the structures in dough that hold carbon dioxide released by yeast to give the final product its airy, bubbly texture. Because of this, it’s used pretty widely, both in the form of flour (often added to things where at first thought you might not expect it, such as sauces, dressings, and drink mixes) and as an additive or binder for medications, preservatives, candies, etc.

The ubiquity of wheat flour (and gluten contamination) will of course make eating out hard, but the sheer usefulness of gluten in cooking is also going to be a pain for making homemade alternatives. If you consider flour, there are a number of different types at the grocery store: bread flour, all purpose, and cake flour, just to name the standard “white” flours. The main difference between them is the relative gluten content: breads and pizza dough need a lot of gluten for the elasticity, and thus bread flour has the most gluten. Cakes and pastries often need a flour that has less gluten so that they come out flakier. All purpose is in the middle. Just using the wrong type of wheat flour can often make a loaf of bread or batch of biscuits come out a little off, so trying to do without gluten entirely is pretty challenging, above and beyond the issue of the alternative flours (corn, rice, potato, sorghum, quinoa, etc.) each having different, arguably inferior flavours to wheat.

Right now, I’m trying to create gluten-free alternative recipes for use at home, preferably only using the 3 most commonly available alterative flours (rice, potato, and corn flour). I’m starting with recipes that don’t rely on the glutenous properties of flour, and in fact my thinking is that any recipe that has a caution not to over-mix, or to let the batter rest so as not to activate the gluten, has a good chance of working well. Indeed, I think the things that make “batters” rather than “doughs” will have the best chance of surviving the translation. So far, I’ve managed to make some decent belgian waffles, and will try a batch of biscuits next. I’ll post these to the recipes section as soon as I find a variation that’s edible (though check back, as I may change the recipes as I experiment).

I know that there are a lot of recipes and products available on the market already, but I’m a little leery of them after the first few I saw. Many of the recipes were trying to do too much at once — making something low fat and gluten free (we’ll worry about making things low fat once we can make them gluten free and edible), or invoving combinations of dozens of ingredients (mixtures of a half dozen flours plus additives to replace the flour). We went out to a gluten free bakery in town and the grocery store, and tried some of the products on offer. The bread was, in the words of the proprietor of the gluten free bakery “not bread. It’s toast. You have to toast it to eat it.” She also sells a “surprisingly good” loaf that’s fairly expensive, but it actually wasn’t too bad. (I think it was a little too soft to make a good sandwich, but then the piece I had was freshy microwaved to make it warm & soft). They had some brownies and pretzels that were quite good (and brownies was one of the things I figured would be easy to do). Then we tried some cookies that started off tasting pretty good with a decent texture… and they turned to ash in our mouths. They left behind this nasty, gritty texture and aftertaste that even a whole can of coke couldn’t get rid of. I’m hoping I can do a better approximation of a cookie than that. FYI: Avoid “Enjoy Life” brand health/alt food products.

I’ve been using Thunderbird as my email client for a while now, and it does pretty much everything I could want an email client to do, and does it pretty well at that.

One thing I’ve really wanted is the ability to redo the subject lines of emails other people send me. Is there any email client out there that will let me do that, or an add-on to Thunderbird? I know it’s open source, but I’d hate to have to try to figure out the programming on that myself. Plus, it is a little unkosher to edit emails other people send you, but I have several very good reasons:

1. Our email server appends a {Spam X.X} score to suspected spam, we can then set a threshold for sorting… but that tag still stays there. I’d kind of prefer to remove it on one or two important emails to make them easier to find (my eyes are trained to skip over messages with spam at the beginning).
2. I have about 50 emails from my supervisor with the unhelpful subject line “to do”.
3. I have about 100 emails from my supervisor with the unhelpful subject line “fyi”.
4. I have about 300 emails from my supervisor with the unhelpful subject line “sdarticle.pdf” or “fulltext.pdf” or “Entrez Pubmed”.