Miller Land | Our Family's Little Blog

Piddling. It’s a word I learned when young. I can’t give you an exact definition, but it’s basically work you do when you’re too tired to work but too awake to sleep. Those who piddle are piddlers and they come in all varieties – gardeners, carpenters, mechanics, secretaries, chefs, moms, dads. Age can be a factor. Piddlers trend older, with slightly less energy.

Some ask – why work when you could just take a break? Go watch some TV or something. Ah, but there is a difference between working and piddling.

Work is hard. Work is hammering nails, sawing wood, and running electric lines. It’s roasting a chicken, washing undies, and hanging them out to dry. It lasts all day – six days a week – pays the bills, and keeps us alive.

Piddling is different. Piddling is organizing your sock drawer, some music playing in the background, the cool breeze softly blowing through the screen door, the kids laughing at the sprinkler, and the lingering taste from that last sip of champagne at your wedding reception twelve years ago. It’s hosing off the patio furniture after the sun sets and the fireflies start winking through the maple leaves while the bull frogs croak their lonesome galumphs.

After work, you may need to nap. After the nap, you piddle.

Lia has learned to use humor to deal with painful emotions. For instance, she wasn’t able to go to a sleepover that she’s been looking forward to for weeks because she caught a cold the day before. She went through her grieving period this morning when I found her huddled in a dark corner of her closet weeping most bitterly. Like another redhead, Anne of Green Gables, she was in the “depths of despair.” But after commiserating with her cousin, she decided to make the best of it. This is how I knew it would be OK.

We were listening to the Bible reading for this week on CD. When we got to 2 Kings 23:26, the reader in his very British, very eloquent voice said, “with which his anger burned against Judah.”  She said, “What’s the matter, did he eat your socks?”

Then, when she spoke disrespectfully, I had her apologize, after which I devised a punishment for her. I was about to start on dinner so I said, “You have to make dinner.”

“I can’t do that, that’s too hard,” she said.

“Precisely, what kind of punishment would it be if it were easy?” I said, momentarily triumphant.

“Well, it would be a punishment for you since you’ll have to eat it,” she pointed out.

This is from Lia’s poem book…

The moon follows you around all night.
It might be so creepy it gives you a fright.
But, think of how lonely he is at night.
He might even be shy
way up there in the sky.
You say, hi,
to the moon in the sky,
but he never says anything back.

Having been away from my family for almost a week to help John and Kate move  and having received the commission to return with 8 fresh Maine lobster, I started feeling the pressure when it was time to leave. I knew I’d be in hot water if I didn’t.

Besides, as Brent put it, it’s tradition for our family to bring strange things by plane. On the visit that would determine his future love, my brother brought over two bricks of American cheese and four crunchy bags of cereal, denuded of their protective cardboard covering. TSA had fun with that one.

“My mom sent cereal for my sister,” he explained to passerby who wondered why my brother was crunching with each step.

Of course, for my brother’s wedding a few months later, my nearly 80-year-old parents lugged 70 pounds of short beef ribs with them from Los Angeles.

Now it was my turn to carry on the tradition, no pun intended.

It turns out that it’s really easy to transport lobster from Maine to Ohio by plane, just as John assured me, time and time again, each time a little more annoyed.

This is one of the times when I knew that John had married the right girl.  Kate said, “Yeah, just put them in a crate and tell them they’re your pet lobsters. This one is named Yummy…”

That pretty much described all the softshell lobsters we got from Young’s Lobster Pound, sure to have lobster any time of year and experts at packing them for air travel. Because I flew JetBlue, I not only got free TV and XM radio, I also got to check in my seafood container without charge. JetBlue – where lobsters fly free.

Lia’s journal entry for October 6, 2019:

When I was about 8 or 9, my mother decided that enough of my brains had leaked out of my head with video games. So her way of plugging the leak was to limit my video game playing to one hour a day.

My parents often struggled with the balance of keeping their active only child occupied while keeping my brain from “melting” with video games.

She made a chart of activities and their worth in game time. For instance, walking the dog earned me 5 minutes of video game play, hanging clothes on the line earned me 8 minutes, dusting got me 5 and so forth. She could award “discretionary” points for good attitude. Then, she’d rotate chores each week.

So next week, hanging clothes might not be worth a specified number of minutes, but if I did it anyway, I might get some discretionary points for being helpful and showing initiative.

I was allowed to accrue a maximum of sixty minutes of game time each day, anything beyond that was given to me in cash. The cash value of each activity was usually half of the minute value. For instance, if I got 10 minutes for playing outside for 15 minutes, I could collect 5 cents instead of using the minutes.

Since all video game playing ended at 7:00pm, any time accrued after that or leftover minutes would be given to me at the end of the day in cash. Needless to say, I didn’t earn much cash this way. Each morning the slate was wiped clean. There were no rollover minutes.

To keep the system working, I had to log my start and ending times when I played video games.

I don’t know what got into me, but I named my own punishment for exceeding my earned video game time – loss of game playing privileges for the next day. What can I say? It was a moment of weakness and I was caught up in a desire to make the system as good as it could be. Although it meant my game time would be limited, the game time system was a reminder of other activities I could do –  reading, practicing piano, caring for the dog,  and various chores around the house.  I felt it was fair and I wanted it to work.

This last week there has been an abundance of probiotic activity in our home. Let the cleansing begin!

Of course, with my mother being here for a week after John’s wedding, which went fabulously (Welcome Mr. and Mrs. Kim!), we have been well-stocked with kimchi, a well-known fermented food rich in “healthy bacteria” called lactobacilli which help with digestion. For this and other reasons, this vegetable dish was named one of the world’s five healthiest foods in Health magazine.

We were also introduced to Kefir (pronounced kuh-feer, NOT like Mr. Sutherland), a beverage made with clumps of bacteria beneficial to the human digestive system. The clumps resemble cauliflower in appearance and ferment milk or any other liquid that’s added to them. The longer you leave them in, the more “cultured” (code for sour) your drink will become.

Being a fan of sour yogurt desserts since the first Pinkberry opened in West Hollywood, it didn’t take me long to get used to Kefir. Lia and Brent, however, are not sold on it.

Brent maintains that he has nothing to kefir but kefir itself. And as I drank a small cup of it one night Lia asked me, “Who gave us that milk – a hobo?”

In this nice
corner of paradise,
we squeeze in
frantic moments
of laughter
and life as
it is. The poet
says truly
’sound and fury.’
All these
people (crazy)
and
I (crazy)
are a lot
in life that
I would not have
any other way.
Until Sunday.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned after living in the country for 10 months is that loudness has its place, one of them being a 2-story farmhouse on Indian Lake Road in Byesville, Ohio.

I have had to increase my volume to be heard in the quietest place I have ever lived. There isn’t much city noise, save the occasional car that swooshes along the road just outside the house, but there are plenty of other noises.

Machines. The low rumble of the four-wheeler signals the approach of kin. The deafening mower (Uncle Dave’s, Kevin’s, or Pa’s) ruins every Usertest known to man. It hums steadily in and out for a couple of hours whenever Brent mows the lawn. It used to take a third of the time when the three brothers did their “psychotic mower ballet” all at once.  According to Kate, it was truly a sight to behold.

Then there are the sounds of nature all day, every where.

Birds. I know for sure that the first word of Mourning Dove is spelled the sad way because one laundry day, each time I came out to hang the laundry or to collect it, I heard the cooing, no matter what time of day it was.  Birds generate a lot of noise around here.

Insects play their part too. The slow crescendo of cicada static is maddening at times. There’s a feeling of physical relief when a wave is past and it’s quiet for a moment. But it’s soon followed by another.  Horseflies are as big as your thumb and sound like bombers when they fly past. The air is thick with insect life, each with its distinctive sound.

This past week when we lost power for two days, we realized that we didn’t need the air conditioner as much to get by. The beautiful, low-humidity weather and gentle breeze didn’t hurt either. Let’s just say, the weather could have been worse for a blackout, at least down in the valley. Usually, however, there’s no way to survive the summers here without them. Especially if you have asthma and you can’t breathe in the thick air. When we are running our ancient AC’s, though, you can’t hear squat when you’re sitting next to them. I make my point late, I know.

You know what’s really scary?

A smart person in the grip of a psychotic episode. I’ve seen it happen to intelligent people in their 30’s and bright kids as young as 8, but in those cases, you know it’s not Alzheimer’s. You don’t have that assurance with older people who develop dementia-like symptoms.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not an easy thing to watch anybody “losing their mind.” With the growing pressures, imperfection, and who-knows-what toxins in our air, food, and water, is it any wonder that according to NIMH (yes, it actually exists) an estimated 26.2 percent of Americans ages 18 and older — about one in four adults — suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year? One in four, staggering.

A fascinating, but sobering thought – Elderly people with a UTI have been misdiagnosed with senior dementia or Alzheimer’s disease.  This is because a UTI can mimic the symptoms of such conditions. Also, according to Nursing magazine, 30% to 40% of elderly patients with this infection don’t have a  fever, a typical sign of infection.

Because the barrier between the urinary tract and the bloodstream thins out in old age, the bacteria in the urine spreads more easily to the blood stream and causes confusion and other cognitive difficulties as it crosses the blood-brain barrier. Sudden onset of these symptoms may indicate a UTI.

When my mother experienced confusion last year that landed her in the hospital, I had to convince each new set of medical professionals – the EMT’s, the ER personnel, the attending nurses and doctors that she was exhibiting unusual behavior.  It took some doing because even at her worst, she still looked dignified. And that’s all they had to go by since they couldn’t understand what she was saying in Korean.

As soon as they found traces of a UTI, they started her on a regimen of antibiotics. That seemed to do the trick. She slowly regained her mental powers and was eventually back to her feisty old self. Needless to say, it made all of us a little more aware of UTI’s and doing all we can to avoid them.