The Pill-grimage

Now that I have taken myself off of birth control pills, they are one less thing I need to worry about taking. As it turns out, it is one less hassle for my husband too.

That is because there was that one time when we were traveling in France when we moved from Normandy to Versailles, from hotel to hotel, when I rummaged through my toiletries kit and couldn't find my birth control pills. Of course, being the calm, cool collected person that I am, I went into a full on panic. What would I do if I didn't have them? This was just the beginning of a ten week vacation? I remember the changes I went through when I went off them in law school. They weren't pretty, and certainly not what you want happening on your vacation.

So, I back tracked in my mind to figure out how I could have left them in the other hotel. I remembered leaving the whole toiletries bag on this dinky little bedside table. The table was so dinky, that at one point the whole (of course open) bag fell over. I thought I had gotten everything that fell out, but now I was convinced that the pills had somehow slipped under the corner of the giant bedspread unbeknownst to me.

What to do? Well, first I got on the phone and of course only got French speaking people back at the old hotel. Pas de probleme, je parle francais. So, I launched into my only adequate french and kept repeating the phrase "boite des medicaments" which I was sure meant box of medicine. Finally, I got some cleaning lady on the phone that said, yes, she had found a "boite des medicaments" in one of the rooms. Parfait, I would send my husband on the over two hours journey back to get them.

Yes, that is right, hubby, worth his weight in gold, or contraceptive pills, went off at 9 pm that night, for the long drive back to the first hotel, without any knowledge of how to speak french, and prepared to straddle the front seat at several points to pay the tolls in our English drive car, at the French toll booths (obviously on the passengers side). The curious thing about that piece of it was that I had just commented earlier in the day as we were driving that it would be very hard for a driver to drive an English drive car all alone and pay the tolls. How perceptive of me.

So, of course in the middle of the night, I get the call. No one at the desk knows anything about the "boite des medicaments" and the cleaning crew doesn't come on until 7 am. So, they gave him a free or really cheap room for the night.

The next morning two very important things happened, and one logical thing did not.
1. The "boite des medicaments" turned out to be a box of gauze pads,
2. I found my pills buried in the bowels of my toiletries bag in a section I swear I never use, and 'fessed up,
3. My husband did not kill me when he drove back the over two hours to Versailles.

Paranoid People Against Plastic Unite!

Hello All,

As some of you may know, my sister was diagnosed with breast cancer earlier this year. This is the first instance of any kind of cancer in my family (well except my grandfather developed colon cancer in his eighties...). Anyway, the scare of my sister's diagnosis has brought my recessive paranoia gene out of hiding.

I chucked out all my plastic containers, haven't had a pedicure since her diagnosis and think two and three times about what I put in and on my body. As those who know me will vouch, I have always been a kind of a health nut, but I have definitelybecome obssessive (see my earlier blog, Look Out for Flying Plastic).

I wanted to share with you some great information that Leslie at my gym shared with me. It is a website called www.cosmeticsdatabase.com and it is part of the Environmental Working Group. It is a fascinating website and rates all kinds of personal products for potentially dangerous chemicals, etc.

Also a tip that my friend Diane (also from the gym, where I seem to excercise my mouth as much as the rest of me!), is Anchor Hocking glass food storage containers. These have glass lids too! So no need to worry about heating up that plastic in the microwave (or dishwasher!)

Finally, a great article on general tips for safe food storage can be found at:http://www.organicgardening.com/feature/0,7518,s-5-83-1110,00.html

Look Out for Flying Plastic

As my husband will tell anyone willing to listen, I am pretty paranoid when it comes to health issues. So, all I had to do was get a whiff of information that certain hard clear plastic caused stomach cancer in rats, and the plastic started flying out of my cabinets. All the Tupperware that I had purchased as part of fundraisers I had organized, ironically for The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and the American Cancer Society or my kids’ daycare center were swiftly ejected from the storage container area.

I immediately went out and bought SIGG metal water bottles for myself and the kids (my husband and I could share I reasoned). I also went off to buy Pyrex glass storage dishes for food. I bought 8 new glass containers in various sizes. I felt proud and healthy. Everything was going fine until my husband started begging me what he was supposed to put all the massive quantities of food I had made, into. You see, eight glass storage containers don’t go too far when, on one of my cooking benders, I make a vat of soup, a food processor full of homemade hummus, homemade French toast, homemade pancakes and turkey and meatballs, not to mention extra homemade chicken stock.

Of course I snapped at him (all that cooking making me a little tired) and muttered something about “well, if I wasn’t the only one eating all this food…” to which my husband replied, “no one asked you to make it.”

Wrong answer. At which point he got the whole “you don’t know how lucky you have it, a gourmet meal every night…” lecture that I usually give him whenever he responds in anyway to my dramatic sighs after a day of cooking. He hasn’t figured out that he should just shut up and eat. Okay, well maybe not shut up precisely. Ideally, he should rave about the food before him.

Anyway, the plastic is pretty much gone ( I have loads of plastic pantry food containers which I had bought after a meal moth crisis in my pantry several years ago) though I am moving to glass storage containers from IKEA for the pantry too. I donated the plastic containers to social service clients in a neighboring town which had requested food storage containers to avoid roach infestations. I did feel kind of guilty giving anyone these potential carcinogen carriers, but reasoned, better for them to address an immediate health concern (roaches, ick!) than an uncertain, long-term one.

Of course, as far as the water bottle thing goes, I am conflicted. I can buy the $23 aluminum water bottle, but how about losing it? That is quite an investment and I am pretty forgetful. I have already left it at choir practice once and luckily someone else picked it up and held it for safekeeping. I thought about just walking around with a heavy, tall glass. But then I figure it would be just my luck and trip over something, break the glass, sever a major artery somewhere and die. That would be the irony in switching from plastic…