Charlie

So far, at least we have been spared the strong wind that was predicted. Luckily for us, we live at the highest point in our gated community, so the water flows around and away from our house and down to the street, which funnels it to lower areas of the community which may be experiencing the flooding.

Rainfall has been extremely heavy here in the Coachella Valley for the last couple of hours, though it is finally slowing down. My house is surrounded by flowing water. Gov. Newsom showed up at the Palm Springs Emergency Operations Center at noon.

I still have a pair of socks that have zipper pockets in them. I think I bought them at a travel store, for people who were worried about pickpockets or muggers in dicey locations.

It has been raining lightly all night, but the wind and rain are supposed to pick up considerably after noon, and we are under a flood watch until 5pm tomorrow. The most vulnerable main roads in northern Palm Springs have been closed since midnight. Some airlines have cancelled service into PSP.

Just returned from the supermarkets, where the shelves look like they did during the pandemic; e.g., Albertson's had no bananas, the ideal food in a power outage (very nutritious, and no need for refrigeration or heating). I had to go to two supermarkets to get everything on my list. Ironically, the sun just came out strong.

The skies are dark, I hear occasional thunder and have seen some lightning. When I take my dog out, he hunkers down and refuses to move in any direction. I have taken inside anything movable, have shut off our underground irrigation system, and as soon as I have finished reading everything on this site, I will head to the supermarket to stock up on supplies (I have my priorities, you know.)

Our primary care doctor does a complete physical, including a series of blood and urine tests, hearing and strength tests, etc., every year. When my spouse happened to mention an unusual physical symptom he had recently experienced, the doctor suspected that he had had a mini-stroke, and immediately ordered other tests. Sure enough, it turned out that he had a partially blocked carotid artery, and within a few days a vascular surgeon operated on to clean it out. If it hadn't been for the routine physical, it wouldn't have been caught, because my spouse didn't consider the symptom important enough for a separate visit to the doctor. Of course, it's worth pointing out that we have had the same gay doctor for many years, and my spouse has a medical history that includes triple-bypass heart surgery.

Small world indeed! I have met DavidSF socially, but I didn't know he had any connection to Tom.

Why, yes!

She was practically the house soprano at the Met for so many years. I couldn't begin to list all the times I saw her.

A number of years ago in New York, I hired an escort whose jealous French Bulldog kept trying to join us. When we finished, he got between us in the bed to prevent any further hanky-panky. Luckily, I am a dog lover, but I am not into threesomes.

How could they leave out......?: 1968 - Charlie and his spouse meet for the first time in Provincetown, MA (55th anniversary)

The revival of this thread reminded me how lucky I am to have someone who has worked out well.

During my senior year in high school, I was a member of the National Honor Society. We had a faculty advisor who wanted our club to be perceived in our suburban school as culturally cutting-edge, so she arranged for us to have lunch in the city and then go to a matinee of an off-Broadway production of a new musical called The Fantasticks at the Sullivan Street Playhouse. I don't remember anything about it except the performance of "Try to remember," which I couldn't stop singing over and over in my head for days afterwards.

I hate the thought of giving up my one glass of wine with dinner every night.

The Nexium was prescribed by my primary care doctor when I was in my late 50s. I took it for several years, by which time it had become available over the counter. I stopped about 15 years ago, because it didn't seem effective any longer. I have had the endoscopy, and I don't have H.pylori. I used Tums when needed, until an allergy specialist put me on Omeprazole a few years ago, because he said the reflux aggravated my respiratory allergies. My current primary care doctor prescribed the pantoprazole, which seems to cause me fewer bowel problems than Omeprazole did.

I read about this only a few minutes before logging on here! I have had acid reflux problems since middle age, and have used over-the-counter and prescription meds (starting with Nexium) for it for many years. I usually found that each one of them became ineffective after a while, and switched to something else. I am currently taking prescription pantoprazole, one of the PPIs, and I have found better results from that than from most others, but I haven't been on it for very long. I have never had more than one cup of coffee in the morning and a glass of wine with dinner, I eat a fairly simple healthy diet, I get a lot of exercise, and I never lie down after eating. My spouse, on the other hand, does all the things one is not supposed to do (he often goes straight from the table to the sofa to nap), and he has never had any trouble from reflux, so he has never taken any of those medications. And he has dementia. So what to do?

'48 Pontiac?

I had to fill out an application from the CA DMV yesterday for a senior ID card for my spouse (he is giving up his driver's license on his 88th birthday next week in exchange for the card), and I was surprised that he had to indicate whether he was male, female or nonbinary. If he had been filling out the application himself, he would have been baffled by the question.

One time I told Rex Brant that I was hiring him to celebrate my birthday. At the end of the appointment, he pulled out a bottle of wine he had bought me for a birthday present (it was a cheap Australian wine, but it was the thought that counted).

That happened to me once with an escort in New York. He also gave me advice on a text I could use in a course I was planning to teach.

When I mentioned this to two straight female friends of mine yesterday, one unmarried and 55 and the other married and 73, both of them said they would have done the same if they could! Obviously, I am missing something important about the TS phenomenon.

After a very enjoyable evening appointment at his apartment, Eric Ryan suggested that I come back the next morning for a relaxed breakfast. I couldn't do it, but I thought it was a very nice gesture that implied he would like me to be a friend and not just a client.

I have never been interested in cooking, so I have been lucky that for most of my adult life I have lived with men who liked to cook. Now that I am a fulltime caregiver for my husband, however, I have to do all the "cooking," which mostly means microwaving frozen dinners. My favorites are Stouffer's, Amy's, Michelangelo's, Rao's, Lean Cuisine, Healthy Cuisine, and Trader Joe's, plus an occasional one-off kind. I have a neighbor who loves to cook, and she often makes extra and offers it to me out of sympathy; I rarely turn anything down.

Some of today's threads are making me feel like an old man. 😕