Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.

I apologize for not posting for a bit. My spouse, squirrel_magnet, was out of town attending to his father, who is 92 and has lung cancer. Luckily, the prognosis has improved, and so the Squirrel is back home for a while. I was taking care of the chores that he normally does, and not doing that terrific a job of it. Feeding the cats and cleaning their litter box involves going down to the basement - and then coming back up the stairs, not something I do enthusiastically. Also, the cats do not like the way I feed them, and I use the wrong stance when cleaning the litter box, or something - anyway, they disapprove. And there's other stuff I'm not real good at - carrying out the recycling, taking out garbage, stuff like that. The cats are glad to have S back doing his chores, and I am too - and glad he's back for many other reasons, of course.

I wanted to mention a website I recently found: http://www.sparkpeople.com . It's mainly a site for helping people lose weight - - but their food tracking feature also is very good for tracking sodium intake. It brought me up short, because when I started logging everything I eat, I saw how careless I had been getting about sodium in restaurant food, and seeing it adding up like that brought me back to my senses; I have been making much better choices this week, after a week of seeing that my intake came to 2200-2500 on some days; now I've got it back down to 1500-1800 milligrams of sodium per day. It's completely free to register at the site. There are a bunch of interesting features, a huge recipe database, and lots of forums/bulletin boards/communities within the site, including teams for hypertension, lower salt intake, heart health, animal lovers, people over 50, and just about every other demographic slice you might think of.  I'm actually having fun with it!

It's summer! If you're taking diuretics, don't forget that they can make you more sensitive to sunburn.

I can't think of anything to say, so here's a meme with a pancake on its head

gacked from urbpan

Mingle²

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:
*murder (4x) *dead (3x) *dick (1x)

WTF? Even my heart failure blog came out PG, although not PG-13: bunrab_mawhf is rated

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:
*dangerous (2x) *crap (1x)

Dangerous? The word "dangerous" is a bad thing in a blog????

reading

I finished The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon in two sittings, one of which lasted till far later into the wee hours of the morning than it should have. Yes, it was that hard to put down. Yes, it is that good. It's not perfect, but it's damn good writing, and off the scales on plot and on novel presentation of interesting ideas/interesting presentation of novel ideas. Definitely worth pestering your library for (fadethecat, it's a little bit depressing in parts, but it's also very funny, and I think it will become a classic so rapidly that you might as well add it to your classics list now.)