Friday, April 22, 2022

 Friday, April 22, 2022 

   The number of visitors to my public blog passed 50,000 today. Germans, or people living in Germany, constituted most of the visits. Now the Germans have all but disappeared. I only have a handful a week. While the Germans have dropped off, the Indonesians have picked up. I will have over 100 in 24 hours. If the Germans dominate, the Indonesians are nowhere to be found; what happens to the Germans if the Indonesian dominate? I’d seen this pattern before. I think an English language teacher travels between Germany and Indonesia. About 13,000 Indonesians are living in Germany. I can’t imagine why they would want to learn English if they lived in Germany. This lone teacher is responsible for most of the visits to my site. If anything happens to them, my popularity will vanish.

     My Hawaiian rehab PT, Katie, put me on the schedule twice a week for pre-op work. She worked on small bones on the outside of the knee. Before, she recommended walking less; now, she says I have to build up my muscle strength in anticipation of lying in bed for a few days. Muscle loss comes fast at this age; muscle gain comes slowly. All the opposite of weight gain and loss. My knee still hurts.

     As directed, I stopped off at the Kaiser pharmacy to pick up the antibiotic, antifungal surgical soap I was supposed to use the evening before and the morning of the surgery. They didn’t have it. They hadn’t been able to get Hibiclens in for a while, “Try Longs.”  I got online. There was only one item listed as a soap. The rest were cleansers. The cleansers were under $20; the soap was a two-pack at $40. My sister applied a cleanser. Would that be good enough for this doctor? I put in a call to the orthopedic advice nurse. While I was at Kaiser, I got that knee X-ray Katie had recommended, and Dr. Reed had ordered. If my knee is screwed up now, it will interfere with my recovery from the surgery.

    In pursuit of childcare for Sidney, I called everyone I could think of. I called Mama K, who knows everyone on the Big Island. She said she would post the information on her Facebook page and her two Moms’ sites. I also texted the teenage girl down the street. She would be interested, but her mother blew up at the thought of her working during the summer. She made it sound like she wanted her home all the time. This is an eighteen-year-old girl who just graduated high school. I assumed she would want to spend some time with her friends. Is her mother going to refuse to allow her to do that?   The mom may just have been overstressed. She is a Russian immigrant; at that time, her aunt and uncle were stuck in Ukraine. Since then, they left and went to Russia to live with her parents.

    Lutz decided to use his time in Honolulu to visit the German embassy to renew his passport. I didn’t know why he had one. I got one because my father and mother had to flee Germany for their lives. All the children and grandchildren of German refugees from the Holocaust are entitled to German citizenship. This is nothing to sneeze at. It means I can live anywhere in the EU should it become necessary. However, I can’t imagine a safe place if the political situation blows up. 

    Lutz would need several hours to travel to the consulate, do his paperwork, and get to the hospital in time to pick me up. His flight was scheduled to land at 11 am. He had to pick me up at the hospital for discharge around 3 for the 4 pm flight home. I recommended he change his flight to Honolulu on the morning of the third to an earlier time. Honolulu traffic is worse than the Long Island Express, known as the longest parking lot in the world.   Also, he would be dependent on bus and shuttle schedules.

    I have been making all sorts of preparations for eventualities. If I can’t come home on the third and need to go to skilled nursing care, I won’t be here when the gardeners come. I wrote a check for them for June and told Yvette where to find it.  

   A character in a TV show was having surgery and commented that the anesthesia was the most dangerous part of the procedure. It occurred to me I could die. I texted Cyclin and Damon the contact information for the engravers in Honolulu. Cylin wrote that my death was unlikely, agreed, but it would be ironic if I did, and no one knew there were two completed gravestones.

   Today Damon’s first movie as a producer was released in the USA. It’s already been playing in foreign countries and doing well. Yvette, Isaac, and I intended to go see it.