Things like

How much bacteria is thriving on the giving end of the toothpaste tube?

I don't like to think about unboiled kitchen sponges. How often is enough? I don't ever do it.

In general, no one around here gets infected.

In general.

Two birds are suffering from similar but perhaps discreet digestive infections.

There was that one two-days when he, then I, spent in utter delirious agony. The "24 bugs" are powerful things.

I cleaned some spilled, frozen multi-grease from its place around the ice-maker dispensing area. "Someone" closed the door too violently after making catfish nuggets.

Multi-grease is an amazing thought just on its own: bacon fat, beef drippings, fish-fried oil. Oh my.

Someday I want to live in a vegan household. Just us and birds. No dead animal products or live/dead-animal by products. I want to live somewhere (don't we all — let's ask the poorest of the Brasilans, the majority of Hatitians, list on and on) with correct and efficient plumbing, too … the kind that doesn't smell.

Self-diagnosis for that patch on a place on my back-ish thigh-side that is most difficult, but not impossible, to view (sans mirror and without glasses) is that it's ringworm. It was just a tiny bug bite-type thing, and, of course, I scratch everything.

And there is this raunchy cat here, the million-dollar probably-going-to-die-anyway critter, and the infected birds, and even though I wash my hands a lot, I read that, well, this fungus is among us, day in and day out, regardless. I had a ring-worm patch once, before, on my femur area … about 25 years ago. I rather was enchanted with it. It went away with OTC cream. But I'm older now, and paranoid, and have health insurance, so I want to be sure. Hello, Walgreen's Take Care clinic. (Sigh.)

Meh, says the woman who hasn't been to a dentist for ~ years.

Meh, says the woman who sought NEW CONTACTS / REAL SIGHT last Thursday and whose intake form and comments were misread/heard so that, sigh, again she's bought glasses that are not in yet and has to, when that happens, come sit for additional exams. Another week, another seven days of just not seeing.

I've become somewhat resigned to having poor vision. One must adapt, if one can not pay $600 every year to get upgraded aids. My last optical exam, before the one eight days ago, was in advance of friends' wedding (and our driving there, across the eastern US to Salem, Mass.) on 09-09-09.

I hate driving around to appointments. Cat, self, bird, car, etc. It's like having to mail things times 1,000.

There are things here from DECEMBER I haven't yet mailed. OCTOBER, even.

Is this in the DSM IV?