For someone born in Taiwan and can speak Chinese fairly well, I am woefully ignorant about a lot of Chinese culture. One of them is the Dragon Boat Festival, or 端午節 in Chinese. I mostly remember it as the holiday when you eat sticky rice balls wrapped in bamboo leaves. One of my few memories of growing up in Taiwan was watching my grandma make these stick rice balls with lots of finished ones wrapped in bamboo leaves and string so they can be steamed later. I just had one for lunch today.
Without Googling, I believe the story is about a scholar in some previous dynasty that was opposed to the new emperor. He refused to write positive things about the emperor, so he was thrown into a lake or river to drown. The people would later go out on the water in boats and throw these rice balls into the lake/river for the fish to eat so they will not eat the body of the scholar. Or something like that.
After reading the linked Wikipedia article, I am only about 50% correct. According to the most popular story, he committed suicide by throwing himself into the lake. At least I got the stick rice ball and fish food part right.
Another refill means another shipment failure. I mentioned yesterday that I will need a lot of insulin pen needles for my trip. Since I am down to my last box, I placed an order for twelve more boxes (1200 needles), and the shipment arrived today.
Or so says FedEx.
Of course, when I went to check my front door/garage/whatever, there was no package. I checked all over the front of my house (it is not that big), and again, no package. I have cameras that record activity on my driveway and front door. There was no FedEx truck delivering packages to my house. This is the second shipment of medication/medical supplies that FedEx has messed up. I assume that the driver delivered my package to the wrong house. I would imagine that FedEx trucks have GPS mapping devices and my address. How hard can it be once you get it into the right truck?
The text notification has instructions for help, so I texted HELP back. I was sent another message with a phone number. By calling the number, you get to open a case with a computer system. It has been 45 minutes and no response yet.
Last time FedEx screwed up, they were delivering insulin pens in a refrigerated cooler. Insulin needles (for those pens) are not perishable so not as urgent. However, I would like to have them for my trip next week.
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Someone just delivered my package and rang the doorbell. I thought it was FedEx, but from my camera, it looks like a friendly neighbor. I do not recognize the car so maybe the package was delivered to the wrong street even.
Hmm, tank top and yoga pants? Definitely not the FedEx driver. I wonder if I should contact FedEx as the driver may go back and look for the package at the wrong house. Anyway, thank you neighbor!
I am starting to pack for our Europe trip already, and one of the biggest headaches is packing all my medications. I have eight pill bottles to take with me, and only six have the prescription label still available. I am not too worried about over-the-counter vitamin D since the yellow gel capsules are quite recognizable. I am missing labeling for Tacrolimus however. and since I take seven pills per day, there is a lot of it.
The other issue is all the paraphernalia that I need to bring along. Due to the length of the trip, I will need two pens for each insulin type. Then I need to take the glucose monitor with enough test strips for three tests per day. Finally, needles. Since I am shooting myself four times per day, I will need a lot of needles. The photo above has seventeen days’ worth of needles or sixty-eight needles. I also need to carry some buffer in case i mess up or catch COVID and must quarantine. So instead of enough medication for sixteen days, I am taking a month’s worth just in case.
My sister decided we would all take one backpack and one carry-on since we have a short layover in LHR (London Heathrow), and there are a lot of inter-city travel on trains and cars. I will need to find all the dry-fit clothing I purchased for my Tunesia trip in 2014 so I can handwash my travel clothing in the hotel bathrooms.
I just posted about this about a week ago, and the EU map is already different. The most recent map has a larger portion of France in orange instead of red. Italy is still in the highest positive case rate category, but the graph is still showing a downward trend. For both France and Los Angeles County, the case rate is flattening out, though they are on the opposite sides of the Omicron BA.2 spike.
Live(?) link to the EU case rate map
I am going into the office this Thursday so I can meet in-person with a few people to delegate my responsibilities for the next two plus weeks. It does look like our trip is on; I just need to review all the COVID restrictions for each county once more and see if there is additional paperwork to fill out.
Several weeks ago, my sister needed to pick-up her mother-in-law and my niece from LAX. They were coming inbound from Florida. Since I was still at work, we decided to meet somewhere and get dinner, and I can go home afterwards while she waited for the flight to arrive.
There are lots of Asian restaurants in Gardena, and we ended up going to a Korean tofu place called Lee’s Tofu on the corner of Western Avenue and Redondo Beach Blvd. My sister really wanted the soon tofu so I ordered a dolsot bibimbap (stone pot rice bowl) instead. I was good but the sauce was quite spicy. It was also a bit pricy, and we spent close to $40 for two people. Probably could have used a bit more meat too.
My sister’s mother-in-law was visiting a few weeks ago, and all of us gathered at my parents’ new place. They have a grassy area outside their house, and we decided to take some family photos. We basically set up two lawn chairs and had different groups of people sit/stand for photos.
I took this photo on my iPhone while they were taking pictures elsewhere. I did not think much about it at the time, but now it reminds me that my parents are eighty-one years old, and they will not live forever. Since our family moved quite often when we were young, we are still very close; I even lived with my parents for the past twelve years. Because we were always near each other, I have not really thought about life after my parents pass away.
I do not think I am very emotional, but I also have not experienced much loss or grief in my life. That was likely why I was devastated when my ex-wife left me after seven years of marriage. She was my first girlfriend and my first breakup. I thought I would just take it in stride, but that did not happen. Instead, I was depressed for years, and it is still affecting me today. That is why I am uncertain how I will react when my parents leave. For many years, while I was on dialysis, I also thought I was going to die before my parents, so I still need to unwind and deal with those thoughts too.
We are about a week away from our trip to Europe, and both Italy and France are in the >300 cases per 100k people per day category. I did research all the travel restrictions currently enforced in Europe, and we can still travel without any COVID tests or quarantine if we are vaccinated. I hope our cheapo CDC white cards are sufficient.
Even though case counts are still high in Italy and France, the number of daily new cases is decreasing. Here are charts for both countries over the past three months.
The big hump for both countries is likely the Omicron BA.2 variant. In Europe, there was not really a break between the BA.1 spike at the beginning of the year, and the second spike. In the US, cases died down quickly but is on the rise again from BA.2.
This is just Los Angeles County so the y-axis scale is totally different. However, you do see an increases in the number of cases while it is clearly decreasing in Italy and France above. I am hoping that cases will continue to drop in Europe during the next week so we will be a bit safer on our trip.
I do feel a bit embarrasses that I am going to a fairly high risk area for vacation, while I am working from home due to the increasing number of cases locally.
One of his points is how using detergent pods actually goes against how our dishwashers are designed to work. Most dishwashers have a pre-rinse cycle, and the instruction manual says to add a bit of detergent to the tub for that. However, if we use pods, then we typically do not have some extra powdered detergent handy, and the pre-rinse cycle is not as efficient as it could be with detergent. He also said that due to higher margins, no one sells powdered detergent anymore. I went to my local Albertsons and saw this:
There were a few boxes of Cascade powdered detergent at the bottom left just off camera. However, it is true that most of the dishwasher detergents today come in pods, much like laundry detergent. I may have to go to a 99 Cents Only Store to find some cheap powdered detergent.
I know someone in Beijing right now and they must do a PCR test daily for the past two weeks. Not sure when or if the testing will end.
At the beginning of the pandemic, some of the quarantine methods used by the CCP were justifiable, if not a bit harsh. But with Omicron and what happened in Shanghai during the past few months, it has become absurd political theater,
I live right next to Peters Canyon Regional Park. The name sounds more impressive than reality. It is basically a few dirt trails around a small reservoir that is used by hikers, mountain bikers, and horse riders. Anyway, there are several small hills you can climb. If you are out of shape however, it may as well be Mount Everest. My sister has been dragging me out to hike these trails, and the first several times, I failed to climb the “big” hill.
View of park from one of the side streets next to the park
So one afternoon, i decided to try and climb the hill without my sister around. I waited until 6:00 pm since I am more susceptible to skin cancer due to anti-rejection medication. First, I had to walk to the base of the hill, which is about one and a quarter mile so I was tired already. I ended up making it to the top of the hill but had to stop and rest twice as my heart rate jumped up to over 130. Most of the other people did not stop so it was a bit embarrassing, but I was happy I made it.
View from the top overlooking the reservoir
Here is the tracker data from my Apple Watch and Fitness app.
Pretty easy to see where I climb the hill; my heart rate correlates to the altitude
The total round trip was about 2.6 miles, and it took me a bit over an hour. I was super tired, and my legs were giving out by the time I got back home. One reason for all this exercise is to prepare for our upcoming Italy trip. I am hoping that all the tourist areas are flat.
Since I live in Southern California, it must be In-N-Out Burger. There are many posts on Reddit arguing about the best burger, but I think for the price, In-N-Out offers the best bang for the buck. I usually get a Double-Double with grilled onions. Their fries are terrible though.
There is an In-N-Out location right next to my parents’ new place at Laguna Woods. My mom said they ate there about a dozen times in the first several months. They do not like cheese so they usually each get a hamburger with grilled onions. The above photo was taken when I joined them for dinner one day.
Just for kicks, I checked out their employment website. They are headquartered in Irvine, and currently there are two openings in finance: financial analyst and business intelligence analyst. I am overqualified for the financial analyst position, but I am tempted by the free food benefit!
The last set of labs showed high creatinine and potassium. I told my nephrologist I may have been dehydrated, and I have not been too diligent on taking the Lokelma daily. So she gave me another lab order, just for a small subset of tests. Those results came back high as well, so I am now doing a third set of labs. I am still missing a few days of Lokelma since it is a powder you need to mix with water, and you cannot take it within a three-hour window of all the other medications. The creatinine levels were around 1.6. Not terrible but definitely high compared to the normal upper bound of 1.3.
I do not feel I have done anything different, although blood sugar has been harder to control. I am not sure if I am building a tolerance to insulin, or i just need to eat a lot less. I am still on the Natera Prospera DNA test program, but they have not mentioned any signs of kidney rejection.
Since my parents moved out, I have had to cook for myself more. They still come over weekly and bring cooked food, take-out, and groceries. During the past two months, I have also been eating one or two meals during my two days at work, but now that I am staying home, I need to find more food options.
I read online that the frozen lasagna from Stouffer’s is pretty good, so I bought a few to try. They are available everywhere; at the local Albertsons, they are $3.49 for the single serving size.
I have eaten about three of these now. I do not eat lasagna that much, but to my unrefined palate, they are pretty tasty. You can either heat them up in the oven or the microwave. For my first taste, I tried using my new toaster oven. However, I think the oven is too small, and the container was too close to the heating element. I likely need a bigger oven to even out the heat. The toaster oven basically melted the container, even though I followed the instructions.
Here is the nutritional information. Not great, but not too bad either. Maybe a bit too much sodium.
One of my three readers mentioned the lack of content so I will post more. I actually had a lot of ideas for posts but work was a bit busy so I ended up doing work stuff.
I am working everyday from home again. COVID cases are on the rise, like due to Omicron v2.0 or v2.1. When I decided to start returning to the office in mid-March, there were about 800 cases per day in LA county. Now it is over 3300 per day. Ugh.
Just to reinforce the point, a bunch of people got sick over the weekend. Three out of the six sick coworkers tested positive for COVID.
I am also watching the case trend in Italy and France since we are still planning on going to our European trip in three weeks. It does appear that Omicron v1.0 and v2.0 spikes were closer together, and both countries currently show a decreasing trend.
I have five items being delivered by Amazon today. One was a one-day delivery while the other two orders of two items each were same day delivery. I could not sleep so I ordered some stuff.
Judging by past performance, I expect to only get three out of the five items since Amazon seems to miss quite a few same-day deliveries.
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It is 5:40 pm and nothing has arrived from Amazon yet. To be fair, they did say delivery by 10:00 pm. However, I did receive two packages from FedEx already. One is the occasional blood draw package from Natera for their post-transplant study. The other is from my online pharmacy delivering my next tacrolimus refill.
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OK, I stand corrected. All five items arrived on-time in two packages. Yay!
I am a huge fan of a good breakfast burrito with bacon. There is a hole-in-the-wall near home that has a gigantic breakfast burrito, but I have not gone there in several years. We also have breakfast burritos at work, but the ingredients are set each week and we cannot substitute for other things, like bacon instead of ham or sausage.
Anyway, this week, the menu happened to have a bacon breakfast burrito. Yay! I was in the office early yesterday and I almost placed an order. Almost… I decided to go back to my desk and check the nutritional info, and I am glad I did.
Holy crap! I just avoided a heart attack. look at the crazy levels of saturated fat, cholesterol, and sodium. I forgot the actual ingredients, but I believe there is a lot of cheese. So, I just drank my vegetable protein shake and waited for lunch. 😭
Since it never rains in Southern California and I rarely wash my car, I went downstairs and backed my car out of the garage and onto the driveway. Even though it is not a car wash, the rain will wash away some of the accumulated dirt and dust. My iPhone’s weather app says rain will stop in about half an hour, but it should rain more tonight.
This is one time that the Summon function is useful in my Tesla. I can back the car out of the garage without getting in the car, and thuse not get wet when exiting the car.
Even since I started using insulin post-transplant, I have been wondering how the pharmacy knows how many pens to send me. Each time I refill my prescription, they send different numer of boxes of pens. So, I finally looked at the small print on the actual pen.
For Toujeo, each pen contains 1.5 mL of solution and there are 300 units of insulin per milliliter. That means each pen has 450 units. Since each box has three pens and I use thirty-two units daily, the box should last me forty-two days. That is why the pharmacy sent me three boxes when my doctor gave me a 90-day prescription.
For Humalog, each pen holds 3 mL but the solution only contains 100 units per milliliter. Each pen only holds 300 units. My current prescription is a sliding scale, but the base dosage is 8/10/10 or twenty-eight units daily. Humalog comes in boxes of five pens, so each box is good for fifty-three and a half days. Instead of sending me two boxes, the pharmacy sent four boxes instead. Do they assume that I will end up using double the base prescription?
The result is that I have many boxes of insulin in my refrigerator. At lease now I can estimate how many days of insulin I have left when refilling my prescriptions.
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Ha! It says “Units per pen: 450” right on Toujeo’s website.
Our family has a lot of old stereo equipment. Most people today just listen to music streaming to their smartphones using headphones. In the old days, however, people had entire stereo systems that cost from hundreds to many thousands of dollars. Since my parents moved out, they left behind lots of stuff, including audio system components and speakers. They brought two systems with them: a Sony AV amp with a pair of vintage Bose 10.2 speakers, and a Pioneer Elite amp with Energy speakers for the bedroom.
Since I am reorganizing all the furniture in the house, I managed to piece together three stereo systems from the leftover components. We moved a TV stand from the family room to the master bedroom today, and I put in my dad’s prized McIntosh MA-6100 amplifier from the 1970’s. It looks like this and weighs a ton:
Even though it was originally sold in the 70’s, people are still selling it on eBay for thousands of dollars. I read that the last production model sold for $799 which is about $3,750 in today’s dollars. We also used to own two pairs of old Infinity speakers, made before they were purchased by Harman International. They used to be made nearby in Chatsworth, CA. Unfortunately, the speaker cones deteriorate over time. The Infinity drivers were made with polypropylene but attached with some type of foam that disintegrated, leaving us with only one working speaker, a black RS3000. I believe I swapped out both main drivers before, and my dad has repaired them as well. Not too durable.
Anyway, you cannot have a stereo system with only one speaker. Fortunately, we have a spare. For some reason, my dad purchased one single JBL J2080 speaker. I think he was going to use it as a home theater center speaker, but it was way too large. Similar to Infinity, JBL is not in the home audio business anymore, but they do continue to make pro-audio speakers. Old JBL speakers were make in Northridge, CA, which is also fairly local. Today, likely all products are made in China, except maybe for McIntosh. Their equipment still has that vintage look and is quite expensive.
This is the current setup in the master bedroom: a 50-year-old amplifier driving two mismatched speakers from the 80’s, receiving signal from a Chromecast Audio (also discontinued) and Spotify on an iPhone 12. Crazy mix of technology.
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Oh, balance knob… To be honest, I have never used one before. Every system had it set in the middle since the speakers were always matching. This time, I think the Infinity speaker has a lower impedance, so it is slightly louder than the JBL. To “balance” out the sound, I have to bias the output so the two channels are of equal volume. Admittedly, the sound is not great. I will probably need to look for new speakers if I start listening to music in the bedroom more often.
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There are still two amplifiers and more speakers in the house. I will set up a home theater system again in the family room even though there is no TV now.
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Updated: soon after initial posting
I found some RS3000 documentation online. The speaker has an impedance of six ohms. Ugh, that is likely why the Infinity speaker sounds louder than the JBL. I tried listening using headphones and the balance sounds fine when the knob is in the middle. Another reason to get some new/better speakers. I am looking at good bookshelf speakers and some tall speaker stands as an option.
Life with chronic diseases 