It's Very Quiet Here...

It’s very quiet here. Chico the Wonder Dog and I have been batching it for the last couple of days. Donna’s sister, Janice, who lives in San Francisco,  isn’t in very good health and Donna wants to spend as much time with her as possible so she went to SF for a visit. Donna calls each morning and evening to let me know she is all right.

She called last night and we chatted for a while. She and Janice have been giving one of the homeless shelters a hand with putting together food parcels for distribution to the needy.

Day before yesterday they fixed and sliced a turkey and made turkey sandwiches. They put the sandwiches in baggies to be included in the food parcels.
Yesterday they made and baggied cookies for the parcels. I tend to wonder if more cookies were bagged or eaten by the girls! ‘chuckle’

Tracey called a few minutes ago and wanted to know how to find something on the internet. I, of course, gave her the standard answer: ‘Type it into google.’ That always works for me.

Googling things is a lot like staying well was when I was a kid. Now when you need to know something, you call on Google. When I was a kid, to stay well, my sisters and brother and I took “Calatabs” and “Black Draught.

The calatab was a small, round  slick pill. It shouldn’t have been hard to swallow but it was. When you tried to gulp it down, it went as far as the top of your throat and stayed there all day. I’ve eaten as much as a whole loaf of Kilpatricks bread trying to get the calatab to go down but it never worked. I think it eventually just melted away.

The Black Draught was worse. It was in a flakey, grainy but very fine powder form and to do any good, it had to be taken into the mouth dry and washed down with a glass if water. I remember how hard it was to get all of the powder down. Sometimes it took up to three glasses of water to get it all down. It was bad enough to gag a maggot! I think I was only sick once or twice in my childhood.

I never took cuts or abrasions home either. I did for a while when I was very young, until I realized merthiolate burned much worse than the skint place hurt.

Merthiolate was a red medicine in a little bitty brownish/reddish bottle. It had a cap that screwed onto the top and attached to the underside of the cap was a glass applicator than went down into that bottle of liquid fire. I’m sure the reason Merthiolate was in such a small bottle was, if there was too much in a bigger bottle, it would break out into flames and burn up. It was that hot!
There was another medicine a lot like merthiolate. It was called, “Mercurochrome.” I asked my Mother once why we didn’t use that one and she said it wouldn’t do any good because it didn’t burn! Go figure! Made sense to her.

Well, Donna just called to say hello and let me know she is all right so I guess I can get around and take care of a few errands.

Later…