emergency rooms of many lands.
Hey! Where's Ohta?
One year ago: Why I hate Microsoft Word, reason 492.
Two years ago: I link to two entries, only one of which is still available (I think).
Three years ago: Visiting a glacier.
Today's entertainment question:What's your favorite Iron Chef battle?
(If you're really interested in what others have to say, feel free to start an Iron Chef forum topic.)
Yesterday, Fernando arrived bearing fresh produce from his wife Nancy's garden: tomatoes of many nations. Well, of many hues and sizes. I do not care for tomatoes, though I eat tomato products, such as tomato sauce. Darin, however, loves to eat raw tomato.
Last night he went into the kitchen and decided to slice up a tomato. I heard him say, "Dammit!" Then: "Where are the band-aids?"
"In the guest bathroom, I think," I said, mostly unconcerned.
He went running down the hallway to the bathroom, which piqued my curiosity.
"They're not here!" Urgent.
I grabbed the baby and ran downstairs to our bathroom. I found the band-aids. Darin came down right behind me.
After a few minutes he said, "I think I'd better get stitches for this."
I realized something in a flash: I didn't know where the nearest emergency room was. I mean, for God's sake, what if something was wrong with Sophia?
I've only been to one emergency room since coming to Los Angeles, and that was when my friend Mj came down with a serious stomach complaint. He called for an ambulance, and when the ambulance arrived the paramedics told him that without insurance the ride would be $550, and there was only one hospital in the Valley they could take him to anyhow. So he called Darin and me and we drove him to the hospital where he could go to be treated without insurance.
That emergency room was a wake-up call: there are a lot of people in Los Angeles without insurance and they have few options. It was packed with mothers with babies and laborers and people who looked indigent even if they weren't. Most of the signs were in Spanish. We waited with Mj for a few hours; he was there for several more after we left. I didn't envy him having to go through that.
We didn't have to go to that emergency room. There but for the grace of Blue Cross, etc.
I loaded the baby into her car seat and carried her to the car. Darin got in, clutching a wad of toilet paper. We agreed on the first place we should check. If that wasn't the right place...then I would have to call 911, because I didn't know of any other hospitals around.
I let Darin out and then parked. I loaded the car seat into the stroller and then joined him in the emergency room.
Which was empty.
Well, there was one guy in there, but it turned out he was waiting for someone.
Darin signed in and was seen fairly soon thereafter. I pored over a copy of People magazine like it was the Dead Sea Scrolls. I didn't even get through it a second time because Darin came out. Turned out the knife cut had stopped bleeding, but they decided to give him a tetanus shot.
We went home, and Darin was embarrassed about going to the emergency room over a cut that stopped bleeding on its own.
I said, "Honey, I would much, much rather waste my time than guess wrong, okay?" I just have to remember to put some reading material in my car.
When we went to bed, I went to the bathroom sink and blanched. There were drops of blood everywhere. Looked like a minor massacre. I realize that overall it probably wasn't much blood, but it doesn't take much to look like something terrible's gone on, does it?
Today Harry came over and we tried another place from Hungry? for breakfast: Billy's Deli in Glendale. It was okay -- there was a little bit of a hassle with service, so we were underwhelmed. But we were in Glendale, so why not go to Pasadena to check out the best bookstore around?
Well, why not.
Vroman's is an excellent bookstore. Lots of books in every section, complete with reviews by store staff of books they recommend highly. I love Amazon.com but there's nothing like a truly excellent bookstore for the in-person, visceral experience of taking a book in your hands and flipping the pages and saying, Yes, I want to own this book. I also always find stuff I'd never find otherwise, either due to placement on a shelf -- one author's name near another -- or a thematic display, or just walking around reading book spines.
I don't know if my love of books comes from when I was little and they seemed so mysterious, these strange objects containing information. If you could decode the hieroglyphics, you could figure out what secrets they held. You knew different things when the book ended, so maybe if you could read all the books you'd know everything.
When the Scholastic book catalogue came around every month or however often it did, I went nuts ordering everything. And when the books came I read them all immediately -- the reading level probably didn't challenge me much, but I didn't care. I hadn't read them before, they were new and undiscovered territory.
I think I still get some of that thrill on beholding an entire store full of books, just waiting for me to run my hands over them, open them up, decode their secrets.
I'm sorry, where was I?
At Vroman's today there was a huge display of books on home schooling. Given that I've been interested in the topic of late -- a topic for another entry, or as a topic in Beth's forum -- I was intensely happy to flip through them and see what's what. I wrote down a number of the titles, not so that I could rush home and buy them from Amazon, but I'd like to remember them for two or three years down the road, when I might be thinking about doing this for real.
I discovered a part of Vroman's I'd never been in before: the upstairs! Which had one of the best blank books/journals/diaries sections I've ever seen. I was in stationery-porn heaven. I found a scrapbook to keep Sophia memorabilia in. I also found a gorgeous, gold-embossed, sewn-binding, lined journal that I couldn't resist, even though it was $20. I bought it with the plan of keeping Sophia's journal in it.
Yes, I realized I am crazy.
I have this journal. Somewhere, in some box, I have my paper journal. I keep a daily (well...almost daily) photographic web journal of Sophia for the grandparents. And now I want to keep a paper journal for Sophia? Am I insane?
Well, ambitious, at any rate. I just hope I don't spend more time writing in journals than doing things to go in them. But I want to write these letters to Sophia, so that she can have a record of what she did and how Mommy felt about it.
Darin said, "Are you going to do this for all the kids?"
I said, "Let's see if I do it for this one."
Do you love bookstores? And how do you feel about stationery porn?
Plus:- Do you like to see movies in the theater?
- Digital camera-fu!
- Creepy actors, we got us some creepy actors.
- What strange phrase do you wonder about?
A place Darin and I found through Hungry? that we will definitely go back to again is the Brighton Coffee Shop in Beverly Hills (Brighton at Camden). One of these just in from the 1950's coffee shops you find all over Los Angeles. Really good meatloaf. I had a baked potato with meatloaf, Darin had the meatloaf sandwich. We're planning on going back at some point to try different things on the menu.
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Copyright 2000 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@nobody-knows-anything.com