Friday Five: June 25, 2021

[brin_bellway]

[arguably cw: illness, food]


1) What's your favorite dish to bring to a summer cookout?

I cannot eat outdoors, except in winter or in extremis.

Formerly, watermelon.


2) How much time have you spent outdoors this week?

Mom dragged me out to the garden for about an hour and a half yesterday. More fucking tomatoes.

("You're ready to face the wilds!" Dad said, when I walked out the back door wearing a pollen mask and a mosquito-net suit.)

I was going to go for a walk on Monday, but it was too rainy.


3) Where do you set your thermostat?

Currently 73F. Some years we work our way up to 74.

Symmetrically, in winter it's 67 or sometimes 66.


4) How did you learn to swim?

I did play around in pools as a kid, but also I took a class in 2011. Apparently almost all people take swimming classes either in early childhood or not at all: there were only two other people in the adult class (ages 13+), and they were both elderly people trying to get over their fear of water so that they could play with their grandchildren in the pool.

Which is kind of strange, really, since it turns out that swimming gets so much easier after you've been on estrogen for a while. I have a built-in flotation belt now!


5) How do you avoid overheating?

In practice, mostly by staying inside. Outside: hats, shade, fans, having a body that grew up with New Jerseyan summers and is used to this sort of thing.

Comments

[contrarianarchon]

Huh, I have vague memories of swimming lessons being a compulsory part of my primary school education. Maybe this was a product of the school being within walking distance of a pool and not a universal fact of life. In practise though I have been able to swim for sufficiently long that I don't remember the process of acquiring the skill any more than I remember learning to walk. I guess that's evidence for "most people learn as a small child", then?

(I used to swim a lot because it was exercise I could do on my bad leg and I miss it a bit but it's kinda really inefficient in terms of the time-costs getting to and from anywhere I could swim)

[brin_bellway]

>>Huh, I have vague memories of swimming lessons being a compulsory part of my primary school education. Maybe this was a product of the school being within walking distance of a pool and not a universal fact of life.

It might be an Australian thing. Come to think of it, ages back I read a list of "things for Americans to bear in mind when writing fiction set in Britain", and one of them was "Britain has government-mandated swimming lessons through the school system: all characters should know how to swim unless there's a reason why that didn't apply to them".

I *infer* that Canada follows the Americans on this one because I doubt the swimming centre would have bothered to run classes of its own if the school were running some.

(Certainly I've had trouble getting things that are normally done through the school system before. It is incredibly, disturbingly easy to fall through the cracks on *chickenpox vaccinations* if you're homeschooled. Apparently, school nurses are the only people around here who ever bring it up. Maybe I was just unlucky in the blindspots of the people I happened to interact with, but from my experience it seems that a non-school doctor will *never* prompt you to receive a chickenpox vaccine: you *must* explicitly request it yourself if you didn't get one from school, and furthermore you *must* insist that they dig through their vaccine supplies and see if they have any lying around (presumably for giving first doses to the 18-month-olds, which is presumably the one (1) age where they actually think of it). When my parents realised one day that my brother had hit puberty and still hadn't had one, they were told to special-order it at a pharmacy, and the pharmacy never fucking responded: it wasn't until after that failure that the GP and her team dug around and realised they actually did have some.

He never did get his second. I did, only because I remembered on my own at age 22 that I had been told when I was 12 to get a booster every 10 years (I looked it up on a government website aimed at doctors and learned that the updated evidence now points at "if you didn't get vaccinated until age 12, two doses a month apart and then never again: if you didn't get a second dose a month later, do it whenever you can, but it's still the last one") and remembered on my own to ask them to check the back when the assistant told me she didn't think they did those there.

(It was late autumn, and when checking if now was a good time to receive a vaccine they asked me *when* I'd had my flu shot, not *if*. It may have been simple misspeaking, but I was amused by the implication that the sort of person who would independently notice that she was missing a chickenpox dose and seek it out would also have gotten a flu shot. (As indeed I had, long enough ago that my body was ready for another vaccine.))

---

...wait, wait, hang on a fucking minute. I asked them once to dig up the vaccine papers the American pediatric team had sent them and check if I was missing anything, and a while later they told me they'd checked it over and discussed it with some government specialist and everything was in order. Except I was *20* when that happened, so unless the change to "two doses 4 - 6 weeks apart" happened at exactly the right time (I'm having trouble checking this), *I know for a fact that they were wrong*. What I don't know is *how* wrong they were.

They gave me a copy of the American vaccine papers. It's probably on the shelf of medical records in my parents' bedroom, and I have already been meaning to look at it in order to formulate a response to this post on tuberculosis (Mom thinks I might have had a childhood tuberculosis shot, but she's not entirely sure). I'm going to put that higher on my to-do list: they won't want to combine any other catch-ups with my COVID-19 booster (which is now set to take place at the same medical centre I go to to see my GP) because the COVID shot is so newly invented and the researchers haven't had a chance to check if you can have it at the same time as other stuff, but I probably *could* combine catchups with an appointment to discuss possible immune disorders† (and perhaps what to try next regarding the pollen issues--which are continuing to degenerate--given that the allergist couldn't make heads or tails of me).

Overall I like my GP: she's generally very good at code-switching between "people who neither understand nor care to understand what's going on and just want to be told what to do about it" (which is, disturbingly, most people) and "people who actually take an interest in their health and try to understand what their own bodies are doing". I gather that a lot of doctors are so used to dealing with clueless idiots day in and day out that they don't know how to deal with anyone else, but she seems to find it *refreshing* rather than offputting when Mom learns how to interpret test-result figures, or when I told her I'd been masking whenever I went outside during pollen season to prevent sore throats. But damn, she really does have a *massive* blindspot around catch-up vaccines, huh.

---

†Which sounds like a weird combination, but given that I generally don't get sick *more often* than normal people, it seems reasonable to assume that I have no deficit in my ability to shrug off diseases I've seen before. Vaccines presumably work just fine on me. ↩

[contrarianarchon]

> I *infer* that Canada follows the Americans on this one because I doubt the swimming centre would have bothered to run classes of its own if the school were running some.

Swimming centres here def run classes independent of any school programs. (if memory serves me right, mainly because they want to have all of the levels of proficiency as ladder-steps on classes, even if nearly everyone will be able to swim at a basic level)

WRT childhood vacines, I can def see that happening, as a child vaccination was something I thought about solely when we were asked to get them by the school and I don't remember a GP ever asking about it, not that I visit the doctor very often. GPs who don't want to explain what is going on are the worst, though.

(... let this act as a reminder that I should go to the doctor to poke them again about misc chronic issues because I dropped that ball entirely to go to norway and need to pick it back up again)

[why_me_why_not]

Watermelon is always a good choice for a summer cookout!

Our local elementary schools now do swimming classes in 2nd or 3rd grade for all students, which I think is a great thing. My pastor is in her 60s and is taking classes to get over her fear of water!

[brin_bellway]

We're going to have watermelon today for Canada Day. :)

(Indoors, with my household.)

[why_me_why_not]

indoors was probably the best way to celebrate Canada Day this year, from what I understand! Crazy weather!