Who's a Dumbbell Now?

The latest on the Physical Therapy front is that they now say I have a frozen shoulder.  I made the mistake of looking up that term on the Internet and decided I'd better stop reading after I saw things like this:

- Can clear up on its own after around 2 years time.
-Therapy might consist of dislocating your arm from the shoulder cap and then popping it back in numerous times (I'm paraphrasing here but that seemed to be the general gist of it).
-If the therapy proves too painful, a surgeon can do the manipulating of your shoulder and arm while you are under general anesthesia but it is not uncommon for the patient's arm to get broken in the process (Yikes!)

How the heck did my shoulder get frozen in the first place?  I read on.  Seems that it can happen if you injure your shoulder.  I can't remember doing that but who knows?  Maybe I injured it in a "after 20-year" post-chemo brain fog.  Or maybe Mad Cow Disease finally caught up to me after eating that Steak Tartare sandwich in Germany in the 70's and I went on some violent shoulder-whacking binge unbeknownst to me.  Or it could be that folks with hypothyroidism and osteoporosis are prone to these shoulder incidents (more likely in my case).

I think I'll just stick with the physical therapy for now but that doesn't stop me from complaining about it.

"I really wish I could sit around and pick up marbles with my toes instead of having to do those stretchy band exercises, " I was complaining to the Commander.

"You don't have a problem with your toes," he replied.

Hmph!  No sympathy from him.  I tried the same thing on my therapist today.

"If you think picking up marbles will help get you ready for all the band exercises, you can pick up as many as you want," he said.

They have graduated me to two-pound weights for several exercises I do where I lift my arm in different directions.  I've already almost cold-cocked one therapist with the weight (totally by accident) and just missed another's jaw the other day.

They're giving me a wide berth now when they see me with a weight in my hand.  Hmmm, maybe I could work this into a bargaining chip.

"Really, I think I'd be much less of a threat to everybody if you just sit me down at one of those little tables, put an ice pack over my shoulder, give me a nice neck massage, and let me pick up paper clips and put them into a little box for ten minutes," I could say.

Sounds like a plan to me.

Smells Like Good News

Every so often I'll blog about something I've purchased that I really like.  I'm one of those people who just loves to share the news when I find something that's neat.  Well, today I just have to tell you about this little gem.  You might never ever have need of this and if that's the case, count your household blessed.  On the other hand, you might be more like OUR household.  Someone (who shall remain nameless) has the ability to use the bathroom and then have the ability to cause grown people to cry (or want to flee the house and find the nearest Army-Navy Surplus Store to purchase a gas mask).

Now I've been accused of having an over-developed sense of smell.  Maybe that's true.....who knows?  Either way, what I'm about to tell you is based on my sniffer so if I'M telling you this product works and I DO have a sensitive sniffer, than you can know it stood up to my demanding standards.

I happened upon this product one day when I was surfing TV channels and caught part of the Dr. Oz show.  He was addressing embarrassing questions from the audience and one was the problem of an odoriferous "p--per."  He pulled out a little bottle of Just a Drop and said it would solve the problem.  I don't remember all the technical mumbo-jumbo as to how it works.  I DO remember that I went up on Amazon's website and ordered it that same day.

All you have to do is squeeze ONE drop of this into your toilet bowl before you do a ....hmmm, how to say this politely......oh, heck, before you poo, and do your business and flush.  That's all there is to it.  There won't be a smell.  Honest!  I, of course, can't tell you that with 100% certainty for everyone's "situation" but I CAN tell you that it worked in our household.  I even gave the bathroom the old sniff test right after the fact and (gasp) I couldn't smell anything.  There was nothing to smell.

Yippee Skippee!  I'm a believer!  I bought more and have one by each toilet plus I gave one to my daughter for her home.  You don't have to thank me for spreading the word but I'll bet there are folks in your house who might want to give you hugs if your home has a similar offender.  Toodle-oo!  I'm off to enjoy a Spring-like day here in PA.

Don't Read the Fine Print!

I got a refill in the mail recently of some medicine that I take to help prevent migraines.  It is actually an anti-epileptic drug but it has been successful in preventing the classic migraines that I tend to get.  I take it every day and it has been a godsend.  Up until now, I've never actually read the literature that my prescription company sends in the package.  That stuff is always so alarmist, don't you think?  But the other day, I happened to skim over the possible side effects and ......oh, my!

"Hey, Honey," I said to the Commander who was happily playing "Welder" on the iPad.  "This medicine can make me depressed.  Have I seemed any more depressed than usual?"

He made no comment.  

"Whoa, listen to this.  It can give me worse anxiety.  That's not good.  I'm already one of the most anxious people I know.  And, oh my gosh, it can give you panic attacks, Honey!", I squeaked.  

I hyperventilated over that for a few minutes but then remembered that I'm on an anti-anxiety drug.  

"Hey, don't worry, Honey," I called over to him.  "I think that other stuff will cancel this stuff out."

"Oh, oh.....this stuff can make me act on dangerous impulses," I continued.  "Do you think I've been acting unusually impulsive?"

"Dee," he replied.  "You always act impulsively.  You've been that way ever since I met you.  Don't worry about it."

"Hey," I yelled over at him.  "Listen to this.  It says it can make me act aggressive, angry or violent AND it can give me worse irritability.  Have I been acting irritable lately?  (no response)   Don't make me come over there!  Have I?"

The Commander looked calmly over my way.  "Put the sheet down, Honey.  Just stop reading it," he said.

He was right.  I decided it was much better to be an irritable, aggressive, impulsive person that to have to worry about getting a migraine any time of the day or night.  So today I impulsively decided to try a new recipe for Split Pea Soup in the new crock pot.  Soup is always a nice comfort food.  Besides, I ate up all the cake in the house.  Wouldn't you know, the Commander just texted me to say he'd be working late and to go ahead and eat without him.  Seriously?  A whole crockpot of split pea soup?  Well, rather than get my knickers in a knot, I think I'll just help myself to a nice bowl of soup, put my feet up and settle back with a good book.  Now THAT is the best kind of medicine!

That Matriarchal Mouth

My 98-year-old mom.....bless her heart!  I inherited a lot of characteristics from her - her wicked sense of humor, her imagination, her intelligence, her hips (not so good), and, unfortunately, her tiny mouth.  It's been a bit of a bother for me all of my life.

I never had room enough in my mouth for all of my teeth so I had to endure braces, which didn't take the first time because my other teeth just crowded everything back out and back to being crooked.  So they had to do it all over again after pulling four teeth.  When you factor in the four wisdom teeth that were removed in college, that is eight teeth that I no longer had by the time I was a young adult.  You'd think that would have freed up enough room in my mouth but you would be wrong.  Things were STILL crowded in there.

"Hey, remember.....I'm STILL on Advil from the oral surgery!"

They always have to use children's bite wings at the dentist on me to take xrays.  They can't fit the adult-sized ones in my mouth.  I had to have a gum transplant in the Army because the gums were being worn down around one tooth that had gotten crooked again.  Ouch!


My daughter was just up last weekend after having her 3rd gum transplant.  She has also inherited the tiny mouth with a crooked tooth here and there, despite teenage braces.  She loves to point out that it is all my fault that she has to go through these periodical dental ordeals.


When I was telling my brother about my daughter's latest transplant, he reminded me that he had also had a gum transplant in the same area of the mouth that she and I had our transplants.  See!  It all goes back to my mother and her little mouth.  Although, they never did gum transplants back in her day.  She DID manage to hang onto all of her teeth until just the last decade when they started to crack and fall out.  Oh, golly, do we have THAT to look forward to?  Come to think of it.....this latest oral surgery ordeal all started because of a cracked tooth but I'm blaming it on the popcorn kernel I crunched down on, not genetics.

At any rate, looks like three generations of us are stuck with these tiny little mouths.  Shoot, and looking at that picture, it looks like that's not the only thing I'm stuck with.  My mother always told me that if I continued to sneer at everything as a teenager, my face would freeze like that.  Looks like she was right.  I've  ended up with one side of a smile that has a permanent sneer.  Of course, it's also the same side where I can do my notorious "Elvis" lip sneer.  I can do it, my brother can do it, and now little Sweet Pea can do it on just the one side.  I thought everyone could do it but apparently not.  It seems to be an inherited trait.  Ah, genetics!  That cosmic joke that binds us together in family groupings whether we like it or not.

Rockin' the Old Marley Look

I've survived Surgery #2 in the "Great Dental Implant Adventure."  Once again, I'm looking like Old Marley in Dickens' A Christmas Carol.  The good news is that the procedure is over.  Yay!  There's more good news.  I'm not in any pain.  I'm not bruised up.  I'm semi-coherent.  Although when I look at this picture, taken right after I got home, I wonder what in the world they were doing.  It looks like they attached a Lamprey fish to my cheek.  I vaguely remember the nurse also telling me that they had put a tube up one side of my nose.  That would explain why one nostril is suddenly so much bigger than the other.  You know, I slept so well last night though, that I'm thinking I should go back and ask if they'd stick a tube down the other side and get THAT side stretched out, too.  Maybe I could finally breathe easier.

The bad news is that I can't drink or eat anything hot for 3-4 days.  I miss my coffee.  I REALLY do.  I am also supposed to do this ice pack rotation at least for one more day.  Ugh!  The day of surgery we were doing it 30 minutes on and 30 minutes off.  Today I'm doing it 30 minutes on and giving myself an hour off between icing sessions.  They tell me that the peak swelling will occur 72 hours after the surgery. Hmm, my first surgery didn't follow that pattern so I'm hoping that this is as bad as it gets.

I'm also hungry.  I've been living on applesauce since yesterday after the surgery.  I branched out this morning and had some Cream of Wheat after I let it get cold.  What joy!  Yeah, right!  I'm about ready to take off the ice pack and drive a few blocks over to Dairy Queen and bring home a sundae.  I'm not on Vicodin today so I might be able to manage that much without any incidents.

Speaking of medication, I'd just like to say that I LOVE my anesthesiologist.  That man can work miracles.  It was so much easier going into this surgery knowing that I would be easily knocked out before they stuck any needles into me.  My guy was a cheery fellow and we were happily sharing stories about living overseas and cultural differences when the doctor walked in.  I almost felt like asking him if he wouldn't mind stepping out and giving us another 5 minutes to finish our conversation but then I reconsidered.  It's probably not a good idea to piss off your surgeon.

"So, are you ready for me to get this screw in your jaw," he asked.

"Sure, what's one more,?" I replied.  "I already have a few loose ones knocking around in my head."

Then it was a few deep breaths into a mask and some lively dreams and suddenly a nurse was asking me if I could slide onto a bed in the recovery room.  Her next step was to remove the IV in my arm which I didn't even feel, which just goes to show you how out of it I still was.  Before too long, the Commander was trying to keep me from playing Pinball with my body as I walked down the hall to the exit and we were on our way home.  Bless his heart.  He took down the discharge instructions and then got to play nursemaid the rest of the day and evening, keeping me on schedule with the ice packs and pills.

I had high hopes of getting lots of knitting done yesterday after the surgery while watching some TV.  Instead, I slept the rest of the morning and all afternoon and didn't rally until about 8 p.m. when So You Think You Can Dance kept me interested enough to keep my eyes open.  When I went to bed, part of my lips were still numb from the Novocaine, too.  Luckily I can feel my face this morning.

Now today the Commander is back at work and I'm in charge of my own medication.  Since I'm still in no pain, I decided to forego the Vicodin and just use Ibuprofin.  I've lowered the dose, too and am taking it at intervals that are further apart.  So far, no problems.  Thank the good Lord for competent doctors, staff, and lots of friends praying.

The last phase in all of this will be in September when I return from babysitting in Texas.  My regular dentist will be putting a tooth on the post that is now implanted in my jaw.  Boy, will I be glad when this is all finally over.  Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to the recliner to snooze.

Food Fun Without the Calories

My brother and I both love to take photographs of food.  I thought everyone did until someone pointed out to me that they thought we were rather unusual in this.  Really?  Well, considering the fact that most of my fun memories are centered around food and occasions when we've been gathered to eat food, I think it is the most normal thing in the world.

When I photograph a dish, I'm able to immediately conjure up what I was doing when I ate that particular food.  For example, our family has a tradition of making "Monkey Balls", a gooey caramelized pull-apart sticky roll concoction, for Christmas morning and New Year's morning.  When I look at this picture, I relive all the good-natured banter we sling back and forth as we fight to see who will get the pieces covered in the gooiest caramel.

A picture of peanut butter pies reminds me of all the pies I've made in my quest for the perfect peanut butter pie.  Yum, I can almost taste the filling just looking at that picture.

There is no one who loves frosting more than me but it has to be the RIGHT kind of frosting.  Whipped topping is NOT what I'm after.  I want the good old lard-based frosting.  When my birthday rolls around these days, I make sure that I go out and buy my own cake so I can be assured that I get the type of cake that I want.  The more decoration it has on it, the more frosting I get to eat along with my cake.  Heavenly!

When I tried a new decorating technique with pastry crust to cover a fruit pie, I documented my success with a picture.  It may be 85 degrees outside today but when I look at that picture, I can smell the hot apple pie coming out of the oven and hear the laughter of my family as we gather around the table to play cards and eat hot pie with vanilla ice cream on top.

The Commander's birthday?  Oh yes, sirloin and grilled shrimp with some garlic mashed potatoes on the side.  He made short work of that meal.

I'm more of a BBQ Beef girl myself.  I like to serve it open-face on a bun.  That way I get extra meat and sauce without the "unnecessary calories" of extra bread.  Ah, my mouth is puckering remember the taste of those early-summer strawberries that I enjoyed with this meal.

One of my favorite pictures is this one, taken in a Starbucks shop in Bandung, Indonesia.  It felt wonderful to take a short break from an unfamiliar culture to just sink into a comfortable chair, order a frosty mocha drink and THEN, to enjoy an unexpected treat of free donuts.  I don't know what my son was working on, but we sat there with our computers for several hours while I ate free donuts, drank more mocha drinks and worked on my blog from thousands of miles from home.  Abercrombie!

If you haven't tried photographing your memorable meals or dishes, give it a try!  I'd suggest that you try taking the pictures using natural light and go for unusual angles.  Don't be afraid to get in close.  If you have a photo editing program, you can try different croppings (saving your original photograph, as well as the cropped images).  You can get quite a few different looks from just one photo.  Then sit back and enjoy those memories for years to come without one worry in the world about indulging in too many calories.  Your photos are entirely fat-free!

It's All in a PA-TX Skype Session

This weekend we had another fine Skype session with Sweet Pea, Spud, and their Mommy and Daddy.   Sweet Pea was talking up a storm, discussing the play kitchen we have here at the house and I was showing her some of the pretend food that we can play with when she's next here on a visit.

"Skype Central" on their end was their iPad and it was set up on the brick hearth of their fireplace.  Unfortunately, little Spud has learned to climb up on the hearth and this was causing some concern (more on that later).

Sweet Pea was "accessing the situation" but it wasn't long before she started inching closer and closer to the iPad.

"Mommy, look....that's ME on the computer."

"I can see my teeth and my eyes when I get closer."

"Nana, what's that little lion doing in your computer?"

"Hmmmm, I think I'll take a closer look."

PawPaw said to Laura, "Judging from that last close-up, I'm thinking you might need to find a tissue."  He's such a comic.

Soon Sweet Pea wandered off to play with her little doll buggy and brother Spud crawled after her like greased lightning.  Next thing we heard was their daddy shouting "NO!"  Laura moved the iPad so we could see.  Sweet Pea had dumped her dolls out of the buggy and was swinging the buggy around in a circle just missing her brother's head.  It was like a whirling dervish version of "Whack a Mole."

We talked some more and I heard giggling in the background.  Mommy moved the iPad again and this time, there was Sweet Pea herding Spud back over to the fireplace by pushing the buggy into his little backside as he crawled along.  He was laughing merrily.  

"Oh, boy....I can make funny faces on the iPad."

With everyone back to the fireplace, little Spud decided to climb up on the hearth.  His sister followed suit and then started playing with the mesh curtains hanging over the fireplace opening.  Her mommy asked her to stop.  She didn't and the countdown began.  When she got to 3, she said, "You're going to have to go to your room for a time-out, Mika."  and then "I'll be back in a minute" to us.

She set the iPad down and off she hustled with a crying Sweet Pea down the hall.  As we heard her in the background talking, we heard some strange grunting and all of a sudden, some blonde hair appeared in the corner of our view of the living room ceiling.  "Oh, oh", we thought.  "Spud has discovered the unattended iPad."

Luckily his momma arrived just in time to save it from a perilous situation and little Spud had to be content to lunge at it in-between bites of baby food.  Right about then the buzzer sounded and Sweet Pea rejoined the conversation and all too soon it was time to wave goodbye and blow kisses.  And THAT'S the latest Skype Scoop from PA.

Better Than Frozen Peas

Well, I survived my first week of physical therapy (PT) and it hasn't been too bad.  I think I'm making a little progress.  If we were to go by the achiness of my shoulder at the end of the day, we could probably say that we're making great progress.

Since I've been feeling a dull ache after doing the exercises, I've been trying to ice down the sore area.  That's not easy when you're a knitter and a typist.  I've tried wrapping up a bag of frozen veggies in a towel and holding it on the sore spot but it doesn't stay in place unless I keep on holding it.  I can't knit or work on the computer with one hand......at least not easily.

One of my friends who is a physical therapist was telling me the other day about a homemade frozen gel pack that I could make from two bottles of dish soap poured into a Ziploc bag.  Then you double-bag it and stick it in the freezer.

I was doing fine on making my own gel pack until we got to the freezing it part.  It wasn't too stable in its "unfrozen" state and I wanted to lay it flat in the freezer.  I could have taken it down to the big chest freezer and found a spot to lay it flat but I solved the problem by putting it on a wire cooling rack.  This gave it stability.

Then I jury-rigged a spot in our refrigerator freezer by stacking some food boxes to make a flat and level surface and placed the cooling rack with the makeshift gel pack on top of the boxes.  Voila!  Now I'm just waiting for it to freeze enough to apply to my shoulder.

Ah, and I noticed today at PT that the therapists were putting their official gel pack into pillowcases and then letting folks sling them over their shoulders to ice them down.  Actually, you could sling them anywhere you wanted to ice something down but the folks I happened to notice today were all icing shoulders and doing it without having to hold the pack in place.  I'm going to try the pillowcase myself at home.  It seems like it would be much easier to work with than a big towel.

So there you have it.  If you need an ice pack and your insurance isn't providing you with one or you don't want to go out and buy an expensive one, try to make your own.  In the meantime, here's to pain-free days!

Stocking Up on Ben Gay

My shoulder has been bothering me for a month and a half now.  I finally had gone to the doctor who thought it was bursitis and prescribed anti-inflammatory drops.  I had told her that I did NOT want a cortisone shot nor did I want surgery.  After doing the drops for awhile, there still was no improvement so I bit the bullet and called her again and this time we decided to try some physical therapy.

Now it's been over twenty years since I last had physical therapy.  My PT had lasted exactly one session.  It was the same day I had my staples removed after the mastectomy for breast cancer.  I'll never forget that session.  The therapist was a real gem......NOT!  He was actually a bully and about as unfeeling as a rock.  I was taken to PT directly after having the staples removed and the first thing the guy did was have me lay down on a table and then he said, "Let's see how far you can move your arm."  Before I could even do anything, he grabbed my wrist and pulled my arm completely back above my head and down to the table.  I screamed.

"Oh, don't be such a baby!  Do you want that shoulder to freeze up?" he said.

The session went downhill from there.  When I got back to my room, I was in tears.  I told the nurse what had happened and she told my doctor and he pulled me out of PT and that was my one and only experience with physical therapy.  So naturally, I was a little nervous about going into the lion's den again after all these years.

I showed up yesterday, logged in and sat in the waiting room listening to two ladies in assorted braces swapping war stories.  I was praying that whoever came out to call my name would be a.  female and b. kindly and jolly.  When I heard my name called, they were neither.  It was a big, burly guy dressed in dress slacks, shirt and tie.  Not exactly my mental image of a physical therapist.

We went back to his office and sat down and he went over my completed paperwork.  I told him what kind of movements gave me pain and then he said, "Let's have you stand up and I'll check your posture."

I stood up and before I could even suck in my stomach, he took one look and said, "Oh, oh.....I think I can see what the problem is right now."  Yikes!  So he pushed and prodded on my shoulder area and the back of my neck and then told me to lay down on the table.

"Um, I don't do too well lying flat on tables," I told him.  "You know, it's the way my back is shaped.  It doesn't lay flat."

"It's called a dowager's hump," he replied.

Well, thank you, Mr. Sunshine.  As if I didn't know what this Quasimodo that I've been carrying around on my upper back for the past 20 years is called.

He moved my arm around and took measurements.  Ow!  Ow!  At least this fellow eased up when I'd say OW!

Then I had to sit up and try pushing against his hands in different directions.  I misunderstood him at one point and pushed in a direction he wasn't anticipating, ending up punching him in the stomach.

"Ooof!", he groaned.

"Sorry," I said.  "That's for that one measurement that really hurt."

The consensus was that my shoulder pain was NOT from bursitis.  It was actually from several factors.  The scar tissue from my mastectomy years ago and the hunching over of my shoulders from years of bad posture, sitting at a computer desk, and the deterioration of my bones from osteoporosis was causing my shoulder tendon to get pinched during certain movements.  My range of motion in that arm was now less than half of what it should be.

Finally it was time to go out into the main room and try some exercises.  He would demonstrate an exercise and then let me repeat it myself for 15 reps.  I was doing one with this rubberized band that made me think of a left-handed Heil Hitler salute when he came over to ask me how it was going.  Bad timing.  I was right in the middle of pulling my arm up.  POW!  My fist got him right in the jaw.  Oops!

He turned me over to his assistant, a nice young college intern.  Now SHE was a bubbly person.  She showed me how to do an exercise for the upper trunk and I began my reps.  Hmmm, I thought.  This is exactly like one I used to do all the time when I was a teen.  "Hey," I whispered to her, "This is the old 'We must, we must, we must increase the bust' exercise.  Every woman knows this one."

"You're right!", she laughed.

By this time, I had noticed two women peddling away on some stationary reclining bikes in the middle of the room.  They were both reading on Kindles.

"I want whatever exercise THEY'RE doing," I said to my therapist.  "Then I can read on my Kindle."

"There's nothing wrong with your legs", he replied.

I did another exercise where I stood facing sideways to the rubber band and then was supposed to pull the band straight-armed down to my hip and then back up at a 90-degree angle.

"Um, what if my hips are extra big?" I asked my therapist.  "It seems like I won't be getting the full benefit of this exercise because I could stop a lot sooner than the normal person."

He looked at me for a long moment.  "Work with me here," he finally said.

"It's the Van Rossum hips," I whispered to his assistant.  She grinned.

It wasn't long before we were finished and I was given the option of icing my shoulder there or waiting and doing it at home, if it became sore.  I opted for home.  I could swear that my therapist looked a tad relieved.

I'm heading back over today and tomorrow for more therapy.  Should be interesting.  This is almost as much fun as yoga class and I don't even have to do that darn Downward Dog.

Outa The Way!

My son-in-law has a new hobby - motorcycle racing.  I'm not sure of all the terms yet but he doesn't do dirt bike racing or cross-country racing.  He doesn't do drag racing.  I think what he does is the superbike racing or  supersport racing on concrete oval tracks.   He's pretty excited about this and his enthusiasm has been wonderful to behold.  Of course, I'm not his momma.  His mother has been less than thrilled.

Today he sent me a YouTube video showing him going around a track for 8 minutes.  It was a BIG track and apparently a fellow riding behind him had been taping him.  I emailed him back with two comments......
"Wow" and "Don't show this to your mother."

There should have been a camera on me while I was watching it.  A video of MY reactions could probably have won a prize on "America's Funniest Home Videos."  Yikes!  He was going awfully fast on those straightaways.  Suddenly there would be a curve and he'd practically be lying on his side as he'd go around the bend.

Then suddenly he'd be coming up on groups of other riders.  You should have seen me gesturing as I yelled, "Get out of the way!  Get out of the way!"  Hmm, it's starting to make sense to me why he so gently told me the other weekend that he didn't think he was quite ready for me to come watch him ride.  It wasn't HIM, it was ME!

I'm very happy that he has found a hobby that he really enjoys.  I have to admit though.....the "Nana" part of me is thinking "Man, if they have ANY desire to have a baby in the future, they might want to start now, while he's still in one piece."  I hope that doesn't make me a bad mother-in-law.

Giving my Manual the Cold Shoulder

When my brother was here visiting recently, he was telling me about a friend with a new car who couldn't figure out how to use all the features in their new auto.  Believe me, I can sympathize.  I have a new Sienna van and I've yet to figure out many of the things it can do.  The owner's manual is the size of a medium-sized novel and about as coherent as a Russian tragedy translated into Japanese by a native French-speaker.

I pointed this all out to my brother.   "Maybe you could show this person how to work some of the features," I suggested.

"I have," he groused.  "It hasn't made any difference.  They need to get in there and try the stuff out for themselves and then they'll figure it out.  That's the only way you'll learn something....trial and error."

"I don't agree," I countered.  "For example, what I'd find really useful would be to have little flashcards made up of the main functions I wanted to learn in step-by-step order so if I wanted to know how to do something like 'open my back vents', I could pull out that card and follow the steps until I was familiar enough with the procedure to not need the card."

He didn't agree.  "Shouldn't need that," he said.

My sister-in-law leaned over and whispered, "I understand completely."

Later, when she and I were out for a drive, I mentioned how lucky I was that I hadn't needed the air conditioning yet.

"I STILL haven't figured out how to turn on the air conditioning, " I told her, "but it hasn't mattered because all I do is turn the temperature control to whatever temperature I want and the car cools right down.  It's great.  I don't know how it does it but it's one less thing I have to figure out in that stupid manual."

"You haven't turned on your air conditioning at all yet?" she asked.

"Nope," I replied, pleased as punch with my fortitude and work-around skills.

"Then why does it say "AC on" there on your dashboard screen?" she asked.

"Where?", I asked her.

"Right there," she said, pointing to the little screen above my stereo.  That screen has all sorts of info on it but I usually only focus on a few things, like the time, the current temperature outside, and the fan setting.  By golly, she was right!  There, off to the left in little letters, it said my AC was indeed on.  There's no little light on the actual AC button where you'd expect to see an indicator that your AC was on, .......just that notice on the screen.

Wow, no wonder my car has cooled right off whenever I've turned down the temperature dial.  Come to think of it, the AC has probably been "on" all winter.  Luckily, I usually have the temp set around 74-76 degrees.  I don't care to be cold.  Hmmm, that also might explain why my gas mileage has been so bad.

I rather shudder to think what other controls I might have fiddled with in the car without realizing what I was doing.  Maybe I'd better go make up some flashcards while this experience is still fresh in my mind.