Weekly Round Up: All Ears!

 

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  In this week's edition I made a dupe of one of my favorite frozen breakfasts and I had the stupidest thing happen to me.  So stupid that I am going to tell you all about it.

[Writes draft of post with the story of the stupid thing up first and then realizes that it does not segue well into a discussion of food.  Moves it to the end of the post.]

Eats

Remember how enamored I was of this frozen breakfast and how I talked about wanting to make a DIY version?

Well, sometimes I am all talk but not this time.  Here is what I came up with.

The tofu scramble has finely diced mushrooms and broccoli, I believe mostly broccoli stems.  I have not purchased fresh broccoli in a very long time since Costco's frozen broccoli is very good and insanely cheap, so to get my broccoli stems, I went through a bag and chopped off as much as I could.  I chopped the stems up very finely, and added about a cup of chopped mushroom pieces.  I gave the broc & shrooms a good long saute in a little oil and salt, and added a couple of cloves of garlic toward the end.

Then I crumbled up a block of tofu and added it to the pan.  My tofu scramble inspo is 100% from The Cheap Lazy Vegan.  I let the tofu sit until it started to turn golden and tossed it around a few times.  It was looking a little dry so I added a few more squirts of oil.

The next step was to add four tablespoons of  CLV's tofu scramble seasoning, which she recommends making in batches so that you have it on hand when needed.

The end result gave me similar vibes as the Amy's scramble, but without the blandness.

I always keep roasted potatoes in the freezer, so to build the bowl I added some of those and some plant based sausage that I've had in the freezer forever.  I'm not vegan, so normally I eat chicken sausage, but I felt that the drier texture of the plant based sausage fit in better with the tofu.

Final verdict: I feel like I came out of the experiment with a "better" version of the already very good Amy's scramble, so the mission was a success.  The tofu is enough for 4-5 servings.

Workouts

We're out of the death freeze, so hiking is back on the table.  The only problem is that the snow is very tough to walk on.  If it's not one things it's another...I can tell you how the story goes...the snow will melt, it will get muddy and all of the creek crossings will rise, so hiking will get messy.  But difficult/messy hiking beats no hiking.

My sleep was excellent this week, for reasons that we'll get to in a moment.

Watching

I only have three Alfred Hitchcock movies left on the rewatch!

My bookclub is actually a book/movie club, and this month's selection was a movie.  I had never seen Mona Lisa Smile before.  What can I say, 20 years ago the trailer looked boring and it still does today.

But the movie took off and was a very pleasant watching experience.  It's not entirely dissimilar to Dead Poet's Society, but the ladies handle the pressures of school and society much better than the fellas did.

Reading

All quiet on the reading front.  I'm continuing to struggle with The Age of Innocence, but love the CBBC chat.

Inhale, Exhale continues to be delightful, and I've continued to just read a chapter or two a night so that I can savor it.

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Okey dokey, that's the normal stuff that I write about in the weekly posts, let's move on to the thing that happened that made last week not like any other week of my life to date. 

Content warning: a non-gross discussion of ear wax follows, so feel free to skip if that's not your thing.  TL;DR everything turned out OK.

All Ears

Last summer when I was in Vancouver, I had a bizarre problem with my ears.  I would wake up with my ears clogged, and try to yawn my way out of it, which would eventually work.  The problem mostly cleared up when I got home, but came back to a lesser extent when I went to New Orleans.

I had my annual physical last Monday, and just for grins I mentioned it to my doc.  She took a look at my ears and told me that I had a large build up of wax.  She suggested using a drugstore product called Debrox drops, and mentioned something offhand about how their office could clean my ears but I might need to see an ENT, and the conversation moved on to other topics and we never got back to it.

A few hours after the appointment I was getting ready to wind down my morning activities for lunch, and I had the random thought that I might as well take a shot at the wax using the only ear cleaning method that I have ever used in my 50 years on this planet.  I don't live under a rock so of course I've heard that you're not supposed to go the peroxide and q-tips route nowadays, but I assumed that was advice meant for other people.  I saturated a q-tip in peroxide and lightly placed it in my ear, and enjoyed the satisfying pop of bubbles.  I moved on to the other ear with a second q-tip.  I only used the q-tips as a vehicle to get the peroxide into my ears and did not do any jabbing or digging with them.

The bubbling eventually died down, but my ears were so clogged that I could barely hear.  No matter, I was sure that it would go away in a moment.

Doggo and I went for our normal lunchtime dog walk, and when I still couldn't hear afterwards, I hit up the drug store for some Debrox drops.  I placed them in one ear and let them soak in for a bit, and then repeated with the other ear.

Um if I couldn't hear before, I really couldn't hear now.  I went about my business and after a few more hours I asked Dr ChatGPT what was up.  The Doctor reported that a buildup of wax would most likely go away after about four days if I kept using the Debrox drops twice a day, but that most people preferred to be able to hear sooner, so a trip to urgent care would do the trick.

I waited overnight and then headed to urgent care on Tuesday morning.  The doc said that the four day thing might or might not be accurate, and rinsed my ears with a special ear wash thingy.  It actually felt very pleasant, but it did not do anything to restore my hearing.  The doc told me that the Debrox needed more time to soak through and gave me the choice of coming back in a few days or going to see an ENT in a few days.  I chose the ENT route and got an appointment for Friday afternoon.

This is a long way of saying that I basically could not hear from Monday to Friday afternoon last week.  I could hear talking as long as it was from a close range, and I could hear audio on headphones, but most background noises were completely gone.  It was a different way to spend a week.

The ENT had a special ear vacuum thingy that got all of the wax out, so I went into her office not able to hear and exited half an hour later with the problem solved.  I get the joy of a monthly Debrox soak and a follow up visit in six months to make sure that everything is OK.

Morals of the story: if your doctor tells you that you have an earwax build up and makes an offhand comment about an ENT, do not let that thread of the conversation drop.  Do not believe Dr ChatGPT that the problem will go away on its own in a few days.  I'll take the blame for the q-tip and peroxide use, but I kind of wonder if my ears still would have clogged on the first use of Debrox.

Good things about losing your hearing for a few days: my sleep was excellent!  And I really appreciated it when it came back.  Background noises sound very loud now.

That's my "really stupid thing that happened last week story".  What have you got to top it?