Last night, HH and I rented the old movie I.Q. with Meg Ryan and Tim Robbins. I loved the string of Meg Ryan comedy romances that came out for a while: When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, I.Q., French Kiss, Addicted to Love, and You’ve Got Mail. In I.Q., she and Tim Robbins create a sweet and tender chemistry. But the thing that really made me love this movie were the oldies who played minor characters.

Walter Matthau plays Meg’s uncle, Albert Einstein. He meets with his retired, brilliant professors every day and they argue the meaning of life. Does time exist? Is an accident ever really an accident or was it preordained, which would mean it wasn’t REALLY an accident? They’re geniuses and naughty and incorrigible. Which made them delightful to watch.

Meg Ryan plays a mathematician and Tim Robbins is a car mechanic who reads science magazines all the time. An unlikely pair, but the four “oldies” work together to make Meg take another look at him, trying to nurture a romance. The plot, of course, throws in all types of mishaps, and the four “oldies” don’t quit interfering until they get the results they want. Just plain fun!

I’ve been battling diarrhea for over TWO MONTHS. And it just kept getting worse instead of better. I went to a walk-in clinic and asked them to test me for c-diff. One of my BFF is a nurse practitioner. She said it’s the first thing she tests for when a person comes in with stomach problems. The clinic tested me for bacteria and parasites, then told me I had irritable bowel syndrome and gave me a diet to control it. I love to cook. We followed the diet. No fat, grease, fake sweeteners, fresh fruits or vegetables, and no fiber. No Change.

So, I went to our family doctor. I asked her to test me for c-diff. She told me if I had it, I’d be more miserable, in more pain, and sent me for a CT scan instead. The lining of my colon was swollen and unhappy. She sent me home with the same diet I got at the clinic and gave me antibiotics. Everything immediately got worse. I took them for five days, then stopped. By then, I was getting a little desperate. I couldn’t go anywhere, couldn’t leave the house. I didn’t even change out of my pajamas, because I was either in the bathroom or so tired, I was taking a nap.

Another BFF works in admittance at the hospital and told me enough was enough. If I went to the ER, they’d take me seriously and find out what was wrong. They were kind, sympathetic, but never called for a gastroenterologist or specialist of any kind. They gave me more potassium and magnesium and sent me home with the same diet the clinic and my doctor had given me. No Change.

I had to change doctors anyway because my old doctor wasn’t in our network, so I went to the new doctor. He didn’t think I had c-diff either but said he didn’t mind if I wanted a test for it. He listed a lot of labs. Five vials of blood. Four stool samples. And guess what? I have c-diff. IF SOMEONE WOULD HAVE JUST LET ME TEST FOR IT IN THE BEGINNING, I’D BE ALL RIGHT BY NOW. And that really bums me out. I missed going to Indy for our big family get-together to see my grandson and his wife’s new baby boy. C-diff is contagious, and no one wanted to take a chance.

I’m done griping, BUT I’d like to spare anyone the misery of what I’ve dealt with for weeks. I asked my health providers for help, asked for a c-diff test, and got turned down over and over again. I trusted their answers. I was wrong. The next time, I’m going to be more aggressive, more demanding. At least, I’m going to try.

We’ve had the same family doctor for years and years. She was our doctor before the boys were born, and Ty’s over thirty now. When we started with her, we chose her because her office is close to our house, convenient. We were young, healthy, and we usually only saw her once a year, and we liked her. Then insurance programs divided, and she went with the Parkview network, and we were with Lutheran. It meant that we had to pay a little more when we went to see her, but we decided to stay with her. We liked her, her office, and her staff.

In early April, though, Parkview announced in the newspaper that they were going to stop treating anyone that wasn’t in their network. I asked my favorite nurse, “Does that mean we’ll have to find a new doctor?” “I’d guess yes,” she told me. My sister’s doctor had retired the end of last year, and she’d started seeing a new, young doctor. She really liked him and recommended him. So, on Friday, HH and I went to meet him. And he’s wonderful. Low-key, droll, funny, and THOROUGH. He asked us more questions than we’ve been asked in years. And he came up with all kinds of ideas that might help us. I think he’s going to be a fresh, new start for us, and I couldn’t be happier.

HH hates change. I tolerate it. But this time, we’re both looking forward to it. We’d been dreading it before we met Dr. Wieging, but he’s at the Brooklyn Clinic, and they have their own lab. That, in itself, is going to make our lives easier. This time around, I think change is going to be good.

HH has reached the end of some of his favorite TV shows. Rock the Block ended, so no more high-end, extravagant, money’s no object home improvement shows. He loved seeing what $250,000 in designing money could come up with. Nothing mundane.

We watched the last episode of the new season’s Somebody Feed Phil, too. It’s a fun show, but I have to say, a lot of the wonderful food Phil tries in different countries is nothing that would excite me. I’m too middle-class. No sea urchin uni or tripe for me. I’m more of a taco or burger type girl. I like international flavors–Korean fried chicken and yakitori–but nothing too out there.

One of HH’s top favorites is The Tournament of Champions where top chefs compete against each other, but it ended, too. And why any chef would put himself/herself that through that kind of misery is beyond me. HH wanted Jet Tila to win this year, and he came close, but no cigar. And the two chefs who made it to the final battle looked like they’d been put through the wringer. Too much stress.

But now HH is flailing around, trying to find something fun to watch. And he returned to Agatha Christie. “There has to be one we’ve never seen,” he told me. So we ended up finding Witness For the Prosecution, a short story of Christie’s I’d read forever ago and barely remembered. HH will never ask for my advice again. All I remembered was that it was a clever courtroom drama with a great twist at the end. Which it had. But I didn’t remember how DEPRESSING the lawyer who defended the case was and what a sad life he had (at least in this 2016 version). We ended the movie and went to bed, determined to NEVER watch that movie again. I redeemed myself with Miss Marple’s TOWARDS ZERO later that week, but I can tell I’d better up my choices this summer. The Great British Baking Show, another one of HH’s favorites, doesn’t start for a long time.

My grandson and his wife just had their little baby boy. They live in Indy, so sent us Face Time with them and Clark. Okay, I know I’m prejudiced, but this kid looks like a sweetheart, like he’s already in tune with the world and ready to enjoy life.

I’m a bit of a horoscope fan, so I looked up his birthdate in my book, The Secret Language of Birthdays, Personology Profiles for each Day of the Year, and guess what the book said for April 16th? The Day of Cosmic Comedy. “Laughter is something that comes naturally to those born on April 16th, and with it, the ability to let others laugh, too.” What a wonderful life plan.

Our daughter from Florida is flying in on May 2nd to see the baby, so our little family in Fort Wayne is going to drive down to Indy and rent hotel rooms for May 2nd and 3rd to see her and the new baby. We’ll leave later on Saturday to drive home, and Robyn’s flying back to Indy early on Sunday. It will be fun seeing everyone and meeting our new great-grandson. I’m planning on making some food ahead for the new parents for days they don’t want to cook. I can’t help it. I love to feed people. I’m making Italian meatloaf because Emily loves it, a pork loin with veggies because it’s easy, and a breakfast casserole because both Ty and Emily like them. Then I want to make potato soup (it was one of Ty’s favorites when he was a little boy), a chicken and orzo soup because it’s super healthy, and a gumbo that they both love. That should buy them some lazy time when they don’t want to bother with supper or lunch.

And even though I’m going to have to pry my daughter’s fingers off the baby, I get a turn to hold him. We’re looking forward to meeting him.

I just finished reading Lynn Cahoon’s Murder in a Tourist Town novella that’s a prequel to her Tourist Town mysteries. And I was surprised by how short it was. Only 119 pages. But I love short stories, so I’m not sure that was my problem. I’m a fan of C.S. Boyack’s The Hat series, and I looked up their length. The last one was 146 pages, but it felt fully developed. Then I looked up Julia Donner’s last story in her Regency Friendship Series. About 146 pages. And it was completely and happily satisfying. Then I looked up the Harbor Pointe Inn series, which I really enjoyed, and one of them was only 109 pages, another one 117. But they felt complete.

So what made the difference? All of the other stories developed at their own speed. The characters drove the story from beginning to end. Murder in a Tourist Town started like that, and I fell for the characters in South Cove. I wanted Jill to leave her exhausting job as a divorce lawyer and find happiness. I wanted her to open a coffee shop/bookstore in South Cove. And I fell in love with Miss Emily. But then the author moved from Part One of the story to Part Two, and it felt like she gave me an epilogue–how everything worked out–and TOLD me what happened instead of just letting it develop. The ending felt rushed. It didn’t have to. Like I said, one of the Harbor Pointe Inn novellas was only 109 pages, but those pages developed the story and characters.

I’m still glad I read Murder in a Tourist Town. It’s a prequel to the rest of the series, and I learned new things about the characters I’ve been following for a long time. But the ending felt rushed. I’m happy with how everything worked out, but a few more pages wouldn’t have hurt to let the story move at its own pace.

One of my favorite movies is Midnight In Paris where Owen Wilson, a would-be novelist, sits on a church step at midnight and a vintage car pulls up to invite him along for a night on the town, then he’s whisked back to a time when F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and other artists are coming into their own in the city. The actor Corey Stoll plays Hemingway and Kathy Bates plays his agent, Gertrude Stein. As a writer, it was fun to hear their discussions about what makes a great book. Hemingway definitely had strong opinions. So, I got a kick out of watching Steve Lund play Hemingway in the latest episode of FRANKIE DRAKE Mysteries that HH and I watched.

The setting for the show is 1920s Toronto, and Frankie Drake is the city’s first female detective. Frankie Drake is nothing like Miss Scarlet in Miss Scarlet and The Duke, two Victorian era detectives. Miss Scarlet is serious about proving herself and earning a good reputation. Frankie is not above bending the law and social expectations to have a little fun. Hemingway is a newspaper reporter who irritates her. It’s mutual. He’s ambitious to write more than just columns for the paper, so he and Frankie end up working together to solve a murder so that he can have the big scoop of a story. For me, Lund did a good job of playing his part.

The Frankie Drake Mysteries is a little bit flippant, a little naughty, and so far has had solid mystery plots. Makes for some light entertainment on a Friday night.

I’m reading Mae Clair’s The Keeping Place right now. And this is going to sound odd, but I can relate to SO many of the characters in the book that’s it’s poking at old memories and stirring them to life.

Glory, a faded movie star, has two daughters–Nicole and Janie. Janie–the younger daughter–is an eccentric, old soul. She keeps notebooks and makes lists, collects odd tidbits as treasures. She doesn’t fit in. I was the oldest daughter in our house, but I was like that as a kid. Lived inside my own head a lot. Only had a few close friends and wasn’t interested in meeting more. Wrote lots of notes but always threw them away. Never even considered being popular. I was happy doing my own thing.

Nicole, her older sister, is more together, more social. My younger sister was a lot more of a people person than I was. Loved attention. Loved boys. Nicole has a crush on Vin, and they plan to get married someday. Vin wants to be a cop like his dad, and they envision a happy life staying in their hometown.

Glory came back to Hornwood after the dream of being a famous movie star didn’t happen. She took over running her parents’ restaurant and becomes a minor celebrity, bringing tourists in to see her. She and her girls have a good life, recognizing and accommodating each other’s flaws until Nicole takes Janie to her senior party for the last day of school, and Janie disappears. Everyone assumes she fell into the creek and drowned, but years later, her remains are found in an old, derelict shack near the railroad tracks, and her death is ruled a homicide.

Glory blames Nicole for not watching over her sister like she was supposed to. The strain between them becomes so much, Nicole leaves Hornwood to live with her father and his new wife. I’m not sure exactly why it happened, but my mom and I grew apart when I started college. Mom thought college was a waste of time for a woman and wanted me to go to business school. I wanted to be a teacher, and the riff just sort of expanded over time. Even after I had our two girls, Mom and I never quite healed. We loved each other, but there was always a hurdle we didn’t cross.

Nicole’s dad’s new wife, Amelia, is a treasure and in her gentle way, helps Nicole heal. And then the news that Janie was murdered, not drowned, emerges, and Nicole returns to Hornwood to find out what really happened on the night Janie died. She has to face the many people she left behind, and to her surprise, none of them blame her for what happened.

I’m only halfway through THE KEEPING PLACE, but the characters in this book have sucked me in. Sometimes, I wish I were a faster reader but not this time. I want to savor every parcel of this story.

My grandson and his wife had our family’s celebration at their house in Indy this year. My stomach/system is doing a lot better, but I didn’t feel safe making the two-hour drive there and back, so we stayed home. My sister was our only guest for the holiday meal. Usually, my cousin would come, too, but she said St. Anne’s was doing an Easter egg hunt and party so she wanted to stay at the nursing home. That pretty much shows how exciting HH and I were this year.

My sister’s not a big fan of ham and the traditional sides, so I decided to make one of her favorite meals instead–beef and noodles over mashed potatoes. Green beans with pearl onions on the side, and a lemon sponge cake for dessert. We had way too much food, but I planned it that way, so Mary could take a bunch of leftovers home with her. I don’t monkey around when it comes to beef and noodles. I go all out since Mary loves them so much. I roasted two chuck roasts to shred for the meat, added chopped carrots, onions, and celery. Then I built from there before adding the Amish noodles. They were a big success.

Next year, Ty and his wife will have a baby to bring to Easter. Their little boy is due any day now. We’re all getting excited. So next year, Easter will be a big deal. This year, the nice, low-key celebration was relaxing and nice.

A Beggar’s Bargain