Take Your Blood, Free Cookie

Our company has a blood drive twice a year. We got an email, thoughtfully translated to English for the foreigners:

"Welcome to tak your blood, free cookie!"

It's actually a Danish and it's all you can eat for only 1/2 liter of blood (!) so the blood drive is really popular.

I feel that it is my duty to provide, since I have really good blood. If that sounds stuck-up, you have to read the list of prohibitions to understand it:

• Have you been to a farm in Portugal or Ireland in the past 6 months? I haven't even been to a frickin movie in the past 6 months.
• Have you had unprotected sex in the past 6 months? I'm married, I haven't had any for a year.
• Have you had sex with a farm animal in the past 2 years? It was a long, long, time ago and he looked human. He became a jackass afterward.

The list goes on and on and ON. Since you can't be pregnant, half the women can't give as women are always pregnant here. So you see, I really must make an effort, and there's the free danish.

Since I have bashful veins, I usually come out of it with bruises all over one or both arms. Last time the medic (nurse?) who took my blood was talking on his mobile the whole time and I ended up with grapefruit size bruises on both arms that hurt for over a week. I didn't give for a year after that.

So, I'm standing in line and it's almost my turn. There's a medic near where we're lining up, another in the middle, and a nurse on the far end. The two doners closer to us both have their arms up, indicating they're almost done. And I'm thinking that I really don't want to be on the close end 'cause I don't like the idea of being flat on my back with my coworkers lining up 3 feet away. And it looks like that's where I'm gonna be, cause the guy there is almost done. So I thought I'd give someone else my turn, and wait for the nurse on the far side. But the medic nearby is from the refugee ethnic group I told you about before, and I know they are subject to alot of flak, so if I don't go when he gets free, he might take it as personal. I don't wan't to hurt his feelings, so I figure I had just better suck it up and go.

But just then, middle medic is ready for the next in line! As I took a step toward him, the woman behind me asks if I mind if she skips me, she wants him to take her blood. Darn! What could I do, I figured she knows him or something. and she asked, so I let her take my turn.

I got the medic near the line. He had trouble finding a vein, as always happens with me, and it took 25 minutes to get the half-liter, just barely, but he got it.

The woman who skipped me was having her free danish when I got there.
"Is that your neighbor or something?" I asked her about the medic who took her blood.
"No, I wanted someone who looks trustworth" she answered, "but maybe I was wrong, it really hurt, he wasn't so good".
I had to rub it in and said "My guy was so gentle."

That was yesterday. Today my arm is perfectly unbruised, with only a tiny dot where the needle went in. That has never happened before, so I called the woman who organized it and told her to please convey my thanks to the guy who took my blood. She said others had commented too about how good he was.

Take my blood, free cookie, no bruises.

The Perfect Woman

This is going to sound perverted, but here goes:

We have a newish girl at work. She's a tiny teen, tottering about on 4 inch stilettos. Well, she has to be at least in her late 20's but she is tiny and comes to work looking perfect every day. Perfect clothes, perfect hair, perfect body, and judging from her perfect position, she is intelligent, and she bakes perfect brownies. The type of person you want to drown in the toilet. But she promised to give us the recipe so we let her live.

One day when she teetered by while I was eating with my friends. I stopped in mid-sentence and just stared at her butt. No amount of exercise could give you that butt. Believe me, I tried.

My friends were all "Ora, what's up, what are you looking at, are you OK?" I couldn't believe it. Her perfect butt is the one I ordered when I was a fetus and the Power that Be was showing me the DIY Butt catalog. I know I chose that butt, I ordered it, it should have been mine!

How can one person get it all? Why am I not that one person? Maybe I was a person who kicked dogs in a previous life so I didn't deserve to get that butt. If that's how it works, she was surely Mother Theresa in her previous life.

Anyway, I'd get you a picture but there are security cameras all over and if they caught me running around with a camera, scrunching down to the level of her perfect butt and taking pictures, you know how that would go. Considering the economy, I don't want to risk it.

Of course my friends now refer to her behind her butt as "There Goes Ora's Butt". Yeah, rub it in.

Natural Cure for Hemorrhoids

For Father Muskrat, whose blog I tried yesterday and read about dinosaur hemorrhoids, I have a tried and tested cure.
One of my Male Relatives who prefers to remain anonymous (heretoforth MR) had suffered from hemorrhoids for years. It had been getting worse. Every time I called him he was angry at me for getting him off the toilet. He was cranky and preoccupied with the subject. He began to take an unnerving interest in other people's bathroom successes.

The creams and pills from the doctor were not helping, and MR was already taking a buickload of pills for another condition. We needed to find something natural, but he wouldn't eat broccoli, a sure-fire fix, as he considers it woman food, poisonous to men.

The following will sound like an obnoxious infomercial, but bear with me. Picture a woman in a magenta turtleneck sitting on a couch smiling like an over-caffeinated pumpkin, holding up a glass of something and talking animatedly about it.

I read that hemorrhoids may be caused by constipation, and remembered reading about a fruit fix in the Healthy for Life Diet (or something like that, I'm translating to English). Two mornings in a row I made MR a fruit shake - one cup of cut up fresh fruit and orange juice blended. The second day he had finally experienced his own bathroom success. I've been making him the fruit shake ever since, 5 years (!) and the hemorrhoids have not returned, happlily ever after.

Here are the important points:

• Drink the juice first thing in the morning, on an empty stomach. If you're used to coffee first thing in the morning, or beer if you're from Wisconsin, this takes some getting used to.
• Use fresh fruit whenever possible. If you can't get fresh oranges, use juice with pulp.
• If you don't have time to mess with the blender, just cut up 2-3 types of fruit.
• Don't add anything - no water, sugar, etc.
• Don't eat or drink anything for half an hour after.

Your bowels will thank you, and you can write and let me know how that's working out for you.