Helping Hands of Friends, and Thundershowers

Yesterday I met up with friends from the former work team. We ate ice cream together: strawberry mascarpone and peanut ice cream for me (admittedly with the medical thought that the strawberry flavour likely had lemon juice with Vitamin C, and the emergency room doctor had advised eating nuts for iron). Then we had a round of coffee and sparkling water. The temperature was over 30°C, at least at first, but I didn't feel dizzy except mildly, when standing for a longer time; and it was nice.

Then, later on, it turns out that the paper bag a friend was carrying (despite her having injured her foot herself, and still recovering) was full of things for me to eat that have iron in them, and that the group had organized this together. I was deeply touched by the gesture.

And it's helped me out a lot since then.

I hadn't felt up to grocery-shopping again but didn't want to be a nuisance by asking my brothers. I was beginning to worry about running out of fruit juice to take with my iron pill in the morning, as we were down to one banana: so the net of oranges was one of the most welcome sights I could imagine.

Besides, I'd run out of fresh ideas for fresh food with iron in it: there's only so many times I can eat spinach, pistachios, and my makeshift lentil recipes over the course of weeks without their beginning to feel like medicine.

Many of the things I had no idea were a good source of iron before: hempseed in a bar of white chocolate, amaranth to add to my usual breakfast cereal, dried apricots, pumpkin seeds that I've just been snacking on in front of the computer, etc.

Anyway, I feel very lucky.

*

Today the painters came by again, to switch out another group of wooden frames that they're repainting — badly needed since we've lived here for over 15 years and had never had the frames repainted before.

There's an elder painter, tattooed and wiry, who's still in his 50s but has to retire because of a bad shoulder and feeling overworked. And a younger one, who didn't say too much today: per his colleague, he was tired and just wanted to go back to sleep.

Because of the weather forecast, they left outer windows in place for now.

And indeed, later, a thunderstorm brewed.

Now it's raining again from a slate-grey sky. I'm hoping it'll reduce the temperatures back down. The temperatures were over 30 again earlier today in parts of Berlin, I think. Then they plunged to 22. And they climbed again. Needless to say, I'm not a big fan of the heat.