Home and Umami

Here he is, home from the hospital! Needs to wash his face; he still has Betadyne on his jaw. It's a little hard to tell from the photo, but his scar looks much better, especially above his hair line where the doctors removed a big section of scar tissue. You can see some of the discoloration and swelling on his left eye, where they rebuilt the orbital shelf.

This episode went way better than previously; in-and-out in less than 24 hours. I spent the night with Jake, which turned out to be absolutely unnecessary. He was perfectly self-sufficient and slept most of the night in any case. Denise had left about 8:00PM last night to go home and sleep and returned shortly before 5:00AM this morning. I was home by 6:00, slept pretty much through until shortly after 9:00AM when Denise called to say that Jake was free to go any time. So, that 3 hours of sleep, coupled with the sleep I got at the hospital worked out to just about, oh, 3 hours and 5 minutes total. The seating accommodations were not precisely comfortable. Amnesty International would have a conniption if you tried to make a detainee sit for any time in one of those.

I was able to entertain myself with miscellaneous activities; Angels baseball on the telly followed by John Wayne in Chisum, assorted web browsing, watching air ambulances come and go from the helipad outside Jake's window, a little Jethro Tull on the iPod and a sort of gymnastics program incorporating various combinations of chairs, pillows and physical contortions in search of the elusive comfortable position.

The funny thing was my one stretch of 5 or 10 minutes of uninterrupted sleep. I was watching the Angels vs. Twins, the Angels attempting an unlikely late inning comeback. I was thinking 'it would be nice if the Angels could tie and send the game to extra innings, if only to give me something to do for a little longer. So, bottom of the ninth, Angels trailing by two, two men on base, two outs, the Twins closer on the mound. Exciting stuff! I wake up, 5-5 in the bottom of the tenth! Crap, I missed all the excitement. Maybe baseball really is boring?!

At that point Jake decided to go for a walk, his first since getting out of surgery. We got back in time to see the announcer interviewing Mike Napoli, who apparently had just gotten the game winning RBI.

Back to Jake, the doctors were apparently very pleased with the outcome. It will be a while waiting for the swelling to subside so that we can see the actual results, but so far he looks good. He was sent home with Vicodin, an antibiotic and some eye lubricating ointment. So far he is not experiencing a lot of pain. Or maybe he just has a high pain threshold, either way, he hasn't been using much in the way of pain killers.

Freed of the hospital Jake wanted something to eat. Last night, he and I had discussed Tommy's as an option for lunch today. Unfortunately, it was a little early for lunch when he was discharged and Tommy's required a pretty significant detour from our homeward route, so we decided to head home and pick up something when we reached Temecula.

We had selected Tommy's chili burgers through a scientific analysis. Since Jake currently has no sense of smell, and, since smell is such an important component of the complete "taste" of food, Jake really has to rely on the five basic tastes. I have apparently been out of the loop on this, being still under the impression that there were only 4 basic tastes; sweet, salty, sour and bitter. It turns out that there is a fifth, Umami, a borrowed Japanese term meaning something like meaty or savory, the sort of flavor you get from meats or cheeses, etc.

Now, I ask me, what could better exemplify meaty and/or savory than a chili burger? And what greater expression of the chili burger than Tommy's? And so our quest began for an Umami-oozing Tommy's burger. Sadly, Temecula sits within a veritable Tommy's wasteland, the nearest stores being 35.57 miles (per Mapquest) away.

No Tommy's, no problem. Googling "Temecula chili burger" delivered several hits for Billy B's Famous Chile Burgers. How could we miss? It's "Famous" after all! The food was, in a word, HORRIBLE. OK, horrible is not exactly right. Maybe it was Voldemort or 'The-Food-That-Must-Not-Be-Named!' To be fair, the chili, excuse me, chile burger was only mediocre, but everything else was pretty bad. Denise ordered what turned out to be the most vile fried zucchini. I had to dissect one for forensic analysis; I think their zucchini was pickled.

Had I been a wee bit more observant I would have caught the 'E' in 'Chile'. No self-respecting purveyor of burgers would spell chili with an 'E'!

Maybe something fresh from the garden for dinner, something to purge the Umami.

Speaking of the garden, a small sampling of our harvest...


...the heirloom tomatoes from which prompted some clowning byJacob.

More updates to come.