JJ Litke

the neural pathways less traveled

Easy Halloween Fence

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My neighborhood is into Halloween, and we get a lot of trick-or-treaters. That makes Halloween a perfect time for fun craftsy projects.

I wanted a fence to guide trick-or-treaters up to the house (and, you know, just to add decoration). But the ones you can buy are insanely expensive for just a short segment of fence. Plus they tend to be really short, and they’re flimsy, making me think they aren’t likely to last long. So this year, I decided to make one myself. This is the result:

A simple black chain fence with little skulls on the posts

Sorry I didn’t take pics all the way through, but the steps are pretty simple. I started with some cheap wooden stakes from Lowes. I got 36 inch, I probably could have used the 24 inch ones just fine (though this does have a nice bit of height). Fair warning, these stakes are meant for construction zones, they’re super rough, and you will get a thousand splinters if you aren’t careful with them.

The other materials were a 25ft black plastic chain, and a set of tiny skulls. Since there were eight skulls in the pack, I only used eight stakes, which turned out to work great for the length of chain I had.

I spray-painted the stakes black with some leftover paint I already had. We seem to accumulate a lot of leftover paint. After painting the stakes, I debated about how to fasten the chain to the stakes. I finally got the idea to just drill holes through them with a 5/8″ bit. Then it’d be an easy matter to thread the chain through the holes—and added bonus, I can take the chain out after Halloween and the stakes will all store nice and flat. So I drilled holes in them. Okay, MrJJ drilled the holes, but I held the boards for him, so I helped! They’re secured on the end stakes with black twist-ties (MrJJ’s idea, he’s a pretty smart guy).

Finally, the skull cap pieces were added. I had thought I’d glue them, but there was a nicely convenient hole in the base of each skull. So I tapped a nail into the top of each stake—MrJJ was into this project by now, and he found some leftover 3″ nails and flattened the heads down so the skulls could fit over them. I could glue the skulls down, but they don’t seem to need it. Plus, again, storage will be so easy if I can just put all the stakes flat together.

Closeup of a little skull on a black post, with a black chain running through a hole in the post

Drilling a second set of holes and running another chain through would make the whole thing look a lot more like a serious fence. Or, the shorter stakes would work great if you wanted a short fence.

I’m thinking about getting something like some Spanish moss to add a little more character. Or I’ve got some orange string lights. Anyway, this is a good base to start with.

Happy trails!

A little skeleton riding a skeleton flamingo

7 Tips For Sharing COVID—And The Holidays—With Your Family

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So you’ve been social distancing and wearing a mask. Great! And now you want to cash in your good karma points on visiting extended family, stuffing yourself insensible, then zoning out by the TV. And surely coronavirus will honor those karma points, right? It pays attention and thinks in its tiny little ‘rona brain, “Hey, that guy’s been good, I’ll give him a pass and not spray out of his mouth into his Grammy’s face when he hugs her. Nah, that’s not how I roll.”

You owe it to your Grammy to go. The best thing you can give her is the gift of you, even if it comes with a side of antibiotic cocktails, lung fluid, and blood clots. You don’t have to risk her life, you could just call her more often and listen to stories about her walking fart problems. But you’re so bored with staying home, and she’s had a good run. A gem of a guy like you deserves some fun!

So here we go, tips for the COVID holiday season.

  1. Wear a mask. Masks reduce the viral load you’re exposed to, which affects how ill you become. Of course, you won’t wear the mask while you’re eating. Even though your brother Jerry talks with his mouth full, so he’ll be spitting flecks of turkey gravy and mashed potatoes at everyone. And you won’t wear a mask while hugging Grammy. Her memory and eyesight are failing like Kanye’s presidential run, and she won’t recognize you with a mask. You know what, forget the mask. It’s not going to make much difference for the five to six minutes you’d actually have it properly covering that face penis you call a nose anyway. 
  2. Wash your hands. This one is important. Grammy is always after you to wash your hands, right? Even though she just wipes her hands on a kitchen towel after handling raw meat, but you know, do as she says, not as she does. Handwashing will make a difference in how many germs are spread around during that maskless, gravy-and-potato-spittled dinner. Especially after Uncle Chester has a few drinks and keeps grabbing your arm to make you sit and listen to stories about his basic training days and pranks involving toothbrushes and rectums. Or when Grandpa starts up with the latest conspiracy theory about 5G-induced STDs, and cousin June helps out by escalating it into a screaming match. Family gatherings are fun, huh?
  3. Use hand sanitizer. Hand sanitizer should be at least 60% alcohol. If you run out, try sneaking some vodka from Uncle Chester’s glass that he’s pretending is water. Bonus game, refill it with water and see if he notices (spoiler: he won’t, he’s drunk on hand sanitizer).
  4. Social distancing. Yeah, you already broke that one just by showing up. Next.
  5. Cover coughs and sneezes with a tissue, then throw the tissue in the trash. Have the kids do this as well. Make them stop wiping boogers on each other, or on Uncle Chester after he passes out on the couch. In fact, make sure you keep the kids away from Uncle Chester. His yell-sneezes that sound like an exorcism in progress can set off every car alarm in the driveway. Bound to be a few germs in there, too.
  6. Clean and disinfect frequently touched surfaces. Give the kids some Clorox wipes and make up a new game: how many surfaces can you wipe down every hour? The winner gets a peppermint that Grammy dug out of her purse with just a little bit of lint stuck to it. Be sure to warn the kids not to get bleach in their eyes or up their noses. Or on the food. Or each other. Actually, this might be a bad idea. Just get some of Chester’s vodka and spritz it around every hour or so. Be sure to get Grandpa’s nether regions. He’s having a little trouble holding things in, if you know what I mean.
  7. Take vitamin D. And zinc. And some C for good measure. If you weren’t sick before, odds are good you just got the new version of the gift that keeps on giving. So hunker down and brace yourself, you’re in for a rough few weeks. Call your Grammy one last time. Happy holidays!

Dragon cake!

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Before recent events, I had never ordered a custom cake. Not even for my wedding reception. That whole deal was casual, and cake was the least of my worries then.

Mom: What about the cake?

Me: *shrug* I don’t know. I guess we should get one.

Mom: You want me to take care of that?

Me: Sure.

It was a very nice sheet cake that served the obligatory wedding-reception-cake purposes.

But as my 50th birthday approached, I got it into my head that I wanted fancy cake. Cake so special and amazing that if you saw it somewhere, you’d be struck by its awesomeness and try to think how to ask it out, but in the end you wouldn’t because you know it can do better and you really aren’t in this cake’s league. That kind of cake.

I found my cake artist at Kelly’s Cakes. When I told Kelly I wanted a dragon on the cake, she asked if I wanted it to be in the style of the O’Connor Dungeons & Dragons type—I knew I had the right person for the job.

And this was the cake!

Photos courtesy of my friend Jo at wavytail.com.

You guys, look at the details! The little tears in the wings! All the scaling! The teeth! His adorable nostrils!

He’s made of modeling chocolate, with fondant wings and gum paste details on his head. So, yes, he’s technically edible. My quandary now is whether to go ahead and eat him until the sugar overload makes me ill, or try to keep him wrapped in plastic until he decomposes. Or I could throw everything else in my freezer away and keep him in there forever, just so I can peek in on him every so often. Freezer dragon could be a fun thing, right?

 

The holidays approach, plan accordingly

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Ah, the winter holidays! Halloween gives us a nice prelude to the looming specter that is Thanksgiving and [December holiday of your choice]. And what makes these festive times so very unnerving?

Family. Those people you’ve avoided all year until now.

Okay, maybe it’s not really that bad. Somewhere in the world, there are happy families who all love and cherish one another and are always genuinely happy to be together. And the rest of us hate those guys. For most people, it’s not really one extreme or the other, and the truth lies somewhere in the middle. You want to see your family, but you’re really nervous about putting on a good front and appearing successful next to your overachieving cousin (that smug bastard). Or you know you’re going to be forced to deal with that jerk uncle who just can’t shut up about his political views. Maybe it’s that you just don’t get to see them often enough and you’re not sure how to get in enough time, which likely means you’re going to spread yourself thin and be exhausted by the end. Whatever your particular flavor of drama, the holidays bring us all the gift of stress.

One of the best ways to mitigate some of that stress is to manage your expectations. Don’t engage in magical thinking about how you’re going to finally get every detail right, or tell off Jerk Uncle this time, or finally earn Smug Bastard Cousin’s respect. It ain’t gonna happen. Accept it. Embrace it. It’s okay. Seriously, it is. You don’t have to be perfect, and you don’t have to be right (and that’s a topic that deserves an entire post on its own–hell, an entire blog). If you routinely feel disappointed at the end of the holidays, start managing those too-high expectations now.

Family isn’t so bad. Except when they are. But they’re every bit as human, and amazing, and flawed as you. If you can find a way to accept that, you’ll all be a lot happier. Especially after the holidays are over.

Family “support”

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My daughter earned her bachelor’s  degree a couple of years ago. She works in a research position at a hospital, but she has decided that’s not enough. So she’s started taking post-bacc classes with the intent to go to medical school.

This is a text message exchange we had a few weeks ago:

Her: Enrolled in cellular biology!

Me: Yay, I guess!

Her: I’m gonna be a doctor BE ENCOURAGING

Three things here. One, she recognized my snarky sarcasm (to someone who doesn’t know me, my comment might not sound as bad as it actually was). Two, she called me out for my complete lack of support. And three, my daughter has ambitions of becoming A DOCTOR. Which is simultaneously thrilling and terrifying.

That last bit is significant. When she talks about medical school, it’s scary to me. It’s big, and challenging, and that makes it frightening. I don’t want her to fail. So what do I do? I discourage her. I pointed out the cost, and the time involved, and the required level of commitment. As if she was going to say, oh, gee, Mom, medical school is expensive? I didn’t think of that because it’s such a well-kept secret! Good thing you clued me in!

As I point it out now, it sounds completely obvious and freaking stupid. But we do this to our families and friends all the time. We’re afraid for them, so we try to hold them back to something safer. Don’t start your own business, it might lose money. Don’t move to a new place, you might not like it. Don’t reach too high, you might fall. And that’s it right there. We don’t want them to fall or to fail, so we attempt to steer them to something safe and easy. We sabotage the people we love most in an effort to protect them. It’s sort of horrible when you realize you’re doing it, or that someone else is doing it to you.

So what to do about it: Well, when you’re the one guilty of it, you can try to realize that your fear is the problem, not their ambition. Maybe they won’t fail. Maybe they will, but they’ll learn something else and still make some gain from it. If you believe your concern is based on genuine issues of not being prepared for the step they want to take, help them find the resources they need. (In the example above, if I thought she seriously didn’t know the cost, I could have tried looking at scholarship-related info and sent that to her.)

If someone is doing this to you, recognize their reaction as fear rather than true lack of faith. (And if it’s true lack of faith, that’s a different problem, and you probably need to quit trying to get support from this person.) Gather the resources you need to achieve your goal, and keep moving toward it.

And when all that falls apart and your family sucks at supporting you anyway, try to realize that this is just how families are.

A little help for your sinus problems

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I’ve had a sudden onset of sinus problems in the past few months. My oral surgeon assures me that these problems have nothing to do with the dental surgery that immediately preceded them. Because there is no connection whatsoever between the mouth and sinuses (inform the otolaryngologists that theirs is sham field). On the subject of ENTs, did you know that ENTs are actually surgeons, and if you go to one for help, they have nothing to offer in between Nasonex and surgery? Well now you know.

My real point is that with some experimentation, I’ve found a few good products that I didn’t previously know about. I’m sharing in the hopes of helping someone else by cluing them in about these surprisingly little-known gems.

Note: I’m leaving out mention of sinus rinsing and plain saline sprays because everyone knows about them and there’s a glut of information for them. Also, if sinus rinsing or plain saline spray is all it takes to keep you clear, then YOU DON’T HAVE SINUS PROBLEMS. What you have is normal sinuses. Consider yourself lucky, and stop telling people that rinsing cures everything.

 

First, an exercise

This won’t clear your nose for more that a few minutes, but it can be very helpful to unstuff things before using a nasal spray (assuming the congestion is inflammation and not mucus).

Exhale. Pinch your nose shut and hold your breath. Nod your head up and down, and continue until you can’t hold your breath any more. Breath through your temporarily clear nose.

Conclusion: You’ll feel like an idiot, but it works for a few minutes. That’s all the time you need to use a sinus rinse or spray.

 

Naturade Nasal Spray, Saline & Aloe

This is a nice step up from a plain saline spray. It’s isotonic (meaning it’s the same level of saline as in the human body). In addition to the aloe, there’s a few other extracts in it that give it a gentle boost for clearing sinuses. It’s low-level help, but sometimes that’s all you need. One of the great things about it is that it’s cheap and relatively easy to find (I got it at Whole Foods).

Oddly, the price is higher on Naturade’s website than what I paid at WF.

Conclusion: A good saline spray with just a little extra.

 

Xlear Nasal Spray, Pump Mist

This is a great Afrin alternative. I’ve told so many people about it that a friend asked if I was being paid to shill for them (they should pay me, but they don’t). It’s hyperosmotic (hypertonic), which means it has a higher saline content than the human body. That means it dries you out more. It also contains the sweetener xylitol, so when it runs down the back of your throat it’s tasty (you just can’t underrate how nice that is compared to some other things you might spray up your nose).

It’s not as strong as Afrin, and it might take just a bit longer to kick in. But here is the awesome part. Unlike Afrin, it’s not addictive, and it won’t damage your sinuses and sense of smell like Afrin can. So you can use it every day if you need it. Seriously, no more “three days only then suffer if it hasn’t resolved.” The only down side is that it is meant to dry things out. So it’s highly effective for clearing mucus, but might not be as helpful if dry, inflamed swelling is your problem.

The manufacturer insists that it’s pronounced “clear,” but everyone I know calls it “x-clear” to clarify that they’re referring to the product and not the condition. The company also happen to be pretty good at social media (they always thank me when I talk about them on Twitter) and they have a good store locator feature on the Xlear website (look in the nav bar at the top). In Austin, you can find it at Whole Foods and the Vitamin Shoppe, as well as a few other places.

Conclusion: Freaking awesome.

 

Sinusoothe Nasal Spray

This is the Holy Grail of sinus sprays: it’s expensive and ridiculously difficult to get. It’s an isotonic saline spray that contains a number of essential oils. It claims to be anti-inflammatory, anti-bacterial, anti-viral, and anti-fungal. I didn’t even include the entire list of claims from the Sinusoothe website, and if you go look at it, it’ll set off your bullshit detectors. The amazing thing is that, in my experience, most of it is true. This stuff actually heals sinus passages like nothing else I’ve tried. I’m still skeptical about their anti-allergy claims as I haven’t had an opportunity to test that (though we’ll get to Cedar Fever season soon enough). If you have a cold, Xlear will do it for you, but if you have a sinus infection or chronic sinusitis, Sinusoothe is what you want.

Here’s the big problem. The manufacturer is in the UK. Which is great if you live in the UK, but if you live in the US like me, you have to mail-order Sinusoothe. And it comes via Royal Mail. In one to two weeks. At $30 a bottle.

About that .64 ounce size: I kept track with my second container, and I got 125 sprays out of it before it got down to the bottom (with a little bit left that was really tough to get the sprayer to pick up). So if you use it only twice a day, one spray in each side, it’ll last a month. But odds are good that if you, like me, have become desperate enough to order it, you need a lot more than the minimal amount. So it goes from expensive to damn expensive.

If you order six units at once, you can get a seventh one for free (I’m desperate enough for a product that works that I did that). The instructions tell you to skin-patch test for allergic reaction first; since most companies simply say not to use if allergic to the ingredients, their added instructions of how to test is a nice touch. I should probably also warn you that some reviews complain about it burning. I got used to it so fast I never even think about that. Either those people are wussies, or their problems are too minor for this stuff. When you get to the “holy shit, I would KILL to get my nose working again” state, then you’re ready.

Conclusion: Freaking awesome. For me, it was worth the money and the shipping time. Though if you need something now, the shipping time might be a deal-breaker.

 

So there you have it. Three levels of sinus spray help, and one exercise to clear you out enough to use them. If you’ve had a different experience, or you’d like to recommend something else, please speak up and comment.