How the Hell Do You Spell Minutiae?

My grandmother grew up in Kansas during the Dust Bowl. Not only did her family survive, they thrived thanks to my great-grandfather who kept the family financially solvent by 'wild catting' and striking oil. Still, no amount of cash could blow back the dust, so her early years were spent trying not to be swallowed whole by the desert prairie. Then WWII hit and one desperate situation replaced another.

Despite a life steeped in history, she only ever wrote the most inane letters to me, as if she didn't want to forget one detail of the better days.  As if she knew the practicalities of life are the building blocks of its wonder.


In her letters to me, she would note the temperature and record the weather. There would be a list of what she ate. Once she told me she rearranged the rocks in her garden and then went on to sort her socks.

I kept her letters because I found the banal narrative hysterically funny.

And then I look at what I do here; record every detail as if the minutiae of my life is at all important.

It must be the Kansan in me.

Some of us talk about the cool stuff and some of us are fixated on how the process of sorting our socks went.

I'm a sock sorter type. (I don't actually sort my socks. I don't believe in that level of organization. I would rather tell you about how I don't sort my socks.)

Here's the latest minutiae.

We survived the flu. The newborn had already been exposed and we were able to enjoy a family Christmas. (I am an awesome aunt by the way.)

My kiddo is still boogerific with no apparent end in sight.

The asthma gave me a hard time, but responded well to everything I threw at it. For once. I'm now tapering down to my base line meds.

I ate wheat again to see what would happen. I paired it with Alpha Lipoic Acid which has meant no joint pain or carb hangover. I do have a resurgence of the itchy rash at my neck. This first appeared about a year ago and was about the size of a quarter. It then grew to cover my entire neck and extend down into my upper chest.

Avoiding wheat helped it quite a bit, although it would still flare here and there, I assume due to wheat cross-contamination. (Going totally wheat free is incredibly difficult. It's easy to avoid bread, harder to skip the additives and hidden gluten.)

The dermatologist diagnosed the rash at the quarter size stage as eczema, but I'm not so sure about that. I think it's a wheat rash  (which is possibly still technically eczema). It sometimes seems to blister up and then I get bright red pin pricks of blood all over.

So wheat is out, for real.