Smells Delicious? Couldn't Care Less.

My last post was a while ago.  I'm doing much better, but in the meantime, I realized an annoying effect that the head trauma had.  I lost my sense of smell.  Apparently, it can take anywhere from 2 months to never to heal.  This put a damper on my cooking.

Taste had a severe impact, since I was only able to taste sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami (or whatever they call it these days).  I can also feel the burn of peppers, but that's not so much of a taste as a feel.  You can test that out by putting it on sensitive skin... you'll feel it if you rub a pepper on your eyelids.  For several weeks, the foods I ate only had the tastes I mentioned, temperature, texture, and presentation.  I lost over 15 pounds during that time, not because I was on a diet, but because neither cooking nor eating was fun.

Fortunately, some smells are coming back.  This does not mean that I smell a weakened version of what everybody else smells, it just means that I can only smell certain compounds.  I can smell white vinegar, but I cannot smell smoke.  I can taste the difference between regular Pepsi and Pepsi Throwback (a limited time Pepsi made with cane sugar instead of corn syrup), but I can't really tell between Coke and Dr. Pepper.  Vanilla tastes different than vanillin (artificial flavoring for vanilla), but sugar cookies and oatmeal cookies taste the same.

Anyways, so I was making london broil today, but the smoke detector kept going off.  Actually, this smoke detector seems to go off everytime I've been cooking these days.  I checked the broil, but no burning.  I'm convinced that the smoke detector is defected.  The meat was rare, which was how it was supposed to be.  I'm thinking that I'll just cut costs for food and not spend too much on herbs and spices for the upcoming few weeks/months.  What do you think?

I was in a hospital for 1.5 weeks

On Thursday of UF's spring break, I went to FIU. I was visiting a friend who lived on campus at FIU. We had fun, and after saying bye to him around 11pm, I left his dorm to walk to my car. Somewhere between the dorm building and the parking lot, two things happened. I fell and hit my head. I lost consciousness. I have no idea of the order in which they happened. I'm told that a campus policeman saw me falling and came to help me. He asked me "Are you okay?" I answered "Where am I?" Since I was clearly not okay, he called the paramedics. I can remember from the paramedics. I remember that I was praying the whole time. I also remember calling my parents. What I don't remember, but what my mom told me, was that they left so quickly that they forgot to bring a Bible or anything, so my mom told me to recite Psalm 23. Apparently, I did it just fine. Then, I remember throwing up blood and blood coming out of my nose. Afterwards, I was told that if I didn't throw up, then the pressure in my head would have been too high and I could have died. The hospital was pretty boring. Being stuck in bed for 9 days is terrible. There weren't many good channels on the TV, and though I had my Nintendo DS with me, I found out, to my dismay, that I fell on it. The screens didn't work. But I spent a good portion of my time reading a book that I brought with me. And the Bible; the book of Job. On about March 19th, the nurses started talking about how my injury was similar to the one that Liam Neeson's wife had died from. They did not stop telling me how lucky I am. They did not stop talking about it even until I was discharged. I have a skull fracture on the back of my head as well as a blood clot. The fracture has healed a good deal, and the clot is dissolving. My right ear feels like there's water in it, and sounds are a little muffled through it. The doctor said it'll get better. My heart rate drops to something around 30 beats per minute sometimes. The average resting heart rate, I'm told, is around 70 bpm. So the hospital kept me in to make sure this wasn't the cause of me falling to begin with. So from 3/13 to 3/23, I was in a hospital in Miami (Kendall). But I'm free now. After all this, I can only say one thing: Praise God!

Teeth pulled

Got my teeth pulled today.  Anyways, notes from earlier this morning:

Watch football game

with family

drive to sports bar

Fabio in parking lot

prison type place

david's there

we're high up, and there's a ledge

been there long enough to lose track of time & day.  

Might even be the same day as the previous sequence.

red & green (crystals? compounds?) react to explode

they (captors) want to know how the reaction works

Gators will be playing in the BCS championship later today.  Should be good.

Go Gators.