Saturday, March 16, 2024

Lego

 It's been windy, raining, snowing on and off all day and for the last few days. Nothing sticks and the rain soaks into the ground in minutes, but it was there. It was.

It's cold, falling to near freezing at night. But my allergies are still trying to kill me. And I never thought I'd be one of those old people, but in this cold, damp weather, the arthritis in my hands starts to act up. My sciatica too. It feels like I'm walking on Lego bricks. So that's fun.

I'm still watching and re-watching episodes of Northern Exposure. Right now, Maggie and Joel are stuck out at the airport in a storm. Soon Ed will join them, ruining Joel's amorous designs. 

Northern Exposure reminds me of a former friend, Pam, who I met when I was in community college as a teenager. She was in her early 30s at the time and seemed so impossibly old. But we became friends, kind of. She could be generous but she was also the kind of person who assumed other people would do her favors. Our friendship fell apart and let's just say that I don't really miss it all that much. Oh, sorry, I didn't say why Norther Exposure reminds me of her. At the time, I didn't watch TV (most of my adult life I've lived without a TV and though I watch a lot of crap online these days, there were a handful of decades in there when I never watched anything) but when I would go to visit Pam, we would often watch a show. One time she invited me over specifically to watch an episode of Northern Exposure. I didn't like it, thought it was too long and boring and I didn't like sitting in front a TV for any length of time, much less for an hour-long show. Pam made dinner, packages of ramen noodles with frozen vegetables mixed in.

A few years later, I was sharing an apartment with my brother and he had a television. Northern Exposure had gone into syndication and so I used to come home from work and watch episodes while I ate whatever crap I was eating at the time, probably also packaged ramen noodles.

There were a lot of years of cheap ramen noodle meals in there when I was making minimum wage ($4.25/hr at the time) or living on tips. That was fun.

I spoke to Judi today. I had let her know that she could call this weekend and she did. We talked about Buzz and about the situation wit Dave's mother. (Dave was out, visiting with his mother.) 

When Dave got home, we went out and as we passed the McDonald's at the edge of our little village, I remarked to Dave that I have never had a shamrock shake in my life. So we went through the drive-thru and got a small one. They taste terrible, like off-brand mints melted into cheap soft serve, certainly not worth the 500 calories, 63g of sugar, and 14g of fat. For a *small* shake! I had three sips. Dave had a bit more, but the rest went into the bin when we got home.

What I really want is a big cup of coffee.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Never


Buzz when we first met him in March of 2018.
 
 
Buzz with Dave two months later in May of 2018.
Buzz just before he and Judi left in January of this year.

Judi texted yesterday that Buzz died in the morning, cardiac arrest. She wasn't ready to talk about it, but wanted us to know that he had died. Poor Buzz. He was so sick for so long though, that it is a kindness for his suffering to be over despite the pain it causes her and us, too. We sent flowers.

Poor Judi. She has had so much loss these past few years, her husband Paul, then two of her long-time friends, her home, now Buzz. I'm glad she is near Paul's daughters. They come around to see her often and at least one of them is a dog person like Judi. She will have that comfort at least. 

Ah, it's so sad to think about. It's like the tears will never be over.

And that was how yesterday started. 

I didn't much want to go to physical therapy after that, but I went anyway. We're working on my shoulders, which is hard going for me. Today I feel like I fell and jarred everything above the waist. I'm achy and sore from a handful of simple shoulder exercises. I store a lot of emotion in my shoulders and so the work is doubly exhausting, exhausting both physically and mentally.

Dave's mother is not doing well either. After some recent dental work, she was given an antibiotic and (I believe) she had a bad reaction to it or it interacted badly with one of her medications. She's been largely unable to communicate, but when she can, she has been treating the caregivers at the facility badly and lashing out. She's fallen twice. Finally, the doctor ordered a sedative, partly because she was so agitated that she was in danger of hurting herself. It's a sorry solution, a chemical restraint rather than a physical one. I feel badly for her--we all do--but there's so little that can be done now for her. 

Dave is exhausted from dealing with that and from not getting enough sleep. Over the weekend, daylight savings time took us by surprise. We're both still so tired from that. 

The week before, I had some strangeness with the meds I've been taking for HTN, so those got changed a bit, then I decided that I didn't like the change so I changed them back. In the middle of that, I had an allergic reaction to something and ended up going back to the clinic to see the PA. It's never ending, doctors and health concerns.

What else?

We had a day of rain and snow. Literally one day. Then it was gone. It was just enough to wreck some of the blooms on the trees. 

I've been reading Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. 

I had my teeth cleaned. I also saw the periodontist who is going to do horrible but necessary things to my gums in June. I like him. He found out I was a nurse and he told me about half a dozen stories about the nurses he used to work with when he was younger. All good stories.

I saw the doctor at the sleep clinic and scheduled a sleep study for May.

I've watched Northern Exposure episodes over and over and over, falling asleep and waking up to them, listening to them while I sew or journal.

I drafted a pattern for and sewed a small crossbody bag. I screwed up the pocket and didn't have the right hardware to make the strap adjustable. I ordered a bunch of bag hardware from WAWAK.

I also ordered a pair of shoes that didn't fit and which will have to be returned. I ordered two keyring flashlights, one for me and one for David. David ordered a lot of looseleaf tea and they shipped out the boxed tea in  mailing envelopes so smashed box after smashed box kept arriving at our door (the tea was safe in the bag inside the smashed box). I ordered toilet paper and alcohol prep pads. I ordered oxygen concentrator tubing and nasal cannulas. I change out those two things quite frequently.

I cooked, lunches and dinners mainly. Tonight I made vegan chili and baked potatoes and salad and heated up some frozen fish for myself since I remembered as I was making the chili that I had had beans and red chile for lunch and didn't want to double up on either of those things today. I made two--or maybe it was three--dinners and one lunch of red chile and beans and scrambled tofu and frozen root vegetable hash browns. We spent a few weeks eating our way through about four pounds of cheese that Dave ordered with a gift certificate his sister gave him for Christmas.

I've been dreaming but mostly not remembering my dreams. There was one about waitressing that I do remember. In the dream, I was looking for a clean uniform to wear to work (I can't tell you how many times I wore a dirty uniform to work or how many times I ironed a dirty uniform--not only as a waitress, but also when I was in nursing school. Both restaurant and hospitals required uniforms to be worn daily and five shifts a week or five days of lectures and clinicals are hard to cover when you are only issued two uniforms and have no washing machine at home). In the dream once I got to work, I was searching for cigarettes and came up with a partial pack, six or so cigarettes, and had to ask myself if it was going to be enough to make it through a shift.

A month or so ago, I was reading the comments on a tik tok video about waiters and waitresses and several people commented that they had stopped waiting tables, gosh, three years ago! and were still having dreams about it. I didn't tell them that I haven't waited tables in almost thirty years and I still sometimes dream about it when I'm stressed. I don't know what that says about me or about restaurant work. There was a study done years ago about stress levels in various jobs and waitressing ranked just below air traffic controller. So take that into consideration when searching for your next career move.

Saturday, February 17, 2024

A Good Day

 It's been a long time since I wrote anything in the blog. Part of the reason is because I screwed up my neck again (sleeping this time) and it's been in some degree of increased pain for about six or seven weeks. More on that in a sec.

We got through Judi's move--she's in Florida now and we sent a nice housewarming gift. I have texted with her several times and she is exhausted from the move I think. Moving house is not an easy thing to undertake in you 80s and Judi is such a control freak that it just adds to the pile of things that are exhausting. Another friend gone in one way or another, I guess.

I started up with physical therapy again yesterday. Of course, my neck felt better before the appointment. (I had to wait four weeks for the appointment.) I went anyway and there are definitely improvements that I can make to keep things going okay. I've had to resign myself to a certain amount of daily pain, but there are things that make it better (and definitely things that make it worse).

Dave is off this morning on a grocery run with my brother. They will stop and pick up a grocery order and then probably stop by the Walmart pharmacy for my brother's prescriptions then pick up lunch someplace. After that, I'll go pick up Dave. 

I don't really want to leave the house today.

Friday, January 19, 2024

Just Is

 Since I wrote last, we've had snow that didn't stick around and some very cold temperatures--though nothing that made me think I needed a heavier coat than my zip-up hoodie. (It's not like I spend a lot of time outdoors though.)

Dave moved his mother into a new facility last week and I spent a couple of nights helping him clear out his mother's former place. The old place turned out to be not great--understaffed, unclean, poor food, etc.--but Dave's mother was adamant at the time that she wanted to move in there, I'm pretty sure she liked the place because when you walk in, the front looks very nice, with a marble front desk and nicely decorated seating area; a gilded nightmare. Dave's mother was glad to move anyway from there and she seems to be getting more and better care in the new facility. Of course all the hard work of finding the place and moving her in fell to Dave. His sister helped a bit with paperwork from afar and of course she handles all the money aspect of it, something I'm glad we don't have to think about. I tried to help Dave a bit by helping with packing up the old place. Dave's mom was in this place, a one-bedroom apartment with a kitchenette--for a little over a year and she had accumulated a lot of stuff, most of which she wasn't able to move into her new single room. What she didn't take largely went into garbage bags to be thrown away. We don't need her old silverware or bedding and though we could have donated it, that would be yet more work. Dave is pretty exhausted and I'm over it.

A lot of my feelings about this whole thing are complicated by my feelings about Dave's family in general. I spent about ten years trying so hard to get them to like me and they never did. They definitely excluded me and I felt a lot of time like they were either just tolerating my presence or laughing up their sleeves at me. So after ten years--ten years!--of prioritizing the maintenance of a relationship with them, I finally realized that it was doing no good and I told Dave I was done. Since then, he's been responsible for maintaining his own familial relationships. I help out if it will help him out, but I don't do anything for any other member of his family. I know it makes me seem unfeeling or uncaring to cut off contact, but sometimes you have to do something that extreme to maintain your self-respect.

I do feel sorry for Dave's mother now that she is getting to the end of her life--she's speaking to a hospice care specialist today--and she's not in great shape from the Parkinson's. I've even come to some understanding of her treatment of me, which I sense comes from her own insecurity about her position in life and in Dave's extended family--shit rolls downhill--though understanding that does not lead me to excuse her poor behavior toward me over the years. Dave says she asks about me from time to time but I find that more manipulative than anything else. She's certainly never acknowledged her poor treatment of me, if she ever even recognized that she was doing it.

There's a lot of complicated history there, I know. But we're all doing the best we can in one way or another. And not doing great at any of it. There is no better or worse at this point, I think, it just is. 

Right now Dave is at the new facility getting his mother's TV and a bed alarm set up. I'm home doing some chores, laundry, etc. In between times, I'm watching John Wick on Netflix. I've never seen it before but I like Keanu Reeves. I skipped past the dead dog part and am just watching the violent parts. I can handle watching people get killed, not animals. (I even had to stop watching How to Train Your Dragon the other day because of some implied meanness toward the dragons.) I've been not sleeping and while I'm not sleeping I've been watching things on Netflix, or trying to anyway. I tried to make it through Downsizing, the old Matt Damon movie, and gave up about three-quarters of the way through because it was just so blah. I also tried to watch a movie from the 70s called The Front Page. I made it a bit more than halfway through. I gave up on another 70s movie called The Lords of Flatbush. I only got about ten minutes into that but maybe I'll give it another try. It stars Sylvester Stallone and Henry Winkler playing, what else, fifties style hoodlums (a pre-Fonz role for Henry Winkler, whom I really like). 

It's almost five o'clock now, so I think I'm going to go start some dinner. Nachos tonight.

Tuesday, January 9, 2024

I'm Afraid

 Nine days into the new year. How are things going for you?

My post-Christmas sales purchases are still arriving. Today's deliveries brought a bubble light centerpiece with nine bubble lights on it and two sets of miniature blown glass ornaments. My mini Christmas tree is going to be amazing next year. 

Next year. Sigh. 

I started taking down our Christmas decorations. I packed away all the ornaments and started on the lights but there is a set of lights that is tangled up in the tree and I can't reach it so I need to wait for Dave to do it.

Dave is off this afternoon packing up his mother's things. She'll move on Thursday into the new facility where she will have more help.

I'm still cleaning up and decluttering. I went through the bathroom closet and cleared out a bunch of stuff that we didn't use in the casita and haven't used since we moved in here. I'm slowly going through drawers and cabinets with an eye on eventually getting to the garage and clearing that out. It's an endless struggle, isn't it, this managing of things, things, things.

On Sunday we went and helped Judi pack up her books. Most of them were Paul's actually, some of the few things of his that Judi didn't get rid of when he died. I mean, she kept his photographs and such for his daughters, but all the rest (clothes, CDs, etc.) all went within a few months of his death. Judi is taking three or so boxes of books. We took three boxes of books. Another twelve or so will be donated. A sad business, this. The movers will come soon and Judi will go soon after. 

In other sad news, her dog Buzz is also not likely to be around much longer. He's been very sick for awhile. Our dog, too.

This will be a year of loss, I'm afraid.