Godspeed, Luann

 Dave's mother died yesterday morning.

Dave and his mother (Durango, Co)

She was ill for a long time with an atypical form of Parkinson's disease and she went on hospice only recently. She died in bed at the small care home where she has been since January. One of her long-term care givers was with her when it happened. The hospice nurse came soon after. Dave and I went a little before noon and Dave went in to say his last goodbyes. The service that Dave's sister contacted came in the afternoon to take her away. They should have her ashes in a few weeks. Dave and his sister will travel sometime after to the small horse ranch where their mother spent summers as a child and there they will scatter her ashes.

One of her horses (Durango, Co.)

 

She loved horses. We'll donate her saddle to the horse ranch here where Dave and his sister took her weekend before last and where she had her last good moments with the horses.

 She did not want a funeral or any kind of service. Today flowers arrived at our door from Judi and Dave's coworkers, condolences for Dave. We started to build a small altar on our mantle using the flowers, the flameless candles from Kelly, Dave's mother's framed doctoral degree, her box of recipes dating back to the 60s. We'll add to it as Dave finds the photos that are lost somewhere in the garage that is filled with her old furniture and books.

She and I never really got along; my grief is not for her, but it does touch on the backlog of grief that I have for my brother and grandmother and father and my friends who are gone. And I think that everyone who dies deserves mourners, even if it's just a resentful daughter-in-law.

Eclipsed

 Did you catch any of the eclipse yesterday? It was not a total eclipse for us like the one last October, and sadly it was too cloudy for us to see much, but we did see something and it was still pretty amazing. We still had our eclipse glasses from October, so that was good. We watched a bit from the courtyard and then I came in and did some chores.

I had made a big pot of pinto beans so I used some of them to make chili beans for dinner. Dave poured the chili over a vegetarian hot dog and made a chili cheese dog. I put mine over a baked potato with cheese and plain Greek yogurt. It was a very filling dinner, lots of fiber. Maybe too much fiber.

What else has been going on? 

I've been in a minor online shopping binge recently, mostly for things we need like hand sanitizer (which is almost impossible to find in an unscented version so I ordered some from a small company in Colorado and only got my shipment after emailing an inquiry after a few weeks and then a slightly angrier inquiry a week after that). 

I also ordered a new shoe cabinet for near the front door. Right now we have open shoe storage and it's fine--we're not fancy--but I found this red metal cabinet that reminds me of high school lockers and since it fit in the same space, I ordered it. It needs to be assembled, but that's waiting for Dave to have a free afternoon since he's the furniture assembler. I'm only the assistant furniture assembler.

I also ordered new embroidery patterns and tea and dish towels yesterday from Colonial Patterns during their recent white sale. I didn't need the patterns, but they are Sunbonnet Sue and nursery rhymes and I don't have either in my collection. (I have tons of iron-on patterns I bought from Colonial over the years and I also got all my grandmother's embroidery patterns when she died.  When I was adding my grandma's to mine, I found I had bought many of the same patterns from the same company twenty-plus years apart.) Anyway, I've been meaning to replace some of our old embroidered tea and dish towels. They get used a lot and have gotten stained and worn. I'll work up some new ones and retire the old. The worn ones will step down to the rag bag to be used for cleaning up messes, the great circle of life.

Other things that have come in the mail or been delivered: A new foot scrubber for the shower, a new kind of sensitive skin lotion, new oxygen concentrator tubing, two shipments of pet food (one cat, one dog), the latest manga version of Murakami's short stories... And that's not getting into what's ordered but has not yet arrived, like more books and the CBD lotion that we practically bathe in now. I also had a shipment from Old Navy of a pair of pants, shirt, and shoes that was marked damaged/missing/returned to sender and the only way I found out about that was by going online to check the tracking. They hadn't bothered to contact me--I guess they though the $70 I paid was, what, a nice little gift to their company? So I canceled the order and got a refund by talking to a very nice man who was doing his best to try to speak English. (I'm never rude to customer service reps who are clearly in other countries so that their employers can save a buck. What can I say? The service rep was doing his best, probably making a pittance, and he's at least bilingual and I'm very much not.)

What else? I've done some sewing recently, little things like book covers and bookmarks. I've been going to PT. I finished reading the Murakami book about running, the first book I've finished in a long time. I started reading In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Mate. 

What else?

It's a little bit burying the lede, but last week (or was it the week before?) Dave's mother went onto hospice care. Dave said it was sad going to visit her because she's not really capable of communicating or connecting much anymore. She is also the only one currently in the four person care home (which has a five person capacity), the other three residents having died in the last week or so. Anyway, Dave's sister is in town this week and she and Dave went to a hospice caregiver conference yesterday with the chaplain, social service worker, and nurse. (The hospice doctor couldn't make it, but phoned in to be a part.) Dave says his mother is mostly out of it now, her appetite diminishing, her body starting to shut down in other ways. It's sad. It's going to get sadder. The best we can hope for is that she won't suffer for much longer. 

We've started talking about changing up this house so that Dave's father will have someplace to be close to family when he's ready for that step. (I'm thinking the overly large garage can be converted into a small efficiency apartment for a single person but Dave doesn't think so and wants to see about adding on to the house.) Dave's father is in his 80s and lives alone now, pretty remotely which is a worry, and is starting to have trouble with his memory and keeping up the repairs and such on his house. He's still fairly active despite that and wants, as we all do, to maintain his independence for as long as possible, so a separate living situation seems best. He could live with Dave's sister, but I don't think he's too interested in where she lives because there aren't any mountains around or any good places to go fly fishing nearby.

What else?

Today it's cold and windy and, speaking of mountains, from where I'm sitting in the dining room it looks like it's snowing in the mountains. It's also supposed to rain here in a bit. It's spring.

Off

Since I wrote last, we've had wind, rain, hail, snow in the nearby mountains, sun and more wind. I'm not too proud to say that spring is kicking my ass. The pollen and the peri/menopausal type hormones have teamed up to destroy my life. They're doing a pretty good job of it right now, too.

I was up all night and then I slept all day, my usual time-of-the-month sleep pattern. (You wonder why crones and witches ply their trades by the light of the moon. Because they couldn't sleep! It was insomnia making them crazy in the middle of the night!) Anyway, I tried to stay up today, but I just couldn't. I went to bed around 9 or 9:30 and got up at 6 p.m. (This would have been perfect if I were still working nights, but I'm not. Last night, I watched videos and journaled on paper and did some collage. I hesitate to make too much noise while I'm up in the night becase that wakes up Dave or it wakes up the dog who wakes up Dave and that's not good.)

Around 8:30 in the morning, I texted Judi to say hi. She texted back a couple hours later that she is getting a new dog! I had a feeling she would get a dog sooner rather than later. She is getting a different kind of sheepdog, a smaller breed with fewer health problems than Buzz's breed is known to have. She sent a photo of the litter of puppies that her dog is coming from and they are adorable. (Of course. They're puppies.) Anyway, she should have her new dog by then end of May. I asked her what she was going to name it. I think she gives her dogs not great names. (Buzz. Crunch. The one before those two just had her last name as his name.) I'm not holding out hope for this one.

After our texts, I had a snack and went back to bed. 

Dinner tonight was takeout burgers and fries from Five Guys. On the way there and the way back, we listened to a few new songs from Beyonce's new album Country Critter. Or no. What is it? Country Carter? That's it.  I like Beyonce. I don't love Beyonce, but I especially like that she put all this effort into making a country album mainly out of spite. That's my kind of energy. I also like that she included Dolly Parton, Willy Nelson, and others like Miley Cyrus and Post Malone and even a Beatles song. Unfortunately, it's not great music (country music rarely is in my opinion--Neko Case being one of the exceptions and Dolly Parton has a lifetime pass to greatness as does Willy Nelson) and some of the lyrics are as dumb as country music comes (country music is not really known for great lyrics, is it?). I have to make fun of just how ridiculous the duet with Miley Cyrus is, where she and Beyonce croon, "I'll be your shotgun rider 'til the day I die" at each other. I found the phrase "shotgun rider" to be cringe and Dave mused that, "If they are both riding shotgun, who's driving?"

And please don't get me started on the videos that were put out with the album. Just...no.  But. I'm glad it's out there and she is welcome to the tenth of a millionth of a cent from the streaming we did of her songs and I hope she makes a gazillion dollars and turns country music on its head.

Back to dinner: I had a double burger and couldn't finish it or my fries. I made it just past the halfway mark and then put everything away for later. I'm so full!

Now it's almost 9 p.m. and I'm doing laundry, typing this, listening to an episode of Northern Exposure, the Thanksgiving episode where all the Native Americans throw tomatoes at the white people in town for days before they all sit down to a communal Thanksgiving dinner. Such a good episode.

I've done some sewing recently, too, making small things like composition book covers. I have a quilt that needs binding. (It was sent out for quilting but I had them leave the binding off because I wanted to trim it myself. The other quilt--a log cabin style--that went with it for machine quilting came back with the binding that I ordered and it's lovely and quite big, almost king sized.) Binding quilts sucks though, so I'm putting it off.

Happy Birthday!

 It's my older brother's birthday today. Happy Birthday!

 I don't think we had met yet when that photo was taken, some fifty years ago. Where does time go?

We sent an Amazon gift certificate and will get together for lunch on the weekend.

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.