The Other

I'm sitting here looking out the window. Dave has spent a fair amount of time and effort to clear off part of the pond and river and it's nice to sit and look at. The trees are starting to leaf out, too, and the view of the mountains (right now snow topped from the snow we've had the last two days) will soon be obscured by them.  It looks like a pleasant day--but I can hear the wind starting to kick up and it's cold. Alexa says it's 54F and that tonight it's going to freeze again. Spring is a big mashup this year so far.

I spent part of the morning doing the online French lessons and then Dave and I cleaned one of the bathrooms. I've fallen way down on housecleaning tasks. It has gotten really bad since Christmas--worse when Rudy died. Clearing out his apartment did me in--Dave, too, I'm sure--and then putting away all our Christmas stuff...and then after all that, it was time to sit and just go blank. And that's still going on. It's going on in its usual way, though, the way where enough of you gets up and goes out to meet your obligations in one way or another, but underneath all that competence there is a river of endless grief. So that's a thing I'm dealing with these days. 

Along with all that there is something hormonal going on, something that messes with my sleep and makes it so that I can't remember the names of things and I feel dizzy and I cry over things I never would have cried over in the past and I feel incredibly anxious. Probably just more menopause. There are close to 100 symptoms associated with menopause (hot flashes are just the beginning) and I have a host of them. I don't have very bad hot flashes though, funnily enough (probably because I consume a lot of soy). 

That's a lot of complaining. Some good things:

I'm still reading, soon to finish the Rue McClanahan autobiography. She's funny and not afraid to name names except in a very few instances (though it's easy enough to jump onto google and figure out who her abusive third husband was).  I'm still watching guys deliver food all over London. I'm still sewing a few stitches from time to time, letting things filter through the brain. I'm still journaling in my paper journal near daily. 

We've been eating the majority of our meals at home, which is healthier for me than ordering takeout four times a week, given the low sodium diet I'm supposed to be on. Dave baked two kinds of bread yesterday, too, my dinkelbrot and a really nice focaccia-like bread that was all white flour and olive oil and air. We had sandwiches for lunch today (I had roast beef and Swiss on the dinkelbrot and Dave had cheese and tomato on the focaccia). So that's a good thing. 

I've been in contact with the office of a surgeon in Miami who does breast reductions. She is unlike many surgeons in that she doesn't have a BMI cutoff for the surgery, so I'm going to have a preliminary/introductory phone call with the office hopefully this week. Sometime this year, I'd like to have the surgery done, even though it will mean going to Miami and staying in a hospital, which is terrifying. But it's something I've wanted to do for a long time and I'm not getting any younger.  A friend of mine (my same age) recently had top surgery and is loving the results and I'm so ready to do the same.

One of the nurses at the hospital used to use the line, "Get busy living or get busy dying" (which, according to google is from Shawshank Redemption, so maybe from Stephen King?). These days, I'm trying to do more one than the other.

Golden Being

We bought some emergency blankets (we keep a couple in each vehicle and needed some to add to my brother's truck). It was cheapest to buy a ten pack, so we bought a ten pack. When they came, I thought: we've never actually opened one of these, so we opened one of them. They are silver on one side and gold on the other and are pretty flimsy but at least didn't tear easily when Dave wrapped it around himself. He looked like a gold alien caterpillar to me, so I snapped this photo.

 

Even after stocking the vehicles, we'll still have six of these things left. I guess we'll keep a couple extra and then maybe donate the rest. Other things we ordered to put in an emergency kit in my brother's truck: A battery jumper/tire pump device (yes, we also have AAA who will send someone to jump our battery or change a tire), a couple of pairs of work gloves, a few pairs of non-latex disposable gloves and a couple of hi-viz vests. I'll add a flashlight, a first-aid kit, hand sanitizer, a couple of bottles of water and a couple of Clif bars. We rarely stray very far from home, but I like to be prepared. I was a Girl Scout after all.

 

Speaking of Girl Scouts, a recent Storyworth question about camping sent me down the rabbit hole of Girl Scout memories, starting with Girl Scout camp and continuing to meetings in the basement of our leader's house. I was a Brownie--one of my elementary friends got me into scouting in the fourth grade--and then a Girl Scout until the seventh or eighth grade. We had troop meetings week in and week out and it was a stabilizing force in my life at the time. We did a lot and learned a lot and I am grateful for that time. Weird to dust off those memories, though. It was so compartmentalized from my regular, everyday life, but maybe I needed that. (I know I needed it.)

 

What else has been going on?

 

I've been reading quite a lot. I finished a Patricia Briggs novel (Winter Lost) and am just past halfway on the Rue McClanahan autobiography and about a quarter of the way into the Betty MacDonald book. I'm also still making my way through the Gabor Mate book, reading a chapter every few days. His stuff is wrenching though, best taken in small doses. I bought a couple of Jennifer Weiner novels that I want to start when I'm done with the Rue McClanahan. My brain is suddenly able to comprehend books, something that hasn't happened in awhile.

 

On the weather front, we have had several days of awful wind. When I say awful wind, I mean awful wind with fire watch warnings and warnings to stay indoors due to poor visibility and poor air quality. Yesterday we had to go out for a doctor's appointment and the mountains had disappeared behind a wall of dust. This can't be good for anyone's lungs.

 

My doctor's appointment was to have my ears checked and my right ear cleaned out. I have some condition in that ear that makes my ear wax form casts that don't easily come out. The doctor (or yesterday, the nurse practitioner) have to use tools and a vacuum to clear everything out. It's often painful and leaves my ear hurting for hours to days afterwards because the nerves are so inflamed by the process.  So that was fun. 

After my appointment, I wanted an ice cream sundae, but we came home and made sopa seca with lots of vegetables for dinner instead. (I still want an ice cream sundae.)

 

Today? Let's see. I didn't sleep well last night, so I slept the morning away today. I got up and ate a bowl of leftover sopa seca for brunch and I'm having a hot drink (Pero with soy milk). I need to get some laundry done today.

Photo Roundup

Last weekend we went to the museum with my mother. This little artifact, part of a larger sculpture that was behind glass, caught my eye.

This is a painting of Buffalo Bill and Herman Melville, throwing gang signs. A comment on a certain type of colonialism perhaps. (This caught my eye because I recently started reading Moby Dick. It's very well written, but we'll see where the story goes. I liked Bartleby, the Scrivener but I did not like Billy Budd.)

A coyote sculpture, very primitive but modern.

David inspecting the inclusions in the rock wall outside the museum while we waited for my mother.

A photo from a long time ago of me, Paul, and Judi. Twenty years have come and gone since this was taken. Paul, too, has come and gone. Judi is in Florida now. The couch, too, was sold. (You have to laugh at something.)

A few days ago, I smashed my right foot and mostly my little toe on the exercise bike. I spent part of the day with my foot elevated and iced and now my toe is purple with half the nail torn away and looks like a zombie tried to bite it off. So walking on that has been fun. 

I've recently become addicted to the youtube videos of a young man who, as a side hustle, delivers food and packages on his electric scooter and e-bike. He calls himself "London Eats" because he lives and works in London. I know it sounds like the most mundane thing in the world, but the videos are riveting. He has almost 300,000 subscribers to his channel, a number which means that he could support himself and his family solely based on what he makes posting videos to youtube. How crazy is that? He would still rather continue working his day job as an electrician plus deliver food at night. Some nights he makes as little as twenty-five or thirty pounds for 3 or 4 hours of work, below minimum wage, but he keeps going back. He does sometimes use some of his youtube earnings to buy e-bikes and raffle them off with tickets going for 99 pence. And at Christmas, he buys a bunch of winter gear like gloves, balaclavas, jackets and the like and he hands them out to other delivery drivers who don't make social media money. 

This world and its inhabitants will never cease to amaze me.

Today? A cloudy, windy day, dusty. I've sneezed so many times today. (And I just realized I left the window open. No wonder I'm sneezing.) Dave and I went out for a bit in the afternoon for a coffee and to look at the llamas and drop some books off in the nearest Little Free Library. I just finished my online French lessons. We had Chinese food for dinner last night and I am very dehydrated. My next move is a big glass of water.
 

Stuff

 Thursday:

I had a relatively quiet day today.

 We had to be up and out of the house early for my physical therapy appointment. It's fine. I won't see her again until the end of April, but there is plenty to occupy me until then.

We came home again and I sat and sewed on and off throughout the day. I've been sewing bookmarks with the tiniest of my scraps. Seriously, some of them are the size of a quarter (though most are larger). I had saved and earmarked these itty-bitty scraps for card making, but I have enough cards so I made bookmarks instead. Along with the tiny scraps, I used up some scraps of denim and interfacing as well as some invisible thread (it's really like a fine translucent nylon filament, like fine fishing line). I have about fifteen bookmarks now and I'll make them until I get bored (since I will never ever run out of little scraps of fabric). Each one of the books we put into the Little Free Libraries near us will include a handmade bookmark. 

While I've been sewing, I started half-watching a new series on Netflix, an Australian television show called Upper Middle Bogan. It's one of the funniest things I've seen in awhile. I really like how good natured it is. It's not sappy sweet--sometimes the characters are mean or sarcastic--but in the end, the characters all have a basic respect for each other and are able to see past their differences to compromise in some way. It's a nice change from what's going on all around me in this so-called real world.

Saturday:

We lazed about most of the morning--well, I did anyway, spending time reading, sewing, and half-watching episodes of Upper Middle Bogan. Dave was up and about, mixing up bread dough. Around 2:30, we loaded up Rudy's truck with a bunch of stuff from the garage that needs to go to the dump. Of course by the time we got to the dump around 3:40 p.m., there was a line of trucks waiting to get in and there was no way that we would have made it in by the 4:30 p.m. closing time, so we came home. Sigh. I did get an iced decaf soy latte out of the deal though. Dave got an iced lavender matcha latte, which he likes even though he says they taste like soap. (I don't like lavender, it makes me itchy just to smell it, so I did not taste his drink.)

We're supposed to meet my mother tomorrow morning to go to the museum, but we'll try to go to the dump again after that. 

We came home and had showers to wash the dust and pollen off. We got into our pajamas and Dave went back to his cooking. He had mixed up dough for dinkelbrot and pitas and he also wanted to make dosas for dinner as well. He is also making a potato filling for the dosas. He's done more cooking in one day than I've done in the last month. 

Happy Birthday

Today is my brother's birthday. I wished him a happy birthday (his ashes on our mantel anyway) and for lunch we went by his favorite burrito place and picked up some burritos and brownies and took them to my mother's apartment to have lunch with her.

 

We'll figure out someplace to donate to in his name, the same amount we'd have spent on a birthday gift for him (usually an Amazon gift certificate so he could buy whatever he wanted). And we'll probably take his--now our--truck out for a spin in the afternoon. 

 

I miss my brother. 

 

 

 

I was watching a youtube video of an Australian woman who lives in Japan. Her sister died last year unexpectedly. The youtuber took a week off and went to Shikoku to do a pilgrimage to the 88 temples that are on the island. She talked a lot about grief and how it never leaves you, it just becomes part of you and part of your story. It does ease up some, the initial shock of the loss, but then it does become part of you, part of your story. I don't know how anyone survives it, but we do.

 

I'm grateful to have had the time I had with my brother. I am grateful to have the time I have with my mother and aunt. I am grateful to have Dave and Gray Kitty and a warm, safe home.

 

Gray Kitty has taken to napping on the end of the couch (leaving me space to nap on the rest of the couch). He's getting so old.

He's been quite affectionate recently, too. He snuggled up next to me to get belly pets a few days ago, something he hasn't done in years. We're keeping up on the shots that he gets for his arthritis and on his daily pain meds, so I think that helps him be more comfortable doing things like rolling over onto his side or back for pets.

Here's a little ball of Gray Kitty. He was sleeping curled up with his paws over his eyes. (He doesn't have a sleep mask.)

We've had typical spring weather recently: Crazy wind, rain, and snow--then blue skies and warm days or, like today, blue skies and cold days. It's supposed to freeze tonight, which will put an end to all the nascent little peaches and plums and apricots on our trees. Oh well.

 This was the slight dusting of snow we had a week ago. I took this from the back door, looking out over the horseless horse corral.