The Fall

It's not the changing leaves but the vivid turquoise sky in the upper right corner of this photo. 

Fall is here. 

Older

 Back to the dermatologist today because of a bad reaction to the doxycycline. (Which cruises another antibiotic off the list that includes amoxicillin (severe heartburn, chest pain), clindamyacin (extreme sun sensitivity), cephalexin (burning chest pain, left arm pain) and sulfa drugs (angioedema).  I may be missing one...) Doxycycline caused a severe headache (a rare side effect that could indicate increased intracranial pressure) and diarrhea (a completely expected side effect). So that's fun. 

At the same time I'm dealing with some idiopathic allergic reaction that has had me taking benadryl for days (which probably didn't help the antibiotic response I had). I'm off that as of today.

Getting old(er) sucks. 

V is for Vistaril

 On Monday, Dave and I and Dave's sister and dad met with the architect and builder and started thinking about where an addition--a separate apartment attached to the house--would go. I have my ideas and everyone else has their ideas. We'll see. The architect is supposed to get back to us soon.

I hadn't seen Dave's sister or dad in thirty years or more. I never got along with his family in the past--a lot of this was centered around Dave's mother and she's gone now so I'm making an effort to get along with Dave's sister and dad. It's going well so far I think. Fingers crossed it continues to go well without the Vistaril.

On Tuesday my mom came out for lunch with Dave's family. They had met years ago--again, over thirty years ago, but we were all different people back then. Or at least I was. I didn't try it without the V.

On Wednesday Dave went with his family to tour one of the nearby pueblos. I stayed home and nursed a headache, canceling an appointment with the PA at the dermatologist's office to do so. I rescheduled the dermatologist for today and I rescheduled by surgery for the end of January.

Today Dave went with me to the dermatologists office and then we stopped at Whole Foods to pick up some things for dinner tonight with his family. His sister is making pasta putanesca and I can't have anything in it except the pasta (and that spikes my blood sugar so I don't really eat it) because my guts are the way they are, so we picked up a rotisserie chicken. We also got a small (like six-inch) cake and a pint of ice cream for dessert and some shishito peppers for Dave's sister, again nothing I can or should really eat. 

This afternoon I have to go see the GI doc. I need for him (or her) to extend my order for an endoscopy to accommodate my new surgery date. I also want to ask about a letter I got informing me that I have a fatty liver (this based on some imaging I had done a while back and not on my always perfectly normal liver function tests). 

We had lots of rain overnight and some beautiful thunder and lightning throughout the night and morning. I actually slept through a lot of it. I've been having crazy dreams recently, unfamiliar but orderly.  Maybe it's the Faulkner I read a few nights ago. Maybe it's seeing Dave's family. Maybe it's hormones or the weather.

Better

October 6: 

Nothing is ever as it seems.

Fall is coming. It's in the air now. The days are cooler and the nights, too. It's dark by seven p.m. now. A few leaves are just starting to change. I am not looking forward to the bare-limbed winter trees.

I've been reading a lot, but nothing serious. I haven't been sewing, but I have done a tiny amount of hand quilting. I'm not sleeping at night. 

My mom came for lunch on Sunday. We had burgers.  

This past week, I had Zoom therapy and an online nutritionist visit. I cried during both.

Dream last night--waitressing, on the floor, but doing okay--I turned the corner into the back of the house and looked into the kitchen fully expecting my brother to be there and that woke me up.

Gray Kitty has not been feeling great recently.  It's hard to tell what the problem is. He has arthritis and bad kidneys. And he's getting old. His appetite is decreasing and he's losing weight. We worry about him constantly. I dread what's to come. Having pets is the best and the worst of what life has to give. 

I'm here at a new physical therapists office.  There's a mosquito in the waiting room with me. One of us is trying to bite the other. 

October 21

Yesterday we had people in the house, some of them strangers some of them not so unfamiliar. Dave's sister Sara and their father are in town and they along with an architect and two builders came to the house in the morning. We're starting to plan a small attached apartment that Dave's father may end up living in when he's done with living alone in his remote place in Montana. Dave's sister lives in the midwest and Dave's father is adamant about not living there because there are mountains and rivers. We have both of those fairly close by. Dave's father also lived here for a long time before moving to Colorado and then Montana, so even though the place has changed, he's still familiar with it. 

Having strangers in our house was stressful, but I better living through chemistry'd my way through it. 

Sara and their father are back today to have lunch with us. My mother will join us, too. It's a messy business, this aging parent thing. And it is likely to get messier with trump's cuts to Medicaid and Medicare which a lot of seniors rely on. (Sorry, we can't afford healthcare or to take care of veterans or senior citizens but we can afford for trump to spend millions on golfing, hundreds of millions on ICE agents to terrorize and attack American citizens, hundreds of millions on private jets for his cabinet, hundreds of millions on a tacky gold ballroom for the white house, BILLIONS sent to Argentina, TRILLIONS WITH A T worth of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, billionaires...and who pays for all of it? American taxpayers and immigrants who pay into the tax system but who can never access even the meager services, scraps and crumbs, that we do get. Yes, it's all paid for by American taxpayers who are being told that they can't have healthcare or veterans services or social security because it's inefficient or too expensive or it's socialism or an undocumented immigrant might benefit from it and therefore it's all bad, all of it. The propaganda is real. We have enough money, if we tax billionaires--even if we left the millionaires alone and only taxed BILLIONAIRES and corporations that turn billions in profits and pay NO TAX, if we only taxed those people, we could afford it all. We could even afford to let undocumented immigrants--who WORK in this country and pay taxes--have healthcare.

It's a fucking travesty what's happening in this country right now. 

Reminds me of when my mother was still working in healthcare in southern NM and the place she worked for was vastly underpaying their workers and denying them breaks and workers were told--and BELIEVED--that it was because Mexican citizens were coming and getting healthcare and then skipping on the bill and that's why the for-profit healthcare facilities couldn't pay more. Later, after my mother retired--and her fresh out of school replacement was hired at a dollar or so less than my mother was making with forty years of experience--someone brought a class action lawsuit against the hospital because they had been denied breaks and the hospital, when that happens is supposed to pay and were not paying, which is just straight up illegal wage theft. My mother got a cut of that settlement, but it was a drop in the bucket to the shareholders who made millions on the backs of underpaid healthcare workers. The propaganda is real.

I get angrier and angrier as I think about all of this. And no trump voter--no republican--should ever have a good night's sleep again. They've all been voting for this for years.

Me? I'm waiting for that front page obituary. I'm going to celebrate when that happens.)

What else has been going on?

The No Kings march.

Fall days. 

Waiting for the cranes to arrive. 

Waiting for our guests to arrive for lunch. Got to take a few deep breaths before then.

Better living through chemistry, y'all. 

Self and Non-Self Focused

The double wedding ring templates I ordered came and I used them to sew this test block (test ring?) :

It's huge and, yes, ugly.  It's ugly because of the fabric I used (scraps chosen because they were large enough to cut the pieces from) not because of the block itself. By using these scraps to sew up a test block, I did get to see how difficult it is going to be to piece the quilt and to start figuring out how to navigate some of the trickier areas. It's huge-- almost 22 inches in diameter--because it just is. That's the size of the block that the templates make. It's round but it doesn't look round because it's pinned to my wool ironing mat so that it drapes back on either side making it look more oval than round. Anyway, it's going to be a good challenge. 

I am a little peeved because I bought the templates from a quilter who is known somewhat for her double wedding ring quilts. She even offers online and in-person classes to teach people how to make them. And surprise, surprise, her templates are very skimpy on directions, almost as though she were expecting people to have enough trouble with them to buy her class that teaches them how to use them. So that's the last sale she'll get from me. I'll figure it out on my own and look elsewhere for future purchases. 

What else has been going on recently? 

I'm reading again, right now focused on a memoir by a woman named Rae Earl. It's called My Mad Fat Diary and is literally diary excerpts from a diary she kept when she was 17 in the late 1980s. She and I are the same age and we have an overlap in a lot of teenaged thoughts and experiences, though she grew up in England and I didn't. It's interesting--and sometimes tedious--to read someone else's diaries for a change.

I'm also continuing to journal near daily. I honestly don't know what goes into these journals since my life is so sedate right now, but I enjoy writing about whatever.

l had a second therapy session with my new therapist. She continues to be very therapist-y, you know what I mean, very touchy-feely in that therapist way. I would have had no patience for that twenty years ago, but right now I've decided I'm going to be okay with it. We've gone back, Dave and I, to our post-therapy take-out, which is nice, not having to cook after dealing with psychological messes. Last night, it was Chinese takeout eaten while watching the latest episode of Taskmaster, the perfect balm.

But! I screwed up my stomach last night drinking a calcium magnesium drink and this morning it was still not great. I went to get some Mylanta and realized we were out (!) so Dave and I went out to Walgreens to get some before he started his workday. Of course, I can't take it within two hours of taking my usual medication, so now I'm waiting for another hour, just sitting here, willing my stomach to not get any worse. (If it got bad, I would just take the Mylanta and deal with the other meds.) 

In non-self focused news, fall is coming. Don't get me wrong, there are tons of wildflowers blooming all around us right now, but it only gets into the 80s during the day and it is cooler in the mornings and evenings and downright cold at night. It's almost nine a.m. right now and only 63F.  I am sitting near an open window and it is calm and cool outside. There are supposed to be thunderstorms this afternoon though. Please, please, please, please let that happen for real.

Looking for photos, I found this one of me and Gray Kitty. This little one has been very cuddly at times recently.

He's our sweet old boy.