Scary Things

I wrote this yesterday, before the election results came in. It was a rout, thankfully.  Hopefully the orange idiot has been neutered. (We have to remember though all the negative changes that republicans put in place that don't start until next year because they knew they were going to take a beating and they want the public to think all the bad shit is the fault of the newly elected democrats.  So be cautious and don't get fooled by that republican trick. )

Anyway, here is yesterday's entry:

The first scary thing is that it's election night in the U.S. and the polls are starting to close. (Whoever thought it was a good idea to have Halloween, Daylight Savings, and an election all in the space of four days?) Dave and I voted on Saturday, the last day for early voting. We went to the polling place in our village's little community center and it was pretty busy. 

 

The second (not so scary) scary thing are my little ghosts made from low-volume scraps of fabric.  

I started out adding little buttons for their eyes, but sewing on little buttons and the arthritis in my hands weren't getting along, so I switched to adding detail with a permanent laundry marker. 

I made these bad boys on this, my new sewing machine, a Singer Heavy Duty, black edition. 

Cute, right? (That's a terrible photo, sorry.) But you're asking why I bought yet another new sewing machine, right?

Well, my latest Janome is in need of servicing, but I'm struggling with taking it in because it cost around $200 new and a service is $100 just to walk it in the door for servicing. That $100 doesn't include anything that they actually do to it. $100 is what they charge just to say hi. Once they open it up and start to service it, the meter starts running. And it very clearly needs work done, so I had to ask: Is it worth it to pay $180 to $200 to have a $200 machine serviced? I don't necessarily think so. (And according to a lot of quilters online, often the other thing that happens when you take in a sewing machine is that you give them the $100 and they open it up and tell you it's beyond repair, but they certainly can sell you a new or refurbished machine for however much. And if that sort of thing happened to me, I would have to burn the place down.)

Anyway, while I was agonizing (mild agony, hardly angsty even) over the whole thing, Dave suggested I just get a new, inexpensive machine to use in the meantime. So I did. This one came from Costco (great return policy) and was well under $200. It's not a beginner friendly machine by any means (touchy foot petal, temperamental fly wheel, etc), but it will do for now. I already have plans for a new quilt, a "Manx" quilt (so-called because it's a style of quilting from the Isle of Man). But for now I am just getting to know my machine by sewing little things for a bit, like my wee ghosts.

And speaking of ghosts, I've been on a mission to finish off all the old journals that I bought, wrote two or three pages in and then put aside in favor of another bright, shiny new journal. So I pulled this one off the shelf earlier and found that I had started it in 2015.

Which it turns out was eleven years ago. Eleven years ago, Dave and I were living in the Casita and both our beloved kitties, Saba and Gray Kitty were alive. They're both gone now. My brother is gone now. My father is gone now. Dave's mother and father are gone now, too. Our friend Paul died during the pandemic. Our friend Judi moved to Florida...Sigh. So much has changed since I last wrote in this notebook.

Back to happier scary things though, okay? Like this, my aunt in her Halloween costume, an eldery Wonder Woman (with a scary nun pal) : 

 Happy election day, y'all.

These Days

We are back from our trip to Montana--our trip home meant three days in a rented minivan--but turns out we will have to make yet another trip there in the near future. Though we flew out and drove back, a return trip will likely mean driving there and back, six days in the car altogether. Doesn't that sound fun? 

Part of the difficulty of driving long distances centers around my knee, which I am still doing physical therapy to try to help treat. (In fact, I had PT yesterday and my knee is pretty sore today.) Even though we stop every sixty to ninety minutes to get out of the car and walk around or stretch for a few minutes, my knee gets stiff and swollen after a few hours. I wear compression stockings pretty much every day now and it helps some, but it can still be pretty uncomfortable. My knee is getting better, but it's slow going. Apparently that is the way it goes with knees. The physical therapist suggests lots more movement than I am currently getting and working throughout the full range of motion even if it's uncomfortable or even slightly painful. The worst thing to do is nothing. (There's a life lesson.)

I wrote that a few days ago.

Today I had to see the useless nurse practitioner and also write a claims appeal to the insurance company to get them to cover my surgery. Yes, that is still ongoing. They paid out a few pennies and I'm seeking to have a larger portion of the claim paid. Of course it's a fucking uphill battle. It always is with insurance companies. I spent four hours writing an appeals letter that we will fax and email to them tomorrow.  

I wrote that day before yesterday....I think. 

Got my flu shot and my brain is a bit fuzzy.  I'm tired. Could be because my iron levels are low.  Could be menopause. Could be the sciatic nerve pain I've been dealing with for a week now. Could be that I spent about five hours crafting a claims appeal letter to the insurance company.  Dave did a lot of work on it, too, as well as the important part of sending it.  He both emailed and faxed it. So now we wait. 

A very light rain is falling right. It's nice.  Something to be grateful for. 

 

This Place

This is the view from the living room of the rental place in Montana. This part of Montana is beautiful and I'm glad I've seen it. I'm glad I've seen it and once we leave I hope never to see it again. Don't get me wrong, just because I haven't seen a single Black person or even any obviously Brown people since we landed in Missoula, doesn't mean the place is not safe for us, but....you know. Why take the chance? 

Dave's sister says she'd love to live here. (It'd be perfectly safe for her.)

The place where we're staying is nice. It's a little upscale "cabin" with a vaulted ceiling, washer dryer, and large flat-screen TV. It's clean and relatively comfortable with only a few hiccups (bar height dining chairs which are murder on my back, no cutting board in the kitchen, curdled individual half and half with the coffee set up, pot smoking neighbors whose smoke gets sucked into our ventilation system). Bright and cheerful, though, just like me. 

There have been a lot of hiccups on this trip. The sprinter van Dave booked turned into a panel van when we arrived and that wasn't going to work because Dave was too tall and I was too big to drive it. So we had to pivot and rent a minivan to haul stuff in.  We needed something larger unfortunately so it's going to mean yet another trip out here to drive the remaining stuff home. We're taking what we can, but the bulk of the load will be left in Durango, at the college. 

Later: Long day.  Takeout pizza for dinner. 

Travel Daze

We are on our way to Montana, a continuation of the sad business of emptying Dave's father's house. We're flying out and driving the last things home. Dave's sister is also flying out but she'll fly home again.  Before she leaves, she is planning a last tour of places she visited with their dad. She made a habit of visiting him every year or two and since they both liked to travel, they saw a lot of the area.  Dave visited him twice-- or maybe it was three times?--and I never did. Without Dave's dad living there, there is no reason for either of them to return to the area.

We'll come back through Salt Lake City and Durango. In Durango we are meeting up with someone from the college where we'll leave Dave's father's papers, research and the like.  From there we'll head home.

The flight out is short, a handful of hours with a layover longer than either leg of the journey. It's a long drive though and I'm not liking forward to it.  I'm not looking forward to any of it actually, not being crunched into too small airline seats, hours in an N95 mask, crowded airports, the crush of unvaccinated people, people, people, people.  I'm not used to people anymore and I've grown even more curmudgeonly than I ever was.

Bear Country

 

What are you looking at? That's a photo, taken today,  of our horse corral. It was taken from our neighbor's roof by a roofer working up there.  The horse barn is the structure at the back left and the dark figure just in front is not a horse but a small brown or black bear. 

That's right, a bear. Just chilling in our backyard. (Our house is just out of view to the right.) Dave said, "I think I'll skip my walk outside today." 

Last night I was up in the night, around one a.m. The window was open and I heard a strange sound outside, like a soft grunt. I stopped and listened and heard it repeated three or four times. I went to the glass door to the courtyard and turned on the outside light but there was nothing on the courtyard. I closed the window and went back to bed.

It's not unusual to hear and see animals in and around our house. There are birds and frogs and lizards everywhere. Our neighbors have horses and dogs, of course, that we see all the time. A few nights ago two of their barn cats were fighting on our courtyard, screeching and howling at each other in the middle of the night. (The cats come to the courtyard and patio to drink from the fountain or from the birdbaths.) I turned on the courtyard light and saw one cat run away. I did not see the other and I didn't go outside to look for it either. Cat scratches and bites are serious business. 

We see coyotes regularly, mostly crossing the road but also sometimes in our yard, hunting the rabbits and quail (which we also see regularly). We see squirrels and chipmunks, many of them. We've even seen a mountain lion, cool and sleek, stopping to look at us, too, before walking up our neighbor's driveway.

We are not at a loss for animals around here, but even knowing that, a bear is something else, no? Something special.

Speaking of animals: I've been going through Dave's mother's old paperwork and shredding the documents that don't need to be kept. Among her paperwork are copies of emails that she exchanged with the married man she had a twenty-year-plus long affair with. Dave declined to read them, instructed me to just shred them--and I plan to, of course. But just because Dave doesn't want to read them, doesn't mean I don't want to read them. (I'm not as good a person as Dave or even as good a person as I want to be.)

The letters are something else.  In case you're wondering what kind of people betray their spouses (the affair began two years before Dave's parents separated) without much if any provocation, rest assured that those people are, in this instance at least, selfish and delusional and manipulative. 

Dave's father supposedly never knew--it was a source of conflict between us that Dave chose to never tell his father what was going on--but there are some signs that he had his suspicions. 

Dun-dun-DUN! 

Escandoloso!  

More later.