Just Things

 It's been awhile since I updated; not much has been going on. 

My menopausal hormones have taken control of my sleep schedule and flipped it nearly completely. I sleep through part of the early morning (from five or six until eight a.m.) then I get up and take my meds. If I'm lucky, I can get back to sleep around ten-thirty or eleven and sleep until one or two. Today I slept from eleven until almost three.

I've recently had some bad dreams, disturbing, like, serial killers coming into the house. But today I had some good dreams, though I don't remember the details. 

My leg is still distressing me. It's healing, but very slowly. I made an appointment for late July (the earliest opening) with the physical therapist the orthopedic PA recommended but that appointment got cancelled and their next available was in August. So I called my old physical therapist who went on maternity leave about a year or so ago.  She had an opening also in August, so I took that one. (I have yet to cancel the old one, but that's what I'll probably end up doing.) Until then, I'm stuck hobbling around and trying to keep the swelling (yes, it's still swelling) down. 

What else has been going on? 

Dave's birthday was this past Monday. It was a quiet birthday that we celebrated at home. He didn't want anything gift-wise, but with prodding did ask for a 3D printed instrument from a musician in France, so I got him that. I also framed some of the photos we scanned at his father' house and I bought him a few other things, including a book about edible plants and a counter-top ice maker. (I wasn't sure about the ice maker, so I bought it from Costco because they have a very liberal return policy. But turned out he likes it, so it's been getting quite a workout. I have to admit, it's nice to have ready ice for drinks without having to empty and fill and find space in the freezer for ice trays.)

Aside from the business of turning the page on another year, Dave has been diligently working away at his new job. He still works from home, thankfully, but he will soon have to travel a bit to meet with his coworkers and their new clients. It will be a quick trip, but even quick trips can be stressful.

My mom and aunt came out for lunch last weekend. We had a good lunch and a good chat. My poor aunt is dealing with an invasion of elm seed bugs. Nothing she's tried has worked to get rid of them. I told her to vacuum them up and seal and throw away the vacuum cleaner bag. 

My mother's broken wrist continues to heal. She is using just a brace now. I just saw on my desk a note I wrote to myself to start investigating the kinds of wearable buttons that can be worn and that will call for help in case of falls. Her apartment is quite sound proof (though not smoke proof as her pot smoking neighbors have shown), so she is trying to remember to carry her cell phone everywhere with her, even in her apartment, but I think it's time to have a backup plan.

What else?

We got and I read the last book in the Heartstopper series. Yes, I know it's for young adults, but I like it. It's a very sweet story. I would have loved it as a teenager, but I can still appreciate it at my age.

Tomorrow, if I update, I'll tell about the project I completed today, with things from my brother.  

There Is No Such Thing As Time

I'll start with the complaints: 

There have been lots of storms moving through which results in lots of headaches and an exacerbation of arthritis pain in my back, hips, knees, and hands. 

Menopause continues its takedown. I've cried over everything I could possibly cry over in the last four or five days.  My blood pressure has been elevated. I am eating everything that isn't nailed down, particularly sweets.

The sharp pains behind my knee are gone from when I injured it going up the stairs, but now my entire leg still feels like someone is twisting it whenever I stand (or sit or lie down). I can see the physical therapist at the end of July.

But wait, there's more!

I wrote the above three paragraph weeks ago. Nothing new has been happening.  I'm still nursing my knee. My arthritis is still plaguing me. Menopause continues along its relentless way. 

Inspired by handling Dave's dad's slide and photograph collection, I did start a new project to label all my photos and put the majority of them in photo albums.  (They've been largely languishing in a cardboard box packed away in a trunk, some of them from forty or more years ago.)

It's doing my head in a bit to handle photos from forty-plus years ago, when I was a wee teenager. I look at photos from just twenty years ago and think I look so young.  What happened??

Suffering, Tired

I'm not really a road trip person anymore--my bladder doesn't agree with hours and hours spent in the car and my knee injury concurred--so our recent road trip was primarily because Dave decided to bring home his father's car. This brings the total number of dead peoples' cars we've brought home with us to three--though we did give away Dave's mother's car.

Anyway, enough macabre car stuff. 

On our way home, we stopped in Darby, Montana so Dave could join a work meeting.  We picked this place, Studmuffins Bakery because they had free wi-fi and outdoor seating. 

Darby is a tiny town and this place was on the main street so it was very loud.  It was also next to a propane filling station, so every once in a while we got hit with the nauseating smell of propane. 

No matter, we were back on the road after about an hour. 

There were so many beautiful sights. We went over mountain passes in the north and past red stone cliffs further south. 

As we neared the end of the nearly twenty hour drive, I told Dave that I hadn't seen a single trump sign. We had driven through places that had proudly voted overwhelmingly for the idiot again and again, but suddenly they developed amnesia? I guess paying nearly five dollars a gallon for gas does that to you-- or maybe it was realizing that the rural hospital they rely on for medical care is closing or has already closed because of trump's federal budget cuts.  

Whatever it was, I hope they suffer. 

What else has been going on? 

As a quick update on my mother's condition: She had surgery on her arm to repair the break. The surgeon had to put a plate in near her wrist. It's healing well so at today's follow up visit, she was taken out of her soft cast and given a brace. While we were gone, she stayed with my aunt, but now she's back in her apartment and thinks she'll be fine to be on her own and to drive.

In other news: 

I saw a PA about my knee and it's soft tissue damage though she noted that there is pretty significant osteoarthritis in my knee and she suggested that physical therapy would help with both. So I have a new physical therapy appointment on the 23rd.

Dave has started his new job and is working quite a bit already. We had moved his computer from his office to the front bedroom so my mother could have the office as her room while she was here. He'll go back to his office probably this weekend, as long as my mother can avoid any more falls I guess.

How did I spend my day? I sorted through clothes. I had four categories: Keep. Donate. Needs work. Toss. 

I got rid of one full bag of clothes. I filled up one basket with stuff I'm keeping and I filled up two hampers with clothes to keep but which need to be washed. One other hamper is filled with things like pants that need to be hemmed or shirts that need to be re-sized. There are a few things in there that I will probably end up harvesting the fabric from to make new things. I also have a laundry basket filled with things to donate, including several brand new bras. (Let me tell you, it's GREAT that I will never need a bra again.)

This is kind of disjointed, but I'm tired. I need a nap to recover from my nap today. 

Long Time

We spent a long time in the car, starting at Dave's dad's house and going through parts of Montana, Idaho, Utah, and Colorado. 

This was just outside Moab.

We spent one night in Ogden, Utah, arriving at our hotel near the stadium just after a game let out. We woke to realize we were down the block from the big Mormon temple in Ogden.

We spent the next night in Durango,  Colorado.

Then we got in the car and drove home. 

It was a rough trip.  My janky knee feels but doesn't look swollen which is a little freaky. It's hard to bend my leg so I'm wondering what's going on there. It feels better if I rest it which I wasn't able to do as we spent three days in the car. (Two and a half, really, and we stopped every 60 to 90 minutes to get out of the car and move around to keep my knee and leg from getting too stiff.)

Like with many road trips, we ate too much junk food and didn't drink enough water and stayed in noisy motel rooms. 

Family Pictures

Dave takes a few last photos at his dad's place, standing on the dumpster that they filled as they cleaned out the place. 

I took this photo from the car window in the driveway just as we left at 8:30 p.m.

Dave's grandmother Mamere wrote this label on a roll of negatives: "Vermont '56 family pictures John in summer uniform excellent!"

These turned out to be Dave's grandparents, aunt and uncles on a beach sometimes and posed with a young woman who neither Dave nor his sister recognized (and who I suspect might have been their uncle John's once- upon a- time fiancé).

Dave was a baby once, a long time ago.  The first boy, his parents took approximately sixty thousand photos of everything he did. (This one looks like that because I was scanning it from some negatives.

In fact, that was my job this trip, sitting and scanning slides and negatives, because I hurt my knee--stepping up onto a stair with an unusual height--on the very first day we arrived. No matter. Dave's dad had about 10,000 slides, boxes and boxes of them, mostly from his time as a history professor when he used them for lectures. Still, there were about another few thousand slides that were personal, as well as the negatives from photos he took going back to the early 60s and family photos on negatives like the one Mamere wrote on above.)

Dave's dad took so many photos of him, it was funny.  Dave's sister remarked on it that there were hardly any of her because she was the second child.  Maybe.  Even after she arrived, the photos of Dave out number the photos of her by about ten to one. 

Such is her personality, I told Dave that if the situation were reversed, she would comment continuously on it, "There are so many more photos of me than you! I wonder why! I wonder why they wouldn't take as many photos of you as they did of me! So strange!"

Family.