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. 

 

Another Quickie

Hello again!

The rain is gone now and we are slowly starting to dry out. The days are sunnier but cooler and shorter. The trees are just starting to catch, their leaves turning color in some spots. Soon the hummingbirds will move on and the cranes will come.

What else has been going on?

A couple of days ago I spoke with the nutritionist I've been seeing online for about two years (!) and we talked about how peri- and menopausal hormones screw up a lot of things (including sleep and energy levels) that make weight gain more likely. So that's been me for awhile.

I have been relatively successful at sticking to the Weight Watchers plan so far though. Soon I will have to lower my points and that's going to be a bit of a challenge--it always is--but hopefully by the time that rolls around I'll have gotten used to counting points and watching portion sizes. Honestly, my diet is really healthy--we eat out once a week (rarely twice if it's been a hard week or if we have company for lunch), we cook from scratch, we don't keep sweet treats in the house, we don't buy convenience or ultra-processed foods (except for Quorn nuggets and some condiments like ketchup). I mean, it really is healthy--it's just that I eat way too much and move way too little.

So now that I'm settling into counting points and limiting portion sizes, I also got my walking pad all set up and I have new shoes (and my feet feel better). All that remains is to get back on my walking program. Though not tonight, as it's the middle of the night as I'm writing this. 

No, I'm not sleeping. I've been up since just before midnight. (I had several broken hours of sleep yesterday throughout the day, though not enough to be truly rested.) I've been dreaming a lot of very vivid and strange dreams, only bits and pieces of which I remember after waking. These things generally mean that my hormones are all over the map. (Another clue about the hormone thing is that I cried during the new episode of The Great British Baking Show, which, I mean. . . And how great is Nigella Lawson? So great.)

I've not been sewing but I have been journaling and working in my art journals. I've also continued to sort through Dave's mom's paperwork. The latest batch turned up plans and receipts from the various redecorating and construction projects. She spent a shocking amount of money on things like pillows and drapes. I mean a truly shocking amount of money. Like, "spare no expense because I only want the best" kind of shocking. I don't get that kind of thinking, I guess. But I also know that sometimes early dementia can manifest in bad decisions, things like spending thousands of dollars on pillows, that make other people wonder without cluing them in that it is related to early onset dementia.

Anyway, sorting through her paperwork is good practice for me to try to be less judgmental. (Don't ask how that's going, please.)

Instead let's talk about dinners. Okay: Last night Dave made vegetable soup with cannellini beans. It was delicious and I had a bowl and a half for my dinner. The night before we had Chinese take-out (my "diet" dish consisted of steamed veg and tofu with no sauce and Dave had fried tofu in a spicy sauce). We had tacos this past week, too. I have some cooked chicken breasts in the fridge and those, with some sauteed veg and salad made other easy and quick dinners for me. Dave usually has the same veggies and salad with vegetarian "chicken" nuggets.  

This coming Sunday we're having my mom and aunt over again for lunch. I'm thinking of ordering some upscale pizzas, but first I'll see what everyone else wants of course. 

Hope everyone's week has gone well. 

A Quickie

 It's fall now. We've been getting a lot of rain recently, which is wonderful, but these long stretches of cloudy gray days can be stultifying. 

Here's a disjointed list of things that have been going on:

My knee is slowly getting better. Yes, it's still swollen and kind of weak. I've been doing my PT exercises faithfully and they're helping, but the progress is pretty slow. Still, better is better so I'm hopeful it will heal. 

We had lunch this past weekend with my mother and aunt Char. My aunt treated us to barbeque and brought enough food that we had leftovers for days. It was nice to see them both, although they soon ran off to the casino. 

I'm glad to have company come over, not only because it's nice to see them, but also because it forces us to clean up some of the clutter that accumulates on the dining room table and kitchen counters.

I made the mistake of stepping on the scale at the doctor's office and now I'm back to following my Weight Watcher's diet. It's been about ten days but I can already feel a difference. (I haven't broken out my scale at home to check though since it's shoved under a cabinet and it needs batteries, but I need to fish it out sometime soon.) I've been meeting my daily protein goals of 100-150 grams of protein a day.

I also ordered some new walking shoes (my old ones were in really bad shape and my feet hurt whenever I walked) And since I was so sick of just going back and forth across the house, I ordered a walking pad. (Walking pads are low, slow treadmills; they have a very limited incline and are too slow to run on.) It should arrive tomorrow. 

What else? 

I recently spent a few days sorting and shredding my brother's old paperwork, things like tax returns, receipts, medical records and so on. (We actually bought a new shredder to do the job. We have a shredder, but we bought it when we lived in the casita and space was at a premium so it's about the size of a large shoe box so it takes a long time to shred anything more than a few sheets at a time. We also had Dave's mom's shredder--but it was pretty trashed and though it worked for awhile, it soon broke in such a way that it couldn't be repaired.) Anyway, I made it through my brother's paperwork. (I found a receipt from when he won $5K on a lottery scratch card, which is something he never told anyone. I hope he had a good time with the money and bought himself a nice treat.) 

After finishing that up, I told Dave to start bringing in his mother's old paperwork and I'd sort through it and shred anything he didn't want to keep. I started yesterday after he brought in a bunch of file folders from the garage. I found a couple of interesting things so far. One was a letter she wrote to someone she had bought a horse from. Soon after she bought the horse, it went into labor--a surprise to her and the vet as she had been assured by the seller that there was no chance it could be pregnant. Anyway, long story short, the foal died in utero and the horse had to be put down. Dave's mother's letter was written to tell the former owner this and to demand a return of the purchase price of the horse. Is that a thing, I wonder? Getting a refund for a dead horse. I haven't found anything to suggest that the money was returned anyway.

What else? 

I finished reading Boy Meets Boy and started reading All the Beauty in the World. It's a little tedious, though. I watched three seasons of Ted Lasso and went straight into Shrinking and watched all three seasons of that. The new episodes of season four of Ted Lasso are only okay, though I'll keep watching because Tracy Ullman is in it. I think she's hilarious. 

Okay, that's it. I'm tired. Menopause apparently means always being some degree of exhausted. 

No Explanation

It's been more than a month since I updated my blog. No real reason, just... haven't. 

Some photos. No explanation required, I suspect.