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. 

Goodbye, Dick

 

This is Dave's mom Luann and dad Dick's engagement photo, taken around 1968, I think.   Both are gone now. 

We've been in Montana, clearing out Dave's dad house so it can be put on the market. 

He loved history, books, guns, scissors, fly fishing, photography... so many things. 

This is the view from his kitchen table. 

Lovely. 

Godspeed, Dick. 

No Time

My mother fell and broke her arm Monday before last and has been staying with us on and off since then. (She stayed last weekend with my aunt.) She has surgery tomorrow to fix the break and then she'll stay with my aunt for awhile. She hopes to go back to her apartment after that. 

We are still really missing Gray Kitty. He was our constant companion for the last fifteen years, coming to live with us as a four-year-old stray. He was such a good cat. We talked to Carrie, the woman who stayed with Gray Kitty while we were in Florida. She is a very talented artist and is going to do a portrait of Gray Kitty for us. Kelly and Kevin are in Italy but they sent some very lovely flowers. Dave's sister Sara sent us a copy of Judith Viorst's book The Tenth Good Thing About Barney. 

So much is going on right now. There's not any time to rest and grieve. 

As part of getting ready to clear out Dave's father's house, we bought a slide scanner. To test it out, we scanned a bunch of slides of work that I did over twenty years ago. I haven't looked at photos of my work from that time in decades. I was surprised at some of it. Some was very good. Some was very pretentious. There were a few that I have absolutely no recollection of, despite having spent hours and hours making it. 

Very strange.