Catch Up

 It's been awhile since I posted.

I'm still nursing my knee along. I was supposed to start PT last week, but the therapist canceled and I was rescheduled for the second week in August. In the meantime, I've been walking 20 minutes a day, wearing compression stockings, and keeping my knee elevated as much as possible. It seems like it might be helping, but progress is very incremental. Hopefully PT will help.

We've been dealing with some very hot weather here, topping 105 F/40.5 C yesterday. Next week is high 90s/low 100s.  There has been a very slight bit of rain some afternoons and evenings, the vestiges of the monsoon rains we used to get twenty years ago. Climate change is happening. 

I'm glad I won't be around for the worst of it. 

Menopausal hormones and the full moon have been pushing me around recently. I think I've cried every day for the last couple of weeks, sometimes multiple times a day. Here are some things I cried over:

YouTube videos about who knows what

A memory of my older brother

Some crappy Netflix drama the title of which I don't even remember 

Watching a rabbit get hit by a car on our way home

Putting the engraved stone we got from Etsy on Gray Kitty's resting place

Writing this list and thinking again of these things. 

 

Nevermind. This is too depressing.

What else has been going on? 

I've been decluttering, focusing on art supplies I don't use anymore. All the non-working pens and markers went, followed by old, cheap, well-used sets of watercolors, then a bunch of old, half-dried acrylic paints. It takes me a long time to declutter art supplies because I always uncover things I haven't used in awhile so of course I have to use them. So in between sorting and decluttering, I sketched and painted and did some collage. I used the tempera paint sticks that I've had for years but which I'm still not sure I like. I used the set of acrylic markers that I do like. I used the nicer of my sets of Prismacolor pencils. I used the metallic brush pens I've had for a few years (used them up, actually). I used two of my nicer sets of watercolors and some of the drawing pencils and metallic pens and markers that I have. I finished off a watercolor pad. I finished another art journal (and started another and found another two half-finished that I added to the rotation). I also finished two journals and started another. 

So I've been doing stuff. It feels like I've been treading water, but I have been doing something with my time.

I've been watching old episodes of Hazel, a sitcom from the early 60s starring Shirley Booth) on Prime. I watched a couple of comedy specials on Netflix and started the latest Jodie Foster film (but it's in French, so I couldn't use it as background noise while I was painting so I turned it off). I watched the Heartstopper movie, the end of the series, thankfully.

I've been reading. I read the last Heartstopper graphic novel and I started a book called Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan who I think was related to a NP I used to work with. (She was an awful person, rude, lazy and entitled.)

We had lunch with my mother a couple of times. In fact, we had lunch with her and my aunt today. We had Greek food and a pie and ice cream my mom bought.

We came home after and got into our pajamas. It was too hot to do much else! 

 

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.