Eclipsed

 Did you catch any of the eclipse yesterday? It was not a total eclipse for us like the one last October, and sadly it was too cloudy for us to see much, but we did see something and it was still pretty amazing. We still had our eclipse glasses from October, so that was good. We watched a bit from the courtyard and then I came in and did some chores.

I had made a big pot of pinto beans so I used some of them to make chili beans for dinner. Dave poured the chili over a vegetarian hot dog and made a chili cheese dog. I put mine over a baked potato with cheese and plain Greek yogurt. It was a very filling dinner, lots of fiber. Maybe too much fiber.

What else has been going on? 

I've been in a minor online shopping binge recently, mostly for things we need like hand sanitizer (which is almost impossible to find in an unscented version so I ordered some from a small company in Colorado and only got my shipment after emailing an inquiry after a few weeks and then a slightly angrier inquiry a week after that). 

I also ordered a new shoe cabinet for near the front door. Right now we have open shoe storage and it's fine--we're not fancy--but I found this red metal cabinet that reminds me of high school lockers and since it fit in the same space, I ordered it. It needs to be assembled, but that's waiting for Dave to have a free afternoon since he's the furniture assembler. I'm only the assistant furniture assembler.

I also ordered new embroidery patterns and tea and dish towels yesterday from Colonial Patterns during their recent white sale. I didn't need the patterns, but they are Sunbonnet Sue and nursery rhymes and I don't have either in my collection. (I have tons of iron-on patterns I bought from Colonial over the years and I also got all my grandmother's embroidery patterns when she died.  When I was adding my grandma's to mine, I found I had bought many of the same patterns from the same company twenty-plus years apart.) Anyway, I've been meaning to replace some of our old embroidered tea and dish towels. They get used a lot and have gotten stained and worn. I'll work up some new ones and retire the old. The worn ones will step down to the rag bag to be used for cleaning up messes, the great circle of life.

Other things that have come in the mail or been delivered: A new foot scrubber for the shower, a new kind of sensitive skin lotion, new oxygen concentrator tubing, two shipments of pet food (one cat, one dog), the latest manga version of Murakami's short stories... And that's not getting into what's ordered but has not yet arrived, like more books and the CBD lotion that we practically bathe in now. I also had a shipment from Old Navy of a pair of pants, shirt, and shoes that was marked damaged/missing/returned to sender and the only way I found out about that was by going online to check the tracking. They hadn't bothered to contact me--I guess they though the $70 I paid was, what, a nice little gift to their company? So I canceled the order and got a refund by talking to a very nice man who was doing his best to try to speak English. (I'm never rude to customer service reps who are clearly in other countries so that their employers can save a buck. What can I say? The service rep was doing his best, probably making a pittance, and he's at least bilingual and I'm very much not.)

What else? I've done some sewing recently, little things like book covers and bookmarks. I've been going to PT. I finished reading the Murakami book about running, the first book I've finished in a long time. I started reading In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Mate. 

What else?

It's a little bit burying the lede, but last week (or was it the week before?) Dave's mother went onto hospice care. Dave said it was sad going to visit her because she's not really capable of communicating or connecting much anymore. She is also the only one currently in the four person care home (which has a five person capacity), the other three residents having died in the last week or so. Anyway, Dave's sister is in town this week and she and Dave went to a hospice caregiver conference yesterday with the chaplain, social service worker, and nurse. (The hospice doctor couldn't make it, but phoned in to be a part.) Dave says his mother is mostly out of it now, her appetite diminishing, her body starting to shut down in other ways. It's sad. It's going to get sadder. The best we can hope for is that she won't suffer for much longer. 

We've started talking about changing up this house so that Dave's father will have someplace to be close to family when he's ready for that step. (I'm thinking the overly large garage can be converted into a small efficiency apartment for a single person but Dave doesn't think so and wants to see about adding on to the house.) Dave's father is in his 80s and lives alone now, pretty remotely which is a worry, and is starting to have trouble with his memory and keeping up the repairs and such on his house. He's still fairly active despite that and wants, as we all do, to maintain his independence for as long as possible, so a separate living situation seems best. He could live with Dave's sister, but I don't think he's too interested in where she lives because there aren't any mountains around or any good places to go fly fishing nearby.

What else?

Today it's cold and windy and, speaking of mountains, from where I'm sitting in the dining room it looks like it's snowing in the mountains. It's also supposed to rain here in a bit. It's spring.