Summer, Birthday, Kamala, Sadness, Rain, No Rain

It's been awhile since I posted, almost exactly a month. In that time, I renewed my RN license and I had a birthday. Dave gave me many lovely gifts, including an Accuquilt fabric cutting machine and several dies to go with it and my mom sent a salad chopper that I requested since I love chopped salads and need to eat more vegetables. Kelly and Kevin had given me some early gifts, an amazingly tiny Japanese calligraphy set and stationary that they brought back from their recent trip to Sri Lanka. 

 

I did not have my traditional birthday sushi dinner (the sushi places near our place are sketchy) but we had an Indian takeout feast instead and it was a lovely dinner and a lovely, quiet day.

 

I also made up a holiday: I declared yesterday a No Guilt Throw Away Day, meaning that Dave and I could throw away anything at all with absolutely no guilt whatsoever. We tossed a mountain of things, some of which were sticking around because we felt guilty for throwing them out. No Guilt Throw Away Day is going to happen somewhat regularly around here for awhile until we get things down to manageable.

Here are some photos, one from a lunch we had with Kelly and Kevin last month:

I brought some skullies along for Kelly to choose from to send to a friend.

This is a photo I took while we were waiting for Judi to arrive for dinner (again, last month):

It's cloudy and windy today but still hot. This used to be monsoon season, before climate change started to dry things up. We did get thunderstorms yesterday and a bit of rain, but I'm hoping for more today. 

And it just started thundering and raining a bit!

This month has had it's ups and downs. I still get chest pain when I read political news so I don't do it often or at all if I can help it and I'm so sad that Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race--I'm so grateful to him for keeping our country from going over a cliff--but I'm trying to be hopeful about the possibility of our first woman president and a woman of color to boot. So that's good.

Our friends Chris and Grace are down with Covid right now. Chris had it about a month ago and was recovered (recovering?) when Grace got it. Then Chris got the variant that Grace has and now they're both sick again. The new variant is spreading rapidly and many people are getting very sick from it. Neither Dave nor I have yet had Covid (that we know of, as of course we could have both had asymptomatic cases and I suspect that I got a mild case from a patient at the very start of the pandemic when I was still working). I chat via Marco Polo with Grace every day or two and she seems like she's on the mend now, so that's good. I read a statistic recently that 1/5 of Covid cases do not resolve within three months, so that suggests that one in five people who get Covid develop long Covid. I don't have to tell you that this is not a good thing.

We also had horrible news from a faraway friend recently, that one of his children had died by suicide. It's an awful situation, this. It's hard to comfort someone who lives across the country, but we sent a bereavement box and contributed a tree planted in the child's honor.We checked in with our friend via text. But what else can you do?

When I was working as a psychiatric nurse in an acute inpatient setting, I dealt with many suicidal children, some as young as five years old (though I mainly worked with teenagers from 14 to 17 years old). One of the things that I came to understand through that work was that no child gets to the point of thinking about suicide without an adult having done something horrific to that child. I heard some horrific stories from children and read even more horrific case histories. I don't know our friend's child's history, but I can tell you with near absolute certainty that some adult did something very bad to that child. (I did not say any of this to our friend; he has chosen not to share any of his child's story with us.)

Ah, the rain has stopped.