Better

October 6: 

Nothing is ever as it seems.

Fall is coming. It's in the air now. The days are cooler and the nights, too. It's dark by seven p.m. now. A few leaves are just starting to change. I am not looking forward to the bare-limbed winter trees.

I've been reading a lot, but nothing serious. I haven't been sewing, but I have done a tiny amount of hand quilting. I'm not sleeping at night. 

My mom came for lunch on Sunday. We had burgers.  

This past week, I had Zoom therapy and an online nutritionist visit. I cried during both.

Dream last night--waitressing, on the floor, but doing okay--I turned the corner into the back of the house and looked into the kitchen fully expecting my brother to be there and that woke me up.

Gray Kitty has not been feeling great recently.  It's hard to tell what the problem is. He has arthritis and bad kidneys. And he's getting old. His appetite is decreasing and he's losing weight. We worry about him constantly. I dread what's to come. Having pets is the best and the worst of what life has to give. 

I'm here at a new physical therapists office.  There's a mosquito in the waiting room with me. One of us is trying to bite the other. 

October 21

Yesterday we had people in the house, some of them strangers some of them not so unfamiliar. Dave's sister Sara and their father are in town and they along with an architect and two builders came to the house in the morning. We're starting to plan a small attached apartment that Dave's father may end up living in when he's done with living alone in his remote place in Montana. Dave's sister lives in the midwest and Dave's father is adamant about not living there because there are mountains and rivers. We have both of those fairly close by. Dave's father also lived here for a long time before moving to Colorado and then Montana, so even though the place has changed, he's still familiar with it. 

Having strangers in our house was stressful, but I better living through chemistry'd my way through it. 

Sara and their father are back today to have lunch with us. My mother will join us, too. It's a messy business, this aging parent thing. And it is likely to get messier with trump's cuts to Medicaid and Medicare which a lot of seniors rely on. (Sorry, we can't afford healthcare or to take care of veterans or senior citizens but we can afford for trump to spend millions on golfing, hundreds of millions on ICE agents to terrorize and attack American citizens, hundreds of millions on private jets for his cabinet, hundreds of millions on a tacky gold ballroom for the white house, BILLIONS sent to Argentina, TRILLIONS WITH A T worth of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, billionaires...and who pays for all of it? American taxpayers and immigrants who pay into the tax system but who can never access even the meager services, scraps and crumbs, that we do get. Yes, it's all paid for by American taxpayers who are being told that they can't have healthcare or veterans services or social security because it's inefficient or too expensive or it's socialism or an undocumented immigrant might benefit from it and therefore it's all bad, all of it. The propaganda is real. We have enough money, if we tax billionaires--even if we left the millionaires alone and only taxed BILLIONAIRES and corporations that turn billions in profits and pay NO TAX, if we only taxed those people, we could afford it all. We could even afford to let undocumented immigrants--who WORK in this country and pay taxes--have healthcare.

It's a fucking travesty what's happening in this country right now. 

Reminds me of when my mother was still working in healthcare in southern NM and the place she worked for was vastly underpaying their workers and denying them breaks and workers were told--and BELIEVED--that it was because Mexican citizens were coming and getting healthcare and then skipping on the bill and that's why the for-profit healthcare facilities couldn't pay more. Later, after my mother retired--and her fresh out of school replacement was hired at a dollar or so less than my mother was making with forty years of experience--someone brought a class action lawsuit against the hospital because they had been denied breaks and the hospital, when that happens is supposed to pay and were not paying, which is just straight up illegal wage theft. My mother got a cut of that settlement, but it was a drop in the bucket to the shareholders who made millions on the backs of underpaid healthcare workers. The propaganda is real.

I get angrier and angrier as I think about all of this. And no trump voter--no republican--should ever have a good night's sleep again. They've all been voting for this for years.

Me? I'm waiting for that front page obituary. I'm going to celebrate when that happens.)

What else has been going on?

The No Kings march.

Fall days. 

Waiting for the cranes to arrive. 

Waiting for our guests to arrive for lunch. Got to take a few deep breaths before then.

Better living through chemistry, y'all.