Where’s the Lid?

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Who would expect mayhem in such a peaceful place?
Who would expect mayhem in such a peaceful place?

It’s as if someone left the lid off the crazy bottle lately and little demons are spilling out all over.  Evidently I completely missed a life or death battle next door last night.  True, the person who related the story to me is a bit given to drama –  if he was really being chased around the yard by an angry woman with a shovel, would I not have seen that? Sigh.  We have two adjoining houses in the oneacrewoods.  We’ve rented out the second house ever since my parents stopped coming down in the winter.  I would say that probably 75% of the renters have been people we enjoyed having next door.  The other 25% have given us some bizarre stories to tell.  I have come to understand that this is all part of being a landlord and no matter how careful one tries to be, situations change, things happen.  The ideal appearing applicant is still a human being with life problems and things can go crazy down the road. I wonder if the message I see in all the recent events is that it’s time to make life a little less complicated.  Simplification can be a beautiful, freeing thing and I might be ready for some of that.  What am I going to want to put up with in five years? ten years? or, for instance, when I’m 90? This week I went to visit the 90 year old lady, living by herself, who needed some help dealing with her security company (read about it here) .  We were able to solve that problem without too much trouble, but I became aware of other problems that come with age and limited mobility.  After we cleared a place off at the table where months of mail was stacked, our conversation turned to how she hadn’t eaten much that day and wished she had a complete food for herself like she did for her dog.  Some sort of pelletized people food would be ideal.  She still drives her truck to the store for milk but she admitted that it was getting a little scary.  And yet she hesitated at my offer of help.  Her mind knows she is not taking good care of herself but her body makes it hard for her to do any better. We are all getting older and we need to watch out for each other and help each other when we can.  I’m just saying, who do you know who needs some  looking after?  Food for thought.

I Would Like to Say but I Can’t

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I can hardly talk.  I’ve had this predisposition for laryngitis since I was a teen but I’ve been so healthy the last few years I had almost forgotten what it was like.  When it happens I know I’m going to attempt to say something but I don’t know if I’ll be able to make a noise or  not, and if I do it will probably not be audible as speech.  Then I’ll have to push myself to talk louder and my throat will tighten and actually begin to hurt.  The first cough will come, very dry and bark like.  It won’t satisfy the dryness, the itch, the involuntary spasms in my larynx until I cough again.  And the more I try to stifle it the worse it becomes until tears are streaming from my eyes and I’m in a coughing free for all.

Where do I not want to be when all this takes place?  Several places.  My worst memory of it was in a plane over the north pole during a 16 hour flight from Cambodia to Atlanta.  I was trapped in my window seat by two other people, and I don’t know where I would have gone even if I could have gotten out.  Another inconvenient place is church, on stage, playing the piano.  Not good.  And then there was today, on the quiet, serene orthopedic floor of the hospital. I  had been talking too much and it triggered an episode that I thought would not end well.  Fortunately I ran into a sympathetic nurse who not only brought me water, but cough drops as well.  Coughing like that makes one feel like a major source of the plague.  Maybe I was.

I was visiting  my client/friend, well, back up a little.

Last Monday I got a text in the evening from my client who is mostly paralyzed, having a C-5 spinal injury.  She does drive a specially equipped van and had been out doing errands that day.  It simply read “I almost got killed today on Manatee Ave.”  With an opener like that, I thought surely she would tell me more but no.

I talked with her again a day or so later and learned that her electric wheel chair had gone off the sidewalk, over a four inch curb and nearly dumped her in the street.  She had been saved  by her seat belt and two young men who pulled her back into the chair and the chair back onto the sidewalk.  Other than losing her lunch during the panic she didn’t think she was injured.  But over the next couple of days there was evidence of pain, then swelling in her leg and finally an x-ray that showed a broken femur.  I knew nothing about this last finding until last night when I got an email from a friend with a partial name of a hospital and a room number.  It was late. I went to bed.

This morning I got up early, before testing my voice, and scurried over to the hospital.  Her room number was 932 but, funny thing, there was no 932 in that hospital, and no one registered by her name.  And it took a lot of vocal energy to find this stuff out, believe me.  So I sat in my car and thought of another hospital where she could have gone.  I experienced the agonizing frustration of talking on the phone, having no voice.  It’s not like I could use body language or charades or pencil and paper.  She wasn’t at that hospital either.  I went home and sent out several queries by text and waited for answers.

I did finally find her in the next town south and made it down there by mid morning.  Other than the above mentioned coughing fit, the visit went well and I was glad I went.  This is why.  She is scheduled for surgery and when going to surgery, jewelry is removed if possible.  My client had a ring that no one had been able to remove from her finger.  It was valuable and she was not wanting to have it cut off.  I knew a nifty trick to remove a tight ring that I had learned years before from a youtube video.  I was dying to use it on this perfect occasion.  Everybody should know this method because it really works great and is so easy.  You can use thin elastic, ribbon, even dental floss.  I used crochet thread because I happened to have it with me.  So, I’m going to end with this and you should watch it because you never know when you might be someone’s answer to prayer.

The Way Things Are

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I have no control, not really.  I may make appointments and think I know where I’m going to be, but it’s never really the case.  It’s such a true saying “wherever I go, there I am” and that’s about all I can count on.  It’s okay.  It relieves me of a lot of responsibility. I didn’t even get upset last night when the post I’d spent a couple hours thinking through and writing down disappeared when I inadvertently moved my hand in front of the touch screen.  I guess WordPress doesn’t have automatic update/save.  That’s the way things are.

Today I am put in charge of a situation to solve for someone else, if I can.  I have total compassion for people who by some strength of body and mind have managed to live to be old, like over 90, and still are taking care of themselves.  But things get difficult and maybe it’s hard to remember how you used to take care of difficulties with contracts and bills and harassing phone calls.  So you are happy to let someone help you.  I was volunteered for this job.

My friend C. who is younger, only a year or so past 80, has taken to looking after a neighbor, the above mentioned person.  A while back she fell in the driveway on her way to the mailbox and couldn’t get up. Someone noticed and came to her aid.  Later when C. was with her he suggested she get some kind of device she could use to summon help.  She had one – it was in the house, when she was in the driveway.  He found out she was a bit disturbed with a bill she had gotten from the security company.  She had an experience with a rather sharp tongued customer service rep when she called to ask about it.  She didn’t understand and C. couldn’t explain it to her but he told her Shirley would take care of it, not to worry.  Right.

After half a dozen calls I finally get to someone who might have info on this account and, as usual, I have to have a password or they won’t address the issue with me.  That’s the way things are.  What are the chances our 90 year old friend will remember a password she chose three months ago?  I don’t remember passwords I chose last week.

It’s a strange day outside.  It is bright and sunny except for the three or four times (about every hour) when a cloud has coasted overhead and dumped torrential rain for 10 minutes or so.  We are in Florida and that also is just the way things are.

Another Interesting Day

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It’s July already and I’m having another interesting day.  Thankfully, this one had nothing to do with me visiting a doctor’s office or my health, but it does have a medical component to it.  Remember hearing about the old days when doctors made house calls?  Well, guess what? My daughter, the veterinarian, still does (read about her here). She traveled 275 miles to see this client.

patient sign-in sheet
patient sign-in sheet

We had a restful Fourth of July weekend visiting Doctor Julia ( ) in Jacksonville at her home. Then yesterday the Doc, the grand dog Tess, the husband and I all traveled south to our home. Julia still has lots of friends here and a couple of them breed Dalmatians – the dogs with all the spots. There was a litter of puppies due to go to their new homes this week and they needed their health certificates.  I always love watching the Doc work so I volunteered to go along and help.  I’m a nurse and a good animal holder.

It was kind of like being at try-outs for a remake of “101 Dalmatians”.  There were 10 of the cutest, roly, poly, wiggly pups waiting to be brought out, one by one, and checked out from head to toe.  And the process is not all that different from what I’ve recently been through, although I wasn’t checked for worms (yet).  Listen to heart and lungs, check ears and mouth, temp, stool sample, vaccines and de-wormer, toenail clip… an assembly line that amounted to a good morning’s work.

The Doc at the poop station checking for parasites...
The Doc at the poop station checking for parasites…

 

Doc, I'm seeing spots before my eyes...
Doc, I’m seeing spots before my eyes…

Lost and Found

Shirleyjdietz9 Comments
two bracelets, three earrings
two bracelets, three earrings

I suppose there are some people who never lose things.  I am not one of them.  In fact, there are certain things that I lose consistently, so much so that I plan for their loss.  That would be jewelry, and earrings in particular.  Losing things that you really like is heartbreaking, but at the same time it opens the way for some really good stories of recovery.

In my early 20’s I had one boyfriend (and only one) who had really good taste in gifts of all kinds – flowers, adventures, restaurants, and jewelry.  He bought me a pair of yellow gold earrings that were simple but beautifully designed.  I loved everything about them.  I must have lost them at least half a dozen times.  Once they were lost for over a year before I found them under the bed in the guest room at my parent’s house.  The first time I lost them was the most traumatic though.  I had only been married for a few months (but not to the guy with the good taste in jewelry) when the husband and I took a camping trip.  We were tenting for a week in Tennessee at a big reservoir near Oak Ridge.  The campground was super nice with big tent sites and a convenient bathhouse.  And then one day my earring was missing.

Why is it that no one ever tells you that you have only one earring on?  My ears are right out there in plain sight, but I am always the one who suddenly realizes that one is gone.  I ransacked our tent, shook out all the sleeping bags,  went through our suitcases, looked in every crack and crevice of our van. I backtracked to all the places I had walked.  Pretty much went around looking at the ground for at least half a day.  Then on the day we were leaving, I decided to have one last look in the bathhouse.  I found it in a pile of slime and hair over the drain of one of the showers.  Gross.  But did I care? No.  I was just in awe that I even thought of looking there.

One year for Christmas I told my daughters to tell the husband about a set of jewelry that I had admired in a store.  That’s how I have to do it with the husband – but that’s not a bad thing because I always end up with something I like that way. There was a necklace, a really pretty bracelet and earrings, and he got it all for me.  It wasn’t long before I lost the bracelet.  Everybody at work helped me look until we finally gave up.  I was so upset that I went back to the store and bought the bracelet again.  Somehow that helped, It was expensive but it helped.  Then I lost one of the earrings. Back to the store,  but you know they won’t sell you just one earring.  You have to buy a pair.  I decided having three was a good idea for someone like me.  I never knew when I might need a spare.  Months later I found the bracelet.  It had come off during a cooking demonstration when I was getting a pan out of the oven drawer of the range. I still have two bracelets and three earrings.  Good insurance.

I really like silver, but because it tarnishes all the time, I like white gold even better.  One vacation I splurged on a pair of white gold hoops. (Okay, I got them in Walmart, but they were real gold and they weren’t cheap.) These hoops have a clasp that drives me crazy – they come open with very little provocation.  I’ve lost them three times, one time for every year I’ve had them.  The first two times I found them in really crazy places involving strange medical equipment that is hard to describe, so I won’t.  But the last time I again gave up after several days of searching parking lots and offices I had visited.  I bought another pair which I did not like as well.  That was two months ago.

Last week, after my medical check up, I decided to re-take my blood pressure at home because I didn’t like how high it had been.  I have the old fashioned cuff and stethoscope, and there around the tubing of the stethoscope was my earring.  Who knew?  Good thing Walmart has a good return policy.

I told the story to my eldest daughter, who also loses things.  She said “I wish God loved me as much as he loves you…”  Oh yeah, it’s nice.  But I am quite sure he loves us both the same.

The Desoto Date

Shirleyjdietz4 Comments

 

A wonderful place to spend some together time.
A wonderful place to spend some together time.

 

 

We were challenged to go on a date every week for six weeks. The time is up now and we tried to remember if we had done that, done anything that was memorable, gone anywhere we could actually name. We came up with a few things.

But I decided we’d better do something quickly to add to the list. We went to a beautiful park we’d never visited before. It qualifies as a date because I walked slow and waited for the husband every time I got ahead of him. We read the historical information together. I took a picture of the husband. We connected with nature and each other.

Here are pictures of Desoto Park. It may have been the place where Hernando Desoto landed and started his trek to claim the New World for Spain. There used to be a local festival honoring him and his conquests – lots of men would dress up in conquistador armor and ride a float made to look like a sailing ship in a very noisy parade. Plastic beads and fake spanish coins would fill the air. I digress. Unfortunately the local native americans had a different version of that history and took offense at the festival being all about Desoto. Now it is simply called the Heritage Festival.

I love this park for its walking trail along the mouth of the Manatee River. Pets are allowed, boats pull up on shore while owners lounge in the water, there’s lots of shade over the path when it enters the mangroves. And if you have never seen a gumbo limbo tree, you will see one here – a very old and beautiful one. That does make it a date, doesn’t it?

I was only a little bit ahead of him...
I was only a little bit ahead of him…
lots of access to the river and intercoastal waterway
lots of access to the river and intercoastal waterway
the path follows the beach at low tide
the path follows the beach at low tide
lots of history to view (read)
lots of history to view (read)
bridges take the trail through the mangroves
bridges take the trail through the mangroves
variety of plant and animal life
variety of plant and animal life
a small white heron
a small white heron
and the gumbo limbo tree
and the gumbo limbo tree

 

 

 

This too shall pass…

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I didn’t feel very good yesterday, not awful, just not good.  In fact the last three days have been full of supposedly easy things being hard, supposedly reliable equipment being unreliable, and a mostly tolerable body feeling less tolerable than usual.  And the stress and pain culminated in a headache last night that was singularly awesome.  Well, actually I can think of three times when I had pain approaching that level and each time one aspect of it was that it seemed it would never end.  

This morning, on the other side of the worst of it, some words of a song came to mind –  “and time shall be no more.”  Frankly, today I am so thankful for the passage of time that I can hardly imagine being without it.  When no change of position would bring relief, when nausea nearly became overwhelming, one of my only comforting thoughts was that time would pass and so would this pain. 

This is not the first time I’ve thought about time (probably not the first time I’ve blogged about it either, but I forget).  The husband says I’m going off into an “alternate universe” direction when I try to imagine a timeless world.  And I wonder if that’s a bad thing or a good thing.  It is hard to think about seeing things that exist not sequentially as they seem to happen to us but all at once, outside of time.  To me it seems like this possibility could explain some of the mystery of God.  But I don’t pretend to understand – it’s just a feeling that it could be connected. 

Right now, I’m thankful for cyclical things, mornings and evenings, seasons, first and last, alpha and omega, even life and death.  I know that this universe with time written all over it seems to have been made for me. I’m okay with that. 

Men and Tools

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I don’t have firmly entrenched ideas about what is men’s work and what is women’s work.  I am more about getting things done than about who does them. I have tools.  But nothing makes gratitude well up in me more than seeing a man use a tool to accomplish something, especially something that I’m glad I’m not having to do.

getting up there..., yeah that ought to be easy.
getting up there…, yeah that ought to be easy.

Our list of things to be done at the oneacrewoods got a bit shorter this month.  We’ve known for a couple years that there was some dry rot under the siding around some second story windows – not an easy place to work and also tricky when it involves making a big hole in the wall to replace windows in a climate where it rains nearly every day and is over 90° F (and a hot metal roof).  But our friends who have done quite a lot of work on our house over the years took it on, with ropes and ladders, patience and skill.  The finish work, inside and out, should be completed today.wpid-20140623_172906.jpg

Like most projects, this one grew midway through the process.  Once this bedroom had new windows, it was necessary to do some dry wall and sanding around them.  And while we’re making that kind of mess, maybe we should think about painting all the walls when we’re done.  And maybe since the carpet is in bad shape we should replace the flooring. Stop it, already.

The men took it in stride and added laying in a laminate flloor – in one day.  As I watched them painstakingly cut the pieces to fit and deal with all that pounding and sawing I was soooo glad that the only tool I had to wield was the broom.

wpid-20140623_172839.jpg

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This Beautiful Place

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Good morning world, it’s Tuesday.  Just after putting all my favorite sky pictures up I see this one on the way to work.  And even though I was slightly late, I had to pull off the road and get the photo.  I live in a place where there is something beautiful to see every day.  Where do you find beauty in the place you call home?

 

sunrise over intercoastal waterway.
sunrise over intercoastal waterway.