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Progress Being Made…

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Hey!!!! Here’s something weird: the hip pain has slacked off SO DRAMATICALLY that it hardly hurts at all to walk around the Funny Farm!

Whaaaaaaa?????

Getting out of the bathtub? Didn’t feel like I’d better have the phone close at hand to call the paramedics.

Making the bed? Swift, tidy, and easy. And…uhm…most important: pain free! 

WhatEVER would cause such a dramatic shift?

It still hurt when I rolled out of the sack this morning But after a couple of hours? The pain is gone!

Well: almost gone. About 95% pain-free…

Why? I can’t even imagine! 

Within the hour, M’Hijto will show up at the door, eager to schlep me to the Mayo Clinic. We already had an appointment out there for a routine visit. He (and I) have figured we can inflict this hip injury on MayoDoc this morning.

But…noooooooo! Apparently NOT!

One can only hope, I suppose.

****

It dawned on me this morning (nothing like dawn to brighten up a morning, eh???) that after I’d spent a day NOT sitting in my favorite overstuffed leather easy chair, the hip pain calmed down. WAY down.

???  WHY???

Only thing I could figure is that something in the upholstery is either not supporting the spine or is pushing my back into some unknown weird position.

So today I’ve been trying to avoid that fine brown throne.

Easier said than done: that is THE loafing chair for me, the centerpiece of the family room. Plopping myself down there is so habitual that I don’t even think HEY STUPID! GO SOMEWHERE ELSE!! 

But the room does host another mega-comfortable chair, one far nicer and fancier than the leather Crate & Barrel number. And that would be an amazing, sophisticated, you-want-Fancy-Dan? wooden rocker from Thos. Moser. It’s all wood, no squishy cushions. Dowels form the back support. Very, very handsome. Very, very pricey: a creature from the time when I had…you know…a job. 

After perching in this chair for some fraction of an hour, I can get up with almost no pain. And I’ll tellya: that feels like some kinda miracle!

Here’s my son at the door…in a rage, for reasons unknown. And so…awaaaayyyy!

 

Awaiting….

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…the arrival of M’hijito, who is slated to drag me out to the Mayo Clinic this morning.

UGH! How do I hate schlepping halfway to Payson to go to a doctor? One who usually hasn’t much to say that I don’t already know…  BLECH!

The particularly annoying aspect of a Mayo Clinic appointment is that, for reasons unknown, they tend to schedule their meetings with patients on Sunday mornings. So…if you’re the church-going type? Tough nougies!

Even tougher when you’re on the church’s choir…

GOD it used to annoy me when some doctor would co-opt the Sunday morning choir performance!!!

Oh well: it’s moot nowadays. 

Our beloved choir director retired and wandered off into the mists. The new guy: well, he’s very talented, no doubt. But he apparently hasn’t the patience to deal with wannabe singers. This is a fella who wants the Real Thing.

So after he got settled into the job, he started hiring and recruiting professional-level vocalists. This left dowdy ole’ ladies like me outside in the fog…  Seriously: I couldn’t even begin to keep up with the music and the fellow singers. So before long, I quit the choir.

Considered going downtown to the Cathedral, which has (or had, anyway) a lot of our ex-members, and so probably performs about on the level I was used to. But y’know…I really don’t want to get out of my car by myself in that part of town. It IS dangerous. After dark, that is. By day, it’s just a business district with a few late-model apartment buildings.

By night, though…it’s alarming. And most rehearsals are held during mid-week evenings.

WHERE the heck is my fine young chauffeur???

Traipse to the back room. Check calendar. DAYUM! The appointment isn’t till this afternoon!  He’s not slated to get here till 11:15 or 11:30.

Barf-A-Roonies!!!!!  Just how I wanted to blow away the whole goddamn day, traipsing across the city to sit in a waiting room and then finally to see a quack who will tell me — SURPRISE!!! — nothing’s wrong with me. Then we can spend another hour driving back across the city, arriving home without lunch and generally frazzled from driving through Phoenix’s ever-entertaining traffic.

See…this is my problem with the Mayo: it’s too damn far away. Seriously: it really is almost an hour’s drive each way, so you’re gonna blow away a good two hours in driving and parking, and you still haven’t even wasted your 30 minutes talking to a doctor who tells you nothing’s wrong with you.

The docs themselves seem to fly on the high side of excellent. And given that a lot of the local GPs practicing in Phoenix don’t even make it to the low side of good, that surely does make it worth the drive.

But worth it or not: the drive is non-fun. No question  o’ that.

***

GRRR..RRARRRRRR….GRRRRRR!

***

What IS it about a mascara wand that you, as a cleaning lady, cannot resist hiding the damn thing???????

Yes. Go to get ready for the Mayo junket, and I find…what? My mascara is GONE.

Not in any of the bathroom drawers.

Not on the bathroom counter.

Not in any of the bedrooms.

Not flickin ANYWHERE!

Once again, Wonder-Cleaning Lady has found an object that she doesn’t much approve of (apparently), and so she’s deep-sixed it.

Searched all over the house for it.

Can’t find it.

So…she must have thrown it out.

grrrrrrrrrrrr!!!

This is not the first time….  Apparently when she’s absorbed in cleaning, she’ll throw out an object if she doesn’t know what it is.

{?? How many women don’t know what a mascara wand is?)

I must have carelessly left it on the bathroom counter. And she must have interpreted that as “toss it.”

*******

Here we are at the Mayo…endlessly…. Hooked to a hanging bag with transparent hoses and needles and weird stuff dripping into the arm from a bag… Staff is great — beyond great to awe-inspiring, actually. But that sure doesn’t make a trip here — a whole damn afternoon — any more fun.

My poor son has had to take time off his job to haul me out here. And we’ve been sitting here and sitting here and SITTING HERE for what feels like half the day. Grand fun!

Hip hurts. Dunno what I did to it, but whatever: it’s mightily spavined. Hurts and hurts and HURTS. Not moving freezes it up and makes it hurt all the more.

ooohhhh welll…

A-n-n-d… {rumble rumble} here we go again!!

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Dusk. Dog and human fed and dutifully loafing. And the evening serenade rumbles in through the windows:

GRRRGGRGGRRRRRUUUMMMMMBLLLLEEEE GRBAM!

Wooo HOO! Lightning and thunder bouncing in through the gray skies.

Just enough rain to wet the pool’s decking and the houses’ roofs. But otherwise: mostly stürm und drang…rather little water. That notwithstanding: we who are a human and a dawg are mighty glad we’re not out prancing around in it.

Innaresting…I can’t tell just how ferocious this freshet thinks it is. NOISY is what it is, actually. Lots of crabby-sounding, grumbling thunder, but not a lot of visible lightning, and just a fairly conservative rainfall.

Hmmmm….. Let’s close them thar drapes. Oddly, I just don’t like the look of whatever is going on out there.

Meanwhile, in the Department of Idle Curiosity, let us look up my father’s people: the Chocktaw tribe of America’s South.

Interesting bunch, they were. My mother said he came out of the deep South. Apparently that was the case…with flair. 😀

He would never admit to being anything, genetically, but whitey-white. But all you had to do was look at him to know something was out of kilter with that claim. He had dark brown hair: so dark that when he slathered Brylcreem into it, it appeared to be black. Combine that with the most striking blue eyes, and…my goodness. He was quite a looker. He was tall, slender but well-built, overall a pretty handsome sorta fella. Came out of Texas and the Deep South.

LOL! My mother was genu-wine whitey-white: French and English. And where he was striking, she was unprepossessing. Nice-looking enough, but not so as to grab your gaze.

And what does that make me? Bland. Very bland. 

Back at the Ranch…in the nick of time

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GAAAAAHHHH!  Go ahead: just try to sit down while the coffee steeps!

Hah. we say to that. Hardy-har-har!

Comin’ on to 8:00 of a VERY soggy morning. Thunder rolling. Clouds lurking. RRRR-O-O-A-A-R!!!! Just made it back in the house from this morning’s doggy-walk….

How can I count the ways…?

Seriously, this is one weird morning. We’re right at 8:00 a.m. and it’s so dark out there you’d guess it was around 6:00. Water all over the back porch: it must have rained during the night, ’cause it missed us while Ruby and I were traipsing around the ‘Hood.

Somebody’s burglar or fire alarm was wailing away…they must be out of town. Or all dead, presumably murdered by their alarm’s visitor. WEEE-UUU WEEE-UUU WEEE-UUU WEEE-UUU WEEE-UUU !!!! What a racket! 

Inside our house, we can’t hear that serenade, though. Just the KER-BOOOOOOOM! of the present thunderstorm.

Man! It’s really roaring away out there! Wunderground predicts a high of 86 with a 98%chance of precip. That would seem to translate to HOT AND WET. 

Uh oh. Lawn blower racket. 

Puuuleeeze, Gawd! TELL me that’s not Gerardo’s boys banging around the yard!!!!!

Nope: they’re across the street, lucky guys. Thanks, God!

How would you like to be trying to mow and blower up a 1/4-acre yard as the sky is roaring at you? Sometimes even the most crabby-making days look just fine compared to someone else’s fine day….

And now…Friday Afternoon

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LOL! The Dawg and the Human dodged some very soggy bullets this afternoon. Doggy-dodgey???? 😀

You should SEE the wonderful, fantastic storm that’s pouring outside the bedroom window, from the inside of which  — mercifully — Ruby and I are watching the weather.

Hardly any wind. The rain is pouring straight down. And pouring down is the term. Man! It’s whaling down like a fire hose! Fortunately, we who are the mammalian set are hunkered inside, under what appears to be a good, sturdy roof. No sign of any leaks…not that I can see, anyway.

If a leak were gonna happen, it would be there now. What a freshet! 

The street out front is flooded from curb to curb. Fortunately, the front and back porches slant ever-so-slightly away from the house, In front, we’ve got a little lake out there: must be two inches deep, at least. Maybe more like three, right outside the front door.

In back, it’ll be a good two weeks before the swimming pool evaporates enough to add more water from the hose.

And the thunder rolls….

…and rolls…and rolls…and ROLLS. And so do the clouds.

It’s something to see, that’s for sure. 

************************

Whew! Time passes: The Weather Drama is letting up a little bit. Still pouring rain, that’s for sure. But not something to make Noah proud….

The pool level is now up to the lip of the Cool-Deck. But…hmmm…I don’t think it will overflow unless we get enough rain to raise the water level another two or three inches.

If we do…well…overflow may be the least of our problems.  Still…we’d have to get an actual tornado to bust up the house or the roof. Or knock over those big trees on the west side. So I reckon we’ll be fine, real-life tornadoes not being the sorta thing you tend to see around here.

We can get some lively windstorms, but not the kind that go round and round! 😀

******************

Ah HAH HAH HAH!!!!!!!

Lookee here what I found: a gift from our honored son. A bottle of premium alcohol-removed wine!!!

JUST what I need to soothe my jangling nerves!!!!

😀 😀 😀

What could be better, eh? Or, we might add, more hilarious.

Hmmmmm….  Let us inspect….

(The house, that is: not the fake booze…)

*********

Okay….I don’t see, offhand, any serious damage out there. Roof looks OK, as far as I can tell. That doesn’t mean it is OK: only that I can’t see any alarming damage. Trees are still upright…no serious breakage there.

Testing M’hijito’s fake wine…

…a-n-n-d-d…

It’s just as ridiculous as you would expect!!
😀  😀  😀

Fully devoid of flavor. ANY flavor.

{chortle!!} Welp, one more thing’s for sure: I ain’t walkin’ up to the store through the puddles to pick up a bottle of real wine. 😀

T0morrow, maybe?????

***

hmmmm…. We’re told a low-pressure zone over Southern California will keep the rainy weather here for a few days. eeeek eeeek! FLASH FLOODS HEAVY RAIN HAIL STRONG WINDS DANGEROUS LIGHTNING eeeek eeek! 

Be scared. Be very scared. 

Friday Morning…

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Not yet 8:30…the Dawg and the Humann have rolled out of the sack, trudged around the neighborhood, perused the pool and the yard, chowed down on whatever was in the fridge, slurped up coffee, read the news (and then some) and now…

Now?  Wish nothing more than to go back to bed.

😀

I should give lessons on how to waste time. Wonder how much people would pay for a course in professional time-killing?

My plan for today was to visit a venerable old-folkerie called Orangewood, a single-story spread about three blocks up the road from the house where DXH and I lived while M’hijito was in high school.

Question: Do I wanna live in that place?
Question: Would there be any benefit to moving over there?
Question: Could I duplicate its services and benefits right here in my house?

Answers:

* Hell, NO! I hate loathe and despise institutional living and do not wish to spend the last months or (God forfend!) years of my life in a dormitory for old folks.

* Yes. Plenty of benefit. You have someone else to clean up after you. You have a cafeteria serving up piles of chow…a “benefit” only if that’s the kind of gunk you like to eat. You have a doctor on the premises, one who materializes, as he did for my father, the minute you have a stroke. You have lots of company. You have a taxi service that will schlep you to appointments off-campus — for “free.”

* Y’know…I’ll bet I can. Turns out my cleaning lady used to go into people’s homes and provide day-to-day services for the agèd and the infirm. If she was doing that, others surely are, too. I suspect I can hire someone to provide most or all of the services that Orangewood provides. Only…in peace and quiet. Without serenades from the half-deaf neighbor’s TV set. Without annoying rules. Without disgusting institutional food.

If she was doing that for a living, that means other folks are doing it. So…one of my assignments just now is to call around and find out how to find such folks, how much they cost, and whether they really can do a decent job of it.

So there you have it: the present Project. Find out if it’s possible to replicate the services of an old-folkerie in your own home. And if so: start getting into position to do exactly that.

The longer I can stay out of any such place, the fewer weeks and months I’ll spend in old-age misery. At least, so I figure. Stands to reason, anyway.