Hello, my people.
Time flies when you're having fun, so they say.
"They" are wrong. I haven't been having fun at all, but, despite that, some of my precious remaining time as a living, functioning person has disappeared anyhow.
I'm trying to meet work deadlines. One of the offices where I have to work in person has no air conditioning and the weather has gotten hot here, so I have to go at times I wouldn't otherwise be even awake. Then I come home and sleep during the day. Crikey. At least that job will end in a couple of weeks.
I'm stressed by my mother's problems, and have been to see my own doctor about my blood pressure and other issues. He recommended grief counselling, which I think is actually a pretty good idea because I think I'm kind of stuck, but then the conversation veered away from how to handle the stress I'm feeling and we never did get back to it.
My mother is declining further, cognitively speaking. She is mixing up her pills and I'm finding them in her clothing, in her purse, in the cushions of her chair, on the floor, etc. The pharmacy has blister-packed them but that doesn't stop her, it only slows her down. I've had to take the medications home with me, which therefore requires me to bring her pills to her every day. She is still talking seriously about getting a new car, and her geriatric assessment has been postponed by over a week. She feels she is doing very well and still has all her wits about her, quote/unquote. I do not feel that, at all, at all.
I was hanging on by my fingernails before; now I am basically doing the mid-air, leg-cycling thing that happens in the cartoons where someone runs off a cliff and keeps running until they realize there's no ground under them anymore. I haven't started the rapid downwards whoosh yet, but I feel it's only a matter of time.
I've been watching some YouTube videos on dealing with dementia as a caregiver, and that has been a little bit helpful. I've also developed some of my own methods of dealing with Mom. Number 1 is that if logic is not working, hey, guess what, more logic won't work either; it just sends my blood pressure through the roof. Number 2 is that I can't wrestle her to the ground and make her take her pills, and I can't hide them in her food like I do for our cat, so taking her meds has to be her choice and I have to let go of trying to control that. If she ends up with health problems from not taking meds, that's a risk I have to be willing to live with.
If any of you have any other tips, I'm all ears.
Moving on to lighter topics, I made an impulse buy last week. It was out of character for me to impulse-buy, but sometimes you just have to go with your inner voice. My inner voice was telling me this was the mug for me. For the record, I've only ever bought one other mug for myself in my whole life, and I don't drink coffee or tea or hot chocolate, and I don't like to drink cold beverages from a mug, so I'll probably use it to hold pens.
(If Laurie or anyone else with vision issues is reading, the mug says: I got so much procrastinating done today. I think this describes most of my days)
Last week these fawns were snoozing in my back yard. I've noticed that when there are two or more deer resting at the same time, they position themselves back to back. Smart deer! And they seem to learn this at a young age.
And this buck was resting by himself, on a different day. His antlers are growing. He was very laid back and his eyes were drifting shut repeatedly.
A couple of posts ago (here), I included a picture of one of our cats, Meredith.
Blogger Bonnie, from It Seems Like Only Yesterday, herself the servant of two beautiful cats, asked for a picture of our other cat, Lucy.
This week, Lucy deigned to pose for me.
No, she didn't. I took the picture without permission and she will likely sue me for it. That's just the kind of girl she is. But she has lovely eyes, doesn't she? And a delightful little pink nose. Which is right above her cobra-like fangs. But we won't ruin the mood with that little detail.
I've been doing a miniscule amount of gardening, as I usually do in mid-July, when the transplants I bought in early June are on their last legs and I have to get them into bigger pots or into the ground before they die.
Here is Frog with his gardening tools and little plant. This is a difficult planter to work with because the place where the earth goes is so small and oddly shaped, and the earth dries out so fast, but this little succulent is what I found to fit in it this year.
I rescued some transplants from the clutches of the earwigs and stuck them in a pot that's nicer than the actual plants are.
Lastly, a chalk drawing of "V for Victory" fingers a peace sign (thanks, Janie Junebug!) I came across recently. Hardly anyone draws on the sidewalks here and this doesn't really look like a child's drawing, so I'm curious who did it.
We can't finish without a funny, right? (In case the caption doesn't get translated into sound for those with vision loss, it shows a take-out mug with "cark" written on it, and the comment, "I said my name was Marc with a "c" ...)
This is not my name (just to be clear) but it made me wonder: Have you ever had your name misspelled when you've ordered take-out? Or do you even give them your real name? I remember someone telling us years ago that they never gave their real name in a take-out pizza place because so many people in our area have the same last name (hint: Scottish settlers make for a lot of MacDonald's still living here).
I hope you're having a good week, my friends. If time is flying past you, I hope it's because you truly are having fun.
