Monday, January 9, 2006
More miscellanea:
- Walkering every day. Good idea. Very successful trip to Costco on 1/5/06. She continues to refuse the cane or to carry it when I insist on cane practice but I'm no longer concerned about this. The more she walkers, the less I have to remind her to breathe through her nose, not her mouth, when she uses oxygen in the house. As well, she's using it less in the house than previously.
- BM yesterday at 1450: Good volume; excellent consistency; very easy elimination; very easy clean-up.
- Dinner last night: Mom's beloved Costco chicken pot pie; Dinner 1/7/06: Milkshakes in the evening after home made curry-chicken soup in the afternoon; 1/6/06: Mom's beloved Costco chicken pot pie.
- Yesterday: "I want to take you to Mechanicsville," a welcome and sad interlude because:
- She obviously knows we're not in Iowa, Dorothy, but;
- I felt it necessary, this time, to explain to her why I'm not up to a long distance trip with her. "I think that time has passed us by, Mom. I'm sorry. I'm just not up to managing, alone, on a trip, everything I do here to keep you clean, comfortable, at ease, healthy and happy." And, I'm not. Her disappointment passed quickly.
- I'm preparing to podcast (without the use of Feedburner or any other syndication software) Mom's personal history using the Once Upon a Lifetime questionnaires as a basis. Mom's been flipping through the first section of questions and is excited. So am I. I've run into a publishing glitch, though: I've got the recording and the rss/xml specifics down, I've already uploaded a test cast but I'm stuck at getting it to come up and play off its home. I may end up publishing through a free syndication service after all. This effort is partly what's kept me from reporting in these journals.
- The other "activity" that's kept me "busy" at night is that Mom and I have been catching up on my guilty pleasure (I believe it's hers too, because she's been staying up to catch up but she won't admit that she's hooked) The L-Word. This ended last night with the beginning of the third season, which looks to be much funnier, less stylized and more like a cross between soap opera and satiric theater than previously: Mom laughed along with me when one of the characters fell into an absurd crying jag. She also very much enjoyed the segment wherein an adoption social worker visited two of the characters who've just become new parents and mentioned (although I'm not sure where she gets her information) that the portrayal of the social worker "isn't too far off". Mom's comments at the end of the third season premiere: "Is this on every night?"
"No, not anymore. Only on Sundays."
"Oh, that's too bad. Remind me not to miss it on Sundays." - The constant day sun continues to blind me, but now that I've got Mom out and walkering every day I'm partially thankful for it. Doesn't seem to be affecting her morning blood pressure much, which remains high despite the 10 mg lisinopril she's getting morning and night and my efforts to make sure the dosages are no more than 12 hours apart [I'm mostly successful at this: She gets her first dose as soon as she awakens instead of with breakfast and her second dose just before she retires]. I'm thinking that she simply remains irritated that I've been taking her BP in the morning. So, I'll probably switch back to evening readings soon. She's past the daily stiffness that plagued her when we began walkering every day, so I think I'll design a slightly more rigorous in-house exercise program than the informal "Chicken Flap" program through which I've been conducting her; not quite as rigorous as the set of formals we were practicing some months ago, catalogued at =>Moving =>Mom. My intention is to organize a new template of exercises and publish the results of each session...my intention is...
- Despite our involvement in the holidays, this year, it seems as though they are years in the past.
- The reading of The History of Old Age is going well and is a delight for both of us. We've just finished the second chapter on the portrayal and realities of old age in the Greco-Roman era. Mom was amused at the dour, debilitated descriptions of old age by writers of the era. I find this amusing because, in fact, many of the descriptions apply to her except her awareness of this. She continues not to believe that she is "very old" and that she suffers many of the debilities of old age mentioned with fear and disgust in the descriptions. Perhaps the key is that, despite her occasional warnings to me not to get old when she is experiencing the worst of The Path of the Ancients, she is not suffering through these debilities, she is merely experiencing them and, thus, taking them, as is her way, with, as she would put it, "a grain of salt".
# posted by Gail Rae @ 10:30 email...
...this post
All material copyright at time of posting by Gail Rae Hudson
