My living room has a fresh coat of paint and the cedar is finished on the outside of the house. All four of Dale’s sisters and one of their husband’s came and worked last night and today and it looks great! If we were paying Freddie we couldn’t afford him. Dale started the cedar when we moved in two years ago and then just never could get back to it. We knew after this summer that getting up on a ladder probably was not in his future at all so we might never have gotten it done on our own. Kinsey worked right along with him from 7:30 this morning til 4:30 this evening with a short break for hamburgers Dale cooked on the grill and home cooked fries. Pam even trimmed his roses for him and after we finished painting they all cleaned and everything is pretty much put back. It was great getting those things done but it was also fun spending time with them again. Freddie left a little while ago so he could get home tonight and get up and go hunting tomorrow when season opens. I hope I can think of something nice to do for him. I’m dog tired and just enjoying sitting in my living room admiring the paint job. Dale has been wandering around helping when he can and he is pretty worn out too. No alarm clock in the morning! I just hope I can move…
Monthly Archives: September 2006
Warning – whining within
My feet hurt. I should have taken an Aleve this morning but I didn’t so it’s my own fault. I’m taking a break from working on “work stuff” (at 8:05 p.m.) to write this and I’m in a rotten mood. Probably not a good time to post. The mood came from several things that happened to point out things I should already know and should have gotten past but every now and then – poof up they jump.
First, no matter what you do you can’t make everyone happy. Okay tough, I should just get over it.
Second, doing good does not always mean reward. Again, tough, I should just get over it.
That said, I need to rethink my own priorities and see if I can get some feedback on making sure they are aligned with what I should be doing. That part gets tricky because I will end up getting opinions from several people and they will not all be in agreement.
Maybe I should apply where my husband works. If I’m going to go home at the end of the day feeling like I didn’t do a good job then I might as well work in industry and get paid better.
Then again, maybe I just need to get a good night’s sleep. Hello, I’m Scarlett – I’ll think about that tomorrow.
Rainy Saturday
Today was a rainy day. The news channel said we got about 33/100s of an inch but our rain gauge said a little more than an inch. Dale and I were sitting on the back porch enjoying the rain when all of a sudden there was a flash of lightening and a clap of thunder that sounded like a rifle going off next to my head. The flash seemed like it was in the next door neighbor’s yard. I jumped out of my chair so fast I nearly knocked it over though I don’t know what I thought I was doing. Maybe for a second I was going to try to outrun the lightening. Dale was amused to say the least. The outcome was that our house and two other had their phones knocked out. The man next door lost the power supply on his computer. Thankfully mine was uplugged including the modem. Jessica had a report to finish and I needed to do some cleaning in the computer lab at school so I took her up there and while I was there I called the phone company. Like everything else these days you don’t get to speak with a human. According to their little online test there was no problem in our line. They suggested that you unplug all phones and answering machines and then start plugging everything back in one at a time to test all the equipment. When we got home I did what they suggested and nothing worked. Dale had some wire and rigged something up outside. He thinks the little circuit board in their box is fried. We have phone and internet now. It’s a good thing I married an electrician. I don’t actually know what the lightening hit and the only thing I can figure is that it either ran along the ground or the air around us just got charged. Our answering machine is dead but everything else seems okay.
After that we decided to go for a ride and see what was going on in the rest of town. The storm had passed and we were restless. We drove around town and didn’t see any more storm damage but as we were driving home we passed the hospital and both parking lots were empty except for about a dozen state patrol cars and an ambulance. The police had all the entrances to the hospital parking lots blocked. I stopped at the Exxon station before we went home and mentioned it to the girl behind the counter. She told me the Pakistani President had been here visiting his nephew and had some sort of heart attack. I thought this had to be some sort of mistake and then the news this evening said the Pakistani President had been visiting in northeast Texas today including a stop in Paris. They didn’t mention anything about the hospital but the two pieces of information were an awfully big coincidence. Maybe the news tonight will be a little more forthcoming. All in all it was a pretty strange day.
Normal Life?
I think life may be settling in to something resembling normal. Dale has been making some progress. He felt well enough to go to church Sunday. He has exchanged the walker for a cane and has been doing some chores during the day while I am at work and the kids are at school. He folds laundry, deals with the dishwasher and either cooks supper or at least gets things started before I get home. This last weekend he even did a little yard work. He was stiff and sore but his muscles have not gotten much use for four months so that is no surprise.
We are getting into sort of a routine with dialysis three nights a week and extra meal planning on weekend and the other two week nights. Renal diets are tricky – limited phosphorus, sodium, and potassium. That takes a little research and planning if you want to be pro-active. Potatoes can remain in the diet but they have to be peeled, cut up, and soaked for at least four hours to “dialysize” them (remove some of the potassium). High protein is important and since most everything that contains protein also contains phosphorus Dale has to chew a large phosphorus blocker tablet with meals that tastes like chalk. His biggest problem foods are dairy and fruit, vegetables, and beans. He swears when he gets a kidney transplant he is going to buy an entire hoop of rat cheese and eat it himself.
Too much potassium and he gets tachy (too high heart rate), too much sodium or fluids and his feet swell and his blood pressure goes up, too much phosphorus and he itches and some gland kicks in that starts to leech calcium from his bones and and cause fun things like degenerative spinal disease and even calcification of the organs and death. On top of all that factor in the vestibulopathy from the gentamicin which damaged his inner ears and cause him to have difficulty with focus whenever his head moves and I am in awe of him – he is truly my hero. He deals with challenges every day and still has a sense of humor, dignity, and is a good husband to me and a great father to his children. How many men are able to do that and are healthy physically?
Work is settling down. A large percentage of the grades are showing up on the website for parents to login and view and most of the gradebook issues have been taken care of. Maybe by next week I will be able to concentrate on the lab and getting it inventoried (again – the original inventory was on my computer that was stolen) and upgrading what I can. At least I can catch my breath now. For the first few weeks I felt like I was running through the day with one day melting into the next and it was hard to see any progress.
I have been settling in with the MAC too. I already love the look and feel of it but I am growing to appreciate it for productivity as I get more comfortable with it. To start with it is lightweight which is great because I carry it everywhere. I get about three hours on a battery charge and I have worked at implementing GTD techniques to keep my desktop and my email organized.
I finally managed to get the church webpage updated so at least the service times reflect the changes and all the ministries are listed. I hope I will be able to be more faithful now. I am trying to make a routine of treating myself one night a week to a latte and some wireless surfing at Hastings. I go while Dale is at the dialysis center and just relax for a little while. I think of it as my mental health time.