Sunday, September 5 – Saturday, September 11, 2010
As we prepared to leave for church this morning, we were counting on all the usual routine…get us up and going and then get Mother up and going…have Sophie come in for a couple of hours until TJ arrived to take her to church, etc.
We had already made arrangements for Sophie to come in from 3:00 until 7:00 this afternoon so Mother would have someone here while I went to choir practice and we went to church tonight.
Everything was going according to plan…Mother was up and around and Sophie was with her as we left for Yantis to start the morning with the fellowship breakfast, followed by Sunday school and church.
It was during the church service that we found out that there would be no choir practice or service tonight because of tomorrow’s holiday. Since it was too late to back out on Sophie, we went back to Our Little Lot at Holiday Villages, took a short nap, had lunch from the clubhouse, and then tackled four hours of chores around the place.
The first job was to drag everything out from under Big V and then set up the rolling pallet that I had fashioned from an old box spring from Mother’s bed. Just as I had hoped, nearly everything that had been sitting on the concrete slab (and getting wet every time it rained) fit nicely in the two sections of the pallet.
By the time I was finished with that chore, everything that we store under Big V was up off the concrete and neatly organized (until the next time we need something).
Next, we turned our attention to mowing and trimming the entire lot. We haven’t had much rain the last few weeks, but there was enough that our grass was growing into the “must mow” range. Barbara mowed our “front” and “back” yards (the areas on either side of Big V) while I did the trimming and then mowed part of the gully where we have the bird feeders.
With that done, I moved to the lot behind us and mowed a big section of it to help keep the critters away from Big V. It is still chigger season and we do have an occasional snake come around, so we try to keep the grass down all around us.
Finally, I moved the mower out to the front of the lot and mowed on either side of the driveway, giving our lot a nice “cared for” look.
With the work done, we got all the tools put away, took showers, straightened up the inside of Big V, and headed back toward Mineola. We stopped to visit Bob and Mary, but they had left for the evening, so we drove to Quitman to pick up mail for our friends Gene and Michelle who will be returning to Holiday Villages sometime this week, and then took a scenic back road trip from Quitman to Mineola.
We arrived back at the house at 7:00, just in time to check with Sophie on how the day went, visit with Mother before she went to bed, and turn our attention to a little TV watching and journal writing…what a really nice day it turned out to be!
Monday, September 6
Happy Labor Day!!!
This was the closest thing to a holiday that we’ve had in a long time. We took our time getting up and around…had a nice breakfast with Mother, did minimal work around the house, barbecued some chicken for a late lunch, and then just took it easy for the rest of the day…no mail and no trips to town…how simple a day is that?
Out of deference to Labor Day, I did labor for a short time this evening as I trimmed and mowed the back yard (but it’s a small yard, and didn’t really count as work).
Tuesday, September 7
Barbara has been doing nearly all the cooking lately, so this morning I said she could stay out of the kitchen and I would take care of things. While her menus tend more toward the exotic, the breakfast I cooked this morning was very basic-pancakes, bacon, and eggs, but it hit the spot and no one walked away hungry or dissatisfied.
We had some little on again-off again showers during the day, but they didn’t do much more than raise the humidity. Barbara decided that she would mow the front yard this morning, just in case it really rained during the day.
Ladd called this morning and invited us to dinner at their place. Angela was cooking a brisket, beans, and potato salad. Not wanting to be unsociable, we said we’d be happy to come over; Barbara even jumped up and baked a cake for the occasion.
When we got ready to leave Mother’s house, I noticed that the starter on the car was lugging down, an almost certain sign that the battery was on its last legs. When lunch was over and we got Mother back to the house, Barbara and I took the car to Walmart to get a new battery and do some shopping. I told Ladd that I didn’t know if we could afford to come back to their house for free dinners. The last time we visited them I had to get two new tires and today I had to buy a battery.
This afternoon I decided to tackle a chore that I’ve been putting off for too long, cutting the vines and ivy out of the fence that separates Mother’s and Addie’s yards. It wasn’t a particularly hard job, but it was tedious as I unwrapped long strands of vines…don’t know what they are, but none of us wanted them around, and then pulled them out of the chain link fence.
Tonight was the first meeting of the new church year for Barbara’s Bridge group at Yantis First Baptist Church. For our newer readers, they don’t play bridge…it’s a group of women from the church who meet together to study scriptural ways to “bridge” the gap among the different ages.
We arranged for Sophie to come stay with Mother for a couple of hours and drove out to Our Little Lot so I could work while Barbara went to church. We ran into a light rain along the way, but it wasn’t doing anything when we got to Holiday Villages, so I got out and prepared to do some yard work. Barbara headed off to church, but she must not have even gotten to the gate when the thunder rumbled and the skies opened up.
With a torrential downpour going on all around me, it was obvious that I wouldn’t be doing any outside work, so I began tinkering around inside. Before long, Barbara returned, saying that no one showed up at her meeting, so she returned to get me. (Oops! The next day Lisa reminded Barbara that everyone, including her, agreed several weeks ago to change the time back to 7:00)
We decided that we’d take the extra time we had to go visit Bob and Mary. Bob is still recovering from his back surgery and we haven’t been able to spend much time with him.
After talking with Bob and Mary for a few minutes, we returned to Mineola and Mother’s house to spend the evening working on the blog and journal.
Wednesday, September 8
With the threat of raining hovering over us, we began the day’s activities as usual…wake up and check email, get Mother up, have breakfast, etc.
We arranged for Sophie to come spend a couple of hours with Mother while we went to Yantis for Barbara’s Bible study group.
Before Barbara went to Bible study, she met with David in the sanctuary and recorded her video testimony that will be shown to the congregation Sunday morning before her baptism. Barbara shared in an earlier journal/blog installment about her experience a few weeks ago, and now the date is set for Sunday morning, September 12.
David and Barbara got the video shot with minimal takes and soon she was headed off to her group and I left to go work around Big V. I spent the next hour or so clearing out the place where John and I had cut down some tree branches on July 4th. There were still quite a few logs around that I hauled off to the burn pile (I wanted to burn, but everything was wet from yesterday’s downpours, so that job will just have to wait).
After raking and hauling off trash, it was time to go back to Yantis, check out the finished video that David made this morning (and it was very good, by the way), get Barbara and then drive back to Mineola.
When we got to the house and stepped inside, the first thing we saw was both puppies standing in the doorway with strange looks on their faces. We knew right away that something in the house wasn’t right, so I went back to Mother’s bedroom and found her lying in the floor. Since Maria, the lady who comes to clean Mother’s room, had been gone only 5 minutes, we knew that Mother had been down only a short while. Mother was just fine, so I called Barbara to help me pick her up and then I started to work “curing” the cause of her latest falls, a power cord from her lift recliner that got tangled in the wheel of her new walker. It took some doing, but the cord is now attached on the opposite side of the chair and cannot get tangled in the walker unless Mother picks the chair up and turns it around, and that is way beyond likely!
Since Mother was on her way to the living room to wait for the visiting nurse when she fell, we got her started back in that direction, but diverted to the dining room to have the lunch that Barbara prepared while I was working on the chair.
We were nearly finished when Kendra, the visiting nurse from At Home Healthcare arrived for her weekly visit. Kendra is a very pleasant young lady and we enjoy her visits as much for conversations we share as for what she does for Mother.
When Kendra left and we had the kitchen cleaned, it was time to take our naps, but mine was interrupted several times by phone calls from David, the mechanic in Tyler who is working on the motorcycle. The first call was good news, as he told me that the key he lost (and the only key to the motorcycle) was now found and he was in the final stages of his work.
After a couple more calls, I gave up the nap as a lost cause and decided to get dressed and go to the backyard to clean out a couple of flower beds. Before I could get my boots on, I heard a terrible racket outside and saw that we were having a torrential downpour…so much for pulling weeds - at least for then!
We spent the rest of the afternoon working at our computers and catching up on phone calls. Later, I went out back and pulled grasses and weeds out of one section of the flower bed, but it was very muddy work and I could tell that there was no way it would all get done today…looks like I’ll be hauling in some more dirt to fill in some low places that have nearly 4 inches of water standing next to the foundation.
The evening was fairly quiet…a little TV and a little work on the journal/blog. Mother was in bed and asleep by 9:00 and we followed at 10:00.
Thursday, September 9
Today was just another day around Mother’s house, with no excitement to speak of.
While Barbara stayed home and cooked lunch, TJ and I drove Mother to Quitman for a dermatology appointment. Mother has all kinds of marks on her arms from dog nips and scratches, but there were also a couple of cysts and some other spots that had us concerned. We were able to get in to see Mr. Gautier, the physician’s assistant who handled my dermatology work in Tyler. Mr. Gautier immediately discounted a couple of the spots that we asked about, but took a deeper look at a cyst on Mother’s arm and decided to scrape it off for a biopsy. He thought it looked like a squamous cell cancer, but we’ll know for sure in a week or so.
When Mr. Gautier was through and had cleared us to check out, we headed back to Mineola and Mother’s house where we found a wonderful meal waiting for us. We spent the next half hour eating and talking and making plans for next week’s visit by Aunt Glennis, who will be coming up from Marianna, Florida, for a couple of weeks.
The afternoon was slow and quiet until our physical therapist, Keith, arrived from At-Home Healthcare. Keith went over all the case notes that he had been given and then started putting Mother through her paces. One of the tools he used was an upper and lower body cycling machine. Mother used it today to simulate riding a bicycle, but Keith said it could also be placed on a tabletop and be used for arm exercises. When we asked where we could find a machine like that, Keith said he had seen them for around $25 at the Wal-Mart in Lindale.
After putting Mother through several other chair exercises to strengthen her hips, knees, and ankles, Keith gathered up his “toys” and left to go home for the day…turns out he lives just a few blocks from us, so he will catch Mother at the end of his travels each day as he heads home.
Tonight we just sat around and watched TV and worked on the journal/blog. As far behind as we are on this little project, there was plenty to get caught up on.
Friday, September 10
The peace and quiet of the past several days was broken this morning when I loaded the dogs in the car and took them to the vet for their annual checkups and shots. Spike, who is always so calm and easy-going, was his usual self…he loves nothing more than getting in the car and going for a ride. Bonita, on the other hand, hates the car and broadcasts to all within her frequency range that she is a very unhappy princess.
When Bonita starts crying and whining, it is impossible to keep the windows closed because the sound bounces off all the windows. But, when we open the windows even a little bit for some relief, all the drivers who pull up beside us stare as if wondering what we could possibly be doing to that poor animal to cause her to screech like that…it is truly a lose/lose situation for whoever draws the short straw and makes the trip to the veterinarian! (Barbara volunteered to stay home with Mother! No big surprise!)
Our appointment for this morning was at 10:30, so I timed our trip to get there by 10:25, get checked in, and get the procedures over with. Unfortunately, Dr. Bradshaw was tied up with someone else’s animals, so I sat there with a crying Bonita in my lap for about thirty minutes before she finally calmed down. Spike, meanwhile, was wandering around the office (on his leash, of course) and sniffing the pant legs of everyone who came in.
Sometime after 11:00 Bonita finally calmed down enough that she just sat in my lap and watched Spike, and at 11:30 they came for the dogs. The rest of the visit was just fine…no more whining and crying…not even a yelp when the dogs got their shots.
When they were finished, I put both dogs in the car and then went inside to pay out, hoping against hope that it would be a quiet ride back to the house. I evidently wasted all my hopes, because as soon as I started the car, Bonita cranked up again, whining and crying all the way home. Boy, am I ever glad that this is only a once-a-year event!
Barbara: While Jim was bonding with the puppies, I got to bond with a couple much more fun! Gene and Carolyn came by to visit and to tell me that Carolyn is flying out Saturday to go play grandma; so they won’t get to come to church Sunday to witness my baptism like they planned. I certainly understood the call to duty but got a chuckle with their way to celebrate my decision. They, in a gift sack with a gal in a bathtub (immersion, get it?), put a diet coke (my drink of choice at any celebration) inside a can coozy.
Anyway, we were having so much fun talking that the time just slipped away from me until I realized that I had to fix lunch, take a shower, and be ready to go to Tyler in less than an hour and a half! But…at least they got to witness Jim bringing home his passengers; in fact, they almost got run over by Bonita who was hurrying to tell Edith how mistreated she had been! So, while I corralled the dogs, Jim got to spend a few minutes chewing the fat with Gene and Carolyn.
Jim: As soon as I got home with the puppies and visited with our company, I helped Barbara get lunch ready while she got a shower and got dressed. Mother came into the dining room and we had lunch and then Sophie came over to sit with Mother for a couple of hours while Barbara and I drove to Tyler to get the Voyager out of the motorcycle hospital.
We stopped at Wal-Mart in Lindale and bought the cycling machine for Mother and also found a new harness for Bonita. Bonita had destroyed her harness a couple of months ago and we haven’t been able to find a replacement until today.
When we finally got to the repair shop, after tangling with Tyler’s Friday afternoon traffic on a loop that is continuously under construction, Barbara took a couple of photos of the cycle and David and me before rushing back to Mineola to relieve Sophie. Silly us, we thought we could do all that in just two hours, but we didn’t count on traffic jams caused by the multiple highway maintenance crews.
Luckily, it was an uneventful trip, although I did get a little nervous when a motorcycle policeman pulled up behind me at a red light in Lindale. My inspection sticker expired at the end of August and today was the end of the 10-day grace period for getting a new sticker. I think the officer must have been in a hurry to get somewhere else, as he took off in another direction.
There is a really nice cycle shop between Lindale and Mineola, so I pulled in there to see if they still did inspections. Lucky me, they did and I was the only customer in sight, so in 10 minutes I rode away with a completely legal cycle, not caring how many patrol cars or cycles I might see.
When I got back to the house at 4:00, Keith was there finishing up another rehab session with Mother. He was pleased to see that we had bought the cycle exerciser and said that Mother should be able to get quite a bit of use out of it while she watches TV.
I went out to the back yard around 5:00 to continue cleaning out the flower beds. I worked carefully around the Zinnias that Mother and Barbara had planted during the spring, but when Barbara came out and saw what I had done, she said to go ahead and pull out the Zinnias too, since they had quit flowering and didn’t look any better than the weeds and grasses. After a couple of hours of pulling, cutting, and trimming, I decided that I’d had enough of that fun and went inside to clean up.
Barbara: While Jim did his outdoor playing, in between times of helping Edith, I got busy trying to design a business card for Gene that I had said I’d do months and months ago. They realize that I’m just at the playing stages so anything I show here isn’t official; but…with a better photo, I think these could look sharp. Also, I am very aware that the phone numbers should be lined up, but as I said...this is just a practice because the photo is too cluttered!! Besides, Carolyn’s out of town and they don’t have a program to open the design so I just decided I’d put it in the journal where I know they will see it. Clever, huh?
Saturday, September 11
Lest we forget, today marks the ninth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers in New York City, the Pentagon in Washington, and the crash of a plane that was commandeered for another attack, but which came down instead in a Pennsylvania field. Nearly 3,000 innocent people lost their lives in the attacks.
After a big breakfast, it was time to get some serious yard work done. With the flower beds in the back yard finally cleaned out, I decided to go to Wal-Mart and get some topsoil to level the beds. As I wrote earlier, a strong rain will leave us with as much as four inches of water standing next to the foundation and I wanted to eliminate that problem if at all possible.
While Barbara worked inside the house, I turned the existing soil and then added eight bags of topsoil to the mix, leveled the beds and raked them smooth, and then trimmed and mowed the back yard. Since more rain was predicted for the day, I went ahead and mowed and trimmed the front yard before deciding that I had done as much as I could for the day.
Since we had such a large and late breakfast, Barbara fixed a late lunch and we sat down to eat around 3:30. After that we rested for a while before going out to Holiday Villages for the monthly Bingo Night. We haven’t had much luck at bingo the last few times we’ve gone, but Barbara won one of the ten games tonight and brought home a $10 Wal-Mart shopping card…yay, Barbara!!!
We got back to the house at 8:00, got Mother ready for bed, and spent the rest of the night trying to finish off the last two weeks of journal/blog entries.
A week or so ago Leah sent us a youtube link and said she thought we’d find it interesting. When I had a moment, I hit the link and found myself watching a portion of the Liberal High School Band 1997 Spring Concert…the year that Whitney was a senior and Leah was a freshman and I was the director.
One of “That” Liberal Band’s traditions was to play Claude T. Smith’s Emperata Overture each year during graduation ceremonies; it was the last piece that the full band would play before the seniors got up and went outside to join their classmates to enter the gymnasium to the strains of Pomp and Circumstance, played by the underclassmen.
Some years I programmed Emperata as part of the spring concert, just so we’d be sure to have some extra practice on in. I believe that in 2007 Emperata was the opening selection of the concert and was undoubtedly one of the best performances of the piece during my 11-year tenure as director of bands. That isn’t to say that there weren’t a couple of moments I wouldn’t like to have “do-overs” on, but I did think it was an outstanding performance by a great band.
Hearing the piece brought back a lot of memories and I thank whoever kept that footage and posted it on youtube. For those who might be interested in seeing and hearing the band, turn up your volume, sit back, and watch and listen when you hit this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tq6OyG5zPM
“When things get tough, always remember…faith doesn’t get you around trouble, it gets you through it!” - Unknown
From Mother’s house in Mineola,
Jim/Dad/Gramps & Barbara/Mom/Grams
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