Sunday, January 23
Happy Birthday to extended family nephew Paul Francis!!!
Barbara and Mother were both feeling a little puny and complaining of flu or allergy-like symptoms this morning, so they decided to stay home instead of going to church. Barbara called Sophie to cancel her out for the day and then fixed Mother’s breakfast and saw to getting her comfortable for the morning.
I went on to church, stopping first at Big V to turn on all the systems so I could work around the lot this afternoon. We’ve kept Big V pretty well buttoned up the last couple of months, but since I was planning to spend some time, I turned on the water and the water heater, turned on the ice maker, and cranked up the thermostat so it would be warm when I returned.
It was another good morning at Yantis First Baptist Church…fellowship breakfast, Sunday school, and a really good sermon as David continued preaching and teaching from Nehemiah, Chapter 2. This morning’s lesson was on how to expect and handle the criticism and derision that will surely come when one is doing the Lord’s work.
I waited around for a few minutes after church to pick up a CD of the service for Barbara and then drove back to Holiday Villages. By the time I got there, the sky was turning black, the temperature was dropping, the wind was blowing, and it was beginning to sprinkle…so much for getting any outdoor work done.
I made the executive decision to shut everything off again and then returned to Mineola for the afternoon. I thought I’d watch one of the NFL playoff games, but it was obvious that the Bears weren’t going to shut down the Packers, so Barbara and I took a nap instead.
We got up around 3:00 and Barbara fixed lunch for the three of us before we sat down to watching a little TV and working at the computers.
Barbara stayed home again this evening to keep an eye on Mother and I returned to Yantis for choir practice and the monthly business meeting. During the course of the meeting I was nominated and elected to serve on the nominating committee. I don’t know what that’s going to entail, but I’m sure it will be interesting.
Back at home tonight I decided to have a bowl of cereal for supper and Barbara went out to Taco Bell for some tacos. We then sat and watched TV for a while until she got up to play computer games with some friends and I watched the Steelers and Jets while I reviewed the latest blog posting that Barbara had worked on while I was at church and then sent out the notice that we were posted on time for the first time in ages.
We recognized another anniversary of sorts today. It was exactly one year ago, January 23, 2010, that we became fulltime caregivers for Mother and moved into her house here in Mineola. Our lifestyle has certainly changed during that time as we changed from an RV couple on the go to life in a “sticks and bricks” setting.
Monday, January 24
Happy 82nd Birthday to our dear friend Jesse Fairfax in Woodstock, Georgia!!!
Retired or not, some days are just days, and this was one of them. I got up early and went to Dr. Bankhead’s office to have blood drawn for some tests. When that was done, and I had visited with the doctor, I went by the donut shop to pick up an apple fritter for Barbara, then to the post office to check the mail, Edward Jones office to see about having a fax sent to their number for us, the pharmacy to get some prescriptions for Mother, and then back to the house.
Meanwhile, Barbara had taken care of getting Mother up, fed, clothed, and generally underway with her daily routine. Bonita (the Chihuahua) and Spike (The Boston Terrier) were both especially well-behaved this morning and were so relaxed that Barbara felt compelled to take a picture of them in one of Bonita’s rare good moods. Spike is easy going and loving all the time, but Bonita has some pretty wild mood swings, and we’re never sure which one of her we’re going to see at a given moment.
The rest of the morning was all about taking care of business as we kept the phone lines hot with calls to the medical examiner’s office and Lake Ridge Chapel in Lubbock, and to Dr. Drew, Mother’s neurologist, in Tyler.
Today Barbara received a call from Jimmy Young, the Resthaven Cemetery employee who helped us when we were making plans for Jimmy Clint’s burial service. Jimmy called to say that the new marker had been laid. Barbara asked him if there was any way he could take a picture of it and send it to us and he said he thought he could do that.
After talking to Mr. Young, Barbara called Cathey to let her know the marker was in place. Cathey was excited to hear it and drove out to Resthaven to look and take a picture that she sent to us. Cathey’s aunts had placed flowers at Jimmy’s grave; so Cathey moved them to the vase. Really looks nice, we think; and we really appreciated Cathey taking the photo for us since we can’t see it in person.
When we weren’t on the phone today we were taking care of the routine chores around the house…just the daily business of living. Tonight I wrote a letter to Mr. Young thanking him for calling us today and for taking the time to get a picture and emailing it to us. In December I wrote a blistering letter to Resthaven about the shoddy service we had received from them, but we did appreciate Mr. Young’s efforts on our behalf today and wanted him and his boss to know that.
Tuesday, January 25
I was going to go to Yantis for the weekly prayer session this morning, but Mother was up three times during the night with some intestinal problems. At 4:30 I finally gave sleep up as a lost cause, started the coffee, and read my morning internet journals and newspapers.
Since Barbara got up at 4:30 to help with the last session with Mother, we were both up for a while and then she said she’d stay up in case Mother needed something and I went back to bed to grab some shut-eye before officially starting the day.
Mary, Mother’s speech therapist came to the house around 9:45 for her weekly session and shared some good ideas with us.
TJ offered to cook lunch for us at her place today, but we worked a deal for Barbara to take me over there to install a couple of software programs on TJ’s new computer and then help TJ bring the food back to Mother’s house so Mother didn’t have to get out twice today (which proved, in the end, to be a wise move).
TJ and I brought a pot of meatballs and sauce to the house to go along with the spaghetti Barbara was cooking while I was installing the computer programs. We all sat down to a nice meal and a few minutes of conversation and then got some rest before starting the next part of the day.
For my part, the rest of the day involved driving Mother and TJ to the Eye Associates clinic in Tyler for their appointments. Mother was to have a laser procedure to remove the film that was building up in her right eye, and TJ was having a closer examination of one of her eyes that had some internal bleeding.
Mother’s procedure went rather quickly and she was out and ready to go by 3:45, but TJ was in a large crowd waiting to see her doctor. Time passed and then passed some more. I kept checking to see how much longer it might be, but it was 5:30 before they even took TJ in to have her eye dilated…and then we waited some more. Finally, at 7:00 p.m. we left the building and drove back to Mineola, returning to Mother’s house at 8:00 after a long, long afternoon.
Mother immediately went to bed and fell asleep and Barbara and I weren’t too far behind.
Barbara reported that her day after we left consisted mainly of watching Spike and Bonita and listening to Bonita’s incessant crying and barking while Mother was out of the house. Spike, on the other hand, took Mother’s absence in stride, but at one point he climbed up on one of the living room chairs and then onto a coffee table to look out the window to see if his mama was coming home. To say that Mother’s puppies are spoiled rotten would be the understatement of the century! Otherwise, Barbara’s day was actually restful though at times she did consider what her punishment would be if Bonita was hanging from the fan as a living room decoration. However, upon careful consideration, she decided that might not be a decoration Edith approved of!
Wednesday, January 26
Happy Birthday to son-in-law Jim Farnham in Olathe, Kansas!!!
Sophie came over to watch Mother for a couple of hours while we went north…Barbara to drop me off at Our Little Lot and then go on to Yantis for the weekly ladies Bible study. As a lead-up to Easter, the ladies are involved in a study of He Chose the Nails: What God Did to Win Your Heart, by Max Lucado.
While Barbara was at church, I dug out the cleaning supplies and started scrubbing down the inside of Big V. Unfortunately, we haven’t been doing any deep cleaning out there in the last few months and Big V was starting to look kind of shabby inside. Not only that, we’ve just been piling things inside wherever they would fit, so it was both messy and dirty. It took about 2 ½ hours of hard work, but by the time Barbara came to get me, I had the bedroom and bathroom areas scrubbed and everything put away where it belonged. I even removed the bedroom TV from its case so I could hook up a digital converter, but didn’t have one of the cables I needed to finish the job, so I left the TV out until I could get back to it.
Barbara picked me up about 12:15 and we returned to Mineola for a light lunch and a short nap.
I went back out to Yantis at 5:30 to pick up the MP3 recorder from Lisa Apel so we could get back into production mode copying and burning the Bible studies to CD’s. When I returned to the house, our friends Gene and Michelle and Gene and Carolyn were waiting for us to go out for a “friends’ night.”
We enjoyed the meal at the new Chinese restaurant so much last week that we decided to try it again tonight. Gene and Carolyn hadn’t been to it yet, so we introduced them to the town’s latest taste sensation. The six of us thoroughly enjoyed making multiple trips through the buffet lines and keeping several threads of conversation going, depending on who out of the six were at the table at that time.
After our meal, we returned to the house. Barbara and I got Mother settled in bed and then the six of us broke out Gene and Michelle’s game of Catch Phrase and enjoyed an hour or so of lively game-playing, joking, and laughing at and with each other. When we played the game with Gene and Michelle last week, Gene and I trounced the ladies (so they say, but we really didn’t write anything down; so not certain we can trust their memories!), but tonight the girls got their revenge on us by eking out a victorious set with a win in the third game.
Thursday, January 27
This was just a plain day around our place…chores to do and business to take care of. We had Mary, the speech therapist come in to work with Mother this morning and this afternoon Keith, the physical therapist, came by for his session.
We asked Keith to do an evaluation of Mother’s bathroom to see if we might need to do some remodeling. It is getting more and more difficult to help Mother in that room, particularly for Barbara to help her with her showers. Keith took a close look and then after listening to Barbara talk about what she had to do to help Mother, suggested some different strategies for where Mother sits in the shower stall and how to get her there. He then used part of his time to work with Mother in getting into and out of the shower stall. What he suggested was a simple change in the way Barbara has gotten Mother lined up to get into the stall and made a world of difference. We’re even going to apply the same principal to helping her get to her recliner and her dining room and living room chairs…should make a world of difference in everyone’s comfort. There is still so much for us to learn about this care-giving bit!
Barbara and Mother did some catalog shopping this morning and came up with some new outfits and shoes for Mother and for me to order online. When that was completed, we ordered a new program that will allow us to produce our own DVDs. Well, it’s really a replacement for a program that Barbara installed on her Dell a couple of years ago. The problem was that she installed it as a download and then we lost the instructions for backing it up. When the Dell crashed last year, we didn’t have the program anymore and are finally getting around to buying a hard copy so we can install it on both computers that we now use.
While Barbara stayed at the house this evening to fix supper for Mother, I took an hour and a half to go out to Big V to reinstall the TV system in the bedroom. Now we have TV (still just the antenna system, but better than nothing) and the VCR/DVD player hookup. We just need to be out there sometime to enjoy it.
Friday, January 28
Today was a really different “date day” for us. Instead of one of our junkets to an exotic East Texas locale, we hired Sophie to watch Mother for a few hours while we went to Our Little Lot and worked in Big V.
Before we got to Holiday Villages of Lake Fork, we drove on across the lake and down a county road to catch up with one of our friends from church, Mary Parker. Mary had sent a catalog of jewelry items to Barbara yesterday and Barbara decided she wanted to make some purchases, so we drove out to Mary’s house to write the check and return the catalog.
It was the first time for us to drive into that particular neighborhood and the first person we saw was another of the ladies from church, Aline Coker. Aline was out raking leaves, so we spoke to her for a few minutes before going across the street to see Mary.
We went back to Big V and ate our lunch on our “porch” while enjoying a beautiful 70-degree afternoon. Then, it was back to work to clean off and rearrange the passenger side of our concrete pad. Leaves and dirt had accumulated, so we got them off the pad and then put the furniture back in order so it looked like someone not only lived there, but was proud of the place.
Tonight was just a quiet night on Heritage Drive as we worked on projects at the house.
Saturday, January 29
Happy 4th Birthday today to step great-grandson, Rhett Johnson, grandson of John and Carol Colwell in San Antonio, Texas.
John sent us this picture of Rhett on his new bicycle.
Today was just another day at the house in Mineola…nothing particularly exciting. Mother slept off and on for most of the morning and we did our part to keep things quiet for her.
Barbara did laundry and unpacked things from the big tub that we filled at Big V yesterday while I tackled the job of going through the stacks of paper on our little desk in the bedroom closet. That’s a job I do once every three or four months, whether it needs it or not. When I got everything organized, filed, and put away, Barbara helped with the reorganization of the closet. We moved some things to a hutch in the dining room, since that’s where we conduct most of our business, and shifted a few other things to a different closet. We’ve learned that in an RV or a sticks and bricks home, “stuff” expands to overfill all available space.
For lunch Barbara fixed smothered pork chops (so tender they fall apart when you look at them) and I cooked some of the turnips that I got from Ladd the other day. Barbara is an expert at the pork chops, but this was the first time in my life that I’ve done anything with turnips. I treated them just like potatoes…skinned them, cut them into small pieces, boiled them until they were soft, and then mashed them with a stick of butter. I thought they were okay and they passed Mother’s taste test, so I guess we now have another menu item for the future.
While Barbara worked in the dining room taking care of bills this afternoon, I sat in the living room to work on the journal and watch basketball…saw bits and pieces of both the Baylor/Colorado and the Texas Tech/Oklahoma State games.
After feeding Mother and getting her settled in bed, we went to Brookshire’s to pick up a few items and then stopped off at Pizza Hut to order a pizza for our supper. When the pizza was ready, I went back to pick it up (no pizza delivery in Mineola) and I spent the rest of the evening working on the journal and watching TV while Barbara played online Family Feud and Scrabble with her friend Dandy in Abilene.
This week we have a couple of photos that we’ve received. One is of Jaycie and a couple of her friends, copied from Jaycie’s Facebook Page.
Just chilling in Mineola,
Jim/Dad/Gramps & Barbara/Mom/Grams
