Give me some leeway

 This will be my last attempt at this post, I have been starting it over and over and fighting each step of the way.  I can't seem to correct one error without creating 3 more.  I just took a nap, maybe that will help.

Friday morning I fell in my bedroom, and I have been in what looks like a fist fight, which I clearly lost.  I have two black eyes, a running scrape  from eyebrow to hair line and a lot of bruises.  I fell on my very well padded floor, and I was walking, not running, and I don't see how I should be so beat up now.  Now I am walking very very slowly, and trying to look only downward and not gazing around.  I am wishing for one of those padding suits like you see in the circus.  I am lucky to not have broken any bones with all the tumbling I do.  I called my doctor and she has given me pain meds to take the edge off all the bruises and scrapes.

I saw my new psychiatric doctor via Zoom and it went very well, I think we covered the the same ground as Dr. W.  She laughed at my humorous remarks, a good sign.  My next appt. is in April.  I guess she received the information from Dr. W.  Maybe it will take until April to go through it all.

I woke up  6 am last night when I saw an orange cat in the reflection of the phone.  I know I saw it, but C could not not find it, and I have no ability to drag my walker around calling "kitty kitty".  C  saw the neighbor's dog out running while he was getting the mail, and he said 'is that your dog'  ? and the neighbor said yes, and said the house they had before had a big meadow to chase things.  And then she went in the house and shut the door. The last two dogs that ran loose had their collars left hanging on their front door handles.  Another one was picked up by the dog catcher cost $200 to parole.This is what fences are for.  Maybe he will run away. I hope he doesn't catch the one of the cats --ours are indoor.  

People who think their pets are so cute and will tolerate any lawn toys as dog toys are mistaken.

All the neighborhood with loose animals are nice neighbors, but keep them in their homes or on a leash.

Time for another pain med.  and then for bed.  good evening.

Fall is here

 Well, actually, fall has come and gone, but hey, a little license here for now.

I will have to try to think up something pleasant to post, because today has been hell on wheels so far.

I took a fall last afternoon and now I look like 10 rounds with Muhammad Balboa .  I fell in my bedroom, on the super thick rug, and looks like I have fallen on brick, last night.  I got a bloody nose, 2 black eyes, a nasty scrape on my forehead , and bumps and bruises all over.  Hopefully that will be all the damages from the rest of me.  I want to take a shower, but I will wait until tomorrow, just in case.  The bathroom is the very worst place there is to fall; all sharp edges and unforgiving 

I called my Dr and she gave me a prescription for  pain meds.  Damn I am stiff today.  I canceled today's therapy.  I should be OK by next day.  

wishing you well.

heading for a sweet ; 

I Think there is some intros that cannot be re-done.

Skip this and go to the post above... 

thanks

Jingle bells all the way

I wish it were Christmas now, When the Christmas tree and the all the gifts were right, and the first time seeing all of them, that's what I loved.  I hung a long strap of horse bells on the hall door knob and put the door half open.  Now the kids tell me that they squeezed past the bells, to see the gifts.  They didn't open them or try to do much more then give them a shake because of the bells on the door.  N says he heard them hold the strap and squeeze past.  Giggling, all the way. 

Now of course they don't even want to get presents (they say), so I said each one is to buy just two for the other ones, and thus each have  2 gifts to open.  

We have had a gift of snow, and it is brutally cold, 7 degrees too cold to play in.  And we ran out of propane which pisses me off, I called last week and they said we were ok for now, we were due for a fill in March.  So we have all the electric heaters on in the house, and we are cold.  It is good that we have no horses or dogs to take care of anymore; we have had cold snaps before but this is ridiculous.  And of course we have no furnace as it is propane, as is the stove and thus we cannot cook so  we will go to Outback for dinner.  Hopefully they have propane or whatever and people to keep the grill going.  I am hungry as it is now (5 am.)  Today is R's birthday and C baked her cake in the toaster oven and it is...different.  Hopefully the taste is OK.

I think I will go back to sleep and stop worrying.  Bye for now.

When my friend's daughter decided to bake a cake while mom was at work, she called her mom all in swivet because the cake was all liquid.  Walking her through her recipe from the box cake, she said she used 3 cups of milk because she liked it moist, and the recipe said  2/3 cups of milk so she used 3 cups.  Makes sense, right?  Her mom said throw it out, there is no way to fix it, and she would bring home another and they would do it together.  I don't know how many "bakers" made the same mistake, thus selling 2 boxes of mix and not just one.  When I was a kid I made two layer cakes, every one did back then, and the top layer had a tendency to siillllde when transported.  I just tipped the platter to the other side and slid it back, a little icing to tidy the sides and good as gold.  The only time you see a layer cake now is on the outside of the box.  Easier, I  guess.

 I fell yesterday, walking  three steps between this chair and the bed.  Three steps!! nearly took the craft table with me, and so today I feel like I've been rode hard and put up wet.  I don't know why I fell, but for now I will walk with itsy bitsy steps.  I think I have now fallen in every possible place in this room.  Maybe I should strap pillows all around me, especially around my knees...  I don't think I will ever get to use a cane at this rate.  When I asked the therapist how long does he think I need to go with the walker, he said until I stop falling.  I am going to get a new walker, this one is wobbly in the side-to-side motion.  Maybe that will help.

Bye!

Nearly Tax Time

Now can we please move along to important things (COVID, highways and potholes, protecting Roe v Wade, education for all children, affordable college repayment and credit card debt) and on and on?  I don't want to hear the T word or see  a smug man-with-orange-toupee ever again?  Please?

The winter storm has not arrived here, but the photos of Cincinnati and cold weather everywhere in the East makes me anxious.  Will we have enough propane? So glad there are no horses to keep blankets on, water thawed, dogs inside (phew!), all the water lines open to warm air, and so on.  We were all so complacent last year when it was warm all winter, I never pulled my winter coat out, and now the snow, freezing rain, sleet, and cold cold weather is showing us how winter really is.  R is the only one who needs to drive to work and she comes home around 8:30pm over roads that are usually plowed/cindered/salted.  I guess schools are canceled too.  She may be at home for MLK Jr birthday.

I was all set to do taxes yesterday, put TurboTax in the drive, and whoops!  It is not compatible with Win 7.  So this morning is the download and installation of the Win 7 -->10 upgrade.  The other Win 10 is on the computer upstairs, which I cannot reach, other than crawling up and down.  Luckily there is a downloadable patch free from Windows, so fingers crossed.  So far it is 37% done.  In my room here it is warm thanks to the electric fireplace which is terrific.  But the computer room heater was used upstairs until C got an oil filled one, and was never brought back down.  So it will take an hour or two to heat the room.

I got my hair cut a couple of weeks ago, and it looked fine after the hairdresser styled it.  Once I box dyed it it looked awful.  Not the color, which was fine, but the haircut.  One side is OK, and the other side is Albert Einstein hairstyle.  I have tried to use electric curlers, blow drying, hair gels and multiple treatments.  I hate it.  I have cut the fringes myself, or used bobby pins.  I just don't look in the mirror now.  

I got a phone call last week from Dr. A saying that I missed my appointment.  When I said, OH no when was it? she said, Now.  So we did a virtual therapy with Zoom and it worked out amazingly well.  I think it is good I need not get ready, get in the car, go to the building and look for a wheelchair, although I would have liked some makeup and a little hair taming.  Anyway, she seems good, I had the same psych doctor for around 20 years, so I was leery of a new one, but I am cautiously pleased.  It's a good sign that she laughed at my jokes.

Well I will check out the progress on Win 10 and get my taxes and R taxes in shape, although I don't actually send them until nearly April 15, we haven't been audited since 2010 and they sent us $$, so talk goes that if they have to pay, you never get audited again.  Even so, we had/have audit defense just in case.

Bye!

 

Charity

I guess it stands to reason that charitable organizations ramp up their "please donate" letters at Christmas time.  I have routinely given small donations at that time, maybe 6 or 7 different charities.  But times are tough now, and rather than sending each 5 dollars, I give $30 a month to two groups that I have supported for years.  They are St. Labre Indian Catholic School in Montana and St. Joseph's Indian School in S.D.  If I can, I add a donation to St. Jude in Memphis.  I have been in St. Jude and talked with some of the investigators in the research part so I feel a connection there. The Indian schools provide an extremely necessary haven for the very poorest children in a depressed area that is mostly overlooked now.  I just wish I could do more.  I still remember that stupid Rush guy on the radio saying that before being allowed to stay in a shelter they should show tax or wage proofs that they are really indigent.  Like they are such a great place that non-poor people are really trying to get there in order to get free lodging.  And in the highly unlikely event that they might have some sort of paperwork, does he think they carry that around in their grocery carts? I was in a laundromat while his program was on, and I'm sure the other ladies thought I was nuts as I argued in rebuttal to the broadcast, but there was no way to get them to switch the station.  Anyway, about Christmas giving, the sure sign that things are tough now is that the pleas for donations continue after the holidays, running the risk of exhausting their donors.  No more political donations from me, they are a never-ending cycle of need for this candidate, or this program, or this party.  I thought the election would put an end to the begging, but apparently not.  I am just tired, I won't read stories about Trump or his witless followers anymore.  

Maybe there should be a program for sending all our wealthy representatives to a shelter for a day or two.  That would give them a new slant on public moneys. It was Senator Everett Dirksen (60s) who is credited with saying "A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money."

I had a flabbergasted phone conversation last week.  I called CVS pharmacy to find out if my doctor had called in a script for a new drug for me.  I couldn't use the automated refill because it was a new script and thus I had no Rx number.  What I needed was a pharmacist, but I would listen to the recorded message about hours, address, Covid vaccines, flu shots, etc., etc.  And when the Voice finally sent me to a person, the man that answered said "would you hold" all in one breath, so I couldn't say "NO" and then I would briefly hear the god awful music, and then be disconnected.  Three times.  When the man finally answered, I said, "oh Jesus"  and he replied well that's not very nice.  I told him briefly about being disconnected three times, and he said he put me on hold and when he returned I had hung up.  I said no, you disconnected me, and he said, well you weren't very nice.  I want to change drug stores.  This one is too far away in any case.  And at 70 years old I'm well past the time when my vocabulary needs attention, profanity notwithstanding.

High?

  It's hard to use this keyboard with a bandaid on my index finger, all because of a toxic hangnail.  That's just a hangnail that's painful when bumped.  Still I will struggle on for now.

I think this is the wrong font/size again, but I am too lazy to figure out how they should be.  I use a MacBook Air, but I need to use both hands, where the Kindles let me use their keyboard with one hand which is some improvement.  Some.  I have 4 functional Kindles, two are mine and two were my husbands'.  He was always hard on gadgets, and the Kindle DX now has a 'next page' sticking key, and a very weak battery.  When I look online at the manuals, they all say the same: don't try to replace the battery.  Apparently the batteries are glued in with big gloops of heavy adhesive along with nearly everything in the case, and battery change is not a do-it-yourself project.  The keyboard can be replaced, the entire QWERTY keypad, but nothing is said about the function keys.  There is a group that takes broken Kindles, fixes them and then gives them to schools, and I plan to do that with the DX, it is the very large black and grey one, and is useful for kids that need a larger screen to read.  That will leave me with 2 second generations, one paper white and one Fire (color).  I wish I could transfer all of the books to one kindle, instead of searching through four to find the book I want.  Ah well, soon enough I will be down to 2 and then they will get donated too.  The paper white is the only one I can easily see.

Last week I had a routine appt. at the hospital, and as I started to stand up beside the car I landed another nosebleed.  I tried to hide it while pinching, I was afraid the clinic people would send me off to the ER, which I did NOT want to do.  So I was a little late for my appointment, but the nosebleed stopped.  This is only the second one I have ever had, and it surprises me how very bright the blood is.  And how hard it is to stop.

The snow from last Wednesday is pretty much gone, between the warm temps. and some rain.  We are slated to get tons of snow on Sunday the 7th but the meteorological data is usually right for the What but not the HowMuch calls.  We live on a ridge and the weather routinely parts and slides over to either side without a lot of snow or rain for us.  I can hope.  

Before they died my parents lived further from town but in a valley and they got lots of snow.  They had a garage and a paved driveway, but the driveway was steep and the snow was slippery there.  When my Dad was in the hospital for several days with a burst appendix, my Aunt from mid-state came to stay with Mom.  Just before the turn to their road there was a Quick Mart, and I would stop there and put the snow chains on the Subaru to tackle the road and the driveway.  They went every day to see 

Dad, and I took them home when visiting hours ended.  I got to where I could whip those chains on and tightened in just minutes.  After I dropped them off I stopped at the Quick Mart and took the chains off and  went home. The only tricky part of the whole process was to get the car in the garage so they didn't have to stagger through snow to go in the front door.  I would have to give the car a gun to get to the top, and then immediately stop before I hit the back wall.  I got pretty good at that too.  When I sold their house it was in the spring, and one buyer said to the other something to the effect that the driveway was steep but since it was paved they wouldn't have any trouble in the winter; to which I said *nothing*.  Caveat emptor.  

Well I've blathered on for a fair amount of reminiscing so I will stop for today.  Bye!