I still worry about waking the cat when I go into the kitchen at night.
And I worry about stepping on him when I'm walking around in the dark.
9:35 AM 2/3/2023
Dave is off to his pre-op consultation.
10:53 PM 2/5/2023
I scored seven at Hexavirus at bedtime. That's almost as good as it gets, but I did score an eight once.
7:43 PM 2/8/2023
I'm going to the hospital with Dave tomorrow, intending to drive the car home (with a stop for groceries), but prepared to stay all day.
Preparing to stay all day entailed an unexpected hour organizing the sewing room. I have some small items that need resistor-coded bar tacks, and thought that I'd throw them and my resistor-code kit into my go bag. The resistor-code kit was (a) in a trunk that was buried under my current project (b) not nearly as complete as I'd thought it was.
And in getting more embroidery floss off the shelf, I knocked down a bunch of other stuff.
I thought for a while there that I didn't have any gray floss.
Dave says he's a nervous wreck. I suggested dealing with stress the way I do: pass out. (Either I've grown out of it, or I've had it pretty good the last few decades.)
He also can't have anything to eat or drink after midnight, and the operation isn't until one in the afternoon.
---------------
Sunday night, or maybe it was Monday, I spent a couple of hours bringing the Banner up to date, polishing interesting entries that recorded stuff that I wanted to remember.
Then in a fit of efficiency, I deleted the notes that I'd used to create entries. I was, after all, about to back up the main file.
Somehow the back-up managed to copy an obsolete file over every last copy of the Banner, but every copy of the notes file is the latest version.
5:00 PM 2/9/2023
Home again. The sentinel node was clean, so the cancer probably hasn't spread. Dave is walking already, but the surgeon said not to walk more than he had to for two weeks.
We did have a shopping stop on the way home: at Zale's to pick up antibiotic and pain killer.
Dave longed for soup, so I reconstituted some Guatemalan chao mein noodles. I overcooked them into mush, but after nearly twenty-four hours without food, he ate them anyway.
I sewed all the bar tacks and darned a sock. I need to take a fresh business card and re-wind the marking threads in an organized way.
10:19 AM 2/10/2023
A little panic this morning when Dave discovered that he'd mislaid his antibiotic. I blamed myself, because I knew he was drunk when I handed him the bag of medicine and I didn't watch to see what he did with it. (We were both pretty keen on getting home by then.)
We searched the car a few times, Dave looked in all his pockets, I got a flashlight and looked under the car from all four sides, Dave took all the stuff out of the center console and brought it into the kitchen. (Later, I put two of the items back.)
Finally I got a wild hair and looked on the study center where Dave keeps his pills. Dave hadn't seen it because he was looking for a bottle and they put pills that come on cards into sandwich bags. I had noticed that the five pills were on cards in a sandwich bag because I cuss at my Fosamax every Sunday. The plastic on the Fosamax is so stiff that one not only can't "push the pill through the foil", one can't push the pill out when the foil is completely removed. But it will fall out if one taps the card and no bits of foil stick out into its path.
The ice the high winds piled on the shore is still there, but smaller and rounder. I still don't believe how high it was piled.
8:18 PM 2/13/2023
Dave came back from Dr. Ilada with all-good news today. He doesn't need a colonoscopy, and he can resume taking Plavek, so he doesn't have to call the heart doctor in Fort Wayne to weigh the risks of bleeding vs. heart valve, and Dr. Ilada set him up with a heart doctor here in Warsaw — Dave said he doesn't mind driving to Fort Wayne, but I don't think that someone going to see a heart doctor ought to.
Dr. Ilada also inspected the surgical wounds and said that they were doing fine, don't mess with them.
I'll report on Saturday's bike ride tomorrow.
1:22 PM 2/14/2023
I just scored minus one at Hexavirus. It must be time for a nap.
10:22 PM 2/14/2023
I forgot eggs when I went to Kroger on Saturday, so Dave went to Martin's today.
When he said it was time to leave, I asked him which doctor he was seeing.
Washed clothes, did a little sewing, got a letter for a round robin ready to print.
That last was embarrassing. I forgot I was the robinmaster and didn't start the round.
It's late and I don't feel like writing a ride report.
9:51 AM 2/15/2023
Dave is Roomba-ing the south end of the house today. He commented that Roomba doesn't get stuffed the way it used to.
I'm washing a sheet. I threw the pillows on the floor without worrying that they would fall into a litter box.
10:13 AM 2/15/2023
I was planning to ride to the animal shelter and come back through Sprawlmart on Saturday, when sunny weather is predicted, but I accidentally discovered that there is a farmer's market at Pete Thorn Center, which is halfway to Meijer, so I think I'll go there.
Yesterday's paper had a story about the Girl Scout cookie drive, I went to the G.S. website to find out when and where, and one of the booths is at the Farmers and Artisans Market.
The market ends at noon, so I don't know how to fit a stop at Zale's to pick up levothyroxin into that ride. But I have enough for two weeks and a day. (It would have been even harder to fit into a trip to Sprawlmart.)
15:49
Finally awake with nothing higher on my priority list than writing up Saturday's ride.
The plan was to tour downtown Warsaw, and stop for milk and eggs on the way back.
My itinerary was first to Our Father's House to drop off unwanted items, then to Warsaw Health Foods to see whether the sesame sticks were back, then back across the railroad to go to Lowery's to see whether I can buy cord elastic and eighth-inch elastic, across the street to the Mexican produce market, back along Winona to Carniceria San José, back across the railroad to Kroger, then home.
It went as planned for a while. I dropped off two still-in-the-unopened-box bras that don't fit and other items that I've forgotten, and bought a meat hammer and a small seamless funnel of a style that is no longer being made. (Pieced-together funnels are New and Improved.) Our Father's house has two new stores: Our Father's Pantry and Our Father's Closet. Did someone underwrite them or is the thrift shop selling that much stuff at teeny prices? The store where Our Father's House used to sell furniture is empty.
There is a new Mexican produce shop near Our Father's House, Mi Poblanita. I bought three cans of La Preferida tomato sauce and a short, very fat carrot. It makes uniform slices. They had iceberg lettuce, but buying something that is easily bruised at the start of an all-day ride didn't seem advisable.
Still no sesame sticks at Warsaw Health Foods. I bought nuts, sunflower seeds, and a bag of carob-coated raisins.
Then I was faint with hunger and didn't like any of the snacks along the front of the counter, so I went downtown to Subway and ate half of a six-inch #4 (Supreme Meat) submarine.
I frequently use Detroit to get from Winona to Market, but I very much dislike going the other way, so I rode back to Park Avenue, which ends on Market at a strip mall that doesn't seem to have a name. The martial-arts place is now next to a fitness place of the same name. Discount Warehouse is closed until further notice, and I didn't see anything I wanted at Dollar General.
When I came out of Dollar General, I thought that I wouldn't feel like grocery shopping after forthing and backing on Winona, so I got back on Park and took Clark to Lincoln to Fort Wayne to Kroger. This, it turned out, was a very lucky decision.
Once again, there was no iceberg in the lettuce department and I settled for buttercrunch. Later I noticed that there was a bin of iceberg next to the bin of carrots, but I'd wooled the buttercrunch around getting it into the produce bag and didn't feel it was right to put it back. There's still a golf ball left of the iceberg I got at Aldi
Here's a feat I couldn't have accomplished in my callow youth: I packed fifty dollars worth of groceries onto my bike despite having shopped at two other places while also carrying a windbreaker, a warmer scarf, and my little bag of stuff. (bag of small tools, spare mask, sun visor for over-lit stores, . . . ) It did make the bike top heavy, but it isn't far from Kroger to home.
The load didn't include eggs. I *know* they were on my list.
When I got home a little after half-past three, I found a copy of The Thaddeus in the mailbox, and intended to take it to Dave and say "Good baby! You didn't walk to the mailbox!", but he was sound asleep, so I emptied my pockets onto the kitchen table instead of putting stuff into my jeans pockets and the drawer of the dresser. I *did* put my phone on charge, which puts it into my jeans pocket.
I'd taken off three shirts (leaving one silk undershirt), put all the groceries away, eaten most of the left-over submarine, and started getting ready to crawl into bed next to Dave when he came into the kitchen fully dressed and said he had to go to the emergency room.
After many tests and an appointment with his surgeon, the verdict was "Ignore it and it will go away" and he ignored it and it went away, so I'll proceed to complain about the inconvenience.
This wasn't a lights-and-siren-he's-bleeding-out type emergency; this was a "the doctor said if I see traces of blood, I should find out why right away" emergency. I should have calmly changed my clothes, swept the stuff on the table into my go bag, and moved my bag of emergency food from the bike's little bag of stuff to my go bag.
Instead, I shoveled the stuff on the floor around the go bag back into it —including, it turned out, a pair of dirty socks, but nothing useful except for a copy of Analog and my go-bag little bag of stuff, which contained a pair of magnifiers to read the Analog with.
The go bag did contain another pair of socks to darn (I think I mentioned in the text file I'm going to paste in later that I darned one of two pairs of hand-knit wool socks while Dave was getting his melanoma off and two lymph nodes out.), but it's fine work in black-on-black, and I'd been about to take a belated nap. My eyes don't focus well when I'm tired.
I did remember to put a bottle of water into the bottle pocket.
Come to think of it, the bag is now sitting precisely where it sat when I threw stuff out of it getting out Dave's shorts, which we'd taken to the melanoma surgery in case his dressings wouldn't fit into his long pants. There's no stuff scattered around it this time because the stuff I took out was on top.
I grabbed my jeans and a snap-front shirt, forgetting that my deck of cards (including my driving license) and my cash were on the kitchen table. (I do keep $4.50 in coins in my jeans pocket.) I forgot my veil, but I keep my second-best veil in the car for just such an emergency. I gave a brief thought to retrieving my bag of emergency food from my bike's little bag of stuff, but I'd just eaten and the hospital cafeteria is just around the corner from the emergency room. Turns out that soda, juice, chips, and pretzels are all the food the emergency room serves.
Dave drove to the walk-up entrance, and after I parked the car, I put on the shirt and rolled up the jeans and put them into the bag. Sometime or another I moved my car keys and phone to the pockets of the shirt.
Now it's after ten and I'm groggy again. In one of the intervals of writing, I discovered that I had two feet of available book shelf, and among the stuff on the floor under the shelf was a pair of writing mitts that I've been looking for for two years. I'll tell that story tomorrow.
I now have access to the dictionaries on the coffee table.
And I don't have as many uncatalogued children's books as I thought I had. Still don't know the location of a home-ec book that includes a recipe I want to try.
I served buttercrunch honeymoon salads with our TV dinner, and Dave said the lettuce was particularly good.
I think that all that's left of the ride report is that it was after half-past eight when we got home. He'd had a bag of potato chips in the emergency room, and I'd had half a glass of grape juice. He ate the two bites I'd left of the submarine; I had something more substantial, but I've forgotten what.
Years ago I cleared off my shelf of children's books and put them on the coffee table intending to catalog them as I put them back on the shelf. ( http://wlweather.net/PAGEJOY/LINKS/BOOKS/BOOKS.HTM ) Times when I had both the time and the wit to catalog proved rarer than expected, and I nearly always forgot that I had it to do, even when I left the next book to be catalogued on my mouse pad, so the coffee table remained a mess.
Until yesterday, when I decided to pile the uncatalogued books in my room and neaten up the coffee table. In looking for a place to pile them, I found that I had two feet of available shelf space. Only two books don't fit on a pile that takes up a third of it.
All I did today was sew, and I put in only about twenty minutes at it. Haven't read the paper yet either. (It's a quarter to eight.)
After supper, Dave and I filled the trunk of the car with litter boxes and cat toys. He scrubbed out the shallower bus-boy tray and washed the two steel litter scoops. We're keeping the deeper bus-boy tray to soak my feet in and put under drips. I'll have to find a place to put it.
8:10 PM 2/16/2023
The entire LETTERS folder has vanished. Both of the copies on Optiplex 4 are obsolete, and there is no trace of the fresh back-ups I made yesterday.
I hate Windows with a purple passion.
This morning we went to the animal shelter. It was closed, but a worker saw Dave and propped the door open with an astroturf dog. (It was more like topiary than like AstroTurf.) It took so long to fill the trunk that I was surprised at how little time it took to empty it; I think we made no more than two trips each, and it made a very small pile.
And I just now realized that we missed two water dishes on the floor under the chair beside my bicycle.
8:30 PM 2/17/2023
I spent the rest of the day sewing.
I've been looking forward to potato salad even though the five pounds of potatoes I bought are a lot smaller than I would have chosen if I'd known I'd want to make potato salad, but when time came to make it, I decided that I could find something at Meijer to take to the pitch-in luncheon. Any cold side dish will do. And I do have a crock pot and a rice cooker; I could take a hot dish.
I may make the salad for just us later in the week.
5:06 PM 2/18/2023
I found the Letters folder! It had been moved to be a subdirectory of Literature. How, I have no clue.
I went to the Winter Artisans and Farmers Market today. The booth that sells the sausages we really, really like was there, but I hadn't come prepared to buy frozen food.
I went on to Meijer. It wasn't very interesting, but I bought a pair of tights at Goodwill on the way. I ate lunch at Panda Express outside to save peeling off layers. I was warm despite the wind, but my food was chilled.
I washed dish towels and cleaning rags today. I soaked them overnight in Tandil and meat tenderizer, soaked them in bleach in the morning, rinsed them in hot water (Which isn't easy in a modern washer), and hung them in the sun for hours. Most of the stains in the bar-mop towels came out.
I looked everywhere my laundry-basket stand might have blown to and couldn't find it. I managed to hang up by taking more than one item out of the basket each time I bent over, and was halfway through taking them down by taking all of one kind of item inside to fold when I complained to Dave that I'd lost my basket stand and he saw it hanging on the hose rack. Then I remembered hanging it up so it wouldn't blow away.
So I folded the rest of the load into the basket.
I guess that's payback for finding his antibiotic. What would we do without each other?
I still want a three-leg stool to put my laundry basket on. I think I should be looking in camping-supply stores instead of furniture stores and big-box stores.
The load included five of the diapers Linda left in the house. Some of them aren't going to survive too many more trips through the washing machine.
11:07 PM
Yesterday, we agreed that all went well with the service, luncheon, and society meeting.
I lucked out with my contribution. I chickened out of potato salad — I couldn't count the number of bowls of potato salad on the table. I thought that if I didn't find anything at Meijer, I could line the bottom of my rice cooker with bacon and dump in a can of baked beans. There were four crock pots (more or less; I counted, but didn't write it down) of beans.
I bought bow-tie pasta salad, but didn't buy grape tomatoes and the salad was in desperate need of a garnish, so I filled two sandwich bags with cut-up raw vegetables (one for roots, one for fruits), took along a jar of sweet pickles, and put three paper platters in a two-gallon zip-loc bag, intending to mound the salad in the middle of the triple platter and put relish all around. Turned out that there was *no* other relish plate! Someone brought in another later on, but there was no overlap.
When I was ready to assemble the plate, I realized that the paper platter was much too small, and used one of the church's pressed-glass trays. That made a beautiful presentation! I'll count on borrowing a plate if I ever take relish plate again; after all, I'm always on the dish-washing committee, so I'm entitled to dirty one.
During clean-up, just as I was wondering how I'd get the paper platters back into my bag, someone needed a big zip-lock bag, so I gave her the one the platters were in and added the platters to the church's supply of paper plates.
But my bag was very heavy walking home. On the way, I reflected that it would be lighter coming back; even if they didn't eat much of my contribution, I'd pour out the melted ice. I forgot that people on the clean-up committee tend to accumulate left-overs.
Afterward, I slept until it was time to clear the fridge onto the counter and call it leftover smorgasbord.
It's after half-past eleven; I'd better get to brushing my teeth and going to bed.
Dave and I went to Mad Anthony's for lunch, and shared a plate of jambalaya. We both overate.
But Dave had a half dozen oysters, and when the jambalaya stung my mouth, I ordered a glass of milk, forgetting that "a glass" is a pint — and I drank all of it.
Reminds me of ordering a pint of milk in southern England and getting an undersized juice glass. In the eighties, Britain had the most *wonderful* milk — but it never occurred to them that one might drink it.
In the twentieth century, I tasted an oyster every ten years because I couldn't believe that anything non-toxic could taste that bad. This century, I'm taking my word for it even though it's more likely that something has changed.
I purged the text file before starting to write — using the *Web* copy of the Banner to check that the notes had been transcribed.
6:52 PM 2/24/2023
I had the whole day for sewing, but somehow it got to be lunchtime before I touched it. I did get some work done while waiting for my skillet-roasted vegetables garnished with pork to steam. It wasn't until I was scraping the vegetables onto a plate that I remembered that we have a parsnip root.
I did bake four slices of parsnip with the tuna steak we had for supper. When I cook the other steak, I'll bake it ten minutes instead of fifteen, and use more corn oil.
Dave worked on the power washer in the afternoon. It looks a lot cleaner, and now the wheels turn.
In the morning, he went to see Dr. Kamanda. Once the surgery heals, he'll have radiation on his leg or chemo. I think that chemo will be easier to put up with and do more good, but I was quite certain I didn't have it straight *before* I noticed that I'd heard "chemo once every three weeks for a month".
Meanwhile, I do have it straight that Dr. Kamanda told him to "eat well" and mentioned nuts, so I got some walnuts out of the freezer and put them into a candy cannister I'd just emptied of cheese crackers. I should wash the candy dish recently emptied of toffee dark chocolate almonds and fill it with pecans.
7:48 PM 2/24/2023
Facebook allowed me to log out today!
I must try to post something the next time I log in.
9:46 AM 2/25/2023
The daffodils are half a foot high, and I'm going for a ride wearing only three pairs of tights and two pairs of socks.
Planning to put on a third shirt before I leave.
4:56 PM 2/26/2023
I was cold on the ride, but not cold enough to get my windbreaker out of the pannier and put it on.
My itinerary was disturbingly similar to the Saturday before last, the one that got a detailed write-up in the Banner, but there were no incidents except that Dave arrived home while I was still trying to put my bike in its parking place. I bought a "protein puck" at Warsaw Health Foods (still no sesame sticks) instead of going to Subway, and did go to Lowery's (still no cord elastic) and El Padrino. But I gave Carniceria San José a miss and went straight to Kroger from El Padrino. I got an avocado at El Padrino, and a pineapple at La Poblacito.
9:35 AM 2/26/2023
The lake is still up over the sandbar.
4:38 PM 2/26/2023
Got a notification e-mail from Facebook, was already logged in, couldn't reply to the post, but was allowed to log out. I'd viewed a couple of Web notifications before trying to log out.
I presume that I was still logged in from the refusal to allow me to log out yesterday — log out was offered, but I remembered that I meant to try to reply, and wasn't allowed to log out after the attempt.
Dave spent the day taking his Lazy-Boy apart for a cleaning and lubing. He organized the document drawer and moved it to a larger drawer in the process. I promptly moved the rolls of tape from the hammer-and-flashlights drawer to the former document drawer.
2:15 PM 2/28/2023
Good weather for cycling tomorrow. I was fussing over what to wear, since all my six-pocket shirts are pullovers, and that would make it time consuming to expose an arm for a blood draw. Finally realized that I could wear my five-pocket windbreaker over walking shirts. It will get warm, Weather Underground says, but not so warm that I will mind wearing a windbreaker — and I could take off a walking shirt or two.
I'll take a grocery bag to put the windbreaker into while I'm inside. Easier than rolling it up in the manner that keeps everything inside the pockets. And that also gives me a way to carry my helmet — the helmet isn't worth protecting, but it sports a genuine Chuck Harris mirror that can't be replaced.
6:22 PM 2/28/2023
It's lucky that I laid out my clothes even though my appointment is in the afternoon. My only warm snap-front shirt was missing. I finally found it on the to-do hook in the sewing room: I had to sew a snap back on. The snap had stuck to its other half, and it had left a clear imprint on the fabric, so that wasn't difficult — once I located a suitable needle. When done, I stuck the needle into a scrap of wool and put it into the bag with the heavy-duty silk thread.
At Dave's latest appointment, Dr. Iloda said he was done with him. This was such a relief that he forgot to ask when he could resume using the treadmill, but his leg will tell him more accurately than Iloda could. Today the leg said that five minutes at one mile per hour was sufficient. It was Dave's first time back; he said that he needed the arm exercises he did.
I haven't been at all — it's so inconvenient to get there. Leaving the house — even for a two-minute blood draw such as I'm getting tomorrow — takes up my whole day.
I do plan to buy groceries on the way home.
⁂