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The pillowcases are off the furniture. I have nine standard-size cases, plus two hand-embroidered cases that were probably a wedding present, and assorted odd-fabric cases used for odd purposes. (There's a duck case left from when I kept a pair of pillows in the car in case of banquets.) And a few that fit my little feather pillow.
There are no standard pillow cases on the bed. Dave's "My Pillow" fits a standard case, but it uses the cases that came with the sheets, and I file the one not in use with the un-opened package of gray sheets and the bag the white sheets came in.
Re-rolling the linens will have to wait until I wash the strip I tore off an old quilt-lining sheet.
The muslin and some other rags are on the line.
I unloaded the handkerchief box so that I could wash the pillowcase the handkerchiefs were wrapped in. That silk handkerchief shouldn't be in there with the cotton and linen. Any takers?
Looking at the picture, I wondered about the nondescript gray handkerchief — I hadn't noticed more than one "blow" handkerchief. (Handkerchiefs used to be divided into "show" and "blow".)
So I took a closer look, and that, too, is silk, with a fancy hem. I should wash both, because silk doesn't like to be left dry too long.
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Later noticed a hole in the printed silk handkerchief.
We cleaned the freezer in the afternoon. We prefer to do that when the weather is below freezing, but the frost was so thick that the situation was desperate. It got easier when I remembered that we have two packets of black ice, and used those to keep the Wheelie Cool cold. Both they and the lesser cold packs were still hard when I put stuff back in.
I'm moving stuff out of the little freezer when it gets in my way. The pack in the big freezer is much looser than it was even though all we took out was the last mochi (ice-cream dumpling) and the last slice of anniversary cake. Both yummy.
I was singing "Democrat corn and I don't care"* in the shower this morning, which reminded me of a story about Nancy — and I realized that whenever I thought about that story, I visualized Mom watching Nancy through the window over the stove, but I had learned to read before the kitchen was moved to its present location (I presume the new owner didn't move it again.).
I don't remember any windows at all in the part of the utility room that would have been the kitchen. I wonder whether there is any sign of the pitcher pump that was in the sink. There must have been a pipe from there to the well. I imagine that any evidence would have been buried when the concrete floor was poured.
And Mom and Dad might still have been living with Dad's parents when Nancy was old enough to talk. I do know that Mom was in the house when it burned down, because she told me once how people behaved during a fire. I didn't realize until much later that it was from personal experience.
Anyhow, the story goes that Mom discovered that she could keep Nancy occupied for hours by putting a bathtub on the front lawn and putting Nancy in the tub.
On one of the occasions when she checked on Nancy, she was singing "You gots to be a Dumpycrat to get your fence rows cleaned out."
One of the make-work projects of the depression was cleaning out fence rows — but the fence rows of Republicans were skipped.
* I frequently mangle lyrics.
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In the afternoon, Steve drove us to Fort Wayne to get Dave's staples out. All seems to be going well, come back in two weeks, stop putting a dressing on in one week, at which time we begin putting ointment on twice a day instead of once. Change the Tegaderm every three days. And I have leave to clean the graft very, very gently to keep the ointment from building up.
We saw the ashes in the median of SR 30 on the way east, but I missed them on the way back. It must have been a very hot fire that there is no sign of regrowth after quite a while.
On the eastbound leg, an incident near Columbia City slowed traffic to a walking pace for miles, but despite our slow speed it was in view too briefly for me to see more than that there was more than one police car and at least one passenger car. I *think* I saw an ambulance.
We had a light supper of pizza-flavor Hot Pockets and canned spinach.
Some time after supper, a wasp stung Dave on the hand and it is very painful.
All the big-freezer stuff is out of the little freezer.
The sting has subsided to itching. I don't intend to re-activate it by asking how it's going.
I've finally scratched "scan deck" off my list of things to do. It didn't take long once I got at it, but I had to scan the fronts twice because one of the cards was upside down.
I set the scanner for "auto" and it made a PDF. I'm not curious enough to make a scan with "Photo" to see whether a JPG is better or worse. "Document" also makes a PDF.
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The handkerchiefs are back in the box.
I wonder who M.W. was?
I kept the silk handkerchiefs out. Perhaps I'll put them in the silk-scraps box.
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The new footstool that came in yesterday's mail (or maybe it was the day before) is covered with non-skid points that are very uncomfortable on bare feet. Rather odd in a stool meant for getting in and out of bed.
I found a filthy carpet sample that is just the right size on the garage floor, whapped it on the sycamore tree, put it through a rinse-and-spin, then washed it. I was planning to sew D rings to it when it dries, so that Dave can secure it with bungee cords, but the sharp points may hold it in place without further coercion. [It did need the D rings.]
While I was gallivanting on my bike, Dave Roomba'd and mopped the kitchen.
I passed a sign pointing to "Farmers and Artisans Market" on my way to the courthouse, and thought "What, another one? I must investigate on my way back."
Got to the courthouse and found no indication that anybody had ever planned any sort of event anywhere near. At which point, I deduced that the market had been moved to the Pete Thorne Center. There were plenty of signs marking the way; I can't imagine why there was no note left at the place where people expected to find the market.
I spent money at all three this week: smoked-brisket sliders, which we had for supper, at the ice rink; pears at the fairgrounds; and Jody's cookies at the Pete Thorne Center.
I washed the sheets and some other things that require hot water and bleach today. I followed Dave's suggestion and threw in a handful of borax, and the rag I use to wipe the clothesline before hanging the sheets came so clean that it wasn't strikingly obvious which one it was. My white linen do rag, which I put away for the winter today, didn't brighten up that much, but the yellow doesn't show in LED light.
For supper, I baked the honey-nut squash that I bought at the fairgrounds the Saturday before last. I was going to stuff it with seasoned-up canned corned-beef hash, my usual resort when baking squash, but at the last minute I remembered that I had two half-pound packages of raw meat loaf in the freezer. A little after the last minute, because a bit was still frozen when I put it into the squash even though I'd had it in a bowl of water in the sink. Since I stuffed it a while before putting it into the oven, that may have been all to the good.
An excellent way to cook the meat loaf; when I tried to fry a patty the day I made it, it fell apart when I turned it over. And it is very good meatloaf. I plan to buy an acorn squash for the remaining half pound next Saturday.
I stuffed the other half of the squash with a cut-up cooking apple with butter, cinnamon, and brown sugar. We ate all of the apple and scraped out the syrup-soaked squash, but most of the squash remains for another day.
I finally finished rolling up the linen napkins today. Before starting, I photographed the copy of the linen-sheet doily:
I couldn't get a clear shot of the whole doily, so I photographed a detail:
Having the camera out, I took a few more pictures along the way:
A crocheted doily of unknown provenance. All I know for sure is that I didn't do it.
I knitted this doily out of carpet warp. I think it was an exercise in increasing and decreasing. The bind-off is single crochet over very large overs.
Assorted pretties.
There is no way I can get these rolls back into the linen closet. I think that there is room on the top shelf of my fabric-stash closet.
Yesterday I put the electric heater up in the attic. Today it's time to bring it down.
In the middle of the night, I discovered an admirable feature of our hallway smoke alarm: instead of chirping when the battery is low, it emits a distressed-machinery squeak.
When I finally found out which device was squeaking, I shut it into Dave's office.
I was already out of bed when I first heard it. Thought I'd stepped on something.
Yesterday we saw the urologist in the morning and the cardiologist in the evening. This morning I picked up the new medicine the cardiologist prescribed and did a major shopping at Kroger.
We'd been planning to take the gift card Andy & Jamie gave us to a fancy restaurant, but since I was restocking the frozen dinners we'd drawn down before the freezer cleaning, this was a chance to spend all of it in one go.
In the evening I washed my clothes, and this morning I put all of them away.
We'll be off to see Nalamolu, the cancer doctor, in a few minutes.
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No news is good news.
I'm not exaggerating when I say we can share a TV dinner and have leftovers. But this was a Hungry Man dinner with three pieces of fried chicken.
After supper, in a last-ditch effort to get the tea stains out of my only white shirt, I soaked it for five minutes in a strong bleach solution and then ran it through a Delicate cycle to get the bleach out.
This is my first use of the Delicate cycle, and I see that they mean that they run in enough water that your delicate things can float instead of scrubbing against one another with parts above the water. This is a plus for getting bleach out.
But no amount of water seems to get bleach off my hands.
The bleach appears to have worked.
On the way to the ice-rink market, thought I was going to get rained on, but it turned out to be a lovely day. After bringing the brisket sliders home, I bought a honeynut squash at the fairgrounds, renewed a book and returned another at the library, took a lap around the courthouse, bought bread and cookies at the Pete Thorne Center, and went back on Lyon Street to check out the new recreationway at Central Park.
It is not easy to cross Detroit at Lyon Street.
Home by way of Smith Street. I stopped at Sherman & Lin's and bought a St. Anne's cheese ball. Thought it was odd to have them on sale so early, but didn't remember that they are sold frozen until I tried to spread some on my newly-purchased bread for lunch.
In the evening, Steve and Martha brought us some sourdough bread and elderberry jam.
I don't remember what I did with today, aside from making a start on gathering the back of the neck of the orange dress I intend to make into a slopping-around shirt. And I spent some time working on my 2025 calendar.
I baked a huge piece of Banquet fried chicken in the big oven for supper and we had enough for a lunch left over. Rice and zapped frozen broccoli for sides, and an apple zapped in a left-over squash skin with butter, brown sugar and cinnamon for desert. I ate half the left-over apple and squash with my bedtime snack.
I hope the fairgrounds market has acorn squash next Saturday. But there is no more meatloaf to bake in it. We had baked honeynut squash Sunday night, since there were no small round squashes on Saturday, with meatloaf on one half and apple in the other.
I washed the sheets and took a short ride to Zales, Kroger, and Jimmy-Johns. We didn't leave much of the Ultimate Porker that I bought.
Dave started a drive in the truck while I was mounting up for the medicine-and-food ride. He got back first.
Great Courses is doing post-revolution American history at the moment.
When we first stopped putting Adaptic (non-adherent dressing that one smears with antibiotic cream to make it stick) on Dave's graft, I patted the graft carefully with artificial tears on a sterile pad. (Genteal is a tolerable substitute for sterile saline.) Then I switched to water that the water heater had pasteurized on a rag that had been washed with hot water and bleach. Now I grab the washrag Dave is currently using and run it under the nearest faucet.
The consumption of antibiotic cream dropped an order of magnitude when I stopped using it as glue and just coated the graft.
The graft seems to be healing well, and I hope that when Crevecouer looks at it next Thursday, he'll tell us not to come back.
The donor site is healing much faster than the first donor site.
Just when Dave got permission to shower his head, his heart doctor slapped a monitor that has to be kept dry onto his chest.
Oops, I had an appointment with the eye doctor today. Last week I noted that it was next week and continued thinking next week into this week.
Now I've got an appointment for Tuesday of next week. And a severely disrupted nap; I couldn't get back into resting mode after the call.
TV dinner for supper doesn't look bad: meat and potatoes, and I've got lima beans thawing.
I've started cleaning the shelves in the laundry room. Found a bottle of rubbing alcohol that belongs with the lotions on the top shelf of the medicines cabinet.
I've hung my new slopping-around pants in the back of the closet and taken out a pair of lightweight sweat pants. And my riding knickers are in the laundry bin to get the sunscreen off before I put them away for the winter.
I've finally learned how to spell "Nalamolu". Just pronounce it "nala-molu" instead of "n'LAMuhloo". Same trick works on "sessamy": "se[e]-same".
I have to look up "Crevecouer"; I always want to write "Crevicouer". Dave learned from Great Courses that one of the founding fathers was named "Crevecouer"; perhaps our plastic surgeon isn't as recent an arrival as we had thought.
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Today's project is sorting the recyclable paper. It was easier than expected because very little cardboard was mixed in with the paper.
I did find a couple of sheets of paper mixed in with the cardboard. All the paper is stacked with weights on, ready to tie into bundles tomorrow, and in the garage in case I don't get at it that soon. (I've got a lot of items on my itinerary for tomorrow.) The cardboard is sorted into three piles and a very miscellaneous heap.
Mystery solved: for ages, I've been wondering why the numbers on the scale are slightly out of focus until I step off the scale. I look at my feet through the *bottom* of my bifocals.
Today's project is to finish cleaning the shelves in the laundry room.
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I washed the top shelf, finding no dirt at all, to my surprise. There should have been dust after all this time.
I made a start at putting things back, but got decisioned out, so I'm going to Quicken my receipts, then dress to go to the grocery for ice cream.
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On second thought, I will snarl viciously while Quicken downloads yet another update. I hope this one doesn't scramble all the categories — they still aren't straightened out from the previous scramble.
This morning, while cleaning peanut butter off my knife before dipping strawberry spread, I remembered that as a child I was told that I must not put a buttery knife into the jam because it would render the jam inedible for Grandfather.
Perhaps Mother inherited her dislike of dairy products. She said that it was because farm-fresh milk was too rich for her stomach. The watered-down milk served in town didn't upset her digestion, but by then she had learned to hate the taste.
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The nurse told me to keep the eye closed for a couple of hours. I'm amazed at how much my bad eye contributes!
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Finally bundled up the papers I left under weights and put them into the bin, then moved the cardboard from the parlor into the garage and put the weights on it. Got it done before there was more cardboard! (There is some paper in the box.)
And when I went to Kroger for ice cream yesterday, I remembered to take the bulging sack of plastic bags and put it in the recycling barrel. Then tore a bag while packing up to come home.
Yesterday, I finished cleaning the shelves in the laundry room and put up a poster telling what was where on the top shelf.
I didn't take notes on the lower shelf, reasoning that I could see what was on it. This was the shelf on which I had found three opened bottles of ammonia, one of which I bought at Ace's going-out-of-business sale.
Kathy has been over every day since she came back from Florida, intending to stay two weeks. She and Dave are Florida residents now, and won't be spending a lot of time in Winona.
Today I rode to Zale's in the afternoon, intending to pick up Dave's Gabapentin, but there was a hitch and he can't have it until tomorrow. I stopped at Kroger to get supper on the way back. Five O'clock is a very poor time to try to cross Winona with a hot chicken in your pannier. Market Street wasn't a picnic either. (Well, I'd have had time for a picnic!) At Center, I made the light — which turned yellow just as I entered the intersection.
I slept sound last night and dreamed up a whole novel a little after six. In the dream I called up a character from The Freedom Maze, and upon waking I realized that the plot was from a recently-read book that now escapes me, and the viewpoint character was from The Gate of Ivrel.
I wish I knew how my viewpoint character accumulated all those very solid ghosts.
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Grumbly-gripe. I meant to include my flowered shirt when I washed clothes yesterday.
I haven't had breakfast yet, and all the clothes are put away.
I was surprised to realize that tomorrow is Tuesday. Today seemed like two days. Thank goodness Kathy was here to help.
We were interviewing Firefly. We plan to hire them to help us manage as soon as we figure out whether Dave's long-term care insurance will cover it.
On decluttering: Sunday afternoon, I drove to the church and unloaded all our cardboard boxes.
We're getting pretty close to getting squared away with home health care. Kathy is still running interference; I'm totally confused.
When I bought the new sheets, I bought two sets so that I could change the bed on a day when I couldn't hang sheets out to dry. Then I reflected that I'd never get a fitted sheet back into the nice neat package, and left the gray set in the bag it came in.
Today I washed the bottom sheet, then realized as I was putting it back onto the bed that I should have washed the top sheet too, so I opened the package — leaving the factory-folded bottom sheet in the cotton bag that stands on end beside the pile of sheets.
To my startlement, the sheet is more silver than gray, it's shiny and metallic. Suspecting that I'd bought polyester by mistake, I fished the label out of the recycling pile: 100% cotton sateen.
I don't think the white set is sateen, but the label is long gone — and my microscope doesn't work. (Dirt inside, I think.)
We saw the podiatrist this morning, and I'm glad that I went along. I learned that Dave has been supposed to put goop on his ingrown nails, and I've been smearing them with the same stuff I put on his legs.
It took him a while to find and identify the goop when we got home.
Kathy was here twice today. There is hope of getting done with Genworth before she goes home on Saturday.
The day began with an AAAAAAAGH!
We forgot to take the trash out, and this was our only opportunity to get rid of the old trash bins. I had remembered them out yesterday afternoon, but thought it was too early to take them out.
On the other hand, the worn-out LazyBoy chair that was supposed to be hauled off today was hauled off yesterday.
I think the "vitual interview" scheduled for twelve-thirty today is our last step with Genworth. We still have one to go with Firefly
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Kathy was indispensable during the virtual interview. I suspect that I gave the impression of being healthier than we are.
She is planning to stay until Sunday to shepherd us through the in-person interview with Firefly.
At first, we plan only to have help with the housework one day a week, but we can move to more housework and nursing care as needed.
Weather Underground says that I can hang wash out tomorrow, so I have a sheet and sweat rags and cleaning rags in the washer, ready to start when I get up. Come Saturday, I plan to go to a bazaar and get a little exercise on the bike. I also have a book due that day.
I was only halfway through proofreading when it was time for bed. The sheet is on the line. I started to hang the rags, then came in to thaw my hands.
This file validated on the first try!
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And I proofread the last line at the exact moment that my timer told me to put the frozen chicken into the pre-heated oven.