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Asparagus omelet for breakfast, and I've checked that we have all the ingredients for chocolate cake. I make half a recipe of Brownies Cockaigne, but don't divide the chocolate.
We don't have eighty-six candles.
We will leave for an appointment with Dr. Nalamolu any minute now.
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Returned from Nalamolu with two more appointments.
The birthday feast began with cake and ended with ice cream. There were some cookies and candy in between.
The main dish was chicken breast baked in alfredo sauce (imported from Italy) with a potato and a piece of carrot. On the side, baked vegetable that included asparagus tips.
My bedtime snack will be left-over vegetables in alfredo sauce.
For two weeks, he was only two years older than me. Now it's 87/84.
The kitchen at Church of the Good Shepherd is usually locked, presumably because it's adjacent to the pre-school, but today both doors stood open. I took a short-cut through it, and noticed that the many stove knobs on the professional stove have clear-plastic covers that have to be opened childproof-cap style before one can turn on a burner.
It was raining pretty hard, but Chelsea had found our golf umbrella the last time she cleaned our hall closet, so I stayed reasonably dry going and coming. Not stepping in puddles was rather athletic, particularly where the streets were torn up for repaving.
I bought cookies twice on Saturday. I've put the majority of them in the freezer in a sandwich bag, but some are still on the table.
All three farmers' markets are open now, there was a special event at the fairground, and it was free-comics day at Chimps. All I saw were superhero comix, so I didn't ask how to get one. Nor did I ask whether any of the comix were by Mark Evanier.
I pumped up the tires of the flatfoot and rode around the edges of the neighborhood to see whether I could see where the water main broke. The streets are still torn up, and there was a fresh coat of black sticky on Union, so I used Columbia. I had to walk over a lot of low-but-sharp curblike edges — and that was with fat tires.
The boil-water order is until noon tomorrow. Suddenly, running the hot-water line through concrete is a feature — I can get plenty of heated-and-cooled water for cleaning straight from the tap. I don't trust it for drinking, but four of my five bottles were full before the break, and there are two un-opened bottles (Voss and Dasani) in the fridge. Dave put our last two bottles of Hint into his Yeti. Pineapple-Blackberry tastes funny.
I started pulling the weeds in the garden today, and got all the volunteer multipliers exposed. Then I sprinkled a little 12-12-12 on them.
Is "volunteer" the right word for bulbs that you didn't get around to harvesting?
I walked down the new steps on Ninth Street for the first time today. The handrail isn't quite finished on the north side.
There was a glitch in the power while we were getting ready for bed, and the internet was down for a while. The thermostat appears to be working.
The microwave, however, had reset to factory defaults, as I discovered when I couldn't open the door. It took Dave a while to put it back. At least the manual was where he looked for it.
Steve put a grab bar beside the scale yesterday. Dave said that he likes it so much that he weighs himself every time he goes into the room.
With the garden nearly sodded with overlooked bulbils, I've been cutting bulbils off as soon as they appear, except for two heads that appear to plan on being particularly fine and fat.
The scapes are still succulent at this stage. My bedtime snack today was fresh garden greens cooked to mush in bacon grease, on semi-toasted sourdough bread. (I left it on the bottom of the skillet that I used as a lid while the greens were cooking.)
I'm keeping up with the plants that are going to seed, so there weren't enough scapes. I picked some of my volunteer chives and a lot of my garlic chives. I hadn't brought a trowel for picking garlic, but I found a left-over garlic scallion in the relish plate. I also put in a slice of bulb onion just to keep the surface of the cut bulb fresh. And I salted it with bacon bits.
I washed rags on Monday and plan to do it again today, as Brenda used rather a lot on Tuesday.
Wednesday we drove to Goshen, Thursday we went to the Beyer building for a blood draw, then after lunch signed some papers at our financial advisor's office.
Which I did wearing my old jeans. I changed my shirt upon coming home from the blood draw so I'd have one with a timer pocket, but didn't change out of my good jeans. While making a peanut-butter sandwich, I knocked over a jar of pickles and got pickle juice all over myself. I ran the jeans through a rinse- and-spin, and they were dry this morning.
Dave wonders whether the Byer Building will be the next to close — I notice that it still says "KCH" over the check-in. Something is very wrong at Lutheran, and spending vast amounts of money and disruption on purely cosmetic changes to the main building can't have improved the situation. It may have touched it off. (I should get my mammogram before they close down Women's Imaging.)
I climbed into the attic yesterday and got the fanny pack down. I couldn't remember whether one of the small backpacks was small enough, and the flashlight was too feeble to check while up there.
Dave is searching the tool drawer from the kitchen for a missing charger, and the first thing to turn up after I set up a card table to sort it on was the flashlight I should have used.
I had forgotten that the fanny pack hooks instead of buckles, which prevents me from wearing it as a snap sack, as I frequently do with my shoulder bags. [It also fell off once during the tour, but I was standing on grass at the time.]
There is a historical tour tomorrow — part of the Fat and Skinny festival — and my wheelchair bike is suitable for a two-mile ride with a dozen stops. Since such tours are frequently photographed, I want to wear non-spectacular clothing, but I also want to carry my wallet.
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I have a reminder e-mail from Remento. The setting-up happened while my e-mail was out of whack and I didn't get the notices, but I gather that I'm supposed to recite stories into a microphone, after which they will be voice-to-texted, edited, and made into a book.
So I'd better write some stories that I can read in when I figure out how it's done.
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If I didn't have Dad's sharpshooter medal, I would never have known that he was a Marine. He mentioned his time in the service only three times:
When I was having my first period, and was lying in bed in the hall upstairs — "hall" was what we called the room where the staircase comes up in Alice's house — with newspapers all over the floor and a washbowl beside the bed, he climbed up to see me, and said that he'd learned on the troop ship that "oranges taste good both ways". It's been good advice, and any fruit will neutralize stomach acid. (I'm really glad that after a few decades I grew out of throwing up every time anything in my body was the least bit off!)
When I got my first haircut, Dad met Mother and me outside the barbershop and sang "Good morning, Mr. Zip, Zip, Zip", which I didn't appreciate at all.
When we were on the road that runs along the Wabash, probably going to Wabash Valley Sanitarium, we passed the old-soldiers' home and he remarked that if he ever got hard up, he could go there and they would take him in.
While flattening boxes — I think it was on Friday — trying to discard the tape I'd peeled off one of them reminded me of another story Dad told.
To amuse a baby, dip its fingers in molasses and give it a feather to play with.
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I didn't remember that the flatfoot is hard to pedal because I have to sit bolt upright and can't use my big muscles. I also forgot that it wobbles all over while starting up, and that you don't steer it, you aim it.
I didn't mind today when I used it to go back to the festival to pick up a philly cheese steak after walking home from church: I could pick my time and space to start up, and started up only twice. Aiming is fine when you want to follow a straight line, and I wasn't trying to keep pace with anyone.
I can ride it while wearing a long skirt, but I didn't. I stripped off my shirt, skirt, and underdress and put on my jersey. By good luck, I'd absent-mindedly put on black tights instead of silk long johns.
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When preparing to pan-broil a steak for supper, I found that the iron griddle and the lid to the skillet were still on the counter, and put them back into the oven. Yesterday I was all set to "sear-and-roast" (brown on one side and bake at 300° for thirty minutes) a roast labeled "beef ranch steak": meat thawed, oven hot, pan hot. Upon cutting open the package, I discovered that it was two steaks.
So I turned off the oven, put one of the steaks into a sandwich bag in the refrigerator, and postponed the browning a bit.
Dave didn't mind having steak two nights in a row. I served it with rice yesterday because we are out of potatoes — I'd planned to dash into Kroger for some on my way back from the farmers markets, but their power was out — and today I served it with the last of the potato flakes. (Potato cakes for breakfast tomorrow!)
We're getting desperate for groceries, but Dave has a CAT scan tomorrow and Brenda is coming on Tuesday.
CAT scan was prompt, and when we stopped at Zales, our prescriptions were on their computer and it took only eleven minutes to pack them.
So I'm up from my nap before half-past two and there would be plenty of time to go to Kroger — if I could remember where I put my wallet when I emptied my pockets yesterday. My little notebook is also missing, so they must be Someplace Safe.
Yesterday I was unreasonably amused by two signs on a door in the church basement, with arrows pointing in opposite directions. One pointed the way to the fire exit, the other to the tornado shelter.
May neither ever be of use.
I'm washing my clothes and a blanket made of a very thin flannel of unidentifiable fiber.
Brenda is due in less than two hours. Printing out her chore list is the most important of the things I have to do before she gets here, but I shouldn't have put it at the top of my things-to-do note. Every time I read "chore list", I think it's a header.
Dave was still asleep when I wrote that. When he woke up, he was running a high fever and couldn't get out of bed, so we called an ambulance.
Brenda was there by then, and she let them in — and cleaned up the house alone. She didn't have to fold up the king-size flannel sheet because Dave was under it when the guys carried him off. I didn't notice that until Dave told me to be sure I got "the blue sheet" and I thought he was talking about a piece of paperwork.
Changing the sheets and washing the bedding is on the chore list, and "call me to help fold the flannel sheet". Come to think of it, I folded the sheet by myself (to make it easier to carry home), but I didn't have anything else to do at the time.
It's pushing four o'clock in the morning, and I just finished my nap. Got to bed about nine. It was really nice to come home to a clean house and a fresh bed.
Dave got so many blood draws that one of the nurses called him a pincushion. At least one of those was to make sure they were stuffing him with the right antibiotics. He also has two IVs, one for fluids and one for medicine.
The medicine appears to be doing its job, and he was feeling much better when I left at six or seven.
I'm glad I added a phone charger to my go bag.
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I'm up. While dressing, I searched for the lyrics to "John Brown's Baby", and found that every last copy omitted "well" after "rubbed". The only page that kept the rhythm was one that updated "rubbed it well with camphorated oil" to "slathered it with mentholated goo".
Dave is home, and ate an improvised supper off a table. Yesterday I crock-potted (in the rice cooker) the chicken thighs I meant to fry Tuesday evening, and put them in the fridge. We also had green peas, a hash-brown patty, thawed strawberries, and hot cocoa: one mug of Swiss Miss and two mugs of Carnation Instant Breakfast. (We split one of the mugs of Instant Breakfast.)
The cocoa used up our last can of evaporated milk. And there's just enough fresh milk for breakfast. I was overdue for a shopping trip when all this started.
Things are more-or-less back to normal. He has has had an appointment for a blood draw tomorrow morning for some time, and a nurse will come to check him out and arrange for his physical therapy some time after two in the afternoon. I hope she calls before we leave for the blood draw. [Turned to be no sweat: the call was postponed until Tuesday.]
When I came home for a nap yesterday, I parked in the garage because it was raining. Later I went into the garage for something and startled a small bird — how did it get in during the few minutes the door was open? He truly wanted out; I opened the little door and turned off the lights — bye-bye birdie.
I am all too good at finding my way around Parkview — though I insisted for some time that the north window in Dave's room (3119) looked south. It's usually east and west that I confuse.
When I was waiting for the elevator this morning, a couple debated whether to take the elevator or the stairs. Just then the elevator I'd summoned arrived and they took it. I, having been reminded that I'm short on exercise, took the stairs.
They only went up one floor, but I learned why the elevator has doors on both sides. Yesterday, I learned that if you press the number of the floor that you are on, the doors open. I could have used that on my previous trip, when someone tried to get in just as the doors closed. The door buttons are not conspicuous, and there are four, labeled in small print: open front, open back, close front, close back. Which door is the back and which is the front?
The second-floor elevator did point the way to stairs, so on the way home I decided to go out that way so I'd know how to find them from the first floor. Found them, went down, the door was locked. The other door had a "caution: nesting duck" sign on it, and looked like other doors marked "alarm will sound", so I said "I'm getting more exercise than I planned on" and went back up. The second floor door was also locked, and so was the door I came in by. Oops! Emergency-only escape route.
So I went out by the caution door, and it led directly outside. And there was a nest with duck eggs in it right beside the door, in a landscape bed. I wonder where she got the straw.
Countdown timer has a serious, serious flaw: if you happen to be typing furiously when it goes off, it interprets the next key struck as having pressed "OK", and the message winks out almost before it winks on.
Race Day! Dave watched on television. Barbecue day tomorrow, and Memorial Day is on Friday. I'd better start wrapping this up pretty soon.
I could start by pasting in the Beeson Banner Extra Edition that I e-mailed:
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Thursday, 22 May 2025
This is late, but I've been a bit busy.
There's an 80/20 chance that I'll bring him home from the hospital after his blood cultures finish incubating, about five o'clock.
On Monday, he got a CT scan for his oncologist.
That night around three in the morning, he fainted while trying to get out of bed. He was fully to himself before I walked around the bed to see what the noise was. We like to never got him up and on his feet, but weren't alarmed because he never gets down on the floor, so we didn't know this was harder than usual.
He slept late the next morning, and when he woke up he was burning with fever and couldn't get out of bed, so we called an ambulance.
By this time, the home helper was here, and she let them in. (Brenda did a yeoman job, and I came home to a clean house and fresh bed that night.)
By the time I got there (with the wrong pair of shoes, I discovered today when I unpacked his clothes in anticipation of bringing him home; the correct pair are in my bag for when I go back this evening.)
By the time I got there, they had him hooked up to IV antibiotics, his fever was down, and he was feeling much better. They wanted to examine his brain on account of the fall; we giggled a bit when they asked whether he'd had a CT scan before.
Since then, it's been one more day to see how the tests come out.
Since this is already overdue, I think I'll wait until the cultures come back to press "send".
3:53
Dave called a few minutes ago to say they were working on his discharge papers.
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Joy Beeson
West of Fort Wayne, Indiana
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It would appear that I forgot to say that I was preparing to go pick him up.
I think that I approve of moving the Memorial Day holiday to a Monday. It leaves Memorial Day proper for solemn observances.
I reported my wallet missing on Friday and found it on Saturday. Wait, it couldn't have been Friday because I stopped on my way to the hospital and he came home on Thursday. Anyhow, I slipped a note under the town hall door Saturday evening, and plan to go back after the town hall opens again after the holiday to make sure they got it. (You get to the police through the town hall.)
On the way back to the car after reporting the wallet, I saw a duck and a drake walking down the new sidewalk, which is still coned off, but the cones appear to be incidental to the cones blocking the parking lot that was torn out. Or is it a new one under construction; I can't remember how it looked before. I think there was a smaller parking lot there.
They need more parking for the pickleball courts.
I found the wallet while hanging up my jersey after Saturday's farmer's markets tour. When frantically searching, I'd moved the long stuff to check the floor, but didn't think of moving the short stuff to check the top of the blanket box. I emitted a very distressed-sounding squeak when I saw it, but Dave was too far off to hear it.
The fairgrounds market was sold out — I slept late. The courthouse market was out of chocolate-chip cookies, so I bought half a dozen oatmeal, raisin, and chocolate chip.
At the ice-rink market, I'd intended to buy an Indian breakfast burrito for our lunch, but Bomy was sold out. I bought two samosas instead, and we didn't like them at all.
I was delighted this morning to see that the bed that was freshly made yesterday was all messed up. Last week it stayed fresh for three days because only one person was sleeping in it.
I went to the police station yesterday and un-reported my wallet. We also had the physical-therapy arranger and Brenda in.
I got a little sewing done while Brenda was here.
We have a hospital followup with Darr tomorrow, and last Thursday's visit from Miranda (case manager & RN), and Firefly just called to say they are going to call while Miranda is here, but today is free.
For breakfast, I cooked frozen biscuits on the oval griddle, with a loose lid, and liked them better than those I baked in the toaster oven. Dave said they were better than the biscuits and gravy he got in the hospital. That was partly because the hospital meals are cold. They ship all at once, and I presume that it's a long way from the kitchen to the third floor. And it must take a while to wheel the cart from room to room.
It wasn't until time to put away the left-over Patterson's gravy that I realized that I should have warmed it in the microwave to save washing a skillet. It's in a petite pan now.
Then I tried to DuckDuck to see whether anyone was making reproduction petite pans. The search was overwhelmed with offers to sell vintage pans, the first hit was a hundred dollars for one pan with no lid. Amazon had one pan, offered at nine dollars.
None of the write-ups mentioned how well petite pans work with microwaves. I think they all copied vintage advertisements.
Nuthin' but excitement 'round here. I could do with a little boredom.
When we went to Dr. Darr for the ER followup, he sent us back to the ER for more bloodwork and a prescription for more antibiotic. I suspect that that was partly because Lutheran took his blood lab away. So Miranda got postponed again.
Today started out well. I had just gotten out of bed when my cell phone rang: Kathy and Cris were on their way back to Michigan from South Carolina, where they had gone for Jim's brother John's funeral. The conversation must have gone rather queerly; Dave noticed that she sounded nothing like Kathy, but it wasn't until I was telling him that it was Uncle John that the dime dropped that I was talking to the other Kathy. "Her father's brother died? That's *me*!"
Anyhow, they got here in time for a pleasant visit before we had to leave for the oncologist appointment. And I got rid of Cousin Blanche's cane-bottom chair. Cris said that they had just moved into a bigger house and could use a beautiful chair. Pity I didn't get the story with the chair; perhaps some of the Loveless historians have it. It's Blanche Lane, librarian at Berea College, and I'm pretty sure she was Mother's cousin.
Another story I didn't get was the one that went with Mom's "genuine diamond ring", which is in my jewel box next to my engagement ring, which I can't wear any more because my knuckles have swollen. Something about a scam someone tried to pull.
When we selected the engagement ring, the jeweler suggested that when we got a maid, we should switch the diamond to a showier setting. I have a maid now, but my hands still get into dirt.
The oncologist said that all the tests were good and Dave still doesn't need treatment for his smoldering myoloma. Which information he delivered rather quickly because Dave's catheter had clogged, and he had to rush home and use the unclogging kit the Interim nurse had given us. Now I need to go to Parkview and see whether they will give us another one.
After Dave got back to normal-for-him, I went to Zales to run the errand we'd meant to run on the way home. Since I was out in the car alone, I went to Kroger for milk, breakfast sandwiches, and a few other things. Then I slept until it was time to cook the steak I'd bought.
When I bought the steak, I had forgotten that I'd intended to pound and fry the remainder of the package of chicken thigh, so after supper I crock-potted it in the rice cooker and intend to make chicken salad for supper tomorrow night. If I don't pick up something yummy on my Farmer's Markets tour.
The chicken salad came out well. I put in a garlic scallion, a handful of winter-onion scapes, a mustard leaf, a mini-sweet pepper, a celery heart, a sliver of under-powered jalapeño, ranch dressing, mayonnaise, about half a packet of chicken boullion powder, and a glop of sweet- pickle relish. I should have put in two mustard leaves, and cut them lengthwise before lining them up with the other vegetables to slice crosswise.
We ate some of it on flatbread crackers I bought on clearance, and some on "artisan-style" bread I bought from "we baked too much". Ritz crackers and Hillbilly Bread went begging.
Now the fridge is stuffed with left-overs.
On Friday, my right thumbnail finally grew enough that I could trim off the un-removable speck of dirt. On Saturday, I had a new spot.
Perhaps using my thumbnail to click the tiny keys on my cell phone drives dirt between the layers.
I got to the ice-rink market before all the wraps had been sold. The three-meat was sold out, but we liked the bacon very well.
Today's mail was two voter-registration cards.
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