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 |  Just play: don't look at your hands! |
What a dumb title for a person who never got a single star  on her piano lessons!Daily practice is the thing though: the practice of noticing as well as of writing.  However, I'd much rather play duets than solos, so hop right in! You can do the melody or the base part, I don't care.  Just play along--we'll make up the tune as we go. I'll try to write regularly and deliberately. Sometimes I will do it poorly, tritely, stiltedly, obscurely. I will try to persevere regardless. It seems to be where my heart wants to go, and that means to me that God wants me there too. See you tomorrow. ![Merit Badge in Journaling
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      Sorry the pictures aren't better, so you could see how neat my house was before this. Too late though. It was trashed by then. I know he hurt himself in his frantic attempt to get out. There was broken glass on the floor and metal blinds chewed through, with some bloody footprints on the counters. It is so sad. I never heard of dogs' separation anxiety till now. Wow. |
| The boxer was a lovely dog all evening, all night. He wanted to be on the bed, but got down when told to. He was perfectly mannerly, and when I left the house at 9 for a quick visit to the nursing home, I put him in the back yard with the bedroom slider door open to the screen porch so he could come in. For the cat's sake, I closed the bedroom inside door, so she could have free movement. The patient, who I hadn't met before, was dying, and she accomplised that as I waited for some family to come. I was gone just a few minutes over an hour. I thought, how timely, how convenient that I could be there, especially since the nurse was busy with another death. I would have to miss the beginning of the staff meeting at church, but it would give me time to check on the dog. The dog was gone. I called the Humane Society, and they gave me the number of Animal Control Officer and told me to call her, which I did. She said she had just seen him, thought he was a new dog that belonged to the family whose property he was on, and had gone on by. It didn't take her too long to find him again and bring him home. He had run over a mile and looked very happy with himself. I remembered how my old boxer liked to run fast in the morning, when I lived in the country and had a place for him to do so. I'd have to figure that out. The Animal Control Officer walked the perimeter of my yard with me and said she thought he must have climbed the chain link fence, in the one short section where we don't have wood fence. Chico was tired and happy, and so I left him in the house to go on to my next patient, having a tiny sense that I should not be gone too long, but not much. I had an unavoidably long trip and was on my way home when Bill called for me to pick him up at the airport. So I was gone a little over three hours. We knew something was badly wrong when we drove into the driveway. I didn't take a picture from the outside; in fact, I'd started to clean up the mess of broken glass and pots of dirt from the window sills before I thought about taking pictures. I'll download them and show you tomorrow what that boy did when he was panicked about being alone. I prevailed with Bill not to beat him, and we put him in the back yard for just a moment to get our bearings and call the Humane Society. Oops, he was up and over the fence, and Bill saw him. Before that it was a little bit of a mystery. Bill jumped in the car and tracked him down, and we returned him to the Humane Society, but with great sadness for the dog and for us. |
| I brought the boxer home today, even though his neutering appointment isn't until Thursday morning at 7. I hated to think of him stuck in a cage, and he seemed glad to see me. He isn't quite as reticent as before, jumping right up on the sofa and settling down when I picked up the computer. He obligingly chased a tennis ball for me a few times, although only picked it up once and brought it half way back. Each time though, he made a fast double circle of the pool and came back looking proud of himself. Two people now have ruled out Speedo as a name for him, and I guess I agree. I was thinking how fast he was, not of swimsuits. One of the things boxers do best is lick themselves, that and fart, and if he were wearing anything it should definitely be boxers, not Speedos.  Saturday Bill flew me up to Quincy, WA, and my daughter picked me up there on the way to Leavenworth for our weekend out. There are several spas listed in the town, but most are day spas. Two had lodging attached, and the one with the cool picture of a woman getting a massage on a table set up in the creek-- it was full. It was a little difficult to get reservations for the spa package at the other one even, but we did it. Turns out it was really nothing more than a day spa in a couple rooms of the motel, not very special. Lenore said she enjoyed the facial and hair treatment as well as the massage, but we both agreed the massage was a little fluffy for our taste, no deep tissue work. The therapist did several different things with hot oil, including a towel soaked in it which was applied to our backs before we rolled over. Then there was another hot oil towel wrapped like a scarf around our necks. The whole thing reminded me of current restaurant food: there may be more in the presentation than in the flavor. The massage tables were covered in wine colored sheets with a light quilt of off white and wine on top. It was decorated with a flower, probably a silk rose-- I didn't look too closely-- and a handful of silk petals artfully placed. I didn't watch to see what the therapist did with them, but when I looked through the head cradle, there they were, decorating the floor beneath me. Ah, what a delightful treat! (Or maybe  would look more appropriately sarcastic.)Anyway, the best part of the weekend was not the spa, not the shopping, not the food or Margaritas or the German band, it was having time with my daughter.  |
| I made it, but barely, to the piano concert last night that Bill really wanted to go to. The performer has been one of our church musicians for a few years and is moving to Texas to teach at the University. She had included one of his favorite pieces and was disappointed that he couldn't be there. I'd taken a nap and almost didn't wake up to go at all, and even then got there a little late. Bill would have enjoyed it more than I did. I prefer brass or strings to piano. The instrument itself is an expensive full grand which Eleanor will leave with us for another year until she can afford to move it. The acoustics of the church are less than perfect, I'm sure, but the concert failed to touch me in the way music does so many. I'm sorry about that. I wish it meant more to me. I had trouble sleeping then last night, and felt tired and draggy all day, even a little queasy by tonight when I realized I'd only had yogurt and a bagel to eat. The only exciting thing of my day was a visit to a volatile patient whom I had not yet met. I went with a social worker who helped admit him last week. He is an ex-con, who, because of his disease, can hardly speak. He was obviously in pain, so our first move was to try to call the nurse. He handed the social worker his phone, making an angry gesture at it and shaking his head. It turned out that the area code for hospice had not been entered into the memory, so it wouldn't work. He thought the social worker had somehow erased his caregiver's number when she was there Friday, because he hadn't been able to reach him over the weekend, and he was angry about that too. He called her a bitch. She carefully entered the numbers again, correctly, made the call, and found out what to do until the nurse could get there. The patient had handed us the box that his pain patches came in, and there were several empty papers. I looked more carefully and saw a new one also. The nurse told us to have him put it on, and the social worker had to get it open for him. The caregiver put it on him, holding it for 30 seconds as the directions said. We all wished it would work instantly, but of course it wouldn't. I told him I knew he was Catholic, and he said, "raised that way." He was no longer, and he had no interest in having a priest. That's a necessary question, because many people who have been raised in a faith, no matter how long ago and far away they are from it, want to see a priest before they die. Not him. I asked if he believed there was anything after this life, and he pointed emphatically down while looking me in the eye. Stupidly, I said, "Hell?" Oops, wrong answer. He shook his head angrily. "You're buried in the ground and that's it, right?" Yes, that was it. He looked less angry. I tried a couple of other questions, about family contacts, and anything else we might be able to help with. There was nothing. With difficulty he asked, "What exactly is hospice?" I explained that it was to help people who are dying live out their lives as comfortably as possible. He had heard that before when he was admitted, but might not remember. Who could tell what he remembered? He dropped his head to his hands in a gesture that looked like resignation. Finding it difficult to communicate with the man, we asked the caregiver if he knew of anything we could do. He said we should get out and leave the man alone, and he walked us out the door. Later when the nurse went to visit, she asked him to pull his pillow over beside him to rest his arm on while she took his blood pressure, and there was a gun under the pillow! She left quickly. It will be interesting to see what happens next. It's illegal for a felon to have a gun. Even if it weren't, we will still discharge him because of the threat he is to our safety. Imagine getting called out at night to treat him? Between pain meds, alcohol that was in sight, and now a gun-- no thanks. But still, it's sad. Well, sorry, that wasn't the pleasant blog about the spa weekend. Maybe tomorrow, if I'm not too busy with a dog. The owner of the shih tzu didn't call back or email me again, so I'm not sure what's up there. But I think I'll bring the boxer home with me and take him to his vet appointment Thursday to be neutered. I didn't want to be the one to have to do that, but I don't want him sitting in a cage all week either. I just didn't feel good enough tonight to deal with it. |
| The boxer came home with me tonight for a trial. The humane society actually allows 3 day trials, but I'm going away tomorrow. He's been pretty calm, a little anxious at first and shy around Bill, but finally running around and playing a little. He lay down in some tall-ish grass (due for a mowing by Saturday) and rolled around and around in it, as if he was delighted just to be outside and free to feel it again. The little guy, Bubba/BoBo/Buttons/Bundle, came for a short visit last night, but Bill was working late at the county fair and didn't get to meet him. Maybe he'll get a chance tomorrow night, but I'll be gone. I'm headed for the cool little town of Leavenworth with my daughter for a spa weekend. So if you don't hear from me again for a few more days, I'm spa-ing. Isn't that great? |
| Lhasa Apso, nope. I was wrong. It's another hard to spell name instead. Bubba is a Shih-Tzu, supposedly. Whatever he is, he's cute. |
  Just what have I been doing other than reading blogs and writing? Looking for a new dog. The humane societies all over the country have their dogs advertised. Just go to petfinder.com and enter the kind of pet, the age, size, etc., and your zip code, and there you'll find pages of pictures. I wasn't really quite ready to get a new one-- in fact, I haven't done it yet. But I've been looking. And I've already discovered that the perfect one who was listed yesterday has been adopted by today. So I've made a few actual visits. The first was to what was billed as a standard poodle, but was a much smaller poodle-ish looking new mom who had been a stray for some time. She was thin and her coat was sparse. She pawed and pawed, and no amount of attention seemed to be enough. So I asked the attendant if she could show me the puppies. She brought in two of the four. One looked just like her mother, the other had thick, long, straight hair. Both were very cute, but of course that was all the mama dog was really interested in, licking the puppies. Today I went to look at a spaniel and a boxer. The spaniel was going blind. She wanted to stay with the attendant. The boxer, a 2 year old male, was small, slightly thin but healthy, very friendly, not aggressive. He strained at the leash and will have to be taught better manners about that (which I'm not very good at.) I really liked him though. He has a silly name for a boxer, Chico. Sounds like a chihuahua to me. He did respond to the name though, so renaming him might mean finding something similar. Cheeks would do. He has great cheeks. I found the Lhasa on craigslist, and he lives a few miles from my house. His owner just went into a wheel chair permanently and couldn't take care of him. This cute little darling has a silly name too, Bubba, which he doesn't seem to pay much attention to. He's a year old, very friendly and interested in everything. The lady who is selling him for the owner brought him to my house. He gave everything the once over, including the cat who he spotted but ignored. She hid in the corner with the hair on her back up a little but didn't run away. Bubba was leash trained to some extent. That is, unlike another Lhasa at the same house, he did trot around with it on, rather than sit down and have to be dragged. Bill has to work the county fair tonight, to fill in for someone who's sick. He said he'd told someone we'd have a dog by tonight, which surprised me. Obviously I've been looking, but I didn't intend to get one without him meeting it and liking it too. Now, however, since he's not home tonight, maybe I'll just get them both! But not till next week because I'll be gone for the weekend. The boxer will have to be neutered first anyway-- standard animal shelter practice. And the lady with the lhasa, whose name sounded like "Wren" on the phone message but was really "Rin," said she'd be glad to keep him over the weekend. I may bring the boxer home tomorrow night to see if he gets along with the cat at all. Aren't they cute boys? Now, help me find some better names! |
| I know there are things I would like to be doing tonight, since I'm unexpectedly alone, but I can't think what. So I've been going thru my email, deleting old things, putting the pictures of kids in a separate folder. I need to do the same thing here, but isn't it tiring! Well, not really tiring, not in the sense that hoeing in the garden would be, and that's one of the things I should have done. There's something defeating about clearing out a page of old email only to come upon another, also with things I haven't read but might want to and those I might even want to re-read. Things. They have a hold on me. I need to practice letting go. But I've been doing it for two hours now, and I'm tired of it. ****** I planted irises and gladiolas last fall, and only one iris came up. It was a lovely one, white with a ruffly purple edge that I didn't take a picture of, more's the pity. The glads have been more productive, but they're the wrong color. I planted red. I'm sure I did. I wanted red flowers to pick and put on my dining room table, and what came up is salmon colored. Not that they aren't pretty, and remind me of my grandmother who loved that color, but not what I wanted. ***** I've lost a bunch of time in the past two days that I could have spent better. Yesterday I waited for two hours for Arlene, the social worker, to come back from an intake so she could ride to the hinterlands with me to see our dear Nellie, whose husband just died. Our office will be paperless by mid-September, and we have a program on the computer for our charting. So I played with that, getting acquainted with its requirements. I guess the time wasn't really wasted, but in the end I went on my trip alone since Arlene had neither appeared or called in. The spiritual assessment is different from what we've been doing-- and that's certainly not all bad! The plan of care may prove to be a bit more puzzling, but I heard that many things can be modified to our liking, even though this is a program specifically set up for hospice. One of the assessment categories is to describe the patient's Image of God. I have cautiously tried that question out, verbatim, with two intelligent, professional women with mixed results. I expected them to be able to verbalize better than other people, but now I see that's not true. I'll try it next with an evangelical Christian. the answers may not be as thoughtful, but the question will probably not catch them so unawares. They'll have the vocabulary for it. I may need to come up with a drop-down menu item in the program, and give the patients some suggestions if they seem confused. My suggestions would be the following: creator, friend, judge, redeemer, spirit, Love, trinity, wisdom, other. ("Other" is actually confusing, because God can be seen as "Other," but I doubt if anyone will notice that. (Can you picture a clerical collar on this smiley face? That would designate it as sort of an 'in' joke.)My ten o'clock appointment here in my town cancelled, or rather, postponed until one. Not wanting to drive to the next town and back again, and then back again for the 3 pm computer program workshop, I hung out around the house for the extra hours, putting away this and that. Silvia, the straightener-housekeeper, did not do a superb job of cleaning. I see a blob of something on the kitchen floor she mopped right over. And the microwave got a cursory wipe off, not wipe out though. My old housekeeper always cleaned the inside too, and kept the oven clean as well, and the windows. Too bad she decided she'd rather "drive truck" with her husband. Does anybody outside the west say "drive truck" instead of "drive a truck?" Bill just called, and he did not eat while he was out, so I need to get something going here. Missed the 9pm deadline anyway, I see. Oh well. So what's another black number, eh? |
| Maybe I'll write more later, but I'll take a minute now just to let you know I'm still around. I had meetings every night last week until Friday, and that afternoon we took off for Portland to see my son and his family. We went with them to the Rotary blueberry pancake breakfast and the Newberg parade, then swimming at a friend's house. It was fun to see and hear the cuteness of little girls, and Lucy's wonderful acrobatics including a back roll into a headstand. I helped make cookies Friday night, some dark chocolate yummies I have to get the recipe for. Best of all, it was nice just to have time to talk with my son. We got back home Saturday night, to get to church on Sunday. Although I'd been sneezing my head off all morning, the antihistamines took effect in time for me to do my deacon duties. That was Fr. Newpriest's second service here, and he did well, especially with the children's sermon, although some thought he should have stopped there. Altogether the service was a little long. We also need to work on the choreography at the altar. With seven of us in the sanctuary trying to get the chalices and patens filled and one of each delivered to the impatient priest in the side chapel, a clear plan and maybe diagram of who -does-what-and-when would be a big help. The new housekeeper does not speak a lot of English, and even if she did, it's easier to see how she does things than try to tell her everything first. Sylvia is a neatener, and I desperately need that. Bill and I are messy people. (The newspaper is in at least three piles by the time dinner is over, with a couple of pencils from the crosswords on the table too, plus whatever we're reading. Etc. Actually, I picked all those things up before she got here. Those are the easy ones. I have a lot of shoes to match up and line up-- Bill's and mine both, and a variety of other things that just don't get put away.) Well, now there's a tabletop in our bedroom that I haven't seen in a long time, and four paper sacks filled with folded things from various places. It's interesting, and curious, to see what she decided to "decorate" with, and what she put away for me to find places for later. Or leave in the bags maybe. She probably doesn't care. Anyway, tomorrow is her day again already. We've stayed pretty tidy since we were gone every evening and most of the weekend, but I do intend to empty out those paper bags tonight and go do some laundry. I'll try to read blogs later if I can. Hope you all are enjoying your summer. It's going fast. |
| Wish I could say I just started writing a novel, or even a story or a poem, but those aren't among the new beginnings happening today. However, some other good things are. First, if I meander backwards through my day, I just hired a housekeeper to come every Tuesday for $25 a week. I'm not sure where I'll find it in my budget. I just started drinking an occasional sugar-free latte from Dutch Coffee, so cutting that out won't amount to much. My workload has died off, so to speak, so my hours are fewer per week. But I do want us to have company sometimes without my feeling a nervous wreck about my dust covered china cabinet, and light fixtures, etc. That won't help our natural messiness, but even once every other week as we used to do kept us a little better in line. I have two new patients who I will enjoy visiting, even if they are right here in town. One I've known for many years when her husband was in and out of the hospital before he died. The other is actually the first person I've ever met who lives in a house whose former owner I knew. That's a sign of having lived in the area a moderately long time, to me. It's a wonderful house overlooking the river, and the son-in-law who owns it is an artist. The patient has never had to be dependent on anyone in her life, and this is new and difficult for her to move in with one of her children. She was reading To Kill a Mockingbird, and so I liked her immediately. First thing this morning I skipped the regular Monday morning meeting at hospice in order to go to the staff meeting at church, the first one with our new priest, Fr. Birch. From now on they will meet on Wednesdays, which will give me the chance to attend much more often. As it is, the few times I've been there this year, I've been very late, due to the previous meeting. I was a little late this morning accidentally, but no one knew I hadn't come as quickly as possible from work. Also, no one said, "I'm glad you could make it," even afterwards. Or even hello. I think I'm getting overly touchy about things like that. Here is another "thing like that" on my list: when this priest came to visit last spring, he never asked me what I do as a deacon, either in or out of the church. So, last week after he'd arrived and settled in a bit, I emailed him to tell him what I normally do in church on Sunday mornings. I told him I have no sacred cows that I know of, that I'm willing to change anything that he wants, etc. Just let me know. Seeing no response, I called him, and he read the email as we talked. He said it sounded like regular deacon things to do. Okay. I guess that was it. So there's my gripe: don't people ask other people questions any more? Don't they say, "So, how's your summer been?" or, "When are planning to take vacation?" or, "Do you have family in the area?" Or is it just priests and other professionals who don't bother with small talk? Or take an interest in other people's lives? That was certainly true of our last priest. I hope this one is more personable. Oh, here's my other beginning. I advertised the wall oven in the newspaper finally. I just found the manual with the model number, etc. Bill bought it at a church sale, a donation for the scholarship fund. It's brand new, still in the box, but too large for the space in our kitchen. It's a 30", and we have a 27" now with no timer or self-cleaning. I hope it sells! |
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