Florida saga -

Yesterday ma woke up early and needed to go to the bathroom so daddy got her up. Of course she fell, of course she cut the back of her head. He is supposed to get the aide. So the aide finally got her back in bed and put a towel on the back of her head. Aide went to get dressed and came out to find that daddy had gotten ma up and sat her at the dining room table, ready for breakfast!! He loses all contact with reality when something happens.

So nurse comes up, calls ambulance, tells aide NOT to clean up the blood (potential evidence in case of death) and off she goes. Daddy and aide follow later in taxi and somehow (didn't get the details) she gets home and is okay.

The stream of phone calls thruout the day - the less said the better.

J tried to teach ma to say, "Get the hell away from me!" when he tries to help her.

Yummy trail ride

Went for a trail ride this morning and W was a star!! omg, what a sweetie he is!

What a brave boy and so happy. He went second in the line of three on the way out and first on the way back. He kept to a nice walk without any trouble at all. He wanted to trot but I did not have to struggle to hold him to a walk. He did trot a couple of times but was easily brought back with no pulling on the reins (well hardly any) - just holding the reins and saying "walk" and a couple of times I did the rein combing, esp when we went by the scary huge rusted out truck someone dumped in the woods. He even walked up the embankment after crossing the creek on the way back. Seen, but not by me - a big deer and an owl. I would have dearly loved to canter by the sand pit/retention pond, but we were good and just walked. W was thinking wtf is the matter with her, this is perfect!!??? All things in good time I guess.

Meanwhile, plumber is here fixing the incompetent work of out contractor's plumber - the master bathroom toilet is leaking thru a light fixture in the ceiling of the family room downstairs. crap.

On a positive note: making macaroni and meatballs for dinner and it smells good. Will get some rolls tomorrow for meatball sandwiches. So i imagine that i will pig out on pasta tonight and fall asleep on the couch watching some asinine tv show.

oh, the time spent!!

How much time do J and I spend on the telephone organizing things in Florida?? It's ridiculous! Since last Friday, it's been a constant stream of phone calls. Daddy has an ingrown toenail which he just happens to mention on Friday so there is no way to get him seen by a doctor. So poor JW frantically tries to get him an appointment with his regular podiatrist but can't get an appt til next Wed. So he gets taken downstairs to the nurse and she gets him an appt with an unknown dr for Monday morning. The aide can't take him then, so the SC bus is supposed to take him.

I get all this from J in a very jumbled way via two long phone calls on Friday late afternoon. Well, that plus the fact that he has something in his eye!! (that no one else can see) I send JW an email and she immediately calls me back and talks for almost an hour. I get the straight story from her plus and update on her social life including the new guy she has met online that she is calling "the turtle whisperer". (JW is so nice - I wish she could find a really nice guy!)

So I call Florida and talk to daddy and tell him that he needs to soak his foot in epsom salts in the meantime and put eye drops in his eye since the last time he thought he had something in his eye and was taken to the eye dr, the dr told him he had nothing in his eye but it was just dry. He gets pissed off at this but wtf??

Saturday, call Alliance and arrange for an aid to go with him to the dr since it will be a place he has never been and he won't know what to do. Of course J doesn't think of this. I don't know why it takes an army of people to manage them. Call daddy and ask how he is and tell him someone will be going with him. Ditto on Sunday along with speaking to ma which is quite painful now and also to the aide who is almost impossible to understand once she picks up speed in English.

Monday morning, call and make sure things are in place. Daddy doesn't remember an aide is going with him, so also speak to aide and remind her. Monday afternoon, call and make sure everything went according to plan which it did. Do not find out anything about the toenail, but get a long impossible-to-understand story about my mother's Monday morning dr appt where it seems that she has very dry skin and needs moisturizer. Well duh-

Okay, you get the picture. Every week there is this kind of heinous back and forth phone calling over something.

On the good side, woke up ridiculously happy from having such a good riding lesson yesterday.

Bathroom wallpaper is up (hidious 3 days of work for just one wall) and the drawers are ready to install. Pics later today. I want to go riding this morning but can't seem to get moving.

Did not go riding but got a lot of small houseworky stuff done and read all afternoon while it poured rain! Made brownies during the afternoon and OH and I ate half of the results! :P I have not made brownies in about 10 years or so!!

Stirrups

My RI put my stirrups up 2 holes today. We couldn't figure out what was going on. After I left the barn, I realized that I had never checked them when I got on so who knows not what hole they should have been in!! I think I may have been riding in too long stirrups anyway so next time I will try shortening them from my usual hole 11 and see how it feels. I did a lot of work the other day with no stirrups.

Today, all of a sudden, a major jump to the side and wild canter off. I stayed on but pretty well wrenched my back in the process. I think he may have been stung by something or bitten by a horsefly because afterwards he was trying to scratch his back leg. He is doing so much better with contact now and I can get him back right away when he evades the bit.

I'm doing much better lately with my riding. I have to keep in mind my constant collapse of my lright side which I'm thinking is due to one, being right handed, and two, carrying a purse on my right shoulder all these years. I have to make myself think about weighting my inside stirrup and outside seatbone and keeping my inside shoulder back. The big improvement tho, is that I am developing a better feel for what is going on. The secret is to picture what you want to happen. I can watch someone do something and then do it whereas all the technical analysis gets me nowhere.

Lovely kitchenware!

I bought all these at Anthropologie! After badgering OH for two or three years to agree to buying (useless) china, I came across these and the difference in price was so great that he instantly agreed to purchasing them.

These are rice bowls but we use them for salad. Salad bowls are usually too small. I got 4 of them!

Dinner plates

Dessert plates.

Bowls - soup size and small size.

Coffee cups.

my cats

Bonnie, the black and white
Claude, the yellow and white.

so much to do

Why is it that when I was working, I never had a list of errands and now that I am home, I have a never-ending list??? I could never understand how J always had so much to do. I guess part of it is this whole house remodel/organization/cataloging stuff I'm doing but I also think that some of it is just pure laziness. I could knock off plenty of small things if I would just stop wasting tons of time doing Sudokus (thanks Tim :P). Okay, 4 half days a week are spent on horseback riding but what about all the other time?

Also, with all this time on my hands, I wish I would plan better meals. Today I am going grocery shopping (only one can of cat food left!) and I need to get coupons out, decide which ones to use, plan some menus, etc. I get slightly sidetracked in the store when I see something nice tho or if something I want for a meal looks gross. For instance, why are all the green beans so horrid looking? I think I will get some watermelon and see if Wiz likes it!!! The other day I gave him a pear and he was in a state of bliss. I will buy some chicken today and grill it with this marinade:

1T lemon juice
t tsp deli mustard
3 T olive oil
1/4 tsp sugar
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper
2 T water
lots of minced garlic and parsley

This is from Cooks Illustrated and it makes the chicken taste like steak according to OH. I usually grill 6 chicken breasts with the tenders separated and we can eat for practically a week on that! I will buy some portobello mushrooms and make the chicken jambalaya recipie from The New American Plate.

Yesterday the drawers for our bathroom were finished and installed. Today I think OH is going to sand a couple of sticky places and prime them. Then they will have to be given 2 coats of paint. I need to sand the wall over the vanity and apply some of that stuff you put on before wallpaper (can't remember what it is called). I may wait til next week to actually put up the paper.

My next-door neighbor washed my king-sized mattress pad for me in her giant washing machine! So now I can make my bed up and get the bedroom looking slightly more put together. I would like to have an upholstered headboard made and get some decent lamps - oh, they must have big big fringy shades. There is not a decent lamp store in Houston. I need to find a good lamp shade web site (must look).

Ziggy cartoon in the paper today:
"I've got so much to get done today!
I don't know what to put off first!"

Wallpaper!!

I take it back! All wallpaper is not ugly - how cute is this????

So interesting

Things to do today:

Call my mother

Air conditioning man and also carpenter coming early this morning

Get some groceries



I need to go pick out some wallpaper for my bathroom. This is the hole that must be covered up

I can't drywall over it because it is the connection for the lights on either side:

Here is the hole covered by the previous wallpaper.

So now I have the dreaded task of choosing wallpaper that

1. I can stand

2. will match the rest of the colors, mood, etc. that are in the room. The bathroom doesn't look like that anymore - the space under the vanity is filled in and the countertop is a neat coffee-colored Silestone.

Why is so much wallpaper so ugly???? Maybe I should put more of this up:

I must see if it matches okay and if I have enough left over from doing OH's closet! Okay, and I have to remember where I put it when I packed everything up for the new carpeting.

happy

I'm totally happy with my blog now that Liz has put that soothing green color on it and linked it up to stuff. Even if no one ever reads it, I love it. I have been writing a few sentences about my day in an engagement calendar every day since 1985. I think a couple of years are either skipped or somehow missing, but I can go back (probably never will) and get a brief on what I was doing at any given time. There are blank spaces in most of the vacation slots and also during times of depression, but for the most part my life is there, boring as it ususally is. Typical entry:

busy at work
boring day
cleaned and grocery shopped

hehe, stupid.

I am going to go ride this morning while Dean sits on the couch, turns on the financial/obama news and either plays scrabulous or Civilizaton or looks up his ancestors. This should be his gym morning but he will not go.

Later!!

Near the end of the remodel!

Scanning that list, it seems that most of it is done. I painted my bedroom a fairly dark green but the room is big so it looks nice. Actually, I love it! I stole the little table from the living room and now it looks just exactly like a picture from a magazine that I have been saving for years and years. I then took the almost matching end table from the family room and put it on the other side of the bed. I still need to get some nice lamps with big fringy shades. The book cases I took from another room since now I will have no drawer in my nightstand. Must see how aggravating that becomes. Since that is the view you see when you come up the stairs, I want to keep it looking nice. Ha, we'll see.

Still to do- contact the carpenter who started to fix the mess the contractor left in the bathroom and ask him to actually make the two drawers. Pick out wall paper for the vanity area (to cover up the hole with the electrical connection) and then re-hang the mirrors.

We worked hard and almost everything is put away. I put all the books back upstairs in a sort-of organized way but not really. For the family room books (5 bookcases), I am putting them all on librarything as I unpack them. I seem to have a lot of books with no LC or ISBN numbers. Okay, Very Broad Categories only!! I just had to pay to add more than 200 books but that's okay.

Today I had lunch with my old supervisor and it was kind of nice to see her. We talked about our ailing mothers, people from work, being retired, my grandchildren and her great-grand children. The food was very good - Italian.

I got my moo cards today - all horsey and very cute. My blog address is on it so maybe someone will read my blog and be interested in it. Any HORSE people out there???

I'm planning to ride out in CA when I come for the BlogHer conference at a place called Blue Sky - it is a half hour south of Half Moon Bay. They have Tennessee walkers which I have never ridden but they are supposed to have smooth gaits.

Mother: not doing well. Has trouble walking. She holds the walker with a death grip and can only walk if you hold her hips from the back and move them forward one at a time. I am going there at the beginning of July and not looking forward to it at all. J just got back from 4 days there.

I have a new huge list of Things To Do but I don't even want to think about it.



Here is the sofa from the living room - now back-to-back with one of the family room sofas!