slowly she turned

AKA “brain dump.”

Even though the past few weeks have been hell in many ways, we have also gotten a few things accomplished. I can use my washing machine again without having to carry the outgoing water out to the garden in buckets. It was what I thought: a huge clog of grease in the outgoing pipes that had been building up for many years. The plumber also found a leak under the kitchen and replaced that piece of old pipe. In doing so, he found that the electrical cord to my dishwasher was rubbing against the hole and was frayed, and he fixed that. He and his helper reattached a drawer front and a wood panel that had come off in the kitchen. Then, between him and my husband, we got the bathroom sink faucet fixed, although in the end it ended up that we had to replace it and that wasn’t cheap. Sandy was able to replace it himself. All in all, we spent over a grand on these way overdue repairs.

Also, I now have a yard maintenance guy who knows plants and he has done one clean up session and one basic mow this month. That is a huge relief.

Credo sent me an upgraded phone for free because we had to for their network upgrade. It is a refurbished Galaxy S9. Even though it is annoying to redo passwords and get used to a new format, I realize that because my S7 still works perfectly fine as a mini-computer/camera, we can take it as an extra phone to Europe. Maybe get a SIM card for it instead of the new phone while we are there, and have extra storage for photos.

I’m sitting on the front porch right now. Even though it is humid it is not bad. Sandy decided to go to the big farmers’ market next to I-40 this morning. I decided to stay home. My friends sell at the Greensboro Farmers Curb Market, but it is nice to have a market that sells on Sunday.

My anxiety is starting to ratchet up about Co-vid again, and I’m sure that I am not alone. I’m worried about our trip to Portugal and Ireland. If I have to reschedule, when would I do so? I’m going to buy a bunch of N95 masks for the trip. The good thing is that these two countries are getting a lot more vaccinations done right now. The bad thing is that I don’t trust people on the plane to be vaccinated or to mask properly. What would happen if either of us got a breakthrough infection over there, or over here just before the trip? So many scenarios going through my head!

In a way, it would be a relief to reschedule. But I feel a time pressure to make this trip while Sandy is doing fairly well, and who knows what could happen in the future to stop us again? Will it ever be “safe”?

My friend Jerry just had a heart attack two days ago. I think that he will be okay. He got a stent and I understand that he will get more on Monday. It is amazing what heart surgeons can do these days.

Seems like everyone has health troubles right now.

I don’t think that I ever said what happened with my eye appointment. My eyes are healthy other than allergies. He prescribed me some eye drops but I keep forgetting to put them in twice a day, so I’m still dealing with fuzzy vision. It was a relief that that was all it was. I don’t even need new lenses.

Sandy just got back with corn and shrimp and andouille sausage. Guess we will eat well today! I was thinking of making squash casserole, and I have a few little potatoes from the garden.

I’ve done just a little bit of cleanup around the house, but I’m going to do more. Still trying to rest this foot. I have some paste leftover from our paste painting session on Wednesday in the fridge. I think that I’ll get that out and play. Maybe finish the lake tapestry. HAHAHAHAHAHA! How many times have I said THAT in the last six months?

I am looking forward to this weekend when I go to Topsail Beach for a three day workshop with Dan Essig at Leslie Marsh’s studio. This will be my fifth? workshop with Dan. I always learn something and come away with my most satisfying work from his classes. It’s been so long since I bound a book that I could use a refresher class anyway. I miss book making. Dan was the artist who introduced me to it. Anyway, I will try to remember to take photos this time.

I hope that I will be able to sleep sharing a bed with Sandy at our AirBNB in Surf City. He stopped using his cPAP machine several months ago and even took it back to the place. Stubborn, stubborn man. I can’t use earplugs any more because I’m pretty sure I have psoriasis in my ears. That’s another worry for the Europe trip – damn! At least in Ireland there will be a spare bedroom. If there’s a sofa in the one in Portugal, that would be good. I slept on the sofa at the lake for two nights – fortunately for me, it is very comfortable!

Therapy is going well. I am afraid that I have become that person who often says “My therapist says…” but I really, really, really like this person. Some of my best sessions have been the ones in which I am feeling good. So much about my life is changing. I think that I am moving in a positive direction, despite my worries this weekend.

This has been a rough week. I’m talking one of those days when you realize that your life and the lives of others that you love are truly going to change in a major way. This is what this kind of morning is like for a vivid dreamer: you wake up and try to make some sense out of the world that you just left, and how it might attach to the real world. Then you remember what is happening in the real world, and you wonder for a few moments if the real world is a nightmare.

Sandy’s diagnosis was weighing heavy on me this week. I joined a support group on Facebook for myositis caregivers, thinking that would help me process it and prepare, and then the links that they provided for information about polymyositis almost undid me. I felt so overwhelmed with negative possibilities, and really feeling our ages. It’s a good thing that I am in therapy, and I hope that Sandy will go with me on Tuesday.

Then came the bomb. My brother-in-law’s surgery to remove a blockage in his colon revealed extensive, inoperable, incurable cancer on his sub-abdominal wall. That’s why they couldn’t find it in the colonoscopy. It was outside his colon. The surgeon built a bypass in his colon so that he can eat somewhat normally and closed him up. The plan will be for him to do chemo in Wilmington, so that he can still live at the lake.

I love my brother-in-law – I absolutely adore him. He is one of the top beloved people in my life. He is more of a brother to me than my brother ever has been. Sandy feels the same way about him. And my sister – oh my God – those two are inseparable. Best friends.

I haven’t talked to him yet. I’ve talked to my sister several times and she thought I should wait a couple of days. He is still recovering in the hospital and on pain meds. But he should be going home soon and I might see them at the lake next weekend. None of us are people who want visitors in the hospital. Unless someone asks for visitors, we view hospitals as places to just heal.

My sister pulled an Aurora Greenway on the staff there when they asked him if he had suicidal thoughts twenty minutes after being told his prognosis. I mean, there he was, just out of surgery and doped up and had just been told that he is dying. What human would not have suicidal thoughts? He said that he supposed so, and so they said that they had to put someone in his room overnight on a suicide watch. So my sister forbade it, ran them out of there, and spent the night with him. When they came back with their clipboard the next day, she forbade them to ask him the question again. She is Mama Bear. Don’t mess with my sister. (I am the same way.)

I mean, can you imagine having some stranger watching you all night the first time you have been given terrible news? That was clearly a bureaucratic cover-your-ass situation, and I would have been furious if it had been me. What a horrible invasion of privacy.

So, the only real help that I could be to my sister was to call my brother, who neither of us have spoken to in almost two years. I controlled my temper on the call, barely, and I warned him at the beginning of it that I was very angry about the situation. Of course, he told me that he and his wife were not vaccinated, and proceeded to state some concerns that were straight from Tucker Carlson’s bullshit about the vaccine, and how the government might force them to be vaccinated. I have zero tolerance for this kind of garbage thinking and while I tried to not totally lose my shit on him, I explained to him that Sandy and my brother-in-law are on immune-suppressant medicine and while the government would not force them to be vaccinated, he would not be welcome to visit unless he was vaccinated. There was more to the conversation but suffice it to say that by the time I disconnected (almost wrote “hung up”) I was in a rage. There is good reason that my brother and I haven’t communicated.

I am so sick of political thinking about EVERYTHING.

I am tired of human beings being treated like numbers and objects and boxes to be checked off a form.

There is a homeless woman named Sarah that we met about a year ago, who walks through this neighborhood a lot and lives on the porch of her friend’s house. She chooses to sleep outside in a sleeping bag in all seasons. She carries a baritone ukelele and the first time we met her she played us a song. I gave her some money which she tried very hard to refuse, but I insisted on it. We’ve seen her several times since then but this morning I was sitting here on the front porch writing this post and I invited her up for a cup of coffee. She asked for water instead and Sandy was fixing lunch and shared his lunch with her.

Talking with Sarah grounded me. She has a much different perspective on life and I don’t expect that I will ever understand all the things that she has experienced. She is somewhat vague about her life other than it has been traumatic and that she “has problems.” We spent a good two hours talking about some very complex issues and emotions and even though she said that she had sworn that she was going to stop talking to people, I think that we both benefited from the conversation.

In the end, we talked about hope. I am a bit conflicted about hope, having read Buddhist teachings  that make me wonder if it is a source of suffering. It’s something that maybe I need to bring up in my therapy session because it seems to me that it will be necessary for everyone’s survival on an individual basis, everyone in the entire world, not just me and my family. At the same time, I fear false hope is stopping the world’s powers-that-be and those who put them in power from doing what is necessary for humanity to survive on this planet. It’s a conundrum, to be sure.

^Resilience

It’s still cool enough to sit in front of the fan on the front porch – not something I expected at 5 pm. I’m drinking a Hell or High Watermelon Wheat Beer in a can, feet propped up. Just took a walk and so far so good, although if I am going to get in good enough shape to walk those hills in Lisbon, I need to step it up. Maybe when I am at work I will walk up and down the stairs several times a day.

After a day away from looking at the tapestry, I decided that the black drops are fine and I wove further along on it. It is a challenge for me to weave something that I am pretty much designing as I go along. It is not like painting, for sure! Maybe I’ll get it done by the end of the summer. I have an appointment with a new eye doctor on July 13.

We had massages by students at a massage school yesterday. Great deal to get an hour long massage for $25! I was concerned when I asked the student who worked on me if he had been vaccinated and he said no. I choked back the urge to castigate him, put my mask back on, and enjoyed the massage. He wore a mask. My hope is that he had not been vaccinated because he already had the virus.

But why? Why? Why? Vaccines are plentiful here. We are so lucky! Most of the rest of the world is still working on getting to the level of vaccination that we are because they haven’t been able to get the vaccines quickly enough.  Why are people in health related professions even allowed to see patients/clients without being vaccinated? Why aren’t students required to be vaccinated for Covid when they are required to be vaccinated for other diseases? I am baffled.

We could have been at the end of this thing by now if people weren’t so goddamned stupid about it. I follow a page called Safe Communities Portugal and they posted today that they are hoping to have 70% vaccinated by some time in September so that bodes well. In the United States, 100% of the people who can be vaccinated could be vaccinated if they weren’t brainwashed and stubborn.

Oh, don’t think that because I am not writing about all the disasters that are happening worldwide that I am not intensely aware of them. I just don’t see the need to when others do it so much better.

I’m not sure why I did not listen to Spotify for so long. The playlists that are offered up nowadays are great! I’ve been listening to a lot of early-mid 20th century music, and today WFDD offered up a playlist with the theme of I-95 South from Roanoke Rapids to Lumberton.

I am not an audio person, generally, but I might have to turn into one so that I can rest my eyes other than when I am sleeping.

Reading: switched to A Game of Thrones from Emerald Germs of Ireland.  Yes, I watched the first season of “Game of Thrones,” and the last two seasons, because the costumes, scenery, and dragons were awesome. The first season was a little tough for me to stomach. I tend to take violent content into my dreams at night.  I find the book to be more palatable, and there are no surprises here, which is not especially great, but I’ve always enjoyed reading a book more than seeing the movie or TV show. I even stopped watching Poldark when I took up reading the series of books, even though I found Aiden Turner to be quite yummy. I know what comes after where I stopped watching the series, and I don’t particularly care to see it acted out.

TV: I started watching “The Good Place” and “Doc Martin” again. I’m also giving “Sweet Tooth” a try.

I booked a hotel room for the night in Dublin between when we arrive from Portugal and get on a train to Westport the next day. It is over near Christchurch Cathedral so maybe we’ll have a little bit of time to see something in Dublin that morning, but I suspect that we will be worn out. I’m thinking that I’d like to have lunch at the Brazen Head and combine some history with my food. So I only have one hotel room night to book for our big trip now – the last night before we get on the plane for home from Dublin. Here’s hoping that Ireland is open for business by then!