Happy Halloween

Good morning and Happy Halloween! Where has October gone? There's a big two-week hole in the month from when I was sick so it has really seemed to disappear.

L refused to get a costume or dress up. I tried to talk her into a hippie costume but to no avail. L has no plans--she had her fun yesterday evening at the football game and with friends at an after-game party.

The boys wanted costumes and then "forgot" to wear them to school yesterday. What's up with that?! T wanted a black ninja costume and J wanted some big black robe (like the grim reaper) but with no mask. T has plans for trick or treating with his friend TD. J wants to hand out candy or trick or treat with his cousin in one of the other Tri-cities. Maybe I can remember to take pictures.

High-grading a photograph of Mom

Yesterday, my sister took this picture of Mom while she & I were visiting with Mom. I have high-graded this photo from C's blog. (The date on the picture is wrong--it was taken on Tuesday, October 27).

You can see Mom's black eye (or green face, as the case may be) from her fall last Thursday. This was her first day on a low-dose pain patch but, from what we were told, the pain patch had not taken full effect yet--it needed twelve hours. We are waiting to see if the pain patch knocks her out to such an extent that she is bedridden. She already doesn't/can't walk or stand but she can sit (as you can see).

This is what 86 pounds looks like on Mom (well, 86 as of last week--hard to tell if she's lost another pound this week and is at 85 pounds as predicted she would be by the hospice nurse). We thought she looked nice in her red outfit and we thought her hair looked fine. She was in a calm and pleasant mood. Sometimes she could say a word or phrase that made sense. She seemed content to "talk" with us and did not seem distressed when her sentences would be hopelessly jumbled--"word salad." I like the verbal exchange even though the content is usually lacking. However, at one point, I said, "I love you, Mom." She replied clear as a bell, "I love you kids, too."

Triage

A week ago Monday, I began to feel slightly sick. Tuesday, I had Evening in Excellence and my part of the program was important to the overall effectiveness of the evening and couldn't be delegated, so I said a prayer that I'd be well so I could perform my responsibilities. Tuesday I felt great. The Evening in Excellence was nice and I was able to do my part.

Wednesday morning I awoke feeling like I'd been run rover with a steam roller. Unfortunately, the steam roller kept rolling over me and over me and over me. Other than being a decoration on the couch, I was utterly useless. By Friday, I was feeling so sick that if B wouldn't have taken me to the doctor, I felt I would have needed an ambulance to get there. The doctor prescribed antibiotics and by Friday night, I knew I would live. However, I was still an exhausted couch decoration Saturday, Sunday and Monday.

Monday, however, I had to work on a project I took on for Relief Society (remind me next time that there is such a word as "no" in the English language). The YW had agreed to help the Relief Society with their Super Saturday by doing some decorative bags. I spent the sum total of my energy Monday and part of Tuesday staring mutely at my Cricut as it whirred away, one tiny cut at a time, with me too exhausted to do much else.

Tuesday, I realized, too late to delegate away, I had a meeting in St. George as a representative of the Middle School community counsel, so I went, praying that I could get through the meeting and that I wouldn't crash, faint or throw up. Those prayers were heard. I kept motoring through the rest of the day: a YW presidency meeting, recommend interviews and our YW service project for the Relief Society.

It is hard when one finally gives up the appearance of a couch decoration because then everyone, maybe even one's self, decides one is well. Like a then six-year old T said to me when I was a couch decoration during a time in my last pregnancy, "Mom, when your feet hit the floor, you have a lot of work to do around here." Well, my feet have hit the floor this time and, yes, there's a lot of work to do around here.

I decided if my feet had really hit the floor that I should try to calm the chaos that has arisen not just from the time I've been sick but residual chaos from my working at my mother's house and, let's face it, residual chaos-squared that was already extant. I have made a few dents in the chaos, maybe like little fly-speck size dents, and I realize that I am not quite ready to be a woman-of-all-work quite yet. So maybe I can alternate between a little couch time and a little staggering around and tidying.

The only thing wrong with that picture is I am to give a presentation on Sunday during Sunday School about the book I made for my in-laws on Shutterfly. Luckily I already made up the handout before I got sick but I still need to finalize a few things before Sunday. So wish me luck as I stagger from thing to thing that needs to be done around here, now that my feet have hit the floor.

A Baptism

Saturday was a busy day, lots of errands and tasks, but we're glad we fit in attending a baptism for my sister's youngest son, even if I had to lead the singing. I try to avoid the appearance of being my mother so I normally avoid leading any singing, since I am not the musical girl my mother was, but I made an exception for this occasion and I think my mother would say that her home evening music conducting instructions were worth something, just to see me up there. W (or is that Dubya?) was successfully baptized and it was a nice service.

Life as I currently know it . . .

Someday I will get the hang of uploading the pictures in a good order. Well, I thought I knew that already but today's upload now looks rather random. But in the interest of time, I'm leaving it as is.

I'm primarily posting these pictures (1) for my brother's benefit and (2) because this has been my life for the past month. These are just exterior views.

Here is what is called the "old rock house." We put down more gravel in the parking area and a gravel trail around the south side of old rock house. (I think the rock part of this house was built by my grandparents at about the turn of the century. I don't know when the brick part was added but it was the first post office and store here in town.)

Here is a shot to show the gravel "trail" I was referring to and the gravel between the houses. I see now that the picture doesn't exactly show all the gravel but you get the idea. The tarp in the foreground is covering B's tomato patch, a kind of sun shade (is that an oxymoron?).

Here is the rear view of Tom's house. Like our contractor said, the stucco made the house look good even from the back. :-)

Here is a big improvement--air conditioning. Lovely invention.

Here are the front porch railings as of today. They are not quite in finished form. When finished, the railings and window grate will be taken down and powder coated white and reinstalled.

Here is our third dumpster full of stuff in four weeks. I just thought I would document it before it is emptied on Tuesday morning. About 1/2 of one dumpster came from the old rock house but otherwise it has come from Mom's house.

Here is Tom's house from the front. How changed it does look.

Here is Mom's house. With this shot, I wanted to try to capture the clean windows but other than the fact that the sun screens are no longer on the west-facing windows, this does not do full justice to the window washing job. It does show up that B and the boys did the yard yesterday, though. B plans to try and reseed the lawn, particularly to fill in the bare spots from his earlier weed eradication campaign.

Here is a closer view of the back porch or wash room area at Mom's that was re-clad with wood to cover the worn particle board. It hasn't been painted but at this time it looks nice and fresh.


This pretty much accounts for the outdoor projects we've undertaken lately:

• yard work and general yard clean up;
• re-cladding the back porch;
• a 2-1/2 hour clean out of the old rock house;
• cleaning between the two houses in preparation for the gravel;
• gravel: path between the houses, to the south of the old rock house, along the north side of the gray house, and in the parking area;
• repair to the cooler turn-off;
• putting the "lid" on the turn-off area;
• hauling off the old fire place insert and some other assorted metal items;
• sweeping/spraying off the porch and the benches,
• window cleaning (by a window cleaning contractor) and
• earlier, repair to the swamp cooler.
  

Now we are having new lights installed at the corners of the house that will turn on just when it gets dark; one, maybe two electrical outlets outside; finding and installing the screens (not sun screens) for the west-facing windows; reseeding the lawn; repair of the corner of the front porch; and eventual painting of the back porch. That's what is on deck for the outside.

I wish I'd taken before and after photos of the projects, particularly on the inside of Mom's house. But all we did and are doing on the inside of Tom's and Mom's houses are posts for another day.

Tomorrow, we dive back in to dejunking. Dumpster number 4, here we come!

Musings

This photo was taken in about the 1950s.

For about the past 2-1/2 weeks, my family and my sister's family have been cleaning and fixing and dejunking my mother's house, preparing for the Tucson Young Women to visit and facing head-on the up-to-now mostly (although not entirely) delayed but unavoidable task of sorting my mother's possessions.

This is not to say we're emptying the house because that is not our current objective but like I said: cleaning, fixing and dejunking in preparation for the Tucson Young Women, with our emphasis on dejunking the place, aka throwing out trash. We need to ferret out any treasures from that trash.

We have filled two dumpsters so far. We have taken perhaps 1/2 a dumpster's worth of stuff to D.I. recently. And, reaching back a few years, we've cumulatively thrown out about one dumpster of stuff via city trash cans (one can at a time).

If we were to gauge how many dumpsters we have yet to fill based on what has gone before, and only being able to guess at what is lurking in one particular closet, Dad's office and the small attic, not to mention other smaller hot spots around the house, I'd say we have at least three full dumpsters to go.

We have found the most time-consuming kind of "junk" to go through is the paper--junk mail, regular mail (particularly Christmas cards), bits of this and that, clothes pins, newspaper clippings, unused cough drops, used napkins and paper towels, church programs, and all thrown together with important papers and old family photos. We have to look through these "piles" one piece at a time because of how it is thrown together.

Aunt M's room took two adult women (my sister and me) working at hyper-speed about 2-1/2 days to work through that room, and it wasn't visually overloaded like the front closet, the office and the attic but it contained a lot of paper stuff. If we don't mine into paper stuff, the clean out can go fairly rapidly. However, I expect we will find much of that paper stuff in Dad's office, once we excavate down to that archival layer and some of that archival layer dates back to my grandpa's era. Heaven help us.

For about the last twelve years of Mom living at her home, she didn't and then couldn't sort through her stuff and it is all there waiting for us. Well, as of today, what's waiting for us is minus two and one-half dumpsters full of the stuff.

I'm hoping that as we leave the archival layer of the 2000s and the 1990s, that we will find that Mom was able to have already done some of that sifting herself for the time frame of the 1960s through the 1980s. We will soon find out when we tackle those three big areas I just mentioned.

We have also mined into lots of memories as we've done our excavation. We had great parents and a great home life. My sister and I have reminisced, laughed and shed tears together.

Because of the almost thorough immersion I have had in Mom's house with all the time I have spent there lately, I almost feel like I am in several eras simultaneously--the Now and the Then--and I do not feel tethered in either, really.

It has almost seemed at times that Mom was merely away, running an errand or two, while my sister and I helped her prepare her house for company. However, even as this illusion would shimmer before us, the reality would come to us forcefully again and again (particularly when visiting her) that she would not be home at all.

It has seemed very much of two minds or of two cross purposes to work to put the house together, all the while taking it apart--to fix the house as though someone lived there, all the while taking it apart because the person who lived there can no longer come back to animate her home and possessions.

Our task has been very sobering and poignant. But it has been good and worthwhile--something that has to be done. I do not want to spread this experience over a series of years, at least as far as the dejunking goes. If I lose my momentum, I am not sure I could bring myself to go again. So I keep going. We need to finish what we have started.