Cassie, you know the saying "it's five o'clock somewhere" !
Thanks for the good wishes. The pest control guy was here a little while ago...$2000, but I have no choice. He was recommended to me & he seems to know his stuff, so I need to trust him.
Charlotte thinking of you and I hope you get the result you hope for and god knows deserve. The waiting is the worst. I hope you get quick response. Hang in there.
Myrtle I would trade 1 leaky toilet, a washer n dryer on last leg and a garage full of self employed contractor tools and crap, Oh and a bedroom window that will not open for your termites. We can seal the deal over cocktails.
Charlotte - I also hope its benign. It's a scary thing but you have lots of people here that are sending positive thoughts and prayers your way.
Mim - I feel for you... I've often felt overwhelmed by all the things that decided to break or go wrong since my husband got sick and subsequently moved into an ALF. I hope things work out and you get rid of the termites... and soon!
Mim - My friend who had advance ovarian cancer is still doing chemo 2 1/2 years later. Last winter they finally started using the strongest drugs out there that finally brought her CA125 down below 100. CT and MRI are negative for any signs but because the CA125 has been elevated, sometimes in the 300s, they keep doing it. She is the one that had a spinal for pain, formed a blood clot which despite her complaining of pain they never did anything until it was too late.
I do pray the rise was a fluke since in infection like a cold can cause it to rise.
Yes Charlotte, I was told not to panic yet (yeah, right), that the number was not necessarily the be all & end all. It's an indicator, maybe even of an inflammation somewhere in the body. I know I have a lot of "gut" trouble, have had for several years, yet nothing has ever shown up in that area except moderate gastritis (not exactly sure what that is, except maybe inflammation - the nurses on here should know, huh?). Hopefully, that might be what it is, but another CT scan is getting scheduled. With this concern, with the concern about Dan's AD & now cancer for him, car trouble & now termites...it's just too much! AARRGGGHH!!!!
Mim, you have already sorted out the termite problem so that is one to tick off the list. No wonder you have gut issues with all the constant stress.That would be inflammation as you said, which would affect the blood tests.So try not to worry too much. Someone here once advised to say LA LA LA LA LA LA............. out loud until it got rid of unwanted thoughts. It works and I still do it often!! As for Dan and the upcoming Pet scan, I am just astounded that they would even try to do it, madness! We all know that stillness is not possible for them so if you have warned them, forget about it now. As long as Dan is comfortable and pain free I don't see the need to contemplate any other treatment. That is my lot of "unasked for advice." Just as well I do live in Australia or you may call around to tell me to, "mind my own business!"
Cassie, your opinion/input is much appreciated. I need a different perspective on things, might try the LA LA LA ...thingy!. I'm sure the Pet Scan will not be successful, but like the radiologist said, we won't know unless we try. It's to find out if the bladder cancer has spread anywhere else. It has already gone into the muscle around the bladder & he said it is aggressive, so we shall see what happens. I'm really thinking there will be no further treatment, have already talked to the nursing home staff on how it will be handled there. I'm feeling pretty satisfied that he will be cared for. Discussed Hospice also.
I would NOT call you to tell you to mind your own business!! :) :)
As lindylou reported on another thread, it has been beautiful weather here. I've been able to open some windows and my cat has been loved that. Last fall, l was too tired to disconnect and drain the hose in the front garden so I gave up and just accepted that it would freeze and crack. Today I put the birdbath back together and tried out the hose and it worked perfectly! On the other hand, the lavender, which is marginally hardy here and which I have overwintered in the garden for four years, appears to have died.
OK, So here's a poem for April. Robert Browning was an homesick Englishman who lived in Italy. I'm certainly not homesick (since I rarely leave the house) but I thought of this poem when I read the news this morning, which I'll will explain on the "Journeys Somewhere Else" thread. But I like to think about the last lines, too, which make me think of the "gaudy melon-flowers" that I overwintered inside my house this year - a bougainvillea and two mandevillas. One mandevilla died and but the other one and the bougainvillea look like they might make it, although they are about 90% smaller than they were when I took them inside in the fall. I just hope that they can hang on until May.
HOME-THOUGHTS, FROM ABROAD
by Robert Browning (1812 - 1889)
Oh to be in England Now that April's there, And whoever wakes in England Sees, some morning, unaware, That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough In England - now!
And after April, when May follows, And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows! Hark! where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge Leans to the field and scatters on the clover Blossoms and dewdrops - at the bent spray's edge - That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, Lest you should think he never could recapture The first fine careless rapture! And though the fields look rough with hoary dew, All will be gay when noontide wakes anew The buttercups, the little children's dower - Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower
Trying to write on a more positive note. My grandmother always changed her curtains at the onset of warm weather. When spring came, she removed the heavy drapes from her windows (although the blackout shades, left over from WWII, stayed) and put summer slipcovers on the living room chairs. My mother did the same (although we did not have blackout shades) and also rearranged the living room furniture, probably to for better access to the screened porch. My observance of this tradition is limited to changing the bedcovers. My quandry this week was how quickly to make the change from flannel sheets, winter blanket, heavy bedspread, and comforter. I decided to keep the flannel sheets and the heavy comforter (it's still in the 30s at night) but change to a light blanket and bedspread. (I use a washable bedspread due to cats.) Our former home health aide thinks it's ridiculous to use all these bedcovers. She is from Eastern Europe and uses only a bottom sheet and a comforter all year round.
I also want to add that for the first time ever, I woke up this morning to find my cat lying on top of me, sound asleep.
I will add when we worked in the fields we took sandwiches with mayo on them - no refrigeration - and never got sick.
Subject: the sane days (Under the age of 40? You won't understand.) My mum used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread butter on bread on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't seem to get food poisoning. Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice pack coolers, but I can't remember getting e. coli Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake or at the beach instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then. We all took PE ..... and risked permanent injury with a pair of Dunlop sandshoes instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors that cost as much as a small car. I can't recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now. We got the cane for doing something wrong at school, they used to call it discipline yet we all grew up to accept the rules and to honour & respect those older than us. We had 30+ kids in our class and we all learned to read and write, do maths and spell almost all the words needed to write a grammatically correct letter......., FUNNY THAT!! We all said prayers in school and sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention. I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself. I just can't recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations. We weren't!! Oh yeah ... and where was the antibiotics and sterilisation kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed! We played “King of the Hill” on piles of gravel left on vacant building sites and when we got hurt, mum pulled out the 50c bottle of iodine and then we got our backside spanked. Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10 day dose of antibiotics and then mum calls the lawyer to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat. To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family How could we possibly have known that? We never needed to get into group therapy and/or anger management classes. We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills, that we didn't even notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac! How did we ever survive? LOVE TO ALL OF US WHO SHARED THIS ERA. AND TO ALL WHO DIDN'T, SORRY FOR WHAT YOU MISSED I WOULDN'T TRADE IT FOR ANYTHING! Pass this to someone and remember that life's most simple pleasures are very often the best. AAAAh, those WERE the days!!!!
I love your story..... I'm going to keep reading it and share it with my sisters. I get the message ......... "Pay no attention to what the Know-it-alls tell us" At our age, we know more than they do.......
Ate full-fat dairy, ate raw, unpasteurized eggs, ran barefoot all summer, played in the pond and the creek, lounged around in the straw in Grandma's chicken house, sat on a big draft horse pulling the plow when I was three years old--no one even considered that I should have a helmet.
Practically lived in the woods from early elementary school age--no adult supervision whatsoever. Ate wild berries, built "forts" in the bushes and made rickety tree-houses from materials and tools "borrowed" from parents' workshops. Endless games of tag, freeze tag, hide and seek, etc. with the swarms of neighbor kids (because few families had less than four kids, and nobody had ever heard of "day care" or "play dates.")
Boy, do I feel sorry for children now. We did without a lot, and my parents certainly couldn't have cared less about having "quality time" with us. They were more interested in if we did our homework (if any--didn't seem to have so much then), cleaned our rooms, did the dishes, and weeded and watered the big garden. But we sure had fun. Everything was real and tactile--none of this virtual reality--and not a screen in sight, except for the screen door that we banged incessantly as the grown-ups chased us out to play outside. (In all weathers.) Well, maybe the one small TV screen in the living room, with its three channels.
Never would have thought I'd look back on those days and consider myself lucky.
I'm with you Elizabeth. I think probably the majority of us grew up that way. The outdoors was our day care and play ground. Not much was out of bounds and we lived to tell about it. Didn't have a horse but we road the goats when smaller and then the cow - we would throw a gunny sack (remember them?) over it, halter with rope and hop on.
Like you, I feel sorry for kids now who only know video games and now that most are not country kids, concrete yards
Oddly enough, my son & I were having a conversation about this kind of thing this evening. He's 48 & even he thinks that kids now aren't really going to know how to live in the real world...so many don't seem to have any social skills, they have arranged play dates (like Elizabeth said), have what is now called helicopter parenting, which takes away any imagination, curiosity. Amazing to me how any of us survived our "dangerous" & somewhat unsupervised childhoods (meaning we didn't need to be constantly entertained, left to our own devices...within reason of course!)
Mim,I will be thinking of you on Tuesday and wishing you all the very best, for a positive outcome. You are one strong lady so hang in there and know that we all love you very much here at Joans'.
Ha, ha--riding goats. Yes, Charlotte, I had forgotten about that one. Our neighbors had a goat farm, and we rode the goats, also laid down in the barn with them, using them for pillows. Good old goats.
Mim and I had coffee the other day--she is so much fun--lots to talk about, like we've known each other forever. She looks nice with her short, short haircut.
It's tempting to idealize the past even though not all of it was ideal. Kids were not invincible in the '50s. One of my classmates accidentally stabbed his brother to death when they were roughhousing while washing the dishes. Children got polio and many smaller ponds closed to swimming in mid-summer for fear of the disease. Thousands of babies were born with birth defects because their mothers contracted rubella during pregnancy. Although children were abused, including sexually, there was low awareness of it and as far as I know, little or no counselling for the victims. And kids suffered the same kind of ordinary injuries they do now - two of my sisters ended up in the ER at different times, one after jumping off a rock and hitting her head and another after falling off a bike and breaking her arm.
The 1950s was a unique time, though, due to the post-WWII economic surge and the population bubble known as the baby boom. I did not live in the country; I lived in the suburbs, where there were large numbers of kids around the same age. Although we seemed to be completely unsupervised when school was out, we were not, for most mothers were at home during the day so there were always adults somewhere in the area. We did have a lot of freedom, though, to build forts in the woods, climb trees, and harvest and eat acorns (which taste terrible). We did cartwheels and played under sprinklers in grassy yards, but moved to driveways to play hopscotch and jump rope and to the street to ride bikes and play softball. No one scolded us for playing ball in the street and drivers seemed to expect we would be there. But the softball games highlight another problem - although boys had little league teams, there were no organized sports teams for girls. So although I learned the rules of baseball during our street games, I was never properly taught how to play the game. (A metaphor for women's lives, maybe?)
Well said, myrtle. I was considering the pros and cons of being a devil's advocate, so am glad you opened the door. Your second paragraph speaks to the freedom that we all cherished and thrived on as children.
We tend to forget what the fears and dangers were during those years, and perhaps as children we were not as aware. Nonetheless, nostalgia wraps its arms around romanticism. In my MIL's family, her farmer father and three of her eight siblings all contracted and died of TB. A possible source could have been unpasteurized cow's milk. One of her sisters was molested by a farm hand. A grandfather was killed by run-away horses and one of his two children was struck by lightening running from the outhouse during a thunderstorm. My other grandfather died when my mother was one year old of surgery for a "twisted intestine" which was probably a strangulated hernia. Who hears of deaths like this any more?
Accidents, diseases, and tragedies are indelibly woven into human life, as are joy, love, adventure and the bias of memory. The point is well taken, though, that today's hothouse children lack a certain boisterousness and imaginative life borne of few possessions and fearful parenting.
And, you know, when things in the AD world weigh heavy and sad, it is good to let our minds wander back to those carefree and fun filled endless days of childhood for a mini mental vacation. I know I did and it was a gift. So thank you to those on this thread who brought up the subject.
Yes, it was not all 'peaches and cream'. I was physically, emotionally, and sexually abused by various relatives, my dad hated me which allowed my brother to be mean to me with no consequences. The nearest neighbor was a mile away. Kids would gather from all around to play together. I had only one grandparent (grandmother) living so we adopted older/elderly in the neighborhood for grandparents. We lived along the train track and will admit we did some dangerous things by todays standards and survived. Good friends lived miles away which meant riding bike there. Often rode my bike the miles to school or when we wanted to walk the bus driver would let us off early so we didn't have to do the whole ride. We often would get to our bus stop when the bus got there (was at end so had an hour bus ride). They would never be able to do that now. I rode a bike or walked until I got a car and license at 16. That included walking home in the dark on a gravel road carrying an arm full of books and my saxophone when I choose to stay for after school sports (high school) and be in the play. Let me tell you - it was terrifying walking in the pitch black with only enough light to barely show where the gravel road was. My dad would always make sure he was on the phone when he knew I would be calling to need a ride (mom was working by then nights), plus my brother told his friends in no uncertain terms were they ever to give me a ride.
But, despite all that I still am thankful I grew up in the country with all the freedom I had.
I understand the "other side" of the comments...we tend not to concentrate on the bad things of the past. There was sexual abuse in our family, one of the neighborhood friends had polio, another had meningitis, Dad had little interaction with my brother & me, but overall, even with the unpleasant aspects, I still think it was better than what the kids have to deal with now. Especially that they generally don't seem equipped to handle life's reality.
Let's face it, every generation, every culture, every family has always had difficulties...we just seem to hear about it so much now. In some instances, that's a good thing (as in the case of abuses, bullying, etc.). In other instances, everyone's dirty laundry shouldn't be broadcast to the world at large.
Reading your stories definitely brought back memories. I came from a broken family. But my aunts and uncles took up the slack. My mom had to work and my sister and I had to do a lot of things on our own. In the summer, we walked eight blocks to my aunts house in the morning and before my mom came home. We went to the park pool by ourselves, unaccompanied by an adult; the lifeguards watched us. We lived in the big city, so it was not u usual for us to take the bus wherever we wanted to go. We were 11 and 12 years old and nothing ever happened to us.
I remember we had a prairie on our corner, in the front of which was a victory garden. The girls on our block would make a date with the boys and the boys would dig a hole in the prairie and roast potatoes and when the potatoes were done they would call us girls to come and eat them. We did have a lot of fun in those days.
Reading through this I can see for the first time how much being an immigrant colors your experience. It wasn't just me trying to figure it out, nothing made sense to my parents either. Learning the new language is big and it must have taken years for them to become reasonably fluent even though I was never aware of that.
You don't hear your own accent. I was told I had one but I'm just realizing as I type that if I had one going into high school, then I must have had a thicker accent looking backwards. All of my memories of growing up there are in perfect english; but, that can't be true.
Instead of having the kind of outlook that we belong where we are and traditions are familiar, we were learning about turkey and thanksgiving and that you celebrate christmas on christmas day, not the evening before.
My world of pinnacle and schnapps wasn't shared by any of the other kids. They didn't eat rabbit and thought it was weird. Or potato dumplings or sauerkraut. We were accepted though by most and by quite a few with open arms.
What we didn't have was continuity. That was in another country. But what I did have even though I was raised in Toronto, was a similar freedom to be outside and have things happen to me and eat dirt and bang up my shin so it looked like a war zone (you'll be fine stop crying), and I'm glad of that compared to today with it's smothering structured events and detrimentally disinfected environments.
Last point. It's said in many places that Germans have no sense of humor. Even Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert stay on that note. But I had Germans all around me growing up and the only consistent thing they did was laugh, make jokes, and tell funny stories. Nevermind.
Yesterday I came home in the afternoon to find that my tenants had left, a few days earlier than they’d said. They took my microwave, some towels, and all my cleaning supplies. In exchange, they left 4-5 bags of garbage. Some of it is pretty high. There was a flood in the kitchen from their unplugging 2 fridges without any protection for the floors. But what a relief to have them gone. I hadn’t realized I must have been holding my breath when they were here, because the first thing I noticed was I was standing up straighter and breathing deeply. Today I looked out of the window, half-bracing myself to see their vehicle parked on the street, but it’s gone. On Monday, I will have a cleaning woman come in to tackle the cobwebs in all the rooms and the mildew in the kitchen. Never again.
Mary75, Hallelujah! You finally have your life back. So sorry they were so disrespectful and underhanded though. Have you got "changing the locks" on your to-do list?
Thanks, Fiona68. It really does feel like I've got my life back. My Irish mother had a saying, "Bad cess on them." I've never understood what "cess" meant, but it doesn't sound good. Yes, changing the locks is on my to-do list. Right now, I'm washing a comforter they used. It's one of his my husband's — it still has his name and room number on it from when he was in the care facility.
I asked my son to find out where the tenants "put the microwave — I can't seem to find it." Turns out to be in the laundry room behind some boxes. So that's good.
I'm glad you have the house back to yourself, despite some labor to clean up their mess. Did they have a security deposit? If so it sounds like you are entitled to keep some or all of it. Especially if the flood caused any damage.
No, no security deposit. Son said, "Mom, they're like family." I haven't inspected the floor carefully yet, but it's probably okay. I had a good quality lino. put in about two years ago, and the flood was probably about two hours old when I went down there and moped it up with towels. Am enjoying my home once again.
I've been reading these Landlady Chronicles on the edge of my seat with bated breath--my goodness, if I've ever had a yen to rent anything to anybody, I've sure been cured of the thought.
Good point. Got a chuckle out of that. Yes, some family. Makes me think of Churchill's remark in the Second World War when one of the enemy said they would "Choke England, like a chicken by the neck." And he said, "Some chicken. Some neck."