Saturday, January 16, 2016 @ 6:36 AM
Good morning. I know
this is the part where we say, Hi, My name is Ann (Marie) and it’s been almost
exactly 5 months since we’ve written. We
did start a note to Dr. Marvin a couple of days ago, but it was only four
paragraphs and we erased it. We’re back
to wanting to write again – especially in the morning, and we want to be able
to write safely enough to do the journal, though we might write and then
cut-out parts that are specifically for Dr. Marvin, especially in writing our
thought on people relationships that we’re in.
Seems all along it’s been something that we’ve worried about, but never
sure how to deal about it so we wane from writing to much to not writing at all
– We’ve got to come up with a better idea than that. So, again, more writing, but less family and
friend writing. At least the kind of
thing that might upset them if they happened upon the writing, you know?
Oh yeah, your getting a lot of the old bad language
habits. We are after all still us. Fighting the urge here to ask, “Right?” Hmm, we’ll that was at least a conscious move
hehe. A lot has happened since writing
last on August 17th. Well,
not a real lot but some pretty significant stuff. My Mother has died. We hadn’t seen that coming. She died September 3, 2015. They are not sure of the exact time. They found her in her home, sitting on her
favorite recliner with both Bibles in hand.
She had her old familiar Bible and the one that we had given to her – so
we’re thinking that it was the morning – Thursday. There was toast on the plate on her counter
and we knew she read her Bibles first thing in the morning. She died of a stroke, which she had had in
the past. There might be more to it than
that, but that’s what we’re able to recall.
There was a long sentence like explanation, but we haven’t been able to
look again at the death certificate which came out quite a while
afterward.
My mother also left a small fortune for the group of
us. We had known for a long time that
David her step-son would receive 26% (for John’s family), the three of us
Scott, CS and us would receive 18%, Tim a family friend of John’s would receive
10% and Pastor Peg’s and my mother’s very small church would receive 10%. We had thought that my mother’s friend Jane
would receive the other friend’s portion, but it appears that paperwork was
never completed. We did offer Jane the
first option on buying the house, but she was unable to do so. The house itself was split between CS, Scott,
David (step-son) and us. It wasn’t very
high priced, but should be closing about this time next month. We hope things go well.
We haven’t gone much of a day where we haven’t thought about
my mother and responsibilities since she’s been gone. I’m not going to talk about it a lot here, at
least directly, but as all my other thoughts – it makes the circuit. In general we feel a little lost, confused
and sad. Most of my mother’s financial concerns
are being handled by financial advisors – And, we have been up to the house in
MN four times since she’s passed. The
first time was for the funeral, the second time was for taking apart her
household, the third time was just to pick up a few things – while we were on
that side of the world, and the last time was to finalize the house for
closing. We had been also at our mother’s
WITH her the end of July.
We were fortunate that my mother left the taking care of
work mostly to Pastor Peg. We really
have gotten to know and enjoy her quite a bit since the first time. We had met her several times before going up
for our annual July trip. But, this time
we were working with her in person. We
really love her to pieces.
Hmm, we think that Rich might be getting up? I heard him move and clear his throat, but
now I don’t hear anything. Maybe? NOOOO He is up! Ahhh … we just got a nice warm hug as he
passed. He’s on his way to make
coffee. Good Rich. That is one of the things we’ve associated
with writing is the morning coffee. Lately,
we’ve only taken what Rich has made – and only on some of the days. First thing REALLY seems to be water or even
pop – something to clear our throat. I
think it’s a diabetic deal that we’re drinking so much of the above. I know PRETTY soon we’ll have to go visit the
doctor – though the last time was only in October, 2015, so that wasn’t WAY far
ago. He had wanted us to come in before
Christmas, or at least this month, but we haven’t arranged that yet. Soon – couple problems we’re thinking
about. BUT, it would mean that we have
to do something with the diabetic numbers.
He’s not going to be happy with that.
Rich just came to give me the extra water in the bottle he
had to use for coffee. Some reason the
blanket was over our head, but we’d reached out to hold his hand again. He said our hand needed lotion – and that got
somebody to come out because we had just been thinking of that a few seconds
ago. We told him Dr. Marvin and us just
talked about it and that we’d have to have some special kind that wasn’t so
oily and that we had to have something that reminded us less of sex. Ok, obviously we’re not very good on the
privacy part, but – at least we can say that kind of stuff is still
happening! Good Anns!
I think we’re going to skip the doctor conversation right
now. We are having problems with
depression, but the new thing now is that it is 5 months later, and we are
writing again – that’s a good thing, right?
I’m thinking … hmm, we just got the lotion for Rich anyway so he could
spread it on the outsides of our fingers because they were hurting to
type. Now they are better, but we have
to deal with the “aroma.” *sigh*
I do seem to remember this part where we’re typing and
typing and then we lose the thought so someone double “enters” and we are on to
the next paragraph. That seems very
efficient, wouldn’t you say?
I think we were talking somewhere between my mother and Dr.,
but not Dr. Marvin, because those would be safer thoughts. He’s still extra special. THOUGH that has some problems too because we
haven’t been going in as much as we should.
We still talk twice a week, but we’ve been going lightweight. I’m thinking that part of that is the
depression. It’s about how much we can
handle going outside our safety zone.
Joe talked to us about something that is working for him right now. He’s using an online game system that’s
called Habitica. It’s a very simple
framework for adding habits, dailies, to-dos and rewards in getting things
done. You may be remembering how hard
this kind of thing involving self-regulation is for us.
Right now in no particular order for our habits our: coloring, cross stitching, money management,
mail and sorting, laundry, make dessert, quilting, make a side dish, make a
main meal, project time, brain buster, language, TED Talk, Personal Management,
Nutrition and creative recreation (like writing). For our Dailies we have: Talk with Dr. Marvin, Talk to Linda on FB,
Reading, Meditation, and Exercise. Then
we don’t have anything special under rewards, but the program suggests a lot of
game playing gear for our “little Ann Person.”
Anything from Training Sword to Snowman Suits! And then the last thing is our To-do
list. We did have Talk to Dr. Marvin and
steps toward going in, but now we have Discussing with Rich the bathroom
remodeling project – broken down in steps because Ed is coming over about
noon. He’s our general contractor.
I suppose we should say that some of our money from our
mother is going into our bathroom remodeling project – we have the Master bath
costing the most, then our laundry room bathroom, and our guest bathroom. All three are having major work done which includes
things like sinks, vanities and toilets, to floors, ceilings and walls. We want to replace a couple other lights so
that they all match, but maybe we won’t install that til we do a little work on
the kitchen. We were forced to get a new
dishwasher this week, but primarily in the kitchen, we’re just going to do
walls, ceilings and countertops. Extra
projects will be new steps in the front of the house (matching back porch),
Lights and wanting to fix the trim in the major part of the house – but, that
could come a long way down the line.
Spouse that would happen during painting of walls and ceiling. Basically we want something besides gypsum or
whatever this is and have just regular drywall.
That should update the place greatly.
Just know that in the old days mobile home seams because of their movability
were done with plastic trim for almost all 8’ x 4’ panels.
Pswhoo – It’s now about 7:50 AM and we’d forgotten to take
our medicine so we went back and did that – and since Weekends are feed
yourself breakfast days – we had to make ourselves something. We told Rich we wanted orange slices. And, he looked at us and asked if he NOW had
to get us oranges too!?? And, we were
like no – we wanted the candy orange slices.
Needless to say that was pretty much disarranged. *sigh*
So we made ourselves some Rice Krispy cereal we had left over from
making bars. Oh yes, you’d be surprised
at some of the turnarounds here! By that
we mean some cooking/baking by us has been happening. WOW!
THAT’S some difference, isn’t it?!
For the record I still like leftover dinner for breakfast,
but there was none of that to be found this morning … there’s no end to the
amount of *sighing* a person could do.
We were going to say that we also gave the boys some
significant money from my mother’s will.
Not a GREAT amount, but yes a great amount, because I wouldn’t have been
able to do that before.
Hmm, where are we?
Forgot what we were saying – we had a second helping of cereal – it was
just 172 calories WITH skim milk. So
that wasn’t too bad and we did share with Dakota. He seemed to like it. Good boy.
By the way, he had a nice day yesterday.
He went in for grooming. He
smells pretty and is soft to the touch.
He had some relaxing to do when he got home, but in general didn’t seem
too traumatized or anything. He did want
to come home. We were sitting on the
park like bench outside the groomer’s door and when he came home he jumped up
on the bench to see us, but then we had to get him down – he’s a big dog to be
doing that kind of hopping around. Hehe –
he WAS happy to see us and be out the door.
I think it’s a lot to go through for a dog with all the activity of
grooming AND being around so many animals.
He did pretty good – we did play some games with his stuffed animal
pets. Rich had gone to a customers with
us on Thursday and he packaged dog things, so when he saw Dakota – he brought
him three new stuffies. Dakota couldn’t
be more pleased to get home and try them out.
One is like a tug of war toy, so we’ll wait until Maury’s dogs come over
to give that a try.
Maury’s dogs will be here from Feb 19-23. Not sure where he is going this time, but he
seems to get around. We had traded him
getting our new TV computer stuff ready for me to be taking the dogs. We’re a little worried about the contractor
being here then, but Maury is brining over a gate to go between the fireplace
wall and the sitting room wall so that we can hopefully keep the dogs in check
on the other side of the house keeping space open for Ed to be getting in and
out. Ed is the contractor. We hope we like him and his work AND prices,
because we have other work, we’d like to do too. I think we mentioned this briefly
before. We’ll have to see how it holds
out – they money. Not sure in February when
he’s coming, but we hope sooner than later.
Our master toilet is sinking enough so we can’t sit down on it
anymore. AND, I think we worked it out
the toilet in the pantry is coming out and we’ll leave it pretty blank until
Missy goes and we won’t need to use the space for kitty box. The next move though is the toilet and sink
will come out and be capped, and then we’ll just use a chair in there until it’s
time to go to a full pantry. Hopefully
Missy stays around for quite a while longer.
She is 17 though so we know the time is closer than not. God Bless her!
I’m thinking how do we pull the time closer together. Maybe talking about a little of Mom. We found out that she was gone after most of
Thursday had gone by. My brother had
called, but I didn’t recognize the number – he called during Dr. Marvin’s
appointment. Later we tried to get a
hold of him, and then my sister and my mother, but the latter two didn’t
answer. After a short while CS called
back and said I don’t know if I should be the one telling you, but Mom
died. I think Rich was home earlier that
day – remember him coming in and using the washroom, but by the time he got out
we were pretty hysterical and cried for a couple of hours. I think that first shock was the worst of
things, though we’d had problems after it.
We just couldn’t make light of it.
We had just seen her and she seemed fine. We did finally after some calling around get
a hold of Pastor Peg and once we got up to MN we found that Scott had
accidentally given us his home phone instead of his mobile and he’d been on the
road to Mom’s. At the time we were
pretty frustrated – but, during the time we were up there and talked to he and
Deb for 2-3 hours, we’d gotten past a lot of our communication problems we’d
had over all those years. I think both
of us were thinking our own ways, and without checking things out they stayed
like bad images in our brains for a long time.
I still think he gets very grouchy, but we can appreciate he’s in his
own stages of grieving and he is a different person than us. I think the best thing is in getting to meet
better his wife Deb. Things have been
happening bad or good, but for the most part they are good. We’re just learning about one another.
CS was another story through all of this. She was up for the funeral, but she wasn’t
able to travel back to the house to help with the major packing up of the
house. Between the group and us, we’d
saved her about 20-25 boxes of things she’d said she wanted in the china and
jewelry. CS was in and out of the
hospital because of infections and such.
We wondered for a while if she wasn’t going to die. It seems to be much better now, but at the
time it seemed touch and go. We will
admit to calling her more when she was in the hospital, then the time she’s
been out, but we know she’s making her way in life then since. We’ve pulled back from Deb too. Just feel she’s busy and we’ve been pretty
much withdrawn into our own small life within the house and too Dr. Marvin’s.
I think there were times that changed too due to some of the
things we collected at Mom’s. Like we
seemed to get our fair share of her old sewing things and that of my
Grandmother’s and Aunt Alice – which means things like we collected 20
thimbles. I know it’s silly, but it
happened. We sorted out the yarn
collected in it’s own boxes and when we meet the girls in February the yarn
will get switched over to Linda’s care.
We’ve since sent her pictures of the boxes, but in general I hope she’s
going to be very happy with the collection.
CS and I don’t knit or crochet and we both have enough with our other
stuff, so that we see it going to a good cause.
Linda might work on donating baby blankets with some of it, but has
promised to make CS and us something first.
I’m thinking we would like just a lap afghan. There is like two gigantic boxes, and a
couple of smaller ones. I can’t wait to
see Linda’s face J
One of the other things that my mother had a lot of was DMC
cross stitch thread. Along with that
came the Aida thread and patterns. That’s
the part that I got really excited about.
It is why we added Cross stitch to our new habits. We’ve got a design picked out and started
with like 9 country style bears – working around a quilting circle. I’m just on the second bear now. We’re not real regular, but am keeping it
next to the couch for times, we can focus on it. I think all told during our inventory process
– there are about 1950-2000 flosses of ALL kinds of threads. We had everything we needed when we pulled
out the group needed for our quilting bears project. And we’ve got hundreds worth of background
cloth.
Because we had that and so many new things, we redid the
quilting room to be more productive. We
went crazy with sorting drawers and then made a video of all that. Maybe later we’ll post it on our blog. Lots of the drawers about 150 of them or so –
are little drawers for just the putsy of stuff, but we had a lot of pleasure
finding space for everything. In the
process we emptied all the bookshelves and all the scrap stuff, and we sorted
through and refolded stuff so that we now have shelves for regular fabric a
couple yards and bigger, a shelf for the DMC threads, a shelf all the bundled
scraps, we’d worked through before, and a shelf of stuff we’re working on and
other newer quilt kits from CS. We also
filled our wicker shelves with a couple shelves for coloring and the others for
books and magazines for quilting. All
the little drawers are on the tables which are mostly cleared off. Our sewing machine sits also on that and
there are five new bigger drawers under the tables, and then we’d brought the
old sewing machine table back to between the regular shelves for my mother’s
sewing machine. Since that time for
Christmas, we’ve given Andy my mom’s sewing machine, because she’s doing so
much hand sewing AND machine sewing over at his mother’s. This is the old Amy. He’s in role playing activities where he is
making his own clothes.
Hmm, been gone for a while.
It is now 9:45 AM. We first
talked to Linda in IM, and then we had to clean the kitchen and take care of
papers on table while Rich vacuumed, and now as soon as he leaves the
bedroom/master bath – we’ll take our shower – oh and we’ve got a load of towels
in the washer – AND the dog has been outside.
Between the dishwasher and washing machine, we hope we have enough water
for a shower. We’ll be checking that
out. Rich couldn’t remember if he said
10-12 pm, where we thought he said 12-1 pm.
So we both had to be ready just in case.
Ok, time for another break – Rich is in the sitting room – hate to be electrocuted
if he was vacuuming the bathroom while we were in the shower, you know? Ok, chances not, but why not eliminate the
chance all together. Ok, here we go!
Good good – we’re back, our things are charging, we’re
showered and dressed and Rich is just emptying the garbage from the vacuum
cleaner … think we’re finishing almost on time.
I think he went through the entire house. Think we have to do the litter and the
garbage.
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