If you care for a loved one who has an illness, your good thoughts might sometimes be criss-crossed with bad thoughts like the following:
– I’m so sick of you and this situation!
– You aren’t who you were and I loathe the way you are now.
– Thanks for ruining my life!
– Please stop needing me!
– Thanks for giving me the guilts!
– Why can’t you just die instead of suffering like this?
– I hate loving you.
I told Anthony that sometimes I felt like this and he hugged me close and let me cry.
Lately the peacocks have begun congregating outside my office and staring curiously at me through the flyscreen door. They’ve never done this before. They used to come to the back veranda door in the hope of bread but I stopped doing that ages ago when their poop began to replace the pavement.
Today I realized that their staring-at-me-through-the flyscreen-door-behaviour was due to my hayfever and the noise I make when I blow my nose. It almost exactly resembles their loud hoot-honking noise. They must think I’m calling them! Of course Gutsy9 is the first one to come running.
Yesterday was our 20th wedding anniversary and Anthony forgot.
So did I.
[Actually, we always forget for some reason but I thought ‘So did I’ was a rather good punchline – ha!]
My mother usually reminds us but she’s in hospital and will be for some time. It was only when I was collecting stuff from her house to take into the hospital that I saw her note – ‘March 27-Ants & Julie anniversary’.
Ants is coming home for the day tomorrow – Good Friday – and I’m not sure whether to tell him about our anniversary or not because it might make him a bit sad and nostalgic.
20 years! Aren’t I supposed to get some sort of present?
[Note to other bloggers – I am having difficulty keeping up with your posts and comments – will catch up asap.]
Zaruma is one of our two pet Muscovy ducks. We raised him from a chick. Then we got Tapper and raised her from a chick too and now they are a happily married couple. At sundown I always put them into one of the fox-proof pens and they now look after Gutsy9, the baby peacock, during the nights. (One photo shows Zaruma clearly; the other photo shows all three unclearly).
Anyway, onto the miscommunication part of this post: Anthony absolutely loves roast duck so the other day I bought two frozen ducks. Well, yesterday I defrosted them to cook tonight so I could be a bit ahead of myself for Easter lunch. So, at 6.30pm I told Ming I would join him to watch our favourite TV show as soon as I put the ducks in. At 6.35pm this was our conversation:
Me: Okay, the ducks are in.
Ming (watching TV): How the hell did you do that so fast?
Me: Well I got them ready to go, put a bit of salt on and no need for oil because ducks have a lot of fat.
Ming: Salt! They don’t need salt do they?
Me: Well it just makes the meal a bit tastier.
Ming: You put salt on their wheat?
Me: What?
Ming: They’re ducks, Mum – they don’t need condiments!
Me: Well I was going to use some pepper too.
Ming: What?
And that’s when we realized that he thought I was talking about Zaruma and Tapper. LOL!
Laugh out loud
Leaves on lawn
Listen or leave
Loser of lottery
Lonely or lustrous
Lovely old leprechaun
Lack of love
Limping on limestone
Lard of lamb
Like or leave
Leaking old lesson
Leaning on legs
Laundering of loss
Long or lengthened
Lazy ornery llama
Lost or loved
Libido of lipid
Lecherous old lion
Lost or least
Lots of love
Laugh out loud!
I tend not to use LOL very much because, after all, it might be misinterpreted.
Yes, it’s been one of those days. LOL!
My mother had a terrible fall yesterday and is in hospital undergoing surgery for three fractures in her wrist. Her pelvis is also fractured in two places. She had just recovered from a fractured hip and was elated to be able to ride her bicycle again and it was only her second ride. A neighbour found her on the road and rang me. Since then it has been a bit chaotic.
She shines.
I weep.
I found some old socks –
the football socks you once wore
to get the cows in.
Your favourite socks!
But you never played football –
you just liked to run….
I put your socks on
and now I will go to bed
With you warming me.
I’ve been trying to find a word that means the same thing as ‘stating the obvious’ but, apart from ‘duh’, there doesn’t seem to be one in the English language. ‘Redundant’ doesn’t quite cut it, ínanity’ only just comes close, so ‘duh’ it is.
A close relative of Anthony’s, who only visits him sporadically, and has baulked at my suggestion of getting him wheel-chair taxied to their place, sent me an email the other day. In the email it was stated that they had visited Anthony but didn’t have time at the moment to arrange for a taxi visit. The irony and inanity of the email’s concluding sentence astounded me:
We notice that he is very lonely.
Duh!
In advanced Parkinson’s disease, it is difficult to predict how any one day will unfold. PD is the kind of disease whereby the timing of medications is almost as important as the medications themselves.
Over the many years since Anthony’s diagnosis, the medications have been changed repeatedly to ‘keep up’ with the progression of the disease. The various timings have also been altered here and there because it’s so difficult to get it right.
In some ways, I quite like the idea of unpredictability – unexpected visitors, for example. In other ways, I don’t like unpredictability -unexpected visitors, for example (ha!)
With PD (especially when it includes a bit of fresh dementia), the unexpected visitors come in the form of constant unpredctability. Today, for instance, I visited Ants at the nursing lodge just after lunch. I predicted that he would have the usual post-meal droopiness but instead he was lively, lucid and he made me laugh.
This was just as unpredicted as the arrival of four wild galahs who seem to have made this place their home recently. So I guess there really isn’t much point attempting to predict the unpredictable, and I am going to stop trying, happily!
Anthony was wheelchair-taxied home for the afternoon yesterday and I was excited about showing him what Ming and I have just discovered – a nest of guinnea fowl eggs behind the wash house, with a mother in attendance.
When Ants arrived he managed to walk unassisted from the taxi to the front veranda after Ming and I helped him out of the wheelchair. But 15 minutes later, when he had to go to the loo, he couldn’t move without my help and it was another 15 minutes before he and I were sitting down again. I knew then that there was no point trying to get him around to the back of the house to see the nest. Oh well, maybe next time.
The guinneas were the first birds we ever got and Ants loves them. If all goes well, we will have another flock soon!
jmgoyder 