Mornin’all. Presently ~9am here and I’ve already wasted a bit more time than I have. Totally clear skies out there, 67/19 now on the way to 77/25. So, as advertised, about 10/5 degrees colder than the last few days.
Last night I ended up stuffed from the RenFaire so just had a lazy evening at home and did 2 loads of laundry. After this post it’s time for shevelment, breakfast, and packing (more like tossing in a change of clothes) for my next 2 or maybe 3 days on the road with the sailplanes.
Mike’s housekeeper just showed up for her semi-weekly tornado through the house. I thought that was last / next week, not this week. Oh well. So now she’s underfoot for my shevelment & breakfast.
Don’t forget that you don’t greatly care about breakage or damage at this point, so a lot more stuff can be dumped unceremoniously into any given box. You’re not trying to vandalize the stuff, but it’s all going to a thrift store next. Whether they get a set of 7 dishes with one having broken 20 years ago, or a set of 6 with one broken 20 years ago and one today, matters not to them.
As to MIL & falling …
As my late wife got worse, the thing that was most frustrating to her was own bodily unreliability. Some days she was strong, some not. One day she could shower unassisted while standing, having walked to the bathroom on her own two feet. The next day it was time for me to almost carry her, plunk her on the shower chair and I did all the washing while she sat there immobile.
Unlike your MIL, she was quite communicative about her plight and it frustrated her mightily. But she did admit to the unreliability, and did deliberately submit to its limitations. Like no trying to walk unaccompanied and unassisted on a day she felt weak. She spent a lot of time pushing a walker that she didn’t really need. Because as she put it, “The only thing worse than dying of cancer is dying of cancer with a broken leg.”
Infirmity of any sort is such a gigantic bad part of the human condition. I’m sorry you’re going through it now.
Applied to your MIL, the message is
Yes Mom, you’re fine. Until suddenly and with no warning you are not. Then you’re on the floor.
You can’t predict when; neither can we. But we can say it’s gonna happen at least once a day. You wanna fall once a day? No? Then let us help every time, not just sometimes.
She won’t listen, and she sure can’t learn, but you’ll feel better having said it.
Yeah. After lotsa years working in airports, it’s odd to walk through them as a customer. There’s this invisible barrier between me and my former co-workers. I’m invisible to them, just another face in the throng and if I did try to yak with them as if I still worked there they’d be polite, but it’d just feel “off” to all of us.
After years of going to the hospital or cancer clinic at least weekly with my late wife, it was also weird to go there as a patient myself. Which I did a year-ish ago for a specialist visit that turned out to be nothing. Having the bar code sticker on your shirt and having the other patients and their healthy entourage looking at you like that is a very different feeling.
Cookie Best of luck on you and dear wife not having caught the intestinal crapola.
And here’s my catch-up from the last of last week’s MMP:
This is them: Keys’ Meads. So apparently professionals at it. I suspect licensing for by-the-drink sales was the issue. I found the great beer not long after, and although somebody else was almost certainly selling mead by the glass, I wasn’t interested by that time. And yes, if a Viking expedition was to have gotten lost, they could sure do worse than fetching up in Key West.
I did not find a Camera Obscura. This is a temporary set-up that recurs every year on the same site in a huge public park, so no buildings; all tents and portable stages and such.
Yaay! Much easier that way. Good for Mom!!
Late aged MIL did great on her own when downsizing from a big 3BR house to a series of 2 BR apartments in her early 80s.
Going from there to the 1BR at the independent living place at age 91, she struggled mightily to jettison even the crappiest of wildly excessive furniture and she kept all her linens, even the round ones when she had only square tables. After that it was game over. Her place was stuffed to the gills, nothing got used or even looked at, but it could not be gotten rid of until after she died.
So now you have a chest freezer and a stove gracing your porches? Soundin’ kinda rednecky to me. What’s next, a broken down pickup truck on cinderblocks out front? 
Sari: All that drama with the dogs make me think you with your critters and that other lady with her critters should coordinate to never be at the park at the same time. Claim it’s due to the dogs’ incompatibilities although we all know it’s really the humans who can’t handle each other.
The less of her shit in your life, the happier you’ll be.
Off to launch the new week in some kinda style …
Cheers all!!