Oh, Dear.

Well, I spent the day today sorting laundry, cleaning out the refrigerator, and cropping my pictures from our trip last week to Wisconsin.  So here I sit at my computer all ready to post them when a message appears from Google telling me that I am out of storage for my pictures.  Now, I COULD understand this as I DO post a plethora of pictures - BUT - I just deleted an entire blog and individually deleted each picture from my Picasa site.  So shouldn't I at least have available to me THAT amount of storage?
Oh well.  If that's the least of my trials for today I must admit that I have it pretty good here in Judyland.

Conversations Heard at Restaurant

Things in my little world have felt a bit mixed up lately. I do not deal well with change. Even GOOD change.

Two weeks ago THGGM and I were on a nice vacation in Traverse City. It was lovely. Relaxing and refreshing.

The following week, THGGM was still on vacation. It felt as if I got nothing done. It was fun, but not as productive as I had hoped.

(meaning, i still do not have shelves in my kitchen closet, although the boards are cut and the lines drawn for hanging.)

What we DID do was go out to eat A LOT. Well, we didn't actually EAT a lot, we went out a lot.

At breakfast one morning we were sitting in a section with two sweet looking elderly women.

And, a younger business man eating alone while conducting business on his cell phone.

The elderly women were actually the closest people to us (by this time, thggm and i had absolutely nothing left to say to each other - two weeks of vacation together will do this, and neither of us mind one bit. this always causes one of us to quote a line from 'when harry met sallly') but we never heard even one word of their conversation. They were well mannered ladies.

For reasons unbeknownst (i love that word!) to me, the younger business man had NO PROBLEM at all talking very loudly on his cell phone.

It was almost like he was the elderly one and hard of hearing also.

Without wanting too, I now know personal information about his client. I also know that someone in the office is extremely mad about something, but it is not this man's fault. No. It wasn't him. Maybe if he had only said this once, it wouldn't have stuck with me, but he seemed to feel compelled to repeat this over and over, increasing the volume with each telling.

But, if he were the only loud one, breakfast may have been relaxing. I find it easy to ignore things about which I have no interest, and I have no interest in real estate nor money.

Enter: Loud Mom and Two Year Old with ability to masterfully control her Loud Mom.

Loud Mom ENTERED the room by saying LOUDLY - in a voice I have only ever heard used by that thick-bearded guy on TV who sells things like OxyClean - STOP SAYING THAT. YOU CAN HAVE CHOCOLATE CAKE AND ICE CREAM FOR BREAKFAST BUT WE HAVE TO ORDER IT FIRST.

Although we NEVER personally talked with this woman nor her 2 year old dictator of a child, I am privy to much information about the two of them.

They are moving. (moving is stressful. i know that.)

They are going to live with grandparents for awhile while daddy fixes up the new house on many acres in the country. (hopefully enough acres to not disturb close neighbors.)

I know the name of their dog, and the name of a dog they may have to borrow so that foxes and bears do not eat their little dog. (comforting words to a child of two, no doubt.)

She does not normally give her child chocolate cake and ice cream for breakfast, she said, but the little dear wants it so badly. She even woke up asking for it. (i did once feed my 22 month old chocolate cake for breakfast just because he asked for it. but, i was 9 months pregnant and in the privacy of my own home. also, the boy was shocked that i acquiesced.)

It's okay to give her chocolate cake and ice cream for breakfast because she will be taking a nap when they get back to the hotel. (really? how'd that work out, i wonder.)

Not only did the child get chocolate cake and ice cream for breakfast, she was escorted to the bakery window to pick out the exact piece she wanted. The entire time she worked at eating it Loud Mom ran a constant play-by-play of everything that had happened so far that day. To the daughter.

Then, she called the child's grandma and repeated it all over again to her. Loudly. (she asked to talk to grandpa, but thank goodness! he was busy!)

Next, she told the waitress, the waitress who had obviously never served chocolate cake and ice cream before noon to a 2 year old.

Followed by a retelling in triplicate to the businessman. The businessman who told the child what a nice mommy she had for ordering her chocolate cake and ice cream for breakfast.

Oh, and just for fun, the restaurant started filling up, and EVERY passer-by got to hear the unabridged account of why the two year old was having chocolate cake and ice cream for breakfast.

I believe that I would be less bothered by breathing second hand smoke than by being exposed to the sounds of people who have no clue that there IS such a thing as an inside voice.

There. I got that off my chest.

Aren't my peonies beautiful?

I love them!

My Morning

Hospitalized or not, my dad calls me at exactly 8:10 every morning. He is just like that. If he says he will do something, he does it.

Today, he did not call at 8:10. Right away, I knew something was up. Most likely he'd been taken to x-ray or was doing physical therapy in the hallway, I thought.

At 8:30 his doctor called. Heart-failure-wise, he had made great improvement. Infection-wise, things are clearing up.

But..,

We all know that there is ALWAYS a but.

He was confused and disoriented.

But then, aren't we all?

He hadn't been able to breathe well for days and had been fighting an infection,

and was also sleep deprived.

Sleep deprived?

I've seen my dad when he is awakened from a deep sleep. He CAN be a bit disoriented. This happened two weeks ago when I woke him up from a nap.

That was NOTHING like what he was like today. NOTHING.

If it wasn't so scary, it would have been funny.

I got to the hospital expecting to sign him out and drive him home.

What I found was a confused and disoriented dad trying to figure out where he was.

He thought he was at a school, but didn't know which one. He could not remember the who, what, when or why about getting there.

He was seeing numerous things that I was not seeing. Condos being built, murals being painted on walls, animals in cages, to name just a few.

The hospital had him on a 'bed watch' as he had been found wandering the halls during the night looking for my mom.

At one point he tried to crawl under the bed, because he could not figure out why it was up like it was.

And, he tried to take apart the bed tray because he insisted that there was a fork stuck in it.

Of course, there was NO WAY I was taking him home in that condition. I hope to NEVER ride in the back of a police car again, looking for a parent.

His nurse went over his medications with me, and nothing seemed to be enough of a change to cause this.

So, they labeled it 'sleep deprivation'.

He didn't even look to be a teensy bit tired.

If you know my dad, he is a man of few words. Very few words.

Except for today! He was extremely talkative and entertaining.

Two nurses settled him into bed after lunch. I turned off his TV and closed the curtains. Then, it seemed best that I leave so he would stop talking and GO TO SLEEP.

I went home. Wrote my sisters an email. Curled up on the couch with my cat and went to sleep.

Tonight, THGGM talked to the night nurse on duty at the hospital.

Was dad doing better?, he inquired.

MUCH better, she said.

They now believe it was an adverse reaction to AMBIEN.

AMBIEN??? He cannot TAKE sleep aids! EVER!

Hmmm. Seems this should have been on his chart when I talked to the day nurse this morning!

And, now it all makes sense.

I am going to bed. I am going to read. I am going to sleep.

Soon, I shall be listed as one of the dangerous side effects of Ambien.

On the Second Day of Christmas

...I am cleaning up from yesterday in an attempt to get ready for the extended family Christmas party on Sunday.

We had a lovely time, truly, we did. But it shall go down in family folk lore as the Poo Christmas of '08. No more on THAT story will be coming, ever.

And, after I sort, crop and tweak, I may have a picture or two to show. Happy children, happy adults, good food and good family time. It does not get better than that.

Now, on to the 'angsty' Judy sort of post we've all grown accustom to.

While reclining on the couch in the early morning hours, I picked up a book that Oldest Son gave to his father for Christmas (everyone is SO excited that thggm reads now.)

The book is "Yours, Jack - Spiritual Direction from C.S. Lewis". The book is a fabulous collection of letters written by C.S. Lewis, something and someone I find extremely interesting and THGGM is growing to enjoy immensely.

But, being the angsty hormonally challenged tired overwhelmed Judy that I am today, this is what I noticed when I read the very first page, the "Editor's Note".

Now, please, bear with me. This weird little error in editing is on the first page? The Editor's Note page? The FIFTH word in the entire book? A book about someone who was extremely word aware?

Here, before I tell you what it actually IS, I must interject that this will seem odd coming from the likes of me, who fills her blog posts with many poor examples of spelling, grammar and even cognitive thought. But, still. I do not do this for a living wage. No. I do it because. Just because. I have no idea why I do it, I just DO. When I go back and find errors in my posts, I tend to leave them as errors, so you, my dear blog readers, will know what I have known for decades. I'm not all that bright.

Anyway, I give you here the very first sentence on the very first page of the very first thing I read this morning:

"Unless you were a person friend of C.S. Lewis, or one of his many correspondents, you are probably not aware that he went by "Jack" to his friends, a name he landed on as a child and decided it suited him better than his given one (Clive Staples Lewis)."

Now. Did you SEE it?

The fifth word?

"person"?

Should that not read "personal"?

One would think.

Unless, of course, here the editor is referring to the numerous alien, animal and inanimate object friends that C.S. Lewis had, which then would make that fifth word permissible.

Really. Does this sort of thing bother anyone else?

(seriously. i need a cookie.)

Thoughts on Election Day

None of these thoughts shall have anything at all to do with the election, but they will be thoughts that I have had on election day. Or, by the end of this you may realize that they were hardly thoughts at all. I'll let you be the judge.

This morning when I got up, I thought how nice it was that I wasn't awake coughing all night. Then I realized that was only because the stuff in my lungs had turned to cement and required much effort to expel. No more details.

My next coherent thought was to wonder why I had such a dreadful stomach ache. Then I realized that due to an extreme inability to taste anything yesterday I had eaten strangely. Much onion/dill/rye bread, two large bowls of popcorn, generous mugs of coffee, rotisserie chicken, raw cauliflower and to top it all off, near midnight I was eating chocolate chips straight from the bag.

I think THGGM has the same thing I have, but he does not seem to suffer in the same manner I do. This is because he takes drugs. I take only foul tasting diabetic cough syrup. Yes. The irony is obvious. I realize there are carbs in the onion/dill/rye bread, popcorn and chocolate chips, yet I choose to avoid carbs in my cough syrup. So sue me. THGGM waltzed out the door in the wee hours of the morning and will waltz back in late this afternoon. In the mean time he will swallow capsules of cold/flu medications and work hard. If I have the energy, I will draw faces on the little felted wee folk's heads and trim their woolly hair. It will take many mugs of coffee before I'm up to that, though.

My thoughts turn to how tired I am this morning. It couldn't have anything to do with how little sleep I got, due to the fact that I had no rotisserie spit to turn on to keep up with my fickle sinus' which could not decide whether or not they leaned towards the liberal far left or the conservative far right and were slithering around annoyingly as if on a mad hunt for the fulcrum. When I realized that the fulcrum would not be found and my sinus' would remain off balance until this evil germ had run it's full course I turned the light back on and picked up my current book, "The Egg and I".

I think I'm in love with this book. Or, am I just realizing that my brain could not keep up with Mary Chesnut and her civil war horrors and life on an egg farm with Ma and Pa Kettle as the closest neighbors makes more sense than Mary's being best friends with Jefferson Davis' wife?

Huh. Sort of makes one think. But then, I realize now that my ability to think rational thoughts has been seriously compromised by this illness that I have, which I am sure is worse than any illness THGGM has ever had in this live-long-life. And, I would tell him that, if I could talk without coughing.