09:33 – Barbara’s mom is being discharged from the hospital today. She and Frances are going to get her back to the apartment at Creekside, but Sankie really isn’t ready to be on her own yet. Frances will stay with Sankie overnight tonight, and not leave tomorrow morning until the person they’ve hired to sit with Sankie during the day arrives. Barbara will head over there after work to relieve that person and stay with her mom Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, until someone arrives to relieve her. Then Frances will take Wednesday night, and so on, until Barbara and Frances are satisfied that Sankie will be okay on her own. It’s a question of physical rather than mental issues. Sankie is doing fine mentally, and wants to be back at home in the apartment, but she’s still extremely weak and terrified of falling. Barbara and Frances are taking her by the medical supply place on the way home to get her a walker, which should help a lot. I also encouraged Barbara to look into lift chairs while they were there. A lift chair is an immense help to someone in Sankie’s condition.
Meanwhile, with Barbara and Frances both fully occupied taking care of their mom, I’ll be visiting their dad in the Brian Center nursing home. Barbara visited him yesterday and said that he pretty much completely ignored her. He wouldn’t speak to her. This is nothing new. Dutch for the last couple of weeks has been very short with Barbara and Frances. I suspect he blames them for being in the hospital and then the nursing home, rather than back at the apartment where he really wants to be. Unfortunately, I think that’s very unlikely to happen. It’ll surprise me if Dutch ever recovers enough to move downstairs to the assisted-living floor at Brian Center, let alone moving back to the apartment. And Sankie really doesn’t want Dutch at the apartment. She can’t take care of him and she knows that, and she’s terrified that he’ll drop dead before her eyes.
Science kits continue to sell well. We’ve already shipped three today, and sales for this month are on track to be three to four times sales in May 2012. Until now, we’ve been building kits in batches of 30, but I think we’ll ramp that up to batches of 60.
All of that brings back not-so-wonderful memories of my own dad’s struggles and then eventually my mom being the first to find him dead and unattended at the nursing home with his eyes still open. Now my mom is starting to have falls and not being found for several hours, coupled with the incontinence. And curses like a drunken Marine on shore leave now.
On the other side, my MIL is in her mid-80s and has had hip replacements, cataract surgeries and open-heart surgery so far and still sharp as a tack most days and apparently intends to drive herself up to Noveau Brunswick later this month over two days to her cottage up there. Her *older* sister walks all over hell, rides a bicycle and goes kayaking on the Lake.
45 here today and the Bay looks like the ocean again, strong winds continuing.
We were pretty lucky with my mum, she was as sharp mentally as ever ’till three months before the end, when she started having mini-strokes. She loved watching DVDs and old VHS cassettes with me, and would nag me to come around when I was in Adelaide and talk to her, look at old photos and watch TV. When I was in Canberra she’d nag me to phone her more often. But that changed after she started having mini-strokes. One conversation went like this (I’d been there for about 30 minutes):
Mum: I think you’d better go now.
Me: Why don’t we watch a movie?
Mum: I hardly ever watch movies anymore.
(a few minutes later)
Mum: I think you’d better go now.
And she had nothing to do except to wait for her next meal, two hours later. I think the mini-strokes changed her personality. My brother said the same sort of thing happened to him.
My uncle died on Friday after a 4 year “battle” with lung cancer. Relief on all sides. He was 78, it was a nasty cancer yet he opted for chemo and the whole nine yards. I would never inflict that on my family — throw a party, say your farewells, and push the morphine. Guess who footed most of the bill?
My ferrets have suffered mini-strokes and it definitely changes their personality. My remaining one is 8½ and has had a few. She wobbles around for a few weeks, then gets physically better but is not quite the same. Going to be time to throw her a party soon, too.
Tell me more about this global warming and where I can get some. It didn’t quite freeze here, slightly north of Albany NY, but it got pretty close. Grandma (ie, my mother-in-law) may have lost whatever she planted a week or two ago after temperatures were getting into the 80s.
Say… does anybody know where Al Gore’s been lately? Has he been visiting the Northeast to tell adoring throngs about the perils of the Earth heating up, and bringing his usual unseasonal cold with him?
They’ve sort of shied away from the phrase “Global Warming” and now prefer “Climate Change.” That way they can blame everything on it. Winter Weather in May? Man-made climate change. Twice as many hurricanes on average now as 50 years ago? Man-made climate change. Catastrophic flooding? Man-made climate change.
“Global warming” is passé. “Climate change” is in.
Low forties here overnight and waves with whitecaps for two days now out in the Bay; glad I haven’t planted anything yet.
Chad has it right; they’ve manipulated the language again to suit their agenda; man-made climate change is now the cause of everything bad that happens from now on. Plus the Twelve Years of Reagan-Bush. And dastardly white male patriarchal hegemony.
Chad has it right; they’ve manipulated the language again to suit their agenda; man-made climate change is now the cause of everything bad that happens from now on. Plus the Twelve Years of Reagan-Bush. And dastardly white male patriarchal hegemony.
Somewhere in my mind, Al Gore is Job and the Devil is playing with him.
This global warming stuff is all about money. The USA government is funding $3 billion per year in research grants to study global warning. No research money to dispel global warming. So, the scientists are all sucking at the government teat and saying, yes, there is global warming. Europe is the same way.
Carbon taxes are coming, hide your automobiles and trucks!
I like XKCD today. “Birds aren’t descended from Dinosaurs, they are Dinosaurs.”
http://xkcd.com/1211/
But Explain XKCD says that Randall is wrong!
http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=1211
Lynn wrote:
“Carbon taxes are coming, hide your automobiles and trucks!”
Carbon Taxes are *here* (in Oz.)
In 2010 the lovely Julia Gillard promised there would be no carbon tax. After the election, guess what sort of tax her government introduced?
We have a very long history here, with countless famous examples, of politicians promising us they won’t do this or that and then doing exactly this or that as soon as they’re in power. You’d think we’d have learned by now.
Well, the politicians certainly have. A complacent, non-voting population is key to that success.
Aaack! Posted to wrong day. Look to Tuesday.