Plants

I love real plants.
There are just so many things to love about a nice plant.
Over the years I have had a variety of plants and I have killed all of them.
I buy the ones that are "impossible to kill" and promptly kill them.
I've killed succulents and ferns and flowering plants and cacti.
I will go for some time without plants after killing one but I always get hopeful and end up buying another plant.
I've tried fake plants a few times but I just don't care for them. Plus I hate to dust so, ya know, it never works out.

I don't remember exactly when but at some point I bought a new houseplant for this house. It's been at least a couple of years now. It was a plant that I recognized as one of those "no one can kill these" kind of plants. It's not my favorite looking plant but I really wanted to have a plant that would live.

and

I hope I don't jinx myself here but, it is still alive!

It's pretty healthy and getting big and doesn't look too bad. Though it's not exactly a statement kind of plant, it is my only houseplant and so it gets a place of honor in my living room.

My Roomba has run over and mangled this plant and it still survives. I have forgotten to water it and I have over watered it. It soldiers on. I love this plant.

Recently Frank and I went to restaurant that had cute but minimal table decorations consisting of a milk glass vase with a small sprig of leaves from the very same plant that I have in my living room.

I was immediately excited because I already collect milk glass and I have that very same plant! What? I know.

I have a collection of pictures on my living room wall and part of that collection includes a small shelf. I keep a milk glass vase on that shelf and have played with various ideas of what to put in the vase: pretty fake flower (looks dumb), whimsical fake flower (also dumb), sprig of fake leaves (nope), twigs (gah!) and so, for the most part, the vase just sits on the shelf with nothing in it. I honestly don't mind it that way but I wonder if it looks unfinished to others? I know I know...it doesn't matter what others think. But bear with me here.

Anyway, I went right home and snipped a small bit of my plant off and stuck it in the vase. It looked pretty good although my leaves are much bigger than the ones at the restaurant for some reason (perhaps a slightly different version of the plant? I know very little about plants.)

And that small bit has lived in this vase for WEEKS now and is perfectly happy and healthy. I even forget to top off the water at times and it just lives on.  It even recently unfurled a new leaf!  I am so impressed.  When it gets too big I will transplant it back into the original pot with it's mother and snip off a new section for my vase.

The success of this little venture makes me want to put snippets of plant in vases all over the place. But I know this would look weird so I try to hold back. Also, as I write this, I wonder when I last checked the water in that vase...hmmm.

It has also made me think that I might possibly be able to get another plant and not kill it. I know, it's crazy thinking but I am *this close* to buying another plant.

Hope lives on!

New Post about Mom

Dementia is an interesting thing. And by interesting I mean awful.

I spent some time with my mom recently to give Dad and Doneen a bit of a break.  She was actually pretty easy to deal with compared to other times but it was an unusual visit.

You see, my mom does this thing now where she keeps a running, out loud, commentary on everything she is doing or thinking.  She does this in the form of retelling a conversation between two people.  Here is an example from this visit:

I walk in and see that mom is wearing a jacket with no shirt underneath.  I find a shirt, bring it to her and offer it to her.

Me: Hey mom, here's a shirt. Do you want to wear this?
Mom: No, I'm fine. I have this shirt (pointing to the jacket)
Me: That's a jacket.  You might want a shirt underneath it.
Mom: And she said you should wear this.  And I said why should I wear that, I have one already. And she said you need to wear it. And she said what are you even doing here, you're just a kid.

So, she makes it clear that she's annoyed by me but in a really weird round about way. Sometimes she says "she said" and sometimes she says "I said" but there doesn't seem to be any kind of rhyme or reason to it. She is sometimes obviously talking about her own feelings at the moment but will say "she said" rather than "I said". And she refers to herself often with the word "we". "We will be fine"...that sort of thing.

She spent a good hour and 15 minutes looking for a shirt after that and all the while she never stopped talking to herself in this "she said" kind of way.  I actually recorded it for awhile because it was so fascinating.  I offered her a BYU shirt at the very beginning which then sort of stayed in her mind somehow while she went through the entire closet and her drawers talking to herself all the while. Sometimes she just pulled things out and looked at them and sometimes she would try them on. She tried on a variety of shirts and jackets (without shirts) until, in the end, she put on the shirt I had originally offered. (though she may have changed again after I left)  Here is some of the recording (my words are in italics, everything else was said by mom.  Only once did she talk directly to me-that part in in bold):

She said here's a good shirt.
And she said how does it close.
She said, just use the zipper.
She said, oh, theres no zipper.
Me: How about this shirt. (Showing her the BYU sweatshirt for the second time since it seemed like that was what she was looking for)
She said, what are you doing here?
To me: I think we'll be fine.
Me: ok
And she said, that's not a BYU one. That's ok. I saw that one.
And she said, Hooray BYU.
And she said, Is that what this is?
And she said, Ok.
And I said, I'm ok. No need to help me. I can take care of myself.
And she said, I'm just a baby and don't know anything.
I said, well, we're all learning so why don't you go help with your other family and then we can all...I can't figure out what happened to that BYU one.
And she said and so we all work together.  And she said the BYU thing was gone.
And I said, why was it gone?
And she said I think some man stole it.
And I said what man?
I think his name was...Oh this is a...this might be a BYU one.  It's a little backwards.
And I said it's a good one.
And I said I couldn't figure out how to get this thing on and then I realized that it was...
And I said, But it wasn't BYU, it was just a blue one and I already have a blue one on.
And I said, you can go back where you came.
And I said, I like this one.  Oh it's kind of pitiful.
So I said, how about this one.
I said, I like it.
I said, well, it has a zipper.
----
I probably find it horrifying mainly because every time my mom does some new crazy thing I imagine that I will do it too someday.  But if I can be unemotional about it, it is interesting to see how her mind is working and how her thoughts jump around but then they will reconnect later sometimes.

I miss my mom.  I'm happy to spend time with her and be of help to her but I miss the person she was.  My mom was amazing and smart and caring. It's hard to remember her now.

If I do get dementia I hope my kids can read my blogs and scrapbooks and things and remember the person I was. But I sure hope I don't get it.

General Complaints

1. My hair is falling out.  Like handfuls of hair every single day. I don't know what's causing it and I don't know how to fix it. Yes, I've talked to my doctor and I'm taking supplements and my thyroid is fine.  The fact that I'm stressing out over my hair falling out is probably not helping anything either. I have a weird skull too so if I go totally bald I am not going to look ok.

2. Cleaning the shower is difficult and annoying and I don't do it often enough.

3. My dishwasher sucks.

4. I think I have a dead mouse somewhere in the house. It doesn't stink to high heaven yet but it soon will.  And I can't find the darn thing! I can just vaguely smell that something is dead somewhere.

5. My windows need cleaning.  I don't want to do it.

6. Grown kids do not call, text or otherwise interact with their mother enough.  Well, at least MY grown kids don't.  If your grown kids do, please DO NOT tell me about it.  I'm having a hard enough time without hearing about someone else's perfect kid. mmmkay?

7. I made a list of meals this week, bought all the ingredients and then made a total of 2 of the planned meals.  I've got ingredients rotting as we speak.  I hate when I do that.

Ok I'm done for now.  Perhaps I will do a post that is general blessings or general happiness next to try to be less of a complainer.  Stay tuned.

A visit to Portland

We went for a long weekend to visit Frank's Dad and help out a bit around the house.

I took an obligatory picture of the Portland Airport Carpet.

Frank knew going in that he would have a few projects to do: his dad had mentioned wanting to power wash the driveway and he has been slowly going through things after Janice's death so we knew there were some jobs around that we would need to do.  I went in assuming that my main function would be to cook. Perhaps make some freezer meals for after we leave and also just feed everyone. As anyone who knows me knows, cooking is not my favorite.  But I was willing to sacrifice for a few days. HA!

I ended up spending a good deal of time going through and organizing pictures. I actually love looking at old pictures so this was not a problem.  The only thing I don't love is the occasional bug I would come across or be surprised by.  ugh.  I didn't do a serious organization of the photos but sorted them into new boxes for Janice's sisters and daughter to go through to take what they want.  I also left with a stack of pictures.
I found old letters and other cool things.  Here are a few that I loved:

Janice's old bible with an inscription from her Lutheran Sunday School teacher.

Janice's childhood glasses (I think? Could be someone else's I suppose). 

They were still in perfect condition and in a cute case. Look how small they are!

Locks of Janice's hair from when she was a child!

Old report cards. Janice was a great student!

Here is a gift from Frank to his parents on their "silver" anniversary.

It is a very Frank sort of gift.

Looks like a broken bracelet but it was real silver. HA! Gave me a good laugh.

These looked handy and I was amazed they had been saved all these years.

I should have tried them out...

There were a number of diaries that belonged to Janice.

I didn't read them all but I got a kick out of one from when she was young that said nearly the same thing every single day: Went to school. Had fun. Played with Lorraine.

Frank's dad said he wanted to get his garage cleaned out a bit and to bring his deep freeze into the house rather than keeping it out in the garage where it is harder for him to get to. The only thing standing in the way was the old family organ which was in the spot where the freezer should go. We called some junk places and looked online at the likelihood of being able to give the organ away and it wasn't looking good. At one point grandaddy said that he didn't want to pay someone to haul it away as he would rather take a sledge hammer to  the thing. Well, my husband is a man of action, so within minutes he had that organ in the yard and was attacking it with said sledge hammer.

We got the freezer unloaded, moved and reloaded without too much difficulty. We cleaned out a bunch of stuff from the garage so grandaddy could walk through more easily.  Frank went up to the neighbor who was out working in his garage and managed to give him several tools, some storage shelves and a table. He was happy and so were we!

After all of the cleaning out we decided to take a trip to the dump rather than have grandaddy try to slowly add this pile of stuff to his weekly trash (we did have the remains of an organ after all and Portland's trash bins are super small). That turned out to be a really good idea and it only cost us like $25 to haul away a car full of stuff.  I do have some guilt over just throwing stuff away so I was glad to see that we could divide stuff into recycling piles and they also have workers there going through and pulling out obvious recyclables. We also made a trip to DI.

We did some cooking but also ordered pizza one night so that was nice. Frank made two pies: blueberry and fresh peach pie. I made the guts and he is in charge of the crust. They were both super tasty.  I made a roast one day and a meatloaf with real mashed potatoes...but I can't remember now what else I made. I didn't slave constantly in the kitchen like I had imagined but I did cook quite a bit. Frank's dad didn't really want any freezer meals so that saved me a bit.

The pie tasted better than it looks in this picture:

Frank and I ate SO BAD the whole time. Sweets and bread and pie and ice cream (two trips to Dairy Queen!).  I was saying to Frank's dad that I promise we don't usually eat this bad...he was skeptical. I don't know what overcame us, honestly, but we ate like fiends the whole time.

Diana, Frank's sister, was out of town while we were there so we didn't get to see her but we will just have to make another trip out soon to see everyone!

Time Flies

Well it's the end of August and I realized that I haven't blogged even once this month.
I have had things to say but haven't had much of a drive to actually say it.
At the end of the day I will think of the things I want to blog about but then just not be able to sit in front of the computer long enough to do it. I am, after all, in front of a computer at work pretty much all day and that makes the prospect of blogging a little less of a draw. And somehow the process of uploading pictures now seems to be just too much work.

Never-the-less I will try to go back and put down a few things that have been going on this month.

At the beginning of the month, my sweet Isabelle had to get her tonsils out.

It was a bit traumatic because, being the stubborn girl that she is, she absolutely refused to eat or drink anything once the initial numbing wore off. I'm sure both Branden and Amber were quite stressed out by this. She ended up in the ER needing fluids. The doctor wanted to try to get her to drink because he felt giving her an IV would be more traumatic than just getting her to drink, even if they had to do it by force. It was actually a pretty funny story to hear from Branden because even the hospital staff, using all of their combined efforts, could not get her to drink anything. They kept "threatening" to use a needle to give her fluids if she didn't drink but to no avail. She managed to fight them off and spit out anything they forced into her including numbing medicine (sometimes all over everyone). In the end she got an IV and the staff was shocked that after all the fighting, she laid perfectly still while they put it in (which took multiple tries since she was so dehydrated).

This is her stoic face

When the doctor was telling her that she needed to start drinking when she went home he thought he'd use some logic on her, asking her if she would rather drink or get another needle to get her water.  She silently looked at him and pointed at the needle in her arm! HA!  She showed them who was boss.  Apparently she did improve after those fluids though and they were able to get her to drink at home. I am happy to announce that she now seems to be back to normal.


Ryan came out for a short visit!  He is living in Indiana currently and working as a postal worker. He is considering moving back to Utah soon though and I'm pretty happy about that! I miss having my kids around.
He had lots of friends to see and not many days to do it but we managed to spend one full day together and went to Lagoon. Carter came too and it was a fun day.

We saw each other a few other times...breakfast one day, lunch another and I let him use my car a couple of times so we saw each other when he picked me up from work.
It wasn't tons of time but I really enjoyed seeing him!
He and Carter also hung out while I was at work and I managed to talk them into doing one of my favorite new activities: Axe throwing.  I seriously think they did it just to appease me but, since I'm always right, they had fun.

Frank and I went for a long weekend to visit his Dad in Portland. We wanted to help do a few projects around the house and just see him since it's been awhile.  I will probably do a separate post about our visit but the gist of it is: Frank worked really hard and I helped a little. :-)

How to get the perfect cherry pie

Frank makes a delicious cherry pie, as you know.

But we have struggled with the difficulty in finding cherries for said pie.

We usually buy canned cherries, which are not always available at the store and when they are, they are very expensive.  We often pay $5 per can...and we use 3 cans of cherries per pie. We have even resorted to buying them from Amazon by the case. So, yeah, we are crazy.

One day I was complaining about the problem finding sour cherries and my neighbor piped up that her family actually owned a pie cherry orchard and that when it was time for harvest she would see if I could get some.  I was ecstatic! And then I forgot all about it.

The other day she says to me that it is harvest time and asked if I would like to come see how they harvest the cherries and maybe pick some.

Frank and I jumped at the chance to check it out!

The orchard was HUGE. So many trees!

They use these big machines/tractors/conveyor belts to shake the trees and knock all the cherries down and into these huge bins.  It's amazing that the shaking doesn't damage the trees, honestly. 

Here is a really bad video of the shaking (I had a hard time finding a good place to stand to see it well...after all we were in the midst of a lot of trees):

The farmer told us that we were welcome to pick the cherries left on the trees after shaking (not too many are left...it's pretty amazing) or to pick from the young trees that are too small to shake.  We grabbed a couple of buckets and got to picking.  

I can't tell you how grateful and happy we were to get all those cherries!

We told them we'd bring them a cherry pie for a thank you and were informed by the farmer's wife that they didn't really love cherry pie! Haha so funny. We will probably still take a pie for those that do like it.

We ended up with a 5 gallon bucket and another smaller bucket full of cherries (we guessed that the smaller bucket was about 3 gallons).  The next night Frank and I pitted the smaller bucket of cherries together and it took about 2 hours.  

The day after that, I pitted cherries for about 7 hours straight while watching "Parenthood" on my computer.  It was a long, sticky time.  

This is a huge cooler that we have and it was full of cherries by the time we were done. 

Full to the very top!

It was my day off so I knew I had to finish the job...So then I got to canning!  Frank helped and we canned 28 quarts and 16 pints of cherries.

I still have one more canner load to do tonight and then we will be all set for over 28 cherry pies!  That's a lot of pie.

And they will be perfect!

The "new" job

I haven't written anything about my job change but now that I am settled into the new job I have decided that it's time.

I liked my old job ok...liked the people I worked with a lot...but the sitting all day was not doing me any favors and I was developing carpal tunnel symptoms from being on the computer all day. And so I started looking around a bit. I wanted to be able to move during the day. I wanted to not be on a computer the whole time.  I applied for a couple of jobs closer to my home and talked to some people I know about possible opportunities.

I like interacting with people (though I always forget about the perfume issues until I am interacting with lots of people and then I'm like "oh, yeah, I should stay in a room by myself!") and decided to look for something where I could move around a bit more and also see people in person, rather than just interacting by phone.

Long story short, I got a job working for a local chiropractor.

And...after two months I can honestly say that I really like my new job!
I don't dread work. I don't get anxious or sad on Sunday night.  I usually leave work actually feeling kind of energized after the day of pleasant interactions and tasks successfully fulfilled.

Other plusses to the job: I have 1.5 days off each week! So, yes, I am working fewer hours overall which might contribute to my happiness level as well. Just maybe.

The doctor is very nice and I like my coworkers (though one is leaving soon so I'm really hoping to like the new person!). I'm learning new skills and new computer programs. I get adjusted for free!  Since it's a small business, I did lose some of the perks that I enjoyed at my old job: 401K, wellness plans, immediate paid time off (I will eventually get that at this job but not for awhile).  But my hope is to stay long term at this job because I can see myself being fulfilled there while still having time for a life.  If something dire happens in my life where I need a job with insurance, I will have to rethink this but for now it fits my life really well.

I'm grateful for the skills I learned at my old job which helped me get this new one and I still keep in touch with a variety of the friends I made there.

I sort of imagined that I would forever be just ok with working full time--managing and adjusting--but never really being happy about it. I suppose the new job is really more like 3/4 time rather than full time but it does feel like something I can keep doing without feeling trapped.

Yay for life upgrades!