May 25, 2013
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Saturday Morning
Well all cheered as Delaney accepted her diploma last night. She’ll be going to U of M in the fall, where, at least in my imagination, she will lead the co-ed life I never quite managed while I was there. That particular phase of my life was extraordinarily difficult, although very little of that had to do with the school. I bottomed out, very nearly cashed out, and I skidded along on my butt for quite a while before I managed to pick myself back up. So I always have somewhat mixed feelings when we talk about U of M. I’m sure she’ll be fine.
We are here in the Conservatory. Annie is gnawing a bone. Riley has abandoned us for the more comfortable couch in the living room. Ilah is in her room. I am having coffee and Nancy is sneaking in a nap, since her efforts to sleep in this morning were thwarted. Oh dear. Now Annie is prowling the house with a low growl. Something is amiss. Apparently it can be resolved by a drink of water.
The problem appears to be that Nancy is sleeping. We do not like that. We have jumped up on the couch and nudged her about four times now. Wake up, Nancy. This isn’t like you. Nudge, nudge. Now, since it appears impossible to wake Nancy, we have curled up into a ball on the end of the couch and we are co-napping.
Much of the family gathered at my sister’s house before the graduation ceremonies and as we started to move toward the cars the door was left open a quarter of a second too long and my sister’s dog bolted out for a happy runabout. I saw him go, but I am too old and too slow and too unfamiliar to be of much help. All I could do was stand there and mutter, “Oh, shit.” My sister was not about to miss her youngest (and only) daughter’s graduation to chase a dog, so we went on to the graduation. Big brother Lance hung back to catch the dog, which he did successfully. And I remembered once the family gathered here, the door opened and Riley bolted off across the road for freedom. My car was blocked in and I was having hysterics in the front yard while Lance loped off and came back with Riley firmly in tow. There must be dog owners somewhere whose dogs don’t lope off into the sunset at every opportunity and I admire them all.
We have tracked Riley down a number of times. Usually if we can find him we can just drive past him, open the car door and invite him to take a ride and he’ll jump right in. Sometimes he picks his own time for that. Annie, on the other hand, has never taken off (perhaps we have more experience preventing that.) I took her to class once and in the PetSmart parking lot–which is huge and very busy–I put on her Gentle Leader, I restrained Rile who was in the car, I gathered up the stuff I needed to take, opened the door, pulled on the leash…which I had never attached to the dog. Fortunately she hates, hates, hates the Gentle Leader and she was on the other side of the car trying to dig it off with her front paws. I walked up to her and caught her before she realized she was free.
We are 3/4s of the way through our second run of Intermediate Obedience and we’re still using the Gentle Leader (which is one of the reasons why we will be taking our third run at Intermediate Obedience, with More Distractions, in June.) Perhaps that is what it takes for me to come to see training as a perpetual on-going process rather than a do it, get it done event.
My sister and her husband are here from North Carolina. They spent last night and will spend tonight at the new Firekeepers hotel. Our baby brother is the purchasing agent for the casino. They are going home Monday.
My father moved from the hospital to a rehab facility in Russellville yesterday. He could be there for as long as 20 days. He needs to work on his walking. Between his recent illness and perhaps residual effects of his stroke (10?) years ago, he is unsteady on his feet and reluctant to walk any farther or longer than he has to. The answer, unfortunately, is to do it more, and we will leave the encouragement and enforcement of that to the professionally trained. To be honest, the last time I stayed with him, which was in March, he was having difficulty walking and I let him sit right there in his chair.
I have had to sort or work through this mentally in the past week, since he went into the hospital. He had a UTI, which made his weaker and sicker and he ended up in the hospital when he started to get up and fell because he couldn’t feel his legs. We took this to mean his legs were completely number and without feeling, when in fact, I suspect it meant he hasn’t had a lot of feeling in his right leg since the stroke, he hasn’t walked much for the past several months and he’s losing some muscle tone. Also it is harder to maintain balance or be sure of what you’re doing when the feeling is reduced. I learned this from my brother-in-law, who struggles with peripheral neuropathy. (I could have learned it from myself every time I try to comb my hair in the morning, since I’ve been babying my right arm every since I fell over Annie in September and slammed into the door frame, bruising my rotator cuff. There are certain positions my arm just won’t go into any more and I suspect it’s purely because I stopped making it do it for a while. I need to buck up and probably get some therapy on it.) (There may be visible traces of my father in my character. Doesn’t work. Screw it. find a workaround.)
I’ll throw in a few random, totally unrelated pictures.
These are Helene’s begonias. I went to writer’s group Friday morning and found two pots* of them sitting on either side of her steps. Out came the camera…
And it’s on to the weekend.
*Okay, so there were two pots total, one sitting on either side of her steps. She likes flowers, but she’s not obssessive about it.
