63 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 6-13-18”

  2. I have officially become old and crotchety. I spent two nights in a hotel room. The bed wasn’t comfortable. I didn’t sleep well. I woke up with my back twisted and sore. I came home last night, slept in my own bed and am fine. I remember listening to people say things like this and wonder why they would drive a distance “to be in their own bed” when they could just stay where they were. Now I know.

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  3. Glad to have you back and rested, Kim. I was thinking about my bed here, it is just a covered piece of foam, several inches thick, sitting on a platform. I guess I am just used to it.

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  4. Not “old and crotchety” Kim. I’m and expert on that.
    Sleeping in your own bed doesn’t cure O&C.
    You were just out of place, that’s all.

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  5. Kim, the difference between a bad bed and a good one also matters. I’ve had a handful of beds in my life that would give me a backache. My sister used to have bunk beds for her boys (before she had a girl), and for me she would remove the bottom mattress and put it on the floor of the nursery. I could barely handle two nights there (and not more), but I didn’t say anything about how bad the mattress was because I figured her kids were little and it wouldn’t matter to them. And then one day she told me her mother-in-law had stayed in that bed and complained she woke up with a backache, and so at that point I told her yes, I always do too.

    In college my freshman year I had a mattress that had so many lumps one couldn’t sleep without being on at least one. I mentioned it to my roommate and she said yes, she had had that mattress in the past herself and it was pretty awful. At the end of the year I saw that the college was trading out mattresses, and I was happy. Then I heard they were stopping at the floor above ours, so I called and asked if they could trade out mine. They said if they had any extras, they would. I called back in 15 minutes and asked if they had found any extras, and they said they had. (Had they been unable to, I was going to go up to one of the floors getting new mattresses and traded my bad one for a better one, knowing the bad one would get exchanged for a new one on that floor.)

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  8. Bad Beds!
    Should have been in the military.
    True story. Leastwise they told me:
    I worked as a radio in the ground station at KAFB in San Antonia for several months. We were active 24 hours, so we rotated shifts.
    One time, I came in off the night shift and racked out.
    While I was asleep, the Captain came through on inspection.
    He saw a bed and asked, “Why isn’t that bed made up?”
    They answered “There’s somebody in it sir.”
    True story, so they tell me. I was fast asleep in a bunk with bad springs and my head covered by the pillow to keep light out.

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  10. So, I made the journey to visit my father. It was a very good visit. I think my father and I talked more than we have since I went away to school. My mother was there as well, and the three of us just enjoyed one another’s company. I stayed overnight at my parents’ and was hoping to visit again today, but I woke up with a raging sore throat. There is a summer cold going around, and it looks as though it finally caught up to me (my landlords all had it, but I had escaped hitherto). I can’t go into the ICU with a cold, and anyway, I can barely talk now.

    The mattress that I have in my apartment is terrible (the apartment is furnished). I can feel the individual coils through it. There is one spot that doesn’t seem quite so bad, so that is the spot I sleep on – I move very little while sleeping. I have had surprisingly few back problems considering that I’ve slept on that mattress for two years now. Working in the hospital and moving patients around did strain my back a little one week, and it took a few days for the inflammation to go down, but it did and I’m OK now. Since going to school, I’ve gotten used to carrying around fairly heavy loads – I generally fill my backpack with groceries and carry a 10 litre jug of water when I go grocery shopping, and I carry my luggage when I’m going home on the train – and I think it has strengthened my back. I have found that changing my position when I studying helps to prevent some strain. If I’m always sitting when I’m doing homework, my back will get sore, but if I keep changing my position by sitting yoga-style or lying on my stomach while I’m studying, my back doesn’t get tired by maintained one position for several hours.

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  11. Morning!! We were blessed with rainfall last night, complete with thunder and lightening! (And some hail!) We did not get the bad hail like Colorado Springs received though. We are waking up to reports of entire fleets of cars destroyed by baseball sized hail. Roofing companies are advertising their services to homes in the Springs. Sounds as though the hail ranged from pea sized (that was us) to golf ball, tennis ball, and baseball sized, all depending which area of town you were located. Crazy weather….but oh so thankful for moisture!!

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  12. Good morning! I got my morning exercise hauling reams of HP Copy Plus paper to the store room. I found a deal on it at Office Depot. So as to not aggravate my still healing wrist, I carried only two at a time (16 in all). It was free, weight bearing exercise.

    My friend Karen is not doing well. I feel badly not being able to help especially when she makes desperate statements about her lack of worth. Another long term friend flew from the West Coast to dog/house sit and wants us to visit for a few days. And then there is the office work, website class, desire to be writing, and an upcoming accounting conference. Whew! Tug, tug at the heart from all directions. Add Wesley into the mix, too.

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  13. Chas @10:18, the French are very Biblical in their greeting. It says three times in the New Testament, “Greet one another with a holy kiss” (I Corinthians 16:20, II Corinthians 13:12, I Thessalonians 5:26) 🙂 I remember, at the end of a conference for ATI families in Canada, seeing two Quebecois families say goodbye to one another, and the father of one family kissed the mother of the other family on both cheeks while speaking his farewells to the family. ATI was extremely sticky about physical contact between the sexes, so my teenage self was a bit shocked at the time. But, on reflection, it was good to see that the French Canadians did not consider themselves bound to stop an innocent cultural practice because of legalistic teaching.

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  14. I have gotten Grandpa and Bitty Baby down for their morning naps. Bitty was fussy, so we read Guess How Much I Love You. It has been a few years since I read it out loud to someone. When I got to the end Bitty was asleep. On the last page it said to CCC Happy First Birthday, Love RosieBill. RosieBill. Bill and Rosemary lived next door. BG called whichever one she was talking to RosieBill. Bill was RosieBill and Rosemary was RosieBill. It made me smile.

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  17. So, it doesn’t matter that I cannot go to the ICU. My father is coming home today. I’ll have to stay away from him, however, as he does not need a cold on top of everything else.

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  20. Re: the raccoon climbing the building – Nightingale wondered if the raccoon could be rabid, since rabid animals don’t always act vicious, but often do irrational things. Hopefully that’s not the case.

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  23. Thanks, Kizzie. I don’t remember if she was a ninety niner, but she was in the Powder Puff Derby a number of times. She took sixth one year and second another but I don’t know about the rest. I had to look in the scrap book. I was fairly young at the time but I remember my mom’s excitement for her. And mom listening to the radio for how the race was going. Betty Miller.

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  24. Sounds like twenty year old got married. Should be interesting. As you recall, she was planning to marry her brother a year ago but has moved through about three more since then. I hope she settles down.

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  26. I thought they had to kill the animal and look at its brain to determine rabies. Maybe that is hundred year old news.

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  27. Perhaps there were just none of the typical signs on examination? Well, other than scaling tall buildings in a big metropolis, maybe.

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  28. Working from home today — homelessness and pelican release.

    My bug bites are finally calming down, but remind me never to take Benadryl at work again. I was afraid my head was going to go crashing down on my desk yesterday afternoon. But the bites weren’t itching. And I did get 9+ hours of sleep last night, barely made it up in time to sign in on the city meeting I had to report on today.

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  29. Mumsee, you are correct. Diagnosis of rabies in animals requires an autopsy: https://www.cdc.gov/rabies/diagnosis/animals-humans.html

    A diagnosis of rabies can be made after detection of rabies virus from any part of the affected brain, but in order to rule out rabies, the test must include tissue from at least two locations in the brain, preferably the brain stem and cerebellum.

    The test requires that the animal be euthanized. The test itself takes about 2 hours, but it takes time to remove the brain samples from an animal suspected of having rabies and to ship these samples to a state public health or veterinary diagnostic laboratory for diagnosis.

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  30. Ooh, I caught Roscuro in a medical error! (Just teasing. An animal autopsy is a necropsy. Of course, I didn’t know that myself five years ago, and I think I’ve seen you use the word yourself.)

    DJ, I read that a stressed raccoon tends to climb, and probably the attempt to rescue it from the two-story building with a makeshift ladder frightened it. So its climb would not, in itself, be a sign of ill health.

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  31. He’s home. Tiny Niece sang out, “Grandpa” when he walked (!) in the door and climbed off the chair she was sitting to run and give hugs to both grandparents. Tiny Niece and her baby brother got to see their grandfather when he was first admitted to the ICU – children are not usually allowed in the ICU, for good reasons, but a nurse smuggled them in a side door because there wasn’t anyone else in that area of the ICU – so Tiny Niece knew where her Grandpa had been. He is on Coumadin now to prevent any new clots from forming. I tell him that he needs to be more careful of himself while on the pills, as he’ll be more likely to bleed. He gets absorbed in completing a task and that’s when he ends up hurting himself.

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  32. Glad your dad’s home

    I think a lot of the dilemma was they knew trying to actively “rescue” the raccoon would only spook it, so the entire strategy after a while was to hope the animal kept climbing to all the way to the roof where they’d set up food and also some traps. Amazing, really, that it worked.

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  34. Cheryl, it did cross my mind that autopsy wasn’t the right word, but I didn’t feel like changing it. Anyway, I’m trained in human healthcare.

    Raccoons are vicious predators who kill and dismember for the joy of it, carriers of more dangerous diseases than just rabies, and damaging pests around human habitation. They are in no danger of becoming extinct. So why the thing was rescued is beyond me.

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  36. I have no idea. But I suspect she is the same extremely needy person she was while living here and jumped at the opportunity.

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  37. They are visiting his stepmom in Minnesota where he just got kicked out for not marrying a Catholic and daughter is in trouble for doing this deliberately to catch her stepson. Not a real solid start. But if they understand commitment….

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  40. Best assignments — pelican or sea lion releases at the beach. What a gorgeous day out there, I didn’t want to come home (and thanks to an older couple who bent my ear for the better part of an hour about other stories and the beach’s history, I got to stay a lot longer than usual). It’s half a mile from me and I was reminded that I need to go there more often with the dogs. Waves crashing, cool, damp salty-air smell, just amazing.

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  41. We got a torrential rain yesterday afternoon. I closed windows and then went to look at the water tank from my window. The water was flowing into it so fast that it looked like someone was using a fire hose to fill my tank. God is good. Many tanks were close to empty around here.

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  42. Neighbor is moving into a house today and I can hear every footstep, starting very early. I can’t believe that she stayed here as long as she did. That flat is the smallest on the whole centre. It is cheap as we only pay 50% of centre fees, but, oh, so small. I saw her last week hanging out laundry at 6:30am, which means she must have started the laundry around 5:30am.

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  44. And so it begins. My father is under orders not to do anything strenuous. But his ideas of what is not strenuous are different than other people’s. He decided to take out the table scraps, which entails walking back some 200 or so feet into the woods. When he returned, his face looked gray and he was out of breath. When I tried to convince him that he shouldn’t be doing things like that yet, as he still has those blood clots on his lungs and he has a blood clot still in his leg, he replied that he had to do something, he couldn’t just be sitting around. This is not going to be easy.

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  46. roscuro, good luck! He sounds like a live-wire. I like him already. But yeah, he needs to SIT.

    AJ, I will send you several photos I took at the pelican release, they really cooperated this time by hanging around on the shore before taking flight.

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  47. Phhos, You haven’t been there so there’s no way you can understand how hard it is for a man to understand and, if he does, admit to himself that he can’t do simple chores anymore.
    If you aren’t doing something, you’re useless.
    What is worse than useless?
    No. It isn’t.

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  48. I am listening to someone mow the lawn. I am not usually home at this time of day, so don’t hear it. Taking care of the mundane things that don’t happen during school term. I defrosted the freezer, now I plan on filling it up. I have a recipe that makes 150 meatballs. That is my next project.

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  49. hmmm….. it looks to me like 49 is just sitting here waiting for me.
    Since I will be 70 next year, I have already purchased four angel food cake mixes. Haven’t seen them in the store for years. And the market always has fresh strawberries.

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  51. You know we’re all in awe of how you’re doing all that you do — I often think how demanding your life actually is right now, making sure Elvera is well and safe, looking after the household and yard, teaching SS when called upon, studying and reading Scripture, pondering the big (and little) questions, taking the time to greet us every morning, bright and early. That’s actually a whole lot, you know. It just probably ‘feels’ different than your responsibilities of former years.

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  52. Roscuro – When my FIL had surgery and was told to take it easy, he refused. He was a farmer all his life and sitting down all day was not his way.

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  53. Our photographer got the best shot, but I sent several of my own to AJ (cell phone versions only, alas, but not too bad, I didn’t think)

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  54. There are many stories of men permanently injuring their body or damaging their health because they refused to rest after a surgery or some other health event. Going against doctor’s orders is not heroic, although some act as if it is. 😦

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  55. I didn’t mean to imply that anyone here is saying it is heroic.

    Chas – This may not be the same thing, but many women have trouble letting others “wait” on them when they are infirmed or ill, because they are used to being the ones who take care of the others, and cook, clean, and wash the dishes. They want to jump up and do those things themselves rather than have their spouse or other family do them.

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  59. OK, Peter and Chas, hide your eyes, but here’s the upshot of Super Raccoon — free at last!

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  62. Hi.
    My computer died. My cell phone won’t open up WordPress. I did not know my password, so couldn’t sign in at work. Password reset.

    So how is every one?

    I survived Camp Moose on the Loose. I think all of my class got a good understanding of the gospel. Praying that there will be others who will water the seeds that were planted,

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  63. Chas, I have been there many times. Asthma can be extremely debilitating, and I have had to rest for days in bed and depend on others to take care of me. I know very well the frustration of not being able to do things for myself.

    But it is downright dangerous for my father to overexert himself. Because of the blood clots in his lungs, he has no reserve lung capacity. Muscles need a lot of oxygen, and when they are exercised, they will quickly deplete the blood supply of oxygen. Normally, the body will compensate by increasing gas exchange in the lungs between the inhaled air and blood (which is why we breathe more quickly and deeply after we exercise), but the blood circulation in my father’s lungs is blocked off in too many areas for the lungs to be able to compensate for the increased demand for oxygen. If he overexerts himself, he will drop the oxygen level in his blood too low. That is why he turned gray. His body cells were starving for oxygen because the muscles were using it all up more quickly than the lungs could supply more. His heart also has to pump harder, as it tries to push against the blocked blood vessels in the lungs, so it too is already working harder and unable to increase much more if he exercises. Recovery from his condition, called pulmonary embolism, can take months, even years.

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