Wednesday, July 27, 2022
Covid, the gift that keeps giving............
Sunday, July 24, 2022
Catching up.............
Hello! How are all of you doing? Here is a bit of a catch up with things around here in no particular order as my photos seem to load just the way they want, not the way I want.
Work has been mixed for me. Lots of families out with Covid, last week I missed an entire day due to that. It rained that whole day and Little Buddy and I enjoyed a day at home, me puttering and cleaning, him in his pajamas watching shows, playing, reading and all that. It was really nice, I think just what I needed. This week lots more out but I never seemed to be able to make my schedule work so I had an afternoon off. My little ones have been crazy, I have lost a bit of my patience, is it the heat? Are we all sick of summer? Do we need a better routine with school starting soon? Was it a full moon? Who knows but it has been a bit rough for all of us.
Little Buddy got exposed again at camp. I can't tell you how many times this child has been exposed to Covid by sustained close contact. Seems two of the teachers got it and one child. He had a stuffy nose at the beach so I tested him when we got home, no Covid maybe just too much salt water. Camp might be canceled for the week, I am still waiting to hear.
Little Buddy and I finally made it to the beach. I work so much that time is limited and on Friday when I am off there are important errands to run or appointments to keep. Saturdays have been rainy, he is not easy to get on or off the beach, we can't run off if it starts to storm so we can only go on brilliantly clear days. Yesterday was just such a day. We were there by 8:30, played in the sand and then the water for over an hour. Little Buddy had the best time. He swam and swam, threw big rocks at me and walked and almost ran in the water. I miss our pool where he did so much therapy during the summer. Two hours was just enough for him, we headed home for a bath and some relaxing time because he told me he just needed to relax all day.
The boys had haircuts last weekend and boy did they need them. Hank is once again losing his hair on top of his head. We went to the vet on Friday and she doesn't seem to know what is going on. And he is licking incessantly, I mean it is driving me crazy so she gave him a shot for that. I have not seen much improvement yet. His food has not changed which was the reason last time this happened. I am now going to try a chicken/rice blend and get off the fish blend. It just might be he can't tolerate that anymore. They were both so stressed with the move, but we have been here almost three months so they should be settled in by now. We also have different grass here, might be a whole combination of things. If they could only talk and tell us what they need!
And Luna my grand dog spent the night last night with her new collar on. She is not , how can I say it without being offensive, well she is not a real feminine girl, so the collar makes me laugh. She is a big tomboy and rules the roost when she is here, so the pink bow collar just makes me smile.
Have a wonderful week.
Update: A cute little boy just woke up not feeling well. He has tested positive for Covid so we are hunkering down for the week. I have to cancel all my patients, yikes! Hopefully he will recover quickly. Stay safe.
Saturday, July 9, 2022
This and that in no particular order................
He has had a very fun week. Last weekend the Fourth of July was celebrated here in this neighborhood for several nights of close and loud fireworks, I had a buddy in bed with me as he doesn't like loud noises. Actually I had three dogs, and a little boy in bed with me, lets just say no one got much sleep. I found one exploded firework on my grass and one on my roof, my brand new roof. I told you they were close.
Saturday, June 25, 2022
The way I see it...............
While I wanted to celebrate a very special birthday yesterday the day was overshadowed by the news that over 50% of the population in the United States have had the right to make decisions over their own body and health taken away. I will forever remember this day with this news, not that Little Buddy turned 11, but this horrific news.
Pro Choice or Pro Life are interesting terms to me. I am very much pro life and at the same time I am emphatically, without a doubt, pro choice. I see a side of this that many of you don't. A side that is going to grow and grow and create more and more problems for our society. I don't understand how you can be pro life but believe that assault rifles have a place in our society. We can protect a bundle of cells with no viability but children can get mowed down with their heads severed in school because it is our right to buy assault rifles.
I am pro life because I believe that all children should be cared for with Universal Healthcare instead of having services stripped away. I see the children whose parents can't afford healthcare or even food. One family I know fed their child carrot water because they could not afford formula, obviously this boy will have developmental and intellectual issues the rest of his life due to malnutrition, he is suffering every day. There will be more of this to come, a lot more, yet we are forcing women to have babies that they know they cannot take care of financially, physically, mentally or emotionally. Babies they can't even feed or afford diapers for. Our system even wants to reduce school lunches, sometimes the only real food a child gets all day. Can you imagine what will happen to all these babies as they grow up without proper nutrition?
I am pro life and I believe in supporting children, and their mothers, no matter their age, with good mental health services. Those services are also being cut, everywhere. Can you imagine a 12 year old being raped by a family member and having to carry a child to term? Giving birth to her brother? Her sister? Her niece or nephew? Trauma based care is so hard to get with the lack of services available, the lack of good mental health professionals that get paid a fraction of their worth. How is this child going to ever survive this on top of the abuse she has already suffered? How is her child, who will most assuredly be significantly delayed for the rest of its life, how does this child make it? Where will the money come from for services to help this little one?
I am pro life but I think having to carry a child to term at the expense of your own physical health is so ridiculous I can barely comprehend it. How many women are going to leave their children motherless because a bunch of non viable cells or a child that will never live outside her womb are more important then the physical children she already has. She will leave this earth and leave her children without a mother due to no decision of her own.
I am pro life and I cannot fathom why we are forcing more children into this world with no thought to climate change and the affects climate issues have on our ability to feed these babies with safe foods, clean water and temperatures that they can tolerate. How can a mother provide for this baby with rents skyrocketing and no childcare benefits?
In the world where we in the United Sates are so ranked so high as far as infant and mother mortality, how is this situation going to improve that? It is all going to become much, much worse. Women will die, their babies will die. Are you ready for that?
I am pro life but I see the children who have been thrown up against walls so hard their retinas burst. They are physically abused so bad they sometimes don't even make it, and when they do they are barely living. Do you not see how this is going to happen more and more frequently because the choice to have a child was not theirs?
Do you think this affects men? Absolutely not, it is always going to be the mothers responsibility to raise a child. Will men have to pay support if they have sex until they know a child has not been created? Frankly, many of them don't support the children they know they have. Will men have to have vasectomies at the age they can start having children, what is the 10 or 11 to ensure no one gets pregnant? And only have it reversed when they become responsible adults? No, it is always, always going to be the woman/girl/child who has to handle the decisions forced on her.
There are over 100,000 children in foster care, almost 120,000 actually, that number is about to skyrocket. The system we have in place is already overwhelmed. Are you going to adopt one of these children? Are you pro life enough to turn your world upside down and bring these troubled and often emotionally and/or physically challenged children into your home? I can talk this way because I did. I did bring a child into my home who was exposed to drugs and alcohol on top of all the brain damage he suffered due to the decisions of his birth mother. He is lucky to have found a home. Are you willing to provide one? Many of these kids end up in residential facilities or group homes with no real family, or are often abused in the very homes they were placed in for safety, they then drift out of the system with nothing to help them. The cycle will then repeat itself with the next generation. Get ready my friends, because this is all going to get a lot worse for these babies who will grow up with little support. Where are your prayers then? Are they helping these poor children?
I am pro life, I am pro choice, but this has just made my job a whole lot harder. The numbers of trauma based children, physically challenged children and babies, drug exposed kids, and babies exposed to excess alcohol is about to skyrocket. Will you be willing to pay more taxes to help these kids get the services they need? I'm not talking a prayer service or a local diaper drive. How are you going to dedicate your life to helping these children having children, or the mothers who will suffer emotionally, mentally and often physically to have a child that they were not prepared to have.
I have already dedicated my life to this, what are you going to do to help besides pray and rejoice that women/girls/children have had a fundamental right taken away from them? A fundamental right that will be cataclysmic to society as a whole and cataclysmic to the very children you are rejoicing that will be born. Will you be wanting your daughter, granddaughter, niece or little girl next door to have a baby when she has been raped? Will you tell her to lay back and enjoy it like one politician has said?
What is next? Imprisoning women who have had a miscarriage? Not allowing women access to birth control?
Let this sink in, an 18 year old has more rights to buy an assault riffle than a woman/girl or child has making choices and decisions about her own body.
It doesn't stop here, and when your particular fundamental right gets taken away remember this day, June 24, 2022. This is not when it started but this is when it became a reality.
Saturday, June 18, 2022
A vey involved week................
Since my computer got fixed a few weeks ago my Picasa doesn't work so I have to download photos from iCloud, and put them in a folder and submit them here. No editing, no watermark, which really bums me out but there you have it. You see everything like my phone camera sees it.
Lots of crazy things have happened this week. The electricity in Little Buddy's room and my garage went out on Monday. I knew it was the circuit breaker but did not know how to fix it. I asked my next door neighbor to assess the situation so I knew what to say when I called someone and he offered to fix it. He is an interesting guy, quite a bit older than me, loves his motorcycle, lost his wife of 39 years to cancer 6 years ago. His house is a bit messy, he is always fixing things right out in his driveway. He is a bit scary looking at first glance, but the sweetest man ever. He went to Home Depot, bought the breaker and put it in. But the system was still tripping so he called a friend. His friend came at 9:15 and they started over. At 10:15 they felt it was still being tripped so had to come in and unplug things to see what happened. I had two guys I really don't know in my house at 10:15 at night and I wasn't at all concerned. I figured they were either going to murder me or I had two new guardians, or at least Little Buddy does. It was all fixed by 10:30 with me promising to contact them if it went out again. No payment was wanted, just a, "this is what we do, we help people when they need it." Turns out when we pushed the garage fridge back in place we knocked the old socket off the wall so everything in the freezer went bad. I of course did not know about it until Thursday so you can imagine the mess and clean up duty. And Little Buddy's ceiling fan did not work after the power went back on, so it ends up I do have to get an electrician after all, but that's okay, it will be nice to have everything safe again.
I missed my headache Botox shots on Thursday because I have shingles yet again. My fifth time to be exact. The first time was years ago and it was all over the bottom of my face, neck and chest. It was missed diagnosed as poison oak so they kept giving me steroids. It kept getting worse and worse, actually cracking in areas but I just got more steroids. What I would have given for anti viral medication to make it stop itching, hurting and cracking. Each time I get it it looks different so I take a while to realize what it is. This time was on the back of my neck and on my head on both sides. I can't see back there so I had no idea what was going on until way too late. I thought it was bites, a reaction to new city water, or poison something. Mine hurt a bit but mostly they itch like the dickens. My neurologist asked me why I got them so bad, did something happen? Was I stressed? I could have manically laughed but held it together. He is adorable, 37 warm and lovely. I keep telling him if his mother ever disowns him I will adopt him and I mean it! But no shots mean more headaches until I can get these shingles to disappear. He did give me nerve pain medication he swears will help, I am crossing my fingers it does.
Little Buddy had his Botox shots for his tight leg muscles yesterday. It was good that his computer was delivered yesterday to help him be distracted enough he did not think about them. Actually it is his biggest brother's computer that he used in college. He has not used it for several years so when we moved I thought it was a good idea to get it updated and ready for this guy. $300 later it works like a dream and should last him for years.
We went to the park near us this morning for one very hot hour. The feel like temp was 105 degrees today so we did not stay long. It is 3 minutes from our house and is an inclusion playground fit for kids of all different ability levels. It has been closed for renovation since we moved it. We spent a very hot hour there and then headed to the grocery store where I had help from a cute little boy who pushed my cart and scanned all my food. Now if I could just get him to bag things I think he might have a new job!
There has been little knitting this week, way too much emotional ups and downs that continue to wear me out. I have no reserve anymore so it is not taking much to make me feel depleted. When I was feeling better last week I made the stone path and the stone border in my backyard. I have since added the last two flat stepping stones making it a total of 10, and moved those rocks around to fit around the new stones. It looks better and prevents me from stepping in dirt as I round the corner to my side yard. The backyard is full of weeds, dirt and a bit of grass. It needs to be mowed a lot as the weeds have those pieces that cling to dog fur. That was my job early this morning before the heat set in.
That was my week my friends. I hope yours was better. Still with all that has happened I am so grateful for my family, my fur boys, my new home, work and my friends and that includes all of you!
Have a wonderful Father's Day tomorrow if you are celebrating. I miss my Dad, he would have been a rock for me and helped me get through all this mess.
Sunday, June 12, 2022
Knitting and life in general..............