chatter

I know it hasn’t been that long since I last posted so I am pretty sure I’m still out there even though no one reads.

I just took the Apple bluetooth keyboard out of the closet and put on my analog desk (totally aside the point of an analog desk but oh well). Anyway I felt like typing with it so here I am.

It is time for Dorothy’s annual get sick, go in a nursing home to get better and kill a cell phone. She is actually three weeks early. This year she didn’t get as sick so she didn’t get that four day stay in the hospital which then complicated things as far as medicaid and the nursing home. She had absolutely no energy. Over Christmas she alluded to me that she was winding down. She turns 90 in June.

Last year we got her a new cell phone after her old one took a bath. RAW just called and said they found her cell phone after the nurses took her sweaters–yep in her pocket after washing them.

Another apparently annual thing that goes in this cluster that I just realized while typing this is a death of a member of MY family. Last year my grama died at the age of 92.98 (2 days before her birthday). My mother called yesterday to tell me my cousin Tom died. He was 46 and in poor health mainly because of uncontrolled diabetes. He had no money or insurance (and no leg) but it was pneumonia that got him. I guess he was in the hospital for it but once they found out he had no medicaid or is it medicare (I can’t remember which is which, one is for old people and the other for poor people) they discovered he was ok and can go home. I don’t know how much time passed but he got worse and by the time his friends brought him back his lungs were totally filled up and his blood sugar was 500+! They knew he wouldn’t make it and he didn’t.

The end of the year is always crazy at work anyway but now we are dealing with the splitting of the company and all the crazy that brings. I am staying with the mother ship while my 2 co-workers are going to the V. Stay with the original company is definitely less stressful because the only thing that really changes for me is that there are less of us. We don’t need new badges or business cards, we don’t have new anything.

After Friday the 21 (aka the end of the world according to the Mayans) I am off for the holidays. I come back on the 31st just in time to make sure my “day one” websites are ready to go. Then when we come back to work on Jan 2, what? Does something magic happen? Can I talk to my co-workers? They will still be sitting next to me for a least a little while. I foresee that they will need my assistance on some of the projects I handed off to them but what will I be able to do. Like I said, weird.

In the mornings, Hollace now walks to school. The school is really close to us but it is on a busy, non-pedestrian friendly road so we never really wanted her to walk. Her friend Kayla was walking so we decided that her last year at that school it would be ok.

They are getting a learning experience by watching road kill decomposition. Every day I get an update on the road kill de jour. Lately it is a deer they named Jessica. She is in bad shape and quite gruesome. Every day Jessica takes another leap into the disgusting. Before Jessica it was Albert the opossum until he blew up. Oh joy. 😉

Last week I had to get tires on my car. 35,000 miles on that set of tires (Bridgestones) which is total crap. I went to Sam’s Club cause I had good luck there before getting my desired brand, Michellin. I do some up front research and fall in love with their new Defender (that is if you can fall in love with tires that is) but according to Sam’s they don’t carry them for my car which I think is an SE and takes 16″ rims. I know this going in yet when I get to Sam’s the guy looks up my car and asks if I want Defenders. Yes!

They are busy so it will be 90 minutes. Ok I will read for awhile and then time my frozen food shopping for 6:00. At 6:00 I go check and they tell me that they haven’t even started on them, another hour. Dang, my frozens will thaw. I go find someone to take my stuff to a freezer while I go back and read (Steven King’s 11/22/63). Half an hour later they call to tell me that they have a problem. The Defenders only come in 15″ rim and I have 16″. Major disappointment. We look at what they do have for 16″ rims and decide on Primacy which I knew from the website. I also knew they didn’t stock them and there is a three day wait. I wasted 2.5 hours at Sam’s and drove away with my old bald tires and paid more for tires with only a 60K mileage instead of Defender’s 90K.

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We have apparently had our DirecTV Tivo DVR for 7 years. For several years it has given us some grief and thought it was time to get a new one but then it would start behaving and all was good again. DirecTV was planning on partnering with Tivo again for HD but was already 3 years delayed. For those 3 years I anxiously waited for the update because we wanted to stick with Tivo if we could. It came out back in February but our DVR was working ok and I wasn’t ready for the added expense of HD so we stayed the course.

Last week however the DVR started acting up and this time it didn’t seem like it was going to fix itself. I was all ready to go for the Tivo when I seen DirecTV’s new Genie super DVR. You could record 5 shows at once and watch side by side shows and it had a TB HD, hmm intriguing.

Saturday after 9:30 pm I call DirecTV ready to take the plunge. They say they will have a guy there to install on Sunday. And he did even though they failed to state on the order that he has to install a new HD dish. RAW isn’t thrilled because they can’t put this heavier one on the fascia like the old one-whatever.

My bigger worry was old stick in the mud RAW and how he was going to adjust with the Genie and it’s features. As I expected, lots of grumbling and whining-ug.

Monday morning I go to turn the TV on and it is asking for the access card–great. Can’t mess with it right now, got to go to work. RAW eventually resets it and all is good.

Tuesday it didn’t it again and wouldn’t recover. I told RAW to call DirecTV and sure enough we have a defective unit. We are still waiting for a replacement. In the meantime if RAW wants to watch TV he has to do it in my studio where he grumbles that the chair is too uncomfortable.

On the bright side, he cleaned the fridge yesterday since he couldn’t watch TV.

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Monday I finally picked some glasses and placed my order.

Part of the reason I dragged my heals ordering these things is that predictably I need the bifocals. I know no one escapes and that I am much older then most who get them, still the same, I feel like I really am old now. I wanted to fight it and quite honestly I think I still see pretty good close up but I know it is starting to go. I am also worried about adjusting to progressive lenses. I watched Paula constantly fiddle with hers the last time she was here. Sherry brought up a good point, it will be easier to adjust while my near prescription is weaker then if I wait until later.

me and my hipster glasses

I am fixated with getting cat eyes, I want to be quirky. Or like Lynda Weinman from Lynda.com.

I guess cat eyes would be the female equivalent of what Hollace calls hipster glasses or I have heard called geek chic. Those glasses are usually those 1950’s black glasses that my dad wore in his HS photo. In fact when Hollace seen that picture of her grandpa in the 50’s, she said hipspter glasses! I’m not getting those, I am getting a variation of what the women work in the 50’s. 😉

I was all set getting the brown ones I picked out the last time but the guy showed me the red ones and I fell in love. Don’t worry, they aren’t Sally Jessie Raphael red from the 80s, these are so pretty. Sherry, my adviser approves through pictures taken with my iPhone. I don’t think I will get them before Thanksgiving though

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We are in dire need for a new mattress. I have been contemplating shopping for them for two years now. I dread the thought of dealing with high stakes (I can’t think of the word that goes with high there) salesmen while laying around a store on mattresses who know who laid on before me. I got to get over that and just do it but first I will do my homework and go in armed with knowledge

It seems like it has been forever since I wrote here but it looks like it has only been a month which isn’t as long as it feels.

My last entry was on our Columbus Day camping trip. Earlier this week we made our reservations for next year. In Wisconsin the earliest you can reserve is 11 month before and with electric sites you better be on the ball. Especially so since Ivie suggested Door County.

Last Saturday Ivie had a Lia Sophia jewelery party. JoAnn wanted to go so we went. I am so not the jewelery house party person but sat there was watched the woman that were in wonder, well maybe not wonder. Barb was there too so JoAnn and I sat next to her.

We ended that party by going to the computer to try and get our camping sites since we were all there but apparently they don’t let you reserve over the weekend which meant we had to do it Monday morning at 9:00.

I had to get reservations for Ivie and Barb too so I opened up three separate browsers and logged into the accounts I set up for them last year and and was waiting for 9:00. There were only 5 sites left so we had to be extra diligent. JoAnn, Deb and I all sat on the phone in a 3-way call at the moment. Jo and Deb both shouted out that they got their sites and me….all three sites I was trying for were already taken!

So a scrambling we go. We head to the other state park in the area and quickly find five sites in a row. Since Jo and Deb already reserved the other sites they were able to try for these. Actually I had a site at the other place for some reason I clicked reserve on even though it wasn’t that close to Jo and Deb’s and it didn’t include Ivie’s and Barb’s so we all go back and cancel those sites–$14 wasted and head back and snag up the new sites. Mission accomplished, we are reserved and now frazzled.

Hope the weather is nice in October next year.

Actually I first noticed something odd with my vision while Paula was visiting. On my right eye there was a blurry spot. I had the urge to rub  my eye to clear things up but it didn’t help. Upon further review, I noticed it was like a piece of film with definite edges that seemed to float around there. It was odd and I was a little concerned but distracted since my sisters were visiting.

After everyone went back home I decided I should look into this odd eye thing that was still there. I try not to play Dr. Google but I wanted to see what the symptom was for all the eye ailments I could think of.

I typed in cataracts then macular degeneration (like mom has) and then glacoma. All of these eye diseases are associated with old eyes. Sherry’s boyfriend has cataracts and is only a couple years older then me so anything was possible. None of those sounded like what I was witnessing.

Then it occurred to me that it looked like something was detached. Yikes, detached retina! OMG, that so totally sounds like it. I asked Sherry about it and mentioned it on BYB and it was unanimous, get yourself to an eye doctor pronto!

I went to a few days later and psyched myself up for a worst case scenario of horrible treatments in my eye. What she said what I had was a posterior vitreous detachment (I guess that detachment part right) and the only thing that can be done is nothing.

What I had was the granddaddy of floaters. Yep, a glorified floater. It won’t go away but my brain will eventually forget about it.

One of the symptoms of a detached or torn retina is a posterior vitreous detachment. So there you have it. Hopefully I will never get there.