Baking bread and blogging a post. Sometimes you need a starter.
While I don’t use a bread starter because I have a bread machine, I needed a starter for this post, and I got it from Dave Rogers — a simple email with a simple question: How are you doing? And then a pop over to his weblog, where he refers to bread baking and includes a link to a bread blogger making his own starter.
Aha! So much synchronicity has to be a message from the “universe” that it’s time for me to post. Thanks, Dave, for the starter.
The frustrations and aggravations of taking care of my mom are what they are. She asks the same questions over and over again, and each time I answer, I lose a little more patience. She’s constantly fiddling with things, objects — folds and refolds towels (including paper ones), keeps putting on and taking off the rings she wears. (One is the grade school graduation ring of my father’s that he gave her because he couldn’t afford an engagement ring at the time. It has a ring guard on it so it doesn’t fall off, and she wears it on her middle finger. The other ring is a gold wedding band, which is too big for her middle finger, but she wears it anyway. I found the gold band on the floor the other day and tried to give it back to her. She said it wasn’t hers and she doesn’t know whose it is. I now wear it on the middle finger of my right hand.)
We celebrated her 90th birthday on Saturday with her favorite lunch (kapusta, kielbasa, and potato salad — all of which I cooked) and invited two of her cousins and their mates to join the party. One of them made and brought chrusciki, and the other biscotti. (There just never seems to be a way or a time to start my much-needed diet.) My mom wasn’t always sure who everyone was, and her participation in the conversation resulted in blank looks all around. But she knew it was her birthday and knew it was her party, and, for one afternoon, she forgot her aches and pains and roster of complaints.
OK. So, what have I done for me lately? Been to the chiropractor twice. (Whaddya know! Medicare covers it!) I have a massage scheduled for next week. I’m planning to go out to visit with my grandson next month for my own birthday and, on the way back, stop in Albany for a couple of hours.
But, most importantly, I discovered the Unison Community Arts Center, where they have a Senior Citizen QiGong class, and they are going to again schedule West Coast Swing classes in the Spring. The Center is only about five miles away, and the QiGong classes are during the day, which works for me. Hopefully there will be other workshops I might like to attend. African dancing maybe?
This weekend at the Unison, there’s a Readers’ Theatre presentation of “Steiglitz Loves O’Keeffe”, which, if I can haul my butt out of here at night, I might go and see. But that’s not as important as getting out a couple of times a week for QiGong and dancing.
Meanwhile, Dave, and oddly enough, while so much of the rest of the Northeast was socked in by that big storm last week (my daughter had almost two feet over there in MA), we had less than six inches that melted quickly. Mother Mountain protects her own.
Tomorrow we take my mom to a neurologist to see what might be able to be done for pain management.
Life with mom isn’t going to change until some drastic change on her part, but I am making a major effort to do some fun things with whatever life I can squeeze out these days without her.
It’s a start.