The Art Project Part Two and my Whiny Week

 

My lunch today consisted of a double serving of mashed potatoes and gravy from Kentucky Fried Chicken and it felt decadent to indulge in a classic comfort food. Don't judge. I deserved it after the week I've had since my last post. I got rid of all the pain in my arm and hand and replaced it with a nasty head cold and a hacking cough that makes my insides feel so sore that I've considered the possibility I broke a rib with all the non-stop coughing I've been doing to bring up green, chunky mucus and phlegm. Too my information? That's what someone told me here at my continuum care complex. And I didn't even say it during a meal time. I live with a bunch of wimps! 

I got a haircut today and my hairdresser says they're calling it the 100 day cough and, god, I hope it doesn't last that long. I've managed to avoid getting sick all winter long and with 72 residents plus staff all around me passing the flu, colds and Covid back and forth it hasn't been easy. I'm really careful not to touch elevator buttons with my finger tips (I use my knocks) and I wash my hands the minute I enter my apartment. I keep my fingers out of my eyes and mouth and use the hand sanitizer stations whenever I walk by them. I also don't eat food offered off other people's plates which bothers me all the time but grosses me out during cold and flu season! But when my bone doctor put me on the 20 mg of prednisone as part of his diagnostic process it must have lower my immunity system (as the package insert warns can happen) because I finally got the crud with side serving of a UTI. Thankfully, the UTI got resolved with a $24 E-Visit at the doctor's website and a three day round of magic pills. 

Still, it was a successful week in terms of the art project---the Artist Handmade Book I finished it up today, on the last day of class. One person was missing because she had a "cold." Oops! and I really felt bad because she probably got it from me but she's always trading food off other people's plates so who really knows for sure? So far she's the only one I had close contact with who has gotten sick. This week I did eat my meals as take-outs or just soup in my room and didn't go to a couple of lectures but I can't keep that up for 100 days so I'll official join the choir of "cougher" who walk around with a pocket full of cough drops and X-Kleenex. Ya, I would avoid sitting next to me too. Logic might tell you that I'm past the contagious stage but the eyes sometimes overrule what logic has to say about whatever.

Art project: Since I moved to this continuum care complex I've written a bunch of poems about life here and I've been wanting to put them in a book form. But I had no idea that a class advertised as "learn to experiment with different materials" would turn in a serendipitous marriage of art and writing. A couple of my sick days were spent playing around with fonts sizes and fonts styles, then printing all my poems out on good paper. As I explained in another post, we started with a large sheet of rag paper and acted like kindergartners slopping watercolors every which way, then turning it over and doing the same thing on the back side. Our next class we be learned how to cut and fold the sheet of paper to form a book that opens up accordion-style. I made a little sampler since then just so I'd remember how to do the folding and cutting because it's so simple, its complicated and if you don't cut in the right place the accordion doesn't work. 

Between the second and the third class I cheated and went ahead and cut my poems up and pasted them on the pages and fell in love with the stupid little five by six inch book that came together. The professor liked it enough that she asked me if I'd make her a photocopy of the book so she can share it in her European workshops this summer. I don't know how I feel about having a random photocopy floating around when I'm still trying to figure out how to make it into a real book. I know, I'm a control freak. But is it so wrong to want to be the one who decides where and who gets to see my poems? And I choose you guys for this bird's eye preview. ©

 

Showing how the book opens

 

A couple of my poems:

 

The Side Table 

 

It’s a billboard screaming

an old person lives here ---

nail clippers, a forgotten mug,

a big button remote

with a crossword puzzle

next to a magnifying glass,

a shoe horn, eye drops and

and a potato chip

that lost its bag a week ago.

Cluttered chair-side tables

talk and tell stories

to our La-Z-Boys

who don’t care if they’re

partners in this classic

display of old people gear.  © JR

 

 

At Eighty

 

In the so-called Golden Years

It takes a long time to stay alive

with all the specialists to see

and pills to count.

Then there’s the memories

that want to escape

while we’re still trying

to build new ones with

classes and books

and friends old and new.

 

In the so-called Golden Years

we try not to linger on the losses

and there are many---

careers

good friends and family,

skill sets and bodily functions.

We laugh, we cry and compare

old people thrills and chills

while counting

each day we wake up as a bonus. © JR

 

The Art Class, Rosie The Riveter and a Great Netflix Movie

Happiness comes in many forms and it was delivered this week with an art class that lit a fire under my pot of stagnant creativity. The three part class is being taught by an award winning college professor who is teaching the class as a favor to our resident, retired art professor. This summer the instructor is taking these same workshops to Europe to teach what she calls Handmade Artist's Books. I guess it's a popular fad right now and there is plenty of evidence online to back up her claim. When it's all said and done we'll have a book of abstract art pages that we'll embellish with whatever pleases us and what pleases me is I'm going to turn the pages into a poetry book. Since moving to my continuum care campus I've written fifteen poems about various aspects of living here in my eight's and I've been wanting to do something with them. 

The class was advertised as "experimenting with art materials" so I had no idea we were going to be taking a large sheet of rag paper and act like kindergartners slopping watercolors every which way, then turning it over and doing the same thing on the back side. Our next class we'll be learning to cut and fold the sheet of paper to form a book that opens up accordion-style. The third class will be the embellishment phase, which to me looks more like scrapbooking than art but, of course, those judgments are always in the eyes of the beholder. All I know is that since the first class and now I've also finished up a paint-by-number I started working on last fall and lost interest in and I've stretched a canvas to use for another customized paint-by-number that I promised to my oldest niece. Plus I dug out my folder of poems to print and use as embellishments, along with a few photos from around the campus.

I also took a trip to JoAnn's Fabrics going out-of-business sale, bought some heavy paper I planned to print the poems on and prompted screwed up my printer trying. It took me almost two hours to get it working again because the paper not only got stuck but it caused the ink cartridges not to read anymore and I had to change them, clean the nozzle and preform all the set up/alignment stuff I did when I first got the printer. Won't be trying to put heavy paper through the printer again. Now I have to dream up another project that will use fifteen pieces of great quality scrapbook paper bought at the ridiculously low cost of twenty-five cents each. I have always loved and lusted after good paper. Back in the days when all I thought about was art I had a great collection of handmade paper samples, I even took a papermaking class in college and just now I realized that the blender I donated to Goodwill a month or so again could have been put to use turning my junk mail into homemade paper. Oh well, I don't have time for all the could have/should have ideas that flit through my head.

Change of topic: If you live in Michigan and get a chance to hear a lecture about Rosie the Riveter or the Willow Run Bomber Plant given by Clarre Kirhn Dahl, don't pass it up. She's a retired history educator specializing in Women's Studies who spoke for an hour and a half on our campus without notes or missing a beat. She had us spellbound and laughing and so pumped with pride in the 269,0000 women in our mom's generation who worked in the factories during WWII building planes ships, jeeps, guns, bullets and making uniforms. Many of us had joyful tears in our eyes when she was finished speaking. She's part of Michigan Flight Museum  (an affiliate of the Smithsonian) and is an official 'Tribute Rosie' who dresses in the iconic look made popular by Norman Rockwell magazine cover and she crisscrosses the country to tell the stories of the American home front during the war and along the way she locates and documents as many the still-living Rosie's as she can find. I had an aunt who was a Rosie. Her two kids lived with us and their mom would visit when she could. For a few years I thought I had three brothers instead of just the one.

If you like Women's history another fascinating and inspirational thing I saw this week was a netflix movie that tells the true story of a black unit of the Women's Army Corp during WWII called The Six Triple Eight. Like the Tuskegee Airmen, an all black unit that served during WWII, it took decades to get the recognition they earned and deserved only to have Musk, this week, use his chainsaw crew to remove their records from military archives as being too DEI. Anything related to Black History month got removed. Even famed baseball player, Jackie Robinson's military recorders got scrubbed. Thankfully, there is an effort to restore the damage these clearly unqualified "Musk's DOGE kids" did purging and attempting to white-wash history. History is history! It can be disturbing. It can be inspirational. It can be a lot of things but what it can't be is changed into something it wasn't. And yet here we are….  ©

Foodies, Food Costs and Body Shamers

Our St Patrick's Day buffet here at my independent living community was both traditional and amazingly good. I say that as someone who doesn't particularly like Irish food. It included stew, of course, corn beef, cabbage, soda bread, a chocolate concoction with Bailey's liqueur and doctored-up mashed potatoes that were so  good I wish I could have stuffed them in a pillow case and snacked on them through out the night. Unfortunately, during and after that meal I drank so much water that I literally made 14 trips to the bathroom between midnight and eight AM. 354 steps according to my fitness watch. Twenty-five steps per around trip. I did the math.

 My CCC gives us a $320 food allowance that we can spend any way we want between their fine dining room and their lunch cafe or snack case. We can even invite outsiders to eat with us and blow the whole amount in one for two sittings. The amount hasn't changed since they opened in October of '21 although the price of their meals has. For example their nightly specials are up to $14.70 (yes, 70 not 75) from $10.75. That only covers a meat and a starch and it's $5.00 extra if you want a vegetable, salad or other side order. Their meals not on special are around $17 for salads on steroids or salmon, $21 for a steak plus the sides are separate. Soup used to be $4.00 a cup at noontime but is now $5.00. Noon specials are $12.95 for mostly sandwiches and fries or chips. If you're careful---which I am---I can eat one meal a day six days a week, and make my allowance last the entire month…until there's a holiday buffet in the month which are $25 to $30 and always well worth it. Others here with families who take them out to eat often have money left over at the end of the month and since it doesn't roll over they look for friends to buy their meal for them. I have benefited from their generosity when a holiday buffet is in the month and I run short. No on wants to leave money on the table for the management.

The lunch special this week was waffles with strawberries and cream, which I lust after (but never order) every time it comes around. If I had ordered them I would have had to do in front of The Body Shamers. One in particular loves to point out how much sugar or white flour is in whatever I'm eating. I've rarely see her eat anything but giant salads or shrimp. Another woman I frequently have lunch with takes a more subtle approach, telling me that she couldn't eat that omelette or grilled cheese sandwich on my plate without gaining weight. 

I'm the second heaviest person living here and I know how they talk about the other fatty behind his back. "He takes too much bread." "He always orders extra sauce and gravy." "He struggles to walk but doesn't use the gym to help control his weight." "He cooks at home, too." "He gets lots of food delivered."

I never raid the table after everyone leaves to round up the bread left over in the baskets like Mister Fatty up above does. But I understand his obsession with doing so. Some of their breads are to-die for and half the women here don't eat carbs so it goes in the trash. I try never to sit next to him at the community farm table because all he talks about is his gourmet cooking which glazes my eyes over. There are two of us here who claim a life time of not having an interest in cooking so we joke about putting space between this guy and us. Grabbing a random seat at a table for 12 or 14 is an exercise in diplomacy. I don’t want to sit near The Body Shamer-in-Chief either or the woman who complains about everything she puts in her mouth. Don't get me wrong, I love the community tables because you can sit back and listen and they are a source of endless amusement with everyone's personal foibles on display and their past histories that get revealed. 

Just yesterday I learned that The Body Shamer-in-Chief used to be 80 pounds overweight before giving up sugar and white flour. Took her a year and a half and she claims that didn't involve any additional exercise. That fact put a whole new spin on her pointing out how much sugar and carbs I consume with my food choices. Maybe she's trying to help? Maybe she thinks a person in her eights doesn’t already know about the cause and effect of food choices? How I need more salads in my diet? When she's not eating salads she's drinking Champaign with a shrimp cocktail so I've taken to asking her if she knows that shrimp are bottom feeders who eat the poop of other sea creatures. It’s a childish tit-for-tat but her being a former principal of a grade school I'm sure she knows that. She's a take charge kind of woman who I really do like but someday I'd like to wrestle her to the floor and force-feed her donuts until she goes into a sugar coma.

Today I did something I haven't done since I was in my teens. I made waffles. A year ago one of the Skinny Minnie twins was selling brand new, Weight Watcher waffles makers for $5.00. I snapped one up for two reasons: 1) I love waffles and 2) I was/still am trying to grow a friendship with her. She, too, was a former fatty-fatty-two-by-four and has been going to Weight Watchers for over 40 years. The box of batter mix I bought back then I got the waffle maker was about to expire so I spent my Sunday morning mixing and baking and cleaning up and the waffles turned out perfect. It was a lot of work but I ended up with enough to freeze and pop in the toaster later. I have a half of box of mix left and will do it again when I can buy some fresh strawberries and cream to top off the waffles. Eating them at home without hearing a choir of comments about how sweet they are or how long someone would have to walk to burn off the calories will be my dirty little secret. 

Eating at community tables seems to bring out the food critics in all of us as we watch each other do things like pick all the onions, olives or candied nuts out of salads, or count the snap peas on our plates. Mr. Fatty is a pea counter and complains if he didn't get as many as someone else at which point someone will often share their peas with him. We all have our food foibles. I hate the rabbit-like eaters the most who leave half their meals behind while I am a member of the Clean Plate Club. I guess their moms never told them about all the starving children over seas. It's bad enough that I have to worry about my own guilt when children are starving and food is being thrown out. 

My teeny tiny next door neighbor is also in the Clean Plate Club but her dog helps her walk it off. Cause and effect. Yes, I do get it. I've gained and lost 50 pounds three times in my life but I just can't seem to find the motivation to go through that torture again. Being a one person assist in my future nursing home room, instead of a two person assist, is all I can come up with for motivation and so far I'm not altruistic enough to put saving their backs up against a year of always feeling deprived when I'm at a lunch or dinner table plus spending hours in the gym every day. My motivations before were: 1) finding a man, 2) keeping him once I found him, and 3) going into knee replacement surgery without a 30% chance of dying on the operating table. My lack of funds for a whole new wardrobe is also a deterrent and being so close under the noses of The Body Shamers who would surely notice if I start eating like a rabbit and that would only drive me back to closet eating. Been there, done that before. I don't take praises well when it comes from people who think they are helping when they point out good food choices. Makes me want to make bad decisions behind their backs just to prove something I don't entirely understand. But I know I'm not the only fatty-fatty-two-by-four who has done that. What's that all about? ©

Until next Wednesday.

Waking up Early and Not-so-Chronic Pain

 

I got up at 5:30 which is three hours before my normal time to 'rise and shine' as my mom used to order me to do each morning when I was kid. "Rise and shine!" she'd yell in the hall between my brother's and my bedrooms, "It's daylight in the swamp!" The sky was starting to show some pinks and lavenders through the bare trees across the green space in from of my apartment, something I hadn't seen in a very long time. Back when I was plowing snow I used to see the sun rise often, to the point that I had better words to describe the pastel mistiness that washes the sky like a watercolor painting in the crisp dawn air. How can anyone not love watching the day come to life?

I looked for the deer they say are often around that time of the day. I looked for the raccoon that leaves tracks in the snow on my deck. I looked for the white tailed skunk I've seen several times but have learned not to talk about it because other people living here freaked out on my report and want to see it and the racoon exterminated. A heavily wooded area was destroyed to build this independent living facility and in my mind we humans need to adjust to live in peace with the displaced wildlife that survived the disruption. White tailed skunks are rare in this part of the country. I researched her on our DNR site and found someone had photographed another white tailed skunk sixty miles away at our state capital. They were as excited as I was to see something they'd never seen before. Not only are the tails white and bushy but the stripes down the backs are wider than on our normal skunks. The first time I saw my skunk all that pure white fur was backlit by parking lot lights and she was stunning.

It was a dream that woke me up. In the dream I was telling myself, "it's just a dream, you need to wake up!" WAKE UP!" I was in that state of Sleep Paralysis which happens sometimes when you are conscious during waking up or falling asleep but you can't move any part of your body. It doesn't happen to me often but when it does it rattles me enough that I can't go back to sleep. 

The only details in the dream that I remember are that my husband took the dog out for a walk and they didn't come back. I waited and waited and worried until I got out of bed in the dream and found he'd left me a hug jar of honey on the kitchen table. Dreaming of honey, according to the dream dictionary, can mean a lot of positive things including that the dreamer has a strong support system which I'm going with in this case because that evening I had had long talks with both of my nieces who were concerned about the outcome of my appointment with my orthopedic doctor. One of my nieces and I had even talked about it being time to start eating a daily teaspoon of locally sourced honey to build up an immunity for our summer and fall allergies.

I don't think I mentioned it before but all winter I've been experiencing a lot of pain in my right arm from my wrist to my elbow. And since it's in same arm that I broke my elbow in 1999, I had myself all worried and worked up thinking it was finally time to do something about the botched surgery, as my current bone doctor calls it. I saw him about this same thing (when the level of pain was much less) last summer and back in 2018 when I wrote: "One of the screws that once held the top of the ulna bone to the bottom was floating around free-willy in my flesh. Another screw that looked to be around 1 ½ or 2 inches long had backed half way out and was no longer anchoring the ulna bone to the radius bone like it was supposed to do, and a stress fracture was showing a few inches below the screw." Xrays taken this week showed both screws are free-willy now, but the doctor can feel their heads through my skin and he doesn't think they are causing my pain. Back in 2018 when this was first discovered he didn't want to do anything to try to correct "the mess" because, he said, would be “a major ordeal involving a very long surgery, weeks in a cast and  months of physical therapy.” I was advised back then to never again lift anything above my waist or ever pick up anything over five pounds with that arm. When I forget, it lets me know.

This week the doctor gave me a shot in my wrist as part of a diagnostic procedure to track down why I can't do things like put my right hearing aid or earring in without pain and dozens of other movements that jabs me with pain through out the day and night. And soon I start a 13 day round of 20 mg prednisone as part of his diagnostic process. The most I've ever had of prednisone are rounds of 4mg so I'm a little concerned about side effects but I trust my doctor. If the wrist shot works (which it did like magic but for only 24 to 36 hours) it means the majority of the pain is coming from arthritis in that area but if the pain in my forearm goes away with the prednisone then the source is coming from crushed and arthritic vertebrae in my neck. It's possible that both are in play. Once he figures that out he'll be able to form a treatment plan that could involve a nerve block on my neck and/or gel shots in my wrist---and "other options" we didn't get into. I'm relieved that elbow surgery is off the table. The bones are fussed together though not lined up right, but they are in no danger of rendering my elbow non functioning which I invented and feared in my worse case scenario. If I live long enough the screws could start cutting through my skin and they'll be easier to remove then. Shrapnel tends work its way outward if no nerves or organs get in the way. On a side note: did you hear that Russia is now dropping shrapnel by drones on Ukrainians to maim, not kill them, in an attempt to overwhelm their healthcare system and give them painful fragments they'll have to live with because they aren't all easy to remove?

Back on topic: All and all things are looking up. I've got a busy March in front of me including some promising looking art classes taught by a college professor and my sense of feeling old and defeated has lessened just knowing a have a path towards feeling better. I'm still struggling to get in enough exercise to make a real difference but nicer weather is on the way so that will help get me outside walking again. By then my fellow residents will quit walking around with ashes on their faces and filling up the calendar with 'churchy' stuff. If that sounds irreverent or disrespectful, I'm sorry. I'm not a fan of the Easter season and listening to how beautiful the Stations of the Crosses ceremonies are, which are repeated here four weeks in a row. I just can't relate to the somberness of the occasion and the bitten-by-the-spirt looks in the eyes of those who take part creeps me out. Not to mention my mom died on Easter which led to a trauma filled couple of years making peace with her very preventable death. 

Nope. I'll buy yellow Peeps but that's the extent of my Easter celebration and this year even that didn't turn out well when one of my table mates at lunch told me my four pack of tradition yellow marshmallow rabbits was pure sugar and not good for fatty-two-by-fours like me. Not her words but implied. More on that conversation in my next post. ©

 Until Next Wednesday...

 

I spent a lot of time trying to track down the author of this poem with not luck and I hate that he or she isn't being created properly. If anyone recognizes it, please leave a comment!