Java, or Habit #3 - Coffee Breaks

Time for a little something.  Be right back...

Pandora

The other day I broke down and bought an iphone because I have a dog who loves to escape at inconvenient times and makes me late for appointments and exercise classes, etc.  I Googled dog-finding applications and devices and found two which sounded promising.  The first was designed for hunting dogs which go far afield in search of racoons, boars, etc.  This system has two components:  a collar with two antennae and a radio receiver which communicates with the collar via satellite.  I liked the way this one sounded because it was rugged and my dog loves to go into the back country of Jupiter Farms.  So I went to Gander Mountain, a big NRA outlet, and bought the $500 system, after being assured I could return it if I didn't like it.

The Red Dog tolerated the ridiculous collar quite well and didn't seem to mind that everyone who saw him laughed at him.  I was able to find him when he went on the lam although it required a bit of compass learning on my part.  The problem with this elaborate system was that the batteries on the collar and radio receiver ran down rather quickly meaning that the Red Dog could go missing at any time even wearing the My Favorite Martian collar.  So, I decided to try another device, the Tagg collar, which works with the iphone.  That meant buying an iphone which I had resisted for years just because. Fortunately, I was due for an upgrade and AT&T sold me the 4s for $99 (plus an exorbitant fee for this that and the other).

It took a few days for the dog tracker and the iphone to learn to love each other, but in the meantime, I discovered itunes and then, the love of my life:  Pandora.  I am totally addicted to my Bluegrass and Country stations.  My earbuds are always in place and I no longer speak to anyone.  This is a blessing and a curse because I find people to be distracting even though I crave conversation and connection.

What I am discovering is how much great music there is out there that I do not have to work to enjoy.  Life is good. 

Habit #5 - Losing Focus

It doesn't seem to matter how hard I work to organize my life and prioritize the items on my to-do list because every year, from November until April, I completely lose my ability to focus.  During those fuzzy months, I cannot seem to do more than get dressed and make my bed each day.  Weeds take over the yard, the dogs find new sources of dirt to carry into the house, the mail piles up, the laundry ceases to fold itself, and I find it difficult to read, let alone write.

November marks the beginning of the holiday season and my brain automatically shuts down.  Every year, about a week before Thanksgiving, I realize that I have not ordered a fresh turkey nor have I given a moment's thought to what else I plan to serve.  So I call the local organic grocery store and order the turkey and decide to quell the holiday panic that is beginning to set in by checking Facebook and researching Important Topics on the internet.  Somehow I always manage to brine the turkey, make the stuffing and other side dishes, bake an apple pie, and remain standing until the last dish is washed.  Black Friday is when I start to panic about Christmas.

Buying gifts for my family is like bringing coals to Newcastle.  Everyone not only has everything he or she could possibly need or want, the girls are equipped with credit cards (which Mommy and Daddy pay for) so they have no sense of deprivation.  None.  Every Christmas I agonize over what to get them so they will feel loved and know that Daddy and I were thinking of them and missing them.  I feel successful if they like one out of five gifts under the tree.  Hubby, is another problem.  He doesn't want anything, he doesn't like anything, he doesn't want me to spend money, and he hates it when I try to improve his fashion sense.  I repeat the Serenity Prayer several times every day while I muddle through the "most wonderful time of the year" and try to stay on top of the extra laundry generated by having two adult children in the house who can't seem to remember how to do their own.  By mid-January, the house is empty again except that my in-laws are down for the winter months, which is not a problem except that each December they arrive at death's door or recovering from surgery or both and a good bit of my time is spent driving back and forth from home to hospital to apartment.  By late February, the health crises have responded to the Florida sunshine and the incessant driving ceases, but my mental health is shot and my creditors are hounding me for payment of the bills that piled up and got lost while I was being a caregiver.

March is a busy birthday month so I spin my wheels for several weeks trying to figure out how to make the birthday boy or girl feel special.  Rarely do my plans work out.  This year, I wanted to have a little dinner party for Hubby (who's having a big birthday).  Everyone I invited was free to join us -- except for Hubby.  He had booked a flight to London and couldn't change the ticket.  Plan B didn't work out because my best friends were not free that night.  Maybe next year.

At some point in April, the in-laws return to the north and my focus begins returning, and then Daughter #2 comes home from college for the summer where she has a big deal internship with a Fortune 500 company.  Perhaps it is the longer days, but despite the heat and humidity I am always extremely productive in Summer, especially after I have taken care of the other birthdays.  I go on cleaning and weeding binges that actually make a difference.  I give the horse a haircut or two, depending on how fast his coat grows in, I wash the dogs, I work on my novel, and then it is back-to-school time.

From mid-September until early November, I often have time and the focus to write.  And then the fuzzy vision sets in and my novel languishes until the snowbirds fly north in the spring.  What I need is a stay-at-home wife to run the household.  Oh.  That's my job.  Never mind.

Copyright 2013 Teresa Friedlander, all rights reserved

Aging

The older we get, the worse we look, feel, and - sometimes - act.  Pain is a factor, as is arthritis and loss of padding in the derriere.  Psychiatric problems can arise as a result of pain, making us cranky, irritable, and - sometimes - incoherent.  Recently, my 93-year-old father-in-law fell and hurt his lower left leg.  The emergency room physician who examined him looked at the x-ray, said nothing's broken, and sent him home.  Three days later, the leg was red and swollen.  Under duress, my father-in-law agreed to return to the emergency room where it was determined that he had a cellulitis infection - MRSA.  While in the medical wing of the hospital the doctors discovered that his kidneys function at 20% on a good day and that he has fairly advanced diabetes.  Tipping the scales at 120 pounds, my father-in-law had no appetite and seemed as if he was making a quick exit from this life.  The doctors ordered installation of a PICC line in order to medicate and nourish this increasingly frail elderly man.  Compounding his problems was the inability to pass urine, despite constantly feeling the urge to go.  So, a catheter was inserted into his penis to drain his bladder.

After a couple of days, his physical state seemed better but his mental state continued to deteriorate.  He asked repeatedly what was going on, who was in charge, why he was here, and why we thought he was sick.  On the day he was to be discharged from the hospital to a rehabilitation facility (next door), his nurse removed the PICC line and the catheter, to my dismay.  How, I wondered, was he going to receive his antibiotics, and did they really think that his appetite had magically returned?  Four hours later, after failing to pass urine (duh!), the catheter was reinstalled and he was transported to the rehab facility.

The first thing you see when entering this rehab facility is a large poster proclaiming their commitment to compassionate care for elderly clients.  My father-in-law saw very little of this compassion from the nursing staff.  We waited for hours before his nurse deigned to come into his room and meet him.  After we got him settled in for the night, or so we thought, my husband, mother-in-law, and I went home for some much needed sleep.  I arrived at ten the next morning to make sure he was OK and here's what I found:  a confused, depressed, distressed, lost soul who had been parked at the nurses' station so they "could keep an eye on him".   There wasn't a nurse in sight except for the occasional CNA who buzzed by on her way to do something other than acknowledge the existence of a clearly distressed and suffering gentleman.  The problem, they explained to me, was that he kept trying to get out of bed and walk around and they were afraid he was going to fall, so they had to put him in what amounts to a traffic island so that if he fell, someone might see him and put him back in the chair before any harm was done (i.e., a family member showed up and raised holy hell).  It took me two hours to calm him down but I failed to convince him that he was not being held prisoner.

Five hours later, the facility manager - intuiting that we were not happy with Dad's care - came and made nice with us.  Finally, we thought, he will get the attention he needs.  Nope.  The next morning I arrived and found him in a guest chair with his head banging into the glove dispenser and sharps disposal.  All someone had to do was move the chair five inches so his head wouldn't bang into those objects, but apparently this did not occur to anyone.  Again, it took me two hours to calm him down but he continued to insist that a nefarious plot was afoot and that I needed to be extremely careful lest I get caught in the web of deception.

I noticed that someone had left a stapled stack of papers on his table with a pencil.  It turned out to be a list of menus for the next two weeks which my distressed, depressed, demented father-in-law was expected to select from in order to plan his meals.  I did it for him because he was completely unable to do it for himself.  Again, I asked myself, has anyone here noticed that he is losing his mind?  Do they really think that he will be able to make food choices?  Have they not noticed that he eats nothing?  Moreover, we told everyone who would listen (and it seems we were talking to ourselves) that he was in extremely fragile shape and needed help with everything.  Their policy, we discovered, is to "get to know the patient" before intervening.  Excuse me?

Once I finished selecting his meals from the fourteen page menu I noticed that he was sliding off the chair and tried to lift him back up.  He told me that his testicles ("balls") were hurting and he was trying to find a position which was less uncomfortable.  I asked if he needed someone to help him adjust the position of his catheter and he said that he was in pain and that no one was paying attention.  To indicate how bad, he insisted that I, his daughter-in-law, look at his male parts!  Having no experience being a man, I could see that all parts were swollen and inflamed.  I called a nursing assistant in to look at the catheter.  She concluded that all he needed was a change of depends.  After an hour during which nothing happened, I sought out his nurse (who had not shown her face in the two hours I had been with him) and explained that he was in significant pain and that his penis and scrotum were inflamed.  A little while later, a nurse practitioner entered the room and examined my poor father-in-law's private parts.  She concluded that the catheter was "leaking" and someone needed to address that.  I explained that he was in increasing pain and needed to see a doctor.  She explained that she could make him an appointment but he wouldn't be seen for two or three days.  "Your other option," she said, "is to send him to the emergency room."

I have to say that I was incredulous.  Here we have a frail, infirm, very elderly man who has a history of infection and whose penis is looking severely infected and the nurse practitioner is acting like it was OK for him to wait until a doctor had an opening in his schedule instead of saying "get him to the emergency room, STAT!". If I were passive or stupid, my father-in-law would probably still be sitting in that room, dying from pain or infection.

This facility, "The Pavilion at Jupiter Medical Center" is considered one of the best.  One of my good friends who suffered severe head and body trauma from a car accident spent several months there and has almost completely recovered.  So why was my frail, demented, very ill, father-in-law neglected to the point that we had to have him readmitted to the hospital?  [Sidebar: he is not on the dole, so no one could claim he was a charity case.]  The answers point to a shocking attitude toward frail elderly people in America, that because they are at the end of their lives they do not need the same attention as a younger patient with a longer life expectancy.  It upset me tremendously because we are not trying to keep a dying man alive at any cost;  all we wanted was for him to be cared for with compassion and to have his discomforts addressed immediately, because he is old and fragile and he matters to us.

Long ago and far away, I worked for AARP when the headquarters building was on K Street in northwest Washington, DC.  In the 23 years since I worked there, in spite of tons of rhetoric and lobbying on the part of this mammoth organization, care for the elderly is still grossly inadequate.  My father-in-law has a wife, son, and daughter-in-law nearby who can advocate for him and still he received lousy treatment at a so-called rehabilitation facility.  All he needed was for someone in that facility to sit with him and hold his hand until a family member arrived.  Instead, he was left isolated in a strange place being "cared for" by people who couldn't have cared less.

AARP should get its priorities in order:  instead of selling insurance, they should be developing care standards for people who move from hospital to rehabilitation so that no one gets parked in the nurses' station or left with his head banging into the sharp's disposal container. There is no excuse for the shabby treatment this World War II veteran, entrepreneur, job-creator, philanthropist, husband and father received when he was at his most vulnerable.

Inertia

A body at rest tends to stay at rest.  The same applies to a brain, my brain anyway.  I go through these incredibly productive periods and then some force acts upon me and inertia sets in.  The force acting on me today is the horror of a massacre in an elementary school in a small town, far removed from the dangers of the big city.  As I try to wrap my head around what happened, I find myself in a state of paralysis because I see no end to the violence.

Crazy people do things like shoot up innocent children.  Why did the Newtown, Connecticut, shooter have access to so many powerful guns?  Because his mother owned them and apparently didn't keep them locked up even though her son who lived with her was mentally disturbed.  She supposedly kept the guns for her own protection.  Fat lot of good they did her.

The real problem, as I see it, is that we have an epidemic of mental illness in the United States of America.  Why is that?  The long answer is, it's complicated.  The short answer is that we are a fearful people and becoming more so.  We no longer have confidence that our law enforcement officers can protect us from the growing dangers threatening our well-being.  Lots of people, perfectly sane people, purchase guns to protect themselves.  The way they see it is that danger lurks around every corner, behind every door, up every tree, and so they keep a gun at the ready. I doubt that most of these guns are effective in preventing crimes, but I guess having them makes people feel better.

I do not advocate banning guns because that would just push the market for guns and ammo underground and create a whole new world of problems.  As far as I am concerned, people can have as many guns as they want AS LONG AS NOBODY GETS HURT.  So, how do we keep guns out of the wrong hands while allowing Americans to exercise their Second Amendment rights?  This may be the most important philosophical conversation we as a nation ever have because until something changes, more innocent people will be mowed down as they go about their lives, and it will happen with increasing frequency because the mental health crisis in our country gets worse every time a shooting occurs.

Adam Lanza was diagnosed with a form of autism called Asperger's Syndrom.  This did not cause his violent behavior per se.   It is quite likely that he was depressed, perhaps because of being bullied as a child at the school where he acted out his inner rage.  Lanza needed treatment -- medicine, therapy, a residential program, something -- but did not get it.  The responsibility for this likely rests with his mother who, given her own fondness for assault weapons, was probably not aware of the message that her hobby communicated to her disturbed son.

Some of my neighbors feel that there should be more guns, not fewer.  These same people are devout Christians of the born-again variety who spend countless hours in Bible-study and prayer.  I don't get it.  Jesus was supposed to have said that we should turn the other cheek rather than hit back.  Unless I am misinterpreting everything I ever heard in church and Sunday school, Jesus would probably be distressed that his followers brought their pistols to church, just in case. 

In the words of the great Pogo Possum, "we have met the enemy and he is us."

I Forget

When my children were little, they named me "Miss Forget" because they noticed that I had a hard time remembering things.  Like the saintly mother than I am, I laughed when they called me this because I was in no position to argue with them.  I frequently forgot lunches, appointments, playdates, essential items from the grocery store, and where I had put things during my occasional cleaning binges.  I would also forget things like Hubby's lifelong aversion to onions and follow a recipe to the letter only to have him eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for dinner.  I have come to realize that "forgetting" the onion problem was passive aggression on my part.  Those early years had their rocky moments.

The Operating Principal in our home was that anytime something went missing, Hubby and Daughters 1 & 2 would accuse me of throwing it away because to them cleaning meant tossing even though I was always extremely careful not to toss anything important, like a report card or math binder.  Cleaning binges being binges, after all, I goofed once in a while and threw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.  Of all the things I inadvertently threw away, none was of particular importance or monetary value in the grand scheme of things, they were instead bits of clutter that had special meaning to their owners which I had failed to appreciate.  Every time this would happen, I would beat myself up for being an insensitive and overbearing matriarch, and proceed to empty out the trash bins while vainly searching for the missing objects, praying for God's mercy so that I could get out of the doghouse.  On a couple of occasions I did find the items in the trash, but most often they would be long gone.  My sins, however, were never thrown away:  they resided on a list which Hubby and Daughters 1 & 2 would recite from memory as proof that what they could not find I had obviously disposed of.  Unfortunately, I could never remember any of the times that I found the items they had accused me of throwing away, so for years I felt quite defenseless.

The other thing I did during my cleaning binges was to Organize the House and this involved finding a place for everything and putting everything in its place.  My three nearest and dearest compete with each other to be in the Packrat Hall of Fame to the point where they sometimes border on hoarding.  This upsets me because it is impossible to clean a cluttered house and when I am in a mood to clean, I let nothing stand in my way.  I have tried various methods of corralling the clutter such as boxing stuff up and storing it in the attic, basement, or garage to see how long it will be before anyone asks for their most precious scrap of paper or Pokemon eraser.  Once, after a box had sat undisturbed for three years, I looked through the contents and tossed it.  The very next day, Daughter #1 asked about that little rubber chicken she had gotten as a party favor in kindergarten which I had just found inside the box which the trash collectors had just picked up.  Of course I lied about it because if I hadn't looked in the box, I wouldn't have known the little rubber chicken was inside.  My penance for telling this lie was that Daughter #1 was hysterical and demanded that I turn the house inside out to help her find the damn thing.  For those things which I assumed had some value to their owners, i.e., they were in the top layer of clutter, I would attempt to stow away in a logical place with the hope that I would remember where to look when asked.  Unfortunately, I could never remember which Organizing Principal I was operating off on the day when I did the stowing and so the item would remain lost until months or years later when I found it while de-cluttering, re-organizing, or moving.

Why is my life so much more complicated than everybody else's?

Copyright 2012 Teresa Friedlander all rights reserved

Weed (s)

The Red Dog

I am not sure why I bother to weed my garden beds because the weeds grow in much more quickly than I can pull them or kill them with Roundup.  I even have help of the canine variety.  The Red Dog loves only one thing more than the swimming pool, and that is helping in the garden.  He is the reason why my house is not and never will be clean (another of my opportunities to practice being Sisyphus).  He is also the reason why my white jeans are permanently stained with large paw marks.  I used to go right around the twist when The Red Dog "decorated" my clean white jeans but now, I no longer care.  The reason I no longer care is that I no longer go anywhere that requires my looking clean and put together, so when The Red Dog comes at me wearing his mud suit and boots, my cammo pants hide the evidence.

Sometimes I use weed-pulling as an excuse to avoid doing things I do not want to do, like cooking dinner, going to the grocery store, cleaning the house, or working in my office.  When Hubby comes home and there is no dinner on the table, I tell him I am saving us tons of money by doing manual labor rather than hiring someone (who really needs the money) and suggest that he get us a pizza from Enzo's.  When the overdue notices start showing up in the mailbox because I have been "too busy" to sit down and write checks, I hide them and then have to spend two solid days in purgatory (my office). It is a good thing that Hubby doesn't get involved with the household accounts otherwise I might have to get a "real" job.

Then there are those opportune times, during tropical storms and 100% humidity, when I voluntarily go to the office with every intention of paying the bills and filing everything away that needs filing and shredding everything else, but decide to check FaceBook instead.  This takes an inordinate amount of time (all wasted!) and makes me want to do some writing in order to get my focus back so I can attend to the high priority tasks languishing on my my desk.  The unfortunate thing about writing is that once I start, I can't do anything else until I am finished -- no matter how long it takes.  It is a little bit like weeding in that way, which leads me to wonder whether writing is a form of procrastination.  (Better not go there.)

As soon as the sun comes out, a whole new crop of weeds will spring forth and I will have to get back to my futile attempt to get my gardens in shape.  My Highly Effective Sister and her Mister do not seem to have these problems.  They keep their garden in shape, get their bills paid on time, host frequent dinner parties, own numerous rental properties, travel constantly (for fun), and hold down Important Jobs!  And they each have graduate degrees.  It's enough to make me want to get out of the gene pool, except it is too late:  Hubby and I have already reproduced, ensuring that the next generation of Highly Ineffective People, like weeds, will keep the entropy going.

Copyright 2012 Teresa Friedlander, all rights reserved