Category: old couple

depression/anxiety, old couple, Reading

Thinking ahead

Laurie

Now that I seem to be out of my depression hole, I’m capable of thinking more clearly of what’s ahead of me without shutting down. That’s great timing, because I am very sad about my brother-in-law’s change in prognosis. I’m angry at the world in general. I’m frustrated with the bureaucracy at work and its dependence on systems that don’t work for every problem and certainly don’t provide the efficiency that they claimed they would. I’m disappointed in my own change of life plans. But, all those emotions are different from being depressed. I think that only someone who has experienced depression understand that. I hope that I stay well away from the rim of the hole, but I don’t seem to have a lot of choice in the matter.

We’ll head down to the lake this weekend and I’ll visit with my family. A few friends are coming with us who all need some LW healing. If the weather cooperates, I am going to coerce these people into making cyanotypes from objects found on site and then I’ll make an accordion book with the prints.

Artist residencies are on my mind, which means that some time soon I’ll need to do a re-haul of the website here and make it more art oriented with my gallery at the forefront in order to have it more professional looking for applications. I won’t get rid of the blog…but it may not be on the front page. I’ve got more ideas for books than I have brain space for, and honestly, I don’t see how I’ll be able to work full-time and get the best ideas underway. I can’t focus when I get home at night.

I noticed that a business that I used to work temp projects for is still in business and is now doing all remote work. I was good at my job there and was offered a promotion during my last project for them about 17 years ago, but I didn’t accept it because it was a sick building. It was always difficult for me to finish a project because I would get migraines and my back throbbed from sitting on folding chairs at tables. It amazed me that they kept hiring me back but like I said, I had a real knack for the work, which was grading writing competency tests for state public school systems. So I will definitely look into working temp jobs for them again if they remain remote after I retire. Then I could take my job anywhere, and would have most of the year off.

My plan is to put off taking Social Security as long as possible and just live off my pension and 403B savings if necessary. We have no debt (knock wood) so at this point it might work. I’ve lived poor before – it won’t be a big shock. Sandy has been able to pay his part of the bills and save his Social Security and invest it instead of spending it. The hard part will be that the cats are reaching the age when they will probably need a lot more medical care. I will be able to keep my insurance at the same rate I am paying now until I am 65 and Sandy is on Medicare. Even though our cars are old, we don’t really need two cars any more. If we needed a second car after one of them dies from old age, we could rent as needed.

So my retirement plan is still on for June 1, 2023 – maybe pushed out to July. I’m no longer fixated on emigration, but we’ll travel as much as we can afford. I’m doing the airline points collecting again, and in the US we’ll take the train and drive as much as we can. It’s nice to have that to look forward to.

Now that the Infrastructure Act has passed, I might add a couple of solar panels to our array. The twelve rooftops panels that we have now almost cover our electrical needs, but not quite.

Reading: I finished The Shipping News and The Midnight Library this week. I think that both of these books significantly affected my mood.

Also affecting my mood: Ted Lasso. I am in love with this show. We are still watching The Last Kingdom, you know, the show about my grandparents. LOL. I’ll have to name our next tomcat Uhtred.

agoraphobia, coffee pot posts, Coronavirus Chronicles, critters, depression/anxiety, Obsession, old couple

Saturday afternoon coffee pot post

Laurie

In which I am settled in near the wood stove with the last of the coffee. There is no fire in the wood stove, though. Allergies in the house has stopped its use unless there is a heating emergency. I need to buy some clean firewood instead of the rotten moldy stuff in the back yard stack. I pulled out an electric radiator style heater to help with warmth during this cold spell.

I definitely started feeling agoraphobic again this week. On Wednesday morning I must have breathed in some saliva in my sleep because I woke up not able to breathe. I coughed for an hour and the stress gave me a migraine. Then I felt totally freaked out because it was so difficult for me to go to work. I called my therapist and she got me out the door, then I had an appointment with her the following day.

I told her my motto for the year was “I guess we’ll see” and she suggested that my word for the year be “Unfolding.” I like that. A strange part of the session which I will talk about with her again next week is that agoraphobia is an evolutionary response to danger, and she seems to be suggesting that at this particular time it is a reasonable one.  I suspect that she is trying to get my anxiety down and to stop being so hard on myself. It’s difficult for me to tell if I am overreacting sometimes. She also reminded me that irritability is caused by my depression.

When I told her that I had watched “Just Look Up” and it was terrifying, she said to me, mid-sentence, “Don’t watch that!” Which is very strange because the main premise of the movie is to pay attention to what is really happening and doing otherwise will kill us all. I mean, seriously, the baddies in the movie countered the slogan “Just Look Up” with “Don’t Look Up.”

I know that I need to prioritize my mental health but ignoring what is going on in the world doesn’t seem to be, I don’t know, responsible?

Critter report: Diego was just sneezing but he is much better. His meds are insanely expensive, so another thing on the list is loratidine to alternate (or substitute) with the Apoquil. After he started throwing it up again, I went back to the EN prescription cat food, and started giving him his pill pocket around 9 p.m. This seems to be working out, because at $4.50 per dose those pills are too costly to vomit up. I also went to Petsmart and took a chance on buying a case of Fancy Feast Turkey and Giblets pate. So far, so good. The Greenie dental chews are a hit as well. I stopped the nose drops but I’m going to try again tonight and have Sandy hold his head still. The other sign that Diego is better is that he is starting to bully Pablocito again.

The trip planning for Portugal has been bugging me. Everything has changed so much since I first bought these Aer Lingus plane tickets from Boston to Dublin. At first I was going to use my Southwest points to get to Boston, so that part was free, then I was taking American home. Since then we changed the tickets to Boston to Lisbon, which simplified that part of the trip, but the plane tickets to Boston and back have doubled. My Southwest points won’t cover the trip and I don’t want to spend any more money with them anyway – I hate their politics, I don’t trust them, and I want to be done with them.

The plane trip back is going to be rough with leaving Lisbon late at night and an 8 hour layover in Dublin – hardly enough time to be worth getting a hotel room at 1:30 a.m. and getting up in time to go through all that security again early in the morning. So I started following United flights out of Greensboro and doing a cost analysis of whether it would be worth it to ditch the previous plan and make the whole plane trip simpler and shorter, without having to pay for parking, and without having to change airlines and doing multiple Covid tests.

To make this plan work, however, I would have to get my 60,000 miles credit from the new United credit card I was just approved for. I probably won’t get those until April at least. Cutting it a bit too short. At least I will have them for my trip to Oregon in July.

This is the kind of shit I obsess over, and quite honestly, I enjoy the hunt. I read articles on the best ways to save money on travel and get the best plane ticket prices and follow Rick Steves among other travel gurus. I started telling Sandy about what I was researching last night and he doesn’t understand how complicated the plane ticketing process is. He brought up Google Flights and told me that flights to Boston weren’t that expensive. He was looking at today’s date and not looking at the different times at all. Then he told me that we could stay in a Boston hotel. I asked him if he had looked at the cost of Boston hotels. Then he said that I was lucky because other women’s husbands would have taken their credit cards away. A jaw-dropping sexist comment from my feminist husband. That got him cussed out. He immediately saw his error, and I didn’t carry that anger too long, mainly because I cussed him out so thoroughly, and also because I realized that we are products of a sexist and racist culture and generation, and both of us still carry these biases that will inevitably rear their ugly heads from time to time.

This morning I apologized for saying “FUCK YOU” and he said that he deserved it for being an asshole. This was a very rare occurrence for each of us in our marriage. This is also a good time to say that I firmly believe that one of the reasons we have been married for 34 plus years is that since Year Two we have kept separate financial accounts and instead assigned certain bills to either of us so that it worked out about equal. We are both extremely frugal and at the moment we don’t carry any debt. At all. No mortgage, no home equity loan, no car payments. If my credit card bill is over what I can pay per month, I have enough in my money market account that I pay it off from there. Then I work on getting that money back into my money market account.

In other words, I am fucking amazing at managing my money. And so is he, although we have different approaches to what we think is best. And today all is well.

I’m going to try to stay out of my bedroom and cook and weave tapestry and read in the front room, not in my bed. I’m going to do the exercise videos again – they are mostly dancing, and if my heel starts hurting too much I can do them sitting down. I don’t know whether I will go to the studio tomorrow. At least the city has mandated masks in city facilities again, but so many people who DO wear masks don’t wear the right kind or wear them correctly. I’ll probably be alone in the room if I go in at 1 p.m. though.

agoraphobia, coffee pot posts, Coronavirus Chronicles, depression/anxiety, old couple, Reading

Saturday morning coffee pot post

Laurie

Well, this week could have gone better, but I’ll take it. I stood up for myself concerning a particularly awful process I was expected to use at work that was inaccurate and basically unusable, and I feel like I was heard at least one step up the pecking order. Then I concentrated on what I could do. I got a lot done.

The weather is absolutely lovely and we spent a lot of time on the front porch yesterday evening. I cleaned out most of the junk in the Honda in preparation to clean the inside and shampoo the carpets. I took out at least 20 books. I also did some front garden clean up – pulled the “weeds” that the bees no longer need but left the dandelions, which I love. My favorite flowers are in bloom right now, and the yoshina cherry trees are bursting with light pink flowers. The peppermint that I shouldn’t have planted is spreading through the fieldstone path across to the other section of the garden, but it smells so good that I don’t mind (now). I planted it in several places in the hope that it would deter both mosquitoes and groundhogs.

Reading: Almost finished with “Good Harbor” by Anita Diamant, which I have mixed feelings about. At first I thought that I could relate to the characters, but instead I have found it pretty depressing. I liked her other novels much better, especially “The Last Days of Dogtown,” which was a recent read. Part of my problem with novels about women who struggle with children or fertility is that I feel no connection to motherhood. I have never felt the urge. The other character is having serious mental health issues revolving around cancer and death, maybe not the best reading choice for me right now. I’ll finish it, because I don’t have much farther to go and it is a short book.

It seems like I’m breaking out of the agoraphobic tendencies, although I am typing this in my bedroom, where I spend way too much time. On Thursday morning I drove Sandy to what we thought was going to be his muscle biopsy under local anesthesia at an outpatient surgical center in Burlington. Instead, it was a consultation with the surgeon and pretty much a waste of time other than him telling us that the biopsy would be done under real anesthesia in Greensboro, maybe at Wesley Long Hospital. He didn’t have Sandy’s lab work or records, and he was quizzing him to see if he really needed the biopsy. Once I told him about Sandy’s CK test results, those kind of questions stopped and he moved on.

It was frustrating, not only because we expected this to be behind us by now, but that the communication has been so bad. These days I know to be wary of any anesthesia that puts you all the way under – it can trip an older person into dementia and Sandy had a difficult time maintaining his oxygen levels under anesthesia during his oral surgery a couple of years ago. It definitely has cognitive effects. And the surgeon was not encouraging about it being scheduled right away, although he said that he was on duty at Wesley Long next week and would try to get it on his schedule.

This biopsy really has to be done soon. Sandy dreads it so much that I worry that he is going to back out. Yesterday he was feeling much better and started working on getting the Honda battery charged and the car aired out. He brought me lunch at work. I am very happy that he feels better and is trying to do more. However, he has a denial problem and I have my hands full trying to stop him from health self-destruction since he wants so badly to believe that all he needs to do is get back into shape. This has been the case for years, not just with this issue. I do not want to play the role of his mother or nurse and I want to treat his medical decisions with respect, but I also don’t want to be a widow in my early 60s. I love him and I want to grow old with him. He will be absolutely miserable if he doesn’t get better. His family history is full of disability, including his father who was quadriplegic and his brother and mother who had strokes affecting their ability to move. He also has a serious aversion to asking for the simplest help.

Anyway, the good aspect of this trip was that I drove to Burlington to an unknown location in heavy traffic and even drove around the area a bit without any anxiety or panic. So I haven’t descended into that agoraphobia hole. I feel better, knowing that.

And I feel better that I am officially fully vaccinated, having passed the two week mark yesterday. I haven’t heard from Lora about the residency in Ireland yet, but considering the problems that the EU is having with a third wave and getting the vaccinations out, it looks more and more unlikely. If I can’t go to Europe this year, we will pick a national park to visit. I wouldn’t mind a train trip, or going to Maine to Acadia NP. I’ve never been farther north than Connecticut.

We got a small tax refund back from the state but not either federal tax refund yet. That will be welcome money that we will probably use to hire local people to work on our house. I also try to donate to a lot of individual causes and charities that I see people advocate on Facebook. We are very lucky, despite what we are dealing with at the present time.

Coronavirus Chronicles, old couple

Wait, wait, wait

Laurie

People who don’t know any better or don’t have friends who live in other countries often cite long waits for health care as a reason that they don’t want government sponsored health care for all. Yet, we have long waits for specialists in this country even with expensive insurance, so there’s yet another bullshit reason against socialized health care.

Really, as we wait for this rheumatology appointment, we are both feeling a bit desperate. Sandy tried to get a vaccination appointment at Walgreens and they turned him down because he filled out the form stating the he had health issues. Aren’t those the very people who need the vaccine the worst? So he called his GP office to ask their guidance and they said to wait until after he sees the rheumatologist on March 11. Still a week away.

In the meantime, his condition gets worse and we are worried, very, very worried. He wants to start swimming at the Y again because he thinks that would be good exercise for him right now. He does a couple of minutes of the video exercise, when before he got shingles he had gotten where he could do 15 minutes twice a day. We worry about the rapid acceleration of his muscle loss. He needs to be able to get out and about for his mental health. I think that he will need physical therapy.

I should be able to sign up for a vaccination early next week, according to an email I received from my workplace. A clinic is being set up for all the higher education workers in the area. Plus, FEMA is setting up a mega-site here in Greensboro at a closed Dillard’s store in Four Seasons Mall, with a drive-through lane.

We are treating each other with loving care these days – each of us trying to do our best under these circumstances.

But we have things that need to be attended to – like the plumbing problem. Like the Honda Fit that has been sitting with a dead battery for several months now. Like rebuilding the front steps, which involves getting permission from the Historic Commission. The possibility of having to put in a ramp. Like the pile of big chunks of dead silver maple that I had hired two different people to split for firewood for me last year. One stopped answering my texts. The other gave it a valiant try before he smashed his thumb and now he has a back injury. Since then, it’s become a termite incubator. So I’m calling a couple of landscapers today to see if I can get estimates on cleaning up the yard, then bi-monthly maintenance. That will be a start, and it would be good to get it done now before mosquito season begins.

That is likely where the Ireland/Portugal trip money is going to go.

However, the good thing is that we do have the lake retreat. I went for a walk with some of our friends on Sunday morning and we sat on an outside deck and chatted over coffee for a couple of hours. Hopefully by this summer we will all be vaccinated and go down to the lake for a weekend or so. One couple just sold their big truck rig and bought a huge RV. Maybe we will buy a small RV instead of moving to Portugal.

The biggest challenge for me in all of this is the possibility of a giant change in our lives. I have spent most of the pandemic, and really the last 15 years, relying on travel planning as my therapy. Finding the cheapest flights. The quirkiest old motels. The AirBNB rooms. Recently, planning to emigrate to Portugal. In a way, the emigration plans are the easiest to give up, since thinking about transporting the cats and what possessions we would ship over was sometimes overwhelming.

I have to find a new way to cope. I hope that my instincts are wrong about this, and Sandy will bounce back and we will still be able to travel to national and state parks and museums and walk on trails. But, if not, we’ve had a good run, and we are luckier than most people to have the memories. I am thankful that I documented our trips so well on this blog, and hopefully there will be many more. We haven’t checked off our bucket list yet, but we’ve knocked off a few major items like Cahokia, Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon, Newgrange, Giant’s Causeway, Yellowstone, Glacier NP, an Alaskan cruise, Tuscany, Cornwall…pretty amazing when you list them all. There is a lot in this country we’ve yet to see.