Fun

I am having fun. I've got so much more energy than I have for such a long time, I'm racing around like a turtle. (Before this new surge of energy, I raced around like a rock.) I've discovered that after a couple of days of steady activity, I do better if I just take a day off and rest as much as I want. Then I've got another couple of days to do lots of stuff. Of course, my "to-do" list has grown accordingly which means I can never die. I have too much to do. (a very old joke).

Keeping the Romance Alive

I just read an article in OPRAH by some Phd. person that summarized some research about romantic love. I've read in the recent past that "being in love" is a temporary condition created by Mother Nature to get us to make babies. Supposedly when men are in love, their testosterone drops so that their brains are able to form a bond with someone. Eventually the condition wears off though.

This most recent research compared old people who had been together years and years but who said they were still in love to young people who had just fallen in love. Their brain waves were measured and sure enough the same part of their brains lit up on a scan as the young people's brains. The explanation? (This is where I laughed out loud.) "Love blindness" or "Self-deception." In other words, they had trained themselves to look at the other person's loveable qualities instead of their faults and had continued to tell themselves how wonderful the person was and how perfect their relationship was.

Hmmmm. Self-deception. Always a useful tool. I don't know what to think about this!

365 Project - Week 20 something

Minky at the early Thanksgiving party. He has already finished eating, and was back to the Legos. It was such a lovely day for me. I hope it was for everybody.

Bridget at the early Thanksgiving dinner. (She had already eaten)

Rebecca at her mom's 4:45 a.m. birthday party. She was just a little tired from waking up so early.

Poor Liz or Lucky Liz - being awakened with cake and presents at 4:45 in the morning. Her three lovely children, in three different places were willing to get up at that hour to sing happy birthday.

My latest attempt to outsmart the squirrels. I'm putting food they might like better on the railings of my ramp. It's not working though. They prefer the birdseed in the bird feeder. Grrrrrr.

I love my fall wreath. It will be replaced the day after Thanksgiving with the Cranberry wreath for Christmas.

My hydrangea bush is still blooming. How about that!?

A weird picture of Bridget's room. Too bad I didn't look more closely! I came to bring her a new outfit for winter.

New Energy

My work with the voice mapping system continues and a couple of weeks ago I experienced a big shift. It would take too long to explain, but the short explanation is that the death of my second son in 1979 has affected me in complicated ways ever since - even though I've tried pretty much everything to overcome the effects. The voice mapping seems to be the key. The heaviness and exhaustion I experience pretty much all the time has lifted significantly. I still go to bed at 6:00 p.m. sometimes, but I've been able to stay up and stay active almost every day. Even more significantly I feel lighter and more present. Yay!!!!

You'll know you're old when....

...you say things like, "In my day people didn't...." I've got a rant like that and I am old. In my day it wasn't so popular to look for ways to take offense. Supposedly, when people criticize other people, it's because they want to feel "better than." Boy, our collective self-esteem must have sunk to new lows. Everywhere I go I see/hear people grumbling about someone else. So, what to do? Perhaps I will begin by quitting doing that myself. My self-esteem really is okay. I don't need to grumble about other people. All I get from that is the feeling that other people's behavior has control of me. Which is not true at all.

The other thing about "my day": In the 40s and 50s and 60s, which I guess would be "my day," African Americans were segregated, John Kennedy was assasinated, so was Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy. There was no Medicare and no Social Security. People died of starvation in our very own country. There was no public education for people with disabilities. My memory says that many other injustices existed too. So, my day wasn't better than today.

It's Tuesday Already

For a person who has no full time job, my time passes awfully quickly. I am thrilled that it does. I've always imagined that if I didn't work and didn't have Ron to hang out with and laugh with that I would be bored. But it turns out my mind can think up WAY more things to do than I have time or energy for. Hmmmm. I love it.

365 Project Week 20 plus

A better week for pictures. Some cheating but less. Good for me. Lynn and Kristin at Applebees for lunch.

Chuck came and raked leaves. Here they are.

Sneakers hanging from a wire on 23rd Street. Hmmm. Does this have a meaning?

Three days worth of mini vegetable quiches. (Southbeach) I hope to lose the 10 lbs I gained back after I lost 10 last year. GRRRR.

My trip to Reasor's yielded some cheap flowers. I love flowers.

OMG! My leaves need raking bad!

Update

My last entry was bad news/good news, who knows the difference? Bad news that there were medication screw ups. Good news that somebody caught it. More good news: I had a brainstorm and emailed the Helen Keller Center in New York for information about adults with Rubella syndrome who have vision and hearing loss. I was very excited to learn that they have a training team that can work with us and a representative in Texas who can actually come here and help. They also referred me to a bunch of articles on object cuing systems which are used as communication systems for people with vision and hearing loss. We have been trying for years to get a system going. Now we have some help!!!

Acceptance

The hardest thing I have to accept is how often my daughter with all the disabilities gets in trouble because of bad medical care. This week, thanks to one of her home staff alerting me, I was able to straighten out a medication mess that would have had extremely serious health consequences for her if it had not been caught early. It happened because a doctor didn't know much about her, I didn't know she even had an appointment with that doctor because her home staff is new and didn't let me know, and because the doctor didn't use common sense.

She was losing weight; the neurologist thought it was because of her seizure meds, and put her on an anti-psychotic drug to boost her appetite. What's true is that she has terrible reactions to any drugs but especially psychotropics and she's takes medication for thyroid problems. Of course, the weight loss was because she was getting too much thyroid medication - common sense, right.

So, she's off the anti-psychotic and we've discontinued the thyroid medication until December. The thing is, I can't seem to figure out how to prevent these mistakes. She's been very near death several times due to medication issues. I need to accept that one of these days she may die before I find out what's going on and very likely will die soon once I've left the planet. Or not. But I would be a lot less agitated if I just accepted that I'm powerless.

The Election

A lovely 14 hour day was had by all the election workers. I'm always amazed that I can actually do a 14 hour day. Of course, a lot of it is sitting down. We had a steady stream of voters for mayor and city council. A little more than 1/3 of the voters in the precinct voted, which is a pretty good turnout. It was a hotly contested mayoral race which may have accounted for the turnout. The guy I voted for promised to get all the streets fixed. I hope he meant it because Tulsa streets are a mess.

I often wonder why I am so fascinated by politics (even thought the "mud-slinging" drives me nuts). I haven't figured it out yet, but I suspect it's because I love it that we have the responsibility for our own government. I don't think we're doing a very good job with our responsibilities, but I'm always hopeful that it will get better. I've taught public policy for volunteers at both of my last two jobs and I'm always amazed at how powerless people think they are. I've learned in my recovery program that I'm always responsible for what I CAN do and to stop worrying about what I can't do. (Serenity prayer).

365 Project

Right next door to the AA and Ala-Non clubhouse was this bar. The bar is gone but the AA folks asked the owner to leave the sign. It's sooo appropriate.

I took Eric on a tour of my home town of Neosho, Missouri. Of course, we had to take a picture of the water fall in Big Spring park.

Two big bridges are on the way to and from my visits with Eric. Here's one of them with the bright blue sky.

This tree picture didn't turn out quite like I hoped. I was trying to get a picture of how tall the Sycamore tree is in my front yard. More practice in picture taking is needed!

It's fitting that I took this picture from outside a chain link fence. This is where my youngest children lived for way too long before I could get them out. They are both 38 this year and have been living in the community since they were 18. I feel so blessed. This haunted place will be torn down this year.

Gratitude

It's really weird what I am grateful for a lot of times. Today I'm grateful that the clocks went forward on Sunday. I had finally worked my way to getting up around 8:30 a.m. Yay! Then the clocks went forward and I got up at 7:30 all week - a time that makes me feel like a regular person. Plus - so far this week I haven't had to have a nap. Maybe, just maybe, I'm beginning to be able to stay up for a reasonable amount of time so I can have a real life. I am grateful. I never imagined that I would still need so much rest 4+ years after the wreck. It's kind of embarrassing as well as annoying. So, maybe it's starting to come to an end.

Heard in a Meeting

I've been alive long enough and have talked to enough people that I'm guessing it might be universal that deep inside we all suspect that we are not enough. We try to hide it, and we fear that people will find out or that due to our weaknesses, bad things will happen to us, etc., etc. It really does seem to be the belief or suspicion that underlies pretty much everything that makes us unhappy.

I heard in a meeting last week - "The reason we feel this way is that it is true: we are not enough. We need God. We are right: we can't do everything and do it right. We need God. It's just our egos that try to tell us that not being enough is a bad thing. It's not a bad thing. It's telling us to go into partnership with the power that IS enough!"

365 Project

Good thing I'm not a perfectionist. This week: Some days no picture, some days more than one picture. Here's the view I face when doing voice mapping. Google "voice mapping" for information. I think it's helping.

Ron's son, Craig, came and got some more of Ron's grandfather's truck parts. Ron worked on restoring that truck for years. Craig has it now and is working on finishing it. He's holding his new puppy - Millicent, or Millie for short. She is a Pomeranian/chihuahua mix.

Dee and I had fried chicken at one of Ron's and my favorite places - the Celebrity Club. It looks like an old fashioned night club.

It's Halloween. I have my cat stuff on and Kristin is Dora the Explorer. She is tired from spending the afternoon at BooHaHa.

Every couple of months or so, I see my counselor for a sanity check. She has known me a long time - ever since I dragged Ron to see her to see if she could persuade him to take better care of his health. Didn't work. But Ron talked her into giving us Cisco when he was her office cat. This is a picture of the kitchen cabinet in the house where she has her practice. The front of all the cabinets have copper sheets on them. It's amazingly beautiful.

Once or twice a year, the carpet cleaning man comes and cleans up the cat barf stains. This time there were one or two dog barf stains too. He cleaned on Friday and on Sunday night, Cisco christened the clean carpet. Ahhh the joys of pets.

The Day of the Dead - November 1, so I'm honoring Ron. Here's Ron's checklist that used to be posted on the back door where he would see it as he went out. Most of the things on the list he posted, but I posted the phone and his friend, Mike, posted fishing equipment. Until he posted the list of things he forgot before he left the house, we perpetually had to go back after things. I think diabetes makes you forgetful. I had the list framed after he died. Just below it is a wood carving of a rainbow trout - Ron's favorite (right after me, that is).

Self Esteem

Self esteem was pretty much wiped out in me when I came into the program. My ability to do the right thing was destroyed by alcohol and co-dependency. I heard pretty early on that if I wanted to increase my self-esteem, I could practice taking esteem-able action. To my surprise I began to be able to do that - and I realized that it was God that made that possible. I still need God's power to take those actions, though.

Today when faced with choices, I will opt for the path that enhances my self-esteem. `Courage to Change.