A Passing, and Update

When I first began writing this blog, I took more time to write about the individual events of my life.  Now, not so much.

Sometimes I feel it would be redundant.  Sometimes life happens very quickly shotgun-style and there are too many fractured and unrelated happenings to make much sense.  Or else I'm already glad they're behind me and am ready to just put them to bed rather than to further their existence a moment longer on the written page.

:-)

Maybe the blog will limp along as nothing more than a series of nonsensical updates, but it is what it is (I say that phrase a lot these days), as is life right now.

Yeah, I'm still smiling.  And, it would appear, settling for the occasional rambling update here.   So here goes...

1.  I saw someone die.  It was one of my clients whose body had been fighting every which-a-way to thwart her good nature and desire to be active and fully-engaged in life's daily activities.  I'm not ready to write about her in detail yet.  I still miss her too much and I'm only now beginning to recover from the upside down schedule of the last two weeks as much of that time was spent revolving around her final hospital stay and the diplomacy necessary to keep things calm as distant family descended.

I'm appalled at how there seem to be few compunctions on the part of greedy relatives when they sense an older relative is vulnerable and dying.  I feel so strongly opposed to the ugliness of that sort of thing that it WORE ME OUT to maintain a professional demeanor in the midst of it.

It was a privilege to be able to be the one person at my client's bedside when she died, and thankfully it was entirely a peaceful passage for her.  I think the only way I can describe it now that it's been a few days is to say it was a sacred moment.  I've been her caregiver for over 14 months, regularly, usually for 10 hours a day.  That's more time together than most married couples have.  I do miss her.  I'm still ...I don't know...adjusting.  And missing her.  I think that will be the case for quite a while.

2.  After having sat vigil on nights I was not scheduled to work, I have made the decision that no matter how bad my knee is, if I have any other options I will choose to NOT work nights.  I had thought about seeing if I might change from days to night work, but it throws all the other days off for me.  I have to have daylight.  My body just doesn't adapt to changing back and forth any more.

3.  Patience, patience.  Not exactly my strong suit!  We thought we would go ahead and get the next step going at the Land.  We have a list of what needs to get done and which things are bigger projects that must be planned for and saved for.  Life has a way of interjecting a few odds and ends in there to slow down the process at times.  The latest delay tactic Life employed was my car needing to have a fuel line replaced and some sort of crucial ring thingies replaced.  Sort of car CPR, must be done now, to wait another day would be disastrous, and all that.  So there went the Most Recent Land Project Money, carefully hoarded, and now my work schedule's down to almost nonexistent due to my lovely knee issue.  If I thought pulling my hair out might help anything, I'd do it.  Pppptttthhhhhhhhhtttttttt.

4.  Everything has its trade-off.  I dearly love being home, and clearly I've not been home much in the past year, judging from the nice frosting of dust that's needing to be excavated.  Boy, do I need to deep clean.  Tackling so major re-organizing in small increments has helped my need to make some forward momentum.  I just can't think about how slowly this momentum is compared to past years when I'd have it all done in a day or two.  Whatever.  I'm able to pay more attention to stretching our food dollars with better homemade meals and putting reserves into the freezer.  Nevermind that I have to lay about with the leg up unless I want to gimp around till kingdom come.  If I don't rest enough, the inflammation renders the ol' knee painful and useless, so the rest is not optional at this point.  And again I try to gracefully learn patience.   The P word.  P!@#$%tience.  :-)

5.  I adore my husband.  And my daughter.  I remain GRATEFUL to God for His goodness!!

6.  I need to get back to studying my herbal curriculum and doing the lessons.  I feel like I'm in slowwww motionnnn.

7.  It's spring and outdoors it's bursting with birdsong and green growing things.  The baby plum trees must have started some pollinating ju-ju last fall because one of the trees has a few baby plums.  Too young to have a real crop.  I'm reminded of the command in the Torah of waiting 4 years before harvesting from a tree.  I'll have to look it up, but it's in that range.  These plums will be for the birds.  I wonder if they can be transplanted or if they'd die if we tried moving them to the Land.

8.  Jack has embraced the Hugelkultur thing.  He digs what looks for all the world like a long shallow grave and then layers trunks and branches of the moringas and the loquat tree trimmings into the trench.  He dumps our "compost" scraps (the lazy man's compost, I suppose you'd call it) and now we have two calabaza plants volunteering from the midst of the Not Yet Covered With Soil Hugelkultur bed.  It still needs to be covered with soil.  We do NOT sod ours over, however, because down here if ANY Bermuda grass takes hold, it's so invasive it chokes out all other plants and you'll never evvvverrrrrr get it all the way eradicated withing nuking it with pesticides, which we won't do.  So we compose a shallow grave for tree debris, in the meantime.  Otherwise known as the Likely To Become Snake Pit.  I hope it gets covered with soil soon.  I shudder to think of what creeps among those limbs and stuff.

9.  Kaleb has had his yearly embarrassing haircut.  We're too cheap to take him to a groomer for lo unto 90 bucks or so, so he gets the Scissor job once or twice a year.  Whenever his double coat and the weed seeds align with the planets and turn him into a walking poster dog for matted hair removal.  He and his truly bad haircut have insured that he is happy happy happy, much cooler as the heat amps up outside, and he has also been scrubbed clean within an inch of his privileged doggie life.  I realize I am the queen of the most horrible run-on and grammatically-errant sentences.  Ppppphhhhhhtttthhhhhhttt.

10.  I continue to get craiglist spam on that sole canning jar Want Ad.  HOWEVER, there was one legitimate woman who contacted me.  She had canning jars and other stuff.  We met and she had other things she threw into the mix for the same price.  It was remarkable...a set of dishes from the 1940's, a food mill, meat grinder, and few other things.  She also hand wrote two pickle recipes she used to use when she lived in Lancaster county, PA and was a Mennonite wife.  We talked and talked as if we'd known each other for years.  That was such fun!!  And tonight I set a pretty table and pulled out the old dishes for shabbat...I think those are now our official "shabbat dishes"...just right!

11.  There are still more things on my To Do list than things that actually get done.  But I get to be home and with my husband a LOT more than I used to, so the happiness-O-meter around here reads pretty darn high :-)


What's going on in your neck of the woods?  Is everyone planting already?