And So It Ends...

Jeri has just left, on her way to the Bay Area with Ned to visit friends and do some recording over the next couple of days, before she flies back to Boston next week.  According  to weather reports, the snow from storms in Boston will have been washed away by rain by then.

It's been a good few days.  Jeri is a unique person and her infectious positivism floods everything she does and everybody she visits.  She was able to have two good visits with her grandmother while here and got her smiling and laughing both times, a talent I don't possess.

The first time they visited, Jeri said that the new "Mildred memories" book I had made was not there, which made me very upset.  But when we went yesterday, we found it buried in a drawer and she went through the book with my mother a couple of times and both seemed to enjoy it.

When we arrived at Atria, we found her in the dining room, and I wish I had taken a photo.  She and her "boyfriend" (must find out that guy's name!) were sitting at a table for two, both asleep, both "bookend" pictures leaning forward their heads down.

She was happy to see Jeri and thrilled to see me ("Where have you been," she always asks, no matter how brief a time I have been gone...that's when I think she thinks I'm one of her sisters.  She will act the same way if she goes to the bathroom and returns, and finds me sitting where she left me.)

Before we went to Atria, we went to Target to buy her a new lamp.  Jeri discovered that her bedside lamp looked like it had been knocked over and the bulb hung at a rakish angle, which looked dangerous.

We quickly returned from Atria and packed up to go to Ned & Marta's for dinner.  Ned needed Jeri to participate in a video that he is making for Brianna's upcoming 10th birthday.  He has made a video for her for the past 9 years and this is the last one he is going to make.

It took forever to get there because the night before there was a Sacramento shooting of an unarmed Black man in his mother's back yard, trying to enter by the back door.  There had been reports of someone breaking into cars and the police tried to stop him.  He was carrying a cell phone, which they mistook for a gun and shot him 20 times, killing this father of two young children.  (I already know they are going to get off because "experts" looking at videotape said that it was a "reasonable killing.")  There were protesters marching, stopping traffic on the freeway and blocking entrance to the Golden One stadium, delaying the start of a Kings basketball game.

It was gridlock all over downtown Sacramento, which we had to drive through, with police cars, sirens beeping (if not blaring) on every block.  I texted Ned to say that we had been delayed by the protest and he texted back "Watching it on tv.  See you when you figure it out."

He made a nice dinner for all of us and then the videotaping took place.  There was a lot of laughter but I am sworn to secrecy until the video is released, so I won't write about it until the end of the month, but it's a good, funny story, with lots of photos.

I can say that while the videotaping was going on, Marta amused herself with her iPod,

while the dog went to sleep and didn't pay any attention to the shenanigans.  But it was definitely fun.

Then home and I collapsed because I had missed my afternoon nap and was exhausted.

World Premiere

I can only assume that when my granddaughters look back on their childhood, they are going to have wonderful memories.  At only 8 and 4 they have already done such wonderful things (like yearly trips to Hawaii and those pictures with birds each year).  They have been involved in lots of diverse activities from gymnastics to karate, to zoo excursions, to days at the aquarium.  I sometimes envy the things they do.

When Ned an Marta were in Santa Barbara the last time, a few weeks ago, they made a movie.

Now, Ned has been making movies since he was Brianna's age, and his expertise has only grown over the past 30 some-odd years.  His movies are so professional looking.  

The girls are into Star Wars, which seems strange for girls, especially at their young age, but Brianna wanted to make a Star Wars movie.  They spent his time in Santa Barbara filming scenes, which he would then come home and put together.  He warned her the movie would only be about 3 minutes long, but by the time he finished it was apparently 15 minutes long.  The big premiere was going to be over this 4th of July weekend.

It was one of the things I was most sad about missing, when we decided not to go to Santa Barbara this weekend.

Yesterday, Laurel posted a video on Facebook (sadly, it's not on YouTube, or I would include it) of the "red carpet" before the premiere.

The video opens sowing the open door of their house with a red "carpet" (rug? towel?) on the floor.  To the left there is a barricade set up and the waiting audience is standing there cheering.  The girls and Ned walk through the door, dressed up, with flowers in their hair (did I see a crown?) and walking into the family room, where special seats were set up in front of the b big screen TV, ready for the start of the movie.

Now they could have just put the movie on and watched it, but I love that they made such a big production out of it--and what fun memories this will be for the girls.  The movie will eventually be on YouTube and I can link to it, but for now I have not seen it, except the very beginning, which starts like all Star Wars movies, with a typed prologue fading up and into the atmosphere.

It's the one time when I wished I were a grandmother and not a daughter.

But it's not so bad being a daughter this week.  When I last mentioned my mother, I had taken her to Kaiser to have her stitches out, but the doctor decided they weren't quite ready to come out and so we made an appointment to come back in two days.

When I picked her up two days later, she looked like a clown.  For some reason known only to her, she had put lipstick on the stitches and on her cheeks.  She denied doing it, but you could not deny that her face had these big red splotches on it, and when we got to Kaiser the nurse started dabbing at the splotches and red came off onto the gauze with which she was dabbing.

She got as much of it cleaned up as she could and took out either all or all but one of the stitches, swabbed the wound area with disinfectant and got a nurse practitioner to come and check things.  She said that the area was infected, so prescribed an antibiotic for her to take three times a day for the next week.

That was when we canceled our plans to go to Santa Barbara and I have been going to Atria three times a day to give her her medicine (I told the girl at the front desk I was earning frequent flier miles at Atria!).  I had hoped to maybe get someone at Atria to give her the evening pill for 3 days so I would not have to come in at 7:30, but she has to be on their "medicine program" for them to give her3 damn pills, so that wouldn't work. 

The nurse practitiona also decided that her glasses were rubbing against the bridge of her nose and making the infection worse, so she shouldn't wear her glasses.  Fortunately, she sees as well without them as she does with them, she has told me ever since she had her last cataract surgery, and the glasses are now merely a habit, so not wearing them would not be a problem for her.

I told her NOT to wear her glasses and NOT to touch her wound and spent my time the first day yelling at her whenever she touched her wound, which she does not remember that she has.  I took her glasses off and wrapped them in a paper with DO NOT WEAR GLASSES written on it and rubber banded around the glasses.

The first morning I went over to bring her coffee and give her her first pill of the day.  She was already up and dressed, and had put lipstick on her wound and was wearing her glasses, my note not to wear them, neatly lying on the kitchen counter.  I asked her if she had put anything on her face and she said "just makeup."  Sigh.  I was so frustrated with her and she was so depressed that she couldn't remember anything.  I cleaned up her wound and put some Betadyne on it and then ended up taking all of her make up and her glasses home with me and as we talked, every time she touched her wound, I would reminder her not to do it.

When I left, she looked like a very depressed, very old lady and I went home feeling guilty

But there is an advantage to seeing her three times a day, I discovered, when I went back in the mid-afternoon to give her the second pill of the day.  She was a different person.  Much more "with it" and cheery and seeming to have forgotten the problems of the morning.  We had a nice visit an I told her several times that the dining room was serving prime rib for dinner and to remember to go.

When I returned at 7:30 for the last pill, I asked her if she had gone to dinner and she said she was eating it now, pointing to a bowl of potato chips.  The next morning, a woman stopped me to ask if my mother was OK because they haven't seen her in the dining room lately.  I guess she's just eating snack food.  So I went out and got better snack food -- cashews, for example, which she loves.  I bought a pound or so of them.  I also got a box of ice cream cones and some oatmeal cookies as well as some breakfast cereal bars.  Nothing nutritious, but better than potato chips for dinner.  There  are better things I could have bought, but I had to buy things I knew she would actually EAT....and she has no microwave or stove, so I couldn't get anything that had to be heated.

Yesterday the wound was looking better and I decided it didn't need Betadyne any more and that it was starting to heal properly.  Also, somewhere in that demented mind, the message to not touch the wound must have sunk in because I noticed that she would rub her eyes, but avoid the wound, though she doesn't remember she has one. (I went and got some Visine for her itching eyes).

She feels bad that I have to come three times a day and keeps asking why I can't just leave the pills because she will remember to take them.  I think even she realizes that's a silly thing to expect.

I had not planned on having lunch with her yesterday, but walked her to the dining room to make sure she went to lunch, but there was nobody at her table, so I ended up sitting with her.  She always orders just fruit and dessert and I have learned how to order at least vegetable soup for her and make her think she has ordered it.

I don't know if she went to dinner, but I suspect not, but at least she had something slightly better than potato chips to eat.  

Seeing how things have gone with her since we saw the nurse, I'm glad that I stayed home to be around 3x/day for her.

But I sure would have given anything to have been a part of the world premiere of Ned's new movie.