Feeling Old

I had a particularly "old" day yesterday.  No explanation for it, that I can fathom, but I was just feeling my years with accompanying aches and pains caused by no extraordinary physical exertion or anything else I could figure out.

It started with a trip to Michael's to get the kind of glue sticks I like, which I have been unable to find anywhere else.  For those who don't know, Michael's is a huge craft store.  Now, I am not particularly crafty, but there is within me this feeling that I could be crafty with the right tools, equipment, and the ability to find a clear surface in this house.  So I occasionally take a browsing trip to Michael's.

That's like going to Costco for a dozen eggs.  You walk out with $200 worth of stuff you had not intended to buy and don't know what you are going to do with.

My first mistake at Michael's was getting a shopping cart "just in case."  Walt accuses me of using shopping carts as walkers, and he's right.   It's easier to walk around a store pushing a cart than having to, good Lord, stand unaided on my own two feet.

So I had a huge shopping cart with two little packages of glue sticks in it.

What was worse was that Michael's was having a huge sale.   Everything seemed to be 50-80% off.  There were bins with things you couldn't live without (but have no use for) for 25 cents each.  So I wasn't really spending all that much money, I told myself, as my cart piled higher and higher, but even when everything is ridiculously cheap, when you buy lots of it, it somehow miraculously adds up.

I bought several kinds of boxes, for example.  Boxes for storing stuff in.  And they will be helpful.  I now have a box for the stickers which I use to decorate letters and which I also send to the Compassion kids when I write.   And I have a box for the rubber stamps I buy, which I almost never use but swear I am going to use some day.  It's great to have these all in one place, if only I had a place to put the boxes themselves.  But let it pass.

When I had finally recovered from the price tag at Michael's, I headed over to nearby Costco.  We needed mayonnaise (and of course buying it by the vat at Costco was better than buying it by the reasonable two-person size quart at the local supermarket), butter (Costco does have the cheapest butter around) and puddle pads for the dog who WILL use one indoors, but dares not sully her feet by peeing outside.

Costco -- that monument to excess

$180 later, I was straining at pushing this cart filled with such necessities as fresh raspberries, stuffed jalapenos, and more romain lettuce than we can finish before it goes bad.

By the time the cart was unloaded, my knees were telling me to sit down.  Now.  Fortunately I was near the car and did.

I came home and collapsed in a chair, unable to move, though I did eventually hobble to the kitchen to try to find a place for all the stuff I had just bought.

Every time I got up, I ached.  I thought, briefly, of getting out my cane, which I retired after I recovered from the Europe trip.  But I didn't.  

We went off to see Follies, which I had never seen before.   The box office knows that my preferred seat is in the upper part of the theater and is very good about always seating me there, but last night I was sorry for that because climbing the stairs up to Row G was a schlep.  Fortunately this theater has a guard rail on the steps because I literally hauled myself up each step. 

I never go downstairs for intermission, but even if I did usually mingle, I would not have left the comfort of my seat because the idea of climbing the stairs twice was just not pleasant.  Instead I sat there and read, as I always do, this time a non-fiction book about the gold rush in Alaska and 3 entrepreneurs (one a miner, one a shop keeper, and one a thief) who were part of it.  This is for my other book club and I must finish it within the week.  It's actually a fascinating book.  We read so much about the 49ers and the California gold rush, but rarely anything about the later rush to Alaska.  Or maybe that's just because I'm a Californian and am exposed to it more.

When the show was over and I had to face climbing back down the steps, I must have looked like I felt because people were stepping aside and waiting for the old lady to gingerly make it to the next step.  As I walked across the lobby to get a piece of opening night cake, I desperately wanted my cane.

Every corpuscle in my body was crying out for sleep as we pulled into the carport and I went directly to the couch and was asleep before Walt had turned out the lights.  Except for moving to the recliner at 5 a.m., I slept through until 7:30.

This morning I dragged the body out of the chair and hobbled into the kitchen to fix breakfast for the dogs, who have NO sensitivity about the mental state of someone just barely awake, and I have now deposited the remains of my body here in my office to get this entry written and start the review.

I now understand what happens when Grandpa's lumbago is affected by the changing seasons.  It has been so cold here (28 in our carport recently) that I can only assume that this complaint by my body is a result, and hope that it will soon return to its normal state, as the weather warms up.

The aches and lack of energy might also have had something to do with being rejected as a blood donor yesterday because my hemoglobin was too low again.