Safe and Sane

It was definitely a safe and sane 4th of July around here.

Walt went off to the Little League field in the morning for the annual Little League pancake breakfast.  He started doing this many years ago, but has not been ever since we started spending the holiday in Santa Barbara.  They used to hold the breakfast at the local community center, but it has moved to the Little League field and, from reports, was as fun as it used to be, though he only saw one person he knew this year, a fellow musician who played in the Rebel Band with Jeri back in the day.  Walt saw him with his two sons.

I went to Atria for the first dose of medicine around 10:30, but it was after 11:30 before my mother woke up.  I had brought my Kindle and sat there reading "Still Alice," kind of a surreal experience, as it is about a woman with Alzheimers.  I saw the movie a long time ago with my friend Lisa and I enjoyed it (if you can "enjoy" a movie like that) but the book was so much better.  The movie shows Alice as she begins to deteriorate from this  awful disease, but the book gets inside her head and you not only see what happens to her, you experience it from inside her head.  Reading things like this always helps me understand what is going on inside my mother's head.

She woke up in a silly mood and we laughed a lot.  Her wound is looking much better and today will be her last day of the antibiotics.  She still doesn't remember that it's there and doesn't remember why she doesn't have her glasses, but I think I will bring them back to her today, as well as her lipstick. If she decides to rub lipstick on the wound now it won't make a difference, except cosmetically.  Tomorrow she has her last follow-up with the nurse.

At noon, she remembered it was time for lunch (she had only been awake half an hour, so had no breakfast) and I walked her down to the dining room and left her at a table with some people she knew, so I was sure that she would actually have lunch.

When I got into the car and turned on the radio, the late Gene Burns, long-time personality for San Francisco's KGO radio, was reading the Declaration of Independence. I found it surprisingly moving, putting myself in the place of those early Americans hearing this information for the first time and how there must have been feelings of pride...and fear...standing up to the King.

I spent the afternoon agonizing over a review I've been wrting.  I don't know why this particular review, about which there should be absolutely nothing difficult, has given me so much trouble, but the words just won't come.  I am almost finished, but had to go off for medicine #2 before I ended it.

She was sleeping when I got back to Atria and I read for a bit longer, though she woke up about 10 minutes after I got there.  In the afternoon she was groggy and then got into "all this crap" mode waving her hands at the cabinet on which she has all of the famiy photos and saying repeatedly "how did I get all this crap?" with a disgusted look on her face.  I reminded her each time that those were photos of people she loved and she would remember that she reguarly sits in her chair an talks to them and then a few minutes later she would wave her hand at them and ask about what she should do with all this crap again.

When it was 6 p.m., I walked her back to the dining room.  On the way out, she saw the food I had bought for her on the stove and said "look at all that crap.  I should just throw it all away."

I know one thing for certain.  When I get to the state where my mother is now, and I am convinced I will get there eventually, I definitely won't be worried about "all the crap" in my living area, since "all the crap" has been my life.  In fact, i am still worried about all the crap in the living room and moving it into the office.  It had been (and still is, sort of) my intent to do it in an organized fashion, but there is just too much crap and too little space so it does weigh on me.  It is what is taking so long to re-settle into the new office because there is much more stuff than will fit in here and I'm just not sure what to do with itall.  Also a lot of the stuff consists of things that really had no "place" in the old office.  It was just stuff piled on top of other stuff, but stuff that was, at least at the time, important to me.

I left Aria and went to buy a 4th of July dinner--hot dogs, potato chips and corn on the cob, a far cry from our Blue Apron meals, but somehow it just seemed appropriate.

After dinner we walked to the home of our friend Nancianne, who lives near the park where the yearly fireworks are set off and who invites people to come and watch the show from her front lawn. 

I had to laugh, as we watched the display to realize that there were four people taking pictures of the fireworks and I was not one of them.  I had not brought a camera...but Walt had.

This was not the best show, nor the worst.  It started pretty boring, with explosion after explosion the same but it grew an was kind of cool the further we got into it.

Our friend Stephen drove us home and the dogs were extraordinarily happy to see us, so I assume they had been shaken up by the explosions, but were locked in the house, so not much they could do about it.

And that was it.  Our celebrations on Independence Day.