Celebrations End

(I'm kind of sorry to see February end.  I really liked the Chihuahu wallpaper.  This salute to St. Patrick is rather bland in comparison!)

I visited my mother yesterday and remembered to  take my camera with me, so I got a photo of her blue fingernails, which I learned her Alzheimers Buddy, Alice, had painted for her.

We sat in the front hall to do what passes for a visit these days.  I told her many times why her arm hurts and why her hand is rough-looking, I told her many times we were going out to dinner with Ned and Marta and we sat in silence a lot.

Her new obsession, though, is cleaning the floor.  Everywhere.  This speck, for example, is the sort of thing that bothers her because the floor is so "messy."

Whenever she found one, she would pick it up and give it to me.  I would toss it back on the floor to my side, where she couldn't see it.

I finally took her for a walk down the hall.  My intended destination was the old dining room, where we could get coffee and a cookie, but before we had gone half way she told me she felt like she was gong to fall, so we stopped at the closed bistro, where someone had left a pitcher of lemonade and plate of cookies out, so we had cookies and lemonade.  She didn't like the lemonade, so I thought we might continue on down to the dining room, but on the way we ran into Alice, who had come to visit her, so I turned her over to Alice and I continued on to the car to drive home.  Alice suggested I might bring in a book of photos that she could use to talk with her about, which is great--gives me a project to do over the next week.

In the evening we met Ned and Marta, along with Marta's mother Ginger and stepfather Bill.  They live in Hawaii and I realized that it had been so long since I had seen Ginger, that I had not even met Bill--and I think she said they'd been married 12 years.  It was lovely to see her again and Bill seems a nice man.

I ordered pesto tortellini, which was what I ordered the last time I was there, and it is delicious.

Since the dinner was for my birthday and Walt's birthday, the restaurant brought us both cherry-burgundy gelato...

Vanilla ice cream with cherries mixed in and then a burgundy sauce poured over the top and very nice, especially since we almost never get dessert when we go out.

So our birthdays are over now and we were home in time to see Jeopardy (well...the recording the DVR made).  I zonked out shortly after that and was happy that I woke up at 5 a.m, so I am well slept.  Now "birthday season" is over for a few weeks, until Brianna reaches "double digits" at the end of the month.