Life after Eighty, in part.

 I think I wrote the first part of this in the middle of last week. Maybe. Things are not much better today.

My laundry room is a mess. The screened porch needs vacuuming and its floor needs scrubbing in the worst way – not to mention the dirt on the walls. My sweater and tee shirt drawers are a disaster. My desk is beyond disaster and my filing system has had a nervous breakdown. The storage room has no room to store anything more until I sort it and get the donation stuff out, working around a pile of my younger daughter’s Stuff as I do so. (Yes, you, YD.) Also, Something was sleeping in the daffodil bed and it is thoroughly squashed, as well as weed-filled and in need of thinning. And that is only a partial list.

You know, back in the day, I used to sort of look forward to old age as I time when I might be able to sit in my rocker and enjoy life. Yeah. Here I am in my rocker, mainly because I am hurting too much to do more than sit and rock and fume, because there is so much that needs doing and I am not doing it.  Not enjoying not doing it either, as that means it does not get done. You know, I did not think of that as I raced through my days. My mental picture was of a sunny day on a nicely swept porch with my coffee and my knitting and the birds singing. The birds do play along and, if I have my hearing aids in, I can enjoy them singing. The knitting is really slow as the arthritic fingers are not very adept. I think I have been picking away at the same mitt for several years. There is a layer of pollen on everything on the porch. The coffee, however, is just fine.

Except when I forget to retrieve it from the coffeemaker and it gets cold. It reheats in the microwave, but somehow it is not quite the same. Forgetting is my middle name just now. This afternoon I drove happily off to have blood work done and left the requisition sitting on my desk prominently where I had placed it so I would be sure to take it. When I realized this, I was about half way through the half hour drive to town. Yeah. I reversed direction at the first turn I could make, frantically dialled my poor husband as I drove far faster than the speed limit back toward home, told him where to find the thing and asked him to get in his truck and drive to meet me to give me the document. This all worked.  I was only ten minutes late for my appointment and no one at the lab said a word. But it is a good thing there were no speed traps this afternoon.

That was yesterday. Today I am sitting at the computer with one earring in and the other on the counter in front of me, waiting for a person to call back with a scheduling change for a repair visit. ‘This could take some time,’ said the person. ‘Please stay on the line.’ Okay. I do have the basic housework done today. Sort of. I have a medical appointment this afternoon in town, so I hope the wait is not too extended. I spent an hour waiting for a bank to answer yesterday. All of which is not, I should add, being done from my rocker but JG reheated and returned my coffee while I listened to the bank music yesterday. This wait music is a bit better, but not up to the Rose-breasted Grosbeak’s song.

Hmpf. Word does not approve of Rosebreasted. Nor of Hmpf, come to mention. Tough.

Representative just came back on the line to apologise for the long wait. He is on hold also to the repair guys. I wonder if he plays Scrabble. I should go and look for some illustrations for the bird. And, if possible, find a link to the song. 

Ah, appointment change confirmed after a wait of fifteen minutes or so. Not bad. And a real person, not a mechanical voice offering options. Does it seem to you that there are no real people answering phones these days? Or issuing appointment reminders? Our local health centre has a lugubrious male voice that seems to prefer supper time to come on and repeat things three times as I fume.

Writing today, and I am going to post this damn thing, regardless.

The good news this Monday is that the ankle pain and swelling is resolved. The bad news is that I have not got an appointment for the x-ray yet. Our hospital is in disarray. I would like to know that I do not have a bone chip in the ankle, but that may not happen. At least I am walking, not hopping. And hoping, but not too much. The poor hospital has had to close the emergency room because of both an ER and general staffing shortage and a Covid outbreak. I expect this has impacted the whole building and explains why I have no call for the x-ray.

And my ED has Covid. Picked up at a conference in Europe she attended last week. The first time she has been able to get out and about for, I think, two years. Everything she has had to do and attend has been on Zoom or equivalent. Long, long hours staring at a computer screen. Not fun. She is not quite the people person that the YD is (and has to be), but she has told me how she misses the in-person contact. She got it last week. A bit too much right at the end there though. At least she got her flights home, in spite of the airport disarray, both here and in France. And she has a partner and daughter who cook and clean and do laundry – at least the husband does laundry that I have seen him toting. I do not recall ever seeing Miss G doing this chore. Hmm.

Talk about a fragmented post.  It reads like the written equivalent of an ancient tomb dig puzzle where all the fragments of the cranium are laid out and someone has a try at piecing together a skull shape. Yes, I just finished reading a book about archaeology. Buried: An alternative history of the first millennium in Britain. By Alice Roberts. Recommended, unless you want to cling on to Le Morte d’Artur.