How do we perceive things?

That's the question of the day - and I think I found an answer for us all!  Take a look at this.

I hope you can see it, even if you do need to use a microscope.

Today is a brilliantly beautiful day, full of fresh new hope and promise.  It's just the kind of day for taking a boat trip and enjoying some oxygenated air.  Hopefully can get there before the winds come blowing.

Francine-Rose has gone to spend a few days with the Sneves, bless her little heart.  The grans will no doubt spoil her rotten as they are off to the United Arab Emirates to take a break soon from the terrible loss of Don.  I'm sure they will all enjoy their time together.  I just worry about their unguarded pool which happens to be right on their porch.  They poo-pooh the idea of having it covered.  They don't realise that a toddler can disappear in a second...  I feel this is hugely irresponsible for a family that can afford to call in the pool-netters and have it done in a morning.  Since they seem to be atheists, they would see it as just sailing into the deep blue yonder.

Francine's mother has gone on a journey.  I hope she'll enjoy the break.  She has been under a lot of undue stress lately.  Not easy being a single mum, ever.

Well, I am off to put on a summer dress and catch some rays while I can....

 

I hate my neck

Well here's a boring post for today.  I HATE MY NECK.  I went for physio today but instead I wish the physiotherapist had rather taken a mallet to my head and smashed it - you know - patients in through the front and out through the back 100% cure rate.  That's how much pain I am in.  It didn't help thinking about amazing people like Michael J Fox and others who endure worse and keep smiling through it all.  24/7 pain - I don't know how much longer I will be able to bear this.  What a cheerful little posting!

Round and Around

As most of us do, I started the day with good intentions to complete plenty of things on my internal combustion's "To Do" list.  Allowed hubby to snore away part of the morning.  Can't remember when last he had a good night's sleep.  To be honest, I can't remember when I did either - but that's not surprising since I don't remember much anyway.  I do seem to have a hazy recall of a child coughing in my ear all night and the terrible reverberations of the bed, floor, walls, window and door as DH snored.  I had to hold on tight or I would have been blasted off the bed and out the door.  As for my ears - ouch.  They are still ringing.  I'm smiling though.  I have some great new ear-plugs to use tonight.  The only thing that stood between us and the divorce courts were lovely pink wax ear plugs which I used up to now and ran out of last night.  I did consider kicking DH without any ceremony right off the bed as my daughter did to her DH, but it only put paid to his snoring while he recovered from his fall off the bed, found his bearings and the pillow and started snoring again.  Did you know that snoring can reach the level of a noisy vacuum cleaner right next to your ear or the decibels of a high-powered jack-hammer drill - the kind they use to break up roads, etc?

Tonight, my ears are in for a treat - can't wait to open the little box containing my brand-new re-usable and washable ear-plugs.  (By the way, DH has told me that I ALSO snore - can you believe such a thing??  I mean, pleeeeeese.....).  (Oh-oh, I do remember my daughter being woken up by a loud noise in the middle of the night when I was visiting, creeping down the passage with a firearm and then finding out it was her mother....but sh..sh...don't tell my husband).

 

Where was I?  Oh yes, going round and around all day trying to do things and being interrupted.  Eventually, sat down and watched some TV and a woman was saying she had ADD and had to keep a written "To Do" list next to her all day and mark it off as she went along.  Perhaps lack of sleep can cause ADD.  I'll write out a list before I hit the sack tonight and see where it leads me tomorrow...

Life is more than pain (gladly)!

It's hard to distract yourself when you are a chronic pain sufferer (my neck) but when the operation you are faced with carries a risk of death, then you try everything you can think of to ease the pain and make life easier.  Fusing C1+C2 (Atlas and Axis) is an option surgeons only like to take as a last resort.  Since the pain in my left arm is becoming worse, the dead feeling and weakness - I'm unsure how long I will be able to postpone it.

Anyway, I am happy today!  The sun is shining after gale-force winds and heavy rain yesterday and there is not a cloud in the sky.  Can't wait to take a nice long walk with my camera and take some shots of this pretty town in which I have the great opportunity to live in.

I had a whole clump of my articles accepted on E-Zine today, which made me smile from ear-to-ear.  This is a nice notch up the ladder for my writing and the amount of articles I can submit.  Up to now they have been largely technical, requiring research - but soon I would like to submit some creative writing.  I'll keep a notepad next to my bed because it is in the late evenings that I get my best ideas (strangely).

My daughter is celebrating her birthday soon and I know exactly what to send to her.  It's a pretty necklace I bought for her some years ago and never sent it.  This has turned out to be greatly convenient right now when my purse is empty.  If my purse had a gauge, it would constantly read near zero!

Have watched "Shaun the Sheep" a million times today with my grandchild.  We did the whole nine yards - play-dough (quite a clean activity - here's how to make it), painting (everywhere but on the paper!).  Fed the dogs ALL their week's supply of dog food and spent some time retrieving it from all over the kitchen floor.  We are at the stage that she wants to do everything herself.  This includes taking medication (spills), getting dressed (inside out), washing (water all over the bathroom floor) - but at night there's just one place she wants to be - behind Nanna's back in bed.



Soon another granddaughter will come to join us for a visit along with her mommy and daddy.  That's going to be great.  I hope they interact well as they are basically the same age.  They can both spend time messing up the house like little tornadoes.  Who cares?  Tomorrow they will be grown up - you know how quickly it happens!

Until next time then - stay happy, stay crazy!  Be yourself.  Remember:  No one is as good at being you as you are!

On the same week gone mad..

I have this amazing neck.  It is quite slender and long.  In my teens, I was so proud of my long neck.  Now it's the bane of my life.  There is only one solution to my neck problems and its not pretty:

Well, this is how desperate you begin to feel after years and YEARS and YEARS of neck problems.

This is what happens when you are taken on a wild canter by the biggest stallion in the stables - JACK TAR.  While on this canter, the riding teacher yelled at me for all she was worth "Stop it, you are ruining that horse's mouth!  It's the best horse in the stables!"  ?  All I was doing was trying to rein it in, trying to pull it towards the fence where hopefully Jack Tar would stop and behave.  He wasn't having any of it.  Not a darn.  He wanted to show me who was boss.  He wanted to frighten the living daylights out of me.  He ran to fences with huge ditches on the other sides, pretending he was about to jump, but stopped at the last minute to blow huge amounts of air through his widened nostrils and steal a superior-looking glance at me.  In a flash, he was off again running around as if his life depended on it, wondering if he should just throw me off or keep me on his back and continue to terrify me.  Oh yes much better to frighten this one, I could feel him thinking.  Away at top speed to a nylon cord strung between two trees, right at my neck height.  Who put it there and why?  Jack Tar bolted towards it, knowing he would go under and I would go off (unless of course I'd been decapitated).


In the end Jack stopped short of doing that and bored, decided to walk with the rest of the horses back to the stables for a long drink.  As I dismounted, my legs felt as if they would buckle under me but I wanted to get away from Jack Tar - and fast.


A week passed by and I found myself at the riding school again.  I walked determinedly past Jack Tar's stable to the end of the row.  I took out the slowest horse in the entire stable - a gentle white mare.  Together, we gently trotted out to meet the rest of the school.  Today, we were to learn how to weave in and out amongst poles.  One at a time, the riders gave their horses a gentle kick to their sides and off they would go, responding beautifully.  Oh, they knew this game well.  And then it was my turn.  I gently kicked the gentle white mare on her sides and woke up in hospital.


And that is basically the story of my neck.  I have very little memory of what actually took place that day - you see, I was asleep - deeply concussed.  Apparently my gentle white mare shied and did what they call a 'dirty stop' on me.  I was flung into the air on landed head first, breaking my right elbow in three places, damaging my neck and probably sustained the brain damage that makes me what I am today.


So there you have it.  My neck and I have an ongoing fight.  The vertebrae are tired of being in a long slender neck.  They want to crumple up and just be.  But before they finally go their resting place, they will ensure that they stomp on every root nerve they can find.  Nerves which send shooting pains down my arms and hands, into my temples, into my head, into my neck, into my shoulders, even into my jaw and through my teeth.


I have tried to find solutions to the problems - but my neck will not play ball.  And if it does, the solution will only last for this.... long and return to torment me.  I tell myself it is my punishment for everything I did that was mean, nasty, horrible and hateful in life.  It's a train that has smashed into the side of my head somedays.  At other times, it is a continually irritating series of stabbing pains which cause me to say "Oh!" at inappropriate times.


So what the heck - I have to live with this and in dealing with daily agonising pain I still have to find a way to be friendly, to smile, to work, to not complain, et al.  Loads of people are doing it every day.

A week gone mad

Friday and I find myself reflecting on this crazy week.  Aging Don had been in ICU for about five weeks, barely hanging on to a shred of life.  Quad heart bypass.  Pneumonia.  Lungs pumped.  Kidney infection.  Blood transfusions in an attempt to up the ante in his body's fight against bugs.  Induced coma to give his body a break.  Life support.  Switched off a few days ago with his family present.  His daughter Mabel (my youngest grandchild's other grandmother) had returned to the Arab Emirates for one day when she had to return.  Shame, the old man was frail.  It was his time to go.  But so it is that even when our loved ones are busy dying, we cling to the hope - that tiny thread of hope - that they may suddenly recover against every single odd stacked against that happening.

From the moment Francine-Rose was born, I found myself a nanna in the midst of a host of other nannas all vying for the same thing - the baby.  Quite odd.  Penny could not make enough blankets for Francine - and they were all meticulously embroidered on her home-embroidery machine.  Oh it's new - state of the art and takes up a whole room.  The couple were so inundated with baby blankets from Penny that even during the filming of the after-event of the birth, Penny stood at the nursery entrance hurling more and more baby blankets at her grandson.  You can actually see Wade fighting them off in the video!

Where were we?  Oh yes, Don was cut off from his umbilical cord of life support over the weekend.

Tuesday:  Told Francine-Rose (all of two years old) that Don had gone to be with the angels.  Waited for her reaction - her reaction was to leap down on me from the window sill giggling and shouting Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.

Tuesday evening:  My daughter came home from work and announced "Mother, you are NOT to tell Francine that her great grandfather has died and gone to be with the angels or anything like that.  Penny, Mabel and the family insist on breaking the news to her.  They say it is THEIR RIGHT".

Did I tell her what I had done?  Not then, but I did later when she was irritating me.  She was furious.  How did I know that I was not to tell Francine who is still oblivious to the fact anyway?  She yelled at me for trimming her fringe two weeks ago as well.

Wait a moment - it becomes more complicated than this.  Wednesday evening I am told, is his funeral.  Odd time, but it was not a funeral.  It was not even a service.  It was something else.  I don't know what it was.  We were not invited.  Only my daughter was.  I was left to take care of Francine as it would be "too emotional" for her.  Well, I can hear you thinking - WHAT was it?  Sounds to me as if one of Don's friends read tributes to Don written previously by the family and it was held at...The Yacht Club.  At same-mentioned club and after a slide show of photographs of Francine with Don - Francine (2 years old I remind you) was declared to be an honorary member of The Yacht Club and have a yacht of her very own named after her - THE FRANCINE-ROSE.  I kid you not.

In the blink of an eye, this crazy week was not about Don's death or playing merrily with the angels - but all about possession and control of my grandchild.  Oh yes, btw she is my grandchild too - especially in the middle of the night when she is unceremoniously plopped into our double bed.  (I am still trying to work out and have been for 40 years now, how an infant or toddler can take up an entire double bed perhaps leaving you with an inch to try to perch upon and fall mercifully asleep).

And so the War of the Grannies continues, but I am holding my peace.  I was going to end - but no, I have something else to tell you before this portion of the saga ends.  When Don's ashes are ready...(to call a spade a spade - after he has been cremated along with others and you think you have only YOUR loved one's ashes but in fact they are all pretty mixed up and no-one ever tells you this)... well when his ashes are in his family's hands, The Sneves will sail forth in a magnificent yacht out into the deep sea with a FLEET of yachts trailing behind them and Don's ashes  (and how many others I do not wish to think about) will be dumped into the sea to the sound of bagpipes.

It will not amaze me if the yacht they use to dump Don's ashes into the sea will be the very same yacht mentioned here - THE FRANCINE-ROSE.

More later....