But But But I Gots Me Some Plans!

It had been a particularly tough academic year and so I had plans for the summer. I needed a roadtrip! I needed to jump into my car and just go.

Let’s step back a moment. In February I had made a commitment with some of my online quilting friends to meet at the beach in North Carolina for a week retreat. There were three of us for-sures and four or so maybes. The three of us for-sures put a portion of the money down, with the balance to be paid in July.

In May, I decided to surprise my mom on Mother’s Day weekend by flying down to southern California. Doug and I bought plane tickets and were looking forward to the visit. Instead, we had an emergency call from Doug’s brother that his parents were missing. We flew out to Pittsburgh the next morning.

Doug’s mother has Alzheimer’s Disease, but it was not diagnosed by her doctor.  Both his parents are nearing 90 and his father was trying to take care of his mother.  As many of you may know, this is an exhausting job.  She is a wanderer, often searching for her mother or a pet dog.  His father was so sleep deprived that he was going crazy.  So he took his wife and ran away to a hotel, hoping to get some rest.  Unfortunately this didn’t solve the problem–now she wandered in a strange place and his youngest son and daughter were so angry at him that they could hardly talk to him.

That’s where Doug and I came in.  We stayed in Pittsburgh for a week and helped his dad find a nursing center for Virginia.  My job was to simply listen to his father.  Norman has always been a talker and his own children had stopped listening years earlier.  He can ramble on for days on one story.  But I came to realize he needed someone to listen to him, he needed someone to understand him, and even when his story went off on a tangent, there was a processing he had for his own mind going on.  It was an exhausting week for everyone.

We did find a good place for her and we headed home.  Doug’s oldest brother arrived as we were leaving, so the tag-team was useful.  He and his wife helped both of their parents get settled.  The good news in this is once she was settled in the nursing center and changed doctors, was diagnosed and her meds regulated, everyone found she was not as bad off as thought.  This is good…and not so good as now she knows what is going on with her and had to come to the realization that this was where she was going to live out the days of her life.

Okay so back to my mother and southern California…  That trip was missed but we had these tickets on Alaska to go visit her.  We figured summer was a good time to fly down and see her.

And we had another visit back to Pittsburgh to help Doug’s father move into a smaller apartment.

And I had that lovely week in North Carolina blooming in August.  The plan was I would drive back to NC, lay around on the sand for a week, and Doug would fly back.  We would then drive home by way of New Orleans, Houston, and anywhere else we wanted.

And then my car died.  I needed a whole new engine in this 2002 VW Beetle.  I found out that this little car was worth $5000…and the new engine would cost me (are you ready?) $5000.  So without the engine, with the engine…$5000.  I had a tough decision to make: go into debt to repair the car or go into debt to buy a new one.  I thought about this for a week or so and decided I didn’t have the energy to look for a new car, so we repaired the car.

Now we had the money in savings, but the (happy) news was my elder son had graduated from college!  Yeah son!  The (bad) news was that he had no job and needed our help while he looked.  And with almost 13% unemployment in Oregon, finding that job was not going to be a fast process.  So, we put the $5000 on credit and moved forward.

But we had tickets on Alaska Air already for California!  But the cost to fly to California, after paying the penalty fee for change, was waaaaaaaaaaaay too much to think about right now.

And tickets to fly to Pittsburgh were crazy high.  $600 a person!  I mean PITTSBURGH, for Pete’s sake!  What was happening in Pitts?  So it was decided that only Doug would go back east to help his dad move and I would stay home and sew.

And then the trip to NC…  No roadtrip for me.  The cost to drive back was much more than the cost to fly.  Apparently everyone wants to go to Pittsburgh but not many to North Carolina.  The tickets were cheap.  I couldn’t back out of the trip because it would ruin the other two women’s visit–one could only come the first weekend because her sister was very ill–and we would lost all the money we had put down.  So I am still flying out to NC for a week and will have a great time.

Meanwhile, I decided to spend my summer in this little pool we bought.  It is 15′ x 4′ and I planned to take my little floaty thing and a book and lay around in the water.  Someone would need to walk past on occasionand slap the water to get that wave motion.  I would need a sound machine with the ocean sound and a sea gull or two flying past.  And just lay in the water…  And this worked for about a week when the temps were 106, 107 for a week.  That was the week Doug was gone.  I sewed until the pool of sweat got too bad (no A/C) and dipped and read until the unheated water cooled me down and then sewed until the pool of sweat…  You get the picture.  Unfortunately the weather has been too cool to swim since.  But that one week was fabulous!

So yes, I had plans.  Nothing really concrete but plans indeed.  No wonder I like being spontaneous better than making plans!

And the beat goes on.
peace~~