“‘Twas the Day After Christmas…”

Yesterday was very very quiet. Today will be more stressful.

Fred’s friend, Bill, is coming to stay with him for a few hours while I get a massage! {Insert a video of me jumping up and down for joy!} Bill is a true friend as he has shown in this crisis but he will stay and stay until Fred tells him to leave! Fortunately, Fred will do this. Then we have Fred’s daughter and her husband and their sixteen-year old son coming this evening. These are the people who are bringing their own food this time. {Which reminds me that once I have finished this, I must clear off the table so they have some place to sit and eat and also check the salad supplies so that we have some contribution to the meal.} And, although they don’t yet know it, the menfolk of this family are going to set up my new DVD player!

Fred and I both got up this morning at 7 am and we were both full of energy which is normal for me and very strange for Fred. He is NOT a morning person at all. However, once he had eaten, he went back to bed. On the other hand, I am dashing around madly taking advantage of this morning energy before it runs out. So far this morning I have:

• done the dishes
• put the ingredients for our favorite home-made bread in the machine, {130 calories a slice and worth every one!}
• taken a load of clothes down to be washed
• started putting out some of the trash…

I want to elaborate more on the last. Fred had been living here ten years before I moved in and he is frugal. Everything is saved “in case we need it.”  Neither of us are neat-freaks and it has taken all this oxygen-stuff to make me really see how much junk we have that we need to get rid of. So, we had a good talk yesterday and agreed to get rid of a lot of it.  I told Fred it was a combination of two things that made me determined {with his permission of course} to get at least 80 % of this stuff outa here! The two things are the oxygen tanks and the fact that I promised my friend Dangnabbit that she can come to our apartment after all this has settled down a bit and I will teach her to knit. Now, it is not that I am thinking that Dagnabbit will comment or criticize our living conditions that got me going on this, but I found myself looking at the piles of “stuff ” through the eyes of others, and I don’t like what I see. 

I really hadn’t broached this before with Fred because it has taken me pretty well the five years I have been living here to come round to thinking it is “our” stuff and not just “his” stuff. One does not just arbitrarily dispose of other people’s possessions! I told him that I will not dispose of anything without checking with him first, but, as I said to him, who needs five old telephone books, for example? The other reason I hadn’t started on any of this was because he mentioned once that one of the many things he came to really dislike about his ex is that she is the kind of neat-freak that snatches the ash try away to empty it the minute he put out his cigarette! {He hasn’t smoked, I am glad to say, for 20 years!}

One of the ways I deal with stress is to tidy up and organize little bits of things. For example, beore all this happened, I would rinse the dishes we used during the day, stack them up by the sink, and wash them all in the morning because there is something soothing for me about doing this while the coffee is perking. Since he came home from the hospital, I am finding myself washing them right after each meal, three times a day! I told him that this was an ideal time, while I can benefit from cleaning stuff out, to do it. As soon as he is better, I told him, I will go right back to my old ways which I classify as semi-clean slobbery!

Then, after I had talked about this, and he had agreed and accepted his share of the responsibility in that  that he has been remiss too {for example, we have five little pastic bags full of plastic “peanuts” to take back to the packing center because they should not go into landfills and they are not recycleable–they have been there for at least a year}, I had the horrid thought that perhaps I was bullying him and he was agreeing because he was not well. Well, we sorted that out, too. He is delighted that I want to do it and he accepts the fact that he should have done his part years ago {FIVE old telephone books!} and he assured me that no man who left the intensive care floor of a hospital  against medical advice after major surgery AND a heart attack is capable of being bullied even if he isn’t totally well yet. I had to laugh—that is SO TRUE!

Timer just beeped so I need to get the clothes into the dryer.

Until later…