Monday 39/41 KWH
We’ve not heard from Emory about her MRI. We called last week, and the technicians did not have the order from the doctor yet.
It’s been a struggle today, we’re both up at 3AM and I’ve maybe gotten 2 hours sleep. Went back to bed and managed to get 5 hours sleep last night. Poured a cup of coffee and checked in with my HAM friends on the Waterway net. I need to give my uncle a call sometime today and drive to Lowes and pick up my filter after they find out where my filter is. Our sponsored child in Kenya sent us a letter today. It’s a bit cooler today, like 68 degrees this morning. (Attic was 65!)
Got her car ready for the trip to the gym this morning. We put a container of boost in an insulated glass with ice so that she has some calories on her way home. I also put the dashcam in the windshield so we can walk back her trip if we need to.
Started dinner (AKA Lunch for us), sweet potatoes and mixed vegetables.
A little frosty, I am guessing the defrost cycle pulled some moisture out.
I am not seeing the electric bill change very much from $180 last month. I thought that changing the garage dehumidifier would have helped, but it hasn’t thus far. The waiter at Longhorn yesterday said that she keeps her home at 68 degrees during the summer. Gee Wiz, that’s a bit cool! I can maybe see that at night, but that’s a huge burden on the air conditioner in the daytime. Hmmm, I wonder what our A/C would do if I locked it in at 72 today.
1:30PM, I added the temp sensor for the bedroom vent back on to Home Assistant. The air was arriving in the bedroom about 55 degrees. (Nice and cold.) It’s also the temp of the air arriving in the master bath though. Down for a nap, I need a brain boost.
Drove to Lowes and picked up the MERV11 washable air filter for the air conditioner. It’s the one that sits underneath my air handler, takes 3 minutes to exchange it. I may get one more so that it’s dry when installing it. (That’s the problem with the other two coarse filters that sit underneath the fine filter, they take a long time to dry.)
I’ll check the performance of the new filter against this baseline I recorded today to check for airflow. I was actually surprised that the temp didn’t fall very much after 12PM running @ 100% capacity. (2Ton, 1200SQ 85 Deg outside.) The worry is that the filter slows down the air and lowers the BTU available.
Tuesday 35/41KWH
Slept in until 8AM, cranked up the radio and did manage to check-in to my friends. Coffee finished brewing and I got the first cup out of the pot. My body pain was distracting enough that I took a hot bath about midnight. (A nice warm bath relieves my body pain better than any pain killer.) I may try to fast today after lunch and see how well I do at bedtime. My current weight is 215 which is 25 LBS over my weight in the Navy. It hasn’t changed more than a couple LBS in many years. I have four cups of coffee in the morning. (I think my dad drank coffee all day long, he had three large thermoses.) Too much caffeine can make me quite irritable. I used to have a problem with a racing heartbeat in my thirties and I had to cut caffeine out altogether.
My myriad of problems that only seem to show up at bedtime. The assumption at the moment is that I am pretty sedentary after about 5PM. My evening meal that I eat between 5PM and 8PM is typically a bowl of soup with crackers. In the short past I used to snack while watching evening TV until I started having pretty severe symptoms. My feet still occasionally have lymph fluid around my toes (like this morning) to where I feel like I have socks on, but I’m actually bare footed. I don’t know yet if that’s caused by the antifungal toe gel that I put on them twice a day.
Read the news for a bit, it was a waste of my time. None of this chaos is going to change by any effort from an elderly couple in Georgia. She is a news junkie. She can watch the news on TV 12 hours a day. It’s strange though, we used to listen to the news on the radio which allowed us to be somewhat productive? Hmmm.
Our little house is full of clutter, it’s been this way since we got back from Vegas.
11:30 We started discussing Lunch which was supposed to be frozen fish. She ate breakfast before 8AM and if she doesn’t eat every four hours or so, she’ll have to snack on something. Between her getting anxious about having something to eat right away and having her braces in for 22 hours a day is impossible. She had not read the recipe nor checked the cupboards to see if we had all the ingredients. The fish needs at least 30 minutes to thaw under cold running water and 15 minutes prep with another 30 minutes to cook. She spent most of the day yesterday watching the news with the DNC in Chicago. We went out to Longhorn for lunch and then slept until 4PM taking a nap. Paul called, there was something wrong with his phone.
We called Emory Imaging, and they did not have the order to be able to schedule an MRI. We were not given an order to hand to our primary care physician either.
Her new braces have a sharp edge on them, we called yesterday about 4 with no answer. We didn’t think to call them today until 4, so that’s something we’ll have to deal with tomorrow. I have a dental appt tomorrow at 9AM.
Wednesday 36/41 KWH
Woke up around 7 this morning and cranked up my radio. Coffee was waiting for me by the time I got back to the kitchen. I checked in with the guys on the Waterway Net before getting ready for the dentist appointment this morning at 9AM. Dental cleaning went well, and I decided I desperately needed a nap. Lunch was frozen flounder. She did a good job baking the flounder and steaming frozen vegetables in the Insta-Pot while I was napping. Went to the bank to get some small bills for the senior home Bingo night tomorrow. Went to get a haircut, but they’re closed on Wednesdays. The 50′ VGA cable for Sunday was waiting on the doorstep for me when I got back home.
Worked on my PowerPoint slides and took a couple naps before we joined the zoom meeting. We watched Leap Year until we got too sleepy to stay up.
Thursday 45/42 KWH
Got up around 7:45 and checked into the Waterway Net with Uncle Paul. She said that she didn’t feel very good emotionally. I recommended that she write in her journal, which she didn’t do. We decided on chicken legs with veggies and a potato for lunch. We’re not going grocery shopping since we’re good on supplies and she needs to nurse her knee. I’ve done three loads of laundry this morning, Whites and two loads of towels. Wrote a survey for Longhorn’s lunch on Tuesday using their website. I am going to try a dry spray in my shoes after I dry them on the boot dryer. That might keep my itchy feet at bay. It’s getting much cooler in the morning which enables work on the outside of the home.
Lunch is chicken legs, veggies and sweet potatoes. The chicken legs were frozen so I tried thawing them in the refrigerator overnight last night. (Still Froze this morning) I cut them out of the package and tossed them in the microwave on a defrost setting. They were still frozen when it finished. So, I set it in one more time and then they ended up just a little frosty. I tossed them onto a baking pan and into the oven.
Lunch was pretty good, we had one piece that needed to be cooked just a little more. The cauliflower was a little tough, the broccoli gets done first, then carrots and finally the Cauliflower.
Bingo with the senior home went well, Kathy stayed home. When we started discussing the dinner for today, I found leftovers from Saturday that will have to be tossed. It bothers me greatly that we just cannot keep track of our food.
Friday 37/42 KWH
Turned on my radio and sipping my coffee. I am beginning to understand how my dad’s estate ended up in such a mess. Pat had RA that gradually disrupted their life in Pahrump with all the trips to the doctors. Pat also had an issue with her back and she almost died. My dad drove to the hospital in Vegas every day. He ended up buying the van during that time with all that driving he was doing. Then he got sick and still made a trip out to see us in 2018. He was a ghost in 2019 when we shot out there because he didn’t sound well. I am guessing that he (Like myself) was spending loads of time taking care of his wife while his home was falling into disarray. The amount of time spent taking care of things gradually creeps up on you until your list is very long. (That’s where I am now.)
I may never be able to claim their federal tax refund for 2019 without reopening the estate. (Depends how the check is written.) The IRS sent us a letter saying the 1310 wasn’t filled out. (I sent them a question about the 1310 that they didn’t answer) Pat didn’t file for their joint return while she was still alive, and I am sure COVID had a lot to do with it.
We’re back from the gym, she is to put cold compresses on the knee as she has a bone bruse. The owner of the gym said that Kathy has a bone bruise where one of the tendons attach from the knee. He recommended we get a wrap brace to support her knee and to take walks. He told her NOT to use certain machines at the gym that would exacerbate the inflation of the bone.
We burnt the vegetables this morning, she didn’t put very much water under the steaming tray today and it went dry. *I actually thought the Insta-Pot would have sensed that the water was gone and stopped heating?
We cleaned the pot and started another batch of frozen vegetables then warmed up a ham steak for lunch. I wanted to have potatoes with it but there was yet another miscommunication about having the potatoes. (She never looked in the box.) After lunch we both took a nap, she was hungry so we warmed up a can of soup. We’re still removing the braces 6-8 times every day between all these meals/snacks. 7AM, 11AM, 2PM, 4PM, 6PM, 8-9PM. And she is still eating ice cream bars and M+M candies witch trigger insulin and probably shorten her spans between meals. I just realized that the issue with her brain is the part we need working to regulate these meals. ARG.
Speaking of which, time to call Emory Imaging and get an appointment. They came up with a requirement that she get a sedative medication BEFORE they would schedule and appointment. She does get anxious inside the closed frame in a MRI machine that’s used for head imaging.
Had soup while we watched some TV and then headed to bed.
Saturday 40/41 KWH
Got up around 8AM and cranked up my radio to meet the guys on the Amateur Radio Waterway net. She brought me a cup of coffee while I get organized. Took a shower and opened the garage door to cool off the garage a little bit. It didn’t really help. Dinner is pork tenderloin, I laid out a timeline for us to follow so we don’t have a disaster like we did yesterday.
Tenderloin tasted pretty good, it was a bit overcooked though.
I did a bit of cleaning around the kitchen table today. Our kitchen table is the center of our home, everything seems to arrive at or be taken from that table. Hence all of our tablets are charged on that wide flat surface. The kitchen counters are too valuable for cooking and all of the large furniture has plants on them.
I have never liked plugging five or six 5W chargers into a power strip. Some multi output chargers are not fast charge compatible or don’t have the power to charge fast charge devices. Some of the older devices charge very slowly on a fast charger. The method I chose is DC-DC converters that have considerably more power to charge the device and only one wall connected device. It provides power for all the converters which then provide the USB power. It also allows for fast charging devices that can be charged with a higher power. The USB cables are short, so very little power is lost between the charger and the device. They are not perfect; I have had several of them fail over the 10 years of using them. (They are super handy for hotel rooms where you really don’t want to plug your $800 cell phone into their charger.)
The problem is that the wires can get to be a mess, LOL.
Sunday 35/41 KWH
Got up a bit late, we have a crowded morning. Make chili, drive to house church and setup the equipment. Service was at 11AM. She said that she was going to make scrambled eggs, so I hadn’t eaten until after 1PM. We were asked to bring a dish, but the chili failed so we’re going there without food. The laptop case had a CPAP power supply in it, so I had to run back home to get one. The audio from the computer had a significant buzz that I just could not get rid of. (The host was too busy to test everything out before Sunday service and the service had a distracting hum.) He also moved the location of the computer to the other side of the room that wasn’t tested either. We also ended up using a 30-year-old power strip that had bad outlets in it, I went home early.
We slept for an hour and a half and found ourselves looking at 4 PM. It’s too hot outside to work on the house and I am really emotional about messing up the worship service today. I didn’t get much accomplished before going to bed. (I did test the audio on Wednesday, it’s not my equipment or cables.)