Labels: Christmas, New Year, sickness

Labels: Christmas, health, Holiday Harbour

However, after sleeping on it two nights…

Can’t be helped. Monday I got online and sought out reviews of mattress pads, finding a list that was the ten best reviewed pads on Amazon. I picked out the one that came first on the list, a 2-inch gel-infused pad, which is supposed to make it cooler in summer (I’ll believe that when I feel it). It was delivered on Tuesday, whereupon I decanted it from its sealed state–it rather looked like a large taco–and laid it out on the library floor to swell up. Wednesday it got put on the bed. Better now.

On Monday I thought I’d better get a start on wrapping the gifts. I figured I would do the five gifts than were sitting on the arm of the futon since they kept falling off each time James had to retreat there in the middle of the night because his shoulder was still hurting from his fall (this was going on every night for a while), and then decide if I wanted to keep going. The next thing I knew they all were wrapped, as if Dudley the angel from The Bishop’s Wife had helped me some, something I am truly grateful for. I usually come out of wrapping gifts in pain and hungry as a bear.

James had another MOHS procedure on Thursday morning to remove a small skin cancer from his left cheek. I wasn’t allowed to come along, but he did fine although he was gone a long time (or at least it seems so when you are sitting home clock watching). It took them a bit longer than usual to stop the bleeding due to his blood thinners. After he arrived home, we picked up some prescriptions at Kaiser and stopped at Publix to do the shopping, and then kept ice on the surgical spot on and off for the rest of the night. He said there was little pain and only used the ice because it was suggested in the post-surgical instructions. He had no problems next day as well, to the point we could go to Lidl and spend some time at Barnes & Noble to boot. Then when we got home I did my yearly baking of a batch of wine biscuits. It’s been very difficult to rouse Christmas spirit this  year and I wasn’t feeling like baking, but there was no having the wine biscuits if I didn’t bake them, so I just did it. It ended up being almost as easy as wrapping the gifts, and when the lovely smell of the cookies permeated the house I felt better.

Saturday ended up quite pleasantly. Since it was more prudent for the Lawsons to cancel this year’s game night/Christmas party, they brought our gift by as they did their weekend errands. Jerry always picks some clever way to package things, and this year he found some surplus Royal Mail postbags--these are actual mailbags that have been used by British postmen--as a gift container! These are bright red, so quite festive, and no wonder they called the postmen “robins” carrying those red bags. In the late afternoon we finally had my birthday dinner at Fried Tomato Buffet, stopped at a couple of stores (where I picked up another gift), looked at the puppies at Petland, and then finished off the night taking a ride home through the battlefield park and seeing a herd of deer grazing peacefully on a swath of open grass, and stopping for ice cream before arriving home.

Labels: Christmas, events, food, friends, health, shopping, sickness

To say this has been a week full of ups and downs would be an understatement.

The good news: I finished putting up the downstairs decorations on St. Nicholas Day (as well as doing most of my Sunday chores) and put up the Christmas tree the next day. Alas, even these fun events were fraught with frustration: the top half of the library tree did not light, I couldn’t fix the problem with the Lightkeeper Pro, and I ended up just replacing bulbs until it came back on. It looked as if most of the yellow bulbs were burnt out! I lost count of how many I replaced, mostly yellow, but also some at the bottom of the tree where I’d replaced lights last year! Not only that, when I plugged in the three segments of the main tree to test them, the top did not light. I left it plugged in while I decorated the library tree and the library, and then the downstairs hall and the airplane tree. When I came upstairs with the tree ornaments, nary a light did I see in it.

Until I kicked it. Then it lit up!

Since I started late (I was sick during the morning), I had to quit tinseling the tree halfway through to attend an online seminar on “Christmas Past” that I signed up for last month, thinking it would be fun. It was, although I didn’t learn anything I didn’t know. The company was nice, though. Then I did finish the tree and it was safely pushed in the corner for this Christmas season.

Tuesday I found some special programs on Amazon Prime about Tasha Tudor, and really enjoyed those, especially the Christmas-themed one with her children. This was filmed, of course, before she died; apparently there was then a big court battle because she left everything to the son and not her other children. Happier times at Christmas, at least. And Wednesday I found out where to drop my Toys for Tots contribution.

And then Friday we thought everything was really hunky-dory because we went to IKEA and finally bought a new mattress. It was a great birthday gift: our old one that we bought at the Home Show had gotten so soft James was sliding off the side of the bed. It was warrantied for fourteen years and only six years old, but the company that made it had gone out of business. Bye-bye warranty. So we went there and once again tested all the foam mattresses (we have to have foam, as we have a adjustable bed), and still decided on the same mattress we had picked out a couple of months ago, except instead of the medium firm we got the firm. We made arrangements to have the mattress delivered and the old one taken away, with signed documents to that effect. Cool, right? Well, maybe… On the way home we stopped at the Buckhead Barnes & Noble, which had been the best one around here. Alas, it has been as denuded as the others, the magazines aren’t up-to-date, and there were panhandlers hanging around the doors. At least we had some ice cream as our dessert.

And then came Saturday! We had a delivery window from 1 -5 p.m., so I took my time getting up. It was 9 a.m. before I noticed I had a call from a delivery service at 8:05: it was the people delivering the mattress. He said it was contactless delivery and he would just leave it on the porch! Sure enough a few minutes later Tucker barked, and a rolled up mattress was dumped on our porch. A few minutes later the dispatcher from the delivery company called me to make sure we got the mattress. I explained it was supposed to be delivered, set up, and the old taken away during the afternoon. He said he’d call to see what was going on. I continued calling him all afternoon, but never got any satisfaction, and of course I tried calling up IKEA, but their automated message continue to inform me that they were too busy to take calls and to contact them online (but the only thing you could do online was cancel the delivery, and that had already happened!), and then it would hang up on me! I finally got through via a different phone number only to be told that they shouldn’t have told me they would do a pickup; they weren’t doing any pickups. Our salesman called the desk and asked before he made out the paperwork! This is a violation of my contract with them–we wouldn’t have bought the mattress there had I known they wouldn’t take the old one away. Basically after several calls they tell me they are refunding our delivery fee and we will have to make arrangements to get the old mattress removed ourselves.

About five o’clock I got mad. The mattress was in a deflated roll, and I just kept upending it until I got it on the landing, and then I managed to tug it up the nine stairs left one at the time till I got to the top and James could help me pull it. We always turn the mattress when we change the bed, so it wasn’t much different to actually get the old mattress off the bed (it took about ten minutes of tugging and grunting because the old one has no handle). After that, the new mattress was positively a doddle to cut open and unroll on the bed to inflate. I know it’s supposed to inflate for a whole day, but it can’t be helped. Tired of James thumping his heel against the side of the bed when he starts to slide off and it must hurt his feet as well.

So yeah, we have a new bed, but now we’re stuck with a queen–sized mattress leaned up against one wall of our bedroom, blocking the chifforobe, the toy chest, and the chair that I sit in to put on my shoes. Not only that, but just as I finished taking my shower, I got heart palpitations! I’d already taken my pill over an hour earlier, so I didn’t know whether I was going to bed that night or Urgent Care.  I finished drying off and put my nightgown on and went to lie down, taking deep breaths and willing my heart to get back to normal rhythms. It would beat-beat-beat-beat then try to slow down then go back to beat-beat-beat-beat to start the cycle again. And then it was back to normal rhythm. The whole incident only lasted about 20 minutes at the most, but seemed like hours. Now I know how my mom felt when this happened to her. She would be doing something and just stop in her tracks and sit down and be very quiet until it passed. Scary.

In the meantime James admitted to me on Monday morning that he almost fell again in the bathroom–I was really upset and went ballistic, which was why I was sick on Monday morning. He is continuing to have problems with his shoulder after the fall, even though the X-rays determined he did not break anything.

Labels: books, Christmas, Christmas decorations, Christmas lights, events, health, shopping, sickness, television

Well, it was a week. And boy what a week...

It did indeed rain on Sunday, but with the lights already outside the rest of the First Sunday of Advent decorating was a doddle. I put additional things out on the porch, and hung the garlands on the inside doors and set the candoliers in the windows. Our neighbors were already brightening their homes as well. Pam next door has a plain white lit tree downstairs, and a red-and-white peppermint tree upstairs. Miranda and Eddie strung multicolor outlines on the front of their house later in the week. Even the lady across the street put a color-changing tree in one of her bedroom windows.

About 2 a.m. Monday morning everything went pear-shaped. James got up to use the bathroom, fell asleep as he leaned forward to pull up his pajama bottoms, and took a header into the wall. I was woken from sleep by an enormous thump and raced into the bath to find him on the floor with a big black-and-blue goose-egg already forming on his right temple, coherent but in pain, and no way to get off the floor, since his knees are so bad he can't roll on them to get up. So I had to call the rescue squad. Four nice firemen/EMTs rescued him, checked him out including his blood sugar, thought he was okay, but since he banged his head, also thought he should go to the hospital to get checked out. The EMTs were geeks and before they left we were talking Star Trek. Then James went off to St. Joseph's via ambulance and I tried to get back to sleep and miserably failed since most of what I was doing was crying.

Labels: accidents, Christmas decorations, food, friends, health, sickness, weather