Sand, ethernet and wormhole socks

When Apple designed the 11" MacBook Air, they had to leave some stuff out to make it so slim and light. One thing they left out was an ethernet port. When I packed our bags for a short trip to North Carolina I had, likewise, to leave some stuff out in the interest of space conservation.

But I didn't have to leave out the dinky little pigtail of an adapter that converts a USB port into an ethernet port. I just forgot to bring it.

Here in Gillespie Cottage things are not so high-tech, and there is no wifi. Net access by wire only, thanks. So I'm about kicking myself. Mom's li'l Toshiba is here, and available mostly, but you know how I like my own stuff. Well, if you didn't, you do now. I'm blogging by iPhone. It's a pill.

Among the tasks: We've got some lattice to reattach to the deck railing to keep inquisitive small-fry contained. A bedspread to replace. (K-Mart doesn't sell bedspreads. What's up with that?) And about 6" of sand on the parking pad under the house that we'll have to call the Bobcat man to clean up. Except for the not-inconsequential portion our shoes will track into the car.

Meanwhile, we seem to have brought along a sneaky sock. It's Jeff's sock. This morning, when he went to put his shoes on before breakfast at the Holiday Inn Select, one sock had up and disappeared. So I got him out another pair. We ate. Mom and the waitress became fast friends as usual. Then, 20 feet into the lobby, the waitress charged after us with a left-behind object. It was Jeff's dirty sock. I cannot imagine from which part of his anatomy it must have tumbled, and I was a bit abashed to have left behind a crumpled sock, of all things. Well, maybe false teeth would be worse.

Anyway, we pressed on and got to Nags Head late morning by which time I'd noticed that Jeff had pretty well smudged his jacket and pants with pasty unidentified substances, so I got him a fresh outfit and threw the dirties in the wash. Including the errant dirty sock and its more well-behaved partner.

When I fished everything out of the dryer, the bad sock had once again vamoosed. Until afternoon errand time when I threaded Jeff into his clean jacket only to discover a sock dangling saucily from the cuff. I'm not sure where it had been planning to jump out--probably while we were eating dinner at the Outer Banks stalwart, Owens' Restaurant.

But I caught it. Who knows what that sock will try tomorrow? Next trip, I bring my ethernet port adapter for sure, but screen socks for precociousness.

and tomorrow...room coffee from a filter pack!

Not a bad drive from Severna Park to Norfolk this afternoon. People don’t seem to do much on a Sunday, apart from breakfasting at Garry’s Grill. (Which thwarted my morning spontaneous plan. With several folks hanging out the vestibule door at Garry’s around 10am, Jeff and I went home and settled for frozen flatbread vegan pizza. Good choice.)

But traffic was light down the eastern shores of Maryland and Virginia, and we made good time. Though initially aiming for The Great Machipongo Clam Shack in Nassawadox, Mom and I decided that 4pm was too early for dinner, so we pushed on to Cape Charles for salmon-topped salads at Kelly’s Gingernut Pub, where the waiter--for some reason--showed us the propane torch they use to melt the sugar on the top of the crême brulée.

Now we’re nestled into the Holiday Inn Select, Norfolk, where I’m wondering a few things. 1) Did they really wash the glasses before they put those little paper caps on top of them? 2) Not sure about one of the towels either. 3) Can other people stand compact fluorescent bulbs, or am I an oddity in finding the light they cast best suited for a morgue? 4) Am I going to be absurdly tired at 7pm for the rest of my life, or is it just a caregiver rhythm? And 5) Why did I bring a Sundance Catalog? Oh, I know. Because I knew I’d be too tired to do anything more intellectually challenging than admire jewelry I will not buy on the principle that I could probably get something more unique, that is not sold by Robert Redford, from Etsy.

But here we are. Mom is across the hall. The minute we walked into our room Jeff said, somewhat conspiratorially, “I know--why don’t we go home and use the bathroom.” “Because we’re in Norfolk,” I replied. “Home’s a little too far.” “How did I miss that?” he said.

So here we are. Tomorrow, the cottage in Nags Head for some inventory and repairs.

ouch parking.

In America, we can’t really fit our cars into our cities. I mean, for a country that opted for extensive interstates over a truly useful public transportation system, we should at least be able to park. But sometimes we can’t.

I’m certain that this is at least half of why people here like suburbs. Because you can park. You can park at your house. You can (except during the 4-5 weeks surrounding Christmas) park at shopping venues, or at the doctor’s office.

Actually, I’m going to take back that part about the doctor’s office. Gradually, over the past decade and a half, most of our docs (whatever their specialty) have moved to the medical complex surrounding the local hospital, and you do have to allow an extra 15 minutes for one of those vertigo-inducing spiral climbs through a parking garage in order to reach one of the 2.5 remaining spots in the open air at the very top.

But the real fun comes when we either must drive or wish to drive ourselves into Baltimore, Annapolis, or Washington D.C. Each of which exemplifies the practical dissonance created when children of Eisenhower’s interstate system attempt to utilize colonial era towns. It’s like trying to link Newtonian mechanics to quantum theory. It doesn’t compute, and the String theory of transportation is decades from perfection.

Did I mention the time, years ago, that Jeff and I stopped in Frederick, MD in the rain and--anxious to avoid an excessive wetting--we scrounged the crevices of our minivan for any coins our children might have tossed about? We needed to feed the meter you see, but there was nothing to be found but a Chuck E Cheese token. Don’t tell anyone, but we discovered that (at least in about 1995) Frederick, Maryland parking meters accepted Chuck E Cheese tokens. Yes, apparently I have mentioned this before.

The thing is, having gobs of coins on hand for meters just rarely happens in 2011, and at least municipalities are trying to adapt. I kind of like the system where you go to one of those “Pay Here” automatons, feed it a credit card, and take the receipt it spits out to place on your dashboard. At least I like it if the boxes aren’t all broken.

Yesterday we encountered something new. Well, at least new to me. We were headed into D.C. for Jeff’s neurology appointment, about to exhaust every one of the 105 minutes I’d allotted to get there. I decided not to even try the parking garage at Georgetown University Hospital. It fills by 10 am, but you don’t know until you’ve reached the 7th level below the river Styx. So I went for neighborhood parallel parking and--amazingly--nabbed one right away. But I had only 2 quarters. Then I noticed the ad, right on the meter: Call a certain number from your mobile phone and pay by credit card! The trouble was, I had 4 minutes until appointment time, and about 37 numbers to input in order to give the dial-a-robot the license plate number, my phone number, my credit card number, and probably a couple other vitals which have slipped my mind in the angst. And then, in attempting to light my iPhone screen back up as it helpfully tried to spare its battery power, I hit enough erroneous keys that the whole process defaulted me to a human operator who had to talk me through the entire process again. So that was fun.

But we got inside where Dr. Turner confirmed that Jeff’s version of Alzheimer’s is in fact Posterior Cortical Atrophy. And, after discerning that Jeff could not put his right thumb on his left ear, or do anything else that involved crossing his midline, the doc exacted reassurance from me that Jeff no longer drives. No, I said. That was an easy call I made several years ago. Now all the parking fun is mine and mine alone.

They had other skills.

Over the years, among the things I’ve noticed about my Gillespie ancestors of the last century or so is that they were crappy carpenters.

The evidence is in a goodly number of pieces of furniture which have been handed down through four or five generations. Today, it was a flourish of trim from the antique bed that used to be my grandmother’s, and before that belonged to my father’s uncle and so on. I don’t know which of my forebears attempted to fasten this chunk of wood, which is roughly the size of a cutting board (if a cutting board had two auxiliary pieces of trim fastened to it) back to the bed frame when it cracked clean off, but I can’t believe that even in 1890, or whenever, they didn’t have something better than a couple of half-penny nails and a messy squirt of Elmer’s glue.

To be fair, the fact that I am only compelled to re-fix it now--in 2011--suggests a repair that at least hung in there a bit, but visually the effort was pretty slipshod. Sometime this week or so, I will employ some wood glue and a long clamp, and see if we can’t do it right this time. Fortunately, I have a couple of genes from the Branches--my mother’s side of the family--where carpentry was heard of and skillfully practiced.

Now that I think of it, I’m pretty sure my grandmother and great-grandmother (Gillespie side) made a regular habit of knocking figurines and such off their perches, then cobbling the heads back on with too much glue. Come to think of it further, despite my slightly better grasp of joinery, I didn’t escape that legacy.

One of the wedding presents Jeff and I received in 1984 was a lamp with a capiz shell shade--one of those top heavy things, where the translucent shell panels are held together in a grid of flexible metal. Well, we each did our share and--all in all--we probably tripped over that thing’s electrical cord 5 times before finally declaring the lampshade an irretrievable loss. Also, I clearly remember the time in my teens that I walked by my Mom’s dining room table, snagged the veneer with the hammer loop on my overalls, and ripped off a 1” x 3” strip. I don’t remember who glued it back on, but I’m pretty sure it was not my grandmother Gillespie.

smushed things, large and small

It is day 12 of waiting for the body shop to complete reconstructive surgery on my car. 3 weeks ago, during a day of high winds, the resident tulip poplars hurled a few of their unwanted branches at the Earth, a sizable one of which smashed my hood, windshield and roof rack, in addition to creating several extra minor dings. (Its final flourish was to punch a hole in the garage door.) Luckily, as a no-fault event (unless you find accountability in anyone parking a car in a neighborhood where the trees are older than the oldest humans,) the repairs are covered by insurance, and I will suffer little out of pocket. Furthermore I have, for the time being, use of the SUV which used to belong to my dad, and which my mom has retained for purposes of traction during episodes of Maryland “wintry mix.”

So I don’t, frankly, have much to complain about, and today’s news photos of cars and houses swept into Godzilla-sized eddies in northeastern Japan do tend to put my bashed Subaru into perspective.

Still, I will be happy to have my car back. For one thing, I will get a break from buckling and unbuckling Jeff every time he takes the passenger seat, and reaching across to open the door for him when we stop. (The handle being trickily located under the armrest, and less intuitive than average. Not that intuition helps in our case.)

In the interest of gumming things up a little more, the wiper motor on Becca’s car decided now would be a good time to go wonky, so that we must now hope that the rain which seeped into the basement this week, and turned our yard into the swamp thing is done deluging for at least a few more days.

For now, I am sitting. I’ve got Japanese homework on my left, and The Power of Passive Investing by Richard Ferri on my right. A hefty cat who would prefer to be on my torso is settling for occupying my feet, and I’ve finished my latest Alzheimer blog for The Fisher Center. Plus, I had tea.

Oh, and as an extra bonus, Becca and I got in a trip to Whole Foods Market while Jeff accompanied his sister on a visit. Which means I got to skip this scenario I wrote up a couple days ago, which describes a typical visit to buy groceries:

We don’t move through crowds well.

For some reason, which I can’t quite piece together now, we ended up in Whole Foods on Saturday last week. Luckily only for an item or two, but--even for a couple targeted strikes--it’s not the best plan.

Lately I find myself, more often than not, with one hand grasping Jeff’s arm as we shop. It’s a bit like shopping while pushing an upright vacuum and a shopping cart. What happens if I let go is he stops. Well, some of the time. The other thing he’ll do is fixate on someone...almost anyone, really...and the minute that person veers off, Jeff is right behind him or her. So that’s why I hang on.

It poses a problem when aisles get tight. I don’t think other people understand why we have to be a double-wide trailer. Sometimes it’s not until you can no longer behave “normally” that you start to observe what normal behavior is. In crowds, it is (for one thing) this: A herd of humans with normal processing skills move, when necessary, like a school of fish. When they approach a constriction through which passing in a wider-than-single-file format would violate cultural space bubbles, they instinctively break formation and goosh through before re-grouping. Jeff can’t, so when a passage will only allow for one I find that I must thread him through first, while holding an elbow, then follow. It’s more awkward than it sounds.

Indeed. I’m going to study some vocab now, so I can beam encouragement toward the people of Japan, and think a couple thoughts that--if they’re tuned in telepathically--they might understand.

season of play

Back when I began spawning small humans, we purchased a playpen. (That's Jeff and Rachel, circa 1987.) Ahem...a playyard. Because that’s what manufacturers had begun calling them by the enlightened 1980s. (Well, maybe other people had trouble penning their small-fry, but I didn’t, so I didn’t ever keep with the times and break the habit of calling it a playpen.)

Not that my babies were ever content to while away more than a few minutes at a time in an enclosure full of the most tempting diversions you could scrounge up to buy yourself a moment, but I did employ the thing. And the whole notion popped back to mind when, recently, I suddenly visualized myself as, once again, the guardian of a playpen.

In the visual analogy that sprang uninvited into my cranium, my house is the playpen. My Soobie Outback is our stroller, and Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, or The Fresh Market (plus a half dozen recurring lunch venues) are our outings in the park.

I used to imagine that if I were imprisoned for some reason, I would find a way to take advantage of it. (this is, of course, assuming a low-intensity form of incarceration, in which I had access to books and other learning materials.) Essentially now this is what I am doing. I am determined to stay active, body and mind, but I think the playpen metaphor does a better job at capturing the nature of our day to day existence, apart from the fact that the toddler is winding down, not up.

Sometimes I think I should be feeling pretty mellow because--in many respects--this is a fairly easy job. We have not reached the levels of stress that dog many of my cohorts in caregiving whose AD spouses are incontinent and/or belligerent. (hoping we can skip the latter, the former will be inevitable, eventually.) We are comfortable and well-fed. I deal with deteriorating building infrastructure as it arises, and rarely go berserk from excessive demands.

I must confess though, that the obscure nature of the end-game, and the relative isolation of being “home with the kid” play a bit of havoc with my mood and motivation. People need to interact--it’s a sort of “self-winding” feature of humans. A certain level of requirement keeps us stepping, and when the demands sink to too quiet...too alone, even all the Rosetta Stone and elliptical trainers in the world lose a little of their sparkle.

In fairness, there is room for malcontentedness all around. Demanding careers can feel like indentured servitude, undoubtedly. My position is not hugely more undesirable than many of the other options, and I am a strong proponent of positivity.

I believe that I am, at present, somewhat fogged as a result of finding myself--caregiver-wise--in the narrow channel between relative mobility and the need for sitters.

Classically, we caregivers deploy whatever help resources we have access to reluctantly and late. Sooner more than later I will need to work out what kind of helper(s) I need and how to engage them. What I am afraid of is that I will have no idea what to do with myself outside of the playpen.