...and Try Again

My mood seems to have lifted. When I woke up today the sun was shining and my mind very nearly so. Makes me wonder how much the barometer had to do with my pissy mood. It wouldn't be the first time I'd noticed a correlation between my mood and a storm moving through.

Well, whatever it was, I'm grateful. It made it possible for me to accomplish several things and be a true help to my sister today. Her son had an orthodontist appointment in Portland OR and she needed to do their Costco shopping afterward. The combined outing was six hours and she needed me to tend to our Mom's needs and monitor the beans she had started in the crock pot. I managed this plus more. I also loaded the breakfast and lunch dishes into the dishwasher, added the soup ingredients to the beans when the time came, mixed the cornbread and baked it and pulled it out of the hot oven and served Mom dinner at six on the dot as she is used to. I swear her stomach has a timer.

Not only all of that but while Mom was napping I also broke out the bags containing my sewing projects and supplies that I went to all the trouble of packing and bringing with me and sorted them and thus was able to start stitching on my dolphin cross stitch project for awhile after dinner.

I did it all without any disasters. No kicking into the dishwasher as I did on New Year's Eve. No catching the oven mitts on fire as I did on my honeymoon. Well, it was the dishtowel I used as a hot pad that I caught on fire in our honeymoon hotel room but it was an oven mitt I caught on fire the first time Mom allowed me to pull a pan of cookies out of the oven when I was about twelve. I've been afraid of the oven every since--long before visual impairment compounded the anxiety. Yes, did I ever mention that I'm the daughter of a home economics teacher?



I have yet to take a decent picture of this project with my camera. This is in two parts because I scanned it when I was here before Xmas 2007 a couple weeks before I got my digital camera. I could only get half of it on the scanner bed at once and couldn't close the lid and even though I used something else to block the light there was still leakage of light that makes it look faded. The last time I worked on this must have been the last time I was here because when I unpacked the bag it was in, I found some items my sister gave me when I was here last year.

Speaking of the camera. I still haven't uploaded to the computer the pictures I took of Mount Jumble, the sorting and packing mess I made the night before I left Phoenix. Since then I've added many more pics I've intended to add to some of the previous posts. Like the front porch where I use my mini-tramp. The dishwasher door I kicked into. The clip-on reading glasses I misplaced New Year's eve and spent the last five hours of 2008 searching for and which my nephew found in the dishwasher when he unloaded it the following evening after my sister had spent another two hours that afternoon re-searching the same territory I had with her better eyes.

If my mood stays stable getting those pictures prepared for posting will be high on my to do list. Along with getting started on scanning the family pictures into my computer--a project I began on my last visit here which has been held up this visit partly by the need to keep my leg elevated as much as possible until just the last few days and partly by not having a good place to set up the project. We think we have that figured out now. Once I start scanning them again, I'll probably post some as I did last time.

Tomorrow afternoon I'm going to be here alone with Mom for several hours again as my sister and her son go to a homeschooling event. I hope it goes as well.