Yearly Archives: 2017

Family, Health, Weather +Climate

Bringing You to Up To Date on Shadow Mountain Doings

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Winter                                                                           Cold Moon

The cold, just a bit of thickness left. The knee. Stiff in the mornings now, but becoming more supple. P.T. this morning at 7:30 am. Work. Still not back, though soon, maybe even today. Sleep. Sigh. Episodic and mysterious.

This new knee has been a difficult thing. Much more difficult than I imagined. Still, the positive elements of it have begun to assert themselves. It will take time to get my muscles back to their pre-surgery, pre-arthritic knee level, but that’s o.k. I have time.

I see my internist, Lisa Gidday tomorrow. She asked me to come in. Didn’t say why. It’s always a little disconcerting when your physician asks to see you. I’ll find out soon.

Kate’s in a much cheerier place now that the endoscopy came back normal. If momma ain’t happy, then nobody’s happy. She has Bailer Patchworkers today, a sewing group that meets at the Bailey Public Library. Very close to the library, but across 285 to the south, is The Happy Camper. Kate’s sewing days often end in a drug run. I’m getting another couple packages of Cheeba Chews, Indica (a strain of M.J.).

Ways the divorce creates upset. Through Jen’s lawyer Jon has been told that he can’t go to the Pontiac St. house to get the remainder of his things until closing. The kicker with this is that Jen has moved out to a condominium and no longer resides there. The restraining order specifically mentions the house, however, and without her permission he can’t get in. Frustrating. To put it mildly.

We had some snow last night, about an inch, similar amounts expected over the next couple of days or so. The cold has gone. Winter is firmly resident now, but in that peculiar Colorado way of snow, then melt. We had chinooks, snow-eaters, yesterday. These are warm winds that roll down from the continental divide toward the Great Plains. We’re in the way. Gusts up to 90 mph. More on them in a later post.

 

Family, Health, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Weather +Climate

A Little Hegge

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Winter                                                                     Cold Moon

We had a somewhat snowy, somewhat cold introduction to 2017, but in the Colorado way, we will warm up into the high 40’s for today and tomorrow.

Organ recital: Knee. Up and down stairs, bend down (still creeky), little to no pain, swelling way down, incision looks good. Illness, a cold, receding. Outlook. Cheery, more energy this week. Ready for it.

We had a fire last night. Probably haven’t used the fireplace as much as we could. It was nice, a crackling fire and the new arrangement of furniture means we’ll use it more this year. Also, saw an article about hegge, pronounced hewgah, a style of Scandinavian comfort that seems to fit in with using the fireplace more. Maybe we’ll introduce it here.

Generally feeling up after a long grind. Knee surgery has a traumatic, car crash element to it with bone saws, drills, punches, inserted metal. Recovery from the trauma of the surgery takes the most time. Nerves have to awake. Muscles need to get prodded by the awakening nerves. The swelling, which creates a lot of the pain, takes a while to resorb. All this requires patience, narcotics and family members willing to put up with an invalid. Thankfully, most of this is in the past now.

Still wondering about the immediate future, what I’ll do when I pick up the keyboard again, the Latin dictionary, the Mesillat Yesharim. Not worried, just wondering.

About a year ago I began an effort to revamp my reading. I did the bibliotherapy bit with the lovely author from Australia. I thought long and hard. And it all resulted in…very little change. I’m still wanting to get some more direction, more purpose into my reading life. Not sure how that’s going to happen, but I want it to.

Since the Pontiac house goes on the market soon, that will reduce one major obstacle to both Jon and Jen literally moving on from the divorce. The divorce is already gradually receding as a part of our lives, even though its fallout will affect us for years to come.

 

Dogs, Family, Shadow Mountain

A Shadow Mountain New Year

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Winter                                                                         Cold Moon

Ruth lit the menorah at Beth Evergreen at a New Year’s Eve service. Kate and I renewed our vows. All three of us ended up in the Canyon Courier.

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Jon’s car, the day after New Years.

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St. Francis at well below zero

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Gertie on New Year’s Day

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Feelings, Health

Melancholy

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Winter                                                              Cold Moon

Melancholy. It has a purple, gauzy purple backlit with a soft light, feel. The color invades each crevice of the mind, casting a haze. Feelings seem to gravitate toward the haze, not upbeat, let’s get on with this feelings, but sad ones, distressed ones, doubtful ones. These feeling seem to detach themselves from their referents and attach themselves to the thoughts arising now.

Example. At least I’m up here writing, 5:20 a.m. That’s progress given the last 5 weeks. Yes. Yes. It’s progress, but to what end? Who cares that you write this blog? Do you even care? Look around. See all those books, all those ideas and thoughts? What have you contributed? Ever? Oh. Yes, I do see. Could be pointless, right? A shiver of distress ripples across the future work that comes to the surface. Why finish the book? Why learn Latin? Why keep at things, anyway?

Pointless floats up, out of the sentence to which it’s tethered and becomes a prompt. Pointless? Absurd. Absurd. Existentialism. Of course. It’s all, always pointless unless we bring in meaning like a turkey at Thanksgiving. And I do.

This is my life, the one I’ve constructed over the years, the one that fits my history, my skills, my dreams. Is it the only or the best life for me? God, who knows? Is it a life with meaning, with contributions to the world? Yes. Well. There you go.

That’s how melancholy can contain within itself the seeds of its own dissipation. The haze lifts and the usual light, a soft light still, plays over the mind. This light soothes, encourages, spotlights possibility instead of despair. A better light to throw on the matter.

 

 

Family, Health

Sneeze

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Winter                                                  Cold Moon

And then, just as the knee began to cooperate and be much less painful, I sneezed. That was yesterday. Last night and today I’m living with a full fledged cold. Kate and I both were dismayed.

Over the last week + I’ve gradually begun taking back daily chores: putting the dogs to bed, getting them up in the morning and feeding them, shoveling snow from the deck, that sort of thing. Now I’m backsliding on all that.

It’s been a long siege for my sweetie, punctuated in an ironic and awful way by the endoscopy on Tuesday. This cold is not forever, no, but it will be very inconvenient for 3-4 days. I’ll need to keep up my exercises, though I’m not sure whether I will today or not.

Looking forward to being clear headed, sometime next week, maybe? Till then, oh, wait a minute, where’s that Kleenex?

Colorado, Minnesota, Mountains, Shadow Mountain, Weather +Climate

Continuing the Theme of the Post Below

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Winter                                                                   Cold Moon

Well. -7 in the middle of the night here and in the early a.m. As we used to say in Minnesota, “It’s going to get chilly pretty soon.” Snowfall amounts lower than anticipated. This is the first time in the last two winters I can recall a storm underperforming here on Shadow Mountain. It does make it easier to get to p.t. at 7:30 a.m.

Coloradans are conditioned in odd ways, both related to snow and to cold. Our Mussar class canceled last night. If Minnesota canceled things under similar circumstances, not a lot would happen over the winter. The cold really gets to them, too. Single digits are down-coat or stay in the house and wait it out weather. -7! Burrow. Turn up the boiler. Find that damned electric blanket. The not insignificant exception to both are, of course, the many skiers who live here, including Jon who has his ski boots out by the door this morning. Snow day!

The reason for these attitudes is a prevailing belief, usually correct, that if it snows today, it will melt tomorrow. Or, if not then, the next day, thanks to the solar snow shovel. The cold is a bit more complicated. Here in the mountains if you’re in the sun, even on a cold day, you heat up pretty fast. If you move into the shade? Temps plummet. So, if the overall temperature is what you might find in the shade on a cold day, well, things have gotten pretty bad.

Don’t know whether we’ll get plowed or not. Here, before you go to the trouble of blowing or plowing a driveway, you look at the weather forecast. If, as in the next few days, temps will hit high forties, low fifties on sunny days, then clearing the snow is not a requirement. It does help, of course, and if my knee were done healing, I’d probably get out and clear this one.

Brother Mark’s road journey continues, speaking of temperatures. He left Bangkok a couple of days ago after his visa expired. He’s now in Phnom Penh, Cambodia where it’s 82 with 73% humidity.

Dogs, Family, Health, Third Phase, Weather +Climate

Snow. Falling.

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Winter                                                            Cold Moon

The snow has come. It started right on time at 9:30 am and continues now, at 5:30 pm. Not a lot of accumulation so far, but the forecast has the big shot coming tonight through tomorrow morning. After a quiet November and December, it’s fun to get the snow groove back. Here the weather forecasters gleefully predict the potential for lots of snow. Colorado is that sort of state.

The knee has calmed way down. I’m doing my exercises, three sets a day, and attending out patient p.t. twice a week. The whole pain, trauma, drug, rehab arc, while positive on the whole, has upset my body and refuses to let me come to a stable, yippee I’m better! place. Nausea, achiness, insomnia are hardly the four horsemen of the apocalypse but in the moment they can make a day miserable. This will pass.

I’ve also been a bit weepy today, crying (or about to) at silly stories on facebook, in the newspaper. You know the ones where the big, burly guys row out onto a fully iced lake, breaking the ice in front of them, to retrieve a dog hanging onto the edge of a hole into which he has slipped. Heroic things, compassionate acts, that sort of stuff.

I’m in that transitional phase between invalid and a returnee to normal life, neither one nor the other, pining for unremarkable days with routine moments, yet not far removed from agony and narcotics. Makes for an emotionally friable inner life. At least today.

Kate, I’m happy to say, has brightened since her normal endoscopy. She’s had a hell of a few months, especially December. She had me to care for, the  grandkids here for 8 wonderful, exhausting days and the threat of some dire disease lurking under her constant fatigue. It’s enough to throw even this steady Norwegian into a bit of a spin.

Gertie loves the snow. She goes outside and immediately plunges her face into the snow, pushing along with her nose as a plow. Then she hops up, shakes off and falls over on her back, sensuously rolling this way and that, legs in the air, squirming like an overturned bug. Kepler and Rigel like the snow, too, but they’re not that enthusiastic.