carbonel

My last post was back in August, when I had a bit of a flood in the basement. That led in a roundabout way to the discovery that my water heater was failing. So now I have less money and a new water heater.

A couple of weeks ago, the temperature in the house dropped down to the mid-60s, so I turned on the heat. Nothing happened. (It turned out the reason I couldn't get warm at that temperature even with lots of clothing was that I had a 100.8 F fever. Food poisoning, not COVID-19, and it passed off in a day.) I arranged for a HomeSmart service call, and a guy came and replaced the thermocouple and got it working again. However, he also yellow-tagged it and recommended replacing it. So that's going to be another major expense when I have time to cope with it.

In mid-September, my mother (who lives in Skokie, IL) got her COVID booster shot, and had a bad reaction to it. It didn't improve over a couple of days. Then it turned out that the booster wasn't the problem. She'd injured her leg back in June, and what with impaired circulation from other issues, it hadn't healed. And she wasn't eating and got dehydrated. She spent ten days in the hospital, and two weeks at a rehab place, and came home in the second week in October. She spent a week at home, then had a relapse (probably infection in the leg), and spent a few days in the hospital, then almost three weeks in a long-term acute care facility. During all of this, I have been spending most of my time in Skokie, with a few stints back in Minneapolis to do necessary life and job maintenance stuff.

I'm back in Minneapolis until Wednesday. My mother is supposed to come home on Tuesday, and my aunt and uncle are there for her now (which is why I could come home). My mother really really wants to go down to Florida, where she rented a house before all this started. She may need surgery, though. Or she may decide that current quality of life is more important, and forgo that. I'll support whatever decision she makes, but I've been living with this uncertainty for the last couple of months, and it's really hard.

In the meantime, spinning is my main stress relief -- thus the icon. Someday I will get my life back, but now is not the time.

Also, my cat (Morwen), probably in revenge for an insufficiently clean litter box, has peed all over a bunch of stuff around but not in the bathroom where the litter box is kept. So that's a thing to deal with. I've cleaned out the current cat box, but discovered I was just about out of litter. Heading to PetSmart now.

At least I got an extra hour today to deal with all of this.