Upstairs, Downstairs

Baby 'possum in the Lanai this morning. Kept trying to climb the glass doors. It must know it lives "up" somewhere but not how to get back there again. I banged on the doors to no effect. It finally crawled under the couch out there to hide form the dawn and rest up during the day. I'll wait until my brother is up and then we can tip the couch over.

Substitute Security Blanket

I mentioned Mom's need to always wear makeup even though she hardly ever leaves the house or has visitors. She has another Old Lady idiosyncrasy: she won't go anywhere without her handbag. (It's a handbag, not a purse. It probably has two cubic feet of available volume and big old straps for hauling stuff around.) She takes it with her from her bedroom to the living room, where it sits on the couch next to her. She hangs it from the arm of her walker or balances it on the seat whenever she gets up. She carries it back to her bedroom at the end of the day. She hardly ever opens it. There is nothing in there she needs over the normal course of a day. (The only time it is at all useful is when we visit the doctors since she carries her wallet with her IDs and medical cards in it.)

She just needs to know that it's there.

. . . And The Livin' Is Easy

Hard to believe it's only the end of April. Feels like high summer has been with us for awhile already. We had the air conditioning on after it hit 90 in the house. Mom likes it that way (she wears her sweater for anything under 80 or if a breeze is blowing) but my brother nearly passed out so he turned it on (I was out at the time).

The tomatoes are coming along fine. In fact we picked a few of the cherry ones a couple of days ago. The peppers are looking good, too. No idea what the onions are up to.

The exterminators never came for the opossums but we haven't heard or seen them since so maybe they took the hint.

Defective Universal Makeup Stick

Last night, as I went to give Mom her final eye drops of the day, I noticed the left side of her face and neck contained huge dark red splotches, as if she'd fallen and hit something which I didn't think was possible since she'd been sitting right there on the couch since dinner. Nevertheless, since she does get frequent hematomas (hematomae?) in her extremities due to ancient weak and leaky blood vessels, my first reaction was "Holy cow! What happened to you?"

When she smiled up at me and said, "What do you mean?" I took a closer look.

Mom has the old lady habit of always wearing some sort of makeup. She had taken her lipstick and applied it down her left cheek and then continued down the left side of her neck. Reminded me of the movie "Airplane" when Ted talks about his drinking problem. When I described it to her she smiled and said, "I didn't think I missed my lips by that much."

"Missed your lips! You didn't even find your face!"

Even better: When I got close to apply the eye drops I noticed she'd drawn a solid line right across both eyes
as if the lipstick was eyeliner or mascara.

I made her promise to wash her face before going to bed and she threw the lipstick away, claiming it was defective. This morning she was pretty well cleaned up with just residual redness on her neck although she did miss a large spot on her temple and her eyes look like she's suffering from severe allergies.

The Upstairs Neighbors, Part 2

My brother called around and animal control doesn't deal with evictions and the professional exterminators wanted $400-$800 for the job, so he thinks he's decided to do it himself except now he thinks he might wait awhile because if they've already had their litter he doesn't want little orphan 'possums (technically not orphaned but abandoned since he intends to transport the putative parents) dying up there and stinking up the house.

Translation: He's really a big softy when it comes to critters of any kind.

The Upstairs Neighbors

My brother spent all last night battling around the house with two very large opossums that have taken over the attic/crawl space. He tried plugging up their apparent entryway over the garage only to find they had another on the other side of the house. He fought one of them with a broom in the lanai. (He had the broom, not the opossum.) So, now, after three hours sleep he's calling city animal control to see if they can help, if not he'll buy a trap and hope they're dumb enough to fall for it (the rat wasn't) so he can release them up north.

He's pretty sure they're the critters that stole the tomatoes.

Kind of makes me wonder--if the opossums are about--why the young cats keep coming into the lanai to visit. I think the 'possum could take one of them apart with ease.

Jello Brand Dreams

Had another vivid dream last night. I walked out of a building and into a sort of plaza next door, kind of narrow with another building on the right and a back wall. The whole place seemed to be enlosed although I don't recall seeing a ceiling or roof. There was a large stuffed leather couch along the left wall with another, indistinct couch or large piece of furniture beside it further back. The floor was large pink/tan tile. I was holding a decoratively carved block, a little more than a foot on each side and thinking how to turn it into office space when I suddenly realized I could stack large blocks on top of each other to make an office building consisting of one cubical office per floor with an elevator running up the side except I would need an outside fire escape on the other side of the building and that would be ugly since it would cover the entire wall.

Then Garrison Keillor started singing "Winter Wonderland" and I woke up.

No more dulce de leche pudding before bed.

Status Report

I must say Mom is doing quite well recently. She has a lot of energy (almost too much. She wants to help out around the house and gets frustrated when she can't (or when we object)). Sometimes, she can't sleep and gets up in the middle of the night, thinking it's morning but, when I point out that it's still dark, she either goes back to bed or sits up for an hour or two reading. She's been reading a lot and she also has a book of large print find-the-word puzzles which she's been working on with some success. The current puzzle is African capital cities and the answers can be found forward, backward, vertical up and down, and diagonal up and down which I think is a fair challenge for a soon-to-be-91 year old. (After all, when she was a kid there were only three or four African national capitals: Cairo(?), Addis Ababa, Johannesburg and Monrovia.)

She hasn't had any difficulty finding the right words to communicate either, recently, and has been pretty good at remembering which day it is (with a margin of error of one either way) although despite remembering on Saturday that it was Saturday and tomorrow would be Sunday and therefore French toast day when she woke early on Sunday she forgot it was Sunday and fixed herself a bowl of cereal which didn't stop her from having French toast when I reminded her it was Sunday.

She knows who everyone is (although she still thinks someone else must be around helping out) and watches the news every night and understands what's happening in Japan and Libya.

In other news, something/someone ate two of the nearly ripe plum tomatoes last night and my brother is pissed.

Coconuts

So, the wind has been howling for going on four days now. It started with the huge thunder cell that sat directly overhead for most of Sunday night and continued more or less consistently through last night when another thunder storm blew through. This one stayed offshore and most of the lightning was north and west of us. It rained just enough to activate the special palm fertilizer I spread under the coconut that dominates the front yard. It's been looking rather poorly this past winter, dropping a lot of fronds and seeming to not grow new ones.

Meanwhile the wind has knocked over the smaller potted plants, mostly geraniums, and a trash can full of aluminum soda cans waiting to be recycled.