Wednesday Check In

Writing:

This week was a battle to get my 1750 words, despite being ahead of the game last week. Lots of stress this week, as things went from bad to worse with my mom. Last Wednesday, she was moved from the assisted living facility (which does not accept Title 19) to her new nursing home. She immediately began to have fits of violence, putting both herself and her new roommate in danger. The nursing home had no choice but to send her to the E.R. and she was then brought to a specialized geriatric hospital where they are giving her counseling and adjusting her medications, as they think the balance was off.

Now her meds have been adjusted and she is doing better, much more like her old self. I made the decision, along with my dad’s friends and caregivers, that we would keep this information from my dad for the moment. He is visiting his BIL, who is dying of liver cancer, and does not need the stress of this information, particularly when there is nothing he can do to help (but he will stress over being helpless, too). It is likely that we will tell him soon, mainly because he will keep asking after my mom and he’ll ask specifics, like “how is she adjusting to the new place” and such. I am also worried that he’ll call the new place to check on her and find out she’s not there. So, since she’s doing better now, we’ll probably tell him what happened. He’ll still worry about things he can’t control, as that’s his way, but there’s nothing I can do about that.

At any rate, between the extra stress of Mom’s situation, once more having to lie to a parent, making sure Dad got his tickets and got to the airport okay (making arrangements, as I live 1200 miles away from my folks), being on the phone nearly constantly with the new hospital since I wanted to be put as the contact person to keep Dad in the dark for now, and all of my usual life’s craziness, writing has been forced to the back seat. I have to keep my phone on and by my side constantly, even overnight, lest the hospital needs to get hold of me in an emergency, so there is no “turn off the phone and disappear from the world while I bang out a thousand words” for me right now. Soon.

I am writing this part (and finished the last 100 words I needed for this week’s count) at 6:30 in the morning, on a morning when my teen is home sick with a cough he’s been fighting for a week, so we’ll be off to the clinic later, too. I have to be by my phone and computer until noon, as it’s order day in my sales business and I will have last minute orders from customers, as well as from new reps that are in my group.

It’s no wonder I can’t seem to get even the 250/day done when my pockets of time are under constant threat of being invaded by phone calls. And I have always subscribed to the theory that people are both psychic and mean—I’ll have no phone calls for hours on end while I run errands that need to be run or do chores around the house. The moment I sit down to write, that’s when the phone rings. So I will be very glad when Mom is settled and I am able to resume a bit of normalcy—not just for me, but for her and my dad, too. They need to find their new normal, without living with each other. We have two more hurdles to go—one when Mom returns to the nursing home and the second when she finds out that is her new permanent home.

Long story short (too late!), I did manage to make the 1750 for the week, but just barely. This week, I have to really buckle down and work on the contest entries. I have just a little over a week to finish and return them. Today’s agenda includes transcribing the notes for the two I’ve already judged and getting them back to the judges so they don’t get them all en masse, from me, at least. I also want to finish the third one and get that transcribed and returned and get started on the fourth. Oh, they’re 25 pages each, by the way, not 20. Whoops! Yes, this is on top of the other stuff and trying to get in 250 words of writing to count toward next week’s goal.

At any rate, your prompt and vocab word.

Vocab: execrable: extremely bad or unpleasant.

Prompt: You live in paradise. What could be so bad?

Weight:

This week has been a struggle with weight, too. Staying on track amidst all that stress when I’m dying to stress eat and binge on pasta and bread has been difficult. Exercising when all I want to do is curl up in a ball and pretend the world doesn’t exist has also been a struggle. On the up side, my monthly has traipsed out the door for the time being.

This week did see me hit two new lows and that is a first since all of this drama with my parents kicked into high gear at the end of February. This despite skipping exercise one day and loading up on bread one evening.

I did try to eat a little better most days, spacing my meals out and eating things (and being filled up by them) that I did not think I would normally. For example, one morning, I had granola and fruit for breakfast. Another day, I had peanut butter on a toasted wheat thin roll with cantaloupe for breakfast. Lunch was just a tuna sandwich on one of the thin wheat rolls (not so unusual, just unusual that it would fill me up), another day, it was just a baked sweet potato with homemade cinnamon butter—the unusual thing were the smaller amount of butter that I used and the fact that I ate the skin, too. Last night’s dinner was steamed fish and broccoli, along with brown rice; I don’t usually eat that much broccoli (at least a good cup, cup and a half) and I don’t usually eat it without it dripping in cheese sauce.

I had no snack last night, as I was so exhausted that I took a nap at 7:00 and didn’t wake up until nearly 9:00. Naturally, there were four important messages on my phone and I had to return phone calls until after 9:30. See? Psychic and mean. I watched a little TV to bring my brain back to calm (comatose, whatever—why mince words?), then tried to write a bit, but my brain was too far gone by that point and my body was crying out to go back to sleep. I think I’m fighting a bit of this same cold that’s been plaguing the teen.

Well, to finish, here is my check-in for the day. A new low--third one this week! See you all soon!