Sunday, April 27
Apr. 28th, 2025 12:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gottawonderToday I am grateful for:
A nice, lazy start to the day.
It's good that my Sweetie can have mornings to himself on the weekend.
I usually scroll through Facebook when I eat breakfast, and I saw on our family page that Mom is back in the hospital. Her surgical incision is infected, and it sounds like they had to reopen it to clean it out, and that she is in a lot of pain.
This also happened a few days ago, and NO ONE TOLD ME.
There's nothing more to be done. She's being cared for now. She's not in the right state of mind for visitors or phone calls.
It bothers me a lot that she has to be in pain, because with her dementia she can't recall why she hurts, or that she's being treated. She doesn't know where she is, or that she had surgery. She just hurts.
So, because there is nothing to be done, and nothing to be gained by worrying or dwelling on it, I did my best to get on with my day.
Once we got going, we did accomplish a few things.
We took the recycling out to the bin, and emptied the compost bin. My Sweetie did the dishes. I put away some laundry and started more.
We did chores, and raked up more old hay accumulation from the front of the pony/goat pen (the last stuff that was buried in ice finally melted).
Then we tackled the fairly big job of cleaning and putting away the "very cold weather pens" that we have for the goats in the garage. Basically pens made of plywood panels. They get pretty built up with bedding and old hay, and in the spring we take the pens apart and haul all the hay and bedding out to the garden to mulch a walking path.
It makes the garage seem huge to have it out of there.
Then we sweep as much of the rest of the garage as we can, as the mess gets everywhere.
Then my Sweetie put the purple martin house back together, as we await new tenants.
I figured out a way to make the "street lamps" that worked REALLY WELL. I had some old steel weights in the garden shed, and they have a hole in the middle for putting onto a bar. Well, I looked at them, and figured that they might work as a base for these lamps.
We had some long wooden handles from various mops and brooms, as we sometimes reuse them. Those handles fit perfectly into the holes in the weights.
So, the black plastic pipes we bought would slide over the vertical wooden handles, and then the garden lights have a pole that fit inside the plastic pipe. Then we used black electrical tape to keep the garden lights in place.
They look great, and the weights keep it from tipping over.
Yay! I thought this would be much worse to figure out.
We took the "street lamps" to the barn with us after that, and tried them out. R was there and looked at them, and SHE came up with one more useful idea...to kind of dig a little hole and put the weight in it, then bury the weight with sand. This hides the weights.
One last thing we're considering, is to use a black plastic plant pot to make the base look more like a real lamp post.
Then I worked with River, and he was still kind of pokey today even though his breathing was good. He did well with the lamp posts and was unconcerned about them. We practiced weaving around them and circling them and so on, and he did well with that.
We did an excellent "stand and toss".
R also gave me a ribbon and a prize (a YELO neck rope) from YELO (Youth Equestrian Liberty Organization, the group we partner with and show with) for winning the high point competitor in my age group in 2024. That means I got the most points overall, from scoring reasonably well in the competitions, but also entering a lot of classes.
It took a while for the ribbon/prizes to get here, but that's okay. It's a pretty cool thing to win.
I was pretty pleased to get those lamp posts figured out, and they really look good in the arena. They FUNCTION well too, not tippy.
We went home and hung out with Wonder and Dandy for a while. We brought Ursula over to meet Wonder, and it was pretty good for an introduction. Wonder makes a lot of noise and there's a bit of posturing, but within moments she was grooming Ursula, who still has a lot of winter hair. It was actually quite sweet.
I had hesitated to bring Ursula over, because she has a bum shoulder and I worried that it might make her a target if Wonder wanted to be a bully. We watched the whole time to make sure that Wonder was going to be nice with her.
We did scrape some of the accumulation of manure in Wonder's pen into piles, we'll have to start hauling it out of there.
Then we put Ursula and Dandy back with the goats, but I feel like Ursula could spend more time with Wonder now too. The stimulation might be good for her.
Then we came in, my Sweetie had a bath, and I made supper. Too late for him to watch something with me, but I might watch something on my own.
A nice, lazy start to the day.
It's good that my Sweetie can have mornings to himself on the weekend.
I usually scroll through Facebook when I eat breakfast, and I saw on our family page that Mom is back in the hospital. Her surgical incision is infected, and it sounds like they had to reopen it to clean it out, and that she is in a lot of pain.
This also happened a few days ago, and NO ONE TOLD ME.
There's nothing more to be done. She's being cared for now. She's not in the right state of mind for visitors or phone calls.
It bothers me a lot that she has to be in pain, because with her dementia she can't recall why she hurts, or that she's being treated. She doesn't know where she is, or that she had surgery. She just hurts.
So, because there is nothing to be done, and nothing to be gained by worrying or dwelling on it, I did my best to get on with my day.
Once we got going, we did accomplish a few things.
We took the recycling out to the bin, and emptied the compost bin. My Sweetie did the dishes. I put away some laundry and started more.
We did chores, and raked up more old hay accumulation from the front of the pony/goat pen (the last stuff that was buried in ice finally melted).
Then we tackled the fairly big job of cleaning and putting away the "very cold weather pens" that we have for the goats in the garage. Basically pens made of plywood panels. They get pretty built up with bedding and old hay, and in the spring we take the pens apart and haul all the hay and bedding out to the garden to mulch a walking path.
It makes the garage seem huge to have it out of there.
Then we sweep as much of the rest of the garage as we can, as the mess gets everywhere.
Then my Sweetie put the purple martin house back together, as we await new tenants.
I figured out a way to make the "street lamps" that worked REALLY WELL. I had some old steel weights in the garden shed, and they have a hole in the middle for putting onto a bar. Well, I looked at them, and figured that they might work as a base for these lamps.
We had some long wooden handles from various mops and brooms, as we sometimes reuse them. Those handles fit perfectly into the holes in the weights.
So, the black plastic pipes we bought would slide over the vertical wooden handles, and then the garden lights have a pole that fit inside the plastic pipe. Then we used black electrical tape to keep the garden lights in place.
They look great, and the weights keep it from tipping over.
Yay! I thought this would be much worse to figure out.
We took the "street lamps" to the barn with us after that, and tried them out. R was there and looked at them, and SHE came up with one more useful idea...to kind of dig a little hole and put the weight in it, then bury the weight with sand. This hides the weights.
One last thing we're considering, is to use a black plastic plant pot to make the base look more like a real lamp post.
Then I worked with River, and he was still kind of pokey today even though his breathing was good. He did well with the lamp posts and was unconcerned about them. We practiced weaving around them and circling them and so on, and he did well with that.
We did an excellent "stand and toss".
R also gave me a ribbon and a prize (a YELO neck rope) from YELO (Youth Equestrian Liberty Organization, the group we partner with and show with) for winning the high point competitor in my age group in 2024. That means I got the most points overall, from scoring reasonably well in the competitions, but also entering a lot of classes.
It took a while for the ribbon/prizes to get here, but that's okay. It's a pretty cool thing to win.
I was pretty pleased to get those lamp posts figured out, and they really look good in the arena. They FUNCTION well too, not tippy.
We went home and hung out with Wonder and Dandy for a while. We brought Ursula over to meet Wonder, and it was pretty good for an introduction. Wonder makes a lot of noise and there's a bit of posturing, but within moments she was grooming Ursula, who still has a lot of winter hair. It was actually quite sweet.
I had hesitated to bring Ursula over, because she has a bum shoulder and I worried that it might make her a target if Wonder wanted to be a bully. We watched the whole time to make sure that Wonder was going to be nice with her.
We did scrape some of the accumulation of manure in Wonder's pen into piles, we'll have to start hauling it out of there.
Then we put Ursula and Dandy back with the goats, but I feel like Ursula could spend more time with Wonder now too. The stimulation might be good for her.
Then we came in, my Sweetie had a bath, and I made supper. Too late for him to watch something with me, but I might watch something on my own.
