Carrie Bartkowiak v. 5.0

I said it wouldn’t be this long, didn’t I? Argh.

Let’s see. Mike got his hair cut again. Donated it to Locks of Love.

Brendon turned 8, Alex turned 4.

This Saturday I’m taking Kelsey to his first full-blown concert, to see Linkin Park. He’s so excited. I swear we’ve taken him to a concert before, but I think he was a wee lil’ thing and if I can’t remember it, I’m sure he can’t either.

We now have a new daily houseguest. Papaw Jess, my grandfather, who is 87. Mom and Dad brought him back up here from his home in Tennessee after going down to visit and seeing how much he really needed someone to be with him full-time. He’s living with them, and on the way to work they bring him over here to be with us. You want to see someone light up? Just watching his face when he sees the boys stumble sleepily down the hall in the morning, see him sitting in the living room, and squeal and RUN to cover him with hugs is a joy. These are his great-grandchildren. Anyhoo, more on that later.

Mike finally got his promotion that he’s been promised since October of last year.

Mom and Dad bought a new (to them) Pontiac Vibe to save some gas while going back and forth to work each day. Today’s gas prices at our local Farm Fresh stores are to the right. Better than some places in the country, at least.

Hrmm, can’t think of anything else new at the moment.

Papaw Jess
Want a stark and sudden change to your routine? Add in taking care of your grandfather every day. =)
It’s been such a blessing to have him with us. The boys are loving it, and he seems to really enjoy being around them, even if they’re just snuggled up to him while making him endure the latest episode of Clifford, the Big Red Dog.

Jess was living by himself at his house in Tennessee. His long-time neighbor and good friend was looking after him. Well, the neighbor called Mom and told her it was time for her to visit, the house needed cleaning up and Jess wasn’t doing too good. So Mom and Dad went down there to find the place a real mess, and ‘not doing too good’ was an understatement. His short-term memory is drifting, and he can’t remember simple things like whether he’s eaten today or whether he’s taken a bath. Hence, he wasn’t eating or bathing well. He wasn’t taking care of the household work; like laundry, or picking up, etc. His day mainly went like so:
Jess would wake up, get dressed, and sit on the porch to wait for his neighbor.
The neighbor would drive over, and he and Jess would go to the local Hardee’s for breakfast. Every day, Jess would get one cup of coffee and two sausage and egg biscuits. He’d eat one there at Hardee’s, and bring the other one home.
The neighbor would go home.
Jess would put the second sandwich on the stove to eat for lunch, and go back out onto the porch to sit and stare at his front yard.
And sit. And sit. Until it was time for him to go to bed.
He’d go get undressed, go to bed, and the next day everything would repeat exactly as above.

Thing is, he usually didn’t eat the 2nd sandwich, because he’d simply forget to or think he’d already eaten it. The neighbor would find it sitting on the stove the next morning and toss it in the trash. So the ONLY thing he was eating each day was one nasty, greasy, fast food breakfast sandwich. You can imagine what this did to his system and his body. He’d lost a lot of weight, was very weak and could hardly stand up from a sitting position, and his bowels… well, let’s just say that you’re not very “regular” when that’s all you have to eat.

Put together fast-food-induced bowel problems and barely being able to stand up, much less walk, and you can imagine what his clothes and floor through the house were like. Mom threw out most of is clothes and bought him new ones. She spent a week down there cleaning the carpets and the rest of the house. Dad was having to help Jess get in and out of the bathtub, and after taking a bath he’d be so worn out and tired he couldn’t even get himself dressed.

So, Mom and Dad brought Jess home to live with them. During the day while they’re at work, he stays with me and the boys.
I am confident that with lots of TLC and some decent, healthy food his strength will return (it seems to be working). Thankfully his body has already responded well so far to having regular food again and the bowel problem seems to have abated for now. I am hoping that with normal interaction and brain activity, his memory will perk back up. He’s a living example of “if you don’t use it, you lose it”, and hopefully getting those neurons firing again will stave off any further degeneration. It might not, but we can always hope. Sitting on his front porch gave him no stimulation at all; he lives in a quiet old Tennessee town in an old established neighborhood and no cars or people went by his house.

Well it’s sure different here, and it’s sure a lot for him to adjust to so quickly. Which isn’t good, but there’s no other option other than a nursing home (simple word: no). So far he’s having his good days where he seems to be adjusting fine, and one “bad day” so far where he was really upset for most of the day because he was just feeling down about himself. Talking about how he couldn’t go out and work, how he could barely get around, and how he “couldn’t contribute to the world anymore”. =(
I tried to talk to him about how we loved having him here, and how much fun the boys were having with him, and that seemed to perk him up. Later he was talking with the boys about how maybe they could all go fishing. (He used to LOVE to fish and went anytime he could.)

My worries are that he’s going to get tired of just hanging out with us and be bored out of his skull. He doesn’t hear well at all, you have to really talk LOUD for him to understand you (yes, he has hearing aids). He also doesn’t read very well; he went to school through the 3rd grade and then stopped to work on the farm. So letting him watch television means having it blasting the neighbors out, and he’s not interested in books. I’ve been looking into gadgets that help folks with hearing aids hear the tv clearly, and will probably end up getting one, although everything I’ve found so far each have just as many “fantastic, can’t live without it” reviews as they do “what a piece of junk, don’t buy it” reviews. (Any suggestions are welcome!) I’m planning on taking him out and around town to see the sights once he’s a bit stronger, and we’ll start walking around the block with him too probably next week.

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So some of my friends contacted me with a slight chuckle and informed me they’d been to see my site… and could tell I hadn’t updated it since I hit level 70 on my World of Warcraft character.

Ack.

Well, ya know, running a raiding guild is rather like herding cats - it takes a lot of time and patience. Recently though I gave that up, moved my raiding toon into a separate guild where other folks can deal with the headaches, and have found I’m enjoying the game a lot more without the administrative headaches. Yes, I still have the guild my friends and I made, but we’ve let go of the pressures of raiding and now just have our friends hanging out in there. Almost zero administration. It’s been nice. I’ve also gotten to see lots of content in the game I’d never have seen with my own guild (at least, not before the expansion came out), so that’s been cool too.

Kelsey turned 10 just a couple of weeks ago. Ten years! Where did they go? He wasalmost asexcited about being “double digits”as he was aboutgetting gifts. We spent the evening over at Grandma and Papap’s and had sloppy joes for dinner - his choice.

Mike’s been thinking about getting a new job, since the promotion they’ve been promising him keeps getting put off until their current project is finished - and it keeps getting delayed indefinitely. Our health insurance costs jumped up so much at the first of the year that there’s no way, without the promotion, we’d be able to pay it and still have money for the house, utility bills, and groceries. Luckily we were able to get a decent interest rate on a refinance, bringing our mortgage payment down and locking us in for a 30-year fixed. No more worrying about payments bouncing around (we were on an ARM). We still wish we had more options on the insurance front, though. We rarely visit the doctor and when we do, we end up paying through the nose between co-pay and the leftover “uncovered” cost; what we’re paying each week dwarfs the amount that the company spends on our entire family of 5 each year. Don’t get me into a rant about how our money is going to pay for illegal immigrants’ health care and frivilous medical lawsuits, and how our family could benefit from having that money back. I might not shut up.

On the decluttering front, I have to admit that the fantastic headway I’ve made has been swallowed up over time, and now you can’t tell anything was ever decluttered. No, we haven’t bought more stuff (are you kidding? With whose money?), and the only thing we’ve “adopted” from someone else is the kitchen island my parents were getting rid of. (It’s sitting in our library waiting for things to get moved around so it can be used.) The christmas stuff certainly helped (too much incoming stuff, again).

No, actually, come to think of it, there was more “adopted” stuff. This woman that Mike and my parents work with regularly cleans out her childrens’ closets, and sends everything through my mother to Mike, to us. We’ve told my Mom not to accept it anymore, yet she does. I’ve told Mike that if it gets put into his car at work, he should drive straight over to the dumpster in the parking lot and can it, yet he doesn’t. SoI’vehad to deal withboxes and boxes of clothes suddenly showing up on my couch when I get up in the morning (Mike sneaks it in from the car before he leaves for work). I have no excuse there - *I* should walk it out to the trash right when I see it; but usually I think to myself “well, I’ll see if there’s something in there that they could really use”. Before I know it, the entire box has been dumped all over the living room by my 3yr old (who wants to play in the box), kicked down the hall, and we end up not knowing what’s new and what isn’t. As a result, we are absolutely *buried* in clothes again.

Oh, and when I went through my big decluttering spree, Mike looked at all of the room in the closet and decided that there was room there for him to pull out his old, bagged-clothes. You know, the ones you bag up and say “If I don’t wear what’s in here in the next 6 months, I’ll get rid of them”? Well, he refuses to get rid of them. If I put them in the trash, he digs them out and adds them to the laundry pile. He doesn’t need them, doesn’t wear them… yet he absolutely REFUSES to get rid of them. Yeah, those clothes are in our closet now, and once again you can’t even move the clothes on his side and they’re pushing over into my side.

So, like I said… we’re buried in clothes, literally. I can’t keep up with them. It’s time for another”give it to Goodwill” session.Ugh.

My high school class is gearing up for our 20th reunion this fall. Still haven’t decided if I’m going. There’s only 3 or 4 people I’d be interested in seeing - the rest I’d be content to just look at pictures, if I even bothered doing that. I honestly don’t care what these people have done with their lives. They made mine hell… why would I want to spend money and travel to watch them all beingcatty and fake to each other? Here’s a hint: if you ever find yourself saying “wow, I haven’t seen you in 17 years!”… there’s probably a good reason for that.

On the personal front, I finally acquiesced to getting rid of all of my dental problems in one fell swoop. Yep - they’re gone. I traded daily pain in my mouth for a daily pain in my ass. Take care of your teeth, folks. I can’t say it enough. On the other hand, I’ve got a quick and easy way to fix America’s obesity problem: yank all of their teeth. Eating is a completely different story when you have to actually go get your teeth, wash and brush them off, put goo on them, press them in place for 30 seconds, and then hope they’ll actually chew what you’re going to eat rather than just squeeze it to death. That’s not even counting the time it takes to cut everything into miniscule pieces that you can swallow whole just in case the dentures can’t chew it… if you even bother to eat at all when considering the whole process you’ll have to go through just to be *able* to eat.America will be the thinnest nation again in just 3 short months.And think of all the money the insurance companies will save on dental bills! Maybe our payments can go down. Win-win.

Political view at the moment: disgusted.
Hope that anon-socialist candidate will end up being even close to the front-runner: no hope at all.
Interest in the election activities? None, other than educational value to show the kids the election process, and even that has taken a back seat as we can’t watch a news show reporting on the process that isn’t filled with what comes out of the end of a bull. “Let’s gush over this candidate that we like and completely ignore these other candidates until they pull out of the race! Giving people all of the information they need to make an informed decision? Good god, no - they might vote for that other guy!” Spare me.

Bah, enough ranting for now. I’m still here, the family is still here, we’re surviving… just not poking our heads out too much. It’s depressing out there and only looks like it’s going to get worse. On a good note, I’m looking forward to spring and being able to plant again.

Hopefully I’ll check in more often than every six months.

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We’ll be leaving this Saturday (Sept. 1st, for archival’s sake) to head out west and take in the sights. Mom and Dad bought a big motor home after checking out the prices on renting one (egads), and we’ll be towing our van behind it. We’ll be gone for 3 entire weeks - it’s kinda mind-boggling. Wish us luck on the 7 of us, plus a cat and a dog, still being sane after living together in a big motor home for that amount of time.

This will be the first “real” family vacation we’ve ever taken - I’ve gone off for a week for business twice, once taking Mike with me. The boys have gone on week-long trips with their grandparents before, but we’ve never done it together. Needless to say, there’s quite a bit of both anticipation and nervousness about the prospect of it. 3 weeks is a long time to be in a camper together. Mike is really looking forward to all the time away from work, but I’ve got a feeling he’s going to be having withdrawal pains and won’t know what to do with himself after a few days with all of that time on his hands. I don’t even think he’s considered what he’s going to take along to keep himself occupied/entertained. I’ll have to talk to him about that tonight.

In the next few days we’ve got a lot of packing to do, cleaning the house up, and generally getting everything ready to go. Wish us luck!

What do you think? I wanna know! Please leave a comment :)
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