Recently Thrown Out

I was not the one who started saving this elementary school workbook.  My parents did that.

 

 

It may have been in one of the boxes that my mother brought down a few years before she died "to get things sorted out."  I kept it for years because the comment that my dad had written on it was just so like him.  He took our education seriously and deliberately showed that he was attending to what we learned. 

 

Fun with Dick and Jane would have been about first grade.  I know I was less than excited, at that age, to sit while he reviewed my work.  Fortunately, he did not keep the in depth review process in place for very long.  I don't remember drawing my own comment on it, but I approve of the idea. 



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I threw this one away awhile ago, but just ran across the picture on my computer.

That's the pictures of my knee before and after the ortho surgeon cleaned it up.  The feathering is typical of osteoarthritis.  In addition, I got a high tibial osteotomy, which I affectionately refer to as a bone wedgie. 

 

 

I suspect that it was G, Mom's second husband that collected the coins from other countries.  I still haven't done anything with them.  They sit on my desk and would get in the way if I didn't have them covered with other stuff that's getting in my way. 

Yes, I feel a bit guilty about that.  Counting by the picture, I've been successful with two out of three items.  I refuse to count by the coin. 

 

Maybe Should Have Mentioned

In between my Mother being diagnosed with cancer in March and dying in May, I had knee replacement surgery in April.  The knee had completely gone, prior to that.  Some days I could get by with a cane and some days it was crutches.  Mom didn't want me to put off the surgery waiting to see how things would go.  Then things went faster than any of us expected.

Three things have kept me from feeling hideously guilty about going ahead with the surgery.  Two of Mom's friends, DeeDee and Paula, formed a wonderful support group for her, and my Youngest Son more or less went to live with Mom, except for during my actual surgery and the first weeks back from the hospital.  Then his Devoted Girlfriend took over driving me around while he went back.  He was the one who took her to the emergency room when she started to be unresponsive and, weeks later, he was the one who was with her when she died.  In beween, he ran all her errands and kept her in contact with the rest of us with an iPad and Facetime.  She loved that. 

It's been about three weeks, now, since the pain has gone.  It's odd not to have it there after all these years.  It's started building up around 1999, give or take a year.  So I have my mobility back, but I need to build up the muscles that weren't used, not just after the surgery, but for months before.  It's embarrassing the little it takes to make different muscles sore.  And if I make the mistake of thinking that I'm a regular, fit person, I end up pulling something. 

I'm still behind on a lot of things and it would be nice to put in some straight-ahead hours catching up.  But I have to potter instead.  I always think both that I'm not doing enough, that I'm using the weak muscles as an excuse to be lazy, AND that I'm doing too much, that I'm risking racking myself up so that I'll have to take time off.  It's a very busy sort of laziness. 

Time to let the dogs out.  Whatever else happens, the day is always punctuated with looking after the dogs.