with liberty and justice for ALL

The view from my window

OUR APARTMENT – MY WINDOW – FACES THE FLAG

I spend ALL day EVERY day I’m home with a giant American flag in my sights.

Today I was honored to lean on my windowsill to recite the Pledge of Allegiance for the Veteran’s Day ceremony at our retirement complex.

I literally had the best seat in the house, as the flag was raised.

I grew up in Mexico

and this was not a regular occasion for me. It was thrilling, every year, to attend the Fourth of July celebration at the American School (we didn’t attend it), as a Girl Guide of Mexico (North District – the English speaking Guides), and to parade in our uniforms with all the other expats in organizations such as The Knights of Columbus and the Boy Scouts.

But, even though I probably did this when I was still in California (up to first grade, IIRC), I don’t remember doing so. I DO remember doing air raid drills against the inner walls of my classroom, each row pushing our desks to the wall, and climbing under (these were Cold War years, and it might have been useless against a real atomic bomb, but it was something to do.

I wonder what the surviving grownups would have done with classes full of small children, but that’s neither here nor there.

This is our first year in the new community in our permanent apartment

Our forever home. We moved here in February. And will stay until we need higher levels of care, and even that will be in this same building.

And I have had the privilege of remembering, and of saying out loud that I believe this is for ALL Americans. Every single one of them.

NOT just the privileged few who have more money than they could ever use, and seem determined to acquire more every day.

I am a baby boomer

My parents were married during WWII, and carefully postponed having their five daughters until after Daddy was demobilized and finished his engineering degree on the GI Bill.

I have been proud to be an American, all the time I lived in Mexico, and since I returned. I thought we stood for something worth having.

Even with the present difficulties, I hope the Founding Fathers built in enough resilience that we can get back on track.

I need to go read more about how the Nation survived Andrew Jackson, and Nixon, and look for the signs of hope.

I intend to be in Independent Living here, with many people in their late nineties, for at least another thirty years.

This was a good start.

I seem stubbornly optimistic, always returning to what should be done. For all.

Happy Veterans Day!

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While marking time do something different

SOMETIMES ALL YOU CAN DO IS WASTE TIME

It drives me batty, but since I need to have 5 bars on my brain to write with it, there are many times when we are in a holding pattern.

This year, at our community’s Bizarre Bazaar, we acquired furniture, and this is the armchair I selected from what was available (otherwise we would have had to go shopping) when the rocker/recliner we bought back in 1986 when we acquired our first child had decided not to stay put in the reclining position, and I got tired of watching TV with my arms over my head to keep my center of gravity far enough back to stay lying down.

We paid the princely sum of $85, and had it delivered to the apartment, and plunked in front of the TV.

We knew from examining it in the days before the bazaar that it had an electric control in the pocket, but nothing else.

Hidden treasures at the bazaar

We didn’t know we were acquiring a Golden Maxicomfort Power Lift & Recline Chair, retail value new at almost two grand.

It had been very gently used, almost not used at all. No signs of wear.

I picked it because, in the cramped display out in the front courtyard, it was comfortable. And that was all we could tell.

The spousal unit, after figuring out we had something different, went online and snagged the manual (the electrical engineering certification for the owner is only a suggestion).

It comes with TWO – count ’em – power blocks and two controls. The silly thing has BATTERY BACKUP – in case you have a power failure while seated, the battery has just enough charge to lift you ONCE.

It will do any position from horizontal with your feet higher than your heart to gently standing you up to get you out of the chair.

Never in my wildest dreams would I go out and spend that much money on a chair for myself.

Kids?

This is the kind of chair the children buy for dear old dad.

It has a Zero Gravity-like position – everything gently supported.

It has what they call a Trendelenburg position, with your feet higher than your head and heart, and which stretches your lumbar region.

If I’m uncomfortable, I push a button and shift position a bit.

More?

One of these days I need to get me a decent DESK chair, as I spend most of my days sitting at the computer, trying to write something.

But meanwhile, you can imagine me stretched out for a couple of hours in the evenings watching The Handmaid’s Tale or Mom or Humans.

Still fiddling with the dosage of the low-dose naltrexone, and waiting for the brain fog to clear.

And managed to get several doctor appointments successfully navigated (but leaving the house for them is one of the reasons I have no energy for writing fiction), plus show Maggie off at the U. California Davis hospital in Sacramento (NOT Davis), to admiring glances from medical personnel. They have VERY long corridors in that hospital, and it would have been an even more exhausting morning had I had to navigate them with a walker.

So that’s it.

I’m at the writing position, internet blocked, several hours EVERY day, and some times we make a bit of progress, but the bars haven’t been there much.

It’s temporary, I’m sure, or I’d be panicked. I have this feeling that when the meds settle in there will be a big burst of productivity. So I’m hanging in there for now.

Even the tone of this post feels as if there were a damper on the brain.

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Oh, and some totally unknown person bought a paper copy of Pride’s Children PURGATORY, which always surprises me.

Hope they will leave a review some day so I find out who it is.

I do love the interior formatting of the paper version – because the ebook is limited to fonts the reader can manipulate easily. Check it out in the Look Inside feature at Amazon.

And pray. I’m soldiering on with this LDN experiment, but it’s not guaranteed to clear the brain fog. I will probably have to get super strict with the low-carb diet. And stop slipping up.

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