Mom & Me Five Archive

...which is good, because today, which is supposed to be our second snow day, is sunny. Cold, true, but sunny. Clear. Bright. I have the blinds drawn. We got absolutely no snow. Just that sleet I mentioned. What a bust, considering that, otherwise, we had a wonderful snow day.
    Yesterday was Egg Nog/Dried Tart Cherry/Toasted Almond Bread day. I baked each of two loaves separately, in case I wanted to change anything from the first to the second batter. Turns out I didn't. I'm not sure if I'm going to publish this recipe. The only changes that my version incorporates are the addition of the cherries and toasted almonds. Otherwise, it's not my recipe. Probably, I should target it on the web. Hope I can find it [I printed it out some years ago].
    It was also Musical Day, Mom's decision. When I asked her what she wanted to do while she was supervising the cooking, she said, "Oh, something I can sing to, something I can dance to." Mary Poppins [the band arrangements and theme follow through are irresistible] and The Sound of Music [we saw this one recently so I'm a little tired of it, but I do like watching Christopher Plummer] provided nicely. She napped between the two. Late in the evening, we started a third, one that I like, too (not that I don't like the others, I just don't like to watch them as much as Mom does), Victor/Victoria, but, fifty-three minutes into it, Mom faded. I was done baking by that time and had settled down on the floor next to her. It was after midnight. Clearly, bedtime. She made me promise to remind her about watching the movie again today, so I think, today, it will be Pumpkin/Cranberry/Pecan and Molasses Spice Bread. Maybe I can squeeze the Honey Bear Brownies in. They're quick and easy. Then, our baking supplies will be just high enough to serve the minimal requirements of everyday cooking.

    Ah, she was just up, went to the bathroom. She looked bleary so I asked if she was planning on "getting all the way up".
    She dropped her head and shook it. "I'm headed back in."
    I checked her bed, changed two of four pieces of bedding, disinfected the urine spot (even though healthy urine is sterile, I'm never sure how "healthy" Mom's urine is). I told her what time it is and asked her how long she wanted to sleep.
    "Oh, a couple of hours."
    "Okay, that'll be around 1300. Your light went out at 0100 this morning. Good choice."
    She beamed, comically.
    I'm not sure whether she'll take it all the way through to 1300. She seemed pretty alert, for being headed back to bed. Oh, yeah, better take out the breakfast meat to thaw. Hold on...

...there. Back to yesterday. So, I multi-tasked with furious satisfaction all day; baking, supervising the supervisor, keeping up with the movies, working on the alternate label index here (still long publishing periods, despite having been halved)...I was so impressive I managed to multi-task my way into burning the tuna/jalapeno jack melts I made for dinner last night.
    In case you're wondering, we haven't tried the Egg Nog loaves, yet. As usual, I've seen to it that we've observed The Time of Mellowing. I was planning on trying it for breakfast but I tantalized Mom with the promise of earlier sweet, quick bread if she stayed up, specifically the Egg Nog Bread, and she said, "Is that the stuff we had yesterday?"
    No, that was the banana bread. So, we'll probably have banana bread for breakfast.

    Anyway, this time through, the labeling and indexing is easy and doesn't require reading anymore rigorous than lightly scanning posts for the markers I inserted when I was cataloguing for The Mythical Table of Contents. I'm pleased with the categories and applications I devised, so I'm using those as label names in Blogger. The page set up is slightly different, but it almost achieves the objectives of my initial Table of Contents plan.
    Although I'm not required to read the material word for word, this time, I'm so familiar with it that scanning usually enlightens me to the gist of any particular passage. I'm thinking that I might have been somewhat less inhibited "back then", a couple of years before some of my visitors made themselves known and I became conscious of the identities of some of them. I'm not sorry about the inhibition, as conversations develop between posts and people that were intriguing, sometimes inspiring. But, lately, since I've been isolating myself, as, it appears, have others, well, one of my visitors commented that my posts seemed somehow different. I can't remember the exact words, but they went to both style and substance. It was a derogation, simply a mention. At the time this was mentioned, I'd begun to label the posts here with the old method. Although I wasn't conscious of having noticed differences in my approach to journaling over the years, I'm not surprised to hear that they exist. I also wasn't, on that day, consciously aware of differences between what I am writing and what I wrote three years ago. But, I realized almost immediately to what my reader was alluding. I have been writing differently in the past couple of weeks. I've been writing like I used to. Weird. Interesting.

    It's Saturday, but it seems like Sunday. Think I'll put together another loaf of quick bread and bake it while I decide whether to do more multi-task labeling here.
    Later.

...there have been a few unsettlingly harsh displays of unfettered sun, but those seem to have fallen away. Yes, the advisory went into effect early. Wish the sky had heard about it. I've caught the radar. The precipitation is happening around Prescott but not on us. Prescott Proper (not including Prescott Valley and some of the surrouding plain towns; they're all getting snow, or, at least, heavy sleet, right now) is in the bottom of a bowl made by the Bradshaw mountains. Mom and I life on the western side of the bowl, just below the rim. It is not uncommon for a mini-inversion to develop (especially during the week, considering all the construction dust around here) as the storms falter and drop their loads on the other side of the bowl. Since it's an isolated montain inversion, though, a strong storm can kick it out of its ass.
    Hmmm. I see that three p.m. today is to feature full snows. I can see that. The "chances" are now 60% today, 40% tonight, 30% tomorrow morning. Then, at least five days of cold sun.
    Maybe I'll snatch a nap with a cat and let it be interrupted by Mom's natural rhythm today. I'd love to awaken to snow. I was expecting to this morning and was disappointed.
    Later.

...I've found my definitive, signature recipe for banana bread, and it's here. If you have ever appreciated banana bread, above and beyond bananas, this is the recipe for which you've been looking.
    Oops. Didn't mean to publish quite so quickly. I must be drunk on the wine in the banana bread. Anyway, it's damned good. Easy. And, at 6,000' elevation, fool proof, it seems.
    This is a small triumph for me because banana bread and our family go way back, to Guam, when the born into family was in it's prime and lived in a house with a banana swamp on the west side. I have fond memories of MCS's banana bread, which I don't think I've ever duplicated. I think all of us sisters have made it. I'm not sure, but I think MCS made the original loaf. That remains one of my primary fond food memories, but it was made in the era when no one thought to use whole wheat flour or to get rid of the milk (or water, or whatever) and increase the bananas. Brown sugar was a little more popular, primarily because Toll House Cookies called for it, but no one would have considered using only brown sugar, back then.
    I was familiar with a sweetening method used by more traditional cooks, though, indigenous to supplies of sugar cane, I imagine of which Guam was: Getting a piece of cane, stripping off the hull and standing (or floating, depending on the size) the stripped cane in heated liquid to sweeten it, the length of time determined by the amount of sweetness desired.
    I never used this method. I'm sure MCS also didn't, although she probably knows about it, too. It was a popular way for sweetening home made teriyaki marinade.
    So, anyway, I've had two pieces of this bread. Robust banana flavor, to say the least. My mother will probably swoon over it and forget to eat her bacon and egg until last. I will, of course, toast and butter (margarine) her piece and sprinkle Vietnamese Cinnamon (the so called "red hot" kind) on her.

    I've begun a new label index, and labeling method, as it turns out, for this journal. It coalesces the labeling scheme I had cooked up over the last couple of years for the journals and the new labeling technique available to me through Blogger No Longer Beta. I like the results of combining the two. The third category, and even the second, for that matter, might be better served with dynamically updated, drop down menus, but that's where I got into trouble, before, so I'm taking neither the long nor the short, but the medium length route home on this one. Setting it up was a little on the tedious side, so I'll probably not put any more entries in for some hours, possibly even a day or so. I think, looking at it and using it, especially the third column in the table, will explain its mechanics.
    I will, of course, eventually, merge the two label indexes into one. It should be pretty automatic, but it may be awhile in the future. We'll see how it goes.

    Not sure when I'm going to awaken Mom. No snow, yet. It's cold and gray out there, cool where I am in the living room, and cozy, cozy warm where Mom is, right now. Where would you rather be?
    No snow, yet, although we had a short bout of sleet, driven by an unforgiving wind, so the ground and dead or hibernating fauna are now prepared to receive sticking snow. The clouds are looming. The wind is becoming confused, but is generally driving in from the west. I haven't seen the radar for awhile. I recall that the "Blowing Snow Advisory" mentioned much earlier this morning will take effect at noon today. Yet a half hour.
    Hmmm. Well, I'm sure it will be a baking day. I'm not sure whether I'll wait or start without Mom. We'll see. I haven't yet peeked in on her, gauged her sleeping self this morning.
    I think I'll head over and fill in stats and stuff for yesterday. If there is any change in our predicted weather, you know you'll know.
    Later.

    This time, each time the storm is forecast, it gets more, rather than less, precipitous. I just missed the latest update, but I'm sure there'll be one before I sign off. Last I noticed, sometime this afternoon, snow was predicted to start around midnight. That didn't happen, although the wind has been raising hell out there for several hours.
    I think I'll wait until tomorrow to report the stats. I managed to get her up before 1300, today. Very little resistance. She remained up until midnight, light out at 0030. Average nap, about an hour.
    I've decided to use up the rest of the holiday baking supplies, or at least as many as I can, over the next few days. I started baking today with a loaf of banana bread, featuring bananas that had begun to turn winey. That should be interesting bread.
    Much of the baking will be quick breads that can be sliced and frozen, but I also bought apples for an apple pie and I promised my mother to back a batch of some sort of cookie and some sort of brownie. I don't think we'll have a problem with either.
    Ah. Okay. Nope, it's clear, although I see a little green floating down in the rotation. Okay...yeah, it's supposed to snow all day, starting prior to 0600. Yes! Predicted high: 36. Chances of precip: 40%-70%-40%. Nothing yet about expected inches, but we'll certainly get the Christmas Card effect. Perfect for baking. I'll probably exist in tights and my favorite lined flannel shirt over the next few days. As well, despite the hour at which I'm retiring, I'll bet I'm up early...and will probably make a brave attempt to go with as little sleep as possible over the next few days, maybe catching cat naps here and there.
    Later.

...over at The Dailies. The immediately previous link will take you to the latest entry, although that one hasn't much information.
    I've been fooling around with a different Label Index layout over there, especially since the labeling is so straighforward because almost everything over there is fact. Labeling journaled prose is only a little easier than labeling poetry...which may as well be labeled word by word. Anyway, I came up with a fairly good layout. Some of the entries may change, a little, but only in order to approximate a hard copy book index. Because there is so much hard information in that journal, the labeling is actually useful, and helpful. I gotta tell ya, I still can't believe I did that, and during a pretty intense care time. Although, well, not that this isn't intense, it's just intense in different ways and I'm marginally used to it.
    So, anyway, yesterday was much more extended than it appeared at the stat journal. It was just very slow. I'm trying to fit in a couple of rented movies that I know Mom would like to see, but she's up and down and up and down. At the last "up", which occurred at 0045 this morning, I even encouraged her to come out and we'd watch a "short" movie, because she seemed alert. I had in mind Water, which I've been salivating to see and I think it would entrance my mother, as many foreign films do, especially those featuring Asiatic cultures. So, I'm not anxious to see it without my mother.
    The other film is a sort of docu-tainment thing, featuring Howard Zinn talking about current political developments, augmented with interviews with others. I'm expecting that she'll enjoy this, too, especially since she read A People's History of the United States [so did I], although I'm sure she wouldn't recall it, now. I think with clipped, sometimes obtuse political banter, such as in The West Wing or such docu-tainments as we have here, today, awaiting us, it isn't that she catches a lot or retains a lot. I think it is the exercise of listening closely and knowing that the person to whom you're listening is being shrewd and you can understand that person. She may not remember these episodes, may not retain anything from them, but I think they provide a kind of exercise that does a subconscious lot to keep her sense of herself firm and reliable.

    I'm not sure when I'll wake her up, today. I'm cruising. We've got a low, only clouds and pressure dropping and increased humidity, going through followed by another somewhat more ferocious (I hope) low that is supposed to bring snow tonight through Friday. I'm expecting to arouse Mom no later than 1400, but she was up until 0200 this morning, and days like this are not uncommon, especially after a protracted period of sleep jag days, like she's had.
    I became worried, again, and attempted to discuss with her, by way of confession, really, whether she'd like me to look into more active, stimulating experiences and circumstances for her. In the back of my mind I was thinking "Dementia Living Facility". In the forefront I was thinking "Adult Day Care Center". As I asked her whether she'd be interested in any of these things I also confused the issue(s) with questions I gave her no time to answer like, "Are you bored, Mom," and "Do you want me to push you more?" and "Do you want to be up more?" and "Do you feel as though you need a reason to be up more?"
    Finally, my mother threw up her mental hands and said, "Goodness, girl, what are you thinking?!? We can hardly manage all the activity that besets us now!"
    Of course, a lot of it depends on how she's feeling, slow or quickened, but, either way, I don't tend to consider myself a failure and feel guilty about days, weeks, even, when she is spontaneously active. Only, of course, when she is spontaneously lethargic...and she thinks her life is almost too busy to handle! What a woman.
    Later.

...my inattention, of late. I've been oblivious. What can I say. The more I miss, the more overwhelming it seems to catch up. So, I turn my attention to other things.
    Sorry. Truly.

...click here. I seem to be more intimate in that journal than here, lately. Not sure how long that will last.
    I'm actually having some fun, somber fun, that is, since I am always aware that I indulge in my own interests and activities at an imagined slight to my mother and her life. Sometimes, though, I just can't help it. I've been organizing my new web effort. How far I'll get with it remains to be seen. Lately, say, within the last couple of months or so, I've been regularly scanning news trackers for articles about old age, all aspects of it. I'll run across stories, have thoughts, then forget to post them in the main journal. Anyway, I thought, if I organized the effort of responding to them in a companion journal, my responsiveness might become easier and more satisfying. I've been ploughing through international news trackers and sources, lately. I've just about decided I'll limit the entries to one story per day. I'll pick one that sparks my highest interest. I'm sure I won't read every story that comes through; the Google tracker, alone, sends me long lists a couple of times a day on stories mentioning "elder" and "old age". I've since subscribed to a few others. So far, just trying to figure out how to keep up with those, chose an article and write my reactions in one day, every day, and attend to everything else is a challenge. But, you know, we'll see how it goes. The website it set up but I'm not "publicizing" it yet because there is nothing there but a few test messages. Handsome layout, though. It will, for the time being, be a Blogspot blog, so I've been using (and familiarizing myself) with the new skins/widget concept of blog design.
    I think The Little Girl (our senior cat) is protesting me letting Mom sleep in so long. So, maybe I'd better consider getting Mom up a little earlier today.
    Anyway, just thought I'd check in.
    Later.

...which I am beginning to think of as "The Lost Day", although we were both fully present, just offline much of the time, see here, which is linked to the above mentioned full description. What a day. Lots of sleep. Little food, few medications, both of us lolling about...
    On days like this, I cannot help but think how much I may be "hurting" my mother by being so inner directed that I will let her sleep her fill, let her laze around, do this for days, which I call my "vacation"...at least I expect this to affect her, weaken her, and my "fears" (although it would be hard to say that I am "afraid" of this) are usually realized. Sometimes she bounces back. Sometimes she doesn't. I'm sure my mother considered yesterday a wonderful day...bracketed, as it was, by sleep and leisure and delectable stuff on TV. And, yet, maybe my powers of observation were over zealous but, as she shuffled to the bathroom, was I noticing that she was even less sure of herself than before?
    I don't know. It is at times like these, when I force a self-vacation upon us, that I think about caregiving in terms of resources...the amount of social resources needed to allow old age, how, in our current economic system, there appears to be little "pay back" for this increased need of resources, all of us are becoming tired of and cynical about the character pay-offs, and, here I am, during a period in which I am bereft, again, for some days, of the resources needed to keep my mother awake, let alone moving; I've not been encouraging the sociality of the season, I've been giving in to her lethargy because of my need for some personal distance and self-attention...and how this need for replenishment of my resources implies, at this time, that her resource, me, will be diminished for awhile.
    I realized, yesterday, that I think she knows this. I think she also accepts this, because I think her preference, now, really, is for as little movement as possible, as much alertness as possible, granting still, the ability to indulge in what has become her Amazingly Active Ancient Sleep...so real it is now a cornerstone of her reality (and, I suppose, mine, too).
    So, I am thinking about this, now, because I, too, am an "Elderly Failure to Thrive" sinner, and I see that the problem isn't mostly personal.
    I am not, by the way, checking others' sites with any regularity. I expect to have to catch up sometime soon. I am, as I mention at the above attached link, reading something that I want to read, an introductory book to economics. It's riveting. It's pulling me away from my usual reading allocations.
    Well, hmmm...it's just after noon, 1207, to be exact.
    Not sure what I'll do next. I'm in vacation mode, still...muffled, but continuing...
    ...later.