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freedom
November 19, 2011, 5:38 P.M.
I am a grass widow of sorts, since Spouse is house-slash-dog sitting for P&E, up in the Milwaukee 'burbs. They drove to Florida for Thanksgiving with their best friends who retired down there a few years ago.
But Spouse did drive down and pick me up this morning, to go and do our annual Thanksgiving shopping trip for the local food pantry/soup kitchen/homeless shelter. This is our fifteenth year, I think. It�s been so long I really don�t remember!
With money and time so tight, we were worried that we wouldn�t be able to do it this year, but I worked some overtime last week, so we got out the sale ads and the calculator and figured out that we could swing all the
ingredients for Thanksgiving dinner for about 20 people this year. And I'm so glad. I was honestly feeling that if I couldn't afford to do this anymore, I may as well be dead. Incomes and prices aren't what they used to be, goodness knows, but I always need to feel like I can afford to do something--or else why am I struggling so hard? Why not stop kicking, and just let myself go down for the third time?
So--anyway. We dashed off this morning to get that going. Stopped at CJ's and had coffee and a donut, then hit the Super-Fresh Market and the Aldi's in Waukegan, and the Wally's in Zion.
We were very efficient, and got all our stuff done in just a few hours. We not only got everything to make a complete Thanks-giving dinner for two families, and dropped it off at the food pantry--we also made our annual purchase of a �boy� toy and a �girl� toy and handed them over to the Marines for the Toys for Tots drive, and I even got my gift for the �Giving Tree� program we are doing at the office this year.
And in between, I managed to get one of my 12-page mega-letters done for Uncle. And made two pans of baked ziti--one for my noshing this week, and a second to be nommed later. Hey; if you're gonna take the trouble, might as well make enough to put a pan in the freezer, too.
All in all, what I would call a productive day.
It turned out my mom didn't have her sinus surgery after all--when I called Daddy on Wednesday to see how it had gone, he was at the auto auction buying cars! I was surprised, and asked what the heck was going on, and he was mad that Mom hadn't called me to say it was off.
I don't know if I mentioned before, but she has been very scared and nervous about this surgery, because the Ear, Nose and Throat specialist was very abrupt and bossy, and whenever Mom tried to ask him a question, he would just turn his back on her and leave the room. We all had been trying to tell her that she should get another opinion, or at least check with her lung doctor to see if this was safe to do.
Well, it seems she went to her regular doctor a couple weeks ago, and he told her the same thing she's been hearing from me and Spouse and my dad. What he told her is this: "If your doctor is an a-hole who doesn't
answer your questions, then you should FIRE HIM". The problem is, Mom puts SO MUCH faith in doctors, she thinks they are all saints with haloes. She never understands that sometimes they are just jerks. And she also has a hard time believing that when we all tell her that she shouldn't have the surgery, it is because we love her, and not because we are trying to hurt her. Because as far as she's concerned, we're all just trying to hurt her.
What I think is funny is that she never called to tell us that it was off, and she never mentioned it when we called her! I was talking to a good friend about it, and she wondered if maybe my mother just didn't to admit she was wrong. But I have a slightly different idea. Mom didn't want to admit that her DAUGHTER WAS RIGHT. After all, we went through this exact same thing back when she was getting jerked around by her knee surgeon. It took her pulmonologist to convince her that the orthopedic surgeon was jerking her around then, too.
I love my Mom very much, but sometimes she is a bit of a handful. Anyway, they are going to re-group after the first of the year, find another ENT, and this time, they are going to coordinate the surgery decision between her regular doctor, her pulmonologist, and the ENT.
I still haven't called her, though. I think I'm a little bit pissed. I was worked up in knots on Wednesday, worrying about the surgery I thought she was having.
I don't know what I'm going to do with the rest of my weekend...maybe I will start making my Christmas cookies and squirreling them away in the basement freezer, so I don't lose them all to Spouse's twin vices of gluttony and philanthropy. Every year, I bake cookies for the six weeks leading up to Christmas, only to find there are no cookies left come the 25th. What he hasn't eaten, he has shipped off to Uncle or Nephew.
And laundry, of course. Always, always the laundry.
Reading:"A Top-Floor Idyll" (1917), by George van Schaick, Illustrated by Chase Emerson. Also "Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions" (1916), by Mary Roberts Rinehart. And I did manage to finish "Nedra" (1906), by George Barr McCutcheon. meh.
Listening: A Fine Frenzy, Florence and the Machine, Elastica, Sleater-Kinney, Jimmy Eat World, Eve 6
Surfing: NeatoCoolville
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