On Saturday, my sister fixed shredded wheats for breakfast. Turns out I’m not much of a fan. From there, we headed out to meet up with my parents and go to visit my grandma in her nursing home. I think we were a little nervous as to what condition we’d find her in. Grandma was in her room and needed help getting into her chair. She looked and acted better than we had expected but not as good as we could have hoped. We wheeled her out to the courtyard and talked to her for a bit. She could follow some of the conversations, but had trouble starting her own. Mom and Dad helped her get up an walk a little bit – and that hit my sister and I pretty hard that she was struggling so much and that she tired out so easily. We brought her chair back over to her and helped her back inside. It was getting close to lunch time at that point so we took her to the dining room. We gave grandma a hug before we left and she said to me “You look so much like Wade” – we laughed a little at that, but it was still disconcerting.
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I took Friday off to go to Illinois for my cousin’s wedding. My sister had to work a half-day, so I was going to meet up with her at her house at 12:30 and we’d go from there. I had directions and did pretty well – until I missed a critical turn. I ended up way far out of my way and had to back track. I was looking for a South street and found the North version instead. It quickly turned into a dead end – and I’ve never been so happy to fail since it meant that a quick turn around would finally put me on the right track.
We’ve got a project here at work with a launch deadline of Monday – and the folks supplying the information didn’t get anything to us until yesterday afternoon. I’m going to be out of the office on Friday, so things got pretty rough. I worked from home last night to get caught up with what they did send and I’ve got more to do today. We won’t be at 100% by Monday, but we’ll be at least ready to launch. Makes me cranky – but not much I can do about it.
I worked on a couple of projects this weekend, both origami. A few years ago, I made a shadow box with a multi-layer set of Mette rings – in orange and yellow with a blue background – that looked like the sun. I gave this to my grandmother for christmas and she really liked it. About a year ago, my aunt asked if I would make one for her and I said I would – but I was a bit hesitant about it since I don’t like to duplicate gifts like that. Plus, not long after she asked, my grandmother moved in with her and my uncle and took the sun shadow box with her. I figured that would be the end of it, but then I saw some sun flower scrapbook paper and figured that the sunflowers, done in the same style of origami, would be an excellent replacement. I cut down the paper so I could fit 4 of them in the shadow box – since she has 4 kids – and finished it up this morning. Photos to follow.
After a really rough morning on Friday, I turned it around with a swim. The pool was configured with the lanes “longways” – twice as long as I’m used to doing – but I stuck it out and did a mile. Three crawl, three backstroke, three breaststroke – then repeat. When I got done, I still felt great – like I could just keep going. But I had a meeting and I needed to get back.
By the end of today, I will have had 11 meetings this week. It’s also the second week of classes, which is a busy time anyway. Throw in family and room-mate stress, shake well, and I have turned into one really agitated dude. So, I took myself for a walk yesterday to try and calm down and clear my head. I also got a chipotle burrito – which helped a little. But the bugs started to bother me, my knee started to hurt, and I began to run out of daylight.
I went to a football game of 6-7 year olds for my FRM’s youngest son. He was there, along with his wife (and her parents) and their new daughter. Also there was his former girlfriend, her mom and brother. And his older sons – and the oldest’s wife and son. And then his grandmother and me. The game itself wasn’t great to watch – very disorganized flag football – but seeing the whole extended crew together again was good.
I drove down to my parents for the weekend – it took the usual time to make the drive, and as usual, it felt like forever. My dad’s hand had swelled up as the result of an infection. He was on some antibiotics and some meds for the pain and was somewhat subdued for his birthday weekend.
My fortune cookie had no fortune today. It was empty.
This is the first week of classes and there are always a few freshmen that get lost on campus. I always try to help when asked, but this year I got stopped by a guy that was “looking for the place where he could enroll for fall semester”. This, on the first day of classes for the fall semester. So, I gave him directions to the admissions building and wished him luck. He was going to need it.