Today, for Mother's Day, I get to have Steve back home. He had an out-patient kidney biopsy scheduled Thursday morning at University Hospital. I dropped him off at 7:30 am (no family / visitors allowed in the building) expecting to pick him up sometime early afternoon after he recovered from a 9:30 procedure. Well, routine pre-op blood work showed dangerously high calcium levels (yes - calcium, NOT potassium) and he had to be admitted so they could hook him up to an IV of fluid and give him some lasix (a diuretic) and they wanted to keep him overnight! Calcium levels on Friday were such that he had the procedure but again, he had to stay in the hospital Friday night. Same with Saturday. And, until about two hours ago, we thought he would be staying today!!! Happily, I get to leave in a minute to bring him home. We will not have the biopsy results until tomorrow and, for the unforeseen future, he can have no dairy in his diet.
The first part of the week was fairly normal. James has been working here all week - except Wednesday when it was very rainy. He power washed the house, he worked on our gutters which were not draining properly due to the foundation settling, and he has been repairing our house siding to get ready for painting. My projects this week were to buy exterior paint and I started washing windows. I naively thought I could wash all of them yesterday but they turned out to be more involved so I will have to finish this coming week. Our house windows are old - double hung - made of wood - the storm window tabs are mostly broken off so installing/removing them requires two needle-nose plyers and patience, and the screens do not come out that I can tell. Bottom line - they do not clean easily. One has to contort the arms to reach behind to get to all the glass. And, for all those reasons, I have never really washed the windows in this house the entire twenty-four years we've lived here!!! Until yesterday. And, it was as tedious and frustrating as I knew it would be. But, when we sell this house, it will be with clean windows, by golly.
After Steve got stuck in the hospital, I just sort of threw routine out the window. I watched movies and I finished tackling a big pile of Days For Girls sewing. I didn't actually sew, I just re-assembled a box of cut fabric rectangles that had been prepared to make shields - but had been done wrong. There were about 250 of these assembled "kits" waiting to be sewn and I discovered the hard way that they were not right. I sewed about 20 of them a month ago and it was "oops - time to pick out the stitching and try again". It took a few days and a few movies but all the kits are now properly put together and whoever ends up sewing them will have no problems. The movies were "The Sound of Music" which Steve and I both watched early in the week, and, on my own, I saw "Sense and Sensibility" (the BBC version), both "Emma" movies (BBC and Gweneth Paltrow), and "Crazy Rich Asians".
Last night, my friend Elizabeth came over for dinner. We trade off going to each other's homes for dinner each month and it was our turn. She had never had pork steak so that was on the menu. She also had some damaged fuel canisters that are used with faux fire places that she needed to burn off and we have a fire pit so that was on the agenda as well as eating. Wet conditions and rain had postponed this get-together a couple of times already so, even though Steve, the grill-meister, was not going to be present, I decided to forge on and have our meal last night as planned. Happily, I managed to not char the pork, and, it was a lovely night to burn old fuel canisters, even if it was surprisingly chilly.
When we re-planted our front strip to grass last fall, I transplanted these azaleas closer to the house and, happily, they lived and they are blooming.
Finally, my dessert from last week that was to die for. Gluten-free Krusteas chocolate cake mix with a chocolate pudding filling between the layers and my mothers chocolate fudge icing. The peppermint was leftover from Christmas.
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