Been on a ride

It seems like about a year ago that I went under the knife at an outpatient surgery center to realign the bones I broke in my wrist last June. The calendar tells me it was a week ago today!

I thought it would hurt like crazy to cut my wrist, saw some bones, stuff some synthetic bone material in place, and install a T-shaped metal plate. Well, it did hurt, but I soon found that a couple of Aleve once or twice a day took care of that. My only problem was living like a zombie for several days, apparently while the anesthesia was slowly leaving my body.

My sweet niece Lora was in the surgery center while I was being cut and sawed, but the doctor (Clark Robinson MD) wrote on my chart “No observation.” When the nurse explained that this was delicate surgery and the doctor didn’t want to run any chance of a distraction, we both accepted that. He’s the only orthopod surgeon at Mercy North who insists on that rule, but we respected him for it.

I stayed at Janet and Ben Qualls’ place in Nampa Tuesday and Wednesday nights, and for the next two days my eyes were shut most of the time. Even when I was enjoying a delightful meal with them (pizza one night), I was half asleep, with my eyes closed.

Friday I’ll see him again and be given a nice, short, arm cast that won’t be nearly so clumsy as the wrapped-up splint I’m wearing now.

Not scared yet

Maybe I should be, but the wrist surgery scheduled for Tuesday hasn’t made me fearful as yet. I look at the procedure as a giant inconvenience until my wrist heals and, I hope, I’ll be able to key for more than ten or fifteen minutes at a time without pain.

Meanwhile it looks like several beautiful days are in store for southwest Idaho. I should go walking every day whether my arm’s in a cast or not.

The neighbors closest to my bedroom window have moved away. They weren’t bad neighbors, but they had the strange custom of meeting outdoors, below my window and about 20 feet from me to chat and laugh and have a good time at 3, 4 and 5 in the morning. Seems that the breadwinner of the household worked strange hours, and the family adjusted their schedule to be with him when he was home. My new blinds took care of the light in my eyes, and closing the windows at night took care of most of the noise, so it hasn’t been a problem.

I’ve never had neighbors in the complex east of my house who stayed put longer than a year. An exception is the family at the south end of the duplex closest to my house. She’s an on-site manager of the whole living area and probably gets her rent free. They’ve been there about three years.

And me? I’ve been here since 1988, but “here” has changed since I built a brand-new apartment above the garage. I need to spend about $40,000 bringing the ground-level parts of the house up to a high standard of excellence, but I probably won’t have that much money to spend on things like that.

The Week’s End

I felt calm and energized today. Plenty of sleep last night, interesting discussion in Sabbath school class on the gospel and ethnicity, good sermon for church on Jesus and the swine, warm weather outdoors up to 44 or so, and a happy dog named Rusty walking with me on a new road between Lake Lowell and the visitors’ center.

Jesus had no regard for a person’s sex, race, or ethnicity. No question about that. Does that mean we should seek out people who are culturally different from us and bring them into our church? Even if we could draw them in, I wonder how long they would stay, since we all feel uncomfortable around others who are obviously different from us.

A blank in my schedule

Not really, but when I got the HealthWorks newsletter off to the client via email about 4:30 pm yesterday, I felt like I’d reached a meadow on the mountain path and could roll over on the soft grass and take a long nap.

Didn’t happen. When I catch up it’s time to work on the Web. So much work to do there to get all of my blogs working and linking and bringing visitors.

I don’t know who is responsible for linking to this site, but it’s probably people who are related to me and maybe a person or to among my small but wonderful collection of friends. Whoever you are, I am grateful for any blips on the radar scene. Keep your visits coming!

Today my computer screen display is distorted when I go to my website or to my blogs. Type is gigantic and crowded. Almost impossible to read. I kept downsizing the text size until the distortion ended, but by then the text was so small it was hard to read.

Oh, well. Life goes on. We are going to have big trouble when this snow melts. Read my notes on this topic. People do not realize the risk of flooding here in this desert-based community. Most people, that is.

My friend Paul, former P&Z chair, says that city officials have known for years that the city is floating on tons of water, but because the stakes are so high to revitalize downtown Caldwell, they’ve looked the other way.

Too much snow in the wrong places

Snow drifted down from the skies Saturday afternoon and most of Sunday. Beautiful, pure (looking) white snow. I felt so secure, able to keep working at full tilt even with a foot or two of snow outside.

Yesterday afternoon Rusty and I got in the car to head for the post office. Out of the driveway, turning to face the road past my place, and I was stuck. Whether it was the snow under the wheels or under the car I couldn’t tell, but my front wheels were merrily spinning, and I was going nowhere.

My bro Dave came over (he lives on the other end of this 20-acre development) about 5 pm and couldn’t figure it out. Said he’d come back today.

I had another idea. When my assistant Kay arrived at work at 9:30, we picked up some shovels and tackled the job ourselves. She was able to unload snow packed beneath the car, and we both worked on clearing or trampling snow in the path the car would take. My driveway is about 100 feet or so in length and wide enough to handle two cars in a pinch. Except that a few decades ago my stepdad built a stone fence from the house to the driveway that cuts the width at that point.

Well, we tackled that snow like we were doing it a favor, and in thirty minutes we had the whole driveway and the area under the car pretty well stomped down or cleared out. Got in the car. Reverse. Forward. Reverse. Forward. Reverse. There it goes! Whoopee!

I drove in and out of the driveway and garage several time and tamped down more snow to put the “seal of approval” on our work. Now I can resort to my usual smug self, so lucky to be in a warm dry place with all the comforts of home and working as hard as I can for Griffith Publishing.

Wagging her tail

My dog Rusty doesn’t have much of a tail. She was born with only a couple of inches. She doesn’t let that stop her from wagging what she has. She also has quite a vocabulary. She knows the word “go” the best. When I got home today with the idea of “going” somewhere, I told her so, and she almost wiggled out of her skin with excitement.

Someone was telling me about a person who had the patent on a vertical sawmill. You put the logs in vertically, and the boards fall into place all cut up nicely. Got a big guffaw when I explained this to friends visiting my bro Dave today. Now where did I hear that? Maybe from Irwin. Possibly from Marv.

Hi, February

We usually don’t get much snow here in the irrigated desert valleys of Southwest Idaho. Some years we may not even see snow except for a few flakes that melt or blow away. Even in the mountains 50 to 100 miles away it seems we never get enough snow.

Not this year! Snow is everywhere. An inch or two at a time, but even here in the valley, snow covers everything. School administrators didn’t know whether to open the schools or not after getting caught Tuesday with high winds and heavy snow right after the kids arrived at school. Now, with higher temperatures and melting snow, we have more school closures, and the kids are getting the last laugh.

I’d show you a picture of the beautiful 5-6 inches of snow, but I broke my camera yesterday. I was in an awkward position talking on the phone and looking things up on the computer and writing in my notebook, and everything—telephone, camera, notebook, and a few other tools—crash-landed on the floor. My poor camera was stalled. Technically “open” but an error message said the lens was malfunctioning. I recharged the battery. Still jammed on “open” and still not working. Probably wearing down the battery.

This was my Nikon digital camera, and I miss it already. I spend $300 for it and enjoyed every minute. I’ll replace it as soon as I can, but meanwhile, no photos to illustrate my comments.