Saturday, November 2, 2013

Another Busy Saturday

This will be another busy Saturday. Bob has his table all set up at the senior center and he hopes to get rid of a lot of unused stuff. I will go up at 7:30 and help him price his stuff. We took it up yesterday after we returned from Bartlesville. He got a lot of stuff out of the storage unit that goes with his new apartment.

We went in last evening to see how much had been done and found that some of the apartment had been cleaned. The bathroom still needs some major help and the kitchen needs a little too. The woman who is supposed to clean is to come on Monday and then I will check and see if she truly got it clean (to my standards) and do some more cleaning if she didn't. The furnace/air conditioning vents in the ceiling need to be washed off since they are stained. The tub and glass shower enclosure in the bathroom need some major help.

We will meet Keith B. at Eggbert's at 6:30 for breakfast. Keith is also participating in the senior center's indoor rummage/garage sale. We visited with him while Bob got his table ready. He is an old friend of mine from high school. He is a widower too and seems pretty lonely. We thought he would enjoy having breakfast with us.

More later...

Friday, November 1, 2013

Very Busy Friday

This will be a very busy day. First, I will go to Independence at 6:20 to get my hair done at 7:00 and then when I get home Bob and I want to go look at what Mr. Grimmett got done last evening at Bob's apartment. Yesterday morning we noted that he had laid all the carpet and last evening he was to have laid the vinyl in the kitchen and bathroom. Then after the ranges are exchanged and the apartment is cleaned, he will be ready to begin moving. I will start with the kitchen. We will load our trunks and just back across the street to unload.

Later after that we will go to our exercise class and then to his 11:00 doctor's appointment to hear from the doctor the results of all his tests done in October.

From there, we will go to Bartlesville to eat at Dink's and he wants to go to Lowe's and buy a white range hood. Mr. Bishop, our landlord, will put it up for him or have his son do it. After that we will return home and pack our trunks of our cars with the stuff he wants to sell at the indoor garage sale at the senior center. Tomorrow he will stay there and sell his stuff. I will check out the sale before I leave.

I slept very well last night. My arms barely hurt. I did wake up at 3:00 and again at 4:00. Finally at 4:00, I got up. It is shortly after 5:00 now. I get an awful lot done early in the morning. Since I went to bed at 8:00, I got plenty of sleep.

Bob came over last evening and we watched the news together. He left about 7:00. Then I took my bath and watched a little more TV but there was really nothing on worth watching. That's when I went on to bed.

More later.....

Mr. Grimmett got the vinyl down. Now it's just a matter of the cleaning the apartment and getting the while range in there.

We will go on to exercise class now.

Thursday, October 31, 2013

A Laid Back Thursday

I don't have much going today. I will cook lunch/dinner. I don't know whether I will have tuna cakes or stew. It depends, I guess, on if I can find some stew meat. Stew sounds good on this rainy day. We have had a lot of rain this week. It's supposed to clear up by tomorrow. I hope so.

Bob made a doctor's appointment for tomorrow to learn more about the results of his tests. I will go with him. I am disappointed in his doctor. He had the first of his tests three weeks ago. He heard nothing for a week so he went by to find out the results. They told him he needed a ultrasound of his bladder and kidneys. Then he waited another week and heard nothing that time either. Finally he went by and they printed him off copies of the tests with no explanations. Then he finally called earlier this week and got this appointment to talk to the doctor. He had better learn something this time.

When he comes over this morning we will go over to find out what has happened over at his apartment. The man who is laying carpet worked again last night. We went over yesterday morning and found that he had cut the carpet but had only a small part stretched in where the washer and dryer go.

Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Special Friend Wednesday

I am meeting Gay for lunch today in Cherryvale. She and I have been friends since she was a ninth grader and I was a senior in high school. That's a very long friendship. She was 14 and I was 17. Now I will be 78 in December. So figure it out. She has been through several marriages over the years but has been married to Tony for well over 25 years...perhaps even 30. I was married to my Bob for 57 years. We are very different but in some ways very alike. She looks enough like me to be mistaken for my sister. Bob will be on his own for lunch. I am hoping he will go to see his sister, Betty again. She is 89 and one of the two sisters he has left. But that's his call.

Gay and I meet for lunch about every month or so. We then catch up on our family news. She has two boys and a girl just as I have. Her oldest boy, Paul, is a year younger then my oldest, Keith. Her daughter, Kathy, is a year younger then my Leslie, and her son, Steven, is a year older then my Scott. We used to spend almost every day together when our kids were small. We would sun bathe while our kids napped. It's a wonder she and I don't have skin cancer.

Bob will be over shortly, probably closer to 7:00. We want to see what Mr. Grimmett got done yesterday evening with the carpet laying. Then later, we will go to exercises. We went in yesterday and noted that he had only got the carpet cut to size. Nothing was laid. Perhaps he got something done on it last evening before he had to leave to go to the coty commission meeting. He is the fire chief here.

I slept pretty well last night but awoke at 3:00am. I'm not sure if I got any more sleep after that or not but I got up a little after 4:00am. I will probably need a nap later today after I get home from Cherryvale.

Tonight I will watch Nature and Nova on PBS. Last evening I watched the special on American slavery...only one of our national scandals. Another is the way we treated the Native Americans. We constantly moved them from their land so we could confiscate it. In doing that and in the ensuing wars, we killed millions of them off. The slavery issue was tragic too. We separated families and sold off children from their mothers. White masters raped their female slaves and used them to propagate more slaves. It's a terrible history. Other countries eliminated slavery long before we did. Cotton was king in those days though and American slave masters needed thousands to harvest the cotton crop.

Capitalism is greed driven. It was then and it still is. That's why we have several hundred multi-billionaires and a huge class of poor. The rich are not taxed their fair share and the poor are overtaxed with sales taxes. And our education system, which has the potential of lifting folks out of poverty, has become a disgrace. Teachers are forced to teach the tests. It's Awful! The entire situation is awful. And there's not too much hope of anything changing except for the worst as long as the rich have all the power. They want to give big business all the breaks and ignore and cut programs for the needs of the poor.

Gay had to postpone our lunch. She's had a toothache since the weekend and she has to have a root canal. We will schedule again in early November.

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Another Busy Tuesday

Bob and I will go to Independence later this morning and he will get a haircut while my color is developing. Then Carol will cut my hair. Afterward we will go across the street to Big Cheese and have a mini pizza.

Yesterday afternoon we transferred most of the stuff from the shed next to the house he rents into the storage area for his new apartment. Saturday he will participate in a "garage sale" at the senior center and get rid of a lot of that stuff in that storage. He should have done it before he moved but didn't get it done. As soon as Mr. Grimmett finishes laying the carpet and vinyl and the apartment is cleaned, we will move him across the street into it. Mr. Grimmett worked on it all evening last evening. After Bob comes over this morning we will check to see how much he got finished. I am curious. I think it will be next week before he can get moved. There's just too much to do.

I had a terrible night's sleep last night. I awoke at 2:00 with my left leg cramping. I had to get up and walk it off. By then I was even more awake so I came into the kitchen and warmed up a glass of milk and took an Aleve. That didn't do much for the better part of an hour. I don't think I ever really got back to sleep. Finally I got up at 4:45 and started my laundry. This is the time I wash my sheets. I got the rest of it done yesterday morning. I just wonder how I will sleep in Hawaii.

Josh, from Cox, came yesterday evening and he told me they are having a lot of trouble all over Kansas and they have two special teams working on the problems by working from west to east across Kansas and meeting in the middle. The only thing they have discovered so far is a nest of bunnies in one of their boxes that had chewed through all the wiring. But that isn't the only problem. I haven't had the problem the past three nights. Strange...

More later...

Monday, October 28, 2013

Busy Monday

This should be a busy Monday. I have already mixed up my meatloaf for lunch/dinner and will cook it in the microwave around 11:30. I will fry up some boiled potatoes and put some veggies in the microwave. Bob will bring the salad. I still have to fix something...probably pudding...for dessert.

Then this afternoon Bob and I will transfer the contents of the shed over across the street to the storage for his apartment two doors down from me. I want to get a head start on the move if I'm going to help. They are laying new carpet in there this week and also vinyl for the kitchen and bathroom. Then they will move the stove from the house he has now across the street into the apartment. His apartment also has a green sink like mine. But it also had a harvest gold stove. He did not want that in there so Mr. Bishop has agreed to move the white one over. The landlord will also put some mini blinds in the living room. Connie had a TV in every room and she ran the cords along the baseboards so we want them to remove those and Bob will just use the outlet in the living room for his TV. That will be a nice apartment for him for the rest of his life. It's smaller then mine but he doesn't need as much room. It is well insulated. He is buying a small Chromecraft dinette for the dining area. He will use the back bedroom for his personal bedroom and the front one for his guest bedroom and his computer desk. The rooms are a pretty good size for a small apartment.

The Cox people are coming tonight to see why my TV picture freezes and tears in the evening. Wouldn't you know...it didn't do it Saturday evening or last night. It had been doing it for a couple of weeks and I finally called them and am having them check it out. At lunch yesterday both Phyllis and Bobby and Karan said theirs did the same thing. Under those circumstances, it's got to be on Cox and not my TV.

More later...

This afternoon after lunch/dinner and Bob's nap, we moved almost everything from his shed to his new storage unit at the apartment here. We got nearly everything in it and he will have even more room when he gets rid of a bunch of stuff at the sale at the senior center this Saturday. At least he thinks it's this Saturday. I had room for the electric pressure washer in my dining room closet. I went to the hardware store this afternoon and bought some chains for the closet light fixtures. They don't have wall switches... they have chains. I need one more but they are out of the ones I'm using and I will have to go back in a couple of weeks after the truck comes in and get one more. We will begin moving him in as soon as Mr. Grimmet gets the carpet laid and the new vinyl flooring. And Mr. Bishop, our landlord, is going to have the apartment cleaned too. Then I will start helping Bob move.

Sunday, October 27, 2013

Sunday Again

Well, I missed posting on Saturday. We didn't get back from the conference until 5:30 and I was exhausted after all that sitting. It began at 8:30am and ended at 3:00 with two breaks...one for snacks and one for lunch. My bottom hurt all the way home.... another two and a half hours of sitting. I tried to stay up so I would sleep well but went to bed at 8:30 last night.

I saw a lot of people I knew and had some chance to visit with some of them during the breaks. Leslie and I talked to the Mission Center president about shortening the camp this year. Six days is too much for many in the first week in July. It is usually too hot. So we suggested shortening it to a Saturday through Tuesday and breaking camp on Wednesday. We think that will fly. We will run it by some of the teachers and see what they think. Combining the two camps in June, which was the original thought, would be impracticable. Both camps filled all the cabins in their week of camp. The June camp is only Wednesday through Sunday. Ours would be Saturday through Wednesday in July. We will see. As soon as we learn if that is acceptable, I will start trying to recruit teachers and staff.

We did agree to hire a couple of youth ministers for the Mission Center. We have over half a million dollars in our reserve fund and we are the largest Mission Center in the church. We need to bring a special kind of ministry for youth. Many churches are losing their youth. Ours is no exception.

After church this morning we will eat out at noon as usual...probably at El Pueblo. Then Bob and I will go to Windsor to help celebrate Jack's birthday at 2:00. Marilyn is not up to doing the Living the Question group tonight too. So we will postpone it another week. If no one else wants to do it, I will do it here on Sunday the 3rd of November.

So this evening I will watch Sixty Minutes and whatever football game precedes it. Sometime before that, I will have to get my letters done.

More later....