Adaptations

There is not a lot to blog about today in my life.  As an aging baby boomer, I am finding life somewhat challenging.  Well, not really life but the living of life.  Specifically the challenge as I adapt to the limitations an aging body gives to its inhabitant.  So it is pretty funny to just sit back and think about the difference in Janice keeping house circa 1993 and now.

1993:
Gene worked 2 twelve hour days on the weekends and 3 eight hour nights during the week.  Crazy schedule that left me alone for 12 hours on my two days at home.  On Saturday I could vacuum, mop, dust, wash laundry and be done by mid day.  Head outside for mowing or other fun stuff I enjoyed like making garden beds.  Not really that hard as the house and yard are small and we are not particularly messy folks.  Besides I want to spend as much time with Gene as I can when he is home and not be cleaning house.

With our only child and all my relatives in another state, there were only Gene's folks to visit.  Oh, yes, there was Sam our golden that required an hour or so of grooming some weeks in the summer.  Windows were washed inside and out about once a month.  I washed the car after work on Fridays some weeks.  We even had Date Nights on Fridays by eating as a favorite place on the mall.  After the meal we checked out shops all over the mall.  Then we made our last stop for a cinnamon pretzel to take with for the ride home.

2012:
Gene does not work outside the home.  I do not work outside the home.  We are together 24 hours a day almost every day of the week.  We encourage each other to go to anything with our friends and even an occasional acquaintance.  We need some space as we have a small house and yard.


The repair job on my knee is just great.  It did not repair all the other parts of my body that I have abused throughout my life.  And even though the knee can almost keep up with the Energizer Bunny, my left foot, my right shoulder, a bunch of sagging internal organs and skeletal mutations leave me  hard pressed to perform simple tasks some days.  A couple of examples of adaptive task performance are pencil holding and vacuuming.

When a high pressure system is looming to the west of Southwest Missouri, picking up and holding a pencil can be an acrobatic act.  The initial pickup of the pencil goes fairly normal, especially if I have a little length on my fingernails.  But moving the pencil to a writing position is more like trying to twirl a baton.  Twirling a baton was another of the Texas 101 for females, so you would think no problem.

Pencils are considerably smaller than a baton.  My thumb joint is not where it was when I learned to twirl.  The thumb joint is sore and slightly swollen due to the High pressure system looming over Colorado.  I miss the critical move from fingertips to the thumb/finger grip.  The pencil flips, I grab and catch just enough to throw the dang thing half way across the room under the table.  Due to skeletal mutations reaching under the table is not a safe option.  Not to mention the sudden jerk to attempt to catch the pencil has set off the shoulder pain.  And Gene does not remember where he left the reacher thingie the last time he used it.

The pencil out of reach under the table brings me to the vacuum.  Since it now takes me at least 3 1/2 days to get the house vacuumed, mopped and dusted, the vacuum is almost always set aside in some room.  The vacuum is a built in system since the stand alone units are too heavy for my shoulder to manage pushing.  I drag the hose of the vacuum to the room where the pencil is glowering at me.  By placing an old knee high stocking over the end of the hose extension, I can now retrieve the pencil.  I go ahead and vacuum the area since the hose is already there.  And then try to remember why I needed the pencil.

As I warned in the beginning of the blog tonight, not much to blog about in my life.  Just a couple of today's adaptations.