I thought cortisone was supposed to really rev you up. I went for a follow-up visit yesterday for the injuries I received when I fell several weeks ago and was told, based on some simple strength tests, that I had strained my right rotator cuff. The physician's assistant in Orthopedics, affiliated with the Urgent Care facility I had gone to the day I fell, seemed fairly certain I had not torn the rotator cuff, which is good news, and says the pain I'm experiencing has nothing to do with the chipped shoulder bone. She prescribed a muscle relaxant, which Humana refused to cover so I didn't get it, and cortisone. I've taken the three tablets prescribed so far for the first day and really haven't noticed any difference...and, based on the last cortisone I enjoyed several years ago, I was really hoping to feel "shot from guns." But that was given by injection, so perhaps that's the difference. I recall feeling the best that following week that I'd felt since I was in my twenties! Lots of physical and mental energy. I was unaware of what I'd been given and asked for more and was, of course, told "No way." Too bad there isn't something legal, that's not debilitating in the long run, we could take as we age to regain that get up and go.
That said, I haven't had a bad couple of days. I left the cabin early yesterday and drove to the apartment in Boulder. I snapped a photo of the newly seeded grass that's coming up in the park just to the west of the building. They are watering furiously and it's looking great. What a delightful view of the Flatirons...
I wanted to get to the apartment early because I needed to color my hair and while that was processing I got a few things unpacked and put in the kitchen cupboards. It was a treat to be able to step into the shower and rinse out that hair color, I'll tell you. It is so difficult to get the product out when you're rinsing by hand in a wash pan. Additionally, you use a lot of water...good for at least one trip to the spring!
I just made it to my medical appointment, perhaps a mile north of the apartment. I really liked this physician's assistant. She seems to know her stuff, didn't keep me waiting, didn't seem rushed, and answered all my questions. She said if the lump remaining in my eyebrow is scar tissue in the muscle it may never go completely away. The numbness, which I also inquired about, does seem to be less today than it was even yesterday. She said the bruise remaining under my eye may take quite some time to completely dissipate. I was given some simple exercises to do for the next four weeks for the rotator cuff, at which time I'm to return.
After my appointment, I returned to the apartment and applied my makeup, which I hadn't had time to do earlier, then drove to meet my friend Paula for lunch. Yes, it was finally the second Wednesday of the month when we get our Social Security checks, but Paula agreed to go to Olive Garden again so I could use the $20 gift card I had been given by management after the restaurant charged my checking account twice for my lunch the last time. The food was good and we had a great visit but, once again, the service was not really up to snuff. I still have enough for another lunch on my gift card, but I'm not sure I'll ever get Paula to go back, so may have to go solo!
After lunch, I went to Walgreens to pick up my prescription, then headed back to Nederland where I stopped at Ace for the paint for the secretary (whoopee) and at B&F for Cheap Chicken and Wednesday's senior discount on a few groceries including more kibble for the foxes.
This morning I heated lots of water and did dishes out on the patio then decided to drag out the ugly table and try to do a better job of painting it than I'd done the other day inside the cabin when it was so windy...
I'd put the first coat on with a brush, but could see brush marks. Today I tried a roller and now I can see roller marks! It was really too hot, I think, and I was right in the sun. I may have to sand this a little and try again although, based on past experience..."It will never be noticed on a galloping horse at midnight..." and it's pretty much midnight in this cabin with all this charcoal brown paint! I noted today, according to Ace, this paint is called Prancing Pony.
I also decided to use Prancing Pony on this old cutting board that had been an atrocious 60s or 70s yellow with some equally atrocious Pennsylvania Dutch designs on the back...
Maybe eventually I'll stencil some subtle design on this so people can actually find it when it's hanging against an equally Painted Pony wall!
Then, on to what I expected to be the fun project...the secretary! I started out with the three drawer fronts...
This paint is Chestertown Buff, one of Benjamin Moore's Historic Colors. It's more intense than it appears in this shot. The one below is truer.
I had moved my painting around to the shade on the west side of the cabin, but the sun soon passed over the yard arm and I had to put up the umbrella. I had given the primer on these a light sanding, followed by a rub down with tack cloth, and the paint went on, by roller, quite smoothly. At one point, however, the very light breeze gave a little gust and I found myself picking out dandelion fuzz, and later gnats, from the wet paint, so this was not without challenges. I'm thinking of adding to my bucket list more creative expletives just to keep the neighbors entertained.
I went on from there to the secretary base. This is the piece I had attempted to prime with the spray Kilz, which went on so rough. I really had to sand it down, inside and out and clean it thoroughly with the tack cloth before I could even start to paint. I decided to paint the inside first...
...so put it on its back. This went quite well using a brush for the edges and corners then filling in with the roller. It is time consuming and brought back memories of painting the shelf unit back in the 80s that's now in storage, but has been such a useful piece of furniture in every place I've made a home since my first studio apartment in Chicago in about 1968!
It started to cloud up and I decided to call it a day, bring everything inside, clean up and drive back to Nederland and get ice--I'm starting to think this old cooler is not doing its job. The ice doesn't last long at all--and sugar so I could make syrup for the hummingbirds which have been without any at my feeder since the bear was last here.
One morning soon after that last night the bear managed to empty the sugar water out of the feeder, I was sitting at the picnic table having my morning coffee and a hummingbird flew close over my head...
Photo courtesy of Wild Bear Mountain Ecology Center, Nederland, Colorado
...descended toward the deck on the opposite side of the table and commenced this bizarre routine just a few inches off the deck, popping up and down very rapidly and turning figure eights in a very circumscribed area and just generally causing a stir! Then it rose to about table height, repeated the performance and flew off. I wasn't wearing anything colorful, so unless it was responding to the new tablecloth, I think it may have been trying to communicate that the feeder was empty! I love animals. Teddee
Good News. Vixen came to eat night before last and has been here twice a day since then. I can't tell if she's given birth.
She always has looked as if she were nursing, so that's no sign. Any weight I've been able to put on her seems to have disappeared. What a scrawny, beat-up baby.
Upon her return after her brief hiatus, she had been a little more flighty than usual. That first evening, she had Valentino, the male fox, with her and she seemed quite concerned that he not get any chicken. She started to leave to go back to the den with her one piece of chicken and when she saw me getting ready to throw out another piece, she circled back and grabbed that one too, so I can't decide whether she sees him as a helpmeet or competitor. I haven't seen him since, and this morning she was much more relaxed. In fact, she was quite funny.
After she ate her kibble and egg and took one piece of chicken back to the den, she returned. I'm trying to stretch this chicken out since I'm on the long forced march to the second Wednesday of June when I get my next Social Security check (can someone tell me why we can't get our checks on the same date, i.e., the 10th, each month, not the same day, i.e., the second Wednesday?), out of which I must save enough for July rent for the apartment in Boulder. Thank goodness I have enough in savings for June, which is due day after tomorrow. So I wasn't going to give her another piece of chicken until tonight. She finished the kibble and then sat, enjoying the sun on her face...
This time of year, it's warmer outside than inside the cabin when I first get up, so I had the cabin door open. She came in...
...and grabbed this cloth...
with which I had been removing sanding dust from the top part of the secretary that I'd been working on yesterday...
...and carried it out into the yard. Then, while I was taking some close-ups of some of the wild chives...
...and wild iris in the yard...
...I had left my coffee mug on the picnic table bench...
...she trotted over, put her front feet up on the bench, stuck her nose down in the mug, took a sip and came up with that same expression on her face little children have after their first taste of coffee. No, of course, I wasn't quick enough to get that shot. I gave her some unsalted chicken broth that I'd cooked down after I cooked this whole chicken I bought at B&F for 99 cents a pound, the cheapest thing I could find, especially for her. That seemed to satisfy her. The next time I checked, she had left.
She brings me so much pleasure. Teddee
P.S. Eye is improving although these close-ups of 68-year-old skin, sans makeup, are really discouraging....A facial? Botox? Reconstructive surgery? And I haven't deliberately sunbathed since I was in my 20s and both my moisturizer and makeup base contain sun block! Too much time in Arizona and the high Rockies! The knob on my forehead is numb. I'm hoping that will go away. And my cheekbone is still sore, but not nearly as sore as it was even yesterday. Arm is still a major source of pain. Pain pills at night are a godsend. I am sleeping long and hard.
A year ago I was just starting to move the last of the wood from a cord I'd had dumped here...
I had had the wood dumped on a huge tarp that I then tried to wrap over the top of the woodpile. The effort to keep the wood dry was a failure. The tarp held the water from the melted snow inside so the bottom layer of wood was lying in standing water and the tarp left a really obvious "crop circle" and I was convinced this piece of ground would never recover.
The bare outlines of the "crop circle" remain, but I think I would need a hovercraft to shoot a photo making it obvious to the reader. I tried standing on a step stool and playing with the exposure and color to no avail, but the point I'm trying to make is that what I thought had killed out everything simply allowed the wild iris and sage to thrive. Yesterday I noticed the first wild iris were blooming...
...and the sage is also abundant...
So I'm hoping my recent fall will, if not leave me stronger, at least leave me no weaker!
I decided I'd keep an "eye diary." Here are the three photos I've taken, the latest this morning. The first photo was taken on Tuesday, May 21, the day I fell...
The photo below was taken yesterday, May 26. Sometime between the fall and here, the points of impact became more apparent than they were right after it happened, but the bruise under my brow is starting to turn yellow, a good sign...
Here's today, May 27...The bruise is spreading, I suppose as the blood settles, but my cheekbone isn't as puffy.
People who know me well know I recommend sports cream for a variety of "off label" uses, I learned many decades ago that I could rub it on my forehead for sinus headaches. I've most recently been using Walgreens Cool 'n Heat...
and I've been, gently, rubbing this on my impact spots. I figure it increases circulation and that can't be bad. You do have to take some precautions. I don't recommend smearing this all over your forehead and then jumping in a hot shower so that it runs down in your eyes. I've also been rubbing this on my right arm, but have to admit that whatever ails my arm is not responding to my home remedy.
Today my horoscope...do you read yours? I read mine and if I like it I pay attention. If I don't think it makes any sense I ignore it...and I think this was actually for yesterday since the one I receive in my e-mail seems to come a day late...said,
Your first impulse will be to ignore it and bravely go on. Don't. Epic sagas aren't written about someone who was cranky from the flu. Go home. Tend to yourself.
Since I had commented in an earlier blog this week that the pain from this arm injury makes me feel at the end of the day as if I had the flu, I decided this horoscope was right on!
Our winds have been up, gusting 30 mph to 40 mph...blew this heavier tarp...and the rocks I had used to weigh it down...off the table last night...
and it looks as if this is going to continue until Tuesday, which makes me tired anyway, so I think I'm waiting until tomorrow to take a load down to the apartment. It got down to 34F degrees last night according to NOAA and is supposed to hit 31F degrees tonight. With that wind, it was cold in the cabin last night. I'm unable to keep my electric blanket and other covers in place because of this arm injury so was half uncovered most of the night I think. It will be nice to get through this and hopefully come out stronger....Teddee
When I purchased a replacement battery for my camera several months ago at Radio Shack, the clerk warned me he didn't have a Kodak battery and the one he was selling me wouldn't hold a charge as long as the original. It has driven me crazy. It succumbs just as a really cool photo op comes up unexpectedly.
I'm posting twice today because I'm so excited about these photos I got coming back from Boulder late this afternoon. I had stopped to take some photos of these low-lying clouds...
I took four shots and started to take a close-up of the aspen foliage, which is such a breathtaking color of spring green, when the camera battery died. When this occurs, a nice Kodak logo pops up on the viewfinder screen then fades into oblivion. I think if Kodak were still making cameras I'd recommend they have something else appear when the battery dies so the user didn't equate the camera's uselessness with the Kodak name.
I groused out loud to myself, "You just see, I'll get up the road and there will be a moose." Well, I went around the next curve and there, right by the road, were seven elk! I tried to revive the camera thinking maybe I could squeeze out one more photo, but no dice. I was spitting mad!
I've been living up here most of two years and getting that many of any kind of wildlife that close to the road seldom happens. I drove back to the cabin as fast as I could, fretting under the 25 mph speed limit through Eldora, pulled into the meadow, ran into the cabin, unplugged the camera cord from the computer, plugged it into the electric outlet, plugged in the camera, got a fire started in the wood stove, threw on a warmer coat, unplugged the camera hoping the battery had absorbed enough juice for at least one photo and headed back to the meadow where I had little hope the elk would still be.
At first I didn't think they were there because they were lying down. I pulled over and they got up and I got about a dozen shots. Here are some of the best. What fun!
An uncle once commented, after looking through some of my family's snapshots, that in our effort to sneak up on our subjects to insure we were taking candids, we took a lot of "fanny shots." At least these guys have kind of cute little derrieres...
Wish they had their antlers this time of year. I've never seen them with racks, but this one seems to be the leader of the pack...
or maybe this one. It was heading out...
...and finally got the rest of them to follow...
Speaking of animals heading out, did you get to watch the Preakness? Having no T.V., I didn't, but if you go to the Daily Racing Form site you can pull up a video. I'll Have Another won again. Could be on the way to the Triple Crown. And that was a horse race. Photo finish. I got excited even knowing who won and without having any money on the race.
I've got R&B Jukebox streaming from KUVO and it's really great tonight! Have a wonderful Saturday evening. Teddee
