February Happenings

It has been an eventful couple of weeks. There have been a lot of things going on, and Paul and I have had a number of experiences both separately and together.




Since the Christmas vacation, Paul has been remodeling the upstairs master bathroom. Our bathroom includes a separate room that has a toilet and shower/tub in it. This is the room that he has been working on. The tub had a fiberglass shell surrounding it on three sides and that was removed, the carpeting on the floor was removed and the floor and all the walls were replaced with a beige travertine style tile, with interest detailing in a layer just under the ceiling and about 18 inches lower again. The detailing was in a terra cotta color and is very attractive. Paul also made a little niche (alcove) in the wall across from the tub, which is just lovely. He worked on it almost every night for nearly a month. He finished up the last pieces of tile and did the grouting the first week in February, and then I spent one whole Saturday working on a final cleaning thoroughly washing down the walls and the niche and cleaning off all the excess grout and bits of glue and plaster. Then I put grout and tile sealing on the whole room and we have begun using it again. It is really nice and we are both really pleased with the way that it turned out. Paul did a really wonderful job. He also replaced all the fixtures in the tub so we have a new spout, water valve, handles and shower head. They are in polished nickel and we also have a new shower rod to match. Paul also put a little corner shelf in the tub wall and also a built in soap dish, so it is a very deluxe place. This has added value to the house and it is very pleasant to use. I have been enjoying it very much.
Paul finished up his work in the bathroom during the same period of time that he was trying to figure out why he had persistent and escalating pain in the left side of his back. The pain although intermittent for a number of years moved to a new level during the summer. Paul was continuously awakened during the night with pain severe enough to keep him awake the rest of night. He finally went to the doctor who recommended that he try a softer mattress to see if that was the cause, since nothing else seemed to be indicated. But when that didn’t work, he went in for a CT Scan. The technician who was reading his results diagnosed him with Nutcracker Syndrome. When his doctor received this news, she didn’t even know what is was—it is rare and almost never discovered in isolation, usually in conjunction with some other difficulty. Here is a little information about it. In medicine, the nutcracker syndrome—also known as nutcracker phenomenon, renal vein entrapment syndrome, or mesoaortic compression of the left renal vein—is a compression of the left renal vein between the abdominal aorta (AA) and superior mesenteric artery (SMA). The popular name “nutcracker syndrome” derives from the fact that from one view, the SMA and AA (with some imagination) appear to be a nutcracker crushing a nut (the renal vein).
On February 13, he went to the University of Utah Medical Center where he underwent outpatient surgery to correct this difficulty. The doctor inserted a three inch metal stent into his renal vein to keep it from collapsing when pinched by the two arteries and to increase the blood flow that had been constricted. The surgery was considered a success. While Paul is not 100% yet, he is feeling better. He did not have invasive surgery, they made a small incision in his groin and did the surgery laproscopically. It is pretty amazing. The surgery took about an hour and he was in recovery for two hours and then discharged. He will see the doctor again on the 2nd of March.
Paul felt well enough on Sunday evening to join with me and many family members for a birthday dinner at Grannie and Granddad’s house. It was celebrating the birthday of Emily Dailey. It was one of the most attended dinners in recent memory with Stephen, Steve, Paul and I, Philip (Camille was working), Peter, Emily, Laura, Jon and Gabriel, Merrick and Philip along with Grannie and Granddad.
We had a really great dinner, Hawaiian Haystacks and a tasty meringue and fresh raspberry dessert. After dinner we sang Happy Birthday to Emily and then we went around the group telling something happy from our life at the moment. It was nice to hear the good in everyone’s life.
On Valentine’s Day, Mom called me and asked me if I would like to attend the Utah Symphony that evening. She and Dad had tickets, but Dad had a cold and Paul was still not up to an evening activity following his surgery, but the two ladies were available so off to the Symphony we went. The guests that night were the King’s Singers. I was exposed to them before I was married and I have always enjoyed them. I have seen them perform quite recently. They were here two years ago as the visiting artists for the Church’s Christmas Concert and they were also here during the Olympics and I saw them in concert both times. They are delightful performers and charming men and they sing so wonderfully that it is always a pleasure to be at one of their concerts. I enjoyed it very much.
Paul and I have made a wonderful new purchase this month. My printer had given out before Christmas, but I hadn’t gotten around to replacing it, and we finally did that with a combination printer, scanner, copier and fax machine. With this new machine we began scanning scrapbooks that Paul had been given responsibility for after his father passed away. We wanted to make the pictures and documents available to family members so I have been scanning and we have been identify the pictures and Paul has been loading them onto a website that he is filling with family documents and pictures. It will be something really wonderful when it is completed. In the meantime we have put five albums up on the site so far. It has been a good activity to keep us busy during Paul’s convalescence.

Target

     It has been a day over a week since Paul and I took Target to South Valley Large Animal Clinic to have him put down.  I can't think of how many times I have cried over this during the last week.  I have cried alone and I have cried along with Paul.  It was a very sad thing.

     We started out to have a fun day sleigh riding in Park City with Bruce Kartchner and his two grandsons, and we ended up barreling down the canyon with Target in the trailer trying to get to the vet as quickly as possible.  In a freak and tragic accident, the sleigh overturned and then Target dragged it empty and on it side for about a quarter of a mile, and in the process damaged his rear leg/hoof beyond repair.

I have many happy memories of Target, who joined our "herd"--usually two or three horses, as an unbroken 18 month old, and turned out to be a fine riding horse.  I haven't been out riding nearly as often as Paul or even Erika, but most of the rides that I have been on in the last six years have included Target in one capacity or another.  In the last few years, I have usually ridden Rory while Paul has ridden Target.  We have had some eventful rides together.  And I have watched Paul train, and delight in Target.  Paul has gotten much satisfaction from working with Target these years and we are so glad that we got a chance to own him.  Our greatest regret is the lost 20 or so years that we would have had with him, without this unfortunate accident.  I pay my respects to him and all that he has been to our family.

January Book Clubs

This year my opportunity to host both my book clubs came in January. Bibliobabes met on January 6, 2009 to discuss Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy and on January 22, Bookworms met to discuss The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens.

Bibliobabes has eleven members although at any given meeting we have around eight in attendance, but this January meeting we had ten of the eleven. Petra, our fearless organizer and leader, encouraged a group photograph to celebrate the New Year and the occasion.

In honor of one of the characters in Jude the Obscure, Drusilla, the baker, I served an all bread refreshment, with banana bread, a lemon cream cheese filled pastry with cinnamon apple topping, a wonderful hot Parmesan cheese casserole bread and fresh rolls as crescents, cinnamon rolls and rolls with butter and jam. There was herbal tea and hot cider to wash it down with.

I thought that Jude the Obscure was by far the darkest of all the Hardy books that I had read, and I expected there to be a lot of antagonism about it, but because Hardy is good at characterization and because he is deep in his own way, there was a surprisingly upbeat discussion about the book and its characters and no one said they out-right hated the book. In the meantime there were a few crazy moments, especially when a large segment of the table broke out in a lively version of Hey Jude by the Beatles.

Bookworms has eight members and six of them were present. This is a very companionable group and I especially enjoy the comments of the members. Everyone is very gracious about the book choices and we tend to safe books. However, we don’t hold back on the endings in the event that someone hasn’t read to the end, and we did have to share with one member that sweet Nell does die in the end, although one keeps hoping that she will get back to London somehow.

Bookworms is a slightly more staid group, so there was no boisterous singing but they, too, had good and positive things to say about The Old Curiosity Shop even though it was LONG. Dickens had some great asides, particularly one about conscience, where he describes it as being very elastic in some people. We spent some time talking about that.

I’m glad that book clubs are a part of my life.