Archive for the ‘Chronicle’ Category
Working Again
She did it! Cyndie made it back to work yesterday. A person can believe that they have made good progress with recovery and rehabilitation, but finally going through the motions of getting up early, showering and dressing, and then driving to work in time for a meeting, …that is an ultimate way to test your progress. It’s not for sissies.
With Cyndie out of the house, it was time for me to reclaim my former Wintervale weekday routine. It’s not all that different from the days that Cyndie has been home, except one less distraction. She’s not around.
With our current cold snap, my attention was primarily focused on caring for the horses. They had been in the barn overnight, so my task was to move them back outside and then clean out the stalls behind them. It’s not rocket science, but at -10° F, everything seems to involve an added challenge, especially when it comes to their buckets of water.
The days are short, and in a blink it becomes time to bring them back inside again. Luckily, they make it a pretty simple process due to their interest in getting out of the cold and into their cozy stalls stocked with provisions. That allows me to get back to the house where Delilah and Pequenita are demanding attention.
Cyndie snapped a photo of me last night, working diligently to tend to ‘Nita’s needs. I had to lie still with my legs stretched out for as long as she required.
It’s tough work, but I gotta earn my keep around here, so I soldier on.
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Cold Morn
It was warm yesterday in that relative way that 32° F feels on a January day in our region. That makes this morning’s well below zero wind chill feel so bitterly bone chilling harsh.
Last night Cyndie and I were comfortably lounging by the fire when our daughter, Elysa, phoned to report she and Anne were coming to spend the night. If they hadn’t driven through the blowing snow, we wouldn’t have noticed how nasty the weather had turned until we were ready for bed and giving Delilah one last chance to pee for the night.
Their arrival and report of blowing snow alerted us to conditions we’d rather not make the horses endure. It is a good thing we didn’t neglect them. By the time we got out to ready the stalls and bring in the horses, they were already wet with blown snow and Cayenne was shivering as the temperature plummeted.
This morning in the barn the horses were warm and dry, allowing Cyndie to cover them in their newly washed blankets and let them out for some exercise in the daylight. They will definitely be back in the barn tonight for the even more extreme drop into the negative temperature numbers.
It is hard to determine how much snow fell, because there has been so much wind. The snowplows were out clearing the roads of drifts, but I don’t need to do much work on the deck. All we have is a small mountain range that drifted up to the back door. The rest of the wood has been blown clean and dry.
Clean, dry, and COLD!
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Reclaiming Routine
We are mostly back to our Wintervale routine again. The horses are grazing hay from the slow feeder boxes as if that is the way they have always done it. I’ve noticed that Dezirea and Legacy have no problem sharing a box and eating together, while Cayenne eats alone and Hunter appears the odd horse out. I don’t know whether she is forcing the situation or he is choosing this on his own. He eventually takes a turn, but waits for his opening.
For the time being, we are electing to let their herd behavior play out. Cyndie mentioned yesterday that she wants to get back out there as soon as her strength dictates to work on refining their manners. The horses have probably had a bit too much autonomy while she has been out of the game.
Yesterday we drove back to the cities (again) for her 6-week follow-up appointment with the surgeon who performed her hip replacement. I have a suspicion that he tells many of his patients this, but we are happy nonetheless that he said he wishes all his hip surgeries looked as “tight” as this one. He also seemed extremely pleased with the appearance of the healing incision.
Cyndie reported that she experienced the biggest boost from simply reading the physical therapy order written by the doctor’s assistant, which said, “Prognosis for full recovery: Excellent.“
The surgeon wants Cyndie to remain cautious for another 6 weeks to give her body every opportunity to grow around the artificial joint with a goal of avoiding any dislocations for a good 30 years on. She is cleared to drive and hopes to return to work on Monday. We spent time waiting at the Minnesota DMV to pick up the disability parking tag authorized by her doctor, only to learn we needed to get it from Wisconsin.
Then we were able to spend a bit more time waiting at the Wisconsin DMV office. They told her it was the craziest day with the most people they had ever served, and were short staff due to it being the day after a holiday. Luckily, and contrary to the all too frequently faced reality, Cyndie was greeted by an exceptionally pleasant and helpful clerk who shared these details while taking time to phone Cyndie’s doctor for information that was missing from the form.
Seriously! He didn’t send her off to fill out the form properly and come back at a later time. And at the end of a day that was their busiest ever.
Could this be the kind of benefit one experiences when they have sent love to those around them? We like to think so.
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Overwhelming Goodness
We are so lucky to have just had the best time with family and friends the last 4 days, upon which we returned home to find all of our animals so well cared for and the house clean, topped off with a fresh homemade loaf of bread from our house sitter, to boot.
On Wednesday, New Years Eve, we continued our charade of mimicking being up at Cyndie’s family lake place by inviting everyone to join us at the Original Pancake House for breakfast. It worked perfectly, especially with the added bonus of not needing to wash any dishes ourselves, afterward.
While visiting before our food arrived, we learned that Cyndie’s brother, Steve, would be hosting some of my oldest friends for a gathering to celebrate the new year. With our plans wide open, it became a priority to make it over to his place, but not before we stopped by to see her brother, Ben’s house. It was to be my first visit after completion of a substantial renovation they had done.
Thus our day was filled with added opportunities to be with family, and the evening provided a chance to relive some old Eden Prairie elementary school days memories. In addition, we shared a brief session of making music and singing harmonies, which harkened back to the earliest versions of our collaborations as budding rock ‘n’ rollers. That was a particularly precious treat for me.
After that late night, we arose at Cyndie’s parents’ house in the middle of the morning to prepare for a small group arriving to watch the University of Minnesota Golden Gophers football team play in the Citrus Bowl game. The good food and fine company were great, but the game fell well short of living up to our high hopes.
Cyndie and I were all packed and ready to high-tail it for home as soon as the outcome was final. This was the first time since we got our animals that we have both been away for more than a couple of days, and as much as we enjoyed the mini vacation, we were both beginning to miss them all.
Delilah gave us the best reception, and Pequenita made it clear in her own way that she was pleased to have us back. Andy had taken good care of everything and left us with a warmest of glows over our good fortune. We are lucky to have found him.
It’s a pretty nice way to start the new year and has us humbly counting the many blessings of overwhelming goodness gracing our lives today.
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Think Happy
It is a new year. 2015 sounds like the future. Did I really live into the year 2015? Hmmm. How did that happen? The niece and nephew were telling us that 2015 is the year in the movie, “Back to the Future Part II” that they travel forward to. Well, that future is now.
Let’s make it a great year. Project love to everyone around you, everyone you know, everyone you think of. Let love be the energy you emanate to the world at all times. It makes a difference. Really. Try it.
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Happy New Year 2015!
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Family Fun
We experienced a dose of two extremes yesterday, our first entire day of a “stay-cation,” engaging in something we had no interest in doing, but later enjoying just what we were really wishing to experience.
After a good period of recovery from her surgery, Cyndie followed up all that holiday family contact with a dose of the flu that is going around. Concerned about getting a serious infection at this point of her healing, she chose to check in with a doctor, which led to us spending much more time than we hoped at a nearby urgent care provider.
I sat for much longer than I felt comfortable in a waiting area that was a revolving door of coughing patients. Turns out it was a good thing Cyndie went in, as they confirmed her flu diagnosis, and prescribed strong meds to treat walking pneumonia. She also learned that her weight continues to drop, so we have yet to succeed in getting her muscle mass growing any measurable amount. I mentioned that the protein smoothies might need to be accompanied by more intentional exercising. Cyndie responded that she was doing exercises while enduring the long wait for the urgent care doctor.
I got her back to our stay-cation home at her parents’ house in time to snuggle under blankets for an afternoon nap. That rejuvenated her for the evening she has been longing to have. Since the family didn’t gather up at the lake like she hoped, Cyndie convinced them to come over for pizza and games in town. She got the dose of niece and nephews time for which she hoped.
We are having a wonderful time thus far, pretending we are up at the lake with her family, even though we are still in town and only an hour away from our usual home.
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Did It!
We did it! We are on a stay-cation! Our house-sitter, Andy, arrived yesterday afternoon and we hung around long enough to see him feed the horses, then ran an errand to nearby Baldwin while he served dinner to Delilah and Pequenita. After that, we packed the car and drove off to stay at Cyndie’s parents’ house for a few days, through the new year.
The errand we were on was, washing the horse blankets at the laundromat that has large-sized washers. Boy, did we pick the wrong time to do that. First, the horses could really use those blankets about now. We are under a severe wind-chill warning for 24 hours. Second, after we got the blankets loaded and washing in the giant machines, we spotted the sign that said, “Don’t put horse blankets in the dryers.”
Oops. I suppose if you wash them in the summer, you could just hang them outside to dry. Sadly, the spin cycle on these machines didn’t do much in the way of pulling excess water out of the blankets. It was running off a couple of them as they hung over a high bar on the rolling clothes baskets provided.
We were making a heck of a mess on the floor. About the time I was ready to freak out over the situation we had created, Cyndie’s resourcefulness had her digging through a trash bin to discover an old t-shirt and baby blanket that had been tossed. We used those to mop up as best we could and I hauled the blankets back out to the car in the rapidly dropping temperatures.
We waited another half-hour for a comforter to dry and then were ready to stop back and see how Andy was doing with our animals. When we got to the car, the windows were all fogged up from the moisture of the blankets. What a fiasco.
Happily, we found everything in good order at home and felt confident that Andy was plenty competent to manage things in our absence. We spread out the blankets in the basement to dry, packed up the car with our stuff, and headed west to my in-laws’ place.
About the time we were retiring for the night, we received a text that Andy had chosen to move the horses into the barn for the night due to the wind-chill warning. Minutes after Cyndie replied with some added details related to keeping the horses in the stalls, she received Andy’s response that all had been done.
It already feels like we are on vacation.
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Precious Memorial
The Christmas holiday brought a bundle of family events which required that we do a lot of driving. For three days in a row, we drove the over two-hour-long round trip distance, twice a day on two of those. It was all worth it, but when yesterday arrived with no agenda requiring we leave our home, the exhaustion hit and we luxuriated in the gift of staying put.
In the afterglow of the Christmas eve and Christmas day events, Friday the 26th became an additional day of precious activities with Cyndie’s family. We started in the morning by gathering at Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis, where we visited the graves of some of their relatives, including Cyndie’s sister, Michelle, who died at the age of 4 in 1967 as a result of leukemia.
It took some hunting to locate the grave sites, but with the benefit of the lack of snow cover, it didn’t take long to find the markers. Some flowers were laid and then a few members of the family read portions of a memorial prayer that second brother, Barry, had composed.
This is the first time the entire family has visited the graves together, which made this a particularly special occasion. Michelle’s death occurred on December 14th, so the Christmas season for Cyndie and her parents and siblings has a way of bringing with it memories of that time in 1967.
As the middle of the day approached, we headed across the city to take a tour of the new auditorium under construction at the Masonic Children’s Hospital at the University of Minnesota. The family connection to the U of M is strong, but the connection to the Children’s Hospital is especially poignant.
The Friswold family has adopted a room in memory of Michelle. We were able to visit a similar adjacent room which was vacant, to see the special features available to children and their families as a result the financial contributions.
A significant effort is made to give the kids being treated as much control over their environment as possible. A touch-screen monitor is suspended on an arm that, among other things, allows the child to remotely control the window shades and alter the color of the room lighting. Of course, I only remember those features because they are the ones our group played with while exploring the room.
To top the day off, we finished with a special private dinner event at the U of M McNamara Alumni Center 
along with the family of Fred Friswold’s frat brother from the class of ’58, Larry Laukka. The Friswold and Laukka families have been getting together regularly at Christmastime the last few years, and this year the two patriarchs took it up a notch, bringing us on campus to share the full story of their incredible persistence as the volunteers who dreamed up and pulled off the incredible accomplishment of this world-class building.
It was a spectacular way to conclude the flurry of holiday family gatherings. Cyndie’s family is very precious, indeed, and I am a lucky man to be included as one of their own.
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Parking Job
It looked like we had a bit of a wild party around here overnight Tuesday. Elysa and Anne had come to spend the night so they could wake up and already be here in the morning for our family Christmas-Eve-day stockings and gift exchange.
When I stepped out with Delilah for her morning walk, I was surprised that Elysa’s car wasn’t there. As my mind worked to solve the puzzle, I realized that I had seen only Elysa the night before, when she peeked into our bedroom to say hello. Did Anne just drop her off and take the car back home, I wondered? Or, did they get up super early and need to make a run to the store for something?
I walked toward their usual parking spot and noticed the tire tracks. Then I spotted the car beyond the driveway in our back yard. What the heck? Did they come in too fast and miss the landing? No. It was obvious from the markings in the snow that they had parked and stepped out of the car doors like always.
From that, I deduced the car must have moved after they parked it. The only explanation I could figure was that the parking brake wasn’t set, and whoever had driven had failed to leave the car in gear after they stopped and shut off the engine.
It made for some good-natured ribbing with Elysa all morning. She said the parking brake was on, but she knew it wasn’t pulled tight. When pulled as tight as possible, she reported, it is difficult for her to get it to release when the time comes.
It took both Julian and me pushing, but she got it turned around and back up on the pavement again before it was time to head home.
Luckily, no one beyond us and the UPS delivery driver witnessed the car in the back yard, so she shouldn’t face any more teasing over the incident. I’m not going to tell anyone about it.
A note for our friends, the Morales family in Guatemala, who visited us during this holiday time last year… notice the lack of snow in the image above? You guys picked the perfect winter last year. What a difference we are now facing. It hardly feels like winter at all.
Merry Christmas, everyone!
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Serious Challenge
I want to send a shout out to my niece, Tricia, for the wonderfully appropriate little fiendish gift she presented to me last Sunday. She said she thought of me when she saw this item, and I can understand why. It’s a puzzle. I like puzzles. Done.
Well… I’m being reminded that my skill with puzzling is stronger in the realms of jigsaws and Sudoku. I can easily consume hours toiling away at either. Physical puzzles tend to strike me in the gaps between my logic. I have fiddled with this little metal challenge for a couple of days now, and am absolutely no closer to a solution than when I started.
That’s part of the fun. If I had solved it this quick, it would have been too easy. I think she picked just the right level for me. That is, if I can someday decipher the solution. I’ll let you know in a few weeks.
I’ve never in my life succeeded in solving the Rubik’s cube puzzle. I’m okay with that. The puzzles that entertain me feel comfortable, like a cuddly soft felt blanket. The cube is more like a scratchy wool to me. Right now, this tangle of metal seems to fall somewhere between those two.
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