March 12, 2007

• Five-course dinner, Daylight Saving Time, & the ER

  What a weekend!!! It was full of a lot of good points, highlighted with a couple of bad things.

  Today is my father-in-law's birthday (HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DAD), but we are both busy all day and we both have an historical society board meeting tonight, and because I'm not dining out during Lent, I made them dinner at my house Saturday. I went shopping for the ingredients Friday afternoon and made the soup that same night. I had every intention of taking off work Saturday as soon as the store closed at 2:30, giving me plenty of time to clean up the house a little and prepare the rest of the dinner. Someone came in wanting a cell phone shortly after 2:00 and while he was helped by the employee who was working Saturday, the employee has the gift of gab and this was one day I was wanting to tell him to SHUT UP because I had places to go. I needed to count his drawer down, so it was about 3:30 by the time I got out of there. While I did run around like a busy bee, I did a fairly good job of maintaining my calm (something I do not do well under pressure) by continuallly telling myself that I had done a good job of prep work and as long as I kept at a steady pace, we would be ok. Dinner was supposed to be served at 6:30 and I was running just a little behind. Dad called at 5:30 to tell me that the car wash where he worked had over 100 cars go through that day and they might be about half an hour late. PERFECT FOR ME, just the amount of time I estimated I was running behind. They showed up a few minutes before 7 p.m., by which time I had everything prepared and in the fridge just waiting to be served or cooked at it's appointed time. The dining room was lit up with a bunch of candles and I was very proud of the ambiance. I offered them each a glass of wine as I popped the appetizers into the oven. We enjoyed each other's company over the next two hours as we had a five-course meal served a little "ghetto" as I do not have enough dinner plates to cover that many courses. So, I had regular dinner plates on the table, on which I served most of our courses on plastic disposable dinnerware (saved on the amount of dishes I had to do as well).

  Our menu consisted of:

  • Pigs in a blanket (Cocktail sausages wrapped in Crescent Roll dough)
  • Chinese Noodle Salad (mmmm, good. I'll have to post it sometime)
  • Homemade meatball soup (I cheated and used frozen meatballs, but the rest was homemade)
  • Orange sherbet for a palate cleanser
  • London broils (tenderloin beef wrapped in bacon) and corn-on-the-cob
  • Mango Strawberry pie with a scoop of vanilla ice cream

  It went over well. Dad said he needs to have birthdays more often. The folks left the house about 10:00 and I took a couple Tylenol PM and went to bed about 11:30. When I calculated whether I had enough time to sleep the pills off, I forgot to figure in the change for Daylight Savings Time, so when my alarm went off at 7:30 in the morning, it was really only 6:30 to my body and I could not make myself wake up. I ended up missing Sunday school because I couldn't talk myself awake early enough. I literally was laying there telling myself "You have to get up, Debbie, you have to get up."

  Church was great and I managed to catch a short nap afterwards before heading out to the monthly sing-along at the assisted living facility. This is always fun. I've been going the second Sunday of the month for years now and many of the residents and I know each other on a first name basis. Many of the folks that come down are younger people (in there 40s or 50s) who are a mildly mentally challenged. One of the ladies always brings cookies and candies for a snack. She's been bringing small cans of soda for a few months now and attendance has boomed since she started bringing those. Yesterday we had one guy there who would just sing out as loud as he could. He called out all kinds of hymns, but especially wanted to sing "Jesus Loves Me". The other residents were getting annoyed at him and would yell, "We already sang that one," every time he would ask. The funniest thing about this guy, though, was that it didn't matter that he didn't know the words. He would sing the words he did know and make up the rest. It was so cute. He just loved singing for Jesus.

  On the way home from County Care, I called my elderly friend Barb, who had left me a message earlier that day that she couldn't go to county care because she had not been feeling well for a few days and was running a fever. When I asked her if she was feeling any better, she told me that she was still feverish and her urine was red. That raised HUGE flags and I told her she needed to go to the hospital. She argued with me a little, so I told her I was going to call her power of attorney and see what she said. The POA wasn't available (turns out she had her cell phone off while she was attending a concert at her church that afternoon), so I went by my friend's house to check on her, even though she kept telling me she didn't want me to get what she had. Long story short, I convinced her to let me take her to the emergency room, where I spent five hours while they poked her and tested her and x-rayed her, and finally admitted her. She has a severe infection, either kidney, bladder or urinary tract, but the way she was wincing when they poked on her side last night, probably kidney. She was also pretty dehydrated. I wanted to stay with her until they either admitted her or sent her home. She kept worrying about being such a bother, and I kept insisting she was worth it. Her POA got the message and came by the hospital as they were getting her settled into a room. I was SOOOOO thankful for her to be there. She showed up at just the time she was really needed because that's when they started asking all kinds of in-depth medical questions I had no idea about. We prayed a little and I left as they were bringing my friend a Healthy Choice dinner.

  By the time I got home at 8:45, John had eaten what was left over from the salad, but he still had room for soup when I heated it up. I have one bowl of it left that I think I'll take over to my friend's house if she gets out of the hospital today (which we are both hoping she will). I did not manage to get any laundry done yesterday at all. I usually manage to get all of my laundry done on Sunday afternoons in between naps and movie watching. I will just have to throw a load in a night this week and hopefully stay ahead of our needs. I don't usually like doing it during the week because I have a bad habit of forgetting it and either end up with very wrinkled clothes or, worse yet, soured clothes from sitting wet in the washer.

  I need to get ready for work. I HATE the time changes.

  • 8:19 am
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