Monday, Nov. 22, (8:30 am)
It’s shower day! That’s a harder day. Tubes have to be drained then tied up with a shoestring around the neck and the tube entrance into the skin must be coated with an anti-bacterial ointment both before and after the shower. It’s like fighting an octopus in the water while bathing. But, grateful to find that today is a better day. The pain is subsiding a little more today and her voice is a little stronger. We’re doing better!
(10:32 am)
Time to go to the grocery store. Visions of the chicken trip flash briefly in my mind. Betty says not to go to the store hungry. She remembers the chicken fiasco too. So I go to the fridge and find some left over chicken and snack. Now I’m ready. Until I look at the list. Now at this point let me give you a little backstory. Our son Caleb and his sweet wife Nadene are coming for Thanksgiving. Since Mom is incapacitated and Dad only cooks chile, (from the can), our son and daughter-in-law have decided to do the whole Thanksgiving meal for us. Betty is excited about them cooking, I’m excited about them cleaning. So, in preparation for the meal, Caleb has emailed, to me, a list of what they will need. Now the last time I was at their house in Durango, I noticed that their DVR did not have the usual things recorded on it. I’ve got things like Monster Truck, Motorcycle Mania, Overhauling and The View. The kids’ DVR had Paula Dean’s Cooking, Grilling with Bobby Flay, Diners, Drive Ins and Dives and The Barefoot Contessa. What’s this! What kind of guy watches the “Cooking Network.” I have got to have a talk with that boy! Then they cooked dinner for us. I can’t tell you what we had because I can’t spell or pronounce it, but it was amazingly delicious! I think it was some kind of chicken. The children CAN cook. Hey, that should be the title of a show on the Cooking Channel! Then, at breakfast, we had some kind of sweet roll that was like tiny little slithers of heaven baked ever so lightly with a slight dusting of cinnamon and golden droplets of butter that melted in your mouth so fast that you wondered if you had actually eaten anything at all. Oh my! I must replace The View with cooking stuff! So the kids are cooking. Now, this list, was my undoing. I had Betty to interpret it for me. It calls for russet potatoes and Yukon gold potatoes. I never knew there was a choice. Table cream. What? Table cream. Nobody in the store knew what that was. I mean this is Grand Saline. One kind of cream is really all you need! The grocery guy said maybe Caleb meant sour cream, since we’ve got two kind of potatoes. So I got sour. We’ll set it on the TABLE when I get it home and it can be both. I panicked when I surveyed the list and didn’t see cranberry sauce. I saw fresh cranberries listed with orange juice and brown sugar, but no cranberry sauce. You know,... the canned cranberry sauce that you can slice with a spoon. It plops out in the exact shape as the can it was deliciously poured in. It wiggles when you set it on the table. I called Betty from the store. My worst fears were confirmed, “we’re having ‘homemade’ cranberry sauce” she said. I said, “I won’t like it!” She said, “Oh yes you will or else!” So now, I’m really looking forward to my new cranberry experience, or at least, that’s what I am told. The list was going very slowly. I was in the store for two hours. A wonderful friend of ours, Sue Kimmel, saw me frantically shopping and parked her cart and spent over an hour helping me find everything I needed. An angel at Brookshires. Who would have thought. The list has now been obtained. We’re ready for the cooking to begin. I bought a can of cranberry sauce for myself that I will enjoy as a snack later on in the day. I’ll be having it with a dollop of sour cream! (I learned the word dollop on Paula Dean’s Cooking today. I recorded it!)
We go to the doctor again tomorrow at 12:45 pm. Hopefully we’ll remove the two tubes and some stitches. If you could pray for Betty at lunch time, we would so appreciate it. Today was so much better that yesterday. That prayer thing really works. Thank you for sharing our needs with the Father. We love you all.