Tuesday, July 30th. Two more days and we will be into the 8th month of 2024. And I will have been “retired for seven whole month. I don’t feel like I think I’m supposed to feel when being retired and that’s probably because our first seven month have been on medical crisis after another and constant doctor’s appointment. My roll has significantly changed and I’m a full time “house-husband”. I don’t mind though. I’m just glad that Ms. Kate is doing so much better. She is getting her strength back and has begun jumping back into the things that she used to do. She has started going places again on a limited basis. Buying her the rollator was a smart move. Yesterday she had a dental appointment and she used it to get into the facility and it worked well. She uses it to go into church and sometimes when we go into a restaurant.

Today has been busy morning so far. We needed to change the sheets on the bed so I did that first thing this morning when I got up. I got them washed, dried and put back on the bed. Then we had a piece of peach pie for breakfast. I made one yesterday and it was delicious.  So, I made two more today. I’ll give one of them away to Dan and Minh across the street, assuming Minh will let him have it. She watches his diet like a hawk. She is thin as a rail and a Vietnamese lady. She makes delicious Vietnamese food but I think that is all she fixes for him. LOL, she has no idea how much he probably cheats when she isn’t with him. But —- I will take a pie over there and he can have that battle with her. Yeh, I’m starting trouble in the neighborhood. 

We are having storms today. The heat and the humidity are off the chart so it no wonder that thunderstorms are rolling through. I think we are supposed to have this for another couple of days on and off. 

Have you been watching the Olympics”. I don’t Kate has missed any of them. USA has som dynamic athletes and a couple of them are from this area. Lilly King, the swimmer id from the west side of Evansville and even went to Reitz High School, which the alma mater for Kate and I. Jackie Young, the basketball player is from Princeton and is a friend of many of my parishioners from the parish. 

My pies are done and it is time to get them out of the oven. Have a blessed day. Peace. 

 Happy Wednesday! It”s a bright Sumer morning. The temperature is 75 degrees but the “real feel” is 83. That’s quite a difference, which tells me it is already humid out there. 

We had a really good visit with Ms. Kate’s Cardiologist Nurse Practitioner yesterday. Despite the fact that she was almost 45 minutes late getting to us, it was a good visit and she is forgiven. She went over Kate’s records and is the first person to actually lay out a step by step plan of treatment for Kate. I think one of the best things that she said to Kate was; your heart is a mess but it is not a death sentence, you’re not dying. She then went into a long discussion of what we need to do and what their plan is for her. And —- it’s al “doable”. We still have a number of doctor’s appointments to attend to. One of the things she mentioned was Kate’s upcoming appointment with er cardiologist. She told Kate to be sure and not miss that because his next available appointment is in June of 2025!! Can you imagine that??? I’m glad that we have an excellent doctor and I’m also glad that Kate has a lot of confidence in him. But the NP said that she will be Kate’s primary heart contact when the doctor can’t get to her, an gave her her 24 hour number.

Wednesday’s job is going to be fill the bird feeders again. I guess it is “that time of the year again”, the years is full of blackbirds and starlings. I went by several yards yesterday and the were flocks of blackbirds in the yards. I think the grass is starting to “seed” and harvest in the fields is a ways off yet. Between the blackbirds and the squirrels, the sunflower feeders are almost empty as are several of the others. 

I also need to get out in the garden and do some weed removal. I don’t know why but my tomatoes are looking terrible. I don’t know if I over-watered them or under-watered them. But they look like they are about done for the season and it is way too early for that. Karen brought us some of the tomatoes from plants that I gave her and they are wonderful. So, obviously I have messed something up. 

That’s about it for today unless you want to go to Walmart with me. I have a list of things I need to get. Yuk!!

Have a wonderful day. Peace. 

 I did a thing! On Saturday I turned 80 years old. Yep, I completed 80 trips around the sun. It was a great birthday with family and friends. Julies and Jim and the pups, Brenda and Andy from Ft. Branch, and sister-in-law Karen came for dinner and a couple of brewskis. I did all of the cooking. I did a coastal shrimp boil with red potatoes, corn on the cob, smoked sausage, and of course shrimp. I have been wanting to do one for some time and I thought that my birthday would be the perfect opportunity. I also made a peach buckle and it turned out very well. Ms. Kate was my “co-pilot” with good instructions on when to add what to the boil. As most always happens, between the two of us it all turned out well, and we all ate a bit too much. 

Yesterday I played a trumpet solo at church. I found a sound called “Until Then” on You Tube sometime ago that was being played by Phil Collingsworth of the Collingsworth family and decided that some day I need to play that somewhere. So, since yesterday was the day after my 80th birthday, I decided to do it then. It took a lot of rehearsing to get it right because frankly, my lips and lungs are far from what they use to be, but I’m happy to say that my performance went off without a hitch. Folks seemed to enjoy it. Of course that means that I’m silly enough to think I need to start on another piece to play. Kate is fond of “In The Garden”, so I might start working on that. Maybe sometime in the fall I can do that one at church. I also like “Amazing Grace, My Chains Are Gone”. We’ll see if any of that actually happens. 

For my 2nd day of my 81st year, I’m doing laundry. Somehow —— it seems a bit anticlimactic! Have a wonderful week. Peace. 

 Well it has been another minute since my last entry of course. I don’t apologize for that; life does keep a person busy.

Ms. Kate is doing fairly well. She is snack in AFIB again. We think the medication change is helping some but time will tell. We have to take her in for another cardioversion on the 8th of August. They will take her in and shock her heart again to put it back in rhythm. The thought is that with the medicine change and the procedure, it should work this time. We pray it does. Until then, we just handle things one day at a time. 

We have been out and about some in the past few days. I don’t know if I told you but we bought a “rollater” for Kate so she can get around better. But so far we’ve only been place where I go in so she hasn’t used it. She could have used it at church Sunday but didn’t; I personally think it was an “image issue” for her. 

Today we went to Posey County to the peach orchard and pick up three “half peck” boxes of peaches. We had gone last Saturday and picked up some and they are gone. She says she wants to make a “peach buckle” which I understand is much like a cobbler. Anything that is like a cobbler has my interest. This Saturday we are celebrating my 80th birthday with a small invite party. I asked Kate if we could do a “coastal shrimp-boil”. I told her I would even do the cooking. We will have Julie and Jim and Karen here and I have asked Brenda and Andy to join us. Brenda’s mom, Georgia Ann, share this day as a birthday and we always celebrated it. So, the thing is that a shrimp boil is all inclusive meaning that you don’t really need anything else beyond the main dish. But, Kate says she want maybe make a dessert. I had originally thought that we would make a freezer of ice cream but then we said that it would maybe not go well with seafood  and a few beers. We’ll see what happens. 

This Sunday I am playing a trumpet solo for church. I don’t know why I put stuff on my plate like this. So, I have been having to try to get my lip and lungs in condition enough to get through the song. This morning our organist came to the house and we collaborated on the song and it sounded good. With luck, it will all go well come Sunday. 

I spent a lot of time in the yard yesterday and this afternoon. I was getting rid of all of the random saplings that continually grow in my flowerbeds. It is a never ending battle. And I mowed my front yard and Dan’s front yard this afternoon. 

That’s it for today. Have a wonderful rest of your week. Peace. 

Good morning on this July 8th. It is 80 degree this morning which would be very pleasant were not the humidity about the same as the temperature. Yuk. I have to water my tomatoes this morning. We are maybe getting some rain this evening but probably not until tomorrow evening. I was out there this morning to do something for the neighbor and saw a couple of piles of deer poop by my plants. But, I didn’t see any nibbles from the plants. Bambi needs to stay out of my garden. 

My squash are done with. I guess I will go ahead and pull up those plants. Maybe I can think of something to plant in there yet. I also need to do some weeding in my raised beds. My zinnias are blooming as are my marigolds. That makes me happy as it is the first time I have raised either. But the weeds are covering up the zinnia blooms. My tomatoes are doing a good job of producing so I am declaring my gardening a success for 2024. The only thing that did not do well was my asparagus. It produced very little. But my sister-in-law said that her’s didn’t do well this year either. Maybe it was a bad year for asparagus. I don’t know. I’m not going to worry bout it. 

Kate had a bad weekend. I had hoped that when we came home from the hospital she would be a lot better on the new meds and she was —— for about a day and a half. I don’t know if it is the medicine change or what;  but she has been totally lethargic all weekend. She can’t keep her eyes open and yet she’s not sleeping either. But, she had a really good night’s sleep last night so I’m hopeful tat this is turning around. We have an appointment tomorrow with her FNP. We’ll see what she has to say. We were supposed to go on another vacation in mid-August for a reunion of my military buddies and their families. But, I have cancelled that because I just can’t trust traveling with Kate because I never know from one day to the next what her health status is going to be. I pray this is not defying he rest of our life. 

That’s it for today. Have a great week. Peace. 

 4th of July, 2024! I pray you are having a wonderful day. 

Yes it has been a a while since I last wrote. We have been back from our vacation now for a couple of weeks and one would hope that life would be smooth, but that doesn’t seem to happen around here very often any more. When we cm e home from the vacation, Ms. Kate was having complications with breathing and rapid heart beat even when she exerted the slightest effort. She didn’t want to call the doctor  and decided that she would hope it would just get better. It didn’t. On Wednesday of last week she finally called her cardiologist office and they set her up with an appointment but it wasn’t until August 14th; a disappointing answer. By Thursday morning she couldn’t handle it anymore and called them again and they told her to go to the emergency room. We figured that she was in AFIB again because she has gone through this twice and has had to be shocked back into rhythm each time. The Emergency room doctors confirmed our fears and admitted her. 

They began a battery of tests which lasted over several days and finally determined that they would put in a pacemaker on Monday morning. In the meantime, they had changed some medications and started some others and she began to improve. Monday morning came and a new diagnostic plan was put into place that they would not put in a pacemaker but would instead make some changes to her medication. Tat was shocking to us ass it was a radical diversion from their other diagnosis. But —- to be clear, none of us wanted her to have a pacemaker, but it seemed that every time a new “specialist” came in, there was a different answer; and the one thing that bothered us was that no one had consulted with her actual Cardiologist because he is not in the Deaconess System but in the Ascension System. We told the heart team that we absolutely wanted her cardiologist in on any discussion of her treatment. They made that happen and her Cardiologist team came to see her and assure us that they were all in agreement with the new plan. 

So, now, she is home, doing well on a new medication regimen and is doing better than she has done in a very long time. All praise to God for the miracles that He allows mankind to perform. 

I want to give a shout-out to the Deaconess Midtown Hospital and their staff. There are two Deaconess Hospital locations here in Evansville. Midtown is “the old one” and Kate has been associated with it literally all her life because she was born there. The “new” Deaconess Gateway is a ginormous medical complex and is also a really good hospital but the atmosphere there, while much more bright and shiny, is also much more aloof and seemingly less caring. So, “Thank you” Midtown Deaconess hospital for your excellent care of Ms. Kate. 

During this last event, Julie came over from Louisville and spent a couple of days with us and then Lisa came up from North Carolina and spent a couple of days with us too. It was wonderful to have them here with us. Had she not gone home Tuesday, Heather was prepared to fly from California to be with us too. No wonder I love my girls so much. 

May God bless you on this day of celebration of our freedom. Peace.