So It Goes in Everyday Ramblings

Oh, the green! It does a soul good. I took this yesterday wandering around on my own. Mrs. Sherlock is off on a scouting trip in Eastern Oregon with her hiking/snowshoeing group. Everyone else in her group is traveling and the lure, the pull of in the moment experience different from the daily grind, got too strong for her.

Ever since I started Diego on the daily steroids for his IBD, he is hungry and anxious and every time I sit down anywhere, he feels he needs to somehow be on me. Or near me.

On all the Zoom calls except teaching (I lock him in the bedroom for my longer classes) he is all over me, mostly in my lap, which is fine for 20 minutes or so, but as a person with arthritis in her SI joints (where the back pelvis meets the spine) I start getting uncomfortable with the weight and squirm, then he moves and resettles and on it goes.

I have picked him up and carried him into the other room about 8 times since I started this post. I realized recently that the reason I am not writing as much as I want to for more public consumption is that I am constantly managing him. Me thinks there might be some anti-anxiety meds in his future. It isn’t just for me; the restless insecurity is not good for his IBD at all.

He is now, finally, resting in his cat bed close to his brother. Carlo pesters me because he wants to play. He is very active for a nine (ish) year old cat. The vet always says they have great muscle tone. Ha. They follow me everywhere and try to insinuate themselves in whatever I am doing.

Yesterday that was napping. After I got back from my long walk that did go through the lilac garden (the fragrance!) I watched Gardeners’ World and took a nap. With them. I got up for chores and then got back in bed to listen to what is currently my favorite podcast, “Know Your Enemy”. They help me understand some of the whacko thinking I hear promulgated by “The Right”.

What I like about the hosts is that they are bright and kind. There is no snark. They do tell jokes occasionally and there are asides, but I got hooked on it after a recommendation in another podcast with younger smart people and listened to the episode about how Joan Didion started out writing for National Review and William Buckley. I did not know that.

I had read the long Vanity Fair piece about “The New Right”. (Well, I listened to it on Audm.) Then tangentially referred to it in this most recent episode about the history of the labor movement in Pittsburgh. About how the shift went from manufacturing jobs with extraordinary benefits available to a select few that get lionized as “the working class” in songs and writing (and the “New Right”) but what really happened is that all the wives and daughters and girlfriends of those workers ended up in care worker jobs, primarily in hospitals as the back of the union jobs was broken and we began to offshore manufacturing.

Oh, and in addition to health care workers, a lot of emphasis shifted to the carceral state. Jails. The “New Right” is not celebrating and lionizing oh say Black or Pilipino nurse’s aides or janitors or prison guards.

Surprise, surprise, here is Diego again. Sigh. I spend hours each day with him on me. I just gently closed the door. And then of course Carlo wanted out. Our pets certainly are an all-consuming distraction.

They are allowing us to renew our Driver’s Licenses online even though all the pandemic restrictions are lifted. They just use your old picture. :) I need to do that as I have a birthday coming up in about 7 weeks.

And I scheduled my second booster for next Thursday. It will have been two weeks shy of six months since the last one. Time flies.

I am going to start a 6-week live yoga course on posture this coming week from a teacher who is a Physical Therapist. She is good, if a little didactic and old school. I took a live workshop from her once and she yelled at me about the position of my foot. Online, I can just shine it on. :) It is a benefit of something that I already pay for so no big deal. I will learn a lot. I always do.

So it goes.