The Hermits' Rest

Quick Hello

I’m not able to write much, due to not only work and figuring out all this moving stuff, but also because I’m sad. A good friend from my volunteer past, Terry Stafford, died a few days ago from a stomach cancer that came on fast and hard. That’s the one that seems to hit people I particularly love.

Here’s sad ole Suna showing how to move more things to your permanent house. Wear them.

Sadness is to be expected, but I’m actually pretty overcome with fear. You see, some of her children stopped speaking to her years ago, saying some things about her that she didn’t understand, and didn’t want to try to work things out. It broke her heart and caused so much pain, but nothing she tried helped. She died unable to reconcile with them.

I’m also transporting these boots. Clever.

What a sad thing. I don’t know the whole story, so I’m not blaming any party, just sad that they couldn’t work it out. And I’m now coming to realize that could happen to me. After 2.5 years, will my older son every decide to let me know what his issue is? I sure hope so. When they said parenthood is hard, I thought they meant the early part. This grief is always there, even as I learn to live with it.

Meanwhile, I learned today that one of my favorite speakers in our Master Naturalist program, Dr. Alston Thoms, passed away in June. He was supposed to be our speaker last month, and that explains why we hadn’t heard from him. Read his obituary to learn about a life well led and a person who truly loved all of humanity, all living things, and the land.

Well, hope your day is going well. Hug people you love.

Lessons Learned about Medications and Their Pricing

Yesterday I mentioned that I paid an unexpectedly high price for some prescription medicine I take. Half my usual dose cost three times as much, which came as a bit of a shock, but because I needed to up the dosage, I paid. I resolved to later figure out what the heck was up.

My pills are not in this picture. *@SteveAllenPhoto via Twenty20*

I spent a good portion of my morning on hold or in chats with the “Health Joy” representative, then with a woman from my health insurance company. I’m glad a meeting was canceled, and that I can keep working while on hold. More on that later.

I discovered something I didn’t know, and wanted to pass it on in case any of you find this kind of thing happening. There are lots of reasons prescription costs go up and down, so it is not always easy to figure out what is going on with them. Prices just go up on a whim, or when a medication becomes scarce. They go down when generics are available. BUT, here’s the thing I learned: not all generic manufacturers price things the same!

I am glad I only take one prescription med. *@Barefoot_Traveller via Twenty20*

I checked to see if I’d been accidentally given the name-brand version of my medication, but nope, it was a generic. But, it was made by a different company. And that’s what the insurance representative explained to me. You not only have to be sure you’re getting a generic, but also that you’re getting the least expensive generic! I guess I’d always gotten the least expensive one back when I was using the grocery store in Austin, but the tiny drug store in Cameron must not have had the cheap one, so they gave me a costly alternative.

If I had refused the medication, the insurance company could have called and told them to switch it out, but I needed it, so I paid. I’ll know better next time, and now you know, too!

In happier news, I’m once again glad that I am so friendly and patient when some task takes a long time. I ended up having a nice conversation with both the Health Joy person, who was in Mexico and surrounded by chickens that I could hear, and the insurance person, who asked me what kind of ear buds I was using, because I sound so clear. I made her day by telling her what I have, that it isn’t expensive, and she can get it on Amazon. It’s so great to laugh a little.

I’ve also laughed a bit at work, thanks to my team members, so it’s one of those days where life does not suck at all. I am even moving forward on getting the Austin house sold.

The grass is always greener in the middle of a pile of rocks, says Mabel.

I think that’s just the way life is, with a few bad days, a few good days, and a lot of days with ups and downs. As my circle of friends lost a valued community member yesterday, I have been reminded that I’m lucky to be here, be healthy, and have people who care!

A Fruitful Visit to the County Courthouse and Horse Lesson

Hello, and happy Tuesday, I think. It’s been a full day for me already and it’s not even 4 pm. I’m losing track of days and times right now, but that’s okay, I’m going with the flow.

The day started off right, when six members of the local Master Naturalist chapter and Master Gardener chapter came together at the Milam County Courthouse to meet with the County Judge. We wanted to talk to Judge Young about whether there could be any meeting space for us in the new county office building complex that’s being created out of our old hospital.

Master Gardeners and Master Naturalists preparing for the meeting.

Judge Young showed us a map of how the buildings will be organized, and it was obvious the planners had put a lot of thought into it, like how to keep the people doing parole meetings separate from citizens coming to pay their taxes or seniors getting their meals. There was also a good security plan and a good parking plan.

Then he showed us where there will be meeting rooms we could use. There are a couple of large ones around Bea’s Kitchen that will be free after 3 pm on weekdays, plus another couple of shared ones with other agencies. When someone asked if we could use any of them, Judge Young said:

“Not only can you use it; I want you to use it.”

We talked about helping out with landscaping the inner courtyards as a way to pay back, and that went over well. He even offered us storage space in the old nuns’ quarters they are renovating for a storage building.

No one could read the map, but we got the general idea.

This will all be available sometime after March 1. It’s so great that the county got a large grant to fix the buildings up nicely for all the citizens of the county. I couldn’t stay to go on a tour of the progress on the buildings (I’d been in them before, when the space was for sale), but I hope everyone else had fun. It’s good to see positive things happening in the community.

Next Activity

I had to run home and get ready to go to my second horse and rider training with Apache. I got my timing off and ended up slamming him in the trailer with no warning, but he eventually got settled down when we got there and we started working on things. I’m learning leadership skills up the wazoo and Apache is figuring things out really well. I even got great advice for walking appropriately and that turned into how I can control his urges to wander off and trot.

He enjoyed getting braided, but they didn’t hold up well. I’ll try something else next time.

I even managed to trot him in circles while remaining centered and in charge. A first for me! We also started figure 8 circles. All of it was very educational in subtle ways, though it looked like I was just going around and around to anyone watching me. This trainer is a very, very good teacher. But whoa, is noon a hot time to try to learn anything outdoors in August.

And Then…

I was taking today off, because I had these obviously non-work things to do, but I ended up working anyway, and was very good at projecting a positive attitude in one of those meetings where that kind of thing matters. I just pretended everyone was my friend and tried to be helpful. I even passed on the Mary Poppins tactic, if you can believe that.

Now that I’m feeling all empowered for the moment, I can go call my insurance company and ask them why the same medication I’ve been on for years that usually costs around $5 was over $90 today. Don’t get me started on health care in the US!

Some Help for Drew the Colt

As you may recall, I’ve been concerned that Drew, age 3 or so, seems really unbalanced and has trouble standing on three legs. I reported that in my Drew’s Clues post last week. Some of it may well be just growing pains. He’s definitely in growth mode right now. But, when Trixie last looked at him, she was pretty sure he had some issues that were causing him to hold one hip higher than the other, making balance difficult. So, today was the day to prod Drew in earnest to see if we could give him some help or relief.

This is my favorite picture of Drew and Trixie in relaxation mode. Yes, Drew has a hole in his mane. But it’s growing back in!

Some of the stretches and other manipulations she did could have been a bit painful to him, so we constructed a fake chute to put him in. It protected Trixie and kept him from squirming.

He looks skinny here, but he’s really fine. This is his “chute.”

Both Trixie and I were impressed with how well he took to all the handling and odd positions he got put in. She said he really has a good disposition and can be a forever horse for me if I keep doing the right things for him. That made me happy, because I get really good feelings about him, too, even when he’s being a bit of a teenager.

I took the above photo for his trainer, to show his muscle development and such right now. One thing I can tell is he’s gotten lighter in just the time I’ve had him, and his legs have more muscle. The biggest difference is his neck, which is filling out well, considering it was pretty skinny when we got him.

By the end of a lot of muscle movement and massage, a couple of miracles occurred, at least for Drew. He is able to stand on either back leg and even cross each leg way over to the other side of the one on the ground. I was shocked at the improvement.

And, his hips are even. Granted, he’s standing a little funny in the picture below (he looks “cow-hocked” but I am assured he isn’t normally), but he looks much more balanced. I hope that by getting him worked on a few times in the next month, he’ll be able to be balanced in training.

Nice healthy poop, too. His tail has grown at least an inch this month!

Many times we’ve noticed that the horses really get relaxed after being worked on. Well, Drew was really REALLY relaxed. I told Trixie I bet he laid down as soon as we took his halter off.

He looks about like I feel. As hard as I try, my mental health is not holding up. But, don’t worry, I also went to the doctor! I had my first telemedicine appointment today, which was an interesting experience. It worked great.

That leads me to my big message for today: if you need help ASK for it. And be glad you aren’t a horse, who has a hard time asking.

I Said I Wanted Fun, Once in a Blue Moon

In today’s family meeting I said I wanted to do fun stuff. I’ll be careful what I wish for.

The fun started yesterday when I went out and found Drew chomping away on the nice grass by the round pen. It turns out I may have left a gate open. The second time I found him out there, I began to wonder if he’d opened the gate himself. No way to know. I am a bit forgetful these days.

Today when I went out, I discovered Drew looking like this. Something had bit the heck out of him. Maybe Apache, but then I realized I hadn’t shut another gate, the one that puts a buffer between Grandma (who is on a liquid weight gain diet) and my guys. My guess is he went after her food this morning and she made it clear that wasn’t a good idea.

From the look of him, he didn’t listen very well. Tomorrow he gets a bath. Today was the other horses’ turn, so I’m waiting until evening tomorrow.

The round pen is a good place to dry off.

Later, I came back out to give the chickens some apple core. I was surprised to see not just Drew, but Apache and Fiona out grazing by the henhouse.

I’d let Drew out on purpose, because the little pasture is all dry and perfect for Apache right now, but not for a growing boy. But how did Apache get out? It turns out it was Kathleen’s turn to forget to shut a gate. We all laughed at ourselves. She told me that was the fun I’d wanted!

At least they will be easy to get back in their pasture if I dangle good at them.

The other “fun” we’ve been having is rearranging furniture, putting away books, and decluttering. Now, I’ll never be minimalist enough for Carol, our old real estate partner. But my office looks better. That’s the second rearrangement in two weeks.

I also cleaned off the desk Lee stopped using in the great room, though I still don’t know what to do with his giant yellow/and-black tote. it WILL be gone soon!

The fact that you can see the surface and there aren’t piles of neon printer paper there is evidence I did something.

I brought a couple plants from Austin to help make that house more spare. It makes the corner that used to have plants and a beautiful stained-glass lamp look a little better.

What happened to the lamp? Heck if we know. One day I looked over and the glass was separating from the metal top.

Wah. This was not a cheap plastic lamp either.

That was not fun. Stuff like that just happens once in a blue moon, and that’s today!

Say Thank You to Your Word Processing Software

Today Lee was unpacking stuff from our old Austin house, you know, the stuff I just couldn’t get to in all the time we lived at the Bobcat Lair, now officially known as Anita’s House of 300 Boxes. (She is ready to move out soon as she can.)

Anyway, Lee found a true gem, a takeaway notebook from a seminar in 1988.

Oh wow. I forgot how much effort it used to be to make newsletters and such back then! Or write dissertations (footnotes on a typewriter, hell). This really helpful (back then) guide even came with tools. Let me explain to you lucky people only slightly younger than me.

So this ruler is for figuring out how many characters you can fit in a space. I’d completely forgotten that typewriter balls came in Pica or Elite. That’s if you were lucky enough to have an IBM Selectric, the dream typewriter with an eraser key and interchangeable heads. I’m eternally grateful to High School Boyfriend for sharing his with me.

We made money typing papers for others in college and I even typed a whole book on Basque for pay. That typewriter was beloved, even though we sure typed a lot of pages over and over, especially when we had to use footnotes. No wonder I love end notes today.

The other tool that came with the notebook was this crazy wheel that tells you how much you have to reduce your text to fit in a certain space. I imagine this was very handy. It also makes me really glad I didn’t make newsletters until personal computers were available. I never had to paste up anything. Yay.

I think this is too much math for words.

I thumbed through the notebook as it showed how to make monospaced text interesting, as it went over how to get photographs (real ones) and put them in, and extolled the virtues of typesetting. Then I remembered the date. 1988.

I got my first PC in 1985. The people one year ahead of me had to write dissertations on a mainframe line editor. I got to use WordPerfect in beautiful Times Roman. By the time I got my first real job in 1987, page layout software existed. I just gave my graphic designer my words and she poured them into the software. The typesetter at work saw their career path dwindling to a footpath.

Things changed so fast around this time. It was fun, though. Soon I could make my own documents.

Soon after that, I was making web pages, all words, no pictures. Monospaced. Then there were digital images! You could make text blink! Be green! Have moving backgrounds! Play an insipid song in a loop! Ah, times were so simple then. I’m so grateful for word processing and page design software!

But the course on how to make newsletters on a typewriter didn’t help Lee for long. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t given much longer. But I sure like that ruler and reduction wheel!

Book Report: The Four Winds

Finally, I was able to read a neighborhood book club book again. The Four Winds, by Kristin Hannah (2021) is set in the 1930s, during the Great Depression and the horrible Dust Bowl times in Texas, Oklahoma, and surrounding states. It’s definitely not a feel-good beach read, though there is plenty of goodness in it.

This book draws you in quickly, as you’re taken in by the story of CCX and her isolated life in west Texas. Hannah truly tells a good tale and make the characters seem real.

Every once in a while someone says or does something that seems out of character to me, but I just rode along with it. I think some of it is how jarring Elsa’s breakthroughs of her “true self” appear, like when she suddenly goes out and BOOM has sex with the first male she encounters.

You also can’t avoid drawing parallels with our current times. Those hard working farmers just couldn’t grasp that they were actually the source of the problems. The message isn’t subtle, but the points ring true.

“The Four Winds seems eerily prescient in 2021 . . . Its message is galvanizing and hopeful: We are a nation of scrappy survivors. We’ve been in dire straits before; we will be again. Hold your people close.”
The New York Times

I was fascinated by the depth of the horror people lived through during the Dust Bowl times. The graphic images of dirt and more dirt are sobering, as are the details of the lives of “Okies” who fled to California.

You’ll come to admire the tenacity of Elsa and her kids and have a hard time putting this one down. I love historical novels like this, where you learn a lot as you enjoy a good tale.

What’s the Most Embarrassing Thing YOU Did Today?

Sometimes, when there’s a perceived need, you do something spontaneously that you later look back on and say to yourself, “Well, THAT was an embarrassing moment!” And that happened to me today.

It was one of those intense days at work. I’d gotten tired of waiting for help on a couple of diversity and equity volunteer things and just dove in to do them myself, which included direct-messaging a C-suite member to get a project going and having a minor hissy fit at accounts payable to get a payment made. I’m glad I got the fit of energy, and truly understood that people are extra busy and have stuff going on in their own lives that may make MY priorities not theirs! But my adrenaline was up.

Then some other work stuff went on that entailed me getting news about more changes coming up (hey, we’re Agile!) and then having to pass said news on to my team in a good change-management fashion, looking at the positive (always a challenge for someone with a personality quirk of immediately seeing the worst in something and uttering the F-word). And of course, the coworker for whom this news would be most unwelcome had to be the first one I ended up talking to.

Here’s my news, coworker! Take notes! Image by *@mcirillo1961 via Twenty20*

I was telling the news to my colleague, who I’d been on-ramping for a little over a month and been working really closely with, and she was expressing her doubts as to whether she’d be great at her new thing or whether she’d enjoy it. Out of the blue, I went into Mary Poppins mode and, yes, I, who’ve lost my voice, launched vigorously into one of the first songs I ever learned in my whole life:

In every job that must be done there is an element of fun.
You find the fun and -snap- the job’s a game.
Then every task you undertake becomes a piece of cake
A lark, a spree, it’s very clear to see…
That a spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down!
Robert B. Sherman and Richard M. Sherman.

Yes. In a Zoom meeting, I sang a Julie Andrews song to someone whose parents weren’t even born when I toddled into a darkened theater and saw my very first movie, Disney’s Mary Poppins. With hand gestures. Oy. Potential career-limiting moment! (Here’s a link to the original; a version that I can share is below.)

To my coworker’s credit, she lit up, agreed, and said I should blog that. So, I did. I probably actually made a good point, because one of the things I’ve been telling new hires and people new to being members of an Agile team is that, in the planning meetings for each quarter, you need to find something that not only fits in with what your team’s been asked to do, but that you and the team can have fun doing. Make it educational, where you learn a new skill! Make it fun, because you’re collaborating with interesting people! Make it fulfilling, because you’re creating something that will be useful!

We just hold each other up like a big ole umbrella – good tactic for coworkers, friends, family, and community members at large! Image by *@holypunkface via Twenty20*

Yeah, just call me the team’s personal Mary Poppins. And by the way, I am grateful that while I work to keep my team’s spirits up, they do such a great job at keeping mine up as well. Everyone should be so lucky!

Letting Go

How good are you at just letting go of things? I’m not talking about physical things, where you ate on the continuum between hoarding and extreme minimalism. I mean mental stuff, from past hurts and disappointments to things going on right now. How are you doing with that?

Wishing you could fly away doesn’t help…much.

Now, are you getting better or worse at letting go? In the current situation, where pandemics, wars, political differences, poverty, and growing inequalities surround us all, I notice people seem to be clinging to their grudges and gripes as if they are a lifeline.

I think we feel powerless much of the time and need somewhere to direct our frustration that we can’t fix the big things. So, we go after smaller things, like our friends and families. Or we repeatedly spread inflammatory content on social media or in person, just to feel like we’ve done something. Just so much acrimony.

I’ve considered being inflammatory lately. I walked away from the useless debate. You can see it wasn’t easy.

Since I’ve become more aware of this, I’ve been repeating my mantras more and more. I’ve also made more time for meditation and hanging out with plants and animals. An image that helps me a lot is one where I’m a mountain and the wind of other people’s burdens just flows over and around me, but doesn’t move me or get inside.

I was never good at letting other people’s energies wash over me. I’d always pick up on it and mirror their state. Now I reflect it back, gently. This empath is finally getting the hang of protecting myself, and setting boundaries , but without abandoning others. How long can I do this? I don’t know! It’s hard!

But it feels good to see the struggles around me and reflect back loving kindness, not take it all in and add to my own struggles. It’s progress. And there will be twists and turns along the path.

How are you coping?

Drew’s Clues

I’ve talked before about my concerns about my 3-year-old colt, Drew, and his issues with balance. He can’t get his back feet cleaned, because he can’t stay upright on three feet long enough. And he’s fine with the front feet. And he stumbles on his back feet when he’s running. Something seems wrong.

Today ended up being farrier day, because we had a schedule mix-up, but it all ended up fine. I told Trixie about my concerns, wondering if he was just lazy, as had been suggested, or if there was another reason.

Trixie felt around and tried a few things. She agreed he has a problem. His pelvis is tilted, with one side higher than the other. That makes it hard for him to put weight on one side, and hard to bend the other side. I asked about how he clamps his tail down, and he said he was doing something to his sacrum with than (I forget what; forgot to take notes).

Perhaps this Vulcan mind meld will help.

Her theory is that he could have scar tissue or adhesions from being gelded in a popular way I’ll not describe here. That makes sense to me. So, she worked on him. He loved neck stretching but not foot work, which didn’t surprise me.

Not much helped his pelvic area, though his head and neck felt good, from his reactions. Trixie will have to come back Monday and do some other stuff.

I’m so glad I paid attention to the clues he’s been giving me, so I can get Drew in better shape before he goes in for training. Luckily there is good news! Drew let his front feet get trimmed pretty calmly for a first timer! I’m proud of my little boy.

Meanwhile, Apache slept through most of Drew’s stuff and his trim, even though we had a few little showers. He was a model citizen and even stood perfectly for his back feet!

The weather is so weird. It’s so pleasant outside that I can sit and enjoy Lee’s pond after spending some time with the horses. It’s August. It should be 105, not 77 right now. And the grass should be brown, dang it.