Keep a stiff upper lip

Skeeter welt onmy chest last year

For several years I have had severe allergic reaction to insect bites, welts, itching, all misery.  Spiders are the worst for me but the MN 'skeeters are almost as bad. So when I am outside working as is usual for me everyday here in good weather, I soray up with Deet types of repellant, to avoid tick bites especially and potential affliction of  Lyme disease.    Besides my OFF spray, I douse myself with Avon's repellant and with Buggs for gnats, recommended last year by a professional pest control technician and pat real vanilla extract around my eyes,nose and on my face.  We have our lawns and shrubs and garden areas professionally sprayed by a Pest Control Company with only commercially available chemicals to ward off mosquitoes, gnats and other pesty flying insects. It is worth the cost as bugs flourish here.  I love being outdoors and although it is hard work out there, I do not mind the workouts. I wish Jerry were able to help but since he cannot, I soldier on. I might grumble now and then about my aching muscles but it is all good for me and preferable to being confined inside or worse living communally in apartment or some place  without any yard, gardens to tend. 

Then again, I hear my heritage, I come from a family of workers, not whiners.   My late Aunt Jinx always said, " never complain about doing good hard physical work, it means you are strong enough to handle it.  Others cannot, sometimes they are sick, feeble, old or even lazy. Be glad you are not like them."  So I bend, stoop, and the range of motions working outside, doing everything I can. 

Some more of the back near mighty maple

 Besides it burns calories, free exercise.   I spent another couple hours yesterday gathering debris from winds against our mighty maple, limbs, self pruning.  And down below, a pine had dropped about 8ft. from its top down into the garden.  This was huge, but I managed to single handedly hoist it over the garden fence and then to use my heaviest pruners to cut off branches for the debris pile before dragging it downhill. Yes, I can do hard work.  Decent temperatures help.

Along one side of our home

Yesterday evening I made the mistake  of going out to the front rose garden at dusk, despite Jerry's adamant warnings to me about how bugs are more active then. But I was excited because in the morning  I'd harvested 6 cherry bomb tomatoes, first of the season, and I didn't want to miss any.  We enjoyed them,delicious and nutritious. 

Not  on this blog, but my FB  knows about my experiment this year, I impulsively planted 2 tomatoes and 1 jalapeno pepper plant in the rose garden.  These replaced the rose bushes that did not survive the winter.  With Jerry's recovery keeping us home this summer I figured I could grow a couple favorites.   

Tomatoes amid the roses out front 

Hundreds of little green marbles

The cherry tomato plant has grown immense and is loaded with  hundreds of green tomatoes. It has far outgrown 2 cages and now I have used all sorts of spikes and things to add support to the laden limbs.

So I went back out for evening patrol.  While there, I take along clippers to dead head and trim shrubs and flowers.  Just about the time I finished, I felt a sensation on my lip and in  the few moments it took me to go inside, my upper lip felt heated and almost like a cold sore had emerged.  Only it was not!  But in the mirror I saw a huge welts, bluster on the middle of my lip, and within seconds it swelled. 

My anti sting bite swabs

 I immediately applied one of my insect anti sting swabs, something I always have on hand but have never before used on my mouth,.  Because the welt or bluster was inside the lip  I dabbed the swab there too.  Not a pleasant taste, but the relief had to outweigh the bad taste of  menthol and benzocaine.  My upper lip swelled so much that there was not any evidence of the two points, normally marking my lip line.  I also applied ice.   Fortunately the misery was localised, no breathing problems, so I decided to take a Benadryl capsule too.  The antihistamine could only help.

Leary on the deck this morning

  It was very uncomfortable my upper  lip so stretched resembling the worst application of Botox.  I joked that it was a good thing I was never tempted to try the Botox lip enlargement treatments so many women went for.  On me it was grotesque.  This morning it is much improved but still slightly swollen.  So I am icing it and taking it very, very easy,for me.  I will skip working out today and instead just stay put.  No 10,000 steps tracked for me today, letting my body repair itself......this experience is surely not what is meant by, keep a stiff upper lip,😉

The morning after, residual swelling


Writing from my tablet sitting in the 4 season room,

Rains and snarky skies

Out back skies from the west

The skies are ominous, that is the way we describe the darkness in the dayllight.  Storms approach from the west and all day we will and have had thunder storms, which are better than the tornado warnings to the north and east.  It is a day to hang around close to home with flash flood warnings.  

Daily I do a yard patrol and pick up debris  tree twigs, branches, leaves, etc. mostly from our very might Maple in the back. Being a conscientious good person,  I even pick up what it drops  onto the neighbor's yard. I doubt she even knows I do this because she has never said a  thank you nor mentioned it.  I wish the ones who live the other side of us would retrieve the debris from their multitude of trees that always blows over here, but there is no possibility of that because they do not even collect their leaves in the fall.  So when I can I toss their branches across onto their lawns.  They are oblivious and just mow over them.  In some ways it must be nice to be so carefree, but I was raised to be tidy and to keep things up, maybe too much, but at this age I will not be able to change my ways and preference for neatness.  Perhaps it is a compulsion but I despise clutter and disarray.  

Looking up through the red maple tree

So as Mother Nature sends storms and prunes I pick up .  Whenever I lament the ash trees that gave us so much shade out back until we had to have them removed two years ago, I remember how much more debris they scattered in the storms and so today maybe it is a good thing they are gone, ravaged by the emerald ash borer and so cut down and taken out .   Just yesterday Facebook showed a picture of Jerry at the back garage door and there was one of the big ash trees.  That is another thing I enjoy  about FB, the memories it provides. But I started to write about our thunderstormy day. 

Last ash soon to go 2017

Preparing to take them down. 2017

 

Front of our home on this dreary day

Japanese Beetle in Apple Jack Rose

But we can weather these storms, water for the grounds although we have more rainfall than adequate already.  And perhaps this weather will discourage those nasty Japanese beetles that have returned, the scourge of the East and Midwest gardens. I spray with copious does of Sevin and that helps.  The stragglers are hand scooted into  what I call my Death Jar, a jar I keep in the garden, covered and  half filled with water with Dawn soap.  They go in there for a swim and that is the last of them.  So far keeping ahead of them, but this is supposed to be a bumper crop year.  I heard on a radio  gardening show  that the larvae thrived over the severe winter, one would think just the opposite but apparently they did not get enough deep freeze to do them in.    

We celebrated good medical news yesterday, well all week was hell week with all mine and Jerry's medical appointments.  My follow up cardiologist appointment went well, all good to go for another year although Dr Myers agreed with me, this extra 6 pounds I accumulated over  late winter has got to go, as he said, "you are a small person and cannot carry extra weight."  Don't I know it.  Besides, I  do not want to expand and outgrow my clothes.  So watching my fat grams again, which curtails my nightly enjoyment of ice cream.  But all for the good.   Jerry's oncologist appointment to discuss his 3 month follow up blood tests and CT scan went well, although we knew the good news ahead as Mayo gives us access to all our tests, medical notes, etc online.  I look at all this online so we knew his tests were good, no cancer signs.  Hooray!  Also his heart tests show improvement in the pumping function which had some concern earlier in the month.  His pulmonary rehab appointments  are over but he is back to exercising at home, working out in his own private  gym with treadmill, weights, slant board for crunches, he monitors his oxygen level and watches that carefully.  But his  muscular strength is returning and now if he can wean off  or decrease the supplemental oxygen will be good.  Would have gone out for dinner last night to celebrate but the weather was too hot, heat index almost 100, so I opted for a  boiled but then cold shrimp dinner at home,  mac salad, tomatoes, fruit, melons and fresh bread.  

Good news to end the week.  Tonite will be a tenderloin filet at home, using the convection oven and probe.  And fresh asparagus, locally grown.  We eat well, no cheap cuts in this kitchen!

St Anthony comes through again, how could I doubt.

Returned, unscathed, thank you again Dear St Anthony, I will donate extra at mass this evening. 

I posted this on my Facebook page hours ago and had acknowledges from over 40 folks within minutes,.  I thought I would update here too since I blogged it yesterday,  the difference, no one sees this.  :  "   Thank you, St Anthony, you never let me down.   An hour ago  I felt an urge to patrol garden perimeter again, carefully. After all, neither the birds nor bunnies would carry the sunglasses off,  they must be somewhere,  could not have vanished, as I told friend Jan earlier.. Sure enough, middle perimeter as I stopped to pull out the pesty creeping Charlie, I spotted a glimpse of blue, victory amid the Charlie, reward amidst the weeds.."----

And at mass we had a visiting priest from southeast India who is working in our Win one, MN Diocese.  He told about the seminaries and the schools for orphans in his native Southeast  India and the extreme poverty, the starvation, the destitute.  We had a second collection which would be for his mission work back in India.  How could I not honor my commitment to St Anthony.?  If course I gave extra money to this mission.

Posting this from my tablet,  different than working on the computer.

Adding this additional information, I grew up Catholic and learned about St Anthony very early in life, I remember seeing this very portrayal of him probably at church and at my grandma's home.  I learned the chant early, "St Anthony, St Anthony, please come 'round, something is lost and must be found."  

Sometime along the way, I started to call on him as Tony.  It amused me to find  online about the prayer to St Anthony, that I am not the only one to call on "Tony" . Praying to St Anthony when something is lost is a Catholic tradition.  Many years ago my late friend Sandy became curious about this habit of mine after her sister returned from missionary work in Mississippi where she learned about the faith people placed in St Anthony. So I shared my prayer with Sandy, but told her the tradition  requires that when your lost item is found one is supposed to donate extra to  the church poor box. Sandy was not Catholic but wondered if it might be all right with Tony is she just gave a donation to a local charity. 

Nevertheless there is a more formal prayer, above,  but for me the chant learned in childhood sticks.   Saint Anthony of Padua,was  born Fernando Martins de Bulhões, August 15, 1195 to a wealthy family in Lisbon, Portugal  and died June 13, 1231, in Padua Italy.     He was Catholic priest and friar of the Franciscan Order. 

My unique skill at losing something right in the garden right where I am

Days roll by, just like today, this morning we learned a local friend Bob Koljard passed away at home a day ago, he was 88, had been ill, wheel chair confined, and not well enough to do much for several years so it is for the best, they say and I  agree. Yet, Jan, now a widow  has been Bob's caretaker all these years, they were married  almost 60 years and when Jan and I talked I knew she was weary.  I can relate because here, Jerry  cannot do what he used to do and so I have been shouldering and soldiering on.  Jan and I said to each other that it is very confining and not the life we ever imagined but the life we now have.  She said that she too is so doggone busy through the day  that by evening she  falls into bed only to begin again the next day.  At times it feels like the hamster treadmill, the other day I said life had become Ground Hog Day after day.  Yet I cannot complain, things are better, just not beck to full gear and we cannot travel.  So we are occupied at home.  Jerry has been going to pulmonary rehab 3 x a week and is significantly stronger, yet still needs his supplemental oxygen 24/7.   

Professional window washers

Fortunately we have someone hired to mow the lawns and this week window washers came to do the inside and outside, but there is just an awful lot to do. We are blessedly financially able to pay for services, it  is often a bigger task to find someone to do the work in this area where everyone is working, servvices are few and busy and often not taking on new customers.   Besides Jerry used to do so much, he has always been handy, a real Mr Fix It and often preferred to do things himself because he is very particular and wants it done right. But with his recovery  no longer is he doing so much. I now not only cook dinner I have cleanup afterward, Jerry used to do that and once in a great while he  does some, at least cleans off the stove, but I used to sit down after dinner, check my Facebook, catch up and finish my glass of wine.  No more, I am often on clean up duty.  Sometimes I have an extra glass of wine as I finish up.  My comfort beverage.  So after  calling Jan to  express our condolences and offer what help we might be able to give her, I proceeded on my day,  an outside chore. 

 

Far right side of the garden  where the volunteer
maple tree thrives

Yesterday I spent a few hours down in the garden weeding, clipping and spraying Round Up.  Just as recently as last year I would not have used the Round Up but  kept on pulling weeds, this year, I try to make things a little easier for myself. I have used several gallons already this year in addition to my old school pulling methods, but spraying Round Up is much easier on my back and no  stooping, etc.  Lazier maybe, more expensive, certainly, but yet anything that makes it easier I am all for these days.   

Big pile of clippings debris, branches, weeds, limbs, etc

 I kept taking my sunglasses off and on from shady areas to sunny areas..  Finally I put them in my shorts pocket because mostly I was in the shade and did not need them.  Sometime  in this last  span of  maybe 40 minutes they slipped out of my pocket.  I noticed as I headed up to the house that they were not in my pocket.  I looked around under the  shrubs and trees and perimeter where I had been last.  I know I had them in my pocket when I finished in the garden and did perimeter and bank work.  The sunglasses were  Vuarnets, over 25 years old, I had bought them in CA from my eye doctor to use when we would go  skiing up to the mountains.  I  use them primarily around here working outside because our sun is very intense, sometimes I wear them on my walks.  

One of my garden whirly gigs

Reluctantly I came up the  back hill to the house sans glasses.  I decided they must have fallen out onto the pile of lawn debris, clippings and  such that I have accumulated and that is waiting foir the landscaper service to remove when they come to do summer pruning anytime now.  The pile is massive, over  5 foot high and  3 feet wide and  yet I keep adding to it.  I had been pulling some weeds near the pile so  thought perhaps I could spot  my sunglasses there, but no luck.  So I shrugged reluctantly and turned it over to St Anthony, my go to saint  who has returned multitudes of misplace and lost things to me over my life.  Today I returned to the debris pile with more briar cuttings and my handly old pitchfork another tool from CA gardening days.  I sifted again through the  outer area and  removed the top from yesterday, the pile is so dense that they could not have fallen deep into it, so I thought for sure I could find them.  Well I was wrong, I did another perimeter and  full garden patrol and  had to admit defeat.  I guess it is time to say good bye to my favorite blue sunglasses.  I had google d last night and see they are not at all cheap in price to replace, so likely I will now  switch to using my old Ray Bans and  the Bucci's.  But I am going to miss the Vuarnets.  At least I did get a chuckle from Facebook over this escapade.  I posted about  my loss and  as soon as I began to scan for updates from friends and family I had an ad from Vuarnet, touting that they have made the best sunglasses from 1957.  Who says FB doesn't pay attention to posts?.  Yet it is still my preference for communication because it is very easy and all at once, no cumbersome logging in, writing emails, etc...I simply cannot understand people who refuse to use it. I figure they are not into social media either cannot figure it out, possibly are limited in their technology skills and/or are afraid, afraid of what?  It is as safe as a person makes it.  But this message will never change their minds and so they go along without knowing what I'm up to and since I am in touch via FB with several hundred others, I  do not care. Within a second of that FB post, I heard from a cousin in PA who had been having a bum luck day yesterday too.  And later on from another friend in  northern PA who had also  lost something yesterday,  We decided that the air waves were all in cahoots.  

Remembering Memorial Day and always

It is a dreary wet rainy day here in La Crescent,  the weather gives me a respite from the heavy duty outside gardening, trimming, hauling, etc myriad mighty physical chores I have been hard at these past few glorious spring sunshiny days.  Rain gives me a chance to rest, that is to do inside domestic chores that are never ending.  But so goes life here, while Jerry is recovering, maybe, although he has ups and downs, and lately more downs than ups???  On Thursday, we drive to Mayo in Rochester where he will see more lung specialists, to determine why he cannot process oxygen keeping him tethered to tanks and hoses.  His primary life outside the house is three days a week at pulmonary rehab where he is strengthening his muscles, but his lungs are not working.  Who knows what lies ahead anymore,  his attitude is not the best, because he feels useless, unable to do much of anything.  So this leaves it all up to me and as a friend said today, "good thing you are healthy and able to do so much."  Yes I am thankful for that, but it would be good to have a rest now and then and not always have the next task beckoning.  Being a compulsive person with only 2 settings either on or off, I spend all day doing so that night brings me exhausted to bed.  Jerry has little interest is even riding somewhere and it is really rough to even get a semi conversation out of him. He never has been one for talking much, but this all leaves me worn out too.

Greenwood Cemetery, Lower Burrell, PA
Hillside family graves plot

Still as I started to write it is Memorial Day and I feel badly that I did not get to PA again this year so far to tend to my graves and to visit my 2 friends there at Greenwood Cemetery too, Dana and Carlie passed last year.  Really I know more dead people than living folks or so it seems.  This is the cost of aging.  We survivors, left behind to remember.  I wish there were a florist I could contact in PA to have flowers delivered to my graves, I say my graves because it is only me who is left to care for them, a duty I feel deeply.  And yet when I am gone, there will be no one, so perhaps the graves are being prepared for the coming neglect.  

My father and Combat Crew 193

My father Lewis S BallAdd caption

Today I remember my father, US Army Air Corp 2 Lt L S Ball, B-24 pilot, gone forever disappeared somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean with his entire combat crew 193, June 1944, months before my birth.  The father I never knew but knew of, the young  man I would now outlive by many many years, he is standing back row, this photo  on the far left with the crew members. .I would learn later in life through my membership in the American War Orphans Network (AWON) that there were  many, some 185,000 of us WWII kids, deemed "orphans" by our own   government, yet Mom never acknowledged the word"orphan", she said she was alive and that I was not an "orphan." I never knew anyone in my situation growing up, how I wish I had, because I have learned so much through AWON, we share so many similar feelings.  A time when  little was discussed contrast to today when everything is talked beyond reason.  I always wanted to get to Charleston, SC to look out at the Atlantic ocean from there where the plane departed, never to return, but so far as  with other things I want to do someday, no Charleston trips have materialized.  This photo shows him, gazing out there toward the ocean that would consume them all.  Oh how different life could have been.  I have no grave to visit for him, no cemetery plot to leave flowers, only the vast Atlantic.  Because no trace was ever found of the plan and crew, my paternal grandmother went to her grave always believing he would return some day.  I have learned about the German U boats that p[atrolled the east coast, and there was speculation, what if on that return flight from Nassau, as they radioed that they needed fuel, what if, a German U boat surfaced, bam, and disappeared.  My late uncle Henry, his brother believed there was something to that and  perhaps there was, it was a different country, time, place.  much speculation, no definitive answers except that he would be gone ..

"Wally", in my dad';s writing

.Another mystery to me was this photo of "Wally" that I found in 2004 when Mom died and I was clearing out her closet.  There among a suitcase of mementos and documents of my father along with letters she had received from Hap Arnold, founding General of the US Air Force, was the photo.  I would learn much later, several years back now from cousins I never knew and have yet to meet,  in Taunton, MA that Wally was the only child of my father's aunt Margaret, a sister to my paternal grandmother.  Walter Kudzia, KIA in the Battle of the Bulge in Germany, 1945 months after he had turned 20.  His body would be returned to MA in 1947 to be buried at home, as his mother wished.   Wally was a rifleman, US Army, enlisted right out of high school.  Part of his tale is told in a recent WWII magazine.  It seems that my family paid dearly the price with fatalities in WWII.  Something I will be asking the good Lord about at the end of my time here, "why"  I pause to remember them, the ones I did not know.  I suppose the answer could be, "why not"  

Walter's death WWII magazine

And so Memorial Day, wet, rainy here, pausing for some time at the computer, I have posted all this and more onto Facebook, where I will get comments from my AWON family for sure.  This blog writing that I do so sporadically, is almost a private diary for me. 

Today another friend sent this You tube link, nicely done, A Soldier  Died Today, it brings tears to my eyes and a lump to my throat     ttps://www.youtube.com/embed/eEs4ke7cdNQ?feature=player_detailpage%25&fbclid=IwAR08yZr3tMz4dpapnxg0DJn2qTVkqT4f15jp-Vi6Eoh2MvXzf4VdjTuTCT0   If you are not moved, you are heartless..Here in La Crescent there is no more Legion building where the old guys go to gather and talk, instead it was sold out, the building had gone to ruin, sold for a pittance of a room in a Community Center, the big deal for the town.  Many of us think this will be another waste of money and become a burden on the property tax payers in the future but for now it is welcomed by the community.  However the Legion is no more, gone with it are the reminisces and the multi thousands of $$ donated to this town and the entire community over the years.  The event Center, bah humbug!  I know I am aging, I do not like these changes, I am comfortable with familiarity.