3/27/25 (A Religious Experience)

Before I get to today, an update with my grandma. The past 2 days have been VERY difficult. Her dementia is making it hard to breath in her throat (it's getting to the brain stem) and it was hard for her to eat things, so it was time to go on hospice. She was able to go into a private room because we weren't sure if she was going to die soon. I drove up to see her and spend some time and say my goodbyes. About 3 hours with her and then went home. Very emotional. Then the next day she went back to her assisted living facility, and I went back up to see her again for some hours, this time making sure to set-up the spare roku in her room so whoever was with her could put on some streaming app we have since all she gets are local channels. It was another good visit, just spending time with her, but now she seems a bit more stable. The thing though is she can't hold a conversation, she says some things but she's not really all there. This week mskate is staying with her parents because she's looking over grandma and watching skating with her parents, meaning that I have the house to myself.

Now for today. This morning is when things started unexpectedly with what I can only describe as a religious vision. About an hour before I normally wake up I was woken up by a younger woman dressed in white calling me by name and shaking my leg (remember, I'm in the house alone). I wake up a little and see her, then wake up fully and she disappears but I can still hear her in a voice that is a little familiar, as she tells me to go back to sleep and I'm able to see her again. This is when I realize that this was my grandma, young and whole, I recognized her from all the pictures that I did for major videos that I did for her, at about the same age as me right now. I won't go into details here and now (that will be for a different project), but it was really great. She told me how much she appreciates all that people are doing for her and have done for her, about how she was glad to see so many of our major life events and even though she really wanted it is OK with not being able to experience great-grandmotherhood and that her best friends / my grandparent figures will be able to experience it for her, settle out some of the frictions we've had and get closure there, and then just go through ALL the stories that she and grandpa would tell me in chronological order, and then I saw her with my grandpa when he was young and able bodies, and my uncle who was now walking (he was in a wheel chair his entire life), and my older sibling who my mom lost in pregnancy; everyone was whole. Really really touching and special moment for me that I'm glad I was able to have uninterrupted, since when I told mskate about it she was all "yeah I would have interrupted you.

I ended up going to work a little later than normal because I had things I had to get ready for the day with and this went a little longer than my normal morning routine, but it was all good just meant I had to stay at work a little longer. After work I watched Dawson's Creek, ate some of my chili, and went to chuck e cheese to use our fun pass. I also wrote most of my women's big 10 gymnastics competition blog, just need to put the pictures in, but I'll get to that tomorrow. Later.

3/25/25

So I don't know if it was just my crazy weekend catching up to me, or the somewhat restless night last night, or that I didn't eat as much as I normally do and my medication didn't like that, or some combination of all that, but I came home beat and kind of napped for like an hour (I don't think I actually slept, but I did kind of dream). I normally make dinner but because I was so tired I asked mskate to make dinner. I watched Dawson's Creek as I try to to finish the series before it expires at the end of the month. I cleaned up some of the house, throwing out some of the garbage that had been collecting and finding places for other things. I need to make my gymnastics blog since it was pretty cool, but I'm just too tired. Later.

3/20-23/25 My Crazy Weekend

OK, so I'm not doing my normal content this weekend because I'm just too tired after being too busy. My dad and grandma are both in the hospital and both are very concerning. My dad had some blood problems and got rushed to the hospital and they can't really figure out what the problem is; he's stable but we don't know what the problem is. Then on Thursday my grandma went to the hospital with sepsis from a bed sore she's been fighting for like 7 months, which meant that I was on call to leave work in case this was the end. Mskate went to the hospital to help my mom with all the craziness mid-day and then I went to the hospital after work and took a personal day on Friday because I needed to be there. Once I got to the hospital she was in the emergency room and that was kind of crazy. When I got there she lit up seeing me, so that made everyone kind of happy. With the dementia there's a lot that we try to get her to remember and she just doesn't, so I was telling her some of the stories that she told me all the time. One of them was when we went to a family reunion and I didn't shut up the entire drive. I said "and you know what happened next, and you know what happened next, and you know what happened next, and you know what happened next" (because that's what I kept saying between recalling what happened in cartoons that I watched) and she said "and it kept going on and on and on," which we all took to mean that she remembered that story. She got to a room around 7PM and we got some liquid snack foods from nursing since dinner was over and she hadn't eaten all day. Just craziness. Mskate and I stayed the night with her parents since they have a guest room.

Friday mskate and I went to see my dad in the morning while mom went to see grandma. They unfortunately are at different hospitals which makes being with both difficult. Dad was in pretty good spirits, but just frustrated that his primary doctor and backup doctor was on vacation and nothing was happening because it was the weekend. We had about a 2 hour visit. After that IRA and I went to see the day the earth blew up, which you can hear my review here. After that mskate and I went to see grandma and we fed her dinner. I found that she doesn't get the channels she likes; educational children's channels (PBS kids and disney junior type channels), the gameshow rerun channel, or metv toons. She does get the hallmark channel and cartoon network/adult swim (which is the west coast feed meaning that adult swim starts much later than on our east coast feed), so we'd watch cartoon network during the day and hallmark channel at night. She's not much of a TV watcher and never was, but we like to put something on to keep her stimulated and we need to put on something that won't be scary or offensive, which is kids cartoons and hallmark movies in this case. We also fed her as much dinner as she could stand. Once we got back to mskate's parents IRA and I watched some Cobra Kai since we like to do that together.

Saturday was kind of wild. Mskate and I went to see grandma in the morning and we took both of our cars, so mskate went right to the hospital and I did a little grocery shopping, looking for shelf stable foods we could leave in the room for visitors to try to feed her (since we're at a point of "any calorie replacement please"). I picked up strawberry-apple sauce, applesauce squeeze tubes, nutella, dove chocolate, saunder's chocolate coated caramels, a 3 musketeers bar, and a botte of coke. We also wanted to get some full sugar puding but the grocery store I went to only had the kind that needed refrigeration. When I got there she was still eating breakfast, so I was able to get her to eat all of the eggs and some of the meat. We had a good little visit for a couple hours. After that we went home and got ready for our next night of events, the big 10 women's gymnastics competition at UofM. I'll go into more details when I write the full blog, but it was a pretty good event. We saw 4 perfect 10s, and saw olympians. On the way there I had something REALLY scary happen though, as I was driving I noticed my index finger didn't have my grandpa's ring on it. I knew I had it when I left the house, but my rings had been a little loose the past couple of days so it must have fallen off somewhere between the stairs landing and in the car. We looked when we got out but it wasn't anywhere we could see. I get home and go through the recycling bin and garbage cans to make sure it didn't end up in there, and it didn't so partial relief, but it wasn't on the stairs, in the garage, or the cupboard, or bin next to the stairs, or anywhere. 

Sunday we went to church and that went well. After church I tore the car apart looking everywhere. I was worried it might have fallen down the vent that gives climate to the back seat but then I saw my fingers wouldn't fit in the holes so my ring definitely wouldn't. After getting rid of all the garbage and moving the seat all the way back I see something kind of shiny under the track the seat adjustment rides on, and it was my grandpa's ring. I yelled for joy with that. Mskate and I also got our pictures taken for the church directory since we do coffee and donuts every 2nd Sunday of the month (it's kind of funny, the donut groups are the ushers, the women's group, the nights of columbus, and then there's the donut group of pokematic, mskate, and one other parishioner). Later in the evening we went to chuck e cheese because we have the 2 month pass. Mskate is doing a fund raiser this year where people pay to get easter eggs set up in their yard, and we decided we were going to use some of our 3600 tickets to get prizes for the eggs since CEC doesn't really have prizes that appeal to us as 30 something adults. It was kind of busy so we focused on quick thrills today. With the prizes we got some wind up airplanes, smily face rings, and butterfly erasers. It ended up being like 1750 tickets, but that's OK it's egg treats we didn't have to "spend money on." Now I'm just relaxing and watching Sunday night cartoons like I've been doing for the past 13 or so years. Later.

3/19/25

When I got home I had some energy to do things. I went to the bank and got a $2 bill for a friend's 2 year old son's birthday card. I did some cleaning, organizing stuff in the car and throwing out some old food. Mskate and I had bratwurst and broccoli for dinner. We went to chuck e cheese and there was a free 500 ticket offer on the app, so we got 500 tickets on our account. At the end of the day we had 3600 tickets on our account. This is pretty good since mskate is going to do an Easter egg fundraiser and we need some things for the eggs, and we can get a lot of trinkets from there for filling eggs, and as grown adults there are not a lot of prizes that interest us so we're always looking for other things we could spend the tickets on. Today instead of working on my stuff I made the updated version of mskate's book since kindle isn't letting us use mobi files anymore. I watched the latest episode of Doc and started watching Dawson's Creek again before it expires. Been some years since I last watched it, but I'm remembering everything. Yay. Later.

3/18/25

Today I watched some episodes of The Rookie and cleaned out some junk in the kitchen. The main thing I did was watch and review Looney Tunes the Day the Earth Blew up. As you can see from previous posts, I've been busy over the weekend and missed opening weekend, but I had $5 ticket Tuesday and I said "I need to support 2D theatrical animation." Hopefully the movie stays in theaters longer than a week because it's great. You can listen to my review here. Later.

3/17/25 (Happy St. Patrick's Day)

Well it's St. Patrick's Day, a day that I didn't celebrate today. As discussed in my weekend blog (that I got out today), I celebrated it on Friday and Sunday, and got a lot of it on Saturday. I even forgot to wear green, but I had done it so much over the weekend that I don't feel like I failed my Irish American heritage. Not too much done today, I cleaned up some more of the house, and got the blog out, and watched some movies while doing my Monday monkey work. One thing I did was some experimenting with leaving the roku set to a live streaming channel to see if it'll stay on with the TV turned off, and it will. This is a thing for my grandma since she doesn't know how to use the TV and all the workers at her assisted living will do is turn the TV on and off, not change the channels (I understand, they have more important things to do than pick out TV programming for a resident). She doesn't get cable in her room (at least without paying extra and she doesn't "like TV enough" to justify the cost), but she does get all the OTA channels in our market and we get a lot of channels, including Buzzer (an old gameshow channel), MeTV Toons (old cartoons), and PBS kids (a 24 hour educational kids show channel), and while those are good (we've been leaving it on the gameshow channel since we knew it would always be "wholesome fun" and not too confusing, and her favorite show was wheel of fortune), she REALLY likes Disney Junior. We have Disney Plus and it now has "live streaming channels" (not "Disney Junior proper" but it does have "Disney Playtime" which is a bunch of preschool shows), and after buying a new smart TV we have an extra 1080p roku that we could use for projects. Unfortunately disney plus doesn't work well on my 8 year old roku limited, but sling works on it and we get nick jr with our subscription, so we're going to try setting that up for her. Later.

3/16/25

Today was pretty low key. Mskate and I went to church and we had a visiting priest. After mass we had my brother's birthday celebration. I wrapped up the remaining special beers that I bought last year when mskate and I went to the other side of the state for her catechism training. I wrapped them up and a diet coke for a gag. We went to a brewery by my parents and had lunch with everyone. I had a corned beef sandwich since I probably won't get one tomorrow (not sure where I'd get one where I live), and a BLT cocktail (burbon, lemon, and tonic). It was pretty good, but I was expecting a little more sour and less bitter. I asked for more lemon and it made it better. Bro really liked the beer and got a chuckle out of diet coke. After lunch we went to my parents house and did some cruise planning (which was a lot longer than we expected). We then went to my in-laws to see how Delilah (their dog) was doing since she had to have a little surgery about a week ago. I had a pork chop and mskate had sausage. I worked on writing my blog for the weekend, but I don't think I'll get it out before I go to bed since there's quite a lot to write and I don't know if I'll get it done in the next half an hour. I cleaned out some stuff of the kitchen. Later.