Moving And Mayo

I’ve been talking a lot about chaos lately. I guess that is what has been on my mind the most. We have finally gotten sort of settled in our new home.

Most of the boxes are unpacked; although Logan’s room could still use a little direction. Mainly because he considers it to be an adventure to live out of a box. He sees no reason to unpack, and I see no reason to put an almost 14 year old boy’s room together for him.

We are at a bit of a stand off, although because I detest clutter I see the stand off not lasting long. Those boxes will get gone. Whether they get thrown out packed or unpacked will be up to Logan. But they will be moved out of my home so it will be organized.

Getting the house set up, getting things on the walls, and making it feel like "ours" took a break this week so I could go back to the Mayo Clinic. I had badly wanted every thing completely done before we left for Mayo, but that didn’t happen.

I had to stop unpacking boxes so I could start packing luggage. Going to Mayo is a production at any time, but going when you are moving is an experience. I very much appreciate all the help we had moving in.

However, that help means I am not quite sure where everything is. Finding things I only use occasionally, like the special bag I only take to Mayo, has been interesting.

My mom, my sister, my niece, my nephew, my nephew’s wife, my mother in law, my father in law, and my sister in law all helped us move and unpack. My idea of a logical place for something quickly turned to "just put it anywhere," when they asked where something should go. I thought we would figure it out later.

Later hasn’t come yet. Some things have gotten where they need to be, some things may never be found again. Getting me and Logan to Minnesota, the big dog to the kennel, and the husband and the little dog settled in to stay home by themselves has been a testament to our sense of humor.

Coming home from Mayo always put me in a fog of exhaustion. Perhaps this time, when the fog clears, I will remember where things are, where they need to be, or just make a whole new place for them. After all, this is a time of new beginnings. I guess we can start by making new places for our stuff.

Losing Our Mind

My Mom has my sister convinced I am going through a mid-life crisis. That would be pretty hard to accomplish for a couple of reasons. For one thing, I am no where near mid-life. For another thing, my sister is four years older than me. She hasn’t had her crisis yet, so I can’t possibly be having mine.

They need some valid reason for the major life changes Gary and I are making. Since Gary is perfect and has never made any wrong choices, bad decisions, or out of the ordinary plans in any shape, size or form, this is all my fault. Again. It is our little secret that we could blame every single bit of this on him. But we aren’t going to. It amuses both of us that he is perfect and I am not.

On one hand, I love that they agree I have a perfect husband. On the other hand, I’m getting tired of losing my mind. Although to my sister’s benefit, after she has soothed my Mom, she calls me giggling. Mom has told her of whatever my latest sin is. Teresa makes all the appropriate "can you believe she did that" noises to Mom like a good older, wiser sister should.

Then she calls me. And laughs. She’s been laughing a lot lately. She wondered what we were thinking when we got a new puppy. At this stage, I’m sort of wondering too. Fifty pound headstrong puppies are...well, they are a pain in the neck, and a few other places.

We were thinking we would finally have room on 20 acres for Logan to have the kind of dog he has always dreamed of. We were thinking by getting him now, he would be adjusted to us before the chaos of the move. That was a joke. Chaos is reigning supreme around here, and his name is Jake.

She began to get more concerned when we bought a house out of my usual comfort zone. My city roots means my fantasy place had always been a penthouse, at the top of the tallest building in the largest city. No grass. Just glass, floor to ceiling. A house so far out that Google gets confused when you put in the address isn’t something I longed for as a girl.

But now, I’ve really gone and done it. They had almost gotten used to the dog. They were getting on board with the house. After this past week, they are absolutely sure I’ve lost my mind. My much loved baby car has turned into a big four wheel drive vehicle.

My baby car couldn’t make it to where the new house is without serious damage. I traded in the car that my sister loved so much she immediately went out and bought one just like it, only in red. Teresa is speechless.

She didn’t start this phone call giggling. She started it by saying "You did not." Which made me giggle, knowing Mom had already been talking to her. Sigh. Yep, Sis, I did. What’s worse, I enjoyed it. And worse than that, I’m loving every single minute of driving my big (to me) bad four wheel drive.

If this is a mid (not) life crisis, I hope I get to have more of them. With the exception of the hard headed puppy, we are having the time of our life. I highly recommend them.
Which is what I have been telling my sister. She needs to catch up. She is older, and she is getting behind in a hurry. Her husband already believes I am a bad influence on her. It’s true. I’m sort of proud of that.

Since there is no redeeming me, I think she ought to join in the fun. She needs to go find her a new house. She’s been wanting to move for a few years now anyway. It’s time for a new puppy, although I would recommend one a bit less stubborn than ours. And if she gets a hankering for a souped up ride....hey, it’s her mid-life crisis. What can you do? She has obviously lost her mind.

Chaos and Confusion, For the Sake of Jake

Chaos and confusion is reigning supreme at my home this week, even more than usual. Every minute of every hour of the day and night. We are exhausted and sleep deprived.

We have a new baby in our house, of the fur variety. This particular fur baby is already around forty pounds at three months. We got a german shepherd puppy last week. Jacob Patton Furnish is now a part of our lives.

Which leads to the chaos. Jake is big. Jake is teething. Jake is hungry, all the time. Jake is about 95% housebroken. Jake has lots and lots and lots of energy. Jake can run through our entire house with a forbidden object in about three seconds. We can’t keep up, and Jake can eat/swallow/shred said object before we can retrieve it. He particularly likes shoes, clothing, and rugs.

But what Jake likes best is Chance. Unfortunately, our 10 pound Pomeranian does not share Jake’s affection. Which leads to the confusion. Chance is extremely unhappy with his new little brother, who outweighs him and outsizes him. Jake’s paw is about the size of Chance’s face.

Jake wants to play. So he chases Chance. He nudges Chance. He grabs a toy or a chewie that Chance thinks is his, and runs with it. They each have their own toys, but Chance, having been an only dog for four years thinks everything belongs to him.

For a few days, Chance just hid. Then he just watched for a few more. Then the real fun started. Chance decided he was here first, and this was his house. My little doggie may be only 10 pounds, but he thinks he is 100 pounds. He decided to exercise that imaginary bulk and fight back.

Now, when Jake decides Chance might want to be chased, Chance barks, growls and stands his ground. When Jake steals a toy, Chance steals it back. One day, Chance tried to get a toy, and Jake put his gigantic paw over it. Chance simply walked around, bit Jake’s tail and waited. Jake moved, Chance got his toy.

Chance is little, so he can run behind furniture or jump up on furniture. He finds his spot, and makes a stand. He gets where he is going, and then lets Jake have it.

By this morning, Jake was putting his head down between his paws and backing off. Which is a good thing. Jake will get somewhere between 100 and 125 pounds when he is grown. At 10 pounds, Chance is grown. He needs to get his bluff in on Jake while he can. Jake can hurt Chance without meaning too, so he needs to think Chance can hurt him.

It is sort of funny to watch the little yappy dog boss the big puppy around, and we are making sure neither one of them gets hurt. We don’t want Chance to hurt Jake any more than we want Jake to hurt Chance.

I will be glad when they work everything out, Jake learns who is boss (that would be Chance), runs down on the Puppy Energy, and things just settl back down to our version of normal again. It is never normal around here, but it is interesting. Here lately, it's a little exhausting, too.

Sherriff Meadows

Like so many others, I was saddened to learn that we had lost Sheriff Meadows. I got the call about his passing early that Friday morning while out of town. Even though I was on vacation, I had a hard time keeping my mind on the fun because my thoughts kept wandering back to my memories of the Sheriff.

When I first started working with him, I appreciated his manner. He would tell me what I needed to know. If there was something that would help me but didn’t need to be published, he was honest about that. He had a sense of humor that kept me on my toes but still made his point.

At one time, he was working on an investigation that I had questions about. It was extremely sensitive because it involved someone who was well-known. Leroy told me he would give me my information when he was ready for me to have it, and in the meantime he didn’t want anything about the investigation leaking out. I told him it was safe with me.

Wanting to drive the point home, he told me what he would do if the information got out before he was ready. He would send two of his biggest, meanest deputies to my house to draw and quarter me and then feed me to the catfish in the river.

"Have you ever seen how ugly those river cat are, little girl?" he asked me.
I laughed at him, assuring him that I had indeed seen them, and that I didn’t want to be fish bait. When the time came, he called me at home late one evening, telling me an arrest was being made at that moment, and to go write my story. I had kept my word, and he kept his.

Images and pictures and phrases and things he said to me over the years kept crowding through my head throughout the last weeks. He called me "little girl" so often that at times I wondered if he knew my name, but he never forgot Logan’s name.

He never liked me taking his picture, but tolerated it because I told him it was part of my job and part of his job. He seemed to have an expression of "can we get this done already" on his face in every picture I took of him.

If he could find a way to get out of me taking a picture of him, he would do it every single time. Which is why quite a few pictures I took in news stories about the sheriff’s department had some shocked looking deputies in them. They had just gotten recruited to stand up and take a picture they weren’t expecting to take. Off to side, Sheriff Meadows is smiling, because he just got out of taking picture he didn’t want to take.

Another thing I remember is how calm he was. We were talking on the phone one afternoon during stormy weather. He asked where Logan was. When I told him he was still at pre-school, Leroy told me to go pick him up. He told me his boys (the deputies of the department) had spotted a tornado in one area near Blytheville, with rotation in the clouds in another area. He had to get off the phone with me so he could go sound the sirens.

That memory sticks in my head because I left work, went and got Logan, and made it back to the drive-way of my home before the sirens sounded. It was probably 15 minutes from the time Leroy told me a tornado had been spotted until I heard the warning sirens.
Now, each time I hear the sirens I remember our conversation and wonder exactly how long ago rotation was actually spotted.

But I also remember that Leroy knew, even during our conversation about work related matters, that I would be concerned for my son. Yes, he needed to get his job done. However, he didn’t just hang up on me. He told me to go get my child, and get him to safety.

He took care of us first, before going on about his business. Which I guess is probably the thing I remember the most about the Sheriff. He just naturally took care of people as he went about his business.

Fighting the Fog

Yes, it’s me. I’m here. I haven’t disappeared, fallen off of a cliff, ridden off into the sunset or met with some other mysterious demise. Since it has been almost a month since I have written a column, I can understand how one would think such a thing.

The past few months have been hard ones for me physically. Writing shouldn’t be something that is hard to do, and usually it isn’t. But since my physical problems include my brain, sometimes just thinking hurts.

Since my editor prefers for me to think while I am writing, it was better for all of us if I skipped a few columns rather than writing in the condition I have been in. Trust us on this.

We just got back from another trip to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. That insures a few things. First, that I will be in what my husband calls the "Mayo Fog" a little longer. The Fog is a term we use to describe the week or so after my trips to the clinic. It is a long trip up and back, 12 hours one way. Mayo can do more to you in one day than most hospitals can do to someone in one week. Then we drive the 12 hours home.

My body reacts to all of that by essentially shutting down. We are so hyped up while we are there, doing everything we can as quickly as we can. For one thing, we want to be home. For another thing, even though insurance pays a portion of the actual treatment at the Clinic, nothing pays for the food, gas, and hotel bills while we are there. The faster we get it done, the cheaper it is. But mainly, I just like being home as opposed to being somewhere that the answer to every single question begins by getting poked with a needle.

We get home, and all that adrenaline fades. Completely. Totally. Into nothingness. I shut down, literally sleeping for up to 20 hours in every 24 hour period. I can do that for days, and we have discovered it is best to let me do that. If I don’t do it, I don’t recover as fast.

Eventually, the fog lifts and life gets back to what our normal is. Which isn’t normal at all, but works for us. That brings us to the second thing. I will get better. I won’t apparently get well, but I will get better than I have been doing the last few months. The doctors at Mayo did a little magic, a little switching and swapping. I am sort of a work in progress. So we have a few new options we are trying, and hopefully they will help.

The third thing may be another procedure at Mayo in June that I dread, hate, loath and detest. It hurts. Well, practically everything they do hurts, but this one is pretty much beyond my tolerance level. I don’t like it, I don’t want it, and asked my doctor not to do it this time. If the magic we are trying for the next eight weeks doesn’t work, I won’t have a choice. If it does, I will. Time will tell, and I am holding onto hope for the magic.

I already feel better. The fog is slowly lifting, and this past week has been better than the past few months have been. I guess that means you are going to have to get used to seeing me around here again.

That’s good, because I like being here.