Vacation Staycation

Well hello there and happy mid-August! I’m attempting to pour myself back into the work routine, as relaxed as a puddle after doing a whole lot of nothing special to anyone else but me.

Before my break, I promised I’d explain why we canceled our road trip to Hampton Beach. Derek will be fine, but he got a bucketful of health news a couple of weeks before we were due to leave. In addition to two hernias that need surgery, he has severe diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol. It could have been worse. It always could be worse.

The hernias cause him varying degrees of discomfort but now that he’s been taking medication for a few weeks, there’s been some improvement. The other issues will take time, but we immediately took it all seriously and as a team. We’ve been kind of reckless for the past few years. We eat well and properly but we also shovel in a lot of extra crap and treat ourselves too often. We’ve done this with full awareness that we’ve put on weight and could be a whole lot healthier. Changes started the moment we left the doctor’s office.

a pile of flattened cereal boxes

Our cereal cupboard is deep and stuff gets lost in the back. Take Puffins peanut butter cereal, for example, that I bought for fun a few years ago and Derek tried once and forgot about. As you can imagine, it’s loaded with sugar and fat. It and a few other sugary varieties had clumped into stale lumps of inedible crap which made them much easier to toss out.

Derek and I spent some time in a grocery store’s aisles reading labels. I’m well already acquainted with them and we have low-sodium products in our pantry because of my high blood pressure, but it’s an education for Derek. He’s a quick study. He’s latched onto nutritional information like it’s a life raft in rough waters, and I suppose that isn’t far from the truth. At this point in our lives, it’s about staying healthy and we’ve just turned a shelf in our kitchen into a pharmacy with all of the new medications. If that doesn’t say “it’s time”, I don’t know what will. We added this composter to our back yard to rid us of vegetable peelings and other produce trimmings, as we’re creating them at a higher rate now.

grey tumbler composter sits on galvanized steel legs

We were going to drive to Hampton Beach and stay in a beautiful Airbnb; a schoolhouse converted into a lovely home. We had VIP tickets to see comedian Ron White perform. They were expensive so I bought ticket insurance and that proved wise. I’m sorry we didn’t get to go, but there’s nothing worse than feeling terrible while you’re in a moving vehicle and away from home. It’s second only to being stuck in a vehicle with someone who feels that way! Maybe we’ll go next year. For now, we’re working on feeling better and getting Derek in for surgery. His consultation is scheduled for January 2018 so we might need a prescription for patience, too.

Instead, we spent a few hours over a couple of days, driving around lake-front and river-front properties in the region. I dream (daily!) of living somewhere that has a view of the water. There are one or two such places that would allow me to commute to work but we didn’t find anything we couldn’t pass up.

We also received some terrible news. My cousin Shelley’s son Justin died suddenly in her home one week ago. Drugs are suspected but autopsy results are pending. It’s a very sad story about a successful young man who just recently fell in with a troubled crowd and his life did a 180. I didn’t know Justin; I hadn’t even seen him since he was a teenager, but I kept up on the goings-on through the family grapevine. I posted his obituary on Facebook and received a tremendous outpouring of sympathy for our family. People are so kind at a time like this. Perhaps because it’s becoming all too common.  No mother should have to find her son’s body. No parent should ever lose their child.

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